FOUR
Lenore died the same night. I was downstairs in the cold drawing room, sitting at the piano, turning through the unused sheets of music. A maid had come in and lit the candles, but this only created more shadows that lurked in the heavy folds of the curtains and crawled across the floor whenever a draft fluttered the candle flames. When I touched the piano keys, it sent tiny chills running down my spine and I could feel the draft whispering down the back of my collar. I wrapped my arms around myself miserably.
There was a faint noise from upstairs. Running feet. Then Lord Deveraux’s voice, raised but indistinct. I debated whether to investigate or stay where I was, but then I heard footsteps coming down the stairs and a moment later Lord Deveraux stood in the doorway. His face was white like marble. ‘Get your hat and coat,’ he said.
I stood up. ‘What about—’
‘She’s dead.’ His voice was flat, but the black fire was back in his eyes. ‘Mr Frankenstein, I believe this is when you prove your worth.’
* * *
The linen-wrapped body came back with me in the Deveraux coach. Lord Deveraux held it in his arms, a white-wrapped cocoon that seemed unnaturally small considering its contents. It reminded me of the illustrations I had seen of the mummies of ancient Egypt. The image did nothing to quell the churning in my guts.
‘My lord,’ I began.
He glared at me. ‘Yes?’
I found I had forgotten what I had planned to say. He turned away from me and held the body closer to him. The black rain hurled itself against the coach windows like gravel flung from an unseen hand.
‘My lord?’
‘Yes, Mr Frankenstein.’
‘My lord, where—where is my lady Deveraux?’
‘Lady Deveraux will not witness the process.’
‘My lord, I don’t think you should either.’
‘What?’ He glared at me. ‘Are you mad, man? Of course I will oversee everything.’
‘I really don’t think that is a good idea.’
‘Why not, pray?’
‘Well...’ I shuffled uncomfortably on the coach seat. ‘Maybe if I explain some of the process to you...’
‘I am not interested in the technicalities, Mr Frankenstein.’
‘First,’ I said doggedly, ‘I will make an incision—I will cut your daughter open from the breastbone down to—’
‘I do not want to hear this!’ he shouted.
‘To remove the organs,’ I babbled, feeling as though I were in the middle of a hideous nightmare and the only way out was forward, ‘and replace them with the fresh ones collected from the other corpses and kept in ice for this purpose. Another incision across her scalp to prepare the brain for connection to the—’
‘No!’
I faltered. There were tears in his eyes, but he still glared at me, pressing the body tight against his chest.
‘That is the process,’ I said, trying to sound gentle. ‘If you stay, that’s what you will see. Can you do that without interfering?’
A tear ran down the inside of his nose, but he just carried on glaring at me, too proud to acknowledge it. ‘I just want her back. My wife...’
‘And you will get her back, you will. I promise you you’ll get her back, but I don’t think you should watch. I think you should let me get on with it, and I’ll send word to you when it’s over.’
‘When you’ve brought her back.’
‘Yes. When I’ve brought her back.’
He sank back against the seat. He tucked the body close against him and didn’t speak again until the coach pulled up outside my house. I held out my arms. ‘Let me take it.’
His jaw clenched, but after a moment he leaned over and placed the body in my arms. ‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘Watch her head.’
I shifted the body closer and stepped out of the coach. The wind hit me in the face with a burst of rain and for a moment I was blinded. Then I saw the porch lantern, and the glowing circle of yellow light it made in the darkness, and I headed towards it.
‘Mr Frankenstein!’ Lord Deveraux was leaning out of the coach, the rain glittering on his face like melting diamonds. ‘Mr Frankenstein!’
‘Go home,’ I shouted over the wind. ‘It’ll be fine. I’ll send word.’
For a moment he still hung there, half in, half out, before retreating back inside the coach. I rapped on the door, hearing the coach clatter away behind me before Kettlesing let me in. The rain seemed to have seeped through my coat into my bones; I was cold all over, Lenore’s wasted body a deadweight in my arms. There was rain dribbling out of my hair into my eyes and my fingers felt brittle.
‘You got her, then.’ Kettlesing was holding out a towel. He began dabbing at my coat, but I shrugged him away. He held out his arms. ‘Let me hold her while you take off your coat.’
I shook my head and pushing past him, headed down to my workshop. Kettlesing had lit all the lamps and scrubbed down the table and bought the bodies in from the ice-house.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Uh?’
‘For preparing in here.’
He shrugged. I laid the body down on the table, took off my coat and hat and hung them on one of the hooks on the wall. Then I turned back to the body and started to unwind the white wrappings.
When the last strip fell away, Kettlesing gave a low whistle. ‘Sweet Lord’a Mercy. No wonder she’s dead. She looks like someone folded her out of paper.’
I’d been trying not to think of the body as Lenore’s, just as a piece of flesh that I had to work with, but laid bare like this, I couldn’t tell myself that any longer. That was Lenore’s face, these were Lenore’s fingers; fingers that I’d touched this very day when she was still alive. Her white lips, the hollows under the sharp ridges of her cheekbones, the blue tracery of veins on her closed eyelids.
‘I can’t do this.’
‘What?’ Kettlesing stared at me. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I can’t do this.’ I dragged my hands through my hair. My stomach was twisting so painfully I could barely stand upright. ‘I told Lord Deveraux that I could do it but I can’t, I just can’t. This isn’t how I work, I never use a whole body, it’s not right, it won’t work, and this—this isn’t flesh, this is Lenore, she’s a person and that’s not how it works, I make people, but I make new people, I don’t make people who were people already before I came along. It’s not going to work. I’ll have to tell Lord Deveraux that it won’t work, I won’t do it, and then he’ll tell everyone about Ingolstadt and—’
‘Victor, get a grip!’ Kettlesing grabbed my arm and held it painfully tight. ‘Hysterics aren’t going to help anyone. Not you or Lenore or me, y’understand? Just calm down, take a breath and think.’ He shoved me down onto the chair and leaned down, pushed his face into mine. ‘You’re going to do this, because if you don’t you’ll never get any work ever again, and your work is your life. You know that and I know that and that’s why you’re doing this. You know I don’t want to know about what happened in Ingolstadt, so don’t think that now is the time for confessions either, because it isn’t.’ He was uncomfortably close, his nose almost touching mine. I could smell whiskey on his breath. ‘Now. You’re going to get a grip and you’re going to go and you’re going to cut that little girl open and you’re going to bring her back because there’s not a chance in hell that you made me steal two dead children for nothing.’
‘My hands are shaking,’ I whispered.
Sour whiskey breath in my face. ‘Then warm them over the lamp.’
I swallowed and stood up. Deep breath. Lenore’s body on the table. No, don’t think of it like that. Flesh on the table. Raw materials. Flesh.
* * *
The next six hours passed in a blur. I remember making the first incision and opening up the white skin to expose the still-warm heart and diseased lungs. I remember the buckets of ice-packed intestines and the way the pancreas slipped in my hands as I fitted it into the abdomen. Sawing off the top of the skull; and the hum and crackle of the dynamo as I inserted the wires into the brain matter. Injecting the heart with the solution of digitalis and working it between my palms, massaging it into movement.
Kettlesing was there the whole time, threading the needles when my hands were too bloody to hold the catgut, handing me a clean scalpel when I needed it, steadying the bucket when I replaced the ruined lungs with fresh ones. I looked up once and saw his breath smoking in the air, and for a moment I was completely confused, aware only of the sweat pouring down my back and beading on my upper lip.
The hair hung down from the top of the skull like some grotesque piece of cut turf growing long dead grasses. Grasses in a graveyard. Grasses on the blue mountains where the pink anemones grow. The face sunken like a crushed mould.
My hands were deep inside the body, inside the tiny ribcage, closed around the heart, and the world withered away until that was all I was aware of, all I could think of; my palms compressing and releasing, forcing the stimulant around it and out through the ventricles, coercing it throughout the entire body until finally it jerked to life between my hands. I saw the passages constrict and dilate as they filled with blood, the organs glistening as the new life poured through them.
There was a needle in my hand, but I didn't remember Kettlesing giving it to me. I closed up the chest cavity, and all the while the body was starting to life under my hands. I could feel the quickening of the new blood, the creak of the bones as the new lungs filled with air, the pulsing of the brain as I disconnected the dynamo and made the suture along the scalp.
‘Victor?’
It took me a moment to recognise Kettlesing. His lips were grey and there was blood on his hands.
‘Victor,’ he said again. ‘Is it—are you finished?’
I couldn't speak. I licked my lips, tasted blood, and swallowed. ‘Yes,’ I said hoarsely. ‘Just need to clean the body. Tansy...’ My voice cracked and came out several octaves higher than normal. ‘Tansy paste to help seal the sutures. Need to apply it. After cleaning.’
The bucket of water was so heavy I feared I would drop it. Kettlesing took another cloth and together we sponged down the body, cleaning and salving the suture lines.
‘Victor.’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s not awake.’
‘She’s breathing.’
‘But she’s not awake.’
‘She will be.’
‘When?’
‘Soon.’
Kettlesing dropped his cloth into the bucket of soiled water. The splash it made sounded profanely loud. He took down one of the sheets from the shelf, unfolded it, and carefully spread it over the body. It looked incredibly small.
‘Victor.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘What?’
He looked at the body. ‘I feel like I’m going to puke.’
‘There’s a clean bucket by the door.’
‘Victor, are you all right?’
I looked down at my hands, my arms. They were red with blood up to my elbows. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said finally, taking off my goggles. ‘I’m fine.’
