Lust Ever After. Rose Fer de

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      Chapter Four

      The Perfect Opportunity

      A few days later, Frankenstein stood in his laboratory admiring the water tank. It had taken eight men to manoeuvre it up the stairs and into the laboratory but now that it was in place it seemed as though it had always been there. A heated pipe had slowly filled it with snowmelt from the roof. Now it awaited an occupant.

       Just imagine what we might achieve together, Victor!

      Frankenstein was in no doubt about the genius of Pretorius; the tiny Cleo was proof of that. She was also a reminder that the creation of strange new life was within his grasp. But strange new life of a more appealing kind than that wretched first experiment. From the very start the monster had resented its creator, rebelling against every instruction and every attempt to civilise it. Where he had gone wrong was in using a male subject. Females were far more submissive and malleable. Not to mention physically weaker and therefore easier to control. Pretorius’s homuncula had all the qualities her creator had desired in a woman: beauty, obedience and – perhaps most importantly – a powerful sexual appetite. With his friend’s help, Frankenstein would create his own perfect woman. He could almost see her floating in the tank now, drifting like the promise of triumph.

      ‘Victor? Is anything the matter?’

      He shook himself out of his reverie, surprised for a moment to find himself in his bedroom and not the laboratory. Sylvia Leigh-Hunt stood before him in her red silk corset and petticoats, frozen in the act of undressing. The widow’s face bore a faintly wounded expression.

      ‘Forgive me, my dear,’ he said, reminding himself whose patronage he was indebted to for quite a lot of his equipment. He arranged his features into a lover’s smile and kissed her hand. ‘I have taken a strange fancy into my head and I was merely wondering whether it might shock you too terribly if I were to suggest it.’

      Sylvia’s face brightened at the prospect of a new game and Frankenstein was again struck by her beauty. The years had been kind to her, and her wealthy husband’s untimely demise had been kinder still, for mourning truly became her. An alluring woman, her face bore few signs of her fortyish years, and her black garments and crepe veil suited her surprisingly well. He supposed it was somewhat perverse of him to find her widow’s weeds erotic but then, what was his entire practice if not institutionalised perversion? Most of his lady patients were innocent of what was really going on but Sylvia was a shrewd woman who knew a good thing when she found it. It had taken Frankenstein several ‘treatment sessions’ to realise that neither was fooling the other. Now there was little pretence about why she really came to see him.