The Madman’s Daughter (13 page)

“The doctor’s peculiar about his diet,” Montgomery said. “Doesn’t want them to develop a taste for meat.”

“
Them
? The natives, you mean?”

But he’d already turned to the door. It had a strange knob: a smooth, straight cylinder and a hook latch with holes for the fingers. The keyhole had been soldered closed.

“Isn’t there a key?” I asked.

“No need. Only the main gate is locked.” He tugged on the latch a few times with his middle finger. “The interior doors have a safeguard. Only five-fingers can open them.”

“Five-fingers?”

“Sorry. I mean, it’s a special mechanism. It keeps wild animals from getting in but lets those of us in the compound come and go as we please.”

“Even into my room?”

He grinned briefly and pushed open the door. “You haven’t anything to fear from
us
, Juliet.”

I followed him inside. The room was large and airy, with a wooden bed and a table and chair. A screen fashioned from a bit of old netting split the room into a bedroom and a dressing area with a dusty mirror. I crossed the room to a barred window that framed the fading sun, muted now behind rain clouds, as it sank below the rolling treetops toward the dark horizon. Far below, I could see the three hulking islanders coming up the road with trunks slung across their backs.

I was alone with Montgomery and the unsettling images of the islanders’ twisting limbs. Mother’s voice whispered in my ear that drawing attention to the deformities would be impolite, but my curiosity wouldn’t be silenced. I turned away from the window.

“What’s wrong with the natives?” I whispered.

Montgomery tugged on the window bars, testing them, eyes flickering to the figures on the road. The pistol was gone from his belt but not from my mind. What was out there? Tigers? Wolves? We’d sailed across the Pacific with a panther that Montgomery had treated like a harmless kitten. If a panther didn’t frighten him, what outside my window did?

“What do you mean?” he asked.

Wasn’t it obvious
? “The deformities. Are they some sort of product of an isolated development?”

“To be sure,” he muttered. Instead of meeting my eyes, he tapped his bare foot against a dusty old trunk in the corner. “Anyway, take a look at this.”

He was avoiding my questions again. Hiding things.

I knelt by the trunk anyway. He lifted the lid. Inside, folded and pressed, was a stack of ladies’ dresses. I ran my hand over the soft fabric. Silk. Tulle. These were expensive pieces, a few years out of fashion, in good condition except for faintly yellowing lace at the cuffs. I sorted through the first few dresses. Below were an assortment of things: undergarments, a shawl, a wide-brimmed hat with a pink ribbon.

“They belonged to your mother,” Montgomery said.

I looked at him in surprise. I touched the dresses again, more gently this time. “How did you get these?”

He shrugged. “There was an estate sale when I went to London a few years ago. I thought the doctor might want them.” His foot tapped nervously against the edge of the trunk. I knew Father wasn’t the sentimental type. He’d
never care about a trunk of old dresses. It must have been Montgomery who wanted these, to remember her and our old life. A string tugged around my heart.

He’d loved my mother like his own.

“Anyway, now you’ve something clean to wear,” he said, suddenly flummoxed as I pulled out a soft handful of satiny undergarments.

I peered at him, seeing the quiet boy I once knew. Maybe I’d judged him too harshly, before, for obeying my father so strictly. He must have felt so alone out here with only the sea as company. “I can’t wear these dresses in the jungle. They’ll be ruined.”

“You haven’t much choice. The closest shop is in Brisbane.”

I replaced the dresses carefully and closed the lid. Something about wearing Mother’s dresses felt wrong. Unearthing her dresses was like unearthing her long-buried corpse.

I stood, twisting her diamond ring. “They’re fine. It just … brings back her ghost.”

He nodded. I wondered what he remembered of his own mother, buried in a common plot somewhere in an overgrown London churchyard. He intertwined his fingers in the mesh dressing screen, pushing it gently in the breeze. I feared I’d said something wrong, stirred up ghosts from the dark places of our pasts. At least I had a father. What did Montgomery have? A story about a Danish sailor who shipped out two weeks before he was born and never returned. Was that why he was so reluctant to tell me the truth? Because no
matter how awful the truth was, no matter if I loathed and shunned and hated my father, at least I had one.

“Montgomery.” My voice was a whisper. I stepped closer until only a small space separated us. It was the first time we’d been alone in a long time. His fingers continued to twist restlessly in the mesh strings. My chest swelled with things I wanted to ask—about him, about the island, about my father. I parted my lips to speak, but the words wouldn’t form. I intertwined my fingers in the mesh screen next to his. I opened my mouth to ask if the rumors were true.

But I couldn’t.

Instead, something else came out. Something unexpected. Something I should have told him six years ago but never had the chance.

“I’m sorry about Crusoe.”

Just saying the name twisted my heart. Montgomery’s head jerked as suddenly as if I’d grabbed him by the throat. Crusoe had been our dog—Montgomery’s dog, really—raised from a pup at his heels. Crusoe died the day before Father disappeared. The reporters claimed the dog was a victim of my father’s criminal experiments. I’d heard all the grisly details of how they found Crusoe’s body. Cut up, pieced together, barely alive. The police had killed him out of pity. No one spoke of such things, and so I hadn’t either. Until now. Because it was wrong for a boy to lose his dog, and the passing years didn’t make it any easier.

Montgomery remained silent for some time, his face flushed. He slowly unwound his fingers from the mesh screen and brushed a loose strand of hair behind his ear.
His lips were shaking. I felt my own heart trembling, remembering the dog that I’d loved, too.

Suddenly he brushed his rough thumb against my jaw, catching me by surprise. Heat erupted across my face as I drew in a sharp breath. Was he going to kiss me? My eyelids sank closed. Our bodies were practically touching. It was wrong to be so close to a boy—every moment of Mother’s upbringing had taught me that. But I didn’t care. We were bound together, he and I.

Someone knocked at the open door. My heartbeat faltered. He pulled away, taking a little piece of my heart with him.

I glanced at the door.

Balthazar. At least it wasn’t Father. If he tried to kill Edward for just setting foot on the island, what would he do to Montgomery for almost kissing the master’s daughter?

“What is it?” Montgomery barked.

“Bath’s ready for you, miss.”

Montgomery took a few steps toward the door. I could still feel the heat of his presence. “I should go,” he said.

I nodded, aware of the change in the air. The moment had slipped away. I wanted to hold on to that feeling, that closeness with Montgomery. I felt safe with him. Complete. Like the world wasn’t such a puzzle anymore.

But he was already gone.

T
HE BATHHOUSE WAS SIMPLE
but pleasant. A large wooden tub held a steaming pool that gave off traces of some sweet herb I couldn’t identify. I peeled off the summer dress and
eased into the bath. It was hot enough to turn my skin red. I scoured every inch of my body with a sea sponge and a bar of lavender soap that seemed out of place on an island full of men. The old me flaked off with bits of mud and sand. The steam eased those tight feelings I’d carried forever, shame and worry and uncertainty. I took a deep breath, shocked at how full my lungs could be without a corset’s restriction.

After the bath I put on a dressing gown and returned to my room. The clouds had parted, though the sun was all but gone. I lit the lanterns and slowly untangled my hair with a silver comb I’d found among Mother’s things. The bath had worked all the thought out of me. My mind was blank. It was a strange feeling.

I stretched out on the bed. Before I knew it, the lantern flickered, and I felt myself giving in to sleep.

I
DREAMED OF
M
ONTGOMERY’S
rough hand on my cheek. His palm was warm, familiar, as it ran over my jawbone, over my shoulders, his thumbs brushing across my clavicles in an echo of the game the medical students played counting Lucy’s bones. The game didn’t seem nearly so silly now that it was Montgomery’s touch. But something changed in that witching hour between waking and sleep. My mind conjured a man’s body, with strong, alluring hands, but they were cold. It wasn’t Montgomery but Edward. That safe, protected feeling I’d had with Montgomery was gone, replaced by a deep chill that sent shivers running down my limbs. In my dream the edges of Edward’s body slipped and slid like a ghost, only half bound to this world.

We were back in Father’s laboratory on Belgrave Square. There were the familiar rows of cabinets, the specimen jars, everything so meticulously laid out. I was flat on the operating table. Something held me down—not the usual canvas restraints used by doctors, but something heavy and metal, like chains.

Edward stood over me. He rolled his shirt cuffs back slowly, first one, then the other, preparing for surgery. A reference book lay open on the table next to him. I tried to lift my head to see the diagram, but something held my head down, too. I tried to jerk free. His gold-flecked eyes slid to me.

“Don’t struggle,” he whispered. “It won’t do any good.”

He turned to the table, sorting through instruments that clanked with the familiar ring of steel. I should have been frightened. But, strangely, I felt only an abnormal calm and the suffocating weight of the chains.

“Remain still, Juliet,” he said.

The swinging kerosene lamp above the table lit up the tool in his hand. A dented old bone saw, rusted and flaking. A butcher’s tool, not a surgeon’s. I noted this calmly, wondering what a bone saw was doing in my father’s old laboratory.

Edward’s other hand flickered ghostly, fingers fading in and out, but when he brushed the hair off my face, he felt solid enough. He traced a hand down my cheeks, tilting my head, examining my face. I thought he might speak, but he didn’t. Instead he raised the saw.

I felt a jolt, somewhere near my feet where I couldn’t see. Then came the awful squeal of metal. He was sawing,
I concluded. But a bone saw wouldn’t cut through chains. You’d need at least a crosscut-tooth hacksaw for that. It was most perplexing.

The squeal and groan of metal continued. I wanted to cover my ears, but my hands were immobile. Edward came back into view. The bone saw was gone. His hands were covered in blood. I frowned, trying to deduce its source. Had he cut me? I mentally inspected my feet, my legs, my chest, my arms. I didn’t feel pain. But I didn’t feel anything else, either, except the strangling chains.

His fingers wrapped around something next to my head. He pulled with straining forearms. Sweat poured off his forehead. The rim of something metal came into the edge of my sight. The sharp edge sliced into his fingers, breaking the skin. The blood on his hands was his own, I realized.

The more he peeled back the metal, the more I could move my head. At last I twisted so I could see. He’d cut off a metal bonnet with a copper flower and a ribbon of steel and then peeled it back with his bare hands.

Very peculiar.

Edward moved to my chest. Another squeal of metal. Straining muscles. Blood dripping onto the table. I could breathe at last. Air rushed into my body, waking my senses. I sat up, shaking off the cold detachment, breathing in lungful after lungful of air. I nearly cried when I saw what he’d freed me from. A metal corset, and below that a metal skirt, already peeled back. There’d never been any chains, I realized. What held me down was a metalwork dress.
And Edward, with a butcher’s saw and bloody hands, had painstakingly undressed me.

Beneath the steel dress I was naked, and I covered myself with my hands, still trembling with the feeling of air and freedom and something else, earthy and corporeal. It was as if I’d woken from a harsh London night into an Italian painting, where the world was lush and warm and passionate.

I swung my legs off the table. Sweat and blood dripped off Edward’s brow. His hands were latticed with cuts. He didn’t look at my naked body, but instead he inspected my face. He brushed my hair back, studying my features, his eyes dark and unreadable.

Without the restriction of the clothing, I was filled with a constellation of sensations. I was aware of the smell of cologne mixed with his blood, the rough feel of his trouser fabric grazing against my legs, the desire that seeped from the cuts in his hands, staining the floor.

He slid a hand behind my waist, his fingers like ice. My bare skin was flush against his bloodstained clothes. His hand brushed through my hair.

He pressed his lips to mine.

Coldness flooded into me like a splash of springwater on a winter morning. I gasped with the sensation, feeling suddenly painfully
hungry
.

I kissed him back, breathless, wanting so much more.

I
WOKE BURNING WITH
sweat. The dream was still fresh in my mind, so fresh I touched my lips with shaking fingertips. I told myself I’d had the dream because of the almost kiss with Montgomery. It had nothing to do with Edward. And now it was daylight, at least midmorning. Mottled sunlight and the distant sound of waves filtered between the bars on my window.

I’d slept through dinner and all night. I might have slept for days, for all I knew. I wiped my damp palms on the bedcovers. When had I crawled under the sheets? I was wearing a nightdress I didn’t recognize, something expensive with lace at the collar. But when I’d fallen asleep, I’d still been wearing my dressing gown.

Someone had undressed me.

I pushed back the sheets as if they were on fire. The memory of the dream flooded back, making me dizzy. Edward’s hands on my naked body. The crisscross of cuts on his hands from peeling back the metal dress. Had Edward
undressed me? Was that why I’d dreamed of him?