Her Dark Curiosity (The Madman's Daughter 2)

“The professor gave me a second chance,” I said. “He gave me a life when everyone else thought I was suitable only for prison. My hands aren’t clean either, nor are yours. We owe it to Edward.”

“If we open that cellar door, the Beast will go on a rampage.”

“I’m not talking about setting him loose. I’m talking about curing him.”

“We’ve tried—”

“And we’ll keep trying!” I snapped. “There’s a piece of Edward still in that body. I can feel it. We still have time. Father did this to him, don’t you see? If Edward dies, Father wins.”

Montgomery was looking at me strangely. “Is this about saving Edward?” he asked, voice suddenly dangerously quiet. “Or about besting your father at his own work?”

A strange feeling crept up my spine. Elizabeth’s eyes flickered to mine. Besting Father at his own work? I wanted to shake my head. To deny it. This was about giving Edward another chance. Giving me another chance. I’d always felt that our fates were intertwined, the beast in him not so unlike the animal in me. Both headed toward our own destruction; him lost to the Beast, me lost to my illness.

If there was no hope for Edward, what did that mean for me?

“This isn’t about besting Father,” I said in a tightly controlled voice. “This is about doing what is right. Give up if you want, but as long as there’s still good in Edward, I will keep trying. If you kill him, know that you’re killing a part of me, too.”

I turned and hurried upstairs. I heard him calling my name, and Elizabeth’s voice telling him to let me have space. I paused on the landing. I didn’t want to be alone now, in that empty bedroom with a cold fireplace and stiff pillows. I wanted something simple, something that wouldn’t twist and stab at me, a single moment of peace in this crashing time.

I looked toward the attic. My feet took me there, to the little bedroom Elizabeth had given Balthazar. I knocked softly, but no answer came. When I pushed open the door I realized the room was a nursery, filled with small furniture and toys. I remember Mother having talked about the professor’s wife who had died years ago, not long after their young son.

In the little bed, Balthazar was curled like an infant with his long feet hanging off the end, a stiff doll on the floor by his side. He slept soundly; I didn’t want to wake him. I pulled up a rocking chair and sat next to him, picking up the old doll. It must have been a hundred years old, well loved, stitched back together in the places where it had begun to fall apart over the years. I ran my finger down the perfect row of stitches, clearly made by a surgeon’s hand. I could picture the professor lovingly patching the old doll for his son. I tucked it at the foot of the bed from where it had fallen.

The darkened room was eerie now with moonlight streaming through a gauzy curtain, landing on one of the old family portraits. This one of a boy, the nameplate lost, and I remembered the professor telling me that his son had died at the same age as one of their ancestors.

I rocked in the chair, in the room that had been left exactly as when the professor’s son died, the ghosts of toys long covered in dust. A rocking horse, a wooden puppet theater, a set of blocks. I ran my fingers lightly over the roof of an old dollhouse, feeling sad for everything the professor had lost, sadder still that I could never tell him how much I’d cared. Montgomery wasn’t the only one who longed for family.

I hadn’t intended on staying long, but my body was heavy with exhaustion, and at some point I must have fallen asleep there by Balthazar’s bedside. I dreamed I was standing in an island creek stained with blood, grass rustling as beast-men surrounded me on all sides.

When I woke, it was to a heavy arm shaking my shoulder. I jerked with a start and found Balthazar’s face very close to mine.

“Something outside, miss,” he said.

I pushed back the curtain in a hurry. It was snowing fast and hard pellets. I could barely make out a carriage on the street below, with a swinging lantern at the driver’s seat.

Suddenly a pounding upon the front door shook the house. I let the curtain fall. It must have been one of the small hours of the night, caught between midnight and dawn. Why would someone come at such an hour?

Balthazar gripped onto my arm. “Best to stay quiet, miss.”

I heard someone on the stairs heading for the front door—Montgomery, from the heavy sound of the steps. The pounding came harder, along with voices I couldn’t make out. I turned back to the window, squinting through the snow, to read the thick block letters on the side of the carriage.

Scotland Yard.

“Oh no. This can’t be good,” I muttered. “Come downstairs with me.”

But he held my arm. “Wait, miss.”

“Montgomery’s down there,” I whispered. “It might be Newcastle for all we know. He might try to arrest him.”

But Balthazar’s face was deeply wrinkled as he cocked his head, listening. His hearing was keen, but could he truly make out words from three stories down?

At last his lips folded in.

“It’s you they’ve come for, miss.”

More footsteps came from below, inside the house now, amid the sounds of arguments. My heartbeat sped. Five men at least, and then came a crash, and lighter footsteps on the stairs as Elizabeth must have rushed down to investigate.

I fumbled with the window, but this wasn’t my bedroom with the broken lock. This one held fast. “I need your help, Balthazar!” I cried. He picked up the lock in his meaty hand, examined it, then fumbled through the dusty collection of toys until he found a stick horse, which he rammed against the lock until it broke. I pushed open the window as bitter-cold snow stung my face.

“Go downstairs,” I urged him. “Help Montgomery and Elizabeth. I’ll hide somewhere outside and come back when it’s safe.”

“Please take care, miss,” he said, and pointed to my feet. “You haven’t any shoes.”

“I’ll manage.” I climbed out of the attic window, stomach shrinking at the four-story fall to the garden. A copper drain spout, ancient and corroded, clung to the exterior wall. I made my way down it carefully, freezing in only my nightdress. I slipped near the end and tumbled to the garden, landing in a pile of snow that broke my fall but left me with a terrible scrape on my shin. When I looked up, the lights were on in my bedroom. If I’d spent the night there instead of the nursery, they would have already caught me.