“Temper, temper, William,” Sloane snapped. He raised the pistol in his hand higher, pointing it straight at Will’s chest. “She proved to be too weak. Couldn’t handle the days locked away.”
“In the pit?”
My heart stuttered just at the phrase.
Sloane shrugged. “Her heart must have given out. Some people aren’t able to bear the absence of light.”
Will’s voice rose in anger. “And sound and heat and food and fresh air.”
“Ah, yes. I forgot you’re intimately familiar with it.”
I remembered then what Miss Wallace’s maid had told us about the nightmares she began having shortly before she disappeared. How she’d babbled about the cold and the dark. And how Kady had worried Mary had foreseen her death. I had found the idea horrifying before, but now—knowing she’d been locked in “the pit”—I couldn’t fathom it.
Dr. Sloane was a fiend and I told him so. “You’re not conducting medical research. You’re torturing these people! You’re nothing but a monster.”
“And your husband truly needed to dissect all of those bodies to write his anatomy textbook?” he calmly retorted.
I recoiled, pulling away from Will, but he gripped me tighter.
“Sometimes advances in medicine require a measure of suffering. Particularly if the brain, the body is ever to be fully understood.”
“My husband may have been no saint, but at least his test subjects were dead before he tortured them. Their souls were gone, their bodies merely husks. They couldn’t feel any more pain. You have no excuse. You drove your own daughter to suicide.”
Dr. Sloane reared back, and I felt the full force of his anger for the first time emanating across the distance between us. His voice snapped like an icy whip. “My daughter was mad, and completely bent on destruction. I tried to find a cure for her, I tried to bring her to heel, but she resisted all my methods. And when I relented, out of pity, she killed her mother while in the grips of a manic rage, and then killed herself.”
I stiffened in shock at his words, and he seemed to sense it.
“Oh, yes. Didn’t know that, did you? She killed more than just herself. But if I’d continued my tests, if I’d kept her far from her mother, at least my wife would still be alive today.”
The click of the pistol cocking jolted down my spine and I gripped Will tighter.
“I’m not going to allow sympathy to get in the way of my research again,” Sloane continued in a more even tone, though his voice was still as sharp as a knife. “The families who refuse to hand over their loved ones with afflictions of the brain are fools who must be saved from their own folly, before their unfortunate relatives harm themselves or others. And I’m afraid you’re one of those unfortunates, Lady Darby.”
An icy band of fear wrapped around my chest, holding me immobile.
“Now,” he continued in the same silky tone he’d used when he first stepped out of the shadows, “I’m done wasting my time. We have a little boat trip to make across the firth this evening, though I fear the rain will hinder our journey somewhat.”
“She’s not going with you,” Will told him, hugging me even closer to his back. I didn’t struggle against him—I was too terrified—but I did worry. With his hands behind him and his body shielding mine, he was defenseless.
“Of course she is,” Sloane said, his tone brisk. “With any luck, my oarsmen already have the boat pulled to shore below. We’ll be gone before the blood even stops pumping from your body.”
I tensed and shoved against Will, trying to get him to move, just as Dr. Sloane’s pistol fired, a percussive burst of light in the darkness. Will jerked backward into me, slamming me into the wall at my back. I felt a spray of liquid splatter my cheek. My knees gave out beneath me and I dropped to the floor with Will on top of me.
The acrid stench of gunpowder lingered in the air. Dazed, I pushed Will to the side and tried to feel where the bullet had struck him. But Sloane grabbed my arm and dragged me out from underneath him. He tried to force me to my feet, but I fought against him, screaming for Will. In the darkness, it was hard to tell, but I thought he moved. Was he alive?
Sloane struck me across the temple with the gun, knocking me to my knees. Pain exploded in my head, sharp and blinding. I couldn’t fight it.
I felt myself being lifted by an arm around my waist and shuffled forward a few steps. Then, from behind me, I heard Will’s voice.
“I said . . . she’s not going with you.”
Sloane turned and dropped me to the floor just as Will seized hold of him and flung him away from me.
“Run,” he ordered me before kicking Sloane where he lay crumpled on the floor just inside the third-floor chamber.
I lurched to my feet and steadied myself against the cold wall, trying to shake away the cobwebs from my mind. “Run!” I heard Will shout again, but I couldn’t leave him. He was bloodied and bruised from his fight with Donovan, and now he’d been shot. If I didn’t help him, he would surely die.