Carmilla was holding Laura’s hand. Lucinda did not want to interrupt such an intimate scene—she felt a little shy even watching it. She would go up to her room, rinse her mouth out thoroughly with lavender water, and perhaps rest for a while. She still felt so awkward and ashamed about drinking blood. Would she ever get used to this new life as a vampire?
She entered through the French doors into the music room. Perhaps, before proceeding upstairs, she would play the piano for a few minutes. She sat down on the stool, which was adjusted to her height—she was the only one who played with any consistency. Ten minutes later, she did not even notice Laura tiptoeing across the room so as not to disturb her. She was so completely lost in the melodies of Shubert.
MARY: As she seems to be right now!
JUSTINE: Forgive me, Mary, but that is Chopin.
MARY: Oh. What’s the difference?
JUSTINE: Why, they are not at all alike! That is like asking what is the difference between Ingres and Renoir, between Delacroix and Monsieur Monet.…
CATHERINE: Are you seriously interrupting my narrative to argue about composers? “Lucinda was playing something or other on the piano.” There, I fixed it. Satisfied?
As the cab drew up to 11 Park Terrace, Mary could not stop looking out the window in all directions—at the gray, rainy streets of London, the Georgian houses on either side, and the trees waving over the housetops, reminding her that Regent’s Park was still there and now that she had returned, she could walk to it whenever she wished.
“Stop shoving me!” said Diana, who was sandwiched between Mary and Justine. She was awake but tired, and therefore especially cross.
The horse stopped right in front of the Jekyll residence. “Whoa, Caesar!” shouted the cabbie. It was lovely to hear a cockney accent again!
At Charing Cross Station, they had stopped for tea and currant buns in a tea shop—the first proper English tea Mary had been able to order since leaving for Europe. How welcome and familiar it tasted, although Diana complained that the buns were stale. And then they had caught a cab. Now here they were, at 11 Park Terrace once again, a month after they had left. In that month, she had experienced so many things! Sometimes they had been wonderful, sometimes terrifying, sometimes merely tedious. She would, she was sure, have such adventures again. But this was where she belonged—no matter how far away she traveled, it was the home to which she would always return.
She paid the cabbie, almost handing him francs by accident and reminding herself that she would need to exchange them as soon as possible at the Bank of England. Justine, in her incarnation as Mr. Justin Frank, helped the cabbie carry the trunk to the front stoop. Diana rang the bell an unnecessary number of times. Over it was a polished brass plaque on which was written THE ATHENA CLUB. Mrs. Poole should be expecting them—Mary had telegraphed from Calais.
But it was not Mrs. Poole who answered the door.
“What the hell?” said Diana.
Standing in the doorway was a boy—short, with ginger hair and a strange, angular face. His wrists stuck out of his suit jacket and his arms seemed strangely long.
“You rang, miss?” he said in what sounded like a foreign accent.
With a start, Mary realized who he must be: the Orangutan Man that Catherine had rescued from the British headquarters of the Alchemical Society in Soho. What had she called him? Archimedes? Archi—
“Miss Mary! Welcome home!” Ah, there was Mrs. Poole, hurrying down the hall behind him. She still had a white apron over her black housekeeper’s dress. “Miss Justine! I’m so glad to see you again. And even you, Miss Scamp!” She looked just as she always did: entirely reassuring. All Mary’s life, Mrs. Poole had been there, to guide and teach and sometimes reprove. She, more than anything else in that house—Dr. Jekyll’s books, Mrs. Jekyll’s portrait—made the Jekyll residence feel like home. Mary wondered how Mrs. Poole would respond if she kissed the housekeeper. She did not think Mrs. Poole would approve at all.
MRS. POOLE: I most certainly would not have. I know my place, I assure you. And I trust Miss Mary to know hers.
Instead she said, as heartily as she could, “Mrs. Poole, I’m so very, very glad to see you again. It’s so good to be home.” But even as she said the word, she realized how different her home was now from the house in which she had grown up as the proper Miss Jekyll. Here she was standing in the front hall with her sister Diana, who was glaring suspiciously at the Orangutan Man. Beside her stood Justine, and in a few days Catherine and Beatrice would be home as well. They had all changed that house—for the better. The Jekyll residence had become the Athena Club.
And Mary herself, returning after almost a month on the continent, was not the same Mary Jekyll who had left. She had heard different languages, tasted different flavors, paid in different currencies—she had met men like Dr. Freud and Count Dracula, women like Ayesha and Mrs. Norton. She had wandered the streets of Vienna and Budapest. No wonder she felt different. Perhaps travel did that to you. Mary had come home, but she was not the same Mary who had left—not quite.
However, this was no time for reverie. They had coats and hats to take off, luggage to unpack, and friends to find—or, if Mrs. Poole’s fears were justified, to rescue.
MARY: I worry that readers who begin with this volume will not understand who we are, how we formed the Athena Club, and why it was so important to rescue Alice. I know you should begin a novel in medias res, Cat, but perhaps this is too much in medias and not enough res?
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Reader, if you have not yet read the first two adventures of the Athena Club, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter and European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, I encourage you to do so before proceeding further. However, I understand there may be reasons why you are unable to do so at this time. For example, if you have lost your fortune, must work as a governess, and cannot afford the first two volumes. Or if you have been kidnapped by bandits who possess only this third volume in their hideout, no doubt stolen from a person of discernment and literary taste. For readers in such circumstances, I shall briefly summarize our previous adventures, in which Mary Jekyll, impoverished after her mother’s death, discovered that her father, the respectable Dr. Jekyll, had engaged in experiments that turned him into the disreputable Mr. Hyde. When he fled England as a known murderer, he left behind a child, Diana Hyde, who was raised by the Society of St. Mary Magdalen, where Mrs. Raymond presided as the redoubtable director. Mary had taken the poor, defenseless girl home with her.
DIANA: Defenseless, my arse!
But her investigations had not ended there, for her father had been a member of the secretive Alchemical Society, some of whose members had also produced monstrous offspring: Beatrice Rappaccini, as poisonous as she was beautiful; Justine Frankenstein, taller and stronger than most men; and your author, Catherine Moreau, a puma transformed into a woman who retained her feline swiftness and cunning. Together, these remarkable young ladies had formed the Athena Club. These events are described in The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, in which our heroines solved the Whitechapel Murders with the help of Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson. In the thrilling sequel, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, they rescued Lucinda Van Helsing and confronted the Alchemical Society with its crimes. While its formidable president, Ayesha, would not agree to halt experiments in biological transmutation entirely, she had agreed to form a committee to evaluate such experiments, with Beatrice as a member.