The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein

  “Then why did she have it?”

  “Perhaps the maid was framing her,” I snapped. The men had paused in the entry hall, and I stood to give chase, stopping short only when one stepped into my path.

  “Why?” Judge Frankenstein asked. “What motivation would the maid have? She loved Justine, as did we all. And she was here all afternoon with the cook. Neither of them had any reason to fear accusation, or a need to deflect blame.”

  Ernest jumped in, parroting what he had heard from the constable, who was already building a case against Justine. “And why would she spend the night in a farmer’s barn not a mile from where William was murdered?”

  “She was sick with grief over her mother! Who among us can claim to act rationally when faced with the death of family? Neither of you is!”

  Ernest turned his back on me, trembling with anger. “You are defending a murderess. She killed my brother. She might have killed me, too.”

  “Ernest!” Justine called. He ran from the room. Justine’s sobbing intensified. “Ernest, please! He is so upset. Where is William? William needs me. Elizabeth, please. Where is William? I will take care of William while you go and help Ernest. Please bring me William. He is fine, I know he is. He has to be.”

  I shook my head, covering my mouth so I would not cry.

  “Elizabeth.” Her eyes were wild and feverish. “Please. Help me. Tell me where William is. Tell me why they are saying— Tell me it is not true.”

  I could only stare at her. I saw the moment the truth finally broke through her haze. The moment she finally grasped that William was beyond her care, forever. The light in her eyes, so frantic, died. She dropped her head and fell to the marble floor.

  “Let me help her!” I shouted. Judge Frankenstein took my elbow in a tight grip, and I could only watch as the men lifted Justine and carried her out the door. “Let me help her! She is innocent!”

  I turned to my captor, glaring up at him as my tears cooled on my cheeks. “You know she is innocent.”

  Judge Frankenstein shook his head. “There is evidence both for and against her guilt. We must trust the courts to rule justly and fairly. It is all we can do. If she is innocent, they will discover it. And if she is not…” He raised his free hand and then lowered it. It could have been a shrug, but it looked like the motion of the terrible lever that operated the gallows trapdoor. “Then they and God will see to her punishment.”

  I shoved my arm forward and then ripped it back, breaking his grip. I ran outside, but I was too late. They had already bundled Justine into a boat and were out of my reach.

  I needed to get to her. I ran to the dock, but the only boat left was occupied by a man we sometimes hired to row us across. “My apologies,” he said, and he did look sorry. “They said not to let you cross right now.”

  I let out an animal scream, shocking him. Then I ran into the trees. I knew what Justine would want. She would want me to go to Ernest, to take care of him.

  What did I care for him? He had believed her guilt with the barest of evidence! How could he? How could any of them!

  The trees grabbed at me, twigs and branches like claws. My dress caught repeatedly, and my hair tumbled free. I ran until I reached the hollowed-out willow tree where I had read Henry’s last letter to me. How would things have been different if I had not been the cause of Henry’s departure? How would things have been different if I had not selfishly gone to Ingolstadt to chase Victor and secure my own stability?

  I curled up in the tree, burning with hatred and guilt and secrets. Judge Frankenstein had said the truth would come out. But how could it, when I had worked so hard to obscure it?

  * * *

  —

  I awoke with a start. I scrambled free from the tree, pushing against its confines. How had I fallen asleep? The night—for day had passed me unaware—was hungry and vicious, another storm punishing the land for our failure to protect the innocent.

  Lightning lit my way and rain lashed my face. I ran toward where I thought the house was, all sense of direction scrambled in my disorientation. I stumbled and fell. My hands and knees slammed into the ground. I let my head hang heavy. I had brought all this down on us. And then I had fallen asleep, while my Justine was somewhere in a cell! I had to get to her. I could not help William now, but I could help Justine. I had to fix this somehow, because one truth remained: if I did not, no one would.

  Lightning flashed. Thunder rumbled. I lifted my head.

  “Damn you!” I shouted at the skies. “Damn you for watching and never helping! I curse you! I curse you for ever creating man, only to let him destroy the most innocent among us, over and over and over again!”

  Movement drew my attention and I whipped around, certain it was Judge Frankenstein and that he had heard my blasphemy. I lifted my chin, defiant.

  But the figure blacker than the night was not my benefactor. I lunged toward him. It was the charnel house man. I would kill him myself, keeping Victor’s secrets, avenging William, and freeing Justine!

  Some animal instinct halted my violent intent, and I froze.

  It was not the weasel of a man I had encountered in Ingolstadt.

  I dreaded another flash of lightning for what it might reveal of the person in the trees watching me. He stood at least seven feet tall, a hulking and unnatural creature. Fear drained my fury.

  “What are you?” I demanded. I had seen it before. Was it a manifestation of my guilt? My own wickedness, formed by my mind and projected outward? Was it the charnel house man, swollen to devilish proportions by his evil?

  And then, in a flash of purest white, the monster was revealed. This was no creature of my mind’s making. No creature of God’s making, either. Neither my mind nor God’s could have conceived of such a perversion of humanity.

  I screamed and turned to run. My foot caught on a root and I tripped, hitting my head on a rock.

  Blackness claimed me.

  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 smil
e. “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, a
nd 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.