“Your grief has gotten the better of you,” Enfield grumbled as he tripped along behind me. “What are we going to do when we get there? Yell at him? Tell him he’s a terrible person for not coming to Lanyon’s funeral?”
“We need to end this right now,” I said. “I believe Henry may be in danger. I need to know what all this secrecy is for. Why does he disappear for weeks on end, then show up and act like a completely different person? And Hyde—”
Enfield huffed. “Please tell me you’re not still going on about him. Let it go, cousin. He’s on the run. If they ever catch him, they’ll execute him for what he did to Carew.”
I stopped and rounded on Enfield. “Then I hope they never catch him. I hope he finds some place to live out his days in peace and happiness. The world is a better place without Carew in it.”
Enfield’s eyes grew wide. “I know you’re angry—”
“Anger isn’t even the half of it.” I turned around and kept walking. “Are you coming with me or not?”
He quickened his step, walking along beside me. We stayed silent until we emerged in front of Henry’s house.
“The carriage is gone,” I said. There was no movement from the windows, no smoke from the chimney.
I crossed into the alley that abutted the Jekyll residence and found the door to the rear entrance to the laboratory locked.
Enfield heaved a sigh. “We can’t just let ourselves in.”
I searched for another entrance and found the garden gate sitting slightly ajar. I slipped into the inner courtyard and Enfield came in behind me.
“We’ll be arrested for trespassing,” Enfield hissed. “This is dangerous.”
He was right, but I didn’t care. I needed to know why Lanyon thought Henry might be in danger.
Someone cleared their throat and drew my attention up to an open window on the second floor of the house. There in the window behind a gauzy curtain sat Henry.
I gazed up at him and he locked eyes with me. My blood turned to ice in my veins. Henry sat with his arm propped on the sill, his dark eyes wide and blank. He still looked as ill as he had the night of Lanyon’s party, but now the hollows under his eyes were so deep the sockets looked almost empty.
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end as his lips pulled back over his teeth in what was meant to be a polite smile, but turned instead into some nightmarish grin.
“You’ve come to visit me, Mr. Utterson?” Henry asked. Even his voice sounded strange. There was a ring of something familiar in it, something of his old self, but it was masked by a terrible rasp.
“Mr. Utterson?” Enfield’s brow furrowed and he tilted his head to the side. “Why are you calling him that?”
“It is the polite thing to do,” Henry said from the window. “Titles are important.”
Enfield looked like he wanted to snatch Henry right out of the window, and I was suddenly glad he was out of reach on the second floor.
“How very kind of you to stop by,” Henry said. “I trust you’ll be on your best behavior, otherwise I’ll have to call for your removal.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“Oh yes you do,” Henry snapped. “Don’t come around looking at me with those big eyes. They betray you and all of your terrible yearnings. I want nothing to do with it.”
I had never felt such anger and it burned through me like a raging fire.
“We buried Lanyon,” I said. I didn’t swallow my sorrow or the stifling sense of betrayal. I wanted Henry to see it. I wanted him to feel it, if he still could. “I miss him so much I can hardly breathe! It hurts, Henry!”
“He was a friend to you,” Henry said flatly. “We are all in need of friends every now and again.”
“Stop speaking to me like that!” I screamed. I couldn’t hold it back a moment longer. “Stop speaking to me like you don’t care if I live or die. Lanyon is dead! He was my friend and he was yours as well! You didn’t even come to his funeral!”
“I wish him a peaceful rest,” Henry said. “You should do the same, and then you should move on.”
“Move on?” I asked, stunned by his frigid demeanor. “Move on from what? From caring about people? I do care, Henry! You used to care! What is wrong with you?!”
Enfield put his hand on my arm. “This is pointless, cousin. He isn’t the Jekyll we know. Not anymore.”
I wrenched my arm out of his grip and positioned myself under the window, as close to Henry as I could manage without disappearing from his line of sight.
“Lanyon was worried about you. I’m worried about you.” I let the tears stream down my face. “I need you to remember who you are, Henry! You are not this!”
“How would you know what I am?” Henry asked as the curtain billowed in front of him. He didn’t move. He didn’t even tilt his head to look at me. “You can’t know what I’ve become.”
There was a commotion in the room behind Henry, and Dr. Jekyll’s face suddenly appeared in the window.
“Gabriel?” he asked. He looked surprised to see me. His expression immediately soured. “Get off my property this instant.”
I looked to Henry, who didn’t even blink.
“What has happened to him?” I shouted. Enfield pulled me toward the garden gate, but I planted my feet. “Why is he like this? What did you do to him?”
“What did I do?” Dr. Jekyll put his hands on the sill and leaned out. “This is your fault! This would not have been necessary if you hadn’t corrupted him!”
“All I have ever done is care for Henry!” I shouted.
“You think I’m a fool?” Dr. Jekyll asked. “I’ve seen your letters. Your incessant pining drew Henry into something he should never have been a part of in the first place!”
The world around me went silent. My breath caught in my throat.
Henry said he’d burned our letters.
“Get away from me and my son and never come back,” Dr. Jekyll said. “You should be ashamed. Look at the harm you’ve done. Look what has become of my dear boy, all thanks to your reckless influence.”
He slammed the window shut. Enfield tugged me back another step—in that moment I was utterly incapable of doing anything on my own. All I felt was white-hot rage.
Henry had only ever strived to please his father. The pressure he put on himself to live up to Dr. Jekyll’s unattainable standards was crushing. And then there was his father’s attitude toward us. What I realized in that moment was that of course there had been an us. It wasn’t my overactive imagination: It was real, and what had existed between Henry and me meant something even if his father didn’t want to acknowledge it.
Dr. Jekyll was behind this. And I had no doubt that Henry was following along with it, because all he ever wanted was to make his father proud of him.
In that moment all I wanted to do was leave, but something caught my eye. As I peered up at the now closed window, I expected to see Dr. Jekyll’s ruddy face, his eyes full of anger and malice. Enfield also looked up, and what we saw in that moment was something I could not fully explain.
Henry stood in the window looking down at us. He narrowed his eyes at me and something shifted in his expression—no—not his expression.
His face.
His jaw seemed to widen, pushing out at the high points of his cheeks and just under his bottom lip. His eyes became rounder and more widely set. A guttural noise erupted from his chest and he gripped the windowsill. His normally close cut and tapered hair seemed to lengthen, and as the daylight slanted through the window, the color seemed to change as well. The bones of his face were changed. The muscles stretched in tight ribbons down his neck, the skin pulling so tight I thought it would split open.
I blinked repeatedly. It was the grief. It was a state of shock at witnessing Lanyon’s death firsthand. It was the agony of seeing him put in a box and sealed up in a tomb at Highgate Cemetery. But Enfield gasped beside me. He gripped my arm so tight I thought it would break.
Henry raised his hand, grabbed the edge of the curtain, and drew it closed.
I raced out of the garden and into the alleyway, Enfield hot on my heels. We ran out into the main street and did not stop until we got to St. James’s Park.
I collapsed onto a bench and put my head between my knees, my heart beating against my ribs. Sweat dripped from my forehead and dampened my shirt.
Enfield sprawled out on the ground and covered his face with his hands. “Gabriel—”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t say anything right now. I don’t know what just happened and I’m afraid that if we speak of it, I will go out of my mind. Just wait. Please.”
Enfield rolled up to a sitting position and pulled his knees to his chest, rocking from side to side like a child. The minutes ticked by and still we said nothing. I felt the gentle breeze on my skin, let the chirping of the birds fill my ears. I forced myself to listen to their songs, allowed myself to wonder what kind of birds they were and if they were staying to make nests in the trees.
“Gabriel.” I hadn’t noticed Enfield had come to sit next to me on the bench. “We need to discuss this right now.”
I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to stay lost in my own thoughts where I could choose to think of the birds and the trees and not of the impossible, horrifying thing I just witnessed. But Enfield would not let me.
“Tell me what you saw in the window,” I said. “Do not embellish. Do not soften it. Tell me exactly what you saw.”
“It was Henry,” Enfield said, his bottom lip trembling. “At least I think it was. I saw him standing there, but the curtain was in the way. The sunlight—the shadows. It was a trick of the light.”
“No. Don’t do that. Don’t try to rationalize it. It wasn’t the curtain. It wasn’t the light.”
“Then what was it? What are you suggesting?”
I didn’t know. I had no idea what I had just seen in Henry’s face. I had no explanation for it. My mind immediately went to my own fragile state. Everything had been like an exposed nerve since Lanyon died—raw and painful. Nothing made sense anymore, and here was yet another thing that I had to try to figure out. I didn’t want to do that, so I turned my attention away from that horrid image of Henry’s face contorting and focused instead on Dr. Jekyll’s venomous words.
“You heard what Dr. Jekyll said about me. Do you think he was right? Do you think it’s my fault that Henry is so distant and strange?”
“What?” Enfield asked. I know he was expecting me to tell him what I thought I’d seen in the window. When he realized I was not going to address it in that moment, he sighed as if he too wanted to put it out of his head. “I don’t think you would ever do anything to hurt him. I know how you feel about him. I thought I knew how he felt about you. I don’t think I’m wrong, but clearly his father must’ve seen something in it that caused him to act that way.”
Tears welled up and I swallowed hard. “What did he see? That I loved Henry? That I cared for him? Is that wrong?”
Enfield let his shoulders roll forward as he took a deep, mournful breath. “I think it depends on who you ask. You know very well what people say. People are willing to close their eyes to things they do not agree with, but it requires you to make yourself invisible. Maybe your affection for Henry was a little too obvious for Dr. Jekyll’s liking.”
I clenched my jaw against a fresh stab of anger. “Do you know what was obvious? Sir Danvers Carew putting his goddamn hands all over me, and all over any other person in his sight. He did that right out in the open and everyone knew about it. That didn’t offend their delicate sensibilities, but my affection for Henry did?”
“I didn’t say I agreed,” Enfield said. “I’m only telling you what Dr. Jekyll might have been thinking.”
“What is Dr. Jekyll doing to him in that house?” I asked.
It was the only question that mattered in that moment. Lanyon had feared for Henry’s safety and now, so did I.