The Isle of Blood

“But that’s what I’m used to,” I argued. “And no one is going to raise me. No one has to. The doctor will be coming back soon and—”

“Yes, and when he does, we will give you back, safe and sound and clean. Come along now, William. Bring whatever you have; I’m sure it isn’t much, but that can be remedied too. I will wait for you downstairs. It’s very warm in here, isn’t it?”

“I’ll walk you down,” von Helrung offered. He seemed anxious to remove himself from my presence.

“No, that’s all right. Good-bye, Uncle Abram.” She kissed both his cheeks, adding, “You’ve done the right thing.”

“Oh, I pray so,” he murmured.

And then we were alone.

“I will explain…,” he began, and then shrugged. “She is right. I know nothing about children.”

“I’m not going.”

“Your… situation demands a woman’s touch, Will. You’ve been without one for far too long.”

“That isn’t my fault.”

His eyes flashed. For the first time he lost patience with me. “I do not speak of fault or blame. I speak of remedy. True, I pledged to Pellinore I would watch after you in his absence, but I have other responsibilities that I can no longer neglect.” He puffed out his chest. “I am president of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Monstrumology, not a nursemaid!”

“Of course you will be the first to know should I hear anything from Europe. The first to know, the moment I know it.”

“I don’t want to go,” I said. “I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to stay with your niece’s family, and I don’t—I don’t want a bath.”

He smiled. “You will like her, I think. Her heart is fierce, like someone else’s you know.”

And so it was in the winter of my thirteenth year that I came to live with Nathaniel Bates and his family, in their three-story townhouse facing the Hudson on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Nathaniel Bates was “in finance.” I didn’t learn much of anything else about him during my sojourn there. He was a quiet man who smoked a pipe and was never seen without a tie and never went outside without his hat, and whose shoes were always polished to a dazzling finish and who never had a hair out of place, and he always seemed to have a newspaper tucked under his arm, though I never saw him read one. He communicated, as far as I could tell, by means of monosyllabic grunts, facial expressions (a look over his pince-nez with his right eyebrow raised meant he was displeased, for example), and the occasional bon mot, delivered with such deadpan sincerity that one always laughed at one’s own peril.

Besides their daughter, the Bateses had one other child, a boy of nine named Reginald, whom they called Reggie. Reggie was small for his age, spoke with a slight lisp, and seemed completely enthralled with me from the moment I stepped through the door. My reputation, it seemed, had preceded me.

“You’re Will Henry,” he announced. “The monster hunter!”

“No,” I answered honestly. “But I serve under one.”

“Pellinore Warthrop! The most famous monster hunter in the world.”

I agreed that he was. Reggie was squinting at me through his thick spectacles, his face lit up by the great man’s glow reflecting off me.

“What happened to your finger? Did a monster bite it off?”

“You could say that.”

“And then you killed it, right? You chopped off its head!”

“That’s close,” I answered. “Dr. Warthrop shot it in the head.”

I thought he might faint from excitement.

“I want to be a monster hunter too, Will. Will you train me?”

“I don’t think so.”

Reggie waited until his mother turned her back, and then he kicked me as hard as he could in the shin.

Their daughter I had already met.

“So here you are, and Mother was right, you’ve lost a finger,” said Lillian Bates. I’d just finished my bath—the first in weeks—and my skin felt too loose on my bones, and my scalp burned from the lye. The robe I wore was her father’s and I was lost in it, overly warm, dizzy, and extremely sleepy.

For her part Lilly seemed taller, thinner, and not in the least uncomfortable in her own skin. It had been only a few months since I’d last seen her, but a girl matures faster than her male counterparts. I noticed she had started wearing makeup.

“How did you lose your finger?” she asked.

“Pruning the rosebushes,” I answered.

“Do you lie because you’re ashamed, or do you lie because you think it’s funny?”

“Neither. I lie because the truth is painful.”

“Mother says your doctor left you.”

“He’s coming back.”

She crinkled her nose at me. “When?”

“Not soon enough.”

“Mother says you may be staying with us for a long time.”

“I can’t.”

“You will, if Mother says. Mother always gets her way.” She did not seem particularly happy about the fact. “I believe you are her new project. She always has a project. Mother is a firm believer in causes. She is a suffragette. Did you know that?”

“I don’t even know what a suffragette is.”

She laughed, a tinkling of bright, shiny coins thrown upon a silver tray. “You never were very bright.”

“And you were never very nice.”

“Mother didn’t say where your Dr. Warthrop went.”

“She doesn’t know.”

“Do you know?”