The Fascination

Contents TITLE PAGE DEDICATION EPIGRAPH CONTENTS PART ONE: SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN ONE: THE MONSTERS TWO THREE: DINNER WITH MISS MILLER FOUR: PROFESSOR LOVELL’S ELIXIR FIVE SIX: THE TOSSING OF A COIN SEVEN: LORD SEABROOK’S LETTER PART TWO: COME UNTO ME … EIGHT: INTRODUCING HARE-LIPPED MARTHA NINE: DR SUMMERWELL’S MUSEUM TEN ELEVEN: A NIGHT IN DRURY LANE TWELVE: OH NO, HE ISN’T … OH YES, HE IS! THIRTEEN: FACES IN CARRIAGES FOURTEEN: THE SMELL OF VIOLETS PART THREE: THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN FIFTEEN: A DISAPPEARING ACT IN THE EGYPTIAN HALL SIXTEEN: ULYSSES, THE MESSENGER SEVENTEEN: RETURNING TO THE BROCAS EIGHTEEN NINETEEN: A BACCHANALIA OF BEASTS TWENTY TWENTY-ONE: A RETURN TO LINDEN HOUSE TWENTY-TWO TWENTY-THREE: COME LIVE WITH ME AND BE MY LOVE TWENTY-FOUR AFTERWORD BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR COPYRIGHT Victorian England. A world of rural fairgrounds and glamorous London theatres. A world of dark secrets and deadly obsessions… Twin sisters Keziah and Tilly Lovell are identical in every way, except that Tilly hasn’t grown a single inch since she was five. Coerced into promoting their father’s quack elixir as they tour the country fairgrounds, at the age of fifteen the girls are sold to a mysterious Italian known as ‘Captain’. Theo is an orphan, raised by his grandfather, Lord Seabrook, a man who has a dark interest in anatomical freaks and other curiosities … particularly the human kind. Resenting his grandson for his mother’s death in childbirth, when Seabrook remarries and a new heir is produced, Theo is forced to leave home without a penny to his name. Unable to train to be a doctor as he’d hoped, Theo finds employment in Dr Summerwell’s Museum of Anatomy in London, and here he meets Captain and his theatrical ‘family’ of performers, freaks and outcasts. But it is Theo’s fascination with Tilly and Keziah that will lead all of them into a web of dark deceits, exposing the darkest secrets and threatening everything they know… THE FASCINATION ESSIE FOX To Millie Anna Prelogar You are an inspiration ‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster … if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.’ —Friedrich Nietzsche CONTENTS TITLE PAGE DEDICATION EPIGRAPH PART ONE: SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN ONE: THE MONSTERS TWO THREE: DINNER WITH MISS MILLER FOUR: PROFESSOR LOVELL’S ELIXIR FIVE SIX: THE TOSSING OF A COIN SEVEN: LORD SEABROOK’S LETTER PART TWO: COME UNTO ME … EIGHT: INTRODUCING HARE-LIPPED MARTHA NINE: DR SUMMERWELL’S MUSEUM TEN ELEVEN: A NIGHT IN DRURY LANE TWELVE: OH NO, HE ISN’T … OH YES, HE IS! THIRTEEN: FACES IN CARRIAGES FOURTEEN: THE SMELL OF VIOLETS PART THREE: THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN FIFTEEN: A DISAPPEARING ACT IN THE EGYPTIAN HALL SIXTEEN: ULYSSES, THE MESSENGER SEVENTEEN: RETURNING TO THE BROCAS EIGHTEEN NINETEEN: A BACCHANALIA OF BEASTS TWENTY TWENTY-ONE: A RETURN TO LINDEN HOUSE TWENTY-TWO TWENTY-THREE: COME LIVE WITH ME AND BE MY LOVE TWENTY-FOUR AFTERWORD BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR COPYRIGHT PART ONE Suffer the Little Children ONE An Introduction to THE MONSTERS Grandfather snatches at his arm and drags him through the study door. The boy has never been inside, because the room is always locked, though he has often stood on tiptoe with one eye pressed to the keyhole – only to see a soup of shadows. But there are smells, and smells seep out. The ones that puddle round this door are wood and leather and vanilla from the pipe Grandfather smokes. Is that what stains his teeth so brown, even the tips of his moustache and the tufts of bristled white that are sprouting from his ears? His grandfather looks like an owl, and his nest is very dark, although some buttered rods of light are creeping in around the shutters closed across the big bay windows. They form a ladder on the floor leading towards the painted globe set on a stand beside the hearth. How the boy would like to spin it, to look at all the greens and blues, the lands and oceans of the world. But to do so he would need to navigate the tiger skin lying on the boards before it. The tiger’s head is still attached. The tiger’s eyes reflect the flames blazing red in the grate. They seem alive, and dangerous. Less threatening are the deer heads mounted high upon the walls. Their softer, melancholy gaze falls across the rows of tables laid with trays containing beetles, butterflies – or are they moths? – of almost every size and colour he could possibly imagine. Inside glass domes are birds and fish, and other animals the like of which he’s never seen before. At least not when he’s been exploring in the gardens or the fields that spread for miles around the house. These specimens – the old man calls them, letting go of the boy’s arm as he gruffly points them out – are macabre, but beautiful. Some are embossed with silver pins that fix them down on squares of velvet. Some hang on wires, invisible between the palest pinks of corals, pearly shells, or stems of leaves, all being artfully arranged to form the backdrops of displays that represent the distant places where these creatures had once lived. Lived, before they died. Did his grandfather go travelling to find and then to kill them, to bring them back to Dorney Hall? Sadly, it is too easy to imagine such a thing. And while continuing to stare the child is all but overwhelmed by a sense of loss and sorrow. This, he often thinks when he is older, looking back, is the moment when he first becomes aware that in some vague and unknown future everything that ever lived is doomed to die; although the notion slips away with a blast of onion breath, when his grandfather demands, ‘What sort of age are you these days? I’ll be damned if I can tell. Such a stumpy little imp. But