Her Dark Curiosity (The Madman's Daughter 2)

I pulled back the next cloth with stilled breath and looked upon the body of the thief. Red hair matted in blood, body bruised from a man’s heavy boot that must have trampled her. At the time I had thought her my age, but she looked far younger in death. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. A missing finger was nothing compared to the missing heart torn from her chest. More blood drained away from my face.

I stumbled to the next table, leaning over the cloth. I could tell from the shape it was another young woman. Annie—or what if it wasn’t? What if it was Lucy’s cold body, or our maid Mary, or someone else dear to me who never deserved this?

Dread scratched its tiny claws at me but the urge to know was stronger, and I dragged back the cloth. Annie Benton, though I was hardly relieved. She hadn’t deserved this. Her light brown hair and fair skin looked so much paler in death. I checked her fingers, but there was no sign of Mother’s ring. Years ago she’d slept in the bed next to mine, and we’d eaten porridge together at breakfast, and each evening we all scrubbed our single change of clothes in the boardinghouse’s laundry room. She’d shared her soap with me once.

It was hard to concentrate on anything besides the gaping tears in her chest, almost perfectly slicing her in the middle. The cuts were jagged, furious, nearly beautiful in their destruction, like all the others’. Whoever had made them had done so with a passion for destruction. Perhaps I should have looked away, but I didn’t.

I turned my head to the last body. The unnamed victim. My instincts urged me not to look, yet somehow my feet took me there, winding around the bare cadavers, their lifeless eyes watching me. I drew the cloth back and jerked away. My heart stampeded in my chest. I collided into the table behind me, brushing against Daniel Penderwick’s cold, dead hand.

I recognized the fourth body.

It was the old white-haired man from the flower show, Sir Danvers Carew, the beloved member of Parliament who had once abused my mother and me. I’d seen him only days ago, and now . . . dead. I closed a hand over my mouth as my mind crawled over his pale face, his bloodstained skin, trying to understand. He had the same slash marks on his chest, and bruises all over his body, made with some blunt sharp object. Like a cane. No wonder the paper had declined to name him. Such an important man, surly his family would prefer not to be associated with a mass murderer. It hardly mattered. He was dead either way.

Four. I knew all four victims.

And in turn, I realized, I had been victim to each of them.

The idea made me back away from the bodies, back pressed against the cold metal door. It didn’t matter how I tried to explain it—nothing about it felt right. Four deaths, Four people who had wronged me.

Almost as though . . .

I hesitated, telling myself I might possibly be going mad.

. . . almost as though someone was watching out for me.

I shivered uncontrollably, as the bones in my hands and arms shifted and popped, threatening another fit.

The nature of the victims’ wounds was familiar, too.

A premonition that had been growing now gripped me hard, as my mind flashed back to all the bodies on the island. Alice, Father’s sweet maid, dripping blood from dead feet. A beast-woman separated from her jaw. Those wounds, as well, had been lovingly made by a monster.

By Edward.

Edward is dead, I told myself. The dead don’t come back.

And yet the premonition kept squeezing my heart, trying to get me to believe in the impossible. My head was already beginning to ache. Soon I’d grow faint. In a desperate fury, I decided the only thing that would calm my mind would be to prove scientifically that the wounds were different, and therefore couldn’t have been made by Edward. In his journal, Father had made meticulous autopsy reports for all of Edward’s victims on the island. I’d memorized the measurements. Eleven and a half inches long, one inch apart, and two inches deep.

I pulled out a thread from my pocket and measured the length of Annie’s cuts, the spacing between them, even gently pulled apart the wounds to measure the depth. I repeated the process on all four bodies.

They were all the same: eleven and a half inches long, one inch apart, and two inches deep.

I stumbled back against the empty table, stunned. The thread slipped from my fingers, along with a spool of my sanity.

The murderer was the same. Somehow, even though I’d thought him dead, Edward had done this.

SEVEN

I FELT LIKE THE room was turning upside down. My legs threatened to give out. I curled my fingers around the table’s edge as though it could keep me from floating to the ceiling.

Edward Prince was alive, and here was my proof.

Against all odds he must have survived the fire and come to London—why? If it were only victims he was after, he needn’t have traveled half the world. But his victims were all very specific. Connected. All people who had at one point in my life wronged me.

My mind slipped and slid back to the island, and the castaway with the gold-flecked eyes.

We belong together, he had said. We’re the same.

Is that why he had returned, for some sort of grotesquely misguided attempt to protect me and win me over? Or was he sending me some sort of threat?

I paced, hands kitting together, among the cadavers. How did he even know about Annie stealing the ring? No one knew about that except Lucy, unless Annie had told someone. . . .

Lips trembling, I managed to pull the cover back over Annie’s face, and the rest of the cadavers. I stumbled into the hallway outside, eyes closed, drawing in a deep breath. The hallways here always had the usual smell of chemicals, along with some traces of lingering cologne from whichever gentleman doctor had last been here.

I couldn’t shake a repeating phrase in my head: He’s alive. Alive. Alive.

I heard footsteps down the hall and spun, expecting to find his yellow eyes in the shadows. Heart pounding, I hurried for the stairs, away from these bodies and what they meant. I threw a glance over my shoulder as I turned the corner and nearly collided with a man coming into the hallway from a side door.

Not just any man. Inspector John Newcastle.

My heart shot to my throat. “Excuse me,” I said in a rush, keeping my head down with the hope that he wouldn’t recognize me. But his hand held my elbow, and he frowned as if trying to place me.

“Miss . . . Moreau, isn’t it? Lucy’s friend. What on earth are you doing down here?”

“Nothing, Inspector,” I stuttered. “Visiting some old friends.”

His eyebrow rose with a touch of irony as he glanced at the cadaver storage room door behind me. “You keep strange company for friends, Miss Moreau.”