“Sit,” she whispered to me, and motioned to the floor next to her.
I knelt cautiously as Elizabeth straightened Hensley’s collar. “He only has nightmares after an operation. Normally he can sleep through anything. I suppose that’s a benefit of knowing you cannot die.”
I bit my lip, both unnerved and drawn to the sleeping boy. Part of me knew I shouldn’t even be here, listening to her explanations. But another part of me was fiercely curious.
I eased slightly closer. “He can’t die at all?”
“Very few things could kill him. Fire, for one. Everything else I can stitch back together and he’s good as new.”
“How does his body work?”
“Just as yours and mine does, only stronger. Even at his small size, he has the strength of three men.” She unbuttoned his tiny shirt carefully so as not to wake him. At least three dozen scars ran across his chest, a puzzle of flesh and black stitching, a record of more than thirty years of wounds that had been healed by Elizabeth and the professor.
My stomach tightened even as my curiosity flared.
“He doesn’t feel pain,” Elizabeth whispered, staring at the scars with a fascination that mirrored my own. “If he’s injured, he knows I can always fix him again. It makes him much bolder than a normal child.”
She led me to a small locked doorway that she opened with a key around her neck. It was a storage room crowded with old trunks and toys and, to my surprise, an entire wall of cages with dozens of white rats.
“So many?” I asked. “I thought he only had one rat.”
“Yes. Well, he thinks there’s only one, too.” She dropped a hand into her apron pocket. “He’s very gentle with them—most of the time. Sometimes he doesn’t understand his own strength and kills one by accident.” She withdrew her hand from her apron pocket, her fingers wrapped around the body of the rat Hensley had been playing with the night I’d nearly drowned in the bog. My throat tightened at the memory.
“The night you returned to Ballentyne,” I whispered. “He suffocated it while we were all in the library, didn’t he? I told myself I must have imagined it.”
Elizabeth nodded. “He didn’t mean to. I always take them from him before he realizes what he’s done. I throw them out on the moors. It keeps the foxes from going after our chickens.” She gazed down at the dead rat. “With all the commotion, I haven’t yet had the chance. I’ve kept this one in my laboratory.”
“So he doesn’t know he’s killing them?”
“No.” She sighed, rubbing the sides of her head. “It’s better to keep him in the dark. He doesn’t grow or age, but his body deteriorates over time and his brain doesn’t work as well as it should anymore. He’s growing unpredictable. I fear what he might do if he knew his beloved pet was only one of many he himself had killed and I’d replaced.”
I shuddered at the thought.
“Better the rats than the girls,” Elizabeth said. “He’s fond of them as well, and he could hurt them just as easily without meaning to. The rats give him something to focus his attention on.”
I hugged my arms across my chest. If Montgomery were here, he’d tell me to leave right now.
But Montgomery wasn’t here.
“Would you like to hear the story of Victor Frankenstein?” She stared at the dead rat in her hand, then smiled tightly. “The legends are true, but they don’t tell the full story. He was nineteen when he began his research, just a few years older than you are now. His family was Genevese. Very modern thinkers. They sent him to Ingolstadt for a scientific education, but his mother passed away of scarlet fever before he left. He was devastated. He became obsessed with the idea of defeating death. Creating humans who would never die.”
She paused, stroking the dead rat’s fur.
“The creature he made was . . . well, not far off from the thing described in legends. Eight feet tall with yellow skin and a lumbering gait. Some versions of the legend say the creature lacked the gift of intelligence and speech, but that wasn’t true. He was quite smart.” She paused. “I think, if the creature had been a mindless thing, the past would have turned out differently.”
The rats kept crawling over one another, their little pink noses sniffing our strange smells, but Elizabeth paid them no heed. “Victor ran away, terrified by what he’d done. He thought the creature would die of exposure, but like Hensley, it didn’t feel heat or cold. It needed food, but not much. It had the strength to break through locked doors. It lived, and it went out into the world. Eventually Victor left to hunt it down. Neither of them was heard from again.”
“And this is the science you want to teach me?”
“Only the daughter of Henri Moreau could understand how important it is.”