CATHERINE: How were we supposed to keep money in a bank? We were constantly moving around the countryside. It was a traveling circus, remember?
MARY: They were still owed for the last fortnight, but we didn’t know if they would be able to collect that money from Lorenzo, since they hadn’t given proper notice. And now we had six mouths to feed! Or five, as Beatrice did not count—what she did could scarcely be called eating. She seemed to live off sunlight, weeds, and the occasional insect. But Catherine ate only meat, Justine ate no meat at all, and Diana ate everything and a great deal of it. I needed to find beds for Catherine and Justine in addition to the one I had already found for Diana, and the bed for Justine had to be seven feet long, or she would inevitably bump her head. Diana was already in the old nursery. I put Catherine in my mother’s room, and Justine slept in what had once been my father’s bedroom. If we built up the bed with enough pillows so she could lie at an angle, it was long enough for her—just. The governess’s room, where Nurse Adams had been sleeping, was still empty. But that was all the bedrooms I had. If creations of the Société des Alchimistes kept showing up, I would have to start putting them on the third floor, in the servants’ rooms. Mrs. Poole occupied what had once been the butler’s apartment, in the basement next to the kitchen, which Poole and his wife had inhabited while they were alive. Beatrice, of course, slept in the office next to my father’s laboratory. The day before, I had lost three dresses and a pair of boots. That morning, I once again had to find enough dresses for all of us to wear. I wondered how we were all to be fed and clothed and housed.
Catherine wishes to write about our adventures, to leave out the domestic details. “This is not a manual of household management,” she says. That would be something: a manual of household management for monsters!
MRS. POOLE: And very useful it would have been in those early days, I can tell you! How was I to make a broth with no meat in it for Justine? I’d never heard of such a thing!
The next morning, Justine was ill and feverish. “She’ll have to stay in bed,” said Mrs. Poole. “The rest of you can go gallivanting around the city all you like, but Miss Justine needs rest, and if she doesn’t get it, she’ll become sicker yet.”
“I would scarcely call escaping from Wolf Men gallivanting, Mrs. Poole,” said Catherine. “We were running for our lives, you know.”
“Are there any more eggs?” asked Diana.
“No, not cooked, so you’ll have to fill up on toast and marmalade. That stomach of yours is like a bottomless pit! You don’t see Miss Beatrice asking for seconds, do you?”
“She barely asks for firsts,” Diana muttered.
“And as for gallivanting, I’m sure you’ll be doing it again today, instead of staying at home as you ought to. There’s more than enough to do here. You’ll need dresses, so there’s plenty of sewing to be done.”
“Sewing!” said Catherine, with an expression of disgust.
“But we have a mystery to solve,” said Mary. They had already discussed the details of that mystery over breakfast, from Mary’s meeting with Mr. Guest to the murder of Molly Keane, the rescue of Beatrice and their slow piecing together of information about the Alchemical Society. . . . Catherine had listened with keen interest.
“Which you could leave to Mr. Holmes and the police, who are after all paid to solve such things.” Mrs. Poole said “such things” in the tone she might have used to describe a dead rat.
“I’m going to check on Justine,” said Beatrice. “Before Mrs. Poole called me down for breakfast, she was running a fever, and she didn’t seem to know where she was. She kept turning her head on the pillow, calling for her father. I think all this has been too much for her.”
“Should I come with you?” asked Catherine.
“No, eat,” Beatrice replied. “You were sitting up with her most of the night. You should rest too, you know.”
Beatrice had flitted out of the room like a beautiful ghost, and Diana had crammed the rest of the toast into her mouth, when the front doorbell rang. A minute later, Mrs. Poole showed Holmes and Watson into the morning room.
“So sorry to interrupt your breakfast, Miss Jekyll, ladies,” said Watson with a bow.
“Yes, yes,” said Holmes, who was obviously not sorry at all. “Shall we begin? There are lines of investigation I would like to pursue today, but I wanted to consult with you ladies first. We were with Lestrade earlier this morning.”
“Would you like some tea, Dr. Watson?” asked Mary. “Mrs. Poole just brought up a fresh pot.”
“Thank you,” said Watson. “And I should go check on my patient.”
“Beatrice just went up,” said Mary, pouring tea into the cup that Beatrice had not used and handing it to him. “Do drink this first. I know what it’s like when you’re investigating. If you were with Inspector Lestrade earlier, you probably haven’t even breakfasted yet. Mr. Holmes? Tea? Or would you prefer coffee? I’m sure Mrs. Poole could make some.” But Holmes was obviously not interested in tea or coffee. He sat down impatiently and said, “Miss Frankenstein’s collapse last night prevented us from telling you about our interviews with the families and friends of the murdered women—or four of them, since Pauline Delacroix had only recently arrived in London. She was a French lady’s maid who had been serving in St. James’s Place. Her mistress dismissed her without a reference, so she was forced to make her way on the streets. She had no family in this country, and had not been in London long enough to make friends. The woman who ran the boardinghouse where she lived could tell us almost nothing about her. But the four others, including the most recent victim, Susanna Moore, had all been recent inmates of the Magdalen Society. Some only for a few days, one—Sally Hayward, the first victim—for several months.”
“All four of them? That’s too many to be a coincidence,” said Mary. “Diana, do you remember hearing any of those names while you were at the Magdalen Society? Anna Pettingill was the other one, I believe, and of course poor Molly Keane.”
“I never paid attention to their names,” said Diana, putting more sugar into her tea before slurping it down. “They all looked and sounded alike. But I always knew there was something rotten about that place! Well, I’m ready to go back and search for clues.”
“You can’t,” said Mary. “They already know you there. What we need is someone who can get in without arousing suspicion, who can search around. Someone in disguise.”