Chapter 26 #2
“They were all bitten?” Caroline asked. She had seen no other scars, except…“What about John?”
Rab lowered his eyes. “John’s is a sad story,” he said. “But he’s your family, too, I suppose, so you deserve to know.”
Caroline’s mouth fell open, but Rab did not notice. He was staring at the floor between them, his hands knit together in his lap.
“John and Viv fell in love,” he began, “when she was just a girl. Fifteen or sixteen, I think. Anyway. He was a laborer on her—on your—family’s estate. When Viv’s father, your grandfather, found out about them—he was like us, you see—he tore John up. On the full moon. Left him for dead.”
Caroline inhaled.
“Viv found him. Saved his life. Foreswore her family, sold off her jewelry, and came here, to London. She found others like John—our kind always seem to find one another—and opened the Full Moon. So people like us, like John, would always have a safe place to stay.”
Caroline blinked away the sudden tears that blurred her vision. Mrs. Easton’s neat, celibate room. The man whom she had once loved so deeply in the room beside hers, nothing but a scarred shell.
“So, like I said, we were all bitten,” Rab went on, finding the ladder of their conversation and hoisting himself out of the dark water that was John and Viv’s love story. “That’s how the disease spreads. Unless, like you and Charlie, you’re born with it.”
“Born with it?” Caroline repeated.
“You’re the first. The originals. The descendants of Saint Ciwa and her beast king, if you care to believe the story. Blevins is Welsh for son of the wolf.”
The melancholy girl in her medieval clothing. The monster beside her, who walked on two legs.
“But here’s the real mystery, Miss Foster,” Rab continued. “Men can survive the pathogen. Women cannot.”
The flowers in the Bible. On the family crest. All those dead baby girls.
“But my mother—” Caroline began.
“She was like you,” Rab interrupted. “Girls who carry the pathogen die before they are born, or shortly after. Except you and your mother. Somehow, she survived. Her parents found some Welsh witch doctor who dosed her with medicine, just as she did you, to keep the disease at bay.”
Dr. Hoffman’s bitter pills. The aconitum in the garden, in the pages of Culpeper’s Herbal.
“Your mother lost some children, didn’t she? Girls?”
Caroline nodded. Anne and Mary, whose headstones lay in the untended grass beside her mother’s.
“She went mad with grief, Charlie said, after they died. Tried to…” Rab trailed off. Swallowed.
“Tried to what?”
He looked at her a long moment. The yellow in his irises glowed.
“Tried to dig them back up. After they were buried. Your father found her in the graveyard, in the moonlight, knee-deep in grave dirt. Howling with grief.”
Caroline’s cracked heart broke in two.
“She hadn’t been taking her medicine. When the doctor arrived, your father held a pistol to his head and made him confess. He told him about the family curse, and your father swore that if your mother ever gave birth to a living child, he would smother it in its cradle.”
“So Mother sent Charlie away,” Caroline breathed. “And faked his death. To keep him safe. But why did he not kill me?”
Rab didn’t meet her eye. “I think…I think he thought you would die. After all, none of your sisters survived. And then, when your mother fell ill, I don’t think he could do it. I don’t think he could bear to be alone.”
Caroline nearly laughed. Not once could she recall a time her father sought out her company; he never seemed to wish to linger at Audley House more than a few days, and then only when the weather was fair, the hunting good.
He had left her alone. So many years of her life she had hung like a forgotten portrait in an unused room. Until Charlie.
“When your mother died, Viv told Charlie. She didn’t mean to, of course.
But she was a blubbering mess, poor thing, and he got the truth out of her.
He decided to confront his old man. Told no one, of course.
Typical Charlie. He stole Viv’s market money and boarded a train to Stafford.
He asked around, hitched a ride to the big house, and walked down the driveway, cocky as a rooster.
Thank God Lord Foster was out. The maid, an old Welsh biddy, sent him off. But not before he caught sight of you.
“You were pink and round as a rose, he said. And the moment he saw you, everything changed. He needed you, you see. Needed to know that something as sweet and good as you existed in the world. So he told your nurse that he’d be back, and if she knew what was good for her, she’d send word when the master of the house was away so he could time his visits when he was absent.
Otherwise, the cat would be out of the bag. ”
Charlie in the cypress grove. Charlie with a bakery box under his arm. Charlie by the stream, Charlie in the stable.
He had needed her? No. She had needed him.
“He kept it from all of us. He would sneak out and disappear for a whole day, show up smiling and sunburnt at twilight. Poor Viv thought he was buying gin, or playing cards down at the docks. I followed him once. To St. Pancras. I watched him buy a ticket and board a train for Stafford. I stayed on the platform all day, nearly starved to death, waiting for him. When he got off that train and saw my face, he knew the jig was up. He made me swear I’d never repeat it to another soul, and then he told me all about you.
“When we got back here that night, Viv gave us both a terrible thrashing. But I told her nothing. I kept his secret.
“I pushed him, though. Asked and asked until, finally, he told me you were like him. Like us. But you took a medicine. A poison, he called it. Said it was keeping you sick, keeping you weak. But I…” Rab swallowed.
“I begged him to bring it to me. Since I was old enough to read, I’ve been searching for a cure.
Dreaming of what I could do, what I could be, if I wasn’t… wasn’t like this.”
Caroline’s eyes flicked to the magazine illustrations tacked on Rab’s walls. The Arc de Triomphe. The canals of Venice.
“And I knew, whatever that quack doctor was giving you, had given your mother, it wasn’t just wolfsbane.
” He followed her eyes, and his gaze went soft.
“I’d already tried that, you see. It’s what we all take now.
It dulls the pain. Tempers the effect. But it doesn’t stop the change.
What you and your mother took, it was different. And now I know what it is.”
Caroline’s heart galloped.
“What?”
“It’s your blood, Caroline.”
The curse is the cure.
Dr. Hoffman’s leeches on her chest, on her back. Carried off plump and sated in their jar to be slit open, their meal repurposed for her rust-red pills. The bitter metallic taste was the taste of her own blood.
“Mixed with wolfsbane, and a few other herbs I’m still working out.
Mr. Tythe and I isolated the pathogen. I took scores of blood samples, from all the boarders who were willing, and we located the disease, separated the pathogen from the blood.
Under Mr. Tythe’s microscope, it looks like little bullets.
The wolfsbane clings to it, like fleas on a dog.
But it doesn’t stop it. Doesn’t cure it. ”
The bottles of blood in his drawer. Not the evidence of murder, but of a scientific experiment.