Her Dark Curiosity

The murderer was the same. Somehow, even though I’d thought him dead, there was no doubt.

Edward had done this.

7

I felt like the room was turning upside down. My legs threatened to give out. I curled my fingers around the table’s edge as though it could keep me from floating to the ceiling.

Edward Prince was alive, and here was my proof.

Against all odds he must have survived the fire and come to London – why? If it was only victims he was after, he needn’t have traveled half the world. But his victims were all very specific. Connected. All people who had at one point in my life wronged me.

My mind slipped and slid back to the island, and the castaway with the gold-flecked eyes.

We belong together, he had said. We’re the same.

Was that why he had returned, as part of a grotesquely misguided attempt to protect me and win me over? Or was he sending me some sort of threat after I’d spurned his advances?

I paced, hands knitting together, among the cadavers. How did he even know about Annie stealing the ring? No one knew about that except Lucy, unless Annie had told someone …

Hands trembling, I managed to pull the cover back over Annie’s face, and the rest of the bodies. I stumbled into the hallway outside, eyes closed, drawing in a deep breath. The hallways here always had the usual smell of chemicals, along with some traces of lingering cologne from whichever gentleman doctor had last been here.

I couldn’t shake this new information: He’s alive. Alive. Alive.

Footsteps came from down the hall, and I spun, expecting to find Edward’s yellow eyes in the shadows. Heart pounding, I hurried for the stairs, away from these bodies and what they meant. I threw a glance over my shoulder as I turned the corner and nearly collided with a man coming into the hallway from a side door.

Not just any man. Inspector John Newcastle.

My heart shot to my throat. ‘Excuse me,’ I said in a rush, keeping my head down with the hope that he wouldn’t recognize me. But his hand held my elbow, and he frowned as if trying to place me.

‘Miss … Moreau, isn’t it? Lucy’s friend. What on earth are you doing down here?’

‘Nothing, Inspector,’ I stuttered. ‘Visiting some old friends.’

His eyebrow rose with a touch of irony as he glanced at the cadaver storage room door behind me. ‘You keep strange company for friends, Miss Moreau.’

‘Oh no, that isn’t what I meant. I used to work on this cleaning crew last year, before the professor took me in. I hadn’t seen them in a year, so …’ I swallowed, watching as his eyes followed my footsteps in the sawdust-covered floor to the storage room. My footsteps contradicted me. He’d know I’d been in there with the bodies.

My heart pounded. He could so easily make trouble for me, being down here where I wasn’t supposed to be, snooping around bodies. The professor’s guardianship could protect me only so far.

‘I came to check on the autopsy report for the latest victim of the Wolf of Whitechapel,’ he said. ‘But I would be happy to escort you back to the main floor.’

I sighed in relief. ‘That’s not necessary. I know my way. And I really must be going.’ I smiled as graciously as I could and turned away, heart pounding, feet unsteady on the tile floor. All I could think of was Edward. All I could feel was a thousand tangled emotions.

‘Wait, Miss Moreau.’

My eyes fell closed, only for an instant. I turned around with another shaky smile. The inspector wasn’t smiling now, as he dropped his voice to a whisper.

‘After I met you, I looked up your name. I’m protective of Lucy, you understand, and your name sounded so familiar. I found a police report …’ He glanced down the hallway, making sure we were alone. My instincts jumped to attention. A dozen scenarios flashed through my head of what I’d do if he tried to arrest me. All of them ended poorly for me.

‘It was self-defense,’ I said firmly. ‘Dr Hastings attacked me. I was a cleaning girl then; no one would believe me—’

He dismissed that with a wave. ‘None of that interests me. I’ve no doubt it was Hastings’s fault – it isn’t the first incident of this sort with his name on it. No, Miss Moreau, the reason I recalled your name was because of your father’s crimes, not your own.’

My body froze, afraid to take a single breath.

At my silence, he continued. ‘I was young at the time, in college training to be an investigator. The case was quite notorious. I went back and read the file on your father, and it seems the case was never closed. He fled England, and no one heard from him again. I hate to leave this sort of thing open, if we can file it away as a solved case. Your assistance, Miss Moreau, would be invaluable to our efforts.’

I stared at him, speechless. After I’d been hiding from the police for the last year, now they were coming to me for help? I might have laughed, if I hadn’t feared sounding like a madwoman.

‘I assure you, you can trust me,’ he continued. ‘We’ll handle the information in the most sensitive manner. It isn’t my intention to cause a sensation, just to solve a long-standing case. It would be a feather in my cap, you see, even lead to a promotion. Together with this Wolf of Whitechapel case, I would be made head of the entire division. Which means I’d be better suited to care for Lucy.’

‘Care for Lucy?’

He smiled boyishly. ‘It isn’t official, of course. I haven’t yet asked her father for her hand in marriage, but I know he’ll give me permission. Any day now, expect to get the news of our engagement.’

There was something undeniably tender about the way he said it. I was quite certain Lucy had no idea the inspector’s intentions were this immediate. My head whirled with the idea of Lucy wed, and Newcastle wanting me to help solve my own father’s case, and among it all, Edward. Alive.

Mrs Bell rounded the corner and stopped short when she saw us. ‘Can I help you, sir?’

I took the opportunity to step away from Inspector Newcastle. ‘I’m sorry, Inspector,’ I said quickly. ‘There’s nothing I can help you with. I’ve heard rumors that my father is dead – I might trust those, if I were you.’

Before he could respond, I bade farewell to him and Mrs Bell, and hurried from the hallways where the electric lights still clicked and sputtered, as if warning me to never come back.

8

As soon as I left King’s College, I rounded the edge of the building and slumped against the rough brick wall, fighting to calm my erratic heartbeat. The day was clear but bitingly cold. My coat hung open, my hands bare, yet I didn’t reach for my gloves nor do up my buttons. I couldn’t. All I could manage was to slide down the brick wall to the frozen grass and let the cold seep up from the ground into me.

Edward was back from the dead.

If he truly was alive, if he had done this, then he must have been following me for some time. My mind searched through the past few weeks and months, trying to remember if I’d felt like I was being followed. But that was just it – one always felt followed in this city. Always felt eyes, always heard footsteps.

A flock of ravens alighted in the central courtyard, and my head whirled around. Was he following me even now? So many places to hide: behind those skeletal trees, on the rooftop of a nearby building …

I hugged my knees tight, not daring to close my eyes. If he knew about Annie stealing my mother’s ring, what else did he know? Did he know about my secret workshop and my growing illness? Did he know how I was stealing from the professor? Did he know that back on the island I’d opened the laboratory door so Jaguar could kill my father?

It terrified me that Edward might know all my secrets. If he chose to, he could expose me. Hurt me for how I’d hurt him when I’d rejected his affections. People loved a good gruesome rumor. If he revealed that the vilified Dr Moreau’s daughter had murdered her own father, this city’s gossip mills would devour me alive.

I ran numb fingers over my face, thinking. Edward was tied up in all those secrets too. Exposing my secrets would also expose his own – his unnatural origin and his inclination to kill. No, the more I thought about it, the more I was certain it wasn’t my secrets he was after.

Maybe it was my life.

A tingling started deep in my spine. For all I knew, I could be Edward’s next target. He could merely be toying with me, killing those who had wronged me to create a false sense of safety before he struck. After all, I’d rejected his love and then left him for dead. I could hardly expect him to do anything logically. How much control did Edward really have over himself? Where was the line between Beast and man?

Yet if Edward had wanted to kill me, there were far more effective ways. I’d given him a thousand opportunities to strike as I slunk along Shoreditch at night on my way to my secret workshop. And I might have left him for dead, but I’d prevented Montgomery from slitting his throat. I had given him a chance.

So what were these bodies supposed to tell me? If he meant me no harm, why hide behind such macabre gestures of affection?

It’s different with you, Juliet, Edward had said. We belong together.