The Madman’s Daughter. Megan Shepherd

‘Intestines of a flesh-toned color. Pulsing slightly, likely from an unfinished digestion. Yes – there, I see the contents moving.’

      With shaking fingers I unfolded the paper’s dog-eared right corner. Initials were scrawled on the diagram: H.M. Blood rushed in my ears, drowning out the sound of the boys and the rabbit and the clicking electric light. H.M. – Henri Moreau.

      My father.

      Through his old diagram, these boys had resurrected my father’s ghost in the very theater where he used to teach. I was flooded with a shivering uneasiness. As a child I’d worshipped my father, and now I hated him for abandoning us. Mother had fervently denied the rumors were true, but I wondered if she just couldn’t bear to have married a monster.

      Suddenly the rabbit jolted and let out a scream so unnatural that I instinctively made the sign of the cross.

      ‘Good lord,’ Adam said, watching with wide eyes. ‘Jones, you cad, it’s waking up!’

      Jones rushed to the table, which was lined with steel blades and needles the length of my forearm. ‘I gave it the proper dose,’ he stuttered, searching through the glass vials.

      The rabbit’s screams pierced my skull. I slammed my hands against the table, the paper falling to the side. ‘End this,’ I cried. ‘It’s in pain!’

      Lucy sobbed. The surgeon didn’t move. Frustrated, I grabbed him by the sleeve. ‘Do something! Put it out of its misery.’

      Still, none of the boys moved. As medical students, they should have been trained for any situation. But they were frozen. So I acted instead.

      On the table beside me was the set of operating instruments. I wrapped my hand around the handle of the ax, normally used for separating the sternum of cadavers. I took a deep breath, focusing on the rabbit’s neck. In a movement I knew had to be fast and hard, I brought down the ax.

      The rabbit’s screaming stopped.

      The awful tension in my chest dripped out onto the wet floor. I stared at the ax, distantly, my brain not yet connecting it with the blood on my hands. The ax fell from my grasp, crashing to the floor. Everyone flinched.

      Everyone but me.

      Lucy grabbed my shoulder. ‘We’re leaving,’ she said, her voice strained. I swallowed. The diagram lay on the table, a cold reminder of my father’s hand in all this. I snatched it and whirled on the dark-haired boy.

      ‘Where did you get this?’ I demanded.

      He only gaped.

      I shook him, but the surgeon interrupted. ‘Billingsgate. The Blue Boar Inn.’ His eyes flashed to the ax on the floor. ‘There’s a doctor there.’

      Lucy’s hand tightened in mine. I stared at the ax. Someone bent down to pick it up, hesitantly. Adam. Our eyes met and I saw his horror at what I’d done, and more – disgust. Lucy was wrong. He wouldn’t want to marry me. I was cold, strange, and monstrous to those boys, just like my father. No one could love a monster.

      ‘Come on.’ She tugged me through the hallways to the street outside. It was cold, but my numb skin barely felt it. A few people passed us, bundled up, too concerned about the weather to notice the blood on our clothes. Lucy leaned against a brick wall and pressed a hand over her chest. ‘My God, you cut its head off!’

      Blood was on my hands, on the tattered lace of my sleeves, even dotting the diamond ring my mother had left me. I stared at the paper in my fist. The Blue Boar Inn. The Blue Boar Inn. I couldn’t let myself forget that name.

      Lucy braced her hands on my shoulders, shaking me. ‘Juliet, say something!’

      ‘They shouldn’t have done that,’ I said, feeling feverish in the cold night air. The paper was damp from my sweating palms. ‘I had … I had to stop it.’

      I felt her hand squeeze my shoulder tighter. ‘Of course you did. Our cook kills a brace of hares for dinner all the time. That’s all you did – killed a rabbit that was already going to die.’ But her voice was shaking. What I had done was unnatural, and we both knew it.

      A cold breeze blew off the Thames, carrying the pungent smell of sweat and Lucy’s perfume. I drew a shallow breath. The rumors of so long ago crept through the streets, coming back to life. All I had were slips of memories of my father: the feel of his tweed jacket, the smell of tobacco in his hair when he kissed me good night. I couldn’t bring myself to believe my father was the madman they said he was. But I’d been so young when it happened, just ten years old. As I matured, more memories surfaced. Deeper ones, of a cold, sterile room and sounds in the night – recollections that never entirely disappeared, no matter how far I pushed them into the recesses of my mind.

      I didn’t tell Lucy about the diagram with his initials in the corner. I didn’t tell her that he used to keep it neatly in a book in his laboratory, a place I glimpsed only when the servants were cleaning. I didn’t tell her that, after all these years trying to accept that he must be dead, a part of me suspected otherwise.

      That maybe my father was alive.

       THREE

      London society was not kind to the daughter of a madman. To the orphan of a madman, even less. My father had been the most celebrated physiologist in England, a fact Mother was quick to mention to anyone who’d listen. My parents used to host elegant parties for his fellow professors. Long after bedtime I would creep downstairs in my nightdress and peek through the drawing room keyhole to take in the sound of their laughter and the smell of rich tobacco. How ironic that those same men were the first to brand him a monster.

      After the scandal broke and Father disappeared, Mother and I were shunned by the company we once called friends. Even the church closed its doors to us. We were forced to sell our home and possessions to pay for his debts. We were left penniless for months, relying only on Mother’s prayers and a string of grumbling relatives’ sense of duty. I was young at the time, so I didn’t understand when suddenly we had an apartment again, a small but richly appointed second-story flat near Charing Cross. Mother would take me to piano lessons and have me fitted for gowns and buy herself expensive rouge and satin undergarments. An older gentleman came by, once a week like clockwork, and Mother would send me out for chocolate biscuits in the café downstairs. He wore strong cologne that masked a pungent, stale smell, but Mother never said anything about it. That’s how I knew he must be rich – no one ever says the rich stink.

      When consumption took my mother, the old gentleman hardly wanted to keep the dead mistress’s bony daughter around. He paid for Mother’s funeral – though he didn’t attend – and let me stay in the apartment for a week. Then he sent over a brusque maid who boxed up and sold Mother’s things and handed me a banknote for their value. No doubt he considered himself generous. I was fourteen at the time, and totally on my own.

      Fortunately, a former colleague of my father’s named Professor von Stein heard of Mother’s death and inquired at King’s College for suitable employment for a young woman of distinguished background. Once they found out who my father was, though, the best offer I got was to be a part of Mrs Bell’s cleaning crew. It paid just enough for a room at a lodging house with twenty other girls my age. Some were orphaned, some had come to the city to support younger brothers and sisters, some just showed up for a week and vanished. We came from different backgrounds. But all of us were alone.

      I shared a room with Annie, a fifteen-year-old shopgirl from Dublin who had a habit of going through my belongings whether I was there or not. She once came across the embossed, locked wooden box I kept at the back of our closet shelf. I never told her what was inside, no matter how much she begged.

      The night I killed the rabbit, I kept the blood-spattered diagram under my pillow. At work the next day I tucked it into my clothing, like a talisman. It infused my every waking thought with memories of my father. Every remembrance, every gesture, every kind