I slammed my fist on the files. Montgomery might already have a bullet in his skull. Maybe Father would kill me, too. Then again, maybe not. There were worse things on the island than dying.
The sweat on my hand smeared the ink on one of the files. I wiped my hand on my skirt and looked at the word.
Balthasar.
I slid out the file. Inside were pages of notes in tight, controlled handwriting. Sketches. Medical diagrams. Notes on behavior, appetite, origin of the bear and dog he’d been made from. Careful recordings of the exact procedure Father had done five years ago.
I read it quickly. Five-fingered, it said. Passable appearance. Still unable to replicate Ajax’s procedure. Suitable for household service.
I threw the file on the floor and dug through the rest.
Cymbeline.
Othello.
Iago.
Ophelia.
All names from Shakespeare’s plays, I realized. That’s how he’d named his creations. There must have been a hundred files, each with careful notes and measurements, as though the islanders were only experiments on paper and not breathing, thinking, killing creatures.
My finger paused on a familiar name.
Juliet.
For a moment time slipped away into some dark void. My lips formed that one word, my name—Juliet, Juliet, Juliet—over and over, repeating until it all made sense. But it never did. How could it? My hand pulled out the file, but it was like someone else’s hand laying the file on the cold ground, opening it, rifling through the few meager pages annotated with my father’s distinctive handwriting.
And then time seemed to fracture again and I was back in my own body, all too aware of how my sweaty fingertips caught on the paper, the grit on the ground digging into my legs, as my eyes focused and refocused on the handwriting.
The pages had a date—July 1879, one month after I was born. The notes were briefer and more disjointed than Balthasar’s and the others’. The paper wasn’t even the same—these pages looked ripped from an old journal. They must have come from a time before Father had developed a system for cataloging his creations. There were only a few scribbled lines describing the surgery he performed when I was an infant. The file told me painfully little, didn’t prove anything—until I reached a handful of words in Latin I didn’t recognize. Except for one.
Cervidae.
Deer.
That was all I needed to see. Feeling melted out of my fingers and I let the pages flutter to the ground. I touched my face, my hair, but sensation was gone—it was like touching flesh that wasn’t mine. And maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it belonged to some animal, a deer. This body—my eyelashes, my toes, the curve of my waist—was a lie. Such a convincing lie that I’d even fooled myself.
I slumped against the operating table, eyes closed, hugging my arms in tight. Trying to see within me, to feel if it was true. At some point the lantern must have gone out, because when I opened my eyes I was alone in darkness. Hours or minutes might have passed—it didn’t matter.
The laboratory’s metal door creaked open, and I shielded my eyes from the bright sunlight. The pages of my file lay scattered at my feet. My eyes adjusted slowly to the light. Father came in, his arms folded behind his back like a gentleman. His face was as calm as the afternoon sea. Feeling flooded back into my numb body. My fists balled, slowly. Anger bubbled in my blood, almost giving me the strength to rip the manacle from the table.
“Where is he?” I said.
“Montgomery should never have been a concern of yours. His kind are beneath you. His mother was a whore whom Evelyn let scour our pots in her Christian charity.”
“He’s smarter than you,” I said, seething. “He bested you at your own work.”
He lifted a hand to strike me, but his eyes caught on the paper littering the floor. He slid the file closer with his boot. “And what’s this?”
“I found the files,” I said. My words sounded so far away. “I know.”
“Know what exactly?”
I jerked my chin at the open file drawer. “Know that I’m one of them. An animal you’ve twisted and taught to speak like some sideshow attraction.” The chain rattled as I inched toward him, as close as I could, wishing I could strike. “And thank God for it. I’d rather be an animal than have your cursed blood flowing in my veins.”
His eyebrows rose. He picked up the folder and straightened the papers carefully on the desk. “You have quite an imagination.”
“Don’t lie to me.” I jerked the chain. “There’s a file with my name on it, just like the others.”
He flipped through the pages leisurely. “And what precisely did you find here? Diagrams of rabbits? Notes on how I turned a sheep into a girl and named her Juliet? Funny, I don’t see any of that.”
My fingers itched to claw the smirk off his face. “You named me after a character in one of your books, like them. You stick a needle in my vein, like them. It’s written right there.” I pointed a tense finger at the first page.
He followed my finger and tapped the word. Cervidae. “You’re mistaken,” he said. “I don’t give you the same treatment as them. I give them the same treatment as you.” He closed the file. “You were the first.”
Thirty-eight
BLACK RAIN FILLED MY vision, making me light-headed.
Father continued, “It’s not precisely the same as theirs, but it’s the same basic compound.” His fingers stretched and itched as though they missed the familiar clutch of a scalpel. “You see, when you were born—yes, born—your spine was deformed. The doctors said you would die within days. But your mother wouldn’t believe it. She begged me to fix you. Whatever it took.”
He leaned against the desk, his eyes wide as they delved into some long-ago memory. “And I did fix you. It’s all right here, in plain print, in your file. But the surgery was unconventional. By the time I was finished, you were missing several essential organs.” He brushed a hand over his chin. “The medical department always kept a few live specimens on hand for the zoology classes. There was a deer—well, it served its purpose.”
My fingers prodded my rib cage, the taut line of my diaphragm, Feeling for something unusual to verify his wild claim. But even if it was true, how would I know? My body was no different than it had always been.
“They said you would die, so I had nothing to lose. I did what any father would have done. Luckily, I was also England’s best surgeon.”