“Many,” she said. “A world of questions.”
He grinned his patronizing grin. “There are only so many hours in the day.”
“I have no engagements pressing.”
“Ask your questions, Miss Savage. I will answer what I can, short of treason.”
“What did you do to Sebastien de Lacey?”
He laid his cup down. “That . . . is a complicated question.”
“It’s a simple question, actually. It is the answer that proves complicated.”
“Yes. You are quite right.”
She arched a brow and waited.
“What did I do to Sebastien de Lacey? Hm. Let me think. I repaired his broken skull. I waited for him to speak. I trained him in his vocation. I introduced him to a world in need of his skills. I loved him like a son.” He smiled again. “Which of these would you like me to account?”
“All of them, sir. In sequence.”
“Ah. A policeman’s daughter, yes?”
“Hm.”
“When I first met Sebastien, he was a little boy and very naughty. He was a stubborn, willful child, constantly pushing the boundaries of his parents’ rules and the limits of their affections. I was not surprised to hear he had fought his father the night they died. He was such a child . . .”
He trailed off, remembering. Ivy gave him that.
“They tried everything for him, those ‘physicians’ of Lancashire. He should have died that night, but didn’t. As I said, he was a very stubborn boy. But his skull was fractured here . . .” He made a motion over the back of his head. “And here . . .” Another motion. “The brain had swollen and pushed the meninges through the bony matter. He did not die, but neither did he awaken. The things they did I can only imagine. It borders on butchery. So after three weeks, they bring him to me. They think he will be this way for the rest of his life and so, where else do you bring the vegetables, the refuse of humanity, but to the sanitarium. Keep them alive but away from society. Unseen, unheard, invisible.”
He could be speaking of her mother, she thought. He could be speaking of her very life.
“So, I start with his brain. The surgeons had been trying to keep it together, so I do not. I remove large parts of the skull, allow the tissue to swell without constraint. Naturally, it does, and after a few days, it shrinks back, satisfied. So, I leave it. I know I can repair the plate with aluminium later. I must let the brain do what the brain needs to do. For the most part, he sleeps. For weeks, he sleeps, but soon, his skin is pink again, not grey, and I know he will live. But he doesn’t wake. I know I need to stimulate the brain, so I insert wires into the tissue and run small electric charges into the parietal and occipital lobes.”
“You sent electrical charges into a little boy’s brain?”
“Compared to what the other physicians did, Miss Savage, it was a blessing.”
She set her jaw but said nothing.
“So, finally, after several treatments, he wakes. He wakes, but he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t blink. He just looks. Looks here, looks there, looks right through you. He looks at you the same way he looks at a stick or a chair or a wall. Nothing registers. Nothing matters. Nothing except Mumford. Now Mumford is different. He looks at Mumford, and I know this is special.”
“Who is Mumford, sir?”
“Mumford is a toy, Miss Savage. A knitted dog made for him by his mother at his birth. I wanted something from his old life for his new one here, and Mumford was the thing I was given. He would go nowhere without Mumford, and when he finally did begin to speak, it was to Mumford. And it was in Latin.”
“Latin? You taught him Latin?”
“I did not teach him Latin, Miss Savage. I taught him English. Well, Czech first, but then English. It was almost a year before he began to speak and when he did, it was Latin.”
“How did he know Latin?”
“I believe that is the language Mumford speaks.”
“Mumford. The knitted dog Mumford.”
“The very one.”
She blinked several times.
“Oh yes, I do know how this sounds. But I am telling you the truth. I patched up his skull with large plates of aluminium, stretched the scalp as much as possible for the hair to cover it. I wanted him to have at least a chance of looking somewhat normal, but he was a very different boy then, Miss Savage. Very different.”
“How so?”
“Excuse me.” The man reached forward to the china service on the ottoman, poured himself a second cup. He sat back, sipped thoughtfully.
“Yes, he was different. Everyone could see that. A bright, articulate, but strange little boy.” He smiled again. “And he has been that way ever since. But he is happy, for the most part. And that, I think, is good.”
“Do you not think him mad, sir? Christien is quite engaged in the study of the brain, and he insists his brother is . . . is . . .”
“Schizophrenic?”
“Yes,” she said. “That was the term. A splitting of the mind.”
He smiled, but the same thin, patronizing grin as before. “Have you ever seen a cat watch something that was not there, watch it so intently that you were convinced it was seeing something?”
She had to admit she had seen it, although she did not have a particular fondness for cats.
“It was said cats could see spirits, Miss Savage. For the longest time, they were thought to be magical animals, in touch with a realm few humans could see. Of course, now with our understanding of the scientific world, we know this to be impossible. And yet, how many of us can see with the eyes of a cat?”
“What are you saying, sir?”
“I’m saying that it is impossible to see like a cat if one is not a cat. For whatever reason, now and ever since the trauma, Sebastien sees with the eyes of a cat. He sees things no one else can see. Terrifying things. Otherworldly things. Spirit things.”
“But how can he see this, sir? He has the same eyes he had before, undoubtedly.”
“Ah yes. A skeptic. But that is a very good question. I don’t know, Miss Savage, why Sebastien sees the things he does. Up to this point, he has not given me permission to dissect his eyes. Insists he needs them still.”
She could well imagine Frankow dissecting someone’s eyeballs and wondered if Castlewaite had ever paid a visit.
“And the cold? The frost?”
“I cannot say, Miss Savage. When he is in communion with these ‘spirits,’ all manner of strange things may happen.”
“Communion with the Realm of Departed Souls,” she said, looking at the fire for a moment before looking back. “You were a founding member of the Ghost Club, yes?”
“Ah, you know this too. You are a good detective, Miss Savage.” He sat back in his chair but did not cross his legs. She wondered if he could. “Yes, I was a founding member of the Ghost Club.”
“But no longer.”
“No longer, no.”
“And why did you leave?”
“That is a long story.” There was the familiar whoosh-thump sound of the pneumatic pipes. He smiled at her. “Another time, perhaps.”
And he rose from his chair, the gears and pulleys in his legs moving like pistons. He retrieved the capsule, pulled the spectacles down onto his face, and read.
He turned to her and his eyes loomed larger than life.
“He is stabilized and has been moved to the recovery theatre. Would you like to see him now?”
It sounded so personal, as though she were a wife or a lover, that she should be invested in this man somehow. But she could not stop the rush of her heart.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, I would.”
He stared at her for a long moment. “You are a brave girl to be following him on his adventures.”
She lowered her eyes, wondered if he could read her thoughts. “Not brave, sir. Merely stubborn.”
“It is the same.”
She watched him as he stepped first one foot then the other into the flat plate of w
heels. They clipped over his feet with a snap. He whirred toward the door and went through without even a backward glance. She sighed and followed, closing the door behind her.
Chapter 24
Of Mumford, a Levitating Man,
and a Kiss in the Infirmary
DESPITE THE NAME “Recovery Theatre,” Ivy was hard pressed to determine why anyone might elect to recover there. Like the rest of the infirmary, it was entirely metal, and green kaleidoscoping lights did little to improve the mood. In fact, the lighting was curious, and as she moved closer, she realized that these were not ordinary gas lamps. They were obviously the work of a glass blower and she thought they belonged upstairs, not in the dungeon-like confines of the infirmary. She could feel Frankow’s large, bespectacled eyes on her, so she turned by way of asking.
“It is a Geissler tube,” he said. “And you are quite right, Miss Savage. It is simply a piece of beautifully blown glass. However, if you coat the inner surface with mercury and run an electrical charge through it, it creates the most beautiful display of lights. Soothing, yes?”
Frankow wheeled towards a pair of steel doors, where a uniformed man was sitting at a desk. His brass pin read “Carl Feigenbaum” and he was tapping out a message on a telegraph. It was curious, and she wondered what a hospital orderly would be doing that warranted a telegraph. He did not look up at them, but punched a code into a hex-key panel on the wall behind his desk. The double doors shuddered and swung inward.
She was surprised to hear music playing through grilles in the ceiling. It was the sound of a carnival organ grinder, pleasant-sounding at first, but oddly disturbing, and she looked at Frankow again.
“Music is therapy for the soul, Miss Savage. It helps our patients recover so much more quickly.”
He smiled proudly and she shook her head. Green kaleidoscopic lights and carnie music. Frankow had strange ideas for therapy.
Beds were lined up along the copper wall, and it made her stomach churn to see the Mad Lord on one of them. He was clothed only from the waist down, and there was a brass brace holding his right arm across his chest. Tubes ran into and out of his body, and red and clear fluids in bell jars were suspended from the ceiling. His mouth and nose were covered in a silver respirator and she could see his breath fog the glass plate. The respirator was attached to a large cylindrical tank, and gas hissed as it flowed into the mask.
At the foot of the bed was an automaton—the first she’d seen here. It was attached at the base of the bed via a lever that allowed it to access all sides. Now, it sat at the foot, watching. In the shadow of the robot lay a brown knitted dog. It had long floppy ears, understuffed legs, and wooden buttons for eyes. It was well-worn, had been patched repeatedly, and was the most human thing in the room.
The infamous Mumford.
Frankow had moved to Sebastien’s side and began to move his fingers across the bandaging, lifting, tugging, checking.
“The projectile went in here, just under the clavicle, and lodged at the scapula in his back. It was a clean shot, all things considered, but took some of the waistcoat and shirt into the wound. I must say, wool and linens are tricky to remove. They have long fibres that get caught in the tissues and quickly turn septic. He is a lucky fellow to have had you to help him.”
Despite the man’s clinical exterior, she could see his eyes, grossly magnified through the spectacles. He was staring at Sebastien as a father might stare at his own child.
“He has never been shot before,” he said softly.
She lowered her eyes, not wanting to tell him that he might not have been shot at all had she not been in the room.
“But he will be fine, yes?”
“Yes. He will be fine.”
“Can you fix these?”
She reached into her vest pocket, pulled out the black-rimmed spectacles.
“I, I stepped on them earlier . . .”
He took them, looked up at her over the rim of his lenses.
“You, Miss Savage, are a calamity.”
He pulled a pocket watch from his vest. “Would you like to see your mother now? It is currently one-forty. We shall find her outside.”
One-forty in the afternoon. So strange. She had lost all track of time.
“Yes, thank you. I would like that very much.”
He looked at the automaton. “Otto, notify Carl once he awakens.”
Green lights flashed across the faceplate. “Affirmative, Doctor.”
“And then we can arrange a coach to take Miss Savage back to Lasingstoke.” He began to wheel out of the room toward the double doors.
“Oh, no, sir. I mean to stay.”
The doors swung outwards, but he slowed, then stopped. He did not look back.
“You mean to stay . . . here? At Lonsdale?”
“Yes, sir. That is precisely what I mean.”
“But your brother?” He spun around on his wheels to face her. “Doesn’t he need you?”
“Davis is a very independent boy. He spends most of his time in the company of Cookie’s daughter.”
“He will not be making any more explorations of forbidden houses?”
“No, sir. He remembers nothing of the incident, but I am quite certain he will not be going back. I am not needed at Lasingstoke.”
He moved closer.
“He could have died, you know.”
“Yes, sir.”
And closer.
“And for Sebastien to have helped him the way he did . . . He could have died as well.”
She swallowed. “Yes sir.”
“The women of Seventh are very angry.”
He was so close now that he reminded her of the sisters Helmsly-Wimpoll, and his eyes were the largest things in the room. She could only imagine what he was thinking, but she raised her chin a little, determined to bear up under his scrutiny.
“You will need a change of clothes . . .”
“I’m fine wi—”
“We have a wardrobe room upstairs. You are welcome to anything that might fit you. We also have many, many sleeping rooms. Again, you are welcome to any of them. I will have Agnes Tidy show you the way.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I will also have Carl send a telegraph to Rupert at Lasingstoke. They may be growing worried.” His eyes flashed over her again, taking in her now wild hair, boy’s breeches, and muddy riding boots. “Then again, they may not.”
She did not know what to say to that.
With that, he whirled and rolled toward the door, pointing a finger to the sky.
“Back up to the sun, Miss Savage! Up, up, up! Once more into the breach . . .”
And then he was gone out the double doors. Ivy stayed a moment longer before following.
THERE WAS A grey fog that had settled over the Abbey above Wharcombe Bay and Ivy found herself grateful for the warmth of the peacoat. How anyone could possibly be cured sitting outside in weather like this boggled her mind, but she had to admit that even the fog was a welcome change from the rust and gloom of the Infirmary.
There were five people outside that she could see. Agnes Tidy was pushing a man in one of the wheeled chairs. He was perhaps forty years old, quite thin, and she could hear his breathing from where she stood.
“Mr. Home,” said Frankow, but he pronounced it Hume. “He has the tuberculosis. Many of our patients come here for the cure.”
She nodded. Consumption was a terrible disease, killing most who contracted it. The toxic Pea Soup fogs of London, Manchester, and Birmingham were notorious culprits. Those who could afford it would retreat to sanitaria such as Lonsdale, where large doses of fresh air, moderate exercise, and good food could often stave off the symptoms for years. She was surprised the Abbey wasn’t full on account of it.
Her eyes wandered to a table, where another nurse sat with a wild-looking young man. His hair was very dark, uncombed, and longer than hers. His moustache and beard were tangled and his eyes darted about as if watching a swarm of bees. Suddenly, he sp
ied her and rose to his feet, making the sign of the cross and shouting in a strange tongue. To Ivy, he looked the very definition of the word insane.
“Grigori is new here,” said Frankow.
“Grigori?”
The man snatched a stick from the dining table, began to lash it backwards across his neck and shoulders.
“Yes. Grigori Rasmussen, Rastafarian, Raspberry . . . Something like that. At any rate, Grigori comes to us from Pokroyskoye, Siberia. That is in Russia, Miss Savage.”
“What is he saying?”
“Oh, that. He is calling you the Virgin Mary.”
“How odd.” She found a grin tugging at her cheek. “Why is Grigori here at Lonsdale? Does he have the consumption as well?”
“No. He stole a loaf of bread from a church, so they sent him here as penance.”
“I’m afraid I don’t believe you, sir.”
His spectacles whirred and clicked. “He is calling you the Virgin Mary.”
She smiled now.
“Aha. We are finally getting somewhere. He is here, Miss Savage, because of two reasons. One, he is believed to be a clairvoyant mystic and his government is afraid of him. They wish me to confirm or disprove his claims and two, because he cannot die.”
“He cannot die?”
“That is what I said.”
She took a deep breath, thought a moment.
“I do not see with the eyes of a cat,” she said finally.
As they continued their tour of the grounds, there was the sound of flapping wings, and Ivy looked up to the roof of the Abbey. She could see a young woman, almost a silhouette, with pigeons on her head and shoulders. She waved down at them and Ivy recognized her as the young woman from Frankow’s office.
Frankow sighed. “I’m afraid Sebastien was quite right. Not even the cowboys of America are prepared to handle our Lizzie. Oh look, over there. A breakthrough . . .”
Agnes Tidy was talking to Mr. Home as he rose to his feet and took a few steps. Smiling, he raised his arms up to the sky.
And began to rise from the ground.
Ivy blinked. The man was rising from the ground. He was smiling and rising from the ground. One foot, two feet, a yard now, and higher. She couldn’t believe her eyes. The man was at least ten feet above the ground and far below him, Tidy was clapping her hands.
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