Here Donald Gilmore was again silent. “I believe I shall shed some of my burden by telling you what occurred.”
And I nodded and agreed, little guessing how heavy a load would fall on my own shoulders with the easing of Donald Gilmore's burden. But even at that moment I suspected that what I was to hear about Victor Frankenstein, whom I so much liked and admired, would reflect badly on him. But to deny knowledge, I then thought, was almost to deny God himself. I am less sure of this now. So I said, “Well, Donald, my good fellow, I am sure whatever you did was done in youth and ignorance. So continue your story.”
“You must imagine, Mr. Goodall,” said he, “the effect it had on us, living on our poor, wild coast with the land so sparsely covered with soil we were hard put to get any crops from it, when from Lerwick one day, going through the single street of our village, came laden wagons making their difficult way up the hill to where the old unoccupied house of the smuggler stood. This was a low stone house on a cliff with some dignity to it. The main windows faced out to sea. There was a forecourt in a paved yard and on either side of this there were big stone buildings, one a barn, one stables with enough stalls for several horses. Both house and outbuildings were dilapidated. Without more ado the doctor began to repair them, paying some attention to the barn and part of the stables, for he let it be known he was a scientist, on the island to get enough peace for his work, and these were to be his laboratories.
This meant little to us. We were pleased enough to get work from him, the men to build, the women to clean and prepare the house. We looked forward to more work and more pay from that quarter, but as soon as the house was ready Dr. Frankenstein made it very plain that he had no more use for us and moreover he had his three burly men keep watch over his premises, day and night. They would accost any man or woman who came up to the house and ask them what they wanted, telling them they had no need to call on the doctor for anything and generally seeing them off. And from that moment on we saw little of Dr. Frankenstein, only his horse going through the street. So the goodwill which existed earlier for the doctor began to evaporate. Rumors started up—that he was practicing black arts, that in his converted stable he was keeping some kind of strange animal which was never seen. And truly, strange noises came to us in the village, when the wind was right, noises the like of which we had never heard before. Being ignorant people, we told each other the animal must be a lion, a tiger or a bear and only felt very deprived that he would not let us come to the house to see it.
“Then, alas, our troubles began. Dr. Frankenstein, during the repairing and preparation of his house, had often made use of my father's sturdy little boat to fetch and carry from the mainland, and now he asked him if he would take the boat to the Low Countries to collect an item of which he must never speak. He would be well paid for this. My father agreed and I went along with him to lend a hand with the sails, as this was to be a long journey for such a small craft and apart from my father and myself, only the doctor and two of his men were to go. Frankenstein's other man was left behind to guard the house.
“We made our voyage successfully, landing at Ostend where we took on board some crates, the largest by far having been conveyed earlier by boat from Dieppe, and being labeled ‘Paris.' This measured some ten feet by eight and appeared, from the weight and the sound which came from inside, to contain liquid, for the sound of it slopping about was audible. Indeed, it was so heavy that at Ostend we had to get it aboard with a winch—this alarmed the doctor who knew that there was no such equipment to be had at our harbor in the Orkneys. Two days later we were back and unloading. The largest crate, that which contained the liquid, was hauled off and put on a waiting wagon with the improvised assistance of the ropes and pulleys we used to haul our boats up the beach. The wagons then set off slowly up the hill to the doctor's isolated house, but on account of the weight of the largest box and the general difficulties of unloading, Dr. Frankenstein asked my father to come along to help. My father dispatched me to a neighbor's. Thus the party set off, one of the men in front with a lantern, for it was late, the other driving the wagon with the doctor and my father walking behind to relieve the weight. Now—though my father had sent me to a neighbor—I did not go. Instead, I followed on and thereby saw my father's guilt.”
“You cannot blame him for accepting a desperately needed commission to take a boat to the Continent—” I began.
“Not that—no,” Gilmore assured me. “It was because of the large box—or rather, what was in it.” He paused. His honest face had been grave throughout his whole recital and now took on an expression of misery. “Imagine me, a boy who had never been away from Orkney,” he said sadly, “I had seldom been even as far as Lerwick, suddenly transported to the Low Countries in the company of such a man as the doctor, so different from us fisher-folk that he might have come from off the moon—then sent back on the instant to stop in a dark cottage with a tallow candle burning. I followed on secretly, curious to see what would happen, taking a sheep path which ran from above the village right along to where, on a ledge, I could look down on the house of the doctor from about twenty feet above. If it had been daylight, and the men less occupied with getting their heavy freight uphill without toppling over the wagon, I would have been spotted for sure. As it was, some time before they entered the courtyard I was safe in my eyrie, peering down. It took some courage, though, to stay in my position for down below was the grange in which Frankenstein kept his animal, whatever it was, and it was groaning fit to bust, poor creature—whether the men left behind had maltreated it or whether it had some affection for its master and knew him to be coming I do not know. But it groaned and moaned in a blood-chilling way, and it was dark and the surf crashed on to the shore below the house—only curiosity conquering cowardice kept me in place that night.
“Then the wagons reached the top of the hill and turned on to the paved area before the house. The unloading of the boxes began, the men, including my father, taking the cargo from the wagon either into the outbuilding opposite where I was, which I knew to be the doctor's laboratory, or into the house. A man had brought a torch and set it in the entrance of the house, and Frankenstein held aloft a lantern.
“Meanwhile the groaning of the beast in the old barn became louder and more pitiful. It began to bang itself against the door holding it in, but the men took no notice. They had left the offloading of the largest crate until last, for that would be the most difficult task. Then, with two men on the wagon, one of them my father, and two more below, they eased the large crate to the back of the cart, the doctor nearby holding up the lantern. The plan was evidently to push the big crate forward until one end was supported by the two men on the ground, while the weight at the back end would be taken by the men on the wagon. Thus they would ease it off gradually. But it was not to be. The two on the ground had just begun to edge the rear end of the crate forward from the wagon when the beast, whose complaints had subsided to a sort of rumble, suddenly gave out a huge, echoing scream. It began to batter furiously at the door of its prison. The shock of this noise—for later we found it had been loud enough to be heard as far away as the village below—caused someone to falter in the difficult business of getting the crate from the wagon. It fell, the men leapt clear—it broke open.
And there, lying half in, half out of a vast, spreading pool of liquid, was the naked body of a young woman, her golden hair spread all about her. I suppose she had been lying in that fluid all the while.”
“Dead?” I asked.
“I thought so then,” he said. “I thought it was a corpse.”
“She was alive?” I questioned, amazed.
“Yes,” he said gravely, “alive!” He went on, “She was motionless, lying, so white in that puddle, with all her long hair seeming to be floating round her. I still recall it, as if it were before my eyes. I had never seen a naked woman before,” he told me.
“A most terrifying way to encounter one for the first time,” said I, attempting t
o disguise my consternation. I wondered if this spectacle, seen in semi-darkness by a mere boy, had been exactly what he supposed it to be. Surely that had not been the figure of a real woman? Had it not been a model or perhaps some rare kind of ape with an uncanny resemblance to the human? Easier to think those thoughts, rather than that Victor Frankenstein had imported a woman, dead or alive, in order to conduct some experiments upon her. “What happened then?” I demanded.
“The doctor was greatly concerned, exclaimed aloud and cursed the men for their clumsiness as he tenderly gathered up the woman and carried her in his arms, her long hair drooping down over his arm, into the house. And all this time the creature in the barn kept roaring and, as soon as I had got over the shock of seeing the crate fall and the woman lying there, I took to my heels and raced back to where I was meant to be, hoping my father would never find out about my hiding on the hill that night, as he did not.”
“He never spoke to you of this?”
“Never. Though he may have spoken to others, for I know it was later said, behind men's hands, that Dr. Frankenstein had imported a woman, drugged, to Orkney for his use. He was rich; we were poor and afraid. Nothing was done.”
“Unlike what we hear of the stout-hearted Orkneyman,” said I.
“Stout hearts sink when bellies are empty,” Gilmore replied. “The men feared that if they reported the doctor for kidnapping or the like, the law would be turned against them and they would be taken away from hungry wives and children.”
I shook my head, “This story of a woman drugged and brought to Orkney by Frankenstein seems to me most unlikely, Gilmore, from everything I know of the man.”
“I cannot help that, sir,” he responded doggedly. “I am telling you the truth—and the truth gets worse. For after this we did not see the woman again, though my father was again employed by the doctor, this time to take a crate, much the same as the last, to Dublin. But there was no liquid inside it. The crate was landed at Dublin, where the doctor stayed for a week. Then he came back with my father in the ship, but this time without the crate.”
I looked sharply into Gilmore's eyes, searching for the truth. Either the man was a consummate liar who actually believed his own lies, or he was telling the truth as he knew it. “You think he took the woman to Dublin in a crate?” I asked, incredulously. “Left her there and came back alone?”
“But it was not the woman,” he said, “for we saw her at his house, while the doctor was away.”
“Saw her?” I repeated, astonished.
“That is how I know she was alive. For she was in the house while the doctor and my father were away on their voyage. The doctor had left only one of his guards behind and once he was gone this man, a big fellow, speaking a harsh tongue none could understand, seized the opportunity to come down to the village and drink and try to get hold of a woman. So I and another lad, knowing there was no one at the house, ran up the hill to see what we could spy out and there she was. We peeped through a big window on the ground floor and there was the young lady, in a blue dress, lying asleep on a couch, with a kind of picture book, like one for a child, in her hand, and all her long fair hair trailing over the sofa. She was, indeed, a lovely sight,” Gilmore said. “So young and so pretty, with a sort of innocence on her sleeping face.”
“Not dead?” I asked.
“No, not dead; for we saw her stir a little as we watched—and we, fearing she would wake and spot us, ran off laughing, like the two young loons we were. But we never saw her again. Thereafter the house stayed guarded. Rumors grew; there was more bad feeling against the doctor, and my father too, for helping him. I do not know how it would have ended, but not two weeks after the doctor and my father came back from Ireland we awoke to the sound of the doctor's wagon going hell for leather through the village street, heading for the causeway. His men carried flares, all his baggage was piled up behind—and even as they left the village we saw the flames of a great fire on the hill. The doctor's house burned down—not entirely, of course, for it was solid stone, but enough to destroy anything in the buildings and most of the timber as well, bringing in the roofs. We thought he must have started the fire himself, for all his possessions had been packed up and loaded, we supposed, before the fire began. The wagons were out of the village almost before we knew it, so we did not know if the doctor himself, or all his men, or the pretty woman, survived the fire.”
Gilmore paused. “So now, sir, you will understand, perhaps, why seeing the man you call Mr. Victor Frankenstein made me run for my life. For I truly believe,” he said in a low voice, “that he, Frankenstein, is the Devil, or something very near it.”
Still between doubt and belief, I again studied Gilmore's face, searching it as if it could provide the answer to my questions. How could Victor—that frank, honest, open, studious, serious man—a man of whom it was impossible to think badly—how could he have hidden himself away in Orkney to indulge in such mysterious and seemingly evil practices as Gilmore spoke of? Yet it could not be denied that Gilmore had instantly recognized Victor as he came through the door at the house in Gray's Inn Road or that the sight had plainly terrified him. Small wonder, if there was any truth in his tale. Was it possible Gilmore had been traduced into inventing this story? But what possible reason would anyone have to bribe him to say such things? The only way to explain Gilmore's story without believing Victor to be a villain, or practitioner of the black arts, was to conclude that Gilmore, a mere boy at the time, with no wide experience of the world, had misunderstood what had happened on Orkney.
What he said next did little to support this theory. “I do not now believe it was a beast he had penned up in the barn,” he said slowly. “I thought it was then, but now I believe it was a man, some suffering idiot crying out in pain and incomprehension. But what would he have been doing to the poor creature, all that while?”
I confessed to him that the same thought had occurred to me as he told his story. What I did not tell him was that what had crossed my mind, as he spoke, was a vision of that hideous creature I had seen at the dock, outside the theatre and in the trees at the end of Victor's garden after poor Elizabeth's murder. If Gilmore's report were correct in its essentials, then was it such a flight of fancy to imagine that whatever unfortunate creature Victor had kept in captivity had returned in order to take a hideous revenge? That would explain Victor's passivity in the face of his wife's murder and his belief that somehow he himself was the cause of the calamity.
And yet—we know man can be boundlessly cruel, that some evil men take pleasure in the torment and suffering they cause to others. But how could I believe Victor Frankenstein one of those men, one who would capture and torment a fellow creature—or seize a woman and take her helpless to a remote island to enjoy her? I could not believe it; the thought was impossible.
Gilmore regarded me sympathetically. “I am sorry to be bearer of this ill news concerning your friend, sir. I assure you all I have said is true to the best of my knowledge.”
“I am sure that is so, Gilmore,” I said, “but we must think of the present now. I will tell Mrs. Frazer something of this story—enough, I hope, to satisfy her and persuade her to keep you on.”
As we walked back I became suddenly alarmed. If there were any chance that Victor was being trailed by a madman, then the man might have tracked him to Mrs. Downey's on the afternoon he visited us. This could put the household at risk. If the madman had killed Elizabeth Frankenstein (who had not even known her husband at the time Gilmore described) then he might just as easily, in his insanity, take his revenge on others connected with Victor.
On the way back to the house I therefore said to Gilmore, “I am still confused by your story, but I am greatly afraid that Mr. Frankenstein may be being pursued by someone who wishes to hurt him or those who know him. Mrs. Frankenstein is already dead, murdered. And at Mrs. Downey's house there are, at present, two ladies, a child and female servants. All may be in danger. Whatever the truth of your story, Gilm
ore, you must promise me that you will never in any circumstances go off as you did before. There must be a strong and active man in the house at all times.”
Gilmore frowned and asked, “Who is the doctor's enemy, do you think?”
“I am sure of nothing,” I told him, “but I think it possible he is that unfortunate creature Mr. Frankenstein kept in captivity on Orkney. We must take precautions for a while. You had better say nothing of this to the household. You must be vigilant, but keep the reasons for your vigilance secret.”
He nodded in agreement. As we hurried back to Gray's Inn Road I thought of Hugo and Lucy Feltham, and how they were, in all innocence, bearing the grieving Victor company at Cheyne Walk. Ought I to warn them they might be in danger? However unpleasant it might be I must now confront Victor with Gilmore's story at the earliest moment. Even Maria Clementi, outside whose theatre the creature had been waiting, might be in peril. Unhappily, I recognized I must act.
T E N
RETURNING TO THE HOUSE I explained as calmly as I could to Mrs. Downey and her sister Mrs. Frazer that Gilmore, as a boy, had met Victor while he was conducting experiments on Orkney. Being young and infected with the superstitious ignorance of a small and unlettered community, he had taken Victor for some kind of wizard, and conceived a great fear of him. On seeing him unexpectedly in London, that fear had suddenly revived, thus his flight. Yet, I told them, there was some evidence that during his days on the island Victor had made an enemy. Since his wife had been murdered, and the murderer was as yet uncaught, it might be wise to take precautions against anyone who might do any of us some harm. I suggested that until there was proof that my fears were unfounded, either Gilmore or I should remain in the house at all times; and that one of us should accompany the ladies on any outing or visit they might make. Other ladies might have welcomed such consideration for their safety, but these sisters, whether by reason of temperament or upbringing were not so inclined to do.
Frankenstein's Bride Page 9
