Her Dark Curiosity (13 page)

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AND BITTER MELON

INSTRUCTIONS:
heat over contained flame in spirits of niter bath until separate oils combine; allow time for essential oils to evaporate. Note: Successful serum shall remain uniform in texture and color when allowed to cool below 40° C. If serum separates, THROW OUT.

On the following pages Edward and I had scrawled our own notations: alterations to the dosage and ingredients, failed results, amended amounts.

The lantern flickered as a spool of air slipped in from the window cracks. I worked quickly, readying the extract, and finished the serum by distilling it over the burner flame and then transferring it into a glass vessel. Each minute that passed while I waited for it to cool was excruciating.

Five second passed, and still it held. My breath hitched with hope.

Ten seconds.

I took a thermometer, waiting at the edge of patience for the reading.

It reached 38° C, and still it held.

Still.

Then it split apart like oil in water.

“No!” I grabbed the vial full of separated liquid, shaking it, willing it to stay mixed. But it had failed, as all of them had. In a fit I threw the serum against the wall, where it shattered to the floor, making Sharkey jump up and bark in alarm. I doubled over in the chair and leaned my head on the table, barely holding myself together.

Failed again.

I rocked back and forth, listening to the wind push at the window, Sharkey’s uneasy pacing on the floor before he curled up again on the hearth. Had Father had these same challenges? Everything had seemed so easy for him. I couldn’t ever picture Father failing at anything.

Your father is still with you,
a voice whispered in the back of my head.

I tilted my head so one eye was free, and my gaze fell on Father’s journal flickering in the lantern light. It wasn’t exactly true that Father said nothing about serums. On one page near the back, I had found a detailed procedure he’d done on a cat.

Glycogen deposits are most potent when they are freshly collected,
the entry said,
And in many cases, this means the difference between a serum’s success and failure.

“Freshly collected”—he meant from vivisecting a live animal.

I glanced toward the door to make sure Edward was long gone, and let my fingers creep toward the crooked shelf like a spider. The lantern cast a ghostly shadow as they moved closer and closer to the journal, until I could graze it with my index finger. The leather cover was soft, well worn, well loved.

The difference between success and failure.

I ran my finger along the top of the journal, testing its weight, how much pressure it would take to pull it from the shelf. I did so, just an inch, and then paused.

How desperate was I to cure myself? To cure Edward? Desperate enough for
that
?

I glanced at Sharkey, curled on the rug by the woodstove. His paws twitched as he dreamed he was chasing rabbits. I traced my eyes along his scrawny rib cage, where the bones stuck out like a map of his body. I’d seen enough of Father’s diagrams to know where to cut to extract the pancreas. First I’d have to splay the stifles and make an incision from abdomen to sartorius, looking for the pink line of the diaphragm. The pancreas would be located between that thick wall of muscle and the spleen. It would take no more than four incisions to free it. A simple procedure, really.

A log cracked in the fire, and the dog twitched awake. I jerked out of my thoughts and slammed the journal back against the shelf as if it was on fire. My head filled with the memory of watching Father at work in his laboratory, his poor victim twitching, screaming, dripping blood onto the floor. I stumbled to my feet, knocking the chair back, whole body shaking. Sharkey leaped up, worried for me, and scrambled to my side.

I looked down at his wet nose, his tiny claws. No, I couldn’t. I would never. God help me, I’d stop Edward some other way before
that.

I pulled Sharkey into my arms.

“I won’t do it,” I whispered to him. “I couldn’t.”

But I could,
that was the thing. If I wanted to, I could

do it.

I didn’t seem to feel any warmth from the fire anymore. All I felt was the sour taste of that journal’s promise of a cure, but at a terrible price.

I couldn’t get out of the workshop fast enough, though I knew Edward would be puzzled when he returned and I wasn’t there. As I escaped back into the cold winter night, the moon was the only witness to that terrible flicker of temptation I’d managed to resist.

I should burn the journal, as the rest of Father’s work had burned.

I pulled my coat tighter as I descended the lodging house’s front steps. It was a quiet night, save the wind that ruffled the strands of hair that had come loose from my braid. I could hardly focus on anything but the failed serum and Father’s journal as I made my way back to Dumbarton Street, feeling naked without my corset, and exposed for all the world to see.

I knew, though I’d be damned for it, that I would never destroy that journal.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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FOURTEEN

T
HE NEXT FEW DAYS
were a precarious balance of secrets and truths, darkness and light. I snuck off to my attic chamber to work on the serums with Edward at night, and during the day attempted to maintain a respectable life with the professor and Elizabeth as they hosted teas and took me ice-skating on the pond in Wiltshire and teased me about every young man who glanced my way.

The newspapers were blessedly silent. The Wolf of Whitechapel hadn’t struck again, credited to Inspector Newcastle’s prowess. Of course I knew it was
my
efforts that had kept Edward restrained, but I could hardly tell that to the
London Times.

On a sunny morning the professor, Elizabeth, and I walked together in Covent Garden market, looking for Christmas presents for Mary and the other servants. By and large, Elizabeth was a fiercely private person, used to the solitude and quiet of the Scottish moors, and even days after her arrival I still had little indication as to the type of person she was. She stayed up late most nights, dressed in a housecoat in the library until all hours, wearing reading glasses not unlike the professor’s wire spectacles, drinking licorice tea laced with gin—she didn’t know that I knew—and staring out the window at the city lights.

“Have you heard of a man called John Newcastle?” I asked the professor as we passed a stall of silver dishware. “He’s an inspector with Scotland Yard. I met him last week.”

“Newcastle? Yes, a crackerjack, they’re calling him. Trying to make a name for himself rather quickly. He puts on a show that he’s from a good family, but his father owned a handful of shoe shops, nothing more. You haven’t got your eye on him, have you? And here I thought you hated police officers.” He gave his off-balance smile.

I laughed. “No, nothing like that. He’s courting Lucy.”

“Ah. Well, he’s got ambition, and that would certainly appeal to her father.” The professor patted my hand as we followed Elizabeth to the flower market for mistletoe. “He wouldn’t be good enough for you, anyway, my dear. You deserve at least an earl. Perhaps even a duke.”

I laughed again until I saw the flower market stalls pressing in on us, and I was reminded of my twisted rosebushes and the attic where I sheltered the city’s most terrifying murderer.

You’re keeping him contained,
I reminded myself.
It’s working.

That evening, my feelings were still torn about Edward. The professor, Elizabeth, and I dined on
carré d’agneau,
and as I hid some of the meatiest pieces in my napkin to take to Sharkey later, my thoughts went from Edward to my father’s letters. If Father indeed had maintained a correspondence with someone in London the entire time he was on the island, then Montgomery must have known about it, since he had been the one to travel to Brisbane and London for supplies, and post letters if there’d been any.

But Montgomery had said nothing. More secrets, just as Edward said. It left the hurt of Montgomery’s betrayal even more raw, as though perhaps I’d never known him at all.

“Well, we aren’t much of a social bunch, are we?” the professor said. “Two weeks till Christmas, and the three of us sit home like lumps of coal.”

I set down my soup spoon, then cleared my throat of my hesitation in bringing up a subject I knew they wouldn’t like.

“I was thinking of Father.”

The professor’s good-natured smile wilted.

“The holidays,” Elizabeth said tenderly. “They always make one think of family.” She dipped her spoon into her soup as though that ended the conversation, but I couldn’t let it go. I needed to discover who Father’s colleague was—and prove that it wasn’t the professor.

“What was he like before?” I asked.

Elizabeth exchanged a look with the professor, who leaned forward with his hands folded. “Yes, a girl should know what sort of man her own father was. When I met him, he was quiet. Focused. A lot like you, though considerably less pretty.”

I smiled.

Elizabeth reached over and squeezed my hand. “Your mother was a lovely woman.”

The professor had his head turned, almost as though listening for voices on the streets outside, or perhaps from his memory. “A brilliant man,” he muttered, and then, “a shame, the way it all happened.”

It seemed he spoke of Father’s banishment, but there was a far-off tone to his voice that tickled the back of my mind and made me wonder if his words weren’t in reference to some other, darker memory instead.

“Did it happen quickly?” I asked, looking between them. “His madness, I mean.”

The professor drew in a deep breath. “Oh, these things are difficult to know. There were times, early on, when he and I would share a cigar at the Hotel du Lac and talk of the possibilities of science. Grand conversations about experiments that would lead to saved lives and better medicine. Looking back, there were things he said that I should have taken note of. We had an argument once about using rabbits for medical trials—he didn’t seem to think there was any morality involved at all. And he started keeping to himself more. Lying. He lied so easily. Only later did we discover he’d been slipping out nights, without even your mother being aware. Other nights he came home smelling of the butcher’s. The dogs used to follow him around the city.”

My hands beneath the table shook as I thought of Sharkey following me because of the meat in my pocket. “When did you know for certain that he’d gone mad?”

The professor braced his arms on the table, as though the motion could hold back all those painful years. “Are you quite positive you want to hear all this?” he asked. I nodded stiffly, as Elizabeth cleared her throat and stood to pour us more wine, and the professor leaned back in his chair, though his body never quite relaxed. “Our friendship had begun to drift apart by that point. I’d heard from colleagues—men I’d known in the King’s Club—that his experimentation had gotten more severe, that he’d been reprimanded by the dean. Then my Helena had died, with little Thomas. Just six years old, he was. Your father didn’t come to the funeral, and after all the lying and disappearing, I drank too much and got irate and went to confront him.” He took a long draught of wine. “I found him in the laboratory with some poor animal. A dog, I believe it was, though so mangled you could hardly tell. He told me he was pioneering a new science, had been tinkering at it for years, and that it was going to change the world. The entire time the dog whined in terrible pain, and he didn’t even seem to notice.”

“And that was when you turned him in?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

The professor rubbed his temple. “It was clear he’d gone mad. I’d no other choice. He fought me, and the dog managed to get away.”

He sank deeper into his chair, as though speaking the memories weighed him down. I felt the shape of them, too, like ghosts in the room, winding among the forest of candlesticks.

“And you never heard from him after that?” I asked.

He must have caught the strange note in my voice, because he looked up and said, with perfect frankness, “Heard from him? No, my dear. As I understand, no one heard from him ever again, until you stumbled upon that young assistant of his.”

I met his eyes boldly, trying to read the truth there. He seemed so sincere, such a hero to the world for ridding it of a mad butcher and then taking in the orphan daughter. I had a hard time believing anything else could be the case. But I’d made the mistake of trusting my father, once. If the professor turned out to be lying, too, I didn’t think I could take another betrayal.

Elizabeth blew out the candles one by one, then turned to me in the faint light from the tall windows.

“Come upstairs, Juliet. Enough of all these old memories. Let me draw you a bath, and after a good soak, you’ll feel new again. I promise.”

A
S SCALDING WATER TUMBLED
into the claw-foot bath, Elizabeth poured in a handful of foaming salts that filled the room with the smell of roses. I balled myself up in the tub, naked beneath the foam but not self-conscious. Elizabeth had a motherly way about her, though she was childless. She took a comb to my hair and hummed a slow little tune while the water crept higher. The melody filled the room like steam, and at last I recognized it.

“The Holy and the Ivy,” an ancient carol with pagan roots.

I closed my eyes and hugged my legs harder, laying my cheek on my knee. I liked how the sound of the water mixed with Elizabeth’s carol singing to drown out my thoughts. My mother had never prepared a bath for me like this. We always had servants to do it when I was young, and then after the scandal we were lucky to clean ourselves in a neighbor’s tepid bathwater.

“Don’t you get lonely?” I asked. “Out there on the moors.”