Her Dark Curiosity (14 page)

The comb drifted through my hair, pulling gently at the knots. “No,” she said simply. “There are the servants, and a little village across the causeway, and Inverness is a day’s journey if I’m desperate for a new dress.”

“Desperate for a new dress?” I asked skeptically. Elizabeth’s clothes were beautiful because she was beautiful, but no one would ever call them fashionable.

She gave a light laugh. “Well, I’d be far more likely to be desperate for some gin, but don’t tell the professor that.”

Rose-scented steam clouded around me, hiding my smile. But it faded quickly. Part of me wanted to confess everything to her, the real reason I snuck off at night and stayed out late, and how Sharkey followed me because of the smells from the butcher’s. I wanted her to kiss my forehead and tell me I wasn’t anything like my father. But I knew I never would confess. I couldn’t.

“I knew them both, you know,” she said. Her tone was softer now. I opened an eye to look at her. “Your mother was six years older than me. I spent most of my life in Scotland, on my family’s estate. All those fine old portraits hanging in the foyer—the figures in them look well groomed, don’t they? Rich as they are, they’re all illegitimate children.” She laughed.

“The von Steins were from Switzerland but there was an affair, a Scottish lord’s daughter, and that’s how my grandparents came to own Balintore Manor. The professor doesn’t like to talk about it, but the von Steins have as many skeletons in their closet as your own family, I’d wager. Each summer when I’d come back to London, your mother would take me for ice cream or chocolate biscuits, as though I was her baby sister. Our families were distant cousins, I believe, by marriage. I was sixteen when she married your father. Such a serious older man he seemed to me then, but handsome in his way. I remember one time your mother was ill, and he took me for ice cream instead, and told me about the work he was doing and how he wanted to save lives. I’ll admit I had a bit of a schoolgirl crush on him. I suppose in part, that’s why I went into medicine myself, though I had to teach myself nearly everything I know.”

The comb caught on a tangle in my hair, and she paused to free it. “Whatever the professor has told you about your father, you must understand that he’s biased. He felt as though one of his oldest friends betrayed him, which left more than a sour taste in his mouth. But as bad as your father’s crimes were, there was good in him, too. When he was younger he laughed more, and he danced with your mother at all the finest balls, and if someone was ill in the middle of the night, he’d throw a housecoat over his pajamas and come running.”

She finished combing my hair. The bath was nearly full, and she turned off the roaring water, plunging us in silence save for the soft crackling of bursting bubbles. She set a fresh towel on the side of the tub, and then leaned over and petted my head softly.

“Hate the part of him that gave in to madness. But don’t hate your father, not all of him. There was a time when he loved you very much, and that’s what you should remember.”

She smiled a little sadly, and dried her hands on the towel in her lap, and then left me among the smell of roses, where I stayed until the water grew as cold as the snow gently falling outside.

L
ATER THAT EVENING, AFTER
the professor had gone to bed and Elizabeth retired to the library, I crept into the professor’s study. It was a tidy place, with a cat curled in the desk chair, and letters paperweighted with the family crest, and a forgotten old stuffed bobcat perched on the upper shelves. I was looking for valerian, a distilled herb with sedative effects used to treat sleeplessness and restlessness, which Father had often used to calm his beast-men; but I also searched for any clue that would definitively rule out the professor as Father’s correspondent. I flipped through the letters, all of them useless, and then opened his desk drawers and rooted through the assortment of papers and notebooks within. There was nothing to indicate he wasn’t simply a retired academic from King’s College, who volunteered at a clinic for the poor on Sundays and donated generously to foundations for medical scholarships.

I pushed aside a stack of boxes stacked in front of the study’s little closet, and coughed as dust poured out when I opened the door. If he’d been corresponding with Father within the last year, then it certainly wasn’t in here. Everything in the closet—his old medical bag, stacks of ancient journals with vellum pages—hadn’t been touched in a decade. I carefully flipped through the journals’ crisp, delicate pages, out of curiosity. Family heirlooms, it seemed, and most written in German. Then I opened his bag and found what I needed. Both distilled and powdered valerian, as well as quite a supply of castorium. I closed the closet and pushed the boxes back, telling myself that like the silverware, and the rest of the things I’d stolen, he didn’t need these drugs nearly as much as I did.

I gave the sleeping cat a small pat and tiptoed back to my room, where I pulled on Elizabeth’s borrowed coat. It would be another sleepless night for me. But as I slid open the window and climbed outside, I thought about how at least I wasn’t alone anymore. Edward would be waiting for me in that attic workshop, with Sharkey and the roses and a warm little fire going—and together we’d fix my father’s wrongs.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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FIFTEEN

E
VERY NIGHT THAT WEEK,
Edward and I worked on developing a serum amid the twisted rosebushes and howling wind outside my workshop, and every night we progressed a little more. On the fifth night, the compound held for nearly twenty seconds before splitting apart. On the sixth, it held long enough for me to prepare an injection, but separated only moments before I slid the needle into his skin. Without the missing ingredient, there was little we could do. I felt helpless, and frustrated, and mired in guilt. The Beast had stopped killing others—but he was still killing Edward from the inside.

On our seventh night together, eyes bleary with lack of sleep as I climbed out of the professor’s window, I hurried through the streets with a new type of burner that would produce more even heat distribution. I raced up the lodging house stairs and threw open the door, the weight of the burner heavy in my satchel. Sharkey trotted over, tail thumping in his usual greeting, and I pushed my hood back and knelt to pick him up. He squirmed as he tried to lick my face, and I laughed and buried my face in his fur.

“Edward, I’ve a new piece of equipment,” I said. Being here eased the tension from my bones in a wonderful way. “Edward, did you hear me?”

When there was no answer, I set Sharkey down. The attic was a small chamber, with only the worktable and bed as furniture, and the alcove tucked away behind the woodstove, which was so dark that I only ever used it for storing grafting supplies. Now, though, I noticed one of Edward’s thick iron chains running from the woodstove into the deep of the alcove. My breath caught.

Was the Beast there, chained in the shadows?

I’d only seen the Beast once, when Edward transformed on the island just moments before the fire started. I remembered his gleaming animal eyes, and how his whole body had seemed larger and hairier. The joints of his feet and hands had twisted his digits together so he appeared to have only three fingers and three toes. Six-inch razor claws had emerged between his knuckles.

I remembered his voice, too, so shockingly human.

We belong together,
he had said.

“Edward?” I called. Sharkey darted into the alcove and I shrieked, bracing myself for a snarl as the Beast ripped him apart, but no sounds came except the thumping of Sharkey’s tail.

I pulled on the chain, which rattled toward me—not attached to anything but air, which was a small relief. But where was he? He’d promised not to leave.

Behind me, the workshop door suddenly swung open hard enough to slam against the inside wall. I gasped and whirled, the chain falling from my hands with a terrible clatter that made Sharkey huddle behind my skirt.

“Edward!” I said.

He stood in the doorway, gold-flecked eyes heavy with surprise that I was there. His shirt was torn at the collar and sleeves, and soaked with blood down to his elbows. His shoes were split at the seams, with jagged holes pushed through the top.

Holes for claws.

My hand went to my mouth, as Edward quickly shut the door and then rushed over, trying to calm me. “It’s all right. I’ve control of myself now. It’s me.”

But as he came forward, all I could see was the blood on his shirt and arms that still smelled so fresh and ironlike. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I’d planned everything to keep him contained. I stepped back with a strangled sound, bumping into the worktable hard enough to knock over one of the vials, which overturned and filled the room with the spicy smell of hibiscus extract.

“Don’t come any closer!” I cried.

“I won’t hurt you, I promise.”

“You’ve killed someone.”

He paused, eyes going to the stains on his own clothes. He could hardly deny it—the evidence was soaked into the seams of his stolen shirt. “Not me,” he entreated. “The Beast.”

“The padlock . . . the chains . . . my god, Edward, how did this
happen
? We took precautions!”

“He came too fast; I didn’t have time to lock the chains. The transformations are getting harder to control.” He dragged a bloodstained hand through his hair, looking like that desperate castaway I’d met so many months ago. “You always knew this about me, Juliet. This is my curse—this is why we’re here, what we’re trying to stop.” He took another step toward me, but I jerked away again. “You never come here before ten o’clock,” he said. “I hadn’t wanted you to ever see this—”

“Who did you kill this time?” I demanded.

His chest fell again in a deep exhale, and I saw how exhausted he was, how his muscles twitched and jumped, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry for him. He collapsed onto the bed, staining the sheets crimson, bracing his head in his hands like he was on the verge of fracturing. “You know I can’t remember what he does. There are only hazy memories . . . following a doctor, but he let him live. And then I remember dark alleyways and the smell of blood. Whitechapel, most likely, which means another ruffian who would have died soon enough anyway, frozen to death drunk in some alleyway.”

“And that makes it right?”

His eyes flashed with indignation. “Of course not!”

His outburst made Sharkey whine and hide behind my skirts again. A doctor, he had said. Could the Beast have been following Dr. Hastings? Hastings had certainly wronged me . . . so why hadn’t the Beast killed him yet?

He certainly deserves it, that awful man,
I thought, and then caught myself. Judging who should live and die sounded too much like Father’s arrogance.

Edward started tearing at his broken shoelaces until he could get kick both shoes off. His feet were knobby and caked in blood from where the claws had emerged between his joints. The claws were gone now, hidden once more between his bones. My own feet creaked with pain at the sight of them.

“Nothing’s changed, Juliet. It’s still me.”

He looked at me with eyes that were all too innocent. A boy with a monster trapped inside, and nowhere to go but this dark attic, and no one to trust but me.

“I know.” The crimson red spilled across his shirt was a terrible distraction, one I could scarcely look away from. Although to see it so plainly . . .”

My left hand started shaking, and I clutched it to my chest before he could see the bones shifting on their own accord. He set his torn coat aside, looking so battered and beaten and hopeless that a small part of my heart twisted with sympathy for him.

“I know
you
aren’t a monster, Edward.
You
aren’t the one who wants to kill. It’s just so difficult to understand where the line is between you and the Beast.” I knit my fingers together, wishing I better understood my own heart, and sat down next to him on the bed. “Before I knew about the Beast, I admired you greatly. You saved my life. You defended me against my father. I know that’s still you . . . and yet
he’s
in there as well.”

Edward picked at his own fingernails, caked in blood. “If it wasn’t for the Beast,” he asked quietly, “would you have ever loved me?”

The bluntness of his question left me shocked. I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know how. Something had been stirring between him and me, feelings I had thought only belonged to Montgomery. But Montgomery had left me. For all I knew, I’d never see him again. Was I to live my whole life alone, then?

Edward reached over cautiously and took my hand. His hand was strong, so much larger than when I’d first known him—a testament to his beastly nature encroaching. Blood caked the beds of his fingernails and the lines of his palm, and it stained my own, too. That was fitting, in a way. His victim’s blood was as much on my hands—my conscience—as his. If it hadn’t been for me, Father would have never known the science to make him into the monster he was.

I felt hot tears on my cheeks, and then Edward wiped them away with the one clean patch of fabric on his cuff.

“It’s my fault,” I choked. “If only I was smarter, if I could have already cured you.”

“You’ve done everything you can.”

“Father would have figured it out by now.”

He pushed back his shirt cuff and brushed my cheek with his thumb instead. “Your father had a lifetime of knowledge. You’re only starting. And we’re getting closer.”

“But how many people must die first?”

“I’m trying,” he murmured, smoothing my loose hair back with both hands as the fire in the woodstove cracked and sparked. “Don’t you think that I would have stopped him if I could? I told you, I’ve tried to take his life by taking my own. He won’t let me.”

There was so much pain in his voice, so much self-hatred and guilt.

“That isn’t what I want,” I said, letting my fingers intertwine with his soaked fabric, holding him close so that he couldn’t slip the chains of my hands. “I don’t want you to die, Edward.” My voice had a breathlessness I hadn’t intended. His eyes found mine, asking a question, and I blinked.