Our hideous progeny, p.25
Our Hideous Progeny, page 25
‘Hold on a moment – we are reading at the Royal Society, then?’
‘Yes, I heard back from Lord Wrottesley this afternoon.’
‘Good Lord, why didn’t you say?’
‘Because I thought I ought to wait until we were all assembled. Certain parties get rather snippish if they aren’t informed of developments at precisely the same time, as you recall.’
From my post in the corner, against one of the slanted walls, I gritted my teeth. The little under-stairs storeroom was too small for the three of us to be crammed inside, especially in such weather; the unseasonably warm spell of April had bled on into May, the sort of spring one saw perhaps twice in a lifetime in Inverness, and the little room was so stuffy I felt nearly light-headed. But with Clarke, as always, complaining that the boathouse stank, and a mostly recovered Maisie installed in her favourite armchair in the parlour, our options were limited. So here I was, trying my best not to catch cobwebs in my hair as Clarke rifled through the various letters and schedules piled on the small desk.
‘What date is the Royal Society reading?’ I asked, itching to leave and finish the missive I was putting together for Mr and Mrs Jamsetjee before I lost my nerve. It was several pages long, this letter, with accompanying sketches of the Creature, and I had felt with every line as if I were spilling my heart’s blood upon the page. But secrecy be damned, I had decided, the debacle with Maisie be damned – I could not let my mentor find out about our miraculous discovery at the same time as any other fellow of the Society.
‘Patience, patience,’ Clarke said, holding the letter up in front of him. ‘“Dear Mr Clarke, I have read the abstract you sent me and, at your recommendation, the full paper as well. I must say, I found the whole thing only marginally more plausible after reading your detailed explanation, and if it were anyone else proposing such an outlandish idea, I would not hesitate to dismiss them out of hand. But, as I have known you some years now, and trust you would not be inclined to lie about such matters . . . I shall give you the benefit of the doubt. And so, against the better judgement of nearly every one of my peers and council members, I have set aside a spot on the fourteenth of June” – ah, what a shame.’
‘Why is that?’
‘That’s the week after the annual general meeting, where they elect this year’s fellows. I’d hoped we could squeeze in before then, have you nominated. Ah, well; next year, then.’
He turned back to the letter, but I had been watching his eyes before, as he spoke of nominations, and they had been trained on Henry alone. I cleared my throat.
‘Have both of us nominated, you mean?’
Clarke threw me a look. The sort of look one throws a dog in the corner which is making entirely too much noise. ‘The Society does not admit women.’
‘It has not admitted any women yet. There is nothing in its charters that forbids it expressly.’ I should know. During my first summer in London, I had hounded Mr William Whewell, a speaker at one of the Society’s public lectures, until he had agreed to check the books for me. You stand a chance yet, madam, was his reply when it finally arrived, and I had clung to those words in all the years since as if they were a raft.
‘Besides,’ I pressed on, ‘the Royal Astronomical Society has female members. Mrs Somerville is a fellow, and so was Miss Herschel. And the Zoological—’
‘Then by all means, go and join them,’ Clarke said drily. ‘There are only fifteen new fellows admitted per year, Mrs Sutherland. Admitting you both for the same achievement would seem rather superfluous.’
‘Superfluous?’ I repeated, the word sharp as a knife.
‘And in any case, you would need five other fellows to support your nomination, and none of them has the faintest idea who you are.’ Untrue; I knew of one man, after all, who would vote for me. ‘Even your husband’s admittance is hardly a sure thing, after that disastrous affair with Professor Owen. Henry . . .’ He threw out an arm towards me in exasperation. Control your wife. ‘Please.’
Henry looked from me to Clarke and back again, a pained expression on his face. Finally, he said, wheedling: ‘It wouldn’t hurt to nominate her, would it? Next year?’
I was being tossed a bone. I placed a hand on the desk to steady myself – to prevent myself from screaming.
Clarke let loose a sigh. ‘Fine. I’ll put in a word, when the time comes. Now, where was I? Ah, yes – “I have set aside a spot on the fourteenth of June for you and Mr Sutherland to read your paper. I am assuming, Mr Clarke, for the sake of your reputation and of mine, that this is not some practical joke. On your head be it.”’
Henry hmm-ed. ‘Rather grim.’
‘Still, better than the one we got from the Linnean Society.’
They weren’t going to mention it. Had they even noticed? I had, of course; the phrase had slid under my skin like a needle. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t expected something like this, but that did not make it hurt any less.
‘When “you and Mr Sutherland” read the paper?’ I repeated icily.
Only Clarke looked up at me; Henry would not quite meet my eye. There was a tightness to his face, something like annoyance. It had never been like this before, I thought suddenly and bitterly, when it was only Henry and me; ever since Clarke had arrived, and I had pushed Henry aside in anger, I had found myself set apart. Henry had not needed to beg his way back into my good graces this time – had known, perhaps, that it was not possible – for he had someone else with whom to commiserate now, to hum and agree on how terribly stubborn and unforgiving I was. And now I was third fiddle, in a band that I had begun.
Clarke slapped the letter down. ‘Good God, woman, do you only know one tune?’
‘You said before that none of them know who I am.’ My voice was shaking with the effort to keep it level. ‘How will anyone learn about my part in this, if I am sitting in the audience? Did you even ask? Did you mention me at all in the letter?’
‘Of course. The illustrations are yours, after all.’
I let out a bark of laughter. ‘The illustrations! Is that all I’ve done? Have you forgotten my research? How many days, weeks, I spent stitching the damned thing together? Poring over nerves and blood vessels and bones and yeasts and my great-uncle’s useless notes – did you happen to mention that the very idea was mine from the start?’
‘So it’s all yours, is it?’ His lips curled. ‘You did it all by yourself?’
‘That’s not what I said.’
‘Shall I write back to Lord Wrottesley and tell him it was all a mistake – Miss Mary wishes to present her findings herself? I wonder how you’d like it if you really did have to do it all yourself. Who would write your letters then?’
‘You think I cannot write? I cannot argue? It’s all I’ve been doing, all my life!’ I threw my hands up in the air. ‘I would be better off if I had written it myself. If mine were the only name on that letter, at least Wrottesley would have seen it before he tossed it aside. Mary Somerville—’
‘Lord on high, would you shut up about Mary Somerville? Perhaps the reason she’s a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and you are not is because she, at least, has some common fucking decency! Have you tried that, hmm? Imagine what you could achieve, Mrs Sutherland, if you were not such an argumentative cow!’
‘Mr Clarke—’ began Henry, red-faced, but I ignored him and pushed him aside until I was nose to nose with Clarke.
‘I should not have to be decent,’ I hissed. ‘I should not have to be nice – God knows, you have not one ounce of compassion or propriety in your bones, and yet you’ve made it this far! I should not have to wait and grovel and plead and crush and cut away at myself until I’m small enough to fit at the margins, in the footnotes! You make all the world a game, where you decide the victor and you decide the rules, then pat yourself on the back for winning every single time! Yes, you are clever, Mr Clarke. Yes, you are talented. Every man is Shakespeare when he’s the only one in London with a pen. You simply cannot bear the notion that, were I to have a turn of it, I would be as good as you!’
He stared down at me, face sour as milk. ‘You would not be anywhere without my research.’
I gave an involuntary laugh. ‘As we would be nowhere without Cuvier, or Conybeare! As Galileo would be nowhere without Copernicus! Shall I go and ask Linnaeus if he would like to be a co-author?’
‘Galileo? What delusions you have! Oh, forgive me; I ought to say “Galileo and his wife”. I’m sure she helped transcribe his notes on occasion.’
‘I made a connection you couldn’t possibly have imagined—’
‘I simply hadn’t taken the time to imagine it, my dear; I was too occupied with other work!’
The edges of my vision seemed to blur. ‘If you call me “my dear” again, I will put that pen through your eye.’
‘For God’s sake!’ shouted Henry. ‘If we could just—’
‘And you!’ cried Clarke, pointing a quivering finger in Henry’s direction.
Henry stood a moment, stunned. ‘Me?’
‘Yes, you! What have you done? Even less than her! You did – what? Some sewing? Not even that! You helped organize some bones? What, in all honesty, have you done?’
A foul look began to gather on Henry’s face.
‘Careful, Clarke,’ he said quietly.
‘Or what?’ Clarke stepped in close to Henry, his voice low. ‘With the amount of money you owe me, I think I would be perfectly within my rights to claim this entire operation as my own. It’s based on my research. I funded it—’
‘Get out,’ said Henry.
‘On what grounds?’
‘On the grounds that it’s my house, goddamn you!’ he bellowed.
The ensuing silence hung in the room like a presence all its own. One could have plucked it like a string.
Clarke swept his papers from the desk, sweeping everything else to the floor in the process, and slid past me towards the door. On his way out, he bent and muttered in Henry’s ear: ‘It’s not even yours.’
Henry’s eye twitched.
Clarke’s footsteps clattered down the hall and up the stairs, dislodging dust from the ceiling as he went. There was the slam of a door, one final drift of dust – and all was still.
‘How much more would you have let him say to me, then?’ I said. ‘Or was it only when he implied your incompetence that it mattered?’
‘You too,’ muttered Henry.
For a moment, I was sure I must have misheard him. ‘What?’
‘You can leave as well. I’ve never been so ashamed – such childish behaviour, from my own wife.’
I was speechless, though not for long. ‘So I’m to be sent to my room like a child?’
He gave no answer. Or, at least, no answer I cared to stay and hear. I spilled out into the hallway, skin buzzing. I longed to hit something, crush something, dash it to the floor and grind it beneath my heel – but I would not, could not. I was an animal declawed; I might yell and spit and scream, but my hands could do no more than tremble uselessly at my sides. There was nothing I could crush but myself.
‘Mary?’
As I wrenched open the front door, a voice rang out from the parlour. Maisie was sitting by the fire, her face tight, hand paused in the turning of a page.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked quietly.
I opened my mouth to speak, but all that came forth was a formless noise, halfway to tears. I pressed my palms to my eyes until my vision spotted black, then turned and ran.
On the banks of the firth, I sank my teeth into my sleeve and screamed. When the ringing left my ears, I stood. Swayed upon the rocks, shut my eyes against the glare of sunlight across the water. There was not even a breeze to relieve me. I envied my great-uncle then, as he was at the end, chasing his misbegotten creature through the Arctic. I could think of nothing I wanted more in that moment than to be cold, to be alone, to have the reason for all my life’s miseries laid out before me, a killable thing.
Fleeing the sun, I found my way to the boathouse. It was dark inside, humid and foul-smelling as the belly of some awful beast. I took comfort there anyway, pushing up my skirts so I could sit and dangle my feet in the water. Shimmering reflections played across the walls. I clapped my hands twice, and up the Creature came to greet me, laying its head in my waiting palms.
‘How do you bear it?’ I asked, voice a whisper. ‘The same little square of water, day after day?’
The Creature made not a sound, but merely gazed at me, its slitted pupils wide in the dark. I stroked my thumb across its cheek, tracing the seams that ran across its skin – and my breath caught.
I ran my thumb over the same place again, to be sure I hadn’t imagined it. I had not.
The seam was unravelling.
22
I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.
— MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
THE CREATURE IS dying.
Those were the only words that could have brought us together again so soon. My palms still bore crescent marks from when I had stood clenching my fists, and I could almost hear the echoes of our raised voices. And yet here we all were again, hoisting the Creature up from the water on to the raised table, despite its protestations. I held its head, trying to coax it still with scraps of fish while we examined it. The sight made my blood run cold. Out of the water, in clearer light, the situation was worse than I could possibly have imagined. The strange liquid which I had noticed only minutes earlier, sticking to my fingers after I had pulled them, horrified, from the stitches at its head, was leaking from every seam across its body – thick and brown and terrible, smelling of blood and rotten fish.
How could I not have noticed this sooner? Had the Creature really spoiled overnight, like fruit left too long in the sun? Or had I simply not looked closely enough? It hardly ever lifted more than its head from the dark and murky water, after all. I cursed myself a thousand times for not luring it on to the worktable to check up on its health more often – for believing that something so good, so marvellous, could ever last.
I whirled on Clarke. ‘You said that it would. Not. Rot.’
‘It isn’t rotting.’
‘You mean to tell me that this is perfectly normal?’ I shoved my smeared hand towards his face, and he recoiled.
‘I did not say that. But I do not think the problem is that it’s rotting. I soaked the damned thing in enough turpentine and spirits that it should still be alive centuries from now. The problem is that the stitches are dissolving.’ He pulled something off the Creature’s back, and I saw that it was a stringy remnant of the catgut we had used. ‘As they should. It takes two or three months, usually, for them to be fully absorbed. Except—’
‘It isn’t healing,’ Henry muttered.
Growth/self-reparation. It had been one of the items on our list, tacked up on the wall of the nursery in London – one of the fundamental qualities of life. I cast my mind back, frantically, to the trials we had performed the previous year. Those creatures had healed, hadn’t they? But I did not recall ever seeing their stitches absorbed, now that I thought of it; our neat seams had remained. Could it be that, all along, none of our subjects’ parts had actually fused? That the catgut – which would last longer above water, but still not for ever – was all that had been keeping them from falling apart?
And if they had never healed . . . had they all been in pain? Was the Creature in pain, even now? For how long would it remain alive, in such a condition?
What have we done?
‘We simply have to redo the stitches, then,’ said Henry.
‘And what if they come out again?’ I protested. Its skin had always seemed so delicate, like tissue beneath my fingers. I had a vision of it making a sudden turn or catching upon something sharp, tearing itself in half.
‘Then we will double-stitch it. Triple-stitch it. Use tougher thread. We shall quilt the damned thing if we have to.’
‘Quilts still need repairing, Henry!’
‘What does it matter, in the grand scheme of things?’ Clarke cut in. ‘It doesn’t have to last for ever. We only need it to last as long as it takes for us to gain some credibility, to prove that our methods work. Ultimately – good God, ultimately the stitching doesn’t even matter! How many people do you think will come to us saying, “You must help me bring my daughter back to life; she fell on to a factory saw and now she’s in twenty-seven pieces”? None! It will be, “You must help me bring my daughter back to life; she died of typhus.” What does it matter if she never heals, her rash never goes away? She’ll be alive, and we shall have our money.’
I froze, dread snatching the words from my mouth. All these months, I had not thought . . . no, rather, I had not let myself think about such questions. About how this science of ours might be applied to humans. From the moment I had read Victor’s tale – the moment Henry had asked me, with that wary look in his eyes, ‘What, exactly . . . should we bring to life?’ – I had cast aside the notion entirely. There were too many unanswered questions. Could such created beings grow and age? Did they have souls? And if so, was it the same soul that had inhabited the body before? Or a patchwork combination, like the body itself? If such beings – as seemed to be the case with Victor’s creature – entered the world without memories, then did it even matter? Would memory be preserved in whole bodies, if not patchwork ones?
Such questions had seemed mere curiosities in the Creature’s case; as intelligent as it was, I could not imagine it being troubled by existential woes. Which was precisely why I’d suggested an animal, after all. But we were palaeontologists, not philosophers – what did we know, truly? How could we ever ensure that such a science would not be misused? I had thought that once our discovery was revealed to the world, we might pass the matter on to more qualified hands, watching from the sidelines as doctors and lawyers and clergymen had it out in Parliament like baying dogs. Such a thing was not for us to decide – and most certainly not for us to sell.
