Eros Element

by Cecilia Dominic

  “Does that mean we’ll never be able to come back?” Edward had looked forward to exploring the city with Iris when he was well.

  “No, he’s leaving for his summer home on the coast tomorrow afternoon, and he’ll be over the incident by the time he returns, especially if we can manage to find a good archaeological gift for him.”

  “I will not entrust anything of historical significance to that man.” Iris strode in followed by Marie and Patrick. Edward walked to her and took her hands in his. Her fingers trembled, as did her lip. He resisted the urge to kiss her and lend her his strength, such as it was.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “I was worried.”

  “I’m fine, although shaken up. It’s been a strange evening.”

  “Where were you?” Johann asked Marie.

  “Talking to my mother,” she said. “She is sending someone within the hour to get us out of Paris quickly. I think the marquis meant to have us attacked—he’s angry about his statue—but Mister O’Connell’s clever driving got us away.”

  “What?” asked Johann. “Do you know where we’re going next? And what happened?”

  “Rome,” Iris said. “We’re going to Rome. As for what happened, I’m not sure.” She glanced to the side, and Edward felt the weight of her secrets.

  “I thought our next stop was Florence?”

  “No, it will need to be Rome. There’s a site where the Pythagoreans had a temple. I don’t know exactly where, but I know it was underground.” She lifted her gaze to Edward. “I wish there was some way we could explore without digging.”

  “Ah.” With reluctance, he let go of her hands and walked to the table where he and Radcliffe had been doing their experiments.

  “There’s nothing on the handkerchief or the case,” Radcliffe said. “Whatever killed Anctil, he must have ingested it at breakfast or sometime after.”

  “Very well.” Edward reached past the table to his valise, from which he drew the clockwork worm. He turned and presented it to Iris. “Here’s the present I promised. It can crawl into small crevices, but it will emit its capture alarm sound and record the presence of echoes. That way you can see if there’s a large chamber.”

  The delighted look on Iris’s face made his troubles and the few times the thing had tried to split his eardrums with its whistle worth it. “Oh, thank you!” She threw her arms around him, and he embraced her back.

  “This is all lovely,” Johann said, “but we should get going.”

  “Yes, Mama will be sending her coach for us in half an hour.” Marie glanced at the clock. “Pack quickly.”

  With reluctance, Edward pushed Iris away. “We need to keep you safe. Go, and we’ll talk on the way to Rome. I want to know what happened.”

  Iris would have to lie to him again. The thought beat in her head as she and Marie threw whatever they could into trunks. She didn’t have the chance to change, and she knew she’d feel ridiculous, not to mention uncomfortable, wearing her formal clothing to travel.

  “Mademoiselle?” Marie asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Have you always been able to do that, to see things when you touch different objects?”

  Iris couldn’t lie anymore. Besides, Marie obviously had been able to sense some of what Iris could do and try to keep her from falling into the past.

  “Since I left childhood,” Iris said.

  “So when you touched my brooch…”

  “I could tell something happened to you with Parnaby Cobb. But remember, I’m not very knowledgeable about certain things.”

  “Probably more than you allow yourself credit for.” Marie closed the trunk Lucille had sent them back with. “This should do it for the new clothing. Do you have your valise?”

  “Yes.” Iris wanted to ask Marie about her special ability, which Iris suspected had something to do with making people believe things about her. “What about you?”

  “I have my valise.”

  “No, I mean, what can you do that no one else can? I know it’s something because of whatever your mother did to us.”

  “I am very good at disguising myself,” Marie told her. “My mother swears it’s more, but I’m a good actress, that’s all. I believe you have something special you can do, but I’m a plain person like anyone else.”

  Iris doubted that, but there was no time to argue. Soon they were in the Théâtre Bohème carriage headed toward the train station south of the city to catch the morning train to Rome. Iris hoped their plan to bypass the main city stations would avoid the marquis’s men and Jeremy Scott as well as anyone else who might follow them. But in the confusion and rush to leave, had anyone been on guard and searching for the clockwork butterflies? She certainly hadn’t.

  “So what happened?” Bledsoe asked and snapped Iris’s attention back to the inside of the carriage. “I want to know what you did to anger our Parisian patron to the point he kicked me out before I finished my concert. A concert, by the way, he’s been after me to give for years.”

  Iris glanced around their conveyance. It was more comfortable than the claptrap coach they’d taken to Paris, but they sat in close quarters, and all eyes were on her. She noticed Radcliffe gazed at her with the same expectation as the others, and she remembered his particular interest in diseases of the mind. Would he think her insane?

  “I can’t explain it,” she said.

  “Then describe it.” Bledsoe’s tone had an edge of impatience.

  “Leave off the lass,” Patrick said. “Whatever it was, it bothered her.”

  “Did he hurt you?” Edward asked. “You’ve been rubbing your wrist.”

  Iris hadn’t removed her gloves, but she suspected that when she did, she would find bruises where the statue grabbed her. “The marquis didn’t, no.” She braced herself. As much as Bledsoe annoyed her, she could tell them what happened outside of her mind, at least where Marie could back up her story. She described the statues moving in response to the music and trapping Marie, then her. As for using the hammer from the past, she said she managed to twist free, and the statue’s hand came apart when she did.

  “And that’s what angered the marquis. He didn’t believe me that the statue grabbed me and wouldn’t let go, so I had to break it to get free. Monsieur Anctil told me the marquis refused to house the statues at the Louvre for fear of them getting broken on the journey from Monceau to downtown.”

  “And can Marie verify all this?” asked Bledsoe. “And are you all right?”

  Marie nodded. “It all happened as she said, and I’m fine. She and the marquis stopped the statue from squeezing me to death.”

  “So the frequency of the music made the statues move,” Edward said. “And the more complicated the music, the more movement. How? Aren’t they all of a piece?”

  “No,” Iris said. “Sometimes if they didn’t have the right size block of stone, they would attach pieces to each other with iron joints.”

  Edward nodded. “But that doesn’t explain the one statue acting unlike the others unless it was put together differently.”

  “Did you consider there might be somethin’ else to it?” asked O’Connell. “Somethin’ otherworldly, so to speak?”

  “Patrick, we’ve talked about this,” Radcliffe said. “There’s a rational explanation for everything even if we haven’t figured it all out yet.”

  “Fine,” O’Connell huffed. “Have you considered a force that—for now—defies rational explanation?”

  “No,” Edward told them. “I refuse to consider the possibility. Everything is rational, and we have the tools to investigate it. Perhaps it was something about the place where the statue stood or the orientation relative to the sound. Or something about the room caused the sound waves to eddy there and nowhere else.”

  “Like the square root of two and Pi?” Iris couldn’t resist asking. “Those aren
’t rational.”

  “Cheeky girl.” But he didn’t look offended. “Now you’re mixing up your terms.”

  Iris and Marie exchanged looks. Iris didn’t know about Bledsoe, but it seemed that O’Connell may believe in her special abilities. Edward and Radcliffe never would, and the thought of having to keep that part of herself from Edward saddened her.

  Each of the miles between Paris and Rome pinched Iris in her dress corset. She knew Edward must feel worse, but he didn’t complain. Instead, he questioned her and Marie over and over about the statue’s attack in the library and had them draw a rough plan of how everything was laid out in the room on the back page of a booklet he had in his valise.

  “There has to be some reason that one acted as it did,” he said. “Tell me how the bookshelves were arranged.”

  “We have no more information to give you,” Marie told him. “You will have to make do with what you have.”

  They didn’t have a private car on the train but did have a compartment to themselves. Each of them took turns sleeping while the others watched over their luggage and looked out for spy devices.

  “Can you tell me anything else about the poison that killed Anctil?” Iris asked Radcliffe when they were both awake keeping watch. “Other than that he likely ingested it at breakfast.”

  “From what you described, belladonna seems the most likely culprit. Its berries have been blamed for several accidental deaths, and in a high enough dose, it will kill a man in hours.”

  Coldness settled into the pit of Iris’s stomach. She recalled Anctil’s fondness for the jam and how he’d alone eaten it. “I doubt this was accidental.”

  He didn’t argue and left her to her thoughts. One—what if she had put jam on her croissant?—particularly disturbed her.

  Nothing odd happened, and they arrived in Rome in the late afternoon.

  Although they arrived two days early, the hotel Parnaby Cobb’s agent had secured for the group in Rome was willing to accommodate them and had an extra room for O’Connell and Radcliffe. The money hadn’t run out yet, but the group still had no word from Cobb, nor did they know how the airship had fared under the attack of the Clockwork Guild.

  Iris left Radcliffe and the other men to settle Edward in his room. She and Marie took turns bathing, and once she was out of her dress clothing and into her comfortable-if-slightly-wrinkled walking dress, a certain restlessness possessed her. She needed to stop thinking about how close she’d come to her own dramatic death in the Louvre, and she was happy to follow the signal of something else that tickled the back of her brain.

  The unassuming hotel had been a stopping point for travelers for centuries, the clerk had proudly told them, and much of the original stone made up the walls, although some had been destroyed in an effort to modernize the building with steam-powered indoor plumbing and electricity.

  “What do you feel?” Marie asked.

  Checking in and using Cobb’s voucher had reminded Iris that Marie was not necessarily to be trusted, although she’d saved Iris’s life and had been mostly kind to her. She hated to admit it, but she now depended on the maid, and she appreciated Marie knowing of her ability but not judging her or treating her any differently because of it.

  “It feels like something important is very close, as if the music from last night sank into my bones, and now it echoes around me. I need to find what will give me peace.” The words didn’t make complete sense to her as she said them, but that was as close as she could get. The volcano egg had called her with a similar feeling, but this was on a much grander scale.

  “Perhaps we should take a walk.”

  “Should we bring one of the men with us?” Iris asked. “Oh, let’s see if Edward is up for it. He probably needs to stretch his legs.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Hotel Segreto, Rome, 14 June 1870

  Edward had never thought he’d be so far away from his home and family, but on this lovely Italian evening with the Clockwork Guild and other troubles so far behind them, he enjoyed it. The determined woman beside him with her hand on his arm didn’t hurt, either. She had the same look on her face that he’d felt on his own when closing in on a discovery, and he thrilled at the thought they were so alike in yet another way.

  “Are you ready?” she asked. They stood by the front door of the hotel and watched the chaos outside. There was a square beyond the street, and in the middle, a large stone structure with two arches.

  “So explain to me how you know we’re close to something?”

  She gave him a wistful glance. “The hotel was built during the same time period the Pythagoreans were active here, although secretly, in the first century AD. There are symbols and characteristics that have not been obfuscated by time and renovation, indicating that there is something important close by.”

  Marie looked at Iris sideways. “You’re sure?” she asked.

  Iris grinned at Marie. “A good archaeologist always has multiple sources of proof for her speculations.”

  “That’s smart,” Edward put in.

  Iris squeezed his arm, and he preened.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Johann said. He’d offered to accompany them and escorted Marie, who was not dressed as a maid.

  Like Paris, Rome was busy, but with a more frenetic air. Small steam-powered vehicles that carried one to two passengers, like small horses but with wheels, zipped in and out among the carriages and steamcarts, which didn’t seem to follow any kind of traffic logic with regard to lane or direction. The people expressed themselves more than the Parisians, and Edward had to admit to some anxiety at these non-reserved individuals who said as much with their hands as with their eyes and mouths, and a lot with all of their parts. And he’d thought the Parisians were open about their feelings.

  “What are they saying?” Iris asked Marie after they’d passed their second shouting steamcart driver.

  “Mostly to get out of the way. We’ll have to be careful crossing the street.”

  They made it across with the help of a soldier who looked like he was dressed in a French uniform. Marie thanked him with a “Merci.”

  “Why are there French soldiers?” Iris asked.

  “There is a garrison stationed here,” Marie said. “It’s hard to tell, but there is some tension between the new Italian government and the Pope over where his territory ends and the city begins.”

  Once they stepped onto the square, a certain weight settled over the quartet. The arched structure loomed large ahead of them.

  “What is it?” Johann asked.

  “It’s the Porta Maggiore,” Iris said. “It was built in the first century AD as part of the aqueduct system and then incorporated into the city walls in the third century.”

  Her hand trembled on Edward’s arm as they walked through one of the arches, and he squeezed her fingers. She smiled at him.

  Beyond the structure, a group of children played jacks or something like it. The rubber ball took a funny bounce to the side, and it rolled between two flagstones. With disappointed cries, the children gathered around the crack, and no digging with their little fingers could extract it. Iris narrowed her eyes.

  “What are they saying?”

  Marie spoke to the children and translated, “They say that in this part of the square, if something goes underground, it can’t be found again, even if they pry the flagstones up, which the soldiers don’t like them to do.”

  “Do you have your device?” Iris asked Edward.

  “Of course.” He took the clockwork worm from his pocket and wound both cylinders with a small key. He knelt on the ground by the crack. The children gathered around and looked at him with wide brown eyes.

  “My niece educated me on worms,” he said. “I’ll have to tell her she wrote a very good paper. And one that was useful.” He glanced at Iris, who smiled at him.

 
“I’m glad you’ve moved into the realm of practical science,” she said. He let the wriggling device go between the flagstones, and the children cheered when their ball popped out. Edward handed it to the biggest of them, and they ran off.

  Soon a crowd of curious onlookers gathered around them, and Edward made sure he stood close to Iris, who sat on a large rock, her palms flat against it and her eyes closed.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  The worm re-emerged and wound down on the stone by the crack before Edward could ask her to clarify her strange response. He picked it up and started to brush the dust off, but Iris stopped him.

  “It may be useful to see what it crawled through,” she said. “Can you put it in a handkerchief?”

  “Certainly.” He coiled the worm and put it back in his pocket after wrapping it in his handkerchief. The onlookers dispersed, and the quartet made their way back to the hotel to analyze the etchings on the wax cylinders that would tell them if the worm found a large enough space to cause an echo.

  The young man who sat behind the counter at the Vatican permitting office pushed his pince-nez up his nose and secured it more firmly on the bridge. Iris tried not to have uncharitable thoughts about him, his country, and the extreme inefficiency of everything Italian, but her patience wore thin. She, Marie and Bledsoe had spent the previous day at the Rome permitting office, where once they spoke to someone, they found the land they wanted to excavate belonged to the Vatican, which held much of the city inside the ancient walls. Now she and Marie stood in the church offices, where they had elected to come without the men, who kept an eye on the site.

  “I’m sorry, Signorina, but the land you want to dig on has already been permitted to someone else. Another English person.”

  “Can you tell me who it is?” Iris asked. “Perhaps I can send a telegram to England or contact him if he’s in the city.”

  “No, Signorina, but I can tell him someone is interested. It seems he wants to move quickly—he was here yesterday and also got the permits to hire the workers, disturb the historic site, and block the road if necessary.”