“Oh—you kept them with you while we were away? Really? That’s a little mean, isn’t it?” I thought about the bedroom and the bittersweets. “But then, how . . .” Jackaby stepped into the office, and I followed. A prickly feeling rippled through me, like electricity in the air.
Jenny was perched in the chair behind Jackaby’s desk. “Welcome home,” she said. She gave our soot-caked clothes a glance. “Have you been cooking again, Jackaby?”
My employer did not answer her. He stared across the desk, and then a perplexed smile crept into the corners of his lips. “Miss Rook. You may want to fetch that little notebook from your valise.”
“Sir?”
“Unless I am very much mistaken, we have another case.”
The desk, I realized, had been cleared of its usual stacks of books and clutter, and a single file sat squarely in the center. Printed neatly on the front was the name Jenny Cavanaugh. The spectral figure reached out one bare, translucent hand and pushed the file firmly across the desk toward Jackaby. It slid without the slightest hesitation at her touch, coming to rest in front of my employer. A handful of notes and newspaper clippings slipped free from the bundle with words like victim, murder and brutal in bold type. Among them I saw a familiar image—an eerie man, pale and stout, and dressed in black. The hairs on the back of my neck pricked up.
“It’s time.” Jenny nodded. “I’m ready to know.”
SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
It was some time after the business of the bones that I remembered to ask Jackaby about his unlikely version of the voyage of the HMS Beagle. According to my employer, during his expedition in Mauritius, Darwin discovered and brought back to England a live specimen of a chameleomorph. Upon his return, he was given a private conference with King William IV, who marveled at the creature’s ability to mimic its prey. The old monarch ordered Darwin to keep the existence of the creature an absolute secret.
The king feared he might die before his niece, Victoria, turned eighteen, since this would make the Duchess of Kent regent, ruling on behalf of Victoria until she came of age. The old monarch loathed the duchess. He made it quite clear that he hoped the power of the throne might never fall into the duchess’s hands, but his health was failing fast, and Victoria’s birthday was still months away. As a fail-safe, the king ordered Darwin to feed the chameleomorph a steady diet of his own, royal blood. It was his hope that a facsimile king might rule just long enough for Victoria to come of age, if necessary.
Darwin, a loyal subject, reluctantly obeyed. Fortunately, William survived a full month beyond Victoria’s birthday, and the bizarre project was aborted—but not before the beast had developed a nearly perfect resemblance to the old man.
With no human language or social cues, the doppelg?nger was a grotesque caricature of the king. Most disturbing of all, the thing craved human blood, and it grew violent unless supplied with a meal laced with the stuff. When she learned of the secret, the newly crowned Queen Victoria was horrified and disgusted. She ordered the creature destroyed, along with all of Darwin’s notes on the species, lest some immoral soul be tempted to recreate her uncle’s abomination in a twisted effort to secure the crown.
Darwin again obliged his ruler, completely editing the monumental discovery out of his Journal and Remarks concerning the voyage of the HMS Beagle. The findings did fuel his interest in the abilities of organisms to adapt and change, and one can practically see the creature hiding just beneath the words in his subsequent publication of his work, The Origin of Species.