This Monstrous Thing(3)
I held up the package so she could see the front. “It’s from Mary Godwin. Do you remember her?”
“That English girl who hung about you and Oliver the summer before—” She stopped very suddenly and our gazes broke apart. I looked down at the package, but that made my heart lurch, so I looked back up at Mum. She was staring at the music box, her fingers running a slow lap around its edges. “Everything happened that year, didn’t it?” she said with a sad smile.
It was such an understatement I almost laughed. 1816 had been the year that cleaved my life into two jagged halves, the before and the after—before Mary had come and gone, before Geisler had been arrested and then escaped Geneva, before Oliver had died.
Mum twitched her pliers in the direction of Mary’s package. “What do you think she wants?”
I didn’t have a clue. I couldn’t imagine Mary would stick any of the unsaid things between us in a letter and drop it in the post after a two-year silence. “Probably just a catch-up,” I said lamely. “You know, how are you, I miss you, that sort of thing.”
I miss you.
I checked my heart before it ran away with that one.
Streets over, the bells from Saint Pierre Cathedral started chiming four. I should have been long gone by now, I realized with a jolt. I dropped Mary’s package into my bag, then started for the door again. “I’ve got to go, I’ll see you later.”
“Be back for supper,” Mum called.
“Yes.”
“You know what day it is.”
The inverted shadow of our name painted on the glass—FINCH AND SONS, TOY MAKERS—fell at my feet as I turned the knob. “I’ll be back,” I said, and shoved my shoulder into the door.
A gasp of December air slapped hard enough that I pulled my coat collar up around my jaw. The sun was starting to sink into the foothills, and the golden light winking off the muddy snow and copper rooftops was so bright I had to squint. A carriage clattered across the cobblestones, the clop of horses’ hooves replaced by the mechanical chatter of the gears. I got a faceful of steam as it passed.
I didn’t have money for an omnibus ticket, but I was running late and the books bouncing around in my bag made it heavier than I was used to. It was a good bet no one would be checking tickets today. When the police force had redoubled their efforts at exposing unregistered clockwork men in the autumn, things like free riders on the omnibus had slipped down their list of concerns.
I crossed the square and joined the crowds spilling toward the main streets that led to financial district and the lake beyond it. On the stoop in front of H?tel de Ville, a beggar was sitting with his head bowed and a tin cup extended. One of his sleeves hung empty, but the arm shaking his cup was made of tarnished clockwork, the leather gauntlet that covered the gears starting to feather with wear. Three boys in school uniforms sprinted by, and one spit at him as they passed. I looked away, though, and without meaning to, I started thinking about how I’d fix that rusted arm if he came into our shop. He needed thinner fingers with smaller gears, a hinge pin at the wrist—I would have added that to Morand’s arm if I’d thought Father would let me get away with it.
The omnibus was already at the station when I arrived, and I found a spot to stand beside the door, close enough that I could bolt if a policeman got on to check tickets. As the omnibus pulled away from the curb with a pneumatic growl, I retrieved Mary’s package from my bag and stared again at my name in her perfect handwriting across the front. Somehow it felt strange and familiar at the same time. I slid my finger under the seal and tore the wrapping off.
It was a book, green and slim, with the title printed in spindly gold leaf on the spine: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.
I didn’t have a clue what a Frankenstein was, or a Prometheus. I thought for a moment it was some of the daft poetry she and Oliver had spent all summer obsessed with, but there wasn’t an author’s name on the binding—not Coleridge or Milton or any of the others they obsessed over. I flipped through the first pages, then back to the spine to be certain I hadn’t missed it, but there was only the odd title.
Curious now, I turned a few more pages and glanced at the first line:
My dear sister, you will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.
The omnibus jerked to a sudden stop as a steamcycle cut into the street ahead of it. Someone bumped into me, and I lost my place on the page. I was a slow and stumbling reader on the best days, and the noise and swaying of the omnibus combined with all those massive words made it even harder. I tipped the cover shut. Mary knew I didn’t like to read—that had always been what she and Oliver shared. They’d spent the whole summer trading books, though he didn’t have many, and everything he gave to her she would return the next time we saw her, finished. When Oliver asked her how she read so quickly, she told him with a sly smile that she took books to bed like lovers. Perhaps she hadn’t meant Frankenstein for me at all, but as a gift to pass on. The fact that it had arrived today of all days wasn’t lost on me.
The omnibus sped forward out of Vieille Ville, the old town built around the cathedral, and along the Rhone toward the financial district. As the street opened into Place de l’Horloge, the clock tower loomed above us, the clock’s black hands suspended at midnight and still as sentries. Built in celebration of Geneva joining the Swiss Confederation, it was the tallest tower in Europe, all industrial struts and iron beams, and boasted the largest clock as well—inside were gears wider than a grown man was tall, designed to operate on an electric charge. It was a spectacle, even though if the clock wasn’t running yet. The scaffolding had finally come down, the frosted-glass face repaired and a sparkling reflection of the frozen lake beyond the city walls. I pulled my coat tighter and looked away from it.