Chapter Text
Victor had been a surgeon before they were married. Elizabeth had always known this, as it was an inextricable part of Victor’s sense of himself, felt more keenly and rooted more deeply than any other facet of his personality, but she had not really understood until she saw the fruit of his Great Project. Victor produced the neat, precise, invisible stitches of a noble lady-in-waiting. His hands were steady when they were still and flew with the arrogant dexterity of a bird of prey when they moved. Having received a merciless education from a squadron of Swiss nuns, Elizabeth had privately considered herself the finest needlewoman of her acquaintance–but Victor! It was like watching God stitch together the heavens.
Elizabeth made the mistake only once of intimating that this skill was a product of his medical education. “No,” he had said, “no, indeed, those fools would have sooner taught me to sew my thumbs to my thighs. It was my mother.” He said this on a sigh; a breath he loathed to release too soon; maman.
Before she had married Victor, Elizabeth had found it prudent to solicit information from as many sources as could be obtained on the subject of matrimony and marital relations. There were not many, of course; her uncle preferred her to maintain an indirect acquaintance with the world, like Lord Tennyson’s Elaine watching the world outside her window reflected in a mirror. But he did not limit her reading habits and he could not or would not leash his own indelicate appetites, which kept a steady stream of lush harlots flowing in and out of the lower receiving parlor. For a few coins, or a basket of fresh fruit, or simply the pleasure of the company, these women were willing to part with their hard-earned wisdom. More than one of them had told Elizabeth that the most important woman in a man’s life was his mother. For good or ill, Margeaux, a regular visitor, had said, for some are affixed something wretched on the lady–the seat of all evil or what have you. And he’ll measure all your habits by the lady, you can be sure of it. The best husband is one whose mother is a happy woman. The second best husband is one whose mother is dead.
Elizabeth had only the one husband. She could not say if he was the best, or second best, as she didn’t remember her own father and Uncle Hans had never displayed interest in marriage. She wrote regularly to her acquaintances from her convent school days–certainly not friends; Elizabeth had never made one of those–many of whom were now married to fine gentlemen who were spoken well of in Wiener Zeitung. But the letters were so bland that these women might as well have married automatons or two-dimensional dolls cut out of paper. Elizabeth did not know what they made of the letters she sent in return. As she abhorred falsehoods, she did not bother sketching her husband to make a doll out of him. She wrote plainly of his temper, vacillating spirits, disinclination to bathe for days–days!--when he was in the grips of some scientific notion. She did not write of the crushing passion that seemed to inflame him at times, until he came to Elizabeth on his knees while she was painting her specimens and begged her to soothe him as he slipped his clever surgeon’s fingers up under her petticoats; there was an important distinction to be made between telling the truth and being crude.
Margeaux had told Elizabeth that some men called for their mother when they were in a fit of passion. Think little of it, she had told Elizabeth. More than half the time they mean you, not their mam–it’s the breasts, you know, it turns them back into little babies. Elizabeth had not had the chance to seek further elaboration on this bizarre and fascinating topic, for Margeaux had been summoned to her uncle’s chambers for some debauchery; and very soon after Elizabeth had heard through servant’s gossip that the lady had died.
Victor did not cry out for his mother. He only ever said her name: Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth. Chanted, like a man at Vespers.
“Elizabeth,” he said, the morning after his Great Project had failed and he had cried himself to sleep in her arms, hot as a feverish child. She was slow to wake; it was the one vice the nuns had not quite beaten out of her. “Elizabeth. Elizabeth!”
~
The creature was astonishingly tall. Like most tall men of Elizabeth’s admittedly limited acquaintance, he slouched a little and walked with a shuffling gait, as though doing so might render him of more polite altitude. Victor had given him the barest of dressings, which was unsurprising because Victor barely remembered to dress himself most days. It fell to Elizabeth to find a shirt and trousers and pair of socks that might fit him and she failed miserably on all accounts. When they were holed up at the water tower in Wallachia they did without servants for large stretches of time; in the throes of agitated genius Victor could not be trusted to modulate himself and Elizabeth did not fancy their secrets being sold to newspapermen. In the absence of Dulcie, her eminently capable maid, who could be relied upon to find anything, anywhere, under any circumstances, Elizabeth was forced to give the creature a pair of socks that did not fit and a nightshirt that covered so little as to be absurd. Even the loosest of Victor’s trousers would not pull over the creature’s densely muscled thighs.
As Victor darted furiously across his work room, taking copious notes and measurements and bellowing to himself, Elizabeth sat on the floor next to the creature and carefully pulled the skirts of her nightgown and dressing gown up to her knees so she might untie her stockings. He watched her with his curiously mismatched eyes, his head slightly cocked to the side, his fingers bent as though he was not entirely sure what purpose they might serve.
Elizabeth held up her wool stocking. “Sock,” she said. In the other hand, she lifted a bit of flimsy red wool that belonged to Victor. “Sock,” she repeated.
The creature’s mismatched eyes rolled back and forth between her hands. His head moved. He made a noise in the back of his throat, an eerie rattle, and mouthed: Vic-tor?
It was the first word he had said. Victor had been so inflamed by this that he’d dashed out of bed and sprinted for his work room, tugging the creature along behind him, and Elizabeth had been left blearily tangled in the bedsheets, unnamed in the chaos. By the time she’d dressed herself in a robe and slippers and hiked up the stairs, it was too late: when she’d introduced herself, the creature had not been able to say her name.
“Sock,” Elizabeth enunciated crisply. She handed the creature Victor’s sock and lifted her foot so it dangled in the air. She carefully rolled her stocking down into a ring and fitted her toe into the cup. Then she unrolled it up her calf, moving slowly, letting the creature watch her fingers.
His head tipped to the side in a slow loll. He jerkily leant towards her, one of his crooked fingers extended–the middle one. He touched the stocking, and then the skin of her leg. His flesh was cool and firm against her own. Elizabeth pulled the stocking up to her knee. “Now you must do it,” she said.
It took two tries, and in the end it was Elizabeth who did most of the pulling, but the creature was shod. “This is a waste of time!” Victor insisted in a shout. “The dead do not feel cold, Elizabeth!”
“He is not dead,” Elizabeth said absently, cupping her hand over the top of the creature’s head and guiding him through the neck hole of the nightshirt. “That is the entire point, is it not? You do not cede land you have conquered to your enemy.”
The creature made a low, distressed droning noise until Elizabeth wrestled his head free, at which point the noise abruptly ceased. His eyes drifted until they caught on her face. Elizabeth reflexively smiled at him. “Hello,” she said. “Shall we try again? I am Elizabeth.” She touched a hand to her throat. “Eliz-a-beth.”
Those bent fingers rose. A ragged nail touched her collarbone, and then her throat, with clumsy pressure. “Yes,” Elizabeth laughed, “the noise comes from here.” She cupped her hand over the creature’s long neck. It vibrated against her palm. He was vocalizing, but either too quietly or at too low a pitch for Elizabeth to hear. As she felt an incision under her fingertips, she wondered for the first time whether Victor had been able to find a fully intact set of vocal cords. In that moment, it seemed to her to be an almost unbearable miracle–a man, or many men, once dead, now united in a common purpose. The purpose of all creatures, really: to live.
Tears began to drip from her eyes. She ignored them. The vibrations under her hand grew stronger, until she could hear them: “Vic-tor?”
“Elizabeth,” she corrected wetly. “You are my husband’s miracle. A gift he has stolen from God.”
“What on earth is taking so long?” Victor yelled from across the room.
“All things have names,” Elizabeth said. “That is the foundation of science and reason.” She lowered her hand and tapped her index finger against the center of the creature’s chest. “Matthias.”
She touched her heart. “Elizabeth.”
This time, when she reached between them to tap a finger against his chest, his hand moved in clumsy concert with hers, and together they felt Victor’s tiny stitches, so small and neat and perfect as to be nearly invisible. It felt impossible that any human construct, let alone one so mundane as sterilized catgut, could hold tight against a furiously beating heart: but she felt that heart, trapped inside the cradle of ribs that Victor had built around it, caught firmly in place by the delicate web of his needlework.
“Matthias,” she said softly.
Briefly, their fingers tangled together. Against the lace cuff of the nightshirt, the skin of his hand was a deep shade of purple. It was far too chilly in Victor’s work room to be half-dressed in a nightshirt and socks, especially after the wretched storm had blown out half the windows the night before. Without servants, only Victor could stoke the fire. He had forbidden Elizabeth from doing so, out of fear that a coal would leap out and catch her skirts on fire. He’d known the sister of a friend in medical school who had died this way and the thought of it was a persistent horror to him.
“Victor, can you stoke the fire?” Elizabeth called. “Please? It’s too cold.”
This provoked some grumbling, but eventually Victor relented. “Very well!” he said, stomping off to do as she’d asked. “We shall be naming the rats next.” And then, the familiar refrain, spoken with all the vehemence of blasphemy: “God save me from naturalists.”
“Vic-tor,” Matthias said, with a tonal inflection that almost made it a question.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said calmly. “You will grow accustomed to his moods.”
~
They were cloistered with Matthias for nearly a week. Although each night Elizabeth tucked him into the chaise longue on the tower landing, a very ugly but indisputably warm Indian shawl pinned around his wide shoulders, she doubted that he slept. He lacked the feverish intensity of the insomniac, with which Elizabeth could not fail to be familiar given her husband’s personality and inclinations, but still she suspected. When she came up the stairs to wake him each morning, she would find him blinking slowly at the ceiling, or peering intensely at one of the shawl’s fringed tassels, or sitting on the windowsill of the landing below the one that held the chaise longue, fascinated by some glimpse of the world through the broken window pane–a bird, a leaf, a cloud, or perhaps the invisible touch of the wind on the landscape. On some mornings, he would present to her the object of his fascination. He would touch her throat with the sides of his clumsy fingers, then hold the item up for her inspection. “Mouse dropping,” Elizabeth would say. Or, “Pine needle.”
On the fourth morning, he was down on the landing with the window, holding something very small between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. It glinted in a sliver of sunlight, winking coyly at Elizabeth as she paused, briefly, to catch her breath at the landing. “Good morning, Matthias,” she said, softly because she was a little breathless. She had already been in pain when she’d awoken and it felt worse now, deepening from her womb in deep jabs towards her spine.
“Vic-tor,” Matthias said. He came towards her in a slow shuffle. They had made a little progress in clothing him; Victor had gone down into the cellar and rifled through corpses he had been saving ‘just in case’ and found a pair of mostly intact trousers, a linen shirt, and a wool waistcoat, all of which had survived being boiled with carbolic soap in the large cast iron kettle that hung in the kitchen fireplace. There had been no shoes. Elizabeth understood this to be so commonplace on a field of war that to have thought otherwise was the rankest naïveté. Men stole shoes from corpses before they were cold–before the soul had fully left the body, even. Luckily Victor had not required shoes to complete his Great Project, for there were none to be found for what seemed to be a hundred miles.
Victor had mocked her, very gently, about the waistcoat. “Are your feminine sensibilities so wounded?” he had asked when he had come upon her stirring the pink, brackish contents of the cauldron. “You’re going to shrink that,” he’d added when he’d seen the waistcoat bobbing in amongst the shirt and trousers. “It’s not going to fit you when it comes out.” But Elizabeth had felted enough hats for the poor in her time with the nuns to be confident of what she was doing, so she had ignored her husband on this particular matter.
“It is not uniquely feminine to provide comfort where it is lacking,” Elizabeth had replied. “It is a human impulse. I am sure it is an urge you feel, you simply do not recognize it. You shy away from tenderness of any sort, as though you think it a vespid.”
Victor had not been offended by this the way that Elizabeth suspected a paper husband might have been. He had laughed, softly, coming behind her and catching her hips with his large, wide palms. He had been able to do so because, in Dulcie’s absence, Elizabeth wore no crinoline and only one set of petticoats under her dress, with a thin apron over it. The layers of clothing, while insufficient for Dulcie’s sense of propriety, were enough that Elizabeth had felt the pressure but not the animal sensations of his touch–the heat, the prick of sweat from his skin, the scratchy callouses that rose at the base of each finger.
He had exhaled softly against the back of her neck. “I don’t recall any complaints from this quarter regarding insufficient tenderness,” he had said. “That first night, nor indeed any night thereafter. Or,” he had continued, softer still, the damp heat of his breath condensing on her nape, “perhaps I am so great a bully that you fear to tell me.”
“I am not a thing that is easily bruised,” Elizabeth had said steadily. “But Matthias is a new creature. All new things need comfort of some kind.” She thought then of a hatching butterfly: the damp and crinkled wings, trembling from exertion, too delicate yet for flight. As a very small child, when she had still lived with her mother, she had found the pale green chrysalis of a meadow brown on a blade of oat grass. She had cut the blade of grass with the edge of her fingernail and brought it home to share with her nanny who had put it in a glass of water on the windowsill of the nursery. The chrysalis had taken two days to open, and if her child self could have put a wool waistcoat on the fragile newborn butterfly that had emerged, she would have.
“Do I bully you, then?” Victor had asked. “I must have a strong word with myself. The Baroness Frankenstein is a lady and ought to be treated as such.” An emotion had strained his voice, transmuting the jape into a plea. He did not often refer to Elizabeth by the title she had gained upon their marriage. His fingers pinched around her wedding ring and spun it; this was a particular custom of his when they were in close physical proximity. In another man Elizabeth might have termed it a nervous habit, but she did not think it a not a gesture borne of nervousness.
Elizabeth had turned her head to him, looking into his dark eyes over her shoulder. His curls were raked back from his forehead, she suspected by distracted fingers. The mobile line of his mouth was uncharacteristically drawn and still. Of course Victor was a bully. The man knew no other way to interact with the world except to demand from it. He had grown used to being denied, and now that the world for the most part acquiesced to his whims because he had found himself first a rich merchant for a patron and then a pedigreed heiress for a wife, he had no talent for tempering himself.
“I fear,” she whispered, “I must confess a great sin. I do not practice the marital art of obedience.”
All at once, Victor’s face had been transformed by cheerful lechery. “I have just the thing for you, my child,” he had said in the scratchy, high-pitched voice he had once used to pretend to be a priest. It never failed to make Elizabeth laugh. She did so now, gladly, for it was a true confession: She was not an obedient wife. She would have tried to be one had she been able to marry William, but the fever had come upon him so suddenly. Elizabeth had mourned him and mourned the life they would have had together and told herself that the curious lightheadedness she felt was grief, perhaps a megrim, perhaps a headache from all of the weeping–but surely it was not relief?
In the end it was not William that Elizabeth had married and she knew that Victor would expect many things from her, none of which would be the obedience a godly man knew to demand from his wife. Victor had wanted something altogether more visceral. If he could have sawed off the top of her head and caressed the inside of her skull with his fingertips, he likely would have done so. If he could have wriggled his hands under her skirts and between her legs and up through her stomach into her ribcage, he would have done so, to palpate her heart with his calloused surgeon’s fingertips. In lieu of being able to do these things, Victor made her speak of her inner self and her deep thoughts. He cut up her nightgowns when he thought them too modest. He made love to her even during her monthly courses, irregular as they were, and it sometimes seemed to Elizabeth that the blood settled him in some way. He would wake the next morning with it smeared along his nose and chin and whistle to himself as he washed off the dry flakes with the lavender-scented water with which Dulcie filled the lavabo.
Victor did not demand obedience. He enjoyed the rare occasion when Elizabeth lost her temper and tussled with him, so he might soothe her and coax her into bed. But he did not always need these games, and as Matthias’ laundry boiled away in the enormous stone hearth Victor had lifted Elizabeth by her waist onto the scarred wooden workbench, fitting his slim hips between her knees as he set his mouth to hers and the fingers of one hand to the button placket of his trousers. She could feel his knuckles, the familiar brush of them between her legs as he worked at the task, while his other hand fitted firmly against the inside of her thigh and wedged it open.
Elizabeth had laughed again into his kiss. Perhaps in this, her carnal acquiescence, she might be considered a little obedient.
Now, the next day, her womb ached the way it did when her courses ought to come but would not, and the thought of anything between her legs made her feel ill. She had feared that she would have to lie to Matthias to hide her discomfort, but when she released her skirts and crossed the landing to see what glittering thing he held in his hand, she felt his innocence and curiosity as a cool balm against her strained nerves.
He said something to himself in a quiet mumble. He held out his hand to her, crossing the landing quickly despite his unsure gait because his legs were so long. He still wore Victor’s red socks. He touched a hand to her throat and it stuck slightly. The glittering thing he held in the other was a piece of glass, Elizabeth saw then, fractured and brilliant, held so that one sharp edge punctured his fingertip and induced a sluggish emission of dark liquid, too thick to be anything but blood but strangely black in the light.
“Oh no,” Elizabeth said, her own pains forgotten. “You’ve cut yourself! Victor!”
“Vic-tor,” Matthias repeated.
“No, no, this is glass,” Elizabeth said. “You ought not to touch it–Victor! Come quickly!” She grasped the hand at her throat and carefully lifted it to eye level so she might inspect the fingers. The index was smeared with blood. How on earth had he cut himself so horribly? Elizabeth stuck the index finger she held into her mouth and sucked lightly on it, feeling with the tip of her tongue for glass or an incision. She felt nothing; only hard, smooth flesh. His blood tasted normal for all its strange color. Elizabeth pulled his finger from between her lips and saw that there was no damage to the skin. “Victor!” she bellowed. Finally, she could hear some faint stirring in the distance.
“Do not touch any more of the broken glass,” Elizabeth told Matthias sternly. She wiggled a handkerchief loose from her sleeve and used it to dab at the piece of glass stuck in his injured left hand. “I knew a nun at the convent who fell on the stairs when it was dark one evening, and she too tired, and she went through a window–it tore her face horribly. She lost an eye. You must be careful!”
With her fingernail and the assistance of an embroidered tulip, she was able to wriggle the little piece of glass free. She immediately clasped the handkerchief to his finger, tight enough to hurt. He made a pained little noise and Elizabeth used both of her hands to clasp his even more tightly, worried he would pull away. “No,” she soothed, uselessly, lifting her eyes to his face. “Don’t worry. Don’t move. I’m sorry, I should have cleaned all of this glass away from the sill. Does it hurt? Are you hurt?”
Matthias said nothing. In the light, she could not distinguish between his two mismatched eyes. They were both turned brown by the sun, with swirls of amber and gold and flecks of darker brown. The eyeballs themselves were not a matched pair and neither were the lids and sockets into which they were set; the left had the longer lashes, pale-tipped and upturned. Like the eyes of a rabbit in a painting by one of the great Dutch masters.
“Matthias, are you hurt?” Elizabeth repeated. “Victor!”
“I am coming!” came the reply, faintly. “Good God, woman, is there a fire.”
Matthias touched the edge of her left hand, the flat blade of her palm, her littlest finger, then the wedding band on her fourth finger. It fit loosely at the base of her finger, trapped there by the thicker knot of her knuckle. Sometimes the heavy stone spun down, so it lay against her palm. Elizabeth had once slapped Victor and scratched his face with it by accident. She was forever having to adjust the ring so the setting faced outward, ready for admiration. Matthias felt his way between the hairs that grew along the metacarpal bone of her ring finger. He pushed at the ring until it spun, the knotted monstrosity of diamonds and emeralds catching the brilliant sunlight.
“Victor,” Matthias said, touching the center stone.
Unaccountably, Elizabeth’s breath caught. “Yes,” she said, faintly. “Victor gave it to me.”
Matthias turned his right hand and opened his palm. He must have caught the bloody piece of glass when Elizabeth had pushed it free–but how? He would have had to have moved uncommonly swiftly and with astonishing deftness, to have managed it without Elizabeth even noticing. Or perhaps the blood had distracted her.
“At-as,” he said.
“Yes!” she said, thinking for a moment the word had been glass. But then she realized.
“Mat-as,” he repeated, smiling sweetly at her.
~
By the afternoon, even her concern for Matthias was insufficient to keep her on her feet, and Elizabeth retired to bed. Victor distractedly offered to mix her a tincture of laudanum, but Elizabeth did not fancy the effects. There were times the pain was so great she could not refuse, but she did her best to limit their number. The nuns had only practiced modern medicine in times of great duress–Sister Agnès had received special dispensation after her fall–and they practiced complete sobriety otherwise. Herbal remedies (they considered the fruit of the poppy to be one) were particularly disdained, being the cultish practices of the païen. Elizabeth had suffered the first five years of intermittent, crippling pain with no succor save prayer and her own strength of will, and she still found them sufficient under most circumstances. That, and reading.
The pain was a distraction for most of the evening, but it waned in early twilight. Elizabeth grew well enough to sip some cold watered-down tea and nibble on a slice of dry mămăligă. There was more substantial fare elsewhere in the tower–hard cheese, cured sausages, dried fruits, jars of pickled eggplant–but the crumbly little wedges of cornmeal were gentle on Elizabeth’s twisted insides. She grew well enough eventually to wish for stronger, hotter tea, and she knew better than to expect Victor to answer if she called for him. She put on a robe and a shawl and did not bother to tie up her hair. In the dim light cast by her lamp, she made her way up the stairs to Victor’s work room. He kept the kettle in the fireplace there. In the absence of servants, it was a rational choice. Better to keep the kettle at hand than scuttle up and down all those flights of stairs.
Elizabeth ascended past the first landing, with its broken window, and then the second. The chaise longue was empty, the hideously pink shawl folded over the arm so the tassels brushed the floor. It was too dim to see much else. Elizabeth climbed the last of the stairs and emerged into the gloomy atrium of Victor’s work room. The stone arches were invisible in the darkness, creating the impression of the night sky having descended like fog into the room. It gave Elizabeth the same eerie sensation she had felt upon hearing Herr Mozart’s great singspiel, Die Zauberflöte–the great, furious, whirling night smothering the earth.
Victor’s voice pierced the darkness. “Are you recovered?” he asked. “How do you feel?”
“I am well enough to walk,” Elizabeth replied. “I’ve come for the kettle to make myself some tea. Are you working? Is Matthias with you? I didn’t see him as I came up.”
Victor did not reply. This was not uncommon and while it was rude, it was a thoughtless kind of rudeness that Elizabeth had come to dismiss as lacking true malice. This was an important distinction to Elizabeth, who had experienced many small, deliberate unkindnesses in her time as an orphan. Her uncle was an exceptional practitioner of them. He loved to cut the ground out from underneath someone with a few deft strokes, so swift and neat that the other man didn’t notice until he was already tumbling. He had turned this sharp attention on Elizabeth a few times after she had first come to live with him, she suspected because he did not know of another way to test the mettle of another human being and he wished to know what he might make of her.
The first time she had managed not to cry until she’d returned to her bedchamber. The second time she had not cried at all. The third, she had continued to scrape a pat of butter across her toast and remarked, softly, how it was more than a little pathetic to witness an old man trying and failing to force their perspective onto a young person. Like a skeleton using his phalanges to carve his name into his headstone, she’d said. I suppose a sophisticated audience might enjoy it. But I do not.
There had not been a fourth time. A few days later, he had introduced her to William, and she had understood that he expected to make much of her.
As he had, of course. She was Baroness Frankenstein. Her husband was a genius; he had conquered death.
Elizabeth set the kettle on the hearth and then picked her way through the gloom to the large, gleaning metal table in the center of the room. It had once held the cabling and tubing that Victor had used to channel the fury of the thunderstorm into Matthias’ lymphatic system. He had pushed most of that miscellanea onto the floor and was bent over Matthias’ lower body with half a dozen lamps arrayed around him. Matthias was sitting up, still, though his head turned very suddenly when Elizabeth stepped into view. One eye, his left, glinted like a cat’s in the dim light.
“What are you doing?” Elizabeth asked, just before she was close enough to see over Victor’s broad shoulders. He had neatly cut away and rolled up the skin over Matthias’ knee, she saw then–the delicate muscles were exposed to the hot air of the lamps, quivering and glistening, as Victor used a pair of tiny forceps to manipulate something he gazed at through a magnifying glass. His notebook was open at his elbow, the pen uncapped, a half-finished sketch of vessels spilling across the page.
“Victor!” Elizabeth said sharply.
This drew his attention. He sat up immediately. “Are you in pain?” he demanded. He set down the forceps and began to rise, turning towards her. “Let me make up some laudanum–it is absurd, your aversion to the stuff. You must sit. Sit here.” He came towards her, his fingertips stained black from ink or blood or perhaps both, his mouth set into a firm husbandly frown. He took hold of her shoulders and shoved her down onto the chair he had vacated.
Matthias sat silently, watching them with his large, dark eyes. Elizabeth immediately leaned over his knee, her hands fluttering uselessly when she encountered a dozen of her specimen pins deployed into his flesh. “Victor!” she said harshly. “You cannot do this! Which of these can first be removed safely?” She peered up at Matthias, putting a hand to his cheek. She could see so little of his expression–his face was cast in shadow. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“He’s fine,” Victor said. There was a rattle of glass from somewhere behind Elizabeth. “Don’t touch anything! I’ve nearly isolated the lymphatics of the popliteal fossa. He feels no pain and I’ve learned so much. I think there is a blockage of the lower leg, impeding the flow of lymph back to the heart. His circulation is poor but the blood vessels are pristine.”
Matthias blinked. Elizabeth felt the lashes of one eye brush her thumb. The other, the cat’s eye, winked at her as it disappeared. “Eliza-beth,” he said.
There was a horrible crashing noise and an inarticulate gasp. “Does it hurt?” Elizabeth repeated urgently. “It must. I’m so sorry. Victor, remove all of these horrible pins and repair the damage you have done! Have you finished preparing the laudanum? Bring it, he must have some.”
“I am not giving him laudanum,” Victor said, speaking so quickly the words tumbled after each other. “I would sooner pour the stuff out for the rats and it’s an unbelievable expense. Did my ears deceive me? Did he say your name? Say it again, creature.”
Matthias lifted his gaze to Victor. He said nothing. Elizabeth felt him press his cheek a little more firmly against the cup of her palm.
“Remove the pins,” Elizabeth said, low. She was beginning to feel furious. The last time she had lost her temper with Victor, she had slapped him across the face and thrown a cup of tea at his head. He had chased her halfway across the house, alternately yelling and crooning, a half-dozen scarlet drops decorating his cheek, until he had coaxed her into his arms. She had trembled there for the rest of the night, like a deer or a great hunting cat. It had taken Dulcie hours to clean the blood out of Elizabeth’s wedding ring the next morning.
Victor shoved something into the hand that Elizabeth held in the air over Matthias’ knee, the one she feared lowering lest she touch him and induce some discomfort. It was a tiny glass vial–laudanum, she could smell its distinctive heaviness, the floral sweetness and myrrh twined with pungent ethanol–and she stood before she consciously thought to do so, moving her hand so it cupped the back of Matthias’ head, using her fingertips to tilt him back until she could lift the vial to his lips and pour its contents between them. “Drink,” she urged him, tossing the vial away so she might use the same hand to stroke his throat. There was a clatter, a yelp, but no distinctive trill of breaking glass. Victor must have caught the bottle before it hit the floor. “Yes,” she said, feeling the muscles under her hand constrict. “Perfect. There you go. Just a little and you will feel better.”
His eyes were fixed on her face. The lamplight turned his pupils into tongues of flame. After a long moment, he blinked. The second time, his lids did not lift again, and Elizabeth found herself leaning over him, trying to slow the fall of his body back onto the table. “How much did you give him?” she hissed.
“Your usual dose,” Victor said. “My God, I wouldn’t have thought it enough to send a lapdog to sleep that quickly. Step away, step away, you’re going to get blood on your shawl.” Elizabeth shot him a poisonous look over her shoulder; she felt her hair fall down over her face as she did so. “Cease your glowering, vengeful witch!” Victor said, exasperated. “I will stitch him back together if you simply sit down.” He put a hand under her elbow and the other against her back, bracing her as she straightened, and all at once she hated him and was deeply grateful for it, for a cramp struck her as she stood and she staggered back into his arms. It hurt. Merciful God! But it often hurt. She was stronger than flesh.
“Fix him,” Elizabeth said, through tight lips, fitting her hand into a fist and hitting Victor’s forearm with it as he carefully settled her back onto the chair. “He’s not a toy, Victor! He is a living thing–a man! And stop calling him a creature,” she continued, fretful now from the pain. “His name is Matthias. He said it to me this morning.”
“Oh, he is a man,” Victor said, darkly, with a short laugh. She said nothing as he made the same clattering noises, bottles clanking and moving in his physician’s bag, the soft susurration of his shoes on the stone floor. “One look at your breasts was enough to give him the vapors.”
“Don’t be vile,” Elizabeth said.
“I am a man, I am afraid I cannot help it,” Victor said. “We are one and all vile beasts, you know this. Your uncle is the worst of us. And your Matthias ought to be better, for he has come to us from some other plane of existence. You would have thought him wiped clean of mortal sins, but he seems primed to accrue some more. You in turn appear eager to accommodate him. Don’t cluck! You’d push me from the nearest window given half the chance, I suspect.”
He crouched next to Elizabeth in the chair and gently placed the vial in her hand. “Drink,” he said. “Then you may shout at me. But drink first. How long have the pains been with you?” He used the back of his black-tipped fingers to brush her hair away from her face, feeling the temperature of her skin. He frowned slightly. “You’re pale. Have you eaten?”
“I am always pale,” Elizabeth said, childishly. “Fix him. Remove the pins. I don’t ever want to see them again.”
“How will you position your specimens?” Victor asked softly.
“I will not,” Elizabeth said. “I never will again. They disgust me. Throw them down the hole so I never have to see them again.”
Victor did as directed. The specimen pins came easily. As he took up his needle and sterilized catgut threads, Victor spoke as if to himself of his findings–the rapid closure of the initial wound, his suspicion regarding the color and viscosity of blood that was left behind, the monitoring of blood pressure and circulation that revealed some sluggishness, Victor’s own confidence that the vessels and arteries of the blood circulatory system were pristine–my finest work!--and his suspicion that the lymphatics might be to blame. Perhaps an insult, a cauterization, from the electrification of life. Perhaps a mistake Victor had made, working to assemble Matthias from unfamiliar parts. Whatever it was, it did not appear to trouble Matthias overmuch, so Elizabeth was not to concern herself unduly.
“Completely healed?” Elizabeth finally asked.
“Neither seam nor scar,” Victor replied. “A curious inertia of the flesh, and one that is not shared with those who gain life by traditional means.”
“On the contrary,” Elizabeth replied, “does the injured infant not heal with little scarring to show for it?” She had heard as much from first-time mothers of her convent school acquaintance. Small scrapes, cuts, burns that healed themselves and wiped clean all traces of their presence. “An inertia of youthful flesh, perhaps.”
This seemed to strike Victor’s fancy in some way, for he said nothing as he collected the whistling kettle and used its contents to wash and sterilize his instruments. Elizabeth sat in the dim light, listening to the sloshing of the water and soap in the enameled basin. She found Matthias’ lax fingers in the darkness and carefully held them in her own. The anger had mostly burned itself out, smothered by laudanum and exhaustion and pain. It left behind to be felt most keenly a kind of exhaustion of the spirit. Elizabeth did not always enjoy her squabbles with Victor. She at times felt as if she were Señor de Cervantes’ great knight pursuing a useless quest of honor.
“Victor,” she said quietly. The sloshing ceased. “Do you hate him?”
“No,” he said. And then, “Yes.”
“Because he is not perfect in your eyes?” Elizabeth asked.
“You knew I was a perfectionist when you married me,” Victor replied. “It is an illness. I cannot cure it. He is a first draft, bleating my failures to the world.”
“You must,” Elizabeth said quietly. “He is not a sketch you might tear up and burn. You have made a man. You must love him, because you are his creator and you owe him love. That is the price you pay for creating life. A mother pays it in blood, and a father pays it in action.”
The splashing began anew. “You speak of this matter as though it is natural,” Victor said. His vowels were sullen.
“All things in this world are natural,” Elizabeth replied. “I know you are capable of loving the monstrous and the strange, Victor, for you love yourself. And you love me.”
~
Victor must have carried her down to their bed; Elizabeth fell asleep in the hard chair next to Matthias in the tower work room and awoke under the coverlet, the curtains drawn around her to block the light that might have otherwise disturbed her. She felt weak, the way she often did when the pains were terrible enough to necessitate laudanum, as if her body had continued to be wracked by them even as her mind was absent. Her abdomen was hot and tight. She lay still as long as she was able. She thought perhaps it was Wednesday now–a narrow band of rosy light ringed each curtain–and to prepare for the day ahead, she considered the fruits of the glorious mysteries in turn, letting the practice pull her sense of self out of her miserable body.
Her rosary was too far out of reach; in lieu of the decade beads she touched each of her fingertips in turn and whispered to herself in the darkness. Ave Maria, gratia plena dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus. Sancta Maria mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. When she touched her thumb to her left ring finger, she prayed for Victor, ora pro meo marito, as she did any time she performed the rosary in this way. The next finger, the littlest one on her left hand: ora pro meo Matteo, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. But she was unsure if there would ever be an hour of his death for her husband’s creation–how thrilling and horrible all at once, the idea of his wounds being made whole–and she fretted over the scene she had interrupted the night before. It ate away at her concentration. In the end, she did not feel nourished at all, as though the product of her devotion was a shriveled little crabapple, knocked too early from its branch.
~
Within a few hours, Elizabeth felt well enough to desire exercise and fresh air. She went up the stairs to the landing, where Matthias sat once more on his windowsill and observed the world outside with a slightly puckered brow. “Good afternoon,” Elizabeth said. He did not startle, but turned deliberately to look at her. “How are you feeling?” she asked. She touched her own knee, delicately, depressing her skirt and petticoats so he might see the body part in question and understand her meaning. “Are you well?” she asked.
Matthias touched his own knee, then looked down at his hand. “Mat-tas,” he said. His tone was slightly curious, but not pained. Perhaps he did not understand the question, but he did not sound otherwise grieved.
Elizabeth went to him, taking his hand from his knee and clasping it between her own. “Come with me,” she said, tugging on his hand. He rose after a few seconds, unsteadily, and then followed her as she carefully guided him down the stairs. Although he was wearing his shirt and trousers and waistcoat, there was no sign of the red socks. Perhaps that was for the best; it was a warm day and there was sure to be dew on the grass. Elizabeth hated when her feet were subject to persistent dampness.
Matthias followed her with no protest down the many flights of stairs, but he balked as she pulled him towards the doors. “It’s all right,” she soothed. “You ought not to go out on your own, but I am with you. It is safe.”
It was a sunny afternoon. The air smelled fresh and warm and Elizabeth stood for a moment on the steps, closing her eyes and lifting her face to the sun. “Yes,” she said, both to Matthias and herself. “This is good.” When she opened her eyes, she had to blink back dancing black motes that speckled the landscape. Next to her, his hand still clasped in her own, Matthias had also closed his eyes and tilted his face up to the sun. The light made the patchwork skin of his face into a quilted landscape of color, white and cream and blue-ish grey with streaks of darkened, ruddy texture. One set of lashes was dark; the other, light. Although Elizabeth could not fault Victor’s needlework, Matthias’ flesh and skin sat oddly on his skull in places. He looked like what he was, which was to say a composite.
Loathe to disturb him, Elizabeth said nothing. The nuns with whom she had lived and by whom she had been educated had nourished their souls with song and prayer and ritual, but as she had grown into womanhood Elizabeth had found herself hungry for other things: the scent of wet dirt, the delicate touch of a set of legs on the back of her hand, the dizzying array–hundreds!--of minute scales that covered the wings of an adult butterfly. She had felt God in each of these sensations, as she had always felt his touch in the blazing warmth of the midday sun, and occasionally in the hypnotizing harmony of the Evening Prayer.
Eventually, Matthias opened his eyes. The pupil closest to Elizabeth sharply contracted as the light touched it. He turned his head and looked down at her. After a moment, he squeezed her hand, then lifted their clasped hands to her throat. He made an inquiring noise.
“The sun,” Elizabeth said.
“Sun,” Matthias repeated. It was the surest she had yet heard him speak.
They went for a long walk. Elizabeth found his companionship deeply restful. He was silent but deeply curious, easily astonished, ready to be pleased, and unbelievably gentle. He stroked the edges of leaves with the pad of his thumb so carefully that they did not bend. He inspected the bright green chrysalis of a pupating moth that had been deposited on the underside of a leaf. When Elizabeth found a colony of cellar beetles inside a half-rotted log and carefully placed one on the back of his hand, Matthias lowered his face until his nose nearly touched the insect. His gentle breath did not seem to perturb the creature.
“This is Cryptophagus cellaris,” Elizabeth told him. “It is a kind of silken fungus beetle. It cannot fly–so when it wishes to escape a predator, it emits a foul aerosol. Do not place your nose too close, or it will make a stink.”
But the beetle did no such thing. After a long inspection, Matthias returned the beetle to its rotting log, holding his hand close enough that the insect could make its way home on its own feet. “You will find many of these in the water tower,” Elizabeth told him. “Down in the cellar–that is the source of its common name–where it is dark and damp. Their diet is primarily fungal. Can you say beetle, Matthias?”
Matthias said, “Beet.”
“Beetles are the most numerous of any insect species,” Elizabeth told him. “One might find them anywhere one cares to look. As stars are in the heavens, so beetles are on the Earth. Shall we see if we might find some more?”
They did, of course, due in part to the abundance of the order as well as Elizabeth’s own familiarity with insect hunting. They found red soldiers and noble chafers and yet more red soldiers. As Matthias held a red soldier cupped in his palm, Elizabeth explained that the forewings hardened to form a shell that protected the delicate hindwings–“The elytra,” she told him. “The name is Greek in origin, from ἔλυτρον. It means covering. Do you see how it covers the wings?”--and for all the paucity of his spoken language, Elizabeth felt that he understood her. She sensed his curiosity and interest more palpably than she might have from someone who could speak, and she felt the full force of his attention on her as keenly as she’d felt the warmth of the sun press upon her face.
They were both crouched, elbows on their knees, examining a rare find in a small clearing–a greater stag beetle–and Elizabeth was encouraging Matthias to note the red color of the mandibles when she heard the approaching footsteps. “I ought to have known,” Victor said, a dry twig crackling under the heel of his boot, “that when I couldn’t find you inside, you would be out here in the woods hunting insects. What disgusting creature have you found?”
Matthias lifted his head. “Beet-el,” he said.
Victor visibly startled. And then, caught off guard, he barked out a laugh. “Indeed!” he said.
“A male Lucanus cervus,” Elizabeth said. “Come and observe his fine mandibles, Victor. They are such a beautiful color, like the sang de boeuf glaze of a Chinese vase. I don’t suppose you have seen one before?”
“Not since I was a boy,” Victor said. He dropped into a crouch, rising up onto his toes. “Does it do anything interesting?”
“It lives,” Elizabeth said.
Victor gave her a droll look. Elizabeth laughed and returned her gaze to the beetle. He sat very patiently for them where another in his place might have attempted to scuttle for cover. “You might suppose the large mandible is for catching prey, but it is not. The males use them like knights at an old-fashioned tourney, jousting with one another.” She did not touch the beetle, but sketched the shape of the mandible in the air with her fingertip. “It is the female who has the terrible bite. It is said to be quite painful. But I have never encountered one. Have you?” she asked Victor.
“Can’t say I have,” Victor said lazily. “But there weren’t many opportunities for chasing insects in my childhood, and if a beetle had ever dared to show its face in the library my father would have cracked it in half with his switch without a second’s hesitation.”
As often was the case when Victor spoke of either his father or his childhood, his voice was slightly self-mocking. Or perhaps it was his father that he mocked. Elizabeth did not know what to make of the man who had been so adored by his younger son and so loathed by the elder. In some ways she was grateful that he was dead; he had wounded Victor very badly. She had assumed when she’d first seen it that the faint scarring on Victor’s cheek was renommierschmiss, the fencer’s badge of honor. It had been William who had corrected her, when they had left that disastrous first meeting and she had scathingly remarked in the carriage on his brother’s eagerness to fight to first blood both at the dueling ground and at the dinner table: Victor did not fence at university, he had said. They are remnants from childhood. Uncle Hans had frowned, perhaps disappointed to learn that he had assumed honor and status where there was none–but no, that had been Elizabeth’s own annoyance distorting his expression. Uncle Hans had been disappointed by neither Victor himself nor that first meeting. All had proceeded exactly to his taste.
Victor frowned down at the stag beetle. “Ugly little thing,” he said. Elizabeth watched as he flicked a glance at Matthias, who was watching the motionless beetle with the fixed attention he had trained on all of the creatures that Elizabeth had shown him during their walk. Matthias’ large palms were resting on his knees, his elbows tucked into his hips, his bare feet flat on the ground. His thin lips were firmly pressed together, perhaps a mark of his concentration. Then, as Elizabeth and Victor watched him, his mouth relaxed and lips parted. They moved, as though he was whispering to himself. She could see the faint shadow of his tongue moving inside his mouth, tasting the words he had yet to speak.
“Stag beetle,” Elizabeth said quietly.
“Ss-tag,” Matthias repeated. Softly: stag. He extended his right index finger and brushed it gently down the beetle’s back. “El-etra,” he said.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “Those are the elytra, which protect the wings.”
~
The next day, Uncle Hans arrived.
~
In the late morning, Matthias and Victor and Elizabeth were in Victor’s work room at the top of the water tower. Elizabeth was showing Matthias her watercolor paints and notebook, the paintings she had made of the beetles that they had seen on their walk and the careful notes she had taken upon observing their behavior. While Uncle Hans made his way hurriedly up the stairs, Elizabeth was sitting on the floor next to Matthias in front of the large rose window, demonstrating the way one added clean water to the brick of pigment to produce paint. Victor was ostensibly tidying his notes, but over the course of the morning Elizabeth had heard the scratching of his pen grow lighter and lighter until the noise stopped altogether.
The shuffling was audible to Matthias first, perhaps; he turned his face to the doorway. Elizabeth had thought he looked to Victor, who had pulled a lap desk and chair over by them. Victor’s fist was under his chin, the elbow of that arm balanced on the knee whose ankle was resting on the opposite leg. This contorted position, adopted with such languor, was typical of her husband, but it was unusual for him to be silent for so long. The lap desk had been unceremoniously relocated to the floor. Victor’s eyes were glittering and she could not read his expression. However, she did not think it was disgust that animated him.
Then, in the doorway, appeared Uncle Hans wearing his tall hat and his traveling greatcoat. The dusty hem and caped shoulders flapped with agitation as he burst into the room. “Have I missed it?” he demanded. “The storm–”
He saw Matthias then. Elizabeth watched him rear back in almost a flinch. “My God,” he whispered. “You have done it. It is done.”
Victor stood immediately and in a great rush of emotion he began telling Uncle Hans of everything that had transpired the night of the storm: he and Elizabeth and their frantic, sodden, slippery movements, the initial certainty that they had failed, the piercing satisfaction of knowing the next day that they had not. Victor was delighted to have a fresh audience to hear of his victory, but Elizabeth perceived that Uncle Hans was not. He was deeply furious, she thought. The source of his anger was not immediately obvious to her, but she felt the shadow of it skitter like chitinous footsteps down her spine. There were some human beings, Uncle Hans and the Mother Superior of the convent where Elizabeth had lived for many years amongst them, who could make their dissatisfaction felt without words.
Elizabeth deliberately turned her attention away from her uncle back to Matthias. He seemed uncertain, perhaps even unsettled. She rested her hand on top of his and murmured, “It’s all right.” He tilted his face to her, not so far that Uncle Hans was out of eyeshot but enough that he could see her, as well. “This is my uncle,” she explained in a low, steady voice. “He and my father were brothers. He was Victor’s patron and paid for his research before we were married.” These concepts were beyond Matthias, likely, but she hoped the sound of her voice might soothe his agitation.
“And what of your Adam?” Uncle Hans meanwhile demanded.
“He is whole,” Victor said. “He is magnificent.” He strode across the huge circular grate in the middle of the floor to the spot where Elizabeth and Matthias shared a blanket and a nest of pillows under the window. Victor leaned over and offered a hand to Matthias, who grasped it and came to his feet at the same moment with an ease that belied the fact that Victor had never before provided such a courtesy. A moment later, Matthias turned and repeated the gesture for Elizabeth. He even made the same little flourish as Victor, which served no real purpose, as Matthias had no cuffs that needed flicking back. Elizabeth laughed and put her hand in his. “He learns,” Victor said, “at a rate I dare say might be prodigious, although of course it’s impossible to know how much of it is truly learned. Some of it may well be remembered.”
Elizabeth rose and released Matthias’ hand, shaking the pool of her skirts loose so they fell properly over her petticoat. “Hello, uncle,” she said, extending a hand to him. He took it and held it close to his chest, using the other hand to pat her cheek. His eyes did not move off of Matthias. His breath sounded very tight, caught somewhere in the middle of his chest.
“Hello, Elizabeth,” he said pleasantly, although she could hear the strain in his voice. “What do you make of your new companion?”
“This is Matthias,” she said. “Please shake his hand, uncle, so he might learn how to do so properly upon making a new acquaintance.”
She could tell that Uncle Hans wished her to the devil for the suggestion, but after a moment he released her and thrust his right hand forward. “How do you do, Matthias,” he said. “I am Heinrich Harlander.”
Matthias observed this offering and did nothing. Victor swooped in from his right and said, “Here, let me,” and shook Uncle Hans’ hand very properly. “Hello, Herr Harlander, how do you do,” he said briskly. “Now you, Matthias.” He released Uncle Hans’ hand and gestured to it with a flourish.
Matthias cautiously slid his hand along Uncle Hans’ hand. He made a startled noise when Uncle Hans’ fingers locked around his, then did the same a moment later. “How, ah, do you,” he said. As she was each time she heard it, Elizabeth was struck by the richness of his raspy voice. It seemed to resonate from somewhere deeper than other men’s voices. It was as if an oak tree could speak. This fanciful thought reminded her of the peculiar sadness she often felt in June on the feast day of Saint Boniface, who had felled Donar’s Oak to build the first cathedral in Hesse. It was great and good to celebrate the Lord, proportionate to how wretched it was to participate in pagan practices. But how mighty a tree it must have been, that oak.
Uncle Hans released Matthias’ hand and stepped back hurriedly. “Remarkable,” he said. “And unsettling!” he added with a barking laugh. “I did not expect him to be quite so monstrous.”
Elizabeth frowned. “Did Victor not say that he purposefully selected the tallest men?” she said.
“Do not be foolish, Elizabeth,” her uncle replied. “I speak of his queer features. You could never be fooled into thinking him anything other than what he is–a reanimated corpse.” He leaned forward and sniffed. “He does not smell of the battlefield, I will give you that. Nothing fetid.”
Matthias shrank back from Uncle Hans’ inquiring nose. “I do not find him so distinctive,” Elizabeth said. She used the crook of her index finger to stroke along Matthias’ hand. His fingers twitched and curled towards hers. “He might have been scarred as any other man is, by some unfortunate accident.” She thought of Sister Agnès, whose scars had healed into dozens of shiny little knots dotting her cheeks and brows. She had worn a patch over the eye that she had lost, a small square fashioned from good black cambric, and it did not take very long for all of the convent’s residents to become accustomed to her new features. No one had called her monstrous; no one, Elizabeth suspected, had indeed ever thought it. But none of the nuns had been as vain as Uncle Hans.
Surprisingly, Victor, too, was frowning. He did not often rouse himself to disagree with Uncle Hans. “Of course he does not stink,” he said. “The discoloration is not gangrene; his blood circulatory system is perfectly functional. I suspect it is a characteristic of the strange inertia that I have observed–a return to the state in which he was first animated. Not all of the composite flesh was properly perfused prior to reanimation.”
Uncle Hans immediately wished to discuss this topic further; he and Victor were distracted by it for many minutes. At first Elizabeth paid attention, but soon her mind drifted. Victor and Uncle Hans retreated to a far corner of the work room to look over Victor’s notes, so Elizabeth and Matthias returned to their blanket and cushions. This time, when Elizabeth sank to her knees, she did so with Matthias’ hands gripping her elbow. He took an unbelievable amount of her weight; it felt like she floated down to the floor. “How chivalrous!” Elizabeth said, slightly breathless. “Did you learn this courtesy from Victor? We must ensure you adopt only his good manners.”
Matthias picked up her watercolor book and placed it in her lap. “Thank you,” Elizabeth said. “Would you like to try using the paints?” She offered him the brush, pretending to wriggle its bristles across the page, but Matthias did not take it. His eyes moved frequently back to where Uncle Hans and Victor were talking animatedly; his big body moved restlessly, unable to settle.
So Elizabeth instead read to him from Mr. Spence and Mr. Kirby’s Introduction to Entomology, slowly, in deference to her imperfect English. She owned the French translation but those volumes were at home. Victor’s library, the entirety of which had traveled with them first to Bucharest and then to the water tower, contained all four volumes in English–he was fluent from his years of medical education in Edinburgh–and Elizabeth was using them to practice. She read small sections aloud, then closed the book with her finger marking the page and explained what she had just read to Matthias in German. She gave him an exhaustive description of the different metamorphoses, and the distinction one might draw between pupa, nymph, semi-nymph, and caged nymph. Matthias said nothing, though his hands twitched and his eyes darted frequently to the distant figures of the men across the room. Elizabeth smiled at him. “You are remarkably patient with me,” she said. “I look forward to the day when I may offer you the same courtesy.”
It was then that the raised voices became impossible to ignore. “You will do this for me,” Uncle Hans thundered. “Or–!”
“Or what?” Victor demanded. “Do not make foolish threats. If your illness has progressed this far already, the cause is lost.”
“You have subjugated death!” Uncle Hans yelled. “There is no cause that is lost, you fool!”
“The syphilitic brain is colonized by Treponema–what do you suppose I will do, boil your brain with carbolic soap and then simply slop it into a new skull? The bacterium will travel with it, as will the inflammation, and any other damage that has already been caused. It is too late for you, old friend.”
“I am not your friend,” Uncle Hans spat. “I am your patron and benefactor. I paid for this work with the expectation and agreement that you would provide this service for me–”
“--that is patently false–” Victor countered loudly.
“--and you will do this for me because you know in your cowardly heart that you owe it to me. You would be starving on the street if I had not found you when I did. Everything here I gave to you. The funds–the corpses–the freedom from puritanical and narrow-minded Scotch oversight–the connections to craftsmen–your baroness! You, so wretched and pathetic a creature that you were willing to let thirst for a woman’s wet fucking cunt keep you from conquering death–I was the one who made sure you received everything you wanted or needed!”
The crude language was not a true surprise to Elizabeth. Uncle Hans could have a filthy mouth when he was inspired, and he frequently was. But it struck Elizabeth that there was something a little strange in how he characterized Victor’s courtship of her. After William had died, Uncle Hans had not really done much to push Victor and Elizabeth together; she had not gotten the sense that he was playing matchmaker.
Silence fell on the other end of the work room. Without conscious intention, Elizabeth stood and carefully stepped off of the blanket. As she approached, she began to make out the ragged breathing of the two men. “Enough,” Victor rasped. “The fact that you’d even say that in earshot of your niece tells me that you’ve lost all sense. I know there is no logic that can persuade you, for the disease has taken you past the point of rationality.” He bared his teeth at Uncle Hans. “Let this instead suffice: I will not make a new body for you to ruin.”
It was then that Uncle Hans threw the notebook he was holding into the fireplace. A brief moment after that, he turned to a nearby table, in one swift motion snatching up and throwing after the notebook something made of glass that broke upon impact with the hearth. It released an audible cloud of flame: a dull roar that rolled upwards, licking the spines of the books piled on the mantle.
“Hans–!” Victor bellowed, but by then it was already too late.
~
Weeks passed before the doctors would let Victor or Elizabeth out of their respective sickbeds. By the time Elizabeth was able to walk, all that remained of the water tower was a deformed, blackened husk. Although the journey took nearly two hours by carriage, she went every day for a week while Victor was fitted for his prosthetic limb and various solicitors spent hours preparing him for the inquest that they had assured Elizabeth would be pro forma. She made the servants wait at the end of the drive as she picked her way through the ruins, warbling Matthias’ name and searching for some sign of him–his corpse–in the sooty rubble.
At the end of the week, Victor came with her, white-lipped from pain, determined to see the thing through despite his unsteadiness. He stood, bracing himself with both hands on the cane that would become his eternal companion, watching Elizabeth dig through the ruins, and as the sun slowly set he lifted an arm and held out his hand to her. She knew that once she took it they would never return.