The Diabolical Miss Hyde (48 page)

Into the darker parts of town, now, where the smells of decay reign amidst dirt and pain. Black is thicker here, true black, the absence of light, in hovels and fireless tenements, down stinking alleys where no sunlight ever shines. He enjoys a dark frisson of delight. Mr. Shadow likes stark contrasts, black and vermilion and blinding white, and Mr. Todd and Mr. Shadow have partnered in the dance so long, he barely recalls what it's like to walk alone.

In a doorway, a dog snarls. Children wail like vermin. A woman staggers, drunk, her skirts flapping with mud. A
public house shines from the gloom, firelight leaking beneath the shabby door.

Inside, drinkers carouse, and Mr. Todd threads through to a quiet area at the back. The man he's come to see slouches on a bench, a tankard of beer at ease in his hand. His suit is burnt umber, his hat the color of coal dust. In the corner slouches his sidekick, a handsome black-haired fellow in a hyacinth-blue coat, to whom Mr. Shadow takes an instinctive dislike. The fellow tastes odd. Hostile, his crooked eyes dark with challenge. An enemy.

Neatly, Mr. Todd sits. “Mr. H.”

Mr. H grins, his bent nose twisting. “Malachi Todd, my boy. Heard you were back in the land of the living.” His voice abrades the skin like sandpaper, unsettling.

Todd just smiles thinly. He has reason to be careful here.

“Drink?” Mr. H offers absinthe and cognac, as always. Its mottled hue fascinates, swirling emerald and burnt sunset gold, hypnotic . . . and then the substances mix and the subtlety is lost.

Mr. Todd drinks. Liquid fire, the flavor of guilt and sorrow. The memory is startling.

The other man's stormy eyes miss nothing. “Work to be done, sunshine. There be restless days ahead. In the meantime, I've got a thing for you.”

“I expected as much.” But his pulse quickens. Despite the drink, his mouth is dry. Just a taste, he'd had, in that aether-bright laboratory with sweet Eliza in his arms. That surgical knife was blunted, coarse, ugly. Not the real thing. Not the truth.

Mr. H places
it
on the table.

Breathless, Todd reaches for it. The polished silver steel is light, cool in his palm. He lets it slip to his fingertips and flicks it open.
Ping!
Firelight kisses the whetted edge. His eyelids flutter, and he recalls with utter clarity a single drop of Eliza's blood. How it glistened. How it tasted . . .

“Have fun. I'll be in touch.” Mr. H doesn't lay hands on him, but his voice holds Mr. Todd in place as stiffly as any rusted shackle. “One thing more, sunshine.”

“Say on.” Todd lets his tone glimmer. He doesn't like threats. And it isn't what Mr. H thinks.

Mr. H's eyes glint, beastly. “Stay away from my daughter. She's not for you.”

Secretively, Todd smiles. He flicks the razor closed—how he's missed that perfect, melodic chord—and makes it disappear into the sleeve of his new coat. His dull, unremarkable coat. The one that makes him look exactly like everyone else.

But Eliza will know him. Eliza sees him when no one else does. And Mr. Todd plans to show her just how exquisitely—just how painfully—he loves her.

Because when you're special—when you lurk as a shadow in a world filled with rainbows—love aches. And screams. And bleeds.

“Edward, I assure you,” says Mr. Todd, tipping his hat with one fingertip, “nothing could be further from my mind.”

A BRIEF HISTORICAL NOTE,

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR HUMBLY JUSTIFIES

HER ANACHRONISMS

As with every fantasy, the corresponding truth is at least as fantastic. Eliza and Lizzie's world was inspired by a few delightful (and a few sobering) historical curiosities:

The real Sir Isaac Newton (knighted for his modernization of the Royal Mint, and not, as is often supposed, for his staggering scientific achievement) is almost certainly dead, and never discovered
aqua vitae,
the secret of eternal life. He did, however, believe he'd discovered the Philosopher's Stone: the substance that transmutes lead into gold. Newton's subsequent realization that his meticulous alchemical methodology was flawed—that he had, after all, reduced God to Laplace's famous “unnecessary hypothesis”—pushed the greatest mind of the age around the bend, into what we'd today call a nervous breakdown. But Sir Isaac had the courage of his scientific convictions: on his deathbed, he is said to have rejected the sacrament, and died an atheist.

Eliza's world is teeming with revolutionaries, and the real world wasn't so different. It's popular to romanticize the early nineteenth century, but like much of Europe, England was a totalitarian police state. The radical Thistlewood Club is fictional, but reform clubs of this nature existed, and were forced underground by anti-radical laws passed in the wake of the French Revolution and mass demonstrations in England demanding what we'd now call human rights. Publishers like my fictional Matthew Temple were arrested. Any large meeting to discuss political reform was deemed an “overt act of treasonable conspiracy,” punishable by death, and deep infiltration of government spies in radical circles created a climate of suspicion and terror.

The eponymous Mr. Thistlewood himself was hanged and beheaded (just in case?) in 1820 for his part in the Cato Street Conspiracy, a badly botched attempted revolution oddly reminiscent of the more famous Gunpowder Plot, both for its audacity in planning to blow up the entire British Cabinet and for the fact that it was masterminded in part by a government
agent provocateur
—an example of how perilous, even for a seasoned political pest like Thistlewood, it was to be radical in nineteenth-century England. By the end of the 1820s, it appears that almost every important radical leader in England was either dead, in prison, or transported to Australia—one reason why the Continental “Year of Revolution” in 1848 (which in the real world, sadly, wasn't incited by sorcerers) never took root in England, while Australia had its own working-class rebellion at the Eureka Stockade in 1854 and continues merrily to celebrate rebels and outlaws to this day.

Thought crime was an ugly reality in England. The anti-
Jacobin Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act of 1795 made it high treason even to imagine deposing the King: republican thoughts could get you hanged. Happily, republicanism is today merely punishable by life imprisonment, and it's unlikely ever to be prosecuted as treason again.

But scientific radicalism was just as provocative. Political radicals often preached iconoclastic theories such as Lamarckian evolution, which contradicted Church of England teachings. The 1859 publication of
On the Origin of Species
—the culmination after two centuries of Newton's scientific deconstruction of God—re-opened the door for Enlightenment principles that had been ridiculed as dangerous folly since Robespierre
et al.
made such an unfortunate scene. Still, so far as I know, the real Royal Society never tortured or burned anyone for scientific heresy, and Michael Faraday died of natural causes.

In Eliza's world, social reforms are long overdue. In the real world, partial reform was grudgingly passed in 1832, with England on the brink of its own Bastille. It took thirty more years and firebrand Benjamin Disraeli to push through the basic rights that the demonstrators of the 1820s had risked hanging for—votes without property, regular elections, “one vote, one value”—and Disraeli's party promptly lost the election their reform legislation demanded.

I've taken liberties with London, especially with the layout of Bethlem Hospital (popularly known as Bedlam; today the building houses the Imperial War Museum) and the streets of Seven Dials (now a trendy shopping district and not the stinking rookery made famous by Charles Dickens). Marcellus Finch's shop at 143 New Bond Street is actually the old
pharmacy of Savory and Moore, of which the original façade can still be seen, albeit with a different kind of store inside. If you go to Russell Square, you can still see the town house in which Eliza might have lived.

The real Maskelyne family, those celebrated stage magicians of the Egyptian Hall whose tricks included levitation but not disappearing, never claimed anyone named Lysander or Ophelia. The electrical experiment with the murderer Forster's corpse is real; Dr. Percival's is not. A prototype pneumatic railway was indeed built in London in the 1840s, but it never caught on and Mr. Paxton (architect of the fabled Crystal Palace, which unfortunately burned to the ground at Sydenham in 1936) never built one across the Thames. Electric trains weren't used in the Underground until the 1890s, and sadly, the fabulously named “luminiferous aether” does not exist.

Likewise, crime scene science wasn't invented until the late nineteenth century; there were no recognized female medical practitioners in England until 1865; and it's unlikely that Henry Jekyll and Victor Frankenstein even lived in the same time period, let alone worked together. Such happy absurdities, as well as any genuine errors, are my own.

My agent, Marlene Stringer, who liked the idea, and waited. My editor, Kelly O'Connor, and the team at HarperCollins, who took a chance on Eliza and Lizzie, and wrapped them in such a saucy little package.

I could go on, but let's just round up the usual suspects and be done: all my friends who read, encourage, support, flatter, wheedle, cajole, and commiserate to make me the writer I am. I could name you all, but you'd only stutter and blush. You know who you are, and what you did.

Photograph by Ric Woods Photography

VIOLA CARR
was born in a strange and distant land, but wandered into darkest London one foggy October evening and never found her way out. She now devours countless history books and dictates fantastical novels by gaslight, accompanied by classical music and the snores of her slumbering cat.

www.violacarr.com
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@viola_carr

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Cover design by Richard L. Aquan
Cover illustration © by Gene Mollica

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Harper Voyager and design is a trademark of HCP LLC.

THE DIABOLICAL MISS HYDE
. Copyright © 2015 by Viola Carr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-236308-4

EPub Edition February 2015 ISBN 9780062363091

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