Mary Shelley — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 2

I write this to you, Cassandra, though I know not if these pages will find you before the season turns, or after I have ceased to trouble the living with my confessions; for I labour now under a sentence more certain than any judge could pronounce, and I would set down the whole of it before the hand that writes grows too unsteady for the pen. You will recall that I went abroad to a capital not my own, ostensibly for employment that required no presence, only the swift traffic of paper and correspondence; you will recall, too, that I believed solitude a discipline rather than a disease. I was wrong in the manner that scholars are always wrong: I mistook the absence of company for the presence of peace, and I did not perceive, until it was too late, that a city may be more populous with strangers than any wilderness is with wolves.

There was a coffee-house near the river, low-ceilinged, panelled in a wood gone the colour of tobacco, and possessed of a single ornament that distinguished it from every other house of its kind: an oval mirror, gilt-framed, hung above the hearth, said to have come from the wreck of some greater household a century before. Across its face ran a single fracture, hairline, silvered at the edges like a vein of frost upon a window; it did not shatter the glass, nor mar the reflection grossly, but bent it, so that whoever stood at a certain angle saw his own countenance divided, as though a second self peered from just behind the first. I noticed it on my earliest visit and thought nothing of it; I noticed it on every visit after, and thought of little else.

I had gone to that city, as I have said, in search of quiet; I found instead an emptiness that pressed upon the chest like a physical weight, a coldness at the sternum that no fire could reach, though I did not then possess the word for what afflicted me, and called it merely fatigue. It was in this state — this bodily hollowness before I had named it grief, or dread, or the first symptom of a curse not yet declared — that I fell into acquaintance with a man who called himself Aldous Vane, though I have since had cause to doubt that this was ever his true appellation. He was some years my senior, handsome in the manner of a portrait too long exposed to smoke, quick of tongue, generous with wine that was never his own to offer; he attached himself to my solitary table with the ease of a man who had performed the same office in every capital of Europe, and I, starved as I was for the sound of a human voice, welcomed him as one welcomes rain after a season of drought — never pausing to ask whether the rain might carry in it the seeds of flood.

"You study that glass," said he one evening, in accents of idle wonder, "as though it held some prophecy." I answered that I did not know why the fracture drew my eye, only that it did; that I had begun to feel, absurdly, as though the divided image were truer than the whole one. He laughed, a short laugh, and turned the subject to his own affairs, which were, he assured me, on the point of a change so fortunate that he scarce dared name it yet — and there, though I could not then perceive it, was the first small aperture through which my ruin began to enter.

I catalogue now, for your sake, the features of that city, which I have since heard called beautiful beyond most cities of the earth: the slow brown river, spanned by its ancient bridge of blackened stone; the spires, a multitude, needling upward through a haze that never wholly lifted; the gardens upon the hill, terraced, fragrant, over-looking all. I confess to you, Cassandra, that I could not feel them. They passed before my eyes as scenery passes before a traveller who sleeps within the coach; and it was only the mirror, cracked and small and gilt, that seemed to hold any communication with the thing that was even then fastening itself upon my life.

That thing, as I have already told you, wore the shape of a man, and I welcomed him as one welcomes rain after drought; I must now set down, Cassandra, how quickly the rain became flood, and the flood a thing that drowns. Vane's fortunes, he assured me nightly, stood upon the very brink of transformation; a contract awaited only a signature, a partnership only a trifling sum to be advanced, a correspondence only the loan of my name, since his own, he said, was known too well to certain creditors who would misconstrue an honest transaction. I did not ask why a name should serve where a signature would not; I did not ask why a man so near to fortune should require the purse of a stranger who lived, by design, upon the far side of every ocean from those who might have warned him. I gave what he asked, in the manner that a fever gives up its heat — freely, foolishly, believing the giving to be a kind of cure.

It was upon an evening in that same low-panelled house, the fire sunk to embers, the gilt of the fractured mirror gone dull with smoke, that I first apprehended the whole extremity of my case. Vane sat opposite, and as he leaned toward the hearth to warm his hands, I saw his image caught within the glass, divided precisely along that silvered vein I had so often studied without comprehension; the one half of his countenance wore the idle, generous smile that had disarmed me from our earliest meeting, and the other, thrown some degrees askew by the imperfection in the glass, wore an expression I can describe only as the patience of a creditor who watches interest accrue upon a debt already secured. I had thought the mirror shewed me my own duality — some fracture in my own reticent nature, some second self that peered from behind the scholar's mild countenance; but I understood, in that hour, that it had shewn me his all along, and that I, in my hunger for company, had mistaken a prophecy addressed to my ruin for an ornament merely curious.

I will not weary you, Cassandra, with the particulars of discovery, for particulars are a comfort to lawyers and are no comfort at all to the afflicted; suffice it that within the week I learned my name had been affixed to instruments I never wrote, my scant remittances drawn upon accounts I never opened, my very correspondence — the sole employment that had carried me across the water — impersonated with a fluency that argued long practice, and no remorse. Vane was gone from the city before I had gathered the strength to confront him; the coffee-house keeper, when I asked after him, only shrugged, and said such gentlemen were common enough in a capital that fed upon strangers, and that I was not the first to have warmed his purse for him, nor should I, in the way of such houses, be the last.

There is a species of grief, Cassandra, that comes disguised as fatigue before it is grief at all, and I have described that species to you already; but there is another that follows swift upon discovered fraud, and this second kind does not disguise itself, but declares its name at once, in the manner of a wolf that no longer troubles to wear the skin of any gentler animal. I went that same night to look once more upon the glass, thinking perhaps to find some remaining counsel in its fracture; but the fire had gone wholly out, and the mirror shewed me nothing but a single countenance, undivided, hollow-eyed, and mine alone — for the prophecy, having been fulfilled, required no further doubling, and the glass, like the debt, had rendered its whole account.

I left that city within the month, poorer in purse and immeasurably poorer in the coin that cannot be counted; and I have carried since, in the sternum's cold hollow that first announced itself as mere fatigue, the settled conviction that solitude sought as discipline will, if unwatched, admit any wolf that knocks in the guise of company. The coffee-house, I am told, was pulled down some winters after, the mirror sold among the rubble to a dealer who did not know, or did not care, what fracture ran across its face; and I confess to you, Cassandra, that I am glad of it, for I could not have borne to learn that the glass yet hung somewhere, dividing some other solitary traveller's countenance, prophesying to him, as it prophesied to me, a ruin he would not have the wit to read until it was already accomplished. This is the whole of my confession; the pen grows unsteady; I ask of you no comfort, only that you remember the mirror was cracked before ever I looked into it, and that some curses, once let in, do not consent to be repaired.