Wildwood

by Farris, John

  The same, he knew, would be true of Wildwood. If only his patience lasted, and the complications of his love for Sibby Langford did not destroy them both before the chateau could be completed.

  For much of the summer and fall the lovers had enjoyed peace and contentment previously unavailable to them. Edgar Langford had been abroad during this time, on an arduous expedition to the Middle East which, his doctor had warned, might prove fatal to him. But Edgar was possessed by a desire for vindication. His bid to be recognized as the singular authority on the civilization of Mesopotamia had been rudely rejected by his peers, who now ignored him as a half-crazed dilettante, returned his lengthy papers unread, and jeered at his theories, his purported discoveries. A technologically advanced society, with cities illuminated by electricity, whose scientists could travel through time and space as casually as they might cross an alley? Who had the power to animate inorganic matter, even as God had made man from clay? He was a disgrace, not worthy of a serious archaeologist's time. Edgar festered with resentment, his back growing drastically more crooked with each snub, and spent increasingly impressive sums attempting to substantiate his earlier findings.

  In spite of his doctor's misgivings, he had not returned from Iraq, shortly after Thanksgiving, in a worsened state of health. In fact he looked better than he had for some years: straighter, wind burned, sharp of eye, and energetic. Success, or triumph, was a tonic for many lingering ailments: he had brought with him yet another trainload of antiquities, and, he confided to Sibby, secrets of life and death. He was not willing to elaborate. Sibby pressed him only halfheartedly, because she shared the view of the eminent archaeologists who scorned her husband that he was, if not mad, at least seriously deluded. And she was afraid, against all reason, that there just might be some ungodly truth in what he hinted at.

  Edgar had little time for her, as usual. Through the Christmas season at Wildwood he spent long hours in his caverns beneath the mountain, translating dead languages from clay tablets, performing experiments with crude machines constructed from plans found in another monarch's tomb, a spagyrist's crushed cellar

  James Travers reluctantly turned his chilled horse toward the Wildwood stables, dreading his return to the chateau, and the dilemma which now only desperate, repugnant action might resolve. There was, of course, another way, if he were man enough: but Sibby had forbidden him to take that initiative.

  "He will kill us both."

  "Your husband is many things I find despicable, but surely he is not a murderer."

  "Edgar will f-find a way to make us suffer, and suffer, until we t-take our own lives. That would be Eh-Edgar's way."

  Oh God—the heartbreak he felt, hearing her stammer again. He grieved for the timid beauty of her youth, transmuted in the menace of their affair.

  Last night, despite the difficulties increased by Langford's presence at Wildwood, they had met, in the architect's apartment, in his small study concealed behind bookcases. Only here did they feel completely safe in this massive building that when finally completed would contain four hundred rooms, seventy staircases, and three quarters of a mile of hallways.

  Sibby had turned him remorsefully aside after a single kiss and told him that she was pregnant.

  "Good God. Are you certain?"

  She had the pallor of bone china, with lusterless blue crescents beneath her eyes. "A woman—knows. It has been two months since m-my last menses. And I have been ill in the m-mornings lately—Pamela has noticed. She smiles at me in a c-conspiratorial way, although I can be sure she will not s-say a word." Pamela was Sibby's personal maid, whom she counted as a friend if not a confidante.

  "But—you have had these cyclical irregularities before. And, perhaps—it's been such a dismal winter, we've all been down with a touch of pleurisy or flu—"

  "James—d-darling—the simple truth is, despite our precautions, I am g-going to have your b-baby." She sobbed then, in a blood-chilling way, and collapsed in his arms.

  "Have you consulted Dr. Burrough?" he asked Sibby, when he could speak.

  "No! I c-couldn't! Not yet."

  "And what about Edgar?" Travers's throat closed; he felt a cringing vileness, having to consider the possibility. "Since he's been back, has he—have you—"

  She pressed her lips against his ear, then straightened, keeping a hand on him as if restraining an unruly animal. Measuring his temper, his recklessness. Her smile was small and cold.

  "Edgar has not—p-paid his respects to me, in that manner, since his return. He is f-far too busy, I am to understand—or f-finally disinterested, after so m-many unsuccessful attempts to f-father a child."

  "Then we—we must—" Words failed him; the bitterness of their perceived fate was nightshade, shriveling his tongue.

  Sibby wiped a last tear from her cheek. She was as plainly dressed as a schoolmistress: dark blue tubular skirt, high-necked blouse with a starched ruffled collar. She squinted slightly these days, having read too many novels late at night by gaslight; the chateau was not yet electrified. There was something severe in the way she regarded her lover then; she looked to be in a trance of calculation, a feminine schemer with whom he was unacquainted, who shocked him.

  "What I must d-do is have the child—Edgar's child. There is no time to lose. The baby will be m-much too early as it is."

  "Sibby, no—!"

  Her throat was flushed, her eyes mildly inflamed as if she burned sacredly, martyr to their years-long affair.

  "I will seduce Edgar tonight."

  "You cannot!"

  "Why c-can't I? After all, it was I who seduced, you.

  Travers flinched from this bold assertion as from the firecracker of a whip under his nose, unable to decide if it was true.

  Her small fingers tightened on his arm imploringly.

  "Don't you see? There is n-no other way. But once I have done it, I will have the excuse I n-need never to sleep with him again. And then I may go on h-having you, only you, my dearest."

  Never to sleep with him again.

  In the stable enclosure Travers gave his horse over to a Negro groom and thawed himself with brandy in front of a fireplace in the slate-floored office. Enough blazing logs for a funeral pyre, or so it seemed to him in his morbid, downcast mood. Had she done it by now, or was she still awaiting Edgar's return from his caverns with the eminent guest Travers had yet to meet? It was now eleven o'clock in the morning. Why, he wondered, was he permitting this? The honorable thing to do was confront the man. I have stolen your wife's affections. She is going to bear my child. We will go away at once.

  And leave the chateau unfinished. The bulk of his commission unpaid.

  What did that matter? The chateau represented seven years of his life, but he was only forty-one. He was a gifted architect. He would find work.

  On the other hand, it was foolish of him to expect a gentlemanly, even a sane reaction, from Edgar Langford.

  There were men you could take a woman from. And men you could not. Who, if they had the means, would go to any lengths to exact revenge.

  Edgar Langford had the means. And he was already pathologically frustrated in his desire to be recognized as a seminal archaeologist.

  Travers was not afraid of Langford. Nor was he reckless as a child, deliberately poking a hornet's nest with a stick.

  The sexual symbolism amused him dourly.

  Just reckless enough.

  And apparently coitus interruptus left something to be desired as a means of preventing conception.

  He walked outside to where a sleigh waited to take him to the chateau.

  Three quarters of the outer walls of the cubiform, three-story building were in place, and despite the brutal weather, work continued indoors, seven days a week; his close attention was required sixteen hours each day. He had already wasted too much of the morning.

  He looked again through his vaporous breath at the superb facade exposed to him from the level of the outlying stables: the vertical alignment of bay wind
ows, double moldings of native limestone marking the divisions between floors, classic pilasters flanking each window, the "pepperpot" turrets at each angle of the chateau now covered in blue slate. The power, the symmetry, the Renaissance grace of his rising masterwork totally absorbed him.

  The child would have Edgar Langford's name; but the chateau would forever be attributed to James B. Travers. And that, finally, was what mattered most.

  Leaving it now, uncompleted, under any circumstances, would be to snuff a vital force within him—his creativity. He would leave partially crippled, and resent it ever after; in time he might resent Sibby as well, his great love, his downfall.

  She was still so very young. Edgar Langford was now past fifty, beginning his declining years in chronic ill health; his family was not noted for longevity. Mother and father long dead, a brother destroyed by a stroke at the age of forty-five.

  How many years did Edgar have left? Or might it be a matter of months?

  He regretted the thought, but it was clear that someday he and Sibby would be together, unstigmatized; there could be time for a child to call his own.

  Sibby had been right; she must do it her way.

  And pray to God her husband would be fooled.

  In the middle of the afternoon Travers returned from his inspection of the massive open-work staircase rising in the corps de logis to the unfinished oval salon which served as the construction office for the chateau. There he was introduced by Edgar Langford to their dapper and celebrated guest, the inventor Nikola Tesla, who had been commissioned to provide electricity and heat for the chateau through a revolutionary new system. Already one of Tesla's polyphase generating systems was in place in the caverns, producing five hundred horsepower from a thirty-foot interior waterfall.

  The chateau, however, was to be heated and illuminated by a different type of power, solar energy: a concept Travers found difficult to envision. Tesla, a native of Yugoslavia, was fifty-two, a man of prodigious discoveries and accomplishments (and some grandiose failures as well): he had perfected alternating current and designed huge dynamos to deliver it; he had been the first to demonstrate wireless voice and musical transmission. The word genius seemed inadequate to describe him. A drafting table already was littered with sketches of the machine Tesla had envisioned many years ago, but lacked the resources to build. He was chronically in debt despite the patronage, at various times in his career, of such men as J. P. Morgan, George Westinghouse, and Colonel Astor, hence his involvement now with Edgar Langford. Yet the two men seemed to have a genuine rapport; Tesla exuded a respect for his latest benefactor that was more than homage to the power of his wealth.

  "I am inspired by your great work here," the inventor said graciously to Travers. "A truly magnificent undertaking."

  "That is most kind of you. And how large will your machine be?" Travers said, pondering the sketches and diagrams

  "It is easily contained in a powerhouse the size of this salon. As you see, the central core, beneath a glass roof, is a cylinder, also of thick glass, some six feet in diameter and situated on a bed made of asbestos and stone. Mirrors covered with asbestos surround the cylinder, and refract the rays of the sun into it. The cylinder at all times is to be filled with water, treated with a chemical process I do not wish to describe. It is a somewhat complicated procedure. Chemical treatment makes it easier for the water to heat and provide the steam which will in turn operate the generators."

  "And if days pass without sun?"

  Tesla smiled confidently, a tall lean man who wore a dark suit that was impeccable despite the dust of the construction site, as if he radiated some invisible barrier not only to dirt in the air but to noise and confusion.

  "I shall soon perfect batteries capable of storing at least a year's supply of electricity—or it could last for a generation, if frugally dispensed. There you have it: clean, inexpensive power. My solar engine, the prototype of which we will build here, will someday replace every other wasteful source of heat, light, and, I have no doubt, motive power."

  "How is heat to be disseminated?"

  "Hot water will be pumped through valvular conduits of copper, controlled by flow meters of my design; the conduits will be surrounded by numerous wafer-thin vanes, also of copper, and covered by inconspicuous metal moldings at floor level. Radiated heat: smokeless, odorless, safe."

  "That is ingenious."

  "And installation will require almost no alteration of your existing plans, which already provide for the passage of interior plumbing."

  They dressed for dinner that night, Travers and the inventor in white tie. Tesla also wore a sash with a starburst decoration upon it, the Order of St. Sava from the king of Serbia. Their host, seated where he would benefit most from the heat of the chimney piece that occupied all of one wall in the dining hall, wore a red silk toga trimmed in gold. Sibby had appeared in an unadorned aquamarine gown: she had been informed of one of their esteemed guest's many phobias. He disliked jewelry, particularly pearls, on the female form.

  Tesla was a confirmed bachelor, although it was said many women, among them the daughter of J. P. Morgan, had been or were still in love with him. He had great personal attractiveness: six feet six inches in height, with a wedge-shaped, aristocratic face, high Slavic cheekbones, eyes that could be blue or a misted gray depending on the intensity of his thoughts. He was a man of such formidable intellect he sometimes appeared to be in a feverish drowse of contemplation, drifting away unexpectedly from the company he was keeping, steepling his abnormally long thumbs and fingers as some vision of technology absorbed him. In addition to Serbo-Croat he spoke eight languages with scarcely a trace of an accent, was an epicure and connoisseur of vintages; he was fascinating, even outrageous, in conversation, particularly when involved in explanations of his life's work and his fantastic predictions for the future: robots that would do the work of servants and common laborers; wireless communications with the inhabitants of Mars. (Such inhabitants, Tesla asserted, were a "statistical certainty.")

  Sibby had been quiet at first, and Travers recognized in her symptoms of great tension, although the glances she briefly directed to him gave no indication that anything sexual had recently occurred between her and her husband. Travers, overtired, felt out of sorts and imperiled by inaction. There was, across Sibby's bland face, a barely perceived but disturbing something, like a crack beginning in a priceless vase. Yet when she spoke, her stammer was reasonably under control; she was obviously charmed by the great Tesla.

  "Is it true, as I h-have heard, that you once precipitated an earthquake, in the h-heart of New York City?"

  "Quite true."

  "And what m-monstrous machine was involved in your experiment?"

  Tesla smiled ironically, and held up a pocket watch of modest size.

  "The 'monstrous machine,' my dear Mrs. Langford, was an electromechanical oscillator no larger than my timepiece. I attached it to an iron pillar of my loft building, which, although I did not know it at the time, was based in the bedrock beneath the cellar. The tiny vibrations of the little oscillator, no one of which would awaken a sleeping baby, gradually built into a force that reverberated throughout the neighborhoods surrounding my loft. Entire buildings shook to their foundations, and windows were shattered; the poor Italians and Chinamen rushed into the streets, convinced their doom was at hand. By then I was aware of a dangerous vibration in the floor beneath my feet, and, although I was oblivious to the turmoil outside, promptly smashed the oscillator with a sledgehammer."

  "And if you h-had not done so?"

  Tesla replaced the watch with a flourish.

  "Ah, then. I'm afraid I would have succeeded in destroying, utterly, the city I most love in all the world. The Waldorf-Astoria, my favorite hotel. The incomparable Delmonico's."

  "I assume you have attempted no further experiments with your oscillator," Travers said.

  "To the contrary. I have performed many controlled experiments, and gained valuable insight into th
e phenomena of earthly harmonics. There is a periodicity to the earth's own vibrations that may, of course, be positively exploited—or used unwisely, to our ultimate sorrow."

  "Do you m-mean the earth itself could be destroyed, Mr. Tesla?"

  "Why, yes. Split in half like an apple, through means that are mechanically sound. But it would take far greater power than that which one of my oscillators is capable of generating."

  "Then we h-have nothing to fear," Sibby said; a woman, Travers was certain, nearly dying of fear at the moment.

  "We must be afraid, not of the wonders of nature and the cosmos, but of the scientifically unscrupulous. Alas, there are far too many such men in my profession. At times I feel them surrounding me, slavering like feral dogs for whatever scraps of invention I may carelessly leave unprotected."

  "Speaking of harmonics," Edgar Langford said, "the Kabalists and Hermetic students believe in other planes of existence that surround us, not available to our senses without the implementation of appropriate symbols, but quite wonderful to behold."

  Tesla nodded, uncommitted to the notion, but interested.

  "Ghosts?" Sibby inquired with a frown.

  "Not implausible," said their guest, making a contemplative steeple of his hands, but not slipping into one of his monastic silences. "Life, I am convinced, continues despite the inevitable dissolution of the body, in the form of electrostatic or magnetic fields of energy and intelligence." He jumped without pause to another concept. "Electricity puts into the exhausted body so much of what it needs—life force, nerve force. The supreme physician. Through the proper application of electricity, we may all one day be immortal."