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Elizabeth. Hensley. Lucy. I wasn’t sure I believed in the ideas of souls, but if they did exist, I was glad they had such a place to wander.
I traced my fingers along the walls as I entered the gaping hole that had once been the thick front door. Not but a few weeks ago I was knocking on it, desperate for refuge. Had I brought about its destruction the minute I set foot here?
No, I thought as I stepped through the foyer. The science within these halls was never meant to exist.
The ancient tapestries had burned, revealing the entrance to the secret passageways. The passages seemed less mysterious with the light of day pouring through the roofless ceiling. I stepped inside, heedless of the soot staining my dress. The rubble shifted and a little pink nose poked out. One of Hensley’s white rats, alive and well except for a small burned patch on its tail. I knelt down.
“Come here, little fellow.” I held out my hand as Hensley and Elizabeth used to do. But the rat shied away, sensing that I wasn’t one of its masters. I didn’t mind. I liked thinking that some of the rats had survived the fire. Life still thrived in Ballentyne, even in ruins. Something still remembered Hensley and Elizabeth.
I followed the passageway slowly, having to climb over fallen beams and collapsed walls. McKenna had quite a task ahead of her, but I was confident she’d succeed. I liked thinking of Ballentyne as a sanctuary for girls who didn’t have anywhere else to go. When I’d been alone and on my own, I would have loved calling this place home.
But it wasn’t my home, not really. Neither was London, which was the site of so much loss, the place where the professor had died and where scandal had befallen my family, and where Lucy’s mother waited for a daughter and a husband who would never return.
I closed my eyes, resting my fingers on the walls. When the wind blew, I thought I could smell a little of Lucy’s perfume, and it made me miss her all the more.
Was it fair that I survived, and she didn’t?
If Lucy hadn’t died, I imagine she’d have lived out the rest of her life here, taking care of the girls. Her father was wrong when he said she only cared for dresses and handsome men. She’d loved the girls, and she’d loved me, and she’d loved Edward. She’d cared about us enough to sacrifice her own life for us.
I left the passages and climbed the central staircase up to the ruins of the northern tower. The glass window of the observatory had shattered, littering the charred floor. All that was left of Elizabeth’s settee was a broken frame. I remembered her leaning in, face a mirror to my own, telling me the story of Victor Frankenstein.
I kicked aside some charred furniture until I found her metal globe of the constellations. The wooden stand had burned and the metal was dented, but mostly intact. I ran my fingers along the top portion, where Elizabeth had kept Les Étoiles gin.
I opened the secret latch of the globe, but the bottles had shattered and melted. Ruined, like everything else. Then my fingers drifted to the bottom compartment where she’d stored Ballentyne’s secrets.
I glanced over my shoulder, listening for the sounds of footsteps or breathing that would tell me I wasn’t alone. But all the paintings and tapestries that hid the secret passages were gone now. I could see everything, even straight to the morning sky. I was alone.
I slid open the compartment, breath drawn. Ashes rained out; thick black ones that stained my fingers. They still had the shape of books until I touched them, and they broke apart into dust.
All of Frankenstein’s legacy, the Origin Journals, had been destroyed.
I looked at my soot-dark hands. These ashes had been ideas once; they’d given birth to my own father’s research, which had given life to Balthazar, and Edward, and even to me.
Even days ago, such a loss might have filled me with melancholy. I knew Henri Moreau’s work was wrong, but I’d come to believe in its potential. Now that I knew he wasn’t my father, and his genius and madness didn’t flow in my veins, the journals seemed distant, like something that belonged to someone else. I let the ashes fall through my fingertips.
The last thing I felt was sadness. In fact, I’d never felt so alive.
I stood up, dusting my hands off, and left the observatory without looking back. A shattered window in the hallway gave me a glimpse of Edward and Balthazar in the courtyard, loading the mercenaries’ bodies onto a pallet to drag out to the bog. I could still remember how close I was to death that day I nearly drowned with the sheep.
I had escaped those frigid waters. Radcliffe and his men never would.
I spent the rest of the morning checking the rest of the rooms, finding little to salvage save a few pieces of jewelry and coins that had survived in a lockbox in Elizabeth’s bedroom that we could use to pay for the inn in Quick and food and transportation. It wasn’t until afternoon, when Balthazar and Edward were almost finished with the last of the bodies, that I steeled my strength and went to the southern tower.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs, tracing the crumbled walls. A small line of smoke still drifted out of some pile of rubble, off to the heavens. I took a deep breath and climbed to the laboratory.
The roof was gone, letting light touch every corner. The wooden operating table was only ash. A few glass jars remained, but I threw them out the window, letting them shatter in the rubble below.
I knelt by the floor, where the metal bits of a corset mixed with white pieces of bone. This is where I had left Lucy’s body, where I’d decided that she wouldn’t have another chance at life. I found a metal pan and gathered her bones carefully, wrapped them in my own shawl.
This isn’t good-bye, she had said to me before I left for the island. I’ll see you again.
I whispered the same to her, telling her that I’d follow her when it was my time. Amid the ashes something metal flashed, and I brushed aside rubble to find Edward’s pocket watch, which Lucy had worn around her neck the entire time he’d been dead.
I slid the watch into my pocket. It was time to bury Lucy and leave this place forever.
I took a step back toward the stairs but hesitated, recognizing my own boot print in the ash. It was small, like Elizabeth’s, and yet the steps were tight and determined, like Henri Moreau’s had been.
I wouldn’t follow in Father’s footsteps anymore.
I wouldn’t follow in Elizabeth’s, either.
I walked through the ash. The only footsteps I’d make would be my own.
FORTY-TWO
MY LAST VIEW OF Ballentyne was with the sun behind it, the moors in the wind, as I scattered Lucy’s ashes in the bog where Edward and Balthazar had buried her father.
