Our hideous progeny, p.1
Our Hideous Progeny, page 1
Epigraph
And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.
– MARY SHELLEY, Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part II
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part III
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part IV
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part V
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
‘COULD YOU,’ SAID the inspector, ‘run it all by me one more time, Mrs Sutherland?’
I took my time in answering. I paused to smooth out my skirts and steady my breathing, to survey the room – its single grimy window, the awful narrow wood-panelled walls that gave one the impression of being trapped inside a cabinet. I do not consider myself an expert in lying by any means, but if there is one thing I have learned on the subject over the course of my life, it is this: lies cannot be rushed. They must be spun evenly and carefully. Too fast, and you risk tangling up the details; too slow, and it sounds like a stage performance, scripted from the start.
And so, despite my racing heart, I paused.
‘I already laid it all out before the magistrate this afternoon,’ I said, ‘and the constable before that, not to mention Mr Wilkinson and—’
‘Yes, well.’ The inspector squinted at me rather reproachfully through his pince-nez. ‘A man is dead, Mrs Sutherland. We must make sure we record every detail. I’m sure you can spare just a few more moments of your time.’
I looked down at my hands, at the bandages wound around my palms and up my wrists. Four small red crescents bled through the fabric on each hand where my nails had dug in.
‘Of course. Although—’
This part I could not bear to take my time over, though I supposed that was all right, as it was not a lie.
‘Would you make a note, sir, that I plan to go by my maiden name in future? In case you need to find me in London?’
The inspector paused, his pen poised above his notebook, and raised an eyebrow. ‘. . . And what would that be?’
‘Frankenstein,’ I replied. ‘Mary Elizabeth Frankenstein.’
IT WAS A grey and foggy March day when we brought it to life at last.
I had expected there to be thunder, or at the very least some rain; I had expected that, on such a momentous occasion, Nature would have been obliged to provide us with a fitting backdrop. But evidently Nature felt that she owed us no favours, as the morning dawned dull as always, wreathed in a thick mist that dampened clothes and sound alike as it crept over the hills.
I took a measure of grim satisfaction in Clarke’s bedraggled appearance as he let us into the boathouse. He had come to us bright-eyed and brimming with confidence; now, in his rumpled shirtsleeves, with grey shadowing his jaw and the skin beneath his eyes, he seemed but a dim reflection of his former self. Henry, meanwhile, outshone us all in his morning coat, the same he had worn on our honeymoon in Lyme, and which had shown the dust of the chalk cliffs so badly. Perhaps he was hoping to make a good first impression.
We examined our instruments one final time: the bellows, to provide the breath of life; the stove in the corner, to drive the spring chill from the room and make its cold flesh warm again; the beakers of elixir upon the worktable, bubbling merrily on their burners. I measured out a vial and handed it to Clarke to administer. Then, having nothing else to do, I leaned in close to the Creature and laid a hand gently upon its neck.
‘Is it warm enough, Mary?’ Henry asked. I nodded, startled to hear his voice; the room had been so silent before, as still as a church mid-prayer. We had built here, in this half-ruined boathouse on the edge of the Moray Firth, a temple to our own strange gods – to Chemistry and Anatomy and Electricity.
There was an acrid smell in the room as the procedure began. The air felt prickly and sharp, bursting with potential, like the moment before lightning strikes. But there was no bang, no flash, no grand transformation – only something dead one minute, and alive the next. Its flippers twitched; its great curved back began to rise and fall of its own accord. And its eyes! I will always hold dear to my heart the fact that I was the first to see those golden eyes open, to see its reptilian pupils narrow and focus on my own – for in those eyes I saw, for the first time, proof that we had created something truly alive.
But that isn’t right. No; I’m getting ahead of myself. That isn’t really how it all began.
Part I
NOVEMBER 1853 – JUNE 1854
1
Our house was the house of mourning . . . she no longer took delight in her ordinary occupations; all pleasure seemed to her sacrilege toward the dead.
— MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
IT BEGAN, RATHER, with a black-edged envelope.
It must have been late afternoon when it arrived, for I remember the slivers of sunlight that cut the room, casting each mote of dust in gold. Most of the time the study was caught in the looming shadow of the opposing tenements, but for one glorious hour each day the sun shone in and turned the air to honey. It caught upon every gilded title on the bookshelves, lighting up my polished ammonite like a mirror. It was a subject of constant debate between the two of us, whether the curtains ought to be left open or shut to prevent the books from fading. Evidently, however, I had won that day – for it was through a haze of that rare London sunshine that I watched through the doorway as the envelope in question slid from the letterbox and landed, with a gentleness that did not match the gravity of its contents, on the chequered hallway floor.
At first, I simply stared. It was my grandmother, most likely; her nurse had written the previous month to say that she had developed pneumonia and was not faring well. I wondered for a moment whether I could simply pretend I hadn’t seen the letter – if I could sit and continue my work in peace for another hour or two, until James brought us the post before supper. But then I remembered (as I had been remembering in jarring stops and starts all week) that we had given James his notice, as we could not afford to pay his wages until Henry found steady work again; and I remembered, too, that Mrs Jamsetjee had been ill earlier that month, with a persistent cold that would not cure. I looked down at the half-finished illustration upon my drawing desk: the stem of a fossil fern, Equisetum columnare, the specimen itself resting in my open palm. I had been holding it up to the light, trying to catch every detail of its petrified surface. Now I was gripping it so tightly my knuckles were white.
With a heavy heart, I set it down and rose to my feet.
‘Mary? What is it?’ Henry called after me as I went to the hall. ‘It’s not Forsythe again, is it? I swear, if that man writes another word to me about the joys of the Swedish countryside, I shall burn everything he’s ever written and send him back the ashes.’
I paid him no mind. The letter’s black wax seal glared at me from the floor. Unable to bear the suspense any longer, I snatched it up with trembling fingers and turned it over. There, in a small, neat hand, were the words:
Mr Henry Sutherland
10 Maddox Street
Mayfair
London
After taking a moment to collect myself – it wouldn’t do, to let Henry see how relieved I was – I went and laid the envelope gently on the corner of his desk.
‘It’s for you.’
For barely a second, he blinked down at it, face going pale. But then, as I watched, he drew himself together and picked up the letter, turning it over to stare at the seal.
‘Well! I wonder who it is,’ he murmured. It was a largely rhetorical question, I knew; the envelope bore an Inverness postmark, and that left only two possibilities.
‘Your father?’ I asked.
‘Possibly. Though he is more likely to ferment than die, I think; and my sister’s primary ambition seems to be to catch every sickness known to man, so one can never be sure. Care to vote?’
‘Don’t be horrid,’ I replied, returning to my seat and the tray of tea which Agnes had left us, now long since cold.
‘Come now, dear. You know you’ll be the same when your toad of a grandmother finally expires. Now, who do you vote for?’
I glared at him over the rim of my teacup, but it seemed that he would not open the envelope until I cast my vote. Finally, I relented.
‘Your father. I’ve never met your sister, so I have no reason to dislike her.’ Besides the petty tales Henry had told me over the years.
‘Oh, you would if you had met her. I, for one, hope it’s her. More of the inheritance for me.’ With a flourish, he broke the seal.
‘“Mr Sutherland,”’ he read, getting up
He set down the letter upon his desk. ‘Well, my dear. I hear that Inverness is lovely at this time of year.’
‘You do not. You have always said that it is terrible at every time of year.’
He chuckled, though it sounded rather hollow. For a moment, we sat in silent consideration. I cast my eyes back to the fossil fern, and to the draft on Henry’s desk, a column on Devonian fossil trees he was writing for Chambers’s. My illustration was meant to accompany it.
‘We shall have to give Mr Roberts the Equisetum back before we leave,’ I said, for of course the fossil was not ours, but a loan from one of Henry’s university acquaintances. We had, to my eternal dismay, no collection to speak of ourselves.
‘Yes, yes. I’ll write to him this evening,’ Henry said absently. He looked down at the solicitor’s letter again, staring at the signature at the foot of the page, though his gaze seemed to reach much further than that. ‘Will you . . . need new mourning wear before we leave?’
‘No.’ I found myself looking away as well, watching through the window as the sun slipped out of view. ‘My old things will do. I shouldn’t think they’ll even have gathered dust.’
OUR TRIP NORTHWARD was long and disagreeable. As no railway had yet ventured as far north as Inverness, we were obliged to go by way of Aberdeen, stopping at an inn overnight so that we might catch a stagecoach the following morning. The stagecoach was a mode of travel new to me, and I found myself instantly prejudiced against it, largely due to the fact that it departed two hideous hours before dawn. For twelve hours we clattered along rutted country roads, stopping only to change horses and to eat a hasty lunch in Fochabers. With every mile, Henry’s mood grew worse. For all that he muttered under his breath about the cold or the hard seats or the quality of the food, however – and deserved complaints they were – I suspected that the true source of his foul temper was not the journey itself, but our destination. In the nearly three years we had been married, I had only had the displeasure of meeting Henry’s father once, when he had travelled down to London, seemingly for the sole purpose of expressing his thinly veiled disapproval of every aspect of Henry’s life – myself included. (I have long suspected, in fact, that this was one of the reasons why Henry had so readily agreed to my proposal that we elope; such a man, whose company left a sour taste in one’s mouth long after he was gone, was not the sort of guest one wanted at a wedding.) I could understand, then, Henry’s reluctance to return to a house so infused with his father’s spirit. Not in a literal sense, of course – I am not one to believe in hauntings – but I do believe that a person’s absence in a house can be felt just as strongly as their presence.
It was for that very reason that I had not been into the nursery for over a year.
At last, as evening fell, we arrived in Inverness. The coach deposited us in front of a bustling hotel, where the Sutherlands’ footman waited for us with a gig and a rather wretched-looking pony, for the house itself lay some distance from the town proper. It began to drizzle as we set off, rain so fine it was nearly mist – but despite the weather, and Henry’s ever-worsening mood, I could not help but admire the view as we trundled out into the countryside. Past the houses, one could see straight down the beach to the Moray Firth. The water was dark, overhung by clouds that cast shadows like bruises upon the sea. Something about the salt-laced air struck a chord of nostalgia within me; evidently, I had missed the seaside more than I had thought.
The house, when it came into view, was a sturdily built thing, all grey stone and slate, the jagged points of Baronial windows jutting up towards the sky. I was taken aback at first by its grandeur; a different beast entirely from our own modest house in London or my childhood home on Wight. Once, in the days of the Tudors and Stuarts, the Sutherlands had been a wealthy landed family – but since then, as Henry often complained, they had frittered away their fortune and connections, their once sizeable estate sold off in pieces to build country homes for bankers and coal men. Now there was barely an acre, and even that apparently could not be kept in good repair. Some way away was a squat brick stable, its roof sagging and mossy; at the edge of the firth sat a boathouse, long since disused.
As we dismounted and stepped out on to the gravel my attention was captured by a noise from the house – a single piercing cry. I looked up just in time to see a shape disappear from the window. Moments later, the front door burst open and out ran a girl, shawl trailing from her shoulders as she flew down the driveway towards us.
‘Henry!’ she cried, as she threw herself upon him in a flurry of black lace and petticoats. ‘Oh, Henry! I’m so glad you’re here!’
And with that, she buried her face in his lapels and began to cry.
I stared as the realization dawned on me that this – this slight woman not much younger than myself, who had run heedless across the gravel in her slippers to meet us – was the dreaded Margaret. I looked to Henry for some kind of explanation, but he would not meet my eye. Instead, he scowled and prised his sister from his coat.
‘Now, that’s quite enough. Look at you – no shoes, no coat, outside in the damp! Where’s your maid? And where is Mr Whitton?’
‘Oh, Mr Whitton is inside,’ she replied, wiping her eyes. ‘But – Henry, I don’t know if I can stand to hear the will just yet. It’s his last letter to us, isn’t it? I can’t stomach the thought that he’ll never write to us again . . .’
‘He did not write to either of us, Margaret,’ Henry said drily. ‘You lived with him, and he despised me. Or have you forgotten?’
She did not answer him, for it was then that she seemed to notice me. She turned and clasped my hands in hers, smiling in a tear-stained fashion. ‘My goodness! This must be your wife, Henry. Isn’t she lovely! It’s wonderful to meet you. I . . .’ She paused, face falling, and a wave of dread washed over me. ‘I am so sorry about . . .’
I knew then what she meant to say next. I could see it in her eyes, the sudden tilt of her brows, the same piteous look Henry and I had weathered countless times this past year. I tried to catch Henry’s eye, a silent plea for help, but – as he always did – he merely looked to the ground, his jaw tight. His sister was only trying to be kind, I knew, but even so, I could not help but feel how cruel it was that after all this time, I should have to suffer this conversation yet again – for if there exists a way to respond to condolences that does not feel like ripping open the stitches of a wound with one’s teeth, I have not yet found it.
‘I am terribly sorry about your father, Miss Sutherland,’ I blurted, in a desperate and terrible display of hypocrisy. She blinked a moment, clearly taken aback, but to my eternal gratitude she let the change of subject stand.
‘Oh, I . . . thank you. I am truly sorry that this is our first meeting; I so badly wanted to come and visit along with Father when you first married, but I was terribly ill at the time, as I am sure Henry has told you. It is not often that I’m as lively as this.’ She gave another watery smile. ‘And I beg of you – we’re sisters now, aren’t we? Call me Maisie; most everyone does.’
I had never heard Henry call her anything of the sort. I did not have the chance to press, however, for we were interrupted by the arrival of Maisie’s maid, trotting out into the drizzle with a pair of her mistress’s shoes clutched anxiously in hand.
Before long, we were ushered inside and into the parlour, with a tray of tea upon the table and Maisie installed upon one of the great velvet couches. We met the solicitor, a balding and rather skittish man of middle age, and sat for a while before dinner making conversation of an insubstantial sort. Henry remained silent for the most part; occasionally, he would stand and examine the framed daguerreotypes upon the wall, or the view outside the windows, or the rather hideous portrait of his father as a young man which hung scowling over the mantlepiece. He seemed to have noticed, as had I, that everything in the house bore a fine layer of dust. The carpets and furniture were faded, which was a puzzle as the meagre amount of light admitted by the heavy curtains was certainly not enough to leach their colour. The whole place had the feel of an aged actress – once grand, but now past her prime, trundling her way to a lonely old age.
