Now Maxwell regarded the brandy bottle with the same dull expression. It was an expression William knew; he had felt it often enough upon his own face, back in the days after the Peninsula. It was the look of a man who needed a rope thrown to him.
Unfortunately, William was not at all assured of his ability to use words to craft such a rope. Three days ago, he might have fancied himself becoming rather good at that sort of thing, but now the disastrous failure with Katarina dragged against the back of his mind. Perhaps he was not so skilled at using words to move others as he needed to be. Perhaps the wrong words would be worse than no words at all. But surely sitting in the same room as Maxwell was better than doing nothing; so he sat, reading through Frankenstein’s journal with half his
