This Monstrous Thing(35)
Half the strawberries were gone when Clémence declared she was cold and we should head for Geisler’s office. As we started to make our way between the last of the market stalls, the strawberry seller called out from behind us in German. Clémence turned and called something back, and he swept his hat off with an exaggerated bow.
“I told him those were the best strawberries we’d ever had,” she translated for me as we turned out of the market. “I may have omitted the fact that you had better in Bruges.”
“Where did you learn German?” I asked.
“I had a tutor when I was young.” She slipped another strawberry from the basket and sucked on it. “Latin, English, and French as well.”
“Dead posh schooling.”
She snorted. “It was.”
“Is your family still in Paris?”
“Oui. In a large white house on the Seine.”
“And what do they think of you working as an assistant to Europe’s most infamous Shadow Boy?”
She looked up as we passed beneath the university gates, their gold letters muted by the spraying snow. “I don’t believe they think of me at all.”
She said it so casually, like it didn’t matter, but when I looked over, she ducked her head and started walking so fast I had to jog to catch up. I didn’t ask her any more about it—I knew families could be sharp and fragile things.
I had hoped there’d be a hunt for Geisler’s keys that would buy me time and justify opening desk drawers, but they were lying in plain sight on the floor behind the desk. Clémence snatched them up. I was ready to invent some excuse to stay longer, but when she straightened, she was smirking at me. “Well, while we’re here . . .”
I stared back at her. “While we’re here what?”
“We might as well see what we can find about Frankenstein.”
“We?”
“Since I’m helping you with some light burglary, I thought I should at least get equal partnership.”
“What burglary? The door was wide open.”
“I meant this bit.” She found a key on the ring and unlocked the top drawer. A set of pens rolled forward with a clatter.
“You rascal.”
“Don’t pretend this isn’t the whole reason you came.”
When I didn’t deny it, her smirk went wider. I cast a quick glance at the door, then crossed behind the desk to her side.
She shifted several books out of the way and peered in. “What are we looking for?”
“Something to do with Frankenstein, I suppose.” I pulled a stack of papers out of the drawer as Clémence unlocked another. “No idea beyond that. Manuscript pages, maybe? Correspondence with a publisher. Does he have a laboratory on the campus where he keeps things?”
“There are student labs, but they’re all shared.”
“So nowhere safe to hide a . . .”
I trailed off. I had pulled a blotched sheet from the bottom of the stack. Written across it in shaky penmanship was:
12 December 1818
Male, five foot ten inches, 152 pounds, consumption
Female, five foot two inches, 104 pounds, whooping cough
Male, six foot three inches, 198 pounds, heart failure?
Male, six foot, 159 pounds, stab wound, two inches, lower abdomen
Female, five foot three inches, 102 pounds, ???
Female, five foot, 91 pounds, broken neck, some damage to skull
There were small marks in pencil next to the first two descriptions on the list.
“What have you got?” Clémence asked, and I handed it over for her to see.
“Do you know what that is?”
Her eyes ran down the list; then she folded it in half and dropped it back in the drawer. “No,” she replied, but she didn’t meet my gaze.
“Let me see it again.”
“It’s not important.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know it’s not important?”
Her mouth twisted. “Forget it, all right?”
“You do know.” I made to snatch it from the drawer, but Clémence batted me away hard enough that her fingers left a red imprint on the back of my hand. “Ouch! Bleeding hell, what was that for?”
“Leave it alone, Alasdair. I thought you were here to find—”
She stopped suddenly, and I heard it too—footsteps coming down the corridor toward us. The office door was wide open, and we were standing elbow deep in a professor’s papers, clearly doing something we shouldn’t be.
The footsteps stopped just outside the door. We were both silent for a moment, then someone called, “Dr. Geisler?”
I started to shove papers back into the drawers, but Clémence seized me by the front of my coat and yanked me toward her. Her face was suddenly very close to mine. “What are you doing?” I hissed.
“Kiss me,” she replied.
And, having no better plan, I did.
She knocked me backward against the desk, one elbow slamming hard into my chest, and I barely caught myself before I fell properly. My hand sent an inkwell smashing to the floor. “Like you mean it,” she said, lips still on mine.
I didn’t have a bleeding clue what she was doing, but I dug one hand into her hair while the other went around her waist. She wasn’t wearing a corset, I realized as she shimmied up against me, and when she inhaled, I felt her heartbeat skip against my chest like a broken clock.