Her Dark Curiosity (The Madman’s Daughter #2)(34)
Author: Megan Shepherd

I took a deep breath. “Lucy . . .”

“If you don’t start getting ready, we’ll miss the masquerade all together.” She picked up a thick brush and started dusting powder on her cheeks. I remained by the door, not sure how to say the words warring in my throat. She threw me an exasperated glance and I crossed to her dresser, fiddling halfheartedly with a stick of rouge. The lilies on the table stole my attention. Flowers were subject to the laws of mathematics, a fact few people knew. You could see the repeating patterns if you looked hard enough. And I tried to look hard, but Lucy snapped her fingers.

She met my eyes in the mirror, giving me a questioning look. “Juliet, what’s going through your head?”

Her voice had a softer timber than normal. For everyone else she pitched her voice higher, exaggerating her words. But now, in the intimacy of the small room, she had dropped the act. The least I could do was show her the same courtesy.

I perched on the edge of the chair next to her. “Do you remember when you said we were like sisters, and we should tell each other everything?” She nodded slowly. “I lied to you about the island.”

Her eyes went wide. She didn’t speak right away; instead she set down the makeup brush and stood, then twisted the key in the door’s lock, before coming back and taking her seat again.

“I’ve always suspected it,” she whispered, though there was no trace of hurt in her voice. “You were gone a year. When you came back, showing up in that hospital looking thin as a twig and half crazed and utterly penniless, saying nothing more than you’d found your father and he’d died, I knew you weren’t telling me something.” She glanced at the door one final time. “Now tell me.”

I wouldn’t have thought it easy to reduce a year’s worth of life to a short, whispered conversation in the quiet of Lucy’s bedroom. But as soon as I told her about arriving on the island and discovering Father’s secrets, the story started to roll out of me. I told her about Montgomery, and how we’d loved each other but he’d stayed behind instead of returning with me. I told her about the beast-men, who had been so gentle and childlike at the beginning, and witnessing Father create them in his blood-red laboratory, and then how they’d regressed into monsters. She didn’t speak the entire time—her face was white, her voice stolen.

I was about to tell her the hardest part—Edward—but paused. She claimed to admire him. It wasn’t so easy to reveal that he was one of Father’s more gifted creations—as well as London’s most notorious mass murderer.

“There’s more, but . . .” I hesitated at her white face, fearing the news about Edward would shatter her. I swallowed and instead said, “Father was corresponding with someone here, one of the King’s Men. There are letters. . . .”

But my words died at the look on her face. She’d been deathly silent throughout my explanation, but now a deep red color came to her cheeks.

“Letters?” she whispered. “Letters? Oh God, Juliet.”

Before I could respond she pulled me into a tight, desperate embrace, her heart thumping nearly as fast as my own.

“I know it’s all hard to believe,” I said, squeezing her even harder.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “If you’d only told me sooner. If I’d only known . . .” Her fingers dug into my shoulders. “Juliet, there are things I haven’t told you, either.” She swallowed. “I know about the letters.”

EIGHTEEN

MY HEART FELT STRANGLED. “Lucy, what do you mean?”

Footsteps sounded in the hallway, and I clamped my mouth shut until they passed—a maid, most likely, but it left me shaken. Downstairs, sounds of hammering and workmen arguing felt a million miles away. Inside Lucy’s room there was only the small crackle of the fire, the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway.

“I wish you’d told me all this sooner, Juliet. So much makes sense now, and it’s much worse than I’d imagined. I didn’t realize all of this was related. . . .”

A creeping feeling spread through my body. “Lucy, I haven’t a clue what you are talking about.”

She took a deep breath, and when they came, her words were quiet and careful. “Remember at the seamstress, when I told you about finding some disturbing documents about Papa’s business? It was letters, Juliet, in a locked drawer of Papa’s desk. There were no names used, only codes, but I recognized Papa’s handwriting. I learned to forge his writing years ago to sign bank checks. I’m positive it was his.”

Suddenly I knew exactly what she was referring to. Edward had come to London with a handful of letters written to Father from a colleague whose identity was secret. He’d suspected a dozen men—including Lucy’s father.

“He was right,” I muttered to myself, and then stood up so quickly the flowers on the table quaked. “It’s your father,” I said, louder. “In the letters, your father calls himself the King’s Man, doesn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said, looking confused. “How did you know that?”

My mind spun frantically to grasp what this all meant. I was relieved it wasn’t the professor, but Lucy’s father . . . If I knew anything, it was how terrible it was to fear and distrust your own father. “Because you’re not the first person to tell me about the letters. What do they say?”

Her frown deepened. “Business transactions, mostly. Receipts and bank account numbers. A few things that made no sense, like a list of the books in the Bible. The letters mentioned experimentation in passing, and other details I didn’t understand at the time. An assistant named Montgomery, and servants with strange names. Balthazar, I think, like from Shakespeare. The letters came from an alias called Paracelsus.”

“Paracelsus,” I repeated. “An old alchemist. Father had his book on his bookshelves.”

Memories came back to me of father’s beast-men, the strangely named servants Lucy was describing. Balthazar, Ajax, little Cymbeline. What a fool I’d been, thinking Father would limit his sights to a single island. He had been too arrogant for that. Of course he’d want the world to know of the science he’d uncovered.

“Were there any scientific papers with the letters? Diagrams, notations, that sort of thing?”

She shook her head. “No. The letters reference research he sent, but Papa must have kept those in a different place.” She leaned against the dresser, stunned. “I thought our fathers only knew each other because our mothers had been friends,” she stammered.