A Cold Legacy by Megan Shepherd

servants must be practically prisoners here, or else they’re all mad, letting Elizabeth experiment on them. We should leave before they decide we’ve seen too much and stop us. We can take Edward in the carriage. Lucy shouldn’t be hard to convince as long as Edward’s with us, and Balthazar will go where I go.”
    â€œWhere would we go? The police are all over thecountry looking for us. Every road, every port, every train station, just waiting to drag us back to London.”
    â€œWe’ll hide out until this is all over. I know how to live in the wild.”
    â€œThe wild ? It’s wintertime. Can you imagine Lucy in the forest, living off berries?”
    He rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t care how dangerous it is out there, it’s safer than within these walls.”
    I shook my head. “No. Elizabeth would never hurt us. She risked her life to keep us safe from the police. Do you really think she’d suddenly turn into a villain because we learned her secret? She knows our secrets, too, Montgomery, and they’re just as scandalous.”
    He stopped pacing, his blond hair lose and wild in his face. “All we did was perform surgery on animals. We didn’t bring anyone back from the dead. That goes against nature, Juliet. It’s playing God.”
    â€œPlaying God is exactly what Father did!”
    â€œYes, and you killed your father because of it. You killed three members of the King’s Club for the same reason. Why are you so willing to believe Elizabeth is any different from them? You’re the one always insisting women can be just as ruthless as men.”
    I paced the opposite side of the room, chewing on the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood. “It isn’t because she’s a woman,” I said. “It’s because . . .”
    It’s because she’s like me .
    I stopped pacing, chilled by my own thoughts. “Elizabeth isn’t going to trap us here because of what we saw. If wehear her out and you still think leaving is best, then we’ll go. Agreed?”
    I could tell by the tense set to his shoulders that if it were up to him we’d be in the carriage right now, tearing wildly into the night, leaving the truth far behind. But no one could run from the truth forever.
    â€œJust promise me it won’t be like last time,” he whispered. “No more unnatural science. No more playing God, not even when there’s a chance the ends could justify the means.”
    I took a step back. Maybe it was my conversation with Jack Serra earlier, but Father was so freshly in my mind he might as well have been standing in the room with us.
    â€œDo you truly have so little faith in me that you think I would become a monster like Father was?” I asked.
    I didn’t tell him that it was a fear I’d had myself.
    â€œOf course not.” His face had softened. “That was never what I meant.”
    We stood like that for a while, the two of us alone with the wind howling outside. At last, Montgomery took my hands.
    â€œSometimes you do remind me of your father,” he said gently, “but I didn’t mean that you’re destined to go mad like him. You come from two parents, you know. For all your father’s faults, there are your mother’s strengths. She was such a kind woman, don’t you remember?”
    I flinched as though pricked with a needle, and all worries about Hensley, and Elizabeth’s experimentation, and even Edward vanished. My mother . I could picture her ifI closed my eyes. High cheekbones flushed with warmth and perfectly pinned dark hair as she sang church hymns. The opposite to my father’s cold countenance. When I was little, she had dedicated her life to helping others. On winter Sundays after church, Mother stayed behind with the Ladies’ Auxiliary to knit socks for the inmates at Bryson Prison. I’d once asked her why she never knit a pair