The Isle of Blood

“Professor Ainesworth has never met him. He’s never even heard of him.”

He set down the watering can, leaned against his desk, and folded his thick arms over his chest. He regarded me soberly, bristly white eyebrows furrowing.

“I do not understand,” he said.

“The night he met the doctor, Mr. Arkwright said he knew we’d been to the Monstrumarium because of the smell. ‘The smell floats about you like a foul perfume.’ Remember?”

Von Helrung nodded. “I do.”

“Dr. von Helrung, how would Mr. Arkwright know that it smelled like anything if he’s never been there?”

My question hung in the air for a long time, a different kind of foul perfume.

“You are accusing him of lying?” He was frowning.

“I know he lied. I know he lied about applying to study under Dr. Warthrop, and now I know he lied about knowing we’d been to the Monstrumarium.”

“But you had been to the Monstrumarium.”

“That doesn’t matter! What matters is he lied, Dr. von Helrung.”

“You cannot say that with certainty, Will. Adolphus, may God bless him, is an old man, and his memory is not what it once was. And he often falls asleep at his desk. Thomas could have explored the Monstrumarium at his leisure, and Professor Ainesworth would know nothing about it.”

He cupped my cheek with his hand. “This has been hard for you, I know. All you have in the world, all you understand, all upon which you thought you could rely—poof! Gone in an instant. I know you are worried; I know you fear the worst; I know what terrors may fill the vacuum of silence!”

“Something isn’t right,” I whispered. “It’s been almost four months.”

“Yes.” He nodded gravely. “And you must prepare yourself for the worst, Will. Use these days to steel your nerves for that—not to torture yourself over Thomas Arkwright and these perceptions of perfidy. It is easy to see villains in every shadow, and very hard to assume the best of people, particularly in monstrumology—for our view of the world is skewed, by virtue of the very thing we study. But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.”

I nodded. His soothing words, however, brought no solace. I was deeply troubled.

I suppose it is a measure of the depths of my disquiet that I confided my greatest fear to the last person I thought could keep any confidence quiet. It slipped out over a game of chess one afternoon in Washington Square Park. Chess was actually my idea. Perhaps if I practiced more, I reasoned, by the time the doctor returned, I might best him—and wouldn’t that be something! Lilly accepted my challenge. She was very competitive, having learned the game from her uncle Abram. Lilly’s style of play was aggressive, impetuous, and intuitive, not so different from the girl herself.

“You take so long,” she complained as I agonized over my rook. He was trapped between her queen and a pawn. “Do you ever just do something? Just do it without thinking about it? Next to you, Prince Hamlet seems positively impulsive.”

“I’m thinking,” I answered.

“Oh, you think all the time, William James Henry. You think too much. Do you know what happens to someone who thinks too much?”

“Do you?”

“Ha, ha. I suppose that was a joke. You shouldn’t joke. People should know their limitations.”

I said good-bye to my rook and advanced my bishop to threaten her knight. She bopped my rook onto its side with her queen.

“Check.”

I sighed. I felt her eyes on me as I studied the board. I willed myself not to look up. The breeze tickled the new leaves of the trees; the spring air was soft and smelled of her lavender soap. Her dress was yellow, and she wore a white hat with a yellow ribbon and a large yellow bow. Even with a new wardrobe and a fresh haircut, next to her I felt shabby.

“Still no word from your doctor?”

“I wish you wouldn’t say it like that,” I said without looking up. “He isn’t ‘my’ doctor.”

“Well, if he isn’t yours, I’d like to know whose he is. And don’t try to change the subject.”

“One of the benefits about thinking too much,” I said, “is that you notice the little things, things other people miss. You say ‘your doctor’ like that on purpose, because you know it annoys me.”

“And why would I want to do that?” I heard a smile in her voice.

“Because you enjoy annoying me. And before you ask why you enjoy annoying me, I suggest you ask yourself that question. I don’t know why.”

“You’re in a mood.”

“I don’t like losing.”

“You were in a mood before we started playing.”

I moved my king out of danger. She barely glanced at the board before swooping in and capturing my last bishop. Inwardly I groaned. It was only a matter of time now.

“You can always concede,” she suggested.

“I shall fight on until the last drop of blood is spilt.”

“Oh! How so very un-Will-Henry-like! You sounded very much like a doer just then. Like Leonidas at Thermopylae.”

My cheeks were warm. I should have known not to become too pleased with myself, though.

“And all this while I thought of you as Penelope.”