Her Dark Curiosity

by Megan Shepherd

  Montgomery pulled me away from the door. “Come on. We’ll get only lies from him.”

  I let him lead me up the stairs into the kitchen, though I couldn’t quite tear my mind away from the haunted face behind that door.

  The Beast was many things, but I didn’t think a liar was one of them.

  ELIZABETH WAS WAITING ANXIOUSLY for us in the kitchen. Balthazar had gone to bed, so we made tea and moved to the salon and I told her about what I’d discovered at Scotland Yard.

  “Newcastle is part of the King’s Club,” I said. “He knew I was protecting Edward, so he framed him in hopes I’d turn against him and help the police catch him. I nearly did.”

  “The King’s Club already used Juliet as bait at the masquerade,” Montgomery added. “Now they’re willing to commit murder. They aren’t going to stop at anything until they have Edward. There’s only one thing to do.”

  He meant kill Edward.

  I studied his face to gauge how serious he was. I didn’t like this side of him—the hardened hunter—yet at the same time I feared I had been the one to make him into this. I’d shattered his faith in my father, I’d brought about the regression of the beast-men, I’d made him face the terrible things he’d been doing with his own hands.

  “No,” I breathed. “We can’t.”

  Elizabeth paced behind the sofa. Her jaw was clenched tight, but her hands were surprisingly steady. “Perhaps he’s right, Juliet.”

  “It would be murder!”

  “He’s killed a dozen people!” Montgomery countered. “And twice that on the island. The fact that he didn’t kill the professor hardly makes him innocent. Why are you so desperate to protect him?”

  Because he protected me, I thought. Because you weren’t here, and he came back for me and in his own way tried to save me. Because the Beast was right when he said we weren’t so different.

  “The professor gave me a second chance,” I said. “He gave me a life when everyone else thought I was suitable only for prison. My hands aren’t clean either, nor are yours. We owe it to Edward.”

  “If we open that cellar door, the Beast will go on a rampage.”

  “I’m not talking about setting him loose. I’m talking about curing him.”

  “We’ve tried—”

  “And we’ll keep trying!” I snapped. “There’s a piece of Edward still in that body. I can feel it. We still have time. Father did this to him, don’t you see? If Edward dies, Father wins.”

  Montgomery was looking at me strangely. “Is this about saving Edward?” he asked, voice suddenly dangerously quiet. “Or about besting your father at his own work?”

  A strange feeling crept up my spine. Elizabeth’s eyes flickered to mine. Besting Father at his own work? I wanted to shake my head. To deny it. This was about giving Edward another chance. Giving me another chance. I’d always felt that our fates were intertwined, the beast in him not so unlike the animal in me. Both headed toward our own destruction; him lost to the Beast, me lost to my illness.

  If there was no hope for Edward, what did that mean for me?

  “This isn’t about besting Father,” I said in a tightly controlled voice. “This is about doing what is right. Give up if you want, but as long as there’s still good in Edward, I will keep trying. If you kill him, know that you’re killing a part of me, too.”

  I turned and hurried upstairs to my bedroom. I heard Montgomery calling my name, and Elizabeth’s voice telling him to let me have some peace. I changed into my shift but couldn’t stop pacing. I didn’t want to be alone now, in that empty bedroom with a cold fireplace and stiff pillows. I wanted something simple, something that wouldn’t twist and stab at me, a single moment of peace in this crashing time.

  I went into the hall and looked toward the attic. My feet took me there, to the little bedroom Elizabeth had given Balthazar. I knocked softly, but no answer came. When I pushed open the door, I realized the room was a nursery, filled with small furniture and toys. I remember Mother having talked about the professor’s wife, who had died years ago, not long after their young son.

  In the little bed, Balthazar was curled like an infant with his long feet hanging off the end, a stiff doll on the floor by his side. He slept soundly; I didn’t want to wake him. I pulled up a rocking chair and sat next to him, picking up the old doll. It must have been a hundred years old, well loved, stitched back together in the places where it had begun to fall apart over the years. I ran my finger down the perfect row of stitches, clearly made by a surgeon’s hand. I could picture the professor lovingly patching the old doll for his son. I tucked it at the foot of the bed from where it had fallen.

  The darkened room was eerie now with moonlight streaming through a gauzy curtain, landing on one of the old family portraits. This one of a boy, the nameplate lost, and I remembered the professor telling me that his son had died at the same age as one of their ancestors.

  I rocked in the chair, in the room that had been left exactly as when the professor’s son died, the ghosts of toys long covered in dust. A rocking horse, a wooden puppet theater, a set of blocks. I ran my fingers lightly over the roof of an old dollhouse, feeling sad for everything the professor had lost, sadder still that I could never tell him how much I’d cared. Montgomery wasn’t the only one who longed for family.

  I hadn’t intended to stay long, but my body was heavy with exhaustion, and at some point I must have fallen asleep there by Balthazar’s bedside. I dreamed I was standing in an island creek stained with blood, grass rustling as beast-men surrounded me on all sides.

  When I woke, it was to a heavy arm shaking my shoulder. I jerked with a start and found Balthazar’s face very close to mine.

  “Something outside, miss,” he said.

  I pushed back the curtain in a hurry. It was snowing fast, as hard pellets clattered against the glass. I could barely make out a carriage on the street below, with a swinging lantern at the driver’s seat.

  Suddenly a pounding upon the front door shook the house. I let the curtain fall. It must be one of the small hours of the night, caught between midnight and dawn. Why would someone come at such an hour?

  Balthazar gripped onto my arm. “Best to stay quiet, miss.”

  I heard someone on the stairs heading for the front door—Montgomery, from the heavy sound of the steps. The pounding came harder, along with voices I couldn’t make out. I turned back to the window, squinting through the snow, to read the thick block letters on the side of the carriage.

  Scotland Yard.

  “Oh no. This can’t be good,” I muttered. “Come downstairs with me.”

  But he held my arm. “Wait, miss.”

  “Montgomery’s down there,” I whispered. “It might be Newcastle for all we know. He might try to arrest him.”

  But Balthazar’s face was deeply wrinkled as he cocked his head, listening. His hearing was keen, but could he truly make out words from three stories down?

  At last his lips folded in.

  “It’s you they’ve come for, miss.”

  More footsteps came from below, inside the house now, amid the sounds of arguments. My heartbeat sped. Five men at least, and then came a crash, and lighter footsteps on the stairs as Elizabeth must have rushed down to investigate.

  I fumbled with the window, but this wasn’t my bedroom with the broken lock. This one held fast. “I need your help, Balthazar!” I cried. He picked up the lock in his meaty hand, examined it, then fumbled through the dusty collection of toys until he found a stick horse, which he rammed against the lock until it broke. I pushed open the window as bitter-cold snow stung my face.

  “Go downstairs,” I urged him. “Help Montgomery and Elizabeth. I’ll hide somewhere outside and come back when it’s safe.”

  “Please take care, miss,” he said, and pointed to my feet. “You haven’t any shoes.”

  “I’ll manage.” I climbed out of the attic window, stomach shrinking at the four-story fall to the garden. A copper drain spout, ancient
and corroded, clung to the exterior wall. I made my way down it carefully, freezing in only my shift. I slipped near the end and tumbled to the garden, landing in a pile of snow that broke my fall but left me with a terrible scrape on my shin. When I looked up, the lights were on in my bedroom. If I’d spent the night there instead of the nursery, they would have already caught me.

  Cold bit at my bare limbs. Pain would come soon, and then terrible numbness.

  I scrambled to my feet. I would freeze in minutes without coat or boots, not enough time to race across town to my attic in Shoreditch. Perhaps not even time to make it to Lucy’s in Cavendish Square, but I had no choice. I stamped through the snow toward the garden gate, eyes blinded by flurries.

  Someone was waiting for me.

  I felt his hands on me before I saw his face. The shock of it made me scramble and claw, but he had another man with him wearing leather driving gloves, and the two of them together were too strong. It wasn’t until the lights from the house shone on his white hair that I recognized his terrible visage.

  “You won’t get away from me this time,” Dr. Hastings said.

  THIRTY-SIX

  ANGER SEETHED IN ME. I had overpowered him once, and I could have done it again if not for the driver holding me. He had twelve inches on me, and I had no knife, no mortar scraper, nothing to give me an advantage.

  “Put her in the carriage,” Hastings said with no little relish. “And notify Newcastle that I’ve got her.”

  The driver shoved me in, despite how I scratched at his face and kicked at the soft parts of his body. I winced, shivering in nothing more than my shift, as I landed in the carriage. It rocked as Dr. Hastings climbed in after me and locked the door.

  I scrambled to the opposite door—locked as well. Trapped. I pressed my back into the furthest corner, eyes wide. Dr. Hastings clutched a pistol.

  “You know, I always detested von Stein, thinking himself so much smarter than the rest of us,” he said. “Pity he isn’t here to protect you anymore.”

  “Were you the one who sliced him apart?” I hissed.

  “That honor wasn’t mine, but no matter. Seeing you locked away for the rest of your life will please me well enough.” He held the pistol unsteadily in his left hand, the one I had maimed. I couldn’t see the scars in the dark carriage, but I knew they were there.

  “Newcastle promised me a chance to dole out my own punishment. The courts can be so lenient sometimes. I’m a biblical man myself. An eye for an eye, isn’t that how the expression goes?”

  Anger seeped up my spine, vertebra by vertebra. I’d be damned before Dr. Hastings laid a hand on me again. I wished the Beast had clawed his heart out when he’d had the chance. Some people didn’t deserve to live, and if that made me a monster, so be it.

  He smiled in that thin-lipped way that showed the tip of his tongue.

  “Now, now, Miss Moreau. I’ve the blade this time.” He flicked open a knife, sliding closer until I could smell his spoiled-milk stench. The pistol’s cold metal barrel pressed against the gooseflesh of my arm.

  “Hold out that wrist of yours like a good girl. It’s either a slice through the tendons of your hand, just as you did to me, or a bullet in the head. Your choice.”

  I could kick him, throw myself at him, yet he held the two weapons. As he reached the knife toward my wrist, there came the sound of a key turning hastily in the lock.

  The carriage door swung open, and my hopes surged until I recognized the familiar outline of Inspector Newcastle, his copper breastplate glinting in the moonlight.

  “Another few moments, Inspector,” Dr. Hastings said, “and I’ll be done with her.”

  “You’re done with her now,” he said. He grabbed the doctor by his collar and dragged him onto the hard street. I could only stare, stunned and numb. Newcastle coming to my rescue was the last thing I’d anticipated.

  He said a few words to the driver in reference to Dr. Hastings moaning on the sidewalk, then climbed in and shut the door. With a rumble, the carriage started moving.

  “My apologies for exposing you to that vile man,” Newcastle said, adjusting his shirt cuffs. “He was a necessary evil, I’m afraid. Without his statement we had no grounds to request a warrant.” He paused. “Were you truly the one who mangled his hand like that? Quite impressive.”

  I tore at the door handle, trying to break the lock, but he hauled me away, pushing me onto the plush seat cushions across from him.

  “Miss Moreau, calm yourself. I’ve no wish to hurt you. I desire only to speak.”

  “Is that why you’ve abducted me?”

  “This isn’t an abduction. It’s an arrest, and I’m fully within my legal grounds. The case against you was dropped last year, but not the formal charges.” He adjusted his copper breastplate. “With luck, we’ll be able to reach an agreement that will keep you out of prison. In fact, I think you’ll find that what I shall propose is exceedingly beneficial for both of us.”

  When I didn’t respond, he smiled in an almost sad way and added, “I know you saw the spectacles. You left your fingerprint on one of the lenses. We have a copy of your fingerprints on file from your former arrest.”

  The carriage jostled as we left Belgravia’s smooth pavement and moved onto a cobblestone street. Stately Street, perhaps, or the north end of Highbury. The heavy curtains hid the outside world.

  “Who killed him?” I asked, deathly quiet.

  Newcastle reached up to turn on the lantern as though he hadn’t heard my question. He sat below the flame, hidden by its own flickering shadow, so all it accomplished was blinding me whenever I looked at it.

  “You must be freezing. Take my coat.” He shrugged out of his wool coat and extended it to me. As much as I wanted to throw the coat back in his face and demand an answer, my bare, damp limbs were shivering beyond my control. I wrapped the coat around me, hating having the smell of him so close.

  “You haven’t involved Lucy in this, have you?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t I who involved her, Miss Moreau, but you. I would never have put Lucy in any sort of danger.”

  “You can’t expect me to believe you actually care about her.” A man like him, so deceptive, was not the type to care about anything.

  But he frowned in a sincere way. “I care about her a great deal. I’m in a business where I hear lies all day, Miss Moreau. You’ve no idea how I admire a young woman who says what she truly thinks, even if more often than not it’s to express her poor opinion of me. It only makes me care for her all the more. If she suffers because of all this, it’s on your hands.”

  “I had to warn her. Her own father is wrapped up in this.”

  “Miss Moreau, the entire King’s Club is wrapped up in this.” He smiled, teeth glinting in the shadows. “But you already suspected that, didn’t you? When I heard you were back in London, I was curious to meet you. After we received word from Claggan that your father had died, all our hopes fell on you. I guessed you’d be clever. I’m delighted to find it’s true.”

  He settled back into the seat and took out a pipe and tobacco from his breast pocket, which he packed delicately, as though we’d all the time in the world.

  “You saw the laboratory, didn’t you?” His exhale of pipe smoke filled the carriage. “The night guard caught a glimpse of a girl in the hallways. I found footprints the next day that were decidedly dainty for any of our members.”

  I considered lying. I considered not saying anything. I considered many things, including lunging for his throat. But in the end, my curiosity got the best of me.

  “Yes, I saw it.”

  “I’m terribly interested to know how it compares to your father’s laboratory, since you are one of the few people to have seen it.”

  “Father kept his things tidier.”

  He laughed at this, deep and rich. “Clever. You’re a rare woman, Miss Moreau.” The carriage jostled again as we returned to smooth pavement. He took another long, thoughtful puff on his pipe. “I was a s
tudent of his, you know. Forensics. He took me under his wing but never extended an invitation for anything social. He was a difficult man to get to know.”

  “Did you hire someone to kill the professor?” I interrupted. “Or was it one of your own?”

  He reclined farther into the plump cushions, moving easily as the carriage swayed from side to side, more than content to let my question go unanswered. “A pity, to be certain, but the professor was an old man. His death was necessary; we knew you were sheltering Moreau’s creation, and we thought the only way to flush him out was for you to turn on him—if, for example, you thought he’d murdered someone close to you.”

  “Yet your ruse didn’t work, and now you’ve blood on your hands.”

  “Another necessary evil, I’m afraid.”

  “You have no idea what will happen if you bring those creatures in the tanks to life,” I said. “You’ve seen what the Wolf can do. You think you will be able to control them, but you won’t. They’ll destroy this city.”

  When he only flicked the ashes of his pipe onto the carriage floor, the terrible truth suddenly dawned on me, all their plans for New Year’s Day and the paupers’ ball in Parliament Square.

  “That’s what you want, isn’t it?” I whispered. “You intend to wreak havoc throughout the city. But why? For what possible purpose?”

  “This isn’t about creating chaos, Miss Moreau. It’s about building something. Your father might have been a madman, but I assure you, I am quite sane. I’ve always seen the practical uses for your father’s research, and I’m not alone.”

  “The French Ministry of Defense, you mean,” I spat. “They’re going to use them as biological weaponry, aren’t they?”

  He shrugged. “Weaponry is one possible application for Moreau’s research, yes, and certainly what the French government is most interested in. This isn’t limited to the French, though. We have an American research hospital that wants the technology for experimental procedures on baboon-kidney transplants. And a Dutch weaponry development company that wants to give its soldiers better eyesight and hearing with animal biological grafting. They’ve even discussed using it for communications—talking dogs that can sneak behind enemy lines, though that seems a bit fantastical to me. We even have a private individual in Germany, a baron, dying of heart failure. He’s willing to pay half his fortune if we can prove pig-heart transplants are possible. Your father’s science will revolutionize the world, Miss Moreau.”