Immanuel laid her against the bed of wild flowers before hauling himself onto the grass and dragging her onto the bank. Leaning close, he patted her cold cheek, which had blanched to the color of her dress. Her lax, blue lips refused to move or draw a breath, yet behind her ear was the sprig of forget-me-nots. He touched her face and shook her shoulder begging her to return to consciousness, but her body and face remained still. His heart raced as he touched her neck, feeling his own frantic pulse against her artery. No beats of blood fought against his fingers. Finally Immanuel put his head to her breast, but the familiar tug and pull of life were gone.
“Hilfe! Please!” he cried desperately toward the faceless picnickers as he picked up her listless form, but with the dense brush between them and the chatter, they couldn’t hear him. Tears burned the backs of his eyes as he helplessly held her against his chest, wishing someone would hear his pleas. The right words escaped in a stifled shout, “Someone please help!”
The woman’s head lolled over his arm, and as it rolled, her hair wrapped around the chain of his pendant and nearly pulled it from his neck. The necklace. Carefully laying her down again, he uncorked the vial but hesitated. Could he trust his ancestors or was the potion merely a family hoax? Immanuel looked from the murk to her lifeless features. It couldn’t hurt her now even if it was poison. Then again, if his mother said it could save him, then he had to trust that it would.
He reread the words incised into the top, cruor. He needed blood. The scientist quickly checked her body but found it to be pristine. Rushing over to his art supplies, his wet shoes slid out from under him and sent him to his knees. Immanuel scrambled to his bag for a pen. The moment it was in his hand, he dug the nib as hard as he could into the skin of his palm. With a final twist, the blood hesitantly dripped from the shallow wound. He removed the top, his eyes stinging with the astringent odor of the brew, before letting his blood trickle into the milky liquid. The fluid bubbled as the red droplets spread and with their invasion came the sweet smell of honey. Immanuel carefully supported her head as he poured the fizzling potion between her lax lips. Voices broke through the trees as he called out again for help, waiting and hoping that what his mother told him was true.
Then, he felt it. His pounding heart seized. The chambers froze one after another until his heart, for the first time since the womb, stood waiting for the spark of life. With a final exhalation, all the air seeped from his lungs. Had he forfeited his own life to save hers? Immanuel hung precariously on the verge of darkness as every muscle froze. When the sound of voices ceased, his fleeting thoughts turned to death. At twenty-one, he never thought he would recognize death with such clarity. A shudder passed over him as thousands of minute fibers prickled through his body and skin like a spider’s web. The moment the last thread escaped, his heart jolted back to life and his lungs inflated. He doubled over, catching his breath, and watched the girl’s big eyes fly open in pained confusion. Water gurgled up from her throat as Immanuel patted her back to sooth her ragged coughing sobs. His body shook with spent adrenaline, leaving only empty fear. The scientist stared at the empty vial and then at the woman. There was no plausible explanation for what happened, but at least they were both alive.
“Emmeline! Emmeline!” her mother cried as she clasped her sunhat to her head and sprinted toward the young man cradling her daughter. Only when she drew near did she see the pink of their flesh shining through where the river had reduced their clothing to muddy veils. “What happened?”
“Mama,” the young woman called from Immanuel’s lap as she tried to stand but fell when her shaking legs gave out. Tears mixed with silt streamed down her cheeks. “I fell in.”
As the other Spiritualists reached the river, Immanuel gathered her up as best he could with his quivering arms and handed her to the blonde man standing beside her mother. The gentleman’s honey eyes narrowed as he searched Immanuel’s features before coming to rest on the empty vial at his feet. Emmeline’s mother embraced her weeping child, coaxing her into quiet with consolatory promises of her safety. She closed her eyes as she pressed Emmeline’s damp face to her breast and held her against her heart, feeling the weight of what could have been. Finally, she let her go, and the gentleman carried her daughter back toward the tables on the other side of the trees.
“You saved her?” the woman asked as she worked a handkerchief in her grasp but never brought it to her eyes.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Staring into his eyes, she rested her hand on his damp shoulder. She studied his face to ensure she would always remember the boy who rescued her only child when she could not. “Thank you.”
***
Professor Elijah Martin’s bald pate bobbed from behind his rose bushes as he spotted his favorite student ambling down the road. As the young man grew closer, he realized the German’s hair was plastered to his brow and his shirt was askew and wrinkled as if it had been wrung out.
“Mr. Winter,” he called as Immanuel made his way to the iron fence, “you had better get to the dormitories before you catch your death! Did you get into a spat with one of the Turner boys?”
“No, sir,” Immanuel replied with a smile as he futilely wiped his damp face with the back of his equally wet hand.
“Did you get pushed in by a young lady?” Knowing the answer, the old professor continued playfully, “I know some girls punish young men who get cheeky with them.”
“No, sir.”
“Then how did you end up sopping wet?”
He hesitated, unsure if he should tell his mentor about the potion or his brush with death for fear of being laughed at or thought mad. After all, there was no scientific explanation for it. “The spirit people who are always at the evolution lectures were having a picnic by the Thames. I was doing my sketches for class, and a girl fell in.” He looked down at his drenched clothes but avoided the empty space on his chest where his necklace had previously been. “I helped to pull her out.”
Professor Martin nodded thoughtfully. “You completed your homework and saved a damsel in distress all in the same day. Well, Mr. Winter, you had better get back to the dormitory before it gets dark and more trouble finds you.”
“Good night, professor.”
“Wait, Immanuel.”
The young man quickly backtracked to the front gate upon hearing his name.
“I recently received a shipment of walrus bones for the museum. I expected them to be clean or at least close to it, but instead they sent me an entire walrus carcass. I could really use an extra set of hands for a few weeks, and of course, I would pay you for your help.”
His eyes gleamed to a brighter shade of blue. “I would love to, sir.”
“Good. Meet me tomorrow night after dinner at the natural history museum, and we can get started.”
Chapter Two:
Alchemists and Pinnipeds
The cathedral of knowledge spread out before him. A forest of steel trunks rose toward the heavens, branching into soaring vaults and arcades of striated stone. A lattice of glass covered the ceilings, allowing the sun to illuminate the mysteries and curiosities of nature. Immanuel stood between the wooden reliquaries as Professor Martin closely examined the bones one more time to ensure there wasn’t a single speck of rotting pinniped left on them. Bile rose in his throat as he remembered the smell coming from the chunks of meat in the laboratory. For two weeks, he returned to the dormitories reeking of the foul, metallic odor of decomposition. After bathing and scrubbing his hands half a dozen times, he would lie in bed at night and smell the all too familiar stench of dead walrus wafting from his fingertips. The young scientist would never admit it to his beloved professor, but more than once when he was spilling out the maceration water from the bones, he could not help but be sick into his flower bed. Now that the bones had been stripped clean and sanitized with acetone, they were actually quite beautiful. There was something remarkable about watching a pile of offal transform back into a bow-legged, barrel-chested walrus.<
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What he still found disconcerting about the whole process was once when he touched the bones, something odd happened. It had occurred when he was carrying them inside after their final drying. Immanuel was quickly bringing them in before a rainstorm undid all his work and didn’t think to put on his gloves since the bones were no longer putrid. As he hefted the skull, a chill passed over him. Before his eyes stood a vast sea peppered with mirror-like patches of ice and a sky that touched the water. The whites and aquamarine blues melded to form one limitless sphere of creation. The wind lashed against his skin, tousling his hair and blowing through his shirt and vest as if they were nothing more than paper. The cold burned his face and arms as he stared into the mute, unending tundra, but when he blinked, the gentle patter of rain hitting his eyelashes and cheeks brought him back to Oxford. He had no idea how long he had been standing there while being in the arctic, but from that day on, he made sure to wear gloves while handling the beast to keep it from happening again.
“Well, Mr. Winter, I believe our friend is ready for some varnish. You start with the head, and I will begin with the tail.”
Immanuel dipped one of the brushes into the lacquer and carefully smeared it across the walrus’ skull.
“You can do it a little more vigorously. You can’t hurt what is already dead.” He watched as his student nodded and picked up his pace. “Now that he is finished, he needs a name.”
A small smile played on Immanuel’s lips. “Otto.”
The professor’s gravelly laughter echoed through the empty museum. “Ah, yes, Mr. Bismarck does bear a striking resemblance to a walrus, doesn’t he?” When Immanuel did not respond, he went on, “Are the other lads treating you any better?”
His student shrugged. “They aren’t mistreating me, sir. They don’t really bother with me. I do not like cricket or going to the pub after lectures. It is as much me as it is them.”
Elijah Martin looked up from the walrus’ tail at Immanuel’s pensive yet pained expression. The young man reminded him of the faces and figures in stained glass windows with each delicate and comely feature carefully delineated by an artful hand. His countenance brightened in the light drifting down from the crystalline roof, giving his hair and eyes an almost metallic sheen, but he had seen the same reaction occur during class as his eyes lit up in comprehension or pride when only he knew the answer. While the professor often met his other students in town, he only caught glimpses of Immanuel Winter on the lawn sketching or tucked away in the library with a massive tome and his hands clasped over his ears despite the silence.
“I am sure you do something enjoyable in your leisure time.” From the only response being the sound of brushstrokes, he assumed that was not the case. “Well, with your small, new-found fortune, you could at least see a play or go into London for the day and take the train back.”
“I have never been to London,” he replied softly as he dabbed the brush into the grooves of a vertebra.
“After three years, you still have not gone?”
“No, sir, I— I worry I will get lost without a proper guide.”
“One day when I go into London to visit my daughter, would you like to accompany me?” Professor Martin asked as he inspected his student’s handiwork. “I will show you the sites and make sure you can get back to Wimpole Street in time for dinner.”
Immanuel stared into his mentor’s pale green eyes, unsure if he could trust his ears. “Do you mean it? Wouldn’t your daughter mind such an imposition?”
He shook his head. “Not at all. She was a medical student herself and is married to a coroner, so you will fit right in amongst us.”
“Thank you, professor.”
Old Professor Martin couldn’t help but smile when his protégé beamed at such a small favor. Three years away from his family must have been hard on him. “Mr. Winter, take it from a man of my years, life is too short to be unhappy or alone for very long. You should go out and do what makes you happy.”
The younger man’s face suddenly darkened as he stopped the brush mid-stroke. “I wish more people felt as you do, sir, especially back home.”
“Is that why you left Germany? Because you were not allowed to do what you wanted?”
Immanuel turned away, hoping to suppress his sigh of desolation before it became audible. He couldn’t bear to tell him the truth. “I needed to leave to find out what really made me happy.”
“And what did you find?”
“Articulating a walrus makes me happy.”
***
Immanuel smiled to himself as he made his way across the lawns and between the medieval buildings, feeling the money from his professor jingle in his pocket. It was bittersweet to finish Otto’s skeleton since he enjoyed spending his afternoons with his mentor, but it would be nice to use the bit of money he earned to have a meal out or buy some new supplies. He wove between the throngs of students and strangers until he reached the massive entrance of the Bodleian Library with its gothic portal and school coats of arms. The warm smell of must and parchment engulfed him as he slipped inside. The cozy, cave-like atmosphere of the Bodleian calmed him on his worst day and had been his refuge since he arrived. The librarian barely looked up from his desk as the lanky, young German signed in and strolled toward a desk among the stacks. He wandered through the shelves searching for those who may be able to help him in his search. It had been weeks since the day at the Thames when the girl fell in and his heart stopped, but he couldn’t help but wonder what his alchemist ancestors created. Every spare moment was spent in the library researching what could have revived her. On a shelf of philosophers stood Magnus, Bacon, and Pseudo-Geber; all were men who sought to wholly understand life but, unlike him, took their studies toward the otherworldly. Immanuel hoped within their spines he would find the curious secret to what had been brewed and bottled in the necklace by his ancestors.
For hours he sat at the desk in solitude and silence with his hands covering his ears and cupping the sides of his face like blinders. Most of what he read made little sense, but as he reached the section on Albertus Magnus, his eyes lit up. Another German had made an elixir of life. He reread the words, but they refused to sink in. The lapis philosophorum had the power to grant life. Immanuel’s eyes passed over the page until they reached the part about how it looked. The immature stone was white but would transform to its most potent form, which was red, with the addition of a reagent. The vial had been a murky milk until it morphed into a sanguine solution upon the addition of his blood. Could his mother’s forbears have left the lapis philosophorum for him as his inheritance?
When Immanuel finally surfaced from the massive volume, his neck was stiff and his hand was cramped beyond cracking. He sat back, clenching his eyes shut, but upon opening them, he suddenly noticed how dark the library had become even with the electric sconces. As he gathered up his belongings, a door opened in the distance, and the lights were extinguished. Immanuel quickly threw on his satchel and grabbed the book by Albertus Magnus to return it to the shelf when their voices rang out in the darkness. He peered around the edge of the bookcase, ready to yell to the librarian that he was still inside when his eyes fell upon three men in the shadows.
“Are you certain he is in here, Higgins?” asked the man in the middle, his voice deep and urbane.
“Very, he is the only one who has not left.” The second intruder’s voice vacillated nervously. “I should know, I have been outside for four bloody hours.”
“Keep it down, or he will hear you. I do not want to have to chase him. Higgins, go toward the back. Thomas, go check the shelves.”
Immanuel carefully padded backwards, keeping an eye on the shrouded men at the other end of the library as he darted toward the Seldon End. His chest tightened as he spun around, hoping to find a place to hide, but all he found was a dead end. He could hide under the tables, but even with the scant amount of light coming in through the windows, he would cast a shadow. Two pairs of feet were rapidly approachi
ng. One of the men called out that the stacks were empty. Immanuel’s heart pounded as his eyes fell on the catwalk above his head. Holding his breath, he inched toward the hall where the men were regrouping and noiselessly climbed the steps on the tips of his toes.
He flattened against the bookcase as the men came in and checked under the desks and near the shelves for any sign of him. What they could want from him, he couldn’t imagine, but he didn’t want to find out. From his hiding place, he watched the figures below move in the waning light. He didn’t recognize them as students or lecturers, and while they weren’t carrying cudgels or guns, it was clear they were hunting for someone. The two who were sent ahead stepped into the lantern light, revealing that they were both at least a dozen years older than he was and better dressed. The man who eagerly sought him under the long desks had a gaunt and haggard countenance with bulging eyes that darted nervously over every surface. The other was a stout man with spectacles, who appeared more fit for servitude or banking than crime.
As their leader emerged from the shadows of the hall, it became clear why they didn’t need to carry weapons. The robust man strode in like a Roman commander. He held his head high and marched past his inferiors. Immanuel swallowed hard as the man put his hands on his hips, causing his ribs to flare and push dangerously against the tailored fabric of his suit and waistcoat. As much as he wanted to monitor the men, he feared that if he looked at them directly, they would feel his gaze and discover him in his darkened corner.
“He isn’t here, sir.”
As the pudgy intruder spoke, Immanuel looked out over the railing toward the arched portal. If he could leap from the second floor and run toward the exit, he might just be able to outrun them, especially since he knew the terrain.
The Ingenious Mechanical Devices Box Set Page 28