I did not realize that a legend had grown about the Cornish Giantess, who roamed that stretch of shore. I suppose I had been seen searching for food among the rocks. That is how Catherine found me.
One day, it was in late summer I think, for the gourds were hanging heavy on their vines, I looked up and there, sitting on the garden wall, was a woman. She was bare-headed and barefoot, in a simple linen dress, with a straw hat on the wall next to her. She had strange yellow eyes, and she sat looking at me as though she had been there a long time.
It had been so long since I had seen another of my kind that I stepped back and shrieked. It sounded like the call of a bird—one of the falcons that sometimes circled overhead. How long was it since I had last spoken?
“Do not be afraid,” she said in English. She pulled down the collar of her dress, which was unbuttoned at the top. “Look. I, too, am made. I, too, am a monster. Monstrum sum.”
CATHERINE: I wasn’t even sure if she would understand me. What if she spoke only French or German? But I thought she would understand the scars. As to who she was, that was a guess on my part. I was traveling with the Circus of Marvels and Delights through Cornwall. One day, a man said to Lorenzo, “You should get the Cornish Giantess, you should. Make a fortune!” He told the story of a giantess who had lived by the seashore for a hundred years. Lorenzo thought it was only a story—after all, it was a hundred years old. But I began to wonder. Moreau had talked about Frankenstein’s experiment. Victor Frankenstein had gone to England, specifically to England, to create a female monster. But he had never completed his task. Afraid that his male and female monsters would reproduce, he had disassembled her and thrown her body parts into the sea. That’s what I knew from Mrs. Shelley’s account.
MARY: Which is a pack of lies.
CATHERINE: Yes, I began to suspect it was inaccurate when I heard of the Cornish Giantess. But why did she lie, Mary?
MARY: To protect Frankenstein. To protect the Société des Alchimistes.
CATHERINE: I don’t think so. What I think is . . .
JUSTINE: Please, can we finish my story?
I had no food to offer this Cat Woman, who had guessed my identity and sought me out. At that time I ate only vegetables and what I could scavenge from the sea, which I did not even cook for fear of attracting attention to myself. But she said she was not interested in eating. She was interested in listening.
“And so you’ve lived here ever since,” she said to me after I had told her my story, such as it was.
“Yes,” I said. My throat ached from talking so much.
“Alone, all this time.”
“Yes, but it does not seem so long. I have books, I have my garden . . .”
“Justine, you’ve been living in this house for almost a hundred years.”
It startled me, that so much time had passed. I had no clock, no calendar. I had not kept track of the passage of time. I did not age, and evidently I could not die. I knew many winters had come and gone, but . . .
“I did not know,” I said, feeling for the first time a sense of desolation. Everything Justine Moritz had known was gone.
“You can’t stay here forever,” she said. “For one thing, the world is changing. The nineteenth century is coming to an end. Although you don’t feel it here yet, the towns are growing larger and there are more people in them. Soon, they will be everywhere, even here. And this house has been sold. I heard people at the sideshow talking about it. The current heir is a woman, raised in Africa and rich from a coffee plantation. She sued to break the entail and won. People don’t like entails much, anymore. The land will be developed—it will become a grand hotel, surrounded by seaside cottages. There is a mania now for going to the seaside, I can’t imagine why. For another, you can’t live alone your entire existence. That’s not right. It’s not . . . no one should have to live alone for so long. And I happen to need a friend. And the circus does not have a giantess.”
That is how I left my place of refuge and solitude. I joined the Circus of Marvels and Delights. And the rest . . . you know.
CHAPTER XX
The Athena Club
When Justine finished her story, the room was silent, except of course for the sound of Diana chewing the last piece of Justine’s toast. Damn that girl, Mary thought—really, her language was deteriorating with Diana around. She would have to make sure that Justine got a proper breakfast.
Finally, Holmes said, “And no one came to the house, not for a hundred years? That seems . . . unusual. I’ve heard stories of such entails and the difficulties they cause, particularly when a case goes to chancery. But surely there would have been a caretaker of some sort.”
“Truly, there wasn’t,” said Justine. “Well, there was a boy, once. It was when I had been there—half a century, perhaps? He came to find the giantess. The people on that coast were poor farmers—they had no interest in whether the legend was true. It was enough for them that their fathers and grandfathers had spoken of a giantess—they repeated the stories they had been told. They were simply trying to survive. But that boy—he was different. He wanted to know for himself. I say boy, but he was already half a man, seventeen or eighteen perhaps. He was already more mature than men twice his age.”
Holmes looked puzzled. “Was he connected with the estate in any way?”
“Not as far as I know. He said he was from up the coast, and had come to a local village during his school vacation. He was the sort of boy who collects seashells, who digs up bones and shards of pottery. He was inquisitive, and particularly interested in the geology of that area. I showed him the library and told him that he could read whatever he liked. He would visit once or twice a week. He helped me to practice English, and we even talked a little in Latin. We became . . . friends. Then one day he told me that he could not come anymore. His landlady had become suspicious about his long walks, and he did not want to put me in danger. So he stopped coming. He promised that he would never tell anyone about me.”
“Did he ever ask you about yourself, who you were and how you were made?” asked Holmes. He sounded—skeptical. Suspicious.
“I do not remember him asking, but I told him . . .” Justine leaned forward as though suddenly struck by the thought. “I told him about the Société des Alchimistes.”
“Could he have been a member of the society?” asked Holmes.
“I do not know. But he was so young—surely not?”
“Frankenstein was young when he created Adam,” said Catherine. “But you know who he was—you told me his name, remember? William something.”
“Yes, William Pengelly. I called him Will, and sometimes, when I was particularly pleased with him, Guillaume. My one friend in all that time, other than the cats of course . . .”