Eros Element

by Cecilia Dominic

  “Interesting. I’ll see what I can do. What symptoms did the victim display?”

  Iris tried to separate herself from the emotional details of the memory, to describe it as if she were documenting a just-opened tomb, not the journey of a man to his own grave. “He became flushed, and when he grabbed me, I could feel the heat of his hands through my gloves. Toward the end, he seemed to have trouble breathing, and his eyes got wide. Not his eyes, his pupils.”

  “Thank you. That gives me somewhere to start. My field is military and battlefield medicine, but I’ve some experience with poisons.” He glanced at the window and swallowed. “And I’ve become friendly with the apothecary around the corner.”

  Iris drew her shoulders back against the shiver of skin at the back of her neck. “Don’t reveal anything to him. Your discretion is of the utmost importance in this. There are dangerous men afoot.”

  “I gathered. People usually don’t get poisoned if there aren’t.”

  “Don’t be flippant. It’s not a funny situation.”

  “Oh, so you are not amused?” He sipped his tea, but the crinkles around his eyes told her he hid a smile.

  “I am most certainly not amused.” Wait, isn’t that one of Queen Victoria’s sayings? Cheeky man.

  “You’re also not accustomed to death and dying. When you’re in that situation on the battlefield, it’s necessary to keep your sense of humor, even if it is of the gallows variety. Now,” he said and placed his empty teacup on the plate in front of him. “I feel it would be best for my patient if you were to go tell him you are not engaged to Lord Scott and don’t intend to be. Patrick will recognize his man if he comes sniffing around here again.”

  “Thank you.” Iris rose. “I’m glad to be surrounded by such gentlemen.”

  She walked away from the table, and again the woman in the mourning outfit caught her eye. Iris nodded to her with a grim smile that she hoped said she understood. The other woman nodded once, so perhaps the message got through.

  She crossed the lobby, her thoughts full of how relieved Edward would be, when she encountered Bledsoe getting off the elevator.

  “Oh, good,” he said. “I’m glad I found you. If you want to visit the place you mentioned earlier, we need to get going.”

  Iris thought quickly. “But I don’t have any gloves.” A sensation of pressure built in her chest not unlike that of the volcano egg on the night it called for her to discover it, and she turned to see who or what wanted her attention. Marie approached from the side door.

  “Oh, there you are, Miss!” She held out a package. “I had the feeling you might need more gloves, so I found these for you.”

  “Perfect!” Johann helped Marie unwrap them and held them out for Iris. “Now let’s go.”

  But I need to see Edward! However, the look on Johann’s face told her she shouldn’t push him, and she did need to see what Anctil was trying to tell her with the address. I’ll see Edward later. He’s probably found something to work on by now. With a resigned nod, she thanked Marie for the gloves and followed Johann to the curb, where he hailed a steamcab.

  Iris glanced toward Edward’s room and thought she saw the smudge of his face in the window, but from what she could see, he was in profile, so he wasn’t looking outside. She raised her hand anyway, and Johann tugged her into the cab.

  The jolt the steamcab gave when Marie jumped in echoed the jarring in Iris’s center upon seeing her.

  “What are you doing?” Iris asked, but she couldn’t muster an angry tone as much as an annoyed and weary one.

  “My mother will have my head—and trust me, they do that here—if I let you go off alone again. I got a message from her earlier.” Marie’s answers made sense. Of course Lucille wanted her to be close to Iris. In the light of day and the knowledge of whatever Lucille had tried to do to connect Iris and Marie, her motivation became clear—she wanted to know what was going on with their little expedition, particularly because it had been funded by Cobb. But Iris also sensed in Marie the same core of rebellion so familiar from her dealings with Adelaide. Could she trust Marie with her secret?

  She thought fast for some way to keep Marie out of the hospital while she and Johann, who looked about as happy to see Marie as Iris was, sought what Anctil wanted her to find there.

  “So this is a children’s hospital?” she asked when the steamcab pulled up to the front. The name of L’Hôpital des Enfants stretched over the arched entranceway, beyond which a long walk led to the front door between high hedges.

  “No, it’s named for the Holy Innocents, the children Herod killed when he was searching for the infant Jesus,” Marie said. “It’s supposedly a place for the helpless and those who have no one to support them, but as with most of the institutions under our beloved Emperor, it’s turned into a way for him to make money, mostly off foreigners who become ill here.”

  They exited the cab, and it drove off. Iris squelched the urge to call it back, to go back to the hotel and Edward and stay with their original task. No, I have to see what this place holds. A man died to bring me here. The thought gave her an idea.

  “Marie,” she murmured as they walked up the lane to the front entrance of the hospital, “I’m not sure why we’re here, but it might be a trap. Please remain in the lobby and look out for anything suspicious, especially any of the men from the other night. Lord Scott is in Paris.”

  “Yes, Miss.” The maid’s hazel eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything more.

  “Do we know what we’re looking for?” Johann asked after they entered and looked around at the quiet hall lined with benches. No one sat there waiting to be seen or admitted, which struck Iris as strange. Had Paris been blessed with a surge of good health as well as nice weather? The admissions clerk didn’t wake from his snooze behind the desk. Or maybe he was pretending not to notice them so he could continue his nap.

  Either way, how odd.

  “May I help you, Mademoiselle?” A woman wearing a nurse’s cap and wire spectacles approached them. Her face, although unlined, held the severity typically seen behind the wrinkles on the elderly.

  “Yes, I think. May we speak privately?”

  Johann raised his eyebrows and followed Iris and the nurse through the door to the left of the desk. She brought them into a small office and gestured for them to sit.

  “Now I am assuming you are here because you are missing a family member and you believe he or she may have been admitted?” she asked. Her lilting French accent didn’t soften her tone, which implied they had been careless, indeed, to misplace someone at her hospital.

  “It was recommended I come,” Iris said.

  “Yes, it usually is.” She rose and walked to a set of shelves behind them, where folders bound together with string lay. “What month did you lose contact with your family member?”

  “You last heard from your father in May, right?” Johann asked. Iris nodded, playing along. Did she dare show the nurse the paper with the symbol on it? But she didn’t know why Anctil had sent her here.

  “We have an excellent photographer de la mort. It’s one of the services we’re able to offer families.” The way the nurse glanced back at Iris told her it wasn’t a free service, and if she recognized someone, they’d be given a bill.

  “A photographer of death?” Iris asked. “As in, someone who photographs deceased people?”

  “Yes, it is a custom we borrowed from the Americans, as barbaric as many of us feel it is. But a body only lasts so long.”

  “How sad,” Iris murmured. But she could understand the necessity of it in this situation. If someone was sick enough, they wouldn’t be able to communicate their identity, and papers often got stolen. This way the hospital could help give families an idea of what happened and also collect for their services.

  “He delivered the rest of May to me today,” the nurse continued, obviousl
y accustomed to barreling through whatever shock visitors experienced. She selected the last folio on the second shelf and handed it to Johann.

  Iris watched the odd events unfolding. This place, this situation took on the same flat, fake aspect as the props in Marie’s mother’s theatre. Indeed, what a strange role she played, but it was comforting to know she could express some of her bereaved feelings.

  “Look through the photos, dear,” Johann said. Iris bit her lip so she wouldn’t let forth a hysterical giggle at him stepping into a part too.

  She nodded and wished she could slip off her gloves. Something about the bundle of paper and photographs on the desk in front of them called to her, although in a more muted voice than the volcano egg had in her father’s office. She wondered what the folder, although it was flimsy and therefore temporary, would tell her about this strange place. Instead, she focused as much through her fingertips, but the first photo in the file made all her desire to read it flee.

  There, appearing to slumber peacefully in a chair in a garden abloom with spring flowers, sat Irvin McTavish.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  L’Hôpital des Enfants, 13 June 1870

  If Iris intended to pretend she didn’t recognize any of the unfortunate images in the folder, to walk out of there with her secret intact, she failed.

  Seeing her father like that in a pose she’d so often found him in at home in the study or in his own beloved garden, laying with one hand on his stomach and the other curled around his favorite pipe… She wanted to cry, to scream at him to wake up, this wasn’t funny, this wasn’t a good prank, Open your eyes, Papa, please!

  But none of it came out around the burning in her throat and feeling the tears she’d hidden for weeks would explode from the corners of her eyes and wash all of these ridiculous situations and people and places away.

  She wished for a veil like the woman in mourning at the hotel restaurant so she could hide away from the world and have it leave her alone for a while. She supposed now she could invoke her right to mourn, now she could pretend that she had just found out and that she hadn’t lied. But she knew the man beside her wouldn’t let her get away with that, and she hated him for it.

  “He looks very peaceful,” Johann said. “You wouldn’t know he’d been ill.”

  But Iris could tell. His skin was pale, more so than she would have expected in death, and dark half-moons sat at the base of his fingernails and under his eyes. He looked older and like he was covered in wrinkled paper rather than flesh. Something had eaten him from the inside after he’d left.

  What is he doing here and not at the coast like he said? Who sent the telegram?

  “So that is your father?” The nurse folded the corners of her mouth into something approaching a sympathetic expression. “My condolences for your loss. I can have Francois bring his things for you.”

  Iris nodded, unable to say anything. Bledsoe removed the photo from the folder and handed the rest back to the nurse, who placed the folio back on the shelves with the others before leaving the room.

  “You have to pull yourself together,” Bledsoe said. “It’s not like this is a surprise.”

  “No, but this is the first time it’s real.” It was true. Before, she could pretend he was away on one of his expeditions and that he would be back. But now she had proof beyond the flimsy paper and printed words of a telegram announcing its grim news across the miles. Now there was a body and a true loss.

  “You can’t let the others know.”

  Iris looked at him through her tears, which distorted his face into a half-smeared image and tugged one corner of his mouth into a sneer. “What? Why?”

  “Because you will be expected to leave the expedition, go back to England, and handle arrangements.” His tone held an edge of desperation, and a wisp of satisfaction uncurled in her chest—he did recognize her need to be there. Then anger torched the satisfaction.

  “Suddenly you’re more concerned for yourself than poor Edward.” She wasn’t going to mention his dilemma with the Clockwork Guild again. Let him wonder what, if anything, she’d heard.

  He twisted around so he faced the door. “We’ll discuss this later. Someone’s coming.”

  The door opened to reveal not the nurse, but Marie. “Mademoiselle? Is everything all right?”

  Iris hoped her eyes didn’t show too much of her recent emotions. “Yes, Marie. Why aren’t you standing guard in the lobby?”

  Marie shook her head. “I felt something was wrong. I’ll go back out.”

  Iris wanted her to stay, but she didn’t need this news getting back to Cobb. “We should be finished shortly.”

  Marie left, and the nurse entered with a box. “I believe these are your father’s belongings.”

  “You can’t bring them,” Bledsoe said. “Not all of them. We don’t have room.”

  Iris nodded. It would be too difficult to explain where they came from, especially to Marie. Still, there must be something for her.

  “Would you excuse me?” she asked the nurse and Bledsoe. They exited, leaving her alone with the box of her father’s things. She pulled out his jacket first. It smelled of his sweet pipe smoke and the faint crisp odor of fresh-turned earth that clung to him even when he wasn’t gardening or on an expedition. But there was also something acrid that hadn’t been there before. She felt in the pockets but didn’t find anything. The same held for his pants.

  When the ancients hid something precious, they often put it in the least obvious place, his voice said in her mind. She’d been ten at the time he’d told her that, and he was talking about crown jewels that a displaced monarch had put in the hollowed-out heels of his shoes.

  She dug through the rest of the box, which held his smallclothes and shirts, and found his well-worn shoes. However, when she held both of them, the left one seemed lighter. She pulled back the lining of the right one and found a compartment with a small wooden tube, which she pried out. When she pulled the two halves apart, a small scroll of paper fell out. On it was written, 45 degree twist, half pull, 30 degree twist other direction.

  This is how to open the poison hider! What could he have hidden in there for me?

  She rolled the little scroll and replaced it in the tube, which she stuck in her reticule. She reassembled the shoe and searched through her father’s other things. She took his pocket watch and pipe, which she had seen him with so many times they seemed part of him. She couldn’t imagine anyone else using them. Aware that the others waited for her, she decided to read them later.

  When she stepped into the hall, the nurse, Bledsoe, and Marie waited for her in the company of a spry wrinkled man.

  “Mademoiselle,” Marie said. “This man approached me in the waiting area. He says he is the photographer de la mort, and he has a message for you from your father.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  L’Hôpital des Enfants, 13 June 1870

  “You have a message for me?” Iris asked. She glanced at Marie, who now knew an incorrect but damaging version of her secret, but she’d have to deal with the maid later. Now all she wanted to do was hear whatever he had to say and go back to the hotel and open the poison hiding contraption to see what it held.

  “Oui, Mademoiselle.” He twisted his cap in his hands, and he reminded her of the urchin who had brought the invitation to the meeting that had started this all. Or perhaps it started before then. She filed the insight away for later pondering.

  “I need my office back,” the nurse said. She eyed the photographer with the look of someone who watched an insect crawl across the floor but didn’t want to put the effort forth to squash it.

  “Is there somewhere else we could talk privately?” Bledsoe asked. When Iris opened her mouth to object, he said, “I cannot allow you to go unchaperoned with a strange man, my dear.”

  “Of course.”

  “The garden
is typically deserted this time of day because the hospital residents are eating lunch,” the photographer said. “I’ll show you.”

  Iris refrained from asking whether that was when he did his work, and she hoped he hadn’t set up one of his clients in the garden to be photographed after they talked.

  “Your father was fascinated by what I do,” he said once they were settled at a table under some fruit trees. “He said future generations would wonder about our customs when they saw them, why we took pictures of our dead, but he said it wasn’t that different from tomb decorations, only that those were for the dead and my creations are for the living.”

  “And the message?” Iris asked. In spite of the warm breeze that made spots of sunlight dance through the leaves, something about the little man left her feeling cold, and she wanted to end the interview as soon as possible.

  “He said you would eventually come to Paris, and he had a friend who would steer you here. He made me repeat this over and over and promise to tell no one but you.” He glanced at Bledsoe and Marie, who moved away a discreet distance, and lowered his voice. “He said to tell you that the dead will dance if given the right music, and that the keepers will kill to prevent the gardener from coaxing the rose’s petals open.”

  “Was he already ill?” Iris asked. It sounded like gibberish, but creepy gibberish, and talking to him gave her the sensation of a thousand invisible ants crawling over her skin.

  “Oh yes. But you knew that, didn’t you? He came here to die, to end the story, but you followed him too soon, so it must continue.” He leapt from the chair and stalked away, muttering about the story continuing, and wouldn’t it have a pretty ending now with lots of people for him to take pictures of?

  Iris brushed at her arms to clear the odd sensation he left her with and to give her hands something to do. Now she really needed to get back to the hotel, but she also had to address the problem at hand.