This is how you shall be exceptional, my father’s voice said. By defeating death to save a life.
I hurried from the cellar, afraid to face Lucy any longer. Upstairs I nearly collided with Montgomery in the kitchen. He frowned at the bundle clutched in my arms.
“Is everything all right?” he asked.
I glanced at the table where the samples for our wedding cakes still rested, minus a few bites. They had tasted delicious at the time, but now all that seemed foolish.
“I think I might have caught whatever Lucy’s sick with.” It wasn’t a lie. My stomach threatened to turn at the sugary smell of the cakes. I hurried upstairs to my bedroom, where I twisted the key in the lock and let the bundle fall onto the floor.
The scalpel fell out, still caked with dried blood.
The idea had already taken hold of me, and it wasn’t as easy to dig it back out again. It was as addicting as a drug, beautiful and promising and so, so dangerous that I hesitated to even look at it directly. It was an idea that could change everything.
Already my fingers were itching to try. Isn’t this what I’d been craving, deep down where I didn’t want to admit it? Since I’d first learned about Frankenstein’s science, since I’d first seen Hensley brought back to life. My father’s spirit was in my veins, urging me to do this. Suddenly the memory of the carnival I’d attended when I was a little girl returned to me: flashes of a man with skin like scales and a little boy with black fur covering his face. I’d gone to the freak show tent with my father. He’d given me a caramel apple and explained the monstrosities’ various afflictions.
No matter how much Montgomery pushed me to be like my mother, he was wrong. Only my father’s legacy could guide me now. Father had created man out of animal, but he’d never conquered death before. I could.
I took out Jack Serra’s water charm. Perhaps this was what his cryptic fortune meant: a stream and a river are made of the same substance, and yet the river has the potential to be so much stronger. The river always surpassed the stream—just as I would surpass my father. Only I’d use his science for good.
I closed my eyes, squeezing the charm. I felt like it was giving me permission, even pushing me toward fulfilling my fate.
I snuck up to Lucy’s room and knocked quietly. In the low light of a few flickering candles, our eyes met.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll bring him back.”
She threw her arms around me so tightly I could hardly breathe. “I knew I could count on you to see reason.”
TWENTY-FIVE
THE DAY OF MY wedding approached, and yet I could think of little else but bringing Edward back. All I had needed was permission, and that’s what decoding Jack Serra’s fortune had given me. I knew what Montgomery would say if I told him—that fortunes were only a way for us to impose our hearts’ own desires—but so be it. If this was my heart’s true desire, I couldn’t deny it any longer.
Lucy conspired to help me sneak away from wedding planning whenever I could, tiptoeing into the hidden alcoves in the walls and reading by candlelight every book I found in the library on anatomy and galvanism, though I already knew most of the information by heart. It was the Origin Journals I needed, the ones Elizabeth kept hidden.
“I know this is probably silly,” I told Elizabeth after dinner, dropping my voice conspiratorially. “But Balthazar was telling me about some old journals he’d found while tidying up the manor. Said there was quite a bit of German in them. I know you keep the Origin Journals well hidden, but I thought you might want to make certain he hadn’t accidentally found them.”
Her eyes went wide for an instant; then she dismissed the notion with a wave. “He must have stumbled upon other old volumes. Lord knows there’s no shortage of dusty books around here.”
But there was uncertainty in her eyes, just as I knew there would be. That night, after the household went to bed, I crawled into the passages and peeked through all the spy holes until I found her in her bedroom. She climbed silently up the stairs to her observatory. I followed in the walls and watched through a small hole. She went to the globe with the hidden compartment where she kept her Les étoiles gin, knelt down, and opened the bottom half—a second hidden compartment.
She took out three dusty leather-bound books, checked them quickly to make certain no one had touched them, and then stowed them away again. As soon as she left, I crawled through a trapdoor and took them. I stayed awake all night reading over them in fascination and copying important sections, then replaced them in the morning so they wouldn’t be missed.