Peter Ackroyd - The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

“Well, my lord, we might climb. We have mountains.” In the presence of Byron it was impossible for Polidori to continue his instruction, so I moved over to the window.

“I think not.” I had forgotten, for a moment, his deformed foot. He had never alluded to it, but I believe that it was a source of embarrassment to him. I knew, too, that deformed persons are often born with strong passions. “Now that we are beside the lake, we must use the lake. Water is my element. Did you know that I once swam across the Hellespont?”

“There is a small castle further along the shore,” I told him. “You might care to visit it. It was once a fortress and a prison.”

“Like the famous Chateau de Chillon?”

“Not so striking,” I said. “But it is picturesque. It is rumoured to be haunted.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Polidori asked Byron.

“I deny nothing. But I doubt everything. We must encounter these ghosts, gentlemen. Shelley will faint.”

“Mary will support him,” Polidori said.

“Yes,” Byron replied. “She is the stronger of the two, I think. It is a question of the hen fucking the cock.” I was shocked by his language, but took care not to show it. “Depend upon it, that girl has steel within her.”

“She has the electric force within her,” Polidori said. “I have just calmed her with it.”

“Did you stroke her thighs?”

“I applied some friction to her skin.”

Byron was about to say something else, but broke off as Bysshe entered the room dishevelled and dazed from sleep. “Well, Shelley,” Byron said to him, “good morning to you. We are going on an expedition to a prison. What is this place called, Frankenstein?”

“The Chateau de Marmion. It belonged to a family of that name. I do not know who owns it now.”

“We will leave our cards, at any rate. Eat up, Shelley, I long to be gone.”

I retired to a small alcove, where I was hidden from them by a screen that divided the breakfast table from some scattered chairs and tables on which newspapers and journals were piled. Shelley soon left the table, confessing that he needed a chamber pot, so that Byron and Polidori were alone together. I began to read an essay on the merits of the Clapham sect, and disregarded the murmur of their voices. But then I began to listen to them. “She has two faults unpardonable in a woman,” Byron was saying. “She can read and she can write.”

I could not hear Polidori’s muttered reply.

“Forgive me,” Byron said to him. “I am as unsocial as a wolf taken from the troop.” It seemed that they were not aware of my presence.

“You seem convivial enough,” Polidori replied.

“I do my best to conceal my feelings. I do not want them to be wasted on anyone other than myself.”

“You are very magnanimous.”

“I have my silent rages, though, when to the world I seem indifferent. You know that.”

“Oh, yes. I have witnessed your contortions. You go a very bright red. But some of your rages, my lord, are not so silent. Do you recall that evening in the Haymarket, when you struck that man down?”

“My dear Polidori, I always have screams and insults at my command. Did you know that I can cry at will? Watch. I will show you.” There was a silence for a few seconds.

“Bravo,” Polidori cried out. “They look like the genuine thing.”

“They are the genuine thing. I just need a reason for them.”

I did not catch the next few words between them: I think that Byron had gone over to a side-table and poured more coffee. When he came back he must have been standing, for his voice became more distinct. “You know, when I was a child, I could not bear to read out loud any poetry without disgust. Now I am unaccountably attached to the habit.”

“As long as it is your own poetry.”

“No. Not necessarily. Tell me who wrote this.” Then his voice changed to one richer and more melodious:

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?”

“ Milton!” I called out from behind the screen.

“What? Are you here?”

“Yes. Paradise Lost.”

LATER THAT MORNING WE set sail. Mary had expressed a desire to join us, professing herself quite well; so there were five travellers on board the Alastor, as he had named her. The chateau was some three miles distant, along the eastern shore, and as we sailed slowly towards it in a fitful breeze I recalled my childhood wanderings in the same lakeland region. Many times I had walked among the pines, or laid myself down in the scrub, in an ecstasy of communion with the world. Those happy far-off days now came before me again. “There it stands,” I said to them, leaning on the prow and pointing towards the shore. It was an old fortress of darkened stone, rising above an escarpment by the lake; there had been some upheaval here, in earlier ages of the earth, for the bank at this point was made up of rocks and boulders long since deposited. “Look at the loneliness of it,” Bysshe said.

“It will be a damned hard job to secure our mooring.” Byron stood by the prow, with the rope in his hands. “I can get no purchase on these rocks.”

“There is a landing bay there,” Polidori said. “By that outcrop of stone.”

Within a few minutes we were standing on the shore. There was a path leading from the landing stage and climbing upward to the chateau itself: I went on ahead, to introduce the party to the present residents. When I knocked, the door was opened by a young man of no very prepossessing appearance; he had a weak left eye, and the purple stain of a birthmark on his left cheek. Assuredly, one side had let down the other. I introduced myself as one of a party of travellers, among whom was a famous English lord of great family. My lord had expressed an interest in visiting the fortress. Would it be possible for our party to be admitted? He replied in French that he and his wife were caretakers and that the owner, a German businessman, was away from home. I knew at once the language he would most easily understand. I brought out my purse and offered him a French louis, which he most gratefully accepted. By this time the others had reached the door.

The young man led us into the master’s quarters, as he called them, a suite of rooms on two floors from which the windows looked out upon the lake and the Jura mountains. “We have not come to see the views,” Byron said to me. “Will you ask him to take us to the dungeons?”

The caretaker had recognised the last word and, with a glance at Byron, he beckoned us to follow him down a stone staircase. There were two floors in the lower part of the fortress. On the higher of them were three cells, side by side, each of them with a narrow window carved out of the rock. They were in such a state of preservation that the leg-irons and manacles were still embedded in the walls. Shelley seemed ready to swoon, and Mary took his hand. “It has passed,” she said.

“No. It has not passed,” he replied. “The doom is still in the air.”

Byron had entered one of the cells and was carefully examining the leg-irons. “They are rusty. What do you think, Polidori? Caused by water or by blood?”

“A witches’ brew of both, I should think.”

“And here are marks in the floor,” I said, “where the chains scraped into the stone. Do you see these grooves?”

“They are the marks of woe.” Bysshe had gone over to the last cell, and was holding onto the bars with a keen half-tremulous and half-expectant look. “I am trying to summon them up,” he said to me as I walked over. “I am trying to find them.”