When Alice was once again seated on the carpet next to the fireplace, drinking a cup of tea, Mary said, “Well. It’s always an adventure having her around, isn’t it?”
No one had a response to that, although Catherine rolled her eyes.
“I have an order of business myself,” said Mary. “Mrs. Poole, please sit. You can move Bast out of Ayesha’s chair—I mean, it’s not her chair, obviously. Unless you want to put Bast on your lap?”
“Not likely,” said Mrs. Poole, brushing Bast off the chair and sitting where the President of the Alchemical Society had sat. Bast protested with a loud meow, then went over and jumped up on the sofa between Diana and Catherine.
“We all discussed it last night—I mean, the members of the Athena Club discussed it. Alice, we would like you to become a member.”
Alice, who had just taken a sip of her tea, spit it up, mostly into her cup but partly on the carpet. “Oh no!” she cried, looking at the drops of tea soaking into the carpet in front of her. Frantically, she soaked them up with her napkin. “I’ll get this clean, Mrs. Poole, I promise.”
“Never mind that,” said the housekeeper. “I’ll do it later. Just answer Miss Mary’s question. It would be a great honor for our Alice, miss,” she said to Mary.
“I think Alice has to be the judge of that,” said Justine. She had not spoken for so long—the Giantess was often quiet for long periods of time—that Lucinda was startled to hear her voice. “Alice may not consider it such an honor. After all, we are members of this club because we are, as Catherine calls us, monsters.”
Alice stood up. “It’s not that. It’s just—I don’t think I’m very good at adventures. Mary is so clever, and Catherine is so brave, and Justine is so strong. I don’t feel as though I’m any of those things. I don’t want to be kidnapped and put in dungeons again, or see my friends in danger. I was glad that I could help Miss Beatrice free Martin and the other mesmerists, but I just want to be a kitchen maid. At least for now.”
“For now,” said Mary. “So that means someday—”
“Don’t be daft,” said Diana. “You were as clever as any of us! And you can break locks with a lightning bolt. I wish I could do that, although my way is quicker and more reliable.”
“And as brave,” said Catherine. “You stayed to help Holmes when you could have gotten away.”
“And you are one of us,” said Beatrice. “You may not have been experimented on directly, but your powers are the result of experiments in biological transmutation by Dr. Raymond, passed on to you from your grandmother, through your mother. You are as much a monster, if Catherine wishes to use that word, as any of us.”
“Please excuse me,” said Alice. Tears were welling up in her eyes. She put her tea-spattered napkin up to them and ran out of the room.”
“Oh goodness,” said Mary. “What did we say?”
Lucinda rose from the window seat. “You see, her mother died not a week ago. When my mother died—” She did not know how to explain it to the other members of the Athena Club. After all, none of the others had experienced what she and Alice had—their mothers dying in their arms. For a moment, a memory came back to her of her mother reaching up and touching her cheek one last time with love and tenderness before the light went out of her eyes. “I will go to Alice. I think eventually she will decide to join us, as I decided to join the Athena Club. But you must give her time.”
She found Alice sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, sobbing. She sat beside the kitchen maid and put one arm around her.
“It’s just that I’m not ready,” said Alice through her sobs, in a voice muffled by her hands. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.”
“You will,” said Lucinda. “Transformation is difficult, is it not? It is the most difficult thing of all. You have been clever and brave and strong, but now you must rest for a while. It is out of adversity that one grows and becomes what one is meant to be—but there must be periods of peace and happiness as well. Plants must have sunshine as well as storms.”
Alice leaned her head on Lucinda’s shoulder. “Are all vampires so philosophical?”
Lucinda laughed. “Alice, I think you and I will become good friends. Come, dry your tears. I cannot eat cake, but you can, and I believe you need a slice of gateau au chocolat. Let us go upstairs and rejoin our friends, who are concerned for us. Friendship and chocolate cake—they do not heal all ills, but they certainly help.”
MARY: Alice, I’m glad that you decided to join us after all.
ALICE: It just took me a little while, miss. I mean Mary. I needed time to realize that I wasn’t just a kitchen maid any longer—that I had changed and grown.
JUSTINE: It is not so bad to have been a kitchen maid. I learned many valuable lessons working in the kitchen of the Frankenstein family as Justine Moritz.
ALICE: Oh, I’m grateful for all that, I assure you. If Nurse Adams, I mean Frau Gottleib, hadn’t arranged for me to be sent here from the orphanage and Mrs. Poole hadn’t decided to hire me, I don’t know where I would be right now. Still in that orphanage, like as not. Or out on the streets, as Kate and Doris were.
MARY: Instead, you’re where you belong—home.
CHAPTER XVIII
A Meeting of the Athena Club
The Athena Club was meeting, with all members present.
Mary was sitting in an armchair under the portrait of her mother. Ernestine Jekyll looked down with cornflower-blue eyes, which was appropriate, since it was spring. A warm spring at that! The roses were already starting to bloom in Regent’s Park. Miraculously for London, it was not even raining.
Catherine was sitting on the sofa. Alice and Diana were sharing the sofa with her, both cross-legged, both with cats on their laps: Diana had Alpha while Alice had Omega. Bast was curled up next to Catherine, whom she had adopted as her particular human. She looked like a small puma next to the Puma Woman. Beatrice and Lucinda were perched next to each other on the window seat. Beatrice was drinking a cup of green goo. Lucinda was drinking a cup of something red. The rest of us were drinking tea, like ordinary women who are not monsters. And yet we were monstrous, each in our own way. Justine sat on the floor with her knees drawn up and her long, slender hand wrapped around a mug.
It had been six months since we had defeated Queen Tera, Margaret Trelawny, and Mrs. Raymond. Those six months had been relatively calm, all things considered. There had been the affair of Prince Rupert and the Oldenburg jewels, which had necessitated a short trip to Schleswig-Holstein; Countess Olenska’s haunted castle (not haunted at all, except by her drunken brother, who had escaped from an Australian penal colony); the naval treaty stolen from Colonel Protheroe’s study, which we had intercepted before it could be sold to the Russian Ambassador; and Miss Lettie Pruitt’s missing King Charles Spaniel, Ivanhoe, who had been found in one of the lowest dens in Bethnal Green, with a bitch of the most disreputable sort. But life at 11 Park Terrace had been quiet, which was a relief to most of us and agony to Diana, who complained of being so bored.