“It cannot be helped, sir. All Marlow is in a fever over this case. Justice must be seen to be done, sir.”
“Where is poor Martha?” Mary asked him.
“The deceased is lying in an ice-house. Behind the butcher’s shop in Lady Place. She will be a little damaged, but she will last.”
We spent the next two days in a state of some gloom; the rain continued, more intensely than before, and on one afternoon Bysshe read to us some stanzas from the poem he was then composing. Certain lines struck me very forcibly:
“I curse thee! Let a sufferer’s curse
Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse,
Till thine Infinity shall be
A robe of envenomed agony;
And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain,
To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain.”
“Very good,” Mr. Godwin remarked. “Very strong.”
“It is a powerful curse,” Mary said. “It issues from a broken heart.”
“I see the curse,” I said, “like a smoking plain, filled with fires and fissures from which billows of livid smoke erupt.”
They looked at me in surprise, and then Bysshe continued reading.
ON THE MORNING OF THE CORONER’S INQUEST, there was great excitement in the town. A crowd had gathered outside the public house, the Cat and Currant, where the proceedings were to be held; but, as soon as the beadle saw us, we were led with great ceremony through the townspeople and in single file mounted the staircase to the first-floor room. It smelled strongly of sawdust and spirits, with the aroma of beer and tobacco somewhere in the mixture; some tables had been pushed together in the middle of the room which, the beadle informed us, were reserved for the gentlemen of the jury. The coroner then walked in. He was dressed in clerical garb, and Bysshe whispered to me that he was indeed the rector of the parish church; he had seen him in the garden of his vicarage, pruning his vines. That gentleman was followed by the jurors; they entered the room with an air of solemn distinction, although I had seen one or two of them drinking ale in the parlour when we had first arrived. Then the people of Marlow crowded in, taking up every particle of space until the air became almost insupportable. Bysshe pointed out to me two or three gentlemen sitting at a table evidently reserved for them. “Penny-a-liners,” he said. “You can tell them from their cuffs. They will be reporting this for the public prints. The news has reached London.”
“Gentlemen-” The coroner began to speak.
“Silence!” called the beadle.
“Gentlemen. You have viewed the unfortunate young woman known as Martha Delaney.”
“I never knew her last name,” Mary whispered to me.
“You are impanelled here to ascertain the causes of her lamentable death. Evidence will be given before you, as to the circumstances attending that death, and you will give your verdict according to that evidence and not anything else. Anything else must be disregarded and blotted from the copybook.” Bysshe gave me an odd look of merriment. “A young lady is present here.” Bysshe assumed an expression of intense seriousness. “A young lady who may have seen the perpetrator of this foul crime. May I ask you to rise, Miss Godwin, and take the oath?” There was a general murmur of approval, from the people of Marlow, as Mary stood beside the jurors and recited the oath. But there was absolute silence when she recounted the events of that night. She had glimpsed a face at the window-“a leering countenance,” as she put it. When her scream woke the others in the house (she refrained from saying who they were) the intruder was gone. Mary had great skill in narrative, and added little touches of description to the simple story. Then she nodded to the coroner and resumed her seat, while the penny-a-liners were still busy with their pens. “Thank you, Miss Godwin, for that affecting testimony. Now I will call an eminent gentleman who, I am informed, was accidentally present when discovery of the death was made. I will call Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley.” There was a murmur of interest among those assembled, and evidence of the keenest attention among the penny-a-liners; they were no doubt aware, or had been informed, of the fate of Harriet. Bysshe stood beside the table of jurors but, when asked to take the oath, replied in a calm clear voice. “I will say to you, sir, that I swear to tell the truth before the eyes of my fellow men.”
“This is very irregular, Mr. Shelley.”
“I hope and trust that I will follow the principles of the utmost honesty in anything I may say.”
“Mr. Shelley is the son of a baronet, gentlemen,” the coroner informed the men of the jury. “Are you content to accept his unsupported word?” They were content. So Bysshe narrated the story of our recent journey down the Thames, and the discovery of Martha’s body among the weeds; he particularly noted the marks of bruising about her neck and upper torso. Then one of the party tracking the path of the creature was called-it was he who had fired the shot into the field-and he described the pursuit and flight of the supposed killer. He described him as “monstrous big” with a “wonderful celerity.” In his opinion we were dealing with an escaped convict, or a lunatic, hiding in the woods beside the river. The session was quickly concluded, with a verdict from the jury that the young lady, Martha Delaney, had been killed unlawfully by person unknown. She could now be buried in the churchyard.
Bysshe hired a carriage for our return to London. He intended to lodge with the Godwins, at their house in Somers Town, until he could find accommodation of his own. I suspected, however, that he would wish to remain in the closest possible proximity to Mary Godwin. Fred and I disembarked at Jermyn Street, to the great delight of the crossing sweeper’s dog that had formed an attachment to Fred over the last few months. The dog jumped against him, and left traces of mud and mire on his serge breeches. “That reminds me, sir,” he said as we climbed the stairs. “I have left your laundry with Ma.”
“Then you must fetch it, Fred. I need clean linen after Marlow.”
“The country is a dirty place, sir. It abounds in soil.”
“We are fortunate, then, to live in a clean city?”
“Oh, yes. The mud in London don’t stick. Look. I can brush it off.” After he had unpacked, and taken up the linen in a great bundle, he made his way to Mrs. Shoeberry.
There had been a marked change in my constitution, I discovered, after the journey to Marlow. I was no longer so listless, so devoid of energy. The murder of Martha served to inflame my desire for vengeance and, in the carriage, I had consulted with myself over all possible means of fulfilling it. It was then I decided upon a course of action. I would return to Limehouse, where I would reconstruct my shattered equipment in the hope of reversing my experiment and reducing the creature once more to lifeless matter. The more I contemplated the venture, the more fervently I embraced it. Would it be possible to build an engine that by means of magnetic force might extract the electricity from the body of the creature? Or was there some way of discharging a negative energy that might balance the power of the electrical fluid already within him? I determined to begin my studies anew, with the single purpose of destroying that which I had created. I also conceived a scheme with which I might trick and deceive the creature. If he visited me in Limehouse, I would welcome him. I would tell him that his frightful acts had forced me to revise my judgement, and that I was willing to create for him a bride as long as he swore a solemn oath to depart these shores for ever. I might even be able to persuade him to endure certain experiments; I would assure him that these would have to be undertaken before I could start work on his female double. He would then be within my power. Such were my enthusiasm and optimism that I considered travelling down to the estuary, and there confronting him in his hidden retreat with the news of my intentions. I had no compunction about deceiving him. Had he not already betrayed me in as deadly a fashion as I could envisage?