Her Dark Curiosity (24 page)

When I finally awoke, drenched in sweat and ignorant of what time it was or even the day of the week, Montgomery told me I’d been in and out of consciousness for three days. He pulled me to him, unwashed though I was, and pressed his lips to my temple. Over his shoulder I saw a fire burning in my bedroom’s fireplace, stacked in his signature way. Our argument from the night my illness struck had left a rift between us, but not one so deep it couldn’t be bridged in the face of desperate times. We loved each other, but he was right. Until Edward was no longer between us, we could never be together.

He commandeered the professor’s dining room and spent the morning testing various serums in an effort to cure my illness, much to the perplexity of Elizabeth and the professor, who ate at the kitchen table instead. By afternoon tea my tongue was raw from swallowing pills, both arms were riddled with needle holes, and I felt decidedly uncured.

I rested my head on the dining room table, his makeshift examination space. “I told you, I’ve already tried all of Father’s various formulas. They’re practically the only things that make any sense in his journal, but none of them work.”

A commotion sounded in the hall. Montgomery and I hurried to the hallway, where a strange sight met us. Balthazar cringed while Lucy, dressed in an elegant hip-length jacket, pummeled him with her handbag.

“Let go of me, you devil!” she cried, boxing the handbag against his ear.

“What on earth is going on?” I exclaimed.

“Found a girl snooping around the garden,” Balthazar said.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, I was hardly snooping around,” Lucy said. “I came to see if you had recovered yet, and this devil accosted me.”

“Let her go, Balthazar,” Montgomery said.

“You hear that?” Lucy snapped. “Unhand me!”

Balthazar’s mouth folded in a frown, but he released her. She dusted off her jacket and cast an angry stare at him over her shoulder.

“You still look like death, Juliet,” she observed. “But at least you’re no longer raving about cutting dogs open. Now you can tell me why the devil I heard you’re engaged. Elizabeth told Aunt Edith, and everyone is talking about it.” She glanced pointedly at Montgomery, who backed away slowly and returned to his medical notations at the dining room table. I pulled Lucy into the foyer, but she kept straining to look back at Montgomery.

“That’s him, isn’t it?” She peeked back around the doorway. “Oh my, Juliet, he’s quite handsome.”

“The engagement isn’t true. That’s Montgomery James, the assistant I told you about. He followed Edward back to London and made up the engagement as justification for being alone with me while we figure out what the King’s Club is planning.”

Her face wrinkled in confusion and I paused, realizing she had no idea the danger spread beyond her father. I pulled her into the dining room, where Montgomery looked up from his work.

“Lucy knows everything, except what we learned last night.” I explained to her what we overheard her father and the other King’s Men saying on the balcony.

“But why do they need Edward?” she asked, sounding worried.

“We aren’t certain,” Montgomery said.

“They spoke of extracting something from him to complete the rest of the specimens,” I said, then paused, forgetting I was talking about slicing open the man she loved. “Whatever they’re planning, it seems to culminate on New Year’s Day.”

Lucy sat straight up at this. “New Year’s Day? And the King’s Club is involved?”

I nodded, filled with an unsettling premonition. “Why, do you know something?”

“Papa’s on the planning committee for the club’s charitable activities. This year they’re planning a paupers’ ball for the city’s poor. They’re distributing warm meals and secondhand clothes. The crowd will fill Parliament Square.” She paused. “It’s scheduled for New Year’s Day.”

I exchanged an alarmed glance with Montgomery, who stood and paced to the window, deep in thought.

“What does it mean?” Lucy asked. “Is it a coincidence?”

“We don’t know,” I said. “At least not yet.”

Lucy pulled over her handbag and drew out a thick set of keys, which she threw on the table. “Then let’s find out,” she said. “I stole these from Papa. I thought they might come in handy.”

My eyes went big. “Lucy, if he finds out . . .”

“That’s why we have to be fast. One of those unlocks the smoking room at King’s College of Medical Research, where the King’s Club holds their meetings. It should be empty tonight, since Papa left on business first thing this morning. I’ll need to have the keys back in his desk by the time he comes home tomorrow, or he’ll be furious.”

“You want to investigate
tonight
?” I said.

“Juliet, this is my father. You have the luxury of knowing yours was insane. I can’t sleep until I find out what the devil mine is up to.”

I shook my head, reluctant to involve her. “How would we even get to King’s College? The professor watches me like a hawk now, especially after the attack at the masquerade.”

“There’s a lecture this evening at King’s College on the women’s role in household management,” she said. “It’s being held upstairs in the same building. Tell the professor we’re attending. Montgomery can go as our driver.”

Her idea wasn’t a bad one, and I drummed my fingers, thinking. “I suppose I could feign a fainting spell halfway through the lecture. You could run and fetch Montgomery under the guise of taking me home . . .”

“ . . . but we’d really sneak into the King’s Club smoking room,” Lucy finished.

“Absolutely not,” Montgomery said, interrupting our scheming. He reached out and grabbed the keys. “It’s far too dangerous. I’ll go alone.”

“To a
ladies’
lecture?” Lucy asked. “You might stand out, don’t you think? Anyway, you haven’t a clue what to look for once we’re there. I’m the only one who’s read the letters.”

They stared each other down until at last Montgomery cursed under his breath and threw the keys back on the table.

“Very well. We go together.” He glanced at me. “Now I understand why you’re friends. I thought you were the most impossible woman in the world, but now I see there are two of you.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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TWENTY-SIX

P
RETENDING TO FEEL FAINT
during the women’s-role lecture wasn’t difficult, especially in light of my recent illness. We sat in the university’s mahogany-paneled lecture room amid a sea of straight-backed chairs filled with bored-looking ladies. The lecturer’s drone might have put me to sleep, if I wasn’t so jumpy from the knowledge of what we were planning to do. As he went on about tending to household tasks, it seemed perfectly natural to swoon and clutch the back of the chair in front of me and complain about the vapors. Lucy made a show of saying she’d fetch the driver, and soon returned with Montgomery. His presence woke up a few nodding heads in the audience, but we were gone before the lecturer had even started in on the proper way to attend to a sick husband.

We raced down the marble staircase to the main floor. Lucy led us past the long line of framed photographs, including the one from 1875 where Father’s young face watched me. She stopped at a locked door and pulled out her jangling key ring, but I held her back.

A finger to my lips, I pressed my ear to the door and listened for the sounds of voices within. Just because Lucy’s father was out of town didn’t mean the rest of the King’s Club wasn’t meeting, but the room behind the door was silent, and I gave her a nod.

She inserted a key emblazoned with the King’s Club crest into the brass lock and opened the door cautiously. It was pitch-black inside save the light from a few windows on the east wall. The scent of cigars was heavy in the room, though beneath it I detected a lingering trace of men’s cologne, and another more earthy scent that made me think of Sharkey when I buried my face in his fur. I swallowed. Why would a smoking room smell like
animals
?

We entered cautiously, and Montgomery found a switch on the wall and flipped on the electric lights. I shaded my eyes from the sudden brightness.

Lucy let out a cry and I whirled around. A beast hovered on the wall next to her, fangs barred, black eyes glinting. She ducked behind a sofa as I let out a deep breath. It was a taxidermied boar, and it wasn’t the only trophy. At least twenty mounted heads hung on the walls: bucks with nine-point antlers, lions with snarls frozen in time, bodiless zebras, and stuffed owls perched atop the upper bookcases.

“This can’t be a good sign,” Lucy muttered, backing away from the boar.

“Not necessarily,” I said, studying the unblinking eyes of a stuffed squirrel on the table nearest me. “Plenty of people like taxidermy, and it doesn’t mean anything. Even the professor keeps a stuffed bobcat in his study. A gift from some relative, I think.”

“Well, I don’t like it,” Lucy said, shivering.

Montgomery had already gone to the bookshelves, and was now riffling through the leather-bound titles. Lucy occupied herself by inspecting the framed awards and diplomas on the walls. There were no cabinets, no desks or boxes where notes might be stored. The room was exactly as it appeared—an elegant, masculine space filled with leather club chairs and cigar humidors for a dozen or more men to lounge in while they bragged about their accomplishments.

I ran my hands along the seams of the walls and the grand fireplace for hidden compartments, but found nothing. There were more framed photographs on the walls that documented the King’s Club’s history of charitable works. Photographs of the construction of the orphanage, and a framed royal decree dated 1855 thanking the members for their efforts to stop the cholera outbreak. Seeing their supposed good deeds hanging on the wall only turned my stomach. There was no telling what their
real
motives were. For all I knew, those poor orphans were destined for a terrible fate. After all, that brain in the hatbox had to come from somewhere.

After twenty minutes, we had searched every inch of the room and found nothing about the plans for the New Year’s paupers’ ball, or references to any kind of scientific experimentation they were funding.

“They must store their records elsewhere,” Lucy said, flouncing onto a leather sofa.

I nodded. “Perhaps if we could get a copy made of the key, and come back to spy on them when they’ve a meeting in progress—”

But Montgomery cut me off with a quick signal. “Someone’s coming,” he whispered. “Into the hallway, quick.” He flipped off the light, plunging us into darkness.

I found Lucy’s hand, and we hurried through the doorway. I could hear footsteps coming but the hallways were like a maze, and the echoes of sound fooled the ear. Lucy had just enough time to slip the key into the lock before someone rounded the corner. It was a pair of men with a bull’s-eye torch that shone directly onto us.

“Who’s there?” one yelled.

I felt like a deer blinded by a hunter’s light. Montgomery grabbed our hands and we raced away from them, but Montgomery didn’t know these hallways. I did.

“This way,” I say, rounding a corner that led to a staircase into the basement. The professors often left one of the exterior doors down here unlocked from the inside. We hurried down the stairs, but the men pursued us. A shrill night guard’s whistle echoed through the dark halls.

“Over here!” I hissed as loud as I dared to Montgomery and Lucy. The cadaver storage room was just around the corner, and from there it wasn’t far to the exterior door. There were no windows here to break the darkness, and the only light came from our pursuer’s torch as it flashed columns of light on the walls behind us.

At last we reached the exterior door. I threw myself against it, but it didn’t budge. “Blast!” I said. “The one night they lock it from the outside.”

Our pursuers were nearly upon us, so I felt the grooves and blocks of the wall until my hand connected with a doorknob. I threw it open, heedless of where it led.

The three of us stumbled down a narrow flight of stairs, black as death, which led even deeper to a level I hadn’t known existed. The air was thick with mildew and an earthy smell not unlike the jungle. We huddled together at the base of the stairs, listening. The sounds of footsteps came overhead, but no one approached the door. We waited for what must have been ten minutes, though it felt like an eternity. My fingers felt the wall, but there were no electric light switches, no gas lines, either.

“They must not have fitted this level with electric lights,” I whispered.

The air sizzled as Lucy struck a match, throwing a dim light on the corridors. They were older than I even imagined, part of the original stone foundation. The ground was littered with the husks of dead insects and refuse, and I wasn’t certain anyone had been down here in years until Lucy lowered the candle to reveal fresh footprints in the dust.

Montgomery bent down to pick up a broken candle, and while he and Lucy struggled to light the ancient thing, I wandered to a doorway at the end of the hall. I tugged on it—locked. I crawled to my knees to peek through the keyhole, but it was very dark within, not a single window. Yet in the pitch-black my ears caught a hint of a strange yet familiar sound, almost like rippling water. I leaned closer to the keyhole and nearly choked from the thick chemical smell.

“Over here,” I called. “Someone’s been here recently. It smells of chemicals.”

Montgomery tugged on the door. “Locked.”

“Try your keys, Lucy,” I said.

“These are Father’s personal keys. The only one with the King’s College crest is for the smoking room upstairs.”

“We haven’t many options.”

To our surprise, the fourth key twisted in the lock. My stomach knotted with foreboding worries about why the King’s Club would need a secret room so deep in the belly of the university.

Montgomery drew his pistol. “Stay behind me, just in case.”

The door creaked open. We stepped inside, at first seeing only worktables and rows of cupboards in the flickering candlelight. But on the far wall, Lucy’s candle reflected in what looked like mirrors. The smell grew stronger. In the faint light I began to make out the shapes of a half dozen identical glass tanks, which upon closer inspection were filled with water. We exchanged uneasy glances. Lucy hung back, but I took a step closer to peer into the murky water.