The Monster's Wife(15)
“Mutig!” he grinned.
She looked past his head, embarrassed at his obvious attempt to win her round, even more at her pleasure in hearing it. She braced herself, mentally repeating, he just wants something. That’s all. For some reason, it seemed important to resist him.
“I have a small experiment underway today, involving galvanism. Do you know that term from your reading?” He turned to gesture to the long table covered in glass tubes and bottles, festooned with wire slung over it like ivy.
Behind it were two more tables. One was set out with a row of sharp and shining knives. The other was covered with a white sheet that rose and dipped over the landscape of its hidden contents. It was a long, thin table and whatever sat at the nearest end overshadowed the rest. Their tips were scalloped and peaked in the middle. And what lay beyond undulated gently over small, soft hills and valleys towards a shrouded moon from which dark weeds hung. It reminded her of wakes and the awful quietude of things that are dead. Could that be...? No, surely not.
Her eyes left the lifeless form superstitiously and looked behind to the windows.
12
Outside, the sky scabbed over and clotted black. Whatever the doctor had planned involved sharp implements and dead animals, perhaps other dead things. Her eyes flicked towards the long table again and away, as if she’d seen a ghost.
She shivered, all at once flooded with the desire to be back at the croft where everything was safe and warm and good. “It’s late, Sir and I must beg my leave. My Granny will be wanting me.”
“Schon gut,” he said gently, “perhaps this is enough for today.” He drew a pair of spectacles from his pocket and propped them on the bridge of his nose before turning to his papers.
She felt a light touch on her elbow. May’s hand held her gently but firmly, pushing her towards the open door, ushering her from the room and down the cage-lined hall.
At the end of it, she pulled away from May’s grasp and they walked through the twisting belly of the house in awkward silence.
On the stairs, May cleared her throat. “He talks and talks infernally, you know. Then all at once he needs to work and he begs you be gone.” Her voice was oddly consoling, as if she expected Oona to be disappointed.
Oona said nothing, unsure of where to begin, how best to persuade her headstrong friend. At the kitchen door, she stopped, turned, measuring her words out carefully before spilling them coolly into the night air. “I don’t think you should work here, May. I found a hand washed up on the beach. A hand. It seems dangerous to me—”
May rolled her eyes. “And you fancy this ‘hand’ is something to do with Doctor Frankenstein, I suppose?”
“I do.”
“And I suppose you have proof of that.”
“My proof is in the chicken coop. I’ll fetch it for you tomorrow.”
May’s mouth went slack and Oona felt a flutter of hope that she’d had an effect. “The chicken coop,” May sighed, rubbing her eyes wearily. “Oona, you’re losing your wits. This is the real world and in the real world, money is a great necessity. The doctor has money and I need it, so I work for it and he pays me, and at the moment I have cooking to do. So if you don’t mind...”
Oona caught her by the wrist. “It’s not merely the money, is it?” She looked straight into May’s eyes, trying to see past the fa?ade into that busy brain of hers. “It’s more than that.”
May struggled free and let out a brittle laugh. “You might know your letters and read all sorts of fine books over at Hamish Yule’s, Oona, but I am the one the doctor desires by his side. You may not have faith in my judgement, but he does, as I have faith in his.”
The words pinched Oona and she turned away, mute. Only when she heard the door slam behind her did she let the tears prick to the surface and fall down her burning cheeks, glad that the night wrapped around her like a veil and hid her.
At the burn, she snatched up a fallen stick and beat the bullrushes, making their dark heads snap off and fall in the fast-moving water. Yes, it sounded like a wonderful kind of trusting relationship, slaving as a maid, doing some strange man’s dirty work, washing his breeks and cooking his bannocks. No doubt it was a real position of authority. May had made it sound as if she was jealous. What a joke! She threw the stick as hard as she could, satisfied to hear the splash it made in the angry tumult of water.
Halfway back, she stopped on the cliff-top to look at the lights on the mainland. She and May often watched them flickering on and off at night as if someone was sending a message: here is light and life and warmth and possibility.
May was right about one thing. Oona was jealous that her friend got to live her life with all its potential for adventure and discovery, for travelling the world and seeing extraordinary things. Ma had been barely two years older than Oona was now when she died.
She wanted to live, not to be found face down in the burn’s cold water, eternally asleep. From where she stood now, the other island looked like a sleeping woman with her hair fanned out under her and her fingers clutching the sea like a sheet and her feet pointing to the heavens.
Feet.
Her heart beat the bony cage of her ribs. She sat down hard. Sweat bubbled from her temples, for she knew with sick certainty what lay under the sheet in the music room.
13