Peter Ackroyd - The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

“And then?”

“I had not the slightest suspicion, as I said, of any connection other than that of teacher and pupil. I would not have dreamed of anything else. The gulf between them was too wide. Mr. Shelley is the son of a baronet whereas Harriet-well-she is merely the daughter of Mr. Westbrook.”

“There must have been an occasion-”

“No. Never. Not until she had fled.”

I rose, and went over to the window. “He is hardly likely to have come to Oxford. Of all places on earth, this is the one he most detests. He could not have returned to his father. That would be unthinkable. Did you enquire at the principal coach offices?”

“I went to Snow Hill and Aldersgate. They had not been seen. I even walked out to Knightsbridge, in case they had tried to avoid pursuit, but there had been no sign of them.”

“They may have gone to some other part of London.”

“In which case, we are lost.”

“This is what I will do. I will write to him, and address the letter to his father’s house. He will not have gone there, but he may have sent a message. It is the only possible means of reaching him. You must return to London, Daniel, in case your sister tries to communicate with you. Try the other coaches.”

“There is an office in Bishopsgate. And in the Tottenham Court Road. What was he thinking? Harriet is still young-”

“Be cheerful. I do not believe that Bysshe is guilty of any dishonourable action.”

I HAD RETAINED MY FAITH in Bysshe and that evening, after Daniel had gone back to London, I began a letter to him in which I wrote broadly of my own affairs. It was possible that it might be opened and read by his father, for whom he professed the most invincible dislike, and so I refrained from mentioning his removal from Oxford and his attachment to Harriet Westbrook. Instead I told him of my journey to Geneva, of the death of my sister and my father, and ended with an appeal to him for news of his own travels over the past months.

Yet I had no need to send it. The following afternoon a letter was delivered by the London carrier. It was from Bysshe, announcing in the most abrupt fashion that he had taken Harriet from Whitechapel for the simple reason that her father “was persecuting her in the most horrible way” and was about to force her return to the spice factory. She had spoken of suicide, and had clamoured for Bysshe’s “protection.” That was his word. He had felt obliged to rescue her in her distress, and to take her beyond the reach of her father’s anger. In a hurried postscript he asked me for funds. It seems that his detested father had stopped his allowance, and he had scarcely the means to live.

Bysshe had inscribed his address at the end of the letter-a house in Queen’s Square-and at once I wrote back, offering him the use of my rooms in Jermyn Street and enclosing a note for the payment of fifty guineas at Coutts. I also urged him to communicate with Daniel Westbrook, and explain the circumstances of his sister’s sudden departure. I had no doubt that Bysshe’s intentions were as honourable as he described them. He was, in a sense, my mentor. So I experienced the noble sense of a duty well performed, and secretly congratulated myself on my liberality to my friend.

Imagine my surprise and horror, therefore, when three days later I received a further letter from London. It came from Daniel Westbrook, who had received a note from Bysshe. He was now writing to inform me, as he put it, that Mr. Shelley and Harriet had absconded to Edinburgh, with the help of the money I had given them, where they intended to be married.

My bewilderment was followed by anger. I believed that Bysshe had betrayed my trust, not only in asking money for such a purpose but also in concocting the story of Harriet’s despair. He had lied to me under the most shameful circumstances.

I took the letter Bysshe had sent to me, and tore off a small piece of it. I put it in my mouth and swallowed it. Systematically I reduced the paper to shreds, and devoured every one of them.

I HAD ALREADY RETURNED TO MY EXPERIMENTS with renewed enthusiasm after the long absence from my studies. My anger at Bysshe prompted me to work ever more arduously, and to shun all human company so that I could lose myself in my pursuits. I felt myself to be truly alone, having been so signally betrayed by one whom I looked upon as friend and companion. I purchased electrical apparatus from a manufacturer in Mill Street, but I soon realised that the scale of his work was not sufficient. I had made some advances. I had acquainted myself with the coroner of Oxford, a former student of my college. I explained to him that my studies required the use of human specimens, and after some reflection on the matter he agreed to help me in the cause of the advancement of science. He was himself an explorer of natural phenomena, having become interested in geological speculation and the structure of the earth, and so he sympathised with my desire to seek out the sources of life in the human frame. I promised to bring him some Alpine rocks after my next visit to Geneva.

I still used the barn in Headington for my experiments and, in the quiet of the evening, the coroner’s two servants would bring me the corpses-or, on occasions, the parts of the corpses-which the coroner had viewed that day. They waited while I worked on them through the night, and then returned them to the coroner’s office in Clarendon Street. I paid them liberally-a guinea each-for every visit. I do believe that the English will do anything for money.

I made some startling discoveries in the course of this work. I found a method of passing electricity through the entire human frame so that it seemed to tremble and to quiver. I was also able to transmit an electrical current through the spine of one child that prompted the eyes to open and the mouth to part. I had hoped for some sounds to be manifested by the vocal cords, but in that I was disappointed. Mr. Franklin had already suggested that electricity might be used to revive the heart, in patients just expired, and I had no reason to doubt him. Green shoots can spring from a blasted tree. I remembered the case in Geneva, some years before, when a young girl was pronounced dead after falling from a first-storey window; yet she had been restored to life by the use of the electrical vessel known as the Leyden jar.

The subjects sent to me by the coroner were generally too long gone for any hope of revival, although I nurtured a strange and wild hope when I was presented with an infant lately drowned in the Thames. I had read of drowned men being chafed or pummelled into life, and I believed that the body of an infant still contained the primal fire or the living principle. I drained the excess fluid from a small hole in the abdomen, and then placed the child on tin-foil as a good conductor. I then surrounded her with hermetically sealed jars, making up the Leyden device; there was a crack, as of summer thunder, and to my dismay the infant was dreadfully burned. But there was no life. I believe that I told the coroner that the burns were the discoloration attendant on drowning.

I could not remain in Oxford without arousing suspicion, even though I worked in the remotest corner of Headington. I had bribed the porters to ignore my nocturnal journeys, before the gates of the college were closed, and my return to my rooms after the gates had opened. They believed a woman to be in the case, and I chose not to disabuse them. But they would talk. When the Master called me into his study, for what he called a conversation, I suspected the worst. But I had already come to the conclusion that it was time for my departure. I would not obtain my degree; but with my father dead and an independent fortune bequeathed to me, I really had no need of the initials after my name.