Fraulein Frankenstein

by Stephen Woodworth

  Birgit left me alone in the bedchamber with this maternal vow, unaware that I intended to seek out Victor Frankenstein the moment she was gone. Under the blanket of my cot, I heaped some clothes in the shape of a sleeping figure in case anyone glanced into the darkened bedchamber. Then I donned a black cloak I’d borrowed from Birgit’s wardrobe upstairs and blew out the candle on my dresser. Unlatching the sole window in my room, I pushed myself up onto the sill and jumped down into the cramped lane that ran behind the townhouse.

  With the cloak’s hood raised to hide my face, I skulked back to the Stadtkirche to recover a bouquet I’d hidden behind a flap of ivy that draped one of the graveyard walls. The rest of the wedding flowers I’d taken to the church’s refuse heap, where they’d either be scavenged by paupers or left to rot into compost. Although the bouquet’s crimson petals had blackened like drying scabs as the day wore on, this one dainty bunch of roses had remained fresher than the others. I chose to use it as my pretext to enter Castle Frankenstein.

  Everyone in town knew the spiraling road that led up the hill to the ancient fortress, yet I elected to take the less conspicuous path through the forest—a trail I remembered well from the night Victor Frankenstein had tracked me through thunder and rain. I had not counted on how much more troublesome it would be to traverse the woods in a petticoat and skirts, branches and undergrowth pricking at the muslin like a harpist’s fingernails. Snarling at each snag, I longed to tear my dress off and run through the trees half-naked, as I had before. Such wildness would hardly suit my plan, however, so I steadied myself by rehearsing the lines I intended to say as best I could in the limited German I possessed.

  At least the weather favored me. The rains had let up over the past month, and the night was clear, if chilly. I carried no candle or lantern, but a gibbous moon sifted white beams through the lattice of branches to light my way. It was still early evening when I emerged from the trees to see the peaked caps of Castle Frankenstein’s towers rising before me. Tonight, the ominous edifice presented a more welcoming face than when I had last seen it. All the windows in the great stone structure glowed with warm, dancing lamplight.

  All, that is, but the topmost window in the right-hand tower. It remained dark, as if the castle’s occupants were trying to forget its existence.

  My feet grew heavy with trepidation as I ascended the steps to the front entrance. I was taking a terrible chance, and for what reward? Victor Frankenstein might simply kill or imprison me without ever revealing where I came from. Yet the thought of continuing life as a nonentity with no past or personality seemed far worse. If I could only get the baron in my power for a short while, I thought, perhaps I could wring enough of the truth from him to relieve the unbearable enigma of my existence.

  Standing before the massive double doors, I lowered my hood, nestled the bouquet in the crook of my arm, and mouthed the words I’d practiced. Reflexively, I checked my scarf to make sure that it covered the grotesque white circlet of scar around my throat. Then I took hold of one of the door’s polished brass knockers and rapped it loudly.

  No one responded at first. As I reached to knock again, the door swung away from my hand and I found myself almost nose-to-nose with the servant, Hans. The old man peered at me with his protuberant gray eyes in the same fashion as the night he’d first seen me, and I became tongue-tied with anxiety, certain that he’d recognized me.

  “Yes?” he snapped. “What do you want?”

  When he showed no sign of familiarity, I moistened my numb lips and tongue.

  “I . . . from wedding,” I stammered, snatching at all the phrases I’d practiced as they flew around in my head like birds in a cage. “Need see . . . Elizabeth.”

  “Impossible. The baron has insisted that they not be disturbed this evening.” Hans straightened himself to board stiffness and moved to slam the door.

  Flustered, I nearly forgot the bouquet I’d brought. I thrust it toward the servant. “Elizabeth . . . she want flowers. Be very angry if she not get them.”

  Hans motioned impatiently with his hand. “Give them to me. I’ll make sure the mistress gets them.”

  I shook my head, pulled the bouquet from his reach. “No . . . I must give to Elizabeth. Have message for her.”

  Grumbling something about ignorant Hungarian scullery maids, Hans stepped back and permitted me to enter.

  “Follow me,” he said as he shut the door, “and make it quick.”

  The old manservant led me up the castle’s grand central staircase, where the harsh stone steps of the medieval fortress had been softened by a cascade of florid carpeting held fast by black cast-iron rods. Souvenirs of the fortress’s violent past lined the walls. Swords fanned out in a semicircle above a shield bearing the Frankenstein coat of arms—a helmet adorned with the wings of a swan above a battle-ax whose double blades had been stained red. Maces and flails had been bracketed to the stone in an attitude of attack, their chains and spiked balls frozen in lethal flight. And in the center of all, the chiseled bas-relief of a sixteenth-century Baron Frankenstein in full plate mail, a war hammer braced upon his shoulder, his right foot stamping upon the carcass of a slain dragon. Evidently, the family had a long history of combating monsters.

  Hans and I reached the top of the stairs and entered a dim hall lit only by sconces. The tapers barely illuminated the Black Forest linden of the wall paneling. Although the corridor had many doors, only one at the end stood ajar, a slice of light cleaved from the darkness. I knew this must be our destination—even before I heard the shriek that knifed down the hallway toward us.

  Hans forgot about me in an instant. In his haste to propel himself toward the noise, the old man nearly blustered into his master, who burst forth from a washroom halfway down the hall. Victor Frankenstein wore only a red satin dressing gown and slippers; he exuded the heady fragrance of rose-water cologne.

  The baron was too agitated—or perhaps simply too nearsighted without his spectacles—to take note of me. “Hans! What the devil was that?”

  “I . . . I don’t . . .” The aged servant made a helpless gesture toward the open door at the end of the corridor and shook his head, as if already denying responsibility for whatever disaster had occurred there.

  “Elizabeth.” Shoving the servant aside, Victor Frankenstein sprinted down the hall and through the open door. The scream had ceased. Dreadful silence followed.

  Although I was as anxious as the baron to learn what had happened, I lagged behind Hans as he waddled forward, for I didn’t want to remind him of my presence. He hesitated in the open doorway, wanting to aid his master yet too afraid to enter. Since I stood almost a half foot taller than the stooped old man, I had no difficulty peering over his shoulder into the bedchamber beyond.

  Victor Frankenstein had halted between the door and the plush marriage bed with its tasseled burgundy canopy. He stared, aghast, at the consummation of an unholy matrimony: Elizabeth trembled on the down mattress, clad in a thin, virgin-white shift in anticipation of the first night with her husband, the neck pulled aside to expose a ripe nipple. Still clothed in its shabby peasant’s suit, the monster embraced the bride with a fierce passion. With one gorilla-like arm enveloping her midriff and one outsize hand encircling her throat, it forced the terrified woman to look up at her impotent groom. When she kicked and thrashed, the creature pinched the thumb and fingers around her neck a little tighter until she became still, barely a rattle of breath escaping her gasping mouth.

  Frankenstein snarled and tensed to spring but stopped as the creature jabbed Elizabeth in the side, allowing her enough air to let out a squeal. It stared straight at its creator with its dark, dead eyes.

  “I told you I would be with you on your wedding night,” it said.

  Frankenstein’s gaze darted about the chamber in an apoplectic rage, but this seemed to be the only room in the castle that did not have weapons mounted on the walls. He seized one of the chest-high candelabra that lit the room, dashed its guttering tap
ers against the stone wall, and stabbed the wrought-iron stand toward the creature as if wielding a lance. “Leave her alone! It’s me you should kill.”

  The monster tightened the pincers of its fingers again, until Elizabeth hacked out a cough that made Frankenstein jerk back the candelabrum’s pronged bar. “Oh, but you’re wrong, cursed creator,” the beast muttered, yellow teeth bared. “You failed to give me a mate who could love me, so you, too, shall spend your miserable life alone.”

  And it squeezed its enormous hand closed around Elizabeth’s skinny neck as if cinching shut the mouth of a sack. The throat stretched grotesquely with a crunching of crushed vertebrae, and the bride’s eyes bulged past their lids, red tears leaking from the burst blood vessels in the sockets. Her lips fluttered in a parody of speech, but all that came out was an appalling gurgle and a swollen, purpled tongue. Then her head flopped to one side, dangling from nothing more than the rubbery bundle of skin and sinew clutched in the creature’s fist.

  Victor Frankenstein wailed in blind grief and, heedless of his wife’s corpse, charged at her murderer. The creature batted the candelabrum from the baron’s hands as if it were a matchstick, then hurled Frankenstein against the carved cherubim on the bed’s headboard. The baron fell back onto the bed, facedown, stunned, and semiconscious. His arm fell across the cast-aside cadaver of his betrothed, embracing her at last.

  Hans scampered back down the hall, wheezing and clutching at his chest. Even I cried out and dropped the bouquet of dead roses I held, aghast at how easily the thing had squashed the life from Elizabeth.

  Only one individual heard my screech. Its head brushing the underside of the canopy as it stood, the monster rose from the bed and lumbered toward the open door. I should have fled, for it could have ripped me apart. But it had left me unharmed before, and perhaps that’s why I did not fear it—despite the slaughter I’d just seen.

  Indeed, as soon as it spotted me outside the bedchamber, its entire demeanor changed. My face must have shown my revulsion, for the creature’s remorseless cruelty crumbled into abject shame. It backed away from me, blubbering, crossing its arms in front of its face as if it could not bear the judgment of my gaze. And although I could have done nothing to stop it, the beast reacted as if I were an impassable barrier. It hurled itself toward the window on the far side of the room.

  “No!” I surged forward, too late, to catch it.

  The glass exploded outward as the monster crashed through the leaded panes. I rushed to the sill and looked down even before the last of the glittering shards had sprinkled to the battlements below.

  The castle’s nearest rampart was not as far down as I had feared. Less than ten feet beneath me, I saw a dark, irregular oval on the walkway. I wondered whether the monster had shattered its giant body on the flagstones. But no—like a cat, it had landed on all fours. As I watched, it lifted its face to me in a kind of supplication. Did it want empathy? Understanding? Forgiveness? In the darkness, it was impossible to tell.

  A groan from behind made me turn my head. Victor Frankenstein had rolled over on the bed and was shaking off his stupor with groggy resolve. A few seconds more and the sight of his limp bride, her unmoored head dangling upside-down upon her breast, would remind him of his need for vengeance.

  Meanwhile, a fusillade of footsteps approached in the hall. Hans must have recruited reinforcements among the servants, for I could hear him shush the nervous jabber of many voices. They would no doubt demand to know who I was and why I had chosen to come on the night their new mistress was murdered.

  I pivoted back toward the broken window. Sticking my head outside again, I saw that only a haphazard mosaic of glass fragments remained on the rampart below. The creature was gone. If it could survive the drop . . .

  With only a heartbeat’s hesitation, I climbed over the sill and hung from it until I’d lowered myself to arm’s length against the outside wall. Swaying about six feet above the battlement beneath me, I let go of the window ledge.

  The shock of the landing shuddered up from the soles of my feet all the way to my hips, but my legs folded to absorb most of the impact. Like the creature, I also dropped forward onto my hands to break the fall. I scraped my palms on broken glass in the process.

  Recalling how the monster had crouched where I now squatted, I glanced up and down the length of the castle wall in hopes of tracking it as it fled. Maybe it could give me the answers that I would never get from Victor Frankenstein.

  But the fugitive was nowhere to be seen. A hue and cry blared forth from the ruined window above, frantic silhouettes already clustering to gaze down at me from the jagged hole. It would be only a matter of minutes before Frankenstein and his forces commenced their manhunt.

  Shards of glass splintering beneath my boots, I ran to the nearest flight of stone steps that would lead me down the battlements and away from Castle Frankenstein.

  CHAPTER 6

  GRAVEDIGGER’S DELIGHT

  It was past three in the morning when I lifted myself through the window of Pastor Georg’s house and into my own bedchamber again; I knew I would have to act thoroughly rested and refreshed when Birgit roused me at dawn a few hours later.

  I brushed off my dusty boots as best I could and hid my dirty skirts in the wardrobe to wash later. When Birgit arrived, I kept my hands folded so she wouldn’t see the scratches from broken glass on my palms.

  I also had to feign ignorance of the sensational scandal, the gossip of which had swept through the city before the rising sun had cleared the horizon.

  “Baroness Frankenstein was strangled in her bridal bed!” Hedda, the butcher’s wife, told Birgit when we went to fetch a loin of pork for dinner. She leaned far across the chopping block to whisper in confidence, gesturing with her cleaver for emphasis. “The baron claims it was an intruder, of course—some vagrant from the woods. You ask me, it sounds like the work of a brutish husband.”

  Birgit shook her head sadly. “I can’t believe he would do such a thing. If you had seen the way he looked at her during the wedding yesterday . . . he had such love for her.”

  “Love!” Hedda snorted. “Love’s killed more good women than the pox, you ask me.”

  I said nothing, merely held Birgit’s breadbasket and tried to seem shocked by the news. Only I knew how close the butcher’s wife had come to the truth. Jealousy had been the motive for Elizabeth’s murder. The monster had envied Frankenstein’s happiness.

  Is love such a treasure that men will kill to possess it . . . or to deprive others of it out of spite?

  “I hear the baron may have had another woman,” Hedda went on, relishing the sordid rumor. “They say some girl no one had ever seen before showed up at the castle last night just before the baroness was killed, then disappeared before anyone could find out who she was. You ask me, she was the one who put him up to it.”

  I felt the blood throb faster in my veins and hoped the telltale flush did not show in my face. Fortunately, neither Hedda nor Birgit came close to imagining that I was the supposed Jezebel. I think I hardly breathed until the conversation ended and we left the shop.

  For the rest of the morning, I made sure to keep my hood up and my head bowed while out in public, lest anyone identify me as the mysterious visitor to Castle Frankenstein. After that I kept to my room as much as possible, complaining of chills every time Birgit asked me to help her with chores outside. Alas, I could not play ill for more than a day without causing Birgit to call in the local doctor—who happened to be a personal friend and colleague of fellow physician Victor Frankenstein. And so I found myself unable to avoid the most perilous occasion of all: Elizabeth’s funeral.

  As with the wedding, I helped Birgit tidy the nave of the Stadtkirche for the service. Again, I observed the rites from behind a column near the back of the church. But for the somber clothing and the dirgelike drear of the music, the two sacraments appeared nearly identical. The same singers, the same congregants, even flowers like those I had seen before Franke
nstein’s wedding: white blooms with black bows.

  Victor Frankenstein had chosen to bury his virgin wife in her lace wedding gown; its high collar hid the crushed putty of her neck. The baron had reportedly employed his arcane anatomical skills to embalm her himself rather than entrusting her to the dubious talents of the local mortician. He’d truly outdone himself, for her face looked as perfect and placid in repose in her casket as it had when she’d spoken her marriage vows, the maiden blush still upon her cheeks. While I arranged the floral accents around the bier before the service, however, I caught the pungent chemical tang of alcohol solution contaminating the oversweet fragrance of the garlands, and it galled me with memories of the laboratory and the vats of preserved viscera on the shelves.

  To see Victor Frankenstein enter the Stadtkirche that morning, one could not imagine that he had possessed the presence of mind to serve as such an artful undertaker. He looked more like an ambulatory corpse himself—his eyes glazed, his expression utterly blank—as he shuffled up the church’s aisle, supported at one elbow by Hans and at another by his footman, as if he might collapse without support. They lowered him onto a pew in the front row, where he vegetated, catatonic, through most of the service.

  Only at the end, when it came time for him to step up to the bier for a final look at his intended wife, did Frankenstein display any comprehension of her death. As he bowed his head to gaze at her somnolent visage, he abruptly let out a yowl of fury so fearsome that the entire congregation paled and husbands shielded their wives in case the man went berserk with madness. The baron fell to his knees before the coffin and beat his head with his fists as if he were, in fact, her murderer. When Hans and the footman went to his aid, he waved away their attempts to lift him to his feet. Then he stalked out of the Stadtkirche in such a tearful rage that he passed by me without a glance.