“I’ll miss you, Lucy,” I whispered. “You never gave up on me, or on Edward, or even on your father. We were lucky to have called you a friend.”
Balthazar stood solemnly a few steps away, blinking into the fading sun with his Bible folded in his hands, Edward by his side and Sharkey at his feet. At my nod Balthazar opened the pages and read from one of his favorite passages.
“A good name is better than precious ointment, and the day of death than the day of birth,” he read, and then closed the Bible. “Miss Lucy was special to me,” he added. “She was like a beam of light on the wall you couldn’t catch. She never thought about the shadows. I tried to look after her.” He took a deep breath. “God will look after her now.”
While he said his good-byes to Lucy, I drew the pocket watch out of my apron and pressed it into Edward’s hand. He looked at me in surprise.
“She would have wanted you to have it,” I said. “She kept it with her to remember you by. I thought it might remind you of her.”
“It shall.” He slipped it into the shirt pocket over his heart, pressing it once to feel its weight against his chest.
When the three of us had said our good-byes to her, I gathered a handful of heather and tied it with a ribbon, and left it on the corner of the field. We made our way down the muddy road, past the oak tree with the lightning scar down the trunk. It was strange to think of Ballentyne empty now, with Carlyle and McKenna and the servants already in Quick. McKenna said the monastery had some spare rooms they could stay in until Ballentyne was livable again, in exchange for help around the monks’ farm. Life was already finding its new path for them.
But would it for us?
Montgomery was lying in a bed in Quick, waiting for me. I toyed with my wedding ring, thinking of our future together. The world was ours, now. No fates or inheritances to bind us. No more shadows, no more lurking threats. Maybe Montgomery and I would travel. He knew how to sail, and I’d love to see the lights of Paris. Maybe we’d go to America, where the great redwoods towered. Or maybe we’d settle in Quick, in a little cottage on the edge of town and take up Elizabeth’s role as healer of small things: broken bones, gout, indigestion.
Balthazar paused, looking back down the road in the direction of the manor.
“What is it, Balthazar?”
“Something I forgot to do,” he said, shuffling a bit. He cast a worried expression back over his shoulder. “I must go back. Not for long. You don’t need to wait for me.”
I rested my hand on his shoulder. “We’ll see you in Quick tonight?”
He nodded, distracted, and shuffled back down the road at a surprising clip. Sharkey followed at his heels, eternally loyal.
“What do you think that’s about?” I asked Edward.
“Who knows,” he said. “The man is entitled to his mysteries.”
We kept walking as the sun sank lower and the twilight shadows darkened the forest. Ahead, the lights of Quick winked. Another mile and I’d be back with Montgomery.
But it wasn’t just Montgomery and me, and the longer Edward and I walked without speaking, the greater that silence became. I cast him a sidelong look, wondering what was going through his head. He had another chance at life now—but without Lucy.
“What will you do now, Edward?” My voice was the kind of quiet saved only for the really important questions in life. “I don’t know what Montgomery and I will do, or where we’ll go. I think Balthazar will always be with us regardless of where we end up. You’re welcome to stay with us, too. You know that, don’t you?”
He rubbed the back of his head. He might have been nearly indestructible, but the bloodstain and hole on his shirt were impossible to ignore.
“I’m grateful, I truly am, but we both know my future isn’t with you and Montgomery. Nor with Balthazar.” The conversation fell back into a thoughtful silence as we continued toward Quick. “I never told you this,” he continued, “but Hensley showed me the secret passages.”
“He did?”
“He was suspicious of me, but intrigued to have someone else like himself. I don’t think anyone truly realized how lonely that child was. Not just because he was the only little boy in a house of women, but because life is different when you’re like we are. Everything’s the same, and yet it’s as though you’re looking at the world from a distance through a spyglass. It can make a person feel very removed from everyone else.” His fingers drifted up to touch the pocket watch in his shirt. “He told me a story about the original residents of Ballentyne.”
I raised my eyebrow. “Victor Frankenstein?”
“Yes, but it wasn’t Frankenstein I was interested in. It was his creation. The fate of the monster he made.”
“It wasn’t a monster,” I objected.
Edward shrugged. “Call it whatever you like. The truth is, I’m not so different from him. Created from bits and pieces of man and animal. Brought to life by a madman. Like him, I know what death feels like. How many people can say that?” He looked off to the horizon, where the first buildings of Quick were just visible. “I think with Hensley gone, there must only be me and him in the entire world.”
He stopped and wiped his forehead, though there was no sweat on the cold night. I heard a dog barking—the rest of the world was just a few steps away, but I felt caught here on the road between my old life and my future one.
“I’m going to go after him,” Edward said. “To the Arctic. He went there because he didn’t belong in the realm of men. I feel it, too. I wanted to be human for so long, but that’s not what I am. I never have been. It’s time I accepted that. It occurs to me that Frankenstein’s creation and I, well, we could both use a companion.”
I tore my eyes away from the lights of Quick. “That was over a hundred years ago. He might not still exist.”
Edward shrugged. “I’d like an adventure.”
The dog barked again, closer now, amid the sounds of a door slamming and a couple arguing and the realities of the real world. Edward gave me a smile. “Come on. Montgomery’s waiting for us.”
MONTGOMERY DIDN’T WAKE UNTIL the morning. I’d spent the night slumped in a chair by his bedside. There was something strange about watching him sleeping. When I still suffered from my illness, it had been me so many times in bed for days with a raging fever. Our roles were reversed now—Montgomery ill and me sitting by his bedside, praying for him to wake safe and sound.