Author: Megan Shepherd
Category: Young Adult
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/megan-shepherd/page,18,54767-a_cold_legacy.html
I sat up. “Just one moment!” I signaled frantically for Lucy to hide the rat. She looked around the room desperately, until she kicked the lid off a hatbox and shoved it inside.
I opened the door. “A package?”
Moira grinned. “It’s your wedding dress, miss.”
I sucked in a breath. Wedding dress? God, the wedding was tomorrow and I hadn’t even bothered to try on those pairs of shoes yet. Guilt washed over me that I’d forgotten about it. Two little girls were with her, smiling widely. She motioned to them apologetically. “They’re dying to see it, miss. Haven’t ever seen a proper bride’s dress before.”
The innocent look on their faces made me feel guilty all over again. I forced a smile. “Then let’s take a look, shall we?”
I tossed one glance back at Lucy before the girls grabbed my hands and led me to the library, where Elizabeth and McKenna stood around the big mahogany table. A package tied with ribbon sat in the middle.
“The dressmaker just delivered it,” McKenna said, “Oh, do open it. We’re all dying to see.”
It felt surreal to tug on that bow, slide the ribbon off. The little girls crowded around the table, eyes big and wide. I opened the box, fighting through crumpled tissue paper the dressmaker had used to pack the dress. I folded back the paper gently, and the girls gasped.
“Oh, Juliet, it’s beautiful,” Elizabeth said.
I stared down at the satin dress that Lucy had helped me design. My heart beat a little faster. It wasn’t really so bad that I was lying to Montgomery; I did want to marry him, and it would be a grand occasion. We had a lifetime ahead of us to come to terms with any secrets from our past—or our present.
“You will be the most beautiful bride!” the smallest girl said.
I gave her a sincere grin.
“Here, girls,” I said, holding up the dress. “Why don’t you try it on? Lily, Moira, it won’t be but slightly too big on you.”
Smiles broke out across all their faces. Lily picked up the dress with the utmost care, and they hurried from the room amid giggles. Tissue paper covered the floor. I shoved it back in the box and sank into a chair.
McKenna went to the window and pulled back the curtain with a frown.
“Looks like another storm is setting in. Let’s keep our fingers crossed it comes and goes before tomorrow afternoon. Rain at a wedding—oh, I couldn’t bear it.”
“I’m sure it will stop,” Elizabeth said, giving me a smile. “Anyway, a misty day can be perfectly romantic.”
I smiled in return, torn between how kind they were being to me and the fact that I was lying to them all.
TWENTY-SIX
THAT EVENING I OPENED the hatbox and took one last look at the rat.
“Time to take you home, little fellow.” I slid open the back panel of the armoire that led into the passageways in the walls. I climbed into the tight space, finding my way by candlelight to the secret storage room next to Hensley’s chambers. I let the rat into the cage, observing it carefully for fear it might be stronger and unpredictable as Elizabeth had warned, but it acted just like the others. If it hadn’t been for the tiny burn mark on its side where the electricity had singed its fur, it would be totally indistinguishable from the others. I bade it good evening and crawled back inside the walls.
I didn’t return to my room straightaway. The manor was different seen through the cracks in the passageways. Timeless. Without the electric lights I could imagine it was a hundred years ago, and Victor Frankenstein was up in that tower with a lightning rod and a bone saw. If I closed my eyes, I could almost hear the sound of scalpel on flesh.
I stopped and leaned against a dusty wall of the passageway to brush away cobwebs on my dress. A thin beam of light shone from a horizontal crack in the wall. I squinted to peer through. It was Balthazar’s bedroom. He sat in the rocking chair by the fireplace with Sharkey asleep in his lap and a book in his hands. He traced the lines of text with his thick finger, soundlessly mouthing the words to himself.
I felt bad for spying on him and started to leave, but I tripped on one of Lord Ballentyne’s uneven brick traps. I cursed before I could stop myself, and when I looked back through the crack, Balthazar was sniffing the air.
“Miss Juliet,” he said calmly. “I can smell you in the wall. Is something wrong?”
“Blast,” I muttered to myself, then pressed my mouth to the crack. “No, Balthazar, everything’s fine.”
“It isn’t, miss. If you forgive me, I can smell that you’re lying. A body produces different scents when one isn’t telling the truth.” He was already out of the chair and had swung opened a hinged section of the wall that served as a hidden door into the passageways. He stuck his head in, sniffing again, and sneezed at all the dust. “Come in, miss. You’ll scrape yourself up in there. It isn’t safe.”
“Oh, that’s really fine, I was just . . .” Sneaking through the walls after secretly bringing a rat back to life? “Well, all right.” I paused. “Is it really true that you can smell a lie?”
“Yes, miss. When Montgomery and I were traveling the world, we developed a signal, because there were plenty of men who wanted to cheat us. I’d tap my nose once for truth and twice for a lie.”
I climbed into the cozy warmth of his bedroom and shook the dust off my dress. Sharkey wagged his tail. Balthazar offered me the rocking chair, but I sat on the rug instead and pulled Sharkey into my lap, scratching behind his ears.
“How did you know there was a passageway behind that wall?” I asked. “Could you smell that, too?”
“Aye, miss,” Balthazar said gruffly, sitting in the rocking chair. “I can smell Master Hensley. Always prowling around in there.”
“You don’t care for him, do you? I suppose he is a bit unnatural.” I paused as Balthazar scratched his nose with a thick finger—a nose that betrayed his ursine origin. I cleared my throat. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being unnatural, of course.”
“He doesn’t smell right,” Balthazar said, casting a wary look at the wall. “Mistress Elizabeth asks me to help her in her laboratory sometimes, but I don’t care for it. It makes me uneasy.”
“Then why do you do it?”
He scratched his nose again, thinking. “She’s the mistress. She’s the law. I must obey her the same as I must obey Montgomery, the same as I obeyed your father.” He raised a hand and let it fall helplessly. I had never quite put it together before, but now Balthazar’s constant obedience made sense. He was part dog, after all, and well trained to be loyal to anyone he viewed as a master. Faintly, I wondered if that included me.
“What are you reading?” I asked, hoping to change the subject away from experimentation.
He held up the book. “Aristotle. I like the messages he talks about. I wanted to reflect on the duties you’ve asked of me for your wedding day tomorrow. I pray that I’ll do a good job.”
I smiled. “I’m positive you will. How did you learn about Aristotle?”
He ran his hand along the spine of the book. “I started reading it on your father’s island.”
Just the mention of my father’s island sent a shiver down my back. I hugged my arms around my knees. “I don’t recall seeing Aristotle on Father’s bookshelves. There was only a handful of books there, most of them Shakespeare.”
“He had more in the laboratory,” Balthazar said. “There was a room off the back filled with books and old paperwork.”
A curious tickle whispered in the back of my head. I’d been so captivated by Elizabeth’s science and my impending wedding that the Beast’s warning had been the furthest thing in my mind, present but set aside like needlework I’d always intended to come back to and had then forgotten about. Ask Montgomery about your father’s laboratory files on the island, he had said. About the ones you didn’t see. He burned a file along with a letter.
“You didn’t ever see a letter my father wrote to me that Montgomery burned, did you?”
Balthazar gave a heavy shake
of his head, distracted by a torn page in the book he was trying to glue back together with a gooey lick of saliva.
“What exactly was in those files in the second room?” I pressed.
The sharp tone in my voice caught Balthazar’s attention. He looked up with his heavy jowls, between me and Sharkey, and scratched his nose. “Files, miss? What files?”
“You just said there was a second room filled with files.” He scratched his nose harder, a sure sign he was hiding the truth. “Balthazar, I know there’s something Montgomery isn’t telling me. Something he’s lying about.”
His big eyes went wide. He said nothing.
I studied him closely, the way he fidgeted with the book, shifting uncomfortably beneath my scrutiny. He started rocking in the chair, almost imperceptibly at first. Back and forth, back and forth.
“Balthazar, why did Montgomery burn a letter? What was in it?”
His lips folded together nervously, and he rocked harder. I’d seen Balthazar rock that way only once before, on the Curitiba when I had asked him about my father. His eyes had glazed over. I’d get no answer out of him now.
I sighed and stood, heading for the main door back into the manor’s hallway. I was done with secrets and passageways, at least for tonight. I had a wedding to think about.
“Good night, Balthazar,” I said, and closed the door behind me. Thunder shook the windows outside the hallway, and I pushed the curtain back. Lightning crashed.
Looks like another storm is setting in, McKenna had said.
Lightning—we needed it in order to bring a human body back to life. There was no telling when another storm would come, or how much longer Edward’s body would stay preserved down there in the cellar.
Whatever Montgomery was hiding, was it worse than what I was hiding from him?
I went to Lucy’s door and knocked quietly. “If we’re going to bring Edward back,” I told her, “it has to be tonight.”
ONCE THE STAFF HAD gone to bed, we crept downstairs. The basement was flooded from all the rain. Water seeped in from the stone walls, filling the low-lit hallways with the sound of dripping and the smell of damp. Luckily the chapel was built on slightly higher ground, so the stone floor—and the bodies—remained dry.
Lucy made a face and lifted her skirts, checking each step carefully. Inside the chapel, we set down the lantern and looked at the dozen bodies. Lucy pulled the sheet back from Edward’s face.
“Do you think he’ll remember what it was like to be dead?” There was a ring of excitement in her voice that I hadn’t heard in weeks.
“I suppose we will have a good many questions to ask him, when he wakes. Now, if we’re going to cut out Edward’s diseased posterior lobe, we have to hurry. I’m getting married tomorrow, after all. We’ll need a replacement brain from one of these bodies. The cadaver should be in good condition. Male and around his age, if possible.”
Lucy drew back another sheet and grimaced. “What about this one?”
I glanced at the corpse of a young man who seemed healthy enough—present condition excluded, of course—with gangly long arms and legs that draped off the end of the bench.
“Goodness, he must be seven feet tall. But he looks healthy enough. Help me carry him.”
Lucy took the lantern in one hand and picked up the man’s feet with the other, while I wrapped my arms under his shoulders. The body had a distinct odor—a sterile coldness not so different from the damp stone walls. A trace of soap from his shirt lingered and reminded me that he had been a person with hopes and dreams that had ended far too young.
Lucy grunted as she lifted the man’s feet. “Is he filled with bricks?” she muttered.
“Bodies feel heavier when they’re stiff.”
She let his feet fall back to the bench. “I’m not going to ask how you know that. What do we do? We can’t possibly carry him on our own.”
I pulled a bone saw from my satchel and held it up to the glinting light. “We only need his head.”
“Juliet, no!”
I gave her a hard look as I knelt by the man’s chest, steadying the bone saw on his neck. “It isn’t going to kill him again,” I muttered, and threw my weight behind the saw.
It was grisly work, but at least his body was frozen, so there was little blood. Lucy fetched a pumpkin from McKenna’s pantry to place under the sheet so no one would notice a headless body anytime soon.
I stowed the head in my satchel, taking extra care not to damage the top of the spinal column. Lucy shivered and wrapped her arms across her chest as she turned to Edward’s body.
“What about Edward? We can’t very well cut him into pieces to carry up to the laboratory.”
I clenched my jaw. If we were going to bring him back, it had to be tonight, while there was ample lightning. We needed someone’s help, but I didn’t dare go to Montgomery or Carlyle, and the female servants weren’t any stronger than Lucy or I.
At last, I let out a frustrated groan, knowing I only had one choice.
“Wait here,” I muttered, hating myself for what I was about to do. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
I hurried up the stairs into the main section of the house, staying close to the walls where the floorboards squeaked less. I knocked gently on the same door I had so recently left from.
Balthazar opened it, dressed now in his striped blue pajamas, with Sharkey wagging his tail at his heels.
I couldn’t bring myself to look into his eyes. I whispered, “You said you felt compelled to obey Elizabeth, because she was the law. Does that extend to me as well, as the doctor’s daughter?”
“Oh, yes, miss,” he answered. “I’ve always striven to obey your law as well.”
I took a deep breath, hating myself even more. Balthazar deserved more respect than I was about to give him, and yet I was desperate. “Then come with me. I need your help with something. I fear you aren’t going to like it, and I’m sorry for making you do it. Regardless, you must keep it secret from everyone, even Montgomery.”
His face fell, and it nearly broke my heart. Father had been cruel, but I never had been. Not until that moment.
“I’m sorry, Balthazar,” I whispered. “But you really must come with me. It’s time for you to fill the role of Igor Zagoskin.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
THAT NIGHT, THE WORLD seemed bathed in blood.
With Balthazar’s help, we carried Edward’s body up the spiral stairs to Elizabeth’s laboratory. He said nothing as he carried Edward, and his silence tortured me with guilt all the more.
“Truly, Balthazar, I wouldn’t ask you to do this unless I had no choice.”
He laid out Edward’s body on the operating table and didn’t speak.
His sullen obedience gnawed at me like a rat’s teeth. Of course Balthazar would feel like what we were doing was wrong. If Father had bothered with an ounce of kindness, used anesthesia, taken care with his patients, then Balthazar might feel entirely differently. He might have even supported his work wholeheartedly.
He whined low in his throat, the strongest objection his sense of loyalty would allow him to make.
I closed my eyes. “You can wait outside, Balthazar. You don’t have to watch.”
“But we might need him,” Lucy whispered.
I shook my head. “We’ve already asked too much of him. Balthazar, please just keep watch and let us know if anyone’s coming.”
He gave me one long forlorn look, but there was a flicker of devotion there, too. Even after everything I’d made him do, he still saw me as his beloved master. It only made my heart ache more.
As soon as Lucy and I were alone, I opened the gash in Edward’s chest cavity and began to suture together the severed veins and arteries of his heart.
“Victor Frankenstein first arrived at the idea of reanimation by watching lightning,” I told her as I worked. “Elizabeth told me the story once. A sheep had died in a bog, much like the night I was nearly drowned. It was storming at the time. Lightning struc
k a tree and carried an electric current through the bog water. The jolt restarted the sheep’s circulatory system. Victor witnessed the entire thing.”
I finished repairing Edward’s heart, then took out the vagrant’s severed head and placed it on the table. I picked up the bone saw.
“Victor was entranced,” I continued, trying to keep Lucy focused on anything other than the fact that I was sawing a stranger’s head in two. “He started to replicate the effect of the lightning on small animals using the lightning rod. Then he discovered he could combine reanimation with surgery and build a human from disparate body parts. That led him to master organ transplantation. That’s why Elizabeth is so good at it, from studying his notes.” With a final heave I sawed clean through the man’s skull to expose the delicate brain. I set down the bone saw and wiped my brow. “She’s transplanted nearly every organ and body part, but never a brain. She never had the chance, because it requires both bodies to be deceased and she’s bound by her oath. One can’t go severing spinal columns while one’s patient is still alive.”
“No.” Lucy grimaced. “I don’t suppose so.”
I inserted forceps into the skull cavity and stretched back the bone, then used a scalpel to carefully remove the posterior lobe, severing the blood vessels and connective tissue, and setting it carefully on the table.
“When you switch this portion of the brain out with Edward’s,” Lucy asked hesitantly, “it won’t change him, will it? His personality, I mean.”
I prodded the posterior lobe gently, measuring the connective tissues to ensure a proper transplant. “No, it won’t. Remember how Edward told us about the ‘reptile brain’? I did more research on it. They call the posterior lobe that because it controls our most animalistic instincts, like impulse control and sexual drive and the voices that tell us we’re hungry or thirsty. It doesn’t store any memory or intelligence or personality; those reside in the front and center lobes of the brain, which will remain intact in Edward’s head. So the Edward we know should remain, but the Beast will be gone.”