“Given up, sir?” the other queried. “I haven’t given up—I’m just looking elsewhere. Whatever that creature is, it doesn’t lack cunning. If I were in her place, I’d have doubled back already. Your men aren’t exactly subtle in their procedures, if you’ll forgive the observation.”
“And what will you do with her if you find her?”
The other raised an eyebrow, mugging as if he were onstage in Jenny Paddock’s cabaret theatre. “Do you take me for one of the pantomime villains I play, sir? Do you imagine that my mind is bent on rape? I can assure you that I’ll be the perfect gentleman, as solicitous as a benevolent uncle.”
“You mean that you’ll help her escape—all the way to London, if you can.”
The valet shrugged. “Won’t be easy, sir,” he said, “given that I’m more-or-less alone. You wouldn’t care to come to some arrangement, I suppose—just between ourselves?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Temple said, through gritted teeth—although he was not entirely certain of the wisdom of his reflexive hostility.
“There’s gratitude for you,” the valet replied, seemingly unoffended. “Watch out for the vampire, sir—he’s a tricky one, by all accounts.” And with that, he continued on his way back toward Fyne Court, leaving Temple alone with the chatter of birdsong and rustlings in the undergrowth that might have been anything at all.
Chapter Six
A Voice from Beyond
Temple stood where he was for three minutes more, listening. There was no sign of anyone else returning from the hunt, and the girl’s pursuers had passed out of earshot, probably on a wild goose chase.
Satisfied that there was no point in continuing, Temple turned to follow Southborne’s valet, and nearly jumped out of his skin. The grey girl had obviously been standing behind him for a minute or more, waiting for him to turn round.
“I believe I need your help, sir,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, a trifle numbly, “I believe you do,”
“I heard you shouting to the men who were chasing me, instructing them not to hurt me,” she said, explaining her decision to approach him, “but I don’t know who you are.”
“Gregory Temple,” the ex-detective told her. “I’m in the employ of His Majesty’s government. I escorted a seven-man commission here from London, to bear witness to your resurrection.”
“My resurrection?”
Temple hesitated, then said: “Yes—that’s what has happened to you. Were you not aware of that?”
“Are you saying that I really did die? That it was not a dream?”
“Yes—you were drowned.”
“Murdered?”
“An accident, I believe. Do you have any reason to think that you might have been murdered?”
“No.” The denial did not seem certain.
“But you remember who you are—were—now? You’ve recovered your memory?”
The grey girl stared at him, quizzically. “I’m not the person I remember,” she said, echoing what Szandor had told him, and what General Mortdieu had apparently told Ned Knob. “Yes, I do remember her—but she was a feeble thing. I feel quite different now. I feel…but I don’t have the words to describe it. I do have words that aren’t my own, though…words that were somehow put into my head.”
“By a mesmerist,” Temple told her. “He was intent on controlling you, and expected to find you far more vulnerable than you were. He had a script all prepared for you, but you wouldn’t respond to his prompts. Perhaps his attempted insistence brought forth an instinctive resistance of some sort. He did save your life, though, when that fool Southborne threw the dagger.”
“Yes,” the grey girl said, vaguely. “He talked about supplying me with words before…”
“Before?” Temple queried. “Before you died, you mean? You had met him before?” Suddenly, he wondered very forcefully whether the girl’s drowning had been something other than an accident. If so, it would not take much imagination to guess who might have been responsible, whether directly or indirectly.
“It was prophesied that I would die,” the girl said, still seemingly lost in something akin to a dream, albeit with elements of cruel reality contained within it. “It was also prophesied that I would emerge from the chrysalis of death as a different kind of being, as unlike my old self as a butterfly is to a caterpillar.”
So she had already been primed, Temple thought, with the sentiments she expressed to Hastings and the Bishop—they merely failed to emerge on cue. Szandor was taking no chances; he intended to rig the entire exhibition—but if he was prepared to commit murder to do it, I ought to bring him to justice, if I can.
There were, however, more urgent matters at hand. What was he to do with the girl, now that she was in his custody? How could he keep her safe, and away from all the other parties avid to interrogate her?
“Are you cold?” he asked her.
She nodded to indicate that she was, although she did not seem entirely certain. She knew, at least, that she ought to be feeling the cold.
Temple took off his jacket and wrapped her in it. He could not immediately think of any place of safety to which they might go, let alone any in which he could leave her while he attended to his duties back at Fyne Court. “What’s your name?” he asked
“I was Helen,” she replied.
“Well, she-who-was-Helen, we need to find a hiding-place for you. If your memories are intact, you must know the neighborhood far better than any of the people chasing you just now—perhaps better than the servants at Fyne Court. Is there anywhere close at hand where you might be safe, until I can help you get away?”
“I know these woods,” she said. “They won’t catch me here. Her father was the finest poacher in the county.” She spoke with pride; presumably, that was not an idea that Szandor had planted in her head.
“In that case,” Temple said, “We need to arrange a meeting place—somewhere to which I can bring a carriage, or at least a pair of horses. Can you ride?”
“Of course I can,” she replied. “They don’t own a horse, but her father and her brother have worked in stables. She’s ridden a post horse—they’re the fastest.”
“That’s good,” Temple said. “Horses it shall be. Pick a good spot, where we won’t be seen.”
“Take the Taunton road,” she said, after a moment’s pause for thought. “There’s a broken signpost by a sunken path, about a mile from the Court. Take the sunken road, as far as the ford in the hollow. Wait there—I’ll try to make sure that you haven’t been followed before I show myself. Best not wait for dusk, though—it’s a treacherous place in the dark.”
Once they were mounted, Temple thought, it would be very difficult for anyone to chase them, provided that their horses were fit enough and fast enough. “I’ll get away when I can,” he promised, “but it probably won’t be before noon.”
She took off his jacket and handed it back. “Best return as you came,” she said. “I’ll be fine, I think. I do feel the cold, but…I’m not sure that it can harm me now.”
Temple hesitated, wondering whether it might not be better simply to take the girl back to Fyne Court, and protect her there as best he could—but he was even more convinced now that he could not trust the vampire, and was certainly not about to put his trust in Southborne’s valet. While Szandor was disguised as Singer, he could not count on Crosse or Faraday either. He cursed his misfortune in being so far from the capital. If only the Necromancers of London had been invited to do their work close to home, instead of being exiled to a supposedly safe distance!
Frankenstein, he knew, would not be ripe for revival for at least 72 hours, and perhaps considerably longer. He might have time to get the girl to London and return, although that would certainly violate his instructions and put his official position in even greater jeopardy. He needed a secure hiding-place much nearer to Fyne Court, from which he could come and go at will.
“Go, then,” he said to the girl. “I’ll come when I can. I’l
l do everything possible to keep you safe.”
The grey girl disappeared into the undergrowth, sand Temple went back to the house. It was a further hour before his men returned, quite empty-handed. Crosse had volunteered to mobilize his servants to beat the woods, but Temple had declined the offer, saying that it would be better not to frighten the girl, and that the wisest course was simply to send someone to wait for her at her parent’s house, to which she would undoubtedly return.
It took the detective until 2 p.m. to make his preparations with what he considered to be necessary discretion—by which time he had reason enough to borrow a pair of horses, ostensibly in order to relieve the man he had sent to the village.
He waited for a full hour at the appointed place, but the girl never showed up. Eventually, he returned to the house cursing his bad judgment, but privately convinced that someone else had captured her. If so, she had not been brought back to the house.
The agents of Civitas Solis were unlikely, in Temple’s judgment, to have any kind of priory nearby, but that did not mean that they did not have friends in the vicinity, especially if William Snow Harris had already been affiliated to their cause. If that really were the case, Harris would undoubtedly take it upon himself to sound out Faraday and Crosse with a view to their recruitment—but with luck, he would try to sound out Singer too, and get more than he bargained for.
Temple did relieve the man he had left at Helen’s old home, but instructed him to send another man out as soon as he got back to Fyne Court, so that Temple need not be too long away. He used the interval to question Helen’s parents about her life, and about any strangers she might have met in the days leading up to her death. Of the latter matter they clamed to know nothing at all, but they answered all of his questions as one might expect of a poacher and his wife confronted with the former cream of Scotland Yard: evasively and with a great deal of suspicion.
Once he was back at Fyne Court, Temple set about interviewing the members of the Commission, to determine what their thoughts might be on the matter of continuing and completing the Inquiry. Six were immediately willing, being curious themselves as to what might become of Victor Frankenstein—Southborne, in particular, expressed a strong interest in seeing him revived—and the seventh, the Bishop of Salisbury, was easily convinced that there was God’s work to be done in any event, albeit best done in a quieter fashion than he had so far contrived.
Eventually, Temple found an opportunity to talk to George Singer again. “What did you do to that girl?” he demanded.
Singer seemed to consider a flat denial, but then shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing too terrible, as you have seen,” he answered. “If I contrived her death, it was in the knowledge—or, at least, the conviction—that it would not be irreversible. It appears that I was more successful than I hoped in planting seeds of suggestion in her mind prior to death, in the hope that they would enhance her capacity to return. Sometimes, I even surprise myself. Have you caught her, then?”
“I think Balsamo’s followers might have spirited her away.”
“Really? I thought you capable of outwitting them—but no matter. Tomorrow might go better; I had no opportunity to plant any seeds in the minds of the other two poor fellows. On the other hand, they might not revive at all, and if they do, their mental faculties might be beyond the reach of my talents as a mesmerist, redoubtable though they are.”
As things turned out, however, the second day’s demonstration did not go well at all. The attempted resurrection failed completely. That would have disconcerted Faraday and Crosse in any case, but it was doubly disconcerting in the circumstances, for they could not be sure that they had not erred in some respect, where Frankenstein would have succeeded.
“We have his instructions,” Faraday opined, in Temple’s presence, “but not his genius. He would have displayed a surer touch—of that we may be certain.”
“But the method works,” Singer put in. “Given that, you will surely succeed—if not tomorrow, then some time thereafter.”
“But dare we take the risk of trying to restore Frankenstein to life, until we have made certain that we are capable of success?” Crosse asked
“Dare we take the risk of not making the attempt?” Singer countered. “We did not expect to reach this situation, but now that we have, the members of the spoiled Commission of Inquiry must still be satisfied—and I cannot see that we can satisfy them now, except by bringing Victor back to life. The gauntlet has been thrown at our feet, and we are honor-bound pick it up. We must meet the challenge.”
“What do you think, Mr. Temple?” Crosse asked, although Faraday frowned at the notion of consulting a layman on what he considered to be largely a matter of science.
“My first duty is to protect the Commission,” Temple said. “I suspect that my superiors might judge that I have already failed in that—but I have a corollary duty to protect the demonstrators who are presenting their evidence to the Commission. In that respect, I wonder whether there might be any danger to Frankenstein in trying to revive him too soon?”
“Too soon?” Faraday muttered. “Like Singer, I’m more afraid of leaving it too late.”
“If the fluid and moderate electrical excitation do not restore his pulse, however, we dare not take him out of the womb,” Crosse said. “Not tomorrow, at any rate. Even the poor soul we lost today showed slight signs of life before fading into oblivion.”
“Some sort of bodily circulation is definitely necessary to restored life,” Singer stated, without specifying the reasons for his certainty, “but I’m confident that Frankenstein will recover that more rapidly than the common run of the dead. We shall be glad to have him in reserve, if the third trial fails—no one will pay much heed to that, in the circumstances; the denouement will depend entirely on the fourth act.”
He was correct in his estimation; the third trial also failed, although it came within a whisker of success. The dead man revived sufficiently to sit up, but not to stand upright or to talk, and soon lapsed into inertia again. No one seemed to care; many of the observers invited from outside the Court had not even bothered to turn up. The exhibition that everyone wanted to see was the unscheduled fourth one, when Victor Frankenstein would be brought back from the dead—or not.
Faraday and Crosse seemed to be divided in their opinions as to the wisdom of trying to revive Frankensein a mere three days after his death, but that gave Singer a casting vote of sorts, and his mind was made up.
“Three days is a propitious interval,” the vampire said. “It carries symbolic meaning for the Bishop, and for his supposedly-devout companions. Besides, the freshness of the body might well be more important than the length of exposure to the preliminary treatment. If we fail, we shall still have the possibility of trying again, but if we succeed…well, think of that, gentlemen. What if we succeed?”
The Necromancers of London could not prevail against the Vampire of Szeged; his arguments would probably have been sufficient even without his additional means of persuasion—and so it was that the audience assembled for a fourth time on the afternoon following the second failure, abuzz with anticipation.
There had been no sign of the grey girl anywhere in the neighborhood, but Southborne’s valet had taken the trouble to tell Temple that Tom Brown had been alerted to the circumstances, and would have the roads west of the capital under careful surveillance. “He’d better pray, then,” Temple had observed, sourly, “that they have not taken her to the Bristol Channel to put her aboard a boat or a ship.” The spy had not had any reason to dispute that possibility.
The audience for the demonstration was larger than any of its predecessors, several of the household servants having found excuses to be in the room, and many of the Commission’s hangers-on, including the two whores, having also worked their way into the company. Victor Frankenstein had become a famous man, albeit as a Gothic villain whose shady reputation was akin to Lord Byron’s notoriety. No one doubted that his return from the world b
eyond would be a momentous occasion, or that any news he might bring back from the afterlife could be anything other than significant. The Bishop was not the only person carrying a crucifix, though, and there was actually a queue of people wanting his blessing before the ceremony began.
The general procedure was identical to the three previous occasions, but it was conducted with a manifest dignity that increased its ritual air. As on the first day, it required three administrations of electrical current to restore any semblance of life to the corpse, but, as on the first day, three sufficed.
The room was filled with a pregnant silence as Crosse and Singer lent the individual who had been Victor Frankenstein the support he needed to sit upright. Singer was not so quick to ask questions this time, however; he remained at Frankenstein’s side, but watched as if mesmerized himself while the new Grey Man surveyed the audience with his bleak but trenchant gaze.
In the end, it was Faraday who stepped forward to ask: “Do you know me, Victor?”
The Grey Man turned his head in order to study Faraday carefully. There was a long pause before he finally said: “Yes.”
Temple repressed a perverse urge to giggle.
“Who am I?” Faraday asked, innocently.
“Michael Faraday,” said the Grey Man, forming the syllables slowly, almost as if he were uncertain of the use of his vocal apparatus.
“And who are you?” Faraday asked.
After another pause, Frankenstein said: “Victor.”
Temple could not help noting that Faraday had already called him by that name, but the scientist seemed to be satisfied that the response was no mere echo.
“Do you remember what happened here three days ago?” Faraday asked—unwisely, in Temple’s opinion. The detective looked at Southborne; the latter’s face was quite white, as if he fully expected the living corpse to point an accusing finger at him, in the fashion of a ghost in a stage melodrama.
“We brought the girl back to life,” was Frankenstein’s answer. Perhaps, Temple thought, he had not had time to form a memory of what had happened thereafter.
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