Her Dark Curiosity (The Madman's Daughter 2)

“I fear you’re right,” he said. “Radcliffe has been trying to ingratiate himself with me for months, badgering me to join the King’s Club. He says they’re investing in the horseless carriage now, of all things. He’s a railroad man, you know, probably making a fortune shipping all those automobile parts to the Continent.” He let out a wheezing snort. “Greedy old blowhards, the lot of them.”

The cuckoo clock chimed in the hallway, making me jump. The professor’s house was filled with old heirlooms: china dinner plates, watery portraits of stiff-backed lords and ladies whose nameplates had been lost to time, and that blasted clock. No matter how long I lived here, I’d never get used to hearing the thing go off at all hours.

“The King’s Club?” I asked. “I’ve seen their crest in the hallways at King’s College.”

“Aye,” he said, buttering his bread with a certain ferocity. “An association of university academics and other professionals in London. It’s been around for generations, claiming to contribute to charitable organizations—there’s an orphanage somewhere they fund.” He finished buttering his roll and took a healthy bite, closing his eyes to savor the taste. He swallowed it down with a sip of sherry.

“I was a member long ago, when I was young and foolish,” he continued. “That’s where I met your father. We soon found it nothing more than an excuse for aging old men to sit around posturing about politics and getting drunk on gin, and neither of us ever went back. Radcliffe’s a fool if he thinks they can woo me again.”

I smiled quietly. Sometimes, I was surprised the professor and I weren’t related by blood, because we seemed to share what I considered a healthy distrust of other people’s motives.

“What do you say?” he asked. “Would you like to make an appearance at the masquerade?” He gave that slightly crooked smile again, and a part of me wondered if he’d also taken me in as his ward to keep from growing too lonely.

“If you like.” I shifted again as the lace lining of my underskirt itched my bare legs.

“Good heavens, no. I haven’t danced in twenty years. But Elizabeth should arrive by then, unless there’s more snow on the road from Inverness, and I’ve no doubt we shall be able to wrangle her into a ball gown. She used to be quite the elegant dancer, as I recall.”

The professor stowed his glasses in his vest pocket with a warm smile. Elizabeth was his niece, an educated woman in her mid-thirties who lived on their family estate in northern Scotland and served the surrounding rural area as a doctor—an occupation a woman would only be permitted to do in such a remote locale. I’d met her as a child, when she was barely older than I was now, and I remember beautiful blond hair that drove men wild, but a shrewdness that left them uneasy. When he took me in, the professor had posted a letter to Elizabeth to join us for the holidays. He said it was to liven up the quiet house, but I had a feeling he hadn’t a clue what to do with a teen-aged girl and wanted a woman’s touch.

“You know how the holidays are,” he continued, “all these invitations to teas and concerts. I’d be a sorry escort for you.”

“I very much doubt that, Professor.”

While he went on talking about Elizabeth, I dug my fork beneath my dress and scratched the itchy fabric. It was a tiny bit of relief, and I tried to work it under my corset, when the professor cocked his head.

“Is something the matter, Juliet?”

Guiltily, I slid the fork into my lap and sat a little straighter. “No, sir.”

“You seem uncomfortable.”

I looked into my lap, ashamed. He’d been so kind to take me in, the least I could do was try to be a proper young lady. It surely wasn’t right that I felt more comfortable wrapped in a threadbare quilt in my secret attic workshop than in his grand townhouse. The professor knew only a very limited account of what had happened to me over the past year, a mixture of half-truths and outright lies. I had told him that the previous autumn I’d stumbled upon my family’s former servant, Montgomery, who had told me that my father was alive and living in banishment on an island, to which he took me. I’d lied to the professor and said father was ill and passed away from tuberculosis. I had claimed that the disease had decimated the island’s native population and I’d fled, eventually making my way back to London.

I had said nothing of Father’s beast-men. Nothing of Father’s continued experimentation. Nothing of how I’d fallen in love with Montgomery and thought it returned, until he’d betrayed me. Nothing of Edward Prince, the castaway I’d felt a strange connection to, only to learn he was Father’s most successful experiment, a young man created from a handful of animal parts chemically transmuted using human blood. A boy who had loved me despite the secret he kept carefully hidden, that a darker half—a Beast—lived within his skin and took control of his body at times, murdering the other beast-men who had once been such gentle souls. Edward was dead now, his body consumed in the same fire that had eaten my father. That didn’t mean, however, that I’d ever managed to forget him.

By the time I looked up, I found the professor’s attention had strayed to his newspaper. I returned to my baked hen, stabbing it with my fork. Why hadn’t I seen Edward’s secret? Why had I been so naïve? My thoughts drifted to the past until the professor let out a little exclamation of surprise at something he read.

“Good lord, there’s been a murder.”

My fork hovered over my plate. “It must have been someone important to have been reported on the front page.”

“Indeed, and unfortunately, I knew the man. A Mr. Daniel Penderwick, solicitor for Queensbridge Bank.”

The name sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “Not a friend of yours, I hope.”

The professor seemed absorbed by the article. “A friend? No, I’d hardly call him a friend. Only an acquaintance, and a black one at that, though I’d never wish anything so terrible upon the man as murder. He was the bank solicitor who took away your family’s fortune all those years ago. Made a career of that dismal work.”

Uneasiness stirred at the mention of those darker times. “Have they caught his murderer?”

“No. It says here they’ve no suspects at all. He was found dead from knife wounds in Whitechapel, and the only clue is a flower left behind.” He gave me a keen glance above his spectacles, then folded the paper and tossed it to the side table. “Murder is hardly proper dinner conversation. Forgive me for mentioning it.”