Megan Shepherd - The Madman’s Daughter

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.

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 word from him had been eclipsed by the terrible rumors I’d heard in the years since.

I slipped away from my mop to find Mrs Bell scrubbing towels in the laundry room. Her light eyes, narrowed as if she knew I was up to no good, found mine through the billows of steam.

I picked up a bar of soap and chipped at it with my fingernail. What did I expect to find at the inn, anyway? My father, raised from the dead, smoking a cigar in his tweed jacket and waiting to tell me a bedtime story?

‘Mrs Bell,’ I asked, setting down the mutilated bar of soap. ‘Do you know where the Blue Boar Inn is?’

I had to wait until Sunday after church before I could follow Mrs Bell’s directions south of Cable Street, avoiding the swill thrown out from lodging houses. As I paused at the corner to find the right street, I became aware of someone watching me. It was a girl around my age, though her face was caked with powder and rouge that made her look older. A striped satin dress limply hung on her thin frame. She stared at me with hollow eyes. I looked away sharply. If it hadn’t been for my employment at King’s College, that might have been me on the corner, waiting for my next gentleman. I leaned against a brick wall, queasy. Lucy had told me what happened at brothels. That had been my mother’s desperate solution, at the expense of the virtues she held so dear. I might not have as many virtues to lose, but I was determined that wouldn’t be my future.

The prostitute ambled down the street, coming toward me leisurely, and I hurried in the other direction, until I suddenly came upon a faded blue sign swinging above a thick door, painted with a tusked beast I assumed was once meant to be a boar.

The inn was a wooden three-story building, keeling slightly toward its neighbor. I tugged on the heavy iron latch and entered. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Little sunlight passed through windows coated with smoky residue. I found myself in a dining hall, among sullen patrons murmuring in low voices over their midday meal. The furniture was worn but made of heavy oak that had recently been polished. None of the patrons looked up except a thin man twice my age, face marred with pox scars, who stared at my Sunday dress and the Bible I clutched in my arms. It seemed the Blue Boar did not see many young ladies.

A portly woman came out from the kitchen and raised her eyebrows. She wiped her hands on her apron and looked me over: my face that hinted of aristocracy and clothes that spoke of poverty. ‘Come for a room?’

‘No … I haven’t,’ I stammered. ‘I’m looking for a man. A doctor.’ My heart pounded, warning me not to get my hopes up. ‘His name is Henri Moreau.’

She peered at me queerly. I must have been the color of ripe tomatoes. ‘We aren’t in the habit of giving out our patrons’ information. You understand.’ It was a command, not a question. Was he there, I wondered, in the same building, maybe right above our heads?

‘I mean no trouble. I only need to speak with him.’

Her face didn’t budge. ‘No one by that name here.’

The ground fell out from beneath me. She was mistaken. She had to be. Or else I’d been a fool, thinking some old paper meant my father was here, in London, the city from which he’d been banished.

The set of her mouth softened. She took my elbow and pulled me away from the diners to a staircase that led into the shadows of the upper floors. ‘We’ve no one by that precise name, but there is a doctor.’

My heart leapt. ‘Where is he? What does he look like?’

‘Calm down, now. You say you don’t want trouble, and nor do I.’ Her gaze slid to the dining hall, nervously. ‘But if it’s the doctor you’re after, you should know Dr James has been nothing but trouble since he arrived.’

Dr James. Not Dr Moreau. A pseudonym, perhaps? My mind was grasping, trying to form the parts of the equation into a reasonable solution, but there was only one logical conclusion: Dr James was someone else entirely, one of a hundred visiting doctors in London. And yet my curiosity wouldn’t be satisfied without proof.

‘I’m sorry to hear it. Perhaps if I may speak to him …’

‘Mind you, the young gentleman is gracious enough. It’s that companion of his. Makes the other guests nervous, you understand.’

‘Certainly.’ I nodded, breathless. No one would describe Father as young. So could the odd companion she spoke of be my father, then?