“You’d do that for us?” I whispered.
She came and sat beside me, touching my hand. “You’re my ward now, Juliet. That means we’re family. My uncle used to say nothing is more important than family.”
I wasn’t certain what to do with her words. Both my parents had been absent most of my life. I hadn’t siblings. All my relatives had cast me out. In the last year the word family had come only to mean betrayal, at least until Montgomery’s marriage proposal. Now he would be my family, and I his. But a husband wasn’t the same as a mother, a father, a brother. Elizabeth’s words gave me hope for a bond like that again.
Tentatively, I squeezed her hand.
THE MORNING SKY WAS a thin, hazy gray as we trudged the short few blocks to the funeral at St. Matthew’s Church. The idea of so many strangers’ faces caused wracking tremors in my wrists, but I pulled on gloves and ignored the pain. I had promised Elizabeth.
The professor had been well-known, so I wasn’t surprised to see a long line of fine carriages waiting to drop off attendees, but I hadn’t expected the sprawling crowd pressed against the churchyard gates, sailors and vendors and all manner of people dressed in shabby winter coats, whispering hushed rumors into the cold morning air. Two or three wore cheap metal breastplates and clutched smeared newspapers.
They weren’t there to mourn the professor, I realized with a sickening lurch. They had come to ogle the Wolf’s latest violence. This was a circus to them. A heartless game.
Montgomery’s hand tightened in mine.
“How could they,” I hissed as my joints twisted, angry as my heart. I would have cursed much louder if the crowd hadn’t caught sight of us in our church finery and badgered us with probing questions. Did you see the body, miss? Was there blood? Did ya see the flower?
I felt at the point of screaming before Montgomery shoved through them to escort Elizabeth and me through the gate. She was the type to go quiet with rage, a dangerous sort. It wasn’t until we were inside the palatial church with the doors firmly closed that color returned to her face.
“A travesty,” she spat. “If it’s the Wolf they want, it’s the Wolf they deserve.”
Inside, the crowd wasn’t much better. Hundreds of faces turned at our entrance, all harshly kind, pitying smiles mixed with flickers of scandal in their eyes. Whispers, whispers, whispers. How they must have reveled in the fact that the madman’s daughter was caught up in yet another horrific scandal.
At least one friendly face caught mine in the crowd: Lucy. She waved to me quietly from a pew near the front, where she sat with her parents and Inspector Newcastle. He nodded to me solemnly, and then whispered something to Lucy, who looked at him in surprise and shook her head.
My heart twisted. Surely they weren’t trading rumors too.
Seats had been saved for the family of the victim in the front row, but I couldn’t bear to sit that close to the closed casket. Montgomery sat with me in the last row, where the preacher’s voice was nothing but a hum, and curious faces kept twisting to look back at me, pretending they were adjusting their fine winter hats.
Those stolen looks ate away at me until I could no longer bear it. After half an hour, I mumbled something to Montgomery and made my way to a side door, twisting it open to a cloistered courtyard where I gulped fresh air. I stumbled into the snow in my fine Sunday shoes, weaving between the headstones of the church’s graveyard.
No faces here, no whispering. But there was a freshly dug plot.
My feet led me to it on their own, knees slumping in the dirt at the foot of his grave. Plain, unlike most of the others. A testament to his simple life.
Victor von Stein, the headstone read, 1841—1896. Beloved father and friend.
I supposed Elizabeth had come up with that phrasing, though if she was referring to me or the professor’s son who had died long ago, I wasn’t sure. The gaping hole awaited the casket. I dug my fingers into the freezing soil, wishing I could hold the professor’s wrinkled old hands instead.
I’m sorry, Professor, I thought.
“My condolences, miss,” a voice said behind me.
I whirled, thinking I had been alone. A spindle-thin man wearing a canvas work jacket and a few days’ unshaven beard leaned on a shovel, nodding toward the gravesite. “You must be family,” he said. “You’d be surprised how often family comes out ’ere, needing a moment o’ peace. Reckon he was a great man. Never seen a crowd like this.” He removed his cap in a stiff gesture.
“He was,” I whispered. “Will you be the one to bury him?”
He nodded, the cap pressed to his chest, wisps of graying hair dancing in the wind.
I opened my purse and fished out a few coins. “Thank you, then,” I said, holding out the coins.
He took them almost reluctantly. “Won’t be nothing. The empty ones are easy.”
“Empty ones?”