I found myself with more questions than answers after my discussions with Marielle and Penn. The mystery gnawed at me night and day, even as my love for Quinn continued to deepen.
I watched him go through his paces, saw how he tended to all in his charge, and I refused to believe that there could be anything so dark or deeply disturbing in his past that I could love him one whit less.
Now I only wanted to know what that history contained, so that I might find a way to help ease his burden, if I could. He had sacrificed much and risked everything to care for all of us, especially me, and I wanted nothing more than to help bear the weight of his own pain.
He seemed, however, entirely determined to keep that pain under lock and key. There were times I wondered how a human could tolerate such emotional distress, but then I didn’t believe that he was completely human and thought that explained a lot of the mysteries about him.
Perhaps he really was much more ghostly creature than man of flesh and blood.
There were, after all, times I would have sworn he appeared out of thin air, moving from one room to another in the house without use of the standard doors or even the windows or balconies as points of access.
This night, the doctor had been called to visit Jib. The hour was late. Schuyler and Penn slept as I paced my room, alight with nervous energy. I adjusted the curtains, tidied up all the trinkets on the vanity, fluffed and fluffed again the pillows on my bed.
I stoked the fire and examined the mantle for dust, but found Schuyler’s meticulous nature shone through again; there was not a speck upon it.
As my inspection of the space continued, I found that a painting on the wall, the one I had admired so in the shop and which had mysteriously appeared in my room the following evening, was hanging slightly askew. Instinctively I straightened it, and to my surprise I discovered that the panel in the wall behind it was actually hollow, and with the right leverage and very little actual strength it could be moved aside.
I grabbed a candle and lit it, shining it into an open space the panel had exposed. Its light revealed a very narrow door, and an even narrower staircase.
I almost expected the steps to give beneath my weight when I tried the first one, but found them to be solid as any thick wood floor in the house, and as I tread them they made no sound.
Just a flight below my room I found another door, and I considered my intentions carefully as to whether or not I should open it. I came to the conclusion very quickly that I was only doing this because I desired to help Quinn, and that reason gave me the boldness to continue that no other could.
I promised myself that if it were locked I would not search for a key, but turn away and continue down the steps to see where they ended up at the last. If the handle turned, however …
The handle turned.
A rising swell of panic washed over me. What if it was Schuyler’s room and he was sleeping inside? Or Penn’s? How would I explain where I was and what I was doing? I could hardly claim sleepwalking. Even if I had not been turned into a nocturnal creature by the doctor, I had never shown tendencies toward it before and the tale would be utterly unbelievable.
I finally pushed my fear aside; after all, I was doing this for Quinn. If I got caught I would tell exactly what I had been doing: I would tell the truth.
The door creaked as I opened it; a menacing sound, and one I realized I had heard before. When I had questioned Schuyler as to its origin he had simply replied that the floors were old, and prone to complain.
My solitary candle was too dim to afford me much sight here, so I sought out the mantle and found several more in holders upon it.
They were brand new, wicks untouched, and with them burning I soon had a much better view of the room in which I stood.
It was Quinn’s room.
It did not take long for me to deduce this, as one of his waistcoats was tossed over the remarkably plain chair in the corner. The room was cold, and from the look of the hearth no fire had been lit in it for some time.
The wardrobe door had been left half open, and one of his shirts was hanging upon it. Cautious not to get my candle too near the fabric I held it up closer, and examined identical pairs of pants and shirts, black and white respectively, all lined up in perfect rows inside.
Schuyler again, I thought.
I had never, not once in my life, been tempted to steal before this moment; but by the heavens I swear, how I wanted to take with me just one of his pure white shirts so I could sleep with it folded up and hidden beneath my pillow.
I turned around and moved toward a single bed, made so precisely and with such crisp linen that it looked as if it had never been slept in before. I could not resist the urge to pick up the pillow to see if it contained any hint of the barely detectable cologne he always wore, as his coat had the time I’d worn it. To my disappointment, I found not a trace to indicate it had ever touched his skin.
No, this room was not where Quinn Godspeed lived. This room was a closet for his clothing. His laboratory… that was where he lived.
One by one I extinguished the candles upon the mantle, and after a moment of silence to breathe in this place, with great reverence I closed the door.
I continued on and found the narrow staircase led only one place more; directly down into that hidden laboratory where he had turned me from merely human into something much more contrived.
I began to wonder, given there were hidden stairways and entire rooms unknown to all but just the few who needed to know of them, if there was more to that laboratory than I had previously seen.
Now that I found myself alone in it at last, I began to take note of the placement of every picture, every piece of furniture, and every mechanical component present.
I touched nothing of his machinery or upon his desk for fear of causing irreparable damage to some important work in progress.
I did, however, search the walls high and low, and just as I was about to give up I detected it: that same hollow sound in the wall I had heard inside my room.
I held my breath, placed both palms on the panel, and pushed.
I walked into the next room and instantly stopped where I stood. There was something not right about this place, something truly dark.
Something unnatural.
It was, for one thing, much colder in temperature than the room adjacent to it, and I shivered from the shock.
It was also unlike the laboratory, which had so many tools and instruments and books scattered about, in that it was absolutely spotless.
It was for the most part empty. There were bookshelves lining almost every inch of wall I could see, and every spine was straightened and displayed in precise order.
Dim gas lamps all around illuminated the space, and those lamps had to be tended, which meant someone visited this room quite often.
Though difficult to see in the light as it was, I feared allowing my candle to burn on in this place; I’d already considered what it might do, should anything nearby be flammable. I extinguished it with one breath, and still clutched the holder in my hand as I squinted to try to get a sense of exactly where I was.
It appeared to be neither library nor study, and I could not comprehend what its actual use might be or why it was kept hidden away as it was, merely to house a store of books.
I walked on, slowly moving forward.
It was only upon making a profound, shocking, and deeply disturbing discovery that I began to grasp the slightest glimpse into the magnitude of Quinn’s genius, and his madness.
She lay encased in glass, like a porcelain doll in a toyshop’s window. Each bright blonde curl upon her head was a perfectly formed ringlet that cascaded down far beyond her shoulders, over her bodice and down to her waist. She looked to be made of spun glass, but I knew she had once been far more than that.
She had once been alive.
There was something more to this woman imprisoned in a transparent coffin; there were lines and tubes and wires running to the pedestal beneath it, and as I staggered forward in shock and stumbled, I placed my hands upon the top of the sparkling, flawless crystal lid and discovered that it was cold.
It was freezing.
She was frozen.
I felt dizzy and thought I might faint, but I fought to hold on to reason through my horror. I knew that so many of the answers I sought were to be found in this room, and I could not risk letting the opportunity to find them slip away.
If I could just see enough and grasp hold of what it all meant, I could finally begin to understand him.
I locked tear-filled eyes upon the face of the woman before me, and thought now that she looked incredibly familiar. There was something about the slightly upturned curve of her nose, the dimple in her chin that I recognized. I had seen these features before, but where?
In whom had I seen this resemblance?
I willed myself to analyze her in greater detail: her sloping arms, her curving, feminine form not too dissimilar to my own. Her arms were crossed gracefully over her chest and on her left hand, a ring…
An engagement ring.
I was forced, now, to look away. My heart knew already what my mind could still not accept. This was the ‘she’ that Schuyler and Quinn battled over, whispered and screamed of. This was the woman they had both loved, and lost.
This was the woman who still held Quinn Godspeed’s heart within the strangling confines of her icy, lifeless fingers. She was the reason that he had never seen me, would never hear me and could never love me.
I pulled my hand back from the surface of the enclosure now and rubbed it against the skirt of my gown. My fingers ached and stung, still burning from the cold.
The question that formed in my mind now was as simple as it was devastating.
Had he ever really wanted to save me, or had he only tried to spite Death because he could not save her?
I heard a gasp from the doorway and jumped. I could not turn, I was too afraid to see in his eyes the rage I knew I would if Quinn was the one who found me in this room.
"God in Heaven, woman, what have you done!" It was Schuyler, and he rushed forward toward me. In three long strides he had reached me, and he grasped hold of me, shaking me by the arms with a violence I did not, until this moment, know he was capable of.
"Stop, please!" I begged, but he was too possessed by fear to hear me.
"Do you know what he will do if he finds you here?" His fingers were bruising my arms, and tears fell down my face. My heart beat a frenzied pace in my chest, out-ticking the timing of its artificial mechanism in a way that made my entire body ache. Unconsciousness was not far off now, and I wondered if this would be the heartbreak that finally silenced my soul in death.
"Who gave you the right?" he demanded.
It was hearing the indignant tone in his voice that finally inspired in me the will to resist.
"THIS gives me every right!" I cried. "This monstrosity, wired and bolted to my chest. This unholy clockwork noose that cannot be removed, except at peril of my very existence. This hellish invention that keeps me prisoner of the darkness, unable to ever live again in the light of the sun without fear of every breath being my last!" I narrowed my eyes as I stared deeply into his and recognized now the familiar curves of the dead woman's face in his own fine features. "The same wires that violate my chest bore into the chest of this woman, as she lies asleep in death before us. Or is she only in suspension, waiting for the time to come when he can resurrect her?"
Schuyler released me.
"She is dead,” he whispered, tears filling his eyes now as he stumbled backward, up against the coffin. "My sister is…" His hands elevated to his face, and he wept, dropping to his knees. "My sister is dead, and he refuses to believe that—" He stopped, unable to speak any more.
I found myself staring once again at the wires that were just barely visible beneath the dead woman's long, silken curls. My own hand rose and my fingertips brushed against the wires protruding from my chest.
I slowly lowered myself to the floor and, despite my fear, gathered Schuyler into my arms.
He had shown me kindness once, when no one else in the world would even have noticed that I was alive. I would not disregard his suffering now, regardless how I personally felt about his concealing the truth from me. Those were matters to be dealt with later, and truthfully, with another person — a man whom I knew would never agree willingly to discuss them with me at all.
He sobbed on my shoulder; for how long, I could not have said. When his breathing finally slowed, and my own heart seemed to resume its singular, artificially regulated cadence, I pulled back from him and began to press him for the answers I longed for.
"Tell me the truth." I lifted his face until he was forced to look at me, and I marveled that though he was as many years older than me as Quinn, he looked in this moment like a lost little boy.
"How much truth are you truly prepared for, and what right do you have to demand anything from me when you still won't even tell me your name?" Schuyler shook his head. "You won't even tell him your name, the man that you so dearly love."
I drew back even further. He could not have injured me more if he had reached out and struck me.
"The man I love?" Now was the time for truth in whole, I decided. And that would include, it seemed, calling Schuyler's own feelings for Quinn precisely what I was certain they were. "What of you, Schuyler? Tell me, how difficult has it been, all these years, to watch the man you love so well grieve for the touch of your dead sister?"
He looked for an instant as though he really did wish to strike me, but I knew he was much too kind and far too wounded.
He pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, his forehead dropping down to hide his face from my unwavering glare.
"Is it so obvious?"
"Not to anyone but someone who knows what it means to love him, too." I felt I owed him at least this much. If I was going to cut him so by revealing that I was fully aware of his feelings for Quinn, it felt only right in this moment that I should openly confess my own.
"That is some small comfort." His voice was muffled, but the emotions in it were still undeniably clear. "You see, when you've loved someone as long as I have loved Quinn, sometimes you begin to doubt your ability to conceal it, even though you know that you must, even if it takes years from your life." He finally tilted his face back up toward mine. His expression was changed, his eyes were emptier than I had ever seen them before. "Even if it takes your life."
"That night, when you argued," I whispered. "When you said 'this time' you were speaking of the fact that he had attempted to interfere with the workings of a human heart before."
"He tried so hard to save her." Schuyler said, tears filling and falling from his eyes again. "He would have taken the heart from his own chest and put it into hers, if he could have, in order to stop her from dying."
"What happened?"
"What happened?” He quietly echoed the question. “Two deceptively simple words, comprising a question so complicated it is nearly impossible to answer." Schuyler wiped furiously at his cheek with the back of his fist. "My sister grew ill, from fever, just as you. She suffered fainting spells. She would stop breathing, and turn blue." The memory hurt him, and I felt guilty in that moment for forcing him to relive it. Still, I had to know the origins of the machinery that was keeping me alive, if I was ever going to understand the workings of the mind that invented it.
"He was only an apprentice surgeon then, working with some of the greatest experts in the field that Fairever has ever known. He was privileged. He was trusted. He was considered to be the future of medicine."
"He abused that trust," I concluded, without further prompting.
Schuyler nodded. "He was willing to sacrifice anything to save her, including his own future. And he did." He sighed, running his hands back through his hair. "He used his access to equipment and laboratories to test his theories, and to construct an artificial means to stimulate the heart back into a steadier rhythm. Only he couldn't maintain it, and there were times when the heart would race out of control. He was doing alternately as much damage as he was good, and my sister was..." He lowered his eyes, pain coursing through him. "Suffering."
I did not doubt it, for I lived with pain that I was sure must be similar to that which she had endured. "She was dying."
"She did die, several times, if you define death as the absence of breathing and heartbeat. Each time, Quinn revived her. Until."
"Until?"
"The external shocks became too much for her body, and he revealed to me that he had conceived of an idea for a small, powerful device that could continually regulate the heart with lesser charges. The problem was keeping the energy source to run it consistent, and strong enough. He drove himself to sheer madness attempting to figure it out before her time ran out." He rose on shaking knees and lurched forward, touching the glass with the back of extended fingers as if imagining caressing his sister's soft, fair skin. "He was too late. By the time he figured out that the necessary power source had been there all along, as clear as the sky above his head, she was already gone."
"The power of the sun," I whispered. Truly, Quinn Godspeed was a genius, evidence of that was clear in the fact that I now rose to my feet again as well, alive and fully aware of the implications of his work.
"He was absolutely furious with himself for not figuring it out sooner. He laments to me, to this day, the fact that it was only because the Sun was shining so brightly the day that we were meant to bury her that he realized what he had been missing."
He shook his head, and he looked up at me again. "Something in Quinn shattered that day, and even as the truth of his work came to light and he lost his license to practice medicine, nothing mattered to him but continuing to design, to understand, and to refine this work.
“He was cast out of society, and we were forced, in the end, to allow the rumors to flourish that he had ended his own life. Death by hanging, consumed with grief over the death of his beloved, Orchid."
"But if he was supposed to be dead—"
"It was easy enough to fabricate a brother, a non-existent twin that would take Quinn's place. Returned home from a stint overseas trying to make his way as an inventor. An eccentric, a man not to be trusted but feared."
I tried to reconcile this story with the life he seemed to live here, with laboratory and access to the components that were required to do the kind of work that he did… the work he'd done on Jib and Penn and the others…
"Ah, I know what you are thinking now." Schuyler turned away from his sister's body and stared at a small table nearby. Slowly he moved toward it, picked up a framed drawing and held it up on display. "I promised her that I would do all I could to protect him. That I would help him. I think…" His eyes focused on the floor, and he started to shake. "I believe she knew what she was asking of me, and still, she asked it anyway. And I loved..." He stopped.
"You loved him too much to walk away."
Once again, tears trailed down his face. "I still love him too much to ever walk away."
I understood more than I wanted to admit, or believe.
"Do you think," he asked me slowly, trembling from head to toe now with fear of what I might say in reply, "that he knows?"
"No," I answered with certainty. "He doesn't know, or at least, he doesn't understand, any more than—" I stopped.
"Any more than he understands that you love him."
I was now the one wiping tears away from my face.
Schuyler set the frame back down upon the table and moved once more toward his sister's coffin. "He said that goddesses do not sleep beneath blankets of earth," he whispered. "He said that until he could send her to rest amidst the stars of heaven where she belonged, she would slumber here, safe in his keeping. Though I believe…" His voice dwindled down to nothing, but I was not having it.
"You believe what, Schuyler?"
"I believe that he still holds out the slightest of hopes that somehow, he will be able instead one day to wake her."
I took her in again. She was a true beauty, classically elegant in ways that made me feel like I was suffocating, trapped within the body that contained me.
"What was she like?"
"My sister..." Schuyler looked at her again, this time his face taking on an innocence that surely accompanied many boyhood memories. "Orchid was the embodiment of laughter. Of music and light. To know her truly was to love her. She did have a darker streak to her nature, however. She was..." He looked almost ashamed now. "She was not above playing a man's heart for sport when it suited her."
My cheeks took on color, burning with anger. Here, I loved Quinn as I did and his heart was always out of my reach. To think that anyone could intentionally inflict pain upon him was unimaginable, and truly unbearable to me. "Quinn's heart?"
Schuyler's head moved up and down in one definitive nod, and the look in his eyes now told me that it pained him as well to see someone he loved so dearly so mistreated. "She did not love him."
"But the ring…?" I was unable to stop myself asking the question, even though I did not finish it.
"A posthumous gift." He shivered, and began to wring his hands in that way he did when he was nearing the end of his ability to cope. "A small triumph, to picture her spirit bound to his, somehow, by the ring that he'd intended to give her that Christmas in front of my entire family and with my father's blessing." He shook his head. "Whether or not it was her intention or desire, Orchid would have married him.
"Now here she lies in silent testament. A statue of dark award in honor of his dearest failure." He looked up at me again at last. "You know Quinn. His mind is of an entirely logical, rational bent. He hates little more than to suffer reminders of his failures." He sighed, glancing affectionately toward Quinn's desk. "They overshadow his successes, no matter how great they are or many they number."
“Do I know Quinn?” I whispered, my hand rising to the device he’d tethered to me and clutching it within my palm. For a moment I was tempted to rip it out, just tear it from my body and let myself become another reminder to him. Even if I became one that he hated, at least I would stay in his memory.
"There is much you do not know about your beloved Doctor Godspeed," Schuyler sneered at me, and I tried to steady my voice before speaking again. He was unnerving me, and I could not allow it if I had any chance of getting the information I still required.
He was right, there was much I wanted — needed to know about Godspeed, but there was no way I believed that I could ever get the answers from the man himself.
"I am not lacking in the ability to hear or understand, sir. Please, enlighten me as to what it is about him that could so change the way I see him."
"You don't know him well enough to say you truly love him," Schuyler declared. "If there is one thing you must understand about Quinn, young woman, it is that he is, in many ways, his own evil twin and always has been. There has been a shadow side to Quinn since boyhood that he can never escape to completely stand in the light. His is a soul divided by halves, and not neatly down the middle as by tailor's shears. The edges are exposed, ragged, and as sharp as broken mirror."
He dropped his head into his hands again, but this time it was no dramatic gesture; it was a sign of true and penetrating grief. "You have seen how he goes days sometimes without sleep. He would do the same for food and drink, were I not there to look after him. Quinn functions highly within the confines of his genius, but he cannot survive alone outside its stained glass walls."
I nearly laughed. "You think that he could not survive in the world without you?"
"Tell me that you don't have fantasies, child, of saving him from that deep melancholy you think you alone can see."
I said nothing. To deny that I wanted to save him from his pain would be a falsehood I could never carry off with any degree of belief from my audience.
"I have been saving him every day for years. He was different once, more the Quinn I remember. Before..." His voice withered as his hand heavily gestured toward Orchid’s coffin. “Before this."
"And since?"
"Since he has splintered. Fragmented into remains of himself, no more alive than she is. It was supposed to be fiction that Quinn died after Orchid did. But the truth is, for all practical purposes, Quinn Godspeed did die that day, and was replaced by the man you now see."
"A good man. A caring, brilliant man."
"Do not let those beautiful blue eyes of his fool you into thinking that his is not the most dysfunctional heart of all," Schuyler warned, shifting as if beneath the weight of a heavy, unseen burden. "Or can you tell me that you have never seen a look on his face or heard a tone in his voice that could not quickly cut you to the bone?"
Again, I knew denial would be useless, and so I said nothing.
"I know that you have heard him make remarks to me that can wound me as nothing else on this planet can, or in the universe ever could. Still I love him, because he is who he is, and I have loved him all of my life. Before I even understood exactly how or why I felt about him as I do, I loved him. So, as someone who has spent years keeping him alive, so that he can do extraordinary things like save throwaway children from dying in the streets of broken hearts, let me tell you this."
He turned away, staring back into Quinn’s laboratory as he spoke. "He's done much for other people, and you are right. He is a good man." He hesitated but a moment before adding, "He can never love me, and he will never love you. A lifetime of loving him will not help him, but it will consume you. Destroy you, as it is slowly destroying me."
He took two bold steps forward but then stopped, and spun on his boot heel back toward me one last time. Tears were in his eyes, and a single drop escaped down his cheek as he concluded our conversation. "There is Hell to be paid for Quinn's gifts, and he is the one who pays most dearly of all."
As he quit the room, he left me with one last warning.
“Do not let him find you here.”