This Monstrous Thing(30)

The other possibility was that Geisler himself had written it. How he had captured some of the details, I didn’t know—maybe he’d pieced together stories he’d heard, stories from Father or Oliver, or perhaps he had puzzled it out and gotten lucky. After all, it was us, but it wasn’t our story, not exactly. But he knew the research. The novel could have been his invitation to me to come find him, but as I had not come quickly enough, he had sought me out. Perhaps he meant it as advertising for the work he wished to undertake with me. But that theory had more holes than my idea that it was Oliver.

And more than that, there were the small things in the book, the uncanny things that no one outside my life should know. Those few lines of Coleridge Oliver had recited. An epigraph from Paradise Lost. A mention of a hot springs near Geneva we’d visited with Mary, and a story about a lightning-struck tree that I could have told from my own memory of a night in Amsterdam. Phrases I couldn’t read without hearing them in my brother’s voice. It was these fragments more than anything else that made me certain it was a story about me by the only person with reason to tell it: Oliver.

There was one other person who knew what had happened: Mary. She knew nearly all of it, about Oliver and the resurrection and selected scenes from our strange lives before Geneva. Mary, the girl who lived in a lakeside villa with a gang of poets and novelists and loved scary stories and hauntings and tales about monsters. I thought suddenly of the letter she’d sent, sealed and lost somewhere in Geneva, and wished with a hollow pang that I’d had a chance to read it.

But it couldn’t be Mary who wrote the book. I was so sure of it. It couldn’t be Mary because I couldn’t believe that the only person I’d ever chosen to put my trust in could turn on me.

All the while I’d known her, she had been my most valiant secret keeper. Oliver and I had both fed her secret after secret—what our father did, Oliver’s work with Geisler, how much I wished it was me in his place—and she’d kept them all for us, stored away inside her as though they were her own. It couldn’t be Mary because the whole reason we met her—the whole reason we all became more than just a forgettable moment in each other’s lives—was that we had given her the secret of what our family did entirely by accident and had to put our trust in her before we knew her.

It happened the second week of May, the start of that summer in Geneva, with a storm beating in the season. I was alone in the shop—Mum and Father were at Geisler’s trial, and Oliver had gone to meet Morand—when the door opened and the bell sang and a young woman with dark auburn hair came in, shaking the rain off her cloak.

“Bonjour,” she called to me brightly. “May I wait here until the rain stops? I forgot my umbrella and I’m all the way in Cologny.”

She was so pretty, and she spoke so fast and posh that my brain got tangled up. All I managed stammer was “Uh,” which she seemed to take as permission to stay.

“Thank you so much, the weather’s just frightful.” She swept off her bonnet and flashed a brilliant smile in my direction. “It’s been so wet lately, hasn’t it? Even for spring. Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink.”

“That’s Coleridge,” I said without thinking. I was proud I recognized it, even though she said it in French.

She beamed. “Yes! Do you like Coleridge?”

“No, I’ve got a brother who does. But he’s good,” I added when she looked disappointed. “Coleridge, I mean. So I suppose I do, I like him. I don’t know, I don’t really read.”

“Oh, he’s marvelous. When I was young, my father used to do recitations of the ‘Ancient Mariner’—”

She was interrupted by the bell over the door, and in came Oliver, wet to the skin, with Morand behind him. Oliver looked in good spirits, but he stopped dead when he saw the girl standing across the counter from me. Morand turned away quick and tucked his clockwork hand in his pocket, eyes on a shelf of windup frogs.

Oliver crossed his arms over his chest and fixed her with a stare. “Can we help you find something, mademoiselle?”

“Oh, no thank you,” she replied. “I’m just seeking shelter from the storm. You must be the brother who likes Coleridge.”

He looked so startled that I almost laughed, but he shot me a scowl nasty enough to shut me up and stalked to my side behind the counter. “You need to get her out of here,” he hissed at me in English. This had been our favorite trick for years—using one of our acquired languages so we could talk about clockwork business in the shop when there were nonmechanical customers about. We’d decided English suited Geneva best. We hadn’t met another soul in Switzerland who spoke it. “Morand got his arm smashed up by some men at the trial who were trying to make trouble for clockworks.”

“Is it bad? I could fix it for him, if you don’t want to.”

“I’ll manage. The framework’s bent, but most of the gears are all right. But I need to get him into the workshop now.” He cast a meaningful look at the girl, who was studying a shelf of windup horses.

“What am I supposed to do about her?” I replied, still in English.

“Find her a cab. Stick her on the omnibus. Bleeding hell, Ally, you knew we were coming, why’d you let her camp out? You can’t go falling over your feet every time a pretty girl looks your way.”