Lucy wailed everything that I wanted to but couldn’t express. I slumped to the bottom of the carriage amid the wreckage of the clock. I picked up the little wooden bird, thinking of the professor, how I’d failed him, too. There was an inscription I’d never noticed before, written on the underside of the bird in German.
Für meine liebe Cousine Elisabeth, VF.
To my darling cousin Elizabeth, VF.
The clock was an heirloom; the inscription a century old. It wasn’t this Elizabeth then, and the V must stand for a different Victor. I started to toss the bird back into the wreckage of the clock, yet at the last minute paused, and looked at the inscription again.
I turned to Elizabeth as a strange sensation grew in the corners of my mind. Elizabeth and Victor von Stein—they must have been named after ancestors of the same names. I pieced together everything I knew of the von Stein family, from those nameless portraits, the journals in German, even the ancient doll in the nursery stitched together by the hands of a long-ago surgeon.
There was only one conclusion to draw, only one dark science that must be detailed in their ancestors’ journals, only one explanation for their names.
“But that’s not the end, is it, Elizabeth?” My own hands trembled at the thought. “Death, I mean. It isn’t the end.”
She regarded me as one might a madwoman. “What are you saying?”
“Your family was from Switzerland. They were illegitimate. They changed their name, didn’t they?”
She didn’t respond with even as much as a nod. She was clever, perhaps far cleverer than me, and yet I had figured out the von Stein secret.
“What was their name, Elizabeth?” I demanded.
“Frankenstein!” she cried. “Their name was Frankenstein before they changed it. Is that what you wished to hear?”
Lucy gaped. “But that’s just an old story!”
I had heard the tales too, like most children. But I also remembered Father mentioning the name Frankenstein in his study with his colleagues. At the time I’d thought they were swapping ghost stories, until I realized that grown men didn’t sit around at night telling stories.
“Victor Frankenstein was my great-great-uncle,” she admitted quietly. “He died in 1794. He’d traveled to the Orkney Islands and fathered a bastard son with a Scottish lord’s daughter—that son was the professor’s grandfather. What you’ve heard are only rumors. But all rumors, Victor Frankenstein’s tale especially, are rooted in truth.”
“That’s why the King’s Club wanted your family journals, isn’t it?” I asked. “They knew. They wanted Victor Frankenstein’s research.”
“Yes,” she said, her voice revealing nothing. “They wanted those journals. My great-great-uncle was very precise in his notes. And I’ve helped you because this far, you’ve been merely victims to dangerous science like his. But what you are suggesting crosses that line. It’s a hard line to come back from. My uncle dabbled when he was younger, but saw the errors of his ways before it was too late. Your father wasn’t as fortunate. If you cross that line, Juliet, you’ll be in danger of becoming just like him.”
Unconscious at our feet, Edward’s fingertips had already turned black.
“Edward’s not just anyone,” I said. “He’s Montgomery’s blood relation. He sacrificed himself to protect all of us.” My voice dropped. “If he hadn’t poisoned himself, I know I could have cured him in time.”
Elizabeth leaned closer. “Think hard, Juliet. It’s only a handful of scientists who are ever even faced with this decision. The smart ones turn back. Only the mad push forward.”
Edward would be dead within hours. He was like kin to me, my father his creator as much as mine. Was Edward worth more than my soul? My sanity?
I was already a murderer, after all. Already damned.
As Edward lay dying and my thoughts turned fast as the carriage wheels, the horses whisked us away, far north, where the heath grew and wind twisted the trees, to a place where people were forgotten.
To a place we’d never be found.
To a place where I might lose myself to the same dark madness that had claimed my father.