The Daughter of Doctor Moreau(61)

It was after one of these incursions into the laboratory that her father walked in and found her dusting a shelf. She had already put away the notebooks she’d been reading so there was no guilty clue he could discern.

“I’ve been tidying a little,” she explained when she saw the question in his eyes. “There’s plenty of dust to go around.”

“Yes. No wonder. It’s not as if I can do anything here, so why should I bother with it?” her father grumbled. “Hernando Lizalde has reduced my funding to a trickle these past three years. You can’t accomplish much when you must economize like this. I shall be happy when I can have better equipment and my funding back. Carlota, my dear, you must ensure this takes place as quickly as possible, the same way as you managed to propel this marriage forward. I must be able to conduct my experiments. New experiments.”

“Fresh funding would permit you to conduct new experiments, yet I’ve heard you complain that the hybrids always fall below your expectations.”

“They do. The human shape I can achieve, almost with ease, but there is trouble with the hands and the claws, and there are painful gaps…but that must not concern you. There are secrets to be had, the treasures of nature to be pried open. The hybrids are not the treasure I seek, they’re merely a piece in a puzzle, one more key that shall unlock one more lock.”

Behind him the glass and metal gleamed, and she saw the elaborate instruments of his trade. For the first time ever she truly wondered what the meaning of all of this was. His father said it was for the benefit of humanity, that it might be healed and elevated, but she did not believe it when he spoke to her now.

“Could you cure Lupe and Cachito? So that they don’t require your treatments?”

“They cannot be mended,” her father said firmly.

“Then can the treatment be improved? So that it is less onerous and they administer it themselves?”

“There you come again with that same idea! Didn’t I tell you I did not want to discuss it? You waste your time with those hybrids. You and Montgomery, schooling them and petting them and making them soft. I know you want to fix them, but they are broken.”

When she’d been a girl Carlota had showed Lupe and Cachito how to read, and she’d also seen Montgomery pointing at a word in a newspaper and saying it out loud for them. Did her father truly mean what he’d said? Were her conversations with Lupe and Cachito something that softened them? And why was softness wrong when her father asked meekness of them all?

“The hybrids are not important anymore, Carlota. They were meant for Hernando Lizalde. I prostituted my intelligence for him, to obtain the money I required. I have not pursued other avenues of research that are more compelling, but now I will have the chance. Your husband will be my patron and I will have free rein.”

“If you refuse to help the hybrids then I shall not tell my husband to give you rein of anything, if—”

“If what?” her father asked, his voice as sharp as a scalpel. “Are you to threaten me, now?”

Her father was tall and had the strength of an ox. Age was nibbling at his body, but it had not brought him to ruin yet, and to look at him when he stood up straight and imposing, to see those great hands of his and his piercing eyes and his lips pressed together, was to fear him.

Carlota swallowed. “I want to have my say, too.”

If Eduardo was tired of asking for permission for everything, then so was she.

Her father stared at her. “Ingrate child. You were not raised to speak to me like that.”

“I’ve said nothing rude or foolish. I ask for mere decency.”

“My experiments will allow for enormous scientific leaps. And remember, without my knowledge you would not be here Carlota.”

His voice was now glacial, but there was a fierceness beneath each syllable which made Carlota wish to clasp a hand against her mouth and be quiet. She spoke up again.

“I am grateful for the medical treatment I have received, but the price of it is high.”

“The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature. Knowledge is not freely granted.”

“Then perhaps if you were to use that knowledge to improve the life of the hybrids and grant them better care—”

“Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Have you forgotten your lessons?”

“I can quote scripture, too. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger.”

“How dare you,” her father said, his gaze leaden.

The bitter rebuke was caught in her throat, jagged, and Carlota pressed a trembling hand against her forehead. She felt faint, short of breath.

“Sit down, Carlota. I will not have you overexciting yourself again,” her father muttered. “Sit, sit. I’ll get the smelling salts.”

She sat down and heard him rummaging in a cabinet, but when he approached her with the flask in his hand she waved him away.

“I’m fine. It was nothing,” she said and stood up, holding on to the chair.

“Carlota, I must adjust your medication, but I need to be careful. In the meantime, I don’t want you exerting yourself. We had this conversation before.”

He put the flask down on the table and gently clasped her hand. That same hand that had wiped the sweat from her forehead when she was ill and turned the pages of storybooks when he was teaching Carlota her letters. That hand she loved and respected.