Czytaj książkę: «A Cold Legacy»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Megan Shepherd

About the Publisher

1

The last travelers’ inn on the road from Inverness was no place to die.

Freezing rain lashed the windowpanes as I huddled over a warm bowl of soup in a corner of the inn’s ground-floor tavern. Across the table, Montgomery rubbed a scar on his arm and stared out the window, scanning the muddy road for signs that we were being pursued. In the upstairs room just over our heads, locked away from the other patrons, Edward lay dying.

I rested my hands on Montgomery’s anxious ones. “We’re safe here. No one would come after us this far north.”

Beneath the worn canvas shirt and the pistol strapped to his side was the young man I’d agreed to marry. His silver ring circled my finger, scuffed and dented after our escape from London. For the past three days, Lucy, Edward, and I had huddled in the back of the carriage while Montgomery and Balthazar had driven us through snow and rain without complaint, north to Elizabeth von Stein’s estate, Ballentyne Manor, where we hoped to hide.

I threaded my fingers through Montgomery’s. My hands were cold, as always. His were warm and solid. They belonged to a surgeon, not a servant, but I suppose it didn’t matter anymore. Now, like me, he was simply a fugitive.

He turned back to the window. “I keep thinking the police will find us.”

“We didn’t leave any evidence for them to trace. Besides, Elizabeth stayed behind to make certain they don’t suspect us. They’ve no reason to tie us to the … the deaths.”

Deaths. Murders is what I should have said. Just days ago, in the King’s College’s basement laboratories, we had brought to life five of Father’s water-tank creatures that had then slaughtered the most dangerous members of the King’s Club. I could still picture the blood seeping from a gash on Dr. Hastings’s neck.

Montgomery and I hadn’t yet spoken of what had happened at King’s College, though I knew the violence of it bothered him deeply. It had been terrible, but necessary—a fact we didn’t quite seem to agree on.

“We were very thorough,” I added in a dry voice.

A dark look crossed his face. He started to answer, but the sound of laughter drowned out his voice.

Annoyed, I turned to the inn’s fireplace, where a dozen red-faced men and women in gaudy satin clothes swapped stories and pints of beer. They were part of a traveling carnival troupe following the winter fair circuit, and were the only patrons sharing the inn with us. A scraggly-haired woman finished telling a ghost story with a loud belch, and the others roared with laughter.

I didn’t realize how tensely I was holding my muscles until Montgomery leaned in. “Ignore them,” he said.

“It’s nonsense,” I muttered. “Telling ghost stories. There’s enough in this world that’s frightening. Only the ignorant would scare themselves on purpose.”

Overhead, a floorboard creaked and I sat straighter, watching the ceiling, wondering how Edward was doing. Days had passed, and yet I hadn’t come to terms with the fact that he’d poisoned himself. He had tried to end his life before—misguided attempts to kill the monster inside him—but the Beast had always been too strong. It hadn’t been until the very end, when Edward and the Beast had nearly melded into one, that he’d been able to force arsenic down his own throat. He’d have been dead in hours if Montgomery hadn’t stolen drugs from a chemist’s shop outside of Liverpool to counterbalance the worst of the poison’s effects. It wasn’t a cure, but it was a chance.

Now, overcome by delirium and fever, he was caught somewhere between life and death, between being Edward and being the Beast. Lucy was up there now, tending to him at his bedside, while Balthazar stood guard outside the door.

The floorboards stopped shifting, and I relaxed. I leaned forward, letting my hair screen my face, and toyed with the ring on my finger.

“Ignorant, are we, lass?”

I tossed back my hair to see the speaker—a thin man with a potbelly gut that stretched his cheap green satin tunic. The leader of the troupe, I assumed. The room had gone silent, save the sounds of the fire popping and the barmaid cleaning glasses. None of his troupe was laughing now.

“It was a private conversation,” I explained. “You shouldn’t have listened in if you didn’t want to hear what we had to say.”

The thin man’s eyebrows shot up in surprise that a young woman would speak to him so boldly. He dragged his wooden stool next to mine, leaning in so close that I could smell the sour beer on his breath. “You’ve a fine accent. City folk, are you? If you’re smart, you’ll turn back.” He dropped his voice to a theatrical hush. “Strange things happen this far north. Flashes of colored light. Pools of black water. They say half the women smell of witchcraft.”

He was trying to frighten me, and it wasn’t working. “It’s probably the smell of soap,” I said. “I don’t suppose you’d recognize that particular odor.”

The barmaid snickered.

Montgomery’s hand tightened over mine. “The last thing we need is to draw attention to ourselves,” he whispered in my ear.

He was right. I started to turn away, but the thin man grabbed my stool with surprising strength and dragged me over until my face was only inches from his. “If you’ve a better ghost story, then by all means, lass, tell us.”

Montgomery let out a sigh.

I narrowed my eyes. I should go upstairs. I should leave it be. But my nerves were agitated, and my patience was a prickly monster. If this man thought I didn’t have my own horrors to tell, he was wrong.

I started to open my mouth. I could tell him about a madman banished to an island who twisted animals until they spoke and walked on two legs. Or a murderer stalking the streets of London who left behind white flowers tinged with blood. Or I could go upstairs and unlock Edward’s door and let the Beast’s six-inch claws show these carnival performers what real terror was.

“We’ve had a long journey,” Montgomery answered for me. “Our nerves are frayed. We didn’t mean to offend.” His words had a finality to them that sent the man grumbling back to the fireplace, where the old woman let out another belch.

“I could have handled it on my own,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow. “By dumping your soup in his lap, most likely, and starting a brawl. I told you, we need to remain unnoticed. Now I should check on the horses while there’s still a bit of daylight. Eat that soup before it goes cold. You need it.”

He pulled his oilskin jacket over his shirt and disappeared into the freezing rain. Alone at the table, ignoring the din from the carnival troupe, I watched the steam rise from my soup while I calculated the distance to Ballentyne Manor. We’d been riding for three days, but the rain and snow and a broken strut had slowed us, so it might be another full day before we arrived. Not much time to keep Edward’s fever stabilized until we could find a cure.

Footsteps approached, and a man sank into the seat that Montgomery had vacated. I jerked out of my calculations, frowning. He wore the same gaudy green tunic as the rest of the carnival troupe, but I hadn’t seen him earlier. I certainly would have remembered if I had. His skin and hair were brown, marking him as a foreigner from Africa or the Americas. I narrowed my eyes.

“I already told your leader that you won’t get any stories out of me,” I said.

“It isn’t a story I want.” His voice was deep and raspy, with traces of a faraway accent. “It’s you, pretty girl.”

I raised my eyebrow, ready to fulfill Montgomery’s fears and dump the soup in the man’s lap, but he only set a deck of fortune-telling cards on the table.

“Or rather, it’s your fortune.”

I rolled my eyes. I suppose to him I must look the perfect gullible victim: a young girl dressed in wealthy clothes far from home. “I think you meant it’s my coins you want, but I’m sorry to say I don’t believe in fortune-telling. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” I started to stand.

His mouth quirked in a smile. He flipped over the top card. I tried not to look at the symbol it displayed, but my curiosity won.

The Fool. It depicted a man on a journey, bag slung over one shoulder with a dog following at his heels.

I paused. The dog looked a bit like my little black mutt, Sharkey, and I was on a journey, though logic told me it wouldn’t be difficult to infer that a girl at a travelers’ inn was on a voyage. “Why did you choose that card?”

“I didn’t choose it. It chose you.”

I rolled my eyes again. “Does anyone actually fall for such dramatics? They certainly don’t work on me.” I turned to go. I should check on Edward and relieve Lucy and Balthazar of their watch. It would be a long day of travel tomorrow, and we’d all need our sleep.

“You claim not to believe in fortunes,” the man said, hand hovering over the next card. “Yet you are intrigued, are you not? Come, pretty girl. One more card.” Though I knew it was a trick, my feet didn’t move. I jerked my head toward the deck begrudgingly.

“Go ahead, then. One more.”

He flipped the card. The Emperor, an arrogant-looking man with white hair and a foppish crown. “Your thoughts are consumed with a man,” the fortune-teller said. “A lover? A brother?” He studied me. “No, a father.”

I sank back into the chair, every sense alert. The fire crackled while the carnival folk whispered among themselves. I could feel my own heart beating. I knew it was nonsense, but suddenly I was very curious to know what else the fortune-teller might say.

Amusement flickered over his features. “Ask me the question that is on your mind. Then you can judge for yourself if fortunes are real.”

I swallowed, glancing around the room almost guiltily. I didn’t believe any of it, of course. Science had long ago disproved fortune-telling. And yet I slid a coin across the table, dropped my voice, and tried to pretend I wasn’t desperate to know what he would say. “Yes, it’s about my father. I want to know …”

But I couldn’t continue. Memories of Father were a hand around my throat, silencing me. The fortune-teller’s gold-flecked eyes met mine, and the rest of the room dimmed. “He has some hold over you, does he not? A hold you wish broken, but it isn’t that easy. A child can never escape her father.”

His words struck too close to my heart, and I swallowed and looked away. “I can. He’s dead.”

The fortune-teller didn’t blink. “Death, in these cases, doesn’t matter.”

For a moment, his words held me in a rapt silence. I thought of my father: his affection for science, his ability to focus so completely on the task at hand, his ambiguous morality, his madness. All traits I’d seen glimmers of in myself. I pictured myself at his age: a gray-haired scientist, brilliant and terrible, just like him.

One of the carnival folk let out a shrill laugh by the fireplace, and I blinked. The room came back into focus, along with my logic.

“I know how this works,” I said a little too fast. “You aren’t psychic at all. You’re just good at reading people’s appearances and mannerisms. You know it’s highly likely that a girl my age would have a problem with some sort of man, so you throw out the obvious possibilities and gauge my reaction. Then you let me form my own conclusions. You’ve nothing to tell me except generalities that could apply to anyone.”

I stood, rather satisfied with myself. I couldn’t deny, however, that there was a tiny part of me that had almost wanted to believe. In a world of science, a little magic would have been welcome.

“Keep the coin,” I said more softly, and turned to go.

“Silver and gold are not the only coin,” he said softly. “Virtue too passes current all over the world.”

A shiver ran through me. Instantly I was a little girl again, sitting in my father’s lap as he read heavy volumes from his library. Euripides, I remembered, in the worn leather binding. I had tried to sound out the words when I’d been just learning to read, but Father had grown impatient and finished the phrase for me.

“Silver and gold are not the only coin,” he had read. “Virtue too passes current all over the world.”

It had been one of Father’s favorite sayings.

I clenched my jaw. “Why did you use that phrase, in particular?”

My question was interrupted by frantic footsteps on the stairs. The barmaid and the carnival folk all turned as Lucy came stumbling breathlessly down the steps. Ever since we’d left London, a glassy dullness had settled over her eyes. She’d learned her father was a terrible man, financing my father’s criminal research and plotting with the King’s Club to bring his science to fruition. On top of it all, she’d found out the boy she loved was a monster. When he’d poisoned himself, she’d been inconsolable.

Her eyes locked to mine, the dullness in them replaced by a wildness that made my heart beat faster.

“Juliet,” she said. “Come quickly. It’s Edward—the fever is breaking.”

2

I pulled Lucy into the stairwell, out of earshot.

“He sat up,” she breathed. “He looked straight at me and said my name. I saw it.”

Edward had been delirious for three straight days, mumbling nonsense and thrashing in his chains. The promise—and danger—of him returning to health shot through me like a jolt of electricity. “Fetch Montgomery. He’s in the stable. Hurry.”

She dashed down the hallway. I climbed the stairs two at a time, tripping over my skirt, and threw open the door to Edward’s room. It was a small room, with a single rope bed and old wooden dresser. Inside, a hulking man inclined over where Edward lay. To anyone else the giant would have looked a monster with his misshapen shoulders and hairy face, but to me he was like family.

“Balthazar,” I said. “Is it true? Is Edward lucid?”

“I can’t rightly say, miss.” His big fingers knit together in hesitation. “He’s delirious now, that’s for certain. If he had a moment of clarity, I didn’t see it.”

I sat on the bed next to Edward, reaching out to touch his sweat-soaked forehead. “Edward,” I whispered. “Can you hear me?”

There had been a time when Edward cared for me deeply, and I hoped that the sound of my voice might reach through his delirium. But his only response was to jerk his head away as though my touch burned him. Thick metal chains twisted around his torso and locked his hands together—a safeguard. Edward and the Beast had been a step away from melding completely in those last moments in London, and now that we’d counterbalanced the poison, we weren’t certain who—or rather what—we’d find when the fever broke. Would one half overpower the other completely? Or would they meld into a sort of hybrid personality? Either way, Montgomery had insisted on leaving the chains securely fastened, and I hadn’t argued. After all, I wasn’t convinced it was truly Edward who had been in love with me as much as it had been the Beast. Though perhaps obsessed was the better word. To a deadly degree.

“Then you didn’t see him sit up and speak?” I asked.

Balthazar’s lips folded in indecision. He’d developed a sweet protective instinct for Lucy, but he also wasn’t one to lie. “No, miss,” he admitted. “I was just outside the door. I think Miss Lucy … she might have wanted it badly enough to imagine it.”

Bitter disappointment twisted my heart. Of course. We all wanted Edward back so badly that it was easy to hope for miracles. This was the boy who had come back to the island to protect me, who’d understood both my dark and light sides. The only other person who had ever stood in my leaky London attic with a mangy dog and threadbare quilt and wanted nothing more out of life.

My hand hovered a few inches above Edward’s shoulder. His eyes were closed, his face still as death. I felt his pulse; it was raging fast. The idea of him calmly sitting up and speaking seemed impossible. I didn’t blame Lucy for imagining it, though—only moments ago I’d been nearly desperate enough to believe the words of a fortune-teller.

Lucy stumbled through the doorway with Montgomery behind her, medical bag in hand. He sank to his knees and checked Edward’s vital signs with the well-practiced skill of a surgeon.

“Well?” Lucy asked anxiously.

Montgomery set down his stethoscope. He wiped a hand over his face, but not before I saw the flicker of sadness there. The two men had once been at odds, but that had changed since Edward had sacrificed himself for us. Breaking the code in Father’s journals had revealed that Edward had been made with Montgomery’s own blood. Now he was the closest thing Montgomery had to a brother, in spirit and in flesh. “He’s still deep in the fever. His temperature is high, but it hasn’t broken.”

“He sat up,” Lucy insisted. “He looked right at me, and it was Edward, I swear. It wasn’t that monster.”

The rest of us stood awkwardly, none of us willing to tell her what we were all thinking—that stress and sleepless nights were making her imagine things.

“I know you care for him,” I said softly. “We all do. But we need to be prepared for any eventuality. The Beast was incredibly strong. The chances of Edward overpowering him aren’t high.”

Lucy dragged a hand through her dark curls. Her eyes were bleary with exhaustion and just a touch of madness. “I swear, Juliet. I saw it. I saw him.”

I touched her shoulder gently as Montgomery packed away his medical bag. “Come to bed, Lucy. You need rest. Let Montgomery watch over Edward for a while.”

She started to object again but broke into a frustrated sob, and I led her across the hall to the room we shared. We climbed onto the straw mattress that made my skin itch even through the layers of my dress. Through the thin walls, I heard Montgomery pacing in the room next to ours, exchanging low words with Balthazar as they discussed how much longer Edward could survive the fever. My body was heavy with worry and sleep, and with the lingering words of the fortune-teller.

I pulled the blanket tighter as the wind whistled outside. Lucy fell asleep quickly, exhausted. I watched the faint light play on her face as she slept through nightmares. The blanket had slipped from around her shoulders, replaced by a mantle of gooseflesh. I tucked the covers around her neck. In that space between awake and asleep, fears turned over in my head.

Would we wake to find a cadaver wrapped in chains? Or would the Beast win, and Edward be lost to us forever?

The thoughts worked my insides the way a baker kneads tough bread. Father had won in life; now he was winning in death, too. He’d created Edward and now he was the arbiter of his destruction. I sank deeper into sleep, anger and worry tangling with the uneasy feeling from my meeting with the fortune-teller. Mind reading was impossible, I knew that. But then again, many things I had once thought impossible were real—split personalities, talking animals, even the possibility of bringing back the dead.

My mind turned back to the conversation I’d had with Elizabeth in the carriage from London before she left us at Derby. I had whispered to her, low and secretive: But that’s not the end, is it? Death, I mean. She had looked at me fearfully as she understood that I had pieced together her dark family history, which she and the professor had only alluded to. Their ancestry from Switzerland, fleeing persecution, changing their name.

What was their name? I had pressed.

Frankenstein, she’d admitted at last.

MY EYES SHOT OPEN, searching the darkness for a sense of place. A scratchy mattress below me. A single window, filled with fog. I’d slept and dreamed of impossible things.

In that carriage ride leaving London, Elizabeth had revealed that her family was descended from Victor Frank-enstein, the brilliant doctor of century-old legends, but she’d insisted that his science had been forgotten and his journals lost. There was no way to replicate his procedures to bring the dead back to life.

I let out a breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding and climbed out of bed, still wearing my wrinkled lavender dress. I twisted the knob silently and slipped into the hall to look for Montgomery.

This far north the days were shorter, eaten on both ends by darkness, but now early-morning light streamed through the hallway windows. Balthazar slept on the floor outside Edward’s room, keeping watch, with my little dog, Sharkey, curled against his chest. I stepped over them carefully and tiptoed to the door of Montgomery’s room. When I cracked it open, I found the bed empty.

Voices came from the dining room downstairs along with the smell of freshly baked scones and coffee. My stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten more than a bite of soup the night before. I descended the stairs, stepped into the dining room, and froze.

Four British police officers faced the bar with their backs to me, speaking with the barmaid from last night. I went rigid. A single creaking board might alert them to my presence.

“Two girls under the age of eighteen traveling with a twenty-year-old servant, a large deformed man, and possibly a young gentleman,” an officer said.

I didn’t dare move a step. The barmaid’s eyes flickered to mine just long enough for me to read the warning written in them. It was us they were after and she knew it.

“You’re certain they came this way, are you?” she asked.

“Clean out your ears, woman. I said we aren’t certain of anything. The dispatch said they haven’t been spotted since fleeing London, so all the major thoroughfares are being checked as a precaution. Train stations and the ports to the Continent and the Americas as well.”

His fellow officer picked at the broken edge of the bar, bored. “I can’t imagine they’d have left London for these parts. Not even criminals would want to hide out in muddy bogs filled with sheep’s dung.”

The barmaid narrowed her eyes. Relations had never been easy between the English and the Scottish, and these officers were as English as weak tea. I could practically see her face burning redder with anger as another one of the officers riffled through the ledgers on the counter.

She flipped a bar towel at him. “You can’t go poking about through there.”

“Keep that rag to yourself,” the officer snarled. Tension crackled between them. With my breath held, I took a single step backward.

“Well?” the lead investigator pressed. “Have you seen anyone matching their description or haven’t you? We’ve other work to do.”

The barmaid glanced at me again, chewing the inside of her cheek. The woman had no loyalty to us. We were just as English as the officers. One word from her and we’d be thrown into the back of their police carriage and dragged to London to face trial for murder.

Once more, the image of Dr. Hastings’s scratched-out eyes flashed in my head.

I took another step backward and the floorboard squeaked. Before the officers could think to look, the barmaid slammed her rag on the bar and said, “If they passed this way, I haven’t seen ’em.”

Relief flooded me, but it was short-lived. As she noisily pulled out some tankards, someone seized me from behind and dragged me into the side hallway. My heart shot to my throat as I lurched for the knife stashed in my boot until I recognized Montgomery’s smell—hay and candle wax. My shoulders eased.

“They’re looking for us,” I whispered.

“I know. I’ve readied the carriage and hidden it behind the barn. Balthazar and I will get Edward. Fetch Lucy and bring our bags to the back as quickly as you can.”

I dashed up the back stairs with fast, quiet steps. I had scoffed at Montgomery the previous night when he set the horses to pasture and hid the carriage behind the barn. His preparations didn’t seem quite so overly cautious now.

I woke Lucy, who gasped awake, and helped her struggle into her dress.

“How did they find us?” she whispered in a fearful hush.

“They haven’t found us, not yet. They’re checking all the major roads. We’ll have to stick to back roads from now on. It’ll slow us down, but we dare not risk anything else.” Together we loaded our meager belongings into carpetbags and carried them down the back steps silent as mice, with Sharkey tucked under my arm. Day was just breaking over the eastern moors, which were shrouded in a thick silver fog. If we could disappear into that fog while the police were distracted, we would have a chance.

Behind the inn, the horses stamped at the hardened earth, blowing jets of warm steam into the cold morning air as Montgomery harnessed them. “I’ve put Edward inside the carriage. I don’t need to tell you how fragile his condition is. Balthazar will ride inside with you—his appearance is too distinctive, and we don’t need anyone paying extra attention to us.”

I opened the door to the carriage, where Edward lay flat on the bench-seat, moaning incomprehensibly. His eyes were closed, the chains still wrapped tight. I climbed in, pulling Lucy with me. Balthazar lumbered in behind her and held Sharkey in his lap. Quietly as he could, Montgomery drove the horses to the road, letting their soft steps get lost in the mist, until we were so swallowed up in the fog that I could no longer see the inn. He cracked the whip, and the horses bolted.

I grabbed the window for balance. Lucy sat next to Edward, his head in her lap, her fingers trailing through his sweat-soaked hair as she muttered sweet reassurances to him that he would come through the fever and be eating cinnamon cake again in no time. I didn’t have the heart to tell her he likely couldn’t hear her, nor would he remember anything she said. Balthazar soon nodded off. The man was able to sleep through anything.

I pushed aside the gauzy curtain every few minutes to make certain we weren’t being followed. After an hour, then two, I began to relax. The fog burned off as the morning stretched into midday, but the heather was endless, a sea of rolling red hills and frozen earth, beautiful in its desolation, hypnotic in its monotony. Twice we passed small hamlets, nothing more than clusters of stone cottages with smoke rising from mossy chimneys; once a farmer, wizened and bent, riding a donkey down the dirt road.

Other than that, there was nothing but the moors, the storm clouds building to the north, and the ceaseless pounding of my heart.