Unfashioned Creatures

Lesley McDowell

• Publisher: Saraband
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781908643391
• eBook ISBN: 9781915089021
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

"Monstrously good." - Louise Welsh. London, 1823. Mary Shelley's real-life friend Isabella Baxter Booth is 'disturbed in her reason' - seeing ghosts and dependent on narcoti to escape a hellish life with an increasingly violent, deranged husband. Fearful of her own murderous impulses towards him, Isabella flees for her childhood home in Scotland, where she meets an ambitious young doctor, Alexander Balfour. He will stop at nothing to establish a reputation as a genius in the emerging science of psychiatry and he believes that Isabella could be the key to his greatness. But as his own torments threaten to overwhelm Alexander, is he really the best judge of which way madness lies?

PART ONE

London & Gheel

1

Richmond, September 1823

I couldn’t have known what it was. Not that first time. I wasn’t to blame, although I believed then that I was, and for a long while afterwards. The wood smashed him down onto stone, not me. The chair tipped and my basin clattered to the floor. Blood bubbled from his burst tongue, his irises rolled and dough splattered yellow and thick on the stone slabs.

He made my girls scream out in terror. But when he tells me now that he still loves my frown, says ‘Bella’ with a confused tenderness, I think perhaps I don’t blame him, either. Then I remember that first time: my girls’ father, made monstrous. His arms thrashing against my newly-scrubbed kitchen floor; his legs bucking at the toppled chair. I might have moved with the heaviness of a woman three times my age but it wasn’t from fear, or reluctance to help. I had to consider, slowly, that was all. Aid or flight. Then came my rush forwards, a sliding on the dough. I sent a footstool flying, which just missed Izzy as she stood rattling at the doorknob and crying out to leave. But I wouldn’t let her go. A demon had my husband. It might take hold of all of us.

I know demons well enough. When I was growing up in Broughty Ferry, we thought about them every Sunday. Kail Kirk to fill our bellies. Cold church walls protected us from the sea outside on bright, fierce days. The sea lured men from the town and some never came back. Drink called to them, too, on a Saturday night, when the taverns bulged. The sea and the drink were demons both, and only prayer and abstinence could save us. When I was young, I thought they were enough.

But prayer and abstinence can’t defeat the demon inside my husband. The demon I put there myself, with my unwifely thoughts of leaving. I was relieved, that day four years ago, to meet it at last. And relief made me clumsy, hurt my girls: I pushed Izzy too hard at her sister, and she fell. I was trying to clear the way, that’s all, to still his head, but he flattened my fingers, twisting this way and that. If I could have made a fist out of my crushed hand, I’d have struck him, but Izzy’s wails called me back. The demon is no match for my girls.

My sister’s silver tea urn crashed down, and her copper pans. There was no point trying to save her wedding china, or the mortar and pestle she brought back proudly from Pisa. Tiny, bloody darts splintered in his cheeks, and my fingers flicked at his face because I didn’t know what to do. I know now, though, how much time I wasted. Telling my girls to stay, to run and fetch help, to stay after all. I waited for my instinct for escape to show me the way out, but it let me down just as it had once before. I sat beside him instead, as still as he was restless, as though by my stillness I could force him to be quiet.

When at last he was, it was little thanks to any action of mine. The demon left as suddenly as it had entered him and the shaking stopped. I took a deep breath and laid my palm on his chest, felt for the heartbeat I knew I wouldn’t find.

I was wrong that day. Expectation is an ambiguous thing. What was I hoping for, as I pressed my hand to him? Perhaps I’ll ask Mary later. Mary, whom I love better than a sister, has told the whole world about monsters. She has written about a yellow-skinned, yellow-eyed creature galvanized by an unseen power into mimicking the movements of a human being. What makes a monster, though? For all her cleverness and all that I love in her, Mary has never witnessed what I have: the monster a man becomes when reason deserts him and he thrashes about, insensible, on a stone floor.

She did see, though, what I wanted all those years ago.

The first time I thought about leaving him came just before his first fit, but his heart did not stop that day, and there have been many more fits like it since, so I know my wicked thoughts aren’t to blame. Just the same, something is nipping at my neck now. Make up your mind, Bella! A spot there makes my worry real and red, and I rub it with fingernails bitten down to the skin, while he sups at his tea. On this quiet September morning I’m thinking only about Mary’s visit and what it means after all this time.

‘My lecture for the Society…’ he announces, looking up from papers that are forever strewn around our dining table. His voice is unusually high and sharp, and the change should alert me. But I take another sip myself and wait for him to continue. When he says nothing, I ask obediently, ‘It’s progressing well?’

It isn’t progressing well: the creases on his forehead that have deepened over the last few days should tell me so, and the strange air about him. But I’m too distracted by my own thoughts. ‘My lecture for the Society…’ he repeats, and then it’s too late and he’s on the floor, kicking out and gasping.

I swoop down on to the carpet in my cheap workday dress like a voluptuous grey swan and bolster his head and shoulders. My hips and thighs grip his back as tea spatters on my skirt. I fix on them while he shakes and shudders against me, and all the time I think, once we might have been happy.

That thought could bring tears but I’ve frozen my heart, warm it only with facts. His fits are more frequent and lasting longer. Ten days since the last one. What will Conolly have to say to that when he sees him? Will he still insist that I care for him at home? You won’t escape him now, Bella, whispers the voice in my head and I swear I hear laughter.

‘There, now,’ I say over and over until he calms at last and I can pour him some water. He grunts, his eyes still closed. The next part is always trickiest: I must get up, reach round his chest, clasp my hands together and pull him as gently as possible from the floor. But he’s taller than me and heavy, for all he’s so thin. ‘Careful,’ I say, as his arm pins down my shoulder and he stumbles. ‘Don’t pull, let me hold you.’ But he doesn’t hear me and as we shuffle out of the dining room together I ask myself for the hundredth time what we have done to deserve this.

I may ask, but I know the answer. Our wedding day wasn’t the bright one I’d hoped for. Drear and dreich, the consistency of shame, our Glassite detractors said, but I wouldn’t show them I cared. My sister’s cold fingers had trembled at my neck, her white velvet ribbon knotted too tight, to be unpicked and redone once she’d gone. My mother’s amber thistle brooch glittered on my collar, flame-shaped and just as fiery, making me suck the breath in between my teeth as I pinned it. I held my head high, though, and didn’t waver once. Christy had never hit me before and the justice of it still spread hot and sharp across my cheek a day later. And if I’d spent my last night in my father’s house alone in my room, full of thoughts of what I’d done and was about to do, then that was just as my sister had intended.

Our father made the peace between us as always, though, wanting the world only to get along. The gift of white ribbon was her apology to me: my gift was to wear it but I didn’t apologize. Father had thought it best not to bring Robbie home for a ceremony without friends, and not held in our church. ‘No need for your brother to see it,’ he said, as though he was ashamed. And yet he loved David as much as I did. I had enough defiance to match his shame: what need did I have, I said to him, for family or friends or a faith that wouldn’t accept our love for one another?

David was standing on the town hall steps that day, shorter for being round-shouldered, but clever and commanding in his black coat: that’s how I like to remember him. People bowled away from him that day like loose beads from snapped thread, but he acknowledged neither their fear nor their lack of manners. From the carriage I watched, made happiest when the wind blew open his coat and revealed new trousers, tucked into new boots. He wasn’t a man whose thoughts ran to fashion: my distinguished husband-to-be, whom they all called ‘Devil’, had made a special effort. So when I stepped down and his fingers gripped mine, I cleaved easily to what those little people feared. My prize, won against so many odds.

I was too warm indoors in my wool coat and gloves, though, and sweat tickled my spine and dampened my dark curls as we stood in front of a nervous town clerk and spoke our vows. But before the heat could claim me completely, we were outside in the rain once more and back at my father’s for the toast; a party of four, half of us gleeful, half of us troubled. Christy, tearful and forgiving after too much sherry, hugged me on the doorstep tightly and extracted promises that we’d see her soon.

Even the rain, pattering on the trunks and our hats, couldn’t make me regretful. I had no presents, no good wishes from friends, but I had what I wanted. Over the Tay to Newburgh that evening we travelled lightly, with few words between us, our happiness felt rather than spoken. And yet, when we arrived, and I stepped across the threshold of my new home to see the portrait of Margaret still hanging in the hallway, I wondered for the first time if I’d done the right thing in marrying my dead sister’s husband.

2

Gheel, Antwerp, September 1823

The miniature of a dark-haired young woman that he carried with him everywhere wasn’t, as many often supposed, a portrait of any sweetheart of his. Without it, Alexander Balfour wouldn’t have forgotten his mother. But he might have lost sight of her, and with that, his reason for coming to Gheel in the first place.

He hadn’t much longer to go in this backwater of a town now though, and he allowed himself a small, bitter smile at the thought. Not too many more of these dark, uneventful evenings in a forgotten corner of the world for him, oh no! A mosquito droned past his ear, the only sound to disturb the silence, and above its insistent buzz he sensed the rest of the town asleep without him, doors shut, shutters jammed. He knew, without much pity or regret if he were being honest, that his forthcoming absence would hardly touch the hearts of many of the inhabitants. Lack of friendship didn’t bother him. But lack of success tormented him every night. His posting here was a failure and he’d only just averted a scandal into the bargain.

Alexander frowned at the smudged papers on his desk. Not that they were likely to comfort him. His rooms above the small, poorly-stocked country hat-shop were dark and bare but for these papers and desk, and a narrow bed, things that wouldn’t miss him, either. The next man to rent this mean space wouldn’t know what anguished hours were spent here, he thought, allowing the self-pity to which all Balfour men were prone, to swell and flood him. The loneliness of failure, of these rooms, of the unknown: despair had him reaching for his usual answer. This time, though, he’d used it up.

Yes, even the blackjack was empty. ‘Nothing more to be given,’ he murmured. Alone on this dark night, his loneliness was his own fault. Just the same, familiar flickers of resentment rose in his gut. He aimed the empty blackjack at the wall, hard, like a punch, but the leather only stroked the plaster the way a woman’s touch might. Nothing more to be given.

Crichton gave him something, though; he never ran dry! Alexander’s spirits lifted as always at the thought of him, the one true god who’d directed him here to this miserable town for a reason. The man taught by the great Cullen himself. Whose words kept his faith intact these last six months, fixed before his eyes every day. Literally, fixed; Balfour men were fond of the literal, something that often struck him when he wondered about his lack of success, as though that might be the reason for it. Nothing ever represented anything else for such men, not for his father, not for his uncle, not for him. They permitted no substitutions. So he was wrong for the art of his age, he’d realized that at least. Truth is beauty? No: Alexander Balfour wasn’t what the poet wanted.

And so he continued to gaze lovingly every day at the words fixed to the shelf above his head:

‘In order to conduct analysis with success, much depends on the previous knowledge of the person who conducts it. It is evidently required that he who undertakes to examine this branch of science in this way, should be acquainted with the human mind in its sane state, and that he should not only be capable of obstructing his own mind from himself… he should be able to go back to childhood and see how the mind is modelled by instruction.’

Analysis and childhood and instruction! The mind and the brain separate. How long Alexander had had the title in his head, he couldn’t say. ‘Childhood Origins of the Disordered Mind.’ The book he’d write one day that would make his name. He had enough ambiti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Prologue
• Part One: London & Gheel
• Part Two: Broughty Ferry and Montrose
• Part Three: Montrose
• Part Four: London
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Also by Lesley McDowell
• Copyright