Pride and Prometheus

by John Kessel

  The Creature watched me silently. His eyes never moved from her naked body, so pale, so small in comparison to his own.

  It was time to fold her into the trunk I had prepared. “Help me now,” I told him.

  Her joints were stiff, and it was only with difficulty that we were able to fold her, kneeling, inside the trunk. As I pressed the back of her head down to close the lid over her, he spoke. “Don’t hurt her.”

  “She cannot be hurt,” I told him. “She is dead.”

  “Let me,” he said.

  He put either of his huge hands on the sides of her torso and subtly adjusted her body so that there was more space to fold her forward. He held the back of her neck in one hand and adjusted it so that her chin lay close to her breast. “Now,” he said.

  The lid closed over her and I screwed it shut.

  “Tomorrow I will return with some draymen to retrieve this trunk and send it ahead to Edinburgh. I do not wish to see you again until my task is complete.”

  He stared at me with malevolence, then strode out of the barn. When I had packed my other equipment and came out after him, he was nowhere to be seen.

  I rode back to the town, contemplating the recent events. The younger Miss Bennet’s sudden demise would save my family, and by extension the human race, from the consequences of my mistakes: her body would become the armature on which I would construct the Creature’s mate. I wished it could have come without bringing such grief to Mary Bennet and her family, but I could not but think it was fate that had brought us together again.

  The next day I returned to the barn with two draymen. We had just gotten back to the inn, and I was directing them to load my additional equipment, when to my immense surprise Mary Bennet herself accosted me. The fact that she had driven from Pemberley alone indicated that she was in a desperate emotional state. She looked half-wild with agitation.

  I hurried her away from the inn, worried that if she spoke with Henry she might discover that I had been absent that whole night. I was right to worry: the purpose of her coming was to charge the Creature with stealing Kitty’s body. She looked so distraught that it was all I could do not to tell her the truth, but I was compelled to equivocate. I embraced her and she cried upon my shoulder.

  How charming Mary had seemed when she had recited Erasmus Darwin’s poem to me a week ago. How taken I had been by her earnestness, her attempts at a coquette’s boldness that only exposed her innocence. And the longer I saw her, the more I recognized a certain slightly disproportionate beauty in her face, and began to have affection for her physical awkwardness. My heart had indulged for a moment the distraction she provided, and I had imagined a visit to her brother’s estate might come as a welcome respite. Perhaps this had all been part of some grand design to bring me, not to her, but to Kitty. Seeing Mary in the company of her sisters and her distinguished brothers-in-law gave me a better sense of the life she had led. Men like Darcy formed the upright backbone of English society. Her sister Elizabeth was a sharp observer of this world, her sister Jane a deft mistress of it. They were the noblest expression of British womanhood, graceful and accomplished guardians of propriety.

  The world of comfort and responsibility they lived in was not so different from the one in which I had grown up. Like my good father, they possessed a magnanimous willingness to relax the strictures of behavior for the ones they loved—provided no one overstepped the bounds that would make them unacceptable to polite society. This sphere I had ceased to live in the moment I had brought my Creature to life. I lived in a different world now. The grisly secrets I concealed, the unholy actions I had taken and must still take, would seem a deranged fancy in Darcy’s sitting room; no wonder I could not speak them. They would never cross the mind of Bingley or Darcy or certainly of their wives—but Mary?

  Perhaps. Mary was not so suited to the world she grew up in. She was an odd fish. She imagined things that her family thought outrageous, and cared for things that they thought silly, and to that one might add her unschooled, childlike moral vision. So she had in complete ignorance discomfited me with her account of Aldini and his experiment with the hanged man. It showed how the misery of my situation had disordered my judgment. I should never have told her my story. In retrospect it was clear that she had not surmised what I had been about. But the fact that I had told her made it imperative for me to put her curiosity to rest.

  She was easy to lie to, and, I had discovered, I was a good liar. I regretted deceiving her. Her intellect was great, but her ability to see through sham was undeveloped, and a kiss on her forehead drove away every thought behind it.

  I had solved the problem of Mary Bennet, but the problem of Henry Clerval remained.

  Following our departure from Matlock, on his insistence Henry and I passed two months in the Lake District. We took a cottage in Grasmere, from which we made excursions upon the fells. In that summer season we climbed the highest peak in Britain, followed freshets of mountain streams, sailed on lakes the color of deep blue metal, circled herds of bleating sheep on hillsides, and picnicked in the picturesque ruins of old cottages shadowed by verdant green woods. Even more here than in Matlock, the landscape resembled that of our native country.

  Though we were far from the city bustle that had engaged Henry in London, or from the clubs and colleges of Oxford, Henry was pleased to meet with the various poets and writers who had made this countryside famous: Romantics who wrote verses about Nature and the Soul and the Immaterial World, who took laudanum and theorized about the transcendental and practiced Socratic love. Aging litterateurs who in their youth had spoken of revolution and now hurled the word “Jacobin” as an epithet. Henry ingratiated himself to some of them, and we spent evenings in their homes discussing the poetic arts and the dispensations of nature. Henry was easy prey. He told me, “I could pass my life here, and among these mountains I should scarcely regret Switzerland and the Rhine.”

  With Henry I dawdled through the weeks in a kind of feverish distraction. Whenever we left the warm light of some home where we had spent the evening in idle speculation around the fire, the moment we were enveloped by the cool night and the sound of crickets in the field, I imagined the eyes of the Creature on my neck. It never left me for a second that the body of Catherine Bennet awaited me, decaying in a sealed cedar trunk in Edinburgh. Time would not stop. I was not so sure of my method that I could afford at this point to dawdle. Now that I had a body to work from, the Creature’s desire to have his mate must burn like an uncontrollable fire. He would not harm me, but in a rage of impatience he might well kill Henry.

  When these thoughts possessed me, I would not quit Henry for a moment, but followed him as his shadow to protect him from the fancied rage of his destroyer. I felt as if I had committed some great crime, the consciousness of which haunted me. I was guiltless, but I had drawn down a horrible curse upon my head.

  As youths, in solitary hours one summer in the alpine meadows, we had spoken of love. Once or twice we had exchanged embraces that went beyond brotherly affection, and explored the pleasures of which our young bodies were capable. There was no shame in these idylls, for we truly loved each other. But for me these moments were the expression of a desire that had more to do with brotherhood than carnality, and when that magic summer ended, though I suspected Henry might have wished it, they were never renewed. As the years passed and our friendship deepened, I felt that I owed Henry a debt, and resented the fact that it could never be repaid. These thoughts had come to me more than once during our travels, and they were with me for those months in Cumberland.

  At last in mid-August I reminded Henry that we were to meet with our friend in Perth in two weeks, and we needed to move on to Scotland. Henry reluctantly bid farewell to his new friends and we took the coach to Edinburgh.

  We had arranged lodgings at a modern hotel located in the city’s New Town, with its straight, broad, clean streets and fine buildings. As soon as we were shown our rooms, and before we had even unpacked, I
left Henry to arrange for supper while I went to speak with the porter.

  “I am Victor Frankenstein,” I told him. “Some trunks and boxes should have been sent here in my name, from London, Oxford, and Matlock. Do you have them?”

  “We are happy to see you, sir. They arrived some weeks ago. They have been stored in the basement.”

  “Show them to me.”

  The porter took his lamp and we wound our way down stone stairs to a dark basement. It was chilly down there, well suited for preservation. I examined the trunk. One corner was slightly damaged, but it was intact.

  “I should like these boxes shipped to Thurso,” I told the porter. “Can you direct me to a reliable carting company?”

  “McMaster’s will do the job for you, sir, at a fair price. But Thurso’s a far way. It will cost you dearly.”

  “I shall pay whatever is necessary.”

  The next day I went to the shipping office and made arrangements for transporting my equipment.

  Edinburgh and its university were noted for its men of science, but at this point I had no need to meet with any such luminaries. What few purchases I made were of women’s clothing—Kitty’s burial dress would not suit the creature I would fashion from her body. I bought servant’s clothes: plain dresses of wool, a coat, and some sturdy shoes.

  Henry had been uncommunicative on our journey from Grasmere to Edinburgh, but had brightened when we reached the city. We visited some of the notable sights: the Edinburgh Castle, the Parliament House, the royal palace and picturesque ruins of Holyrood Abbey. The day we visited Holyrood was overcast with occasional gusts of rain. Puddles stood on the worn stone pavements of the chapel floor, open to the elements. Water trickled down the ruined masonry, green with moss. My mind was not there, but drifted on thoughts of home.

  As we left the ruined abbey, the sky cleared and sunlight broke through. Henry said, “The weather improves. Rather than return to the hotel, will you walk with me? We might climb to the summit of Arthur’s Seat and take the prospect of the city and the landscape.”

  Arthur’s Seat is a mount situated in Holyrood Park about a mile from Edinburgh Castle, and renowned for the view it gives of the region. In truth it is more a hill than a mountain, but Henry had enjoyed the Cumberland mountains so much that I decided to accompany him. Perhaps a climb together would help reduce the distance that had grown between us.

  From the university the profile of the hill resembled that of a lion, couchant. For the most part the clouds had blown away, and the bright sun shone. Henry and I followed a gravel path up its flank, winding through folds of emerald turf, tall grass, thick bushes, and mossy boulders. In places the path broke into rough steps made of flat stones. The heather sported sprigs of purple flowers, and yellow wild iris lay scattered like fallen stars in beds of grass. Some few other people had come out onto the hill, but for the most part we were alone. We paused several times on our climb up to catch our breath, and the chilly air invigorated me.

  The stark red stone Salisbury Crags, the shelf above covered with turf, looked down on the city. We could see the steeples of the town’s churches, and the romantic pile of the castle with pennants flying above its tower. From the summit of the hill, some eight hundred feet above the surrounding plain, Edinburgh lay spread to the west and north where the land eventually ran down to Leith, Queensferry, and the Firth of Forth. The water lay silver with the reflection of the sun.

  To the east, cows were visible in a field between lines of trees, pastures punctuated by stone houses and barns. Above us wind-torn clouds occasionally passed before the sun. Gulls swooped and hovered over our heads.

  As I viewed this tranquil scene, I was startled to feel Henry’s hand upon my shoulder. I turned to find him watching me with sober eyes, the faint smile upon his lips belied by his tragic mien. He did not let his hand drop. Instead he embraced me and held me tightly to his breast.

  I submitted to his embrace, but did not return it.

  He stepped back. “Victor,” he said, “do you love Elizabeth?”

  “Of course I love her.”

  “Yet you show no sign of wishing to return to her. I understand that sometimes we keep our true affections a secret even from ourselves. Whether with intention or not, I think you deceive her—deceive us all.”

  Henry had coaxed me up to this place only to make some claim on me. “The only deception I know is that you profess to travel with me in order to educate yourself for a career in diplomacy, when you are here simply to keep from taking up work in your father’s business.”

  Henry looked wounded. “I came with you to help you.”

  “You might help me by leaving me to my thoughts.”

  “What else must I leave you to? Your grave robbing?”

  My heart flipped. Henry stood very still. The wind blew back his hair.

  “What do you mean?” I said feebly.

  “I mean your absence from the inn on the night that the Reverend Chatsworth found the strangers in his graveyard. I saw you blanch as he told that story. I mean your absence on the night that Catherine Bennet’s body was stolen. And your contracting the cart men to retrieve that new trunk the next morning, before we departed, and your hurrying to check on it the first thing when we arrived in Edinburgh. I am not blind, Victor, nor am I a fool.”

  “You have no faith in me.”

  “Had I no faith in you, I would have told someone about this. Instead I have kept silent. I thought, when we were in Cumberland, that you might have set aside this madness, but I see you are ready to resume whatever it might be. I do not look forward to what occurs next.”

  “What occurs next is that you will let this pass, or go back to Geneva without me.”

  “You jested of inventing some new battery. It’s no battery you have sealed in that trunk. You met with that anatomist in Oxford. You have haunted graveyards. You are intent on pursuing the medical research that ruined your health in Ingolstadt—the obsession that has weighed on you ever since.”

  “What weighs on me is the death of William.”

  “William’s murder does not drive you. I might accept that scientific research could distract you from your grief, but you act as if torn in two directions. One thing pushes you toward these researches, and something else makes you wish you could thrust them aside, as if a poisoned cup were being held to your lips.”

  “You have no right to ask me these things.”

  “I nursed you back to health through a German winter. No one has been more devoted to your well-being than I. But for the life of me I cannot understand what does drive you, and I fear where it will end. I worry for your sanity, Victor. Must I write your father? What promised achievement, what new discovery, could possibly justify your behavior?”

  He was right to remind me of the trouble I had brought him, yet his hectoring tone pushed me past some limit, and I was suddenly furious. I had worried constantly that because of me he was in danger; I had hovered over him like a guardian angel—and it came to this.

  “What promised achievement leads you into the private homes of these artistic older men?” I told him. “Or the younger men of Oxford? The clubs and dining rooms? On those evenings when you have been absent all night and come back to our rooms at dawn, whose graves have you been robbing, Henry?”

  Henry crossed his arms over his chest. He looked at me for a moment, and then looked away. “You’ve been in half those clubs and dining rooms with me.”

  “Not of my own choosing, I assure you. And of late it seems to me that you have preferred that I not be there.”

  “Is it any wonder?” Henry could not look at me. He kicked at a stone and it skittered away on the path, landing amid some bluebells. “We were to be companions on this journey. It is almost a year now since we left home. I thought that time and a change of scene might foster the intimacy that we once had as boys, that you might open your soul to me as you once did—and as I did for you. But I realize that is not to be. So I have pursued other acquaint
ance.”

  “And amusement.”

  “Yes, Victor—amusement. What right have you to gainsay my doing so?”

  Now I could not look at him. “No right.”

  “So,” he said, an attorney summing up his case, “we come to a meeting of the minds after all. I have no right to ask you about your unsavory pastimes, and you have no right to ask me about mine.”

  He turned his back to me and looked to the west, where the summer sun glared off the Firth and turned the clouds silver. The birds still swooped overhead.

  We stood a while in silence, and then, in silence, we descended the mount. The next day we left Edinburgh for Perth.

  In Perth we stayed at the home of Dr. Christopher Marble, who had lived in Geneva and done some business with Henry’s father. He was very pleased at our arrival and proved the most generous of hosts. He and his family lived in a large town house in that busy municipality.

  Dr. Marble was a tall, genial man with impressive side whiskers, whose distinguishing quirk was his insistence that everything in his home be kept spotlessly clean. Mrs. Marble was as sociable as her husband, and just as curious.

  “And how fares your father?” Dr. Marble asked Henry in his soft burr. “Your dear mother? Does she still spend so much time tending the flowers in your garden?”

  I was happy to let Henry occupy them with family tales, especially as, when Marble discovered that I had studied chemistry and anatomy, he became a fount of well-meaning but uncomfortable questions. I was at some difficulty to put him off, warily watching Henry out of the corner of my eye.

  Marble had two children: a daughter of about our age and a younger son who had recently graduated from St. Andrews. The daughter, Julia, was a quiet young woman, but I could tell that she very much enjoyed having two young bachelors as guests. She and Dennis, the son, were eager to introduce us to Perth society, which was livelier, they said, than one might imagine thanks to the Perth Academy and the Queen’s Barracks—to say nothing of the local distilling industry. Immediately we were scheduled for dinners, card parties, and balls.