Frankenstein's Bride (8 page)

“Jonathan,” he said flatly, in greeting.

There was no way of presenting my mission as a cheerful visit. I looked at him as grimly as I could and said, “I have just
been at the theatre, Victor.”

“Did you see Maria?” he asked me, too quickly.

“I saw her but we did not speak. She was surrounded by a crowd. Victor—” I appealed.

He said dully, “You come as a missionary, I know. I will spare you the embarrassment you anticipate. Hugo Feltham is not a
man to go behind another's back. He wrote to me saying that during her visit to Old Hall Elizabeth confided her anxieties
about me to his wife and that he had written you a letter appealing to you to visit me and discuss the state of affairs. So
let me be plain. It pains me to say this but say it I must. I love Maria Clementi. That love torments me for she does not
love me in return. I am completely wretched, made all the more so because I know my good wife, who has never injured me in
any way, is wretched also. I cannot sleep. I cannot work. I can think of nothing but Maria. I do not know what to do for I
must have her but she will not have me.

“Do you know, Jonathan, what my plan was for this evening? Because she has forbidden me, through Mrs. Jacoby, to visit the
theatre every night, I was intending to go to her house, to hide in the trees of the square, to watch her arrive home in her
carriage and spy out who might be with her. Then I would keep vigil opposite the house, watch the lights being extinguished
and so stay on until at last I was weary enough to return here to sleep for a few hours. That is how I planned to spend this
evening, Jonathan, as I did last night and will no doubt do tomorrow. You see to what state I am reduced.”

“My dear Victor!” I exclaimed.

“Do not pity me,” he said, “for I am being punished.”

I put a log on the fire and tried to kick it into a blaze. “Punished? Victor! For what do you think you are being punished?”
The fire threw out smoke, but no flames.

“I cannot tell you that,” he said.

I suppose when I undertook to speak to Victor I had imagined that familiar kind of conversation in which a friend appeals
to the husband on behalf of his distressed wife and is told either to go away and mind his own business or receives assurances,
true or false, from the culprit that he plans to give up his mistress. I had not bargained for this—and, dishonorably, my
heart soared. I knew I could not have Maria—or thought I could—I might—I did not know what I thought. My animal nature, where
reason does not prevail, was organizing my thoughts, or failing to do so. All I knew was that Victor had not possessed that
wonderful creature, Maria. And that made me rejoice. If I could not have her, it would still have upset me if Victor had.
In this respect I was a madman and I confess it. Those who never looked into the deep, grey eyes of Maria Clementi, never
saw her dance or heard that thrilling voice may condemn me; no man who did could fail to understand what I felt.

But, meanwhile Victor had spoken of punishment, his punishment. “What can you mean? Do you mean Maria will never love you?”

He did not reply. I continued to tussle with him as he sat there, thin and weary, seeming like a beaten man.

“My dear friend,” I said, “it is dreadful to see you in this state. Should you not battle with this desire for Maria, which
may lose you everything you hold most dear, the affections of your wife, your work—would it not be better to take your family
away from London, settle for a time elsewhere, try to shake off this passion, starve it by taking it far from its object?
Dishonor can only come of this. Even if Maria loved you in return, what good could you do her? She is a young woman of good
reputation in a profession where few others like her are to be found. As yet there is no scandal attached to her name. Do
you, a married man, truly wish to seduce her and ruin her, setting her inevitably on the path downwards?”

“Unhappily, it is a bitter truth, one I would rather not admit, but that is exactly what I wish to do. I have no care for
consequences, for her or for myself. I want her to be mine.”

“You know you can only harm her, and yourself and your wife. You must summon up your will—and go away.”

“It is a punishment,” he said again.

I stared at Victor Frankenstein, that man of intellect and command.

“You think me mad,” he went on, “but if you knew—if you only knew—if I could tell you. I am miserable and I deserve my misery.”

“Are you sure you are not answering to some fierce Calvinist God of your youth, some God of predestination, hell fire and
damnation?” I appealed to him. “You have not slept, you say, and plan some vigil in Russell Square tonight. Let me take you
home—or let us even order two beds here at the club, obtain a sleeping draught for you from the porter. I will stay with you
until you sleep. By morning, when you have rested, matters may look different and we can talk again. If you agree, I will
send a message to Elizabeth saying where you are.”

“My presence is an affliction to my wife,” he said.

“Your absence is also an affliction to her,” I returned. “Elizabeth loves you dearly. Come, Victor, you must go home. Let
me come with you.”

He said sadly, “What a villain, what a slave I am. How I wish my wife did not love me. How I wish Maria did.” Then he looked
at me impatiently, saying, “Jonathan—leave me. You cannot help me.”

“I cannot abandon you in this condition,” I said and, hooking my arm under his, I raised him to his feet. “I shall take you
home, see you swallow some opiate to make you sleep and return in the morning so that we can speak more of this.”

He agreed, being perhaps too weak to resist, but gazed at me as if he knew how little my plain man's approach would help his
situation. Then began the dreadful nightmare . . . The club's porter sent for a carriage which could not be found quickly.
We stood outside, snow falling, waiting while Victor spoke disjointedly of Maria. Eventually the servant returned through
the snow walking beside an aged carriage drawn by a tired horse. The journey took place with a hideous slowness as I sat wearily
in the carriage, Victor beside me, staring hollow-eyed, at something I could not see.

At Cheyne Walk there was a crowd milling about outside the house. The front door stood wide open. The windows of the house
were all lighted.

Victor cried out, “My God! What is this? What has happened?” and threw himself from the carriage and ran to his house. I came
rapidly behind, pushing through the people in front of the house, taking the steps two at a time, passing two maidservants
clinging to each other in the doorway. By the time I reached the hall Victor had run upstairs.

The head manservant came up to me. “What's occurred?” I asked him.

He told me the awful news. “Mrs. Frankenstein is dead. She and the little boy have been murdered. They are in her bed, both
of them, with their throats cut. Both,” he said, his voice trembling, “lying there in sheets all drenched with their blood—”

“But who—?” I asked.

“We do not know. A maid woke after the household had gone to bed, thinking she heard the sound of glass breaking downstairs.
She roused me and another manservant. We lit candles and went downstairs. There we found the window of the long drawing-room,
the salon, broken. It was plain an intruder had entered—”

“And Mrs. Frankenstein—the boy?”

“As we blundered about downstairs in the darkness we heard a scream. Another maid, searching about upstairs had opened the
door of her room and found her there, with the boy.”

I ran upstairs. I found Victor, in a room full of men staring down at the blanched face of his wife, her throat cut. The little
boy, whom she had evidently taken into her bed, to comfort him, or herself, still clutched her, as if in fear. His throat
also was cut.

It fell to me to drag my poor friend from the deathbed of his family, where a doctor who had been hastily summoned bent over
the bodies and the smell of fresh blood filled the air. Even as I tried to get him from the room, where his wife and child
lay grey and ghostly in their own blood, heavy feet overhead indicated that a search continued for the individual who had
committed this atrocious crime.

It is a scene which even now I flinch to recall.

No one was found in the house, only an open attic window in the bedroom of the servant who had first been aroused by the sound
of breaking glass. It was concluded that the murderer, having entered by the window of the drawing-room, had run upstairs,
done his dreadful work and then, as the servants blundered about downstairs in the darkness, had run up to the attics, and
made his escape from there, either clambering over the rooftops of adjacent houses or making his way perilously down the front
of the house. Whatever he had done—and he was evidently a man of some speed and agility—by the time the open attic window
had been discovered he was long gone; the prospect of finding him was small.

That, though, hardly concerned me, for I was with Victor, whose agony was terrible to witness. We could not use the pleasant
room upstairs, made charming by his wife and so redolent of her character and taste. We were, perforce, in the very salon
into which the murderer had first come. This room, created perhaps as a ballroom, was some thirty feet long and sparsely furnished.
There was a sofa in front of a vast, empty grate. A spinet stood against a wall. Overhead were big chandeliers, uncandled
and swathed in cloth. Because of the room's great size it was rarely used by the Frankensteins, who did not entertain on a
grand scale. In this bleak apartment, snow drifting past its long windows over the darkened garden, I sat with my poor friend,
able to do nothing to ease his pain. What was worse, perhaps, than the grief he felt for his wife and child were the torments
of inexplicable remorse he suffered. “My fault—my fault. Oh, my poor Elizabeth, my little child, what have I done to you?”
he repeated over and over again. He sat on the floor, his head buried in the upholstery of a long, armless sofa.

As I busied myself with lighting a fire, I heard him moan, “Better to have ended it then—when my crime was fresh.” At first
I thought these agonies of guilt were caused by his having been away from the house at the time of the murder—at his club—unable
to bear returning home to his wife under the burden of his love for Maria.

A normal man in such a dreadful situation might well have reproached himself in that way. Yet he did not directly accuse himself
of having been absent when his wife and child died, nor did he speak of finding out and punishing the man who had done this
deed. His agony seemed connected with some guilt he could not name, with a punishment he had earned but which had been visited,
instead, on Elizabeth and his son.

I did what little I could to comfort him and form a buttress between him and those who came to discuss the crime, ask if he
had any enemies, establish if there had been robbery, as well as murder, done in the house.

As dawn came I was at the drawing-room window while Victor lay on the couch, his despairing countenance down which tears continually
poured turned to the ceiling. Glancing out, I thought I saw a figure in the trees beyond the lawn. There was little light
and some mist about the dark trunks of the trees, so it was difficult to see the huge form of a man among the tree trunks,
especially as he stood so still. I closed my eyes and opened them again. I still believed what I saw there was a man—and not
just a man but that ogreish figure I had seen earlier outside the theatre.

“My God, Victor!” I cried out. “I believe he is there, among the trees—the murderer!”

Victor jumped up and came towards me. I turned, left the room, ran down a passageway and pulled back the bolts of the door
leading to the garden. But by the time I had got them undrawn and hastened outside there was no sign of the figure I thought
I had seen. I ran across the snow-sprinkled lawn to the trees but no one was there. If he had been there, and I was still
not quite sure of what I had seen, then he had escaped over the garden wall, where I found the bent-back branches of an elder
bush growing close to some old crates piled up against the wall, which might have assisted him in scrambling over. I thought
I saw his footprints on the path leading to the wall, but in the dim light with snow falling, then melting on the earth of
the path the marks were hard to read.

I went slowly back to the house, thinking of that great, limping figure I had now seen, I thought, three times. Or had the
figure been on this occasion the product of my imagination, worked on by fatigue and emotion? But if it was that same hideous
creature I had seen before, was he the author of this dreadful crime? When I re-entered the drawing-room Victor was still
by the window, ashen and hopeless. The early light showed deep lines carved on his face, lines which had not been there the
evening before. He seemed twenty years older.

“I thought I saw a hulking brute out there.” I told him. “I may have been mistaken. At any rate, if he was there before, he
is gone now.”

Victor shivered. I took him to the fire and put a rug over his shoulders. As I did so I said, “It may be imagination, but
I believe I am haunted by a vast and ugly individual. I saw him once two months ago, by the river near this house, then last
night, outside the theatre.” As I described my encounters with the man and his appearance Victor's eyes seemed to sink deeper
into their sockets and he entered a state of profound and deadening despair. Then he said in a low voice, “Then he is back.”

“You know him?” I said, startled. “Who is he?”

Victor stood, went to the window again.

“Who?” I asked. “Who, Victor? Who is this enemy?” For I assumed this man and the murderer were one and the same.

Victor turned to me and through the half-dark of the room said, “Do not ask who, Jonathan. Ask rather what—what fiend—what
thing—is that?” And then merciful nature came to his rescue and he fainted.

S E V E N

VICTOR LAY ILL for many days. I insisted I must summon his parents from Switzerland, but this he would not allow. When I pressed
him to ask them to come, he became agitated, so I assumed temporary responsibility for his health for a time. My first thought
was to persuade him to leave that house in which his wife and child had been slain. I even wondered if the murderer would
return to strike again, for it was very obscure what the man's motive had been in killing an innocent woman and child, and
I had become doubtful whether the matter could be as simple as a thief interrupted and killing those who might identify him.
Victor, though, refused to remove to Mrs. Downey's, who had sympathetically agreed to assist a man she did not know. He was
so insistent about staying where he was that I yielded, thinking more argument would impede his recovery and instead hired,
as well as nurses for Victor, two sturdy watchmen to protect him.

For the first week he lay in a raging fever, but later improved, at which point I felt it safe to ask him who he thought the
man in the garden might have been and whether he thought he had any part in the murders. But he only replied, “I cannot tell
you. To tell you anything would mean telling you everything and that I cannot do—cannot.” And with that he turned his wasted
face from me on the pillow.

“Victor,” I persisted, “tell me, I implore you. Describe the man. Say what he is to you.”

He turned a tear-stained face to me and whispered, “Jonathan—please leave me.” And I was forced to go, though I could not
believe that with such a weight as seemed to be pressing on his mind, my friend's recovery could be either quick or complete.

Meanwhile, Hugo and Lucy Feltham, who had heard of the death of Elizabeth Frankenstein and her son, arrived in London to stay
with Victor and do what they could for him. Slowly he recovered his health.