Mrs. Downey and Mrs. Frazer were the daughters of a lawyer, John Jessop, and had been reared in Cornwall on a small estate (so small one might call it a garden, Mrs. Downey once merrily told me). Mr. Jessop practiced law in the nearby town. The family on both sides was well connected, but the Jessops were not rich. Mrs. Jessop, being a reading woman, whom some might have termed a blue-stocking, was not the most careful mama in the world. Her two daughters spent more time with the village children, blocking up streams, stealing watercress from farmers' fields and the like, than some parents would think advisable for young ladies. Nevertheless, young ladies they were, though from an unconventional household liberal in its ways of thinking. The late Mr. Downey was the son of Mr. Jessop's partner. When he and the young Cordelia Jessop made a match they removed to London, where, after only eight years of marriage, Downey died, leaving his wife little more than the lease on the small house in Gray's Inn Road. Her mother's sister had mercifully left her a little money some years earlier, so she was able to continue to make a home for herself and her little girl Flora.
To make ends meet, Mrs. Downey decided to take a lodger. How I became that man is easy to tell. Two years earlier I had come to London to pursue my researches. Needing a spot near to the libraries and individuals whom I should need to consult, I asked at an inn where I might find lodgings in the neighborhood. I was directed up the street to Mrs. Downey's. I was a little surprised to discover when I met my prospective landlady that the widow looking for lodgers was not a motherly woman of forty but a young woman of twenty-six. But as she appeared to have a clear sense of what she was doing in the matter of candles, laundry and chops, I took the rooms. It was not until I had been there six months that I discovered I was Mrs. Downey's first lodger—I was also to be her last, but that tale comes later.
This digression may help to explain why Mrs. Downey and Mrs. Frazer were not happy about recommendations without explanations. Respectable as they were, they had been reared according to the advanced principles of education promulgated by Mr. Godwin and French savants such as M. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. According to these men, there ought to be very little discrimination between boys and girls as far as their education and rearing is concerned. Training had produced a very curious, animated, questioning, independent spirit in Mrs. Frazer and Mrs. Downey. Admirable as this spirit might be in many ways, it does not produce blind obedience to male suggestions and wishes (and was, I believe, one of the chief reasons for the less than cordial relations between Mrs. Frazer and her husband). Therefore I left the house as the questions began, abandoning Gilmore, I suspected, to an interrogation which would make him wish he had fallen, rather, into the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. I had to trust him not to reveal too much of his horrible and mysterious story when pressed, yet had no choice, I thought, but to leave him to his fate, for I had to speak to Victor.
I decided first, however, to visit Maria Clementi's house and communicate my suspicions of the man I had seen outside the theatre to Mrs. Jacoby, asking her if she, too, had observed him on any occasion.
When I arrived, Maria was not at home. Ushered into a small sewing-room upstairs, I found myself addressing Mrs. Jacoby as she bent over a heap of theatrical costumes to which she was making repairs. It was not a cordial welcome. I launched into my story, telling her bent head much of what I had told the ladies at Gray's Inn Road. I added that I had seen a hulking figure concealed outside the very theatre at which Maria was performing, and that I suspected he might be the same man I had observed in Victor's garden on the night of the murder of his wife. Victor, I said, might have an enemy in this man and since the murder of Mrs. Frankenstein, it behoved all who knew him to take precautions to ensure their own safety. I was not sure how much of this strange story was believed. As I concluded she put down her work, lifted her head and told me robustly that she had already called on the services of an old sergeant of her husband for the defense of the household.
After a pause she apparently came to some resolution and, with angrily tightened lips, told me, “There would seem to be matters connected with Mr. Frankenstein of which you are unaware. My decision to employ a strong man in the house was taken for reasons not unconnected with Mr. Frankenstein, but I do not want them spoken of on every corner. I would not tell you of this had you not come here with this strange story. But you have, and now I will relate what occurred here only yesterday.”
This was of course the very day when Victor had been brought to Gray's Inn Road, and Gilmore, recognizing him, had run off. Mrs. Jacoby then told me that Victor, very weak, had arrived at Russell Square in the early evening accompanied by some friends who had been very reluctant to let him leave the carriage. The lady of the party, Mrs. Feltham, had come to the door saying that Mr. Frankenstein, who was traveling back to his home with them, had suddenly insisted on visiting Russell Square to see Maria Clementi about an urgent matter.
Plainly, Mrs. Jacoby told me, she was unhappy about the proposed visit but could not prevent it. She appealed for Mrs. Jacoby's cooperation in making the visit a short one for Mr. Frankenstein was still weak after an illness.
Mrs. Jacoby had agreed to all this, though reluctantly, but told me, “I was very unhappy he had come. Let us be quite candid—before his wife's death Mr. Frankenstein was seized with an alarming passion for Miss Clementi and I feared that, in spite of his bereavement, that emotion had returned. I believe Mrs. Feltham knew this and also disapproved of the visit.
“I am employed to guard Miss Clementi against the sort of scandal which attaches itself to young women in prominent positions. I exist, moreover, to spare her agitation and fatigue. Mr. Frankenstein's visit was not welcome to me.”
According to Mrs. Jacoby, Lucy Feltham returned to the carriage to wait. Victor descended and entered the house looking, Mrs. Jacoby said, very ill and feverish. He pleaded for an interview alone with Maria, even if it were to last only five minutes. His manner was so agitated she thought it better to agree to a brief meeting between the two in private, if this was Maria. But she herself would be in the adjoining room all the time. Her aim, she said, was to get this interview over quickly and calmly and set the sick man on his way home with his friends.
Maria agreed to see Victor alone in the small drawing-room for five minutes. Mrs. Jacoby therefore retreated to the dining-room, with which it was connected by large double doors. She sat down and kept her eye fixed firmly on the clock. But not a minute after Maria entered the drawing-room she heard Victor's voice raised in passionate speech, though whether his tones were those of love or anger she could not tell. The voice went on and on and she was about to interrupt the interview, even before the agreed five minutes were over, when she heard him cry out in a dreadful voice, “Maria! Maria! You will be the death of me!”, then leave the drawing-room and, indeed, the house, slamming the front door behind him.
She had rushed into the room to find Maria, very white, collapsed in a chair and unable, of course, to give any account of what Victor had said or what he wanted. Plainly, said Mrs. Jacoby, Mr. Frankenstein had upset her very much—and not, she added grimly, for the first time. “I shall not let him in the house again,” she told me. “To do so would be insanity. He is a sick man and, I believe, deranged. I dread to think of the state of mind of a man returning to pay court to a woman two weeks—two weeks!—after the death of his wife. Yet what else could his visit have meant? If that is so, then he is a monster. The story you have just told me of an enemy keeping watch on him is unpleasant. Whether it is entirely true I do not know—but of such a man as Mr. Frankenstein I must tell you I can believe almost anything. To be honest, I half-suspected when you first arrived he had persuaded you to come and press his case with Maria. I apologize for that suspicion. But now you see why I have already sent for a sturdy man to guard the door. I cannot have him here again. And if you have any sense at all, Mr. Goodall, I should leave this matter strictly alone. It is none of your business and involving yourself in it can only harm you.”
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br /> I stood up. “In spite of all, Mrs. Jacoby,” I said, “I still regard Mr. Frankenstein as a friend and I am going now to speak to him and try to help him.”
“I wish you joy of it, then,” she said. “And if you will take my advice you will get him to a quiet spot far from London where, with help, he can recover his strength and his sanity.”
As I left the door a carriage came up the street towards me. In it I saw a smiling Maria Clementi, a young woman I imagined to be her servant, and that degenerate, Gabriel Mortimer, dressed in his burgundy coat and trousers, a tall green hat on his head from which his jet ringlets hung down in profusion. He and Maria seemed to be laughing together at some remarks of his. Having no wish to encounter them when they dismounted from the carriage, I turned, as if I had not seen them, and went off rapidly in the other direction, searching for a hackney carriage to take me to Cheyne Walk.
I thought of that merry party in the carriage. How could the delicate Maria Clementi manage to stay on those terms with a fellow of such an obviously disreputable kind? What a strange household that was—in spite of an appearance of honesty, even Mrs. Jacoby did not seem utterly candid and open. I could not decide whether she was what she purported to be, the loyal friend and protector of Maria, or a woman of a more sinister and self-interested kind.
On my journey to Chelsea snow began to fall. My heart sank at the prospect of the necessary but unpleasant interview I would be forced to have with Victor. Only a few weeks before I had been reproaching him with his conduct towards his wife. Now I was searching him out in order to imply there might be some unadmitted, shameful secret in his past. It would not do, I thought. I must disentangle myself from the web of Victor's affairs, part of which was the enticing, fascinating Maria.
I was pleased to hear, when I arrived, that Mrs. Feltham was out, calling on friends. I wanted neither to raise specters in front of her nor to be forced to draw Victor aside in order to speak to him.
I was shown into the study, where I found Victor in a chair by a roaring fire. A shawl was over his knees. Hugo was leaning negligently against the desk, upon which lay a half-empty bottle of claret. The two were laughing as I entered. I felt a little foolish when I saw all this. Here was I, bent on investigating a dark secret involving a friend, on warning the household of danger; there was Victor, glass in hand, health plainly much restored, enjoying a pleasant afternoon. I looked at him as he greeted me with a smile. I could not believe that this was the same man I had seen desperate for Maria Clementi, seen racked with remorse after the death of his wife and child, and who now, if Mrs. Jacoby was to be believed, had resumed his courtship, with wife and child barely cold in their graves. And then, there was Gilmore's tale of what had happened in Orkney. My heart failed me. It seemed impossible Victor had anything with which to reproach himself. Yet I had come to the house for a purpose and decided, most reluctantly, to fulfill it, although knowing this interview might well cost me some part of a friendship.
Victor began by offering me wine, which I declined. I asked him where were the two men I had employed on his behalf to guard the house while the madman who had killed Elizabeth and the child was still at large, for I had seen no trace of them when I arrived. “Oh,” Victor responded to my enquiry, “I discharged the fellows. I did not like having them about and I have come to the conclusion, as has the magistrate, that the murderer was a thief who disturbed my wife as he went about his business and wickedly killed her to avoid detection. The magistrate thinks, and so do I, that he is unlikely to return to the scene of his crime.”
In a voice I knew to be less confident than his own, I asked, “But what of the man I saw lurking in the trees in your garden on that dreadful night, the same man, I believe, I saw earlier in the evening outside the theatre where Miss Clementi was performing?”
“I did not see the man myself on either occasion,” replied Victor. “And nor, I believe, did anyone else.”
“Dear God,” I burst out. “Are you telling me I imagined that man? Victor—do not deceive yourself or your friends. There is some bad work afoot here. That young man who left my landlady's house so suddenly yesterday when you arrived was Donald Gilmore, her sister's servant, son of the boatman you employed when you were on Orkney. You did not recognize him because since you last saw him he has turned from a boy into a man. But he knew you the moment he saw your face—and named you. He has told me of the woman you caused to be brought to the island in his father's boat, of a creature you kept in the barn, of the guards around your house—of a fire. Victor—do you not think that all this had something to do with that malformed creature who appears to be watching you and those you know, and with the death of your wife and the boy? For your own safety, and ours, be frank.”
He regarded me with a steady demeanor, perfectly at ease. But I noticed his face had gone very pale.
Hugo was gazing at me in astonishment. He asked, “Jonathan—what is all this?”
Victor only said, “So that was Gilmore's lad. He was but a boy when I was in the Orkneys. The fisherfolk there did not like me. Indeed, they feared me. I had thought to find peace for my scientific researches in that remote spot, but in the end was driven off by hostile and superstitious local folk. I had my house guarded because I knew their temperament. I had reason to think that one night, after drink and inflammatory remarks at the bare cottage room they called the tavern, they might march on me and do me and my work harm. Indeed, I think they may have started the fire which burned my house. I do not take it at all kindly, Jonathan, that you chose to discuss me and my affairs with your landlady's sister's servant and give your attention to wild boyish tales he related to you. Now you come here fantastically prating of some imaginary enemy—”
I was shaken by his all too plausible denials. Yet there was at least one fact in a cloud of what Victor correctly pointed out to be hearsay. I cried “You saw the man in your garden. His appearance distressed you. You spoke of guilt—”
“My wife had been murdered a few hours before. And my only son,” Victor said shortly. His tone was very cold.
I stood quite still, as shocked as if he had struck me. Either I was a fantasist or my friend Victor was a cold-blooded liar.
Hugo the peace-maker intervened. “Jonathan,” he appealed, “if there is some old story the man Gilmore has told you, can we not talk of it later? Victor has been ill, is still unwell.”
“Not too ill, it seems, to prevent him yesterday from descending from the carriage taking him home to have a noisy interview at Russell Square with Miss Clementi,” said I.
“So you have spoken about me to Miss Clementi's paid companion, as well as a manservant at the house you live in,” Victor said, his tone verging on the contemptuous. “Well, I am grateful for the interest, Jonathan, you seem to be showing in my affairs. Would you like to discuss me with my butler now? May I introduce you to the boot-boy?” He paused, and regained control of himself. He continued in a less unfriendly voice, “I went to see Miss Clementi to ask her to resume her lessons with me, as a favor to both of us, for I must work and occupy my mind so as not to dwell on the tragedy that has taken place. The sooner I begin, the better it will be for me. Jonathan, my dear man, can we not forget all that has been said here this afternoon? Let us put it behind us. Will you not sit down and take a glass of wine with us? We dine in an hour. Will you stay?”
The bewildered Hugo added his voice to Victor's, “Stay, Jonathan, do. Shall we not sit down together, the four of us, you, Victor, Lucy and myself, and talk together as we have done in the past?”
But I shook my head and said in great confusion, “No, no—I cannot. I must leave. Victor—I am truly sorry if I have said anything to upset you. I will go now. I must think.”
And I blundered from the room, as mortified as I have ever been in my life. The scene had not taken above ten minutes and yet, during it, I had angered Victor, shocked Hugo and acted, as I saw it, like a fool and a villain. Such scenes are forgiven, I knew, but never quite forgotten.
I cursed myself as I walked quickly along, as if escaping from the house, although snow was swirling round me and the ground beneath my feet slippery. Then I saw, through the blowing snow, some hundred yards away, what I took to be a figure, dark against the surrounding whiteness. It was on top of the wall which surrounded Victor's garden. As I looked, it moved, heaved itself a little higher up and put one knee on top of the wall.
Then the man hurled himself over and dropped the ten feet or so to the ground below in a wild tangle of arms and legs. Once on the ground this individual instantly scrambled upright and began to run away down the road, with a curious lop-sided gait. He was huge—he was the man I had seen before, whose existence Victor had so recently denied—and he had been watching Victor's house.
I set off after him as fast as I could go, shouting, “Stop! Stop, man! I must speak to you!” I did not reflect that there was no one about and that, if I caught up with him, an encounter might be the worse for me. He ran on, though looking over his shoulder, then put on speed, going quickly enough for a crippled man traveling over a slippery surface.
This chase, with both pursuer and pursued hampered and often sliding through a snow storm, might have struck an observer as comical. Yet we were both, I'm sure, in dead earnest—me to catch him, he to get away.
He crossed the road to the riverside. I followed. Then there was a sudden flurry of snow which went into my face, blinding me. When I brushed the snow from my eyes the man was gone—but I knew where he was. He had returned to the quay where I had first seen him. So I walked straight down to the strand, spied out the steps up to the wharf ahead of me (the tide was low) and struggled on to the quay. As my head rose up to the stone surface of the dock I saw, through the snow, first a braced pair of legs, then a trunk, and found myself facing a sturdy man with a sack over his shoulder. As he looked doubtfully at me I asked him, “Have you seen a man with a limp?”
Frankenstein's Bride Page 10
