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“I shall return both volumes to you now.” He produced Frankenstein from the chair next to him.

“What is the verdict on that one?”

“I found it extraordinary.”

“How so?”

“To begin with, I could not put it down. You see this? He pointed to a mostly healed abrasion on the bridge of his nose. “This is a reading injury.”

“A reading injury!”

“Yes. I started this book the night before we departed. I was tired. It was a struggle to keep my eyes open. Eventually, I lost the battle with exhaustion and the book fell out of my hands toward my head. I started to awaken, and in my attempt to catch it before it struck me on the head, I pivoted just right—just wrong—such that I was rewarded with a nasty paper cut.”

“I heard Lord Stonely telling Miss Morgan that you cut yourself shaving.” Diantha had been seated near the pair yesterday at tea and had been a mite surprised by how intimate they seemed.

“That’s what I told the others,” Lord Marsden said. “A reading injury sounded so … unmanly.”

She laughed. To think, moments ago she had been nervous about the prospect of being near Lord Marsden, and now they were laughing over a shared secret.

“My lord,” Diantha said with a smile, “your argument is circular. You say you found the book extraordinary because you couldn’t put it down. Why couldn’t you put it down?”

“You are of course correct.” He gazed at the ceiling as if trying to find the words to summon. “Well, to begin with, it’s interesting from a religious perspective, isn’t it?”

“Many people might say it is blasphemous.”

“Well, that’s rather the point, is it not? Victor fancies himself God, and how does that work out for him?”

“Hmm.” Diantha couldn’t argue with anything Lord Marsden was saying, but for her, the novel’s religious themes weren’t primary.

“But I suppose my chief interest,” he went on, “is to do with what made the creature who he was. Was he born bad, or was he made bad? He started out an innocent, did he not? Was he not forced into baseness by neglect and rejection? By cruelty?”

“Hmm,” she said again.

“You keep saying ‘hmm.’ What does it mean?”

“Nothing. Of course you are correct; that is a major theme of the book. I simply hadn’t considered it.”

“I beg your pardon? How can one read Frankenstein and not consider questions of nature versus nurture?”

“I suppose because I was fixated on what I view as the novel’s main theme: revenge.”

“Hmm.”

“Now you are ‘hmm-ing’ me.”

He chuckled. “For the same reason you were hmm-ing me. I hadn’t given the question of revenge much consideration, but, of course, the monster does get his revenge.”

“Yes, and at what cost? That is what I find interesting. He could have stayed away. He could have had a decent life.”

“How?” Simon asked. “He was alone, newborn and alone.”

“Perhaps we can agree that the central theme of the book is loneliness. Fear of it, in particular. The lengths to which people—or monsters—will go to avoid it.”

“Miss Brown, I wasn’t going to say anything, but …” The book had been resting on the table between them, and he took it back and flipped through it until he found what he was looking for.

“I stumbled on one of your markers.” He redonned his spectacles and read aloud. “‘Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some living thing.’”

He looked at her expectantly.