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“I am going to ask anyway. What is Victor to you that you searched so hard for him and went to such lengths to protect him? Surely he must be more than a cousin. Are you in love with him?”
I looked out the window as we passed the city center, now sunny and bright, as though its nighttime version were a dream best forgotten. Oddly, Mary’s having discovered my secrets freed up my willingness to talk. Normally I kept the truth behind closed doors and heavy locks, letting only careful shadows of it out into the world.
“He is my entire life,” I said. “And my only hope of a future.”
* * *
—
Victor left before the dirt had settled over his mother’s grave.
“I will be back when I have solved it,” he promised, pressing his lips to my forehead like a seal in wax.
And then I was the mistress of a house that had never been mine and still was not. I ran the household, overseeing basic management. Judge Frankenstein never gave me funds, always in charge of the budget himself. Madame Frankenstein’s personal maid was immediately dismissed. I was to assume Madame Frankenstein’s role but inherit none of her privileges. I was allowed only the cook, one maid, and Justine.
My relief at my unexpected foresight in getting Justine hired was immense. I had relatively little to do with Ernest, now attending school in town, and young William. Sweet though they were, children remained to me a foreign language that I could speak and understand but never felt comfortable with.
Justine flourished. She would have done the work of five household servants, but I did not let Judge Frankenstein realize that. She was not of low birth, after all.
In fact, I secretly suspected she was of higher birth than I.
Though I had kept my fears to myself all these years, with Victor gone and Madame Frankenstein dead, they bubbled to the surface whenever I ate a meal alone with Judge Frankenstein. With every delicate bite I took, every impeccably mannered sip of a drink, I wondered whether it would show. Whether he would know. Whether he already suspected.
They had bought me based on a lie.
It had to be the case. Looking back, it was laughable, really. Madame Frankenstein had told me the story they were given. It made no sense. How would a violent mite of a woman living in poverty in the woods come into possession of an imprisoned Italian nobleman’s daughter? Her story, woven of political woes and Austrian-seized fortunes, was as juvenile as something I would tell to get William to quiet and go to sleep. “The beautiful wife died bringing an even more beautiful daughter into the world! And though she was an angel, her father, bereft and angry, could not give up his righteous fight against those who had wronged him! Taken far away to a dark dungeon, the father left his daughter to be raised in meanness and the lowliest estate, until the day a kind and generous family found her and instantly knew she had been born to more than that.”
I would burn a book that defiled my mind with such trite nonsense. Instead, the more likely story: The woman had inherited me from a sister or a cousin. She resented another mouth to feed. When the Frankensteins took up residence at Lake Como and she saw their young son, she seized her opportunity. Took the pretty child and sold her, complete with newly brushed hair and a shining story to wrap her up in.
So it was that my mind was already gnawing anxious circles around my origin when Judge Frankenstein, gaunter and obviously in poorer health since the death of his wife, actually addressed me at dinner six months after Victor had left.
“Tell me, what do you remember of your father?”
My spoon paused halfway to my lips. I set it down so he would not see it tremble. He had indulged his wife for years, but she was gone now. Victor was fixed. The judge had no reason to keep me. What was I, after all, but a worthless stray whose usefulness was past?
I smiled. “I was so young when they took him away. I remember crying as the doors to our villa closed behind me and they loaded him, shackled, into a black carriage.” I remembered nothing of the sort.
“Do you know what your mother’s name was? Anything about her family?”
“Oh.” I batted my eyes as though the dim light were difficult to see in. “Let me think….I know I was named after her.” I did know that much, at least. “Pretty little Elizabeth, as pretty and useless as the Elizabeth you came from. I spit on her grave for burdening me with you,” my caretaker still hissed in my memory. “But I do not know what her family name was. I wish I did. Then I would have something of hers to hold on to.”
“Hmm.” His brows, wiry and gray with age, drew low over his dark eyes. Where Victor’s eyes were lively and intense, the judge’s were the heavy, forbidding brown of an aged gallows.
“Why do you ask?” I said as innocently as I could, keeping all trace of fear out of my voice.
“No particular reason.” His voice slammed the conversation shut.
I would have avoided him after that, but it was not necessary. Most days he spent shut up in the library. When I would sneak in at night to find a book, I would find his desk littered with papers and half-finished letters. He looked increasingly troubled, and his trouble affected m
e most deeply when I found a list on his desk titled “Drains on the Frankenstein Estate.”
There were no items listed, but it was not difficult to imagine my name at the top.
Without Victor, I had no reason to be here. And while the Frankensteins had been generous to take me in, they had also rendered me useless. If they had taken me on as a maid or even a governess, I would at least have employable skills, like Justine. Instead, I was treated as a cousin: pampered, and educated in disciplines that in no way translated into the ability to care for myself.
They had saved me from poverty and, in the same stroke, doomed me to utter dependence. If Judge Frankenstein kicked me out, I would have absolutely no claim or legal recourse to take anything with me. At any moment he could force me to leave, and I would once again be simply Elizabeth Lavenza, with no family, no home, and no money.
I would not let him do that.
