“Tell me again how I came to be,” she said, her voice low and thoughtful. The afternoon light lay in pale bands across her paler skin. Once I had thought this body to be merely flesh. It was a surface to be measured and incised, coerced into a form that had been sketched carefully on paper. Now, I could not look upon it without wonder. The scars, once raw and angry, had softened beneath balms and with time. I drew the coverlet higher, not from shame, but from an overwhelming tenderness. I think of the winding sheets in which the parts of her had arrived, parts I would grow to love as they became whole.
“When he began you, my love, my fascination was with the science of you.” I think of the chamber of Victor's manic, frantic experiments. I do not and cannot tell her everything. How could I speak of the women whose deaths supplied what life denied them? Of the femoral head of a mother lost in childbirth, fitted true within its socket? Of the delicate hands I now crave to touch my own body? How I had marvelled at their delicacy, a seamstress’s hands, the thumb and forefinger bearing the callouses of her trade. I remember thinking how clever Victor was to fashion beauty from what society had discarded. Even now I colour with shame at the thought of it.
“I had drawn your form long before breath found you,” I say instead, brushing her dark hair from her brow and pressing my lips to the faint seam at her throat.
I remember how the laboratory stunk of spirits and damp wool, and the hiss of galvanic wires when first he tested the current upon dead muscle which jerked and stilled with the charge. I had read to him from his notes on frogs and electric life when his eyes burned too exhausted with his endeavour to see. I had not just read, but I had absorbed the the measure of charge required to coax a tremor from still flesh. He believed me merely an assistant, a dutiful wife though I had not yet seen the altar.
“Elizabeth,” he would say, “observe the alignment — see how the pelvis must bear the weight.”
Though he worked under duress, compelled by his first creation’s demand, pride had not left him. I stood beside him as I had stood beside him since childhood — removed from my own country and made a plaything for him. Where else was I to direct my mind? Botany and illustration were thought suitable for a wife. But here, in that dim chamber, even if he would not admit it, I was more than suitable but necessary.
“Perhaps,” he murmured once, not knowing I heard him fully, “the female form may accept the vital spark more readily.”
From the shadows, the first creature watched. I feared him, yes, because he had a dreadful appearance and had killed to spite his creator, to hurt him. Yet I also I pitied him. How unhappy was this child of Victor's, treated so unkindly that it was not possible to be gentle. I dared not voice such thoughts. I thought of my wedding night to come, and how I must submit to Victor with my flesh. Perhaps that is the moment I began to feel for the creature who was taking shape on the table.
When at last the form lay nearly complete, Victor faltered.
“What if she prove more malignant than the first?” he muttered. “What if they propagate? What if she refuses him?”
I saw it plainly then.
'What if she does not love him?' he asked.
In that instant I understood something greater than his terror. I did not wish to marry him. I did not wish to belong to a man who could not endure a will apart from his own. The future I had accepted as inevitable fell away like the sparks of electricity that would animate her, reflected in the eyes of the monster who had longed for his bride with such loneliness, because Victor had created the hole inside him, and it was only Victor that could fill it.
But Victor, seeing her eyes blink open and unable to see his creation like the first, tore her apart.
Before the watching creature, who howled as I did, horrified. Limbs wrenched from their careful sutures. Months of work undone in a frenzy of dread. I still hear that mournful, pitiable, and livid roar. I wonder if he roars now, as Victor ever hunts him.
Victor would hunt her too, had believed her not lost.
Yet ho could such a prideful man reckon with what I had learned? He had locked tight his chamber, but did not think to hide the key from my sight, not believe me wily.
When his fevers overtook him as I knew they would, I returned to the ruins and gathered what he had cast aside. I corrected what he had misaligned, strengthening the sutures, my own fingers becoming calloused. I adjusted the charge, seeking to gently animate, rather than the aggressive dominion that possessed him before she drew her first feeble breath. Unlike his, my hands did not tremble as the storm receded beyond the hills.
Her fingers moved first in the moonlight, a slight flutter, and then breath.
'When he brought you to life,' I tell her now, my voice steadier than my heart, 'I loved you.' I feel her warmth next to me, her fingers betwist mine. She does not detect the lie. Love came later, after the fear, and the awe, and the determined resolve to put aside those feelings so that she would not again be subjected to another man's experiment.
'Did he love me?' she asks. All daughters long for their fathers.
The rain moves softly across the roof of our chalet. We are travelling sisters to those who inquire. My hair lighter than hers, my eyes darker. We are solemn and unremarkable. No one looks twice as we travel the continent, to the place of my birth. I presume my own parents long dead, but I still longed for them, and hoped I might find them there.
'He loved his own idea of mastery,' I say carefully. I cannot tell her it was I who restored her, that Victor told the world I had perished, torn limb by limb by the monster. We agreed upon my disappearance to save his reputation - he did not want London society to believe he had been left unloved by his bride to be. I agreed as it gave me freedom - a small purse, some letters of introduction as a governess once under his employ. He was never aware of the woman who was my travelling companion, that I had taken with me what he believed destroyed.
She knows by the sound of my voice that this tale has come to an end, and I will not answer her questions further. We are both sleepy, and tomorrow will be another day of hard travelling. There will come a night when I give her the full truth, and with it the burden of choosing what she is to herself. For now, I reach for the book on the nightstand, to continue her appetite for learning the world. There are other stories to tell that I want to be more important than this one.
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