CATHERINE: He should have found a way. His family was one of the most important, one of the richest, in the region. The Frankensteins should have protected you.
JUSTINE: But they believed me guilty. Only my father knew the truth. And remember, I confessed. I should not have, but the priest told me I could only have absolution if I confessed to the crime. I thought that without absolution, I would not be able to enter Heaven or stand before God, who knew I was as innocent as the bluebells that grow on the mountain slopes. I know now that God is merciful and would have understood, but I was only seventeen, and frightened.
CATHERINE: I wonder which of them would win, in a contest for worst father? Frankenstein, Rappaccini, Jekyll, or Moreau?
The night after my hanging, Adam came to my father and threatened him. If he did not make a monster out of me, a monster like him, Adam would kill the members of the Frankenstein family, one by one.
MARY: Why you, Justine? Why did he ask for you specifically?
DIANA: Well, she was a convenient dead body. I mean, she’d just been hanged.
MARY: You really are the worst, you know that?
DIANA: What? It’s true.
My father told me that Adam has seen me on the day of William’s murder. I was worn out from searching for the boy and had fallen asleep in a barn, on a pile of hay. That was when he put the locket into my apron. He must have thought me . . . attractive, I suppose.
So my father agreed that he would do this thing, bring me back to life—for Adam, to be his mate. But not in Geneva. He had heard of new surgical techniques developed in England, and would travel there, to study at the Royal College of Surgeons. Then he would travel to a remote location, where he would not be disturbed in his work. He preserved the parts of my body and packed them into a trunk—very cleverly, he told me. But of course I remember none of this.
What I remember is the waking, as though coming up through water, up and up until I thought there would be no surface and I might drown. Then I took my first breath, gasping and staring wildly about me. There was a light like the moon, but it was the lantern over the operating table. The first words my father said to me were, “Justine? Are you awake?”
There was pain, a great deal of pain. Catherine and I talked about this, when we were in the Circus of Marvels and Delights. We are both made creatures. That is why I think we understood each other immediately, when she found me. She said, “Do you remember the pain?” And I said, “How can I forget it?” But I healed.
“Can you walk?” my father asked.
I stumbled like a child to a bedroom he had prepared for me. For a week, I lay on a mattress filled with straw, half awake, half in fevered dreams. Then one day I opened my eyes and the sunlight was golden, the sea continually crashing against the rocks below. I could hear birds and insects. The fever was gone. I was alive.
“I was so worried,” he said to me later. “I thought I would lose you again.” So you see, he cared for me. He loved me . . .
I thought of him as my father because I remembered no other before him. Justine Moritz’s father had died when she was a child. It was Frankenstein who gave me life again—the life I have now. I had to learn how to walk, how to eat with a fork and spoon, how to read first words and then sentences. All these he taught me, carefully, patiently. He had brought a woman’s dress for me, but it did not fit. In creating me, he had necessarily made me larger, elongated the joints. He was not a trained surgeon, just a university student. He did not have Moreau’s skill.
At first, I had to wear his clothes, although the trousers were too short for me. But I found that if I cut the bodice off the dress and sewed a new waistband, I could make a serviceable skirt. I used the same needle and thread he had used to stitch me together. . . . Over it, I wore a shirt of my father’s. When it was tied with a sash, I looked respectable enough.
Slowly, slowly, I learned. For months, we lived peacefully in that lonely cottage, with its stone walls and low thatched roof. Once a week, he would take a boat to what he called Mainland, for we were on an island—one of the Orkneys, I found out later. Despite its name, Mainland was one of the other islands, the largest of them. We were on one of the smaller islands. Once a week, he would come back with food—flour, sugar, whatever we could not grow in our stone-walled garden or procure from the few poor cottagers who lived on that island with us. No one bothered us, and I was not seen except by sheep, and once a shepherd boy from a distance.
Our days were simple: a breakfast of porridge, then a walk across the hills or down to the rocky beach, and perhaps a game of ball to increase my coordination. Then study. He taught me so much! I suppose out of sheer boredom as much as a desire to educate me. As Justine Moritz, I had been merely a servant, who could read fairy tales and add numbers as long as she was using the fingers of both hands. As Justine Frankenstein, I read Aristotle and discussed the sorrows of young Werther. My father had brought two trunks, one filled with me, the other filled with books. I soon exhausted them and started reading my favorites a second time.
I knew it could not last. He told me as much. Elizabeth, to whom he was betrothed, was waiting for him, and he would need to get back to his university studies in Ingolstadt. But I was young, in mind if not in body, and I did not think much about those things. My world was the windswept stone cottage at the top of the cliffs, and our meager vegetable garden, and the restless, eternal sea.
JUSTINE: That’s good, restless and eternal. Thank you, Catherine. You make me sound so much more eloquent than I am.
CATHERINE: You wrote that, actually. You’re a better writer than you think.
JUSTINE: Oh, surely not! After all, English is not my native language. If I could have written it in French . . .
CATHERINE: You’re just as annoying on this subject as Beatrice. Your English is perfectly fine, if a bit Miltonic for a modern audience.
And then, one day, he appeared. The monster, Adam.
We were sitting in the sunshine, at the top of the cliff on which our cottage was situated. I was sketching—my father had taught me how, to help with my fine motor coordination. He had brought pencils and a notebook to make anatomical sketches, but I used them to draw butterflies, or the flowers that grew in the nooks and crannies. Sketching became my favorite occupation, a way to record the wonders of the natural world around me. And I found that I had an exact eye, a skilled hand. Again, I do not know if that is Justine Moritz, or the Frankenstein in me.
My father was sitting on the grass, reading from Plutarch’s Lives. Then suddenly, I heard a roar, as though of a wild animal.