Blood and Ice by Liz Lochhead

Author:Liz Lochhead [Lochhead, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848420618
Publisher: Nick Hern Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ACT TWO

Widow MARY with candle, quill, at her writing desk again. She has some letters, opens one, reads. Paces, frets.

MARY. Oh, Percy Florence Shelley, my sweet son, how am I to keep you?

When your grandpapa Godwin, far from supporting us financially, asks us for money just as constantly as he did when Shelley was alive?

And when your grandpapa Shelley threatens he will cut us off without a penny if we bring out your father’s poetic productions posthumous before the world and add, in his eyes, yet more infamy to the family name?

But he should know it. I will collect and edit and bring out in a single volume the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley if it is the last thing I do.

Must write!

When creation goes dead and dull, that’s the time the author has to force himself to put the long hours in and have the faith that sometime soon the spark surely will return.

The Last Man, oh, Mrs Shelley – if you can but keep your courage – this is the book that will make your name, your fame and your fortune.

‘The year is 2073, a slowly spreading plague threatens the very existence of human life on earth. Vernay, the hero of our tale –

The Last Man.’

I’ll live here lonelier than the last woman alive on earth and I’ll write it.

It is so much better an idea than any I ever have had before in all my life.

As for my last monstrosity, my grotesque invention, my scandal, to my surprise my enduring and popular success, no, I didn’t invent you, I didn’t write you, you came unbidden and I wrote you down.

Movement in the shadows.

CREATURE’S VOICE. Wrap yourself in furs, Frankenstein, for soon such ice and cold. No escape, except by the death of you or this.

MARY. I could never think how to kill you. Night after night, I had done with you, only for you to rise again.

I buried you in an avalanche, I had you leap into the smoking crater of a volcano, I burned you to death in a church.

I did not think of drowning you in the ocean…

I mangled you in the workings of a gigantic mill…

I froze you to death in an Arctic storm. But you would not die.

CREATURE’S VOICE. Come, pursue This, chase This, till This shall catch you…

MARY picks up the volume, Frankenstein, opens it at random and reads with a shudder.

MARY. ‘How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch which, with such infinite care I had endeavoured to form? His lips were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was lustrous and flowing, his teeth of a pearly whiteness – these luxuriances merely a more horrid contrast with the watery eyes, that seemed almost the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set… his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips… I could not endure the aspect of the being I had created.

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