Her Dark Curiosity (6 page)

I tore myself away from the old photograph and hurried for the stairs to the basement, where I felt instantly more at ease. The morning cleaning crew was already hard at work scouring the stairs leading to the basement hallways. I recognized the shape of my old boss, Mrs. Bell, as her rounded body stooped to scrub the treading. A woman who used to watch out for me when no one else did. When she stood to refill her bucket, I grabbed her hand and pulled her around the corner.

“Mercy!” she cried, putting a hand over her heart. “Juliet Moreau, is that you? My, but you gave me a fright.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Bell. I wondered if I might ask you a favor.”

“You aren’t wanting your old job back, I hope,” she said, then cocked her head at the fine dress beneath my apron. “No, I suppose not. . . .”

“It isn’t about that. As a matter of fact, I’ve had a change in fortune, and it’s only right for me to share.” I fished in my pocket for the silver buttons and pressed them into her hand before she could object. “I just need to know if you’ve already cleaned the hallways on the east side.”

The buttons jangled in her calloused hand. “Heading there next, right after we finish these stairs.”

I bit my lip, glancing at the two other cleaning girls. “Might you start on the west side instead? It’s a long story . . . a student friend of mine thought he might have dropped some cufflinks there and I’d like to look for them.”

She gave me a stern look, and I half expected her to ask what the real story was, but luckily for me she just threw her hand toward the hallways.

“Have at it, girl.”

I started past the steps, where a rail-thin cleaning girl was polishing the brass handrail. Her basket sat beside her, filled with a handful of cleaning tools that were all quite familiar to me. How many hours had I spent on hands and knees on this very floor, sleeves hitched above my elbows, scrubbing so hard my knuckles bled? What a lonely life that had been, with only my memories to keep me company. Only a year ago, and yet it felt like ages. How easily I could be back there if not for the professor.

The skinny girl turned around when she saw me staring at her basket. Her eyes went to the dirty apron that didn’t quite match my fine dress—an incongruity only the poor would notice.

“Can I help you . . . miss?” she asked.

“Oh no,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry. My mind was wandering.”

She nodded, still looking at me strangely, then returned to work. Once her back was turned, I bent down to pretend to lace my boots and secretly grabbed one of the brushes out of her basket, a soft-bristled one meant for cleaning fabric. If I ran into anyone down here, I might need it as disguise. I hid it in my apron and hurried down the stairs into the basement.

The electric lights were on, buzzing and clicking, spilling artificial light over the tiles. Fresh sawdust had been sprinkled on them to soak up any blood fallen from patients or bodies. I wound my way down another corridor and paused at the door to the storage rooms where they kept cadavers for autopsies.

Before opening the door, I peeked through the keyhole to make sure it was empty. Unwanted memories returned of a night a year ago when Lucy and I had come here on a dare, only to stumble upon medical students dissecting a live rabbit. My arm twitched, just as that rabbit’s hind leg had, and I clamped a hand over my arm to keep it calm, hoping the rest of my illness’s symptoms wouldn’t soon follow. Through the keyhole, I spied the cold tables draped with clothes.

Voices came down the hall, making me gasp. “Old coot doesn’t know his head from a hole in the ground,” one said.

Their footsteps were headed my way. I pulled the soft-bristled brush out and stooped to hands and knees on the sawdust-covered floor just as two medical students rounded the corner.

“You can’t expect him to—” the one speaking paused when he saw me, but then continued—“You can’t expect him to graduate you when
he
couldn’t even pass the exams.” The two students stepped over my arm as I pretended to scour the floor. One glanced back briefly, but I made sure to keep my face toward the ground. Cleaning girls weren’t worth anything to boys like them except a quick glance to see if they were pretty.

They neared the corner and I started to let out my held breath, until I heard a third voice behind them, clearly belonging to an older man.

“Bentley! Filmore! Stop right there.”

My spine turned to ice. I knew that voice, even without looking at its owner. Dr. Hastings—the professor who had attacked me last year and caused me to flee London. I fought the urge to panic and forced my hand to move rhythmically over the tiles, pretending to clean the mortar with a useless soft-bristled brush. As his footsteps neared, I cringed.

“Yes, Doctor?” one of the boys said, considerably more polite now.

Dr. Hastings came to stand beside me. I glimpsed his silver-tipped shoes before quickly looking away.

Focus on the tiles. Focus on the tiles. Focus on the
—

“Don’t think I don’t know about those pranks you’ve been pulling. It’s one thing for boys to have a bit of fun, but quite another to chase me down Wiltshire at night. I nearly broke a shoelace.”

“It wasn’t us, Doctor, I swear!” one of them sniveled.

I didn’t worry about being recognized by most professors here—they never bothered to glance at the cleaning crew. But Dr. Hastings had always been different. I think he liked to think of us on our hands and knees, cleaning up the messes he made. If he found me here now, he could do anything to me and not a soul would ever know.

I swallowed, wondering if I could crawl backward and scoot away. But to my relief, the two students had his entire attention. He stepped around me and started after them down the hall, chastising them about schoolboy pranks. The moment they were around the corner I leaped up, shoved the brush in my apron pocket, and snuck into the autopsy room.

I waited ten seconds, twenty, a minute, and heard no more voices. A shiver ran down my back as I found a switch on the wall. The artificial electric light snapped to life, bathing the room in a garish glow so much starker than the hurricane lamps my father used in his laboratory.

Eight tables lined the walls, four of which were occupied with cadavers. Each body was covered with a heavy cloth, but I could make out the shapes of the bodies beneath. One was large, over six and a half feet tall—that had to be Daniel Penderwick, the solicitor. In my memory he’d been tall as the devil himself, with just as black a heart. I lifted the cloth and looked at his pale, dead body. His naked chest was gutted open with slash marks now drained of blood. The wounds pulled me to them. They whispered truths—memories—I wasn’t certain I wanted to ever recall.

I approached the next body cautiously, uncertain who I’d find beneath the heavy cloth. Annie’s body would be here, as well as the thief girl’s. But what of the other unidentified one? Would it be familiar to me, like the others? Could I still call it all a coincidence if it was?

I pulled back the next cloth with stilled breath and looked upon the body of the thief. Red hair matted in blood, body bruised from a man’s heavy boot that must have trampled her. At the time I had thought her my age, but she looked far younger in death. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. A missing finger was nothing compared to the missing heart torn from her chest. More blood drained away from my face.

I stumbled to the next table, leaning over the cloth. I could tell from the shape it was another young woman. Annie—or what if it wasn’t? What if it was Lucy’s cold body, or our maid Mary, or someone else dear to me who never deserved
this
?

Dread scratched its tiny claws at me but the urge to know was stronger, and I dragged back the cloth. Annie Benton, though I was hardly relieved. She hadn’t deserved this. Her light brown hair and fair skin looked so much paler in death. I checked her fingers, but there was no sign of Mother’s ring. Years ago she’d slept in the bed next to mine, and we’d eaten porridge together at breakfast, and each evening we all scrubbed our single change of clothes in the boardinghouse’s laundry room. She’d shared her soap with me once.

It was hard to concentrate on anything besides the gaping tears in her chest, almost perfectly slicing her in the middle. The cuts were jagged, furious, nearly beautiful in their destruction, like all the others’. Whoever had made them had done so with a passion for destruction. Perhaps I should have looked away, but I didn’t.

I turned my head to the last body. The unnamed victim. My instincts urged me not to look, yet somehow my feet took me there, winding around the bare cadavers, their lifeless eyes watching me. I drew the cloth back and jerked away. My heart stampeded in my chest. I collided into the table behind me, brushing against Daniel Penderwick’s cold, dead hand.

I recognized the fourth body.

It was the old white-haired man from the flower show, Sir Danvers Carew, the beloved member of Parliament who had once abused my mother and me. I’d seen him only days ago, and now . . .
dead.
I closed a hand over my mouth as my mind crawled over his pale face, his bloodstained skin, trying to understand. He had the same slash marks on his chest, and bruises all over his body, made with some blunt sharp object.
Like a cane.
No wonder the paper had declined to name him. Such an important man, surly his family would prefer not to be associated with a mass murderer. It hardly mattered. He was dead either way.

Four. I knew all four victims.

And in turn, I realized, I had been victim to each of them.

The idea made me back away from the bodies, back pressed against the cold metal door. It didn’t matter how I tried to explain it—nothing about it felt right. Four deaths, Four people who had wronged me.

Almost as though . . .

I hesitated, telling myself I might possibly be going mad.

. . . almost as though someone was watching out for me.

I shivered uncontrollably, as the bones in my hands and arms shifted and popped, threatening another fit.

The nature of the victims’ wounds was familiar, too.

A premonition that had been growing now gripped me hard, as my mind flashed back to all the bodies on the island. Alice, Father’s sweet maid, dripping blood from dead feet. A beast-woman separated from her jaw. Those wounds, as well, had been lovingly made by a monster.

By Edward.

Edward is dead,
I told myself.
The dead don’t come back.

And yet the premonition kept squeezing my heart, trying to get me to believe in the impossible. My head was already beginning to ache. Soon I’d grow faint. In a desperate fury, I decided the only thing that would calm my mind would be to prove scientifically that the wounds were different, and therefore couldn’t have been made by Edward. In his journal, Father had made meticulous autopsy reports for all of Edward’s victims on the island. I’d memorized the measurements. Eleven and a half inches long, one inch apart, and two inches deep.

I pulled out a thread from my pocket and measured the length of Annie’s cuts, the spacing between them, even gently pulled apart the wounds to measure the depth. I repeated the process on all four bodies.

They were all the same: eleven and a half inches long, one inch apart, and two inches deep.

I stumbled back against the empty table, stunned. The thread slipped from my fingers, along with a spool of my sanity.

The murderer was the same. Somehow, even though I’d thought him dead,
Edward
had done this.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

SEVEN

I
FELT LIKE THE
room was turning upside down. My legs threatened to give out. I curled my fingers around the table’s edge as though it could keep me from floating to the ceiling.

Edward Prince was alive, and here was my proof.

Against all odds he must have survived the fire and come to London—why? If it were only victims he was after, he needn’t have traveled half the world. But his victims were all very specific. Connected. All people who had at one point in my life wronged me.

My mind slipped and slid back to the island, and the castaway with the gold-flecked eyes.

We belong together,
he had said.
We’re the same.

Is
that
why he had returned, for some sort of grotesquely misguided attempt to protect me and win me over? Or was he sending me some sort of threat?

I paced, hands kitting together, among the cadavers. How did he even know about Annie stealing the ring? No one knew about that except Lucy, unless Annie had told someone. . . .

Lips trembling, I managed to pull the cover back over Annie’s face, and the rest of the cadavers. I stumbled into the hallway outside, eyes closed, drawing in a deep breath. The hallways here always had the usual smell of chemicals, along with some traces of lingering cologne from whichever gentleman doctor had last been here.

I couldn’t shake a repeating phrase in my head:
He’s alive. Alive. Alive.

I heard footsteps down the hall and spun, expecting to find his yellow eyes in the shadows. Heart pounding, I hurried for the stairs, away from these bodies and what they meant. I threw a glance over my shoulder as I turned the corner and nearly collided with a man coming into the hallway from a side door.

Not just any man. Inspector John Newcastle.

My heart shot to my throat. “Excuse me,” I said in a rush, keeping my head down with the hope that he wouldn’t recognize me. But his hand held my elbow, and he frowned as if trying to place me.

“Miss . . . Moreau, isn’t it? Lucy’s friend. What on earth are you doing down here?”

“Nothing, Inspector,” I stuttered. “Visiting some old friends.”

His eyebrow rose with a touch of irony as he glanced at the cadaver storage room door behind me. “You keep strange company for friends, Miss Moreau.”

“Oh no, that isn’t what I meant. I used to work on this cleaning crew, last year before the professor took me in. I hadn’t seen them in a year, so . . .” I swallowed, watching as his eyes followed my footsteps in the sawdust-covered floor to the storage room. My footsteps contradicted me. He’d know I’d been in there with the bodies.