“I’m not talking about punishment. I’m talking about life!” Molly found the next person in line—a hunched man with dirt-streaked cheeks and a wrinkle across his forehead so deep it looked like a cut. “How many meals will you eat today, sir?”
The man hung his head, mumbling.
“How many?”
“Just this, miss.”
“And you, Ursula. What did you have to break your fast this morning?”
“Only a bowl of porridge.”
“And?” Molly said.
“And what?” Ursula’s cheeks pinked. “That’s all.”
“Candied oranges, nuts, baked salmon, eggs, and a steak with gravy for Papa,” Cady whispered, looking pleased.
Ursula shot her sister an indignant stare. “I didn’t eat any of it.”
“No, but you could have,” Molly said.
The man took his bowl from her hands and eagerly scurried down the line, happy to escape the bickering.
Ursula glared at Molly. “What makes you so much better than the rest of us?”
“I’m not better,” Molly said. “I’ve just been hungry before.”
“You mean you were poor?” Ursula’s head tilted, and her lips curved into a smile.
“No, I . . .” She could as good as feel Ursula’s proboscis unfurling. Shame, hot and ugly, blazed across her face as she tried to smooth her error. “I just mean that no one deserves . . .”
Ursula laid a manicured hand on Molly’s. “Of course you would feel sympathy. They’re your people.” She stared pointedly at Molly’s red hair. “I assure you, Molly, I make no judgments.”
A loud clap of hands sounded from the front of the line.
“Time!” Mrs. Rutledge’s voice cut through the air. She laid her bowl on the serving table, and the other ladies followed suit. The actual workers swiftly moved back in to fill their places, aproned bodies crowding Molly out of the way.
Face still burning, she searched for Cady, but Ursula’s sister was nowhere in sight. When she finally spotted her, Cady was exiting the dining hall, Mrs. Rutledge’s voice raised in a lecturing tone beside her.
Molly’s anger became a dull ache once more.
Why hadn’t she just kept her mouth closed? She’d had only one chance to ask Cady about Edgar, and she’d wasted it.
Molly found Ava sitting at one of the long wood tables beside an old woman.
“Molly! I didn’t see you there.”
“The others are leaving.” She wondered if she should tell her aunt of her blunder and then decided against it. She was sure Ava would hear soon enough.
“Of course. I’ll be right with you.” Ava pulled a silver tin from her pocket and shook out a shiny green candy into the wrinkled palm of the old woman. “Here, Myra. A sweet for a sweet.”
The old woman’s toothless mouth cracked into a gummy grin. “Bless you, child.” She popped the candy into her mouth, eyes closed, as the scent of peppermint released into the air.
Opening her eyes, her gaze floated up to Molly’s hair and then widened. “Jessi?”
Molly stepped back in confusion. “No. I’m Molly.”
The old woman grabbed her arm. “Jessi! You’ve come back!”
Ava sighed. “Her daughter. She went missing a few days ago.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Jessi’s husband was quite free with his fists. There’s talk he may have loosed them one too many times.”
The old woman’s chin jutted forward. “That ain’t what happened! The Knifeman got her. Liked that her eyes was two different colors.”
“Who’s she talking about?” Molly whispered.
The old woman’s grip tightened, sending a spike of pain shooting up Molly’s arm. “Likes the unusual ones, he does. Cuts ’em up and keeps pieces of ’em to build a bride hellish as himself.”
Ava leaned over, gently untangling Myra’s fingers. “It’s just a story.” She shook out another candy. “Sometimes it is easier to believe in monsters than the truth about someone we love.”
Myra held out her hand, and Ava obliged, smiling sadly.
“I’d give her the whole tin,” her aunt said, “but they’d just say she’d stolen it.”
“That’s terrible.” Molly watched the old woman’s palsied hand bring the sweet to her mouth.
“Places like this are always terrible.” Ava shuddered. She took hold of Molly’s arm, squeezing tightly. Her eyes bored into Molly’s. “Promise me you’ll never end up in one of them again.”
* * *
The chill from Myra’s story followed Molly through Old Blockley, but as she stepped outside, the cheerful sun drove it away.
Most of the other women in the Ladies’ Society had already gone. Only Ursula and her sister, Cady, remained, peering anxiously down the street at an approaching carriage. The horses stopped in front of the women, and a raven-haired man descended.
“James!” Ursula’s voice had risen in a high-pitched trill.
Ava looked on with disgust before leaning over to whisper, “If you learn nothing else from me, Molly, learn this—a woman who loves a man has already sold herself.”
Molly thought of Da and the way Ma had used to look at him.
At the bottom of the stairs, Ursula stood on tiptoes and began to busily whisper in the boy’s ear. She stopped only when Ava and Molly approached.
“James, let me introduce you to Molly Green. James is the top medical student in his class.” Ursula dripped the knowledge like a cat licking fresh cream from its whiskers. “He volunteers here at the hospital.”
James frowned. “They’d be better off dead, most of them,” he said, his icy eyes crinkling.
He was handsome, Molly thought, but with the kind of features that seemed more at home on a newspaper advertisement than they did on a real human. Pomaded black hair framed a perfectly symmetrical face, the robin’s-egg-blue eyes accented by thick black lashes. There was not a single wrinkle on his expertly tailored navy suit, and his heart-shaped chin was clean shaven.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she said. Trying to appear confident, Molly stepped forward and extended her hand. Too late, she remembered the garish cut, still healing, and tried to hide it by keeping her palm down.
But James simply stared at her, then looked quickly away.
An awkward silence followed until Ava gently nudged her. “Ladies curtsy,” she whispered.
Molly fell into an awkward bend, and James bowed.
Face blazing, she hurried after her aunt to their carriage, the high-pitched sound of Ursula’s laughter following close behind.
10
The Knifeman.
The name beat like a trapped moth inside Molly’s head, overtaking the shame of her ungraceful departure. Tucked inside the dark carriage, her attention returned again to Myra’s story.
Likes the unusual ones, he does.
“Are you all right?” Ava leaned forward, concerned. “I know today was difficult.”
Molly nodded, but her mind continued to swirl.
Kitty wasn’t the only girl to have disappeared. Besides Myra’s daughter, Tom had said women’s mutilated bodies were being found all over the city. The newspaper her aunt had tried to hide that morning at the breakfast table had confirmed it.
Kitty’s corpse had been discovered outside Philadelphia, but even so . . .
Cuts ’em up and keeps pieces of them to build a bride as hellish as himself.
There was a killer on the loose, and at least according to Myra, he was targeting special girls just like Kitty.
Slowly, a new and horrible thought began to form.
What if Edgar hadn’t just killed his lover to hide the baby?
The thought continued to gather shape one ugly limb at a time, like a monster rising from some madman’s lab.
What if his interest in her had had l
ess to do with a quick thrill and more to do with the thrill of possessing her body? So much so, he’d kept bits of her as a prize. Bits of other women too.
What if the Knifeman wasn’t just a story?
What if Edgar was the Knifeman?
“Tom will pick you up this evening,” Ava said as the carriage pulled to a stop in front of the house. “In the meantime, try to get some rest.”
“You’re leaving?” Molly did not know what she had expected. Company? Encouragement? But her aunt’s kindness was as unpredictable as a winter storm.
“I have more errands to run. I think it’s better if you get some rest. Night will come sooner than you think.”
Letting Molly out of the carriage, Ava shut the door.
As soon as her aunt’s carriage was gone, Molly hurried toward the church. Madman or no, she needed to find Edgar.
But it was empty, the door firmly locked.
Molly roamed the house listlessly, her mind refusing to settle. If the killer truly was Edgar, Molly might be the only person in the world to know the Knifeman’s real name.
She fingered the knife in her pocket like a worry stone, the gruesome image of Kitty’s grave replaying itself in her mind. It disappeared only long enough to be replaced by the thought of the bodies she would be asked to steal in just a few hours’ time.
Finally, she found the library, and only there did her anxiety recede slightly. She pulled a heavy volume down from the shelf and curled up in an armchair that smelled of pipe tobacco and leather. Sitting cross-legged, she spread open the book with its flaking spine across her lap.
Da had loved books. It had been a weakness in a man of his position—a farmer in so much debt that he didn’t even own his own horse, let alone his own house. He’d spent money on books all the same, and Molly had reaped the benefit.
When she was growing up, it had been the classics Da favored—Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare. But those books had never moved Molly. Though Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was an exception because of its science, she preferred books without stories. The ones that told her the way the world really worked. A collection of essays about smaller organisms banding together to outwit larger predators. Crabs carrying venomous sea urchins on their back. Lessons in survival. Those had seemed much more valuable by far.
Her favorite was a book Da had bought from the widow of an entomologist—Night Moths of the World and Their Transformations—a two-volume set that featured beautiful colored drawings. Molly could recite entire pages from memory.
Moths are not perhaps so gaily colored as their gaudy rivals, the butterflies; but when we consider the splendid sphinges, or twilight fliers, by which they are linked to the day-flying butterflies, they can scarcely be deemed less beautiful.
Molly would never be pretty like Ma or Kitty, but the words had given her a secret hope that perhaps there was another sort of transformation to which she might aspire. She had recited that particular passage enough times that Kitty had started calling her a “splendid sphinge” whenever Molly did something that amused her.
But the memory of a laughing, joking Kitty was too painful, and Molly turned her attention quickly back to the shelves.
The library seemed to have been made specifically for her—almost none of the books were fiction. Most were medical or scientific texts. Molly began to devour them eagerly, flipping through pages that revealed the inner workings of worlds she had not even known existed. Soon, she found herself lost in An Introduction to Practical Geometry. By the time evening came, her head was spinning with spheres, lines, and equilateral triangles.
Around six, sensing the light fading, Molly closed her book. Stretching, she cracked her knuckles.
You’ll ruin your wings, you splendid sphinge.
She shut the voice away, slipping her hand into her pocket again to touch the blade.
In her room, Maeve had laid out another borrowed gown for her, this one a pale-blue silk with ruffles at the neck like a child might wear. Molly put it on with a grimace.
Downstairs, she found a meal waiting for her, the dishes and silverware perfectly arranged. Ava was still nowhere in sight, so Molly sat down to dine alone.
She was hardly able to eat.
The dinner roll mushroomed into a misshapen head, its springy texture sinking beneath her fingers like flesh. Dropping it, she tried a bit of pickled herring instead, but the tiny bones stuck in her throat.
She settled for water and, at eight o’clock, went outside to meet the carriage.
Tom Donaghue sat in the driver’s seat, grinning.
“Hello, Molly. Lucky for us, it’s another terrible night for seeing stars.”
* * *
Philadelphia at night was like a bruised fruit. One need only bite its flesh to find the rot.
On Market Street, the smell of fresh bread from the day had given way to the opium dealer’s cart of night. Men ducked into doorways with women not their wives, and young girls no older than Molly sold themselves for a quarter. And everywhere was the dank, fecund smell of the river.
The carriage plunged deeper into the city’s heart. As the neighborhoods became poorer, the mask of good health fell completely away. Chamber pots splashed out windows onto snow-packed streets, and eyes peeked from shadows. Twice, Molly heard a scream.
How easy it would be to simply disappear into this hell and have no one look for you again.
How easy for the Knifeman to find you . . .
The horses slowed, and Molly felt a chill work its way up her spine. The ice-covered trees disappeared, revealing a large snowy expanse, bumps like rotten teeth rising on its hills.
They were parked at the gates of a cemetery. Opening the door, Tom helped her outside.
“Who am I to be tonight?”
“You’re here to claim your sister. You can even give her a name if it’ll make it easier. Gertrude. Or Jane or Victoria, for all I care.”
“All right, I have a sister. And?”
“And you’re to ask the man inside for her body. I’ll go round and get the wagon to collect her. The boys working for me have it now on another run, but they should be here shortly.”
Molly stood perfectly still.
“Give me your coat,” Tom said. “If you look like a lady, they won’t ask as many questions.”
She did as he asked, shivering as the freezing air hit her skin.
“The corpse is female, aged sixteen to twenty, brown hair, with a mark above her lip. She’ll be waiting for burial in the paupers’ grave. They like to get a good bunch of ’em together before they dig.”
Her stomach clenched.
“Look,” said Tom. “There’s some folks who get put off by it. Say keeping a corpse from being buried, you’re dooming them to hell. Me, I think it’s a job. Somebody’s got to give the sawbones something to practice on, and your aunt makes sure we do it respectful-like, as much as we can.”
“Sawbones?”
“The doctors. I don’t suppose you’d want them practicing their skills on living folk, would you now? All medical students have to dissect a body to graduate. They cut ’em up and look for a prize, like kids with a king cake. The only legal way to get one is to wait for a criminal to be executed, and there ain’t close to enough of those.”
He peered at Molly, his one good eye glowing in the moonlight. “What about you? Are you afraid of the devil?”
She thought of Kitty, the priest who had condemned her simply for how she’d been born. Of Edgar, first using Kitty and then cutting off a piece of her to keep.
“I don’t believe in the devil,” said Molly. “It’s people who are bad.”
“Now, there’s a girl.” Tom gave her a half smile. “Perhaps you’ll prove your aunt right after all.”
“What about the dead girl’s family?” Molly asked. “The real one? What will they do when they can’
t find her?”
Tom scoffed. “Ain’t no families of the ones we take. Tomorrow, the gravedigger will throw her in the ground and cover her up with a half dozen like her, and that will be that. The only way she’ll do anybody any good is if you get to her first.”
He waited, tongue poking nervously at the edge of his lip, as if he expected Molly to collapse in a faint. “You could always quit,” he said, sounding almost hopeful.
She let the numbness that circled her heart freeze the rest of her.
And when she answered, her voice was steady. “Tell me what I need to do.”
* * *
Her name is Mary.
Molly spoke the words over again to herself as she approached the groundskeeper’s shack, her hands clutching at the skirt of her fine dress, soaking it with sweat.
Mary.
She had chosen the moniker of a woman the orphanage priest had spent an entire sermon condemning. She had never forgotten it, though the Mass had been years ago. Mary Shelley, the priest had told them, was a godless woman who’d written a godless book about a monster. Clearly, said the priest, a female’s mind twists and rots when not focused solely on family and children; her demonic book was the spawn of a too-worldly woman. But Molly had not cared. She’d thought only how wonderful it must be to earn money for something that you’d done with your own hands and for no other reason than it pleased you.
Mary.
The name became a story, a person, a truth.
Her name is Mary, and I loved her very much.
She took a deep breath and rapped twice at the grounds-keeper’s door. The cold wood stung her knuckles. From inside came the scrape of a chair and the stomp of a booted foot hitting the floor. “Who’s there?”
The door swung wide.
Molly moved the skirt of her dress aside in an awkward curtsy. “Sir.” She did not have to pretend her fear. “I am sorry to disturb you so late. Only . . .” Her throat tightened, so that she could barely finish the sentence. “My sister. I think she is dead. Her name was Mary, and I loved her very much.”
The Corpse Queen Page 7