She found herself in an emptier part of the building, long corridors of marble floor surrounded by portraits of imposing-looking men. There was some odd music coming from another corridor. Following the sound took her back to the landing of the main staircase, where both wings of the building united; she had to be more careful here, she was more in the open. And there it was, clear as the air, dark and still as the night. Somewhere on the right corridor there was a melody, and someone sobbing freely, two sounds mixing irrevocably together. She peeped in: another corridor, going down into the depths. A cursory look helped her ascertain which room the noises were coming from, behind a heavy-looking door of dark wood. The whining was more intense here, and she had no doubt that whoever was crying at that eerie music was doing so on the other side. Helena moved towards the next chamber, to find it locked. She took out a long hairpin from her hair that she tended to carry for such an eventuality. Picking locks was something Helena had learnt to do in Cambridge a long time ago, for her grandfather kept his library closed—due to a minor feud with the housekeeper, who showed no respect when cleaning and re-shelving the books—and that wasn’t going to keep her away from Melville, Shelley or Brewster. The familiar click told her that the job was finished, and she turned the handle slowly. Once inside, she sighed with relief: the two rooms had been connected, as she had expected on a building made up mostly of offices and meeting rooms. She went to the communicatory door, and put her eye to the keyhole, revealing the inside of the next room. That could only mean one thing: the key was not in the other side of the door. Congratulating herself on her good luck, she peeped through the hole.
There was a child of no more than sixteen years, hanging in the air. Perhaps this wasn’t an accurate description, as his feet were touching the ground. But his posture was all wrong, as if an invisible rope was hanging from his shoulders. She moved to get a better look: his feet were touching the ground, but only by the points of his toes. He certainly could not have had that posture without supporting himself on anything, so it appeared as if he was levitating. He looked unresponsive now, his eyes all white.
Next to him, on a chair, an elderly gentleman also looked unresponsive, his eyes white too. Unfortunately, she could not see the source of the music from her position, but she could hear it, a haunting melody, coming from some kind of flute.
During the few seconds she had been concentrating on the task, the sobbing had changed, and now someone was humming a tune. And now it was the old gentleman who started a quiet sobbing.
She got up, an odd feeling shooting up her spine as she attempted to interpret the horrid scene, but she had to double back quickly: two men were coming her way. She retreated once more into the empty room. She could now hear them clearly; they must be getting close.
‘You must know that I am doing all within my power—you absolutely should assure Madame Florence of this. Bévcar is not an easy man to keep happy—’
From her hidden position inside the room, Helena could see the two men: one was unknown to her, perhaps part of Bévcar’s inner circle. But the second man she knew well: Thomas Bunthorne.
‘Oh, Bévcar, Bévcar… The man is a bore, and I haven’t even met him yet.’
‘And you probably won’t!’
‘Yes, well. Look here, what I am saying is that you cannot keep using Bévcar as an excuse for not doing what we’re paying you to do. Surely you must see that.’ Bunthorne’s tone was conciliatory, if with a trace of impatience.
‘I know, I know—but surely you must see that I am risking my neck! If I don’t succeed, you won’t get what you want; but I won’t get to live another day!’
‘Very well, I see…’
‘What exactly do you see?’
‘You want more money. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?’
‘My dear sir!’
‘It’s time; the new vessel is ready. The longer we take, the greater the risk. We need to act, and act now, my good man!’
Helena retreated further into her room. Vessel? What was Madame Florence involving herself in? And what had Helena stumbled upon?
* * *
Back home, Helena sat at her desk, a pen in her hand, her head trying to order the pieces at her disposal. She had never liked this bit. She imagined enjoying it, for a change, to sit in a private compartment, perhaps, with only the moon for company, scribbling in her personal notebook while contemplating a beautiful landscape floating behind a train window. Or perhaps resting on a bench in the middle of the cheerful hubbub of a public park. Humanity going around on its important business of leisure, while she recounted her odd adventures. But this exercise in self-narration had never come easy to her. Helena had never been able to keep a diary, perhaps because her grandfather insisted on instilling the habit in her. But she knew that now it would be impossible to avoid it, that the many complications of the most mundane of lives might demand perhaps that act of retelling, of generating some order out of chaos, reaffirming existences as more than mortal creatures. The soft, cream-coloured pages of a journal giving the writer the wrong impression that they were like an explorer, charting some terra incognita. But the mundane does not allow itself to be tamed that easily. She could never gather the required energy to sit down every night like a dutiful girl, and recount her exploits. And now, even less. Curiously, the more interesting her days had become, the less Helena wanted to record them. There was darkness all around her. Even if the outcome was a happy one, the getting there was always messy; she had no desire to archive those abominations.
And now she had to put in writing not one, but two strands of separate investigations that she was following: the Matthews case, and the children’s vanishings from London’s poorer streets. With mounting dread, she found herself questioning why she had picked her chosen profession, only to give herself the same answer as always: it had chosen her.
* * *
At the time the Matthews children liked playing in ruins. Samuel Moncrieff ‘appears’, out of thin air, it seems, on that same fateful week—
She stopped—Samuel. What to write? How to write it?
Samuel Moncrieff is twenty years old, about to turn twenty-one. Therefore, he arrived at Mr Bale’s door the same year that the children went missing as a newborn. That is a fact.
Samuel Moncrieff was not a missing/stolen child, since no baby disappeared in the area (that I know of).
So far, no records of his being born that my associates have been able to find.
He has been raised by Mr Bale. Fact.
Helena did not believe in mediumistic writing; however, this exercise of letting her mind go, of scribbling as if some force directed her pen, had some similarities with the mystical science.
Mr Bale is good friends with Lady Matthews, so much so that she trusts him with her most intimate affairs. They were also partners in a business venture, a failed steam factory, up the coast, now an abandoned building—check this place. Is the factory really abandoned? Could it now be used for some criminal activity?
Samuel Moncrieff does not remember much about his family. Some hidden stain instinctively means that he would rather not ask. Is Samuel Moncrieff the illegitimate son of Lady Matthews and the house’s architect, Mr Williams? According to Scotland Yard’s records, the architect threw himself out of a tower shortly after the girls’ disappearance. Was he connected to the events? If Samuel Moncrieff is their illegitimate son, how is his sudden appearance twenty years ago connected to the girls vanishing? Could Lady Matthews have made the girls disappear so Samuel could inherit the estate? And after everything went awry, or perhaps out of guilt, she gave the child to Mr Bale to raise?
Helena wrote a thick question mark at the end of these last lines: they didn’t ring true. And she was getting side-tracked from the facts by questions she could not yet answer.
Everything ought to have a rational explanation; she could not, however, take out of her mind Lady Matthews’s words on the afternoon they met.
‘I know that t
here is more to the children’s disappearance than foul play.’
She sighed and started another page.
Possible connection with the case of the children’s disappearance: Madame Florence’s partner, Thomas Bunthorne, seems to be in cahoots with Bévcar and The True Dawn, even though they present themselves to the world as enemies. Why? Bunthorne mentions a ‘vessel’. Are children taken for this purpose? She stopped to think for a second. She resumed her writing.
However, how old is Madame Florence? Several accounts describe her as blonde; she is dark. It is possible that there is an innocent explanation for this. But why this word, ‘vessel’?
Bévcar is famous for his supposed ‘transmutation’ powers. Even if these powers are not real, is it possible that some people ‘believe’ in them, and hurt children in their quest for immortality?
She underlined heavily her last sentence.
* * *
It was curious, she thought, how science and spiritualism had always gone hand in hand with her. One of the things that Helena decided on the very moment the two Northern mediums left her grandfather’s house was to study medicine. Her grandfather had come to believe that the mediums were a fraud, and that they had tried to fool him. Indeed, she was able to ascertain that the pale apparition, the hand hovering over the table, had been nothing but a trick; and she could have proved it to him. But she and her grandfather did not always see eye to eye.
No one had told Helena, but the unconscious current of knowledge in the house had made sure she knew it: he was the one responsible for sending her mother away. Helena hated him for it, with passion. And if she hated something else passionately, it was agreeing with him.
And so it was that Helena kept the mediums’ little secret.
Somehow, it had been an early attempt at detection. And she had succeeded in unveiling the truth. She didn’t despise the mediums for it; on the contrary, she found herself admiring their ingenuity, how cleverly they made their living in a world populated and dominated by men like her grandfather. She rapidly took their side; after all, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of corroborating his opinions.
The only time they seemed to have agreed on anything was on her going to Girton. Her grandfather thought her a lost cause by then, and was very happy to see that she valued learning, and had the disposition. But the college saddened her a little: it welcomed her with its air of an abandoned asylum, and it was located miles from town, in order to discourage male visitors. Grandfather insisted on a classical education, and Helena could not escape this little compromise. She was already interested in what perception could achieve, in exploring the inner recesses of the mind, in knowing why people saw the world as they did. As soon as it was possible to do so, she started attending other kinds of lectures, other kinds of settings. Cabinets of curiosities, laboratories, experiments. She remembered well her thirst for knowing things, the endless nights of study by candlelight, how she couldn’t let something lie if it didn’t add up in her head, or if she didn’t understand it.
It was different now, so different. How much she would give never to have known, never to have learned certain things.
She knew it, she had always known. Even if no one had told her directly. That her mother had not died of a consumptive disease. That she had been sent away, by Grandfather, to a madhouse, where, alone and scared, she had committed a horrible sin, the most horrible of all; and she should rot in unconsecrated ground, and in the deepest circle of hell.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The child that Eliza had found catatonic in the marshes was now being looked after in her cousin’s house. As soon as he had seen her, Peter had commented on the similarities to another local case, someone connected with the big house. This had made Eliza curious.
‘They are looking for help, in fact. Mrs Burroughs, who looks after Dot, is getting on in years.’
This had spurred Eliza’s interest, and she had immediately volunteered.
‘I will put in a good word with Mrs Ashby. I am sure that they will be grateful for your help. Your scientific knowledge will come in handy.’
‘Thank you, Peter.’
Eliza considered her cousin the cleverest man around. She had confided in him her findings, both about the disappearing nature, and about the strange, sticky fungi substances, pale grey or green, that seemed to emerge from the fetid north coast.
At Eliza’s insistence, they had gone on a little expedition. This time they were prepared. They were both carrying old rags to tie around their mouths, to protect themselves against the putrid fungi in the ruined manor. They came to the other end of the little wall that surrounded the property, and descended in the direction of the sea. Eliza was trying to remain rational, to compose a map of the terrain she had covered in her head, perhaps. Measurable data. Certainties.
The road wound down to the marshes. A line of trees, forming a little shady avenue, also twisted its way down to the sea. So she went to find the marshes, the reed swamp, the open sea at the end. With the tide down, she could see the rhyolite. At the end, the midst resolved itself, and the old abandoned fortress appeared. And what was that? With the water so far out, so far back, they could make out a long steam-like arm, a metal contraction, ready to dig deep into the sea base. Eliza advanced a little to focus on the image, and her boots touched something soft and meaty. She looked down. It was a tern, dead on the floor. She held it in her hands; it was real, she was touching it. But, at the same time, she feared the tern ought not to be there of all places.
‘We have to continue, we have to get to the factory,’ she had said, although she was scared.
‘I am not sure that’s a good idea.’ Peter was collecting samples of all the fungi-like stickiness that he could get his hands on: white, grey, green, orange. ‘I am getting an awful headache; something here is not right.’
Once back, Mrs Hobbs served them tea by the fire. The day had turned strangely dark, but they were both thankful to have escaped the ruins.
‘The plague-wind, and the plague-clouds,’ Peter had said, quoting Ruskin.
‘You are absolutely right: men’s greed will never abate. It is obvious that something has been unsettled out there.’
‘Why men in particular?’
‘You are always quick at exploiting nature.’
Peter chuckled.
‘Well, why don’t you tell that to the women who wear plumage on their hats, or cover themselves with dead animals? And we all slaughter animals for meat!’
She knew he was right. Peter got up, rummaged in the bookshelf, found what he was looking for, and, rocking the little book in his hands like a naughty schoolboy, read:
‘It looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; very possibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys in a square of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men’s souls—such of them as are not gone yet where they have to go, and may be flitting hither and thither, doubting, themselves, of the fittest place for them.’
‘I find it very hard to believe that Ruskin believed in ghosts…’
He laughed. Eliza quoted, from memory:
‘An atmosphere of that gas would give to our Earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present an increased temperature from its own action as well as from increased weight must have necessarily resulted.’
‘Who?’
She rolled her eyes.
‘Eunice Foote.’
‘Ah! The very lady…’
‘I wonder if she meant, you know, there are more things in heaven and Earth… Ah! This is silly. Do you think that the factory disturbed some kind of pollutant in the seabed?’ asked Eliza.
‘It is possible. But what I don’t understand is why this is happening now: the factory hasn’t been functioning in years.’
There was no answer for t
hat.
* * *
Peter was as good as his word, and the next week Eliza received a letter from Mrs Ashby asking her to come to the cottage on the grounds of the estate where her charge was kept on that very night. Eliza got there on the appointed evening. No one answered her knocking, so she let herself in. Someone was crying softly, and she followed the noise to a little room, lit by the sad glow of a few candles. There was a bed, unused despite the late hour, a big wooden wardrobe, a chair and a table underneath the only round window, and an imposing dressing table with a huge mirror. In front of the mirror sat a young woman. Eliza calculated that she was probably in her early thirties, a few years older than her, with dark hair traversed by grey streaks. She was combing it with a repetitive gesture, almost mechanically, and her eyes were large and unseeing: although Eliza’s reflection covered the huge mirror as she advanced behind her, appearing in fantastical proportions over the reflective surface, she didn’t make any sign that she saw her, or cared about her presence. On each side of the dresser sat two huge vases filled with meadow flowers.
She moved with strange docility, like an old-fashioned doll.
‘Hello,’ Eliza ventured. The woman didn’t react. ‘My name is Eliza. Eliza Waltraud. I am here to help look after you.’ Nothing. But, what reaction had she expected? It did look as if the woman could not see her. She kept repeating the same languid gesture with her arms, combing her hair down. Eliza approached her, and saw the grey threads that sprouted here and there. She kneeled down next to her and tried to make her stop; she was cold to the touch, a coldness that disgusted Eliza for some reason. A little line of spittle was falling from one corner of her lips. Her eyes were too dark, as if her pupils were continuously dilated. Suddenly Eliza felt afraid of looking into that blackness. There was something odd in the scene, as if she were existing in a space and time different, and only her physical body remained in that room. As if she were beyond good, evil.
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