Elizabeth had changed into a simple white lace dress with a housecoat, elegant as always. The only clue to the night’s horror was her hair, which now hung limp down her back, instead of in its usual curls. I thought of her petting the wooden cuckoo bird, and my heart clenched all over again.
“Well, drink,” she said, as none of us took our cups. “The man loved a good licorice tea. You’re doing his memory a disservice by letting it go cold.”
Montgomery cleared his throat and took a cup with the awkward manners of a former servant who wasn’t used to being served himself. “Very grateful, madam.” He’d pulled his hair back and unbuttoned his shirt a few buttons, and he looked quite possibly like the most handsome man I’d ever seen.
“Now that the professor is gone, your guardianship falls to me, Juliet.” Elizabeth paused, as though there was something more she wished to say. But her eyes flashed to Balthazar in the corner, and she shook her head, changing her mind. “It’s been a long night. We should all get as much sleep as we can.”
She pressed her lips to my forehead and whispered a prayer I couldn’t make out.
As soon as she was gone, I slumped in the chair, exhausted. Montgomery asked Balthazar to take Sharkey into the kitchen for a cup of water, with a mind to spare his friend the conversation I knew we were fated to have.
The fire crackled, and the room smelled like licorice, and all I could picture was blood.
“It was the Beast,” I whispered.
Montgomery ran a hand over his face. “I know.”
“He killed the professor, Montgomery. He has to be stopped.”
“I’ve been scouring the city. He hasn’t left a single track.”
I swallowed. He hadn’t left a track because I’d told him his previous room at the brothel wasn’t safe and then warned him about Montgomery following him, and this is what my warning had gotten us—the professor, murdered.
“He was staying in a lodging house in Shoreditch, the attic room, for a time,” I said softly. “Though you’ll never find him there now; he wouldn’t dare return after this, nor to the room he kept before. But I know how we can find him. Wait here.” I ran upstairs and retrieved the pressed white flower from within my journal, then returned and set it on the tea table. “He leaves these at his crime scenes. They’re very rare; he must be getting them from somewhere.”
Montgomery took the flower from the table, and my stomach cringed to see such a delicate thing in his graceless hands, afraid he’d crush it. My anguished heart didn’t know what to make of all this. Edward had never betrayed me, and yet now I forsook him in cold blood. But what choice did we have?
When I opened my eyes, Montgomery’s blue eyes held a strange sort of look, almost as though I was a stranger to him. He had only looked at me that way once before, when I had frantically climbed into the wagon on the island as the compound had burned—only seconds after I had helped kill my father. To this day, I still didn’t know if he had seen how I’d helped Jaguar enter the laboratory.
That’s when I realized the look in his eye was fear. He was afraid of the things I was capable of. He was afraid of me. My heart surged again in worry, and I bit my lip nearly hard enough to taste blood. Did he know my greatest secret? Had he seen what I’d done that night on the island?
Would he still love me if he did?
“We’ll find out where the flower’s from,” he said carefully. “And then we’ll do what needs to be done.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE FLOWER SHOP WHERE I sold my grafted rosebushes was one of London’s finest, owned by a Middle Eastern couple who imported their flowers from countries I’d scarcely even heard of. As I made my way toward Narayan Flowers & Wholesalers, I clutched my satchel with the journal inside. It had taken some time to convince Montgomery that instead of coming with me, his time would be better spent eavesdropping on the King’s Club members.
I entered the flower shop, jumping as the bell tinkled above the glass door. A dark-skinned middle-aged woman in a bright orange scarf leaned over the counter. She held a broom in her hand as elegantly as a parasol’s handle.
“Ah, Miss Moreau. How are those roses coming?” She set the broom aside and brushed clippings off the counter-top, sending dancing pollen into the hazy morning sunlight. It smelled of summertime here, amid the flowers that watched from every corner with perfect and still attention.
“I hope to have a few more finished before New Year’s, Mrs. Narayan, but I actually came today to ask you a question. Do you know anything about tropical flowers?”
She gave me half a smile. “Where do you think we import most of these from?”
I took a hesitant step forward, clutching my journal through the satchel’s stiff leather. I dared a glance at the street outside, nervous about revealing the flower, which by all rights should have been logged into Scotland Yard’s evidence file.
“Would you take a look at a flower to see if you can identify it?” I asked.
“Of course. Let’s see it,” she said, nodding to the counter.
I slid the flower from my journal’s pages and set it on the counter. “I’d like to know where one can buy them in town. It’s quite important.”
She stooped down, eying the flower almost nose to nose. A tiny, feathered white seedpod drifted across the room to settle on my coat sleeve. I pressed it between my fingers as if it might grant a wish.
To find Edward, I wished on impulse. To be wrong about him, and learn the professor’s death was caused by something else, someone else. . . .