by John Kessel
“We cannot put her back into the bath. We will not wait here on the chance that something may happen that may not.”
“I agree. But I have considered other options, and I have prepared a treatment that will, I believe, insure her continued existence.”
“A treatment?” I said.
Eve looked at us, completely out of her depth. She watched my face, and Miss Bennet’s.
“Kin to the medicine that I have given her every night. It contains the vital elements that I use to bring dead cells to life. It should act within her over the next weeks to correct those things that may have gone awry.”
I tried to gauge his motives. “Why should you worry about this, when you would like nothing better than to see us disappear forever?”
“I have no desire to have to create for you a second mate, and I will not do so,” Victor said. “She is all the companions you shall ever have.”
The possibility of losing her struck terror in me. “Give us this potion, then.”
“If you will come into the laboratory, I have prepared it.”
Victor led us into the back room. He asked Eve to sit upon the edge of the table. Mary helped her up and began to fumble with the buttons of Eve’s dress.
“There is no need for her to disrobe,” Victor said.
On his worktable sat the alembic, which he had used to prepare her daily tonic; from its neck dripped a fluid into a china teacup. “I have brewed this medicine over the last day. It should be cool enough for her to drink.”
Victor took the cup and swirled the potion within it. “I believe it is ready,” he said. He handed it to Eve.
“The taste will be unpleasant, but she must drink it all down.”
Eve’s nose wrinkled at the smell, and she looked to me for reassurance. I nodded. “Drink,” I said.
Eyes on mine, she brought the brew to her lips and drained it. She grimaced at the taste. She dropped the cup, which bounced off her lap, fell to the floor, and shattered.
Eve’s eyes went wide. She swayed. I caught and steadied her. Her face was inches from mine. Her head trembled and she coughed, splattering saliva in my face. She heaved and choked. Her body convulsed in my arms.
“Eve!” I cried.
“What is it?” Miss Bennet said.
Victor stood watching, his face frozen. He turned away.
I carried Eve, spasming as she gasped for air, to the bed. She began to vomit, half of it blood, and I had to turn her over to keep her from choking. Still she gasped painfully for breath, a terrible rattling wheeze. Her eyes drooped and her head lolled. “Eve,” I cried, holding her face in my hand. A thin line of white showed beneath her almost-closed eyelids.
She lay convulsing for several minutes, shuddering, and then she stopped breathing entirely. A bubble of blood burst on her lips.
On my knees beside the bed, I shook her, trying to rouse her. She was as limp as an empty coat. I laid my head on her breast and listened for her heart. It was still.
I must have let my head lie there, stunned, for some moments. I became aware of excited voices and lifted my eyes to see Miss Bennet arguing with Victor.
I stood. My head brushed the room’s rafters. “Why?” I asked.
Miss Bennet turned her face to me. Tears showed on her cheeks.
Victor stood straighter and lifted his chin, the way, I had observed, men did when trying to convince themselves that they are brave.
“Shall I, in cool blood, set loose upon the earth a second demon, whose delight is death and wretchedness? Your semblance of humanity is deceit. You are indifferent to your own depravity. Your existence is wrong—the only cure for it is to do away with you. I only wish I had managed somehow to get you to share the healing draught.”
Miss Bennet recoiled at his words, as if each were a physical blow.
“You could not recognize the beauty you had created,” I said, “how simple and good she was. You had to annihilate her, lest by her very existence she point out the worthlessness of your entire race. How the thought of our marriage must have tormented you.”
Miss Bennet stepped between Victor and me. “Do not kill him!”
“You think you must protect him from me?” I said.
“Don’t trouble yourself, Miss Bennet,” Victor said. “The hour of my weakness is past, and the end of his power is arrived.”
“No—I will not kill you, Victor,” I said. “But do not think you may be happy, while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness. You shall never be free of me. You, my tyrant and tormenter, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. I shall be with you on your wedding night.”
“Villain! Before you sign my death warrant, be sure that you are yourself safe. I am no coward.”
I looked down on Eve’s body, lifeless for the second time. A cold rage burned in my heart. I laughed. “I have no doubt, my creator, that if you should survive to tell our tale, you will neglect to relate how you tricked me and poisoned Eve. You will give a report much kinder to your overwhelming vanity.”
I gathered up Eve, shouldered past Victor’s wrathful eye and trembling jaw, past Miss Bennet, and into the laboratory. In the corner stood the trunk. I kissed Eve’s lips, bitter with the taste of poison. I folded her so that she might fit into the trunk, much as I had folded the body of Kitty Bennet to fit within it months earlier. I carried the trunk out of the cottage to the beach and loaded it into the stolen skiff.
TWENTY
The cup bounced off Eve’s lap, fell to the floor, and shattered.
As Eve choked and went into spasms, Mary stepped toward her, then hesitated. Adam caught Eve up and carried her through the laboratory door to Mary’s bed.
“What’s happened?” she asked Victor. “Help her!”
Victor looked stricken. He did not move.
Mary followed the horrid sounds coming from next room. She found Adam kneeling over Eve on Mary’s bed. Eve shook and gasped. Her mouth was red with blood. The sound of her tortured breath, a fearfully loud wheeze, sent shivers down Mary’s spine. Eve vomited and Adam tried to clear her mouth. He held her face in his hand and spoke to her.
Mary heard Victor behind her. She turned on him. “Please, help her.”
“She is beyond anyone’s help,” Victor said.
The end of Mary’s confusion was like a physical blow.
“How could you do this?”
“I had no choice,” he said hoarsely.
“No choice!”
Victor tore his eyes from Adam and Eve and returned her gaze. His expression turned from horror to anger. “Mary, you are a fool. You are a fool twenty times over, and I a fool for drawing you into this. Look at them! They are not human, they are monsters. The idea that I could create a human being was a blasphemous presumption. Let no one else suffer because of my sin. Let it all fall onto me, his rage and hatred. I can bear it. I deserve it.”
Mary could hardly speak. She was crying. “You had no reason!”
A few steps away from them, on the bed, Eve no longer gasped for air. She did not move. Adam’s head lay on her breast. He lifted it and stood. His bulk filled the room.
“Why?” he said to Victor in a choked voice.
“Shall I, in cool blood, set loose upon the earth a second demon, whose delight is death and wretchedness?” Victor said.
Mary watched the rage swell in Adam; his voice trembled with it as he accused Victor of killing Eve out of envy. Mary stepped between them. “Do not kill him!” she said.
Adam looked at her in astonishment. “You think you must protect him from me?”
He threatened to make Victor miserable and vowed that he would be there on his wedding night. Then he picked up Eve and carried her into the laboratory. He fit her into the trunk that had contained Kitty’s body and then, kicking the door open with his foot, carried it out of the cottage. The cold wind rushed in. He hoisted the trunk to his shoulder and walked toward the beach.
Mary turned on Victor. “How could you destroy an innoc
ent like Eve?”
“I had every reason to destroy her. Her continued existence would have led to evil. I could see it happening—she was becoming an appendage of his will. Soon she would have seen humanity as he does, and acted out of his merciless hatred. His malice was evident in every move of his body, in the subtle manipulations by which he deceived you, in the lust revealed by every glance he cast upon his hideous bride.”
“You are wrong. He had changed. He was changing every hour.”
“Mary, you were made to be used. Have you never been told that you are a terrible judge of character?”
“I regarded you highly,” she said.
“You erred in that as well. I committed an abomination. Out of cowardice I repeated the sin, but now I have mustered the courage to put it right. Like Prometheus, thinking I would benefit my race, I seized a godlike power, not realizing how inadequate we are to wield such power. Like Prometheus I shall be punished. You heard what the demon said.”
Mary could not stand to remain. She ran out of the cottage.
She called aloud as she approached the beach. In the moonlight she saw the stolen skiff half in the water. Adam had loaded the trunk into it. He stooped over beside the skiff, tossing sea-smooth rocks from the beach into the bottom of the boat.
“Adam!” she called. “Please, stop.”
He ignored her. He pushed the skiff into the waves and hoisted himself over the gunwale. Mary called out, “Wait! Please! Don’t go!”
She ran into the water. A wave crashed against her and she staggered. The sea was icy. She gained her feet and pushed forward, the water rising to her waist. “Adam! Stop!”
He fitted an oar into the rowlock. She saw him turn and then another wave hit her and knocked her over. Her feet lost the seabed and she tumbled below the waters. The ocean was pitch-black. Her head broke the surface, but before she could draw breath, another wave pushed her under. Just as she realized that she was going to drown, something grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the water.
Her body scraped against the side of the skiff and Adam hauled her aboard.
Mary coughed and gasped, lying in the water that sloshed around the skiff’s bottom. Her sodden dress weighed so much she struggled to move, and the wind on her exposed neck sent a chill down her back. She shivered.
Adam sat, took the oars, and rowed past the surf into smooth waters. His long, wet hair hung over the shoulders of his coat. He moved with rhythm and tremendous strength, and his eyes were dark pits.
Mary managed to pull herself up enough to lean against the trunk that contained Eve’s body. The shoulder by which he had dragged her from the sea ached.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what he was about to do. Had I known—”
“You know very little,” he said.
She considered this a fair assessment. It seemed that Victor and Adam could at least agree on that.
He rowed steadily until they were well away from the island. The sea was calm and the stars bright. The waning moon created a glittering path on the water. Mary wished she could step out and follow it to the horizon, to escape this world of horror and blood.
After a while she said, “What will you do?”
“I shall desolate his life. I shall destroy his heart and mind. I shall make of his every moment a living hell. I shall torment him with the thought of the deaths . . . I shall take from him . . . I shall . . . I do not know all the things I shall do, but I shall never stop until he suffers as grievous a loss as I suffered tonight. I will burn, I will rage, I will—”
He pulled so hard on the oars that one of them popped out of the rowlock and he fell over backward. He struggled up, seized the offending oar, and hurled it end over end into the air. It splashed into the sea and floated some yards away.
He heaved a sigh and sat down on the thwart, his head hanging. Mary heard the sound of his weeping.
She sat shivering. After some time he stopped. He wiped his eyes. He scanned the sea. To the south a speck of light lay on the horizon.
Adam fished the discarded oar from the water. He crept toward her. The boat swayed. “Move,” he said.
She fell back onto the seat that ran across the stern. She trembled with the cold. Looking at her feet, she saw that Mrs. Buchanan’s wedding shoes were completely ruined.
Adam knelt beside the trunk and opened it. Mary could not see within, nor did she wish to. One by one Adam took up the stones he had tossed into the boat and set them carefully into the trunk. When he had finished, he closed it and sat staring at it.
He said to Mary, “Sit on one side.”
She did so. On one knee, he picked up the trunk and, balancing against the boat’s swaying, dropped it overboard. It made a slight splash and sank into the black water. He stared down, his hands on the gunwale, for some time. He turned. “I should throw you overboard too.”
The boat rocked with the wind.
“You might have left me to drown back in the surf,” Mary said. “But you chose not to.”
“Why did you come after me?”
Mary asked herself the same question. “I could not stay with Victor. I wanted to console you.”
“Console me!” His voice rose. “I have endured more than any being could abide. For a year now I have crept across Europe, England, and Scotland, living on the blasted heath, suffering cold and hunger, all the time waiting for him to give me the only consolation possible. And now he steals it from me! Worse, he took that poor creature’s life. Console me. I should kill you for speaking the word.”
“Adam, I know that—”
“Don’t call me that name! I have no name!”
He stepped forward, rocking the boat so perilously that Mary had to clutch the seat to keep from falling overboard. Adam—the creature that had been, briefly, Adam—seized the mast that lay in the bottom of the skiff and mounted it in its socket in the boat’s prow. He attached the yard and raised the sail, which caught the breeze and snapped full. The boat heeled over; Mary seized the rudder to keep it from capsizing.
Though Mary had sailed on a lake once or twice with Darcy, she knew little of guiding a boat. The Creature came back and managed to steer the skiff south toward the mainland. She wanted to reach out and touch him, but she feared he might respond with a blow.
He sat not three feet from her, leaning on the tiller, a huge black figure in the moonlight. He was gaunt in a way that she had not noticed before. The knob of the wrist that stuck out of the sleeve of his too-short coat stood out so starkly that it cast a shadow.
The moon was coming down, and soon the sun would begin to lighten the sea’s horizon in the southeast.
Back at Pemberley she had watched Kitty die, lying in bed, her sisters around her, the focus of all the love—and understanding of her flaws and foolishness—that had grown between them over a lifetime together.
Now Mary had watched her, in Eve, die a second time. This death came from another realm. Mary had never seen and could hardly have imagined anything like it; her life could never have allowed her to come into a circumstance where she might witness such a barbarity. Horrors like this did not happen in the home of a gentleman, his foolish wife, and his family of girls.
Apparently they did happen in this other world. She sat a yard away from an artificial man who had sworn vengeance against all humanity. He had reason enough, in his heart, to kill Mary. But she had seen something in him on the road, and had most definitely seen it in the last week with Eve. He had a soul, a gravely tormented one, and that soul was at this very moment at risk. He knew right from wrong and cared about the difference. It was Mary’s duty to try, with whatever means at her disposal, to help him save himself. He could only do that if he was able, with forbearance that Mary could not imagine, to turn the other cheek, battered and bruised as it was.
She would have to remain in his company. She would have to talk with him, listen to him, persuade him, if it came to that. For her to be here at this moment in this si
tuation was so impossibly unlikely a circumstance that God must have had a hand in it.
She did nothing now but keep her eye out for that light in the south and search for the town. Soon the sky began to glimmer and with a piercing sliver of light the sun broke the horizon. They spotted the village, and the Creature steered toward it. Before reaching it he turned to the shore on the opposite side of the river’s mouth. They ran aground on a deserted beach.
Mary did not attempt to climb out of the skiff. She said, “I know you have no reason to, but will you help me?”
“Help you,” he said, his voice completely flat.
“I am cold. I am wet through. I have no money. I know no one here. I shall have to throw myself upon the mercy of the parish, if they will have me.”
“Find the local church, then. That’s their business, isn’t it? Christian charity? Take this with you.” He pulled the Bible from his pocket and held it out to her.
“You keep it. You may yet have need of it.”
He looked at her with a face devoid of expression.
“What will you do?” Mary asked.
“What does it matter?”
“It matters. I beg you, Adam—”
“Have a care.”
“I beg you to give up your quest for vengeance against Victor. Remember the regret you feel about killing William.”
“I killed William. I killed Justine. Will I be more damned if I kill others—if I killed you here, on this beach? What difference would it make?”
“It would be an act of despair. It would not lessen your pain.”
“I think it will. It is the only thing that will.”
“You may yet repent and be saved.”
“Saved? Saved from what? I am finished. Victor destroyed me. But I am not finished with him. I will desolate him. I will see that he will never know the acceptance and love he stole from me. I will kill all who love him. He will know that his cruelty to me is the cause of their deaths—if he is capable, which I doubt, of caring what happens to anyone but himself. If he had spent one moment caring for the life he made in me, I would hold back my wrath.”