by John Kessel
“Not so much as in days gone by,” Walton said.
Mary asked him, “You are a seaman and a scientist?”
“Some years ago I imagined myself an explorer destined to write his name in the history books.”
Mrs. Saville said, “Robert had the mad fancy that the North Pole would be a region of beauty and delight! When he left England, I thought I would never see him again.”
“But I came back to you, my dear Margaret.”
“And I am grateful to God for your deliverance.”
They chatted amiably while Captain Walton examined the fossils. Mary made a few comments and he ended up purchasing one that showed what looked like the small bones of some animal’s foot.
On an impulse Mary invited them, if they were not too busy, to come to tea that afternoon. Living as she had in Lyme the year round, and having only herself to please, she had become bolder, and quite less formal, than she had ever been at Longbourn. Mrs. Saville and her brother agreed, and Mary went home to prepare.
Her cottage sat on a little knoll to the west of the town. Her garden had a fine view of the harbor and sea. It was not a home of any extravagance, but it proved an ideal dwelling for Mary and her lone servant. When she arrived, Mary found Alice and told her they would have guests for tea. She made sure the sitting room was in order, then retired to her room to change clothes.
When Darcy had brought her home from Scotland six years earlier, it was some time before her family treated Mary as anything other than a madwoman. Mary did not elaborate on the little she had told Darcy when he had found her in the care of Mr. Kirwin. Darcy was appalled at the fate of Clerval and the fact that Frankenstein, if he should ever recover his senses, was to be tried for Henry’s murder. Every conversation Mary had with her mother back in Meryton was freighted with Mrs. Bennet’s fear that Mary might say or do some new, terrifying thing. For her part, Mary brooded over her experiences. No detail was very far from her mind. In the midst of sitting in the garden, or during a church service, or while listening to William Darcy talk about his schoolwork, the desolation of her walk back from the beach where she had left Henry dead would sweep over her as if it had happened only moments before.
She sent Mrs. Buchanan’s ruined wedding shoes back to her, along with a letter of apology and a sum of money that would replace them ten times over, but she knew that they were irreplaceable and that her betrayal of that good woman’s trust could never be made right. Her conscience bothered her every time she opened her wardrobe and found her own many pairs of shoes lined up there.
Mary’s distraction did not keep Mrs. Bennet from urging her in whatever way she might to present herself to the attentions of Mr. Collins. But Collins, who had never expressed an interest in Mary even in her youth, had decided that her Scottish exploits had cast a shadow over her character that put her quite beyond association with such a respected clergyman as he. Mrs. Bennet would never forgive Mary for spoiling her fantasies of saving Longbourn.
The year Mary spent at home after her return was a difficult one, and she devoted many hours to trying to understand what had happened to her. Victor and Adam were in her thoughts. She wondered what had happened to Victor when he recovered from his swoon—assuming he ever had. Had he been sent to the gallows for Henry’s death? What an irony if he died for a murder he had not committed, which happened less than a day after he had committed one that would never be known to anyone.
And Adam? Mary’s heart was torn in a dozen directions whenever she thought of him. He was a murderer three times over, yet she was tormented by her sight of his slumped shoulders as he climbed into the boat, by her image of him teaching Eve to sing, by her memory of the nights on the road when he had kept Mary warm, by her knowledge of the bullet he had taken in rescuing her. By the sound of his voice as he had spoken the last words he would ever say to her: It is my fate to kill them all.
Mr. Bennet had died three years ago, and Longbourn had passed into the hands of Collins, who by that time had remarried. He took possession of the estate with the smug sense of his worthiness that the family had come to expect of him. He even—as he told everyone—though not obligated in any way to do so, and despite the fact that her daughters were married to two of the most prosperous men of the midlands, set aside fifty pounds a year for Mrs. Bennet.
In tears Mrs. Bennet left the home where she had borne and raised her children. Where she was to reside was a difficult question. In the end, like King Lear, she was obliged to spend half the year with one daughter and half with the other, though it must be said that Jane and Elizabeth were more patient and more generous with their affections, despite whatever trials Mrs. Bennet might cause them, than Goneril and Regan.
Mary was invited to live at Pemberley, but she was not inclined to take Darcy and Elizabeth up on this offer. Besides the one thousand pounds of Mary’s inheritance, Mr. Bennet, recognizing her to be unlikely ever to find a husband, had left her an income of one hundred pounds per annum. Darcy added another one hundred. With this money Mary took the cottage in Lyme Regis, bringing Alice with her as her maid-of-all-work.
Mrs. Saville and Captain Walton arrived promptly at four, and Alice ushered them into the sitting room where Mary waited. They chatted amiably for a while, and then Alice brought the tea, which Mary served.
“So, tell me about your expedition to the North Pole,” Mary said. “When did this happen, and how did it end?”
“The expedition sailed from Archangel in the summer of 1816,” Walton said. “Its end was ignominious. We never got north of the eightieth parallel. People call 1816 ‘the year without a summer’: indeed, the bitter cold and the density of ice we encountered the farther we traveled north were extraordinary, though I suspect now that the arctic sea is impassable even in the best of conditions. Certainly I have had to surrender my belief that the apex of the globe hides a temperate hyperborean zone, and I am here to swear that those authorities who speak of such are purveying utter nonsense.”
Captain Walton raised his teacup, held in the thumb and first two fingers—the only fingers that remained—of his right hand. “Frostbite,” he said, and winked at Mary.
“Robert,” said Mrs. Saville. “Must you?”
“But this is fascinating,” Mary said. “Tell me what you sought?”
Walton was happy to tell his story, as it seemed he must have more than once before. He explained how his poetic nature had been attracted to the notion of discovering a land of eternal light, and the source of the power that commands the compass needle, at the pole. But in the event, the ship he had hired and crew he had assembled found themselves frozen tight in the arctic wasteland long before Walton had reached his goal.
“Here occurred something so remarkable, and unexpected, that it challenges the imagination, and has met with such disbelief, not to say ridicule, from men of science to whom I have told it that I have chosen not to publish the tale.”
Mary was intrigued. Captain Walton’s manner was so affable, his voice so full of mystery. Mrs. Saville, though she must have heard all of this before, listened indulgently to her brother. “Please, go on,” Mary said.
“Our ship had been stuck in the ice, and the crew suffering the bitter frost, when in the glare of the unending, cold arctic sun we spied at a distance of half a mile or so a man of enormous size urging a sledge pulled by a team of dogs across the desolate, jumbled sheets of ice. He passed into the mists, giving no sign that he had seen us.”
Mary stopped her teacup on its way to her lips, then carefully took a sip.
“A day later, when the ice had broken somewhat, we discovered another man stranded on a floe with his own sledge and team of dogs, all but one of them dead. I never encountered a soul in so wretched a condition. We brought him on board and over the next weeks, as he recovered his strength and faculties, he and I became friends. He was not some northern savage as I had surmised but a European, finely educated, a person of great melancholy, even despair, but also of a high and noble n
ature fit for a better fate than that which befell him. His name was Victor Frankenstein.”
Mary put down her teacup. “An unusual name.”
“He was a Swiss, educated in Germany, of about my age, though the tragedies and hard use he had endured left him enfeebled. He had spent some time in England and Scotland, and spoke excellent English.”
“How did he come to be marooned on a shelf of ice in the Arctic Ocean?”
“He was in pursuit of the man—more accurately the demon—we had seen the previous day. He had pursued this being across Europe since the day that the thing had strangled his wife.”
“Robert,” said Mrs. Saville. “See how you have upset Miss Bennet. She is as pale as a ghost. I should have stopped you as soon as you began this terrible story.”
“No,” said Mary. “Tell me more. Tell me what became of him.”
“I shall. But first I must tell you his story, as he told it to me over the course of the next weeks, as he came to trust me and unburden himself of experiences that he had revealed to no one before we met. We may need more tea. It will be some time in the telling.”
Captain Walton proceeded to relate the story that Mary had heard years before from both Victor and his Creature. Dramatically, Walton lingered over the extraordinary circumstance of Victor’s discovery of the secret of life and his creation of a monster. He watched Mary’s eyes, prepared for skepticism, but she was too troubled to feign astonishment at something she knew to be fact. Walton’s narrative closely resembled what Mary already knew, but she appeared nowhere in it, nor any woman who might have been Mary. And there was nothing in the tale of bringing Eve to life, or of her death. To hear Walton tell it, Victor had earned the eternal enmity of his monster by dismembering his female before he had brought her to life.
Months after Mary had left Scotland with Darcy, Victor’s father had arrived. Victor recovered his senses, and a grand jury determined that, despite his professions of guilt, he had been in the Orkneys when Henry Clerval was murdered. Victor and his father traveled back to Geneva, where Victor wed his cousin Elizabeth. That night, Elizabeth was strangled by the monster who had vowed to be with him on his wedding night.
Mary, agitated, could not help saying, “But if the Creature made such a vow of vengeance, why would Monsieur Frankenstein still marry?”
“This is just what I asked myself,” Mrs. Saville said, “when Robert first told me this tale. It passes understanding.”
“You did not know Victor Frankenstein, my dear,” said Walton. “He would never have knowingly put his beloved into danger. He assumed that the monster’s enmity was meant for him, and that, having refused to create a bride for it, it would kill him before he could enjoy the blessings of connubial companionship.”
“Yet if the tale you tell is true,” Mary said, “in all the time since his creation the Creature had not harmed Victor. He had destroyed his younger brother, his family’s servant, and his best friend. How could he not have suspected that his wife, not himself, might be the target of the fiend’s ire?”
“You should have heard the remorse in his voice as he upbraided himself for not understanding just this point,” Walton said. “He accused himself more than anyone else could. Moreover, his father died in grief days after hearing that Victor’s wife was murdered. Haunted by his guilt, he pursued the thing from Switzerland to the far north of Russia, and beyond across the polar ice. He was bound on a mission that was, I am convinced, the only reason he had survived as long as he had—although he did tell me that the demon, whenever it seemed Frankenstein was at risk of losing the trail or coming to grief, would slow his flight enough for him to follow, and leave food to keep him from starving.”
The late afternoon sunlight was coming through the west windows of the sitting room. Mary rose to pull the muslin curtains and diffuse its force. The image of the Creature and Victor, pursued and pursuer, crossing a lifeless landscape of ice, haunted her. Out of his rage for vengeance the Creature plants markers to reveal his path, leaves food, and draws his creator on, keeping Victor alive so that he might follow his own rage for vengeance deeper into this suicidal whiteness. Each of them gives purpose to his life by this game. The two of them orbit about each other, so isolated that the rest of the human race might have vanished. It was a vision of hell more harrowing than any Mary had ever heard from the pulpit.
She returned to her seat. “When Monsieur Frankenstein recovered fully, did he give up this pursuit and return with you to Europe? Where is he now?”
Walton shook his head slowly. “Alas, though Frankenstein rallied for a time after his rescue, in the end exhaustion and the toll of his pursuit took him; he declined rapidly and died while we were still locked in ice.”
“And did you believe his story?”
“Within hours of his death I had the terrible proof of it. Late that night, while I wrote an account of these events for Margaret, as had become my habit, I heard sounds from the cabin in which I had left Monsieur Frankenstein. When I investigated, I found the demon there lamenting over Frankenstein’s body. Never have I beheld a vision more repulsive than his face, of such hideous strangeness, like and unlike that of a human being. He had the impudence to beg forgiveness over the corpse of the man whose life he had blighted, and whom he had lured to his death in this desolate place. Only now, after having destroyed beings who had done him no harm, did he feel the pangs of conscience. Although I was frightened, I charged him with his hypocrisy.”
“Perhaps, if he was able to restrain himself under your accusation, he was not so monstrous as Monsieur Frankenstein portrayed him.”
Walton raised an eyebrow. “I confess that I felt a moment of compassion for him. But Frankenstein had forewarned me about his eloquence and persuasiveness. Yet you never heard him—what causes you to feel sympathy for the wretched thing, Miss Bennet?”
“I only imagine what the world must have been like for a being abandoned at birth, and reviled at his every encounter with humanity.”
“Your sympathy speaks well of you, though I hazard to say that if you had ever seen this monster, you would have run in terror.”
“Perhaps. What ensued when you confronted him?”
“After expressing his hypocritical remorse and complaining of his treatment by Victor and the rest of humanity, he told me that with Frankenstein’s death his life was without purpose. He said it was his intention to find land, build a funeral pyre, and put an end to his life amid its flames. Then he leapt out of the cabin onto a raft of ice, and I lost sight of him in the darkness and distance.”
Mary said nothing. A silence stretched, broken finally by Mrs. Saville.
“Robert, I fear you have repaid Miss Bennet’s gracious hospitality by giving her nothing but material for nightmares. I hope you will not trouble yourself over this story, Miss Bennett. We have long overstayed our welcome.”
“No,” said Mary. “I am glad to have heard your story, Captain Walton.”
“I could tell that you were affected by it. I must say that, though I knew him for only a matter of days, and in him saw only a shadow of the man he must have been before the ordeals that he suffered, the loss of Victor Frankenstein still haunts me. He was a man of great qualities, a deep soul, and the noblest impulses, and deserved a better end.”
“He was a remarkable person,” Mary said.
She escorted her visitors to the door. Captain Walton and Mrs. Saville said their good-byes and left.
Mary closed the door on them and leaned her back against it. The ticking of the clock on her mantel reminded her of the one in the Perth home of Dr. Marble where she had waited for Henry Clerval. That was when she had learned that Victor was engaged to his Elizabeth. All three of them now dead.
It is my fate to kill them all.
Alice came into the parlor to retrieve the tea tray. Mary told her, “Alice, I will not be having supper tonight. Do not bother with it.”
“But I have I have a roast I’ve been preparing all day.”
“Keep it until tomorrow, if it will keep. I am going out.”
She took shawl and bonnet and left the cottage.
The long summer day was declining, and the sun setting over the sea. The mild evening breeze from offshore, running up the lane, brushed Mary’s face. With the coming of evening, people were returning to the busy town from a day at the seaside. There was to be a ball at the Assembly Rooms that evening; the front door of the hall was open and people bustled in and out, making preparations.
She walked down to the harbor, a woman alone in the gathering dusk. Even in a town as placid as Lyme Regis, even for an aging spinster as established as Mary, this was behavior that she would have questioned when she was a girl. It was not so much the danger of the world that Mary had been aware of, as the importance of propriety. She knew now that much of propriety consisted of a veil of hypocrisy over self-interest. The machine of society was prepared to grind those without money or powerful friends exceedingly fine if they should disregard the shibboleths of the righteous. It remained true that to discard propriety was to put oneself at risk, whether or not one ended up strangled.
But to lean on the promptings of the heart alone? That was what Victor had done, and Adam.
The longer she thought of Walton’s story, the angrier Mary became. Victor and Adam had followed a direct path from the place she had left them, precisely the same course they had been on before she had entered their lives. For a time it had seemed to her that they might turn to a different, happier fate—though who could know where any path leads in the end? Still, there was little doubt where following the impulses of hatred and revenge led. In the case of Frankenstein and his creation, they had led exactly where they ought—to desolation and the grave.
Mary’s intervention had been their last chance to avoid this. She had put herself between them expecting to keep them sane. It was a terribly foolish, dangerous thing for her to do. She’d had no idea with what or whom she was dealing. How idiotic she had been, so blinded by her own hopes.