The Madman’s Daughter (30 page)

I rushed forward. “Stop it!”

But it connected with a sickening crack. Blood flowed from his shredded knuckles. I locked my hands around his wrist.

“Stop it!” I said. “It won’t change anything.”

“Let go!” His loose hair was caked in sweat and grit. The muscles in his arm flexed like steel clockwork below his skin. It took all my strength to hold his fist back from pounding into the wall again.

“He’s going to hurt himself,” Father said. “I’ll prepare a shot of morphine.”

Montgomery reeled toward him. “I don’t want your drugs. I don’t want anything from you!”

Father ran a shaking hand over his chin’s thin white hairs. For a moment I thought he might apologize or, at the
least, offer some condolence. But then his black eyes iced over. “That suits me. You were worthless anyway.”

Montgomery’s arm jerked back. In another second his fist would have slammed into my father’s face, but I threw my arms around him.

“Come on,” I whispered. I touched his hot cheek, his tense shoulders, trying to calm him. Alice’s cold flesh lay by our feet on the kitchen floor. Her blood soaked into the mortar. It could have been me. It could have been any of us. The thought nauseated me. “You need air. You need to clear your head.”

He strained against my arm, pacing like a wild animal, but I was able to gradually pull him away from her body, through the broken gate, and away from the compound.

I found a grassy place against the vine-covered outside wall where we could see the sparkling ocean. I sat down, but it took him some time to calm. I tore a strip of cloth from the hem of my skirt.

“Let me bandage your hand. You’re getting blood everywhere.”

His blue eyes met mine. The wild animal was still there, still restless. But there was pain, too. He sat down next to me and tied his hair back. I gently wiped away the blood from his busted knuckles. His jaw had a hard edge. He was so handsome it made my pulse race.

“I’m sorry,” I said, winding the strip of linen around his hand.

He didn’t answer.

I pictured Alice’s white feet in the mud, glad I hadn’t
seen her cold, dead face. “I know she loved you,” I said before I could stop myself. “And I know I came between you. If I’d never come, maybe she’d still be alive.”

His deep eyes could carry every burden in the world. I tied off the bandage, tucking in the frayed edge. It was already damp with sweat and blood. “It’s not your fault,” he said.

“Did you love her?” She was dead, not even buried, but I couldn’t keep my frantic thoughts to myself. My voice rose in a hysterical pitch. “If I hadn’t come, would you have married her?”

His eyebrows were a line of worry. “What are you talking about?”

“You always wanted to save people. She was an orphan. The only missionary left. How could you not have fallen in love with her?”

“Blast and damn.” His head fell back against the wall, crushing the vine’s little white flowers. “I wasn’t in love with Alice. God, Juliet, I thought you knew. She wasn’t one of the missionaries.” He paused, not meeting my eyes. “She was a creation.”

My breath caught. I pushed my hair back with shaking hands. Alice? The sweet girl who carried the comb of my silver brush set, one of
them
? I felt my head shaking forcefully. “That’s impossible. She was human.”

“She looked human,” Montgomery said. Sweat beaded on his forehead. His wounded hand tensed. “But she was created two years ago from a sheep and three rabbits.”

“Rabbits?” I put my fingers to my lips, as if I could feel the word. As if that might make it more believable.

Her harelip.
They are all flawed
, Father had said. I tried to piece it together, to make sense of the puzzle. Alice had dodged my questions about her past. God, I’d been such a fool. When I called Balthazar and the others animals, I’d been calling her the same.

“I thought you said it couldn’t be done.” I swallowed back my rising fear. “You said he couldn’t make them look completely human.”

The blood drained from Montgomery’s face. He took a deep breath. “He can’t.”

It came to me then. A whisper of an idea.

“You made her,” I said. Not a question. An accusation.

He rubbed a hand over tired eyes. The wound had reopened, and blood seeped through the bandage.

“How could you?” I whispered, lips trembling. “Just like Father …” Blood rushed in my ears. I tried to stand, but he grabbed my hips and pulled me back to the grass.

“What’s done is done! If I’m to go to hell, so be it. But I’m not like him.” The force of his anger was a slap in the face. It wasn’t me he was angry at, but himself. He let me go and stood up, grabbing the iron bars outside my window. Like he deserved a prison.

“It was a mistake,” he said. “I knew that from the beginning. Your father and I had an argument. One of his creatures died on the operating table. I tried to warn him. I saw the errors in his work. But he’ll never admit to mistakes. He told me he was the doctor and I was a servant, and it would always be that way.” His knuckles tightened on the bars. “I wanted to prove him wrong.”

The breeze off the ocean blew a strand of hair into his face. He hadn’t said it in so many words, but I understood. By creating Alice, he had bested my father at his own work. With no formal training, as only a teenage boy.

And they called my father a genius.

I looked at him askance. I had underestimated him. We all had. As much as I cared about him, I always thought of him as the handsome, brooding assistant. Edward was the clever, educated one. Montgomery was a workhorse, strong and faithful.

But if he could make Alice, what else was he capable of?

“It was wrong.” He turned away from the window, plucking a flower from the vine and tucking it behind my ear, as thought it could protect me. “And now she’s dead, and so we are all if we don’t find Ajax.”

“Ajax?” I asked. “Don’t you think it was the monster who killed her?”

He frowned. “What monster?”

I paused. Didn’t he know? Alice had been terrified of something very real, and it wasn’t Ajax. Montgomery had been gone for months. Long enough, I supposed, for Father to create some terrible new creature without his knowledge.

The trees rustled in front of us. The sound of footsteps came from the jungle.

I slowly stood. Montgomery stepped in front of me protectively.

The footsteps grew louder.

Something was coming.

M
ONTGOMERY PULLED A BLADE
out of his boot. The footsteps were running now. Whatever it was, it tore through the jungle. I clawed at his arm. We had to get back inside the compound.

But Montgomery wouldn’t come. His eyes were the steely color of ice. He wanted to be there when the monster returned. He wanted to ram the knife into its murderous flesh.

The leaves trembled just beyond the line of trees. The muscles in his arm tensed, ready to strike. A figure came out of the woods, tearing at the leaves. I grabbed the blade from Montgomery. I had recognized Edward a second before Montgomery did, and that might have saved his life.

“Devil in hell,” Montgomery cursed. “You gave us a fright, Prince.”

Patches of blood streaked Edward’s shirt. Scratches formed lines over his face. He braced himself on his knees to catch his breath.

“Are you all right?” I asked, just as breathless. “Is something chasing you?” The jungle was silent, but silence could hide danger.

“I don’t know.” He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “I heard noises. I ran. It might have been only my imagination.” His sleeve was torn. A gash ran down one arm. Blood seeped through his shirt where his shoulder met his neck. He touched the blood, wincing. “Damn thorns are big as my thumb.” He looked between me and Montgomery. “What are you doing outside the walls?”

He hadn’t been here. He didn’t know about Alice.

Montgomery slid the knife back into his boot. “I have work to do.” His voice was dead again. He wanted it to have been the monster, I realized, to exact his revenge. “I have a casket to make,” he muttered over his shoulder.

Edward’s face went slack. A question formed on his lips.

“For Alice,” I said hesitantly.

Edward collapsed against the wall, wiping a hand over his white face. “How? When?”

“While we were in the village. Something broke into the compound. It tore down the gate.”

“There are iron reinforcements.”

“Even so.” I took a deep breath. “Come inside. I’ll dress those cuts.” Between him and Montgomery, at least I was getting some use out of my medical knowledge.

We climbed through the splintered gate and passed the area outside the kitchen. They had moved Alice’s body, but the tiles were stained red. Edward was silent.

Most of the medical supplies were in the laboratory, but I knew there was a small kit in the servants’ bunkhouse. The quarters were spartan, simple, just as I’d imagined. Two beds for Balthazar and Puck and a floor pallet for Cymbeline, though he’d disappeared back to the village when the treatments stopped. The sheets were crisp and white. A woven ring hung above one of the beds, rich in red-and-gold threads, as if it was meant to capture nightmares before they could enter the sleeper’s mind.

I pulled open the desk drawers until I found a length of cloth and a pair of scissors.

“Sit down,” I said. “Take off your shirt.”

He pulled out the stool and obliged. His skin was pale except for his tanned arms and a sunburned ring around his neck. In addition to the cuts on his arm and neck, a dark-blue bruise covered his ribs.

“Thorns did this?” I said.

“Everything here’s dangerous. Even the damn plants.”

I poured iodine onto a clean rag.
I should bandage Montgomery’s knuckles, too
, I thought briefly. But he’d never sit still long enough. I dabbed the iodine on Edward’s cuts. The sting didn’t seem to affect him, but when my fingertips grazed his skin, his stomach muscles contracted sharply.

“You’re too good for him,” he said.

I dabbed the rag carefully around his cuts. I didn’t need to ask who he meant. “He’s a good man,” I said. “He’s smarter than he looks.” I tried to keep my fingers from shaking.
So smart he made Alice
, I thought, but I kept that to myself.

“A good man wouldn’t have brought you here.”

I turned away to measure lengths of cloth. It wasn’t a discussion I was willing to have. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I could win.

“Your father wants us matched,” he stated. As if I needed reminding.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t talk about that.”

“We have to talk about it! We’ve all been dancing around it.…”

“Fine, then.” I balled the cloth in my fist. “Why don’t we talk about why you killed Antigonus, then? I must have missed when you and my father became so close that you decided it was all right to kill to defend him.”

The tic in his jaw pulsed slightly. For a moment his face seemed undecided as he tilted it slightly toward the door. He brushed at his chin as if he could sweep away the tic. “I wasn’t thinking. I saw the blade in Antigonus’s hand, and it was just instinct. It wasn’t your father I was trying to defend, Juliet. I swore to protect you. To be honest, your father could be sliced through the chest tomorrow, and I wouldn’t blink.” He paused. “I’m sorry. That was heartless.”

I shook my head. I didn’t like what the island was doing to us, making Edward a killer and me so unhinged. I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter that Edward had killed one of them so easily. It wasn’t in cold blood. It was defense.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We need to focus on leaving.” I wrapped the cloth around the gash on his shoulder, glad that at least I could fix one thing. But what was one bandage going to do against the madness out there?
I had an overwhelming feeling that the island wanted to sink its thorns into us, to bind us to this place.

“Even if we left,” I said, fighting to keep an even tone, “even with water and food, how could a ship possibly find us? One tiny dinghy might as well be a piece of driftwood!”

I jerked my head toward the sea, angry at myself for being weak. I should have been stronger. Edward wrapped an arm around my back. I buried my face in the soft bandage on his shoulder.

“We’re going to die, aren’t we?” I asked bitterly.

He held me so tight I could hardly breathe. But I wanted tighter still. “Not here. I swear it.”

T
HAT EVENING, THE CHIME
of bells mixed with jungle birdsongs. I found the wagon in the courtyard with all the men gathered. The gate had been hastily repaired with scrap wood from the barn. Boards from the same source formed a simple wooden box the length of a small person.

“Let’s be done with it then,” Father said. He took a lantern. Balthazar and Puck slid the coffin into the wagon bed.

I pulled a shawl around my blouse. “Where are you taking her?” I asked.

Montgomery paused with his hand on Duke’s harness. The rifle was slung over his chest. A pistol glinted at his side. “We’ve got to burn the body,” he said. He swung into the driver’s seat.

My stomach turned. “But you dug graves for the others.”

“That was before. They’ll dig her up now. The regression gives them a better sense of smell.”

Balthazar held his hand out to help me into the wagon. I shook my head, remembering the buzzing flies and bloody canvas wrap. I’d rather walk than ride with another dead body.

At a click from Montgomery, Duke heaved at the wagon. We followed its deep tracks into the jungle. Father’s small lantern was our one light in the darkness. I matched my steps to Edward’s. A rifle hung over his shoulder, too. One of the new ones from London. I raised my eyebrows.

He jerked his head toward my father. “Apparently killing a man makes me trustworthy enough to get one of the good rifles.”

We walked for some time. The only sounds came from the jungle and the squeak of Duke’s harness. I heard the sea before I saw it. The dirt path turned to sand under our feet, and then suddenly we were there, bathed in moonlight, beside the churning tide. Montgomery stopped the wagon. Balthazar and Puck took out armfuls of wood and started down the dock.