Minda Webber
The Reinvented Miss Bluebeard
Dedication
I want to thank my fans, Kathe Robin and the Romantic Times BOOKreviews for their acknowledgment of a fledgling author. It can be a scary thing to be published for the first time. I was fortunate and found not only acceptance, but also encouragement and support. Thank you.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Paul, Crystal and Carlos for doing a bit of research for me; Holly league for being the first fan that I didn't know personally; Marilyn Webber for reading the manuscript; my editor, Chris, for not wringing my neck on my typos, and for his always great advice; my 2006 night class for coming to my Bustin' signing and making me laugh; Scott for his belief in me, Alien and a spaghetti dinner; Phil for his belief in me and the corn in his ear; and for one of the best written, best acted and funny sitcoms of all times—Fawlty Towers—which has given me years of laughter with jack-in-the-box rats and kippers in bed.
Author's Note
No pirates were plundered during the writing of this book. No native soil from vampires' coffins was thrown out with the wash. No Frankenstein monsters were chased around insane asylums with burning torches, and no rosebushes were exposed to any indignities. However, creative license was taken once again on historical dates and accuracy.
Chapter One
It Started with Eve in the Madhouse
The trouble with being a Bluebeard was that everyone associated the name with plundering pirates, peg-legged men, and plank-walking prisoners. They were a salty crew, what with their arghs and shouts of "Give me your jewels." Their family crest was a skull and crossbones, and no one with any sense wanted to cross paths with them. Eve Bluebeard Griffin had more reason than most to avoid the whole thieving lot, for she was the daughter of Captain Edward Bluebeard, notorious scourge of the seven seas.
"Why must he come here tomorrow, of all days?" she asked herself, her fingers playing with the brief missive written by her father. "Doesn't he have anything better to do? Important things, like forcing his motley crew to swab the deck, or following a treasure map or two?" She squinted, trying to decipher his chicken scratch:
Back in port. Prepare to defend yourself for your mutinous actions—or rather, lack of actions. Love, the Captain.
"Doesn't he have any treasure chests to pack? Ocean voyages to take?" Only the silence of her spacious study replied to her distress.
Frowning in frustration, she stared out a large beveled window in the far west wall. Curtains of rich fabric were tied back from the long windows placed between massive oak bookshelves. Most of those shelves were filled with stately bound volumes, books of every kind and size, many with gold-leafed pages that concerned diseases of the mind or supernatural abnormalities. Adorning other nearby shelves were ornaments from the Far East and delicate porcelain figurines from Germany. On the north wall, two more large windows looked into the room. Opened midway, they admitted the sweet breezes and golden sunlight of a day in early fall, the light casting patterns on the hardwood floor.
Through the open casement, the scent of rose petals perfumed the air. Since Eve usually saw patients in this room, the walls were painted a pale green and trimmed in various shades of amber—to calm overset sensibilities and fragile nerves. This was a room that commonly left Eve with a feeling of restfulness, but today her serenity was lost as she envisioned the arrival of her father for their biannual talk. In reality, the "conversations" were one-sided, and filled with a litany of the Captain's complaints. Verily, he would swagger into the room and begin issuing commands as if he were still on deck. Cursing up a blue streak, he would expect Eve to blindly obey, as all good daughters did in 1830 London.
Although it was quite true that she was a daughter, and good, Eve had never done terribly well at blindly obeying. To say her fractious father had been disappointed when she failed to take up the gauntlet and sail the seven seas with him, causing mayhem and madness, was an understatement. But Eve had wanted a different kind of life, one that would enable her to be captain of her own dinghy, so to speak. Yes, being very much her father's daughter and thus stubborn to a fault, she would accept nothing else but a life free of robbing and looting, a life where people respected not only her, but also her chosen profession.
Even as a small child, Eve had wanted to make a worthy contribution to the world and not just steal worldly goods from unsuspecting travelers on the high seas—or on the low seas, for that matter. Any liquid-located larceny was bad. Several years ago, fortune had smiled upon her in a less than ideal way: Her great-great-uncle, a vampire, had participated in a duel with a young upstart warlock. Needless to say, he had bitten the dust both figuratively and literally. Though he had won the duel, he had sadly miscalculated the sunrise and gone from being one of the great undead to just plain dead. Still, her inheritance had allowed Eve to abandon her father's ship and chart her own course, reinventing herself by remodeling her uncle's old manor on the outskirts of London as an asylum for the supernaturally insane.
Although mostly mortal and not of a supernatural bent, Eve Bluebeard did have a skeleton or two in the old family wardrobe. There was a werewolf or three, and warlocks, though only one vampire now that her great-great-uncle was dead. This rich, diverse ancestry had given Eve a compassion for the supernatural, and also marginal inclusion into the otherworldly world.
Her father, literally an old sea dog, had inherited a few shapeshifter traits, though he was not yet nor would he ever be a full-blooded werewolf. Captain Bluebeard couldn't change shape under the full moon—or any moon—but he did have a terrible growl, a worse bite than bark, acute hearing, and could sniff out a ship in the dead of night. He also aged somewhat slower than humans. Eve had a few werewolf attributes herself, but interspecies marriages to mortals had diluted the Bluebeard blood severely. By the time the shape-shifter genes reached Eve, she was left with merely an acute sense of smell and rather warm blood, often going without a cape until winter's first snowfall.
It had been Eve's paternal grandmother who had passed on the genes. Grandmother Ruby had been a full-blooded werewolf, and had raised Eve after Eve's mother died when she was a girl. Eve had loved Ruby dearly, even though as the years passed the woman had gone beyond eccentricity into sheer lunacy. Werewolves, as Eve learned early in life, could shift shapes only when the moon was full, and in fact they had to change form then. But after the full moon came and went, Eve's dear daft grandmother would howl and wander the house in search of her full-length fur wrap that she always seemed to "lose" for twenty-some days every month.
It was from tending to her grandmother in the old woman's final years that Eve had recognized what she wanted to do with her life, which had nothing whatsoever to do with pirates or plunder. Instead, she yearned to help others who were struck with mental instability—especially those who were stark, howling mad. Thus, after her grandmother's death, Eve had dedicated her life to the cause. Helping the supernaturally insane, she hoped to become a "psychiatrist"—a new scientific term for those who studied illnesses of the mind.
In the past, this new field of psychiatry would have been considered witchcraft, and practitioners would have been burned at the stake. But as time marched forward, so did acceptance. It was the modern world now, and medical science was finally venturing out of the closet. The medical community had discovered that the mind could be diseased like other parts of the body, and with this groundbreaking revelation it had become the general consensus among men of intellect that the insane could be helped to live more normal lives.