by John Kessel
I did not understand. “Class?”
The clerk eyed me. “Do you wish a compartment, or will you share a space with the other passengers?”
The thought of sitting for a day or more in a public room terrified me. “A compartment, if you will.”
“That will be ten guilders.”
I pulled the purse from my pocket and opened it, grateful for the gloves that hid my hands. But I did not know the coins there. I placed a handful onto the counter and pushed them forward. “I am not familiar with your money,” I said.
“That won’t pay for more than third class,” the man said, watching me. Something about the way I moved was strange to him. By this time half the others in the office were watching the huge cloaked man who spoke French and did not know a guilder from a cent.
I persevered. “Third class, then.”
The clerk took half my money and wrote out a ticket, which he blotted and handed to me. “Your baggage?”
“No baggage,” I said. I left the office and walked out to the pier. The great ship towered over me, its masts as tall as the tallest trees. It was full morning and the docks were busy with sailors, stevedores, and passengers. The longer I stayed abroad the more attention I would attract, but if I boarded, I would be confined in a space where I might elicit even more scrutiny and which I could not easily escape. There seemed to be no good choice. When a sailor stopped to stare at me, startled by my size, I turned and climbed the gangway.
The third-class passengers were in a large room belowdecks in the forward part of the ship. The ceiling was not six feet above the deck. I stooped over and entered. The room had bunks on either side, little more than platforms with some mattress ticking, but better than any place I had ever slept. Down the narrow aisle between the bunks ran a long table with two benches. Two oil lamps hanging from the ceiling provided dim light, and on either side of the room was a latticed unglazed window, with shutters that could be closed against bad weather.
There were already five people in the room: a husband, wife, and their child—a girl younger even than Victor’s dead brother—and another woman and man who did not seem to be traveling together. The instant I entered, everyone went silent. Rather than sit on a bench and subject myself to their scrutiny, I crawled onto one of the platforms and crouched in the shadows, curled up with my knees before my face, my arms encircling them.
The child clutched the folds of her mother’s dress and stared at me with large eyes. Her mother said a few words to her in Dutch, steered her to the bench, and put a piece of biscuit before her. The father lay down on one of the pallets, and the exhausted mother sat beside him. The other woman watched me for a moment, then set her bag on the bench and opened it to search for something.
The other man pulled a printed paper from his coat—what I had learned, in my passage through the German towns, to be a newspaper. He spread it out on the table just below one of the lamps and bent over it. I watched his lips move as he read.
I began to think that I might carry off this masquerade, if I did not move quickly and was not called upon to speak.
The child continued to stare at me. She had finished but half her biscuit when she climbed onto the platform where I sat. She held the rest out to me. “Heb je honger?”
I did not know the words, but I could fathom her meaning, and my heart was moved. I held out my open palm and the girl put her biscuit into it.
“Je te remercie, enfant,” I said as softly as I could. The first time in my existence I had occasion to use these words.
But my voice carried farther than I intended. The woman with the satchel turned to look, and the man at the newspaper lifted his head. The mother woke from her half doze. “Anki!” she called.
I tried to give the crumbs back to the girl, but the mother must have mistaken my reaching out as an attempt to seize the child. She yanked the girl’s arm and the child began to cry.
The father awoke, but before he could move, the newspaper reader shouted and knocked over his bench in the effort to get to me. I was much quicker than he, but in the confined space I could not evade him, and when I tried to roll away, I hit my head on the ceiling. My hat came off, and the muffler fell from my face.
When he saw me, the man froze. The young woman and the mother screamed. “God save us!” the man said.
The young woman ran screaming for the hatchway. “Help us! Help! Captain!”
The mother huddled with her child and useless husband on their side of the cabin, but the other man stood between the hatchway and me. His expression of witless confusion enraged me. I grabbed my hat and scarf and with a swipe of my arm knocked him across the table. In a crouch I squeezed through the door and up the steps to the deck. The woman, screaming in English at a sailor who did not understand her, waved an arm at me as I crossed the deck in two steps and, seizing one of the lines that ran from the rail to the mast, leapt over the side of the ship onto the dock.
There came shouts from behind me as I ran through the smoke and bustle of the waterfront, my heart racing, and every astonished and horrified expression I encountered lies still imprinted on my mind, as does the sweet face of that little girl who thought I was hungry and offered me her food.
It was two days before I dared creep back to the waterfront. I had no other hope than to find my way onto a ship bound for England, and my experiment with purchasing passage was not one I was prepared to repeat. So I lurked and watched, discovered a cattle scow bound for London, and awaited my chance.
At twilight, in a downpour, the crew harried cattle up the ramp and into the hold. They did not see my huddled figure creeping among them. The hold was all gloom with a single lantern hanging beside the steps that led up the hatchway. Once inside I moved to the darkest corner.
The boat cast off and sailed down the river in the storm. Rain drummed on the deck above, and thunder rumbled. After a while the ship reached the sea and began to pitch as it fought the waves. The cattle stumbled about and threatened to crush me, so I crawled until I found a door in the floor that led to the bilge. I climbed inside and closed it over me.
So that was how I finally crossed the impassable ocean, in profound darkness, lying on a bed of ballast stones, sluiced by filthy waters, wet and cold and stinking. I tried to doze, but that was impossible. Instead I thought about Victor. Perhaps he believed that if he ran far away he could avoid keeping his promise. Or perhaps he only meant to draw me away from his family while he constructed my mate.
I had told him I would glut the maw of death with the blood of those he loved. Already I had murdered his brother and let Justine go to the gallows for it, but that had not been done in calculation so much as blind rage. I did not seek to become the fiend that he already thought me. It all depended on his keeping his promise—if he failed, or went back on it, how could I live? At times my fury burned so hot that I might wish the entire human race exterminated, but when I saw the comfort that these beings could offer one another, I longed to have a part in it. So as I lay there awash in the sewage at the keel of that cattle boat, I fervently wished that Victor had taken my threat seriously enough to keep to our bargain.
A man down here would drown or take sick. A man could not have lived through the things I had suffered. The cold, the heat, the hunger. I was stronger, more agile, smarter, more adaptable, able to eat things that would kill a human being, more able to recover from the physical injuries that humans had rained down on me. Stronger, too, in my mind. Lonelier.
He had so much, and I so little. When I thought of this injustice, my mind ached. No more wretched creature could have walked the earth; certainly not one who was so aware of his wretchedness. I might have been a god, but I was nothing.
After two days of misery, the sound of the water against the hull changed, and the bilgewater no longer surged from side to side with the rolling of the sea. We had entered the estuary of the Thames. Hours later the crew stirred and the ship came to rest. I heard muffled voices and the moving of cargo above. I
hid while all the cattle were driven from belowdecks. I waited until the daylight filtering down from above faded before I crept off the boat.
The waterfront here was like that in Rotterdam, down to the pens for the cattle and yards full of coal. Warehouses towered above the narrow streets. The air was thick with yellowish fog against which the wan light from streetlamps made little purchase.
Down an alley I found a rain barrel full of water clean enough to drink. I washed my filthy clothes as best I could, and cleaned my naked body. Then I broke into a warehouse, and, hidden among some bales of cotton, surrendered to sleep.
I was awakened by dockworkers arriving in the morning. Ravenous, I took to the streets. The cold, dank air reeked, and from every chimney rose a stream of coal smoke that soon made the day a second twilight. I wondered that humans would choose a place like this when they might live in the forest or mountains. The only benefit of this man-made darkness was that it enabled me to conceal my appearance more easily.
My education had proceeded to the point where I recognized the signs of dire poverty everywhere. Crowded, shabby buildings filled the neighborhoods near the dockyards, their facades blackened by the same soot that blackened the faces of their inhabitants out in the streets. My size and muffled face did not arouse notice here in the way they had on the Prince William, though I took no chances and kept out of the way.
I made my way toward the center of the city. I saw the tower fortress at the east of its heart. Businessmen and clerks hurried to and from their places of work. Here the clothes were finer, the faces cleaner, the bearing of the pedestrians more confident, though the streets were filled with mud and young boys with brooms attempted to extort a penny from passersby by sweeping it before them so that they might cross without soiling their boots.
When I passed a bakeshop, the aroma of cooking made me dizzy. On the street a costermonger sold pies for a penny; I gave him one of my remaining Dutch coins and he let me have one.
I retired to the neighborhood of a great domed church, a building as large as any I had seen on my journey down the Rhine, sat in a corner, and consumed my meal. I considered my prospects.
I had no idea where I might find Victor and Henry, I understood no English, and I had no British money. My attempt to buy passage, though it had ended badly, offered me hope: it was possible for me to pass among men for at least a short time, in the proper circumstances. Among the poor and downtrodden I might move without as much suspicion, and my frightening stature, rather than drawing trouble, might cause people to avoid me.
I would never find Victor as long as I could not speak the language, so my first task would be to teach myself English. In this I was aided by the fact that I was a superior mimic. I could imitate a sentence in an unknown tongue precisely enough to sound like a native speaker, even when I did not know what the words meant.
I spent that winter in this effort. I lurked in the corners of streets, hid in alleys where I listened to the boys hawking newspapers and men selling fruits, vegetables, and fish. I ate trash that had been thrown out as inedible by the poorest people in the city. I listened to these people argue with their wives and husbands, yell at their children, haggle with shopkeepers, and fend off constables. In shame, I robbed any number of men in order to put a few coins in my pocket. I listened outside pubs, and on occasion even entered them to buy a pint of ale. I heard desperate women offer their bodies to men in the streets for the price of a loaf of bread.
Every day in London brought a new astonishment. In the three months I lived in warehouses and alleys, I learned a great deal about the human race. What I learned was that most of the days of their short lives, the greater number of human beings were miserable.
How naive I had been that year and a half that I lived in a shed at the side of the De Laceys’ cottage! Spying on them through a chink in the wall, I had thought they lived in paradise. They had fire. They had food. They had one another. The old blind man played guitar. The young women sang. They were beautiful, all of them, even the old man. I observed Safie touch Felix’s wrist as they stooped over to put more wood on the fire, and his hand upon her back as he helped her to rise. Though I was no longer so innocent, I persisted in believing that these things were genuine.
Innocence was a treasure I no longer had. It had been spent—no, it had been stolen from me—by the blows Felix leveled on my back, by Agatha fainting dead away and Safie rushing from the room at the sight of me, and by the bullet in my shoulder shot by a man whose daughter I had saved from drowning.
I was alone. No woman would touch me, and I would touch no woman, unless Frankenstein kept his promise.
By February I had some command of the language, some knowledge of the city, and some confidence that I could pass among humans. I had become an accomplished thief. I waited in the alleys of the theater district, lurked along the Strand or Haymarket where prostitutes sauntered down the night streets with their skirts partly tucked up to advertise their wares. It was simple work to nudge one of their customers into an alley and rob him. Occasionally a soldier might put up a fight and I would have to knock him senseless, but I managed never to kill any of them. From the pockets of one of my victims, snagged while he was soliciting a prostitute, I gained not only money, but a Bible. Poring over this strange book, I learned the reading of English.
Then my search for Victor began in earnest. On the slim chance that he still remained in London, I haunted the inns of Mayfair and Bloomsbury. I went abroad mostly at night, when the guests went out to dine or attend the theater. I would set up on some corner or in some close and watch the entrances of the inns for hours at a time, hoping to spy Victor should he appear.
The Adelphi, the Crown and Anchor, the Golden Cross, Locket’s, the Queen’s Arms, the Bull and Gate, the Ram’s Head, the Red Lion, the Cross Keys. There were too many inns. Weeks passed. I might have concluded that Victor was no longer in London, but I needed to know for sure. At the pace I was setting, I could search forever and not know.
One night outside the Black Horse Inn I called from the alley to a street lad, “Here, boy!”
He peered at me in the darkness. I could see him consider flight. “Yes, I am large,” I said. “If I wanted to wring your neck, it would already be wrung. So, do you speak?”
“Aye,” the boy said. He had brushed his jacket and trousers, but his elbows were threadbare and his boots broken. His thick hair was almost as black as mine.
“How would you like to earn a pound?”
He kept his eye on the distance between us. “Doing what?”
“Come closer, boy.”
“You come out of the alley.”
“I like the alley. The lamplight does not suit me.”
The boy smirked. “And you’ll give a quid to the likes of me. You don’t have thruppence.”
I threw a coin at his feet. “There’s thruppence.”
Quick as a snake he snatched it up.
“I seek a certain gentleman,” I said, “who stops in one of the inns about here. A Frenchman. His name is Victor Frankenstein. He travels with a companion, another man, named Clerval.”
“Don’t know no Frenchmen.”
“Quel dommage,” I said.
“Who is he? What do yer want with ’im?”
“Let’s say he is a Bonapartist. He may look innocent enough, but he is a dangerous fellow.”
“How do I know you’ll pay?”
“There’s thruppence on account. You find him for me and you’ll have that pound.”
“There’s dozens of inns—I can’t mind ’em all.”
“You must know the other boys that work this part of town. I bet you know the slops boys of the inns, and the bootblacks, and the boys who hold the horses for gentlemen or fetch cabs for theatergoers. You can figure out how to spread your money around.”
“When I find him, where’ll I find you?”
“You know that alley that leads to the Blewitts Buildings off Fetter Lane? You have something to tell
me, you stand by the gate there at seven o’clock at night. I’ll find you, and you’ll have your quid.”
For the next week, every evening I scaled the rear of the building on the corner of the alley leading to the Blewitts Buildings. It was an easy enough climb for me. I lay between the chimney pots and watched the soot-stained facades of the buildings opposite, the passersby in the street, the lamplighters as they made their way in the deepening gloom. I pulled my cloak up around my neck against the late winter cold and waited.
A week to the day after I hired that boy, he came down Fetter Lane from High Holborn and waited at the entrance to Blewitts. I let him stand there in the dark for ten minutes while I made sure he had not been followed. Then, silently, I climbed down the side of the building and dropped to my feet not a yard from him.
He fell back against the gate. “Cor!”
“What do you have to tell me?”
The boy scrambled to his feet. “My—my money.”
“Don’t play with me, boy. Where is he?”
“He’s staying at the Dorant’s Hotel, near St. James’s Street and Piccadilly.”
“You know it to be him?”
“I know the yard boy there, and he knows the chambermaids.”
I fished a sovereign out of my pocket and laid it into his palm. “If you’re lying, I will find you and kill you.”
The boy peered up at me, trying to make me out in the dark. I turned my back on him, pulled the brim of my hat lower, and walked off. As I did so, a light rain began to fall.
Dorant’s Hotel stood in a fine neighborhood of Piccadilly, between a saddler’s and a pianoforte shop, across the street from a mansion so large that it might be a palace. In the early evening, despite the cold March weather and mist, the street was busy with cabs and people. The inn was brightly lit. Here Victor had resided for three months while I lived in a warehouse. If he was at work on creating a mate for me, this did not seem a likely place to do it. I stood on the edge of the street, wondering what next I might do, and was almost run down by a cab. I stepped back onto the sidewalk; men and ladies circled around me.