The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

by Peter Ackroyd

  “And you also believe this?”

  “It is an article of faith. There was a time, Victor, when you would also have subscribed to it.”

  “I do not have all of my old enthusiasm, Bysshe.”

  “Are you sure you are quite well? You seem to have lost your spring.”

  “It has turned to winter, I am afraid.” I longed to unburden myself to him, to explain all that had occurred in the most exact and methodical manner, but I knew well enough that even Bysshe would deem me to be a madman.

  “The deaths of Harriet and of Daniel,” he replied, “have been a monstrous blow to us. You have fallen, dear Victor, into a melancholy from which I vow to save you. You will stay with us here in Marlow until you are quite recovered. We will spend long quiet days at our ease. We will journey along the Thames. You see. Already you are returning to life. Come. Let us join the Godwins.”

  It transpired, in the course of conversation, that the father and daughter had decided to settle themselves in Marlow in order to console Bysshe after the death of Harriet. They had rented a house close by but, at Bysshe’s urgent entreaty, they had agreed to take up quarters in Albion House itself. There was room for all, he said, in Albion. I gained the impression that Mr. Godwin was in straitened circumstances and, as a consequence, had welcomed the offer. I wondered, too, if he was also accepting contributions from Bysshe’s purse. Bysshe had not the slightest regard for money.

  “I wonder, Mr. Shelley,” Miss Godwin said, “that you keep a boat in this dreadful weather.”

  “I have asked you to call me Bysshe.”

  “I know. I must learn to forget my manners.” She was a striking young woman, with a mass of black hair descending in curls and ringlets; she had a fine forehead, suggesting a highly developed ideality, and dark expressive eyes. She always looked as if she had just awoken from sleep, and in repose had a dreamy and even passive expression. She looked intently at me as she spoke to me, but would then drift back into some world of private reflection. “Will you join me, Mary, on the water?” Bysshe asked her. “I will show you the delights of the river even in dreadful weather, as you call it. There is an inexpressible comfort in seeing the rain dissolving into the water, and we can shelter beneath the branches of a willow. There is often a mist where the rain and the river are reunited.”

  “Will it not be cold?” she asked him.

  “Not if you have shawl and bonnet.”

  “The hydrologic cycle,” Mr. Godwin said. “There is not one drop of water, more or less, than there was at the creation of the world.”

  “Is that not an enchanting thought, Victor?” Bysshe had handed me another glass of Madeira wine. “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.”

  “You are quoting an old prayer,” I said, “for deliverance.”

  “A prayer of celebration, I think.”

  “Eternity fills me with dread,” I replied. “It is not to be imagined.”

  “Now there, sir,” Mr. Godwin said, “you have touched upon a great truth. Eternity is incomprehensible. Literally so. Even the angels, if such beings exist, cannot envisage it. Every creature that is made is imbued with a sense of ending.”

  The conversation continued in this vein for a little longer, until I pleaded tiredness and was taken by a maidservant to my room. She told me that her name was Martha. “Where is Fred?” I asked her.

  “He is in the kitchen, sir, tucking into some ham.”

  “Not to be disturbed then.”

  “Do you need him, sir?”

  “No. Not at all. Leave him to his ham. I will see to myself.” I undressed and lay down upon the bed. It was a stormy night, and the rain lashed the windows; I found a certain comfort in the sound, and very quickly fell asleep.

  I WAS STARTLED INTO WAKEFULNESS by a prolonged scream coming from some part of the house close to me. It was a shriek of the utmost terror. I took my gown and hastened into the hallway, with many dark thoughts descending upon me. Suddenly Bysshe appeared in his nightshirt, at the other end of the hallway, and beckoned me to come forward. “Did you hear that?” he asked me.

  “Who could not?”

  “I believe it came from Mary’s room. Here.” He tapped lightly upon the door, whispering her name.

  It was opened a few moments later. “I am sorry,” she said. “There is nothing to fear.” She was wearing a white muslin nightgown, but it was not as luminously pale as her face or her trembling hands. She stood uncertainly, and the door remained half-opened. “I dreamed that I saw a phantom by the window. It was a dream. I am certain of it. There was a face.”

  “Of course it was a dream, Mary. But dreams may take on the appearance of a terrible reality. You were right to scream.”

  “I am sorry to have awoken you. I awoke myself.”

  “Think nothing of it. Now try and sleep.”

  She closed the door. Bysshe and I returned to our chambers. I had said nothing during this exchange, but it was a long time before I managed to find rest.

  ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING Mr. Godwin was in fine spirits. He had slept peacefully through the night, he told us at breakfast, and was feeling “very sound.” Miss Godwin looked pale still; she could not eat, and said very little. “I have been extolling to Martha the virtues of Baxter’s beetroots,” her father was saying. He helped himself to a large portion of kedgeree. “They are sweet. They are tender. They are delicious. They surpass all others in the kingdom. You must remind Martha of them.”

  “I have not seen Martha this morning,” Bysshe replied. “She will be at the market.”

  “I will speak to her when she returns.”

  We did not mention the incident in the night, but I noticed that Miss Godwin and Bysshe exchanged glances of a private kind: I could not help but think that my friend was growing greatly attached to her. After the meal was over Bysshe repeated his proposal for an expedition on the river. The storm had passed, and the sky was clear. What better morning for a jaunt upon the Thames? Mr. Godwin was enthusiastic at the prospect, and so his daughter dutifully assented. I merely followed the general wish.

  We sauntered from the house down the main street towards the river. The Godwins walked ahead, and Bysshe took the opportunity of discussing with me the events of the previous night. “Mary has seen phantoms before,” he said.

  “Do you mean ghosts? Spirits?”

  “No. Creatures that seem to be of flesh and blood. But they are not truly alive. She dreams of them often.”

  “She has not seen one in reality?”

  “Of course not. Whatever are you thinking?”

  “Thinking of nothing.”

  “She knows that they exist only in her sleeping mind. But they scare her. Ah, the river beckons.”

  Bysshe had hired a skiff for the duration of his stay, and he kept the vessel by Marlow Bridge. It was large enough for us all, and he took the oars with some aplomb, guiding us from the bank into the main current of the river. In his enthusiasm he began to recite a poem that I did not recognise, but that seemed to be of his own composition:

  “O stream,

  Whose source is inaccessibly profound,

  Whither do thy mysterious waters tend?

  Thou imagest my life!”

  “That is very fine,” Miss Godwin said. She trailed the fingers of her left hand in the water. “Where is the source?”

  “Some say that it is Thames Head. Others insist that it lies at Seven Springs. There is great debate about the matter.”

  “Which do you favour?” she asked him.

  “I do not understand why a river cannot have two sources. A living being requires two parents, does it not?”

  “It is believed,” Mr. Godwin said, “that some molluscs are auto-generative.”

  “Too painful to contemplate,” Bysshe replied. We passed a small island in the middle of the river, where two swans were resting. “Faithful until death,” he said.

  Miss Godwin looked at him for a moment, and then resumed her contemplatio
n of the water. “It used to be said that the swans greeted the ships sailing home with song,” she said to no one in particular. “But how can that be so?”

  “Precisely,” Mr. Godwin said. “They are mute swan.”

  “I hope to have a swan-like end, fading in music,” Bysshe replied.

  “I would rather prefer swan pie.”

  So we continued downriver, following the current. Miss Godwin seemed to be lulled to sleep by the movement of the water, and for a moment closed her eyes. I hoped that she was not dreaming of phantoms. “What was that?” Bysshe asked suddenly.

  Miss Godwin opened her eyes very wide. “What?”

  “Over there. By the bank. I thought something reared its head and then went under the water.”

  “An otter,” Mr. Godwin said. “I understand that they are common here.”

  “It did not seem to be an otter. It was too big. Too awkward.” I looked in the direction Bysshe was pointing, and I did indeed notice some perturbation on the surface of the river; it was as if something had gone down to the bottom leaving its wake behind. Mary took her hand out of the water.

  Bysshe eased the boat forward with a barely perceptible movement of the oars; the river was muddied, and I could see where the bank had been eroded by more than usual motion. And then I felt the first drops of rain. The sky, so clear before, had suddenly become overcast. The water turned from a lucent green to slate grey, and a cold breeze brushed across us. Bysshe looked up at the sky and laughed. “You see, Mary, you are especially favoured. The river wishes you to see all of its moods.”

  “It is only a light rain,” she said.

  “We will recline beneath the willow boughs. Here is the spot.”

  He manoeuvred the skiff beneath the trailing branches of a willow leaning over the water; it was a natural shelter, of a kind I would once have relished, and my companions seemed happy to remain secluded amid the gentle pattering of the rain around us. Then Miss Godwin spoke in a low voice. “What is that? Oh God, what is it?”

  Her eyes were fixed upon a stretch of water just beyond the tree. There was a hand among the trailing weeds, apparently clutching at them; and then on a motion of the current a face broke the surface of the water. A few moments later the whole body emerged, with a white linen nightgown billowing around it. “God, God, God.” Miss Godwin chanted the word.

  “What is this frightful thing?”

  I do not know who spoke. The words might have come from my own mouth.

  Bysshe leapt from the bench and quickly steered the skiff towards the body; then with the oars he managed to push it against the bank, where it was caught amid the roots and weeds. He jumped from the boat onto the bank, and managed to haul the corpse on shore before it floated further downstream. “It cannot be,” he said. “This is Martha.” He stepped back, and stood at a short distance from the body without saying anything further. Miss Godwin clung to her father, and pressed her head against his jacket.

  “Whatever has happened?” Godwin seemed genuinely puzzled, as if he had come upon a calculation he could not settle. I clambered out of the boat onto the shore, and surveyed Martha. Her body had been pinched and bruised in death, no doubt by immersion in the water, but there were also livid marks around her neck and upper thorax. I had no doubt that she had been strangled before being consigned to the river; Harriet Westbrook had met approximately the same fate in the Serpentine.

  “I saw her last night,” Bysshe said. “She was eating ham in the kitchen.”

  “With Fred.”

  “She was brimful of laughter, as usual. What is to be done, Victor? What are we to make of this fearful thing?”

  “We will be steady, Bysshe. We will take the body back to Marlow, and alert the parish constables. We must leave the matter in their hands.”

  “Why would she have wished to drown herself?”

  “I do not know that she did.”

  “Could she have fallen into the river in some terrible accident?”

  “Do you see the marks upon her neck and body? She was held in a powerful grip.”

  He looked at me in horror. “Is that possible? That she was destroyed by someone?”

  “I believe so. Now is not the time to debate, Bysshe. We must act with urgency. Come. Help me with the body.”

  “I cannot touch her, Victor. I cannot.”

  Miss Godwin would not stay in the skiff with the corpse of Martha. But with the help of her father I managed to place the body in the boat. It was agreed that Bysshe and Mr. Godwin would take it back to Marlow, while Miss Godwin and I would walk back along the bank to the town. We watched as the skiff slowly made its way upstream with its unhappy burden. She was silent as we began our walk beside the bank. “I know it is wrong of me,” she said eventually, “but I cannot help thinking of Ophelia. There is a willow grows aslant a brook. You know it, Mr. Frankenstein?”

  “Please call me Victor.”

  “We have gone beyond ceremony, I think. You shall call me Mary.”

  “Ophelia drowned herself, did she not?”

  “Her garments, heavy with their drink, pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death. Those are the words of the queen. Not mine.”

  “I am afraid that Martha may not have been a suicide.”

  She stopped, and was seized with a fit of coughing. It was as if she were trying to expel something from her body. After a few moments she recovered.

  “You mean that someone has killed her?”

  “I believe so. Yes.”

  “I knew it. I knew it when I saw her in the weeds.”

  “What made you suspect it?” I was eager to hear her account, touching, as it might, upon my own secret.

  “The face at the window,” she replied. “It was no dream. No phantasm. I am sure of that now. I had tried to comfort myself, and you, with my explanation last night. But it was not a face I had ever seen before in my dreams.”

  “Can you describe it, Mary?”

  “It seemed crumpled, creased rather, like a sheet of paper hastily thrown away. The eyes were of such malevolence that even now I shudder.”

  It was clear enough to me that she had seen the creature. He had come to the house at Marlow in pursuit of me and my friends, with the object of performing another act of vengeance. “You must tell the constables everything you saw,” I said. “There will be a search for this demon.” I had conceived the hope, only half-formed, that the creature might be taken and killed by the mob-or that in some other way he might be destroyed by the forces of the law.

  “Demon? No. He was a man, I believe, but one of terrible appearance.”

  “We must speak to the constables as quickly as possible. They may be able to capture this man before he can flee.”

  “It is possible, Victor, that he wished to murder me. Only my scream prevented him. But then poor Martha-” She said no more. We walked the rest of the way in silence.

  16

  WHEN MARY AND I CAME BACK into Marlow, we saw the commotion by the side of the bridge. A small crowd had gathered on the path sloping down to the river. I could see Bysshe in animated conversation with an elderly gentleman in rusty black who, as I discovered later, was the watchman of the high street. As we came up to them I realised that the crowd had formed a circle around the body of Martha. Mr. Godwin and one of the parish constables, in tall hat and blue surtout, were standing beside the corpse and looking down upon it with scarcely concealed relish.

  “Look into her eyes, Mr. Wilby,” one of the women in the crowd called out to the constable. “You will see the face of the murderer there.”

  “You do it, Sarah,” he replied. “You are the wise woman. Not me.”

  “These superstitions,” Mary whispered to me, “are very strong.”

  Sarah had obliged the constable by coming forward and kneeling down beside the body. She peered into Martha’s open eyes, and then suddenly jerked her head back. “I see a fiend,” she said.

  Mr. Godwin laughed. “If it is a fien
d, Mr. Wilby, you will not be able to catch him.”

  “We will have difficulty, sir. That is sure enough. Be good, Sarah. Stand up now.” The crowd were murmuring, unsure whether to accept or to ridicule the woman’s verdict. I decided now to act. I walked up to Mr. Godwin and the constable. “Miss Godwin,” I said, “has something very important to tell you. She saw the murderer last night. Outside her bedroom window.”

  “What?” Mr. Godwin seemed offended. “Why did Mary not tell me of this?”

  “Before we found Martha’s body, sir, there was no possible reason to alarm you. She thought it might have been a dream.”

  “Where is this lady?” Mr. Wilby was very solemn.

  “She is conversing with Mr. Shelley. There.” The constable walked over to her, and they stood together in earnest conversation. Bysshe seemed strangely excited; his eyes were bright and, as he approached me, I saw that his face had the faintest flush. “I should have searched the garden,” he said. “I should have caught this madman before he came upon Martha.”

  “We had not the slightest notion that he was real, Bysshe.”

  “I should have trusted Mary.”

  “She did not even trust herself. She considered it to be a vision. A dream.”

  “But she sees into the heart of things. She knew that some dreadful event was about to take place.”

  “It is too late for this, Bysshe. All our efforts must now be bent on finding the killer.”

  “He will have fled. I am sure of it.”

  “But we may find traces of his presence. He may be hunted down.”

  “Hunted down. That is a good phrase.” He glanced at Mary, still standing with the constable. “I will keep her safe. I will protect her.”

  Mr. Wilby began to organise a party of men for the search of the immediate neighbourhood; it was composed of shopkeepers, boatmen, and other workmen of the town. In addition three men were sent out to inform the inhabitants of the outlying villages. The constable hoped that there might have been sightings of the killer in the locality, even if the villain himself was not found. Inwardly I exulted. The creature was no longer the embodiment of my private despair; he had to some extent become a public agent, an object of concerted horror and suspicion. I joined the band of Marlow townsmen, and explained to them that they should begin their search along the stretch of the Thames where we had found the body of Martha. For a moment they were suspicious of my Swiss accent, but Bysshe reassured them that I was a good friend of him and of England. So they willingly followed me along the towing path until we reached that spot where Martha had risen among the weeds. There was no sign of disturbance in the vicinity. The recent fall of rain had left a film or haze of moisture over the trees and bushes around us, and all was still. We advanced further along the path and, following a slight bend in the river, came upon a water meadow where the grass had grown tall. “Something has been here,” I said. “Do you see the dark line in the grass? Something has left a track.”