The Monster's Wife
Kate Horsley
For my mother, who taught me to tell
stories, and in memory of my father,
the mad scientist.
1
Hoy, Orkney, August 1798
Life changed when he came to the island, the foreign doctor from further away than anyone cared to know. The night he landed, a storm rose and blew boats towards the Northern ice floes, swept Dolphins aground to lie panting on the white scythe of beach. New lambs were stolen and hens found with their throats torn out. Kirk-going women left their cooking and ran wild, reeling home soused to take the distaff to their husbands’ heads. All were agreed that this pestilence followed the foreign doctor to the island as Hell follows the pale rider.
‘All’ was counted as the score and ten who lived in Quoy, the only village on Hoy, though that number varied year on year as a fresh crop of bones fell under the hill and new small islanders were born. Nearest the sea was Old Cormick’s tumbledown shack, then Neaquoy, then Norquoy. Beyond the Norquoys lived the Kilpatricks. The turf-roofed crofts of more Norquoys plus a rabble of Moodies, Fletts and Umbesetters dotted the greensward up towards the summit of the mountain with its shawl of grey.
Each croft had its byre and barn and fields of oats or barley and this year, as every year, Oona and May offered their help with the harvest, bending their waists to the oats and binding sheaves. People always gave them a pat of butter, smoked fish or a scoop of ground oats for their labour. Ever since the doctor came, people were saying the year would be thin. No rain, poor seed. The moment he landed, oats and barley soured in the ground and the shoots looked mean.
May was in need of money for her wedding, so she went to work in the big house, scrubbing laundry and keeping the fires lit for its new tenant, Doctor Frankenstein.
Oona had it on good authority that he landed at night, somewhere up the coast from Cormick’s beach. Stopping by the Smokehouse, she’d heard Cormick saying you could see the furrow where they’d pulled the boat in, and for once, people believed him. He got a free drink out of Big Dod because of it and was happy and said it was a fine thing the laird had done to leave the big house to rot, because strangers could come, strangers who’d buy his fish.
How the doctor got to the big house from Cormick’s beach was anyone’s guess. Down by the laundry pool, where the women slapped and pounded their men’s breeks, they laughed and leaned closer to May, who was sure to know the gossip. And there was always gossip in Quoy, what with Andrew and Stuart smuggling whisky and Margaret Umbesetter’s rowdy boys forever in trouble and what everyone knew was a romance between Hamish Yule, the Minister, and Oona’s Granny, Mrs Scollay. For slow news weeks, there were oft-told tales, like the time Cormick had kissed a young girl at the Umbesetters’ bridecog and was almost tarred and feathered for it. Or the time Oona’s father drifted back from fishing in the North waters frozen into a thing of diamond, his hands still clutching the tiller.
Now was hardly a time of slow news, what with Napoleon’s ships gathering in the firth, threatening war. But that talk was worrying and doom-laden. It was far more entertaining to hear Fiona babble about how it was a rickshaw the doctor came on, such as Reverend Yule said Indian princes used.
“No, no, a barouche box surely,” said Janet of Flett in her haughtiest voice and looked down her long nose at May, who was rinsing out bed sheets upstream from her. For only May had seen him, and yet it had been a full week now and she’d barely opened her lips on the subject.
“Most likely,” began May and paused to savour the spectacle of nine women leaning closer to her, “he stumbled through the mud in the pitch dark and could not find the door key and slept that first night with the pigs in the byre.” But she said it wryly, as if it might not be the whole truth, and turned back to her sheets.
The other women turned back with a sigh that came from all their lips at once like a chorus. Oona counted herself above idle talk and was ashamed to be seen wheedling for tidbits like everyone else. She needn’t have bothered. On the subject of the doctor, May was resolutely silent. Two weeks after she began her labour as a housemaid, all she would say about it was that she was working her fingers to stubs and far too tired to come over late so that she and Oona could pass a clay pipe between them and talk. Nor did she have time to sit on the beach and eat her piece with Oona, or even walk under the stars to listen to the burn rattling out to sea the way they’d always done.
For the first time in her life Oona smoked her clay pipe on the beach in solitary silence. She swigged rough cider, feeling it was more of a sin to do so alone, but caring little. Her thoughts were wilful and returned unbidden to the doctor. She fancied he was tall, thin and exquisitely dressed, a dandy with a strange accent. Now he stood at the prow of a small vessel, his luggage piled high behind him. Now he dined alone at the head of a polished table upon which candles burned in sticks graven with imps, flickering light upon the frozen snarls of mounted fox and boar and the old, gilt-framed ghosts that lined the walls.
He was always lonely in her imaginings, that brave and chivalrous man, Doctor Frankenstein. So that, before she ever laid eyes on him, Oona dreamt of a life by his side. Keeping him company as he strained his eyes over medical journals, long after midnight rang out on the grand Swiss clocks. Bidding the maid light the tapers. Sitting at the fireside to embroider. Wearing the fine silks and satins befitting a gentleman’s wife.