Move him into the sun, I said (I don’t know why).
Artificial life. The statue wakes and walks. But what of the rest? Is there such a thing as artificial intelligence? Clockwork has no thoughts. What is the spark of mind? Could it be made? Made by us?
What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
The shadows darkened the corners of the room. I brooded upon the nature of my own mind. Yet when my heart stops so must my mind. No mind, however fine, outlasts the body.
My mind turned back to the journey I had made with Shelley and Claire, who returns to this story like a bookmark – not the text, but a marker of some kind.
I was to elope with Shelley, and Claire decided she could not be left behind, and so we agreed to go all together, keeping the plan secret from my father and stepmother.
I must add this note that after my mother died my father could not be alone, and soon enough he had married again – an ordinary woman of no imagination, but she could cook. She brought with her a daughter called Jane, who soon became the ardent pupil of my dead mother’s writings, and in time changed her name to Claire; I did not disapprove of this. Why should she not remake herself? What is identity but what we name it? Jane/Claire acted as go-between for Shelley and myself when my father grew suspicious. Shelley and I were both fond of her, and so when the time came to leave Skinner Street it was decided that we should go together.
Stars in the sky like uncounted chances.
Four o’clock in the morning. Felt slippers on our feet, our boots in our hands, so as not to wake Father, though he sleeps deeply when he takes laudanum for his ague.
We ran through the streets where the world was waking.
We reached the coach. There was Shelley, pale and pacing, an angel without wings.
He embraced me, burying his face in my hair, whispering my name. Our modest bags were loaded, but suddenly I turned from him and ran back home, stricken with conscience, to leave my father a note on the mantelpiece. I could not break his heart. I deceive myself. I could not break his heart without telling him I was breaking his heart. We live by language.
The cat curled round my legs.
And then I was off again, running, running, my hat slipping round my neck and my breath dry in my mouth.
Anxious and exhausted, we were gone, post-haste to Dover, seasick under the sails of a boat that took us to Calais – and my first night in his arms in a padded room in a dark inn with the rattle of iron cartwheels going over the cobbles and my heart sounding louder than iron and wheels.
This is a love story.
I could add that my stepmother soon followed us, pleading for Jane/Claire to return. I think she was glad enough to be rid of me. Shelley walked all three of us up and down separately and together, arguing love and liberty. I do not imagine she believed him, but eventually she was exhausted, and bade us farewell. He had prevailed. We were in France, the home of revolution. What could we not manage?
As it turned out – we could manage very little.
Our travels were not easy. We had no clothes. Paris was dirty and expensive. The food gave us cramps and foul smells. Shelley lived off bread and wine. I added cheese. At last we found a money-lender from whom Shelley was able to borrow sixty pounds.
Buoyed up by our wealth, we decided to travel, and set off into the country, seeking simplicity and the natural man that Rousseau had written about.
There will be beef and milk and good bread, said Shelley, and young wine and clean water.
That was the story.
The reality was otherwise.
For some weeks we endured, endeavouring to hide from each other our disappointment. This was the land of liberty. This was where my mother had come to find freedom. Where she had written The Rights of Woman. We thought to find like minds and open hearts. In reality, the cottagers overcharged us for every little thing. The farms were dirty and broken. The laundresses stole buttons and braids. Our guides were surly, and the donkey Shelley hired – that we might take it in turns to ride – that donkey was lame.
Does something ail you? asked Shelley, disturbed by my silences, and I did not say, yes, the sour milk the sweating cheese the rank sheets the fleas the rainstorms the rot the beds stuffed with straw stuffed with mites. The soft vegetables the gristly meat the lice-teemed fish the weevil loaves. The distress of my father. Thoughts of my mother. The state of my underclothes.
Only the heat, my love, I replied.
He asked me to bathe naked with him in the river. I was too shy. Instead I watched his body, white and slender and sculpted. There is something unworldly about his form. An approximation – as though his body has been put on hastily, so that his spirit might walk in the world.
We read Wordsworth out loud to distract the hours, but France was not poetry; it was peasants.
At last, knowing my distress, Shelley secured us places on a barge that floated out of France and down the Rhine.
Was it better? Smug Switzerland. Drunken Germany. More wine, I said. And so we passed our days, underfed, over-drunk, longing for the soul and not knowing where to find it.
What I want does exist if I dare to find it.
One day, not far from Mannheim, we saw the towers of a castle rising out of the mist like a warning. Shelley adores towers, woods, ruins, graveyards, any part of Man or Nature that broods.
And so we followed the track, tortuous, towards it, ignoring the staring looks of peasants at their forks and hoes.
At the foot of the castle at last we stopped and shivered. Even in the hot afternoon sun it felt cold.
What is this place? asked Shelley of a man on a cart.
Castle Frankenstein, he said.
Desolate place of brooding.
There is a story, said the man, requiring money to tell it, and Shelley paid twice over, not disappointed by what he heard.
The castle had belonged to an alchemist named Conrad Dippel. Too early his beloved wife died and, unable to bear his loss, he refused to bury her, determined to discover the secret of life.
One by one, his servants abandoned him. He lived alone, and was seen at dawn and dusk wandering amidst the graveyards and charnel houses, dragging home what fetid bodies he could find, grinding the bones of corpses to mix with fresh blood. He believed he could administer this tincture to the newly deceased and revive them.
The villagers grew to fear and hate him. Alike they must guard their dead, and alike listen for his footsteps, or the bridle bells of his horse. Many a time he burst into a house of grief. In a bottle he carried his filthy mixture, stuffing it into the slack mouth of the empty body as a goose is stuffed for liver pâté.
There was no resurrection.
At length, everyone in the surrounding villages came together and burned him alive in his castle.
