Our Hideous Progeny, page 12
Still, despite all my reasoning, I found I could not bring myself to voice my idea just yet. In the light of dawn, with Henry’s gaze upon me, it seemed altogether too ambitious and strange. I was just wondering what I ought to tell him instead when I looked up and was struck by the intensity of his expression. He did not look like a man unconvinced – no; rather, he looked like a man stuck with a difficult puzzle. An engineer gazing into the depths of a broken machine, endeavouring to make it work. That was when I realized: this was not an argument in the typical sense, wherein each party struggles to bring the other around to their point of view. Instead, it was the sort of argument shared for millennia by priests and philosophers and scientists alike, wherein each party is trying to convince themselves of a miraculous truth.
‘You believe it, don’t you?’ I said softly, a smile in my voice. ‘You play the part, Henry, but you cannot fool me. You think that it might be possible – to create life. To restore it to that which is dead.’
He looked at me, eyes glinting, and I knew that I was right.
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But it does not matter, in any case, whether I believe it or not.’
‘Oh?’
‘Because the only thing that matters,’ he said, leaning in to whisper to me, as if we were conspirators in some grand plot, ‘is if it is true.’
WE DID NOT leave the study all that morning. Agnes must have thought us up to something truly sinister, for every time she entered the room – first to bring us breakfast, and then later to clear away the plates we’d hardly touched – we stopped mid-sentence, following her every movement in perfect silence until she was gone. Then we would resume our whisperings, debating in circles upon circles.
New species do seem to have arisen spontaneously in the past, as you say; but is that new life entirely? Or a transmutation of some existing life form?
It does not matter. Whatever the case, life must have begun at some point, arising from nothing or from non-living matter. Why couldn’t it happen again? And not necessarily in the form of Cuvier’s ‘multiple creations’ – but uniform over time?
Ah, Mr Lyell’s approach! For every species which falls to extinction, some new form appears. And does God have any hand in these creations, or are you finally revealing yourself a heathen?
He may do. Perhaps He fashioned the world like a well-wound watch, so that every hour, as it were, it strikes life into inanimate matter.
But why wouldn’t we have noticed this clock striking before? Ah . . . well, perhaps Lamarck is correct: any new forms originating today are too small and too simple for us to notice, and will only rise to complexity later . . .
Perhaps. But in any case, that is life generated from nothing; we are concerned with life restored. Surely that must be an easier task; the pieces are already in place.
And so on, and so on.
Eventually, tiredness overcame us, and we were forced to leave our books and stacks of hasty, half-formed notes to rest. When I woke some hours later, I found I was alone; Henry, having snatched a good four hours of sleep the previous night to my none, must have woken already. All was hazy and muffled as I made my way downstairs, soft about the edges in that peculiar way of early evening.
‘Ah, there you are!’ Henry exclaimed when I came into the study. He was sitting by the window in his dressing gown, a translation of Liebig’s Animal Chemistry on his lap. ‘I’ve been making a list of the books we’ll need. There are some I can find in the Society reading room, and some I can borrow from friends, but the rest—’
‘We’ll simply have to go shopping for,’ I cut in, and he gave me a knowing smile. We rarely ever purchased books on these shopping trips – our budget simply would not allow for it. But many was the time I had hidden in the back corner of O. E. Janson’s or Percy Young’s on Gower Street, copying out figures from an expensive reference text while Henry sent the owner chasing after a first edition of a book that did not exist.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you, Mary,’ Henry said as I settled into my usual chair, ‘if you had any thoughts on the matter of what, exactly . . . we should bring to life?’
There was a peculiar tone to his voice, caution verging on worry – or perhaps on fear. It was a question I had been avoiding ever since the previous night, urging our conversations in the direction of theory rather than practice, as I feared the absurdity of my answer. But meeting Henry’s eyes now, I realized that he, too, had been avoiding it, although for an entirely different reason. I thought of the marshy hilltop to which I still had not returned, the marble headstone crowned with cherubs which had cost two weeks of Henry’s pay – the only luxury we could ever give her. I imagined those rows of graves lit by moonlight, the weight of a shovel in my hand—
‘No!’ I cried at once. ‘Good God, no! How could you think such a thing?’
‘You hadn’t?’
I stopped, a hitch in my breath; for of course I had. More than once. Each time the thought came to me, it drove the breath from my lungs, filling me with terror and longing in equal, painful measure.
It was such a tempting abomination.
‘We couldn’t. We can’t.’ My throat was tight. I shook my head, hard, as if to shake the vision away. ‘Besides, do you not remember what happened to Victor? Perhaps if he hadn’t abandoned his . . . man; if he had raised him as he should . . . Perhaps things might have ended differently. But we cannot be sure, I think. Far better to make something that does not know enough of the world to resent its place in it.’ I chuckled, bleakly. ‘Something that cannot hold a knife.’
‘All right,’ said Henry, and I was glad to see his face soften with relief. ‘I concur. I was just afraid that you were hoping . . .’ He waved a hand. ‘In any case. It is settled, then – an animal of some sort. But what kind? Something small and easily obtained to start with, I think, at least until we have identified the correct method. But we’ll need something more impressive than that in the end. At least a man can speak, and attest that he has been brought to life; how can we prove that we have done the same with an animal, short of performing the act live, in front of the Royal Society? But even then, it could be viewed as a stage trick . . .’ His eyes brightened suddenly. ‘Your Victor stitched together parts of multiple men, did he not? Perhaps we can do the same. With parts of different animals, like those awful mermaids you see at circuses – or parts of the same animal? That may be easier. But then, we can’t have the Royal Society think we’ve simply embroidered a rat . . .’
As he went on, I pulled from the clutter of my desk the lovely leather-bound journal Mrs Jamsetjee had sent me for my last birthday. I opened it to the first page and took up a piece of charcoal, laying down rough shapes and sweeping curves – a hasty thing, work I would have been ashamed of under normal circumstances. But the artistry needed not be impeccable here. It needed only to communicate to Henry the image which had seized me the night before, the idea that would put Richard Owen’s statues to shame, which would bring his stony-eyed creations to life in a way no one had ever attempted before . . .
. . . the image of an antediluvian monster. A fossil, rendered flesh.
A Plesiosaurus.
When I turned the book around, Henry stopped and stared at it agog. And then – though not in an unkind way, not in the way I had feared – he began to laugh.
‘Mary,’ he cried, eyes alight. ‘What a remarkable creature you are.’
11
To the head of a Lizard, it united the teeth of a Crocodile; a neck of enormous length, resembling the body of a Serpent; . . . the ribs of a Camelion, and the paddles of a Whale. Such are the strange combinations of form and structure in the Plesiosaurus . . .
— WILLIAM BUCKLAND, Geology and Mineralogy
AT FIRST, AFTER his initial enthusiasm had worn off, he argued. If we were to create a living rebuttal to Owen’s theories, why not an Iguanodon, the most outrageous of all his designs? But such a thing would be too impractical, I reasoned; it was too large, too difficult to engineer – for, after all, being a land animal, it had to support its own weight as it moved. Not to mention that there were scarcely any existing fossils, so any attempt we made would be even more of a leap than Owen’s model.
‘If we had a complete skeleton, perhaps,’ I mused, teetering on a stool as I searched our bookshelves for Cuvier’s Lessons on Comparative Anatomy. ‘Then we could simply extrapolate the musculature, and let whatever natural gait it takes be our proof. But there are no such fossils; we would have to base our construction so heavily on modern reptiles that we may as well present the Society with an iguana.’
‘True . . .’ By the pensive look on Henry’s face, one crooked finger pressed to his chin, I knew he was coming round to my proposal. ‘We would have more claim to accuracy, with your idea. And we do want something distinctive; so different from any existing creature that it could not possibly be taken for a hoax, or some naturally born mutant.’
My trailing finger found the book’s spine at last, and I drew it out. ‘We could make ours with a proper neck.’
‘Yes – chip away at Owen’s reputation inch by inch! Once that particular theory is undermined, his peers may be more willing to disbelieve his other models, too.’
‘And, if it is aquatic, we need not worry about whether it is strong enough to lift its own weight. If it breathes, it will float. All we must do’ – I hopped down off the stool, gripping Henry’s proffered hand for balance – ‘is get it to breathe.’
Henry did not release my hand then, but held it tighter, his smile a sharp and hungry thing. I found I liked it quite a bit.
‘You make it sound so easy, my dear.’
BY THE END of the week, the house was full of lists. Lists of supplies, of methods of preserving flesh, of books and bones and ligaments, covering every surface like some morbid découpage. Longest of all, it seemed, was the list of things we did not know; for although we were both well informed in natural history and geological formations, in the comparative anatomy of reptiles both ancient and modern, we knew staggeringly little of physiology or chemistry. But somehow, strangely, this did not dampen my enthusiasm in the slightest. I had never paid much attention before to the workings of nerves and organs and circulation, as the subjects of my interest generally possessed none of the above; now, however, I found myself poised before a great unexplored wealth of knowledge, as ravenous as I had been as a child when I first began my studies of natural history. Henry, I could tell, was experiencing much the same, poring over bibliographies and catalogues of texts with the lustful gaze of a glutton surveying a trolley of desserts. We were giddy, two explorers embarking upon a nigh-impossible quest, all the more tempting for its impossibility.
Before long, we had put together a recipe of sorts, a rough estimation of the essential components of that nebulous thing we call life. This list hung in pride of place above my desk, and it read:
Vital force (action of the brain and nervous system)
Respiration
Circulation
Taking in sustenance
Movement (animals)
Senses (animals)
Growth/self-reparation (to an extent)
‘We will need a laboratory,’ Henry said as I tacked it up, the pins between my teeth. ‘Somewhere private. By the water, eventually, though for the moment we can make do without, if we wish to refine our methods on rats and such first.’
‘Could we rent somewhere by the docks?’
‘Too expensive. And impractical, too. We can’t be travelling down to the docks every day, lugging all our supplies and notes – and dockhands gossip just as much as fishwives. But we could start here for now, in the house. Perhaps . . .’
He paused, shooting me a wary look. I knew already what he meant to propose; worst of all, I agreed with him, even if the very thought filled me with dread. It was our only spare room – well lit, and scantily furnished. We couldn’t afford anywhere else. So why not use it, I asked myself? Was I to spend the rest of my days tiptoeing about my own home, forgoing this or that room because it was where she ought to have slept, ought to have eaten, ought to have played?
No. Far better to wash away such memories. Open the windows and air them out.
‘We could use the nursery,’ I heard him say.
I closed my eyes, and when they were open again I was resolved. A paper-thin resolve, perhaps – but a resolve nonetheless.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We could indeed.’
ONCE, WHEN I was very young, I’d run sobbing to the kitchen with a dying rabbit in my arms. I’d found it in the garden, bloodied and shaking as the neighbour’s cat loomed over it. I’d known even then, I think, that nothing could be done for it; but I’d brought it in regardless and laid it in the lap of our old cook.
She’d taken one look at the thing and snapped its neck. I remember my breath catching at the sound, that awful, fleshy snap. Bones, I knew; dead things, I knew. There was a certain sadness in them, true, but also an emptiness, like the site of an ancient battlefield, its bloody past too distant to grieve. But this, watching life crumble to nothing before my very eyes – this was another matter entirely.
‘It was a mercy, Miss Mary,’ the cook said, clearly exasperated. ‘The world won’t miss one little rabbit. They have scores of babies, you know. They have to, to account for all them that gets eaten.’
At that, I’d only cried harder. How awful, how unthinkable it was, that a mother might look upon her babies and think, Only one of you shall live. The rest of you are fodder.
I remembered the rabbit later that year, when the butcher’s boy caught his hand upon a nail and died within the week. When the Reverend Walker’s niece fell down the stairs and snapped her neck. When scarlet fever swept through my school, missing me only because I was already at home with a cold, and cut the class in half. The church that winter was full of mothers and fathers wearing black, crowding the aisles like blackbirds gone to roost. I took to opening my eyes during the prayers, staring out across the rows of bowed heads and thinking, Why would you make a world such as this?
I prayed, when Henry and I first married, that ours would be one of those marriages barren of children. It happened, I knew; the Jamsetjees had nearly been one such case, as I had learned from a particularly heartfelt missive Mrs Jamsetjee sent me when she heard of my elopement with Henry. They had gone nearly ten years of marriage with no children until the birth of their daughter in the cold winter of 1830 – the same year in which I had been born – only to be rendered childless again before the decade was out. My heart ached to read that letter, not only out of sympathy but also a wretched, guilty hope. Henry had never seemed eager for children; he had mentioned the idea, in the distant way one might speak of retiring to the country in one’s old age, as the inevitable consequence of a life well lived. But whenever a tottering infant bumped into his leg on the street, or a host brought out their talented young daughter to play a sonata after dinner, he responded with a sort of wary confusion. I had once found this hilarious, teasing him mercilessly when he went so far as to give one such pianist a pat on the head, as if she were a stray dog.
And yet – despite my prayers, despite our obvious unsuitability for the task – we were to be given a child. I recall still the wave of panic that gripped me when the doctor delivered us this news, as well as the equally panicked expression that passed across Henry’s face – soon replaced, to his credit, by something in the broad vicinity of joy. But I was angry with him in that moment, quite hypocritically; furious that, as I was being wrung out by sickness and fatigue, subsisting on sips of water and crusts of toast and whatever foul tinctures my doctor recommended, he should be worried at the mere notion of fatherhood. My reaction was unfair, and I knew it. Henry had plenty to worry about. Week after week, as he flitted about answering congratulatory messages and arranging nursery furnishings and buying flowers for my bedside which would inevitably have to be discarded as their smell made me ill, I could see it in his eyes: the knowledge that, just as surely as my own birth had killed my mother, this could be his widowing.
That is when I began to pray – though I knew this wasn’t the sort of thing one ought to pray for, not at all – that I would lose it. Or at the very least, if I was to be denied even that, that it all be over quickly; that I be delivered of it swiftly and painlessly; that I might hand it over to a nursemaid and forget the whole affair.
What a silly hope that was.
Cruellest of all, I think, is that even after everything, I did not want to hand my baby to the nursemaid. I forgot all the promises I had made to myself the day before – that I would not love her, not until she was five or ten or twenty; that I would not stake my heart upon such a fragile thing. But I discovered then that it was not a matter of choice. No matter how much I fought, my foolish heart went against me. The moment I first held her in my arms, too small and too light and too perfect to be true, I loved her. And the moment I caught sight of the doctor’s face, heard him mutter, ‘She really ought to be crying by now’ – I knew I had been right. She was too good to be true after all.
Within the hour, she was gone. Barely had they let Henry in, pale-faced and full of questions, when she slipped away in my arms. I must have asked the doctor one hundred times, clinging at his sleeve: ‘Why? What was it? What did I do wrong?’ But he only looked at me sadly and told me not to worry; these things happened on occasion. I was young. I would have another.
I tried not to think of all this, as I stood at the threshold of the nursery. I tried not to think of the cot she had never used; the last prayer I had ever made, a single voiceless please; the chair in the corner where I had found Henry slumped the year before, murmuring over a bottle of whisky: ‘What would we have done with a child, anyway?’ All that was gone now, stripped away. The dusty furniture had been taken out, the floor covered in wax paper to protect it from spills. I walked to one of the dormer windows and ran my hand across the glass, cold and whorled with age. Beyond stretched the roofs of London, an undulating sea of grey tile and red, plumes of black smoke drifting up towards the heavens.
