by Ava Morgan
Less than ten feet away, a shower of sparks sprayed from a hunched figure.
Abigail clambered back, tripping on the hem of her skirt. Sparks continued to fly, reaching the stairs. She slapped at them as they landed on her dress.
The cellar retuned to black and stayed that way. Abigail blinked rapidly in the dark to make the starbursts from the blue light dissipate from her eyes.
Where was the hunched figure? Did it see her before she retreated? She listened for footsteps. Nothing. But the person knew she was there. That’s why the light stopped flashing.
She twisted to find the railing. Light suddenly engulfed her as the lamps in the cellar came on at once. Abigail looked up to a figure looming over her with large, black, empty eyes. A cry rent through her throat before the figure raised a big hand and peeled back its face.
Dr. Valerian’s familiar intelligent features and keen eyes appeared. His finely etched mouth drew a hard line. “Are you lost, Miss Benton?”
The remaining starbursts fell from her eyes. She saw his protective leather duster, gloves, and welder’s mask. A workbench and table were situated to his right, a small portable coal burner on the floor. The frantic fear she experienced moments before fizzled to chagrin.
“Of course you’re not lost,” he answered for her, “Curiosity got the better of you and so you found your way down here.”
“I saw light flashing. I heard noises.”
“From welding instruments. I’m constructing a component for an existing device.” He peeled the gloves and duster off next until he stood before her in his normal attire of shirt, pants, and waistcoat. “But tell me, exactly what was it that you expected to see?”
He had every right to react the way he did. She intruded upon him. Anything she said now to defend herself would come out foolish and unjustified, so she opted for speaking the plain truth. “I don’t know what I expected to see.”
“Graveyard spoils and lightning conductor coils, perhaps?”
“I’m not one for macabre horror stories, Doctor.” Abigail finally let go of the iron railing. “I’m in the wrong, I know, but I wished to learn why you spent so much time down here. You never seem to rest.”
“Are you concerned for my health now?”
“What an odd question.”
“It’s called sarcasm, Miss Benton. You’ll find it typically employed in situations where one’s boundaries are encroached upon.” He returned to his workbench. His walking stick rested against it. “To ease your concerns, this is where I start constructing my ongoing projects. I have one now that must be completed by spring. That’s why I am at constant work.”
Abigail came down to the cellar floor again. The foundational level of Dr. Valerian’s house was a craftsman’s work area, with cutting tools, hammers, welders, and rivet guns of varying sizes lining the cork-boarded walls. Shelves housing an assortment of glass bottles and storage containers rested in the back corner. Another large shelf gleamed with raw materials of steel, brass, and copper. “Is your project for a patient or client?”
“Neither. It’s for a scientific agency.”
The loftiness of his statement gave Abigail pause. What could he be making? “Did your former assistant work on it, too?”
“No, this is very new. Besides, my former assistant didn’t dare to even venture to the cellar without being accompanied.” Dr. Valerian tilted his head for a moment to regard her. “Which I can’t say is true, in your case.”
Abigail saw the hard line of his mouth soften, one corner slightly raised. One minute he was angry, and the next he seemed to be laughing at her. She folded her arms, frustrated. “Does my daring amuse you?”
“It hasn’t escaped my notice. You’ve shown yourself to be persistent and inquisitive. In other realms of society, such traits in a woman would be scorned.”
Surely he wasn’t drudging up this tired bit about her sex again. Abigail ventured to ask, “And in your realm of science and medicine, Doctor, what would be the conclusion of your findings about me?”
Her challenge made him scrutinize her. “Such traits lend themselves useful. I cannot have a timid assistant.”
Perhaps she didn’t wreck her chances of keeping this job after all. “Does that mean I’m to remain in your employment?”
“I promised you an answer at the end of thirty days. The day isn’t over yet.” He picked up a small hammer and chisel and went to work on a fist-size chunk of rock.
He was going to force her to wait. Abigail took a seat on the bench across from him at the table. He didn’t object. She noticed a saucer on the far end of the table, along with an empty teacup. The saucer bore the crust of cinnamon bread.
“Did Maria inform you that I liked cinnamon bread?”
She’d been caught staring. “No. Was it satisfactory?”
“It was very good. Thank you.” And as abruptly as that started, it ended as Dr. Valerian launched back into chiseling. “This is cast iron that I’m preparing to put into an armored device,” he explained. “It has properties unlike any other composition of iron as we know it.”
She watched him chip away at the cast iron before she reached for the sketchbook and pencil on the table. “Do you mind if I use this to make notations?”
“Go ahead, if you can find a blank sheet.”
Abigail flipped through the pages. Sketches of various armament and prosthetic models filled the book. A few she recognized from seeing in the display cabinets in Dr. Valerian’s practice, but most of the drawings were very rough conceptual designs. Eraser smudges and hastily scrawled notes filled the edges of the paper.
“As you can see, the design stages are much cruder than the end product. You said you did some sketching as well.”
“I do sketch, but I don’t remember saying so to you. Was it before you hired me?”
“The time wasn’t important.” Dr. Valerian waved dismissively. “How would you rate your ability to draw?”
“I don’t say this to boast, but I believe I can fashion presentable drawings. I usually do them from memory.”
“Show me.”
Abigail found a blank page in Dr. Valerian’s sketchbook. She took the pencil and made a rough sketch of one of the prosthetics in the display cabinets upstairs. The process took several minutes. She presented it to Dr. Valerian. “Do you recognize this?”
Dr. Valerian studied the sketch. His eyebrows lifted. “That’s the prosthetic device for Mr. Carney’s hand. You sketched quickly, but the details are still there.” His eyes moved from the paper to meet her own. “I’m impressed.”
Abigail became strangely bashful under his frank and steady gaze. “Thank you.”
Now,” Dr. Valerian said, picking up a piece of the cast iron he chiseled, “this metal is from Aspasia, an island nation near Greece. The Aspasians have used the iron for centuries, but it was recently discovered that when an automaton is built with this combination of iron and copper alloy from the same region, it can interpret sound.”
Abigail put down the sketchbook. “I knew metals conducted sound, but what do you mean by interpret?”
He picked up another piece of metal. It was reddish-gold in the light. “If crafted properly, these metals make a mechanical device register vocal commands through resonant vibration. Somehow, when particular tones and pitches are recognized, the device reacts. No one yet knows why the metals can make it do this, but I have a theory that the soil properties where the metals are extracted play a role.”
All she could do was stare at him.
“I knew you’d be skeptical.” He offered an accepting smile that produced in her an interesting inner excitement. “I was, too, at first, but I tested my theory. You remember the ether solvent I ordered from the apothecary.” Instead of waiting for her to respond, he rose from the bench and walked to the back of the cellar. Abigail followed him.
He removed a box from the shelf and withdrew two stoppered vials. “I added one drop of solvent to these cast iron samples. See how the Asp
asian iron’s components were broken down compared to the locally sourced iron on the left.”
Abigail peered into the vial. The iron had liquefied under the solvent’s harsh chemicals to subsequently solidify into a penny-sized corrosive mass. The edges had a prismatic effect of light blue, green, and violet. She turned to the local iron sample. The ether solvent reduced it to a flat mass as well, but its corrosion was the normal ruddy color of rust. “I do see the difference.”
Appearing pleased to hear so, Dr. Valerian returned the vials to the shelf. “Just think, Abigail,” he didn’t notice that he addressed her by her first name, “if I could find a way to embed the Aspasian metals into armor and prosthetic devices. A weapon could discharge upon an assailant with just a word. Or in the case of prosthetic limbs, instead of the harnesses and springs used to maneuver them, a voice-responsive metal could make for ease of movement.”
“Your patients would be enthralled by the improved use of their devices.”
“Yes. Very.” He looked down momentarily at something on or near his right leg.
She couldn’t tell what it was.
“But you said this project was for a scientific agency.”
“Correct. Once a working weapon is complete, the Cabinet of Intellectual Curiosities will let its agents test it.”
“I’ve never heard of such a Cabinet.”
Dr. Valerian returned to the worktable and began putting the Aspasian metal samples away in a box. “The COIC doesn’t engage widely with the public. It’s comprised of inventors and scholars who seek objects of scientific value.”
Abigail turned over in her mind what she just learned. “Like the automatons from Aspasia. And now your work with mechanical prosthetics.”
“Yes. When the Cabinet learned of my practice, they commissioned me to not only build a weapon, but find how the Aspasian metals worked when worn on the body as opposed to being within an automaton.”
A British agency, a relatively unknown Mediterranean island, and the astounding properties of supposedly ordinary metals. It all sounded like strange fiction. Hammond’s words about Dr. Valerian came back to Abigail: He’s an eccentric.
But eccentricity didn’t have to be the bedfellow of instability. Abigail wanted to give Dr. Valerian the benefit of the doubt. “When in the spring does the COIC want this project?”
“The third week of March, to be exact.”
“That’s not much time, considering all that must be done. But aren’t you scheduled to go to the college today?”
“The college is still on holiday.” He looked at his pocketwatch. “Today we’ll visit the laborer’s hospital near St. Giles. This is the final rounds of the practice that you haven’t seen. But we must leave now if we’re to be there on time.”
And before Abigail could catch her breath, he whisked her away from the ether solvent experiments, rough sketches of mechanical armor, and unfinished welded metal.
Chapter 10
Now that he told Abigail a little about the COIC project, Jacob wondered what she thought of him and his practice. Maybe he should have waited to see how she handled herself at the laborer’s hospital first.
Jacob looked at her from across the surgeon’s ward, where she talked amiably with a patient at his bedside. Already those in the ward had warmed to her pleasant demeanor, which was good. The men and women, and sometimes the occasional child, that found themselves within the hospital’s crumbling brick and plaster walls needed to see a friendly face.
Life inside a laborer’s hospital was overcrowded and grim, with frequent need of cauterizations and amputations from factory machine accidents. Outside the building, a few blocks within the parish of St. Giles, life was grimmer still. Even after four years of traveling through it in order to care for the hospital patients, it never failed to unnerve him that progress brought with it so much poverty and filth.
And pain. Jacob looked away from Abigail and finished changing the bandages on a female patient’s arm. She gave an agonized moan, even with the small dose of morphine he administered to her. “There’s no sign of infection, but if the area of amputation continues to bleed, it will have to be cauterized again.”
Her eyes, glazed over from pain and medication, produced a veil of tears. “I can’t take much more.”
“It is an ordeal,” Jacob acknowledged, quietly. “But you must do what is necessary.”
“You got two workin’ hands. Look at this.” She raised the bandaged stump of where her right hand used to be, and promptly let out a sharp cry.
“Madame, please.” Jacob helped her ease her arm back down upon the bed. The dingy threadbare bedcovers rose and fell with her rapid breathing. “You must keep yourself reposed so that you can heal.”
“I was one of them silk weavers at the mill.” She turned her head away from him on her thin pillow. Her brown hair, cut short for her to work around machinery, matted with sweat against her neck. “Got my hand caught in the loom and now I’ve got no way to care for my wee ones. My husband’ll be next. He works in the mill, too.”
Heaviness fell across Jacob’s shoulders. Nothing could be said to console her. He knew from experience how trite and useless even the most well-meaning words of comfort could be, especially when the pain of losing a limb drove a searing hole through the mind’s ability to cope.
“I will help you.” He hoped that she still listened. “With every resource at my disposal, I will help you and the other patients in this hospital to regain their health.”
“But not my hand.” Her bitter, mournful words were muffled against the pillow.
No, that he could not do. The silk weaver, poor and already living without, was now forced to sacrifice more. Jacob rubbed his leg at the knee, where the straps securing his mechanical limb dug into his skin.
The subtle warmth of vanilla rose above the hospital’s smell of unwashed linens and its ill inhabitants. A gentle touch fell upon Jacob’s shoulder.
“She’s in much pain,” he said to Abigail, as she approached a rolling cart near the silk weaver’s bedside. “The hospital won’t receive another shipment of morphine until tomorrow.”
Abigail gave a solemn nod. She took a clean cloth from the cart and dipped it into the cart’s attached water basin. “I’ll stay with her while you visit your other patients.”
Jacob picked up his medical bag and went to the next patient’s bedside, wishing he had brought his own supply of laudanum to the hospital. It wouldn’t have been nearly enough for every patient in the ward, but it would have offered some respite for those suffering the most.
He checked the new patient’s vitals as he heard Abigail speak to the silk weaver in gentle, dulcet tones as though she were her own mother or sister. She applied the damp cloth to the woman’s fevered brow.
Jacob finished making his rounds at the ward at six o’clock, one hour later than he expected. The hospital windows showed the backdrop of the paper mill and garment factory buildings. Between the steam and soot clouds billowing from their roofs, the sky darkened from gray afternoon haze to a brown dusk.
He needed to get Abigail out of that part of London before nightfall. Assistant or not, there were certain parts of the city that were very unsafe for women after hours.
Jacob took his bag, coat, and walking stick and went to find Abigail. She was at the front of the ward, walking alongside a mill boy who was learning to maneuver on crutches. “It’s six o’clock. We should be getting back to Bloomsbury.”
Abigail helped the boy to his bed before she put on her coat and joined Jacob at the hospital door.
Outside, the temperature and the late hour had sent most people indoors, including those leaving the day shifts at the factories. Jacob viewed the street from left to right in search of a hansom cab to ride. None were to be found. He tapped his cane against the curb, regretting his continuous lapse in punctuality. “It looks as though we’ll have to walk until we find a cab, Miss Benton.”
Abigail buttoned her coat up to her neck. �
��The cold isn’t as bracing today.”
“It’s not the cold that concerns me. This quarter is dangerous at night.” Jacob cast a glance at the nearest gas light as an automaton lamplighter wheeled along and, raising half its body with the use of a metal ladder apparatus, lit it. The automaton’s gears creaked as it lowered itself down and went forward. It repeated its procedure on three more coal gas lights on the row before the street settled into a gritty dimness. Additional illumination was provided by the glow from fires that stoked the machines of the mills. The automaton rolled along to complete its task on the next street.
Abigail watched it depart. “At least the streets are not crowded. That is in our favor, isn’t it?”
Across the way, two men stumbled out of a drinking establishment. They turned their faces towards the hospital, and then lingered on Abigail.
“It’s time we leave,” Jacob said, maintaining eye contact with the men to let them know that their presence did not go unnoticed.
He felt Abigail slide her hand into the crook of his arm. She took his medical bag and fell in step with him. The two men continued to watch until they were up the street.
Jacob gripped his walking stick defensively as he moved first around the corner. The street itself lay bare before them, but three men stood huddling along the sidewalk. They walked past a waif and an old woman who warmed their hands over foul-smelling flame, stoked with rubbish. The boy looked up at them with large sunken eyes. The old woman sneered.
“Leave ‘em be, lad. They’s better’n us.”
Abigail shook her head and moved as though she were going to search her reticule for some coin. Jacob stepped into the street, taking her along with him.
“Why did you do that? She wouldn’t have hurt me.”
He waited until the three men passed by. “Giving money at this hour only draws more attention. Didn’t you learn that during your missions to India?”