by John Kessel
She leaned close to speak in a low voice.
“I don’t know you, Miss Bennet, but I cannot let you leave without lending you some advice. I speak only out of concern for you.
“Go home. You are too well-bred to chase after a man. You put at risk your reputation and that of every person in your family. You may suppose at your age that no one will care, but I assure you that your family will care a great deal.”
Mary felt her face flush. She saw that Clerval lingered in the hall, watching them, and hoped that he could not hear.
“I know what I am about, Mrs. Marble,” Mary managed to say.
Mrs. Marble opened the door. “Then may God keep you,” she said, and ushered her out, closing the door behind her.
Mary stood on the doorstep. Across the way a portly man in fine clothes was helping an elderly woman in a white cap into the town house opposite.
Mary walked down the block only half-aware of the horses, carriages, and pedestrians. She felt humiliated, and angry, and confused. Why had discovering the existence of Victor’s engagement startled her so? The image of Victor, holding a cup of negus in his hands, confiding in her at Lord Henry’s ball; the delight with which he had listened to her recite Darwin’s verse, rose to hearten her.
She sensed that Henry had spoken at least in part out of exasperation with Victor. It seemed clear that he did not know about Victor’s monster, and that the creation of a second such creature was Victor’s reason for isolating himself in such a remote location. But his assessment of Victor’s character, from a man who had been his friend since childhood, necessarily gave her pause. It did not accord with her estimation of Victor. There was more to him than Henry knew. Henry did not share Victor’s interest in the natural world. He could not imagine how a person might desire to know things simply to know them, to understand how nature works. Victor himself had warned against such ambition, but he could not be so insistent on the subject if his mind were completely convinced that it was wrong. How great a pleasure it would be to have such knowledge to oneself before telling—perhaps, if one chose to—the world and accepting its approbation.
The things she knew by now about Victor showed him to be a man who would test the limits of civilized behavior. But he was no devil. He was Prometheus, reaching for knowledge on behalf of all humanity. He simply had not taken proper care to anticipate the consequences of his actions, but his character was too noble to have left him incapable of understanding the moral responsibilities of a creator toward his creation. His current actions were evidence of that.
Henry might have given her pause, but Mrs. Marble’s words were the ones that burned the most, because Mary could see the justice in them. It was not untrue that she had come to Scotland out of love. Certainly Victor had not asked her to follow him. But she knew there was more to it than that. There were things that she sought on this journey for her own purposes.
Despite these rationalizations, she saw herself reflected in Henry’s—and Mrs. Marble’s—eyes as a smitten, self-deluded, aging woman, prey as much to her own fantasies as to any deception on Victor’s part.
Walking up Kinnoull Street, Mary realized that Lizzy would see her running off after Victor the same way she had seen Lydia’s running off to be with Wickham—against every stricture of reason, of propriety, of self-preservation, of common sense—except that Lydia had done this as a foolish girl of sixteen, while Mary was a woman of thirty-two.
At this thought she stopped dead on the sidewalk. It was a hard truth, and it sat in the center of her mind like a stone. By this time her family must be in complete turmoil. Darcy must have been dispatched to Scotland the way he had tracked Lydia down in London a dozen years ago. When he found Mary—assuming he did—his displeasure would make that which he’d expressed to her on the night of her excursion to Matlock seem like a millpond compared to the Atlantic.
But what of the Creature? What of Kitty? If Victor could indeed create from Kitty’s body the bride that the Creature sought, might there be some remnant of Kitty remaining in her revivified frame?
A passing gentleman saw her standing there and stopped. “May I help you, madam? Are you unwell?”
Mary came to herself and looked at him, a short man wearing a tall beaver hat. “I am quite well, thank you,” she said.
The man looked her up and down, the matter of a second, and tipped his hat to her. “Good afternoon, then.” He walked on.
Mary went to the coaching inn and asked after her portmanteau. The porter at the inn was surprised and grateful to see her well, but they had no portmanteau belonging to her. He told her that it must have gone on with the coach to the next stage of the route. The innkeeper told of the confusion that had ensued when the coach had arrived with the bleeding mail guard.
The innkeeper offered to accompany her to the magistrate so that Mary might speak to him regarding the highwaymen. She told him that since she had escaped the men without harm, she did not seek to concern herself further with the matter except to regain her property. She asked if the company would reimburse her for her losses and inconvenience, to say nothing of the mortal danger she had experienced. The innkeeper said it was not his responsibility, and if she had objections she might take that up with the magistrate.
Mary left. Mrs. Buchanan’s wedding shoes had begun to pinch. She might find a shoe store and buy some shoes for herself, but she was not eager to spend more of her dwindling resources just yet. She stopped at an apothecary’s shop and purchased a poultice and a vial of laudanum. It took her some time to walk all the way back to the Buchanan farm. The day was already declining, the clouds gray as the slate cliffs at Lyme Regis. She recalled how cold the winds had been there.
Buchanan was in the fields when Mary returned, and his wife was washing clothes in a tin tub. She told Mary that she might join them for supper at six. They ate a meal of oats and boiled turnips with a scrap of smoked fish, and soon after retired for the night.
Mary sat at the tiny loft window that looked out over the side yard. The temperature had dropped since sunset; the wind ripped through the trees. She climbed onto the pallet they’d given her and tried to sleep. The humiliations she had suffered in the last day ran through her mind. How was she going to make it all the way to Thurso? What could she expect to come of it?
The rattling of the tree branches outside her window would not let her sleep. She turned from her own problems for a moment and imagined the Creature lying injured out in the woods in this cold. In the morning she would give him the medicine on which she had spent some of her scant resources. That was enough.
She could not stand to think of him; she could not avoid it. After an hour, she rose from the pallet, put on her coat, and descended the creaking stairs to the kitchen. From the pantry she took a turnip and the two most withered of a bunch of carrots. She found an empty bottle. Once outside she crept across the yard to a trough, filled the bottle with water, and corked it. She moved past the barn toward the woods. The moon was just a bright spot in the clouds; beneath the trees she got lost before she found the place where she had left the Creature.
He was not there. Her first reaction was relief. If he had gone on without her, she would not have to concern herself with him.
She had turned back toward the house and only taken a few steps when she heard his croak. “Miss Bennet.” His voice was faint amid the rustle of the trees, and she wondered if he had been calling her without effect before now.
She found him huddled in the hollow of a great oak, half buried in leaves he had piled up to keep him warm. He looked like nothing so much as a discarded scarecrow, save that his watery eyes gleamed in the light. Mary knelt at his side.
She uncorked the bottle and held it to his lips. He steered it with one hand but did not take it from her as he drank, and drank, until it was empty.
She offered him a turnip and carrots.
“Not hungry,” he said, his voice a little stronger. He trembled.
“You are not well.”
She hesitated, afraid, then drew in a breath and held her hand against his livid forehead. He was very warm, but she could not tell if that was normal. “How does your shoulder feel?”
“It hurts.”
Mary opened the vial of laudanum and gave it to him. He drank it in a single draft and let his hand fall to the forest floor beside him.
She helped him to remove his coat and unlaced his shirt. She unwrapped the bandage from around his shoulder. In the darkness she could not see the wound clearly. She touched it gently with her fingers. His flesh here was still warmer, and swollen around the edges of the bullet hole. Mary smeared the poultice onto his shoulder and pressed it into the wound, and then wrapped it in the fresh bandage she had brought.
Through all this he watched her like a mute animal. He might have been one of those wax figures in Bullock’s Egyptian Hall, but for when an eyelid twitched as something she did caused him pain.
She had never touched a grown man like this. His sallow skin was perfectly smooth and hairless, as fine as that of a child, and he had no beard. Though he had lived in the outdoors for months, and his clothes were pungent, his body did not smell bad. He was as clean as a cat. She helped him lace up his shirt and, slowly, pull on his coat.
Embarrassed, Mary sat back onto the leaf mould of the forest floor.
After a moment, the Creature said, “I did not expect that you would come back.”
“How will I get to Thurso without a companion?”
“What is Thurso?”
“It is a town in northernmost Scotland. Henry Clerval told me that Victor left for there a fortnight ago.” She watched his face. It was still hard for her to keep her eyes on him. If she relaxed her self-control for a second, her mind recoiled, shouting, This is a dead thing It is an imitation, a diabolic counterfeit. Run.
“I will return early in the morning,” she said. “I hope you will be better then, and we can leave.”
The Creature simply watched her. He gave a slight nod and closed his eyes.
Mary walked to the edge of the woods and across the harvested field of rye grass. When she entered the house through the kitchen door, she found Mrs. Buchanan waiting, sitting on a chair in the dark.
“You’re a bold one, to come back,” she said in a low voice. “Looking for something else to steal?”
“I’ve stolen nothing.”
“The bottle that was in the pantry? My carrots and turnips?”
Mary could think of no answer. Finally she said, “Please don’t tell your husband.”
“He’d whip me as soon as he was done whipping you.” Mrs. Buchanan’s voice was tired. “I thought you was a lady, with your fine speech. Did you steal those clothes, too?”
“I’m sorry. I did not mean to—”
“Give me my shoes and get out.”
Mary looked down. She lifted the hem of her coat to expose the cheap shoes. She was going to have to walk more than two hundred miles.
While she hesitated, Mrs. Buchanan reached for them. Mary pushed her away, knocking her from her chair, opened the door, and ran off across the field.
FIFTEEN
On the roadside north of Inverness stood a gibbet. The wood of its posts rose weathered and gray as old stone, the chains hanging from the crosspiece rusted red as a robin’s breast. It did not look as if it had been used for a long time. Should we be caught, they would hang me from it without hesitation, food for crows and a warning to all such abominations of nature as I. But there are none such as I.
If they discovered that Miss Bennet had stolen the shoes she wore, they would perhaps even hang her, as the good citizens of Geneva had hanged Justine Moritz.
In the weeks after we left Perth, I learned a great deal from, and about, Miss Bennet. We were of necessity in each other’s company every hour of every day. For the most part we traveled at night, safe from the view of human beings. Later, as we traversed counties as deserted as the surface of the moon, and just as spectrally haunted as the moon’s counties must be, we took the risk of traveling during the day.
At first Miss Bennet was able to keep up with me only because I struggled under the effects of my wound and the fever it had brought. Within a fortnight I was returned to health, and after that I had to slow my pace so that she might keep up. I considered whether it might serve me better to leave her behind.
She was afraid of me but so intent on reaching Victor that she mastered that fear. I would catch her being brave. She seldom looked at me directly. Nine hours out of ten she kept her distance. But when she cleaned my wound, or when we huddled together against the cold of the evening, we were within an arm’s length of each other. Sometimes closer. She was not so beautiful, nor young, as Victor’s Elizabeth or Felix’s Safie, or even as Justine had been. Lines creased the corners of her lips, and her hair was thin. Her jaw was heavy and her eyes small, and when she smiled—as she might at the sight of a field of foxglove or the song of a bird—her gray eyes squinted so they could hardly be seen.
Yet there were times that I could not help but be affected by her female presence, and angry that she seemed so afraid of me.
It was on one of those afternoon marches that we passed the gibbet, a day so overcast that one saw no direct sunlight until, in its last half hour, the sun descending below the clouds, the full force of its rays slantingly filled the landscape. The road ran through rolling moorlands, deep green, broken by outcroppings of rock that thrust out of the earth like hands from the grave, clumps of bushes in their lee. Not a tree in sight. A stream threaded its way through the folded moors.
“Might we stop for a while?” Miss Bennet asked. She held her hand to her brow and pointed. “Is that a shepherd’s hut?”
It was. “We can shelter there,” I said. “We need not continue tonight.”
We crossed the moorland, boggy near the stream, and reached the hut. It was little more than a circle of stones piled high, with a broken thatched roof, but it would keep off the wind, and someone had stacked a pile of peat to dry outside.
“I shall build a fire,” Miss Bennet said.
I carried two blocks of the dried peat into the hut while she tore up fistfuls of dead grass and broke twigs from the gorse for kindling. Miss Bennet took out the tinderbox she had become so expert at using. She struck steel against flint until sparks lit the tinder. Leaning forward on her knees, she held the flame to the grass and blew it until it caught and spread. She sat back.
“I will find food,” I said, and crawled out.
I walked down to the stream. By now the sun was below the horizon and the land was darkening. I waded into the icy water, half to my knees, and peered down through the surface, waiting. It was not long before an unsuspecting trout darted by and I snatched it out of the stream. I tossed it onto the bank and sought another, which I had in a span of minutes.
When I took them up, they wriggled in my hand, so desperate to escape. Had I traveled alone, they would have lived on. Instead I beat their heads against a rock and brought them back to the hut.
Miss Bennet had taken off her bonnet and the stolen shoes and warmed her feet at the meager fire. I had to crawl to fit inside, leaving hardly room for her. The peat hissed as it burned, and tiny blue flames danced between its fibers. Miss Bennet rubbed her feet with her hands.
The shoes were falling apart, and her clothing had not worn well. Once it would have been obvious to anyone who saw her that she was what humans called a lady, but now her hands were raw and her hair unkempt. The Scots were wary of strangers. Whenever we came near a town, we were at risk of arrest. I would wait in the countryside while she went to ask directions: the roads were largely unmarked, and we had lost time by wandering from our way. On these forays Miss Bennet used what remained of her money to purchase food. But she was no lady now. The last time she had stopped in a town, she had been chased away by a grocer who accused her of thievery.
In truth, we had stolen food more than once. Outside Kingussie I had pilfered the tinderbox and a hooked knif
e. I used that knife now to scale, gut, and bone the trout, then spitted them to roast over the fire.
We did not speak. The smoke that collected in the tiny hut stung my eyes, which had of late become sensitive as never before. Whenever such changes occurred in my body, I wondered if they might be a sign of something going awry with it. Frankenstein’s method for creating life might be imperfect, and his creations doomed. The sensations I felt at any moment might be the last I would ever feel. Dead, I would be nothing, for even if God indeed ruled the universe, there was no place in his afterlife for me.
All the more reason to live as well as I might, or, if my life became an insuperable misery, to end it. This would be decided when we next saw Victor.
It was peculiar to think of Miss Bennet and myself as “we.” I wondered at my impulse to save her from the highwaymen, after she had been so scornful of me in our only encounter. Her stepping from the coach seemed an apparition, some sign that there might be an order behind the otherwise random events of my life. These thoughts would never have occurred to me before the journey to England forced me to enter the world of human beings. I saw them better now. Everything connected to everything else in ways that I could not fully understand.
Or perhaps this was just the fantasy of my overheated mind.
Miss Bennet had joined with me on this journey out of her need. That was one way to see it. Did she expect Frankenstein to bring her sister back? Did she love him? I pondered the nature of an emotion that would cause a person of her privilege to abandon all the rules that these people seemed to make for themselves and pursue a quest very unlikely to come to any happy conclusion.
I was surprised, when she fled the farm, that she bothered to find me. She came running across the shorn field of rye grass and stumbled between the trees. “We must run!” she gasped. “The farmer is coming!”
I pushed myself to my feet and stumbled with her into the woods. Weeks later we were still together.
Miss Bennet pulled two pieces of trout from the spit and offered one to me. I pushed her hand away and fumbled in my greatcoat pocket for the turnip I had dug up from a farmer’s field.
