Cadaver & Queen

by Alisa Kwitney

  “Did you ask him?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “It was a strange evening.” Taking a deep breath, she described finding the Bio-Mechanical.

  “You can’t tell anyone,” she added. “I haven’t even told Makepiece that he spoke to me.”

  Byram leaned back on his elbows, blew out a plume of smoke and contemplated the cloud formations. “Well, then, you’re daft. You have one ally here on faculty. Don’t go risking that for the sake of some little science project.” He looked at her sharply. “Unless you’ve convinced yourself that this corpse walker’s got feelings.”

  “You’re making it sound ridiculous, but you weren’t there. He wasn’t like Igor. He seemed...aware. Intelligent.”

  “Like a dog? A good hunting spaniel’s aware and intelligent, compared to Igor.”

  “It was more than that. He told me...”

  “He actually spoke to you?”

  “Yes. He said that his head was hurting... I mean, not as clearly as that, but I understood what he meant.”

  “So he grunted something and you interpreted it? Goodness, he does sound like a genius.”

  “There was more to it.”

  “I’m all agog. Did he inquire about the county cricket championships? Request a copy of The Yorkshire Post? Or, no, wait—did he inquire after the health of the queen?”

  He was joking, but she felt prickly with unease. How much to reveal? “He told me to hide. Clearly. No slurring or grunting, and I did not imagine it.”

  “All right, then, for argument’s sake let’s just say he did. Any particular reason for this nugget of advice?”

  “We heard Makepiece and Moulsdale and Grimbald talking as they came to the laboratory.”

  Byram stubbed out the butt of his cigarette on a rock. “I see. And so you hid?”

  She nodded, uncomfortable. She hadn’t intended to confide this much, but having gone this far, it seemed easier to just continue. “It was very strange. Grimbald seemed, I don’t know, enraged at the creature. Upset. I got the impression that the Bio-Mechanicals aren’t really working the way they want them to.”

  “Interesting.”

  “And then they said... They said something about the queen. They’re bringing her in as a patient.”

  For the first time since she’d known him, Byram looked thoroughly shocked. “Are you certain?”

  She nodded, and suddenly she wanted to tell him the rest of it. “There was something else, too.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  The last secret seemed to jump off her tongue. “I think they might be intending to do something to the queen.”

  Byram stared at her for a frozen moment, then snorted and shook his head. “Well, I’ll say one thing for you, Lizzie—you’re never boring.” He pushed himself to his feet. “Come on, we might as well head back down.”

  “So, what? You think I’m crazy?”

  “I think you’re...imaginative. In a way that’s not particularly advisable for someone who wants a career in medicine.”

  “You’re right, I suppose.”

  “Of course I’m right. I mean, even if the heads of school wanted to turn the queen into a scrapper, she’s got guards and relatives and ladies-in-waiting all over the place. You don’t think someone would notice if the queen went to Yorkshire for a treatment and came back with bolts coming out of her neck?”

  “Maybe they’re in on it? Or they could give her a ruff to wear, like Queen Elizabeth?”

  “Fine. But even if they could get away with it, it’s not like we’re an absolute monarchy. We’ve got a prime minister, you know.”

  Now that Byram had spelled it out, she felt quite foolish. “I guess I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “Look, lots of folks are uncomfortable with the idea of Bio-Mechanicals. My own father threatened to disown me if I came to Ingold. I’m all for taking the piss out of the institution, but we can’t go spreading wild tales.”

  She waited a moment before following him across the gap. She had never been a part of anything before, and now she felt disloyal and stupid and more of an outsider than ever.

  As they made their way past the section of the wall where previous generations of boys had scrawled their names, she couldn’t help looking for the quote, its letters still fresh as if recently made: It is dangerous to be right in matters in which the established authorities are wrong. Perhaps Byram was right about the queen, but that didn’t mean he was right about everything. She felt certain that the Bio-Mechanical in the laboratory was something unique. If she could encourage him to speak, then he might prove to be the breakthrough that Grimbald and the others were seeking, and she would receive part of the credit. Of course, she might win herself more enemies than allies: she could not forget what had happened with the etheric magnetometer, turned up to its highest level by some malicious hand. Yet what else could she do? If she didn’t try something to change the status quo, she would wind up failing Gross Anatomy.

  This time, when she shivered, it wasn’t from the cold.

  14

  It was late in the day when she finally had a free period to check on the Bio-Mechanical.

  “Professor? Hello?” She walked slowly around the cluttered laboratory, but aside from the salamanders eyeing her from their glass aquariums, the room appeared empty.

  Then she turned, and there was the Bio-Mechanical, standing at his full and formidable height. Lord, he’s tall. Tall and unhappy. In fact, he looked downright menacing, scowling at her with his lank black hair half-hiding his swollen eye. She swallowed. The room was very quiet, and looking up at the Bio-Mechanical’s face, she tried not to imagine a newspaper headline reading: Female Medical Student Falls Victim to Homicidal Monster.

  No, that was ridiculous. Those were the sort of vaporish feminine fears that she loathed. She would not give in to them.

  “Hello?” No response, just that baleful, one-eyed glare. She stiffened her spine. “Do you understand me?”

  He gave a curt nod. For some reason, this made her feel less frightened.

  “Good. I’m here to help you.”

  He narrowed his eyes.

  “Honestly. You can trust me.”

  For a long moment, he didn’t move. Then his right hand came out, palm open. She took a deep breath, then placed her hand in his. It felt warm, and muscular, and absolutely human. Then, unexpectedly, he placed his metal-gauntleted left hand over the top of her hand, trapping her. She thought about how, in this moment, she was utterly in his power. But once I leave this room, he’s at my mercy, too, she realized. He has no way of knowing if I’ll tell what I know about him. And wasn’t that the definition of trust? I put myself in your hands.

  She put her left hand over his, touching the darker skin where it melded with metal. “Does it hurt? The graft?”

  He shook his head, looking bemused as she traced her fingers over the invisible seam that joined man to metal.

  “Can you feel it, though? Where I’m touching you?”

  He nodded, watching her fingers, so pale against his skin.

  “It’s amazing that there isn’t more nerve damage.” Suddenly, she realized what she was doing and withdrew her hands. “What is your name?”

  He struggled visibly to form a word with his swollen mouth, but what came out was a strangled grunt that sounded like “Vunh.”

  “Oh, dear. I couldn’t quite make that out. Did you say Van?”

  He tried again, and this time managed to get out “Vunh-uh.”

  “Vanner? That’s not really a name. Vance? No, it has to be two syllables.” She tried to think of other names that began with the letter v. “Vernon?” He shook his head. “Vincent? Virgil? Valentine? No, that’s three syllables. Vicary?” He blew out an exasperated huff. “Vittorio? No that’s also three.”
But he was nodding at her. “Yes? Is that it? Vittorio... No, not quite.” He was shaking his head again. “Am I close, though? Something like Vittorio?” For a moment, she wondered if he really understood anything she was saying, but then he made a gesture with his right hand she interpreted as meaning “go on.”

  “All right. Am I close? I’m close. Hmm, what’s like Vittorio? Vito!” She clapped her hands with pleasure, but then realized that the Bio-Mechanical was turning away, looking a bit deflated. “All right, not Vito, don’t give up...let me think... I was always so bad at charades.” She tapped her finger against her cheek, then looked up into that bruised, distorted face. “Vittorio is Italian for victory... Is your name Victor?” It seemed a cruelly ironic selection for a creature in his straits, but he nodded vigorously.

  “Well, then.” She beamed at him, and he grimaced back at her with his fat lip. “I am very pleased to make your acquaintance, Victor.” She went over to the side table and picked up her magnetometer. “You remember this, don’t you?”

  His left hand shot out, capturing her wrist and nearly making her drop the device. She knew he must be remembering the way he blacked out the last time she used it on him. But still, it did help, she thought. “I won’t hurt you, Victor. I’m a medical student, and I want to help you. Do you trust me?”

  He nodded. And after a moment, his left hand unclenched.

  “Good. Now, for what I have in mind, we need to stimulate your brain, not your arm.” With her back to him, she opened a wooden box that contained various configurations of carbon-filament bulbs and glass wands and electrical leads. “I’ll need to change this around... Oh, of course, the perfect thing.” Walking over to the Galvanic Reanimator, she removed the brass helmet and began unscrewing various pieces, and then reattaching elements from the wooden box so that now the wand was attached to a glowing glass semicircle. “That should work.” As she raised the magnetometer to his head, he flinched, and his left hand shot up to seize her wrist.

  “It’s all right, Victor. It won’t hurt you. I’m setting it very low.” She smiled, and his hand released her.

  She turned the dial, listening for the moment as the clicking noise gave way to a rising hum. Holding his gaze, she placed the glass on his head, disconcerted by the unexpected intimacy of touching him, unchaperoned by anyone other than Makepiece’s cat, who observed them from a windowsill for a moment before closing her eyes.

  * * *

  That was the first of many sessions.

  Miss Lavenza thought her device was painless, but she was wrong. Each time she passed the magnetometer over his neck, Victor offered up a small prayer, and remarkably, each time his left arm remained quiet by his side, the fingers sometimes trembling or tapping, but nothing more. Good arm. Perhaps it was a bit mad to think of the appendage as possessing a mind and will of its own, but there was no denying that, under duress, his Bio-Mechanical limb did seem to act of its own accord. In the Bible, Matthew admonished that “when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth,” but in Victor’s case, it was his left hand that seemed to make decisions independent of the rest of him. Yet for some reason, it allowed Miss Lavenza to do as she willed. Perhaps his sinister limb knew that she was only trying to help them. Or else he might not be the only one who admired the redoubtable medical student enough to endure a little torture, so long as she was the one meting out the punishment.

  Yet, really, what were a few minutes of discomfort when he was compensated by what followed: an intelligent human being regarding him with compassion, touching him gently on hand and brow and speaking to him in a low, warm voice.

  Besides, each time she used it, the magnetometer was becoming less painful. The first time she had used her device on him, back when he was recovering from the guard’s beating, had been like getting zapped by lightning. The second time had felt more like putting his hand on a live wire. “So strange,” Miss Lavenza had said. “It’s not supposed to hurt, not at this setting.” She had furrowed her brow and looked at him as if he were a puzzle she was trying to assemble. “Perhaps it’s because of all the metal attached to your flesh.” By the fifth and sixth session, however, the magnetometer no longer shocked him as badly, and afterward he felt bone-tired but relaxed.

  He wondered if this meant that he was getting better, or if it meant he’d reached the limits of how much he was going to improve. Certainly, his speech was clearer—still slow and slightly slurred, but intelligible. That was also thanks to Miss Lavenza, or Lizzie, as she invited him to call her. The nickname didn’t suit her—it was light and dizzy, a name for a barmaid or a hat girl. Elizabeth was a better choice—the name of a queen wiser and more spirited than most kings.

  Despite Elizabeth’s assurances, he couldn’t bring himself to trust Makepiece, but the old scientist was so unobtrusive that half the time, Victor forgot he was even there.

  Elizabeth seemed to forget, as well. After she put the magnetometer away, she would sit and talk with him. He still had trouble retrieving words—simple words, words even a five-year-old would know—which made him want to swear and break things, but Elizabeth was patient, and she had an easy way of speaking, as though they were friends. Over the course of their meetings, he learned random tidbits about her life. She had never had a pet, for example, although she had tried unsuccessfully to make friends with a neighbor’s farm dog, a border collie who did not have time to waste on lonely children when she had work to do herding sheep.

  She talked to him with the stunning frankness of an intimate, as if they had known each other for years. He did not know whether this was because she was American or because he was something less than human. In any event, he soon knew more about her than he knew about anyone, save Henry and his brother, Will. He knew, for example, that her mother died after catching measles from one of her husband’s young patients. Mrs. Lavenza had quarantined herself so she wouldn’t pass the disease on to her young daughter, but Lizzie came down with the rash all the same; by the time the spots had faded from her body, her mother was already gone. After that, Robert Lavenza decided to teach his daughter at home. At times, Elizabeth said, she felt as though she had made a bargain with the devil: no more torturous days in the schoolyard, but the price had been her mother’s life.

  She said she didn’t miss the company of other children, but every once in a while, usually around birthdays or holidays, her father would say, “You need some friends your own age,” and then drag her off to some neighbor’s house, where she would be deposited with a bunch of unfamiliar children.

  It usually took the children less than an hour to realize that she was as unfamiliar with the most basic rules of children’s society as any adult. She didn’t know that you never stop a game of tag to ask if you can play, or that bragging was reserved for pack leaders. She didn’t comprehend that teasing was allowed, but that tattling to parents was not.

  Adults liked her and commented on how mature she was, but until she was fourteen, she didn’t have a single friend under the age of forty. That was the year she met Perry.

  Perry had been one of the village’s popular boys, moving in a circle so far removed from Lizzie’s that he might as well have been the Prince of Wales. Then, at the age of sixteen, Perry was kicked by a horse. His family cared for him at home until gangrene set in. By the time they brought him to Dr. Lavenza, the infection had spread and the leg had to be amputated above the knee.

  As Perry recovered, Elizabeth spent weeks sitting by his bedside, reading to him from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island. For the better part of two weeks, Perry moved in and out of consciousness. Then, one morning, he interrupted her reading to say, “Always wanted to be a pirate. Now I suppose I can get a peg leg and hobble around like Long John Silver.”

  She put down the book, smiling. “Oh, I think my father’s capable of fixing you up with something a little better than that.”

  “Depends
what you mean by better.” He sounded sour. “My uncle Ned lost his leg at Antietam. Got himself some highfalutin wooden contraption that buckled on with leather straps. Never wore the danged thing, though. Said it weighed a ton and chafed him worse than a scolding wife.”

  “We can do a lot better than that.”

  Working together, father and daughter came up with a design for a prosthesis that attached by means of a suction socket, and had a knee joint made of a lightweight alloy of brass and aluminum. They added a spring and rubber “tendons” so that Perry could control the movements of the articulated foot.

  Once the artificial limb was constructed, Perry required weeks of work to strengthen his good leg and learn how to use “that infernal device,” as he called it. Her father was insulted on her behalf, but she didn’t mind. She didn’t require compliments. She knew that deep down, Perry appreciated all she was doing for him. Besides, she enjoyed it.

  Jealous, Victor listened as she rattled on and on about the other fellow.

  As the autumn turned colder, Perry’s condition improved, and by Thanksgiving he was able to move back home in time to celebrate with his family. She tried to be happy for him, or at least, to look as though she were happy for him instead of sorry for herself. In any case, she was sure he would come back. He would visit, perhaps introduce her to his other friends, take her along on picnics, maybe even fishing. It took her two months to realize that an older, healthier Perry was a Perry who no longer had time for her. Afterward, when she saw him in the village, he always smiled and asked how she was doing, but he never made any effort to see her again.

  It was his illness, she explained to Victor, that had brought him down to her level. She was glad she hadn’t known that at the time. She might have wished him sick again, just to have him back.

  Hearing this, Victor longed to take her into his arms and declare his feelings. The first part was easy enough to imagine—even if she was likely to recoil from his embrace—but the second part was trickier. What was it exactly that he felt for her? That he understood her? That he admired her? That he wanted her as a man wants a woman, but also as a confidant, as a friend, as a partner? It was absurd, risible. At best, she would feel a kind of uncomfortable pity for him. At worst, she would feel repulsed.