A Cold Legacy (The Madman's Daughter 3)

“What do we do, then? Return it to the cage with the others?”

“I suppose. Elizabeth warned me that reanimated creatures might have unnatural strength like Hensley, but it’s just a rat, and it seems perfectly normal.”

A knock came at the door and we froze. I threw off the covers to find daylight streaming through the windows. Morning had come sooner than I’d realized.

“Miss Juliet?” Moira’s voice came from the other side of the door. “You might want to come downstairs. A package just arrived from Quick.”

I sat up, throwing back the blanket. “Just one moment!” I signaled frantically for Lucy to hide the rat. She looked around the room desperately, until she kicked the lid off a hatbox and shoved it inside.

I opened the door. “A package?”

Moira grinned. “It’s your wedding dress, miss.”

I sucked in a breath. Wedding dress? God, the wedding was tomorrow and I hadn’t even bothered to try on those pairs of shoes yet. Guilt washed over me that I’d forgotten about it. Two little girls were with her, smiling widely. She motioned to them apologetically. “They’re dying to see it, Miss. Haven’t ever seen a proper bride’s dress before.”

The innocent look on their faces made me feel guilty all over again. I forced a smile. “Then let’s take a look, shall we?”

I tossed one glance back at Lucy before the girls grabbed my hands and led me to the library, where Elizabeth and McKenna stood around the big mahogany table. A package tied with ribbon sat in the middle.

“The dressmaker just delivered it,” McKenna said, “Oh, do open it. We’re all dying to see.”

It felt surreal to tug on that bow, slide the ribbon off. The little girls crowded around the table, eyes big and wide. I opened the box, fighting through crumpled newsprint the dressmaker had used to pack the dress, and then delicate tissue paper closer down. I folded back the paper gently, and the girls gasped.

“Oh, Juliet, it’s beautiful,” Elizabeth said.

I stared down at the satin dress that Lucy had helped me design. My heart beat a little faster. It wasn’t really so bad that I was lying to Montgomery; I did want to marry him, and it would be a grand occasion. We had a lifetime ahead of us to come to terms with any secrets from our past—or our present.

“You shall be the most beautiful bride!” the smallest girl said.

I gave her a sincere grin.

“Here, girls,” I said, holding up the dress. “Why don’t you try it on? Lily, Moira, it won’t be but slightly too big on you.”

Grins broke out across all their faces. Lily picked up the dress with the utmost care and they hurried from the room amid giggles. Newspaper stuffing covered the floor. I shoved it back in the box and sank into a chair.

McKenna went to the window and pulled back the curtain with a frown.

“Looks like another storm is setting in. Let’s keep our fingers crossed it comes and goes before Friday afternoon. Rain at a wedding—oh, I couldn’t bear it.”

“I’m sure it will stop,” Elizabeth said, giving me a smile. “Anyway, a misty day can be perfectly romantic.”

I smiled in return, torn between how kind they were all being to me, and the fact that I was lying to them all.

TWENTY-SIX

THAT EVENING I OPENED the hatbox and took one last look at the rat.

“Time to take you home, little fellow.” I slid open the back panel of the armoire that led into the passageways in the walls. I climbed into the tight space, finding my way by candlelight to the secret storage room next to Hensley’s chambers. I let the rat into the cage, observing it carefully for fear it might be stronger and unpredictable as Elizabeth had warned, but it acted just like the others. If it wasn’t for the tiny burn mark on its side where the electricity had singed its fur, it would be totally indistinguishable from the others. I bid it good evening and crawled back inside the walls.

I didn’t return to my room straightaway. The manor was different seen through the cracks in the passageways. Timeless. Without the electric lights I could imagine it was a hundred years ago, and Victor Frankenstein was up in that tower with a lightning rod and a bone saw. If I closed my eyes, I could almost hear the sound of scalpel on flesh.

I stopped and leaned against a dusty wall of the passageway to brush away cobwebs on my dress. A thin beam of light shone from between a horizontal crack in the wooden siding. I squinted to peer through. It was Balthazar’s bedroom. He sat in the rocking chair by the fireplace with Sharkey asleep in his lap and a book in his hands. He traced the lines of text with his thick finger, soundlessly mumbling the words to himself.

I felt bad for spying on him and started to leave, but tripped on one of Lord Ballentyne’s uneven brick traps. I cursed before I could stop myself, and when I looked back through the crack, Balthazar was sniffing the air.

“Miss Juliet,” he said calmly. “I can smell you in the wall. Is something wrong?”

“Blast,” I muttered to myself, and then pressed my mouth to the crack. “No, Balthazar, everything’s fine.”

“It isn’t, Miss. If you forgive me, I can smell that you’re lying. A body produces different scents when one isn’t telling the truth.” He was already out of the chair and had swung opened a hinged section of the wall that served as a hidden door into the passageways. He stuck his head in, sniffing again, and sneezed at all the dust. “Come in, Miss. You’ll scrape yourself up in there. It isn’t safe.”

“Oh, that’s really fine, I was just . . .” Sneaking through the walls after secretly bringing a rat back to life? “Well, all right.” I paused. “Is it really true that you can smell a lie?”

“Yes, Miss. When Montgomery and I were traveling the world we developed a signal, because there were plenty of men who wanted to cheat us. I’d tap my nose once for truth and twice for a lie.”

I climbed into the cozy warmth of his bedroom and shook the dust off my dress. Sharkey wagged his tail. Balthazar offered me the rocking chair but I sat on the rug instead and pulled Sharkey into my lap, scratching behind his ears.

“How did you know there was a passageway behind that wall?” I asked. “Could you smell that, too?”

“Aye, Miss,” Balthazar said gruffly, sitting in the rocking chair. “I can smell Master Hensley. Always prowling around in there.”

“You don’t care for him, do you? I suppose he is a bit unnatural.” I paused as Balthazar scratched his nose with a thick finger—a nose that betrayed his ursine origin. I cleared my throat. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being unnatural, of course.”