He nodded, silent.
“You should not have cut yourself.” I stroked his cheek and pulled him close. “That was naughty to play with the scissors and cut yourself.”
He whimpered, nuzzling his head against my shoulder.
Victor returned with the kettle. I held out Ernest’s arm, careful not to pour the water where it would wash the scissors clean. He cried out again, but he was exhausted from fear and shock and quickly quieted. The only sound was Henry’s pounding on the locked door above us.
“Hold the skin together.” I frowned in concentration, mirroring Victor’s standard expression. It was just sewing, after all, and I had done plenty of that at Madame Frankenstein’s side. Victor aided, watching closely. I sewed the wound shut as neatly as I could manage. My work was as good as any surgeon’s. I never had much artistic flair for needlework, but apparently I was good with skin.
Closed, the cut only seeped blood, making me hope that Ernest would suffer no long-term ill effects. I rushed back upstairs to the hall linen closet, ignoring Henry’s shouts, and pulled out a clean towel. I ripped it into strips—wishing I could use those stupid scissors—brought them downstairs, and bound Ernest’s arm tightly.
Then I curled up in the armchair with him snuggled into my lap.
Victor stood in the center of the room, watching us. “I should learn to sew,” he said. “When we get home, you can teach me.”
“Get Henry out of his room and tell him that Ernest got into the nursemaid’s sewing bag and cut himself. Tell him I was so busy helping that I forgot to let him out.”
“Why did you lock him in, in the first place?” Victor asked, puzzled.
“Because I did not know what was happening.” I gave him a look heavy with meaning. “And I needed to protect you.”
Victor looked impassively at the floor, where the blood was congealing around the scissors. “I can tell you what happened. I—”
“We know what happened. It was the nursemaid’s fault for leaving out her sewing supplies. She is stupid and lazy and still sleeping. She will be punished and relieved of her duties. Ernest will be fine.” I paused to be sure Victor understood that this was our story, no matter what. “And we are fortunate that she is stupid and lazy and convenient, and nothing like this will happen again. Will it?”
Victor looked more thoughtful than sheepish. He nodded curtly, then turned to go get Henry. By the time the Frankensteins and Henry’s parents returned, Ernest was sleeping warm and silent in my arms. Victor was reading the same volume that had obsessed him the entire trip, and Henry was fretting and pacing.
“Little Ernest got into the nursemaid’s sewing supplies and cut his arm horribly!” Henry was filled with melodrama as he threw himself at his mother for a comforting embrace. “Elizabeth and Victor stopped the bleeding by sewing his wound shut!”
Madame Frankenstein rushed into the room, ripping the boy from my arms and waking him. He immediately began crying and fussing again—she was always disturbing him like that, with no sense of how to handle him—and she called for the coachman to take them to a doctor.
Judge Frankenstein quietly surveyed the room: The blackened puddle of blood. The scissors so artfully placed. The nursemaid still absent. And Victor reading.
There was a narrowing of the eyes, a cloud of suspicion in his terrible judge’s face. I kept my head lifted, my face clear of any guilt. But he did not look at me. He looked only at Victor. “Is this true?”
Victor did not glance up from his book. “Elizabeth did a marvelous job with the stitches. If she were not a girl, she would have a bright future as a surgeon, I think.”
His father ripped the book out of Victor’s hands with an explosively violent gesture. “This is garbage,” he said, sneering at the book and tossing it on the floor. “Surely you can do better things with your mind. And surely you can afford to give this current crisis more of your attention.”
Victor looked up at his
father looming over him, something going vacant behind his eyes. I rushed to his side. “Come, Victor,” I said. “I have blood on my hands. Help me wash them while your father sorts out the situation with the nursemaid.”
“Thank you for your quick thinking and action,” Judge Frankenstein said. “You saved my son.”
I could not tell which son he spoke of, and I suspected I was not intended to. Victor stood, picking his book up off the floor, and followed me upstairs. I made him read aloud to me to calm himself as I washed the afternoon from my skin.
That night, when I snuck into his room, unable to sleep, I found him still reading. “I like this book very much,” he said. “The ideas are fascinating. Did you know you can turn lead into gold? And that there are elixirs that can extend and even restore life?”
I hmmed as I crawled into bed next to him.
“Elizabeth,” he said. “You never asked me what actually happened this afternoon.”
“It is fixed now. It does not matter and I do not care. Read me some more of your book,” I said, closing my eyes and falling asleep.
* * *
—