Our hideous progeny, p.32
Our Hideous Progeny, page 32
And, of course, it had not all been about pride. Above all, I had done what I did for the Creature’s sake. That, I suspect, is what needled Henry the most; the fact that I had chosen the Creature over my own husband.
‘And now,’ he muttered, seemingly having given up on my response, ‘they suspect me of murder. Will you be happy then, when they hang me?’
My stomach twisted. ‘They will not hang you, Henry.’
‘Oh, won’t they?’ He gave a rather hysterical laugh. ‘What do you think, then? Will they transport me? Ten years’ hard labour?’
‘They have no evidence.’
‘They have a gun and a body, and the only man at the scene when the shots went off!’
‘They also have two witnesses who will swear upon your innocence! And . . . Henry, listen to me. If it comes to the worst, we will tell them the truth. I’ll admit to it. We can find some way to convince them that—’
There was that laugh again, sharp and bitter. ‘That my wife shot a man in cold blood? The man to whom I owe hundreds of pounds, whom I had every motive to kill? I barely avoided assault charges on the two of you, and you think—’
‘Perhaps you’ll die, then, Henry,’ I hissed, a lump in my throat. ‘Is that what you want me to say?’
Behind him, the door to the inspector’s office swung open, but Henry did not turn around. Rather, he stared at me, head tilted slightly to one side, an odd look in his eyes, as if he had finally solved a long and difficult puzzle and found the answer lacking.
‘Do you have any heart at all?’ he said quietly.
My throat grew tighter still, tears welling in my eyes. In the doorway, Maisie froze like a rabbit, looking mortified.
‘Of course I do, Henry,’ I said, gathering my shawl about me and rising to leave. Despite my best efforts, there was a peculiar sadness to the words which I could not shake. ‘It simply isn’t yours.’
IT WAS TWO weeks before Henry was released. There would be a full trial in time, we were told, for which we would be duly notified; but the lawyer with whom we spoke seemed quite con-ident that since there was not enough hard evidence to keep him in gaol, there would not be enough evidence to have him convicted, either. The boatman whom Henry had rudely woken from sleep to ask if he had recently hired out any unusual barges could attest to his whereabouts at the time of Clarke’s death; Mrs Wilkinson swore (due to, I could only assume, a combination of poor eyesight and an active imagination) that when she had been woken by the first shot, she had looked out of the window and seen Maisie and myself standing on the opposite bluff. Then there was Clarke’s accountant, whose books had been thoroughly examined for evidence of Henry’s debts, the process of which had turned up several strange inconsistencies that threw into doubt even the fact that Henry had been in debt at all. (Though I, for one, was certain these inconsistencies had far more to do with Clarke’s dubious history of bribery and blackmail than Henry’s innocence in that regard.)
We were free to leave Newcastle, then, at least until a trial was scheduled, which could very well be months. Maisie and I did not wait for Henry to return to the King’s Head and retrieve his things; out of some unspoken agreement, we merely collected our own luggage and went to the station. At the counter, Maisie asked for two tickets to Aberdeen – and then, suddenly anxious, turned to me with a question in her eyes. I blew out a long breath, thinking of the townhouse in London, where most of my belongings still lay: my books, my father’s Bible, the less-favoured dresses that I had chosen not to bring with me to Inverness. I would have to go back for them eventually, I knew. There were ties to sever still, loose ends to be tidied up. But I could not stand to think of such practical matters now; the very idea made me exhausted, a tiredness that surpassed the mere physical need to sleep and slipped into a sort of bone-deep longing – the aching desire to go home. Wherever that truly was, now.
‘Two tickets,’ I said quietly, and her face glowed with relief.
‘AM I A monster, Maisie?’
I watched her reflection in the train window cast me a complicated look. Outside, the coast sped by; dark clouds, heavy with rain, hung like a hazy watercolour above the anxious waves. Every crest looked to me now like a wake, every ripple the result of some dark shape slipping beneath the water. Is that it, is that it? Did it make it north again? Is it safe?
‘He wasn’t a good man,’ Maisie said at last.
‘That wasn’t my question.’
She pondered awhile, staring at her folded hands for so long that I thought she must have decided not to answer. But finally, she said:
‘Does it matter? The Creature was a monster, and yet you loved it just the same. A monster is simply something . . . irregular, isn’t it? Something strange?’ I could hear the smile in her voice, even though I couldn’t see it. ‘And I’ve always thought you a little strange.’
‘Yes, but the Creature never shot anyone, did it?’
‘It did nearly bite someone’s leg off.’
‘It did, but that’s . . .’ What it was meant to do, I tried to say, but the words struck me oddly, sent me spiralling down another well of thought entirely.
I didn’t have the slightest clue any more what I was meant to do.
‘Do you regret it?’
I looked out towards the distant clouds and bit my lip so hard it stung. Slowly, slowly, I shook my head. ‘No.’
Then: ‘Do you think I should?’
‘I think that’s entirely up to you,’ she replied.
At last, I met her eyes. She looked tired, as I’m sure I did; her dress was a bland beige tartan thing, bought to replace the one we had ruined with blood and salt water. But despite all that, she seemed to me sharper than ever – a knife with the rust scraped away, revealing the metal true beneath. I thought of that girl I’d first met, clutching her brother’s lapels, weeping at her father’s funeral. I had not seen her cry since. She had kept herself dull for so long.
‘How can you be so . . . so good to me?’ I whispered, finding it hard to speak. ‘So calm, after everything that’s happened?’
For a moment, she seemed lost for words. Her hand shot out to take mine, pressing her cold fingers against my knuckles.
‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘I did take a fair bit of laudanum before we got on the train . . .’
My head shot up. ‘Maisie!’
‘I’m only joking!’
‘Lord, Maisie, that’s terrible!’ She was giggling; and now, to my mortification, so was I. We bubbled over like pots left too long to boil. I gave her foot a kick. ‘Stop it, people are staring!’
‘You stop it!’
‘It was you who started it!’ I managed, one hand pressed over my mouth to stifle my laughter.
Once we had regained our composure, wiping our streaming eyes as the couple in the opposing booth shot us stern looks, I said:
‘We’re terrible, Maisie. We’re terrible women.’
She grinned. ‘We are.’
29
It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.
– MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
IT ENDED, I suppose, much as it began: with another black-edged letter.
Normality, I had found, was a surprisingly easy thing to feign, and a harder thing to make real. Occasionally, on my early-morning walks, my feet would still carry me to the site of the old boathouse, now nothing more than a black smear upon the lawn. More than occasionally, I would wake in the night with a jolt like gunfire, heaving breaths that tasted of blood and salt, like drowning anew each time. Or, no; it was like having been drowned already, remembering only in fits and starts that I ought to be dead.
Despite all my worries, despite all the hours I spent staring at the wallpaper in the dark, trying to forget the feeling of thread cutting into my wrists and cold metal against my forehead – despite everything, the sun still rose. The tide came in. We ate and slept. The slashes across my palms scabbed and began to heal, leaving pale scars in their place. When Maisie was laid low for a week with another fever, I lay beside her and read to her in whispers.
On her first day out of bed, as we sat by the fire – I reading, and she swathed in blankets, sorting that day’s post – there came a sound from Maisie, an ‘Oh!’ as if she’d been stabbed with a pin. I looked up and saw in her hands, of course, the black-edged envelope. Slowly, she turned it over and read the address, then held it out to me.
‘It’s my grandmother,’ I told her once I’d opened it, with no great surprise. What did surprise me, perhaps, was the hollow pang I felt at the news; though it was not for my grandmother precisely, but rather for what she might have been. That old, familiar ache of the mother-shaped hole in my heart.
‘Oh dear,’ said Maisie quietly, reaching out to place a comforting hand on my arm. I was more thankful than I could say. After all, I knew that if anyone else understood that ache, it was she.
‘When is the funeral?’
‘Tuesday.’
‘Ah, no chance of making that.’
‘No.’ And I was rather grateful for it. I looked back at the letter, turning the page . . . and froze. I backtracked, reading the line I had just spotted a second time, for I was sure I must be mistaken, but no. I read on, eyes moving with frantic speed, taking in the news one disjointed phrase at a time.
Typically, in cases of intestacy . . . investigate all possible . . . but could not find your certificate of birth; so I contacted . . . in a small town, near Southampton . . . name, on the local register of births, was not Mary Brown, madam, but Mary Frankenstein.
And the same register confirmed that, two days before your birth, your parents did in fact—
Abruptly, I stood. Maisie looked up at me with wide and worried eyes.
‘I . . .’ I swallowed hard. ‘Excuse me for a moment.’
Clutching the letter to my side, I made for the front door.
Outside, in the fresh air, I leaned against the warm stone wall of the house and took a long breath. My hands shook with rage, or shock, or perhaps even relief – a strange mixture of the three, most likely. I felt as though the world had shifted below my feet; that everything I had ever known about my childhood had been cast in a different light, every pointless jibe and obstacle I had encountered made even more pointless by the fact that I need not have suffered any of it. My life, it appeared, had been founded on a lie.
And yet . . .
And yet, I mused as I stared at the seagulls wheeling distantly over the firth, had anything truly changed? Besides my opinion of my grandmother, which was now lower than ever – unless, of course, she herself had not known. Was it she who had orchestrated this, or was it simply an unfortunate accident of fate?
Carefully, as my racing heart began to slow, I conjured in my mind an alternative reality, one in which I had known the truth from birth, and tentatively mapped its borders. Would my life have been all that different, had I known that I was not a bastard after all? Perhaps I might have had a happier childhood, or suffered less at the hands of men like Finlay Clarke. Perhaps I might have married a different man than Henry. But then again, perhaps not; I was still the daughter of a housemaid, conceived out of the respectable bounds of wedlock. I could imagine that in my grandmother’s mind, that was equally shameful, another blot on the family name. And perhaps it no longer mattered. If I was entirely honest in my estimations, I suspected that my path in life would have been much the same.
. . . And that path, I thought now as I glanced at the parlour window and caught the curtain twitch as Maisie darted out of sight, was not such a terrible one, in the end. A smile plucked at my lips; slowly, I let my hand unclench around the letter, and smoothed out the creases I had made.
At least some good might come of this sorry affair.
Inside once more, I handed the letter to Maisie and waited while she read it, her eyebrows rising with every word.
‘You—?’
‘Yes.’
‘And your grandmother, she simply . . . lied about it?’ She looked up, and it made me terribly happy to see how furious she was on my behalf.
‘Well . . . I do not know. My father was already very ill when he brought me to Wight; it’s possible he wasn’t able to tell her the full tale before he died. Or he couldn’t bear to. And if she did know about the marriage, then . . . perhaps she couldn’t bear the thought that her precious son had run off with a housemaid? She wanted to paint my mother as the villain, the vile seductress.’
‘Yes, from what you’ve told me, that does sound like something she might do . . .’ Maisie muttered. And then, with sudden glee: ‘If that were the case, she must have been seething when she heard that you and Henry had eloped, too.’
I gave a bark of laughter, and dropped into the chair beside her. ‘You’re right. And she’d be seething still, to know that I shall now have the house.’
‘What are you going to do with it?’ Maisie asked, and I did not think I was imagining the anxiety in her voice. I hurried to assure her:
‘Oh, sell it! At once! I’m never setting foot in it again.’ A dismaying thought occurred, and I winced. ‘Ah . . . Well, I suppose that will be up to Henry, really, seeing as all of it is his by law.’
Maisie chewed her lip. ‘Surely he will be reasonable, though, won’t he? Perhaps you might split the money; he could set up an allowance for you, like I have with my inheritance. It would make sense, if you are to continue living apart.’
‘Perhaps.’ It would be the honest thing to do – on both our parts, I begrudgingly admitted, considering I had dashed all our dreams of riches when I set the Creature free. I could only hope that despite the animosity between us, Henry would choose the honest thing, too, rather than simply use the lot to pay off his debts. Although now that Clarke was dead, perhaps he had fewer worries on that front.
‘Probably best to wait a bit, though, before you ask him,’ Maisie said, grimacing.
‘Yes! Yes, let the situation cool down. I’ll bring it up after the trial, perhaps. And after I’ve gone down to Wight myself, to sort out the rest of her affairs.’
She gave a hum of agreement, and turned to stare into the fire. There was something poised in that moment, some unspoken thing I longed to ask, until I could bear it no more. I got up and knelt by her chair, clasping her hands in mine, and the words spilled out.
‘Come with me.’
It sounded more like a plea, a reckless longing thing, than any sort of question. She blinked.
‘I . . . yes, all right. I wasn’t sure if you—’
‘There are some stops I need to make along the way. London, I suppose, to gather the rest of my things, and Canterbury.’ I had written to the Jamsetjees, of course, a nonsense letter full of vagaries and cryptic messages that I had penned in a daze the day after we returned to Inverness – for as much as I felt they deserved the truth, now that I had no proof, I could not think of a way to tell them without seeming like a raving madwoman. Still, they deserved something; at the very least for me to give them back their Leyden jar. ‘You must meet Mr Jamsetjee – you remember, my mentor – and I think you would get along splendidly with Mrs Jamsetjee, too. But after that, on Wight . . . oh, the cliffs, Maisie! White as snow, taller than anything, and simply bursting with fossils! I must get you an ammonite; even if we can’t find one on the beach, there are plenty sold in town—’
‘I already said yes!’ she laughed. ‘You don’t have to convince me. It sounds quite delightful. It will be warmer there, too, won’t it?’
‘Absolutely. We could winter there, spare you some of the cold and rain – or in Canterbury.’ I had a plan brewing in my mind now; a plan involving my newfound inheritance, my newfound lack of anything to do with my life, my long-standing promise to myself that I would get Maisie out of this dark and dreary house. And perhaps, too, there was a way to get my mentor his money and his assistant after all.
‘And then later, after the trial is over and everything is sorted out, then perhaps . . .’ I tried to suggest it casually, as though I had not been thinking it for days, even before the news of my grandmother arrived. ‘We could go somewhere else. Visit the continent.’
She gave me a long, appraising look. Anxious, I babbled on. ‘You did say you wanted to visit Paris, didn’t you? We could go on from Canterbury to Dover, and Calais – I have an old friend there who might be willing to put us up while we arrange travel south . . .’ For, after all, what was the use of having your closest companion abandon you for the crime of caring for her too fiercely, if you could not later exploit her guilty heart for free accommodations? ‘From there, maybe up through Belgium – or we could simply keep going south if you like, where it’s warm. Though it’ll be harder to get back that way. What do you think? I’m sure that—’
‘All right.’
‘Really? Are you sure?’
‘You’re the one who suggested it!’ she cried, exasperated, and I grinned.
‘I know; I just thought I’d have to work harder to convince you, that’s all.’
‘I am . . . willing to try.’ She bit her lip. ‘But Mary, I need to ask . . . I need you to promise . . .’
She met my eyes, as if she was steeling herself for some awful revelation, and my heart broke at the sight.
‘Promise me you will not tire of me. Because I’ve seen how you and Henry go about everything, always rushing hither and thither, doing five things at once – and I cannot do that, Mary. I can’t stomach another trip like that awful dash down to Newcastle.’
‘Ah, but I was so looking forward to visiting the Baths again,’ I said wryly, and she swatted the back of my arm.
‘Be serious!’
‘I am!’ I leaned forward, chuckling, and squeezed her hand. ‘I promise, Maisie. I don’t want to go with Henry – I want to go with you. And I don’t care if we don’t get far, and have to turn back at Calais. I don’t care if you’re trapped abed three weeks out of every month and it takes us a year to get to Paris! Well, that is to say, I’d care, of course – but I wouldn’t care.’
