The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (29 page)

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 contemplation 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?”