Julien brushed aside the reassurance with a twitch. “It seems he knows much more than either of us thought. I’m starting to believe we weren’t forgotten, dear brother. Just…transplanted.”
“And yet still found wanting,” Viktor muttered, grabbing the diary once more.
The fireplace behind Julien flared to life, the logs igniting as flames shot high up the flue. Startled, I jumped from the chair, a cry for help on the tip of my tongue, before I realized it was only Viktor blowing off steam.
“Some warning would be appreciated,” Julien said, teeth clenched. He opened another dossier, ignoring his brother’s outburst.
“That man,” he spat, flipping through more of the diary. Along the wall, the gas lamps’ flames danced, swaying dangerously. “We’re not fit to remain at his estate. We’re deemed too unseemly to be recognized as his own sons, but he couldn’t just give up everything he’d worked for with us. ‘Julien’s intellectual aptitude grows by leaps and bounds,’？” he sneered, his voice mincing. “？‘Each letter from Sheffield astounds even my wildest hopes for him.’ Good for you, Jules. You’re not welcome at family dinner, but you’ve gone and impressed Father.”
Julien pressed his lips together. It wasn’t exactly a smile, but I could sense his pleasure all the same.
“？‘Viktor,’？” he began reading, then stopped short. After a moment’s pause, he ripped the page from the book and crumpled it in his hand. When he unfurled his fist, all that remained was soot.
“Is there anything more on Alex?” I asked, hoping to defuse Viktor’s anger, but also wanting to know what Gerard thought would happen once he paired me with his youngest son. I’d never seen Alex do anything like his brothers could. But if Gerard went to the trouble of bringing me—of bringing my talents—to Chauntilalie, there must have been something specific he hoped to achieve.
“Pages,” Viktor replied darkly, thumbing through the diary, his face taut with rage. “Pages and pages and pages. Whole chapters on the golden one’s life. And you know what they all say?”
I shook my head, unable to find the courage to voice an answer.
“Nothing! Not a damn thing.” He pitched the tumbler into the fireplace and the heavy glass shattered. “There’s not a single thing about our brother that makes him special. Not one. He’s completely normal. Completely useless. The exact opposite of whatever it was Father was trying to achieve. Not like me. Not like Jules. But we were cast off. We were sent away. We—” His words died in a snarl, hands trembling.
It took me a moment to realize the journal was smoking.
“Stop that,” I said, snatching it from him and fanning it back and forth. There were singed marks across its edges, blackened shadows where his hands had been, but the book was otherwise unscathed.
Viktor crossed back to the bar cart, muttering to himself as he grabbed the absinthe with an elaborate swipe. He flopped down hard in the chair once more, kicking up his legs over the arm and drinking straight out of the bottle.
“Are you just going to sit there and get drunk?”
He glanced at me, his face drawn and exhausted. “Have you a better suggestion?”
“Let him be, Miss Thaumas,” Julien spoke up, his nose still buried in the documents, unconcerned. “He’s likely to burn down half the manor in his mood.”
Viktor raised the bottle toward his brother, saluting him before taking another swig.
With a sigh of disgust, I thumbed open the diary and began to read.
The first entry was dated twenty years prior. Dauphine had just confided she was with child. Several lists of roots and extracts followed after. It seemed as though Gerard initially began dosing her teas. For days he documented how many ounces she drank and the side effects she experienced. A week later, he added powdered tinctures to her meals. Later on, salves and lotions, applied directly to her burgeoning belly. Then, shots.
My own stomach clenched as I imagined a thick needle plunging within me.
It said she suffered from terrible nausea, that she would often black out after treatments only to sob uncontrollably in her sleep. Gerard wrote she spent whole days in bed, speaking to things, to beings, he could not see.
Her stomach grew and so did the amounts of drugs he foisted upon her.
Dauphine must have realized at some point that these procedures weren’t regular. Why had she gone along with it? Had Gerard told her there was something wrong with the babies? That he was attempting to fix them?
I desperately wanted to believe she’d not willingly subjected herself to his mad schemes.
With a fit of disgust, I slammed the diary closed and tossed it upon the nearest bookshelf, unwilling to keep hold of the dreadful things inside it for any longer.
As the diary fell heavily onto the shelf, the entire bookcase swayed back and forth.
I blinked, certain it was an optical illusion, a trick of the light in the dimly lit room.
But no.
The bookcase was swinging, back and forth as if…
As if it wasn’t really a bookcase at all.
I threw a swift glance back at the boys, wondering if they noticed what I saw. Julien was absorbed in a new notebook, his nose just inches from the page. Viktor’s eyes were closed and his head listed against the armchair, the bottle of absinthe nearly falling from his loosened grip.
With wonder and dread, I pressed tentative fingers to the shelves, gasping as the entire behemoth shifted, moving to the left. Just above me, I spotted a piece of tracking disguised to look like trim work.
The bookshelf was a false front, nothing more than a mask hiding in plain sight.
With an umph of effort, I pushed the bookcase to the side, revealing another set of shelves behind it. But these shelves held no books on them.
Instead, they were filled with jars.
Rows and rows of large jars.
Wet specimen canisters.
Artie had a small collection of them. He was forever bringing home deceased creatures found washed up onshore, caught in tide pools. He loved examining them and would stick the animals in jars full of formaldehyde. The dark liquid preserved the creatures in a state free of decay.
My throat clenched as I wondered what things Gerard could possibly be keeping in his.
I leaned in to examine the closest shelf, right at my eye level, and twisted one jar round.
At first glance, it was an animal of some sort. It was pale and long dead, its surface strangely pliant and waxy. Elongated limbs bent backward, curled and compressed to fit within the confines of the jar.
A pair of animals, I guessed, counting eight appendages.
It bobbed in the formaldehyde, turning on an invisible axis.
My mouth fell open as the head came into view.
Heads.
It was then that I realized this thing in the jar, not the hidden cache of papers, was the reason Gerard kept the study locked up so tight.
The bodies—body, I mentally corrected, spotting the band of flesh that knitted all three chests together—were small. They’d been born prematurely, that much was clear. Their features, vague and flat in the liquid suspension, didn’t look finished, a piece of clay abandoned by a disinterested sculptor.
Even still, the features were wrong, so very wrong.
The triplet on the left side of the mass had a perfectly round head, without ears, and a gaping circular mouth that reminded me of the buckets of lamprey eels Cook would bring to Highmoor, fresh from the docks. Rows of serrated teeth puckered its edges.