The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(41)

“This man who keeps you… this—what did you call him? Doctor of ‘aberrant biology’? He is not a religious man?”

“I don’t think many doctors of aberrant biology are,” I answered. I remembered his words the day before he abandoned me:

There is something in us that longs for the indescribable, the unattainable, the thing that cannot be seen.

“I would think it’d be the norm for such men, given the nature of their work.”

I didn’t offer a contrary opinion. I really had nothing to say. What I saw, in my mind’s eye, was an empty bucket sitting on the floor beside the necropsy table.

“Look at you!” cried Lilly when we arrived back at the house on Riverside Drive. She had just gotten home herself. She had not yet changed out of her uniform and had had no time to apply makeup. She looked as I remembered her, a young girl close to my own age, and somehow that made my palms begin to itch. “I hardly recognize you, Will Henry. You look so…” She searched for the word. “Different.”

Later that evening—much later; it was not easy in the Bates home to have time to oneself—I happened to glance in the bathroom mirror and was shocked by the image of the boy captured there. But for the slightly haunted look in his eyes, he bore little resemblance to the boy who had warmed himself by a fire fed with the chopped-up remains of a dead man.

Everything was different.

Each morning there was a full breakfast, for which we were expected to arrive promptly at six. No one was allowed to start this meal—or any meal—until Mr. Bates picked up his fork. After breakfast Lilly and Reggie went off to school, Mr. Bates went off to his job “in finance,” and Mrs. Bates went off with me. She was appalled at the staggering extent of my ignorance in the most elemental aspects of a proper childhood. I had never been to a museum or a concert or a minstrel show or the ballet or even the zoo. I had never attended a lecture, seen a play, watched a magic lantern show, been to the circus, ridden a bicycle, read a book by Horatio Alger, skated, flown a kite, climbed a tree, tended a garden, or played a musical instrument. I hadn’t even played a single parlor game! Not charades or blindman’s bluff, which I’d heard of, and not deer-stalker or cupid’s coming or dumb crambo, which I had not.

“Whatever did you do at night, then?” she inquired.

I did not wish to answer that question; I was honestly concerned she might arrange to have the monstrumologist arrested for endangering a child.

“Helped the doctor.”

“Helped him with what?”

“Work.”

“Work? No, I am speaking of afterward, William. After the work was finished for the day.”

“The work was never finished.”

“But when did you have time for your studies?”

I shook my head. I did not understand what she meant.

“Your schoolwork, William.”

“I don’t go to school.”

She was flabbergasted. When she discovered I had not been inside a classroom in more than two years, she was furious—so furious, in fact, that she brought up the matter to her husband.

“William has informed me that he has not attended a single day of school since the death of his parents,” she told him that evening.

“Humf! You seem surprised.”

“Mr. Bates, I am mortified. He’s treated no better than one of that man’s horrid specimens.”

“More like one of his instruments, I’d say. Another tool in his monster hunting kit.”

“But we must do something!”

“Humf. I know what you’re going to suggest, but we’ve no right, Emily. The boy is our guest, not our responsibility.

“He is a lost soul placed in our path by the Almighty Father. He is the Jew beaten by the side of the road. Would you be the Levite or the Samaritan?”

“I prefer being Episcopalian.”

She dropped the subject, but only for the time being. Emily Bates was not the kind of “expert in the field” who allowed a boil to fester.

I did not see much of Lilly on school days. Her afternoons were devoted to piano and violin lessons, ballet classes, shopping trips, trips to the salon, visits with friends. I saw her at breakfast, at the evening meal, and afterward when the family gathered in the parlor, where I learned all the games in the Bates family repertoire. I detested charades, because I was awful at it. I had no cultural context upon which to draw. But I liked card games (old maid and old bachelor, our birds and Dr. Busby) and I Have a Basket, at which I excelled. When my turn came round, I could always name what was in my “basket,” no matter what letter fell to me. A was easy: Anthropophagi. V? Why, I have a Vastarus hominis in my basket! What about X? That’s a hard one, but not too hard for me. Look here. It’s a Xiphias!

The weekends were a different story. Hardly an hour passed without her company. Bicycling in the park (after an afternoon of instruction; I never got very good at it), picnics by the river when the weather warmed, hours in the library at the Society’s headquarters on the corner of Broadway and Twenty-second Street (when we could sneak away; Mrs. Bates took a dim vif all things monstrumological), and, of course, many hours at her great-uncle’s brownstone. Lilly adored Uncle Abram.

She had not given up her dream to become the first female monstrumologist. Indeed, she possessed an almost encyclopedic knowledge on the topic, from monstrumology’s colorful history to the even more colorful practitioners of the craft, from its catalogue of malevolent creatures to the intricacies of its Society’s governing charter. She knew more about monstrumology from studying on her own than I did after living two years with the greatest monstrumologist since Bacqueville de la Potherie, a rather embarrassing fact she delighted in pointing out at every opportunity.