The Monster's Wife(13)
May pulled her close, held her hard. “Please stop,” she whispered.
“What?” Oona couldn’t tell whether she knew about the hand. “What I found—”
“Shhh,” May pressed a finger to Oona’s lips. “We’ll speak later on, but not here. He might hear us.”
“Who might?”
“Him.”
“I’ll decide when I speak my mind.”
“May. I need you in this moment!” The man’s voice, though muffled by the door, was urgent nonetheless. It was accented, but differently than Oona had imagined, not deep and mysterious, but as crisp and definite as the notes on the strange piano. The door swung open.
May slipped from Oona’s arms. “Doctor Frankenstein.” She looked ashamed.
He peered round the door at them like a startled weasel, raising his eyebrows until they vanished into the blonde hair spilling over his forehead. He wore a stained, white shirt with no cravat, green breeches that were dirty and rumpled. Clothes almost as filthy as Old Cormick’s. He was a slight man, angular and lithe. His nose was large and slightly hooked, dominating the boyish, clean-shaven face and his lips were wide and full. He was entirely unlike the tall, dark and handsome aristocrat of whom she had dreamt.
Appearing to sense her watching him, Frankenstein turned towards Oona. She braced herself for a lecture. Instead, his boyish face creased into a charming smile. His grey eyes, which turned down in a melancholy fashion at the outer edges, squinted shut until they seemed to disappear between thick, blonde lashes. “This is your friend? Bitte sch?n bring her into the Music Room. I need both of you.”
Oona looked at May searchingly, losing sight of her anger in the moment’s turmoil.
May met her eyes. “Don’t speak out of turn,” she hissed.
11
The music room stank of bird shit mingled with rancid meat and something acrid she couldn’t identify. Sharper than lye or rotgut, it stung her eyes. She couldn’t see where the smell came from because a curtain split the room so that only a narrow strip of floor was visible, a sort of walkway around the shrouded space in the centre. Cobbled together from dust sheets, the curtain hung from pulleys attached to the white cherubim that flew across the ceiling.
All along the walkway, paintings were turned round to face the oak panelling like naughty children. To their backs were tacked papers covered in angular symbols and numbers. The grandfather clock had stopped. Its pretty face - adorned with a serene moon smiling from painted heavens - hung open. Cogs and the entrails of springs hung out of it. A classical bust in the corner was painted with lurid features and an inky, numbered brain. None of it looked like the stories she’d heard of the Laird’s elegant Music Room in which imported string quartets played.
“I have experienced somewhat of a lightning bolt, not to say an epiphany, given the Sisyphean labour of adapting what jetsam we have to hand.” In his stocking feet - the yellow silk sadly wrinkled at the ankles - Frankenstein padded over the worn Persian rug, its stars and camels embroidered in golds, reds, oranges. He had a quick way of walking, an air of barely suppressed panic, as if time ran in constant and frightening pursuit of him. “May knows whereof I speak.” He smiled broadly, eyes squinting. “My Man Friday, scavenging the wilderness for manna!”
May’s lips eased from their white rictus. “Talks in riddles, does the doctor. Never stops working, either,” she said under her breath, and smiled confidingly. “He means I’ve gathered specimens for his experiments.”
She’d seen this version of May before, many times: the blushing girl who hung on a boy’s arm and laughed at his foolish jokes. Although it grated on her and although she wished fervently for her tactless, foul-mouthed friend to return and drink and smoke with her, she’d learned not to feel too bitter about all the eyelash fluttering, since she knew how much May wanted to be a wife and mother. Sometimes she wondered which May was the true May, though, and which the act. She prayed that this time at least, the simpering was being put on.
“Specimens? Like frogs and birds?” She raised a sardonic eyebrow.
May elbowed her in the ribs. “Oona!”
“Hands?” Although Oona kept her voice low, even she could hear the anger in it.
May looked away, her mouth tightening into a frown.
Frankenstein flicked them a look over his shoulder, as if he had overheard their murmured exchange. “To discover the secrets of life, we must flush nature out of her hiding places, move her into an orderly setting in which she may be observed. Therefore I keep caged birds, not free-flying ones.” Walking backwards now, he joined his thumbs and flapped his hands. “I cannot study them when they are flying all around my laboratory, shitting.”
The doctor beckoned to May and she hopped over the scattered papers to reach him, hot colour spreading unevenly across her cheeks. Oona looked back at the open doorway. The cage-lined hallway stretched out beyond it. She could still turn back, though it wouldn’t erase the fact of coming in the first place, wading deeper and deeper into whatever madness lay here. She thought of the dull eye of the caged blackbird, so used to its prison it didn’t even look at the open door that would set it free. She wasn’t sure that birds flying around this place and shitting would make much difference to the maelstrom anyway. In front of the dust sheet curtain, smudged papers spilled over the rug and floorboards, notes in handwriting loosely looped and dramatic, as if excitement had overwhelmed the writer; drawings inked so decidedly that the quill had torn through the paper in places.