“I’m also the daughter of Evelyn Chastain, and she’d faint at the very mention of Frankenstein’s monster. Why are you so certain I take after Father, and not her?”
She raised an eyebrow. I thought she might speak, but instead she took an apron off a hook near the door and handed it to me.
“Put that on, and we shall see which parent you take after most. Consider this your first lesson: Always wear an apron you don’t mind getting dirty. Very dirty.”
THIRTEEN
“YOU ASKED ME ABOUT Valentina’s hands,” Elizabeth said as she led me up the rest of the steps to the locked door at the top. “She came to us two years ago nearly dead from blood loss. She’d traveled a long way, following a rumor among itinerant performers that I could restore missing limbs. She’d lost her hands in a wood-chopping accident and brought them with her in a wicker basket, but I couldn’t use them. They’d been too badly damaged. I threw them out to the foxes.”
“Where did you find her current hands?” I asked, following her up the stairs.
“There’s a monastery outside of Quick. They have a graveyard that serves the entire region. It’s where I get most of my raw supplies.”
Raw supplies? I thought. More like body parts.
“The death rate this far north is abysmally high,” she continued. “I had the corpses of three girls her same age to choose from. One was very recent, died in childbirth; it made the transplant easier. I would have liked to find a corpse more her natural coloration, but there aren’t many Romany in these parts. She didn’t mind. She was so thankful to have the use of her hands again that she dedicated her life to Ballentyne. I can hardly recall how we managed before she arrived. She’s teaching the girls astronomy and philosophy in addition to needlepoint. They might be milkmaids by trade, but that doesn’t mean they can’t also be well educated.”
My head spun with questions. Did the monks know Elizabeth took the bodies, or did she grave rob them late at night? She probably sent Carlyle to do the dirty work, except now he was getting on in age. Maybe that was why she’d been so kind to Balthazar, wanting him to fill Igor’s role as her laboratory assistant.
I followed her up the tower with nervous steps. Each stair took me closer to secrets I’d wished to know ever since I was a little girl peering through the keyhole of Father’s laboratory. Elizabeth slid her key in the lock but paused.
“Once we go in here, Juliet, there’s no going back. I’ll ask you one more time. Are you certain you wish to learn all of this?”
I pressed a hand against Jack Serra’s water charm beneath my dress, reminding myself that I had to learn my demons before deciding to follow them or not. Technically, I was also staying true to my promise to Montgomery; I wasn’t following my father’s footsteps. I was only standing in the door and peering down that path to see where it led.
A tremor of excitement ran through me. “Yes.”
She opened the door. My greedy eyes took in everything at once: the roundness of the tower walls, which gave the feeling of a giant stone womb; wooden shelves and cupboards; books and papers stacked in piles that were tidy but didn’t have my father’s rigid adherence to order. In fact, nothing about the room brought to mind my father’s cold and sterile laboratory. This space had the touch of a woman, from the apron hanging on a peg to a kettle and cup of tea that must have long since gone cold. There was even a little painting on the wall, done with childish inaccuracy, signed by Hensley. The only thing at all similar was the operating table in the middle: the same leather manacles, the same sawdust underneath to draw the blood, now fresh and unsullied.
She lit a lantern. “What’s going through your mind?”
The room was warm, with the windows shuttered against the winter wind. Cozy almost, not unlike my attic apartment in London. I had the urge to wrap a threadbare quilt around my shoulders and curl up in my old rocking chair by the fire.
“It feels more comfortable than I’d expected.”
“Good.”
She closed the door behind me and locked it, then returned to the table, where she carefully laid out the body of Hensley’s white rat. My eyes scanned its tiny feet, the ropelike naked tail. Its fur was matted around its neck in a very revealing way.
“Hensley means to be protective, but he doesn’t know his own strength. Instead of throwing this one out for the foxes, I thought it might prove . . . educational.”
Her eyes darted to the metal pole coming down from the spired roof, and I realized it was the reverse end of a lightning rod. It connected to wires designed to hook onto a cadaver’s body.
“We’re going to reanimate it?” I couldn’t keep the thrill from my voice.