I froze at the word. Blatherskite. Not a common term, yet I’d heard it before. I remembered standing with Montgomery in Lucy’s garden the night of the masquerade, eavesdropping on the King’s Club members overhead. One of them had used that word.
I peered keenly at Newcastle. Perhaps it was a coincidence. Like the missing flower, it proved nothing. We had seen the roster of King’s Club members, seen the photograph, and Newcastle wasn’t in it.
“Your theory, Miss Moreau?” he prompted kindly.
I gave him a second glance. He said he trusted my opinion, but what inspector would take anything seriously said by a seventeen-year-old girl? I bit my lip. Perhaps he was only humoring me because I was a friend of Lucy’s. I sat down slowly, trying to make sense of it.
“Yes, my theory,” I started. “It has to do with the missing flower, and why the professor was so unlike the other victims.” My mouth felt dry, and I swallowed hard. Newcastle was watching me intently, seemingly patiently, though his fingers were drumming on his desk.
Why would someone merely humoring a young woman listen so anxiously?
My eyes fell on the brown folder, and I looked closer. Unless I was mistaken, I had seen that handwriting before. I scooted closer, clearing my throat, using my illness as a reason to lean on his desk.
The particular slope to the l’s, the flourish of the g’s. Yes, it was quite familiar. I had seen it only days ago and remarked on it, but where?
The hidden laboratory in King’s College, I realized. The journals.
My insides shrank. The handwriting was the same as that in the journals kept by the King’s Club’s scientist who monitored the water tanks. Inspector Newcastle was that scientist; he had to be. But how had he learned so much about biochemistry? I clenched my fist to keep it from shaking as I looked around the room, at the books, the paintings. The plaque over his desk said he majored in forensics. Forensics was the study both of criminal investigation and medicine. He wasn’t just an inspector, then.
He was also a scientist.
The air in the room started to feel too thin. I did the calculations in my head as fast as I could—Inspector Newcastle was the right age to have been one of Father’s students.
All of it came together in one terrible suspicion.
Was John Newcastle one of them?
I thought back to what I knew of him. When he’d caught me searching the cadaver room . . . hadn’t the door he’d emerged from been the same one that led to the subbasement laboratory?
Newcastle regarded my silence strangely. I grabbed the handkerchief and dabbed at my eyes to cover my shock. Is this why he had asked me so many questions about Father? Why he was so ingratiating to me?
This entire time, he’d played me for a fool.
“I wonder if I might have a cup of that tea after all,” I stuttered. “Thinking of the professor, I find myself quite weak all of a sudden.”
I forced a few tears, which looked all the more convincing given how hard I was shaking.
“Certainly,” Newcastle jumped up, thrown by the sight of a woman crying in his office. He opened the door. “Marlowe? Where the devil did that man get to . . . One moment, Miss Moreau.” His footsteps echoed in the hallway as he disappeared.
The minute he was gone, I practically crawled over his desk. I opened the folder and found pages of notes and letters, but nothing out of the ordinary. I searched through Newcastle’s drawers frantically, finding more letters and journals, but none in Father’s handwriting, none that spoke of an island or experimentation.
I heard a door closing downstairs and was about to return to my seat when my eyes settled on a familiar emblem printed on one of his envelopes. An image of Prometheus bringing fire to mankind, writing in Latin encircling it.
Ex scientia vera. From knowledge, truth.
The motto of King’s Club—I recognized it from the old photograph hanging in the King’s College hallways.
With trembling fingers I opened the letter, read the contents. An induction letter into the King’s Club, pending certain unspecified achievements, to be announced and enacted upon in the new year.
I dropped the letter, stunned. It fell on a tin of tobacco and a handful of personal trinkets. Cuff links, a cigar clipper, an old pair of spectacles.
Trembling, I lifted the spectacles to the light. They were simple, well-worn, with wire rims that curved around the ear. There was a scratch on the left lens and a single drop of blood on the right.
They belonged to the professor.
I dropped them back into the drawer and slammed it shut, skirting away from the desk as though it had singed my flesh.
There was only one reason Inspector Newcastle would have the professor’s missing spectacles among his personal effects, not carefully catalogued into the evidence room as they should be: The Beast had been telling the truth. He didn’t kill the professor. Inspector Newcastle must have arranged for the professor’s murder—or had killed him himself, though I couldn’t imagine it.
Either way, I was in the den of the enemy.
I flung open the door, racing down the polished-wood floor. I nearly tripped on the stairs in my hurry to get back to Montgomery and tell him everything—that Newcastle was a King’s Man, was Moreau’s protégé, had framed Edward in what must have been a bid to get me to cooperate—but I ran into Newcastle himself coming up the stairs.
“Miss Moreau,” he said, shocked to see me. “The tea will be up momentarily. Why are you—”
“I’m nauseous, I’m afraid,” I stuttered. “It came upon me all of a sudden. We can continue this conversation later.”