child can never escape her father, the fortune-teller had said.
The sun sank over the horizon, meaning darkness would fall before I reached Ballentyne. I started to walk faster, but I couldn’t outrun my thoughts. There were times when I could almost feel Father in my head. I’d read enough research papers on genetics to know that a child naturally took on the properties of a parent. Even personality. Even an inclination toward madness. Is that what the fortune-teller had meant? Maybe there was no use fighting who one was—and I was inescapably a Moreau.
I must have been a mile and a half from the manor when a shriek like a child’s cry came from the moors. I froze. My stomach tightened with fear that Hensley or one of the young servants had gotten lost.
Alarmed, I pulled up my heavy winter skirts and trod into the heather toward the sound. The ground, normally frozen, had thawed a few inches and my boots sank into it, threatening to trap me. Crossing the moors was far more difficult than it seemed, each step sucking me down, heather catching me like thorns. The crying got louder. I scrambled up a small hill where the ground was more solid, and overlooked a bog with ice clinging to the edges.
A sheep was trapped up to its neck.
I drew in a sharp breath.
At least it isn’t a child, I thought, though that was small comfort: the sheep’s desperate bleats still pulled at my heart. Behind me, I could barely make out the road in the twilight. I couldn’t afford to stay out here on the moors with night falling. Yet the sheep would drown or freeze if I left it.
I started down the hill. My heart thudded, warning me to hurry. There were so few trees that it took me a precious few minutes to find a branch I could use. I came as close to the bog as I dared. The sheep had stopped struggling and bleated to me mournfully. I laid the tree branch close to give it purchase, but no matter how the sheep bucked, it couldn’t get out. I leaned closer, trying to grab hold of its mud-clotted wool. My fingers grazed its neck when the sheep bucked again, and I slipped off the branch, landing shin deep in the bog.
I cried out with the rush of cold. My dress was beyond ruined; Mrs. McKenna would have to cut it up for scraps. But I was in now, and I could reach the sheep. I waded a few steps closer, mud trying to suck me down, and wrapped my arms around the sheep’s neck and leg. I pulled, and it bucked in fear, succeeding only in dragging me down deeper with it. Mud crept up my stockings. A jolt of cold ran through me. I tugged my foot, but nothing happened.
Suddenly, I realized I wasn’t saving the sheep anymore.
I was just as stuck as it was.
Panic made my pulse race. I let go of the sheep and grabbed onto the tree branch, but it wasn’t attached to anything, and I only got stuck further in the muck. The sheep bleated frantically, frightened by my movements, and I sank deeper.
The sun set on the horizon.
I was going to die out here.
I screamed as loudly as I could until my voice was hoarse, until I could see only the horizon in the faint light, until the sheep gave up struggling.
Until a figure appeared on the horizon, as unreal in the twilight as a ghost.
It wasn’t until the figure came closer, walking expertly over the moors, that moonlight splashed over it and I recognized the face beneath the hooded cloak.
“Elizabeth!” I screamed.
She approached quickly but carefully, as though she’d spent her entire life learning how to navigate the hidden dangers of a bog—which I suppose she had. She wore a long brown cloak and a traveling gown, stained now with black peat. I didn’t notice the rifle in her hand until she was only feet away.
“Stop moving!” she called. “It only makes it worse.”
She lay down on the ground and held out the rifle. “Grab hold and don’t move. I’ll pull you in, but we must go slow.”
I curled my fingers on the rifle, heart pounding, fighting the instinct to kick as hard as I could. Inch by inch, she pulled the rifle toward her, giving the mud time to shift and release me. My heavy skirts caught on roots deep in the muddy waters. No matter how she pulled, she couldn’t tear me free.
“Your dress is caught,” she said. “You’ll have to take it off.”
I started on the row of buttons down the front of my dress with stiff fingers. Once I struggled out of it, the cold water bit at my skin through my underclothes, but I felt lighter, freer, and it didn’t take Elizabeth long to drag me to the bog’s edge and pull me from the water. I was slick with mud and shivering uncontrollably. She wrapped her cloak around me as I huddled on the ground, breathing in her rosewater scent.
“My God, Elizabeth, I nearly drowned …”
A shot rang out, and I jerked up with a cry.
The smell of burned gunpowder hung in the air. She’d shot the sheep to put it out of its misery. The poor animal sank into the bog, a part of the moors now.
She wiped the muck from my face. “I heard your screams from the road. Why are you out here alone?”
“I went to Quick for a wedding dress. God, it seems so stupid now. I heard the sheep—”
“Oh, you foolish girl. My carriage is waiting back at the road. Thank goodness I was held up in Liverpool or I’d have missed you completely. Let’s get you home before you freeze to death. Valentina knows which herbs to use in a bath to restore circulation.” She wrapped an arm around my shoulders and led me along the winding bog paths. It was dark now, clouds hiding the moon, steam rising from the horse’s nostrils. She helped me into the carriage.
I sank into the soft seats. “I’d have died if you hadn’t come just now.”
She leaned forward and rubbed my knee. “We von Steins pride ourselves on good timing.”
“Did you discover what the police know? Are they still after us? I read an article that John Radcliffe wrote about the massacre, and it made no mention of us.”
She rubbed my freezing hands in hers. “Right now you need to worry about getting warm, not the police. They won’t be storming the house tonight, I can promise that.” There was a troubled look on her face, though, and she pressed a hand against her coat, retucking a folded piece of paper that had nearly slipped out of her pocket.
We heard Lucy’s and Montgomery’s voices calling to us a quarter mile away, but it was Balthazar who reached us first. He flung open the carriage door and wrapped his arms around me. Montgomery raced up just behind him.
“Juliet, what happened?”
I couldn’t answer. I was shivering too hard.
Montgomery touched my hair, my face, my hands, as though reassuring himself I was intact. There might have been tension between us, but he still loved me.
“Balthazar, my friend,” he said, “carry her back to the manor, quick as you can.”
I hadn’t the strength to object when Balthazar scooped
