The Amazing Dr. Darwin

by Charles Sheffield

  “Melancholic?”

  “Not at all. I saw—and see—physical decline. She has been losing weight, steadily. She was always fair, but now her skin seems almost translucent. Her eyes are set deeper in her head, and the skin beneath them appears to be almost purple, as though bruised.”

  “And her manner?”

  “Febrile, intense, yet cheerful. She seems distant from me, in a way that I have never before experienced. When I ask concerning her health, she says only that she is feeling tired, and does not seem able to get enough sleep. That is certainly true. She will nod off during dinner, or as soon as she sits down in a chair. I wonder what is happening.”

  It was Darwin’s turn to hesitate. “Mr. Solborne,” he said at last. “It pains me to suggest this, but I assume that the obvious explanation has occurred to you?”

  “That Helen and Riker are romantically engaged, and she spends her nights with him? Of course. It is not the case.”

  “How do you know?”

  “By taking an action that was not strictly honorable. As I told you, the main body of Newlands, including parlors, guest bedrooms, living room, dining rooms, and servants’ quarters, is of brick. However, there are two towers of stone, one to the north and one to the south side, rising from the main house. I have a suite of rooms, including my bedroom and study, in the north tower. Helen occupies the southern one, with her bedroom and parlor and sewing room. There are two entrances to each tower. One leads through to the main body of the house; the other, seldom used and originally built I suspect for use only in case of fire, leads directly outside, onto a path that runs along the cliff. It runs, in fact, to and past the house rented by Anton Riker. Suspecting Helen’s actions, I did two things. First, I placed locks on the outside of the tower doors. No one could then enter or leave Newlands without passing through the main body of the house. The only window in the south tower that can be opened wide enough to admit a person is near the top, overlooking a forty-foot sheer drop to stony ground.

  “Second, I moved Joan Rowland, one of the servants who happens to be an unusually light sleeper, to a bedroom next to the inner door of the south tower. She was instructed to tell me if she heard any comings and goings at night.”

  “And did she?”

  “Not a one. She said that she heard Helen—or someone—moving around in the tower, often late at night when the rest of the house was asleep. But Helen never left her own quarters.”

  “A necessary condition for chastity, but not a sufficient one.” Darwin stirred in his chair. “Mr. Solborne, when I was a student at Cambridge, it constantly baffled me that there was a rule forbidding the presence of ladies in college at night, while open access was permitted to any woman during the day. An odd assumption seemed at work: that improprieties take place only at night. What of your sister’s movements during the daylight hours?”

  “Dr. Darwin, Jacob Pole warned me of your prescience. You are a mind reader.”

  “Not at all. I merely seek to close logical loopholes. During the day?”

  “At close of day, which in this season means between four and five o’clock, Helen leaves Newlands and walks south along the cliff.”

  “To the house rented by Professor Riker?”

  “That was my original assumption, that there was some sort of assignation involved. But it is not the case. As she walks south, he walks north along the shingled cliff to meet her. They stand in full view and talk to each other for five or ten minutes as darkness approaches. They just talk. They do not touch. Before it is fully dark, they part, and she returns home.”

  “You have been spying on them?”

  “I am very worried about my sister. Daily she has grown more pale and tense, more wan and bloodless.”

  “And now we have one more mystery to consider. Timing.” Darwin did not elaborate, but leaned forward in his seat and thoughtfully cut a wedge of Stilton. The room fell silent, except for the sound of steady munching and the wheeze of James Watt’s asthmatic breathing.

  “You seem to anticipate everything else.” Solborne finally broke the silence. “So perhaps you have some notion of my real concern—the one I find so improbable that I am reluctant to voice it. The fear that brought me to you.”

  “Surely.” Darwin licked his fingers. “All the components are present, are they not? Put aside, for the moment, the question of the calculating engine. Then we have a young woman who encounters a mysterious man from the Continent, perhaps from the central regions of Europe. Rapidly she comes under his sway. They meet every day, but only when the sun has gone from the sky. Access to her quarters cannot be obtained at night except through a high window set in a vertical wall, inaccessible to mortal man. She never goes out after dark, yet every day she becomes weaker, until she is as pale as though the blood itself were draining from her veins. Every day her intensity of manner increases, but so does her indifference to ordinary events. To anyone with a knowledge of European folklore, especially Slavonic traditions, a possible inference is clear.”

  “I know. I have seen no puncture wounds on her skin, but Professor Riker is a—”

  “An inference that is clear, yet is also total nonsense. Life on Earth admits a huge variety of forms, but everywhere there is a logic, whereby form follows function. I can no more believe in Das Wampyr than I can believe in Sinbad’s roc, a bird so large that it feeds on elephants. By the simple law of proportions, such a creature could never lift itself from the ground. And such a being as Nosferatu, the vampire, hated by all men but totally helpless during the daytime, could never survive the centuries.”

  “But if Riker is not that—that thing—then what is he? And if not he, then what is doing this to my sister?”

  “I do not know.” Darwin placed his hands over his paunch. The fatigue of the late afternoon had vanished and again he was eyeing the dish of smoked eels. “At this moment, I honestly do not know. But I assure you, Thomas Solborne, that we will find out.”

  * * * My dear Erasmus, I told you, did I not, that I was the wrong man for your job? And pox on it, I was right. Tom Solborne hasn’t said one word, but I’m sure he thinks I’m about as much use here as tits on a bull…

  Alone in the coach, Darwin tapped Jacob Pole’s letter on his knee, leaned back, and allowed himself to rock back and forward with the sway of the steady movement.

  The problem was, Jacob was right. He wasn’t the first choice—or even the second. But what option had offered itself? Solborne had arrived at the height of the season for winter ailments, when Darwin’s locum tenens was already pressed into service elsewhere. Jimmy Watt was deep in the wreckage of his engine, in that mood of solitary thought that made him seem scarcely human. Transported to Dorset, he would see only steam. As for Matthew Boulton, he ran the great Soho factory under his own absolute control and he could not be spared for a day, still less a week.

  Darwin comforted himself with the thought that a fortnight was not much time for Jacob to hold the fort, no matter how long it might seem to him.

  On the other hand, if Helen Solborne were to die…

  Darwin longed for a report from a man with his own keen diagnostic eye for medical matters. Jacob had not been pressed into service, he had gone willingly enough, but he could no more read the facies of impending death or disease than he could swim unaided from Dorset to the coast of France. How sick was Helen Solborne? She’s an attractive little woman, and she said hello to me polite enough. But Solborne is right, a lot of the time she doesn’t seem to be all there. And Lord knows what she’s talking about the rest of the time. Two days ago she asked me if I knew of some Italian type called Fibonacci, and his successions. I asked her if he was that Italian general who’d fought against Austria in the War of the Polish Succession, and she laughed like I’d made the biggest joke in the world and said that Fibonacci had been a good deal earlier and a much greater man, and when she said successions she meant sequences. That was one of our better conversations. Afterwards, Tom said she’d been talking about
her mathematics. God help the man who marries her…

  Helen Solborne did not sound like an easy dupe—or an easy subject for her brother’s control. Darwin glanced down to the letter sitting on his knee. He had read it often enough to be sure that the information he sought would not be found there. Jacob was too full of his own opinions and interests to serve as impartial observer.

  …looks of a starved Spaniard, or maybe a Portugee, though his accent says Hungary or even farther south and east. Either way, I’d bet money that his original name isn’t Riker. I followed him into Dorchester and watched him wander until he found a shop that suited him. He ordered a ton of food and spices delivered to that house he rents, most of it foreign muck as bad as any I’ve seen in Egypt or the Indies. No wonder he’s thin as a rail. He probably eats like a cormorant, but I’ll wager the stuff goes right through him. And the amount of it! You’d be hard pressed to put away all he ordered, ’Rasmus, and you’d make two of him in size.

  Two of him in size. Darwin leaned his head back on the stuffed leather of the coach seat, eyes closed but deep in thought. They were skirting the chalky slopes of the Western Downs, rumbling down to Dorchester and Weymouth. Portland was a couple of hours away. The tempering effect of the English Channel could already be felt in the milder air.

  Darwin turned to another page of Pole’s letter.

  Jacob might not be the best judge of exotic foreigners or of talented young women, but he had other strengths. He evaluated terrain and landscape with the practical eye of a soldier and the methodical approach of a first-rate artillery engineer.

  The west side of the Portland peninsula, where Newlands stands, is actually a continuation of a curious feature of the mainland known as Chesil Bank. The bank is a shingle beach that runs offshore of the mainland all its length, eight miles and more. A body of water called ‘The Fleet’ runs between bank and mainland. On the peninsula, however, the bank comes ashore, rises higher, and is more than thirty feet above the sea by the time it reaches Newlands. And Newlands is built on topof that bank. Tom Solborne said that the high window of the south tower was forty feet up. But that’s from ground level. Add in the height of the bank, and the window is more like seventy feet above the water. I checked the wall beneath. It has smooth facings of white freestone. The only way to get in that window would be to fly in, unless a man could run up the sheer wall like a human spider. You can also dismiss the idea of Helen Solborne, like Rapunzel, lowering a rope down to a waiting lover. He would have to be sitting in a boat and he’d get only one grab—the tide runs fast along this part of the shore. Next I examined the door locks. They are padlocks, simple enough for someone with experience. I, for my sins, had them open in a half a minute, without a key. However, the locks cannot be reached from inside the tower. The only other possibility would seem to be an accomplice, opening the lock from outside. In the next day or two I therefore propose an all-night vigil outside the south tower. It’s not as cold here as in Birmingham or Derby, but there’s a dampness that blows in from the sea. Bring plenty of your pills and nostrums with you—I’ll likely need them for my creaking bones.

  From habit, Darwin patted the medical chest at his side. He might indeed need the contents for Jacob Pole, using them to treat the colonel’s agues from tropical service; he was more and more convinced that any standard pharmacopeia would be useless in dealing with Helen Solborne.

  * * *

  Thomas Solborne was waiting as the coach rattled up the Newlands gravel drive.

  “Quickly now,” he said, helping Darwin down the double step. “There will never be a better time. What delayed you?”

  The sun was setting, and a thick fog was creeping in from the sea.

  “Broken traces, just beyond Wyke Regis.” Darwin was already surveying the house and shoreline. “Where is Colonel Pole?”

  Solborne pointed to a narrow road leading to the left. “Helen went for her afternoon walk and rendezvous. Jacob again agreed to follow her—discreetly—while I waited for you.”

  “What is her condition?”

  “Deteriorating, at least to my eye. But Helen is of indomitable will. She admits only to a slight fatigue. Let us hurry. We have perhaps twenty minutes.”

  He led the way through the double doors at the front of the house. The entrance hall was long and wide, furnished with massive oriental standing vases and gloomy suits of old armor.

  Darwin peered down at the polished floor. “Purbeck marble? I have never seen it before except in churches.”

  “It is mined locally. It is beautiful, wears forever—and is diabolically cold in winter. Were it not for Helen’s strong views and preferences, I would cover everything with carpets.”

  Solborne was walking to the left, where a long curved staircase led upward to the next level. Darwin, still motionless in the entrance, saw an identical stair at the other end. He was forming in his mind a picture of the house layout and dimensions. Beyond the stairs must lie another room, and then the towers.

  “Newlands was built with a high degree of symmetry.” Solborne had turned, aware that Darwin was not following. “The north and south ends of the main building form a matched pair. But it is better if you see the tower containing Helen’s suite of rooms.”

  “It is best if I see everything.” Darwin, moving after the other man, ran his hand along the smooth curve of the banister. It was polished and free of dust.

  The staircase brought them to an antechamber with two doors. One, open, led to a dining room, thirty-five feet long and with a log fire blazing on the seaward side. A huge table of gleaming mahogany and eighteen chairs dominated the middle of the room. The other door of the antechamber was closed. Solborne opened it without knocking and went through.

  “Joan Rowland’s bedroom.” He pointed to the left, where still another door stood ajar. “Joan spends every night here.”

  “What is her relationship to Helen?”

  “I thought of that also. It is respectful, but not close. There is no way that Joan would jeopardize her future at Newlands by serving as Helen’s accomplice.” Solborne was at a door in a blank wall of white stone, no more than five feet away from Joan Rowland’s room. “And this provides the only inside entrance to the south tower.”

  Darwin examined the door as they passed through. It was panelled and not particularly thick. It would not muffle sounds from its other side. He bent low and looked at the latch with special care, checking that it had no lock.

  Beyond lay a large chamber, its octagonal shape matching the outside figure of the stone tower. A tight spiral staircase of iron filigree led down to the tower’s outside entrance. Darwin did not attempt a descent—with his bulk it would have been a tight fit—but asked, “Is the outer lock still in position?”

  “In position, and according to Colonel Pole, untouched. He inserted a dab of candle grease into the padlock. It remains undisturbed.”

  The two men began their ascent of the wider stair that followed the outer wall of the tower. One level brought them to Helen Solborne’s sitting room and study, with its own fireplace and south-facing window. Darwin tried to open it, and grunted.

  “As you see.” Solborne came to his side, and pushed hard on the casement. “A couple of inches of travel, no more. Not an entrance or an exit.”

  “For a human.” Darwin was lingering over the many books. Solborne gave him an uneasy glance, and dragged him away. Ten minutes had passed since the arrival of the coach.

  The next floor was a plain bedroom, above it a sewing room. Packets of furniture covering materials sat on every available surface.

  “One more.” Solborne had noticed that Darwin was breathing heavily. “And the only one with a window that can open wide. Up we go.”

  Full-length mirrors stood on all walls of the last story, throwing multiple reflections of both men. “As you see, Helen’s dressing room. The morning light is excellent, because the window faces southeast.”

  He went across and threw it open. The thick-curtained
window looked out over the sea. The fog was thickening, and a curl of mist drifted in. Darwin joined him and leaned out over a sheer drop. After a few moments he leaned one shoulder out and turned to peer upward. A gutter ran around the top of the tower, about eight feet above his head. He craned to look to the right, but the roof of the house itself was hidden around the curve of the tower.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Solborne said nervously. “Do you see anything?”

  “Enough.”

  “Then we’d best be getting down again.” He led the way, only to have Darwin pause near the door and bend down to examine a pair of heavy brass oil lamps.

  “For dressing here after dark.” Solborne waited impatiently. “On the occasions when Helen can be persuaded to attend a social evening gathering—which is rare indeed.”

  He breathed more easily once they were out of the tower and in the long dining room. “Is there anything else you would wish to see in the house itself, before Helen returns?”

  “The roof of this part of Newlands.” And, when Solborne stared. “It would, I think, be impossible for mortal human to ascend that sheer stone face. But it might be easy indeed to descend it.”

  “Ah!” Solborne’s face lit with sudden understanding. “From the tower top, with the assistance of a rope. There is roof access through the attic.”

  He was already running for the stairs, and by the time that Darwin had negotiated three flights and reached the attic level, Solborne had opened a dusty roof skylight. He stood outside, in approaching darkness.

  One glance was sufficient for both men. Solborne turned to his visitor and shook his head. The tower top stood a full fifteen feet above them. There was no sign of a ladder, or anything else that might assist in scaling the tower.