“I’m just a scullery maid, miss,” she replied, shaking her head rapidly, like a sparrow. “No more adventures for me, thank you. I’ll clear up here and then bring something up for Mr. Holmes and Miss Moreau. They need their breakfasts too, I’m thinking.”
And then, despite Mary’s concern that they would all be too much for Justine, they trooped upstairs: Mary leading the way, with Holmes and Catherine and Diana trailing behind.
Justine was sitting up in bed, looking pale and tired, but composed. Beatrice was sitting in a chair by the bedside, drinking more of that green sludge she seemed to favor. Justine had toast and what looked a bowl of vegetable broth on a tray, but she had not touched it.
When they entered, Beatrice moved back toward the window and opened it a crack at the bottom, to let in air.
“Mr. Holmes,” said Justine. “You see I have been waiting. You told me that you wanted me to tell you everything I know about Adam Frankenstein. It’s little enough, I’m afraid. Before last night, I had not seen him in almost a hundred years. Even with what I know of him, I would not have thought him capable of such atrocities. Cutting up women! He was always violent, but impulsive, not calculating. I would never have imagined . . .”
Holmes sat on the edge of the bed and took her long, pale hand. “Forgive me, Miss Frankenstein. I do not mean to distress you, but you understand, I’m sure, why we must know everything. Adam, Hyde, and Prendick were all involved with this secretive society, although in different ways, I suspect. Prendick seems to still be a member, Hyde was cast out, Adam was never admitted. And Renfield—what is his connection? Why did Hyde choose him to pin the murders on? You see how complicated this case has become. I doubt Renfield will give us any useful information—he is too sunk in his madness. Hyde may speak, once he has spent some time in Newgate. I have arranged for an interview with him, after he is charged and imprisoned. Meanwhile, any additional information may lead us to the Société des Alchimistes.”
Justine nodded. “I will tell you everything I know.”
“And Mr. Holmes, I found this on the bookshelf while searching for something to read to Justine.” Beatrice picked up a book from the side table and handed it to him. Over his shoulder, Mary saw the title in gilt letters on a green cover:
Frankenstein:
A Biography of the Modern Prometheus
“I believe of us all, only Dr. Watson and I have read it. My father believed it to be an accurate account of the creation and death of Adam. We know now that it is at least partly false—Justine was not destroyed, and Adam did not pursue his creator into the Arctic waste and die there. I do not know why Mrs. Shelley falsified information. Nevertheless, I believe we should all read her book.”
“I’ve read it,” said Catherine. “It was on Moreau’s island. That’s how I knew to look for Justine.”
“Well, I shall read it as soon as possible,” said Holmes, examining the frontispiece. “A pursuit through the Arctic—it sounds quite the shilling shocker. Miss Frankenstein will tell us to what extent it can be trusted.”
CATHERINE: Although it’s not at all a shilling shocker. She was a very good writer, you know.
DIANA: Why are you interrupting your own story?
“I’ve never read it myself,” said Justine. “But I will tell you my story, and you can judge. Perhaps if you will all sit down . . .”
Holmes nodded and withdrew to the other chair. Mary and Catherine sat at the foot of the bed. Diana shamelessly plopped in bed next to Justine, sitting cross-legged and with her chin in her hands, as though listening to a bedtime story.
Just as Justine was about to start, Alice brought up a tray with a plate of toast and eggs for Holmes, and a plate of kippers for Catherine. She gathered Mary’s and Catherine’s empty teacups on the tray, then headed once again toward the door.
Justine sat up against the pillows, took a sip of water from a glass on the side table, and said, “If you will pardon a preamble, I shall begin at the beginning—or my beginning, as it were.” Alice stopped and stood, half in and half out the door, leaning on the doorframe, as though even she could not help listening after all.
CHAPTER XIX
Justine’s Story
I do not remember my life before I woke on my father’s operating table, except in glimpses: my mother, a widow to whom I was simply another mouth to feed, sitting in her rocking chair by the fire, with my brother and sisters around her. She wore a faded black dress with a white lace fichu around her neck, and looked older than her years. The Frankensteins’ grand house on the shore of Lake Geneva, with its walls of gray stone, beneath mountains whose peaks were always covered with snow. In spring, we would gather wildflowers on their slopes and make crowns for ourselves, the upstairs maids and kitchen maids, even the fat old cook. Only the housekeeper was too proud to wear one. The courtroom in which I was condemned to death and the faces of the good men of Geneva, solemn beneath their white wigs, looking at me as though I were an insect, the lowest creature on God’s Earth.
I do not remember my first childhood, or how I grew up in the Frankenstein household.
But my father told me my history: how I was sent in service to his family when I was no older than Alice. How I was treated well, as part of the Frankenstein family. How his mother loved me, and how I was considered almost a sister by his cousin Elizabeth, who had lived with the Frankensteins since she was a child. I was trained as a nursemaid for the Frankenstein boys, first for his younger brother Ernest, and then for the youngest, William. Victor, the eldest, was already in school, and soon to depart for university. He told me that I was a happy girl, always laughing, with golden hair and eyes like the sky above Lausanne in summer. That is what he told me. But I do not remember.
One day, William was found dead, strangled in the woods. The house was searched, and a locket that he had been wearing, with a portrait of his mother in it, was found among my clothes. I was accused of his murder—I, who had taken care of him since birth, who would never have harmed a hair on his head.
It was Adam who had killed him, in a fit of rage when William, meeting him in the woods, called him an ugly ogre. He confessed it all later to my father—confessed to the murder, and to putting the locket in a pocket of my apron. He was responsible—both for William’s death and for mine. But the jury did not know of Adam’s existence, so I was condemned to death, and then hanged.
CATHERINE: Frankenstein should have told them.
JUSTINE: We’ve had this argument before. How could he have convinced them that he, a university student, had created a man out of corpses and brought it to life? They would never have believed him.