“You have taken me to feast on my flesh,” she said in a despondent whisper.
“Why would you say that?”
“That is what is being said. That a daemonic fiend has been stealing young girls to feast on them.”
I shook my head. “My diet is mostly what I forage in the forest. Berries and mushrooms. I took you from that burning cottage to rescue you, and for no other purpose.”
She thought about that for several minutes, a look of deep consternation ruining her brow.
At last, she said, “If that is true then I must be a witch after all. I did not believe it when that hag Frau Brunnow accused me, but why else would a daemonic creature suddenly come to my rescue?”
“You are not a witch, since they do not exist, and I am not a daemonic creature,” I said, although I was not at all sure of that anymore. Dark, satanic magic breathed life into the hideous form that I now resided within, and if it wasn’t the Devil behind the feverish obsession that had sent me skulking through homes in my search for Victor Frankenstein, then what could it have been? Still, though, I prayed that my soul hadn’t been completely eroded, and that some of Friedrich Hoffmann’s sensibilities still resided within my heart.
Her eyes grew puzzled at she looked at me. “Then what are you?” she asked.
“I was once a man,” I said. “Terrible things were done to me, but I believe I still hold some of my former goodness.”
She did not look convinced, but she was too weak to do much more than close her eyes. I used my cape to clean her face, which had been darkened with soot, and then I went to off to find her water and food. During my earlier nighttime excursions, I had stolen a flask. When I found a spring flowing with fresh water I filled this flask that I now carried on me, and after finding a raspberry bush, I returned back to her. She accepted the water and berries that I offered her, and after several minutes she regained the strength to sit up.
“What will become of me?” she asked.
“You will rest until you are able to travel, and then I will take you to a new village where you will be safe.”
Her face darkened as she considered this. “There is no such village,” she said. “Whether or not you are a daemonic creature, it does not matter. Word will spread throughout the countryside of how the Devil rescued me from being burned alive as a witch. Anywhere I go they will now believe that I am a witch, and they will burn me also.”
This was true. Stories of this kind spread quickly.
“Then I will take you to a foreign land where nobody has heard of this. I will see you safe before I leave you.”
She gave me a hopeless look to show that she did not believe that that would be possible, but she was too tired and weak to argue, and instead closed her eyes and drifted into a sound sleep.
I watched her for a moment, and then after laying my cape over her, I gathered firewood so that she would be warm enough when night fell.
CHAPTER
12
When morning came and she opened her eyes and saw me standing guard over her, she looked up at me with an expression devoid of any emotion and without a single reflection of the hideousness of my appearance, which, without my cape to conceal me, was fully exposed to her. “It was not a nightmarish dream as I had hoped it was,” she said.
“I am afraid not.”
She deliberated on this, a hardness settling over her features as she did so. When she was done, the hardness faded leaving behind vulnerability. “I suppose if you had ill intentions toward me you would have acted on them already. It is true that you only wished to save my life?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you then,” she said. “And thank you also for covering me with your cape to keep me warm. But you may reclaim it. I can already feel the sun’s rays upon my face.”
“Later,” I said. “There is still a chill in the air.”
She nodded and closed her eyes again. “I am afraid I am too weak to stand.”
“That is to be expected. You will rest here until your strength has returned, and then I will take you someplace where you will be safe and can start life anew. Someplace where stories of your rescue will not haunt you. Perhaps Geneva?”
“Perhaps.” A bare wisp of a smile showed on her lips. “I do not know what to call you.”
“Friedrich.”
Her eyes opened a crack as she acknowledged me. “And you may call me Henriette.”
And then her eyes were closed again and she was back asleep.
I cared for Henriette over the three days that it took for her to regain her strength. During this time I fetched her water and food as needed, watched over her to keep the wild beasts of the forest away, kept the fire burning to keep her warm, made a balm from herbs to apply to her cut hand, and over her protestations I covered her each night with my cape. The times that she lay awake we would talk. She told me how she had lived her whole life in the village of Aibling, and how she had been orphaned as a young child and had been put to work at the age of twelve in the village’s beer hall.
“It hasn’t been bad,” she said as she explained the simple life that she had led. “At the beer hall they would have me clean the glasses and bring beer to the customers. That was fine. It was only when lechers like Herr Brunnow believed that the cost of an ale entitled them to also pinch my bottom that I detested my work.” She giggled, adding, “Two weeks ago, Herr Brunnow tried to grab me outside of the beer hall and I kneed him in a sensitive area. That is why he has been unable to show any enthusiasm toward the sow that he married.”
All at once she began to weep.
“What is wrong?”
She shook her head, her eyes showing her fury. “How could they accuse me of being a witch?” she demanded. “I have lived with these people my whole life. How could they do that to me? Because of Frau Brunnow’s jealous accusations? Because I dared to rebuff other men’s advances? And how will I live somewhere else?”
“You will. There is much strength in you. I can tell that. Soon, as you are starting a new life in Geneva, this will all be but a bad dream.”
Henriette used her palms to wipe the tears from her eyes, and this left her pale skin blotchy and her eyes reddish. “I do not think Geneva would be safe for me,” she said. “We have had travelers from Geneva pass through Aibling. They speak the same language as us. Stories of my being rescued by the Devil could end up there.”
I had to agree. Geneva was too close, and there was too much commerce between Bavaria and the Swiss Confederation, and many of the Swiss were fluent in both German and French.
“I will take you to Italy then. Perhaps Venice?”
She showed me a fragile smile. “I cannot speak the language.”
“I can teach you Italian.”
She opened her eyes wide at that, and I explained how I was well versed in many languages other than my own native German, including Italian, French, English and the ancient languages of Latin and Greek. “At a very young age I was a student of languages,” I told her. “Once I decided on a course of study in chemistry at the University, I studied languages even more intently so that I would not have to wait for translations to be able to read papers on subjects of interest. In fact, I supported myself while engaged at the University by translating other works into German.”
I proceeded to rattle off phrases in different languages, and that impressed her, and when I felt a smile wrinkle my own face, she smiled back at me with a pleasantness that warmed my heart. We agreed then that I would teach her Italian during our travel to Venice. This meant we would have to cross the Alps, and I was not sure
