As I turned, my eyes lingered on his walls. They were lined floor to ceiling with books. The room smelled of leather and paper and dust. I had always been jealous of Victor for leaving. Now I knew to be jealous of what he had left for.

What I would give for the freedom to declare myself a student, to spend years in dusty rooms, in dusty tomes, learning and puzzling and asking questions of the brightest minds to be found! And to study what I chose, when I chose, with whom I chose. To think that all those years ago, I had been forced to trick Victor into doing what I would have given anything to do.

—

When Madame Frankenstein had Ernest, it did not bring about the change I expected or feared. I worried she would no longer care to have me around. But the baby was another boy—her third, though the second died in infancy—and she seemed more desperate than ever that I be with Victor at all times.

We spent the next two years throwing ourselves into whatever Victor decided we should study. I learned poems to perform for his parents, and helped care for the baby some. But, to my relief, my main responsibility remained Victor. Better to be lying on a bed of moss being a corpse for examination than bouncing a drooling toddler on my hip!

I did too good a job of socializing Victor, though. He had taught me to read and write and learn, possessively proud of my sharp mind and keen memory. I taught him to react calmly, to smile in a believable way, to talk to others as a peer instead of an aloof critic. With me at his side, his sharp, cold edges blurred to acceptable degrees.

The changes in him did not go unnoticed. One morning when we tumbled into the breakfast room to eat before running outside, Judge Frankenstein stopped us.

“We are having guests today.” He said it as though handing down a guilty verdict, and watched us closely for our reactions.

Madame Frankenstein’s hands fluttered in front of her face as she searched for an appropriate facial expression. She finally settled on excitement, though her eyes were too bright and her mouth too tight across her white teeth. “A new family,” she said. “One that does not know us from— One that does not know us.”

Victor and I exchanged a look. I still had not asked what had happened to the other Frankenstein baby, the one who came after Victor and before Ernest. Whatever had transpired, it was awful enough that the Frankensteins had left Geneva and traveled—and therefore found me. So I did not care about that lost baby except as far as its role in my salvation.