Eros Element

by Cecilia Dominic

  “You’re the reason we got attacked?” Edward asked. “I lost my best copper globe up there.”

  “And my best set of clothes,” Marie said.

  Johann held up his hands. “I’m sorry, especially about your injuries, Edward. But Cobb knew, or he must have known. He approached me about this expedition a week before he appeared at the University and said he knew I would be interested in a potentially lucrative opportunity.”

  “But he didn’t mention your gambling debts specifically.” Marie toyed with a knife, and Iris wondered if the maid was pondering sticking it in the musician.

  “No, but he implied them.”

  Radcliffe and O’Connell exchanged looks.

  “What is it?” Iris asked, happy to divert the attention from the maestro, whose face was as red as the tomato sauce they’d come to like.

  “I’ve met Cobb,” Radcliffe said. “At Harvard. Patrick and I were having lunch one day at a restaurant off campus when he approached us. Of course I knew who he was—everyone in Boston does. He asked if I was the talented colored physician he’d heard of who had a knack for Greek.”

  “Don’t let Chadwick fool you with his false modesty,” O’Connell put in. “He took highest in the class.”

  “And would have gotten the tar beaten out of me for it if Patrick hadn’t stepped in. But I told Cobb yes, I was. He paid for the trip to Vienna, and when we got waylaid in the north of France, he sent us a message to stay put because his airship would be landing. He had a chance for me to use my skills in Greek and medicine, and O’Connell’s tinkering might help as well. He told us not to say anything about it, but to make ourselves useful so you’d want us along.”

  “So why did you tell us?” Marie asked. “You were lying all along too, but it would have been easy enough for you to keep your secret.”

  Radcliffe inclined his head toward Iris. “She’s probably figured it all out.”

  The parts of the conversation dropped into place like puzzle pieces in Iris’s brain. “Cobb didn’t want us to know he’s the puppet master. If you look at history, savvy emperors had networks of spies unaware of each other. Remember, we’re supposed to be posing as Grand Tourists. Perhaps if we seemed too cohesive a group, we would have alerted Cobb’s competitors.” But she sensed Radcliffe wasn’t telling them something important. She caught Marie’s eye, and Marie nodded. The link between them continued to strengthen, and Iris knew Marie shared her suspicion.

  “Meanwhile, what do we do?” Edward asked. “We’re close—I can feel it—and perhaps if I make this discovery, I can save my department, if not my job.”

  “We keep working,” Iris told him. “The stuccoes in the chapel have to have something to do with the device we found. I need to take another look at it.”

  And I need to get my hands on it to see what it can tell me.

  Edward’s face showed his distress at his friend’s betrayal, but he set his mouth in a line, and Iris admired how he refused to let it deter him from their mission.

  He has definitely changed. We all have. The memory of the first crack in his emotional armor showing at the airfield swirled around in her head along with grief—yes, more grief—at their group being broken up and the thought that her marriage to Scott would come sooner rather than later. She would try to wait until the heavy mourning period for her father was over, but she suspected Scott would find some way to force the issue. Even if she could put him off, he would be a large and annoying part of her life from this point on.

  The group split up with Iris and Marie going to the rented offices, Johann disappearing, and the other men heading back to the site to see if they could see anything in the chapel that had eluded them to this point but that could help.

  “What will you do?” Iris asked once they walked out of the sun and into the dim but stuffy office building. “Do you have to go back to him?”

  “What concern is it of yours?” Marie asked. She turned her back on Iris and looked at the objects on the shelves in front of her.

  “I’m worried about you. You know what I can do—your brooch told me some of what happened.”

  Marie turned toward her. “Don’t be. He’s doing with me what he does with everyone else in his life. He’s used me, and now he’s sending me back to the theatre. He sent a separate note, that he’ll pay my passage back to Paris, and he no longer needs my services.”

  “Isn’t that good? You’ll be away from him.”

  “And back with my mother, who will take every opportunity to remind me how she told me taking up with him was a bad idea. I’ll have to become an actress again—it’s the only profession that will suffer my ruined reputation now that I’m no longer in Cobb’s employ. Well, the one I’m willing to do. At least with my training, I can fight off any man who thinks actresses are for more than acting.”

  “Is that why you don’t want to go back to it?”

  “That and when I’m on stage, I feel like I lose part of myself, my true self, with every role. I wish I could go back to being a ladies’ maid, but as much as I’ve traveled with Cobb, I’m too known in the big cities, as is my reputation.”

  Iris knew Marie spoke truly. “I’m sorry. I wish there was some way to help.”

  “Figure this thing out.” Marie gestured to the device, which sat on the table between them. “At least make it so this journey will have a good outcome for someone.”

  “If we do, we’ll have to hide it from Lord Jeremy and test it and patent it before Cobb finds out.”

  “Go ahead and see what it has to tell you,” Marie, apparently done with talking about Cobb, said. “I’m surprised you haven’t already tried to read it.”

  “I wanted to figure this out with my archaeological training and knowledge. Plus, Doctor Radcliffe and Ed—Professor Bailey—have been doing well with this part of the puzzle. I feel they’re close.”

  “But not close enough for the time we have.”

  Iris pulled off her gloves. “Right. Not nearly close enough.” She flexed her fingers. “If I’m in the trance for too long or if you sense that something is very wrong, do what you need to get me out of it.”

  “You can trust me.”

  And oddly, Iris knew she could. She pressed her fingertips to the wooden sides of the device, caressed the gears with her thumbs, and closed her eyes.

  Images and feelings tumbled through Iris’s mind. First there were Edward’s and Doctor Radcliffe’s excitement at working with the device, a shared joy in a good challenge that was both academic and practical. Edward’s feelings at Iris’s betrayal floated in, as did his sadness that she would be marrying someone else but then relief that he’d escaped the clutches of another deceitful woman. Iris pushed through those emotions—she didn’t want to intrude on his privacy—and Radcliffe’s strange sense of wild hope at what they would accomplish. The man remained a mystery, but she couldn’t focus on that now. There was a long period of muffled noise as the city changed around the little temple and finally a glimmer of light and flurry of activity.

  “Tell me why we have to haul all this gravel down here?” It was the slave girl Iris had read the statue of at the Louvre. Apparently she hadn’t been sacrificed in the temple as Iris had thought, and she staggered down the ramp under the weight of a large bag.

  A burly man with a similar bag slung over his shoulders replied, “Because he said what they’ve found is too dangerous. It’s two that’s required, and he needs this place hidden by the next new moon. The emperor can’t get hold of this.”

  Two what? Iris asked. She didn’t know how much her present self could affect the past.

  “Two what?” The girl echoed Iris’s thoughts.

  “Two tones, high and low. They figured it out with the Astrological Calculator. When the moon is dark, there’s one source of sunlight, and there’s little enough interference to make it stay.”

 
“How do you know this?” the girl asked.

  “I assisted at the last ceremony, and my Greek isn’t as rusty as yours. Trust me, it’s good we’re covering all this up, burying it. They don’t know what it’s capable of, but the emperor don’t care about taking it slow.”

  The warning of the statue came back to Iris, how some sort of primal being would be unleashed, but the slave girl again seemed to share her thoughts, this time her skepticism.

  “That’s what they say, but they also believe people come back as beans. How much of this is myth and how much is true?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Do you think they’ll let us live after we do this? The secret will die with us.”

  The girl nodded, a resigned expression on her face. “I always thought it would come to this. I hope I won’t come back as a bean.”

  Iris recalled her first vision, which must have been the girl’s death in the coliseum, and whispered, “I’m sorry for what will happen to you.” The slave looked to where Iris stood, and Iris recognized she wasn’t in anyone’s perspective this time, but rather watching from the altar like a ghost from the future. Or maybe there was something in the device. But objects couldn’t have spirits, could they?

  Either way, a tug brought her back to the present and Marie.

  “Are you all right?” Marie asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I think I might have been one. I wasn’t in anyone’s head this time.”

  “How? You’re not dead.”

  Iris shivered. “I hope not.” But then she remembered she would be marrying Lord Jeremy Scott soon, and part of her felt like she might be. “Come on, we have to tell Edward and the others.”

  “Wait,” Marie said. “Did you see anything else? Before you went into the past?”

  It all seemed shrouded in fog now, but Iris dug through it. “Radcliffe is really invested in us figuring this out, but I can’t determine why.”

  Marie held up the echo-worm, which they’d found would also record voices. “I saw him and Mister O’Connell go into the hotel, and he’s been watching the papers from Austria. Perhaps I should have one delivered to them and send this device in to see what they say.”

  Edward stood alone in the temple and counted the number of stars at the top of the main stucco at the altar. Clues, clues, they had to find clues as to how to work the device and discover the tone that would stabilize the aether into a new element. The Eros Element. It seemed aptly named, for without the partnership of minds, they wouldn’t have gotten as close as they did.

  “I know what you’re missing,” Iris said from the top of the ramp. She carried the device gingerly in her gloved hands and descended into the gloom to join him.

  Edward stepped back. “Should you be here alone? You’re affianced to another man.”

  “The others are out and about, and Marie had an errand to run. I’ll only be here a few moments.” Iris set the device on the altar, and it caught a ray of sunlight. It blazed gold, and Edward thought it looked like it must have when new. Like his and Iris’s relationship—time had tarnished it.

  “What do you mean, you know what I’m missing?” Edward walked to the device. The dials were where he and Radcliffe had left them.

  “Look at all the stuccoes.” Iris gestured around them. “There are Psyche and Eros. And there’s Orpheus and Euridice and Medea and Jason… They’re all relationships, meetings of minds and hearts on common ground to form something greater or make a journey of transformation. Perhaps this was an initiation chamber of some sort.”

  She didn’t have to say it. Edward’s brain took the leap. “There needs to be more than one tone. A person can’t initiate himself.”

  “Yes. But it has to be the perfect pair.”

  “Right. Because early experiments with more than one tone proved disastrous. That’s one reason we all wear goggles. It’s thought that there is no such thing as a perfect combination of tones. There will always be some dissonance, and dissonance can be deadly.”

  “There’s always conflict in the myths. In most fairy tales, if you think about it.” She looked at him, and her dark blue eyes held sorrow. “They always have to fight for their love and overcome obstacles to make it work.”

  “Forgive my skepticism, but I’ve recently recovered from my airship crash injuries. Are you suggesting I put myself in further danger?”

  “Let me do it. You figure out the tones using the device, and I’ll run the experiment. I’ve seen you go through the procedure enough times.”

  Edward waved her away from the clockwork device. Although she’d betrayed him, he wouldn’t allow her to put herself in danger of permanent disfigurement. “I’ll do it. I just need to know what settings to start with.”

  “Whichever ones help you calculate the time of the dark moon. By the way, that’s when the experiment needs to be run.”

  “Are you sure? How do you know?”

  She smiled at him. “I know you can’t trust me in much, but do me this favor and believe me when I tell you that you need pure sunlight without any chance of reflection from the moon for this to work.”

  “Very well. The moon turns new tonight, so I will run it at dawn tomorrow.”

  When Iris emerged from the temple, a rough hand grasping her elbow made her struggle against the bruising hold before she recognized her fiancé.

  “Let me go,” she said and pulled her arm away.

  “Were you alone down there?” he asked. The muscles of his face clenched so hard that lines appeared under his round cheeks and jowls.

  “No,” she said, “I’m not going to lie to you. I was discussing the experiment’s next step with Professor Bailey.”

  “Are you an idiot?” Scott snapped. “You’re an engaged woman, but that doesn’t preserve your reputation.”

  They walked across the square toward the hotel, and Iris counted the steps until she could feign a headache and escape from his company. No, she couldn’t do that. She would honor Edward by sticking to a strict code of honesty.

  “I’m not stupid,” she said. At least that was the truth. “And we don’t have much time. I can’t accomplish what I need to if I have to go running for a chaperone every time I need to talk to one of my male colleagues.”

  “Enjoy it now,” he snapped. “Because once we get back to England, you’re not seeing any of them again.”

  Iris managed to slip away from him on the crowded sidewalk and stalked into the hotel. The first person she saw was Marie, who stood between Radcliffe and O’Connell with a guilty look on her face.

  “You seem to have lost something,” Radcliffe said and handed her the limp clockwork worm.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Trattoria Domani, Rome, 27 June 1870

  “We have to stop meeting like this,” Iris told Radcliffe once the four of them were seated at a corner table at the trattoria they frequented regularly. It was off the square and therefore quieter. “People will start to talk.”

  He didn’t crack a smile. “You didn’t need to spy on us. If you had questions for me, you could have asked me. I’m not interested in playing your and Mister Bledsoe’s game.”

  O’Connell’s size had struck Iris as potentially dangerous, but Radcliffe’s intensity and the way his gray eyes hardened with anger made her want to scoot away.

  Big hairy ox’s bollocks, I’ve already been manhandled by Jeremy Scott today, and I’m not backing down from this. Iris tried to assume a stern expression. “You say you’re not deliberately keeping secrets, but there’s something you haven’t told us. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. Why are you really along on this crazy mission? It has to be more than showing off your Greek.”

  Radcliffe and O’Connell exchanged glances.

  “She’s a smart one like Claire,” O’Connell said. “Even if her maid isn’t as sneaky as she thinks. Maybe they can hel
p, give you a woman’s perspective.”

  The doctor held his hand up to the waiter, and once the stone carafe of wine appeared, and four cups had been poured, he looked at Iris, and the way his eyes filled with pain, which must have taken a lot of energy to suppress, nearly broke her heart. Nearly.

  “There’s a girl from Boston,” he told her in the sort of tone men used when they spoke of their true loves. “She’s white. I’m…” He held out his hands. “Well, as you know, I’m not. She didn’t care, and her father was a tinkerer and her mother a tutor, so they had more liberal views on such things. But she had an aunt who didn’t.”

  “A narrow-minded, stubborn woman if I’ve ever seen one,” O’Connell added. “I studied with the girl’s father, and her aunt manipulated the family through money, and they were always short.”

  “But Claire saw through it.” Radcliffe spoke with a kind of professional detachment, but sorrow came through. “I managed to enlist in the army as a field hospital doctor to save some money so I could marry her. I proposed to her at her eighteenth birthday party—I was on leave for the holidays—and she accepted though all I could give her was a small ruby.”

  “It was a lovely ring,” O’Connell said. “Everyone thought so too, until the aunt saw it.”

  “She wasn’t supposed to be there, but I went ahead and proposed. The look on her face, as sour as Claire’s was happy. Her parents felt badly and allowed me to drive her home in my new steamcart. I should have known better.”

  “What happened?” Marie asked.

  “A horseman, one of the draftee hunters, came out of nowhere. It reared, and its hooves landed on the boiler, which exploded and sent the cart flying. Claire caught the worst of it on her hands and arms and tumbled out of the cart and down an embankment.”

  “How awful!” Iris said.