He’d known all along? “I was mad with jealousy. I had found my dream man, with a face that stopped my heart, and he possibly belonged to another? I know it was wrong to lie to you, but I want you to know this: She didn’t love you like I do. She didn’t try to bring you back.”
“Not everybody has your resources or intellect,” Will reminded her with quiet censure, not acknowledging her love declaration. “People love in different ways. Just because a wife with no scientific knowledge doesn’t beat back death doesn’t mean she is less caring.”
“You’re in my world now, and it does mean that. Why aren’t you more surprised to be married?”
“You’re just confirming something I have suspected. How else could I resist?” He gestured wryly in her direction.
“You’ve always known deep down that you belong to another. It’s why you feel unfaithful. Pass me that soap bar, please.” She pointed to the basin stand. The change of subject would head off the swell of bad emotion inside. “When Lizzie and I dragged Victor to Paris, we found this tiny soap store tucked into a laneway. They supplied Marie Antoinette.”
“If it was good enough for the queen of France, and Princess Angelika, it’s fine for nameless, nobody Will,” he said, fetching it. “I shudder to imagine the cost.”
“I have never smelled anything as divine as your soap.” She cupped the cake in her hands and inhaled deeply. “I can smell you all around the house. I chose this scent for you, long before I ever saw you.”
“That’s why I am finding it hard to trust you now. If your first attempt at a husband had worked, you would have given him your favorite soap.”
Angelika tried to picture it. “I’m quite sure I would not.” But she had been infatuated many times before with total strangers.
He was patient. “I cannot know that it is me you love when you do not know me. I understand why you didn’t tell me at first about the ring. But it changes things, and I now have to investigate new threads tying me to my old life. My death may have been a catastrophe for my family.” He hesitated, then made an admission. “It made me sick to think of myself as your fourth. I want to kiss you again, too. But these thoughts are chased by the idea that I am not free to make a new choice. I may have children who depended on me, and now they might be stealing to survive.”
Emotion swelled inside her because he was a very good man indeed.
She spilled the truth.
“Your ring has an engraving, but we were too careless to even look at it. There, now you know everything. All of my terrible wrongdoings and lies. You were found by the worst person.” She laid her head down on her folded arms and shivered as he cupped water across her shoulders. “We will follow that ring to the ends of the earth, and with it I hope you can unlock your entire past. Your family, your wife . . . You will go home to them.”
She added some salt tears to the bathwater.
“I probably will. But don’t worry yourself tonight. Lie back.” When she did, he pillowed her head on his forearm. “My poor love, you have had such burdens, being so lonely up on this hill,” he said with total understanding, and her tears came in earnest. After keeping these details from him, she’d expected a scolding, but now he just carefully washed her face, cleansing her tears like he couldn’t bear them. “You were good to confess the full truth, and more so, I never had to press. You give me everything, at every chance you get. I love my new boots, by the way.”
“I’m so glad.” She reveled in his touch as he stroked the sponge across her face.
“This is what you did for me on that first night. I was in the most unspeakable pain, right through my bones. It was the way you washed my face that made me want to keep living. Who would think a sponge and warm water could be so soothing?”
She tried to lighten her tone. “The sponge is from the store in Paris, too. Only the best for you.”
He wouldn’t allow her to sidestep her emotion. “I felt how much you cared for me.”
Maybe he was asking her to feel that now, too, so she closed her eyes, and it felt real. He was tracing and stroking the sponge across her brow, cheeks, lips, neck. Over and over.
This was forever love, till death parted them.
“I will tell you what I know now, in this moment. You are the most beautiful woman who ever lived,” he told her with quiet certainty. “The most brilliant, the most witty, the most brave.”
Angelika could not find a reply.
He continued. “I need you to know I am in awe of everything you are. Even the bad parts of you. But this resurrection pastime is not a game. You need to give life, and death, the respect it deserves. It is not up to you to make these decisions. You are not God.”
Angelika was not used to such gentle censure. “I see it now completely, and I will be better. I promise.”
He completed another pass with the sponge across her face. “I would like to see you make some changes in your life. Look around yourself. See your privileges. Find ways to help the people of this village who are struggling to survive. Show mercy and kindness to them, because you can afford to.”
Angelika’s voice was small. “I know I have lived a self-absorbed life.”
“I know you will improve. I have faith in you.”
Faith.
Somewhere along the way, the Frankensteins’ distrust of the church had erased that word from their vocabularies. Will accepted all these good and bad parts of her, tended her near-naked body like it were art, and he was confident that she could, and would, do better. Angelika had dreamed of a declaration of love for her entire life.
This one felt monumental.
This felt like a preview of what their life together would be like: Riding through fields as equals on adventures, each supporting and saving the other. Bathing companionably, a debate, a laugh, then curling together in French linen sheets to lusciously defile each other. No other person could breach this little world they had created together, and no man could ever replace him.
And just as she was reaching for him, to put her hand into his hair, to bring him down to her mouth, he evaded her. “You do not hide what you want,” he repeated to her. “But I wish you would. From the neck down, I do not believe we should wait. And I need to leave now, before I lose my head completely.”
He was out of the room, closing the door quietly behind him, and she was left behind to soak in the freezing water in his bathtub.
Chapter Eight
Two days later, on the way to the Dunmore Military Academy, Will asked Angelika, “Whose carriage is this? Did you create these footmen last night in your laboratory?”
“Our neighbor lets us borrow it, in exchange for using our fields for his goats and sheep. It’s a good arrangement. As you know, Victor is not fond of formal outings anywhere. Myself, I’d love a coach drawn by eight black horses to see the world in.”
He had empathy in his expression. “I truly wish that for you. I wonder how Victor has gotten on. Will he send a messenger, or just arrive home?”
“He took a pigeon with him. He’s trained them to fly home. They arrive and wait on the windowsill, with a note in a canister on their leg. It’s frightfully exciting. Last time, he sent me this silver necklace.” She hooked her thumb into the chain at her throat.
“How pleasant, to be so wealthy a bird can be trusted with such a delivery.” He thought this over, and a brilliant grin spread across his face. “Another Frankenstein invention.”
“I’m sorry you got caught up in our nonsense.”
Will was seated opposite her, their knees sometimes brushing and her boots held secure between his. It was another of those I wish this was forever moments. In her instant daydream, they were just married and about to crest a hill, the ocean below foaming against the shore. A ship was docked, ready to take them across to new worlds. She felt she could travel for hundreds—thousands!—of days, until the ache of being manor-bound had eased off. And she would do it gladly, holding Will’s hand, with a tired ache in her thighs and his kiss on her mouth.
This much was true reality: now that they had touched lips at the morgue, it seemed impossible to stop staring at each other. Being left behind in cooling bathwater the other night should have been enough to chill Angelika’s passion. Instead, she was in a constant sweat over him.
She attempted a joke to break the silence. “Buy me a carriage and horses when we are married. I promise to be very surprised by the gift. But—you do not seem comfortable?”
His hands clutched tight on the seat. His face appeared pale, and his Adam’s apple was bobbing in swallows. “Something about this enclosed space is fraying my nerves,” he admitted, looking through the lace curtain at the forest they were traveling through. “I feel like I’d rather get out and walk.”
“Fresh air will help—breathe deep and count to one hundred.” Angelika was gratified that after a minute of deep breaths, he turned a better color. “Perhaps this is a fear from your last life.”