Outcasts

by Sarah Stegall

  “To Polly, we must seem like a collection of outcasts.”

  Chapter XXXI - Principles

  …. when I considered the improvement which every day takes place in science and mechanics, I was encouraged to hope my present attempts would at least lay the foundations of future success. Nor could I consider the magnitude and complexity of my plan as any argument of its impracticability. It was with these feelings that I began the creation of a human being.

  —Frankenstein, Volume II, Chapter III

  Claire finally dropped off into an exhausted sleep. Mary watched her awhile, and then crept out in search of Shelley. She found him standing on the balcony, watching the wild weather. He was soaked to the skin.

  “Shelley!” she brought him his greatcoat and he shrugged into it. “You must come inside.”

  “She was right to come out here,” he said. “Claire followed the right instinct, consulting with Nature.”

  “Her consultation may result in poultices and emetics ere morning,” Mary said practically. “I will not have two patients on my hands! If you do not come inside immediately, I shall—I shall call Doctor Polidori!”

  That name was enough to break the spell of sky and rain, and Shelley stepped back over the threshold, dripping water on the carpet.

  They settled before the fire; Shelley poked at it thoughtfully.

  “Byron?” Mary asked.

  “Went to bed,” Shelley said. He grimaced. “I believe he took the chambermaid with him, or perhaps his valet.”

  “Or perhaps both,” Mary said. She laid a hand on his. “What will he do? About Claire?”

  Shelley shook his head, water dripping from his curls onto the hearth. “He will acknowledge the child, and will provide for it, only—”

  “Only what?”

  Shelley rubbed his eyes. In the firelight, he looked older than his years. “He will only agree, if she gives the child to him.”

  “What? Monstrous! You cannot allow it!”

  Shelley looked at her out of innocent blue eyes. “Allow? It is not mine to say yea or nay, Mary. He refuses to let her raise his child. He will not have it raised by ‘atheists’.” His tone was bitter.

  “She is talking of returning to my father’s house,” Mary said. “Godwin will not accept her or the child. If Claire attempts to return home, if she tries to have the child at Skinner Street, with my father and her mother there—Oh, Shelley, I cannot imagine what he will say!”

  “Claire wants Godwin’s good opinion,” Shelley said. “Is mine not enough?”

  “Dearest … no.” She swallowed. “Despite all he has said about marriage, about love, despite all that you agreed together in your long talks, my father’s good opinion of me—or Claire—is not sustained when I actually live as he taught.”

  “And your own?”

  “My own?” Mary frowned.

  “Is your own good opinion of Mary not enough to sustain you? Or must you have the support of Custom, and the world, and all those chains we have thrown off?”

  “Have we thrown them off? Or have you, my love, freed yourself only?” She could hear her voice growing sharp, but could not prevent herself.

  “But we are equals, above that world of shadow and hypocrisy! We are free, my Mary!”

  “You, perhaps, are free, as all men are freer than women. Albé is free. Polidori, even, is free. Claire and Mary, however, cannot have the freedom in this world that we were promised.”

  “But—”

  “Promised, Shelley! From the hour I was born, I was told that the world could be reformed, perfected, if only we lived reformed and perfected lives, if only we stayed true to principle.”

  “Yes,” Shelley said eagerly. “And by example—”

  “Example? Do you know know what we are examples of? Me, Claire, Fanny—all three of us are rejects. We are examples of decadence to the entire world! As are you and Albé!”

  Shelley looked distressed. “Why do you care what those snickering hypocrites think?”

  “Shelley, if I am to be an example of a better world, perhaps it would be useful if I were not regarded with loathing.”

  He paused for a long moment. “Does this mean you no longer hold to those principles—”

  “Oh, Shelley, do stop philosophizing for one moment!” Mary cried.

  He held out his arms and she stepped into them. He folded his arms close about her; she smelled wet wool and sweat, and took comfort in the scent that said Shelley to her heart.

  “When we are together, when we are alone, just you and me and Will-mouse, I care nothing for the opinion of the world. Oh, why can we not just live quietly somewhere, we and our children, and write and dream and live as we will!”

  He said nothing, but rocked slightly back and forth, as if comforting a child.

  “But there is Claire,” she added reluctantly. “She has nothing. You know that she will not have Byron, despite her scheming and wishing. What is she to live on?”

  “Of course I will support her. And the child,” Shelley said.

  “Which everyone will say—all those snickering hypocrites across the lake there—is your child.”

  “I do not care. You know this.”

  “You should care, Shelley. Not for your sake, not even for Claire’s. You choose to cast off the world, as it casts you off. So does Claire. But the child will grow up despised and rejected by the world, for no fault or cause of its own.”

  “Who cares if fools despise you?”

  Mary wrapped her arms around herself. “I would not, if it were from my own actions, my own choices. But my father made Fanny infamous when she was barely a child.”

  “You refer to your father’s publication of your mother’s papers. But that is a sublime book! Your mother’s life is a shining example of merit, of courage—”

  “It made Fanny the most notorious bastard in England,” Mary cried. “Yes, my mother was courageous, and yes, he loved her! But to show his love that way, to publish her private papers, her journals, her failures and doubts, was to strip her naked before the world!”

  “You blame him for publishing?” Shelley asked soberly.

  “I blame him for not realizing the effect it would have. Had he kept those things private, just for myself, Fanny, Claire, yes, that would have been unarguable. I am persuaded my mother would have kept nothing from me, would have opened her life to me on every level. But to grow up knowing that her very name—my name!—is condemned without justice, without understanding—”

  He grabbed her shoulders and spun her to face himself. “He lived by the same principles as she! Would you have had him honor the woman he loved—such a superb woman as she was—by abandoning those principles?”

  Mary looked into his eyes. “My mother’s first care would have been for her children. Not her principles.” She stepped back, and he released her shoulders, staring at her. “My mother would never, never have abandoned me as he has.”

  “So because he rejects you, you reject his principles? I am distressed.”

  “We spoke of the principle of life, did we not? We spoke in terms of chemistry and animation, of electricity and subtle fluids. We did not speak of the real principle of life, Shelley. We did not speak of love.”

  He shot both hands through his hair, causing it to stand up on end, like the halo around an earthly angel. “But we speak of nothing but love, sweetest.”

  “No, you mean something else when you speak of love. The sympathy for a human being, a child, that is what I mean by the world. Oh, will you men never understand true parenthood, true creation? We are more than mere objects of enquiry! What forms us, what makes us what we truly are, is not atoms and parts and medullary particles, not principle and idea and belief, but connection.”

  “Of course, but—”

  “Not ‘of course’! You perceive it, blindly, with open heart and wild verse. But Godwin, Godwin never perceived it at all. To him, I was a philosophical experiment, nothing more.”

  “No, Mary,
no. He loves you, I know it.”

  “But he has cast me off. I, his creation—he formed my mind as well as my body—he rejects and ignores. I am adrift, like some ice floe on an Arctic ocean.”

  “What would you then, my Mary?”

  “I would be free of him. He will never change. He will never love. Oh, you have shown me what true love is, what true sympathy of mind is, what true equality can be. But he is so inward, so self-regarding, why he makes Byron look generous!”

  “But that is exactly how his own Political Justice describes the superior man!”

  “His superior man is inadequate. He lacks a heart. He was formed without one. He lacks even the imagination to know he lacks it. He raised me with his ideas, never imagining that the world outweighs him, and that what the world will tolerate in a man it will not tolerate in a woman.”

  “I will never cast you away.” Shelley said this in a low, quiet voice, fervent and calm.

  Beset by sudden tears, Mary stepped close to him. He wrapped his long arms around her, pulling her into his chest. She smelled rain and sweat and the lavender she had folded into his shirts the day before. “Must I rely on your will alone?” she said, her voice muffled. “Because without you, I am nothing, have nothing in the world. May I not be alone, myself, free and independent?”

  “Declare your independence, then, my dearest.”

  “Shall I write a new Political Justice?”

  “Or a poem. Or a story. Meet Godwin in his own arena.”

  “A story—about abandonment?”

  “And love.” He caressed her hair.

  “Or its absence—and principles. And the obsession with them.”

  “And love.” He kissed the top of her head.

  “And consequences. The earnest philosopher, blind with ambition, ruins his life and the lives of everyone around him, because he has not the gift of empathy.”

  “Or love. Come inside, my dearest, and we will go to bed.”

  Chapter XXXII - Nightmare

  … I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.

  —Frankenstein, 1831 Introduction

  It started as a familiar dream, the churchyard at Saint Pancras. Here under the willow stretched the gray stone, the faded grass. Her dream-self knelt, tracing over the letters of the name that was hers, that was her mother’s, that linked them beyond death: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN. Over and over her fingers traced, and behind her she heard her father’s voice, telling her about her mother, teaching her the alphabet from this, her mother’s own grave. Her name. Her mother’s name. Letters on a grave.

  The voice behind her changed, and it was no longer Godwin but Shelley, his cracked soprano whispering words of love, drawing her away from her dead mother and father and the legacy of early death and lasting notoriety. She turned, seeking him, and saw that he was far away, standing with her father, fading. The sound of thunder, faint under their voices, rose and drowned them out, until the crashing roar shook the very ground. She rose, reaching out to Shelley, to her father, but they faded and she was left in the downpour, the sickly yellow light peeping under the edges of the black cloud above her. A shadow fell across her, and she looked, and there beside the grave of her mother knelt a man who was Shelley, who was Godwin, who was neither and both. He looked down, and from the flattened sod a form rose, pressing upward through the soil—her mother. And her. The faces were the same. Lightning blazed, and the eyes of the corpse opened. The creator and his creature stared at one another, and then both turned their faces, and looked at Mary—

  Mary swam to the surface of the dream, gasping. She sat up in the bed; night enclosed her. Was the nightmare gone? Or was this part of it, still? She didn’t have to look, she knew Shelley was gone. No whisper of sleepy breath beside her, only wind moaning outside the shutters, and the creak of the house resisting it. Groping towards the bedside table, her hand fell on cold steel—Shelley’s pistol. Her fingers found, and passed over, the cool cylinder of Shelley’s microscope, a flutter of papers, the ruffle of a quill pen. Finally, the rough surface of the tinderbox. She clutched it, feeling her heart pound in her chest, almost afraid of what light might reveal.

  An abrasive scratch and spark, and the candle caught. The timid flame wavered, danced, tried to die. She pinched away some wax, oblivious to the scorch of the flame. The room looked back at her blankly, emptily. No fright stood above her bed, no corpse looked at her with a question in its dead eyes.

  “Nothing,” she whispered. “Just a dream.” And yet still the echo of terror in her trembling fingers, which made the candle dance and dip.

  She looked at the empty bed beside her. Where was Shelley? Here, in the clarity of the deep of night, her mind pictured several answers—writing by a single flame downstairs, or arguing with Byron, or putting a loaded pistol to his head. Or the picture she did not want to imagine, despite all her father’s philosophy, despite all her long-held convictions—Shelley in bed with Claire, coupling with her with the same passion, the same energy that broke through her reserve, that revealed to him and to her everything she hid. No, it cannot be. It must not be.

  Mary climbed out of the bed, her small feet flinching as they touched the chilled floor. Summer, indeed, she thought to herself. She’d known warmer winters in London. At the foot of the bed lay a blanket; she snatched it around her shoulders, clutching the ends together as she picked up the candle with the other hand. She thrust her feet into slippers, struggling with the recalcitrant heel of one until it finally straightened. She opened the door.

  The hallway was not entirely dark; light seeped out from under a door. Polidori? But then the architecture of the house rearranged itself in her head, and she realized it was Byron’s door. From behind it came a rhythmic wooden creaking and a masculine grunt. Which proved only that Albé was having sex, but not with whom. Mary glanced down the entry to the gallery, and saw only darkness; Polidori, at least, was asleep.

  Noise from downstairs; Mary’s hand shook and the flame cast lunatic shadows across the floor. Outside, the wind gusted, then fell ominously silent. It was the dying hour of the world, she thought, when men draw their last breaths and women pray, weeping. The cold seeped through her like water infusing a sponge. The noise downstairs—Shelley at work? She came to the head of the stairs. It was like standing at the brink of an abyss; the circle of damp light emanating from the lamp in her hand died halfway down the stairs. They looked as if they led downward forever. Mary gathered up her nightdress gingerly and stepped carefully down the first few risers. Ahead of her, the circle of light showed her the sharp-limned edges of the staircase, threw ghastly shadows against the walls through the balustrade. Portraits of strangers glared down at her, as if roused unhappily from sleep by her intrusion. Too many ghost stories swirled through her head, a dozen remembered scenes of Bluebeards and monsters and vampire frights.

  At the bottom of the stairs, she stood listening. The dining room lay to the left, to the right the drawing room where they had sat up telling stories. A rustling sound came from the dim room, and Mary’s heart did a slow roll over in her chest. She took a deep breath, strode resolutely to the doorway, and froze.

  Two ghost-green eyes looked back at her from the darkness, shining with cold malevolence. Her hand flew to her mouth. The blanket fell to the ground, and the eyes flickered, following the movement.

  “Felix! Oh, for heaven’s sake!” The gray kitten pounced forward, tiny claws scrabbling. “How did you get in?”

  A cool breeze against her face answered her; the French door stood slightly ajar. Hastily, Mary transferred her naked candle flame to a lamp, lowering the protective glass shield. She turned up the flame, and the room emerged from darkness. A fallen decanter on the sideboard dripped the dregs of its contents onto the carpet. Papers lay in wind-scattered confusion
across the carpet. Mary detoured around an overturned chair. Ahead of her, the glass of the French door reflected her lamp again and again. She halted, but the reflections continued to move.

  Mary realized she was seeing not the reflection of her lamp, but lights beyond the window, lights moving in the darkness. She thought of ghosts, perhaps the ghost of her mother, of her daughter. Ghosts that walked without heads, ghosts that killed their own children, ghosts that drank blood. She froze, unable to move, seeing the lights move and bob eerily. The French door swung gently open.

  Chapter XXXIII - Frankenstein is Born

  The idea so possessed my mind that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond. I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me.

  —Frankenstein, 1831 Introduction

  From the darkness beyond the glass, a familiar voice: “I arise from dreams of thee / In the first sweet sleep of night, / When the winds are breathing low, / And the stars are shining bright….”

  Shelley …

  Dizzy with relief, Mary felt her heart grow light. She ran to the window, heedless of her thin nightdress, the flaring lantern, her unbound hair. The night air flung the smell of rain in her face, and thunder muttered along the edges of the world, but it was not actually raining as she dashed out of the French doors and down the steps.

  The voice continued, “I arise from dreams of thee / And a spirit in my feet / Has led me—who knows how?—/ To thy chamber-window, sweet!”

  Down the slippery cobbles of the walkway, across the wet grass she ran. The lamplight skipped and leaped around her, finding a sudden rosebush, a stone in her path. She danced around all of them, hearing the rich voice in the darkness ahead of her. The waves lapped more loudly along the shore as she approached.