She had used the vision as the basis of a novel; it was the story of a student of natural science who assembled a man out of lifeless parts, and who then managed by scientific means to endow the thing with unnatural life.
Shelley had been very interested in the tale; he encouraged her to write it out, and to freely use incidents from his own life to amplify it. She’d taken him at his word, and the story had become almost a biography of Shelley, and a chronicling of his fear of being pursued by some kind of double of himself, a sort of dreaded twin that was destined to kill everyone he loved.
Shelley had even suggested the name of the protagonist, a German word meaning something like the stone whose travel-toll is paid in advance. She had wanted to use a more English-sounding name, but it had seemed important to Shelley, and so she had obediently called the protagonist Frankenstein.
The story took place in the Swiss locales Mary and he had lived in, and the name of the protagonist’s infant brother, slain by the monster, was William,
the same as the son Mary had had by Shelley; the areas of science involved in the monster’s vivification were ones Shelley was familiar with, and the books the monster read were those Shelley had been reading at the time.
And, based on Shelley’s description of the intruder he’d wounded in his house in Scotland in 1813, she wrote a scene in which the monster’s face is seen leering through the window of an inn at its creator, who later tries unsuccessfully to shoot it; though here Shelley had showed some hesitation, and made her omit certain details. The physical description of the monster couldn’t actually be that of the thing Shelley had shot in his parlor on that occasion—Mary remembered the drawing of it that he’d done from memory, that night in Switzerland, and how much it had upset Claire and Polidori—and for some reason she couldn’t mention the fact that Shelley had pulled a muscle in his side, at the scar under his ribs, during the encounter.
She hoped the book would be published, but it seemed already to have fulfilled its main purpose, which was to draw out and dispel Shelley’s outlandish fears. He was much calmer now that he was back in England and she’d written the story out—it almost seemed that she had taken the fears one by one from Shelley’s head and transferred them to the novel.
And Shelley seemed comfortable without them—"Maybe she did stay over there with Aickman,” he had said recently while half asleep, and Mary got the clear impression that the “she” he’d referred to was the thing that he feared.
Mary hoped that the worst of their problems were now behind them, and that they’d soon be buying a house to raise children in.
She heard Shelley put a book down in the next room, and then she heard him yawn. “Mary,” he called, “where’s that letter from Hookham?”
Mary frowned slightly as she put the sheet of paper down and stood up, for while Hookham was Shelley’s publisher, this letter was probably in answer to the inquiry Shelley had made a month ago about the situation of Harriet, Shelley’s wife. Mary was determined to get Shelley to divorce Harriet and marry her, and she hoped the woman wouldn’t have got herself or the two children into some situation Shelley would feel called on to help out with.
“It’s on the mantel, Percy,” she said cautiously. Soon she heard paper tear, and wondered if she should go into the sitting room and wait expectantly while he read it, but then she decided that she shouldn’t seem to care.
She hoped that the news, whatever it might be, wouldn’t drag Shelley back to London—the city never seemed to have a good influence on him. Only yesterday he had returned from a visit to the London suburb cottage of one Leigh Hunt, a mildly revolutionary poet and editor, and the visit had apparently almost caused Shelley to suffer a relapse back into his fear of supernatural enemies—for he had met there, he said, a young poet who was “clearly marked by the attentions of the same breed of antediluvian devils” who had supposedly harried Shelley back and forth across the map.
“You can see it in his face,” Shelley had told her, “and even more clearly in his verse. And it’s too bad, for he’s as modest and affable a fellow as I’ve ever met, and he celebrated his twenty-first birthday only a month and a half ago. He has none of the pose and morbidness that neff—that this crowd usually affects. I advised him to postpone publishing his verse; I think the advice offended him, but every year that he can avoid drawing the attention of … certain segments of society … will be a blessing.”
Mary tried now to remember what the name of the young poet had been. She remembered that Hunt had nicknamed him, to Shelley’s considerable disgust, “Junkets.”
John Keats, that’s what the name was.
She heard Shelley shout in the next room, and ran in to see him sprawled across the couch, the letter clutched in his hand.
“What is it, Percy?” she asked quickly.
“Harriet’s dead,” he whispered.
“Dead?” Out of love for him, Mary made a determined effort to share his grief. “Was she sick? How are the children?”
“She wasn’t sick,” said Shelley, his lips pulled back from his teeth. He stood up and crossed to the mantel and picked up a piece of smoked glass that had been sitting there since they’d gone out to view a recent solar eclipse. “She was killed—as her murderess promised me she would be … that was four years ago, almost, in Scotland. God damn it, I didn’t do enough—not nearly enough—to protect her.”
“Murderess?” said Mary. She’d been wondering how to tactfully take the piece of glass away from him, but this last statement had jolted her.
“Or murderer, if you’d rather,” said Shelley impatiently. “I—” He wasn’t able to finish, and for a moment Mary thought it was rage, rather than grief, that choked him. “And she was pregnant when they found her body!”
Mary couldn’t help being glad to hear it, for Shelley had been separated from Harriet for more than a year. “Well,” she ventured, “you have always said she was of weak character….”
Shelley stared at her. “What? Oh, you mean she’d been unfaithful. You don’t understand any of this, do you? Mary, she undoubtedly thought it was I. You should be able to grasp that, you thought it was I who was standing over—” He shook his head and clasped the piece of glass in his fist.
Suddenly Mary was afraid that she did understand, and she was frightened. She remembered his strange fears, and all at once they didn’t seem so ludicrous. “Percy, are you saying that—this thing you’re afraid of—”
Shelley wasn’t listening. “And her body was found floating in the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park. The Serpentine! Was that damned …joke … necessary? She—he, it—can’t really have thought that I’d have failed to recognize its handiwork without this … this hint.”
Blood was dripping now from his fist, but Mary had forgotten about trying to get the piece of glass away from him. “Perhaps,” she said unsteadily as she sank into a chair, “you’d better tell me more about this … this doppelgänger of yours.”
Shelley left for London later that day, and in a letter that Mary received two days later Shelley proposed marriage to her; they were wed two weeks later, on the thirtieth of December, but Mary’s joy was marred a little by her suspicion that he had married her mainly to get legal custody of his two children by Harriet.