How Beer Saved the World

by Phyllis Irene Radford

  Master Harte remained half-turned toward his largest bookcase and only partially faced her. How unusual for him not to notice her presence. He was an inventor. Noticed all manner of things. Something must have put him off. Maybe she’d done a mistake.

  “Yer stout, sir,” Eleanor said. She should have said “your,” but certain words from her childhood vernacular kept slipping out. “Shall I leave the stout on yer desk, sir?”

  Why didn’t he answer? Eleanor glanced down at her starched white apron and the ankle-length skirt of her gray dress. She hadn’t reached her twenty-third year without learning basic facts of class and life. Men of Master Harte’s station didn’t need to justify their eccentric behavior. Servants like her bloody well did.

  “Did ye hear me, sir?” Eleanor asked.

  “The tankard,” Master Harte said, his voice flat. He still didn’t turn. “Hand me. Now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He’d just spoken with all the polish of a ten-year-old stable boy talking to a hound. Did the Master play a little game she didn’t understand? Eleanor set the tray upon the desk. She moved nearer to him, gripping the tankard’s cool sides with both hands. The handle remained free for him to grasp. Nary a muscle, he moved.

  “Closer,” Master Harte said, his voice firm. Silvery threads in the collar of his smoking jacket shimmered. “To me.”

  A warm tingle raced across the backs of Eleanor’s hands. This strange speaking had to be a bit of sport he made with her. In a minute she hoped he’d give her an affectionate pat on her shoulder and send her on her way for the night.

  “Handle,” Master Harte said, still not looking at her. “In my left hand.”

  In his left hand? He was right handed. An odor, like dried-out bogwood and sulfur heaped onto a smoldering fire, wafted out of nowhere. By Our Lady! Even flatulence couldn’t generate such a disagreeable stink.

  “Step,” Master Harte said. His hand—chilly as an eel packed in snow—brushed her own and grasped the vessel by its handle. “Back. Now.”

  Eleanor edged backward. A long stream of warm breath purged its way out her mouth. She must have been holding her air all in, afraid to exhale. Her eyelids raised as far as they could. Master Harte tilted his tankard and poured the stout down the top of his right arm near the shoulder. Had he gone balmy?

  Liquid dribbled on the carpet. Now the Master turned his face toward her, his wide eyes shiny as polished agates. Her gaze shifted downward. His black shoes moved and pointed straight toward her own. Eleanor tilted back her head, lifting her chin. Master Harte stood fully before her. Except it wasn’t there. His right arm really weren’t all there. Just ended at the blooming elbow, it did. Holy saints and Trinity! Eleanor let out a high-pitched shriek.

  “Quiet, woman,” Master Harte said and shoved the empty tankard into her hand.

  “What’s happened to ye?” Her heart raced. A man missing half-an-arm might need a tourniquet. She must help him now. “Should I fetch a doctor?”

  “Hush.” His thick eyebrows blended into a single black, blurry line.

  Master Harte leaned back against the glass doors of a bookcase. No mangled stump gushed blood or even dripped. He didn’t seem in pain, neither. Inch by inch, his lower arm appeared—sleeve and all—as if he pulled the half-limb out of a magician’s top hat. The sulfur stench receded.

  His fingers wiggled, pink and healthy. There he was, all put back together. Blimey.

  “For now,” he said. He rubbed his regained arm. “Safe.”

  What did he mean, for now? First, no arm. Then plenty of arm. What the bleeding heck had happened? Why was he safe only for now?

  “That will be all for the evening, Eleanor.” He glanced down toward the soiled carpet. “A good stain to mark the spot, don’t you think?”

  The grandfather clock chimed the hour from the hallway. Eleven o’clock. Eleanor couldn’t move. Speak. Do anything.

  “I said that will be all.” His piercing brown eyes stared into hers. “Be a good girl now and get some rest. It tried to get me again, that’s all.”

  <<>>

  Eleanor inhaled the aroma of cooked bacon and served Master Harte his breakfast eggs and rashers. A morning greeting squeaked its way out of her mouth. The Master appeared to lavish the majority of his attention on the morning newspaper. Just as well, after last night’s unnatural events. They’d deprived her of sleep, they had. Did the other servants know about them strange happenings? Her fingertip itched to tap the sleeve of Master Harte’s suit coat. Surely real flesh and blood now lay below.

  The newspaper rustled. The Master turned another page. Black-and-white headlines facing Eleanor declared the latest goings-on in and around London. The temperance ladies stirred up a fuss in Kensington. Parliament argued about the cholera outbreak in Whitechapel. Anarchists had rioted near Hyde Park. No obvious front-page reports of unexplained disappearances of hands or arms.

  “I have a research project in the library this morning,” Master Harte said. “It can’t wait until Parker’s return.” He folded his newspaper, until it matched the size the delivery boy had left upon the front door stoop an hour ago. “You would be of great service to me if you kept notes.”

  “The library, sir?” The room had to be daemon possessed. Why couldn’t the Master wait until his valet got back from London? ‘Twas him who sent Parker to the city in the first place. “Yer sure about going in there so soon?”

  “Most definitely,” he said.

  “Then,” Eleanor said, “I’d be... pleased to take notes for ye.”

  She was not at all pleased. Not anyhow, but wouldn’t say so. Her fingers rubbed her elbows. What if one of her arms disappeared? Best she bring along a tankard of beer?

  “The stroke of nine it will be then,” Master Harte said. He cleared his throat and slipped a folded piece of paper—the size of a calling card—into Eleanor’s hand. “In the library.”

  A message? Eleanor dropped the paper into her apron pocket, then poured Master Harte more tea. Dared she read this note in the kitchen? She didn’t want Mrs. Blake, the cook, to start rumors about special attentions. The upstairs and downstairs maids, neither. She was a good girl, she was.

  “Nine’s a civilized hour for a project, sir.” She curtsied. Better than eleven at night.

  Master Harte grinned, like he knew a secret she didn’t. That note? Serving tray in hand, Eleanor hurried toward the kitchen.

  <<>>

  “Beware the nine.” The warning scrawled on that piece of paper from Master Harte still rang in her brain like parish bells before a funeral. He hadn’t written the message. The pen strokes wasn’t bold enough to be his. She patted her apron pocket and opened the library door. What was the nine the message mentioned? The hour of nine?

  “It’s safe to enter,” Master Harte called from across the room.

  “Yes, sir.” How could he be so blooming sure? Regardless, she wouldn’t step anywhere near that stain on the carpet.

  Inside the wood-paneled library, a variety of brass and wooden instruments rested upon the drafting table. Compass. Level. Only an inventor could know what all them other items was. Master Harte motioned her toward the desk, which held a typewriter.

  Brenton Parker—the most accomplished gentleman’s gentleman in Brighton—usually served as his scribe. Parker was attending to an errand up in London, but he’d taught her a little shorthand so she could fill in when necessary. She hadn’t mastered the letter clacker, though. Her fingers was so slow.

  Master Harte picked up a stick with a wheel on one end. He paced this way and that, the wheel of the upright stick clicking as it rolled across the floor.

  “Bookcase to desk,” he said, “three feet seven inches.”

  Oh, the thing was a measuring device. Now Master Harte called out the size of several angles. He stepped on the stain and gave her another reading. An estimation of where half his arm had gone the night before?

  Beware the nine. A shiver crossed the back of Eleanor’s shoulders
. Might the number of feet, inches and degrees add up to a multiple of nine? How could any sum of numbers make a body part appear to vanish? How could spilled stout set things right?

  “That’s enough, I think.” Master Harte rested his clickstick against a bookcase.

  Eleanor translated her shorthand, her two index fingers typing on a sheet of paper. She removed the sheet from the clacking machine and laid it on the drafting table. Master Harte cupped his palm around his chin. Over and over, he mumbled what she’d recorded. The first finger on his other hand traced imaginary lines on the table’s surface.

  “Just as I thought,” he said. “No theme of nine in my measurements. Wasn’t in the other place either.”

  In the other place that tried to get him?

  “In what place, sir,” she said, “would that be?”

  “Our London house,” he said. “In my bed chamber.”

  “Oh.” A blush warmed her face. A good thing he’d not asked her to take notes there.

  “Holes, that’s what caused it,” the Master said. “Rare cavities in the air around us. Something like painted-shut windows suddenly opened.” His finger tapped the typed paper on the table. “The holes can be closed when nothing blocks the way. Stout seems to have the right combination of alcohol and organics to do the job.” He frowned. “Trouble is, I don’t know if those openings lead to individual little pockets or to a huge foreign world in a separate dimension.”

  Such talk of a separate dimension. More likely, the matter involved malevolent spirits or a passageway to the devil’s den. May heaven protect all the folks at Brighton House—even Mrs. Blake, whose scolding voice reminded Eleanor of crows.

  “Mrs. Blake knows a medium, sir.” Actually, the cook knew a variety of odd folks who might prove helpful. A strange one, that woman was.

  “We’re dealing with science.” Master Harte scratched his mutton chop. “Not the supernatural.”

  “Science, sir?”

  “Chemistry and physics.” He gestured toward his instrument table. “I suspect someone plots against me, but I don’t have the foggiest notion why. Unless they think I’ve stolen one of their inventions.”

  A plot to do him in? A mystery, this was. Eleanor straightened her apron. At the market square, she’d overheard talk about Scotland Yard. Inspectors solved mysteries by asking questions. If she came up with clever questions to help Master Harte, maybe he’d reward her with important responsibilities.

  “That warning about the nine,” she said. “Where did it come from, sir?”

  “A stranger,” he replied. “One of the temperance ladies outside the liquor shop up the street from my club. About your age.”

  “Do any of the other servants know about all this?”

  “I doubt they know much.” He winked. “We ought to keep things that way.”

  A bell clanged. The front door. The noise gave Eleanor a start. Master Harte hadn’t mentioned expecting visitors. Her fingers inspected her bun. Her hair seemed in place. Footsteps and voices grew louder.

  “I’m relieved to see you, Jeremy,” the gentleman in the library doorway said.

  The stocky toff—still wearing his elegant woolen greatcoat and leather gloves—brushed past the household footman and entered the library. Pallor covered the stranger’s face, as if he’d seen his own specter in the hallway mirror.

  “I’m sorry about barging in this way,” the visitor said, his voice shaky. “But I’ve some rather untidy tidings to report.”

  “My God,” Master Harte said. “You look appalling.” He ushered his visitor to a leather chair, then turned toward Eleanor. “Fetch a shot of brandy.”

  Eleanor hurried over to the liquor cabinet, all the while straining her ears to catch tidbits of conversation. Had someone else misplaced an arm?

  “Your valet,” the visitor continued, “brought those drawings of yours to the club yesterday evening. We were all quite eager to study your proposals for protecting the city water supply from cholera contamination. I fear the epidemic spreads beyond Whitechapel already.”

  So that’s what Parker was up to. Eleanor carried the snifter of brandy to the distressed gent, careful to avoid the untrustworthy patch of space near the main bookcase. She set the tray on the table beside him. He had two hands visible and could jolly well pick up his own glass.

  “Get to the point,” Master Harte said. His hands, tensed as wound-up clockwork, clutched the lapels of his suit.

  “Parker,” the gentleman said, “set your document case down on a table. He poured himself a pint of stout.”

  The toff raised the brandy toward his mouth. He drank not a drop and returned the glass to the tray.

  “And?” Master Harte said, his voice pinched.

  “Parker vanished,” the visitor said, “as the clock struck ten.” His palms pressed against his lowered face. “‘Twas like the poor chap was never there.”

  Parker gone? Not just half his arm but all of him? Done in forever? Eleanor let out a wail. Blimey. She was loud enough to jelly live eels.

  <<>>

  A live eel was the last thing Eleanor wished to drag about London today, but that was the way it worked out. Mrs. Blake had a favorite market and a mouthful of reasons for her to buy an eel there. Master Harte, off to investigate Parker’s disappearance, had ridden with her on the train into the city. Thus Eleanor now stumbled along cobblestones while cart vendors in her path hawked their wares. Her burlap sack wiggled. She sighed. Poor Parker. Most likely dead, he was. How could the cook care about stewing an eel?

  Flies buzzed everywhere. The stench from rotting fish in passing carts overpowered even the stink of manure. Eleanor’s head and feet throbbed. Would be nice to visit Master Harte’s inventors’ club and rest in an overstuffed chair. A pity the place didn’t welcome women, except to do the cleaning. You’d think the wallpaper would peel from floor to ceiling if a lady crossed the bleeding threshold and sat down to sip a cuppa tea. Rules was rules, though. Nothing to do but wrestle with this eel while the Master sought clues about Parker.

  Parker was—or had been—a clever sort. Well, not clever enough. Had whoever nabbed him expected Master Harte instead? Then raced down to the Brighton coast upon discovering the mistake? That was over forty miles. Nobody could have traveled from the club to Brighton House in an hour. And no God-fearing magician would make a man vanish into another world. The blame had to rest upon devilry or evil spirits, no matter what the Master claimed. No wonder he hadn’t brought the bizarre details straight to Scotland Yard.

  Eleanor reached the train station, the eel in her sack still thrashing about like a cat in the wash. Some eels could live for days out of water. At least she’d picked out a right fresh one.

  “Ticket to Kensington Station,” she told the station clerk.

  She set down her sack on the floor and fumbled in her purse for money, giving the man in line behind her—a fellow with a greasy black beard—a wary glance. His shabby houndstooth greatcoat fit like it belonged to a shorter bloke. Stolen? A good thing she’d sewn that secret money pocket into the lining of her coat. She paid the clerk. Her purse was empty now, except for her handkerchief. She tucked her ticket inside.

  Time to pick up her sack and board the train. Her hand reached for the drawstrings. Spiny teeth snapped at her. They missed. Almighty Lord of Heaven. The eel’s slimy head protruded from the top of the burlap bag, the beast’s lower jaw longer than the upper one. Them drawstrings had come loose.

  “Need ’elp, Miss?” the houndstooth man said. He reached toward the sack without waiting for a reply.

  “Do take care,” Eleanor said. The swollen cut on his brow suggested a recent scrap. He’d better not make a grab for her purse.

  Something about this bloke was familiar. Had she seen him in the fish market? Had he followed her? God, she was jumpy as the eel. The business about disappearing arms and people unsettled her senses.

  “Ye just got teh know,” the stranger said, “how teh ’andle a wiggler righ’ and
proper.”

  His meaty hands grabbed the sides of the bag and shook the eel back into place. He pulled the drawstrings tight and knotted them. His dark complexion made him look part gypsy. Was he in this for a tip?

  “I don’t have money to spare,” Eleanor said, accepting the bagged eel from the man. She smiled even as tension clenched her innards. “But thank ye, nonetheless.”

  “Oh, I got me reward enough,” he said, and stepped up to the ticket window.

  What an unexpected reply. Eleanor lifted her squirming charge and boarded the train to Kensington. A faint ticking sound puzzled her. A fellow passenger’s pocket watch? Now something whirred. She glanced behind her. No one followed.

  <<>>

  The underground train rumbled toward Kensington Station. Only a couple stops left to go. Eleanor would meet Master Harte on the front steps of his inventors’ club. They’d return to Brighton by carriage, as planned.

  On the seat beside her, the eel sack wiggled. That stranger in the ill-fitting greatcoat still unsettled her. All manner of evil characters roamed London. Whatever took Parker likely had wanted Master Harte instead. Could the houndstooth man have bewitched this eel-in-a-sack in order to do the Master in? She should jolly well leave the bleeding thing on the train when she got off. Then tell Mrs. Blake to buy eels only in Brighton.

  “Ye got no righ’,” a woman’s brash voice said, “teh take up two seats when a lady needs one of ’em.”

  Eleanor looked up. A pair of round blue-gray eyes separated by a thick nose glared down at her. Two painted lips, redder than holly-berries, pinched together. The thick powder on the woman’s face crinkled. A tart. Despite her fashionable ostrich-plume hat and fur-trimmed coat, this woman wasn’t no lady. Not at all.

  “Ye best take the window seat then,” Eleanor said. “I’m getting off soon.”