“It has been two years.” I drummed my fingers against the mantel where I leaned by the cold fireplace. “Surely you can barely remember him!” It was early May, three weeks since we had left Ingolstadt. I had in my pocket a brief letter from Victor, who would arrive in one week. He had been true to his word. Perhaps when he was home I would feel less unsettled.
I thought I saw movement outside the nursery window. I rushed to look, but I was mistaken. It was just the blackened and tortured remains of that tree long ago destroyed by lightning. Why they had never torn it out, I did not understand. Something about it now struck me as obscene. It was like leaving a corpse as a monument.
“Do you think I am bigger than him now?” Ernest stood and threw back his shoulders.
“Than he,” I absently corrected him. “And no.”
I turned my back on the window and its false threats. Ever since Monsieur Clerval’s visit, I had been haunted by the feeling of being watched. Perhaps it was Judge Frankenstein’s new habit of surprising me at meals he had never customarily taken with me. Or the way he seemed to be staring at me whenever I looked up. But there was also the sense that if I simply turned around fast enough, I would catch a face at the window, staring in at me.
I never did.
“I think you probably will be taller someday,” Justine said. Evidently I had hurt Ernest’s feelings with the truth.
“Good,” Ernest said. “I know I will be stronger. And I know how to fight. Victor never bothered learning that.”
“Are you planning to challenge him to a duel?” I asked, laughing. But my laughter stopped when I saw Ernest rubbing the forearm that bore his scar. Whether the action was conscious or unconscious, I did not know.
Ernest looked at me too closely, much the way his father had begun to. “You have been spending an awful lot of time with us. You never used to.”
“Perhaps our time away taught me to miss you.” I crossed my eyes and stuck my tongue out at him as if he were still a little boy. “Or perhaps I am just bored.”
“Must be truly bored to spend time in the nursery.” He flopped back down on the couch, his careful posture abandoned. “I cannot wait to leave this house. This stupid house with no neighbors and nothing to do. I will row away across that lake and never come back.”
“Do not say that,” Justine reprimanded with gentle sadness.
Ernest sighed, sitting up again and crossing the room to her. He revealed his lingering childhood by throwing himself into her lap. Justine hugged him tightly and mussed his hair. He had been young when his mother died, but he was old enough to remember her. I wondered if he preferred Justine. I certainly did.
“I will always come back to see you,” he said. “I promise. And I will write you every week.”
“We have worked so hard on your penmanship, it is the least you can do,” she said teasingly, though I could see her holding back panicked sorrow at the very thought of his permanent departure. “But you are not leaving yet! The military can wait until you are grown. Give us a little more
time, dear Ernest.”
“I am not going to be a soldier,” William declared, continuing his march of poorly formed E’s across the parchment. Justine was too permissive, letting him use good ink and paper for his practice.
“What will you be?” Justine said, turning her attention back to him and releasing Ernest to go back to lounging.
“A dragon.”
“That is a deeply practical aspiration,” I remarked dryly. “Your ambition will serve you well.”
William blinked his heavily lashed eyes at me, confused. “What?”
“Cousin Elizabeth means you can be whatever you wish.” Justine ruffled his curls. For her, his dimpled smile appeared.
Was it wrong to envy a five-year-old child? As the third son of the family, he would have means but lack pressure. He truly could be whatever he wished. Perhaps he could even change into a fire-breathing hellbeast. Wealthy men did whatever they wanted, after all.
Though from what I had heard, if Monsieur Clerval had his way, none of the Frankensteins would be wealthy.
“I want to go shooting,” I said to Ernest, who regarded me with surprise.
“Really?”
“Yes. I would like to learn. And I think you are old enough to teach me.”
“Me too!” William said. Justine glared at me across the room, shaking her head vehemently. She grabbed William around the waist and guided him back to his seat.
But Ernest stood undeterred, his face alight with anticipation. “I will go and—”