It was the icy arrogance Julius noted. Despite their many afflictions, each of the children remained coolly regal. Nor even a crazed Lazaran incursion had dented their supreme self-assurance.
The boy resumed the doze they’d found him in. They’d received their dismissal.
Some of his companions (or those with the requisite organs to do so) tittered. It was not pleasant amusement. The rattle of bottle-bandoleers festooned across every single body made it worse.
Frankenstein drew one such flask from its holster. Its owner raised no protest. Julius broached and sniffed it.
‘Serum,’ he announced; and sniffed again to be sure. ‘My enhanced serum…’
Meanwhile, Ada looked like she was going to slap the princely youth back into discourse. Lost in disgust, Foxglove would have been too distracted to stop her.
But she did not. Instead she clenched her fists and surveyed the wider scene.
It was limited but rich in diversion. Screens blocked off all view of the countryside beyond—or more likely hid the rooftop’s contents from the world outside. And with good reason.
Not one in ten of Napoleon’s children had bred true. Some of the furthest from the norm were very wide of human. Most slept or writhed listlessly in confinement. All were that particular pallid white that comes from absence of vitality—and yet they still breathed. The likeness of their father was stamped on each of them.
‘These are the best.’ Frankenstein supplied expert commentary as the resident Revivalist. ‘The ones that were kept…’
Foxglove spoke. Till then he’d been silent; revulsion carrying him somewhere far away.
‘Then God preserve us from the rejects…,’ he said, returning to harsh facts.
To which they could only say ‘amen’—but neither did. It would not have been appropriate even if they believed. Here, high up in the sky and thus that bit closer to God’s Heaven, was nevertheless a Godless place.
In any case, whatever ‘preservation’ they’d been favoured with was only a small mercy. With the whole rooftop garden their own to wander and wonder in, they soon found that exploration revealed nothing any easier on the eye or soul. Quite the contrary. Things got worse the closer they looked.
‘How long have we got?’ asked Ada.
Frankenstein calculated.
‘Not long: there can be few Lazarans left for them to suppress down below. Five to ten minutes maybe. But by then a soldier will have mentioned they left someone aloft. ‘Left who?’ will come the question. ‘The Swiss corpse healer’ they’ll say. ‘You know: the doctor chappie…’ Two minutes more will pin a name on that description. Which will be reported and someone senior will realise I am not authorised to know the secret of the roof garden. And then…’
‘By then we’ll be gone,’ said Ada. ‘Meanwhile, let us learn all!’
Only Ada’s heart was in it. Therefore she led the way, sweeping a path, jungle-explorer style, through the undergrowth of monstrous children. Frankenstein followed, even though he didn’t much care to know more. Foxglove formed their rearguard as the infant throng closed up again behind them. Some of the chalk-white children pawed at the party as they went by.
There was a building at the furthest end: a long low barracks-type structure, out of sympathy with the elegance of the rest of the Palace. The brickwork looked hurried and slapdash. Frankenstein received a strong sense of foreboding from the place.
If she shared it Ada didn’t show it. Being charitable, Julius thought some laudable urge—perhaps the desire to see the worst and get it other with—kept her headed in that direction.
Against all better judgement Julius joined her, just in time to hear Lady Lovelace pronounce judgement. Her voice reverberated back from the threshold.
‘Oh my God!’
‘As you may guess,’ said Frankenstein, continuing his confession, ‘God had nothing to do with it. The diametric opposite in fact. Satan reigned there supreme.’
By his silence the priest signalled he agreed. Or maybe it was shock. Doubtless he’d heard a great deal in his time as a confessor, and perhaps it was those things that had helped put snow on his head. Equally doubtless though, Frankenstein’s revelations must have been a first. The highs (or was it lows?) of sin were being taken to hitherto inconceivable limits.
When reply came it was not in the priest’s customary confessional whisper. Instead he husked.
‘A scaffold?’ The tone was that of sheer disbelief. ‘A hangman?’
‘A team of them. France’s foremost professionals.’
‘Beside a nuptial bed?’
‘Well…,’ Julius cavilled, ‘‘nuptial’ is overstating it, unless you subscribe to serial monogamy. Which,’ he added speedily, ‘you obviously don’t, of course. ‘An abode of Venus’ might be more accurate. A jousting ring for bouts of passion: passion, I hasten to say, purely in pursuit of procreation. Though not, now that I think of it, ‘pure,’ nor indeed procreation as commonly understood…’
This wasn’t the normal him. Julius was deliberately waxing lyrical to forestall remembering the scene in explicit detail. If he worked hard at constructing flowery descriptions of what they’d seen—and smelt and heard—on that rooftop, then perhaps it might dissuade his brain from visualisation.
The priest skipped over all that to make sure he’d heard right: in hope that he had not.
‘Women in harnesses?’ he went on, a litany that only increased his distress. ‘Damaged women..?’
‘A harem of them,’ Julius confirmed. ‘A breeding herd.’
It had been obvious from first glimpse: the lolling heads, the slack mouths: somehow sentience had been extracted from the pregnant mothers. At the time, the scene itself had been enough. Subsequent reading of ‘The Book’ and thereby learning the reasons for those sights improved the memory not one whit.
‘But why?’
Julius could tell the priest didn’t want to ask, but felt compelled—just as Julius was compelled to tell.
‘Because what is asked of them,’ he replied, ‘or of their bodies, is so gross a demand on the human frame that the thinking mind rebels against it. Living flesh rises up against the carrying of Lazaran seed. Or so the scientists hypothesised. They observed that where the mother’s higher mental functions were unimpaired there was a far higher spontaneous miscarriage rate. Whereas idiots and the insane tended to breed true—or truer. Consequently, they experimented with the insertion of red hot wire into the forebrain and…’
‘No! No more!’ ordered the priest, leaning back from the grill. ‘I forbid you. These are not your sins, they are the wickedness—the gross wickedness crying out to Heaven for vengeance—of others!’
Julius feared it might come to this: the time of trial. Here was the big question: was he an honest man or not?
Spiritual tests of strength do not conform to conventional time. This one, though a savage struggle, was won between one breath and another.
Frankenstein used the air that that breath drew in to commence his real confession.
‘Well actually, father, that’s not strictly true. Alas. You don’t know my family name. Permit me to introduce myself…’
It was to the credit of the Church he served that the priest did not give up there and then—or just give up Frankenstein to the authorities. Instead, he steeled himself and heard the whole sorry tale.
Morning wore on. Outside in the Courtyard of the Penitents, the queue for this particular box had long since given up and joined other lines.