The Isle of Blood (19 page)

I heard a woman’s voice next. “Well, I should hope so! You did tell him I was coming, didn’t you?”

He stepped lightly to one side, and in charged a dynamo draped in lavender, wearing a fashionable bonnet and carrying a matching umbrella.

“So this is William James Henry,” she said in a refined East Coast accent. “How do you do?”

“Will, may I present my niece, Mrs. Nathaniel Bates,” said von Helrung.

“Bates?” I repeated. I knew that name.

“Mrs. Bates, if you please,” she said. “William, I have heard so much about you, I cannot help but feel we’ve known each other for years. But stand up and let me get a look at you.”

She took my wrists into her gloved hands and held my arms out from my sides, and puckered her lips in disapproval.

“
Much
too thin—and how old is he, Uncle? Twelve?”

“Thirteen.”

“Hmmm.
And
short for his age. Stunted growth for lack of proper nutrition, I would say.” She squinted down her nose at my face. She had bright blue eyes like her uncle’s. And, like his, they seemed to shine by their own soulful light, insightful, a bit wistful, kind.

“I would not speak ill of any
gentleman
,” she said. “But I am not impressed with the rearing abilities of Dr. Pellinore Warthrop. Uncle, when was the last time this child had a bath?”

“I don’t know. Will, how long has it been since you’ve bathed?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“Well, here is the problem as I see it, William, and that is, if one cannot remember the last time one had a bath, it is probably time to take one. What is your opinion?”

“I don’t want to take a bath.”

“That is a desire, not an opinion. Where are your things? Uncle Abram, where are the boy’s belongings?”

“I don’t understand,” I said to von Helrung, somewhat pleadingly.

“Emily has generously proffered an invitation for you to stay with her family for a few days, Will.”

“But I—I don’t want to spend a few days with her family. I want to stay here with you.”

“That is not going so well, though, is it?” Emily Bates asked.

“I’ll eat. I promise. I promise to try. And Dr. Seward, he gave me something to help me sleep. Please.”

“William, Uncle Abram is many things—some of them wonderful and some I would rather not think about—but he hasn’t the first idea how to raise a child.”

“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?”

“I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

“Even if I kissed you?”

“
Especially
if you kissed me.”

“Well, I have no intention of kissing you.”

“And I have no intention of telling you anything.”

“So you
do
know!” She smiled triumphantly at me. “Liar.” And then she kissed me anyway.

“It is a pity, William James Henry” she said, “that you are altogether too young, too timid, and too
short
, or I might consider you attractive.”

Lilly’s faith was not misplaced. I was her mother, Emily’s, next project. After a restless, unendurably long night in the same room as Reggie, who pestered me with questions and ntreaties for monster stories, and who exhibited an alarming disposition toward midnight flatulence, Mrs. Bates bundled me up and trotted me to the barber’s. Then she took me to the clothier’s, then to the shoemaker’s, and finally, because she was as thorough as she was determined, to the rector of her church, who questioned me for more than an hour while Mrs. Bates sat in a pew, eyes closed, praying, I suppose, for my immortal soul. I confessed to the kindly old priest I had not been to church since my parents had died.

“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.