The Daughter of Doctor Moreau(67)

“I bred the hybrids in the bellies of pigs, then transferred the viable fetuses to my tanks. But there were mistakes, details that went…well, I thought perhaps the problem was the materials I was utilizing. I was employing the gemmules of criminals and vagabonds. I decided my own gemmules would be more fitting. And I also decided a woman would bear the child, not a hog. I found Teodora in a whorehouse. That was…that was the woman who birthed you.”

Carlota stopped in her pacing. She stared at him. “Then I did have a mother, and Hernando Lizalde is wrong. I’m not a jaguar’s child.”

Her father’s lips were pressed into a grim, thin line. He let out a sigh.

“I took Teodora out of that whorehouse, and she agreed to birth me a child in exchange for money, and the child did grow in her womb. It had some of her traits, yes, and some of mine. But it also had the gemmules of a jaguar. Carlota, you are not the child of two parents. I made you, like I made the other hybrids. You are an impossibility, practically a creature from myth. A sphynx, my love.”

She did not know what to say and remained still, standing behind the table, as her father slowly rounded it, leaning on his cane. Her eyes darted toward Montgomery, who was rubbing a hand against his jaw.

“Like the other hybrids,” she whispered slowly.

“When you were born you didn’t look like them. My other creations had been wretched and flawed in some way, but you looked exceedingly human! There was work to be done, yes, but I had never seen anything like you. I had to correct certain traits and express others more fully, and there was an amount of pain in the beginning—”

“I remember nothing but pain when I was a child,” she said sharply, recalling the black cloud of suffering of her youth and her father’s cool hand upon her brow. “Was that your doing?”

“You’ve seen what happens with the hybrids. I needed to tweak certain components. But you cannot deny the genius of my work. Your face is perfectly balanced, your features are most pleasing.”

“So you made and remade me?”

“Yes. Because you were close to perfection. Unlike the others. That lot of miscreants have too much of the animal inside, they’re riddled with mistakes. Not you. There has never been another who has approximated you in form and thought. You are a gentle child and obedient and…ah, Carlota, don’t you see? You are a work in progress, a—”

“A project,” Montgomery said, with a sneer on his lips. He had been leaning against the wall and now pushed himself forward. “Isn’t that what you said to me, doctor? One great project. Well, you were not lying about that, I suppose.”

“Yes, and what is wrong with it?” her father asked, turning around in exasperation and looking at Montgomery. “Every child is a project! Mine happened to be better than the dirty, low projects of common men who simply wish to have children so they might help farm their meager plots of land.”

“It’s not the same.”

“But it is. And I have been a good father. I have clothed, fed, and educated my child. She did not have to endure the beatings of a violent man, as you did, Montgomery. Nor was she unfortunate enough to inherit the traits of a vicious alcoholic which would have doomed her to the exact same life of inebriation. She has grown whole and healthy, and if I should choose to exhibit her this instant, before learned men, no one would be able to deny I’ve created a chimera to surpass any ordinary woman.”

“My father was a lowlife, yes, but so are you,” Montgomery said, pointing an accusing finger at the doctor. “I always knew you were a little mad, but to treat your own child like a thing you would wish to exhibit at a fair?”

Moreau slapped his chest, his voice rising. “I never said I would exhibit her. I said I could. There is a difference there.”

“No wonder you’ve been trying to sell her like one sells a horse!”

“Spare me your idiotic rantings, Laughton. All men marry their daughters off. I simply wanted her married to the best. There is nothing wrong in ambition.”

“Where is my mother?” Carlota asked, staring at the ground. She felt exhausted, and at some point her hands had stopped aching, as if a spell was breaking, as if slowly something inside herself was drawing back and reassembling itself. The nails looked smaller and rounded. “Where is Teodora?”

Both men turned their heads to look at her.

Her father licked his lips and raised a hand in conciliatory fashion. “It was a difficult birth. She died not long after it. That is why I never pursued the option of growing another hybrid in a human womb. It seemed too risky. But that might be the trick. Nothing else has ever approximated you. Or perhaps it was a quirk, a miraculous alchemy I cannot hope to recapture.”

“She had no family? No siblings?”

“None that I knew of. She was a foundling who’d been whoring herself since the age of fifteen. The lady who visited me was the woman who owned the brothel where she worked. She wrote a few times, asking for money; she even came in person on one occasion. She probably believed I’d done the girl in. Well, I didn’t kill her. She slipped away. Like my wife. My poor wife…” he said, trailing off.

“Where is my mother buried? Is she here?”

“No. The corpse is in the lagoon. I weighed it down. It will never be found. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Carlota. I did not intend to harm her, never. I even liked to pretend, sometimes, that she had been my paramour and you had been no experiment. It was a pretty fiction.”