The universe wasn’t static: it was expanding!
***
Phibes waited in the darkened room for a few more minutes before he made his exit. Overton and his brood were nowhere in sight but he hurried out of the Museum anyway and reached South Kensington Station just in time to catch the train back to Bermondsey.
He was standing in the crowded car when the pain came upon him suddenly and very stiff, like some plank had been shoved up under his ribs. He knew the warnings. Was his heart just now registering that two-years-ago inferno? He should have died on that Alpine road. Was he dying now?
He was hanging onto a strap and swaying with the speeding car like a regular. The pain grew razors on it with each bounce. Is this how a vampire feels when they drive in the stake?
He tightened his hold on the grip. His hands were sweating and he wanted to sit down but the cane back benches were full. The pain was grinding into his ribs. One more stop. Just one more stop!
Then Bermondsey Station arrived and he rushed out the door ahead of the others, racing up the stairs to where it would be cooler.
But it wasn’t. The sun had burnt through, warming the pavement underfoot. Three blocks to go and the pain was still stuck under his ribs but there was no other pain and his breathing was good.
He wanted to sprint but the sidewalk was crowded so he kept his pace just ahead of the others but not too fast to cause a stir.
The scars, always the scars were stinging him now, cutting into his ribs like burning matches.
He jumped into the pool as soon as he got home, crashing into the ice- cluttered surface with a large Crack!
Vulnavia had gotten it ready for him. Thank God for Vulnavia! She knew what he needed and when he needed it.
The cold water covered his agony while he drifted around on the surface. The chunks of ice bumped against him, softened now with the melting. The pain drifted away in the cold. Calmer, much calmer now, his mind returned to the Universe.
SWIMMING
He was in the pool. He’d been coming there every day for the past three months but the pain did not slacken. When he got up in the morning, it felt like he’d been lying on a bed of shattered mirror glass, the big pieces more like cleavers than shards. He didn’t walk about like he used to, the tube ride back from the Science Museum too sharp in his mind. He went motoring with Vulnavia instead. Piccadilly, raucous Piccadilly was a favorite destination.
The pool was in the basement and for structural reasons had been positioned directly under the ballroom on the main floor. At 30’ x 20’ it is larger than most private pools in London, of which there are very few anyway. The English like to go to the south of France to escape the cold or, for the economically-minded, to Spain's Atlantic coast where St.Feliu is a favorite haunt of civil servants.
Judge Maldine had himself commissioned #5's pool, it being one of the dividends of his instructions to the architects to be ‘inventive’.
Bathing for the average 19th century Londoner was a weekly chore, to be suffered through as quickly as possible. In this latter-day Industrial Revolution, where the steam-powered British Railways on land and the Grand Fleet at sea assured England its eminence as a Great Power, household plumbing was still in its infancy.
Even in the early 20th century, most households still favored that relic of the 19th, the copper tub. Bath-taking was an arduous chore that involved heating and transporting several kettles of boiling water from the kitchen to the upstairs bathroom. This task was assigned to the bath-taker's family or, if he or she lived alone, had to be borne by the individual.
The far more delicate task of getting and keeping the bathwater at just the right temperature was only fleetingly successful at best. Epsom salts helped the water keep its stringency but did little to shorten the time it took to bathe. Few citizens could spare the 4 or 5 hours out of their workday, which left proper hygiene to the leisure classes and to the very poor, the latter living in rank hovels where several families shared a single bathroom (and were responsible for keeping it clean as well!)
Public baths were a popular if somewhat unsavory alternative. And then there were the athletic clubs which catered mostly to young men.
The water in #5's pool took its color from the light blue tiles that lined its sides and bottom. The Judge was in one of his expansive moods when he approved this costly addition. No doubt he was still enthralled with his vision of a ’toney’ Bermondsey. These days, the chunks of ice tossed in by Vulnavia gave the water a green tint. Phibes enjoyed the soft knocking of the ice blocks as he paddled about the surface. After half a dozen laps he could feel the pain ebbing from his skin, the bobbling ice chunks having a lulling, soothing effect.
One night, it was eight o’clock, he’d gone down to the pool for his second dip of the day. Phibes didn’t know how she did it but Vulnavia had already loaded the ice blocks in and they were bobbling musically when he arrived.
He dove into the water on the deep end, slicing the surface cleanly and angling downward at 45 degrees to touch bottom 12’ below. The rush of bubbles, the pressure impinging on his eardrums, brought him back to the North Pole.
His skin seared at the memory, unbearable after two years. Devotion and yearning aren’t enough to mend love's permanent loss. What must be done? Thinking rapidly and in ever-shorter bursts, he soon dozed off, awakening later – it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes – to the murmurings of the ice.
He floated in the dimness, the ice blocks slipping along his sides. And there was something else,
Singing. Something catchy. He’d heard that voice before. Sophie! He climbed out of the pool, straining to hear it again but the song was gone, lost in the babbling ice blocks. Only the memory was left.
MAIL
The Royal Mail Service made 12 deliveries per day in the 19th century. This rapid exchange let bakers know when the flour shipment would arrive so they could fire up their ovens. Lovers could track the pulsing of each other's hearts. And of course the Industrial Revolution surged unchecked thanks to this postal rapidity.
One chilly March morning a locked pouch was delivered to #5 Maldine Square during the day's second mail run. It bore the indicia of the British Foreign Service.
The pouch was on his desk when Phibes arrived in his study later that morning. Mail rarely came to #5 and when it did, it was usually sent by tradesmen soliciting business. Payment to the contractors who did work on the building was handled by Barclay's.
From the dates on the indicia, the Service had been trying to track him through his various duty stations although at some point they must’ve known that he’d already retired.
Don’t let one hand know what the other is doing. This cardinal rule of the diplomatic corps apparently applied to the mail room.
The letters - half a dozen in all - were written during the time of Victoria's admission to St. Thomas’ Hospital. Reassuring at first, they quickly took on a tone of immediacy, the physician's reserve giving way to ‘you would do well to come as soon as convenient’. The final letter, sent one day after she died, offered regrets and sympathy. Phibes crushed it in his fist and was about to toss it in the trash when he noticed something else in the pouch. It was a leaf from a prescription pad belonging to Sephardim Rastgeldi, MD. Scribbled on it but still legible was a single word: hurry!
Phibes knew Rastgeldi from his service days. The two men had met while Phibes was assigned to the Calcutta Duty Station. Their friendship was spontaneous. They socialized, the tall diplomat stiff with his English reserve and the wiry public health worker, hopping about like a sparrow with the happy intensity of his mission. The two could talk about everything and did, from the crowded Calcutta streets, home to a third of that city's residents, to Buster Keaton's rubber face. Even then Rastgeldi, still in his 20s, had sired three children. And his wife could already be described as a substantial matron, but one who was sublimely proprietary about her husband.
It was his embrace of domesticity that certified Sephardim Ra
stgeldi's trustworthiness.
Phibes visibly contracted at Rastgeldi's warning. A medical emergency is certainly reason to hurry but was there another reason? Was Rastgeldi trying to tell him something, something about the hospital, the surgical team, or both?
They’d had no warning. Victoria's recent physical offered no surprises. She was just 25 and her tennis game was good enough to get her seeded in the regional tournaments. They’d been talking about returning to the States so she could get her degree, a move that was shelved when Victoria was offered an internship at Sadler's Wells.
Did Victoria have to die? Did she speak up? Demand a second opinion? (And if she did, why wasn’t she listened to?!) The agonizing thought - that all could’ve been prevented in favor of a more conservative treatment had the letters caught up with him in time - tore Phibes apart.
Victoria alone in the hospital, waiting for him to come to her aid - her growing despair, her helplessness - it was too much! Tears flooded his face.
This man who had no voice grew speechless!
The study door opened slightly. Vulnavia paused on the threshold, waiting for his permission…
HENRI VESALIUS
The WWI battlefield achieved the greatest artillery concentrations ever recorded in military history. The massed cannon and machine gun fire sent up a literal firestorm of steel that shredded the enemy attackers as soon as they left their trenches. Wounded men survived for hours, even days after being hit, only to die from shock because the medics could not get to them in time.
A bullet wound is clean, and direct. Shrapnel tears off limbs and crushes bones. Both are fixable but first you have to stop the bleeding to keep the victim from going into shock. With a kill zone several hundred yards deep, medics were just as likely to be killed in the heat of battle as the infantry.
And like the regiments they were attached to, few medical teams survived the war intact. They had to be extremely fast with both their hands and feet, dodging the shell bursts and, once they got to the fallen man, stanching the blood flow, performing amputations on the spot where limbs were too badly mangled.
Henri Vesalius was fast on both counts. A short-distance track star at the University of London before the war – 400 meters was his specialty - he could cover a lot of ground very quickly. But it was his running style, low to the ground instead of upright like most track men, that made him a difficult target. He ran short bursts full out, pitching into the fallen man on the run and opening his kit as he knelt. He was already probing the wound when the other members of his team arrived.
Henri Vesalius was at the Somme on July 1, 1916. Wounded twice he stayed on the battlefield, where he's credited with saving the lives of 28 wounded men, some of them close to the enemy wire.
Vesalius served out the war with the same unit he’d enlisted in. ‘Stay with what you know’ he would later say to his colleagues when they pressed him about his service. At war's end, Henri Vesalius was awarded the Victoria Cross, one of the few medical corpsmen to be granted that honor.
Phibes knew the name from his from his military service. Vesalius’ exploits on the Somme were the stuff of legend - in a battle that was larger than legend! Of the 100,000 British soldiers who entered the battlefield that morning, 20,000 didn’t return. Some units, like the 1st Newfoundland, had ceased to exist.
If survival means testing the fates and believing you can win, Henri Vesalius was daring enough to do just that. And now Phibes was seeing his name again - in a letter relating to his wife's death in surgery, a surgery presided over by Dr. Henri Vesalius.
THE
WORKOUT
The Maldine Square Park is deserted this morning as it has been for the last fifty years ever since the perimeter fence was built to keep out the local drunks and other undesirables. Since then the park has been largely unkempt except for a few patches of sod, these donated and tended by some good-hearted neighbors, proof that civic spirit survives in the most unlikely of places, hard-bitten Bermondsey being our current example.
The park is open during the daytime hours. Locals may apply for a key at the borough forester's office. The rules on the application are quite specific: the key is to be used solely by the key holder and not be lent to anyone else. The park is open between 6AM and dusk which, at this latitude, falls between 5 and 7PM depending on the season.
This morning the regular symphony of birdsongs is pierced by whistle bursts - short, long, shrill, deep - these cadenced by massed feet on the sod.
And there, peeking through a gap in the privet, we see a group of early risers going through the paces of their morning work-out. Twists, knee bends, touch toes, each set punctuated by a ten brisk one-handed push-ups, show this bunch to be no amateurs. Their faded sweats, blues, reds and grays, further attesting to their athletic prowess.
We’ve seen them before, down at the Canary Docks and more recently on the bandstand at # 5 Maldine Square. Stix the Drummer is today's whistle-blower. Shorter than the others, his broad shoulders and big hands make up for the deficiency. He is very concentrated on his task.
Twist, bend, touch-toes, this bunch could hold their own in any gym.
Vulnavia and Sophie are watching them from the sidelines. Sophie is also in her work-out togs this morning even though she's been a spectator ever since the accident that forced her to stop singing.
Several weeks have gone by since then. Phibes checked and re-checked his work. Following his visit to the Science Museum, he did a complete breakdown of the Difference Engine, discovering the 2” discrepancy between her height and that of the other musicians. After a painstaking set of calculations - which would’ve taken over a year if done by hand - he recalibrated Sophie and returned her to her place on the bandstand.
This evening celebrated their reunion. The sparkle sign above the bandstand said “I’m Back!” over a glam image of Sophie in silhouette. Her life-size cameos were strung up all around the ballroom. To kick off the event, Phibes thundered up from the basement atop the hydraulic lift, a silk topper rakishly perched atop his noggin, pounding out a jazz fanfare on his pink Plexiglas organ, the Wizards strutting out onto the ballroom floor to join in on the chorus.
The lights dimmed, went to dark. There was that low movement of chairs, of shifting instruments, the blackness suddenly pierced by the tightly cadenced sound of many shoes tapping. Now a tight-angled beam threw a spot on the solitary mike at stage center. Sophie, gorgeous in a red pointillist Chanel, stepped into the light and started to tap in counterpoint. Her cameos swarmed around her to form a chorus line and, with Sophie in the lead, tapped it out:
Yes! She's Back!!
At the end of that high energy welcome, Sophie returned to center stage where she coyly grasped the mike, smiled and started to sing - but no words came. She bent the mike closer, trying to find her voice but finding nothing instead.
Stix saved the moment by taking her arm and leading her to the piano. There, lifting her onto the piano cover, he sat down at the keyboard and broke into “…didn’t he ramble, didn’t he ramble…etc.”, the band and the organ driving it home. Sophie smiled and was mouthing the words at the finish
CHICAGO
SOUTH SIDE
Miss Josefowicz was a dour and cheerless young woman who’d been assigned to him upon his arrival yesterday morning. And who was now going through the relaxation segment of his visit before he caught the 20th Century Ltd. back to New York at 11 that evening.
The whole day had been spent with municipal officials, an enthusiastic bunch of native Chicagoans who were eager to show the Europeans their best Water Management Practices (BWMP).
‘Bwamp’ as they called it (alphabetizing being an American strong suite) had the extensive and detailed plans for the Chicago River, the filthiest river in the world. And it would stay that way as far as anyone could see if these vapid numbskulls kept their hands in the effort.
The river tour ended promptly at 5. After taking their leave, Phibes and his escort hailed a taxi. Let's go
to the Loop, she offered, her voice tinted with a sliver of excitement. That’ll give you time to window shop and we can grab a bite at the Stockyards Inn afterwards. Howzzat sound?
He’d been to the Great Lakes Region twice before and knew that the locals liked to run their words together, probably, he reasoned, that talking in the frigid winters had its limits. But tonight was a balmy 70's and the breezes coming off Lake Michigan carried the remnant convections of the day's heat.
He knew from the hotel's calendar that Bud Freeman was at the Club Alexandria this week. His mention of this 63rd Street club took Miss Josefowicz by surprise. But she quickly recovered and nodded primly at the cabbie as he turned left on Stony Island and headed down to the South Side.
Club Alexandria wasn’t just another juke joint. Headliners played there along with new acts on their way up. Billie Holiday made a point of stopping by when she was in town.
The band was in their second set by the time Phibes and Miss Josefowicz arrived. Most of the tables in the small room were filled. Freeman was one of the greatest sax men of the era and judging from the hush in the room, plenty of his fans were in the audience tonight.
Fannie (that was her name) asked for a stinger as soon as they were seated but Phibes knew better than that and ordered a couple of bottles of Canadian Ace instead.
Wasn’t that Al Capone's brewery, said Fannie, rolling her eyes. Phibes didn’t know whether it was or not but the beer came to them with a nice frost on the bottle a habit which, for the life of him, he could never understand.
Englishmen take their beer at room temperature because they like to taste what they're drinking.
A bowl of popcorn came with the beer, one of those big wooden salad bowls painted over in a forest theme: brown trees with orange leaves.
Dr. Phibes in The Beginning Page 8
