I SMILED AS I awoke, lured from my depths of slumber by the scent I found most comforting in the world: ink and book leather and the dust of parchment.
“Victor?” I asked, starting to sit up.
It was a mistake. Pain roiled through me. My stomach swam, and I froze, lest moving again create a new wash of agony.
Why did my head hurt so? What had—
William.
Justine.
And the monster.
“Victor?” I whispered.
“I am here.”
I heard a heavy tome close. I peeled my eyes open to see Victor looming over me, concern narrowing his features and drawing his eyebrows close to each other. “We keep reuniting over sickbeds. I think it is a tradition best ended now.”
“When did you—”
“Two nights ago. We have had this conversation already.” He took up my wrist to feel my pulse, then placed the back of his hand against my cheek. “Three times.”
I lifted my hand to touch my forehead, but he caught it and held it in his own. “You have a large bruise and a small cut, which, fortunately, I was able to stitch up myself. It should be easy to hide beneath your hair. What possessed you to go running in the woods in the midst of a tempest?”
“Justine.” I tried again to sit up. Victor sighed in exasperation, but propped pillows behind me and helped me get upright. When I had been still long enough for the pain to subside into manageable amounts again, I pushed on. “Ernest thinks her guilty, and your father will not intervene! But now you are here.” I closed my eyes in relief.
Victor was here. He would fix this.
“The evidence is quite damning.” But I could hear in his voice that he did not think her guilty.
“It is entirely circumstantial! She spent the night in a stable to take refuge from the storm.”
“And the necklace?”
I looked up at him without a smile. “You and I both know how easy it is to place an object in a convenient location to shift blame onto an innocent party.”
Rather than being offended, Victor gave me a rueful smile. “That was playing. We were children. And who could want to harm Justine? You told me yourself she is an angel on earth. Does she have any enemies?”
“No! None. The only person who bore her ill will was her own mother, a wicked harpy of a woman who died last week.”
“Well, that certainly removes suspicion from her, then.”
“Victor!” I snapped.
He looked mildly abashed. “I am sorry. I know it is a terrible time. But I cannot deny I am happy to be reunited with you. Even under such circumstances.”
I sighed and closed my eyes again, bringing his hand to my lips and kissing his palm. “There is…something I have not told you.”
“What?”
“In Ingolstadt. I visited some addresses I found in your—” I caught myself. I had pretended I had seen nothing of his laboratory. Hopefully he had been so delirious at the time, he would believe my next lie. “I found on a paper on your table. One of the addresses was a charnel house. The man there—”
“Dear God, you went there?” Victor finally sounded horrified. “Why would you do that?”
“He was awful! And he said you owe him money. He tried to grab me. I stabbed his wrist with my hatpin. Is it possible he followed me here, saw the golden necklace on William, and—”
Victor interrupted. “He was still in Ingolstadt when I left.”
“How can you be sure?”
Victor leaned over me, peeling back my eyelids to examine my eyes. “Your pupils are returning to normal. That is good. I know he was there because he was part of the debts I had to settle. I told you as much before you left. So he was not here, and I do not owe him anything.”
I did not know whether to be relieved that I had not drawn the murderer here, or upset that I could not produce a suspect other than Justine.
Victor put his finger on my chin, tilting my head down so he could check the wound. “Now, tell me what happened in the forest. Why were you out there? What caused your fall?”
I sighed, wishing I were still asleep. “I ran out because I was upset with your father and Ernest for not defending Justine. And I did not want to mention the charnel house man as a suspect until I had spoken with you about him.”
“I am glad you waited. It would only have distracted from the investigation.”
I nodded, then instantly regretted the motion. Sparks danced in my vision, reminding me of the lightning. “I did not mean to stay out there. But I fell asleep, and when I awoke, the storm was in full force. I was running home when I saw someone. Some…thing.”
His hand twitched, and I opened my eyes to see him staring at me with wide-eyed intensity. “What did you see?”
“You will think me mad.”
“I have known madness, Elizabeth. I see none of it in you. Tell me.”
“I saw a monster. Like a man in form and shape, but no man created by God. It was as though a child had crafted a figure out of clay—disproportionate, too large, unnatural in both shape and movement. I cannot describe it except to say it was wrong. And I do not believe it is the first time I have seen it.”
“A monster,” he repeated. He spoke slowly, his words perfectly even, like the ticking of a clock. “You hit your head very hard.”
I scowled at him. “After I saw it! And now I am certain I saw it watching me in Ingolstadt, and again on the journey home.”
“And you said nothing?”
“I thought it a dream.” If the charnel house man had never been here, then it was some other presence I felt, some other nagging sense of having been watched since Ingolstadt.
“Does it not make more sense that it is still a dream? A product of your injury and your extreme upset? Maybe inspired by something you might have seen—an image? Or a nightmare?” He spoke carefully. He was holding something back from me. I could see it in the way he seemed to look everywhere but into my eyes.
“I am not the one who falls delirious into fevers! I have never dreamed anything like this. How would I have even conjured such a…” I paused. I had not had time to connect the two, but now that I could separate myself from the sheer panic and terror of being in front of the thing, I realized I had seen something like it before.
A drawing.
In Victor’s notebook.
Did he know I had seen his notes? Was that why he had suggested that the product of my injured mind had been inspired by an image?
Or was there some other reason he was being evasive? “When you were sick, when I found you,” I said, hesitant, as I sorted through what I wanted to reveal and what I wanted to hold back, “you said ‘It worked.’ Your experiment worked. What was it?”
Victor’s face briefly contorted in rage. I flinched and he turned his back, picking up a book and then setting it down. When he finally spoke, his voice was so measured and calm I could hear every hour I had spent teaching him to control himself. “It does not matter. Whatever I said, I was out of my mind. Nothing I did in Ingolstadt was successful.”
I did not want to push. I did not want to risk one of his fits when he was so newly restored to me. But I could not let this stand, not when Justine was threatened. “Are you certain? Sometimes when you have your fevers, you forget things. Things that happen just before you fall ill. Things that happen before you are confined to your bed. Is it possible that—”
Victor set the book down with a sigh. “I want you to rest. I believe you that Justine is innocent. I will investigate this and haunt the courts until they free her. Her trial began this morning. Now that you are awake, I will return to it.”
“This morning!” I pushed up, but my head swam. I could not stand, as the room swayed around me. Victor gently but firmly guided me back down to the bed.
“You are in no state to attend. You could injure yourself further.”
“But I must testify on her behalf.”
He sat at the desk and pulled out a quill, dipping it in my inkwell. “Tell me what you wish to say, and I will present it as character evidence.”
It would be better if I were there in person. I could picture exactly how I would look testifying: My golden hair like a halo around my head. I would wear white. I would cry and smile at exactly the right times. No one would be able to doubt me.
But if I went as I was now, I would look crazed. Victor was right. I could not help her in this state.
So I poured out my heart for the letter. Justine was the kindest friend, the truest person. She had loved William as her own child from the moment she met him. Never had a governess cared so much about her charges or taken such delight in nurturing them. After the death of Madame Frankenstein, Justine had stepped into her place and provided William with the most compassionate surrogate imaginable.
“Oh, Victor,” I said, sadness competing with pain. “We have not even spoken of William yet. I am so sorry.”
He finished the letter and then carefully blotted the quill and set it down. “I am sorry he is dead. It is a waste, losing him so young. But it feels more like something that happened to someone else. I barely knew him.” He turned, searching my face for either my response or a clue to how his own should be shaped. “Is that wrong?”
I had guided him so much in how to react to things, how to shape his expressions, how to be sympathetic. But I had nothing to offer him now. “There is no wrong way to feel after something so violent and terrible,” I said. Of course Justine had been insensible. It was overwhelming, and so strong and big a feeling that it felt…unreal, in a way.
“Death touches us all in different ways,” I said finally. I closed my eyes, my head already aching so badly that I longed to fall back asleep. Victor was probably right. Perhaps a combination of the storm, my upset, and the blow to my head had lifted Victor’s gruesome drawing out of my memory and placed it, in terrifying size, in my mind. I had, after all, been plagued by nightmares my whole life.
Though I had never before seen those nightmares while awake.
“Death is never allowed to touch you.” Victor traced his fingers along the spill of my hair across the pillow, and then walked from the room.
Most nights, when the children around me had fallen asleep, all scabbed knees and biting teeth and freezing feet, I slipped out of the hovel and crept to the banks of Lake Como.
I had made myself a burrow there, in a depression beneath the overhanging roots of a massive tree. When I climbed inside and curled into a ball, no one could find me. No one ever tried to, of course. If I had stayed there and never come out, my passing from the world would have gone unnoticed.
Some nights, when even my child’s heart knew that what I had been asked to endure was too much, I would stand on the edge of the lake, lift my face to the stars, and scream.
Nothing ever called back. Even among the creeping things of the lake’s night, I was alone.
Until Victor.
The next morning I awoke early, ready to go to the trial. Victor had returned with a mixed report. The evidence remained circumstantial, but public opinion was against Justine. Testimony of her mother’s violent madness had been offered. It provided a family history that painted Justine in a bad light, competing with my character witness.
“What is your father’s opinion?” I had asked Victor.
“He insists the law will make it right. I think he is too overwhelmed by William’s death and the potential of Justine’s betrayal to commit himself to either side.”
I was not too overwhelmed. I would stand in front of them all—judge, jury, damnable townsfolk—and force them to see that Justine was incapable of such an act. If only I had a suspect to present to them, other than my nightmare monster. I wished it were real, that I would find some evidence of it.
What bleak and dark days, that my hope was in favor of a monster existing!
I opened my door to find Victor with his hand raised, ready to knock. “I am ready,” I said. My head still hurt fiercely, but I could walk without losing my balance. My pale countenance would only amplify the blush of my cheeks and the blue of my eyes. I would be perfect testifying. “Take me to the trial.”
Victor’s countenance was heavy, his eyes mournful. “It is over.”
“Why? They cannot have made their decision already!”
“They did not have to. Justine confessed.”
I staggered backward. “What?”
“Last night. She confessed to the murder. They are hanging her tomorrow.”
“No! That cannot be. She is not guilty. I know she is not.”
Victor nodded. My voice was rising in tone and intensity, but his remained calm and steady. “I believe you. But there is nothing we can do now.”
“We can talk to her! Make her retract it!”
“I already spoke to my father. The courts would not accept a retraction at this point. Once a confession is made, it is taken as irrefutable proof.”
A sob ripped from my chest, and I threw myself into Victor’s arms. I had only pictured having to fight to get her name cleared. I had not imagined this. “I cannot lose her,” I said. “Why would she confess? I must go see her. Right now.”
Victor went with me, helping me into the boat. The ride across the lake was miserable, increasing the pain in my head with every dip and wave. As we hurried through Geneva, I was certain each window contained the face of someone who wanted to see Justine pay for a crime she never could have committed. I wanted to throw rocks through all the glass. Tear out their window boxes of lying, bright flowers. I wanted to burn the whole city to the ground. How could they not see her innocence?
And how could she claim guilt?
When we finally reached her prison cell, I found her in mean condition. She wore black clothes of mourning, and her chestnut hair, always so carefully pinned, was tangled around her shoulders. She was curled on a bed of straw, her ankles and wrists manacled to long chains.
“Justine!” I cried.
She rose immediately, throwing herself at my feet. I dropped to my knees on the cold stone floor, pulling her to me. I stroked her hair, my fingers catching in the snarls. “Justine, why? Why did you confess?”
“I am sorry. I knew how much it would hurt you, and I am sorriest of all for that. But I had to.”
“Why?”
“The confessor—he was here whenever I was not in the court, hounding me, screaming, shouting the same things my mother said. And I had no one here for me. I began, in my despair, to fear that my mother had always been right. That I was a devilish girl, that I was damned. The confessor told me that if I did not admit my crime I would be excommunicated, that hell would claim my soul forever! He told me my only hope was to be right by God. So I confessed. And it was a lie, which is the only sin I have to weigh on me. To avoid damnation, I have committed the only crime of my life. Oh, Elizabeth. Elizabeth, I am sorry.” She wept, and I held her.
“Victor,” I said, looking up at him. “Surely the confession cannot stand.”
He had his back turned to give us privacy. He did not turn around, but his voice was quiet. “I am sorry. There is nothing that can be done.”
“I will fight them, then! I will do whatever it takes! I will not let them hang you. Do you hear me, Justine?”
She calmed some and lifted her face. It was lined with tears, but her eyes were clear and lucid. “I do not fear to die. I do not want to live in a world where devils can take such perfect, beautiful innocence without punishment. I think I prefer it this way—to go on to my sweet little William so that he is not alone.”
The absurdity of her acceptance rankled my soul. She had been so convinced of her wickedness by her cruel and depraved mother that she would let a man convince her to confess false guilt simply for the sake of some invisible soul’s well-being!
I would lose my Justine for nothing. Would lose the one person I had tried to save in the midst of a life spent selfishly trying to make certain I stayed safe myself. The one person I loved because she made me happy, rather than because my security depended on her. And she was going to die because I had decided to help her that day in the streets of Geneva.
“I cannot live in this world of misery,” I said, the words harsh as they ripped from my throat.
“No!” Justine took my cheeks between her hands, the cold iron of her manacles brushing my jaw. “Dearest Elizabeth. My beloved. My only friend. Live, and be happy. Honor me that way. Remember me by having the life I dreamed of for you, the life you deserve.”
I deserved no such thing.
“We must go.” Victor nodded to the waiting guard.
“No,” I growled.
“Go.” Justine stepped away from me, smiling. A ray of light from the window beamed down and lit her from behind as the angel I had always known her to be. “I am not afraid. Please do not come tomorrow. I do not want you to see it. Promise me.”
“I promise you that I will prevent it. I will stop this.”
Justine trembled. “Please, this is all I ask of you. Please promise me you will not be at the scaffold.”
“It will not come to that.” I would not say it; I could not say it. If I agreed, I was agreeing that it would happen. And that I could never do. But the hurt and need were so raw on Justine’s face that I could not deny her.
“I promise,” I whispered.
“Thank you. You saved me.” She smiled, and I watched her over my shoulder as the guard escorted Victor and me out. Finally we turned a corner and my angel was lost to view.
The judge would not see me.
Judge Frankenstein would not intervene.
My agitation was such that, the next morning, the Frankensteins rowed across the lake with both the boats so that I could not possibly get to the city and enact some “regrettable” course of action. Victor tried to stay behind, but I shouted at him to go if he could not save her. If they could not save her, they should have to bear witness.
I was alone.
I wandered to the edge of the lake and collapsed to my knees. Then I lifted my face to the heavens and screamed. I screamed my rage, and my despair, and my intolerable solitude.
Somewhere nearby, a creature answered my call. I was not alone. The other cry contained the soul-deep sense of loss I could scarcely breathe around.
I curled into a ball around myself and wept until my senses left me.