“She is here,” she whispered.
“No!” I tried to cry out. The word was unintelligible, crushed to a groan.
Afterward Lily looked down at me as from a great height and laughed.
“I have never lain with a corpse before. And now I have.”
Still laughing, she pushed away and quickly dressed.
For a hellish eternity I lay on the stone willing myself to do no more than breathe. If I moved, it would be to murder her.
At last I found pen and ink and paper and set down the above, writing into existence a tether to hold my sanity tight.
Having written down my torment, writing again now hours later, I still feel violence pulse beneath my skin in the hot throb of my heart, in the steady tick of the tiniest vein. In violence I was all and everything, I was my own creation. Now, without the snapping of bones and the pouring out of blood, what am I?
A monster would have killed her. And though the coldest part of me can see that her proud armor is insanity, the larger part of me knows that a man would have left. Once I was at least one of these. Now I am neither.
January 5
Days now since I have written.
Days since my mind has thought in words.
Days and days with but the thread of silence to stitch the days together.
If Doughall MacGregor heard the silence between us, he did not remark upon it when I sought him out in Orphir to take us away from the accursed Orkneys and sail us back to John o’Groat’s. Instead he filled the silence with the sound of his own voice, once more spinning tales of life on the sea. It was late by the time we landed, and MacGregor invited us to spend the night before moving on to wherever our next destination might be.
“Granny has more room than me,” he said, “but in the week since I’ve seen you she was nae murdered twice, and I dare nae send you back to her.”
With a nod I accepted, deciding that this very night I would leave the cottage as he and Lily slept. In the silence I had come as far as that, knowing I must quit Lily’s presence or myself go mad. If her father’s image again tried to summon up my culpability, this time I could chase it back down to darkness with the knowledge that MacGregor was a good man: I could leave her with no better protector.
After a dinner of fish chowder, which Lily did not eat—prompting a new set of tales from MacGregor about privations forced on him at sea—I stood up and said I would walk along the beach for a time. Lily eagerly ran to the door ahead of me, as if she knew my intentions and thought that this was when I would abandon her.
I set off briskly. If I could not leave this moment, at least I might so exhaust her she would sleep more soundly than usual tonight and not hear me steal away. The evening was pleasant enough for a long walk—mild, windless, and with a rare warmth. Sunset painted the air an ever-darkening red, till at last sea and sand blended invisibly, marked only by an occasional faint glimmer from a rush of foam.
“Wait,” Lily called at last. Struggling in the sand, she had fallen behind. I stopped and looked backward. I could no longer see the lights from MacGregor’s cottage.
“Take my arm, Victor,” she said. “I am tired and ready to go back. Besides, you have ignored me all day.” She spoke as easily as if we had conversed this evening and the days before it. “It is one thing to ignore me when we are alone and quite another when others are present,” she said. “I would have you show me the respect I’m due. Perhaps, when my house is restored and I return home, I will find a position for you—something in the garden, I think, since you have such a fine talent for digging.”
She floundered in the soft sand, then struggled to her feet, and slapped at her dirty trousers. Was she incensed because she had fallen or because I would not play at being her servant? It did not matter. Tonight all this would end.
“My arm, Victor.” She waved it impatiently. “I need you to guide me back. I do not have your cat’s eyes!”
“Now there’s an ugly thought,” I said. “Perhaps it’s true. Or perhaps I merely see with the eyes of a man who has long had the habit of darkness.”
“You see with a man’s eyes? Oh yes,” she said hotly. “That means you see nothing at all!”
Refusing to be baited, I moved past her to return to MacGregor’s.
“Do you understand, Victor?” she asked, her voice rising. “You demanded an answer from me. Now I ask you, Do you understand? Of course you don’t!” She grabbed at me. “You are as blind as any man, blind now with stupidity, that night blind with lust.”
“Blind?”
“I offer you a position in the grandest house in Northumberland,” she said, “and your silent refusal is full of contempt: ‘I am too good to serve her now because I have seen her tremble with pleasure.’ That night you saw only what you wanted to see. Just as you did not see what you did not want to see.”
“You are right, Lily, I do not understand,” I said gently, taking her arm to coax her into returning. My time with her was now short enough to count by hours, and that helped me keep my patience.
“Poor Victor. In your blindness, you did not see I was not a virgin. You did not see there was no blood to mark my purity.” Her grin yielded to disgust. “I have not seen blood of any sort these past six months.”
“Six months?”
“I am with child, Victor! I was three months gone when you first arrived at my estate. Did you think I would otherwise let you touch me? You didn’t see my hatred, just as all along you did not see my swelling stomach.” She turned on me. “Could I not have been plainer? Did I not say a thousand times how the worm battens on me like the leech it is?”
“The worm. I thought it was the bloat of disease. I thought you were dying.”
“It is a sickness, and I am dying. I know what children make of a woman—nothing! I will be like our little songbird, Cassie Burke.” She pressed her hands to her temples. “I drank Biddy Josephs’ foul expellants. I followed you, enduring arduous travel, galloping on horses, starving myself to starve it. I deliberately taunted you that night in the cottage so you would strike me. You turned away at the last moment, and the brat is with me yet.” She continued bitterly: “I had hoped the doctor in Drexham would rip it out. He would not. But the thing is small, small enough for you to have deceived yourself. Its size is my final hope—that it will not survive being born. If it does, it most assuredly won’t survive its first few moments of mothering.”
I sat down, my legs unable to support me.
“Who is the father?” I asked. “Surely not the man you married?”
“My parents thought the brat was yours, that you had been at Tarkenville long before you showed yourself.”
“Mine?” Laughter burst from my lips.
“That is why my father would have killed you, because you had violated his daughter, no matter how willing she might have been, no matter how sympathetic he was to you.”
“How did your parents find out you were with child?”
“I dismissed my maid as soon as I realized that she would have no bloody rags to wash when I claimed myself to be indisposed. I imagined myself growing fatter by the minute and took back from the servants my old Empire gowns. They had already been decades out of fashion when I gave them away, but they were loose and needed no corsets. I began wearing a shawl everywhere, even to the costume party. All of this was to keep eyes from what I believed was my swelling belly. All it did was draw eyes to my unexpected behavior. Lily Winterbourne dressing herself? Washing her own rags? Wearing out-of-date dresses? We betray ourselves, don’t we? In the end, we have no need of enemies.”
She pursed her lips, angry at herself.
“My mother guessed, and I did not deny it. She arranged a hasty wedding. She had my many suitors from which to choose,” Lily said, smoothing her jacket like a bird preening. “The man asked no questions. He was half-dead already. He believed that, at worst, he would die soon anyway, but die a happy man; at best, he might be revived for another year by such a pretty young wi
fe.”
“What of the worm?” I asked, for I could call it nothing but that.
“I planned to have a secret confinement and a stillbirth.”
“A stillbirth. Ah, yes, your mothering.” I raked my fingers across my scalp. “Who fathered the child?” I asked again. A dozen faces from the costume party appeared in my mind. “Did he not care what would happen?”
“I do not know who the father is, Victor, and thus he does not know.” Her eyes gleamed and a sly smile tugged at her lips. “In truth, I didn’t run with the hounds at night for their sport, but for my own.”
Her words were beyond comprehension.
“Why have you stayed with me?” I asked. “Such a husband as you took could not really care about your virtue.”
“Do not underestimate how proprietary a husband feels about his wife, especially one he has so plainly purchased,” Lily said. “I was no untried maiden. That he knew—although he did not know about the worm—and that he could accept. But once I was his wife, another man’s hands on me would have been an insult—your hands unthinkable.
“There were other reasons, too, why I remained with you.” She looked out toward the sound of the ocean, as the sea was by now invisible in the dark. “When you abducted me, I had the idea of staying away till I could destroy the worm on my own. I would no longer have need for a husband. But how can a woman travel without a companion? I needed you as an escort. Also my lovely house was ruined. I needed time for the restorations before I could return and reclaim my … my … And by then, too …”
She stopped speaking.
“What, Lily? What other justification did your warped logic present?”
“You shall never know me!” she cried heatedly. “Never!”
“I don’t want to.”
As if one mask replaced another, the anger drained from Lily’s face and her features settled first into calmness, then a slow smile. She crossed the few feet of sand that separated us, bent down to where I sat, caressed my cheek with a single finger, leaned closer still, and pressed her hungry mouth on mine. Hesitant, I tried to read her eyes; they were too dark, the night too dark as well. Without thought, my lips parted beneath hers. My fingers circled her waist, and I pulled her down next to me. I was repelled by her; that did not prevent my body from wanting hers.
Did all flesh betray men’s souls so easily, or was it only the nature of mine, as each disparate limb battled to achieve its own will?
Her breath at my ear echoed the roar of the ocean, the roar of the blood in my veins, and she whispered, “You may now be as close to hating me, to hurting me, as you have ever been,” she said, “yet you desire me still.”
I shoved her backward onto the sand, shook the numbness from my legs, and returned to MacGregor’s. Laughing, my eager pet followed close behind.
The cottage windows were dark, all lamps put out save one. It was not so late that MacGregor should have retired, unless he dozed waiting for us. Not wanting to startle him, I tapped on the door before opening it.
“MacGregor?” I called softly.
Beyond the unexpected darkness, nothing seemed amiss and I stepped inside.
“Doughall?”
MacGregor lay in the far corner, his burly form limp, a knife protruding from his bloodstained chest.
Lily peered from around my back.
“He’s dead!”
“Yes, he’s dead,” said a voice from the shadows. “He said he was your friend. He left me no choice. I have no friends, so you may have none.”
Two boots appeared next to MacGregor’s head as a figure lurched from the shadows into the light of the dying fire. Slowly, fearfully, my gaze moved upward … from legs, their knees tortuously bent … to a hunched body … to the face, dry and leprous white in some places and in others, raw with scarcely healed scars that matched my own. I could almost see smoke still emanating from the burnt skin.
“I am as ugly as you now,” Walton said. His eyes traveled to Lily’s abdomen. “But I see I am not your first creation.”
“You’re alive!”
“Hatred has wonderful resuscitative powers.”
Lily stepped in front of me to question her uncle.
“Has my house been restored? Did the workmen try to cheat me?”
I grabbed her shoulders from behind and forced her to her knees.
“Here stands your uncle whom we thought dead,” I said, “someone with sure knowledge of your mother, and you ask about your house? Ask about your mother, Lily!”
“My sister died of a broken heart thinking I was dead.”
Margaret dead? I had orphaned Lily and laid more guilt upon my weary shoulders. With Margaret dead and MacGregor, too, how could I leave her now? Standing behind her, I could not see if her confused mind understood what had just been said.
“Your mother died the night of the fire,” Walton said. “Did he tell you how he burned the house to the ground? I was caught in the worst of it. My clothes, my hair lit up, and I threw myself out the window to escape. My dear Margaret covered my broken body with hers to beat out the flames.” His rough voice harshened: “As she lay on me, her weight sank into my burned flesh. I screamed, but my tongue was silent. I could not make a noise, I could not move, I could not breathe. She thought I was dead and died right there herself, her poor heart giving way to sorrow.”
There was no candle of clarity in his eyes, only impenetrable blackness.
He was my twin, my likeness, and he was a horror.
So long a time had passed with scarcely a word between us—until tonight, this flood of insanity, scarcely minutes removed from Lily’s own shocking revelations, and with MacGregor’s murdered body still at my feet.
“Ten years!” I cried. “Ten years you have hunted me. Ten years you have murdered anyone who might have had so little as a soft word for me,” I said, gesturing to MacGregor. “Why? For a few days’ acquaintance with a stranger and a story he told, fit for a fairy tale?”
“A stranger? You robbed me of the only man who knew my soul!”
The outburst cost him, and Walton had to gasp for each breath. He limped past the body, lowered himself into a rocking chair, and put his hands on the armrests. In the light of the dying fire, I saw the empty space at his knuckles where he was missing the middle finger. With a smile he held out his gnarled hand.
“Do you keep it on you as a talisman?” he asked. “And the ring? Or did you give the ring to your whore?”
I shook my head. “Both are below the ice,” I said.
“As is my ship.”
“Nature sank your ship, not I.”
“And was it Nature that mutilated me?” he asked. “That stole from me the pole and the world’s love and forgiveness? That forced me to be a saint while the demon was fruitful and multiplied?”
His eyes were blank, his tone flat, his face expressionless. This apathy, these strange words intimating carnality, were more frightening than his anger and more provocative.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“You are a beast,” Walton answered. “It is not in you to understand, only to kill.”
Lily stepped between us.
Perhaps wishing to reclaim the attention, she kicked MacGregor stoutly and with a giggle said, “Poor Granny. It was not for herself she should have feared murderers.”
Walton and Lily: such was humanity, which I would become.
I began to retch.
“See, Victor? I was right not to eat the chowder.”
Laughter bubbled from my lips as I wiped away vomit. We were all mad, all those within this room, all those without—all the world, mad.
“Winterbourne warned me,” I said. “He warned me of the Walton blood.”
“Winterbourne is a fool,” Walton sneered. “Margaret is better off dead.”
I looked up sharply.
“He did not die? Lily’s father still lives?”
“He is not her father,” Walton said. “And yes, the fool lives.”
“Did you hear that, Lily?” I cried. “Your father is alive!” I wanted to exclaim, “My father is alive.” I did not know my full burden of grief till released from it. Dizzy, I leaned against the wall for support.
“The house is not yet mine? Oh, Victor!” she cried.
“Victor?” Walton’s ugly face was made more horrible by rage. “You dare take Frankenstein’s name? And you”—he turned to Lily—“how is it you address him so familiarly?” Cracked lips pulled back in revulsion, he looked at each of us, then spat into the fire. “What you’ve done is far worse than your mother feared.”
“That I would learn to love the monster?” Simpering, Lily stroked my body intimately and pressed herself against me in mock seduction. “Yes, I do.”
I shoved her away, saying, “You think to torment me. You only put yourself in danger!”
“From him?”
The words were not from her lips when Walton leapt up and from MacGregor’s body grabbed the knife from his chest. By the time he had wrenched the blade free from the bone, I had grabbed an iron pot from the hearth.
He threw himself at Lily.
In my moment of surprise, Walton slashed at her viciously. He aimed at her throat, overreached, and struck high across her cheek and tripped. As he fell, I slammed the pot across the side of his head. He collapsed, knife still clutched in his fist.
Panting heavily, he looked up at me. His insanity lifted a moment, giving me a view of darkness beneath a dark veil, and he said, “Kill me now, for that is your only chance, and hers.”
The pulse of death throbbed in my fingers; still, in this single night, I had become more human than the people before me.
Should I kill a crippled madman now, while Winterbourne waited?
I grabbed Lily and quickly pulled her stumbling after me out into the night.
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