The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd

Author:Peter Ackroyd
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780385531498
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

YET IT WAS MY DUTY first to visit Daniel Westbrook in his prison cell, and offer him what comfort I might provide. On the next morning I made my way to the New Prison at Clerkenwell, furnished with payment for his gaolers as well as books and wholesome food for Daniel himself. He had been placed in a cell below ground, and I was led down a gloomy passage way; it was lit by torches, and smelled of urine and fetid air. “More fierce than Newgate,” the gaoler whispered to me.

Daniel was in a small cell at the end of the row; he jumped up from his plank-bed when I entered, and embraced me. “It is so good of you, Victor, so good of you.”

“It is not good. I am not good.” I scarcely knew what I was saying, faced as I was with the unwitting and innocent victim of my own crime.

“You know what I am accused of?”

“Take your time. I fervently believe in your innocence, and will essay every means in my power to free you.”

“They say that I murdered Harriet, Victor!”

“Tell me what occurred.”

“I had gone to the Serpentine to meet her. We often walked there together in the evening. She was not at our usual meeting place. I was fatigued after my day’s work; I slept beneath a tree-lulled to rest by the sound of the water—but then I was roughly shaken awake. It was a party of the watch. To my horror I saw that my hands were smeared with blood. When they searched me at their office, they found a necklace in my pocket. It was her necklace, Victor. How could it have been in my pocket? At first they considered me no more than a thief or footpad. But then her body was found in the water. She had been strangled with the necklace, and had bled copiously from the nose. Who could think it, Victor? Who could accuse me of murdering her?”

“There has been some terrible miscarriage here, Daniel. Some wilful perversion of facts. Do you have a solicitor?”

“I have no funds—”

“Leave that to me. What are your circumstances here?”

“Look around. My only comfort is that the gaol is used for democrats and revolutionaries. But they have no fellow feeling for me. They look upon me with horror. As the murderer of my sister.”

As I stood in the wretched cell, with its floor of beaten earth, I resolved to use any and every means to save Daniel from the executioner. I believed that I understood the sequence of events. The creature, having committed the crime, had decided in his malevolence to throw the suspicion upon someone else. Or perhaps in some primitive sense he believed that he might avoid the guilt by placing it upon someone other. Who could fathom his reasons? Had he known that Daniel was Harriet’s brother, or had he come by chance upon his sleeping form?

When I took my leave of Daniel I glanced back at his dimly lit cell, where he seemed to be the most isolated and wretched being on the earth.

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