each of us a glass, but Lucy waved it away, and so did Montgomery. He stood, tucking the poster into his pocket. “I’m going to show this to Balthazar, but I’d prefer to keep it hidden from the rest of the staff. It’s best they don’t know our pasts.”
He strode out of the room.
Elizabeth drank the gin he’d left behind, and then Lucy’s, too. “I know it’s a terrible shock,” she said, “but I assure you that you’re quite safe here. It seems our more pressing concern is Mr. Prince’s health. McKenna told me he’s still alive, in and out of consciousness, which is a miracle itself. With the amount of arsenic he took, a normal man would be dead in days.”
“Yes, about Edward.” I exchanged a glance with Lucy and then dropped my voice. “There’s something rather pressing we must discuss. He had a moment of lucidity a few nights ago. He told Lucy and me that the Beast was caused by a disease in the brain and was curable if we could drain or transplant the diseased organ.” I knit my fingers as I explained the rest of what Edward had said and why we’d kept the information to ourselves.
“We thought with your advanced medical knowledge,” Lucy added, “there might be something you can do.” The light from the fire illuminated her desperation.
“I see.” Elizabeth was quiet, thinking, as the fire crackled and popped. Hensley crawled along the floor by Elizabeth’s feet, laying out bits of dried cheese for his rat. The rat tried to scurry away and Hensley grabbed it hard, hugging it to his chest, stroking it fiercely.
“Don’t run away,” he whispered. “It isn’t safe.”
Elizabeth murmured something in his ear about giving his pet some bread to calm it down, and Hensley relented and handed her the rat. She quickly slipped it into her pocket, which she buttoned closed, but I couldn’t help but notice the rat wasn’t moving. I dared not ask her about it now, though, with so much hanging in the balance for Edward.
Elizabeth let out a deep sigh.
“I can tell how hopeful you both are about this new development, but I’m afraid I shall have to be the bearer of bad news. Organ transplantations are possible, in some cases. I transplanted a liver, and I’ve heard of it done with lungs and kidneys, even a heart once—they kept the blood flowing during the procedure with artificial pumps. However, the brain is central to life. If the spinal column or cranial complex is severed or even badly damaged, death is immediate. There would be no way to perform a brain transplant on a living person. It’s a paradoxical situation, you see. The procedure might cure him, but he would have to be dead for us to perform it.”
The fire crackled more, as the hope slowly drained out of Lucy’s face. Her bottom lip started to tremble.
“I can make his days as pleasant and comfortable as possible,” Elizabeth said softly. “That’s all, I’m afraid. If he is to defeat the Beast, he will have to do it on his own.”
“But he isn’t strong enough on his own!” Lucy cried. She pushed off from the sofa, tears streaking down her face, and ran out of the room. I stood to go after her but stopped. What could I possibly say to her to make things better?
Elizabeth picked up a sleepy Hensley in her arms. It was hard to reconcile the two sides of her—I had always thought of her as a brilliant and cold surgeon, not unlike my father. Now I saw her as a mother, too.
I swallowed. “How do you do it?” I asked quietly. She cocked her head in question. I explained, “How do you ignore the voices in your head? The ones that won’t let you just be happy. The ones that want more out of life. More like what men are free to do—study what they want, go where they want, be who they want.”
Her smile was rather tight. She held up the glass as Hensley fell asleep on her shoulder. “I drown them in gin, but I’d be no kind of guardian if I recommended that.”
Days passed, and Edward’s fever still didn’t break.
We moved about the manor like unquiet ghosts. McKenna tried to brighten our gloom with talk of the wedding. She sent the girls out to prune the flowering trees in the garden so the spring would be full of new growth, and prepared entrees for us to sample for the wedding feast, but it was increasingly impossible to ignore the feverish moans coming from Edward’s room. Lucy attended to his bedside day and night.
“You’re going to make yourself sick,” I told her one morning. “Take a break. Let me watch him.”
“Your bedside manner is deplorable.” She tried unsuccessfully to feed him broth. “You’d poke and prod him so much, he’d never want to get better.”
She tried to feed him more broth, but he turned his head, eyes glassy and unfocused, and mumbled something incomprehensible. Sometimes he seemed to be aware of who we were, and in the next moment he’d push the bowl away and shudder.
“It’s getting worse,” she muttered, mopping up the spilled broth. “No matter what Elizabeth said, I can’t help but think …” Her voice trailed off as she caught sight of something over my shoulder. “Goodness, do you see that? It looks like the moors are on fire!”
I whirled toward the windows, where the blackness was broken by huge flames in the lower fields. I pressed my face against the glass.
“Montgomery!” I called. “Balthazar, hurry!”
They soon appeared, and I pointed beyond the window. “The fields are on fire,” I gasped. “Stay with Edward. I’ll find Elizabeth and warn her.” I turned to go.
“Juliet, wait.” Montgomery’s voice was steady and calm, almost light. “It’s just a bonfire. Look.”
I squinted into the darkness. He was right—it was a controlled blaze in the lower field. I let out the tension in one long breath.
“It’s the festival of Twelfth Night,” Montgomery explained. “It’s a pagan holiday in this area. Carlyle told me about it while I was helping him chop firewood yesterday. The highlanders celebrate it out here, where no preachers are around to tell them not to.”
The flames rose higher, crackling with sparks. Now I could make out clusters of people around the bonfire, some of them dancing. My heart lurched. With Edward so ill, it had been a long time since we’d all laughed and danced, that carefree.
“The whole household must be down there,” I said. “No wonder it’s quiet as a church around here.”
Lucy tsked as she squinted toward the fire, exhaustion written in her features. “To think they didn’t invite us.”
“They probably thought we wouldn’t approve of a pagan festival,” I said. “We being such civilized city folk and all.”
Lucy rolled her eyes.
Balthazar turned to Montgomery, fingers knit together. “I’ve never seen a festival before.” He paused and sniffed the air. “Roast pig with honey. Oh, Sharkey loves roast pig. Might we go?”
Montgomery seemed amused. “Certainly you may go, Balthazar, and I’ve no doubt Sharkey would be welcome, too.”
Balthazar
