That night I wrote to Wheeler advising him to visit Maria no more. I would see him, I said, when I came next to London.
The rain poured down next day and the next, but the morning after that dawned fresh and blue. In the evening there would be a ball at a neighbor's to which even I looked forward. I rose early and was about to set out to our coalfields for an early interview with the overseer there when a maid came with a letter into the stable yard, where I was waiting for my horse to be saddled. With sinking heart I recognized that flourishing, ornate hand and the pale blue ink. I had resisted going to London. What fresh horrors had Wheeler to impart from a distance? Any faint hope I had that the news might be reassuring was destroyed as soon as I read the opening sentences:
“Mr. Goodall—I expect you will by now have received my last letter in which I told you I feared to go further with Miss Clementi. I mentioned also that I had warned Mr. Mortimer it might be dangerous to do so, but, alas, far from heeding my advice he has ignored it completely and has embarked on a course which alarms me greatly. Events move fast. I need your advice and, perhaps, practical help in the matter.
“Mr. Mortimer and his associate, the young man of whom I told you—it appears he is Mr. John Nottcutt, nephew of the Duke of North Shields (and the biggest libertine at large, in my opinion and that of many others)—have hatched a plot together. They have arranged for March 4th a demonstration of mesmerism with Miss Clementi at the Royal Society in front of a host of invited dignitaries, both scientists and other notables. I have said over and over I dread going on with Miss Clementi without good safeguards. Now—imagine my horror of proceeding without such safeguards and before a large audience of people.
“You might say, Mr. Goodall—then Wheeler, do not do so. But consider my position as sympathetically as you can, I beg you. I am a man without means other than what I can earn by my powers. I depend on the favor of others. Mr. Nottcutt is the eldest son of the brother of a Duke. The Duke himself is in poor health. If I refuse I run the risk of earning the enmity of the future head of one of the most powerful families in the land (and Mr. Nottcutt, let us be clear, is not one to take lightly the smallest slight). I live by the patronage of such men. I fear to offend them, I much need now the counsel and perhaps the support of a gentleman such as yourself, more able than I am to engage with Mr. Nottcutt on equal terms, more capable, to put it bluntly, of taking the force of his wrath and weathering it.
‘I assure you I am more upset than I can say in addressing you so soon again, and particularly in these terms, but I fear for Miss Clementi and for myself if the plan devised by Mortimer and Mr. Nottcutt goes ahead.”
The brightness left the day as I finished reading this letter. I rode out across fields to the coalfields in a miserable frame of mind. I saw some men, women and children plodding off to their work. These dark-visaged people in their work-blackened clothes depressed my spirits even further.
I would have welcomed any letter from Wheeler removing the temptation to go off to London. This, however, removed any excuse to stay away—it was I who bore most of the responsibility for the terrible outcome of an attempt to get Maria to speak.
That graceless fellow Gabriel Mortimer and his strange ally, John Nottcutt, proposed to put Maria on public exhibition, like a freak at a fair. Mortimer obviously felt that this would increase her—and his—fame; Nottcutt, I suppose, was moved by idle curiosity, as a boy pokes an anthill with a stick to see the insects run about. And Wheeler had earned himself many a guinea by his association with the powerful, a living, understandably enough, he did not wish to endanger. All of which left poor Maria Clementi being moved by a villain, a knave and a poltroon.
I had been away from the febrile excitement, the terrors, the mysteries of the situation surrounding Victor Frankenstein for one week—and already I was being drawn irresistibly back. No help for it—if I was going next day I must impart the news immediately to my family—and to Cordelia. This I did. It would be for days only, I told them, then I would return at speed. Faces were pulled, pity was expressed that I found myself forced to go again to London. Into Cordelia's eyes I could not look. She spoke to me little during the day.
It was that evening, as I dressed for the ball, she came to my bedroom and sat unceremoniously on my bed, watching me put on my tailcoat. She said, “Jonathan—must you return to London? Can it not wait? Can it not go on without you at all?”
“I fear I must go, dear,” said I, feeling a hypocrite and growing angry as a man will.
“Are you bored here in the country?” she asked.
“My dear Cordelia. This is my home where those I hold dearest in the world are all gathered together. I assure you, I leave because I feel I must, not because I wish to.” Yet I knew as I spoke that my desire to pry into all the corners of the world was leading me from home, a man of my disposition would leave Heaven itself to see what mesmeric power could make of Maria Clementi. I would choose differently now, but then I was young and eager, lured against my will, by Maria. I had not discovered into what danger the lust to know may take a man.
Cordelia stood up to retie my cravat for me and said, as she did so, “I fear for you, Jonathan. It is not only that the murderer is at large, and is close to those he is persecuting, though that is bad enough: it is that I sense something the Scotch would call ‘uncanny.' It makes me shudder. It has done so from the start, and now it grows worse. Can you wonder I am afraid for you?”
Then I took her in my arms and will say no more of what followed. I was misled by vanity again, believing the main reason for her disliking my visit to London was her fear of Miss Clementi's charms. And—my Cordelia's instincts have ever been true—her battle too was with the demon of curiosity within me, that devilish heretical impulse to know.
As we went downstairs to take a little tea and bread and butter before the ball I told her, “My greatest comfort is that you and Flora will be here in safety with my family, who have already taken you to their hearts.”
“It is sad I shall not feel as comfortable about you,” was all she replied—reducing my ease considerably. In short, making me feel a villain.
Meanwhile we took our tea. My father had been persuaded to accompany us to the dancing and had put on his old bottle-green coat, always pulled out for such occasions. As Arabella and Anna often disrespectfully remarked, this garment might have made its first bow at the court of Queen Anne. The ladies went off to take last looks in their glasses, leaving my father and myself alone at the table among the tea-cups. We had settled for a stiffening glass of claret apiece when he said to me, quite harshly, “I hear you leave us tomorrow, Jonathan. I do not understand you. I'm given to believe you'll ride a hundred miles in all weathers to witness an experiment in mesmerism, leaving behind you, after only a few days, the charming woman you wish to make your wife. I had counted on you to be here, sir, to assist in the business of the estate. More important, Mrs. Downey needs you here. I believe you're mad.”
“Well, I think I must go, father,” I said.
“I hope you don't plan to fall in love with this foreign dancer,” he said, cutting to the heart of the matter. “A dumb beauty may have much appeal for a man but I pray you'll resist. I have long hoped for your marriage and the arrival of the admirable Cordelia Downey rejoiced my heart. No better woman could have been found, had she had ten thousand pounds a year. I fear she will take your defection as a rejection of her, which she does not deserve. I would much dislike to see anything go amiss with the marriage.”
“It will not,” I assured him, in no very good temper, for I half lied, but would not admit it, and that makes a man angry. And my father believed what I said, and that made it all the worse.
The ball took place and I will not describe the candles, the dresses or the music, though I fancied my Cordelia just a little distant with me, nor was I encouraged when I saw her lightly tripping over the floor in a polka and then in a cotillion with the local cavaliers. It was a mercy in our backward part of the c
ountry the waltz was still considered less than decent at that time, for had I seen her whirling in the close embrace of others, I might have burst my buttons. Even so, the sight of Cordelia dancing gaily with others at all did not cheer me. Gloom is always our attendant as we embark on a voyage for dubious reasons.
Next day I left the house before anyone was up.
I was in London by afternoon, muddied from head to toe and the horse near dropping. Horse stabled, I went straight to Wheeler's lodgings in Farringdon Road where his landlady told me sullenly he was gone—had packed a valise and been driven off to Grosvenor Square in a coach with a coat of arms painted on the side. On I went to Russell Square to find Maria and was there told she was visiting at Nottcutt House, in Grosvenor Square. So that was where the cast of the play was assembling, thought I, and off I too went to Grosvenor Square, to one of the handsome new mansions there, houses of unprecedented splendor. The door was opened to me by a footman in livery who looked askance at my travel-stained clothes.
By using the name of Mr. Nottcutt, I achieved an entrance into the large marble hall hung with pictures, where a great fire burned in a marble fireplace and a porter snoozed in a red leather armchair. This hall was large enough to absorb a whole floor of Mrs. Downey's house and still leave room to hang the laundry. The sight of such wealth helped me to understand more fully Wheeler's fear of a quarrel with its possessors.
A butler with more presence than a prime minister claimed me and led me up a sweeping marble staircase, then along lofty carpeted corridors, under candle-holders burning with lights, to a door, where the butler knocked—and knocked again. After a pause this door was opened a crack, in a furtive manner hardly consistent with the dignity of the house. The face in the doorway was that of Augustus Wheeler. His look when he saw me was cautious, almost suspicious. He made no move to open the door further. As the recipient of two letters from him imploring my intervention I had thought he would hail me as a savior. It appeared this was not to be the case.
“Let me in, Wheeler?” I asked, though he had no right to deny me. Reluctantly it seemed, he opened up further and I stepped in. He shut the door quickly behind me.
This must have been one of the smaller rooms in the house, though it was twenty feet square. It was handsomely furnished in blue and gilt with a beautiful and no doubt costly Chinese carpet upon the floor and a gilt mirror from France over the fireplace. The individuals in the room did not match its style.
On a chaise-lounge opposite the fire, in the center of the room, lay Maria Clementi in a loose blue robe in Arabic style, her hair undone and falling over her shoulders. She was pale, appearing lethargic, even exhausted, though just as beautiful as ever. Gabriel Mortimer lay negligently in a chair wearing his burgundy coat and trousers, one gleaming boot propped up on a stool. His curls shone no less glossily, his watch-chain was no smaller than before. The black eyes of his ruined face were on Maria; he barely glanced at me as I came in.
Standing by the fireplace was a tall, dandified figure in a smoking- coat of dark red velvet, whom I assumed was Mr. Nottcutt. This gentleman's hair and moustache were yellow as butter, his face long, pale and inexpressive and his mouth rather small and slack. One glance at John Nottcutt and I knew him and disliked what I saw. Here was a man whose wealth and position had from his earliest years supplied him with everything but that which may ultimately be of most value to us, the close and loving attention of parents, friends and kinsfolk, often as hard to come by in the houses of the wealthy as in the overcrowded hovels of the poor. Reared by the basest servants, introduced to every indulgence at an early age by those who had not the power to restrain him, trained neither to work nor think nor to exercise self-control, Nott-cutt was an empty man. Boredom was an ever-lurking enemy, one to be defeated at all costs and by all means. Meanwhile, he loved my appearance as much as much as I loved his. He gave me and my bespattered clothing a smile of amusement, intended to insult.
Wheeler, having let me in, moved rapidly across the room to the thickly curtained windows and sat down close by them as if attempting to conceal himself in their folds.
About the room stood plates and dishes, relics of an old meal, or several. On a Chinese chest stood wine bottles and a flask of yellowish liquid I took to be laudanum. The air was heavy with smoke. One would have sworn from the postures of those present that no one and nothing in the room had moved for hours. It was as though the sun stood still; time had ceased.
Meanwhile, no one spoke to greet me, to introduce me to Mr. Nottcutt, or to invite me to be seated. I was obliged, still standing by the door like a servant come for orders, to break the uncomfortable silence myself, saying across the room to Augustus Wheeler, “Mr. Wheeler—alarmed by your recent letters I have hastened here from Nottingham. I apologize for arriving still in my traveling clothes, but I felt from your tone it was a matter of urgency. I must ask you gentlemen whether it is right to put Miss Clementi on public show at the Royal Society. Do you think her nerves will stand this, after what you saw at the last encounter?” (I wondered whether Maria's belle indifference had come from the laudanum flask.)
Nottcutt, at the fireplace, looked me up and down and asked insolently. “Who are you? What right have you to interfere?”
Mortimer hastily introduced me to him, but did not supply his name to me, treating me as if I had come in with coals for the fire. This made me love neither of them better I must tell you. Mortimer, stating my name, called Nottcutt “Sandor,” and I thought “San-dor?” What sort of a name is that, and what jiggery-pokery is occurring here?
The atmosphere in the room was so strange and so private and the air of those in the room so like a conspiracy that I felt as if I were in a coven of witches and warlocks. However, I was forced to blunder on, addressing Maria, saying, “Miss Clementi—has anyone spoken to you of the distress you endured while in your trance? Did they tell you that you cried out ‘Fire!', then contorted yourself as if you were burning? Has the gentleman I see over there in his corner, as if planning to disappear into the wall, mentioned to you that he has written to me twice in one week, saying he feared for you if you undertook more experiments like the first, are you not concerned that you will be helpless on a stage before a large crowd of men and women? Think, Miss Clementi, think, I beg you, what you are doing.”
My vehemence was wasted. To the earlier questions she gave an indifferent nod, to the rest she raised a shoulder where she lay, as if in a shrug. I despaired for her—and of her. I felt also much at a disadvantage and very angry with Wheeler, who had called me here, and now took no part in the conversation, afraid, no doubt, of Nottcutt's displeasure.
“Wheeler!” I cried out to him. “Will you risk this woman's health, risk her possible humiliation in a most public manner?”
He gazed at me for a second, then turned his eyes to Gabriel Mortimer, who was frowning slightly. None in that room, neither the lounging men, nor the reclining woman, moved. Nottcutt now regarded me steadily with some menace behind his stare. It would not be long before he summoned a servant to escort me out. Thinking to avoid the final shame of being conducted from the house at his orders, I took my leave, to the perfect indifference of all there.
As I left I said, “I shall go to Sir Humphry, President of the Royal Society, and put my case; tell him I believe this performance, for so it is, ought to be cancelled.”
“You may do as you please,” mumbled Nottcutt, as if obliged to comment on the weather.
I left that room feeling thoroughly foolish, put out and angry. Wheeler, who had brought me to London to defend him against the others, was now their accomplice—even Maria, for whatever reason, was prepared to perform. Had she been intimidated, drugged, or was it from vanity? I could not guess.
Sir Humphry Davy, whom we coal-owners have reason to bless, and to whom I had the honor of being presented when a boy, was not in London, but I was directed to the home of another officer of the esteemed Society whom I was assured would be able to assist me.
Science is a ruthless mistress. She can put a fever in the blood. For her sake a man can disregard all the laws of God and man as a man may gamble away his estates and ruin his family to satisfy a mistress's whims. However, propriety is also a stern mistress. I pointed out that I found it quite indecent that Miss Clementi, a young woman, should be embarking on this ordeal, as it might prove to be, in front of a large audience without a single person, still less one of her own sex, to support her. This gave him pause.
Plomer, alarmed now, declared, “Goodall, I do not know if you are right or wrong in your suspicions of Mr. Wheeler's demonstrations—let us hope you are wrong—but the invitations are out and, alas, it is too late to withdraw them. So that is that. Nevertheless, it is quite undesirable for Miss Clementi to have with her no suitable attendant. Will you find one?”
To this I agreed.
I returned to Gray's Inn Road, suspecting Sir Humphry might have done better for me than Plomer. I reflected that had those invited to the demonstration—performance, rather—been colliers and washerwomen rather than the luminaries of the land, a stop might have been put to the proceedings. But there was no help for it now. The demonstration would take place unless some other means could be found of preventing it.
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