The Madman’s Daughter

Now my eyes devoured the rabbit’s body, trying to match the fleshy bits of organ and bone to the ink diagrams I knew by heart. An urge raced through my veins to touch the striated muscle of the heart, feel the smooth length of intestine.

Lucy clutched her stomach, looking pale. I watched her curiously. I didn’t feel the need to turn away like normal ladies should. Mother had drilled into me the standards of proper young ladies, but my impulses didn’t always obey. So I had learned to hide them instead.

I looked back at the rabbit. Creeping vines of worry wound around my ankles and up my legs.

‘Something’s wrong.’

The student performing the surgery glanced up, irritated, before selecting another scalpel and returning to work.

‘Sh,’ Adam breathed in my ear. My chest tightened as my eyes darted over the rabbit. There. The rabbit’s rear foot jerked. And there. Its chest rose and fell in a quick breath. I clasped Lucy’s hand, feeling the blood rushing to the base of my skull.

My brain processed the movements disjointedly, with an odd feeling like I had seen all this before. I gasped. ‘It’s alive.’

The rabbit’s glassy eye blinked. My heart faltered. I turned to Adam, bewildered, and then back to the table, where the boys continued to operate. They ignored me, as they ignored the rabbit’s movements. Something white and hot filled my head and I gripped the edge of the table, jolting it. ‘It’s not dead!’

The surgeon turned to Adam in annoyance. ‘You’d better keep them quiet.’

‘It isn’t supposed to be alive,’ Lucy stammered, her face pale. The handkerchief slipped from her hand, falling to the floor slowly, dreamlike. ‘Why is it alive?’

‘Vivisection.’ The word came out of me like a vile thing trying to escape. ‘Dissection of living creatures.’ I took a step back, wanting nothing to do with it. Dissection was one thing. What they were doing on that table was only cruel.

‘It’s just a rabbit,’ Adam hissed. Lucy began to sway. I couldn’t tear my eyes off the operation. Had they even bothered to anesthetize it?

‘It’s against the law,’ I muttered. My pulse matched the thumps of the frightened rabbit’s still-beating heart. I looked at the placement of the organs on the table. At the equipment carefully laid out. It was all familiar to me.

Too familiar.

‘Vivisection is prohibited by the university,’ I said, louder.

‘So is having women in the operating theater,’ the surgeon said, meeting my eyes. ‘But you’re here, aren’t you?’

‘Bunch of Judys,’ a dark-haired boy said with a sneer. The others laughed, and he set down a curled paper covered with diagrams. I caught sight of the rough ink outline of a rabbit, splayed apart, incision cuts marked with dotted lines. This, too, was familiar. I snatched the paper. The boy protested but I turned my back on him. My ears roared with a warm crackling. The whole room suddenly felt distant, as though I was watching myself react. I knew this diagram. The tight handwriting. The black, dotted incision lines. From somewhere deep within, I recognized it.

Behind me, the surgeon remarked to another boy in a whisper, ‘Intestines of a flesh-toned color. Pulsing slightly, likely from an unfinished digestion. Yes – there, I see the contents moving.’

With shaking fingers I unfolded the paper’s dog-eared right corner. Initials were scrawled on the diagram: H.M. Blood rushed in my ears, drowning out the sound of the boys and the rabbit and the clicking electric light. H.M. – Henri Moreau.

My father.

Through his old diagram, these boys had resurrected my father’s ghost in the very theater where he used to teach. I was flooded with a shivering uneasiness. As a child I’d worshipped my father, and now I hated him for abandoning us. Mother had fervently denied the rumors were true, but I wondered if she just couldn’t bear to have married a monster.

Suddenly the rabbit jolted and let out a scream so unnatural that I instinctively made the sign of the cross.

‘Good lord,’ Adam said, watching with wide eyes. ‘Jones, you cad, it’s waking up!’

Jones rushed to the table, which was lined with steel blades and needles the length of my forearm. ‘I gave it the proper dose,’ he stuttered, searching through the glass vials.

The rabbit’s screams pierced my skull. I slammed my hands against the table, the paper falling to the side. ‘End this,’ I cried. ‘It’s in pain!’

Lucy sobbed. The surgeon didn’t move. Frustrated, I grabbed him by the sleeve. ‘Do something! Put it out of its misery.’

Still, none of the boys moved. As medical students, they should have been trained for any situation. But they were frozen. So I acted instead.

On the table beside me was the set of operating instruments. I wrapped my hand around the handle of the ax, normally used for separating the sternum of cadavers. I took a deep breath, focusing on the rabbit’s neck. In a movement I knew had to be fast and hard, I brought down the ax.

The rabbit’s screaming stopped.

The awful tension in my chest dripped out onto the wet floor. I stared at the ax, distantly, my brain not yet connecting it with the blood on my hands. The ax fell from my grasp, crashing to the floor. Everyone flinched.

Everyone but me.

Lucy grabbed my shoulder. ‘We’re leaving,’ she said, her voice strained. I swallowed. The diagram lay on the table, a cold reminder of my father’s hand in all this. I snatched it and whirled on the dark-haired boy.

‘Where did you get this?’ I demanded.

He only gaped.

I shook him, but the surgeon interrupted. ‘Billingsgate. The Blue Boar Inn.’ His eyes flashed to the ax on the floor. ‘There’s a doctor there.’

Lucy’s hand tightened in mine. I stared at the ax. Someone bent down to pick it up, hesitantly. Adam. Our eyes met and I saw his horror at what I’d done, and more – disgust. Lucy was wrong. He wouldn’t want to marry me. I was cold, strange, and monstrous to those boys, just like my father. No one could love a monster.

‘Come on.’ She tugged me through the hallways to the street outside. It was cold, but my numb skin barely felt it. A few people passed us, bundled up, too concerned about the weather to notice the blood on our clothes. Lucy leaned against a brick wall and pressed a hand over her chest. ‘My God, you cut its head off!’

Blood was on my hands, on the tattered lace of my sleeves, even dotting the diamond ring my mother had left me. I stared at the paper in my fist. The Blue Boar Inn. The Blue Boar Inn. I couldn’t let myself forget that name.

Lucy braced her hands on my shoulders, shaking me. ‘Juliet, say something!’

‘They shouldn’t have done that,’ I said, feeling feverish in the cold night air. The paper was damp from my sweating palms. ‘I had … I had to stop it.’

I felt her hand squeeze my shoulder tighter. ‘Of course you did. Our cook kills a brace of hares for dinner all the time. That’s all you did – killed a rabbit that was already going to die.’ But her voice was shaking. What I had done was unnatural, and we both knew it.

A cold breeze blew off the Thames, carrying the pungent smell of sweat and Lucy’s perfume. I drew a shallow breath. The rumors of so long ago crept through the streets, coming back to life. All I had were slips of memories of my father: the feel of his tweed jacket, the smell of tobacco in his hair when he kissed me good night. I couldn’t bring myself to believe my father was the madman they said he was. But I’d been so young when it happened, just ten years old. As I matured, more memories surfaced. Deeper ones, of a cold, sterile room and sounds in the night – recollections that never entirely disappeared, no matter how far I pushed them into the recesses of my mind.

I didn’t tell Lucy about the diagram with his initials in the corner. I didn’t tell her that he used to keep it neatly in a book in his laboratory, a place I glimpsed only when the servants were cleaning. I didn’t tell her that, after all these years trying to accept that he must be dead, a part of me suspected otherwise.

That maybe my father was alive.

THREE

London society was not kind to the daughter of a madman. To the orphan of a madman, even less. My father had been the most celebrated physiologist in England, a fact Mother was quick to mention to anyone who’d listen. My parents used to host elegant parties for his fellow professors. Long after bedtime I would creep downstairs in my nightdress and peek through the drawing room keyhole to take in the sound of their laughter and the smell of rich tobacco. How ironic that those same men were the first to brand him a monster.

After the scandal broke and Father disappeared, Mother and I were shunned by the company we once called friends. Even the church closed its doors to us. We were forced to sell our home and possessions to pay for his debts. We were left penniless for months, relying only on Mother’s prayers and a string of grumbling relatives’ sense of duty. I was young at the time, so I didn’t understand when suddenly we had an apartment again, a small but richly appointed second-story flat near Charing Cross. Mother would take me to piano lessons and have me fitted for gowns and buy herself expensive rouge and satin undergarments. An older gentleman came by, once a week like clockwork, and Mother would send me out for chocolate biscuits in the café downstairs. He wore strong cologne that masked a pungent, stale smell, but Mother never said anything about it. That’s how I knew he must be rich – no one ever says the rich stink.

When consumption took my mother, the old gentleman hardly wanted to keep the dead mistress’s bony daughter around. He paid for Mother’s funeral – though he didn’t attend – and let me stay in the apartment for a week. Then he sent over a brusque maid who boxed up and sold Mother’s things and handed me a banknote for their value. No doubt he considered himself generous. I was fourteen at the time, and totally on my own.

Fortunately, a former colleague of my father’s named Professor von Stein heard of Mother’s death and inquired at King’s College for suitable employment for a young woman of distinguished background. Once they found out who my father was, though, the best offer I got was to be a part of Mrs Bell’s cleaning crew. It paid just enough for a room at a lodging house with twenty other girls my age. Some were orphaned, some had come to the city to support younger brothers and sisters, some just showed up for a week and vanished. We came from different backgrounds. But all of us were alone.

I shared a room with Annie, a fifteen-year-old shopgirl from Dublin who had a habit of going through my belongings whether I was there or not. She once came across the embossed, locked wooden box I kept at the back of our closet shelf. I never told her what was inside, no matter how much she begged.

The night I killed the rabbit, I kept the blood-spattered diagram under my pillow. At work the next day I tucked it into my clothing, like a talisman. It infused my every waking thought with memories of my father. Every remembrance, every gesture, every kind word from him had been eclipsed by the terrible rumors I’d heard in the years since.

I slipped away from my mop to find Mrs Bell scrubbing towels in the laundry room. Her light eyes, narrowed as if she knew I was up to no good, found mine through the billows of steam.

I picked up a bar of soap and chipped at it with my fingernail. What did I expect to find at the inn, anyway? My father, raised from the dead, smoking a cigar in his tweed jacket and waiting to tell me a bedtime story?

‘Mrs Bell,’ I asked, setting down the mutilated bar of soap. ‘Do you know where the Blue Boar Inn is?’

I had to wait until Sunday after church before I could follow Mrs Bell’s directions south of Cable Street, avoiding the swill thrown out from lodging houses. As I paused at the corner to find the right street, I became aware of someone watching me. It was a girl around my age, though her face was caked with powder and rouge that made her look older. A striped satin dress limply hung on her thin frame. She stared at me with hollow eyes. I looked away sharply. If it hadn’t been for my employment at King’s College, that might have been me on the corner, waiting for my next gentleman. I leaned against a brick wall, queasy. Lucy had told me what happened at brothels. That had been my mother’s desperate solution, at the expense of the virtues she held so dear. I might not have as many virtues to lose, but I was determined that wouldn’t be my future.

The prostitute ambled down the street, coming toward me leisurely, and I hurried in the other direction, until I suddenly came upon a faded blue sign swinging above a thick door, painted with a tusked beast I assumed was once meant to be a boar.

The inn was a wooden three-story building, keeling slightly toward its neighbor. I tugged on the heavy iron latch and entered. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Little sunlight passed through windows coated with smoky residue. I found myself in a dining hall, among sullen patrons murmuring in low voices over their midday meal. The furniture was worn but made of heavy oak that had recently been polished. None of the patrons looked up except a thin man twice my age, face marred with pox scars, who stared at my Sunday dress and the Bible I clutched in my arms. It seemed the Blue Boar did not see many young ladies.

A portly woman came out from the kitchen and raised her eyebrows. She wiped her hands on her apron and looked me over: my face that hinted of aristocracy and clothes that spoke of poverty. ‘Come for a room?’

‘No … I haven’t,’ I stammered. ‘I’m looking for a man. A doctor.’ My heart pounded, warning me not to get my hopes up. ‘His name is Henri Moreau.’

She peered at me queerly. I must have been the color of ripe tomatoes. ‘We aren’t in the habit of giving out our patrons’ information. You understand.’ It was a command, not a question. Was he there, I wondered, in the same building, maybe right above our heads?

‘I mean no trouble. I only need to speak with him.’

Her face didn’t budge. ‘No one by that name here.’

The ground fell out from beneath me. She was mistaken. She had to be. Or else I’d been a fool, thinking some old paper meant my father was here, in London, the city from which he’d been banished.

The set of her mouth softened. She took my elbow and pulled me away from the diners to a staircase that led into the shadows of the upper floors. ‘We’ve no one by that precise name, but there is a doctor.’

My heart leapt. ‘Where is he? What does he look like?’

‘Calm down, now. You say you don’t want trouble, and nor do I.’ Her gaze slid to the dining hall, nervously. ‘But if it’s the doctor you’re after, you should know Dr James has been nothing but trouble since he arrived.’

Dr James. Not Dr Moreau. A pseudonym, perhaps? My mind was grasping, trying to form the parts of the equation into a reasonable solution, but there was only one logical conclusion: Dr James was someone else entirely, one of a hundred visiting doctors in London. And yet my curiosity wouldn’t be satisfied without proof.

‘I’m sorry to hear it. Perhaps if I may speak to him …’

‘Mind you, the young gentleman is gracious enough. It’s that companion of his. Makes the other guests nervous, you understand.’

‘Certainly.’ I nodded, breathless. No one would describe Father as young. So could the odd companion she spoke of be my father, then?

She turned her attention to my dress, narrowing her eyes, and spoke in a low voice. ‘I won’t question what a pretty young lady wants with that pair, but I doubt you’re a relation. This is a reputable establishment. I don’t want no trouble, you hear?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ A nervous bloom spread across my cheeks at the realization of what she was implying about a young woman alone with two strange men.

Her chin jerked toward the stairs. ‘Second floor. Room on the left.’

I dashed to the second-floor landing, gripping the railing to steady myself. To my left was only one door, tucked into an alcove. A tarnished mirror next to the door reflected my face, wide-eyed and flushed. I looked like a madwoman. I paused. What was I doing chasing a whim? I should have been with the other girls from the lodging house, gossiping about the handsomest boys in church this morning.

But here I was. I slid my Bible into my bag and knocked cautiously.

There was no answer. Should I wait? I rapped again, harder. Behind me, low voices and the sounds of clinking glasses floated up from the dining hall.

A wild idea struck me. I tried the knob – locked, of course. It wasn’t a sophisticated lock, though, so any skeleton key might do. I rifled through my bag for the key to my wooden box at the lodging house. At last I found the small bronze key and compared it to the door’s lock. Too small. I knelt, peering into the keyhole. Inside was a small room with an unmade bed and stacks of steamer trunks. I tried the key again, willing it to reach the tumbler, and I almost had it before it slipped out of my hands.

‘Blast,’ I muttered, bending to retrieve it. As I stood back up, I brushed the hair out of my eyes, the movement reflected in the mirror. I looked again at my face, studying the hollows under my cheekbones, the shadow around my eyes, wondering if Father would even recognize me now. Suddenly, a second face appeared behind my own – a dark face covered in a thick beard that obscured a man’s heavy features. His forehead slanted with an odd deformity, leading to a brow that thrust forward, hooding his eyes. I gasped and tried to turn, but his beastly hands dug into my shoulders. The key fell as he forced a cloth over my mouth. The last things I saw before passing out were his yellow-green eyes glowing in the mirror.

FOUR

I awoke, head throbbing, the taste of chloroform in my throat. I was on the same wooden-framed bed I’d seen through the keyhole. I bolted upright. Scanned the room for my attacker, for a weapon, for an explanation as to why I was there.

I remembered in flashes. The face in the mirror. The cloth against my mouth.

Drugged.

A rush of panic sent my vision blurring and my ears roaring as I ransacked my clothes, relieved to find no signs I’d been harmed. Regardless, I needed something to use as a weapon – a fire poker or a letter opener. But a wave of nausea knocked me back to the pillows. I squeezed my eyes shut until my foggy head began to clear.

I was alone at least. In someone’s room – the deformed man’s, most likely. From the angle of sunlight pouring into the room, I must have been out for hours. A sick taste rose in my throat as I recalled the feel of his hairy hand against my mouth. My breath came fast, faster, until I thought I might black out. I gritted my teeth, holding in the urge to scream. Panic would get me nowhere.

I opened my eyes, slowly. Testing the door wasn’t an option until my head cleared enough for me to stand. But the room was full of clues about my abductor. Crates and trunks were stacked by the door three deep, surrounded by packages wrapped in brown paper. He was traveling, then, and somewhere far away, judging by the cargo. A caged parrot on the dresser eyed me warily while picking at the bars with its beak. I stared at it.

My abductor traveled with a parrot?

A second door, which I assumed led to an adjoining room, was shut. Beside the bed was an open trunk, which I managed to lean toward without too much nausea. It contained rows of glass bottles, partially obscured by packing straw. I brushed the straw aside and took out a bottle: Elk Hill brandy. My father’s favorite.

Before I could piece together what it meant, the door to the adjoining room swung open, revealing the beastly face from the mirror.

‘You!’ I cried. I coiled my fist around the bottle neck, ready to swing. I tried to stand but my feet wouldn’t obey, and I grappled for the bedpost for support.

His was not the face of a monster, as I’d first imagined, but it was disfigured nonetheless. A wild black beard covered a protruding jaw below a snub nose and deep-set eyes. He moved with an odd lurch, as though he was unused to his own legs. Despite his disfigurement, he didn’t seem so threatening now, partly due to the tray of tea and biscuits he was holding.

Still, my body tensed. He stepped forward with a shuffle, just far enough to set the tray on the foot of the bed. He scurried back and twisted his mouth into what might have been a smile.

The strange act of kindness only made me more uneasy. ‘Get away!’ I cried. I hurled the bottle at him, but my vision was distorted from the drugs, and it fell uselessly past his shoulder into a crate of clothes. I climbed over the bed, stumbling with vertigo, grabbing at his wrinkled linen shirt and hammering him with my fists. ‘Someone, help!’

The man did not speak. He merely cringed and let me pummel him. But the side door jerked open again with a squeal of hinges and another man rushed in, a young man with shirt half-buttoned and suspenders at his sides. He threw his arms around mine to keep me from tearing the beastly man apart.

‘Let me go!’ I cried. But he was powerfully built, and it didn’t take him long to pin my wrists in the shackles of his hands.

‘Juliet! Stop this!’ he said.

I froze at the gruff sound of my name. The young man let me go and I whirled on him. His face was deeply tanned, odd during the London winter. Loose blond hair fell to his broad shoulders. My lungs seized up.

I knew him. I’d have known him anywhere, despite the years.

‘Montgomery,’ I gasped. But what was he doing here, with my abductor? I’d expected to find my father, if anyone at all. The last person I’d expected to find was my family’s former servant.

My knees buckled from shock, but he grabbed my elbows, holding me up. I had thought I was alone in the world. But here he was, the one person who knew me, the only one left who shared my dark secrets. Just seeing him started to untangle the swollen tightness in my chest.

I pulled away from him, not ready for the fragile, preserved knot of my heart to unravel so quickly.

‘It’s safe. You’re not in danger.’ He held out a hand as though he was calming a wild horse, his handsome features set with seriousness and concern. The recognition in that expression nearly unbalanced the cadence of my heart. He was two years older than me, the son of our scullery maid. After his mother died when he was very young, my parents kept him on to help with the horses and Father’s research. I’d had one of those hopeless crushes on him girls get before they even know what love is, but he had disappeared six years ago, the same time as my father. Wanting nothing more to do with our terrible family secrets, I’d assumed.

Now here he was, flesh and blood and blue eyes and a total mystery.

Montgomery glanced at the hairy-faced man, who shuffled nervously. ‘Leave us,’ he said, and the man obeyed. A part of me relaxed to see his deformed shape disappear into the other room. But then I realized I was alone with Montgomery, totally unprepared. My hand shot to my coiled braid, which had fallen loose and wild in the commotion. Blast. I must have looked like an idiot.

He finished buttoning his shirt and slid the suspenders over his shoulders, throwing me hesitant glances as he tied his blond hair back. He wasn’t a thin, silent boy any longer. In six years he’d become a well-built young man with shoulders like a Clydesdale and hands that could swallow my own. Montgomery and I used to spend so much time together as children, though he was a servant and I the master’s daughter. I’d never been at a loss for words with him.

Until now.

‘I am sorry about the chloroform,’ he said at last.

I swallowed. ‘Odd way of greeting an old friend, don’t you think?’

He paused while buttoning his cuffs. ‘You were trying to break into our room. Balthazar behaves irrationally sometimes. But he meant you no harm.’