Frankenstein's Bride

by Hilary Bailey

  There was little we could tell these men that would satisfy them. To get rid of them I suggested Maria might have gone to Mr. Frankenstein's house at Cheyne Walk and for the same reason Mrs. Jacoby suggested the house in Russell Square, the theatre and certain other places. But neither of us believed that Maria would go to any of them. She was in pursuit of her Adam, whoever and wherever he was.

  The men left and we sat alone for a while, thinking of Maria roaming through the darkness, going towards, I supposed, this Adam she was trying to find. Mrs. Jacoby told me she knew nothing of him, adding, in a tired and disillusioned manner, that she had come to London at the demand of her conscience, but only with the gravest doubts, knowing that anything concerning her erstwhile employer could not go healthily or right. This had proved to be the case. She said she was not a young woman, had not slept the previous night from anxiety, had come post-haste from Chatham that morning and, though it was but eight o'clock in the evening, she craved to end a long and disquieting day. She wished to hear no more of the business, or think any longer about it. With my permission she would go upstairs to bed and leave early next morning by the coach to Kent, glad to be out of it all. At least, she said, with a weary smile, she had been plunged back into the hectic and disreputable life she had once led in such a way that she could never again doubt the wisdom of leaving it, even for her present dull and melancholy life. And she added kindly, “Mr. Goodall, you summoned me back for the best of motives, to a life I had renounced out of shame and remorse. I do not complain. But this affair is not over. No—it is not over—it will get its tentacles about you and drag you to the bottom of the sea. And I note what perhaps you have not—there is no disinterested person in this matter other than yourself. Gabriel Mortimer has profited handsomely by Maria's effort since he first discovered her in Ireland and hoped to do better if she could speak. Wheeler put her on show to placate his rich masters and increase his own fame—after this recent horrible display he may have failed but who can tell about that, the world is very strange. And Nottcutt—Nottcutt was a bored degenerate in search of sensation, now, I suspect, trying to distance himself from the affair which has shocked his parents.

  “But these men, Mr. Goodall, involved themselves in this matter desiring some personal satisfaction. Alone among them, you did not. Let me tell you, nothing concerning Maria Clementi is without criminality, or frenzy, or lust. She is a magnet for men with empty pockets or fevered brains or bodies. She may not be entirely to blame. After what we heard this evening, whatever the real truth, it appears at least that she has been very ill-used.

  “But you, Mr. Goodall—Jonathan—are innocent. You must withdraw from this matter before it overwhelms you. You have, I know, a worm of curiosity in your brain, a desire to know more, a feeling truths can be discovered which will transform the world. The light of reason, you think, can be induced to play over the world; all will be transformed; we shall live in Paradise.

  “Well, my dear, I am older than you and have seen the world transformed twice, once by revolution in France and then by the Emperor Napoleon, and this second transformation widowed me. I have no love for transformers and no desire to see a world transformed again. Leave things as they are, Mr. Goodall. Leave them alone. Go down to the country, live with your good young woman and your family, look to your land and care for the families who tend it for you. In short, cultivate your garden, that is the best a man can do. Do not lose your grip on the good and the real, I beg you.”

  After Mrs. Jacoby had retired to bed I was very thoughtful. She had told me forcibly what I knew, gave me the advice I gave myself. Maria had gone; I did not think she would return. I determined I would visit Victor next day to see how he did (revealing nothing of today's transactions even if he were in a state to understand what was told) and then go swiftly back to Kittering before I lost everything I held dear.

  S I X T E E N

  NEXT DAY, EARLY, Mrs. Jacoby and I parted with all good will. I secured a place on a coach leaving for Nottingham at eleven that morning and went to pay a visit to Victor before my departure.

  Mrs. Frankenstein was greatly distressed when I arrived, and not very welcoming either, for she and Victor's father had seen me getting Maria from the room at the Royal Society and discovered from the men calling at the house that she had escaped. She thought me to be Maria's accomplice. Maria must be found, Victor's mother insisted, and forced to confess the dreadful allegations she had made against Victor were false.

  However, the poor woman had greater cares even than that. Victor, she told me, had the day before gone into a high fever: the doctor despaired of him, saying that during the attack vital organs must have been penetrated which were now mortifying. Little could be done, said Victor's unhappy mother, stricken with grief at the approaching death of her son—and deeply bewildered also. Apparently at three the previous morning he had called for pens, paper and ink which his nurse had been afraid to refuse him. Since then he had been propped up in his bed, dreadfully ill, writing furiously. His mother had not discovered all this until daylight broke when she went in to see him. Finding out what he was doing she had pleaded with him to stop. He would not; she dared not force him to do so, even though she knew this exercise could only weaken him further. He was still there, she told me, leaning against his pillows, scribbling, the bed strewn with written-over sheets of paper.

  “He cannot be writing an account of his attack,” she said. “For why would he write so much? He gave me the keys to his desk, also, and insisted I bring certain papers to him. When I refused he became so agitated I was forced to comply. Please,” she urged, “please, Mr. Goodall, will you go to him, try to calm him, persuade him to rest?”

  I agreed I would do this and went upstairs to Victor's room. The situation was exactly as Mrs. Frankenstein had described. Victor lay propped up, yellow-faced and indescribably thin. There was a roofing fire, a nurse sitting by it but doing nothing, for there was nothing to do. As I came in she gave me an anxious look, then rose to her feet. Around Victor's head was a bandage badly stained. I guessed even there his wounds were not healing. As I approached I saw his face was beaded with sweat. In his hand was a pen, spluttering ink as his hand moved rapidly across a tablet of paper propped on a writing desk he had against his slightly raised knees. His position looked painful; his whole face and attitude spoke of agony. The entire expanse of the bed was covered with sheets of paper, some written, others containing diagrams and chemical formulae. As I went to him the nurse intercepted me, saying, in an undertone, “Can you persuade him to cease this frantic work?”

  I nodded and went to the bedside. Victor looked at me and smiled, a mere rictus, yet somehow, his sunken eyes were more peaceful than they had been for many months. I was happy to see it, yet I grieved.

  “Jonathan,” he whispered in a rasping voice—he had much trouble breathing and as I came closer I heard his breath sawing in and out—”Jonathan, I am glad to see you. Will you take my papers?”

  “Of course I will, Victor,” I answered.

  “There are also some notes of my work.”

  I nodded again.

  “Do not let my parents see this,” he said, gesturing with the pen at what he had been writing. “They must never see it.”

  “I will make sure of it. But Victor, you must cease writing. It is doing you damage.”

  “I know, but I have finished now,” he said. “Jonathan, there's no help for me. It is over, and I am glad it is. For I have made my world a hell and I can live in it no longer. These papers are my testament and my confession. Preserve them, and preserve the scientific papers also. I have made advances, scientific advances in a way no man should have, but the knowledge, Jonathan, the knowledge—” And as he said these last trailing words it was in the tone of a man who speaks the name of a lover. Then he gasped, “Gather them up. Hide them. Take them with you when you go.”

  I could do no more for him than relieve his mind of anxiety, so I gathered the papers roughly in a bu
ndle and put the weighty document into the inside pocket of my coat. I removed the pen from his hand and the desk from his knees as he shut his eyes, unutterably exhausted.

  As I went about my business with the papers and the desk I tried to speak levelly to him, but kept my eyes from him, for they were full of tears. “Victor,” I said, “whatever you have done you have repented and repented bitterly. There is a God who will forgive you. May I not send for a clergyman now, to whom you can unburden yourself and who will assure you of that forgiveness?”

  He sighed. Each word, as he spoke, gave him pain. “No churchman could—no priest could give me absolution for what I have done. God himself could not forgive. I have abrogated His rights, done what no man should do—I have tried to make myself a god.”

  “Victor,” I groaned, weeping openly now, “this stern Lutheran conscience—this self-punishment—it cannot be right.” I fell to my knees beside his bed.

  “Jonathan,” he said, “I cannot truly repent unless I destroy my work, the work from which so much evil has come. And that I cannot—no—will not, do. Read my pages—read them.”

  “I will,” I said. “Of course I will.”

  His eyes closed again, and “Farewell,” he whispered, His breathing became harsher, more labored. In his physical struggle he forgot me, then, I saw, lapsed into unconsciousness. So, “Farewell, Victor,” I said and kissed his brow and left, weeping.

  I descended the stairs. At the bottom, Mrs. Frankenstein awaited me. I must not show her the papers, the writing of which had cost her son so dear, yet I knew she would think she had a right to them. Reaching the bottom tread, I wiped the tears from my eyes, looked at her anxious face and saw it change as she realized from my expression that I, too, believed her son would die.

  I told her Victor had finished writing and had given me his papers to put in order. I would take them to the country to do so. Mercifully she did not ask me then for copies. Her first—her only thought—was for Victor, whom she, bidding me a hasty farewell, went up stairs to tend.

  Later I received a letter from Victor's father asking for his son's last testimony. I replied telling him that as he knew his son had been in a high fever when he wrote, the pages, alas, were rambling and incomprehensible, the diagrams and formulae appeared meaningless. I had therefore, I said, taken the liberty of burning the pages, which would have brought no further credit to his name. The work he had done and the feelings of his friends and family for him would remain his best memorial. Mr. Frankenstein did not reply to this letter.

  It gave me no joy to refuse the request of the bereaved father but I had promised Victor I would keep his papers from his family. And had I broken that promise, what consolation would they have brought? Certainly, possession of the last testament of Victor Frankenstein over the years I have held it, has brought me no peace of mind.

  I set off for Gray's Inn Road, where I would pack my small bag and go to the coach, but I had not gone very far on the frosty road, under a laden, yellow sky, when the first snowflakes began to blow in my face. Before I reached home I was walking half-blind through the snowstorm and there was an inch of snow on the ground beneath my feet. I suspected the coach might not set out in such conditions and this proved to be the case. When I arrived with my bag in the City, the coachman was well muffled on his seat atop the vehicle, six coach-horses in their traces. Then he began to clamber down again, passengers put their heads out of the coach windows, demanding to know what was going on. The coachman shouted that reports from further up the road told of snow having started early in the morning, and roads already half-blocked. To proceed would be folly.

  I was sorely tempted to hire a horse or a private carriage and blunder my way through to Nottingham. But a moment's consideration made me realize this would have been madness. Cordelia, given any choice, would prefer a delayed husband-to-be to a frozen corpse by the wayside. I returned to Gray's Inn Road, frustrated and melancholy.

  It was therefore in Cordelia Downey's little parlor that I sat alone before a roaring fire and, putting the pages of drawings and scientific information aside (and I have not looked at them since), I began to read the account Victor Frankenstein had scrawled that day, from what was to prove his deathbed.

  S E V E N T E E N

  Iknow myself to be a dying man, killed by that beautiful creature I created. I know I am irrevocably doomed for I have committed the unforgivable sin, the ultimate blasphemy. I have usurped my Maker, and made life. I made a new Adam and a new Eve. They are wicked; they have proved my punishment. Oh, my poor wife and my little son, innocent even of the knowledge of what I had done, now both dead, dead as if by my own hand.

  “But I must be as brief as I can for I have little strength or time left to me. I dread being unable to finish this, my account of my life, of my sins.

  “The first creature I made as a young man was a brute, though whether I created a brute or turned my creation into one, I cannot say. However, it was that creature which turned against me, which destroyed my life and, made it a waste. He taught me what I had never known before, bitterness, loss of hope, self-contempt.

  “After this occurred I would not learn the lesson it taught me. A wiser man, a less ambitious man would have felt remorse—as I did—then, never meddled again in such business. But I, arrogantly, thought I could put right what I had done—by going further. It came to me that the softening effect on my creature of one of his own kind, but a woman, might render him harmless and thus decrease my guilt. And he wanted one, a bride, as he called it, moaning, ‘My bride, get my bride,' in his strangled tongue until I was forced to lock him up to get him away from me or I would have killed him.

  “His nature was not all savage. His fits of bestiality would come on him at random, or when he became disturbed about some matter, big or small. Sometimes, God help him, he was pleading and gentle enough, whining, asking questions and demanding little playthings which I would sometimes supply. Seeing that grisly, monstrous figure in his jail-room, playing like a child with a little wooden horse and cart I had given him, knowing I had created this perversion, this freak of nature—I cannot describe to you the rage and self-disgust I felt. Yet I had brought this awful thing into the world and pride, evil pride, forbade me to do what should have been done—destroy it.

  “It was pride made me think I could solve the hideous problem I had created by making a woman for my monster. In my arrogance I supposed I could correct my first error by further effort, by making a woman for my man, a Frankenstein's Eve to match that abortion, Frankenstein's Adam.

  “Pride, all pride. Fatal pride, which killed my wife and son and now kills me.

  “‘Make my bride, my bride, my bride.' As I lie here that mumbling grating voice still rings in my ears, as if he were in the room with me. And he might be, for he is still at large, the villain, and will outlive his creator. Does he know it? I think he does.

  “In the Orkneys, then, with only the backward inhabitants of that poor little fishing village, a people ignorant, degenerate and barbarous as any Mohican or Apache in America, I thought to hide my beast and make for him his beastly bride.

  “I got information from the mainland (a man with money can buy anything he desires if he can find one base enough to supply it) that over in France they could obtain for me the body of a young woman, only nineteen years old. They told me she was a country girl who had come to Paris to sing and dance, had been seduced, was with child—had killed herself. To this day I do not know whether it was suicide or murder. Knowing me to be willing to pay, having found the girl, my villainous associates might well have taken matters into their own hands and caused her death themselves. I asked no questions then, desperate to continue my experiments, find some way of controlling the monster I had made—and improve on him. I had made a man, yes, but a maimed and horrid figure of a man. I thought, if I am to create afresh, let my new creation do me credit. So, using a man desperate for gold as my boatman, I sailed to France and came back with the corpse, a b
eautiful young woman, whole and undamaged. I needed not fashion her, like the last, merely use the technique I had found of giving life to animate her corpse, thus bringing the dead to life again. I did not this time blasphemously create man like God, as I had done before, but blasphemously mocked Our Lord Jesus Christ, who brought Lazarus back to life. Yet, one might ask, what harm is there in restoring life to one of God's creatures? Is that not only one step further on from what a doctor, bound by sacred oath, must do? That was what I said then to myself.”

  “Ill-luck dogged me. I shall be glad to leave this cruel world. For who could have guessed that seven years after I left Orkney Donald Gilmore, son of the owner of the fishing-boat I used to transport the girl, would be in London, in the very doorway I was entering? That he would recognize me, that he would tell all he knew?”

  “There on Orkney I had my brute locked up in his barn, roaring and yelling, while I made his partner (first removing all traces of the child she was to bear). Soon I had, living and breathing, the bride, the wife for my monster. She was so beautiful, soft-haired, smooth-skinned—so beautiful. And, because her mind was wiped clear of all memory, she was so innocent, primally innocent. Even as she awoke from her unconscious state she looked into my eyes—mine was the first face she saw in her new life—and smiled such an innocent smile, the smile of a baby.

  “At that moment it came to me, with some vast pang which tore through my body, that I could not give over this angel to that beast. For all I knew then, he would kill her. If he did not he would brutalize her, make her, for all her beauty, as foul as he was. She was mine, I thought. Not his—but mine. Thus, one sin gave birth to another.

  “In his barn, knowing my work proceeded, the beast grew more noisy and importunate. I had to send the men in to quieten him, but even then he would not be still. And all the while I contemplated teaching my woman—my blasphemously titled Eve—to speak, to teach her what she must know to be my consort. And yet, within days, even before she understood anything, she yearned to go to where he lay on straw in his barn. At night I was forced to lock the doors, for otherwise she would creep out at night and be found outside the door of the barn at morning, half-frozen and completely ignorant of what she had done. When he cried and called out she would gaze towards where the cries came from, rise and try to escape, to be with him.