Our Hideous Progeny, page 14
‘A cemetery?’
‘Not that I plan to make use of it soon!’ he amended, hands flying up in hasty protestation.
‘Good, good.’ I clutched at my chest. ‘I meant to say, when you said you were thinking of returning to London, I had hoped you meant alive . . .’
He gave a laugh, which pleased me. ‘No, no! It is only – I had thought that perhaps poor Georgianna would have to ship me back to India, when the time comes.’
And with that, the mood was grim once again. There was a clunk from the adjacent room, and a chorus of gasps, as if some bit of glassware had very nearly met its end.
‘Is there no way at all you might continue with your studies?’ I asked. ‘What of your wife? Or Alma? They already help with your correspondence; could they not assist you in your work as well?’
He was already shaking his head, which vexed me at first – was it such a ridiculous prospect? – but with a rueful smile, he explained:
‘My dear . . . they do not want to. Alma nearly fell asleep last week when I tried to translate some Faraday for her; and Georgianna tolerates my rambling well, but she has no true interest in science. It is kindness enough, and imposition enough, that they write my letters for me. I will not force them to do more.’
I will do it. I bit my tongue then to stop myself saying it – though I could not stop myself thinking it. It would never work, I knew. Between helping Henry with his regular work and researching our own project, my days were already full to bursting. And even if I gave up the latter, there was still the matter of us living – at least for the moment – in different cities. The most Mr Jamsetjee would be able to do with my meagre weekend help was tinker, not any kind of useful research. And even then, he would not have the money to purchase more voltaic cells when his current supply ran dry.
But with the research that Henry and I were working on . . .
I met my mentor’s eye then, for a moment lost in a far-flung fantasy: Henry and I with all the scientific renown we could ever hope for, with the sway to petition the Society on Mr Jamsetjee’s behalf, with money from the crown and Royal Society to spend as we wished. A grand house somewhere, with a magnificent modern library; quarters for Mr and Mrs Jamsetjee, and for any other guests or collaborators or student cousins who might have need of them. The start of a scientific circle all our own.
I cringed at first, at the childishness of this dream. But then again, why should it be considered childish? There were already plenty of men, American inventors and English lords, who lived such lives. Why should it be ridiculous, to imagine such a thing for ourselves?
I was about to say as much – though perhaps not in so grandiose a manner, merely to express that I would help him – when Mr Jamsetjee’s eyes shifted to the window behind me. I watched as his face registered first surprise, then delight. From the adjacent room, I heard Mrs Jamsetjee call out:
‘Oh – Jehangir, they’re here!’
‘Wonderful!’ Mr Jamsetjee cried, scrambling to pick up his cane. ‘Oh, Mrs Sutherland, have I got a surprise. I wasn’t sure if they would arrive in time; they did say they might be delayed . . .’
‘They?’ I began, bemused. ‘Sir, who—?’
But before I could finish my question, it was answered. Upon the drive was a young woman, the same age as myself, with a child in her arms and two more – barely old enough to walk – tottering about her feet. She was exceptionally well dressed, her face obscured at first by the curve of her bonnet and the angle of her body as she turned to pass the infant to a harassed-looking nurse, though I hardly needed to see her face to recognize her. My breath caught in my throat.
She lifted her head at last, a twist of red hair slipping free from the lace and ribbons, and I saw the moment she recognized me through the window as well.
It was Catherine Leveaux.
MR AND MRS Jamsetjee took the children (and a rather disorientated Henry) into the garden, leaving Catherine and me to ‘reacquaint ourselves’. What that meant precisely, I had no idea – and neither, it seemed, did Catherine. We sat across from each other in a pair of faded armchairs, offering each other tea and sweets from the tray Alma had brought in; both trying to pretend, I think, that we were not avoiding the other’s eye.
‘I should say . . .’ she began at last. She did not have an accent as such – English and French were equally her mother tongue – but there was nevertheless something slightly strange about her speech. Stiff from disuse, like a gown put away for too long. ‘It’s Mrs Carré now.’
For the first time I could read something in her expression – a slight mischief about the eyes – though it took me a moment to catch her meaning. When I did, I flinched, remembering how I had bumblingly introduced her as ‘Miss Catherine Leveaux’ to Henry. Of course the children were hers; of course she was married; of course we ought to address each other properly now, as grown women.
‘Oh, how wonderful! Congratulations!’ I managed. ‘I should say, too – it’s Mrs Sutherland now, for me. As you know, of course. You just met him. My husband.’
She cut short my rambling with a glowing smile. ‘Yes, well met! He looks like a very fine gentleman. Sugar? Milk?’
‘Yes, please. And thank you.’ I poured rather more milk than I had meant to into my tea, then offered the jug back to her, but she shook her head.
‘Oh, no, I have to take it entirely black these days. Sweet things tend to make me ill.’
With a laugh, she laid a hand upon her stomach – and that was when, with a dizzy feeling like I had been sliding further and further down a rain-slicked slope, I bore yet another realization. The wide waistline of her gown, the way it sat slightly high upon her belly – it was not just that she had grown broader with age.
‘You’re expecting,’ I said quietly.
‘Yes!’ She beamed. ‘Our fourth. You met the others. Claude is the youngest, named after his father; Clémentine and Justine are our twins, quite unexpected . . .’
‘You must be very busy,’ I heard myself say.
‘Oh my, yes! That’s why we’re passing through at the moment, in fact; we were touring England, but this one came as a surprise, so we’re going back to Calais so that my mother can help when the baby arrives. She’s even found another nanny for us.’ She smiled again, in that glowing way that women who are with child are always said to do, although I could not recall ever having done so myself. ‘Truly, I’m surprised Uncle never said anything . . . I didn’t even know you were still in correspondence. Whatever do you two write about, if not news?’
I was surprised, too, though I supposed Mr Jamsetjee had always assumed that Catherine and I must keep in touch of our own accord. And he was, like Henry, always far more eager to talk of ‘concrete things’ than of matters so inconsequential as health and family.
‘Scientific news, mostly,’ I said. ‘I keep him abreast of all the happenings in the Geological Society and such – Henry is a fellow, you see, so I quite often go with him to meetings.’
I was not sure, as I was saying it, why I was playing down my own scientific interests. It was a thoughtless instinct, like a turtle curling up inside its shell. And then Catherine’s face crumpled, and I remembered precisely when this instinct had been forged.
‘Oh dear, he drags you along, does he? My condolences! Does that mean you get to travel often, at the very least? Claude met a pair of geologists visiting Paris last month, said they’d travelled all over Europe, what fun – even if their wives were forced to play secretary.’
She laughed again, freckles creasing beneath her eyes. I laughed along with her, and conjured up some highly edited tale of my honeymoon in Lyme Regis, for anything was better than saying what I truly wanted to say – than revealing to her yet again what a freakish specimen I was.
You have changed, and not for the better.
‘My condolences’? You ought to have mine, madam.
I loved you once, when you were not so dull.
But I was being unfair. She had not changed, not truly; she had only grown up. It was I who had refused to let go of childhood – believing in magic and miracles, digging about in the mud for interesting stones. She had done all that she was meant to do, and seemed all the happier for it.
‘I’m glad that you are happy,’ she said as I came to the end of my story, as if reading my mind – or as if she, too, had been thinking of other things. Her smile was a complicated one; fond, guilty, with a note of pity. I felt a flash of anger, but tamped it down – bit down, too, my jealousy and bitterness and lingering sorrow – long enough to speak the truth.
‘I’m glad that you are, too.’
Dear Maisie,
I know precisely what you mean, when you speak of legacy. Death is one thing, but death in the minds of everyone you once knew – the death of your name, your reputation – is another matter entirely. I do think you overestimate my and Henry’s importance, however; I hardly think that our smattering of articles, or our single (rather derivative! Don’t tell Henry) geology primer will live on in the minds of men. They barely live in the minds of men now (and not only because the latter is not yet published). But perhaps, someday soon, if our latest avenue of research goes well—
A pause; a sigh; a nervous tap of the pen. I leaned forward and scratched that last sentence from the page. It was entirely too soon to get into all of that.
But I would say, Maisie, that even by holding your mother in your memory, you are a better legacy than most. Perhaps it is only because I never knew my own parents—
Another pause, another feverish scratching-out. Another sigh as I regained my courage and wrote it all back in again.
Perhaps it is only because I never knew my own parents, but it seems to me that one of the worst tragedies of all is to have a child who does not think fondly of you after you are gone – either because you died too soon for them to know you, or you were obliged to leave them in the care of another, or you made yourself so perfectly hate-able that you do not deserve such fondness. I resolved long ago that if I should ever have children of my own, I would keep them by me. I would give them reason to love me.
I sat back and grimaced at the page before me. I looked at that if before children, and I hated it; it seemed to me that I was dancing about the issue at hand, too cowardly to mention it outright. But how could I? How could I commiserate with her on what a wretched legacy I was, having married against my grandmother’s wishes and tried and failed at motherhood, without rendering her an even worse legacy, for never having tried at all?
‘Mary!’ Henry called out from the floor below, and I jumped, the tip of my pen smearing ink across the page.
‘Yes?’ I called back, trying feverishly to wipe up the mess. Maisie and I had been writing for half a year now, though our letters had become gradually less frequent of late – on my part as well as hers. Was she growing tired of me, I wondered? Was I growing tired of her? Did we truly have anything in common, truly – or were we simply both pleased that we had proved ourselves capable of friendship?
Henry’s voice came again, drifting up the stairs. ‘Mary, you must see this!’
‘In a moment!’ I saw, with a cry of exasperation, that I had dripped ink on to my letter to Mr Jamsetjee, too – another painful, half-written thing, beginning with a polite Thank you for hosting us, et cetera, and veering off almost immediately into a maze of crossings-out, a chronicle of my many attempts to express what I had been unable to put into words that afternoon: my vow to help him. To repay him, both literally and figuratively. To claw out a place in the world for us both, in which we might finally be allowed the respect we deserved.
I heard the creak of Henry’s tread on the stairs and marvelled anew at the man’s impatience. I turned, ready to snap at him that nothing could be so important—
When I saw the bundle he was carrying.
‘Is that—?’ I asked, breathless.
‘It is.’ He was grinning at me, a manic energy in his eyes. ‘Our first usable specimen. It’s perfect, as far as I can see.’
I bit my lip, casting one last look at my writing desk – before I pushed to my feet and followed him upstairs.
WE LAID OUR instruments upon the table: Mr Jamsetjee’s Leyden jar, to provide the spark, and the electric-shock device copied from Mr Kite’s book on resuscitation, with which to administer it. In the middle, we tacked down a square of wax paper and tipped the rat out of its bag. I have never been one for squeamishness, but somehow that very first rat, stiff and slightly warm, turned my stomach just a bit. Nevertheless, we both leaned in to examine it. It was still dirty, its fur uneven and its paws grey with grime from the street. Its mouth lay open, tongue lolling out on to the table.
When I looked up at Henry, I saw that his excitement seemed to have faded somewhat. He had done a thousand dissections during his time at the collection, I knew; he had spent whole weeks putting small dead things in jars. I, meanwhile, had only ever seen such things in books. For him, this might be the tiresome part, the long stretch of hard work between the project’s conception and its completion, but for me – for me, it was all brand new.
From this point, there would be no more dreaming. It was time to turn our theories to flesh and blood.
13
But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles . . .
*
With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.
— MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein
‘DO YOU THINK we ought to try a higher voltage?’
‘Higher? Dear Lord, Henry, we nearly cooked the last one. Perhaps it is more a matter of applying a subtle current to multiple locations at once.’
‘But did we not already try that with specimens nineteen and twenty? I still think the freshness must—’
‘But the one we used last week was practically still twitching. And besides, Victor took his fragments from a graveyard; that’s hardly fresh.’
‘I suppose not. Damn it all.’ Henry sighed, turning to glare out of the window. It was a dismal afternoon; we had already exhausted that day’s rat, and by lunchtime it had begun to rain, big fat drops leaking through the roof and pooling upon the wax paper. We had retreated to the study to sulk and ponder, searching through books we had already read ten times over while outside the storm clouds boiled.
It had been such a thrill to see our electrical devices working those first few times – the buzz of the wires, the arcing snap of sparks in the air. But now, each specimen only one more wasted body left in our gruesome, rodenticidal wake, that excitement was waning. No matter how many attempts we made, no matter what other techniques we used concurrently – heating the body, applying intestinal stimulants, simulating respiration through use of bellows – our rats remained stubbornly dead.
I had always thought myself a patient woman, but in these past weeks I’d felt that patience begin to fray. I’d taken to pacing, to long walks through Hyde Park along the banks of the Serpentine. I let my correspondence pile up, answering in great guilty batches of ten at a time. Once we are done, I promised myself; once we had something to show for our efforts, and I could be truthful, I would be a more faithful correspondent.
I tried not to think, as the weeks ticked by into months, how long that might be.
With a sigh, I shut my sketchbook. Somewhere, distantly, a church bell rang the hour.
‘Suppose it is all divine intervention?’ I said suddenly.
‘Hmm?’ Henry, apparently bored of the silence, had turned back to his book – a hefty Bridgewater treatise with the rather eclectic title of Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion. I recalled quite clearly having written its name on a list I had composed the previous week, entitled Last Resorts.
‘Suppose there is no such thing as spontaneous generation,’ I said. ‘What if, every time some small thing comes to life, it does so by the hand of God, and we are running a fool’s errand?’
Henry snorted. ‘Surely God doesn’t have time for all that. Every weed, each blade of grass? Every inconsequential beetle?’
‘He is infinite and all-knowing, Henry,’ I replied, equally derisive. ‘Time means nothing to Him, I’m sure.’
Henry grew quiet for a moment. A great gust blew by, lashing rain against the windows in diaphanous sheets. Finally, he said softly:
‘I find it rather difficult to believe in an infinite, all-knowing God since our dear—’
Our dear—. There it was, the space in which a name ought to have been. But of course, she’d never lived long enough to have been given one.
I watched as he slowly closed the book upon his thumb.
‘Do you believe there is a God at all?’ he asked, not meeting my eyes.
It was a dangerous question. One which might ruin one’s prospects and connections if answered incorrectly, or in the wrong company. Even Mr Jamsetjee’s Parsee faith seemed to draw less scorn than atheism or deism – though I supposed that was because most viewed it as nothing more than an exotic party trick, powerless to affect England’s own good and moral citizens. There were some, to be sure, who proudly wore their disbelief on their sleeve – and an unknowable number more, like Henry and me, who kept our doubts behind closed doors.
‘I believe there is,’ I said at length, ‘but . . . I don’t believe He is omniscient. There are some events too miraculous or coincidental, I think, to have occurred by chance . . . and some too terrible to occur by intention.’
‘Many would say such things are meant to teach us a lesson,’ he said wryly. That wrung a laugh out of me.
‘What sort of lesson? That the world is cruel and aimless? I knew that already.’
