Page 11 of Her Creation

The castle darkened with their words. Firelight flickered across stone, casting dancing shadows where warmth once lived. Only the faint glow of Betty lamps lent any comfort. Every corner seemed to mourn Mary’s absence, hollowed and silent.

From that night forward, Victoria and her father became inseparable. Their bond, forged in grief, study, and defiance, grew as certain as moss on a damp tombstone. She read, debated, and learned in his laboratory, while he taught her the delicate truths of the human body—things her books could not convey.

Together they explored decay and revival, anatomy and life’s fragility, working in tandem as equals. Secretly, she assisted with surgeries, cleansed bodies, administered anesthetic mixtures they discovered together, and kept watch while the bell tolled across the castle.

Through it all, Victoria remained steadfast. Black was her mourning, her choice, her armor. Twenty-two years old now, she continued to wear it, a visible reminder of loss, but also study and resilience; while the world assumed her somber dress reflected weakness, in truth it marked strength.

That year’s autumn passed in a blurred haze of ceaseless obligations. As winter’s grip laced its fingers around Glen Shire, Victoria struggled to separate her two lives—two parts of her that could scarcely touch or her carefully crafted world would crumble and fall. The life as the daughter of a respected surgeon in the social eye of some of the most influential families in all the Holy Roman Empire. The days of being in society were sometimes more exhausting to her than her evenings of lessons, when she would return home to the castle and replace her elegant black gown with a blotchy, bloodstained, muslin smock she’d dedicated as her laboratory attire. She wasn’t as skilled at washing laundry as Rosamond or Greta, and the stains and repeated abuse had begun to show on the now-faded charcoal-gray dress. It was just another thing she was required to do in secret. Rosamond and Greta, as maids in the castle for a long time, had accepted the family’s odd peculiarities, but they too could never know what Victoria was up to when she visited her father in the lab. The staff of the houses gathered weekly at the taverns in town to commiserate, and it was imperative that they not know Victoria was now secretly being groomed to take her father’s place one day.

Victoria could not pull her thoughts away from the cadaver that would arrive any day to aid in her learning. In every spare moment she possessed, her thoughts drifted to wondering about the cadaver from Russia. Would he be old? Young? Would it not be a man at all, but an enormous woman? What sort of life had they lived? The only thing she knew was that they were to be exceptionally large. It had to be that way based off her findings. Her father, tired of her incessant nagging, had finally agreed to allow her to test her theories of resurrection. She imagined for other families they would just buy their daughter a pianoforte, but this was her father’s way of granting her entertainment, plus they would use it as a tool to teach her more advanced procedures and experiments. He had agreed to help her execute her resurrection theories, and eventually it became a favorite pastime for the both of them, mulling over tests and theories.

Her father was loving, but the pressure and studies to take his place were grueling. The day was filled with pretending to be an unintelligent, well-behaved young woman, while the night brimmed with studies and dissection.

Their resurrection work was the only thing that abated her exhaustion, sparking the excitement and hope she’d held as a child when she had first begun to study the subject. The deeper Victoria delved into the intricate workings of the body, the more her theories and knowledge of the natural sciences clicked into place. Together, she and Alphonse worked on an apparatus that would collect the powerful electricity of a lightning storm and a machine that would use the body’s brain to keep the fresh organs from decomposing too quickly as well as track changes to their vitality. Victoria believed this was key to reanimating the corpse after they replaced all its defective and malfunctioning components with viable ones, and flooded the brain and system with blood.

Although Victoria interacted with more people than ever before, she was trapped in a doorless iron cage of emotions, lonelier than ever. Exhaustion continued to take its toll, and just when she touched the edge of a restful night’s sleep, the worry of her father’s worsening condition and her failed experiments would keep her from a thoroughly needed night of sleep. Her father’s decline was the crimson wax that sealed her despondency. Beyond her mother, the only love she’d ever held had gone to her father. Because of this, that endearment had turned into a desperate, frightened love filled with anticipatory grief. Alongside a fear of losing him and the terror of disappointing him was also the vulnerable, unspoken pressure to save him. The smoky wisps and curls of fear and the flickering heat of rage were the only things she knew anymore.

December descended upon them in a relentless deluge of snow, smothering the thick boughs of pines in the forest that loomed beyond the castle walls. The skeletal trees had been stripped bare, twisted and shivering under their burden of frost with gnarled limbs contorted as if in eternal supplication to the heavens for a flicker of warmth. Along the castle’s obsidian edges, long crystalline daggers clung like talons, sharp and gleaming, poised to tear into the winter air itself.

Along with the ice, accidents in Glen Shire and the surrounding towns and villages had increased. Victoria was gaining experience in the secret shadows of her father. They had taken great pains to craft a covering for the patients’ faces from leather and scraps of cotton that slid over their eyes, padding the hollows, ensuring they could not peek out and see her. Pockets of down between leather and metal to muffle their hearing further concealed her presence. Though her experience was increasing, Alphonse was required to work quickly as time in these situations was not frequently on their side, and Victoria could only assist in smaller, less time-sensitive portions as she did not have the speed of her father yet.

Victoria found Alphonse growing stern and easily angered as his condition worsened. Nothing she could do restored his happiness. He seemed incapable of sleeping; the drag and thunk of his unsteady footfall slew her own sleepless nights as she lay in her bed, quietly listening for the next drop of his foot to land, reassuring her exhausted mind that he hadn’t fallen. She couldn’t recollect the last time her coiled, anxious stomach had allowed her a full meal or when she’d last had more than a few paltry hours of sleep.

On this early winter day, Victoria lay outstretched by the roaring fire in the great room. The wind howled against the castle’s frosted windows, singing a haunting lullaby. The warmth heated the fabric of her clothes just to the edge of being too hot. With ink-stained fingers, she lifted the knot of bread that she’d grabbed from the kitchen and studied it, irritated that instead of her mouth watering, her stomach knotted. A pain surged in her face as her jaw tightened, and she tossed the bread in the fire. Dancing black and red embers glittered through the fireplace with a soft crackle.

Her notebook lay open next to her with barely a spare inch of space not covered in Latin. She had found a flaw in their newest formula and wanted to go over it before bringing it to her father’s attention. Sunken, dark eyes traced along the elegant swirls of ink, as meticulous and graceful as a slow waltz, but eventually the heat from the fire coaxed her eyes closed, and the notebook fell to her side.

“Victoria! Victoria! Where the hell are you?” her father called from a distant room.

Her eyes flickered open. “Papa, are you okay? What is it?” She shot to her feet. Her hand pressed against the black detailing of the fireplace as icy darkness circled the edges of her vision as the blood left her face, then arms and legs, in a wave of cold prickles. “I’m in here,” she called again, unable to go to him.

“There you are. What the devil are you doing in here? All the better, actually. The men who delivered it had a horrid time. I don’t know how they managed, but they did. Thankfully, they took pity on me and assisted with setting it up in the lab,” Alphonse clipped with an irritated squint on his face.

Victoria’s chest tightened. She hadn’t realized what he had been doing or where he had been for the better part of the day; she’d been so selfishly engulfed in her own mind. “What men were here? How did they manage? It’s impossible out. Have you eaten yet? Rosamond will bring you some stew while you explain. Rosamond!” Victoria called, though her voice was so soft even with force, it hardly carried past the great room.

“There’s no time for that, child. Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said?” he snapped. “It has arrived! I thought for certain you would wish to cast your own eyes upon the beast; it seems the only thing you’ve spoken about lately.” His mouth formed a line of disappointment.

“What on earth are you speaking about? What beast? Oh—while I have you, I have found a discrepancy in our formula.” She lifted the notebook haphazardly. Absently, she tried to remember if Rosamond had mentioned a pig for roasting or something that might be the beast her father mentioned being delivered.

Alphonse’s mouth pursed with interest. “Yes, I believe I know what you will say, but I believe the cerebellum will be reinvigorated with the flooding of oxygenated blood. We will test it tomorrow—or tonight if you prefer. Come, let’s examine your newest training instrument. You need to run the assessment on it, not me. This is your laboratory rat, though the man is the size of a Percheron.”

Victoria’s head shook slightly from side to side, shaking free the fog that sat in her exhausted mind. “The cadaver!” A smile lit up her face and was quickly mirrored by her father. Excitement bloomed in her chest. She knew her father thought of this cadaver as just another decaying slab of flesh that they would work on together, but to her it was different. This cadaver would be alive and a part of their lives forever if their experiment proved possible.

In fact, Victoria hypothesized that the resurrection would make the person immortal. Her chest lightened at the thought. Perhaps he would serve as another father figure to Victoria—one that could help her when it was time to bring back her father. Her chest pounded at the thought. To her father, this was a learning cadaver. To Victoria, it was already alive: another family member and potential friend for her father. When she closed her eyes, she could see the two old men bickering and laughing together. The thought of her father having a friend filled her with warmth and relief. He deserved a friend, and she ached for relief from some of the duties required of her. She was eager to have someone to share the burden of figuring out her father’s disease and resurrection with. Her father of course had a few friends already, unlike her, but none, she imagined, who would be as close to him as family such as this person. She wasn’t sure why she almost always pictured the cadaver as being older. Genetically, it was most likely to be a man, given his size, and the only men she’d ever met from Russia were old, academic friends of her father’s.

“Yes, I’ve only just opened the crate. You need to perform an initial examination. I’m afraid that it will need more maintenance and repair than I was first led to believe, but you will only gain more experience.”

Victoria followed Alphonse into the laboratory, trailing behind him in a way that reminded her of being a child.

The enormous pine crate sat atop a table, separate from the one they typically used, in the corner opposite Alphonse’s tidy desk and was within a straight line of sight from the table they typically used. Tucked in the corner diagonally from the table was a small wooden desk, littered with beakers and stray notes Victoria recognized as her own handwriting.

“You’ve given me a desk,” she said with a wide smile. “And an entire corner. I feel so official now as your apprentice.”

Alphonse paused behind his desk and pulled out a green glass bottle filled with thick reddish-brown, nearly opaque liquid. With a squeak, the cork was pulled free, and several drops were carefully added to a glass filled with a liquid that sat on his desk. The scent of the sweetly resinous saffron and cloves pressed against her senses, and she had to lean against the sheet-covered crate to stay upright as the scent of cinnamon and cloves now violently turned her stomach. Her stray hand gripped a massive log of ankle, and she glanced down, realizing there was no crate top under the sheet, only an enormous body. She removed her hand slowly. Her dark brows pinched together in amazement.

“Yes, it’s just a small desk for now, something to put your things on until—” His gaze fell to the bottle. “Until it’s time for you to take over this desk.”

Victoria’s spine turned rigid at her father’s heavy words. She spun back around to focus on her father. “How long have you been taking laudanum? Why did you not tell me?”