“Do you notice anything peculiar about these animals?”
I looked at them. They seemed perfectly normal. One of the cats rose and came to rub itself against the wire of the cage. Polidori opened the cage door and lifted the animal out, putting it into my arms. It began, at once, to purr.
“They seem perfectly normal. Is there something peculiar about them?”
He smiled. “This cat, that seems so content to snuggle in your arms, was dead less than twelve hours ago.”
I stopped petting the cat. “What?”
“It was dead. I resurrected it.”
“What can you mean?”
“It drowned. I gave it a new spirit and now it lives. Well, rather, to be more accurate, the cat spirit that inhabited this body was in another. I transferred it from that body to this one.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Oh, but it is.” He lifted the cat from my arms and returned it to its cage, then moved to the Machine and uncovered it with a flourish. “With this.”
The Machine was twice as impressive at close quarters as it had been from the loft. It gleamed in the light of the lamps—all gears and oddly shaped bells and metal wire brushes and cables. I could only stare at it until its bright contours blurred, unable to quite grasp what he was telling me.
“Mary, this is how I will cure our mutual friend. This machine will enable me to place George’s spirit—his soul—in a new, healthy body.”
I was stunned beyond description. I felt as if my own body had rooted itself to the cobbled floor of Dr. Polidori’s laboratory, as if my soul was reaching down into the earth to maintain its hold on solid reality. “That isn’t possible,” I murmured. “It can’t be.”
“But it is. That cat—these animals—prove that it is possible.”
He told me the same tale Immanuel had told of an alchemist named Dippel who thought seizures were caused by a misalignment of a person’s soul and body, and that an electrical shock might possibly realign them.
“I have taken the idea further,” he explained. “I have theorized that it might also be used to drive a soul from one body to another. That it might cause a soul to align itself to a new vessel.”
“You can’t be serious,” I said, trying to read his face. “That’s...it’s—”
“What—blasphemy? Don’t tell me you believe that superstitious nonsense, Mary Shelley.”
My face suffused with sudden heat. “Yet, are you not playing at being a god?”
“What of it? If we can perform the acts of gods, then are we not gods? What is a body, after all, but a vehicle for the soul? If your carriage springs its frame, you simply acquire a new carriage, do you not?”
“But bodies are not built by men as carriages are. They are born. They have lives of their own.”
“But if that life flees, Mary, if the vessel is empty, what wrong is there in refilling it—reanimating it?”
“What harm? What harm came to the cat whose spirit has now been dispossessed?”
He blinked at me. “It...it is gone. Dead.”
“And would this not be true of a man whose body you sought to use?”
He paled. “What are you suggesting? That I might commit murder to acquire a new body for our friend? I would do no such thing!”
“What then? Rob graves like your alchemist?”
He was suddenly suspicious. “I said nothing about him robbing graves.”
“I’d heard of him before.” I turned away from him. “What you are suggesting is—is—”
“What I am suggesting, Mary, is the only way that my friend and yours can live unfettered by a malformed body and a diseased mind.”
He came around to stand before me. “Yes, diseased, Mary. Lord Byron is a great poet. Potentially the greatest who ever lived. You say your friend Immanuel was destined for happiness. Well, now both of them—the great poet and the great doctor—are destined for nothing but decay and death. Indeed, they are already dead...without this—this miracle.”
I met his zealot gaze. “Are you proposing to give Immanuel a new body? Why?”
“I have experimented on animals successfully. I have yet to do it with a human being. I would that George perhaps not be the first.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. “You mean to experiment on Immanuel. No. It is too cruel!”
“Too cruel? To offer him a future he does not now have? A future that holds more than a slow, agonizing death, or a swifter self-administered one?”
I recalled what my friend had said about serving as a cadaver for the medical college and I knew that Dr. Polidori was right.
He saw the realization in my face. “Bring him to me. Tomorrow. Let me see him—speak to him.”
“But where would you acquire a—a suitable host for his soul?”
“People die every day, Mary. True, they do not every day die relatively young and of causes that leave the body unscathed. We must have a drowning victim, or someone who has been struck by lightning or suffocated or had an allergic reaction to something perhaps. And we must have it as soon after death as possible. In fact, I have already put the word out among my colleagues to be on the alert for such circumstances.” He smiled a strange, fierce smile. “I am ready.”
I left for Petit-Lancy that afternoon, knowing that I was not.
I brought Immanuel to the doctor as he proposed, the next morning around eleven o’clock. George, Claire (for so she now styled herself, both Jane and Clara forgotten) and Percy had gone down to a favourite tea room in Geneva. I had begged off with a headache and had taken a tilbury into town to collect Immanuel. It had not been easy to convince him to come—he was so torn between wretchedness, hope, and absurd guilt.
Whatever could he imagine he’d done to deserve such a fate, I asked him, and when he named some ridiculous oversight, I asked him what he thought I might have done to deserve to lose my little daughter—or what she might have done to deserve to die before she had yet lived.
That quieted him, and he came.
I do not recall all that was said during that interview. Indeed, while John examined Immanuel in his office, I wandered the laboratory, peering at the animals, looking for signs of deterioration, running my hands over the gleaming metal of the Machine and wondering...
I was still standing by the machine when John and Immanuel returned to the room. I realized, only when they’d jarred me back to reality, that I had spent the time deep in my own imagination. A second realization struck me as I stood blinking at them—the Zealot and the Wretch. I had been more than hoping Polidori might save Immanuel—I had been praying.
“I believe,” John said, smiling, “that M. Dessins is a perfect candidate for my procedure.”
“And does he understand what your procedure entails?”
The doctor looked at Immanuel, who nodded.
“You are willing to accept this?” I asked him.
“Yes,” Immanuel said. “God help me, yes.”
“God will not help you,” John said, laying a hand on my friend’s shoulder, “but I shall.”
A strange, fleeting haunted look inhabited Immanuel’s eyes for a moment, then he bowed his head in acquiescence.
John had his man Paolo escort Immanuel to his residence for he had other plans for me.
“I’ve said before that you are a singular woman, Mary Shelley,” he told me. “Because of this I have a proposition to make you. I need someone to assist me during the procedures. Someone who possesses your qualities of courage and intelligence.”
I was chilled. “You have Paolo.”
“Paolo is a servant—a valet and drudge. He is neither brave nor remarkably intelligent. He follows instructions, but he has no capacity to understand the principles behind what I am doing. You, on the other hand, will assuredly understand them, which means you will understand why you must obey my orders to the letter.”
I started to object. I was not as brave as he thought, nor as intelligent. I knew little of science or medicine.
“Mary,” he told me, fixing me with that sharp, dark gaze, “your friend Immanuel must abide the procedure. Can you not find it in your heart to stand by him?”
In my heart, yes, but in my soul something clamoured that this was not right. Still, I nodded and accepted his proposition. He taught me that very morning how the Machine worked.
Poet King
We were still in the coach house when the others returned to the villa from the Tea Room. Hearing their coach, the doctor cursed and brought our lesson to a close. I slipped out through the stable and pretended to have been out taking the air for my headache. At first I thought my simple story was believed, but that afternoon at Tea, I looked up to find Percy watching me closely with the most extraordinary mixture of expressions on his face: doubt, curiosity, bemusement...and something altogether darker.
Finally, when Claire had gone over to the spinet to play and sing one of her amour’s poems to the tune of a lullaby, he leaned forward in his chair and said, “I thought you had a headache this morning, Mary.”
“Yes. I did.”
“Yet when we arrived home, you were in the coach house.”
He did not say, “with Polidori,” but I was certain he thought it.
“Yes. I was.”
“Was the doctor there, as well?”
“Well, of course he was. Did you think I sneaked in secretly?” I must have blushed as I spoke the words, for he pounced upon them.
“You might have done whether he was there or not.” He was frowning now, clearly dismayed at my coyness.
I was puzzled by his attitude. Before we’d left England he’d actively encouraged me to take our mutual friend, Thomas Hogg, as a lover and yet now...
“He invited me,” I told him.
“Indeed? And so you forgot your headache?”
I set down my tea cup. “Is this jealousy? What of your pressing me about Thomas?”
“That was different,” said Percy, pouting a bit. “I approved of Thomas. I’m not at all sure I approve of John Polidori.”
“I am not making love to John Polidori.”
“Then for what purpose did you accept his invitation?”
“For the purpose of receiving a palliative for her megrim.”
I looked up over my shoulder to see Dr. Polidori himself standing just behind our chairs. He was solemn and looked every inch a doctor. I was suddenly struck with the urge to giggle. Instead I picked up my tea cup and hid my inappropriate mirth in the Earl Grey.
But now, we had been overheard. George was there in a moment, hovering. “So, Mary, you’ve seen the inside of my good friend’s secret laboratory? Tell all, dear girl. What does the doctor do in his dark and murky offices?”
I exchanged a glance with the doctor, who smiled and put a hand on George’s shoulder.
“I have been cruel, haven’t I, denying you knowledge of the work I’m doing on your behalf. Hardly fair, is it? Very well. I relent. I will tell, if not all, certainly the heart of my plans.”
And, as we sat like children at story time, Dr. John Polidori told our gathering most of what he had told me that morning. The effect was, I am sure, very gratifying to him. There was, at first, mirth over a suspected prank. Then resentful scepticism and finally, with my added testimony, which the good doctor pried from my lips, awed acceptance that he really meant to do this thing.
“You will be whole, George,” he told our friend. “You will own a new, well body. No club foot. No black moods. No need for the palliative crutches of opiates or drink to hold your shadows at bay. You will be the Poet King you were meant to be.”
“When?” George insisted on knowing. “How soon?”
“I have but one more experiment,” his would-be saviour told him. “I must prove that it can be done as simply for a human spirit as for an animal one. With that accomplished, you will be reborn.”
“Who will you use for your primary experiment?” asked Percy.
I stiffened.
John met my gaze and said, “A village lad with a degenerative disease. Someone I discovered quite by accident.”
I smiled my thanks at this discretion, and he took the others to his lab to show them his work. I stayed behind, telling myself it was only because I wanted to hold my baby.
It was more than anticipation I felt. It was hope and worry and dread. It was purgatory.
I wanted Immanuel to be...cured? Healed? Reborn? That was the word our doctor had used—but was it really rebirth? How could it be when I knew deep in my heart of hearts that as much as I was waiting for Immanuel to be reborn, I was waiting for someone else to die.
I attended Dr. Polidori in the lab and even assisted in the reanimation of the capuchin monkey. He chilled me that day by casually wondering what might happen if he were to try to put the spirit of a monkey into the body of a cat.
He looked up to see me staring at him, open-mouthed, and smiled. “I was jesting, Mary. What do you take me for?”
I didn’t know what I took him for and said nothing.
He came to dinner one evening about a week after his unveiling of his great plan in a high humour, virtually glowing. He was lightning in human form. White-hot and pulsing, his face almost too bright to look upon. Something had happened and I was certain we would hear about it when he felt the moment most dramatic.
George was in a rare mood, as well, and had clearly been thinking a great deal of what the doctor proposed to do.
“John,” he said as coffee was served, “how many times might you perform this feat—this soul transfer—on a single person? That is, how many times might you transfer a single soul?”
The doctor shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t imagine any reason it could not be done repeatedly, if necessary. I suppose there is a chance the procedure might not take—”
“No, that’s not what I was thinking,” said George, leaning forward avidly, his slender fingers tight around the bowl of his coffee cup. “Look, John, if you can transfer me to a new body because this one is flawed, could you not just as easily do it if my new body became diseased, or aged?”
John fixed him with the most extraordinary look, as if he had just seen through a doorway into heaven. He breathed out a solitary word: “Immortality.”
“Yes. And if you can do it for me, why not for Percy, for Claire, for Mary, for yourself?” He leaned even farther forward. “We could be immortal, John. A race of immortal Poet Kings.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Immortality? For all of us? Suddenly, I was looking down a corridor in time, back to Johann Dippel, digging up his graves, then ahead to us, waiting like vultures for someone somewhere to die. Or far, far worse. I recalled what Immanuel had said one afternoon: “Men are fools—and worse—who wish to be immortal.”
I didn’t realize I was on my feet until Percy touched my elbow.
“Mary, whatever is wrong? Isn’t this the most exciting thing? The most glorious thing?”
I opened my mouth to spill out my fear and loathing at the idea, but a glance at my husband’s face checked me. “Glorious,” I said and hurriedly left the room.
Death & Rebirth
The young man drowned late on a Saturday. I was the first one Dr. Polidori told of it. The body had been brought to a clinic in which he had colleagues, and when the young man—who had been flung from his horse into the channel—was pronounced dead, Polidori’s colleagues drained the lungs and packed the body in ice from a neighbourhood glacière. It was on its way.
I was in an extreme state of agitation as he gathered the rest of our group in the drawing room and made his momentous announcement: “We have a body. A drowning victim. I am informed that it is quite perfect. A young man of twenty-four, the son of a merchant of Geneva, strong and healthy.”
“But for want of the ability to swim,” George added in an unseemly jest.
“Oh, what does he look like?” asked Claire.
“I’m told he’s quite handsome. Blond and grey-eyed.”
C
laire smiled and glanced mischievously at her beau. “Indeed.”
The corner of George’s mouth twitched, whether in humour or irritation I couldn’t say.
“The body will arrive late this evening. I’ll perform the procedure at first light with Mary assisting.”
All eyes turned to me and I realized that I had become associated with Polidori’s enterprise. The thought chilled me to the marrow.
“I’ll send Paolo to tell...to tell the—the patient,” I said, though “victim” was the word that had come to my mind. Nonsense, Mary, I told myself. The doctor is saving Immanuel, not harming him. He will be reborn. Renewed.
“There’s no need for that, Mary,” said John quietly.
“Oh, have you already dispatched your man, then?”
“M. Dessins will not be my first subject after all.”
“What?” I had turned to leave the room and now stopped and swung back.
John’s voice was gentleness itself. “Understand, Mary, that bodies of young men of this age and in this condition—bodies of a quality to be a fit receptacle for Lord Byron—are exceptionally rare and difficult to acquire.”
The look he sent George Gordon was one that made my flesh creep, and I knew that they had likely cooked this up between them days ago and were only now telling me. I looked at Percy, but he was nodding as well.
I wanted to scream at them that it wasn’t fair, that Immanuel had been given hope and now they were to dash it. I wanted to put myself away from them quickly and emphatically. Instead, I nodded, too. “Of course,” I said. “It sounds a perfect match for Lord Byron.”
I turned and continued from the room, making my way upstairs to the nursery. I could feel John Polidori’s eyes on me until I was out of sight of the drawing room.
Elise was with William. She stood when I entered the room, her gaze bright and wary. “What is it, Mam? What’s happened?”
Shadow Conspiracy Page 4