“They’re called the King’s Club. You’ve heard of them, I’m sure—the professor was a member, though briefly. They want to continue my father’s experimentations, and they’ve already begun. We found a laboratory.”
She leaned back, thinking. “The King’s Club, involved in all this . . .”
“I know it’s difficult to believe,” I said.
“Oh, I never said that,” she said dryly. “I never trusted a single one of those men, and neither did the professor, which is precisely why he left their ranks. Do you recall hearing about the cholera epidemic of 1854?”
I nodded, thinking back to the royal decree framed in the King’s Club’s smoking room. “The King’s Men were involved in stopping it, if I recall,” I said. “Part of their charitable work.”
Elizabeth let out a harsh burst of air. “Charitable work? I hardly think so. If anyone benefited from the epidemic, it was the King’s Men’s own bank accounts. The city invested in a new system of waterworks and sewers for the city, and their companies produced all the granite and piping for that project. And I know for a fact that one of their members was a doctor of epidemiology.”
I leaned closer. “Are you saying they started the epidemic for their own monetary gain?”
She shrugged a little stiffly. “There’s no evidence, of course, but that’s what the professor suspected.” She leaned back, picking anxiously at her fingernails. “For the last few years they’ve sent representatives around to visit the professor, trying to get him to rejoin, pestering him about our ancestors’ journals. I’m sure that’s what the professor thought Isambard Lessing was after. He must have been shocked when Lessing mentioned your name instead.”
I tilted my head, thinking of those journals stacked upstairs in the professor’s study. “What’s in those journals that they want so badly?” I asked.
Elizabeth followed my gaze. “The ones up there collecting dust are nothing but genealogical records. I have the rest of our family’s history at the manor in Scotland, well hidden.” She stood to stir the fire. Her movements had a practiced calm to them that suggested she wasn’t a stranger to midnight surprises such as this. I wondered what exactly her life was like, in the wilds so far north. I suppose a woman living all alone had to be prepared for anything.
“We need your help,” I said. “Your silence, nothing more. As long as Edward is locked in that cellar, he can’t hurt anyone. We just have to develop a cure for his condition before the King’s Club finds him.”
“I can certainly offer you my silence,” she said slowly. “And more than that. I’ve developed treatments before. I can help you cure him.”
The look in her cold blue eyes had softened. I remembered her pressing her lips to my forehead like a mother to a child, and my heart clenched.
“You’d do that for us?” I whispered.
She came and sat beside me, touching my hand. “You’re my ward now, Juliet. That means we’re family. My uncle used to say nothing is more important than family.”
I wasn’t certain what to do with her words. Both my parents had been absent most of my life. I hadn’t siblings. All my relatives had cast me out. In the last year the word family had come only to mean betrayal, at least until Montgomery’s marriage proposal. Now he would be my family, and I his. But a husband wasn’t the same as a mother, a father, a brother. Elizabeth’s words gave me hope for a bond like that again.
Tentatively, I squeezed her hand.
THE MORNING SKY WAS a thin, hazy gray as we trudged the short few blocks to the funeral at St. Matthew’s Church. The idea of so many strangers’ faces caused wracking tremors in my wrists, but I pulled on gloves and ignored the pain. I had promised Elizabeth.
The professor had been well-known, so I wasn’t surprised to see a long line of fine carriages waiting to drop off attendees, but I hadn’t expected the sprawling crowd pressed against the churchyard gates, sailors and vendors and all manner of people dressed in shabby winter coats, whispering hushed rumors into the cold morning air. Two or three wore cheap metal breastplates and clutched smeared newspapers.
They weren’t there to mourn the professor, I realized with a sickening lurch. They had come to ogle the Wolf’s latest violence. This was a circus to them. A heartless game.
Montgomery’s hand tightened in mine.
“How could they,” I hissed as my joints twisted, angry as my heart. I would have cursed much louder if the crowd hadn’t caught sight of us in our church finery and badgered us with probing questions. Did you see the body, miss? Was there blood? Did ya see the flower?
I felt at the point of screaming before Montgomery shoved through them to escort Elizabeth and me through the gate. She was the type to go quiet with rage, a dangerous sort. It wasn’t until we were inside the palatial church with the doors firmly closed that color returned to her face.
“A travesty,” she spat. “If it’s the Wolf they want, it’s the Wolf they deserve.”
Inside, the crowd wasn’t much better. Hundreds of faces turned at our entrance, all harshly kind, pitying smiles mixed with flickers of scandal in their eyes. Whispers, whispers, whispers. How they must have reveled in the fact that the madman’s daughter was caught up in yet another horrific scandal.
At least one friendly face caught mine in the crowd: Lucy. She waved to me quietly from a pew near the front, where she sat with her parents and Inspector Newcastle. He nodded to me solemnly, and then whispered something to Lucy, who looked at him in surprise and shook her head.