“Yes, and you killed your father because of it. You killed three members of the King’s Club for the same reason. Why are you so willing to believe Elizabeth is any different from them? You’re the one always insisting women can be just as ruthless as men.”
I paced the opposite side of the room, chewing on the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood. “It isn’t because she’s a woman,” I said. “It’s because . . .”
It’s because she’s like me.
I stopped pacing, chilled by my own thoughts. “Elizabeth isn’t going to trap us here because of what we saw. If we hear her out and you still think leaving is best, then we’ll go. Agreed?”
I could tell by the tense set to his shoulders that if it were up to him we’d be in the carriage right now, tearing wildly into the night, leaving the truth far behind. But no one could run from the truth forever.
“Just promise me it won’t be like last time,” he whispered. “No more unnatural science. No more playing God, not even when there’s a chance the ends could justify the means.”
I took a step back. Maybe it was my conversation with Jack Serra earlier, but Father was so freshly in my mind he might as well have been standing in the room with us.
“Do you truly have so little faith in me that you think I would become a monster like Father was?” I asked.
I didn’t tell him that it was a fear I’d had myself.
“Of course not.” His face had softened. “That was never what I meant.”
We stood like that for a while, the two of us alone with the wind howling outside. At last, Montgomery took my hands.
“Sometimes you do remind me of your father,” he said gently, “but I didn’t mean that you’re destined to go mad like him. You come from two parents, you know. For all your father’s faults, there are your mother’s strengths. She was such a kind woman, don’t you remember?”
I flinched as though pricked with a needle, and all worries about Hensley, and Elizabeth’s experimentation, and even Edward vanished. My mother. I could picture her if I closed my eyes. High cheekbones flushed with warmth and perfectly pinned dark hair as she sang church hymns. The opposite to my father’s cold countenance. When I was little, she had dedicated her life to helping others. On winter Sundays after church, Mother stayed behind with the Ladies’ Auxiliary to knit socks for the inmates at Bryson Prison. I’d once asked her why she never knit a pair for me, and she’d taken me to Whitechapel and pointed out the vagrants with frostbitten toes. It was the first time I understood what wealth meant, and how devastating it would be if we ever lost it.
I stared at Montgomery, transfixed, our earlier argument forgotten. “Do you really think I could take after her instead of my father?” I couldn’t keep the hope from my voice. It was a possibility that had never occurred to me before. I flexed my cold fingers, feeling warmth flooding into them for the first time in what felt like years.
His expression softened. “You already do take after her. You just can’t see it.”
I looked down at my hands’ slender tapering and pale color. Why hadn’t I noticed before how identical they were to my mother’s? How much of me besides that was like her, that I’d ignored all this time? Father’s shadow stretched so long that it had hidden any other paths I might have in life.
“Juliet, promise me you’ll think more about being like her. Especially in light of what we’ve seen tonight. It worries me, you being in a house full of experimentation.”
My mother had her faults, but she’d loved me. She’d taken care of me. She’d obeyed Scripture and visited orphans and knit socks for prisoners and never once crossed the line into immoral science.
I took a deep breath. Yes, my mother’s blood was also in my veins. She would help ground me as we faced whatever Elizabeth was doing in that tower laboratory.
“I promise.”
TEN
ELIZABETH REMAINED LOCKED IN the tower with Hensley all that night and into the next day. Montgomery and I waited for her to emerge, watching from the window at the far end of the hallway as the sun came up and then started to sink again. I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother and the possibility of following her path instead of Father’s. Memories of her filled the hours while we waited: Mother helping me decorate the Christmas tree, giving me my first pair of dancing slippers, reading me stories at night.
At last, the door creaked open.
I jumped up, brushing the hair out of my eyes. Elizabeth stood in the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel. She wore the green dress from the night before, but without the grand fur cloak she looked less like Queen of the Fairies and more like a worried mother.
“I expected you’d want some answers,” she said. McKenna appeared in the doorway behind her, a basket of bloody clothes in her arms, and started down the stairs. She paused when she reached me.
“Keep an open mind, little mouse,” she said. “This is a peaceful house. None of us, the mistress included, have a cruel bone in our bodies.” She looked at the floor and hurried down the hallway.
The line of electric lights winding up the stone stairs flickered.