Author: Megan Shepherd

“Lovely. Simply lovely.” Father gave a tight-lipped smile. Next to him, Balthasar brushed aside a tear. I suddenly felt crowded, as though they were pressing in. The rush of emotions was too much, drowning me. I slouched on the piano bench, desperate for a breath of air.

“Are you well?” Father asked. Suddenly the smile was gone, replaced by a physician’s cold determination. He felt my forehead.

“I’m just a little dizzy.”

But I might as well have been a cold body on the dissection table. He felt my wrist for my pulse. The morning’s pinprick flashed, red against the pale skin of my inner elbow. Redder than it should have been. Swollen.

“What’s this?” he barked.

“Just a small infection. From the ship.”

“Have you been taking your treatment?” His lips pursed. “You haven’t missed a day, have you?”

I pressed my other hand to my forehead. Suddenly every sound in the room was magnified like a loudspeaker at the races. Alice clearing the table. Edward’s quick breaths. The scaly man whispering to Balthasar.

“I’m fine!” I cried. I wrenched my arm back. “I’m fine. I just need some rest.”

Father glanced at the clock above the mantel. “Midnight. I’ve kept you up.”

“It’s all right, I’m just tired,” I said. I tried to stand, but my legs were weak.

“Someone help her to her room,” Father said.

Edward and Montgomery were suddenly both by my side, each taking an arm.

My face burned as I looked between them. Two boys, two sets of hands on my wrists. One rough and calloused, the other strong yet smooth. My emotions knotted tighter, threatening to cut off my circulation.

“You take her, Prince,” Father said. There was an odd tone to his voice that made me think of how he wanted me to get to know Edward better. Edward seemed pleased enough to escort me, but Montgomery squeezed my wrist harder. Not wanting to let Edward have me.

“Father, won’t you take me?” I asked, trying to keep things peaceful. “Like old times.”

Father grunted, but helped me stand. I leaned on his arm, overpowered by the chemical smell coming off of his jacket. Had he been in the laboratory before supper? I hadn’t noticed the smell earlier. I looked closer. Three thick black hairs glistened on his collar. I realized I hadn’t seen the panther or the monkey or any of the animals since arriving.

What had he done with them?

Father escorted me into the courtyard, where the night air cooled my cheeks. The chickens were gone, roosting in some cool, dark corner. The footfalls of our boots echoed through the portico, the only sound of humanity among the trilling, whispering jungle sounds.

Maybe I should have felt out of place so distant from the noisy streets of London. But there was a serenity here, as though I had crossed the threshold into a place both familiar and novel. This gray-haired man wasn’t a stranger. He was my father.

He stopped outside my door and patted my hand—the one with Mother’s ring—as if the scandal had never happened. And it hadn’t, I reminded myself. It had only been rumors.

“I hope you don’t regret coming,” he said. “I don’t know what you thought you would find, but I realize an old Spanish fort and an old wrinkled man are probably a disappointment.”

“I’m not disappointed.” I laid my hand on top of his, squeezing before turning to my room and the odd door latch.

“Oh, and Juliet,” he said. I turned back. Half of his face was thrown in deep shadow, while the whites of his teeth gleamed in the distant lights from the salon. “I’ll be working in the laboratory late tonight. I’ve a good start on the new specimens. Don’t be alarmed if you’re awoken. The animals—they scream, you know. An unfortunate effect of vivisection. It keeps the whole household up.”

For a breath, the world seemed to freeze. And then the clouds rolled again, the wind howled again. I realized that he had charmed me, just like he charmed everyone. I’d thought I was so clever. I thought I could see past his manipulations. But I’d only heard what I wanted to.

He’d never said the accusations were untrue. Only unfair.

Eighteen

THE NOISES STARTED SOMETIME in the night, during the hour when the moon was at its highest. Not screams, exactly. More like moans. Howls. Sounds I couldn’t put a name to. I lay in bed, wide awake, staring at the odd shapes the moonlight threw against the whitewashed walls. I couldn’t tell what type of creature he was working on in that blood-red, windowless laboratory. I’d heard the panther make all types of howls and cries on the ship, but nothing like what came from that building.

Whatever it was, it was large.

Tears pooled in the hollows of my eyes. I wiped them away angrily. All I could think was that I’d gotten what I wanted—answers. Why should I be surprised? Hadn’t I suspected the rumors were true, somewhere deep in the creases of my mind? And what about all the other strange things happening—the islander dying, Balthasar showing up at the picnic with rifles? Father had lied to me about everything.

The angrier I got, the more thorny memories began to surface, like drowned bodies rising to the water’s edge. I remembered his voice calling to Crusoe, here, boy, there’s a good dog, and the laboratory door locking shut with a quick, dull click. I remember how the servants’ eyes were bloodshot and sunken on the mornings after he’d operated. The screaming kept them awake, too. But none of us ever spoke of it. Least of all Montgomery.

Thinking of Montgomery made my hands twist at the sheets. He’d spent half his life on the island. He must have known of my father’s guilt. Why hadn’t he told me? And then I remembered how he’d tried to talk me out of coming. He’d warned me without putting it into so many words. But I’d insisted. I said I’d have to sell myself on the streets if he didn’t take me with him.

But was this any better? This terrible, anguished truth?

A painful bellow tore through the night. I kicked the sheets off, sweat pouring down my neck. Was it the sheepdog? I didn’t know any creature that could make such an ungodly sound. As the screams dragged on, haunting my every breath, my mind started to wander to darker and darker places. Wondering what would cause an animal to scream like that. Imagining the beast spread out, shackled down, dotted lines traced on its skin in black ink. And why? What purpose did Father have for such wanton cruelty? He was beyond dissecting for knowledge’s sake. He already knew every corpuscle, every bend of nerve. No, he wasn’t studying. He was working on something new. Something different.

My mind searched for an answer among the moonlight splashes on the walls. Whatever experiment he was working on, it had begun in his laboratory on Belgrave Square when I was a child. Over the years he withdrew inside himself more, working later and later hours. Even when he was with us, his eyes would stray to the door, as if half his mind was always tethered to that laboratory. Whatever it was—his new discovery—it had consumed him enough to abandon everything else in his life. It was more important than his reputation, his wife, even his daughter.

It was this idea that drew me out of bed. After years of wondering what science he’d unlocked in that damp basement, a science that he loved even more than he loved me, I had a chance to see it. My feet swung into a pair of house shoes as though they had a mind of their own. The need to know pulled me like a puppet, commanding me to dress quickly, to open the door, to find out what my father was working on that had brought him to the edge of madness.

A single lantern hung in the courtyard, swinging softly in the breeze. It threw the light at odd angles, making shadows lengthen and then disappear. A faint glow came from beneath the laboratory door.

I waited until the lantern light dimmed, then I darted around the portico, past the servants’ bunkhouse and the barn to the laboratory, where I pressed my back to the tin wall. The thrill of finally learning Father’s secrets took little bites out of me, making me feel savage. The screaming had stopped, but my head pounded, clouding my senses. A low, mournful sob began from within, which grew into an earsplitting wail. I dug my palms against my ears.

This was madness. This curiosity inside me was unnatural. It had pushed me further from my mother, further from reason and rules and logic. But there were times I still couldn’t resist it.

I rested my forehead against wall and closed my eyes. It wasn’t just my curiosity, or my fascination with anatomy, or how I could unhesitatingly chop a rabbit’s head off with an ax when a roomful of boys couldn’t. Those things were all symptoms of the same sickness—a kind of madness inherited from my father. It was a dangerous pull in my gut drawing me toward the dark possibilities of science, toward the thin line between life and death, toward the animal impulses hidden behind a corset and a smile.

Turn back, I heard Mother whispering. It’s wrong, what he’s doing. But she was no longer here to scold me. I was free from her and society and the watching eyes of the church. I could do whatever I wanted. But what did I want? To follow that slithering curiosity to Father’s laboratory door, or to listen to Mother’s ghost and go back to bed where I could close my ears to the screaming?

Suddenly the wailing stopped. Air slipped from my lungs. A tuft of snow-white hair blew slowly across the stone portico. I picked it up and rubbed it between my fingers. Next to me the dark entrance to the barn gaped like a chasm. I peered inside cautiously.

Out of the darkness came a white shape, hopping to the edge of the barn, just inches from my toes. One of the rabbits. Somehow, it had escaped its cage.

Father didn’t eat rabbits. They were intended, rather, for the sharpened blade of a scalpel. To pursue science. But the difference was that my father wasn’t accused of practicing science. He’d been accused of butchery. He’d already crossed that forbidden line long ago. And I couldn’t lie down on my feather mattress and just listen to it. To understand my own curiosity, I needed to understand his.

I returned to the laboratory. The tin door had the same latching doorknob as the rest of the buildings. I squeezed it slowly with bated breath. I felt the latch catch and release. It opened in my hand, silent as the night.

The sharp smell of rubbing alcohol and formaldehyde slipped from the cracked doorway. In an instant, I was a little girl again, sneaking into her father’s laboratory. The memory was so strong I almost shut the door and ran back to my room.

But a whisper came from the dark.

I held my breath to keep the smells at bay. My eyes adjusted slowly. At the end of the room, a shadowy figure stood over a wooden operating table surrounded by a lantern and candles on a high shelf. The candlelight reflected in dozens of dark glass jars lining the walls, like the glowing prayer candles in a dark cathedral. Only these jars didn’t hold votives, but things I could only imagine.

Specimens. Experiments. Nightmares.

And the figure at the front, the unholy priest, was my father. His back was to me, but I knew the tight set of his shoulders and shape of his head. Whatever was on the table was half covered by a sheet, and all I could make out was the shape of thin limbs, the scarlet spill of blood on the sheet, a pile of towels at Father’s feet, the silver gleam from the surgical instruments. The sound of fluid slowly dripping reminded me of the ticking clock in the dining room. Father said something in his low voice. I imagined more of his haunting commandments, some kind of terrible prayer, but it was only mental notes to himself. He lowered the blade to the table. The scalpel pressed against firm flesh, which gave, opening into muscle like butter.

The thing on the table jerked to life with a painful squeal. Its cry was a blade to my heart. Thick leather manacles bound its limbs to the corners, but it writhed wildly under the sheet. My sweaty palm slipped on the door latch. I wiped it on my skirt. As terrified as I was, my eyes were riveted to that table.

Father seemed unfazed by the thing’s torment. The manacles strained and rattled, but they held. Father kept cutting, a slice here, another there, as graceful as an orchestra conductor. He hummed a few notes of a melody. The Chopin piece, I realized, with a sickening lurch. I caught only glimpses as his hands flew over the creature. A flap of skin, pale and still dripping with subcutaneous fat, pulled back on its shin. A white bit of bone flashing in the candlelight. Father covered it with a towel to stanch the blood, but the towel soaked quickly. He peeled it off carefully and dropped it into the growing pile at his feet. So much blood. It made me tipsy. For a moment my thoughts slipped out of my control, into a primal hunger. What was he doing? This wasn’t just vivisection. It was much more than that.