A Cold Legacy (The Madman's Daughter 3)

She hates me. I could feel it in my bones. She hates that I’m Elizabeth’s heir and she’s not. That isn’t something one can get over easily.

Montgomery grabbed my wrist and started to drag me across the field toward the house.

“Slow down!” I yelled. “What are you doing?”

“We’re leaving this place. I knew there was something wrong from the first night.”

“Leave? We can’t leave! What about Edward?”

His pace didn’t slow as the lights of the manor approached. One had turned on high in the south tower, which was always locked. It had to be a laboratory. Elizabeth was probably up there now operating on Hensley.

Montgomery paused at the front door, one hand on the iron knob. “You saw that child. He wasn’t human, at least not anymore.”

“We need to give Elizabeth a chance to explain.”

“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 nearly dying 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 talking to 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 he 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 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 men 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.