Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match(98)
Angelika was somehow still able to smile. “That makes me happy. A little soul is swirling inside you.” Inside herself, she only felt emptiness, and a true glimpse of her future was revealed. Now she was back to crying. “I’ll be left alone. I can’t go on.”
Lizzie was firm with her. “He has lived twice for you now. Keep your faith in him. And you will never be alone. You have me.”
“He seemed quite intent on crawling back into his own grave. You have to keep fighting,” Angelika told Arlo with quiet urgency as she wiped at her tears. “Stop all of this dying nonsense. I beg you.”
Lizzie wheezed in amusement. “I’m told you were rather insistent with Father Porter, when he tried to take him into the church.”
“I screamed in his fishy old face until he crossed himself.” Angelika let go of Lizzie’s hand to rub Arlo’s stomach for a while. “Why would Arlo tell me, just before he collapsed, that he had decided to stay at the church?”
“He was feeling unwell and was not himself.”
Angelika did feel cheered by how certain Lizzie sounded. “I’m sure a nice night’s sleep will restore him.” She began to chatter mindlessly about the weather outside.
Lizzie tried her best to keep the doubt from her eyes, and they held hands over the almost-dead man once more.
*
Arlo died his third death right before dawn, but Angelika was highly persuasive. When he was resettled again into his body, she put her face into a pillow and howled.
*
Arlo was still alive at breakfast time. When Dr. Corentin assured her he would look after Arlo for a while, Angelika excused herself in search of Victor. “He’s gone running,” Lizzie had mumbled in her sleep.
“Running,” Angelika repeated as she went downstairs. “Victor is running, in the pouring rain, when I need him?” Whatever she was hoping the doctor would produce from his leather valise did not exist. “He needs to invent a solution. Yes, yes, I will be back,” she shouted over her shoulder at the gaggle of servants who slowly emerged from the shadows of the halls. “He lives, and I will be back.”
To her intense irritation, Victor was not in the laboratory putting the finishing touches on an elixir to restore Arlo. “Time-wasting idiot,” she seethed, and seized upon his notebook. “I will have to do this alone.”
She began leafing through it backward from the most recent entry. It was, of course, in his secret shorthand code. “I can’t read it,” she complained out loud, in the exact tone from her childhood. “But wait, this is about Arlo.”
There was a sketch of the wound on Arlo’s hand, and the measurement. As she flipped back, she realized Victor had been measuring it every two days. It had not healed a fraction. “I have never listened to what Arlo was trying to tell me.” She swallowed her rising panic, cast the notebook aside, and began lining up various compounds and glass beakers. It was here that Victor found her sometime later, hunched over the bench, alternately cackling and wheezing with panic.
“And they call me a mad scientist,” he said. Then his smirk faded. “I think you should be sitting with him.”
“I’m inventing a way to cure him.”
With gentle pity, her brother replied: “You won’t find it in here.” He ignored her collection of foaming, poisonous previous attempts on the far bench. “Come inside.”
She dipped a spoon at random into a jar of magnesium sulphate. “Do you have the monopoly on genius and talent? Did you achieve everything in your life alone? Am I mentioned even once in your notebooks? Does Herr Jürgen Schneider curse my name also? Will I be remembered in history?”
A speechless Victor was her favorite kind. She continued her rant.
“Everything you have ever done is because I helped you. Your conceit is exactly equal to my delusion. But despite these personal failings, we carry on.”
Lizzie would definitely want to steal that entire monologue.
Angelika shoveled the powder into a fresh beaker, cast around for an additive, then hesitated. She was so tired she could not remember which reacted with what. But because Victor was watching, she filled the beaker with cold water and set it above a burning flame.
“You are thinking of giving him a warm magnesium tonic?” Victor pondered this. “It will have to be administered with a throat tube. But it may assist in keeping his joints and muscles softened. He said you have a marvelous salty bath solution that helps with the pain. Good thinking, Jelly.”
Angelika was so relieved to have created anything at all, she wept all the way out the door, up the path, through the manor door, and up the stairs.
With one hand holding the beaker and apparatus, Victor patted her shoulder with the other, repeating, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Dr. Corentin stood as soon as they entered. “I am called away for a childbirth.”
“Absolutely not,” Angelika countered, but Victor nodded to the man. She was aghast. “Victor, he is otherwise engaged, working here.”
“There is a baby wishing to live who needs me more,” the doctor replied as he picked up his case. As he passed them on his way to the door, he added sadly, “Ma chère, take my original advice. Pray for his soul and prepare yourself.”
“Victor!” Angelika was unable to move her feet as her brother closed the door behind the departed doctor. “You’re going to let him just leave? Offer him more! All that I have, take it!”