Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Four

Death was wise to recognize Angelika Frankenstein as a formidable opponent.

“He is stabilizing, for now, but things are . . .” Dr. Corentin searched for the right phrase before settling on, “Comme ci, comme ça.” He began writing something down. In his heavy French accent, he continued: “The laudanum must be administered strictly as I write it here, as he appears to be in a great deal of pain. Mon Dieu, I have never seen injuries such as these. Was he at war?”

In their panic, the Frankensteins had forgotten about the scars delineating each of Arlo’s joints. He was laid naked from the waist up in Angelika’s four-poster bed, almost as white as her French linen sheets.

“He’s lived quite a life,” Victor said to the doctor. “But he is a survivor.”

“His blood is brown when I do a pinprick. I am not sure enough to try bloodletting.” It was becoming clear that the doctor wasn’t sure of anything.

“He will not die.” Angelika said this so adamantly the candles flickered around them. “I refuse it. I will bring him back, again and again. We haven’t come this far to let him be overcome by exhaustion. That’s all this is, of course.”

“Calm yourself,” Dr. Corentin warned. “You do not seem to comprehend the situation. This young man is close to death.”

The man’s pessimism was frustrating. “He isn’t dying, he’s just tired. What else shall we do?” Angelika’s stress levels rose with each instrument that the doctor packed away in his case.

The doctor said, “Keep him warm. Pray for him.”

“Our mother died from a prayer-related illness,” Victor informed him acidly. “I expected more from you, sir. Give us real things to do. Science. Medicine. That is what we believe in this household. Got a goddamn leech somewhere in there?”

Angelika watched as the doctor became offended, and she searched for a solution; the best one she knew. “His return to health will entail a thousand-pound gift for yourself, Dr. Corentin, which should be easy money, because he will be fine after a good night’s sleep. Please, may I entreat you to stay the night across the hall?”

It was midnight, and the wind outside howled. Dr. Corentin patted his pocket as he readily agreed. “I should be most interested to learn your method of resuscitation,” he said as a peace offering to Victor as he was shown out. “To save a man’s life in such a way is no small feat.”

Victor and Dr. Corentin closed the door behind them. Angelika was alone with her love, and she promptly fell apart. She wept as she struggled out of her gown, undergarments, and boots, and sobbed as she put on her silky nightdress, placed in her drawer a lifetime ago by that old scamp Mary.

Mary would know what to do now, with her witchy folk remedies. She would put a green pine cone in the fireplace, or pack some damp yew leaves into his armpits or some such nonsense, but it would absolutely help, because it would mean she was here. Perhaps she was nursing poor Adam in a similar state? Angelika cried for Mary, and Arlo, and Adam, and her parents, and her own wretched soul.

With chattering teeth, she got into the bed and moved close to Arlo’s side. He was as cold as a pane of glass. Rubbing his arms and chest, she called out loudly to her brother, “Ask Sarah for heating bricks. As many as we have. I’ll save you again,” Angelika told Arlo’s sleeping profile. “I swear I will. As many times as it takes.” She imagined his wry expression at this dramatic declaration. “I will even allow Victor to assist me, like I did earlier.”

At the graveside, she and Victor had fallen to their knees beside Arlo’s prone body and rolled him over.

“No pulse. The Persian book—the compressions,” Victor had told Angelika. She’d read every book he had, and it was why she would always be his ideal assistant. It was advice from the fifteenth century, but it was all they had. Tearing Arlo’s shirt open, Victor had begun pressing on his left-side rib cage.

When Angelika looked up at Christopher, he shook his head, helpless.

“No heartbeat, no breath,” Angelika observed, kneeling at Arlo’s head. Improvise, experiment, use your brain, Jelly. She put her mouth to Arlo’s in a passionless kiss, and exhaled. When she felt air tickle her cheek, she blocked his nose and forced him, over and over, to take her air, her love, and her abundance of fussing.

Victor reentered the room now, interrupting the memory, loaded down with heating bricks wrapped in cloth, and more in Lizzie’s arms behind him.

“I would swear it, Vic,” Angelika told him absently as the bricks were packed in around them under the blankets, “when I was breathing the air into him, I swear I felt his soul in my lungs.”

Victor said briskly, “You’re in shock. We don’t believe in—”

She cut him off. “Never again tell me what I think. Never again attempt to convince me of what you think is true. He has taught me to believe in everything.”

“I cannot believe you knew about this,” Victor spat out. “A priest? Father bloody Northcott, in my own house? How long were you aware?”

“Who he was is not his fault,” Lizzie said pointedly. “It is your fault, Vic, for experimenting on him in the first place.”

“It is our fault,” Angelika agreed. “Victor, we did this to him. We let him dig that hole, completely exhausting his life force.”

Victor ignored her and kept at it. “Your complex reveals itself again—you do prefer those unattainable types. You truly believe a man would choose you, over his own God?”

With the confidence of an empress, Angelika replied, “Yes.”

He choked laughing. “Then you are more delusional than I ever imagined. Well, if there are pitchforks and flames down below, you had better ready yourself for them.”

“Happily.”

“Vic, get out!” Lizzie snapped at him, and he stalked out, banging the door shut. Lizzie lay down on the top of the quilt, on the other side of Arlo. “Don’t listen to your absolute pillock of a brother. I will always believe you. Tell me everything.”

Angelika made a grunt that meant something like: You’ll tell Victor.

Lizzie persisted. “I’m your sister now.” She put her arm across Arlo’s stomach, and the two women held hands. “How did it feel? His soul?”

The warmth in the bed was making Angelika drowsy. “Like stars. I breathed it all back into him, and then Vic found his pulse again.”

“What a pretty way to describe it. I may borrow that line.” Lizzie mulled this over as they all lay there. “Funny, when I’m not vomiting into a chamber pot, that’s what it feels like here.” She patted her lower stomach. “Silvery and magic. Stars.”

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!”

Victor’s mouth was in a rueful line. “What if it were Lizzie one day, giving birth, needing him to come at once? He’s right,” he tried to impress on her, but Angelika was turning redder than an apple. “Jelly, he does not have the expertise. There’s nothing more he can do.”

“Shut up.” She crawled up onto the bed and put her ear to Arlo’s mouth. “He’s still alive. Come on, help me.” Hating Victor’s reluctance, she wrenched the tube and funnel from him. “I have no idea how to do this.” Arlo’s body did not accommodate the intrusion willingly, but after several sweaty minutes she had poured the entire beaker into his stomach. “There,” she said, rolling up the wet tube and thrusting it back at her brother.

“Good work” was his reply. “Can’t hurt.”

Arlo’s body jerked. He vomited, and began choking. “Roll him,” Victor directed, and they caught the expunged liquid with towels. “His body still has these kinds of base reactions,” he told Angelika as they pounded his back. “I think this is a good thing.”

“A good thing?” Angelika wiped Arlo’s mouth. Her voice rose. “A good thing? You know what I see? You, standing about, being absorbed in yourself, jogging in the forest, working on your own precious body, doing absolutely nothing to improve this situation. Is it because he was originally a priest? Or is it because he loves me?”

“Jel—”

“You’ve never wanted anyone to love me. You’ve always laughed at my infatuations, and told me I am a fool, and nobody would ever want me.”

“I never laughed at you,” Victor said uneasily. “All right, maybe I did. But I was joking.”

“You were never joking, and you weren’t joking when you said it last night. But he loves me, and it’s not for my fortune or my face. He loves my flaws. He makes me feel like I could be a better person. We are connected, at a blood level.”

“I do not doubt the depth of your love.”

She ignored that. “You are going to be right, as always. Being dead is the ultimate in unattainable, wouldn’t you say?” In her rage, she was calmer than she’d ever been. “I will die of heartbreak. There’s a plot vacant beside his grave. Put me there. That is my wish.”

Victor’s complexion turned ashen, and he said nothing.

She turned her back on him. “Get out, and don’t come back until you can do something useful.”