Frankenstein's Bride

by Hilary Bailey

  “Damn him,” she said again. Then Wheeler leapt to his feet, saying, “Lovely Maria—tell me the truth—” but his voice was drowned by hers as she continued. This time her voice was that of a young girl, a child, and she spoke in French: “The first I remember is light, coming from darkness into light, cold, very cold, I was very cold.” Then in English she said, in a loving tone, deep in register, alas, all too like the voice of Victor Frankenstein, “Then I saw a dark face bending over me, the face of a lover, the face of my creator, Victor, who loved me because he made me, made me because he loved me.”

  The slurred voice in which Maria had begun came again now, like that of a man in a drunken rage, “I know what he did, the villain, he took the other he made, my dearest, my Adam, and beat him and imprisoned him, then carried him away and sent him far, far off, to a desert, alone. Yet I knew where he was—Adam, my Adam—always where he was, what pain he was in, from the moment when I opened my eyes on the island and looked into the face of my creator, I always knew where Adam was, whether near or far. Damn Frankenstein. God damn Frankenstein.”

  Wheeler, now beside her, tried to interrupt. She went on, though, now cruelly mimicking the tones of Victor himself, “I have brought you to life, my darling, and you were to be a companion and bride to my other creation, but he shall not have you. You are mine.”

  A woman screamed. A man rose to his feet and cried, “Blasphemy! What is this blasphemy?” his voice half lost amid a host of other cries. There came a woman's piercing cry, “No!” I thought of Victor's parents sitting in the crowd hearing these hideous calumnies against their son. I turned, saw them sitting quite still, expressions of horror on their faces. I turned then to Mrs. Jacoby, who had her hand to her mouth and was muttering, “Is it true? Can this be true?” I grasped her arm. She was like a woman stunned. “Help me stop this,” I urged. Mortimer meanwhile was trying to pull her to her feet, understanding that Wheeler had not the presence of mind to stop the atrocity (and still Maria's words were flowing over us) and that we must, with as much decency as was left to us, get to Maria and pull her away. And all the time the horrid monologue went on.

  Did she speak the truth or not? Was this the end of Maria's long silence, the moment when all her pent-up delusions broke the banks of reason and flooded over us—or was it the truth?

  The audience was still astir. There were sounds of people leaving. A man's voice called out, “Will no one stop this?” The danger was that there might be an assault on Maria, or Wheeler or both. She spoke again and this time there was no doubt in my mind that the voice was Victor's. She crooned, “My lover, my sweetheart. I did not mean to hurt you. But you are mine, mine now, mine forever. Oh, my love, forgive me.”

  “Dear God!” I exclaimed. Then I pulled at Mrs. Jacoby. “Mrs. Jacoby. Stand—help me stop this!” But she did not stir. Maria's own voice, clear and carrying, now resumed.

  “He beat my lover and he beat him and beat him and kept him in the cold and dark. He said I should be his, for he was my maker. I would not be his. I knew nothing, knew not myself, even, except that I did not want him. So then he took him away and put him, Adam, for many weeks and weeks in chains in a ship sailing for a far away shore. Then he was kind to me, my maker, and I turned to him for he fed me and petted me and tried to make me love him, but though I turned to him—for he was my god and said I must love and worship him yet—yet—I still yearned after my true love, the other he had created, the man he had created me for.” Then her voice became savage. “He gave me drink. I slept. Then there was fire, much fire.” She screamed. “Burning. Burning. The door will not open. He has locked it. Where is he, my creator? Save me. Save me. His face is outside the window, watching me burn. Watching me burn!” She began to tremble and put her hands to her face now.

  There was a cry—I heard a chair topple as gentlemen hastened their ladies from the room. But others, men, came to crowd about the foot of the platform where Maria stood.

  Maria straightened her body. “I came to another place,” she continued. “They beat me, put me in the streets to sing. I could not speak. I could not speak. I knew no words. Victor had given me no words.”

  Now there was a gentleman on the stage, speaking urgently to Wheeler. But Wheeler was in his seat, slumped over, his head in his hands. I stood up, Gabriel Mortimer was at my side and we linked arms and went forward, ready to push our way through the crowd to Maria. With my other hand, as we started off, I grasped Mrs. Jacoby's hand and pulled her to her feet. Thus we advanced as Maria spoke on.

  “I found out the words, then I could not utter them and had I spoken they would have come from a void, from nothing, for I was nothing. I had no beginning—only Victor—and some shadows in my mind—shadows —a field and a mother—city streets, a man—dark water, pulling me down.”

  On the steps of the stage Mortimer, Mrs. Jacoby and I stopped short—as Maria extended her arms in a parody of stage craft. Then she said in her own clear voice, as if aping the voice of reason, “And there you have it, lords, ladies and gentlemen, I speak now but am nothing. Victor Frankenstein made me and I am nothing. He tried to kill me—and I am nothing. And now I have destroyed him, his family, his work and now his life, for he will die soon.” And she began to laugh, a light, merry sound as if someone had amused her, but going higher, less controllable as Mortimer and I, pulling Mrs. Jacoby, forced our way on to the stage. Once there Mrs. Jacoby dropped my hand and rushed forward, crying to Wheeler, “Stop this! Stop whatever you are doing to her!” But he turned to her and said, as though his voice were being dragged from his throat, “I have done nothing to her. She—what has she done to me?”

  In the meanwhile I had seized Maria and called to Mrs. Jacoby, “Come on!” and we hustled her through the crowd and away to the double doors at the end of the room, joining the crowds attempting to leave. I glanced about as much as I was able, trying to glimpse Victor's poor parents, but in all that mêlée could not see them. As we tried to struggle out there were those who gazed at Maria in horror and pushed away from her, but a vast crowd was after us, jostling and shouting questions, “Was it real? Is it true? What happened?”

  We got through the doors somehow and just outside then, to one side, was a tall, lean man in black, sane and charitable enough, it appeared, to assist. He very quickly took my arm and gently but firmly led me, Maria and Mrs. Jacoby through the next room, then quickly through another door to one side and into an empty corridor. Mortimer had disappeared, pushed away from us in the crowd or deliberately abandoning us, I do not know which. The man led us down the corridor, through another door, into an alley. “We have lost them for a while. I will get my carriage,” he said. We huddled in the alley in dark and cold until, not long after, he came up with the conveyance.

  My only thought was to get away from the place discreetly. We dared not go into the main street in front of the building, where those who had attended the demonstration might be assembled in numbers, some repelled, some indignant, altogether unpredictable in their responses. There were those who might think Maria's claim to have destroyed Victor Frankenstein a confession of murder—and perhaps it was. They might try to lay hands on her for that reason and on Mrs. Jacoby and myself as her abetters. Others might attack us from fear or from disgust. The curious would surround us. As we stood waiting, Mrs. Jacoby recovered a little and in a calm manner, with admirable sang-froid, asked Maria, “Were you speaking the truth, Maria, or was what you said all wicked fictions?”

  Maria did not reply, for then the carriage arrived and the dark-suited gentleman who had rescued us leaned out, saying, “Get in quickly, I pray you,” which we did and set off smartly eastwards in a direction evidently prearranged between our rescuer and his coachman. I and Mrs. Jacoby sat on either side of Maria, the stranger opposite us. This man, I now saw, was about thirty-five years of age, with a long, handsome, thoughtful face, very pitted with old smallpox marks. His dark hair fell to just below his ears. He had fine dark eyes.

  I said
to him, “Thank you, sir, for your help. May I ask where we are going and why you help us in this way?”

  “My name is Simeon Shaw. I am vicar of St. Michael and All Angels near Spitalfields. If there is any truth in this young woman's tale, it may have much bearing on the subject of the soul.”

  Beside me I heard Mrs. Jacoby, who was plainly fatigued and whose own conversations with her soul had become less and less frequent during the day, give a weary sigh. “I think, sir, I should like to go to Russell Square,” she said. She turned to Maria quite naturally and asked, “Maria—should you like to go home?” She displayed no surprise when Maria said, in a clear and pleasant voice, though tired and indifferent, “It would be too dangerous. A crowd might assemble and kill me for a witch or a murderess.” I, however, was truly astonished. If Maria had been in a trance, how did she know what she had said?

  Mrs. Jacoby responded dryly. “I'm glad to find, Maria, that recovering your voice has not altered your nature. You still think first and last of yourself.”

  Maria answered, “Of whom else should I think? You have heard my story now. I have no conscience—I have no soul.”

  Simeon Shaw interrupted this extraordinary exchange hastily, “I came to the demonstration today interested in finding out if the hidden soul of a man could emerge during a mesmeric experience. For, under that influence a man might come closer to God. What I heard, Miss Clementi, interested me deeply. I am uncertain of the precise nature of what we saw tonight, whether sideshow, horror tale, or what, but I feel, bewildered as I am, some kind of mystical truth may have been involved.”

  “A devilish truth, if that is what you want,” Mrs. Jacoby said sharply. “I should have thought it your duty as a clergyman to avoid such things, not embrace them. Do you know all you said tonight Maria? Have you any recollection?”

  But she did not reply. I felt her body, very limp against mine in the carriage. It was as though she were ill. Often enough, my mind had pictured Maria's body close to mine. Now it was, but in these circumstances I did not know what to think or what I felt. Mrs. Jacoby continued.

  “Understand now, Maria, that what you said under Mr. Wheeler's mesmeric influence was this—that in some manner Victor Frankenstein had created you and another, whom you called Adam—that he had attempted to burn you to death and dispatched the man to some dreadful place far away, hoping, no doubt, that he would die there. And you claimed to be nothing and no one—and rejoiced in Mr. Frankenstein's coming death, laughing like a maniac the while. Maria—we must know more.”

  To this she made no answer. She did not care about us, I realized, nor about anything that had occurred. It was as if she had dropped to our planet from the moon.

  “Maria's tale,” said I, “tallies all too well with what I was told by Donald Gilmore, who was present as a boy on the Orkneys, the cold and lonely sea-girt place described by Maria.”

  And—“So there is supporting testimony,” murmured Mr. Shaw the clergyman to himself. Though he had rescued us, I began to like the man less, and mistrust him more. He was plainly in the grip of some kind of theological fanaticism concerning the human soul, researches perhaps best left alone and certainly irrelevant to our present predicament.

  Meanwhile we rode on. Maria lay back in the carriage, her eyelids flickering like someone in a fit.

  “Where are we going, Mr. Shaw?” I asked him. “These ladies are in my charge.”

  “To my church,” he said.

  “Never,” said I, with more firmness than I felt. “These ladies need fire and food, not the cold interior of a church. I thank you for rescuing us but I think now we had better make our own arrangements.” I had no idea what these might be. It seemed to me then it would be undesirable to go to Russell Square, equally so to Gray's Inn Road. In either place we might face arrest or hostile crowds. Should we find some quiet suburban inn to pass the night?

  Shaw offered another suggestion.

  “If you will not come to the church, then let me take you to the house of my Bishop. He will see to your comfort and I will explain things to him.”

  Mrs. Jacoby asked, as if to herself, “And what will you explain?”

  Meanwhile he had leaned forward and shouted up another address at the driver. The carriage turned into the road and clopped back in the other direction.

  “The soul—” Shaw began.

  “I have no soul,” came Maria's dreamy voice.

  Shaw said, “But this is blasphemy. Why do you say that?”

  “Mr. Frankenstein told me so,” she said, then lapsed into silence again.

  “Can it be possible?” questioned Shaw.

  “Frankenstein is a villain,” declared Mrs. Jacoby. “I have never heard such blasphemy in my life. You are speaking now, Maria. So speak. For the love of God, tell us everything you know.”

  But whether from fatigue, illness or obstinacy, she would say no more.

  A few minutes later we evidently reached our destination, the Bishop's house, for we passed through gates, drawing up on a paved semicircle before the house. A servant let us in. Mrs. Jacoby, Maria and I were ushered into a small, fireless room where Mrs. Jacoby and I took seats on wooden chairs while Maria extended herself on a hard leather sofa, which had seen better days. Shaw went off to explain matters to the Bishop. Some fifteen minutes passed. We grew colder and colder and it became more and more apparent that the Bishop was extending no welcome to Mr. Shaw, or our party.

  Mrs. Jacoby expressed this first: “The Bishop will have none of us or of Mr. Shaw's theories of the soul. He sees danger to the Church, or himself, in all this. An argument rages while we freeze. We need fire and food, perhaps a nurse for Maria.”

  “And almost certainly a lawyer,” I agreed. “What to do? I think we must risk going to Gray's Inn Road and on the way I will leave a note for my lawyer Mr. Finborough to attend immediately. We must resolve this matter of Maria's confession.”

  “Made under the influence of a mesmerist, and therefore nonsense,” Mrs. Jacoby said decidedly. The godly woman of Chatham now pushed firmly from the door, the practical woman in charge. “Very well, let's go to Gray's Inn Road. We must at least have some shelter. When we arrive, you must descend from the carriage at a distance and scout out the house before we enter. If anyone is encamped there, either outside or inside, you will not return and I and Maria will go elsewhere.”

  “Where then?” I asked.

  “That will be my business,” said she.

  We left without ceremony, finding ourselves in a cold empty street near St. Paul's Cathedral with Maria supported between us and no conveyance in sight. A sleeting rain began and I said, “We had better reconcile ourselves to walking,” which we did. At Mr. Finborough's in Fleet Street I left a message asking him urgently to call on me. I persuaded the reluctant servant to hasten to a nearby mews where there were carriages for hire. Meanwhile we waited in a hall, Mrs. Jacoby and I standing, Maria on the only chair.

  Mrs. Jacoby, looking at Maria, said severely, “She could speak if she would. She feigns illness.”

  I admired the pragmatism of her approach but I knew, and so must she, there were grave considerations here. Had Maria's outburst been caused by insanity, had she been put up to the entire thing by Wheeler, or had she said what she did deliberately to mislead and cause sensation? It could not be as simple as that. I knew Gilmore's story; furthermore, Elizabeth Frankenstein was dead, Frankenstein himself was gravely wounded, and there was the missing man-beast I had seen so close to all of us, even now being hunted for attempted murder. It was hard to believe Maria's statements merely insane or deceitful.

  It was equally impossible to believe, in a reasonable world, in Victor's conducting deadly experiments with human beings. Yet he had done something, some terror had taken place on Orkney. But what?

  Above all, I wondered what of Cordelia? I had earlier that day envisaged myself on my way back to her this very evening, undertaking the first part of my journey home before darkness made it too difficu
lt. Yet here I was in a carriage going back to Gray's Inn Road, worse entangled than ever in this sinister affair.

  Mrs. Jacoby now addressed the fainting Maria, in no uncertain terms. In fact she grasped her by the shoulders and shook her. “Speak up, you bad, wicked girl. You could speak—if you would—we know it. Why did you say what you did? What is the truth? Do you understand you must now face the charge that you killed Frankenstein? Certainly you will be suspected of involvement in his attack. And where did you come from and what is your proper name? You must tell us now.” And with this she dealt her a blow across the face.

  Maria did not respond in any way, so Mrs. Jacoby gave her another buffet. Then Maria, with an access of strength of which she had not seemed capable, wrenched away from her and cried out in an anguished voice, “Adam!” She leaned past me, over my lap and grasped the handle of the carriage door. Even as I lunged to stop her, she had thrown it open and hurled herself over me and out of the vehicle. Few could have so quickly evaded my too-late clutching hands; even fewer could have jumped past me from the moving carriage—and landed on their feet. But this Maria did.

  As Mrs. Jacoby shouted for the carriage to stop I leaned from the door, and saw her running ahead down the road, then veering into an alley. I heard her cry, “Adam! I come to you!” Then she was lost to sight, gone into the darkness like a frightened cat. I suppose we both realized we had little chance of finding her, though we combed the streets in different directions for an hour, I on foot, Mrs. Jacoby in the carriage.

  When I returned to Gray's Inn Road I was not surprised to find Mrs. Jacoby there with two burly men from Mr. Worley's, the magistrate, wishing to question me about the whereabouts of Maria Clementi. Word of what had taken place at the Royal Society had been spread quickly to all ears.