I found a grassy place against the vine-covered outside wall where we could see the sparkling ocean. I sat down, but it took him some time to calm. I tore a strip of cloth from the hem of my skirt.
“Let me bandage your hand. You’re getting blood everywhere.”
His blue eyes met mine. The wild animal was still there, still restless. But there was pain, too. He sat down next to me and tied his hair back. I gently wiped away the blood from his busted knuckles. His jaw had a hard edge. He was so handsome it made my pulse race.
“I’m sorry,” I said, winding the strip of linen around his hand.
He didn’t answer.
I pictured Alice’s white feet in the mud, glad I hadn’t seen her cold, dead face. “I know she loved you,” I said before I could stop myself. “And I know I came between you. If I’d never come, maybe she’d still be alive.”
His deep eyes could carry every burden in the world. I tied off the bandage, tucking in the frayed edge. It was already damp with sweat and blood. “It’s not your fault,” he said.
“Did you love her?” She was dead, not even buried, but I couldn’t keep my frantic thoughts to myself. My voice rose in a hysterical pitch. “If I hadn’t come, would you have married her?”
His eyebrows were a line of worry. “What are you talking about?”
“You always wanted to save people. She was an orphan. The only missionary left. How could you not have fallen in love with her?”
“Blast and damn.” His head fell back against the wall, crushing the vine’s little white flowers. “I wasn’t in love with Alice. God, Juliet, I thought you knew. She wasn’t one of the missionaries.” He paused, not meeting my eyes. “She was a creation.”
My breath caught. I pushed my hair back with shaking hands. Alice? The sweet girl who carried the comb of my silver brush set, one of them? I felt my head shaking forcefully. “That’s impossible. She was human.”
“She looked human,” Montgomery said. Sweat beaded on his forehead. His wounded hand tensed. “But she was created two years ago from a sheep and three rabbits.”
“Rabbits?” I put my fingers to my lips, as if I could feel the word. As if that might make it more believable.
Her harelip. They are all flawed, Father had said. I tried to piece it together, to make sense of the puzzle. Alice had dodged my questions about her past. God, I’d been such a fool. When I called Balthazar and the others animals, I’d been calling her the same.
“I thought you said it couldn’t be done.” I swallowed back my rising fear. “You said he couldn’t make them look completely human.”
The blood drained from Montgomery’s face. He took a deep breath. “He can’t.”
It came to me then. A whisper of an idea.
“You made her,” I said. Not a question. An accusation.
He rubbed a hand over tired eyes. The wound had reopened, and blood seeped through the bandage.
“How could you?” I whispered, lips trembling. “Just like Father …” Blood rushed in my ears. I tried to stand, but he grabbed my hips and pulled me back to the grass.
“What’s done is done! If I’m to go to hell, so be it. But I’m not like him.” The force of his anger was a slap in the face. It wasn’t me he was angry at, but himself. He let me go and stood up, grabbing the iron bars outside my window. Like he deserved a prison.
“It was a mistake,” he said. “I knew that from the beginning. Your father and I had an argument. One of his creatures died on the operating table. I tried to warn him. I saw the errors in his work. But he’ll never admit to mistakes. He told me he was the doctor and I was a servant, and it would always be that way.” His knuckles tightened on the bars. “I wanted to prove him wrong.”
The breeze off the ocean blew a strand of hair into his face. He hadn’t said it in so many words, but I understood. By creating Alice, he had bested my father at his own work. With no formal training, as only a teenage boy.
And they called my father a genius.
I looked at him askance. I had underestimated him. We all had. As much as I cared about him, I always thought of him as the handsome, brooding assistant. Edward was the clever, educated one. Montgomery was a workhorse, strong and faithful.
But if he could make Alice, what else was he capable of?
“It was wrong.” He turned away from the window, plucking a flower from the vine and tucking it behind my ear, as thought it could protect me. “And now she’s dead, and so we are all if we don’t find Ajax.”
“Ajax?” I asked. “Don’t you think it was the monster who killed her?”
He frowned. “What monster?”
I paused. Didn’t he know? Alice had been terrified of something very real, and it wasn’t Ajax. Montgomery had been gone for months. Long enough, I supposed, for Father to create some terrible new creature without his knowledge.
The trees rustled in front of us. The sound of footsteps came from the jungle.
I slowly stood. Montgomery stepped in front of me protectively.
The footsteps grew louder.
Something was coming.
THIRTY-FIVE