Page 2 of Adam, Mine

You must know this first, that they laughed at him. Often and ardently.

It is rare when you are fully grown, to remember the sting of humiliation and how it reverberates through the body of a child. It is pulpy and red, a rage made of tears, and it fills every inch down to the fingernails. Then, as if that were not terrible on its own, once enough of it has been had, it settles into the base of the brain and changes it permanently. Almost always for the worst.

Victor was seventeen and that is not yet a man. Though at the time, it was quite close to it. The laughter should have pained him less if he were fully blooded, I believe.

It is easy when someone has wronged you to imagine they worked with wicked hands and spoke with a wicked tongue at every instance of your betrayal. But I cannot. Kindness comes too easily to me, and perhaps that will always be my undoing.

Educated men know that truth told by conquerors is a denigration of the defeated, but you must know how I have tried. Even in the moments where I was not there to witness the quietness of despair, I recognized it in artifacts left behind. I have rebuilt it here, in God’s image, through time, interview, and investigation.

Take this volume as the warning it is intended. I do not portend with the veracity of your old masters or the dark wizards within your field of study. I am but Margarite’s eldest child.

But a significant evil has happened.

And through your study of this book, I should greatly desire for it not to be repeated.

Elias.

1890

Run

When he woke, Victor was pleased to find there was cold hare for breakfast, left from dinner last night.

Victor’s landlady was a marvelous cook—for all that she had no husband or children.

His landlady cooked for pleasure and insisted upon Victor dining with her nightly. Did not even charge him extra for the food. Though he was young and she was over middle age, he loved sitting across from her by candlelight, eating spiced sausage or herbed breads. All the better that their loneliness was remedied by it.

She had given him free reign of her three-story house and the workspace in the basement. The rent for his room was half that of similar spaces nearby, and she didn’t mind if he took the rest of his meals elsewhere at his leisure.

And he was thankful.

Not that Victor took advantage of that very much.

He would go to the tavern occasionally for lunch, if his schedule allowed, but he always sat alone at the end of the bar. Beside him on every angle, men full-grown, drinking and laughing with their companions. He watched them closely.

Even when things got rough and they spilled their ale or got bloodied in fights, he longed to be among them. Ears ringing, cheek on the sticky floor, shaking off the pain of bruises and running out the doors into the evening. Allies at his back. But he had no companions his age, and it was no fault but his own.

Company, for Victor, remained a university library of silent guests. The pretense of office hours with a professor. Letters ardently written to his family and dearest Elizabeth, but cold and dry, and their shared dinner by candlelight. He thought of his early days in this city, far from home, and had to smother the ache in his chest with his palm. He should have been more thankful for Henry’s friendship when he had it.

Victor swallowed hard and clenched his fists until they were steady, then he pushed away from the table, and fled the building.

He marched down the street until the foul atmosphere choked him less and the bright sunshine and bracing wind made him feel himself again.

Morning Glory

He was meant to return home after graduation and graduation was close. It had been four years since he’d left Geneva at just fourteen. He was a different person now.

Victor’s memories of his family were brittle, but his duties to that place were still strong: His father sent money at the beginning of the month and a letter four times a year. He expected to hear detailed information about Victor’s studies, presented him with interesting cases and details about the patients he handled at home. Doctor Frankenstein was a heavily lauded scholar and a patriarch and he expected Victor to grow to be the same.

His mother, who he was not close to, wrote more often, talking to him about her hobbies and interesting gossip from her trips to town. Remarked on how well the farm was doing and the growth of his baby brother, the weather of the day.

But Victor awaited the letters from his dear Elizabeth the most. She spoke to him about her dreams and asked about his, and no one had ever done that before or since. A not-sister and ward who came to live with them. She had followed him into his father’s workspaces, helped his mother in the kitchen, ran with him in the fields and didn’t care much about the mud trailing up the hem of her dresses. She knew him, more than anyone, she knew him and liked him in spite of it.

Real love can’t be built on letters alone, Victor was aware of that. But if he must have a wife, he wanted it to be her. He hadn’t spoken to her of his feelings yet, but there would be time. She was determined to remain un-betrothed until Victor was back in Geneva, wanting for the family to be “complete again,” she said. Waiting for him, he hoped.

But there was terror in that, too, in the end. The expectations Doctor Frankenstein had for him at fourteen would be stronger now that he was a man. Patients would be looking to him for answers instead of assistance. He had a brother he barely knew and a farm to care for, besides. He had to make plans for his inheritance—as it would be considerable—but between his impending nuptials and building a household worthy of Elizabeth, it must be managed.

And Elizabeth, the last she’d seen of him was when they were children. He must strive to be the sort of man who stepped off that boat and onto dry land like a titan before her.