Read Dr. Frankenstein's Daughters Online
Authors: Suzanne Weyn
Dr. Frankenstein's Daughters (17 page)
FROM THE DIARY OF
BARONESS GISELLE FRANKENSTEIN
Glasgow, Scotland
November 1815
So, Diary, it’s another day with the nuns here at the women’s home for the mentally unstable. I am awaiting trial for five alleged murders — which is impossible! I couldn’t have killed these men. Investigator Cairo has petitioned for more time so it can be proven that I am not mentally fit.
How humiliating either way they present it: Either I’m a fiend or a lunatic.
I am told they kept me on this drug called laudanum for weeks while they waited to transfer me here. Once here, they have weaned
me from it. At first Ingrid and Investigator Cairo stayed with me and tried to question me, inquiring why I had murdered five men. I didn’t know why they were asking such a ridiculous question. Murdered?! What an insane question; clearly it was they who were acting crazy. I would never murder anyone!
After my second week, Investigator Cairo came to visit me accompanied by Ingrid and a Frenchman he introduced as the Marquis de Puységur. He was thick-featured with hooded eyes, yet I found his accent and his manner charming. “They tell me, mademoiselle, that you walk in your sleep,” he said, taking my hand gently.
“Yes. I have been known to walk in my sleep,” I confirmed.
“She hasn’t done it in over a month,” Ingrid added, laying on my bed table the fresh linens and nightgowns she brings me every week without fail.
“The marquis was a student of Franz Mesmer, who died this past March. Marquis de Puységur is his foremost follower and renowned in his own form of mesmerization, which he calls artificial somnambulance.”
“I will induce a state in you that will be much the same as the waking dream of one who walks while asleep,” de Puységur explained. “That way I will be able to plumb the inner workings of your mind.”
This worried me. “And what do you hope to find in the depths of my mind?” I asked cautiously.
“Memories — deep and long-forgotten memories.”
I didn’t like this one bit and turned away from them. “I don’t want to.”
“It is painless,” the marquis prodded.
“Please, Giselle. Perhaps it will help prove your innocence,” Investigator Cairo added.
“I think you should try it,” Ingrid urged.
I studied them both warily, unsure of what to believe. As it turned out I should never have let them persuade me because the outcome was shockingly disastrous.
I have pasted the confession I allegedly made under the influence of this artificial somnambulance here using sealing wax. It is written in Investigator Cairo’s handwriting since he claims to have transcribed my every word, and I still doubt its truth as it is too amazing to be real.
The first time that the bad man came to get me was when I was six. Ingrid and I were in our beds in our room by the garden on the first floor. I opened my eyes and there he was, looking in the long window. I could see his face because the moon was very bright. It was a monster’s face, scarred with bulging eyes and gray-green skin.
I screamed when he punched in the window and crashed his way in. He grabbed Ingrid and me from our beds, carrying each of us in one hand. I
beat his shoulders and face, kicked at him, but he was too strong. Ingrid was so scared, she couldn’t do anything but look at him with giant frightened eyes.
He took us into the garden and Grandfather came out with his rifle. When he shot into the air, shouting for the horrible creature to release us, the Monster got scared and dropped us. He ran away into the night.
Have I ever seen him again?
He didn’t come back for a long time. We were safe with our grandfather because he had a rifle. But then we made the mistake of leaving Grandfather and the bad man came after us.
The next time I saw him was in a park in Edinburgh. He grabbed me and knocked me down. Lucky for me there was a rock nearby. I pounded him in the head until he stopped struggling, and then I rolled him in a nearby river.
He then tried to drown me in Millburn Bay, but I saw through his disguise as the captain of a boat. His piercing, hate-filled eyes gave him away. He whispered evil things to me, and I knew as soon as he had the chance he would try to kill me. When he sailed into a hidden bay where no one could see him strike, I knew it would be a fight to the death. He capsized the boat and would soon kill me if I hadn’t acted boldly and wrapped the sailing line around his neck.
I thought I had stopped him but somehow he got out and followed me back to the castle where I live in Gairsay. I was in an underground tunnel
waiting for Ingrid when he grabbed me in the dark. I fought with him and smashed my lantern. I stabbed him with a jagged piece of glass and got away.
He wanted to attack me again on a street in Stromness, but this time he pretended to be sweet. He asked me to join him in a pub but I knew what he really wanted — a chance to get me alone to murder me. Luckily I spied rat poison in the kitchen and was able to slip inside to grab some. While he tried to woo me with sweet words I slipped it into his ale, thereby making my escape. He followed me into the alley but as the first convulsions suddenly overtook him, I dashed away.
It wasn’t long, though, before the monstrously invincible creature was after me once more. He made his way to Gairsay where he tried again as I walked home, only this time he was in a wagon and got out to kidnap me. Fortunately I possessed a letter opener, which I used to fight him off.
The last time I saw him he was sitting up on a bed in a hospital or somewhere like it. I’m not sure what it was. Ingrid was there and he was attacking her this time. I saved both of us that day.
Since I’ve been here I haven’t seen him. But if I do see him, I won’t let him get me or Ingrid. I’ll protect us.
I don’t remember saying any of this: Clearly the effects of artificial somnambulance put me into a nightmare state where my mind concocted a nightmare vista where I played the role of … Of what? Brave heroine? Deluded dreamer? Mad murderess?
I awoke screaming frantically. Ingrid and Investigator Cairo tried to soothe me, but the fear that this induced dream brought to me was unbearable. My mind felt it would explode with the terror of it all. Nothing but the laudanum would calm me, and I have been dosed with it ever since.
The marquis came again today wanting to put me in a trance state once again. He says he wants me to remember the incident of the Monster trying to kidnap us when we were little, but I don’t want to remember anything. Maybe some things are just too terrifying to think about. I still say, some truths are better left unexplored.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF
INGRID VDW FRANKENSTEIN
December 1815
I am sitting now by the big fire with the portrait of my father gazing down on me. The days have grown very short and I long for the summer of endless sunlight. Life is very quiet at the castle with Giselle in Glasgow. It is lonely and I miss her more than I can say, though I visit as often as I can.
I am happy to say that with Dr. Sarlandière’s help, things went very well with Walter. He still needs a cane, but he’s walking. He has regained the use of his right hand as well. His face, though scarred, I still find handsome. I like the character his imperfections have imparted. He still suffers from bouts of melancholia,
but I hope that as he gets stronger, those will improve. He is deeply grateful and we remain close, though he still insists it would be too selfish of him to ask me to share my life with him as his wife. Still … maybe … with time. Time and my continued scientific efforts on his behalf. I dream of Walter in all his former glory, healthy and in love with me.
Often I think about the things Giselle said when she was giving her confession. Surely the man who came to snatch us from our beds that night was the Monster that Victor Frankenstein created, once more seeking his endless revenge on my father. Do I remember the incident?
I have searched my brain and simply can’t dredge it up. It’s one of the mysteries of the mind. Why one person is destroyed by the same event that another — and a twin at that — is fortunate enough to survive?
But just tonight I experienced a glimmer of a memory as I gazed out the front window. The moon was bright and I saw the hunched and lopsided form of an extremely large man silhouetted in its glow.
I shuddered and turned away. When I looked back, it was gone.
Clearly I owe a huge debt to Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece
Frankenstein
and have done my best to honor it, though in several places I have taken creative license with the story. In the original novel, Victor Frankenstein was nineteen when he brought his Monster to life. (Shelley herself was eighteen when she wrote the first draft and twenty-one when the first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818.) His family is unaware of his life at the University of Ingolstadt, and I thought it plausible that he might have married and had twin babies during that time, though this is a fiction of my own making and does not derive from the original novel. His pursuit by and the murderous intentions of his Creature are true to the original novel, as is his final demise in the Arctic Circle.
In the original
Frankenstein
, the Monster does demand a bride and Victor goes to Orkney to create that bride. I picked the island
of Gairsay in the Orkney island chain partly because it is sparsely populated (a census of 1851 claimed that only six families lived there) and because it has a small island nearby of red sandstone named Sweyn Holm thought to be named after the Viking Sweyn Asleifsson. (How could I resist the name Sweyn?!) The Viking marauder built a castle there, which was later leveled and replaced by another in the 1600s. My Castle Frankenstein is fictitious. In the original, Victor Frankenstein simply works in a homemade laboratory on an uninhabited island in Orkney.
I have tried to be faithful to the science of the day, not even using the term scientist because my copyeditor, Annie McDonnell, diligently pointed out that it was not in use in 1815 (along with the other anachronistic words not used in 1815 that she took out of the manuscript). I fudged a little in one place and that is with Dr. Jean-Baptiste Sarlandière. This brilliant young French doctor from a family of doctors was born in 1787. He began his medical studies at the age of 16 and — after an eleven-year military career — received his medical degree in 1815 at the age of 28. He didn’t publish his book on electroacupuncture until 1825 (
Mémoires sur l’electropuncture
), but I think it is plausible that he might have been thinking of it and experimenting years before publication, though this is only my own supposition, and so his appearance in this novel might be somewhat anachronistic. (But only somewhat, since he was a known figure on the cutting edge of the scientific scene in 1815.)
Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and, indeed, Mary Shelley — among other real historical luminaries mentioned — never attended a big party at the fictitious Castle Frankenstein on the very real island of Gairsay. They never saw the fictitious Walter Hammersmith being operated on in a laboratory on the real Sweyn Holm.
But what fun, if they had!