Frankenstein in London

by Brian Stableford

  Every thief and scoundrel in London declared himself to be an honest man, Temple knew—and many of them, he suspected, actually believed it, being far readier to see the motes in their neighbors’ eyes than the beams in their own—but he judged by the boatman’s weary tone that he, at least, was an ignorant individual who preferred to nurture his ignorance rather than take the risk of knowing too much.

  From Tower Bridge, Temple set off in the direction of St. Thomas’s Hospital, where he found Malo de Treguern abed, evidently weak but fully conscious.

  “What did you find out, Mr. Temple?” the Knight of St. John enquired. “Do you know what has become of Jean-Pierre?”

  “No, alas,” Temple confessed. “I nearly fell into the same trap myself—and I must confess to some slight surprise that you were spared.”

  “Spared?” Treguern queried, looking down at his bandaged arm. “They could have killed me had they wanted to, I suppose, but they certainly did not spare me. I’ve sustained worse wounds, in the days before the revolution, and lived to tell the tale, as I certainly hope to do again, but I’m no longer a young man.”

  “That,” said Temple, “is exactly why they might have taken you—but they were bravos acting under orders, and probably knew no more than I did that you would be accompanying Sévérin. Why were you with him?”

  “I heard that he was coming to England, with information relating to the vampire. I had information of my own, from the Church’s informants. Like him, I thought you should be apprised of it. Szandor and Addhema are in England. Byron having departed from Europe, their attention is now directed toward Victor Frankenstein again. Whether they intend to harm him, I cannot tell, but I am certain that they want to know his secret, and that they would use it if they could.”

  “I believe they would,” Temple agreed. “And you would go to any lengths to prevent that, I assume?”

  “I am sworn to uphold God’s law,” the warrior monk stated, proudly, “as you are sworn to uphold the law of England. Neither, I think, extends any tolerance to vampires or necromancers.”

  Temple frowned. “For the moment,” he said, “Victor Frankenstein is under the protection of His Majesty’s Government. Whether he will remain so depends on the outcome of an official Commission of Inquiry. I ought to remind you, Brother Malo, that the Roman Church has no authority on English soil.”

  “In this instance,” Treguern relied, “the Roman Church and the Church of England are in perfect agreement. Even your dissenters have no truck with necromancy. There is a Bishop on the Commission of Inquiry, is there not?”

  Temple nodded, unsurprised that the information in question had been communicated to the Knight of St. John. “The Bishop of Salisbury,” he confirmed. “Along with three members of the House of Commons, Robert Hastings, Stephen Southborne and John Medstead—two Tories and a Whig—and three men of science: Thomas Young, Peter Barlow and William Snow Harris. Michael Faraday would undoubtedly have been included had he not already involved himself with Crosse’s trial as an enthusiastic supporter. I do not know how many of them, apart from the Bishop, have strong religious convictions of one sort or another, but I suspect that God’s acknowledged servants might be in a majority”

  Malo de Treguern expressed his satisfaction with this judgment with a mere nod.

  “That might not be of any great consequence,” Temple added. “The genie is out of the bottle. Grey Men are being manufactured by the score, if not by the hundred, in Haiti, and it is only a matter of time before the practice spreads to Cuba and New Orleans. If the information transmitted by our diplomats is reliable, experiments are being conducted in Paris, Leipzig, St. Petersburg and Constantinople. This is the 19th century—religious objections tend to be set aside once the prospect of profit puts in an appearance, and governments have scented potential advantages in labor and in war. The only prospect worse than failing to seize an advantage in such matters is that of seeing others seize and exploit it instead. The competition has already been joined; the only question now is who will win; I believe that the parliamentarians will have been apprised of that, and that their scientific colleagues would not require any such formal instruction. The commission’s report will not be as reflexively negative as you might hope.”

  “Do not be so sure, Mr. Temple,” the knight said. “In any case, the commission’s report might be a minor matter of provocation. God has intervened before, with flood and fire, when blasphemy and corruption threatened His plan.”

  “There are many who would agree with you that London is the new Sodom, and Paris the new Gomorrah,” Temple conceded, “but the world is larger now than it was once imagined to be, and it would require a vast volcanic eruption to consume them both, and other dens of iniquity besides. Men of your kind are ever avid to preach that the world’s doom is imminent, but they have never been correct before. To make matters worse, from your point of view, Civitas Solis might gain the upper hand even within the Church, if its reignited research into the principles of longevity bears fruit.”

  Treguern looked at him long and hard, despite his evident weariness. “Have you been in recent contact with the man who calls himself Giuseppe Balsamo?” he asked, shrewdly.

  “Yes, less than a week ago,” Temple replied. “We are not friends, though. His associates arranged the kidnap of my grandson, in the course of a plot to capture Henri de Belcamp, alias Tom Brown—Germain Patou’s one-time collaborator.”

  “Balsamo and his associates are dangerous heretics,” said the warrior monk, “but the Vatican has their measure. They did capture the man you call John Devil, if the information transmitted by our diplomats is reliable, but he gave them the slip not long afterwards. They’re searching for him high and low—low being the more likely eventuality.”

  “He has friends in many strata of society,” Temple observed. “He undoubtedly has the ear of the Duchess of Devonshire as well as that of Jenny Paddock, and has probably doffed his Quaker hat to King George more than once. His mother taught him well, but she betrayed him in the end, although he swears that she was mistaken, and that he never intended to leave her for dead. On the last point, at least, I believe him—he did love his mother, and valued what she and Thomas Paddock taught him far more than the formal education for which his father paid.”

  That was not the information for which Malo de Treguern was fishing. “Was it his agents who attacked the mail coach, do you think?” he asked.

  “Unlikely,” said Temple, although he did not want to tell the Churchman about Sam Hopkey’s warning. “If I had to bet, my money would be on the Grafina von Boehm’s vehmgerichte. They’re the most aggressive of all the interested parties—although it would smack of ingratitude, after you and Sévérin came to their rescue at the new château in Miremont. Their resurgence is rumored to be due to the active involvement of the Bavarian Illuminati—who originated, I believe, as a splinter-group of Civitas Solis.”

  Treguern’s brow was furrowed and he was biting his lip. “I could imagine them pinking me, but scrupulously leaving me alive,” he said. “They have a peculiar notion of chivalry, more Romantic than Roman—but Sévérin is cut from different cloth. They’ll get nothing out of him.”

  “I doubt that information is what they want,” said Temple, thoughtfully. “They might well be interested in his experiences as a morgue-keeper, but it’s his own apparent possession of an innate elixir of long life that intrigues them far more. While they can’t lay their hands on Saint-Germain or the Jew…” He trailed off, provocatively.

  Treguern’s eyes narrowed, testifying to the fact that the names were not unknown to him, and their mention in connection with the present affair not entirely unexpected, but he rose no further to the bait than that. Like so many other players in the game, he did not regard Gregory Temple as an enemy, but nor did he regard him as a wholly trustworthy ally. “On that score,” the monk said, “they might have done better to take me as well, if they could; Sévérin and I are much the same age. How old ar
e you, Mr. Temple?”

  “Old enough for my name to have become legendary, in certain circles,” Temple admitted, “but I do not drink the blood of virgins, or feed gluttonously on the life-force of young men, else I’d have sucked the likes of Ned Knob and Sam Hopkey dry some years ago—and Tom Brown too, had I ever laid hands on him long enough to do it.”

  “You must not speak like that, Mr. Temple,” the Churchman told him. “Even jests can be blasphemous. I beg you to keep the Bishop safe when you escort your charges to Somerset, and not to be blinded yourself by whatever you see at Fyne Court. I would go with you if I could, and will follow when I can.”

  “I would rather you did not, Monsieur de Treguern,” Temple said. “My duty is complicated enough as it is.”

  “No, Mr. Temple,” Treguern retorted. “Your duty is perfectly clear and perfectly simple—it is your doubts that are clouding your judgment.”

  Chapter Three

  Fyne Court

  The next day, Temple and four agents of Lord Liverpool’s secret police met the members of the Parliamentary Commission at Paddington Green, from which westward-bound coaches set off at regular intervals, mostly bound for Bath or Bristol. The convoy that was to carry the expedition would take the Bath Road, and then depart from that city in a south-westward direction, heading for Taunton, and ultimately for Broomfield, the site of the ancestral home in which Andrew Crosse had installed the finest electrical laboratory in England.

  The commissioners, along with their servants and other companions—Hastings and Medstead were traveling with young women who were not their wives, as MPs far from their constituencies sometimes did when on official business—were divided into four carriages. One of Temple’s agents was instructed to ride with each carriage, seated next to the coachman. Temple rode a horse, sometimes at the head of the column and sometimes at the rear. The party changed horses twice before making its first substantial stop in Reading, and four times more before eventually reaching Bath, where it made an overnight stop.

  Temple was perfectly sure that Civitas Solis and at least one other organization must have spies among the women and the servants accompanying the commissioners, and perhaps among the commissioners themselves, but there was no way to identify them. His own men took care to eavesdrop on as many conversations as possible, and to report their substance back to him, but he did not expect anything to come of that, save for an estimate of the likely temper of the discussion that would follow Frankenstein’s demonstration, if it were to prove successful.

  At least three of the seven commissioners appeared to be convinced that it would not be successful, and that the whole affair would prove to be nothing but a hoax, but those who took the possibility seriously seemed direly suspicious of the whole business. The Bishop, in particular, freely expressed the opinion that if an appearance of life were to be returned to a corpse after death, the only possible cause would be its possession by a demon. He declared himself ready, materially and spiritually, to perform an exorcism if necessary, both to prove the point and rid the world of the demon in question.

  So far as Temple could judge from snatches of overheard conversation, it was the parliamentarians rather than the scientists who were most prepared to approach the question with open minds, ready to weight up the evidence presented to them. Whether or not the scientists were sincere Christians, their commitment of faith to the science they knew seemed unwavering, and two of them—the aging Young and the much younger Barlow—seemed to take it for granted that death was irreversible, and that whatever they saw when the demonstration was mounted would most probably be a hoax of some sort, achieved by means of trickery. Temple heard Young opine that the trickery would likely be mesmeric in kind, but Barlow would not even admit the honesty of mesmerism as a technique or an art.

  At dinner that evening, in Bath’s finest coaching inn, the Bishop addressed the whole company on the subject of the Devil’s wiles, and the possibility of an all-out assault by the legions of Hell on the human world, which had fallen too far into apostasy, thanks to the blasphemous ravages of Jacobin science. Temple noted, however, that although most of those present nodded politely, the men of science were definitely opposed to the Bishop’s views and the members of parliament seemed distinctly dubious. There was no talk of mesmerism while the company of travelers was at table, but there was a good deal of skeptical talk about progress, with Medstead the Whig seeming only a little less doleful in that regard than the two Tories.

  Material progress, according to Medstead, might well be linked to the progress of mores, but that did not mean that it was an unalloyed virtue in itself. Like most Whigs, he maintained mental balance-sheets whose accounts were scrupulously made up in terms of utilitarian calculations of arithmetically-expressed pros and cons. Not surprisingly, however, his remarks made no inroads in the Tories’ assumption, as voiced by Hastings, that technological progress was a mere fad, which served to deflect attention away from the moral progress that was humankind’s collective vocation, and that the moral progress in question had to be based in a sound understanding of humankind’s past and a ready appreciation of the causes of human folly.

  The scientists, not unnaturally, saw things differently. Young, in particular, agreed with the Bishop that progress in morals had reached its terminus in the teachings of Christ, which would have improved human society long ago had the mass of men ever been inclined to follow them, but contended that great strides had yet to be taken in the matter of progress in knowledge and the understanding of the natural world. All three of the men of science professed belief in natural theology: the doctrine that the proper study of mankind was God’s creation, and that every discovery of new phenomena and the laws controlling them brought the minds of men closer to the mind of the God who had designed and ordained those phenomena.

  But if I read the Book of Genesis right, Temple thought, death was no part of God’s original plan, at least so far as sentient and willful beings were concerned. It was a punishment that he inflicted on Adam and Eve for disobeying His instruction not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Perhaps it was always His plan—or His hope, at least—that knowledge would eventually lead humans back to a remedy for the plight, by one means or another. And perhaps God took care to ensure that there would be a choice of such means, in order that humans would have to take responsibility for the architecture of their own fate.

  He said none of that aloud, though; it was not his place. He contented himself with listening carefully to as many of the discussions taking place around the table as he could. There was little profit to be gained by such eavesdropping, however, from an intellectual as well as a political point of view. Eventually, as his overloaded head began to swim, he cursed himself for his insatiable curiosity. A wiser man, he thought, might have abandoned all philosophizing about progress long ago, having discovered that it did not lead anywhere but around in circles

  On the following day, the expedition’s own progress—construed in a purely practical sense—became much slower, the roads leading westwards from Bath having not been maintained as well as the highway connecting that city to the capital. It was by no means unknown for such roads to become quite impassable between late December and early March, but the cold snap that had descended upon the country in the last few days had arrived in the wake of a relatively dry and balmy spell, and the frost did not linger long in the ground once the Sun came up. The gradual ascent into the Mendip Hills posed difficulties, but the four carriages were the sturdiest that government money could hire, and there were no major mishaps apart from the customary instances of lameness among the 16 horses, which did not slow them down overmuch in site of the relative infrequency of relay stations.

  Temple maintained his vigilance, in spite of a near-total recent lack of natural sleep, but there seemed to be no sign of danger, and the commission’s members seemed quite safe in their apparent relaxation. Their relaxation was manifest—a tendency Temple had often observed in London-dwellers when they
left the capital for the country. It was as if they were making a crossing from one world to another, where time slowed in its pace and the inert mass of the past reasserted its dominance over the seductive magnetism of the future.

  If the conversations of the scientists and parliamentarians ever took on a sinister edge, it happened while Temple was out of earshot; he saw and heard nothing but everyday pleasantries and friendly banter. He continued nevertheless to watch the road like a hawk, and to listen in on the conversations going on inside the carriages, even though both exercises had come to seem like wasted effort. Nothing was said that might have betrayed an individual who was not what he claimed to be, and there were no armed confrontations, even on the minor roads taken by the carriages in order to avoid the city of Bath entirely, its temporary and permanent inhabitants having been reduced to penury and crime, wittingly or not, by dire and stubborn circumstance.

  Even though no attempt was made to interfere with the convoy, Temple was heartily glad to see the rooftops of Fyne Court appear. The house was said to have been built during the reign of Charles I, but had obviously been extensively modernized, Andrew Crosse’s taste for the contemporary obviously extending far beyond his scientific adventures. Crosse had the local reputation of being a wizard rather than a man of science, intent on mocking God by aping His creation of a human being out of common clay, but Temple knew how easily gaudily-clad rumor may outstrip dull reality in the eyes and memories of men; for that reason, Temple supposed that Crosse was merely a rich man who had taken up electrical science as a hobby, much as his ancestors might have taken up the study of astrology or alchemy, and that he was much misunderstood by his neighbors.

  The arrival was inevitably hectic, with trunks being transported from the carriages into various quarters of the house according to the instructions of Crosse’s butler, a typical domestic tyrant named Caddick. Temple and his men were, of course, given rooms in the servants’ quarters, although Temple was immediately summoned to meet Andrew Crosse and his guests in the library.