Her Dark Curiosity (The Madman's Daughter 2)

Elizabeth stood at the top of the stairs, musket in hand, silhouetted by the kitchen light. “I have something for you.” She started down the stairs and I climbed up to meet her halfway, where she extended me a sealed letter. “Since I’m only going with you tonight as far as Derby, I’ve written you a letter of introduction to Mrs. McKittrick, the housekeeper, and explained I’ll be joining you in a few weeks. I should warn you, it’s a large manor, quite remote. There’s a village five miles away, but it can be difficult to reach when the moors flood. The servants are all a bit out of practice with polite society. You’ll find some of them rather strange, I think.”

“I’ll be quite at home then.” I tucked the sealed letter into my bodice. “I’ll bring Edward up in a few moments.”

She nodded, and I returned to the cellar. Edward was being strangely quiet. A small metal object gleamed on the ground next to his hand.

I crouched down to pick up the pocket watch he was always fiddling with, open now, only where the clockwork should have been was only empty space.

“There’s no clock—” I started.

He took it from me and closed it in one snap. “You wish me to join you? Very well. Let us be gone from this place.”

His voice was heavy, almost a mockery of himself, as he held his wrists out. I closed the shackles around his hands guiltily, wishing we didn’t have to treat him as a prisoner, angry at the Beast for making it necessary. I uncapped the syringe of valerian and injected it into his arm. He winced as the drug wove its way through his system, causing his body to shudder. I was relieved that his eyes, when they met mine, had cleared at least briefly.

I helped him to his feet but he paused at the door. “It isn’t that I don’t care for Lucy,” he said. “There is much to admire. But Juliet . . .” He paused. “Ah well, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

I twisted the ring on my finger anxiously as we made our way up the stairs, through the kitchen toward the waiting carriage. He was being strangely quiet again, and a premonition that something was wrong itched at the back of my neck and made me throw sidelong glances at him in the gas-lit courtyard.

His face was the same; no sign of the Beast. What was it about him that had changed? He came with me too easily, as though he’d given up, content to be a puppet pulled along at my feet.

Montgomery locked the townhouse behind us, then climbed into the driver’s seat with a bandaged Balthazar. Elizabeth was already inside the carriage with the professor’s cuckoo clock in her lap, the best thing she had to remember him by. Lucy sat next to her with Sharkey, a bit of twine tied around his neck as a leash. His tail thumped at the sight of Edward. We climbed inside and, with a tap on the roof, Montgomery started the carriage.

He drove the horses with haste. Elizabeth clutched the clock, lost in her own thoughts. I marveled that she was so willing to help us, until I remembered that without the professor she had no family save me, her new ward, and that family meant much to her. Neither she nor the professor had spoken much of their deceased relatives. Only that they’d been Swiss by ancestry but Scottish by birth, descendants of an illegitimate line of unscrupulous scientists not so unlike my own father. Maybe for this reason, Elizabeth saw a younger version of herself in me as well.

Edward coughed, pulling his coat tighter the best he could with his wrists bound. Lucy rested a hand on his knee, but then frowned and slid closer to touch his forehead.

“Edward, you’re burning up.”

“A fever. That’s all.”

I studied him in the faint light as we bounced over the streets. Sweat poured down his brow despite the cold night. He doubled over, coughing harder, a deep rattling that came from too far down in his chest. Even Elizabeth seemed unsettled.

“Edward . . . ,” I started.

He squeezed his pocket watch and coughed more, starting to shake. I inched forward and took his hand in mine, feeling for his temperature. He was sweating all over.

“My god, Edward, what have you done?” I whispered.

His fist tightened over the watch and I ripped it from his weak fingers, inserting my fingernail into the seam to open it. What had he been keeping in here, in the space meant for a clock? All those times he’d toyed with it, I’d thought it nothing but a bauble.

I lifted it to my nose—odorless. On closer inspection, I found a faint trace of white powder. The watch fell from my hands and clattered on the floor.

Arsenic.

My heart stopped. My breath stilled.

The horses were moving faster now; we must have left the city center for the open roads of the country. It didn’t matter how fast they moved, or if we turned around and rushed to a hospital. There was no antidote for this poison.

“Why?” I whispered. Neither Elizabeth nor Lucy had seen the powder, and for a few moments the poison was a secret only Edward and I shared.

He doubled over again. “You know why. Someday soon, the Beast would take control. He’d kill one of you. You’ve protected this city tonight in your way; now let me protect it in mine. I’ve tried to end my life a dozen times but he was always too strong—until now. I’m becoming him, but he’s becoming me, too—he can no longer stop me.”

I fell back against the cushions, stunned. I wanted to argue. I wanted to scream. I wanted to do anything but sit on this soft carriage seat in my fine coat and watch him die.

Lucy gasped as she realized what had happened. “Stop the carriage!” she cried.

But neither Montgomery nor Balthazar, outside in the wind, heard her. Lucy screamed as Edward convulsed and fell onto the bottom of the carriage.

“Now it’s done,” he coughed. “The worst of your father’s creations, finished.”

“Edward, no!” I collapsed next to him. “It didn’t have to be this way. I would have found a cure.”

He convulsed again, pressing a hand to his head as though it ached, the skin around his eyes and mouth turning dark.

“Elizabeth, help him!” I pleaded.

She set the clock aside and felt his pulse, brow furrowed. The carriage hit a rut and the cuckoo clock tumbled to the floor with a crash of gears and squawk of the wooden bird. Squawking and squawking, each time the carriage jostled. Furious, I reached over and ripped the back panel off, clawing at the gears until they came loose in a terrible mess and the squawking stopped.

“There’s no cure for as much as he’s taken,” Elizabeth said, releasing Edward’s wrist. For the first time since I’d known her, she looked lost. “He’ll be dead before we reach Derby.”