“Blast,” I muttered to myself, then pressed my mouth to the crack. “No, Balthazar, everything’s fine.”
“It isn’t, miss. If you forgive me, I can smell that you’re lying. A body produces different scents when one isn’t telling the truth.” He was already out of the chair and had swung opened a hinged section of the wall that served as a hidden door into the passageways. He stuck his head in, sniffing again, and sneezed at all the dust. “Come in, miss. You’ll scrape yourself up in there. It isn’t safe.”
“Oh, that’s really fine, I was just . . .” Sneaking through the walls after secretly bringing a rat back to life? “Well, all right.” I paused. “Is it really true that you can smell a lie?”
“Yes, miss. When Montgomery and I were traveling the world, we developed a signal, because there were plenty of men who wanted to cheat us. I’d tap my nose once for truth and twice for a lie.”
I climbed into the cozy warmth of his bedroom and shook the dust off my dress. Sharkey wagged his tail. Balthazar offered me the rocking chair, but I sat on the rug instead and pulled Sharkey into my lap, scratching behind his ears.
“How did you know there was a passageway behind that wall?” I asked. “Could you smell that, too?”
“Aye, miss,” Balthazar said gruffly, sitting in the rocking chair. “I can smell Master Hensley. Always prowling around in there.”
“You don’t care for him, do you? I suppose he is a bit unnatural.” I paused as Balthazar scratched his nose with a thick finger—a nose that betrayed his ursine origin. I cleared my throat. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being unnatural, of course.”
“He doesn’t smell right,” Balthazar said, casting a wary look at the wall. “Mistress Elizabeth asks me to help her in her laboratory sometimes, but I don’t care for it. It makes me uneasy.”
“Then why do you do it?”
He scratched his nose again, thinking. “She’s the mistress. She’s the law. I must obey her the same as I must obey Montgomery, the same as I obeyed your father.” He raised a hand and let it fall helplessly. I had never quite put it together before, but now Balthazar’s constant obedience made sense. He was part dog, after all, and well trained to be loyal to anyone he viewed as a master. Faintly, I wondered if that included me.
“What are you reading?” I asked, hoping to change the subject away from experimentation.
He held up the book. “Aristotle. I like the messages he talks about. I wanted to reflect on the duties you’ve asked of me for your wedding day tomorrow. I pray that I’ll do a good job.”
I smiled. “I’m positive you will. How did you learn about Aristotle?”
He ran his hand along the spine of the book. “I started reading it on your father’s island.”
Just the mention of my father’s island sent a shiver down my back. I hugged my arms around my knees. “I don’t recall seeing Aristotle on Father’s bookshelves. There was only a handful of books there, most of them Shakespeare.”
“He had more in the laboratory,” Balthazar said. “There was a room off the back filled with books and old paperwork.”
A curious tickle whispered in the back of my head. I’d been so captivated by Elizabeth’s science and my impending wedding that the Beast’s warning had been the furthest thing in my mind, present but set aside like needlework I’d always intended to come back to and had then forgotten about. Ask Montgomery about your father’s laboratory files on the island, he had said. About the ones you didn’t see. He burned a file along with a letter.
“You didn’t ever see a letter my father wrote to me that Montgomery burned, did you?”
Balthazar gave a heavy shake of his head, distracted by a torn page in the book he was trying to glue back together with a gooey lick of saliva.
“What exactly was in those files in the second room?” I pressed.
The sharp tone in my voice caught Balthazar’s attention. He looked up with his heavy jowls, between me and Sharkey, and scratched his nose. “Files, miss? What files?”
“You just said there was a second room filled with files.” He scratched his nose harder, a sure sign he was hiding the truth. “Balthazar, I know there’s something Montgomery isn’t telling me. Something he’s lying about.”
His big eyes went wide. He said nothing.
I studied him closely, the way he fidgeted with the book, shifting uncomfortably beneath my scrutiny. He started rocking in the chair, almost imperceptibly at first. Back and forth, back and forth.
“Balthazar, why did Montgomery burn a letter? What was in it?”
His lips folded together nervously, and he rocked harder. I’d seen Balthazar rock that way only once before, on the Curitiba when I had asked him about my father. His eyes had glazed over. I’d get no answer out of him now.