This Monstrous Thing(31)
“Shut it,” I snapped.
“Get her out of here,” he replied.
I glared at him, even though he had already turned away, then went around the counter to where the girl was still standing. “Would you like me to find a cab?” I asked her in French. “I don’t think the rain is going to let up for a while.”
“That would be good, thank you,” she replied, and her voice was more clipped around the edges than it had been. Perhaps Oliver had put her off.
She waited under the shop awning while I got drenched hailing a cab on the street. When one finally stopped, I held the door so the driver wouldn’t have to climb out. The girl lifted her skirts, hopped a puddle that was collecting between the uneven cobbles, and took my outstretched hand, her glove smooth as water against my skin.
“Sorry for the trouble,” I said as she hoisted herself onto the step.
She glanced over her shoulder at me, and the corners of her mouth turned up in a pointed smile. “It wasn’t any trouble,” she said in bright, clear, Britain-born English.
My heart jumped, and before she could climb the rest of the way inside, I grabbed her arm and yanked her back down onto the street. She raised her chin, and a stream of rainwater cascaded off the brim of her bonnet.
“Kindly release me.”
“You speak English?”
“I’m from London. I thought someone ought to teach you and your brother to be more careful.”
“You can’t—” I started, then changed course and tried, instead, “Please don’t—” They’d hang us, all of us. Oliver and I were old enough, and we were both Shadow Boys in our own right. They’d string us up right alongside our parents. We’d known Geneva was dangerous, more than anywhere else we’d lived, but I hadn’t truly felt it until that moment, with my life and my family in the hands of this stranger, whether she knew it or not.
Perhaps she did understand, or perhaps I just looked so panicked she took pity on me, for her face went soft again. “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have frightened you like that. You won’t have any trouble from me, I promise.”
“You can’t—” I tried again, but I was interrupted by the cab driver shouting at us over the rain, “What’s going on? Are you in or not?”
“Just a moment!” she called up to him, then turned back to me. “Why don’t you come see me tomorrow and we can chat? I’m in Cologny, at Villa Diodati.” She said that name like it should have meant something, but I shook my head. “Oh, do you not know . . . ?” Her words trailed into silence, and she looked away. “I’m staying with some friends there. Come see me. Ask for Mary Godwin. Now, please, I need to go.” She pried my fingers off her arm, then climbed into the cab and shut the door. The clockwork kicked to life with a crackling hiss, and a jet of steam exhaust dissolved against the rain as the cab pulled away.
I waited until Morand had left and it was just Oliver and me in the shop before I rounded on him. “You bleeding idiot.”
He hoisted himself onto the counter, grinning in an unconcerned way that made me want to slug him. “Are you still sore I made you get that girl a cab?”
“That girl was from London. She spoke English, she understood everything you said.”
He froze. “Shit.”
“Right.”
“Shit,” he said again, louder this time. “God’s wounds, I’m sorry Ally, I didn’t think . . .” He pushed a hand through his hair, leaving a track of dark curls standing straight. “Shit.”
“She told me to come see her tomorrow. She wants to talk to us.”
“Probably wants money to keep her mouth shut.”
“We have to tell Father.”
“No, don’t tell Father,” he said quickly. “We’ll go talk to her, but we won’t tell her anything more. We’ll figure out what she knows and then come up with some clever story that will explain what I said. We can do it. Everything will be all right.”
I don’t remember what clever story Oliver came up with, or how long it took before Mary saw straight through it. I do remember going to see her that next day. She caught us before we were shown into the grand house and took us to a hillside overlooking the lake, just the three of us for the first time. Oliver and I were both dead certain she was going to ask for money to keep silent or else call the police on us, but instead she wanted to talk about Coleridge. Then Wordsworth. Then Paris, then the best places for pastries in Paris, then the pneumatic lift that had just been installed in the opera house there. Then somewhere along the way we started talking about castles and ghosts, and Mary told us she’d heard about a haunted chateau in the foothills, and then we weren’t standing any longer, we were sitting on the damp grass, then sprawled across it with our shoes off, and I told a story about Oliver thinking our shop in Amsterdam was haunted when really it was a squirrel living in the rafters, and Mary laughed so loud I swore the boaters across the lake must have heard her.
When we finally got around to talking about clockwork, I was already certain: Mary Godwin wouldn’t tell a soul we were Shadow Boys.
So it seemed to me that Frankenstein had three possible authors, and though each of them felt impossible for their own reason, I kept them ranked in my head: Mary, the least likely; then Geisler; then Oliver.