Chapter 6
VICTOR AND FRANKENSTEIN
“Persephone, I’ve apologized ten times. Ten. That’s excessive.”
She pretended she didn’t hear him, sitting prim and proper, shoulders back and spine straight.
Victor shouldn’t care that he’d upset her so badly. And he didn’t. Truly he didn’t. But she was making the hours interminable! They would roll by as smoothly as the landscape if she was insulting him.
But she wasn’t. And he felt grumpy about it.
“You’ve not said a single word for five hours. Five. I’m damned bored. Forgive me and speak to me already.”
She sniffed and looked in the opposite direction.
“I cannot take this any longer.” He meant it, too.
Five hours was much too long for her to go without calling him names.
And he’d determined sometime yesterday, they would be lovers during this absurd little trip.
Rings be damned. Whatever force she thought they’d held over them yesterday, he didn’t believe it.
That had been plain lust, nothing more, nothing less.
And the little interlude had only whetted his appetite for her.
But he couldn’t seduce her if she wasn’t talking to him. “I apologized for the rings. I didn’t know you’d take it so hard. I thought you’d think me clever.”
Another sniff.
“I didn’t even know I was ruining them.”
“Them?” The word sailed out of her like a bat out of a cave at sunset—surprising and not in a good way. “By them, Morington, you mean the rings. But I mean the people who wore them while living.” Finally, she turned to him, the rage from five hours earlier still lived in her face.
“They’d taken the rings off.” He shrugged. “You say that means they were estranged.”
“But their memories were there! The memory of their emotions and love and frustration and passion!” She held the rings up on a single flat palm. Her bottom lip trembled.
“Don’t you dare cry.”
“Now, even if they wished to make up in the afterlife, they will not be able to.” The last word was a wail.
“I didn’t take you for a romantic,” he grumbled.
She cried, sitting as upright as a human could get, her chin lifted to the heavens and her hair streaming down her back.
The straighter her body became, the more his curved in on itself. He’d not felt shame in years. He’d killed it to keep going. But a woman wailing like her heart had just been cut from her chest could bring a soul back to life.
Only to kill it again.
He let her cry until her tears were gone. He had a sister. He knew what to do when this sort of thing happened. And when she stopped, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her gown and sniffling, he didn’t beg her for conversation.
She gave it, though, her voice raw but steady, determined but low. “I had my own ring, you know. Mr. Graves, my husband, he forged them—mine and his own—from a bit of nickel.”
She’d had a life of passion and love poured into two bands of metal. Realizations could dawn cruelly cold sometimes. And too late. “What happened to it? To them?” He didn’t want to know. Already guessed.
“Destroyed. He sold them to buy potion, and when I finally tracked them down after his death, they’d been stripped. The same way you stripped these.”
It was worse than he’d thought. He tugged his hat low to hide his hot face. “How did he die?” He shouldn’t ask it, shouldn’t heap more pain on her head after the unintentional emotional torture he’d just foisted upon her. But he couldn’t keep the question behind his teeth.
She picked at a thread on her skirt. “He loved potion. Not the useful kinds for healing a wound or a cough or to help clean a house. He liked the ones that got you as foxed as five ales with a single swig. He couldn’t pick himself off the floor most mornings.
He stopped inventing entirely. The only coin he could bring in was from digging graves between bouts of intoxication. ”
“Did you do anything? Before your, erm, current occupation.”
“I taught at a foundling hospital. I enjoyed working with children, helping them find their places in the world. But he showed up there once, drunk and raving, and I was dismissed.”
He tried not to let anger—irrational and ridiculous—bubble up from his chest and clog his throat.
She swallowed, and her hands made a wrinkled mess of her skirts, clutching the already wrinkled folds of cotton tightly in her fists.
“I tried to stop it, him. I hid our money, so he couldn’t buy any more.
He hated me for it. I woke up one morning, and he was gone.
And my ring was gone. And I couldn’t find him.
The constable did. Dead at the end of an alley. ”
“Bloody hell.” The words like bile on his tongue. “How did you end up married to such a worthless man?”
Her head snapped toward him like a rope breaking, eyes wide and mouth dropped. “Some things are better left unsaid, your disgrace.”
That was better. She was insulting him again. “But it’s true.” He uncurled himself.
“Yes. It’s true. He was, in the end, a bit worthless. But so was I. I couldn’t save him.”
Victor winced. “I know that feeling well. My father was a philanthropist.”
“No! Impossible.”
“True, true.”
“But how did a philanthropist raise a man like you?”
“Some thoughts should remain unspoken, Mrs. Graves.”
She rolled her lips between her teeth, fighting a smile. There. Finally. If he had to commit crimes against humanity past, and against widows present, he’d rather it be with a laugh. A little joviality to cut the moral tension.
“Yes,” he said, “my father was a paragon. Quite virtuous. And I was determined to follow in his footsteps.”
“Lies.”
“Unfortunately not. I’d much rather I’d set out to be a rogue. Then I could consider myself a smashing success. Alas, that is not the case.”
“What happened?” She’d dropped forward, digging her elbows into her legs and resting her cheek in her hands. That cheek plumped up over her fingers and even more curls fell loose from her coiffure to play in the wind.
His fingers itched. He held them steady.
Not yet. “My father was sick for some time before he died, and he’d spent much of the estate’s money on remedies that proved worthless.
We—my sister and I—had no idea. He’d used glamours to hide the extent of his illness as well as the extent of our financial woes.
He left me three houses, innumerable tenants, farms and dairies and servants and laborers and even an entire foundling hospital filled to the roof with homeless waifs.
And he left me no means by which to care for them all.
Thus began my life of crime. Well, after I tried to sell my sister to the highest bidder. ”
“After? Selling your sister sounds like the inaugural crime to me.”
He shrugged. He’d already paid well for his careless treatment of Jane. He deserved it. It was a damned miracle she and Nico still allowed him in their lives. “I was an arse.”
“Imagine that.”
“And I wasn’t enough. I’ve completely failed my father’s legacy.
I sold the foundling hospital and everything unentailed.
The estates are bringing in just enough money to keep themselves running, and without improvements this coming year, I don’t know what I’ll do.
When I heard about the device buried with my brother-in-law’s father, I…
Well, I have hope maybe I can finally do something to fix all of it.
When I say I understand what it is to feel useless, that’s what I mean.
I am useless, and I’m trying not to be.”
“Digging yourself out of your guilt one shovelful of dirt at a time?”
“Hmph. I suppose so. But you”—he glanced at her from the corner of one eye—“you’ve done nothing wrong. You don’t deserve your self flagellation. You tried to save him. In the end, you could not have stopped him.”
“You tried to save your father’s legacy. Through legitimate means, I assume. I’m not referring to the forced marriage plots.”
He laughed. He’d never actually laughed about his situation before. But now, with her, it felt easy. “Investments that went horribly wrong, partnerships with crooked men. And who says selling a sister into marriage isn’t legitimate.”
“I do.”
“Well, then, pardon me, Persephone.”
“I don’t think I will, Morington.” She scowled. “What is your given name? It seems unfair for me to constantly call you by your title when you throw my name about so freely.”
He did, didn’t he. He liked her name. It suited her. “Victor.”
“Victor.” She took her time pronouncing it, and he wanted to kiss her lips as each syllable crossed them. “Like the man who built a monster?”
“The what?”
“The man in the book? Oh, I can’t remember the title. But the man, he was named Victor… Victor… Fitzgerald? Fitzwilliam? Franklin? I’ll never remember. But he builds a monster. From the spare body parts of dead people.”
“Bloody hell.”
“You remind me of him.”
“Brilliant and cunning?”
“Silly and dangerous.”
He laughed again, harder this time, so loudly, he startled the horse.
When he’d conquered the mirth, he found Persephone’s eyes dancing.
And he wanted to dance with them, to stop the horse and pull her to the dusty road, and waltz with her down it, into the setting yellow sun.
He’d glamour her into a gown like the sunset—navy-blue velvet wrapped round with gauzy, soft pinks and yellows.
And when they reached the horizon, laughing the both of them, he’d kiss her like they stood on the precipice.
The end of the world just beyond their tapping toes, and them falling into it with clinging arms and kissing lips.
Sobered, he said, “I’m sorry for the rings. I didn’t know. I thought of them as nothing but a prop. I see now it’s more than that. If I could have a bit of metal that would let me feel my father’s love as if he were alive, I would kill for it.”
Her chuckle sounded forced. “Don’t say that. I’ll believe you. And then I’ll have to sleep with one eye open tonight.”
“Do you have such a device?” If he could feel his father’s emotions despite death, what would they be? Love? Pride? Shame?
Damn.
“No,” she said softly. “Nothing like that exists. The rings are memories trapped in metal, and he would have needed to wear it while living, while feeling those emotions.” She grabbed his hand, and he had to focus to keep the brougham in line.
“Do you have a signet ring? One he wore? Don’t transcendents do that?
” She flipped his hand over, as if he were hiding it somewhere on his bare hand.
“I sold it.”
“Oh.” That single syllable as soft as the hands that folded his. As if in prayer. “Oh, V-Victor, I’m… I am terribly sorry.”
“I need neither pity nor apologies. Help me make a fortune. That’s all I need.”
She faced resolutely forward, her shoulders firm as a general’s. “I will do just that.”
“You will?”
A firm nod with that little chin.
“Well then. That was easy. It appears I’ve been a negative influence on you. Excellent.”
“Do not preen, your grace. You’ve had no influence on me at all. But I intend to have a good influence on you.”
He snorted. “When flying horses inhabit London.”
She bit her lips, her cheeks flaming red. Then her laugh flew into the world like a bird flinging high, all joy and ease and light as she wrapped her arms around her belly.
He gave way, too, and though his laugh couldn’t fly quite as high, it sounded right twisting with hers on the wind.