Her Dark Curiosity

by Megan Shepherd

  I pulled back the next cloth with stilled breath and looked upon the body of the thief. Red hair matted in blood, body bruised from a man’s heavy boot that must have trampled her. At the time I had thought her my age, but she looked far younger in death. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. A missing finger was nothing compared to the missing heart now torn from her chest. More blood drained away from my face.

  I went to the next table, shakily leaning over the cloth. I could tell from the shape it was another young woman. Annie—or what if it wasn’t? What if it was Lucy’s cold body, or our maid Mary, or someone else dear to me who never deserved this?

  Dread scratched its tiny claws at me but the urge to know was stronger, and I pulled back the cloth. Annie Benton, though I was hardly relieved. She hadn’t deserved this. Her light brown hair and fair skin looked so much paler in death. Years ago she’d slept in the bed next to mine, and we’d eaten porridge together at breakfast, and each evening we’d scrubbed our single change of clothes in the boardinghouse’s laundry room. She’d shared her soap with me once.

  It was hard to concentrate on anything besides the gaping wounds in her chest, almost perfectly slicing her in the middle. The cuts were jagged, furious, nearly beautiful in their destruction, like all the others. Whoever had made them had done so with a passion for violence. Perhaps I should have looked away, but I didn’t.

  Eventually I moved on to the last body. The unnamed victim. My instincts urged me not to look in case it was someone dear to me, yet somehow my feet took me there, winding around the bare cadavers, their lifeless eyes watching me. I drew the cloth back and jerked in surprise. My heart stampeded in my chest. I collided with the table behind me, brushing against Daniel Penderwick’s cold, dead hand.

  I recognized the fourth body.

  It was the old white-haired man from the flower show, Sir Danvers Carew, the beloved member of Parliament who had once abused my mother and me. I’d seen him only days ago, and now… dead. I closed a hand over my mouth as my mind crawled over his pale face, his bloodstained skin, trying to understand. He had the same slash marks on his chest, and bruises all over his body, made with some blunt sharp object. Like a cane. No wonder the paper had declined to name him. Such an important man, surely his family would prefer not to be associated with a mass murderer. It hardly mattered. He was dead either way.

  Four. I knew all four victims.

  And in turn, I realized, I had been victim to each of them.

  The idea made me step away from the bodies, back pressed against the cold metal door. It didn’t matter how I tried to explain it—nothing about it felt right. Four deaths, four people who had wronged me.

  Almost as though…

  I hesitated, telling myself I might possibly be going mad.

  . . . almost as though someone was watching out for me.

  I shivered uncontrollably, as the bones in my hands and arms shifted and popped, threatening another fit.

  A premonition that had been growing now gripped me hard, as my mind flashed back to all the bodies on the island. Alice, Father’s sweet maid, dripping blood from dead feet. A beast-woman separated from her jaw. Those wounds, as well, had been lovingly made by a monster.

  By Edward.

  Edward is dead, I told myself. The dead don’t come back.

  And yet the fear kept squeezing my heart, trying to get me to believe in the impossible. My head was already aching. Soon I’d grow faint. In a desperate fury, I decided the only thing that would calm my mind would be to prove scientifically that the wounds were different and therefore couldn’t have been made by Edward. On the island, I had read and memorized meticulous autopsy reports from Father’s files for all of Edward’s victims. Eleven and a half inches long, one inch apart, and two inches deep.

  I pulled out a thread from my pocket and measured the length of Annie’s cuts, the spacing between them, even gently pulled apart the wounds to measure the depth. I repeated the process on all four bodies.

  They were all the same: eleven and a half inches long, one inch apart, and two inches deep.

  I stumbled back against the empty table, stunned. The thread slipped from my fingers, along with a spool of my sanity.

  The murderer was the same. Somehow, even though I’d thought him dead, there was no doubt.

  Edward had done this.

  SEVEN

  I FELT LIKE THE room was turning upside down. My legs threatened to give out. I curled my fingers around the table’s edge as though it could keep me from floating to the ceiling.

  Edward Prince was alive, and here was my proof.

  Against all odds he must have survived the fire and come to London—why? If it was only victims he was after, he needn’t have traveled half the world. But his victims were all very specific. Connected. All people who had at one point in my life wronged me.

  My mind slipped and slid back to the island, and the castaway with the gold-flecked eyes.

  We belong together, he had said. We’re the same.

  Was that why he had returned, as part of a grotesquely misguided attempt to protect me and win me over? Or was he sending me some sort of threat after I’d spurned his advances?

  I paced, hands kitting together, among the cadavers. How did he even know about Annie stealing the ring? No one knew about that except Lucy, unless Annie had told someone… .

  Hands trembling, I managed to pull the cover back over Annie’s face, and the rest of the bodies. I stumbled into the hallway outside, eyes closed, drawing in a deep breath. The hallways here always had the usual smell of chemicals, along with some traces of lingering cologne from whichever gentleman doctor had last been here.

  I couldn’t shake this new information: He’s alive. Alive. Alive.

  Footsteps came from down the hall, and I spun, expecting to find Edward’s yellow eyes in the shadows. Heart pounding, I hurried for the stairs, away from these bodies and what they meant. I threw a glance over my shoulder as I turned the corner and nearly collided with a man coming into the hallway from a side door.

  Not just any man. Inspector John Newcastle.

  My heart shot to my throat. “Excuse me,” I said in a rush, keeping my head down with the hope that he wouldn’t recognize me. But his hand held my elbow, and he frowned as if trying to place me.

  “Miss… Moreau, isn’t it? Lucy’s friend. What on earth are you doing down here?”

  “Nothing, Inspector,” I stuttered. “Visiting some old friends.”

  His eyebrow rose with a touch of irony as he glanced at the cadaver storage room door behind me. “You keep strange company for friends, Miss Moreau.”

  “Oh no, that isn’t what I meant. I used to work on this cleaning crew last year, before the professor took me in. I hadn’t seen them in a year, so…” I swallowed, watching as his eyes followed my footsteps in the sawdust-covered floor to the storage room. My footsteps contradicted me. He’d know I’d been in there with the bodies.

  My heart pounded. He could so easily make trouble for me, being down here where I wasn’t supposed to be, snooping around bodies. The professor’s guardianship could protect me only so far.

  “I came to check on the autopsy report for the latest victim of the Wolf of Whitechapel,” he said. “But I would be happy to escort you back to the main floor.”

  I sighed in relief. “That’s not necessary. I know my way. And I really must be going.” I smiled as graciously as I could and turned away, heart pounding, feet unsteady on the tile floor. All I could think of was Edward. All I could feel was a thousand tangled emotions.

  “Wait, Miss Moreau.”

  My eyes fell closed, only for an instant. I turned around with another shaky smile. The inspector wasn’t smiling now, as he dropped his voice to a whisper.

  “After I met you, I looked up your name. I’m protective of Lucy, you understand, and your name sounded so familiar. I found a police report… .” He glanced down the hallway, making sure we were alone. My instincts jumped to attention. A dozen scenarios
flashed through my head of what I’d do if he tried to arrest me. All of them ended poorly for me.

  “It was self-defense,” I said firmly. “Dr. Hastings attacked me. I was a cleaning girl then; no one would believe me—”

  He dismissed that with a wave. “None of that interests me. I’ve no doubt it was Hastings’s fault—it isn’t the first incident of this sort with his name on it. No, Miss Moreau, the reason I recalled your name was because of your father’s crimes, not your own.”

  My body froze, afraid to take a single breath.

  At my silence, he continued. “I was young at the time, in college training to be an investigator. The case was quite notorious. I went back and read the file on your father, and it seems the case was never closed. He fled England, and no one heard from him again. I hate to leave this sort of thing open, if we can file it away as a solved case. Your assistance, Miss Moreau, would be invaluable to our efforts.”

  I stared at him, speechless. After I’d been hiding from the police for the last year, now they were coming to me for help? I might have laughed, if I hadn’t feared sounding like a madwoman.

  “I assure you, you can trust me,” he continued. “We’ll handle the information in the most sensitive manner. It isn’t my intention to cause a sensation, just to solve a long-standing case. It would be a feather in my cap, you see, even lead to a promotion. Together with this Wolf of Whitechapel case, I would be made head of the entire division. Which means I’d be better suited to care for Lucy.”

  “Care for Lucy?”

  He smiled boyishly. “It isn’t official, of course. I haven’t yet asked her father for her hand in marriage, but I know he’ll give me permission. Any day now, expect to get the news of our engagement.”

  There was something undeniably tender about the way he said it. I was quite certain Lucy had no idea the inspector’s intentions were this immediate. My head whirled with the idea of Lucy wed, and Newcastle wanting me to help solve my own father’s case, and among it all, Edward. Alive.

  Mrs. Bell rounded the corner and stopped short when she saw us. “Can I help you, sir?”

  I took the opportunity to step away from Inspector Newcastle. “I’m sorry, Inspector,” I said quickly. “There’s nothing I can help you with. I’ve heard rumors that my father is dead—I might trust those, if I were you.”

  Before he could respond, I bade farewell to him and Mrs. Bell, and hurried from the hallways where the electric lights still clicked and sputtered, as if warning me to never come back.

  EIGHT

  AS SOON AS I left King’s College, I rounded the edge of the building and slumped against the rough brick wall, fighting to calm my erratic heartbeat. The day was clear but bitingly cold. My coat hung open, my hands bare, yet I didn’t reach for my gloves nor do up my buttons. I couldn’t. All I could manage was to slide down the brick wall to the frozen grass and let the cold seep up from the ground into me.

  Edward was back from the dead.

  If he truly was alive, if he had done this, then he must have been following me for some time. My mind searched through the past few weeks and months, trying to remember if I’d felt like I was being followed. But that was just it—one always felt followed in this city. Always felt eyes, always heard footsteps.

  A flock of ravens alighted in the central courtyard, and my head whirled around. Was he following me even now? So many places to hide: behind those skeletal trees, on the rooftop of a nearby building…

  I hugged my knees tight, not daring to close my eyes. If he knew about Annie stealing my mother’s ring, what else did he know? Did he know about my secret workshop and my growing illness? Did he know how I was stealing from the professor? Did he know that back on the island I’d opened the laboratory door so Jaguar could kill my father?

  It terrified me that Edward might know all my secrets. If he chose to, he could expose me. Hurt me for how I’d hurt him when I’d rejected his affections. People loved a good gruesome rumor. If he revealed that the vilified Dr. Moreau’s daughter had murdered her own father, this city’s gossip mills would devour me alive.

  I ran numb fingers over my face, thinking. Edward was tied up in all those secrets too. Exposing my secrets would also expose his own—his unnatural origin and his inclination to kill. No, the more I thought about it, the more I was certain it wasn’t my secrets he was after.

  Maybe it was my life.

  A tingling started deep in my spine. For all I knew, I could be Edward’s next target. He could merely be toying with me, killing those who had wronged me to create a false sense of safety before he struck. After all, I’d rejected his love and then left him for dead. I could hardly expect him to do anything logically. How much control did Edward really have over himself? Where was the line between Beast and man?

  Yet if Edward had wanted to kill me, there were far more effective ways. I’d given him a thousand opportunities to strike as I slunk along Shoreditch at night on my way to my secret workshop. And I might have left him for dead, but I’d prevented Montgomery from slitting his throat. I had given him a chance.

  So what were these bodies supposed to tell me? If he meant me no harm, why hide behind such macabre gestures of affection?

  It’s different with you, Juliet, Edward had said. We belong together.

  He’d been wounded before he’d been able to explain what he meant by that plea for help. As I leaned against the brick wall, body ravaged by too many emotions, I wondered if Edward Prince had come back to London with that in mind. Not to destroy my life with rumors, not to claw out my heart, but to confess his love once more.

  A hundred uncertainties twisted at my heart. The question was, Who else had to die first? Who else had wronged me? I could give him a list, I thought blackly, starting with Dr. Hastings. But I immediately regretted such thoughts. Edeard was the murderer, not me. The truth was, he had to be learning about all these people from somewhere. No one knew about Annie stealing that ring except for Lucy. Perhaps she told someone; perhaps Lucy wrote it in a journal that he’d found.

  Could he be following Lucy, too?

  Before I knew it, my feet were racing along the streets toward Lucy’s neighborhood, throwing glances over my shoulder. I didn’t dare involve her in any of this, and yet I needed to make sure she was safe. Edward could be anywhere. I made my way toward her house in the finest part of town, where the muddy snow had been cleared from the streets. Every manor was stately here, even finer than in the professor’s neighborhood, and each home was decorated for the holidays with mistletoe over the entryway.

  Lucy’s family’s mansion was impossible to miss, a four-story red-brick palace on the most prominent corner, by far the grandest house in Belgravia. A wall of perfectly trimmed hedges designed to keep the riffraff out circled the rounded brick turrets. An iron gate opened onto the front walk to the imposing entryway topped with a holiday garland that smelled of pine.

  I paused by the gate, casting another cautious glance over my shoulder. The smell took me back to my childhood, when I used to come here for parties. We’d had the most beautiful carriage then. I remembered soft lace curtains and peach upholstery. Montgomery would sit up front with the driver, learning his duties as groomsman, while Mother and Father and I rode in silence in the back until we pulled up at this very gate. Montgomery would take my hand—never meeting my eyes, as a proper young groomsman—and help me down from the carriage. The place beneath my left rib throbbed again at the memory.

  A door slammed and a maid appeared in an upstairs window with a rug and duster. I started to pull my hood over my hair and duck away, but I reminded myself that I was once again welcome in this house. The Radcliffes had forbidden Lucy to see me after Father’s scandal, but now that I was ward of the illustrious Professor von Stein, they had no problem smiling at me like nothing had happened. I approached the front door and knocked.

  Clara, the maid, answered the door while wiping her hands on a rag. Her face lit up when she saw me. “Miss Juliet! What a tre
at—we haven’t seen you around here much.” She paused. “You looked like you’ve seen a ghost, miss. Are you ill?”

  I shook my head, though she was closer to the truth than she could imagine. “Is Lucy home?”

  “She’s in the salon with her aunt. Shall I tell her you’re here?”

  I hesitated. My heart thumped with the need to make certain Lucy was safe. But with her aunt in the room, I wouldn’t be able to speak openly. “I didn’t realize she had company. I’d really wanted to speak with her alone. If you’ll just pass along the message that I came, and have her come visit as soon as she can…”

  “Juliet!” Lucy’s face appeared behind Clara, and she jerked the door open wider. Her frown accused me just as much as the finger pointing at my chest. “You’re not leaving without saying hello, are you?”

  Her face was so warm and full of life, after those in the basement. “If you’ve already got company—”

  “Henry’s here for tea and Aunt Edith is chaperoning. And I’m in desperate need of you, you horrid friend. After you left me alone with John, I practically had to fend him off with an umbrella to keep him from kissing me.”

  “I’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll chat then.”

  Lucy folded her arms across her chest. “I’ve told Henry so much about you that he must believe you’re an imaginary friend I invented out of boredom. The least you could do is have a cup of tea with the poor man.”

  At the end of the alley a carriage rumbled by in the direction of Covent Garden. I should be headed there now, to get the latest gossip from Joyce about the murders and see what else I could find out about Scotland Yard’s investigation. But Lucy was narrowing her eyes at me, and I said, “All right. Though I can’t stay but a few minutes.”

  “We’ll see about that. And Clara, I came to tell you I’ve eaten all the gingerbread cakes and we need more.”

  Lucy linked her arm in mine as she dragged me up the main staircase to the parlor. “Thank god the holidays will be over soon, else I’d put on a stone in weight. Oh, I’m so glad you arrived! Henry’s been boring my ears off and I’m desperate for some real conversation. At least he’s nice to look upon.” She caught herself, and quickly added, “Though only in a certain light. Otherwise he’s an ogre.”