Her Dark Curiosity (7 page)

My heart pounded. He could so easily make trouble for me, being down here where I wasn’t supposed to be, snooping around bodies. The professor’s guardianship could only protect me so far.

“I came to check on the autopsy report for the latest victim of the Wolf of Whitechapel,” he said. “But I would be happy to escort you back to the main floor.”

“That’s not necessary. I know my way. And I really must be going.” I smiled as graciously as I could and turned away, heart pounding, feet unsteady on the tile floor. All I could think of was Edward. All I could feel was a thousand tangled emotions.

“Wait, Miss Moreau.”

My eyes fell closed, only for an instant. I turned around with another shaky smile. The inspector wasn’t smiling now, as he closed the space between us and dropped his voice to a whisper.

“After I met you, I looked up your name. I’m protective of Lucy, you understand, and your name sounded so familiar. I found a police report. . . .” He glanced down the hallway, making sure we were alone. My instincts jumped to attention. A dozen scenarios flashed through my head of what I’d do if he tried to arrest me. All of them ended poorly for me.

“It was self-defense,” I said firmly. “Dr. Hastings attacked me. I was a cleaning girl then; no one would believe me—”

He dismissed that with a wave. “None of that interests me. I’ve no doubt it was Hastings’s fault—it isn’t the first incident of this sort with his name on it. No, Miss Moreau, the reason I recalled your name was because of your father’s crimes, not your own.”

My body froze, afraid to take a single breath.

At my silence, he continued. “I was young at the time, in college training to be an investigator. The case was quite notorious. I went back and read the file on your father, and it seems the case was never closed. He fled England, and no one heard from him again. I hate to leave this sort of thing open, if we can file it away as a solved case. Your assistance, Miss Moreau, would be invaluable to our efforts.”

I stared at him, speechless. After hiding from the police for the last year, now they were coming to me for
help
? I wanted to laugh, if I hadn’t feared sounding like a madwoman.

“I assure you, you can trust me,” he continued. “We’ll handle the information in the most sensitive manner. It isn’t my intention to cause a sensation, just to solve a long-standing case. It would be a feather in my cap, you see, even lead to a promotion. Together with this Wolf of Whitechapel case, I would be made head of the entire division. Which means I’d be better suited to care for Lucy.”

“Care for Lucy?”

He smiled boyishly. “It isn’t official, of course. I haven’t yet asked her father for her hand in marriage, but I know he’ll give me permission. Any day now, expect to get the news of our engagement.”

There was something undeniably tender about the way he said it. I was quite certain Lucy had no idea the inspector’s intentions were this immediate. My head whirled with the idea of Lucy wed, and Newcastle wanting me to help solve my own father’s case, and among it all, Edward. Alive.

Mrs. Bell rounded the corner and stopped short when she saw us. “Can I help you, sir?”

I took the opportunity to step away from Inspector Newcastle and head for the door. “I’m sorry, Inspector,” I said quickly. “There’s nothing I can help you with. I’ve heard rumors that my father is dead—I might trust those, if I were you.”

Before he could respond, I bid farewell to him and Mrs. Bell, and hurried from the hallways where the electric lights still clicked and sputtered, as if warning me to never come back.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

EIGHT

A
S SOON AS
I left King’s College, I rounded the edge of the building and slumped against the rough brick wall, fighting to calm my erratic heartbeat. The day was clear but bitingly cold. My coat hung open, my hands bare, yet I didn’t reach for my gloves nor do up my buttons. I couldn’t. All I could manage was to slide down the brick wall to the frozen grass and let the cold seep up from the ground into me.

Edward was back from the dead.

If he truly was alive, if he had done this, then he must have been following me for some time. My mind searched through the past few weeks and months, trying to remember if I’d felt like I was being followed. But that was just it—one
always
felt followed in this city. Always felt eyes, always heard footsteps.

A flock of ravens alighted from the central courtyard, and my head whirled around. Was he following me even
now
? So many places to hide: behind those skeletal trees, on the rooftop of a nearby building . . .

I hugged my knees tight, not daring to close my eyes. If he knew about Annie stealing my mother’s ring, what else did he know about? Did he know about my secret workshop and my growing illness? Did he know how I was stealing from the professor? Did he know that I’d opened the laboratory door so Jaguar could kill my father?

It terrified me that Edward might know all of my secrets. If he chose to, he could expose me. Hurt me for how I’d hurt him when I’d rejected his love. People loved a good gruesome rumor. If he revealed that the vilified Dr. Moreau’s daughter had murdered her own father, this city would devour me alive.

I ran numb fingers over my face, thinking. Edward was tied up in all those secrets too, though. Exposing my secrets would expose his own—his unnatural origin and his inclination to kill. No, the more I thought about it, the more I was certain it wasn’t my secrets he was after.

Maybe it was my life.

A tingling started deep in my spine. For all I knew, I could be Edward’s next target. He could merely be toying with me, killing those who had wronged me to create a false sense of safety before he struck. After all, I’d rejected his love and then left him for dead. I could hardly expect him to do anything logically. How much control did Edward really have over himself? Where was the line between Beast and man?

Yet if Edward had wanted to kill me, there were far more effective ways. I’d given him a thousand opportunities to strike as I slunk along Shoreditch at night on my way to my secret workshop. And I might have left him for dead, but I’d prevented Montgomery from slitting his throat. I had given him a chance.

So what were these bodies supposed to tell me? If he meant me no harm, why hide behind such macabre gestures of affection?

It’s different with you, Juliet,
Edward had said.
We belong together.

He’d been wounded before he’d been able to explain what he meant by that plea for help. As I leaned against the brick wall, body ravaged by too many warring emotions, I wondered if Edward Prince had come back to London with that in mind. Not to destroy my life with rumors, not to claw out my heart, but to confess his love once more.

A hundred uncertainties twisted at my heart. The question was, Who else had to die first? Who else had wronged me?
I could give him a list,
I thought blackly,
starting with Dr. Hastings.
But I immediately regretted such thoughts. The truth was, he had to be learning about all these people from somewhere. No one knew about Annie stealing that ring except for Lucy. Perhaps she told someone; perhaps she wrote it in a journal that he’d found.

Could he be following
Lucy,
too?

Before I knew it, my feet were racing along the streets toward Lucy’s neighborhood, throwing glances over my shoulder. I didn’t dare involve her in any of this, and yet I needed to make sure she was safe. Edward could be
anywhere.
I made my way toward her house in the finest part of town, where the muddy snow had been cleared from the streets. Every manor was stately here, even finer than in the professor’s neighborhood, and each home was decorated for the holidays in the latest fashions with mistletoe over the entryway.

Lucy’s family’s mansion was impossible to miss, a four-story red-brick palace on the most prominent corner, by far the grandest house in Belgravia. A wall of perfectly trimmed hedges designed to keep the riffraff out circled the rounded brick turrets. An iron gate led up the front walk to the imposing entryway topped with a holiday garland that smelled of pine.

I paused by the gate, casting another cautious glance over my shoulder. The smell took me back to my childhood, when I used to come here for parties. We’d had the most beautiful carriage then. I remembered soft lace curtains and peach upholstery. Montgomery would sit up front with the driver, learning his duties as groomsman, while Mother and Father and I rode in silence in the back until we pulled up at this very gate. Montgomery would take my hand—never meeting my eyes, as a proper young groomsman—and help me down from the carriage. The place beneath my left rib throbbed again at the memory.

A door slammed and a maid appeared in an upstairs window with a rug and duster. I started to pull my hood over my hair and duck away, but I reminded myself that I was once again welcomed into this house. The Radcliffes had forbidden Lucy to see me after Father’s scandal, but now that I was ward of the illustrious Professor von Stein, they had no problem smiling at me like nothing had happened. I approached the front door and knocked.

Clara, the maid, answered the door while wiping her hands on a rag. Her face lit up when she saw me. “Miss Juliet! What a treat—we haven’t seen you around here much.” She paused. “You looked like you’ve seen a ghost, miss. Are you ill?”

I shook my head, though she was closer to the truth than she could imagine. “Is Lucy home?”

“She’s in the salon with her aunt. Shall I tell her you’re here?”

I hesitated. My heart thumped with need to see Lucy, to make certain she was safe. But with her aunt in the room, I wouldn’t be able to speak openly. “I didn’t realize she had company. I’d really wanted to speak with her alone. If you’ll just pass along the message that I came, and have her come visit as soon as she can . . .”

“Juliet!” Lucy’s face appeared behind Clara, and she jerked the door open wider. Her frown accused me just as much as the finger pointing at my chest. “You’re not leaving without saying hello, are you?”

Her face was so warm and full of life, after those in the basement. “If you’ve already company—”

“Henry’s here for tea and Aunt Edith is chaperoning. And I’m in desperate need of you, you horrid friend. After you left me alone with John, I practically had to fend him off with an umbrella to keep him from kissing me again.”

“I’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll chat then.”

Lucy folded her arms across her chest. “I’ve told Henry so much about you that he must believe you’re an imaginary friend I invented out of boredom. The least you could do is have a cup of tea with the poor, dull man.”

At the end of the alley a carriage rumbled by in the direction of Covent Garden. I should be headed there now, to get the latest gossip from Joyce about the murders and see what else I could find out about Scotland Yard’s investigation. But Lucy was narrowing her eyes at me, and I said, “All right. Though I can’t stay but a few minutes.”

“We’ll see about that. And Clara, I came to tell you I’ve eaten all the gingerbread cakes and we need more.”

Lucy linked her arm in mine as she dragged me up the main staircase to the parlor. “Thank god the holidays will be over soon, else I’d put on a stone in weight. Oh, I’m so glad you arrived! Henry’s been boring my ears off and I’m desperate for some real conversation. At least he’s nice to look upon.” She caught herself, and quickly added, “Though only in a certain light. Otherwise he’s an ogre.”

We reached the top of the stairs and I tried to brush my hair back and make myself look presentable, when all I could think about was a boy back from the dead.

We entered the parlor, a small but opulent room with a cheerful fire crackling in the ornate fireplace and tea service set out on the low table between the upholstered chairs. Lucy’s aunt, a rather stiff-lipped, dried-out woman, turned when we entered, eyebrows raised at my sudden appearance. Henry was sitting on the sofa with his back to us.

Lucy brushed an errant curl back. “Aunt Edith, Henry, I’d like to introduce you to a dear friend. This is Juliet Moreau.”

I dimly heard my name, but for some reason she sounded far away. Henry had turned at the sound of her voice and was staring at us. At
me.
Suddenly the room felt too small, as though the furniture was pressing in and the fire consuming all the oxygen. He stood slowly to greet us. I was vaguely aware of Lucy’s aunt standing as well, her mouth moving and sound coming out, but she was no more real than a dress shop mannequin. Everything seemed equally unreal, just vague suggestions of furniture and people.

Everything, that was, except for the young man whose gold-flecked eyes met mine.

“Juliet,” Lucy said. “May I introduce Mr. Henry Jakyll.”

He stepped forward to shake my hand.

The faded scar on his right cheek. The face that was so achingly familiar.

The hand extended to me belonged to Edward Prince.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

NINE

T
HE FIRE STOPPED CRACKLING.
The steam froze in the air. Everything had drifted into a far-off place, shifting into a colorless world like a fading photograph.

Everything but Edward.

Jakyll,
I thought. Another false name, just like other name he’d created—Edward Prince, or rather Prince Edward, a name borrowed from the pages of Shakespeare. Edward didn’t have a given name since he’d never truly been born, but made in a laboratory out of a handful of animal parts. Fox. Heron. Jackal. Of course—that was the source of his false name, a testament to his darker animal side.

The
jackal
side.

He had changed in the months since I’d seen him. Though the scar under his left eye still marred his face, his features had sharpened in a way that gave him a dramatic, brooding look. His eyes seemed a darker shade of brown—very nearly black—as did his hair. The most shocking change, however, was his size. Never a large young man, he now stood several inches above me and seemed to have put on fifteen pounds of muscle.