Her Dark Curiosity (37 page)

“How much time do you think he has left before the Beast takes over completely?” Elizabeth asked.

“A few days. A week, at most,” Montgomery said shakily.

“As it is, he can barely keep himself in one form or the other,” Elizabeth said. “I know you don’t wish to hear this, Juliet, but if we can’t cure him, the kindest course of action might be to put him out of his misery.”

Put him out of his misery.

I remembered a rabbit, long ago, laid out on an operating table being dissected alive by medical students. I’d taken an ax to the rabbit to put it out of its misery. But Edward wasn’t a rabbit. However he was created, he was a person now.

I looked to Montgomery. He had wanted Edward dead all along, but could he truly learn he had a blood relation, only to kill him?

“You can’t kill him,” a voice said. Lucy stood in the kitchen doorway, tears dried and a hard resolve on her face. “I’ve just been downstairs talking to him—” She silenced me when I tried to object. “Balthazar went with me. I was safe. Edward had a right to know all of this, since it’s his life we’re talking about. He’s back to himself, for now, though the Beast is just beneath the surface.” A look of tenderness crossed her face. “You can’t kill him for crimes that monster inside him committed. It isn’t fair.”

Lucy was right—here we stood discussing Edward’s fate, when he should have some say. Montgomery called after me, but I ran through the dining room covered with scrawled pages and ciphers, into the kitchen that still smelled of rosemary, and descended the stairs.

The basement was quiet.
Put him out of his misery,
Elizabeth’s voice echoed. We’d made a successful cure for me, and I knew I could find a way to cure him, too. I wasn’t my father’s daughter for nothing. We could replicate the malaria somehow, send Montgomery south to the tropics. . . .

At the bottom of the stairs, I wrapped my hands around the cellar door bars. “I know Lucy told you it’s hopeless,” I said. “But I’m better now, Edward, and soon you will be too. . . .”

My voice trailed off when I caught sight of the body crouched in the corner. Signs of the Beast were all over him—the way his fingers twitched, the powerful curve of his muscles. Lucy had been down here only moment before, but it didn’t take long for the Beast to transform.

He looked at me with gold-colored eyes. I should have been afraid. I should have been
terrified.
Such beastly eyes, such a cruel-looking face didn’t belong in this world. Yet as he stood and sauntered toward the door, never taking his eyes off of mine, it wasn’t fear I felt. It was a strange thrill, those old tinges of curiosity that had always drawn me to him despite my horror. I had thought all that banished when I’d been cured.

And yet I still felt it. That shouldn’t have been possible.

“Cured, are you, love?” he said. There was almost a flicker of humanity in those yellow eyes, before it burned away. “No, I don’t think so.”

I
KNITTED MY FINGERS
together, rubbing the smooth joints, reminding myself that they no longer cracked and ached. They
were
cured. The Beast was merely toying with me, working doubt into my head as he loved to do.

“Yes, I am,” I said, trying to sound brave. “Montgomery and I made the serum, and it held. I can feel the difference in my body.”

“I’m not talking about your lovely little fingers and toes,” he said. “Flesh, blood, bone—only a container for who we truly are inside. Maybe the serum cured your physical afflictions, but it didn’t cure the illness of your soul.” The tenderness in his voice, the truth in his gaze . . . he could capture me, a wolf stalking a deer, if I wasn’t careful. I stepped back, shaking my head.

My heart started to thump harder, in time with his fingers tap-tap-tapping on the cellar bars. “You don’t understand,” I said. “I’m a different person now, body
and
soul.”

But a coldness crept from the old stone foundation, weaving among my skirts to my bare legs. It was quiet down here, a million miles from London, from the island, even from the others arguing upstairs. In a way, it felt
right
to be down here.

The Beast’s eyes fell to the chained handle of the cellar door. “There was a different door once,” he said quietly. “A red door on a jungle island.”

I took another step back, frightened by the memory. A red laboratory, paint bubbling beneath my fingertips as a fire raged in the compound, my father trapped inside. And most memorable of all, Jaguar waiting for me to open the door—just a crack—so he could slip inside and kill my father.

I had done it. I’d helped him kill my father. And yet that had been the
old
me, sick of body and soul.

“Would you change what you did?” the Beast asked quietly.

One would have to be sick to be capable of killing her own father. The new, cured me could never have done something so ruthless. And yet. My eyes sank closed, as my heart beat harder, painfully, wrenchingly.

“No.”

His voice was softer now. “Would you still have opened that door?”

And this is what it came down to: surely a normal girl, that girl I’d imagined pushing a baby pram through a garden and dancing on Saturdays, couldn’t be the same girl who helped kill her father. But I
was
still that girl, still my father’s daughter, still the one who, even now, would open that door if faced with it again.

“Yes.”

He smiled grimly, though there was no glee in it, as though for once he understood how heartbreaking this was for me. “No serum can change who you are. Nor should you change. Genius or madness—it all depends on who’s telling the story.” His hand stopped tapping, and that humanity flickered again in his eye. “You’re perfect as you are, my love.”

I took a shaky step away from him, fearful and confused, and hurried up the stairs. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t get away from his words.

He was right. No serum could cure who I
really
was—a Moreau, through and through.

I
T WAS LATE WHEN
I rejoined the others. I told them I was exhausted and wanted to be alone, then picked up Sharkey and climbed to the attic nursery. I liked the quiet here, the stillness of the unused toys, Sharkey’s grainy fur beneath my fingers.

I sat in the rocking chair and leaned my head back, watching the moon beyond the city’s skyline. It was so easy now to move my neck, my hands. Their former stiffness was nothing but a fleeting memory.

But the Beast was right. A coldness lingered in my heart, and always would, no matter how much I lied to myself.

I shouldn’t have been so single-minded in the way I viewed Father’s research. Elizabeth had told me Father was more than just a madman, but I hadn’t listened. The Beast had seen the truth on me, plain as day, among the jungle vines of the greenhouse. Even Lucy—even
Newcastle—had
known that science in and of itself wasn’t good or bad.

Sometimes, even, it was a necessary evil.

As I pet Sharkey, I watched the tendons on the back of my hand plucking like piano strings. I had tried to deny the darkness inside me, but all this time, perhaps I should have embraced it for the potential good it could wield.

Sharkey jumped out of my lap, stretching on the rug so that half his body was thrown in moonlight, half still cast in shadows. I sat straighter as an idea tickled the back of my head.

Enough with the secrets.

Enough with hidden horrors.

There was only one way to protect Edward from the King’s Club’s machinations, and also ensure that no one would replicate or condone what they were trying to do ever again.

Outside, church bells chimed midnight. I thought of the family across the street, tucked into warm beds, the children dreaming of waking in the morning to toys wrapped in big red bows. All over the city, families like theirs slumbered. Families that wouldn’t sleep nearly so deeply if they knew what was happening in those basement laboratories of King’s College.

I swallowed. My plan was a cruel one, dangerous, yet I couldn’t deny that the curious corners of my soul curled at the thought: Maybe the best way to prevent the King’s Club from enacting their plan was to enact it
for
them, and show them—and the world—exactly what would happen if my father’s science was unleashed.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

FORTY-ONE

I
WOKE TO THE
sounds of Saint Paul’s bells ringing in Christmas Day.

I had stayed up half the night going through the details of my plan. Lucy slept over after sending a note home to her mother and was now fast asleep in the sea of pillows on my bed. I made a list of three King’s Men—Inspector John Newcastle, Dr. Hastings, and Isambard Lessing—and when she woke, told her to write an urgent message to each one in her father’s forged handwriting, calling for an emergency meeting at precisely nine o’clock in the evening and not to be a moment late. When she asked to what purpose, I refused to say. Still half asleep, with the trust of a life-long friend, she did as I asked regardless.

In the meanwhile, I gave Edward another injection of valerian to keep him sedated, then pored over every word in Father’s journal and letters, studying his procedures, focusing on the science the King’s Club was trying to duplicate. For the first time I allowed myself to truly delve into it, guiltlessly, and the genius of his work made my whole body feel alive.

Elizabeth paced around the house like an unquiet ghost, throwing wide-eyed glances at the cellar door, never far from the musket and bottle of gin. In the afternoon Lucy left with Balthazar to deliver each of the letters personally, with instructions to meet back at the professor’s house in the evening. The final step in my preparations involved Montgomery, but when I asked him to get his medical bag and come with me to King’s College, he didn’t obey as unquestioningly as Lucy had.

“You must tell me what this is all about,” he said. “I’m to be your husband. You must trust me.”

I bristled at the word
husband,
still unused to the idea despite how much I loved him.

“That trust goes both ways,” I said. “Once we’re there, I promise to make everything clear. You said once that before we are wed, you want no more shadows in our lives. Tonight I can end all our fears about the King’s Men and Edward falling into dangerous hands.” I held his hand, squeezing hard. “But I can’t do it alone.”

He leaned in, resting his forehead against mine, and the feel of him so close kindled the coldest parts of my body.

“Come with me,” I whispered. “I need you.”

The tensed muscles in his back eased. “You know I’d follow you anywhere. Though I fear we’ll both end up damned.”

We left Elizabeth to keep an eye on Edward and slipped out the back alleyway under cover of darkness. As we darted down the lanes, I peeked into open windows. Each one showed a different vignette of city life. A stout family shared a feast of ham and bread pudding amid the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree. A wife baked a meat pie for her husband. A young woman tucked a baby into a bassinet under a spring of mistletoe.

We’re doing this for them,
I told myself.
To keep power out of the hands of the King’s Club.

At last we reached the imposing brick archway of King’s College. On Christmas Day the place was deathly quiet, no horses or harness bells or students tromping around. We climbed the main stairs and I used a pouredtin copy I’d made of Radcliffe’s key to allow us entry. As I’d anticipated, not even Mrs. Bell and her cleaning crew were working. Only faint moonlight filled the long hallways, even the dust having long settled.

I jerked my head for Montgomery to follow me.

The halls threw loud echoes of our footsteps as we hurried down the marble floor. He headed for the King’s Club smoking room, but I grabbed his hand.

“Wait. Come with me to the basement first.”

His face hardened. He knew, as I did, what those basement hallways held. But he followed me without argument, trusting me, and we took the stairs into the basement that smelled of sawdust, where the windowless halls held a darkness thick as fogged breath, and then we climbed even lower to the subbasement level where the stone walls smelled of ancient times. I felt along the wall until my fingers brushed the doorknob of the King’s Club’s secret laboratory, but Montgomery stopped me.

“Stop, Juliet.” In the darkness, his voice was disembodied. “Tell me what you are planning, first.”

“Come inside, and I will.” I pushed open the door and lit a match to illuminate the various lanterns, which threw orbs of light onto the tanks of water and the ungodly beasts suspended within. With one glance, I could tell they had grown in the week since we’d been here. They now had inch-long claws, and powerful jaws that could snap a man’s bone in one bite.

It was better than I had hoped.

“This is what I wanted to show you,” I said. “These creatures. All this time we’ve tried so hard to keep the King’s Club from catching Edward, but they’ll never stop. So we’re going to finish the King’s Club’s work for them.” I curled my hands into fists, my fingernails digging into my own skin. “They wanted monster. Let’s give it to them.”

“A
RE YOU MAD
?” M
ONTGOMERY
asked, closing the laboratory door behind him as though afraid someone would overhear us. “That is exactly what we’ve been trying to
prevent
from happening.”

“Yes, trying to prevent by keeping things secret. But don’t you see—secrets are their ally. The moment rumors spread about Father’s research was the moment his work in London ended. If the public knew the truth about what the King’s Club was endeavoring to accomplish, they’d never stand for it. Imagine the newspaper headlines. So many illustrious men, captains of industry, even Scotland Yard’s most promising detective—all in on this conspiracy. They’d be banished. Arrested. Even if some of them escaped the courts, they’d never dare pick up a scalpel again.”