A Cold Legacy (The Madman's Daughter 3)

“He doesn’t smell right,” Balthazar said, casting a wary look at the wall. “Mistress Elizabeth asks me to help her in her laboratory sometimes, but I don’t care for it. It makes me uneasy.”

“Then why do you do it?”

He scratched his nose again, thinking. “She’s the mistress. She’s the law. I must obey her the same as I must obey Montgomery, the same as I obeyed your father.” He raised a hand and let it fall helplessly. I had never quite put it together before, but now Balthazar’s constant obedience made sense. He was part dog, after all, and well trained to be loyal to anyone he viewed as a master. Faintly, I wondered if that included me.

“What are you reading?” I asked, hoping to change the subject away from experimentation.

He held up the book. “Aristotle. I like the messages he talks about. I wanted to reflect on the duties you’ve asked of me for your wedding day tomorrow. I pray that I’ll do a good job.”

I smiled. “I’m positive you will. How did you learn about Aristotle?”

He ran his hand along the spine of the book. “I started reading it on your father’s island.”

Just the mention of my father’s island sent a shiver down my back. I hugged my arms around my knees. “I don’t recall seeing Aristotle on Father’s bookshelves. There was only a handful of books there, most of them Shakespeare.”

“He had more in the laboratory,” Balthazar said. “There was a room off the back filled with books and old paperwork.”

A curious tickled whispered in the back of my head. I’d been so captivated by Elizabeth’s science and my impending wedding that the Beast’s warning had been the furthest thing in my mind, present but set aside like needlework I’d always intended to come back to and had only now remembered. Ask Montgomery about your father’s laboratory files on the island, he had said. About the ones you didn’t see. He burned a file along with a letter.

“You didn’t ever see a letter my father wrote to me that Montgomery burned, did you?”

Balthazar gave a heavy shake of his head, distracted by a torn page in the book he was trying to glue back together with a gooey lick of saliva.

“What exactly was in those files in the second room?” I pressed.

The sharp tone in my voice caught Balthazar’s attention. He looked up with his heavy jowls, between me and Sharkey, and scratched his nose. “Files, miss? What files?”

“You just said there was a second room filled with files.” He scratched his nose harder, a sure sign he was hiding the truth. “Balthazar, I know there’s something Montgomery isn’t telling me. Something he’s lying about.”

His big eyes went wide. He said nothing.

I studied him closely, the way he fidgeted with the book, shifting uncomfortably beneath my scrutiny. He started rocking in the chair, almost imperceptibly at first. Back and forth, back and forth.

“Balthazar, why did Montgomery burn a letter? What was in it?”

His lips folded together nervously, and he rocked harder. I’d seen Balthazar rock that way only once before, on the Curitiba when I had asked him about my father. His eyes had glazed over. I’d get no answer out of him now.

I sighed and stood, heading for the main door back into the manor’s hallway. I was done with secrets and passageways, at least for tonight. I had a wedding to think about.

“Good night, Balthazar,” I said, and closed the door behind me. Thunder shook the windows outside the hallway, and I pushed the curtain back. Lightning crashed.

Looks like another storm is setting in, McKenna had said.

Lightning—we needed it in order to bring a human body back to life. There was no telling when another storm would come, or how much longer Edward’s body would stay preserved down there in the cellar.

Whatever Montgomery was hiding, was it worse than what I was hiding from him?

I went to Lucy’s door and knocked quietly. “If we’re going to bring Edward back,” I told her, “it has to be tonight.”

ONCE THE STAFF HAD gone to bed, we crept downstairs. The basement was flooded from all the rain. Water seeped in from the stone walls, filling the low-lit hallways with the sound of dripping and the smell of damp. Luckily the chapel was built on slightly higher ground so the stone floor—and the bodies—remained dry.

Lucy made a face and lifted her skirts, checking each step carefully. Inside the chapel, we set down the lantern and looked at the dozen bodies. Lucy pulled the sheet back over Edward’s face.

“Do you think he’ll remember what it was like to be dead?” There was a ring of excitement in her voice that I hadn’t heard in weeks.

“I suppose we shall have a good many questions to ask him, when he wakes. Now, if we’re going to cut out Edward’s diseased posterior lobe, we have to hurry. I’m getting married tomorrow, after all. We’ll need a replacement brain from one of these bodies. The cadaver should be in good condition. Male and around his age, if possible.”

Lucy drew back another sheet and grimaced. “What about this one?”

I glanced at the corpse of a young man who seemed healthy enough—present condition excluded, of course—with gangly long arms and legs that draped off the end of the bench.

“Goodness, he must be seven feet tall. But he looks healthy enough. Help me carry him.”

Lucy took the lantern in one hand and picked up the man’s feet with the other, while I wrapped my arms under his shoulders. The body had a distinct odor—a sterile coldness not so different from the damp stone walls. A trace of soap from his shirt lingered and reminded me that he had been a person with hopes and dreams that had ended far too young.

Lucy grunted as she lifted the man’s feet. “Is he filled with bricks?” she muttered.

“Bodies feel heavier when they’re stiff.”

She let his feet fall back to the bench. “I’m not going to ask how you know that. What do we do? We can’t possibly carry him on our own.”

I pulled a bone saw from my satchel and held it up to the glinting light. “We only need his head.”

“Juliet, no!”

I gave her a hard look as I knelt by the man’s chest, steadying the bone saw on his neck. “It isn’t going to kill him again,” I muttered, and threw my weight behind the saw.

It was grisly work, but at least his body was frozen, so there was little blood. Lucy fetched a pumpkin from McKenna’s pantry to place under the sheet so no one would notice a headless body.