by Suzanne Weyn
“I can make you see it a different way if you will only walk with me awhile,” Johann insisted. “I have come all this distance, and I think you owe it to me to hear me out.”
“I owe you nothing and resent your presumption.”
“Giselle, did you not tell me to come meet you here? I came on this long journey at your invitation, and I believe that means you owe it to me to let me tell you how I feel. I have clearly done a bad job of it, but you must believe that is only because I am nervous at the thought of your rejection.”
His words angered me, though I supposed he made a point — I had told him to come, never dreaming his goal was to woo me away from my new inheritance. I decided to put up with him for just a little longer. There could be, I thought, no hurt in that.
“Perhaps we can walk in the direction of my hotel, and that way you can escort me back,” I proposed. “I’d appreciate it, since I do not know the city at all, but I do have the address of the hotel written on a paper in my purse.”
“Surely you don’t want to return there straightaway?”
“Yes, I do,” I said as I extracted the slip containing the address. “Here’s where we must go.”
Johann slipped the paper in his jacket pocket and signaled the waiter for the check. “I know how to get there.”
There seemed to be nothing more to say. It was a relief to finally reach the outside where the noises of the street distracted from the silence between us and where there were passing attractions — street performers and vendors — to casually remark upon.
As we walked, mostly in silence, I sneaked glances at him from the corner of my eye, and it occurred to me that Johann was not nearly as handsome as I had remembered him. How was it that I had never before noticed how close-set his eyes were or that there was a definite weakness in his jaw? There was a flare in his nostrils that gave his face an expression of arrogance that I had previously considered attractive, but no longer did.
After some distance, it seemed to me that we had walked for a longer amount of time than it had taken to arrive at the restaurant from the hotel. Also, I didn’t recognize the deserted park into which we had wandered.
“Johann, are you lost?” I asked as we stopped by a narrow, winding river that looked as though it were man-made. “I am certain my uncle and I did not travel this way.”
“Ah, you’ve caught me,” Johann answered. “I knew if I could only get you alone, I could change your mind about me.” He took hold of my hand, and though I tried to draw it away, he held tight and used this grip to pull me toward him. Before I could protest, he had planted his lips on mine and was kissing me.
What I would have once longed for was now utterly repugnant to me. Pushing with all my strength, I made some distance between us.
“Johann! Stop it!” I cried.
“You love me, Giselle,” he insisted, pulling me back to him, his hold tight. “You kissed me in the restaurant, and I could tell you enjoyed it.”
“That was before I realized you were no more than a fortune hunter.”
“A fortune hunter!” His face reddened with fury at my words. He gripped my wrist, twisting upward until it hurt. “Nobody calls me that!”
Grabbing my waist, he pulled me into a rough, wet kiss.
Biting his lip, I lurched away and searched the park unsuccessfully for another person to run toward. I ran from him but he quickly caught hold and was once more kissing me. I pried my arm from him and raked my fingernails across his face, drawing blood.
Infuriated, he called me a name I have never heard before and never want to hear again. With a quick, sharp blow, he knocked me to the ground, where we struggled until I was able to break loose and get to my feet. I lost all sense of myself, all sense of any thought but that of escape.
I ran blindly from the park through the quiet streets, looking over my shoulder to check if he was pursuing me but did not see him. Breathlessly, I climbed chipped narrow stone stairways leading back toward the center of town. At a busy thoroughfare, I finally recognized the way to the hotel and headed for it.
Oh, Diary, this is an event I want to wipe from my mind completely. Horrible! So horrible! Now that I have written about it I never want to think of it again.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF
INGRID VDW FRANKENSTEIN
June 26, 1815
My mood lifted as Anthony walked me back to the hotel. He told me of the surgeon who would give the lecture on the diseases of the colon and on how diseased sections of it could be simply cut out and reconnected with a special string made from catgut.
“The body is really quite mechanical when you break it into its components, isn’t it?” I remarked as we neared the hotel.
“In its material components, it is all quite logical,” Anthony agreed. “But what is that magical force that animates the flesh? That’s the mystery. It is what I think of as God.”
“Must it be so mystical?” I questioned. “God may watch over us and judge our morality, but is it necessarily divine intervention that starts life? Might it not be an electrochemical reaction such as any other? Whether sent by God or simply powered by itself.”
“Electrochemical?” Anthony asked.
“Yes. You know I studied with Count Volta. I have continued reading works on electricity as it interacts with other chemicals,” I said. I told him too that I had come upon my father’s experiments and writing on this subject. I didn’t say that I felt that my father had surpassed even Galvani and Volta in his findings. I didn’t want to seem a boastful daughter. And I also did not want to delve too deeply into the circumstances of my father’s life. I knew Anthony was ignorant of them, and I wasn’t about to enlighten him.
“You should contact Jakob Berzelius,” Anthony suggested.
I knew the name, and remembered that my father had been in touch with him. They had exchanged letters on the possibility of curing disease through the use of electric current.
“Is he still in Sweden?” I asked.
“He’s teaching at a university there,” Anthony confirmed. “I’ll try to get more information for you.”
At the front door of the hotel, Anthony stopped and took my hands in his. “Ingrid, we get along so well,” he said. “And it is so good to see you again.”
He lifted the man’s hat I had worn all day, which allowed my hair to tumble loosely to my shoulders.
“I no longer look like a man,” I said with a laugh.
“No, now you look like the lovely young woman you are,” Anthony said, his dark eyes beaming affectionately. “Could you ever think of me as more than a friend?”
The image of Walter in his chair, with his eyes closed, his hand holding mine, flew unbidden into my head.
“Anthony, you are so dear to me,” I began. “We do have fun together.”
Immediately a look of disappointment came over him. “I’m sorry I spoke. You don’t have the same feelings for me. I can hear it in your voice and see it on your face.”
“I might feel otherwise if another had not already taken that place in my head and my heart.”
“He’s lucky. I hope he knows that.”
“I’m not sure how he feels,” I answered honestly. Perhaps he had only grasped my hand as he was falling asleep. It could have been a gesture of friendship. Nothing like that had happened since, although I had read to him other times. We had become deeply companionable, but no more.
“If he foolishly does not return your feelings, write to me and I will come to your side at once.”
Squeezing his hands fondly, I promised I would. Anthony would be a wonderful romance for me. He is handsome. Charming. And we have so much in common. But I could not lead him on with Walter constantly on my mind.
Anthony threw off the awkwardness and said he’d come for me in the morning. He would sneak me into the demonstration on intestines. I told him I couldn’t wait, which was absolutely true.
“Is it safe to open my package now?” I asked.
“I suppose s
o.”
With eager fingers, I opened the burlap and gasped with delight. It was Doctor William Harvey’s On the Motion of the Heart and Blood. Gingerly I turned the yellowed, crumbling pages.
“Is this from the sixteen hundreds?” I guessed. I knew from my private readings that William Harvey had been the physician to King James. It was he who had disproven the existing theories of the day regarding circulation. Excitedly, I read from the page I had opened to: The heart does not make blood, instead the same blood circulates endlessly around the body. It goes around and around without being absorbed, and the heart is simply the pump that sends it on its way. Inside were the most detailed anatomical drawings. They were not as perfectly drawn as those in my father’s papers, but they were easier to follow in their relative simplicity.
“Harvey was brilliant,” Anthony said. “Even though this volume is almost two hundred years old, you will learn a lot from it. It is not available anywhere but in a medical library. You could not buy it anywhere, not with all your new fortune.” He grinned, pleased to have given me such an invaluable treasure.
Still holding the book, I hugged him. “Oh, you are such a true friend. I can’t thank you enough,” I said sincerely. “I shall be up all night taking notes.”
“No, my friend, sleep, so you can be alert for tomorrow’s lecture,” Anthony counseled.
“I’ll try, but it won’t be easy.” Bidding him farewell, I entered the hotel’s quiet lobby. But the day was still warm and my mind was so filled with everything that had happened today. And so I turned around and went for a walk to enjoy the last of it. Now I sit on a park bench in Parliament Square near the Cathedral of Saint Giles and write. I want to get it all written down before any of it leaves my head. This may be my only chance to write, because I know that once I get to my room I will be completely absorbed in Dr. Harvey’s revolutionary work on the heart.
Even though I never knew him, I imagine that my father would have been proud of my inquisitiveness, and the lengths to which I’ve gone to investigate further.
FROM THE DIARY OF
BARONESS GISELLE FRANKENSTEIN
June 26 (continued)
My heart is torn apart and I am wretched beyond belief. This has been the most hideous day of my life. I feel like such a fool to have thought that Johann had truly changed in his feelings toward me when all the while he only loved the idea of gaining control of my fortune. Not only is he not the person I thought him to be, but he is a brute and a scoundrel. In a thousand years I could never have expected him to attack me as he did.
I shudder to think of what might have happened had I not been able to fight him off.
It was not easy to make my way home, since the attack had left my mind in complete disarray. On the way I passed police officers but did not think to tell them what had happened. In truth all I wanted was to be back safe in my hotel room.
When I finally made it back, I was disappointed that Ingrid had not yet returned. I longed to tell her what had happened. I noticed a note that had been slipped under the door and retrieved it. It was written in the hand of one of the hotel staff, saying that my uncle had sent word that he would not return tonight but rather stay with a friend some miles away.
As soon as I looked at my image in the full-length mirror, I was glad that neither my sister nor my uncle was there to see the state I was in. My hair was almost completely unpinned and there was blood all over me from a wound I incurred on my right hand. I have scrapes of all kinds.
An urgent desire for a bath suddenly consumed me, and I couldn’t shed my bloodstained clothing quickly enough. The very idea that Johann’s skin might linger under my fingernails repulsed me; I longed for every trace of him to be washed away.
The claw-foot tub in the bathroom was deep, and I lay in it for a while with a blank mind.
Another onslaught of tears overwhelmed me as I thought of Johann. I had learned to accept his disinterest in me, but to then raise my hopes with such callous motives was so unconscionable. What could he have been thinking by pressing himself on me like that? Did he believe that once he had robbed my virtue I would have no recourse but to marry him?
I wanted nothing more than to block it all from my mind, and so, shutting my eyes, I lay my head back against the back of the tub.
There was to be no escape, however, for in the next instance I was dreaming that Johann had me thrown over his shoulder and was carrying me into a shadowy forest of towering pines. I screamed, kicking and scratching, determined to squirm free from his viselike grip but unable to. In this dream my fear was completely unbridled, greater even than it had been today in the park. The sky shook with thunder as it opened, releasing a torrent of rain. Aware that I was losing my battle to break free of Johann, I screamed for help but was suddenly unable to breathe and started to choke. Then I heard Ingrid’s voice calling to me as if from very far away.
My eyes snapped open, and I was, in fact, choking and sputtering because I had sunk just below the water’s surface and must have cried out in my sleep, allowing the bathwater to flood into my open mouth.
Panicked, I sat bolt upright, gripping the tub ledge and coughing as though my lungs might burst.
“Giselle?” Ingrid called through the bathroom door.
I opened my mouth to reply, only to find my voice so choked with emotion that I could not steady it sufficiently to speak.
“Giselle! Shall I come in? What’s wrong?” she kept on.
I didn’t want her to see me so distraught and so found my voice enough to ask her to wait. I stepped out of the tub and wrapped myself in a robe.
Feeling overwhelmed, I sat a moment on the edge of the tub and fell into tears once again. Ingrid’s expression was a mask of horrified concern when she stepped into the bathroom and found me sitting there.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF
INGRID VDW FRANKENSTEIN
June 26 (continued)
When I went into our room about an hour later, I could see Giselle’s clothing was tossed carelessly around the room. Her diary lay closed on her bed. It was not like her to be so slovenly.
“I’m back!” I called to the closed bathroom door.
A long period of silence was followed by the sound of Giselle coughing.
“Are you all right?”
Giselle’s coughing continued. After a few minutes more, I rapped loudly on the door. “Giselle? Shall I come in? What’s wrong?”
Cracking open the door, I saw that her head was in her hands as she sat propped on the edge of the tub. Her luxuriant hair veiled her face, but the lift and fall of her shoulders told me she was, indeed, weeping heavily. “Go away, please,” she pleaded in a sob-choked tone. “I’ll come out in a moment.”
“All right,” I agreed out of respect for her wishes. It wasn’t easy since I wanted to race to her side to discover the cause of her unhappiness.
It had to have been Johann. I’ve always believed he was vain and unworthy of Giselle’s tender affections. Everything she’d ever told me about Johann made me dislike him. Whenever I voiced this, she wouldn’t hear of it. Where Johann was concerned, she made every allowance for his shallow self-centered behavior and his rudeness to her. I suppose it was an example of love’s legendary power to render blind the one who is in love.
While I waited, I picked up the clothing Giselle had flung so recklessly. The white shirt she had worn beneath the jacket of her blue traveling suit was speckled with red. Lifting it to my nose, I detected the pungent, iron-tinged odor of blood.
As I was examining this, Giselle emerged from the bathroom wrapped in her thick, paisley-print robe. Her eyes were swollen from crying. “Giselle, what’s happened?” I asked urgently, wrapping my arm around her.
She didn’t answer until I’d gotten her seated on the bed. Giselle choked out the story of how she had thought Johann had come to her out of love but that over lunch it had soon become clear that he was only after her inheritance.
“Are you sure that’s why he came?” I
asked.
“I’m certain of it. He found out about the fortune from Margaret. He’s already planning how he will spend it traveling the continent, and live at the castle when he’s not traveling across the globe.”
Giselle threw herself against my shoulder and fell into another fit of forceful crying. “And it gets worse!”
“What? Tell me!” I urged.
“He tried to force his affections on me, and when I rebuffed his advances, he hit me!”
“He hit you!” I cried, outraged. Pulling back, I examined her. When I brushed away her hair, I observed a definite blue-purple welt on her cheekbone. Checking her hands, I saw they were horribly scraped. One very pronounced gash across her palm was probably the source of the bloodstains on her shirt.
Filled with furious indignation, I stood. “Have you told this to Uncle Ernest?”
Giselle shook her head. “He sent a message that he is visiting a friend in Glasgow and won’t return until tomorrow.”
“Then I will go speak to Johann’s father myself. He can’t be allowed to get away with this. We’ll have him arrested. Where are they staying?”
“I have no idea,” Giselle replied, wiping her eyes.
“Then in the morning I will go to every hotel in search of them,” I resolved. “I will check every register.”
“It was horrible, Ingrid,” Giselle sobbed.
Holding her tight, I rocked her soothingly until her breathing slowed. Lowering her to the bed, I pulled the covers over her and was glad she drifted quickly off to sleep.
A murderous rage consumed me. Needless to say, I did not spend the evening studying Harvey’s book on the heart as I had planned. Rather, I sat in the dark seething, still fully dressed in my manly disguise.
How dare he attack my sister? How dare he!
June 27
When the first rays of dawn crept through the window, I couldn’t wait any longer. I left our room and went out into the quiet streets determined to locate Johann and his father. In the half-light of early morning, my man’s clothing made me feel less vulnerable than I would have felt in a dress.