Peter Ackroyd - The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

I left while questions were being put to Mr. Davy, and walked out into the street. Whether it was the atmosphere of the place, or whether it was the influence of the electric current in the aether, I felt stifled. I walked quickly, but then broke into a run. I knew that I had to escape the confines of the city. It was the strangest impulse I had ever experienced, so alarming and so urgent that my heart seemed to beat faster with every pace I took. I might have been fleeing from someone, or something, but the nature of my pursuer was not known to me. Was it an episode of madness? I may even have looked over my shoulder on one or two occasions. I do not recall.

I continued my flight past the Oxford Road and continued northwards. There were some who called after me, presuming that I was escaping from the Runners or some other force-they shouted encouragement. By a timber yard some children ran with me for a while, hooting and jeering, but they soon left off. And then, as I passed a public house and turnpike on the edge of fields, I had the most curious notion that someone else was running beside me. I could not see him, or hear him, but I was fully aware of his presence as I ran over a rough track. It could not have been my shadow, because the moon was obscured behind clouds. It was some image, some phantasm-I scarcely knew-which insisted on keeping up with my rapid strides. I ran all the faster to shake off this extraordinary sensation, and I skirted a large pond before crossing a field of brick kilns and smoking refuse. I was now on the very edge of the city, where there were a few straggling tenements, fetid ditches and hog pens. Still I did not slacken my pace, and still the other ran close beside me. The ground now began to rise and, as I passed beside some infirm and wasted trees, I stumbled upon a root or branch; I was about to fall upon the ground when, to my astonishment and fear, something seemed to lift me up and save me from falling. It occurred to me even then that I was sick of some nervous fever, and I slowed my pace a little. I made my way towards an oak, its shape outlined in the darkness, and rested against it.

I sat there, recovering my breath; I felt my forehead for evidence of fever, but perceived none.

I do not think I slept, or ever lost my waking consciousness, but the fear left me without any sign of its passing. I had returned to myself, as it were; yet with a sense of resignation that felt almost like weariness. I experienced a curious sense of acceptance-not of relief or of gratitude-when I had no notion of any burden being taken from me. I believed that I had been marked out in a way that I could not then comprehend. Gradually I became aware of a sound, like that of some avalanche or rock-fall; I sat up alarmed, recalling the disasters of my own region, but I quickly realised that it was the noise of London, a confused but not inharmonious muttering as if the city were talking in its sleep. I could see some fitful lights; but the predominant impression was one of brooding darkness, an inchoate roar of vast life momentarily stilled. I got up from the base of the oak tree, and walked down towards it.

IT WAS RAINING WHEN I CAME to the threshold of the city, a quiet steady rain that cast a veil over the streets. On such a night there were few people abroad, and my footsteps rang distinctly against the cobbles as I made my way towards the Oxford Road. I did not want to return to Berners Street, not yet. I had the absurd superstition that something might be waiting to greet me there, and instead I decided to walk on to Poland Street where I hoped to find Bysshe still awake. It was his custom to write, or to talk, by candlelight and then to watch the first stirrings of dawn creep beneath his casement window. Sure enough, when I passed his first-floor lodgings, I saw the light burning. I threw some pebbles against the pane, and he unfastened the shutter; seeing me in the narrow street below, he opened the window and threw down the keys. “You have heard the chimes at midnight,” he called to me. “Come up!”

“Are you quite well, Victor?” he asked me when he opened his door above the first flight of stair. I must have been breathing heavily. “You seem to be in a cold sweat.”

“Rain. Nothing more. It is a bad night.”

“Come in and warm yourself.” Then he said to someone, over his shoulder, “We have a visitor.”

Daniel Westbrook rose to greet me when I entered the room. “We were just discussing you, Mr. Frankenstein,” he said.

“Please call me Victor.”

“I was curious about your studies.”

“Oh, yes?”

“I told him, Victor, that you are a student of galvanism. You are interested in the principles of life.”

“I am interested in the springs of life,” I said. “That is true.”

“Where it comes from?” Westbrook asked me.

“Where it might come from. What else have you two been discussing? I cannot be a topic of absorbing interest.”

“We have been discussing, Victor, the future of Daniel’s sister.”

“Mr. Shelley has seen my father.”

“Really? When did this occur?” The conversation in the tavern, when Bysshe pledged himself to educate Harriet Westbrook at his own expense, had taken place three days before.

“I visited the Westbrook family yesterday morning,” Bysshe replied. “I believed that Sunday was, for Daniel’s father, the only day of consideration.”

“Mr. Shelley-” Westbrook began.

“Bysshe,” he said. “Merely Bysshe and Victor.”

“Bysshe was remorseless. He remonstrated with my father for allowing Harriet to consort with loose females.”

“I exaggerated. To make the point. Harriet had already left the room.”

“He pleaded with him to allow her the study of improving authors.”

“I know that she can read. She told me so.”

“And then, in a final moment of passion, he offered my father money.”

“That did it. I promised to pay to him the exact amount of Harriet’s earnings, with another guinea a week. These religious men love lucre. Stand by the fire, Victor, you are still trembling.”

“My father,” Westbrook said, “is a poor man as well as a religious one.”

“I am not blaming him for his poverty. I am blaming him for his neglect of Harriet.”

“Where will you place her?” I asked Bysshe.

“I do not intend to place her anywhere. No. That is not true. I will place her here.”

“You mean-” I looked around at the mass of books and papers; his lodgings were in the same degree of confusion as his rooms in Oxford.

“I intend to educate her myself. Daniel and I have been discussing the question of female education as the necessary preliminary to female suffrage. I will introduce Harriet to Plato, Voltaire, the divine Shakespeare.”

“That is rich fare for a young girl.”

“Daniel assures me that she is eager to learn on her own account. They began to read under the tutelage of their mother.”

“She is dead now,” Westbrook said.

“And Daniel passes books to her still which she reads on Sunday within the pages of her Bible.”

“So she will come here?” I asked.

“What of it?”

“She has no female to accompany her?”

“You are still the solid citizen of Geneva, Victor. There are no such conventions in London. In this part of London. And, if there were, I would be happy to break them!” He looked at Westbrook. “I have Harriet’s interests wholly at heart. I will read to her. Look.” He went over to a pile of books, half-fallen on the carpet, and picked up one of them. “Volney’s Ruin of Empires . You know it, Victor?” I nodded. “From this she will learn how unjust power is doomed and how all tyrants decay.”