Peter Ackroyd - The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

“I think,” Mary said, “that he feels shame. He feels his deformity.”

“I take it,” I asked her, “that he has a club foot? That is the phrase, is it not?”

“Yes. That is the phrase. But the pain goes deeper. He is ashamed of life. He wishes to expend it quickly.”

“He can be very fierce,” Bysshe said, “with the people around him.”

“That is because he is fierce with himself,” she replied. “He has no mercy.”

William, without prompting, had brought over another plate of ham sandwiches. Bysshe attacked them with renewed appetite. “I wonder,” he said, “that he has not been wholly spoiled by his success. I have said that he is proud. But he has no vanity.”

“You mean,” Mary replied, “that he deigns to speak to mortals such as ourselves.” Bysshe seemed offended by this. She noticed his reaction and added, very quickly, “Of course he respects you as a poet, Bysshe. He is disparaging of his own verse.”

“It comes too easily to him. He sees no merit in that which flows freely. He relishes a struggle.”

“I agree with him there,” I said. “Out of adversity comes triumph. All great natures aspire.”

Bysshe raised his glass. “I commend your spirit, Victor. Death or victory!”

Mary evidently disliked this turn of the conversation. “That is easy for you to say. Men have an appetite for glory.”

“And women have not?” he asked her.

“We wish for a different kind of renown. We do not seek conflict. We seek harmony.”

“I drink to that,” he said. “But sometimes the world will not allow it. That reminds me, Victor. Byron wrote of dreadful storms.”

“We are used to storms in the mountains.”

“No. These are out of all reckoning. The local people prophesy a season of darkness. From some unknown cause.”

“I look forward to it,” I said. “I like the aberrations of nature.”

AT THE END OF THE MONTH we assembled at Dover -Bysshe and Mary with their young serving maid, Lizzie, myself and Fred. It was Fred’s first journey out of England, and he was in a state of high excitement. He had never seen the open sea. “I expect,” he said, “that we will see islands and such like.”

“There are very few of those, Fred,” I replied, “in this stretch of water.”

“Just a bare flat plain of sea, then?”

“I am afraid so.”

“How deep is it, sir?”

“I have no idea, Fred. You must ask the captain when we board.”

“Deep enough for whales?”

“I am not sure.”

“I would welcome the opportunity of spying one of them,” he said. “I saw a print of one knocking over that boat.” He was referring to an incident eleven months before, when the Finlay Cutter was broken up by an irate whale. “Beg pardon, Mr. Frankenstein. Not meaning to suggest any danger.” He had gathered up our luggage and, whistling to a porter, spoke to him very confidentially and persuaded him to transport it down to the quay where our boat was berthed. The Lothair was undecked, and with much pulling and pushing we were eventually lodged in two small and uncomfortable cabins. “This is snug,” Fred said.

“We will not be here long.”

“That must be the smallest window in the world.”

“I do not think that is the word in English. There is a nautical term for it. Porthole.”

“It is of glass, sir, and you can barely see through it. So I call it a window.”

The captain, a surly fellow named Meadows, scarcely bothered to stop as he walked along the corridor between the several cabins. “We set sail now,” he said. “Without delay. The wind is fresh.”

Within an hour we had begun our journey and were upon the open sea. Fred could scarcely contain his excitement. “It is very boisterous, sir. My stomach hits the floor and then comes up into my mouth.”

“You should sit, Fred. You will be ill.”

“Not me, sir. I have ridden in my father’s cart. The streets of London are worse than any sea. Look, sir. Over there. There is the whale I mentioned.” I looked out of the porthole, but I could see nothing through the spray. “Did you not see that creature following us? It popped its head in and out of the water.” I looked again, and for a moment thought that I glimpsed something. But it had gone beneath the waves.

“It was a piece of timber, Fred. A plank.”

Bysshe came into our cabin. “Mary is unwell,” he said. “She wishes to be left with Lizzie. I have given her a powder, but the sea is very high.”

“High and low at the same time,” Fred said. “It is a regular seesaw.”

“But we are making progress, I think. Come and sit with me, Bysshe.”

“Yes. We will discuss old tales of sea adventures. We will relive the journeys to Virginia and the Barbadoes. We will hail the sapphire ocean!” Bysshe had a wonderful ability to rise above circumstances and, as we sat in the tossing cabin, he entertained me and Fred with the tales of sea journeys he had read as a child. He recited with vigour the lines from the Odyssey where Odysseus sails up the narrow strait between the islands of Scylla and Charybdis where the sea “seethed and bubbled in utter turmoil, and high overhead the spray fell on the tops of the cliffs.” It was Bysshe’s own translation, and I am sure that he composed it as he went along.

There was a sudden knock on the door of the cabin, and Lizzie stood before us. She gave a little curtsy. “Please to tell you, Mr. Shelley, that my mistress is a deal better and craves a little bit of your company.”

“I shall be there, Lizzie, before you are gone.” He gave me a hasty adieu, and retired.

Fred and I sat in silence, Fred whistling as he looked out of the porthole. “Do refrain from that noise, Fred. It is giving me a headache.”

“There goes that whale again.”

“Are you sure? I am not convinced that whales frequent these waters.”

“Where there is water, sir, there is a whale. Look.”

I went over to the porthole. “I can see nothing, Fred. You are dreaming. Will you please seek out the captain, and ask him how much longer we will be at sea?”

“He is an old cuffin,” Fred said on his return from the captain’s quarters. “A matter of hours, he says. How many hours, I says. Am I God, he says. Far from it, I says. Then he slams his door shut.”

It was indeed a matter of hours-hours more than I had anticipated, since for a while we lay becalmed in the wallowing sea. Eventually Bysshe came into the cabin. “We are approaching land,” he said. “The seamen are scampering about.”

There was in fact some delay, and our ship was becalmed just before we reached the harbour; but a sudden gust was admirably caught by the captain, and we reached our moorings. There was a line of various coaches and carriages along the dockside, some already taken and some waiting to be hired. Mary, with what I soon discovered to be her usual expedition, went up to one of the drivers and engaged in some form of bargain: we had agreed to hire a carriage to take us through Holland and part of Germany, even though Bysshe had expressed a desire to travel through France and Italy. Yet his wish was quite ignored by Mary, and it was agreed with the driver that we would ride through the plains of Holland before going onward to Cologne. “I have heard from others of ruined France,” Mary said as we settled in the carriage. “The Cossacks have spared nothing. The villages are burned, and the people beg for bread. The auberges are filthy, too. There is disease everywhere. Really, Bysshe, France is not the country of your imagination.”

“No country ever can be,” he replied. “But I live in infinite hope.”