The Madman's Daughter
Page 5He’d been our servant, I told myself. I didn’t owe him anything. But that was a lie. Montgomery and I were bound together by our past. This was the boy who had secretly taught me biology because my father wouldn’t. Who’d told me fairy tales late at night to distract me from the screams coming from the laboratory.
I sank back down, not sure how to act around him. His blue eyes glowed in the hazy light from the window. He moved the tea tray to a side table and poured me a cup, adding two lumps of sugar then breaking a third in half with a spoon, crushing it, and stirring it in slowly—the peculiar way I used to prepare my tea when I was a little girl. I was so oddly touched that he remembered that I didn’t tell him I’d given up sugar in my tea long ago. As I took the cup, his rough fingers grazed mine and I bit my lip. Just that brief touch sent the muscle of my heart clenching with a longing to feel that bond with him again.
My throat felt tight, but I forced out words. “I found the diagram and recognized it. I thought, maybe, it meant Father was here. Alive.” Spoken, it sounded even more foolish. I braced myself for his laughter.
But he didn’t laugh. He didn’t even flinch. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said softly. “It’s only Balthasar and myself.”
I took a sip of the tea, which had grown cold, but its sweet taste replaced the chloroform. I wondered what Montgomery thought of me, showing up here, looking for a dead man. Father’s death had never been confirmed—just assumed. I think the world wanted him dead, or simply forgotten.
But a girl couldn’t just forget her father.
“Do you know what happened to him?” I asked. I wanted to ask if Montgomery believed the rumors, but the words wouldn’t come out. I was frightened by what his answer might be.
He looked toward the window, foot tapping a little too fast against the table leg. He shifted in his stiff clothes, as though his body wasn’t used to them. It struck me that a wealthy medical student wouldn’t pick so uncomfortably at his starched cuffs like Montgomery was doing. I wondered how recently he had acquired his fortune.
As if sensing my thoughts, he loosened his shirt’s collar. “The day he disappeared, I ran away too. I was afraid I might be accused as well, because I sometimes helped him in the laboratory. I’ve heard speculation . . . that he died.”
The teacup shook in my hand. I felt at the point of shattering with warring emotions. I wondered if that was what Father had felt like before he went mad—shattered. The teacup rattled more, and I set it next to the blood-spattered paper. “What do you even want with this?” I nudged the dotted lines that formed a split-open rabbit. I knew it was abhorrent, but my gaze kept creeping back to the black lines, obsessively tracing the graceful arcs of the body.
“I study medicine. I’m not a servant anymore.” His words were pointed.
“But this? Vivisection?” It was hard to talk about these things with him. The corset I had worn under my Sunday dress suddenly felt too tight. I pressed my hands against my sides. I thought of that rabbit, its twitching paws, its screams. Not even science could justify what those boys had done. And I knew Montgomery, deep in my marrow. He wasn’t like them. He had a strong heart. He’d never do something he knew wasn’t right.
His foot tapped faster and his gaze drifted around the room until it settled on the parrot. His throat tightened. “It was among a collection of documents, that’s all.”
He’d always been a terrible liar. I studied him from the corner of my eye, wondering. His gaze darted again to the parrot on the dresser, and I stood up and started toward the cage, just wanting to look closer at its iridescent feathers as some sort of distraction from everything that was happening. Montgomery’s eyes were too real, too evocative, too familiar. I didn’t know what to do with myself around him.
“What is that?” I said quietly.
His fist clamped the object like a vise. His chest and arms were tensed. He’d always been strong. Now he was powerful.
Curiosity made me bolder. My fingers drifted away from the parrot’s cage and rested a breath above Montgomery’s closed fist. I wanted to touch his hand, feel the brush of his skin against mine, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“Montgomery, what is that in your hand?”
His face was broken with things unsaid. “Miss Moreau . . .” The title sounded too formal on his lips. Juliet, I wanted him to call me.
My fingers trembled slightly. “Please. Tell me.”
Something changed in his face then. He seemed so grown-up, but it was all an act. I knew because I’d played the same role for years. But being with him tore down that facade and left me stripped, vulnerable, just like the look on his face now.
“Don’t be angry, Miss Moreau.” His voice was little more than a whisper. He looked away, softly, and opened his fist. The object dropped into my palm.
A pocket watch. I turned it over in my hand. Silver, with a gouge in the glass face and an inscription on the back that had all but worn away. It didn’t matter. I knew the words by heart. Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother. Unlike my mother, who’d maintained her devoutness even after becoming a mistress, Father had a scientist’s skeptical fascination with religion. The watch had been a gift to him from his father, a bishop with the Anglican Church. Father had little use for the Ten Commandments, but the inscription was one rule he believed in and expected me to uphold.
Father had carried this watch every single day. He’d never have left it behind. Which meant Montgomery had either stolen it, or . . .
Montgomery folded my hands over the watch, and his hands over mine.
“I’m sorry. He made me swear never to tell you he was alive.”
Five
But I didn’t care about his explanation.
“You lied to me,” I said.
He dipped his head, avoiding my gaze. “I said I’d heard speculation that he died. That’s true enough.”
“He’s been alive this whole time and you’ve known it.” I sank to the bed, closing my eyes. Seeing Father’s watch had brought that wall back up, reminding me that I wasn’t a child anymore. I couldn’t afford to let my guard down, not even with Montgomery.
He turned toward the window, twisting the watch chain. “He thought if the world assumed him dead, they’d leave him alone.”
Father was alive and had never tried to find me—the painful realization of that betrayal ripped open the last tender stitch in my heart. “But I’m his daughter.”
His only response was to pour me a glass of brandy and one for himself. He, as well, had returned to the act of playing adults. He sank into the desk chair. “I still work for him, but no longer as a servant. I’m his assistant now. He isn’t here, if you’re wondering. He refuses to come back to England. We live on a biological station, of sorts. An island.” He swallowed the brandy and considered the empty glass. “It’s very far. He wanted a private place to continue his work undisturbed. I leave every eighteen months or so for supplies.”
I set my glass down, untouched. “And your associate? Are all his kind like him?”
“The islanders.” Montgomery hunched over his glass. His hair had come loose, veiling his face. “They are, yes. You needn’t fear him. He’s harmless.”
As though he’d heard himself mentioned, Balthasar came in with a fresh pot of tea. He was a monster of a man, twice my size, with hands like bludgeons. He set the tray down and daintily removed the sugar bowl’s tiny lid. Montgomery thanked and dismissed him.
He prepared my tea again with my childhood sugar ritual. The steam from my cup rose like the words of an oracle, forming a haze between us. I took a sip, hoping the tea would soothe my nerves. I tried to remember him as a child. He’d been quiet, especially about what went on in the laboratory. But Mother had been, too, as had the other servants, and all of us. None of us wanted to talk about the puddles of blood on the operating-room floor or the animals that went in and never came out or the noises that woke us in the night. Father said those were the ways of science and I shouldn’t question them. Montgomery, at least, took good care of the animals before they went in.
I took another sip of tea. “How did you find my father after so many years?”
“Find him? I never left him. The story about running away . . . it wasn’t exactly like that.” He brushed the loose strands of hair behind his ear. “After his colleagues made their accusations, your father knew he had to flee. He thought Australia might look upon his work more favorably. He took me with him. We found an island off the coast that suited his needs. I didn’t want to leave you and your mother, but I hadn’t a choice. I was twelve years old.”
“There is much you don’t know,” he said. “I was just a boy.”
“Well, you aren’t a boy anymore,” I snapped, even though I knew that wasn’t entirely true. He dressed like a man, but he was too stiff in his clothes, too uncomfortable. He was only pretending to be a gentleman, and making a fairly poor show of it. “You don’t have to keep working for him. You can come back to London—he can’t return or they’ll arrest him.”
Montgomery bristled, as though the idea of returning to London was like agreeing to be locked in a cage. He didn’t want to return, I realized. The city, with all its mechanization and soot and rigid society laws, had lost its hold on him.
But he said nothing. He only jerked his chin at the pocket watch and then at last said, “It’s not that simple. He’s been like a father to me.”
“He’s no father!” I curled my fingers into the armrests, suddenly angry that my father had left me behind and raised a servant boy instead. “Haven’t you heard? He’s a madman.”
His face tightened. “He’s your father, too, Miss Moreau.”
“Would a father abandon his wife and daughter? Mother died and I heard nothing. He left no money. I’m one step away from the streets.” The words poured out before I could stop them. They’d been buried such a long time.
“I’m sorry.” His throat constricted. “I wish the last few years had been easier for you. If I’d been here, maybe . . .”
Maybe Mother wouldn’t have died? Maybe I wouldn’t be living in poverty? Maybe . . . what? His eyes dropped to the pit of my elbow, hidden by my sleeve. I pressed my fingers against the sensitive place, protectively.
He nodded toward it, his voice lower. “You still give yourself the injections?”
I drew back, clutching my arm as though the skin had been stripped back, leaving the veins exposed and vulnerable. Montgomery knew things about me even Lucy didn’t know. Like my illness. I rubbed my inner elbow, thinking of the glass vials in the back of my closet at the lodging house. The ones in the stamped wooden box Annie kept asking me about. They held a treatment—a pancreatic extract—I injected into my arm once a day. If I kept to a rigid schedule, I rarely showed symptoms. The few times I’d missed a dose, I’d gotten feverish and weak. My eyes would play tricks on me, hallucinate things that weren’t there. Sometimes, in the evenings, the weakness would come anyway. Just thinking about it now made a cold sweat break out across my forehead.
Father had diagnosed the condition when I was a baby. A glycogen deficiency so rare it didn’t have a name. I would have died if he hadn’t discovered the cure. Now, I’d slip into a coma if I ever missed more than a few weeks’ treatment.