“You can count on it.”
Over the next two weeks, I became a nurse to Kitten, relieving Davenport at regular intervals. I had heard of Kitten’s past troubles with opium, but had understood that she had left the compulsion behind long ago when she achieved success as a bookaneer, a combination of not being able to afford any distraction and not needing it. This period of watching over her in Maison Chappuis was the most concentrated time I spent with the profession’s most celebrated woman. For the first time in my eyes, she looked her fifty-two years. Not only had she visibly aged, but unhealthily; she was delicate and gaunt. She was shrinking out of existence.
I’d pass a warm towel along her brow and caress her hollow cheeks.
“She saw him here.”
I asked her what she meant.
Her voice was small, a croak. “Shelley. She saw the creature, that glorious thing, when she looked upon these very mountains, across that peaceful lake, she saw it waiting, when others saw nothing but the scenery. She was Mary Godwin then. But called herself Mrs. Shelley to everyone she met. She knew.”
Despite her general stupor and her gnawing hunger for opium, I was impressed by how well Kitten could tell a story, even if it was not wholly coherent. She talked of other missions, as well, though most often of the Frankenstein novelette she had been so proud of procuring. There was sometimes an air of confusion. She would speak of looking upon the mountains and scenery as though her eyes were on them, even though she was confined to a dark chamber. She could not answer questions about what she was looking for that brought her back to Geneva.
Another time, she said: “He cannot understand.”
Her eyelids were fluttering and she was shivering badly. I thought she might be imagining scenes from Mary Shelley’s time in Cologny again, surrounded by Byron and Percy Shelley and other men whose reputations in literature were secure when hers was in its infancy.
“Who? Who does not?”
“He does not understand that I need to do this, and he never did.” Then her eerie ice blue eyes opened and she exhaled.
“I read it all to her,” she said after I frowned and nodded; then she was asleep.
I heard her repeat this phrase, “I read it for her,” or “I read it all to her,” or something to that effect, numerous times.
Sometimes I began to ask too many questions, and I’d give pause when she’d move her hand—bony, more so every day, and ice cold—to mine.
I had never seen someone cry herself to sleep, but that is what our poor opium eater did more than once.
Another moment I remember as happening a day or so later. I was trying to brush the tangles from her hair, which had become wiry but brittle. I tried to be as gentle as possible, but if too gentle the tangles would worsen. Then she said: “Belial.” The word was carried on a gasp. I asked her to repeat, to explain what she wanted to say about him, but this time there was nothing more.
Davenport sent me out to gather the belongings Kitten had left at scattered hotels and boardinghouses around Geneva where she had lodged. Most of what I found was inconsequential. There was one item—a well-worn edition of Frankenstein—that caught my bibliographical interest. It was French, and from the early 1820s; if my memory served, it was the third French translation of the novel ever published. I hoped it might lead us to find out why she had returned to Geneva, what she was searching for, but that was not to be. I showed it to Kitten and she embraced it tightly, but never said anything about it.
Davenport did not want to leave her alone for any long period. He and I would sit in the small dining room and eat cheeses, some too soft and strangely colored for my conventional taste, and crusty bread purchased from the market on the other side of the lake. I learned more about Kitten in a matter of days than I had in years previous. Trivial facts about her that Davenport mentioned intrigued me. She had suffered her insomnia for many years. She had long had a problem of crying frequently and suddenly, sometimes without knowing why. This shed new light for me on his feelings for her, on the memories I had of him running to be by her side. I had imagined him as the young puppy following at the heels of his overbearing mistress. But he was protecting her, guarding her from her nightmares, even as she was guiding him in the profession. He also spoke of her struggles with opium in the past, long before either of us had known her. The fact that these epochs had preceded him in her life made him positively jealous of them, beyond the dangers with which they had once threatened her—and now threatened again.
I thought of telling him about her spontaneous cry of their elusive rival’s name, but he was so generally distraught, I could not add another item of sadness and confusion to the catalog. The last thing he’d want to hear was Belial’s name. Besides, she had not been speaking very fluently.