The same reason I’d helped kill him.
I went to the window. It was still dark of night, and the street below was quiet save the wind ruffling the garlands. A light turned on in a downstairs window across the street, and I caught a glimpse of a man in a stocking cap heating milk on the stove. My stomach rumbled with more than just hunger.
“Before my father’s blade, Balthazar began life as a bear and a dog,” I said.
“And now you call him a man?” she asked.
Next door, the kitchen light extinguished. “I call him a friend,” I said.
“And the young man downstairs? Is he a friend as well?”
“He was, once. Now I can’t say what he is. Father developed a new procedure to change a creature’s composition on a cellular level. He created Edward from a collection of animal parts and human blood, but the results were unpredictable. Edward is a man, but he’s also a monster. It lives within his skin, quite literally.” I paused. “He’s the Wolf of Whitechapel.”
Elizabeth sat straight up, eyes aflame. “The professor’s murderer? Is that why you’ve brought him here, instead of to the police?” Her voice dropped. “Do you intend to murder him as some sort of revenge?”
I bit my lip. “I’ll not deny he’s a murderer. He admits to killing many of the Wolf’s victims, but he claims he didn’t kill the professor. It sounds mad, but I’m tempted to believe him.”
The wind whistled down the chimney and made the fire flicker, and she didn’t take her keen eyes off of me.
“We can’t turn him over to the police,” I continued. “There’s an organization searching for him, and their plans are worse than anything Father ever imagined. They want to use him to create more creatures like him, which we think are destined for France’s Ministry of Defense. I can only imagine what the military would want with those things. They’re vicious, Elizabeth. Bloodthirsty.”
Her eyes flickered in that cold way that told me nothing. “What organization?” she asked.
“They’re called the King’s Club. You’ve heard of them, I’m sure—the professor was a member, though briefly. They want to continue my father’s experimentations, and they’ve already begun. We found a laboratory.”
She leaned back, thinking. “The King’s Club, involved in all this . . .”
“I know it’s difficult to believe,” I said.
“Oh, I never said that,” she said dryly. “I never trusted a single one of those men, and neither did the professor, which is precisely why he left their ranks. Do you recall hearing about the cholera epidemic of 1854?”
I nodded, thinking back to the royal decree framed in the King’s Club’s smoking room. “The King’s Men were involved in stopping it, if I recall,” I said. “Part of their charitable work.”
Elizabeth let out a harsh burst of air. “Charitable work? I hardly think so. If anyone benefited from the epidemic, it was the King’s Men’s own bank accounts. The city invested in a new system of waterworks and sewers for the city, and their companies produced all the granite and piping for that project. And I know for a fact that one of their members was a doctor of epidemiology.”
I leaned closer. “Are you saying they started the epidemic for their own monetary gain?”
She shrugged a little stiffly. “There’s no evidence, of course, but that’s what the professor suspected.” She leaned back, picking anxiously at her fingernails. “For the last few years they’ve sent representatives around to visit the professor, trying to get him to rejoin, pestering him about our ancestors’ journals. I’m sure that’s what the professor thought Isambard Lessing was after. He must have been shocked when Lessing mentioned your name instead.”
I tilted my head, thinking of those journals stacked upstairs in the professor’s study. “What’s in those journals that they want so badly?” I asked.
Elizabeth followed my gaze. “The ones up there collecting dust are nothing but genealogical records. I have the rest of our family’s history at the manor in Scotland, well hidden.” She stood to stir the fire. Her movements had a practiced calm to them that suggested she wasn’t a stranger to midnight surprises such as this. I wondered what exactly her life was like, in the wilds so far north. I suppose a woman living all alone had to be prepared for anything.
“We need your help,” I said. “Your silence, nothing more. As long as Edward is locked in that cellar, he can’t hurt anyone. We just have to develop a cure for his condition before the King’s Club finds him.”
“I can certainly offer you my silence,” she said slowly. “And more than that. I’ve developed treatments before. I can help you cure him.”
The look in her cold blue eyes had softened. I remembered her pressing her lips to my forehead like a mother to a child, and my heart clenched.