This Monstrous Thing(34)
“Can I come with you?” I asked.
She arched an eyebrow. “It’s still snowing.”
“I don’t mind. I’d like to get out.” I tried to look innocent, but it had suddenly occurred to me that if I could get into Geisler’s office with her, I might be able to find something that would either tick him off the list of possible authors or confirm it.
I didn’t know if Clémence would let me come along if she suspected I was planning on snooping, and for a moment she stared so intensely at me that I was certain it must be written all over my face. But then she shrugged and turned away from the door. “Get your coat.”
The walk to the town seemed longer than when we had taken it with Geisler. The storm was lightening, but the bitter wind drilled snowflakes into my skin. Clémence and I kept our faces deep in our scarves, hands fisted in pockets. She had swapped out her trousers and linen shirt for a blue dress, but she still wore the gray wool coat that I was certain had been made for a man. Her hair was loose, and the strands falling from her cap twirled in the breeze like ribbons. “I’ve never heard of a laboratory assistant doing the shopping,” I said to her as we walked.
“Well, there’s no one else to do it,” she replied. “The automatons certainly can’t, and Geisler won’t do it himself.”
“He could hire a housekeeper.”
“Why? He’s got me.”
“But that’s not your job.”
Clémence blew on her hands, then shoved them back into her pockets. “I don’t mind. I do whatever makes me useful to him.”
The market was set up in the main square, walled in by buildings that mercifully blocked the worst of the wind. In spite of the storm, there were still a fair number of people wandering about. Clémence kept her gaze on the produce she was buying and didn’t speak to the merchants until she spotted a man selling baskets of strawberries from a crate.
“They grow them in the university greenhouses,” she explained as she dragged me over to see. “Where else could you get strawberries in weather like this?” She had a quick exchange with the merchant, shifting from French to German and then into what seemed like a crossbreed of both of them. I didn’t speak any German, so I stood stupidly at her shoulder while they chatted. The merchant held up a basket for her, and I noticed with amazement that his hand was mechanical, spindly silver fingers twitching as cogs meshed beneath them. In Geneva, a mechanical man walking openly at a market was rare, but selling goods from a university and having people purchase from him was unheard of. People spoke to him, addressed him like a human being, and didn’t run the other direction when they saw he was made of metal. I wondered if they’d treat Oliver the same way if I brought him here. Maybe not everyone would think him a monster.
Clémence handed over her money, and as the merchant gave her a basket of strawberries, he pointed to me with a thin silver finger and said something in his German-French.
“What did he say?” I asked Clémence.
“He wants you to eat one,” she replied, holding the basket out to me. “He says they’ll make you live long and die happy.”
I took one and bit into it. I must have made a ridiculous face, because Clémence laughed. “Good?”
“Brilliant,” I replied.
She took another from the basket, and for a while we just stood there in the snowstorm eating strawberries and sucking the juice off our fingers. Clémence closed her eyes and tipped her head back so that the snowflakes tangled in her eyelashes. “I can’t remember the last time I had strawberries.”
“When my family was in Bruges,” I said, “there were good strawberries there.”
“Well, you’ve just been everywhere, haven’t you?”
I shrugged. “We had strawberries a lot when we lived there because they grew wild along the canals. Oliver and I snuck into this merchant’s yard to pick some once. We took our shoes off, because it was muddy, and then a servant from the house chased us away and we had to leave them behind and walk all the way home barefoot. Father gave us a good telling-off for that, but we got to eat ourselves sick on strawberries, so that made it all right.” I realized suddenly that I was babbling and stopped. “Sorry.”
“You need to stop apologizing for everything. It was a good story. I liked it. You’re shit at endings, though.” She sucked the fruit from a stem, then hurled it into a heap of rubbish piled against one of the shops. “I’m sorry your brother’s dead. It sounds like he was a riot.”
I stuck my hands in my pockets and stared up at the university spire rising above the rooftops. Halfway through the story, I had remembered why he’d taken me to steal the strawberries in the first place: it had been my birthday, and I’d wanted them. That had been Oliver’s gift to me.
“Yes,” I said, “he was.”
We stood in the square for a while, sheltered from the wind, eating strawberries and not talking much. A group of boys from the university passed by, one of them proudly thrusting an exam sheet in the air while the others shouted and slapped him on the back. I watched them as they stopped for glühwein, all of them laughing and chatting like it was so easy.
That was going to be me, I thought, and the weight in my chest lifted again. It was going to happen. Ingolstadt and uni. I could be back here in weeks, in this small, remarkable town, meeting interesting people, working with Geisler, studying things that fascinated and challenged me, not doing the shop work for Father I could finish in my sleep. I would buy strawberries at the market from a man who didn’t hide his mechanical bits, live in a flat all my own, and worry about exams and revision and class rankings and absolutely nothing else. I wanted it all so badly it felt like some part of me was stretching outside my body to reach for it.