Her Majesty's Necromancer (The Ministry of Curiosities #2)(67)

Another hop around the office brought me no closer to a plan of escape. I needed to get the damned ropes off. Even if I managed to escape the room, I couldn't run anywhere, trussed up like this.

I tried rubbing the rope that bound my wrists against the edge of the desk, but it was hopeless. It didn't even fray. The small rectangular brass plates on the filing cabinet would be better. They acted as both handles to pull open the drawers and holders for the label. Their edges were sharp.

I hopped toward the cabinet, but tripped on the edge of the rug and landed heavily on my side. Pain flared in my cheek again but I bit back a cry.

It didn't matter. My fall had been heard. The door unlocked and swung open. Captain Jasper stood in the doorway and held his lamp higher. If I'd been closer, I could have used the moment it took for his eyes to adjust to tackle him.

But I wouldn't have been able to do more than that with my hands tied behind my back. Particularly if Jimmy and Pete were in the next room.

He spotted me on the floor and came over. "It's Miss Holloway, isn't it?"

"And you're Captain Jasper," I hissed.

He looked surprised that I knew that much. "Are you all right?"

"Do I look all right?"

"I'm very sorry for this, but you shouldn't have fought back. My men were already afraid of you and then when you hit them, they thought you must have been possessed. I tried to assure them that you weren't." He helped me to my feet and waited until I was steady before letting me go. "You're not, are you?"

"What do you want with me?" I snapped.

"We'll get to that in a moment." He set the lamp down on the desk near a stack of papers then sat on the edge. "Are you all right? That bruise on your cheek looks nasty."

"Of course I'm not bloody all right. I am being held against my will. I don't know what you want. My face hurts, and so do my ankles and wrists." I turned and waggled my hands at him. "If you are a gentleman, you would set me free."

"I'll untie you, if you'll listen to my proposal. I don't wish to hurt you. Will you listen?"

He would untie me? It was more than I'd hoped for. I nodded quickly and tried to school my features.

"Sit on the chair and don't attack me," he said. "Jimmy is just outside this door. If anything happens to me, he has my authority to hurt you again."

Jimmy, not Jimmy and Pete. I only had two men to get away from, not three. The odds were improving.

I sat quietly while he untied my wrists then remained still as he stepped back out of my reach. He didn't untie my feet, but had no objection when I bent down to do it. The knot was tight and I broke half of my fingernails in the attempt, but I finally got them off. My god, such relief!

"Did you learn to tie knots like that in the army?" I rubbed the raw skin at my ankles then set the rope in my lap.

"I did, as it happens. How much do you know about me, Miss Holloway?"

"Very little. I know you're experimenting on dying men, then testing their bodies after their deaths. I just don't know to what purpose. Or why you've kidnapped me."

"I've kidnapped you because you'll make my experiments so much easier. You can raise the dead, and I wish to speak to the dead. It will solve a host of difficulties I've encountered."

I shook my head. "I don't understand."

"That night at Mr. Lee's establishment, you opened my eyes to a new way of gathering information from my test subjects."

Subjects? Was that what he thought of the men who died after he fed them that liquid?

"I wasn't aware of people like you until then," he went on. "I didn't know it was possible to raise the dead. It wasn't until I got home that I began to consider the applications of your…gift. It could change the way I work and will certainly save a lot of time and effort."

"What work, Captain? What are you doing to those poor men? Killing them?"

"No! Good lord, I'm no murderer. No, I wanted to save them."

"That doesn't make sense. Save them how?"

"They were going to die anyway, Miss Holloway. When I found them, they were already close to death. I didn't hurry the process along, I simply watched them as they deteriorated and grew closer to the end."

"Then what was the liquid you fed them?"

"That was supposed to save them. Well, not save them as such, but bring them back to life."

My stomach rolled. Another mad doctor obsessed with bringing back the dead. Why couldn't they leave them be? "The dead don't want to be brought back to life, Captain."

He scoffed. "Of course they do." He pushed his glasses up his nose. "No one wishes to die. I'm trying to develop a serum that brings the dead to life again."

"Is that what you fed them? That liquid was the serum?"

He nodded. "It must be administered before death."

"And the blood in the syringe?"

"I extract samples for testing. I need to record the changes to the subjects both before and after death. That's why I kept those four bodies in the butcher's cold room."

"You were testing them too."

He nodded. "I took samples from them periodically to monitor changes to their muscle mass and vital organs. I couldn't bring them back to life yet, but they helped me fine tune the serum."