A Cold Legacy Page 8

  “Explain what? She lied to us. Victor Frankenstein’s science was never lost. She must have been practicing it in secret. On a child, no less.”

  Footsteps came from the gravel courtyard behind us, where Valentina and the younger girls were also headed toward the manor. I grabbed his shirt collar. “We should talk about this in private. Come on.”

  We hurried into the house and up the stairs to the privacy of my bedroom. The vision of Hensley’s one white eye reflected in the space behind my eyelids. Had he died as a boy, and Elizabeth brought him back? Was he stitched together like Valentina’s hands? No wonder he wasn’t suitable to be her heir.

  I took a deep breath. Elizabeth wasn’t mad, not like my father. She wasn’t ambitious like him. So why had she done it?

  “It all makes sense now.” Montgomery paced in front of my bedroom windows. “The little girl’s limp. Carlyle’s missing ear. Do you know what happened that day you went to Quick with Lucy?”

  After I nearly died in the bog, the reason Montgomery had wanted me out of the house had been the last thing on my mind, but now my curiosity flickered back to life. “You investigated, didn’t you? What did you find?”

  “Nothing, and not for lack of trying. Valentina was my shadow all day. She wouldn’t let me out of her sight for fear of what I’d find hidden away. The servants must be practically prisoners here, or else they’re all mad, letting Elizabeth experiment on them. We should leave before they decide we’ve seen too much and stop us. We can take Edward in the carriage. Lucy shouldn’t be hard to convince as long as Edward’s with us, and Balthazar will go where I go.”

  “Where would we go? The police are all over the country looking for us. Every road, every port, every train station, just waiting to drag us back to London.”

  “We’ll hide out until this is all over. I know how to live in the wild.”

  “The wild? It’s wintertime. Can you imagine Lucy in the forest, living off berries?”

  He rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t care how dangerous it is out there, it’s safer than within these walls.”

  I shook my head. “No. Elizabeth would never hurt us. She risked her life to keep us safe from the police. Do you really think she’d suddenly turn into a villain because we learned her secret? She knows our secrets, too, Montgomery, and they’re just as scandalous.”

  He stopped pacing, his blond hair lose and wild in his face. “All we did was perform surgery on animals. We didn’t bring anyone back from the dead. That goes against nature, Juliet. It’s playing God.”

  “Playing God is exactly what Father did!”

  “Yes, and you killed your father because of it. You killed three members of the King’s Club for the same reason. Why are you so willing to believe Elizabeth is any different from them? You’re the one always insisting women can be just as ruthless as men.”

  I paced the opposite side of the room, chewing on the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood. “It isn’t because she’s a woman,” I said. “It’s because . . .”

  It’s because she’s like me.

  I stopped pacing, chilled by my own thoughts. “Elizabeth isn’t going to trap us here because of what we saw. If we hear her out and you still think leaving is best, then we’ll go. Agreed?”

  I could tell by the tense set to his shoulders that if it were up to him we’d be in the carriage right now, tearing wildly into the night, leaving the truth far behind. But no one could run from the truth forever.

  “Just promise me it won’t be like last time,” he whispered. “No more unnatural science. No more playing God, not even when there’s a chance the ends could justify the means.”

  I took a step back. Maybe it was my conversation with Jack Serra earlier, but Father was so freshly in my mind he might as well have been standing in the room with us.

  “Do you truly have so little faith in me that you think I would become a monster like Father was?” I asked.

  I didn’t tell him that it was a fear I’d had myself.

  “Of course not.” His face had softened. “That was never what I meant.”

  We stood like that for a while, the two of us alone with the wind howling outside. At last, Montgomery took my hands.

  “Sometimes you do remind me of your father,” he said gently, “but I didn’t mean that you’re destined to go mad like him. You come from two parents, you know. For all your father’s faults, there are your mother’s strengths. She was such a kind woman, don’t you remember?”

  I flinched as though pricked with a needle, and all worries about Hensley, and Elizabeth’s experimentation, and even Edward vanished. My mother. I could picture her if I closed my eyes. High cheekbones flushed with warmth and perfectly pinned dark hair as she sang church hymns. The opposite to my father’s cold countenance. When I was little, she had dedicated her life to helping others. On winter Sundays after church, Mother stayed behind with the Ladies’ Auxiliary to knit socks for the inmates at Bryson Prison. I’d once asked her why she never knit a pair for me, and she’d taken me to Whitechapel and pointed out the vagrants with frostbitten toes. It was the first time I understood what wealth meant, and how devastating it would be if we ever lost it.

  I stared at Montgomery, transfixed, our earlier argument forgotten. “Do you really think I could take after her instead of my father?” I couldn’t keep the hope from my voice. It was a possibility that had never occurred to me before. I flexed my cold fingers, feeling warmth flooding into them for the first time in what felt like years.

  His expression softened. “You already do take after her. You just can’t see it.”

  I looked down at my hands’ slender tapering and pale color. Why hadn’t I noticed before how identical they were to my mother’s? How much of me besides that was like her, that I’d ignored all this time? Father’s shadow stretched so long that it had hidden any other paths I might have in life.

  “Juliet, promise me you’ll think more about being like her. Especially in light of what we’ve seen tonight. It worries me, you being in a house full of experimentation.”

  My mother had her faults, but she’d loved me. She’d taken care of me. She’d obeyed Scripture and visited orphans and knit socks for prisoners and never once crossed the line into immoral science.

  I took a deep breath. Yes, my mother’s blood was also in my veins. She would help ground me as we faced whatever Elizabeth was doing in that tower laboratory.

  “I promise.”

  TEN

  ELIZABETH REMAINED LOCKED IN the tower with Hensley all that night and into the next day. Montgomery and I waited for her to emerge, watching from the window at the far end of the hallway as the sun came up and then started to sink again. I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother and the possibility of following her path instead of Father’s. Memories of her filled the hours while we waited: Mother helping me decorate the Christmas tree, giving me my first pair of dancing slippers, reading me stories at night.

  At last, the door creaked open.

  I jumped up, brushing the hair out of my eyes. Elizabeth stood in the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel. She wore the green dress from the night before, but without the grand fur cloak she looked less like Queen of the Fairies and more like a worried mother.

  “I expected you’d want some answers,” she said. McKenna appeared in the doorway behind her, a basket of bloody clothes in her arms, and started down the stairs. She paused when she reached me.

  “Keep an open mind, little mouse,” she said. “This is a peaceful house. None of us, the mistress included, have a cruel bone in our bodies.” She looked at the floor and hurried down the hallway.

  The line of electric lights winding up the stone stairs flickered.

  “How is Hensley?” I asked quietly.

  Elizabeth smiled. “He’ll be causing trouble again in a few days, no doubt.”

  Montgomery folded his arms across his chest. “We need to know the truth about him.”

  “Yes—well, it seems y
ou shall have it, whether I wish to tell you or not.” She sighed, coming down the stairs. “Let’s talk in the observatory. I’m exhausted, and the stars always have a way of putting me to sleep. Come.”

  I didn’t bother to mention that dusk was only now falling, and the stars weren’t out yet. She led us down the stairs and through winding hallways that all looked the same, then back up another set of stairs with a new runner and freshly polished brass sconces. The observatory was a tall room with a glass ceiling in the northern tower. The collection of astronomical equipment was impressive: heavy silver sextants, a telescope, a library full of star charts. Elizabeth walked over to a globe of the constellations and swung it open to reveal a hidden compartment.

  She took out a bottle of Les Étoiles gin and three glasses.

  “Les Étoiles,” she said, holding up the bottle wryly. “It’s French for ‘the stars.’ I told you they always put me to sleep.”

  Montgomery sat on a wooden stool, and I settled into a leather chair and looked out at the setting sun beyond the observation window. Elizabeth sat across from me, sipping her gin. She’d removed her apron and gloves, but she’d missed a small streak of dried blood on her chin.

  “You lied to us,” Montgomery said, “about Frankenstein’s science being lost.”

  Elizabeth shifted. “I swore an oath never to tell, and I didn’t see any reason why you should need to find out, at least not right away. If your friend Mr. Prince had never poisoned himself, my family’s history never would have come up in that carriage ride from London. Raising the dead? Who in their right minds would ever think it possible?”

  “Did the professor know?” I asked.

  “Yes. All the von Steins have known. The third lord of Ballentyne had a daughter who gave birth to Victor Frankenstein’s bastard child in 1786. She helped him with his research and understood how to replicate the procedures, but after he died, she knew it had to be kept secret.” She tapped a finger against the gin glass. “When I told you earlier that Frankenstein’s journals had been lost, that wasn’t exactly the truth. I have them, and I keep them well hidden. They’re called the Origin Journals.”

  “And what do they contain?”

  “Everything one would need to re-create Frankenstein’s work. Instructions on the reanimation procedure detailed enough that even the most basic surgeon would be able to follow them. The knowledge has been passed down to all our family as guardians.”

  “For what purpose?” Montgomery said.

  “The power to defeat death isn’t something that one stumbles upon every day. There might come a time when it’s needed. An epidemic in which so many lives are lost that it’s necessary to keep the population stable, or a great leader struck down before his time. We have strict rules for when the science may be used. A code. It’s called the Oath of Perpetual Anatomy. In one hundred eleven years we’ve never met the criteria.”

  My voice felt hoarse. “But you broke the rules when you brought back Hensley.”

  She laughed, dry and brittle, and picked up her glass. “I thought you might have figured it out by now, Juliet.” She took a sip. “Hensley isn’t my son. He was the professor’s little boy.”

  A gasp caught in my throat. Memories of the professor’s dust-covered nursery came to me: the old toys, the child-sized bed, the portrait on the wall. “Thomas?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “Hensley was his middle name. I told you, when we were leaving London, that the professor had strayed dangerously close to the line into immoral science. In fact, he crossed it. Thomas took ill and died so suddenly, and the professor’s wife not a week later. The professor went a bit mad with grief. He brought his son’s body here to Ballentyne and reanimated him.”

  The feeling had drained from my feet, and yet my heart kept beating faster and faster. They had truly achieved it. Defeated death. Not even my father had dreamed of such lofty achievements.

  “He knew it was a mistake right away,” Elizabeth continued. “But he could hardly undo it and kill his son all over again. Nor could he bring a dead little boy back to London.”

  “So he left Hensley in your care?”

  She gave me an odd look. “I’m merely the most recent mistress of Ballentyne to care for him. Hensley was born six years before I was. He’s forty-one years old, though neither his mind nor his body have aged.”

  I slumped in the chair, stunned. The things it meant for the world . . . A cure for plagues. Eternal life. She was right—it was wonderful and terrible at once, and so easily abused.

  Montgomery leaned forward. “Did the King’s Club know about this?”

  “A few of the elite members suspected, which is why they sent men like Isambard Lessing around to question us. But it was never more than rumors. If they knew the truth . . .” She shuddered. “They wouldn’t adhere to the oath, I can promise you that. They’d bring back anyone who might serve their ambitions.”

  “Well, we needn’t worry about them,” I said. “With their leaders dead, the rest of the King’s Club members have scattered just as we predicted. John Radcliffe’s letter in the newspaper proved that.”

  Montgomery flexed his knuckles. “Perhaps, but there are other associations in other cities, in other countries. There’s no shortage of unscrupulous men and women who would exploit Frankenstein’s science, if they knew about it. That science is too dangerous to exist. It should be burned.”

  “Absolutely not,” Elizabeth said, her eyes flaring. “We’ve kept the secret for six generations. It’s perfectly safe.”

  “The servants know,” Montgomery pointed out.

  “You needn’t worry about them. They’re entirely loyal to me. That’s what giving people body parts they’ve lost will do. I’ve operated on all of them, except for McKenna—but Ballentyne is in her bones. Her family’s been the primary caretakers of the estate for generations; I couldn’t possibly manage this place without her. Most of the work I’ve done on the others is beneath their clothes where you can’t see, or the odd eye or tongue that you probably haven’t noticed. They’ll go to their graves with the secret and would give their lives to protect Ballentyne.”

  I thought of Valentina’s hateful glare at the bonfire. Was it possible her anger came, not from jealousy, but from a fear that I was a threat to the carefully constructed secrets that the manor held?

  Outside, clouds rolled in, bathing the moors in shadows. Night had fallen, but there were no stars. So remote. A person could lose herself here.

  A flash of white near the door caught my eye, and I turned just in time to see dark curls and a white nightdress disappear around the corner. Lucy. She must have slipped away from Balthazar. How much had she overheard?

  I glanced at Elizabeth, but she was pacing by the desk, running her fingers along the row of dusty books, too lost in her thoughts to have noticed our eavesdropper.

  “You said you were one in a long line of Ballentyne mistresses to uphold the Oath of Perpetual Anatomy,” Montgomery said. “You have no natural children of your own, so I can’t help but wonder if your decision to name Juliet as your heir has anything to do with the Oath.”

  I nearly choked on my gin. I’d never assumed the inheritance was anything other than the house, but one look at Elizabeth’s face told me Montgomery’s guess was correct.

  “It’s true,” Elizabeth said. “I hadn’t intended to talk to you about this so soon, but after the professor died, I became the last one with this knowledge. If anything happens to me, a century’s worth of secrets will be lost. I’ve already named you heir to Ballentyne, Juliet—the buildings and the land. It is my intention to make you heir to its secrets, too. To teach you Perpetual Anatomy.”

  Montgomery’s hand clamped onto mine. “She’s promised never to delve into that sort of science.”

  I tossed him an uncertain look. “He’s right,” I said slowly. “I promised to put all that behind me.”

  Elizabeth gave me a sharp look. “Promised whom? You’re the type of girl who makes her own decisions.
Besides, it’s what the professor wanted. It’s the reason he took you in.”

  I shook my head, confused. “No it isn’t. He took me in because he felt guilty that he couldn’t save my father. He wanted to give me a chance at a normal life.”

  A pitying look came over her face, and I realized how naive I had been. “That isn’t entirely true, I’m afraid. He took you in because I’ve no children of my own. We needed someone younger to pass the information along to. Someone who had the intelligence to understand how the science worked, and an open mind. Someone who wouldn’t run away screaming. He heard how you slit Dr. Hastings’s tendon and thought you might be a good candidate.”

  I closed my eyes. It was cold, and yet sweat beaded my brow. I could still remember the day, nearly a year ago, when the professor came to get me out of jail and told me he was making me his legal ward.

  Why are you doing this? I had asked him.

  Because I failed to stop your father until it was too late, he’d said. It isn’t too late for you, Miss Moreau, not yet.

  “You were exactly what we were looking for,” Elizabeth said. Hope, mixed with motherly affection, filled her voice. “It doesn’t mean he didn’t love you like a daughter, or that I don’t think of you as family as well. That’s why the von Steins have kept the secret for so long: because we’re family, and family makes us strong. We take care of each other, Juliet.” She paused. “I’ve taken care of you, even at great risk.”

  Montgomery’s hand squeezed mine hard. “Because you want something from her,” he argued.

  “No. Because I want to give her something. Knowledge. Trust. Family—one that won’t disappoint her.”

  I looked down at Montgomery’s hand over mine, afraid to speak. I had promised him. But that had been before I’d known there was an oath, and a code of conduct, and that such science was even possible.

  Which meant more—keeping a promise, or a chance to achieve great things?

  I stood before the temptation grew too strong. “I’m not like my father. You’re wrong if you think I am.” I signaled to Montgomery that it was time to leave, but she grabbed my arm. I looked at her hand with its long and nimble fingers. A surgeon’s fingers.