Elizabeth blew out the candles one by one, then turned to me in the faint light from the tall windows.
“Come upstairs, Juliet. Enough of all these old memories. Let me draw you a bath, and after a good soak, you’ll feel new again. I promise.”
AS SCALDING WATER TUMBLED into the claw-foot bath, Elizabeth poured in a handful of foaming salts that filled the room with the smell of roses. I balled myself up in the tub, na**d beneath the foam but not self-conscious. Elizabeth had a motherly way about her, though she was childless. She took a comb to my hair and hummed a slow little tune while the water crept higher. The melody filled the room like steam, and at last I recognized it.
“The Holy and the Ivy,” an ancient carol with pagan roots.
I closed my eyes and hugged my legs harder, laying my cheek on my knee. I liked how the sound of the water mixed with Elizabeth’s carol singing to drown out my thoughts. My mother had never prepared a bath for me like this. We always had servants to do it when I was young, and then after the scandal we were lucky to clean ourselves in a neighbor’s tepid bathwater.
“Don’t you get lonely?” I asked. “Out there on the moors.”
The comb drifted through my hair, pulling gently at the knots. “No,” she said simply. “There are the servants, and a little village across the causeway, and Inverness is a day’s journey if I’m desperate for a new dress.”
“Desperate for a new dress?” I asked skeptically. Elizabeth’s clothes were beautiful because she was beautiful, but no one would ever call them fashionable.
She gave a light laugh. “Well, I’d be far more likely to be desperate for some gin, but don’t tell the professor that.”
Rose-scented steam clouded around me, hiding my smile. But it faded quickly. Part of me wanted to confess everything to her, the real reason I snuck off at night and stayed out late, and how Sharkey followed me because of the smells from the butcher’s. I wanted her to kiss my forehead and tell me I wasn’t anything like my father. But I knew I never would confess. I couldn’t.
“I knew them both, you know,” she said. Her tone was softer now. I opened an eye to look at her. “Your mother was six years older than me. I spent most of my life in Scotland, on my family’s estate. All those fine old portraits hanging in the foyer—the figures in them look well groomed, don’t they? Rich as they are, they’re all illegitimate children.” She laughed.
“The von Steins were from Switzerland but there was an affair, a Scottish lord’s daughter, and that’s how my grandparents came to own Balintore Manor. The professor doesn’t like to talk about it, but the von Steins have as many skeletons in their closet as your own family, I’d wager. Each summer when I’d come back to London, your mother would take me for ice cream or chocolate biscuits, as though I was her baby sister. Our families were distant cousins, I believe, by marriage. I was sixteen when she married your father. Such a serious older man he seemed to me then, but handsome in his way. I remember one time your mother was ill, and he took me for ice cream instead, and told me about the work he was doing and how he wanted to save lives. I’ll admit I had a bit of a schoolgirl crush on him. I suppose in part, that’s why I went into medicine myself, though I had to teach myself nearly everything I know.”
The comb caught on a tangle in my hair, and she paused to free it. “Whatever the professor has told you about your father, you must understand that he’s biased. He felt as though one of his oldest friends betrayed him, which left more than a sour taste in his mouth. But as bad as your father’s crimes were, there was good in him, too. When he was younger he laughed more, and he danced with your mother at all the finest balls, and if someone was ill in the middle of the night, he’d throw a housecoat over his pajamas and come running.”
She finished combing my hair. The bath was nearly full, and she turned off the roaring water, plunging us in silence save for the soft crackling of bursting bubbles. She set a fresh towel on the side of the tub, and then leaned over and petted my head softly.
“Hate the part of him that gave in to madness. But don’t hate your father, not all of him. There was a time when he loved you very much, and that’s what you should remember.”
She smiled a little sadly, and dried her hands on the towel in her lap, and then left me among the smell of roses, where I stayed until the water grew as cold as the snow gently falling outside.
LATER THAT EVENING, AFTER the professor had gone to bed and Elizabeth retired to the library, I crept into the professor’s study. It was a tidy place, with a cat curled in the desk chair, and letters paperweighted with the family crest, and a forgotten old stuffed bobcat perched on the upper shelves. I was looking for valerian, a distilled herb with sedative effects used to treat sleeplessness and restlessness, which Father had often used to calm his beast-men; but I also searched for any clue that would definitively rule out the professor as Father’s correspondent. I flipped through the letters, all of them useless, and then opened his desk drawers and rooted through the assortment of papers and notebooks within. There was nothing to indicate he wasn’t simply a retired academic from King’s College, who volunteered at a clinic for the poor on Sundays and donated generously to foundations for medical scholarships.
I pushed aside a stack of boxes stacked in front of the study’s little closet, and coughed as dust poured out when I opened the door. If he’d been corresponding with Father within the last year, then it certainly wasn’t in here. Everything in the closet—his old medical bag, stacks of ancient journals with vellum pages—hadn’t been touched in a decade. I carefully flipped through the journals’ crisp, delicate pages, out of curiosity. Family heirlooms, it seemed, and most written in German. Then I opened his bag and found what I needed. Both distilled and powdered valerian, as well as quite a supply of castorium. I closed the closet and pushed the boxes back, telling myself that like the silverware, and the rest of the things I’d stolen, he didn’t need these drugs nearly as much as I did.