by Jay Lake
“As a matter of fact,” the tall man said “I started off following the fellow who brought the girl.”
While this terse conversation was taking place, the newcomer’s gaze had made a careful tour of the gloomy laboratory. His dark eyes did not give much away, but Mathieu judged that he had not had the slightest expectation of seeing this kind of apparatus, and was now wondering what kind of alchemist’s den he had stumbled into.
“Why?” Mathieu asked, bluntly.
“Because I was told in Stepney that he once collected another girl in exactly the same fashion—one who hasn’t been seen since by her mother, sister or aunt.”
Mathieu’s heart sank. Not the police, then, he thought. At least not yet—but trouble all the same. On the other hand, he can’t be certain that the other girl was also brought here. “What do you want with me?” he asked, aloud.
“That I don’t quite know, as yet,” the stranger replied. “What did he want with you, do you think?” He nodded towards the door through which the other invader had made his escape, which still stood open.
“A common sneak-thief, I suppose,” Mathieu said, wishing that he sounded more convincing.
“This place reeks of blood,” the tall man observed. “What in God’s name are you doing here?”
“Medical research,” Mathieu retorted, taking slight offense at the other’s tone. “Work for the benefit and progress of humankind.”
Perhaps remarkably, given that he seemed no better educated than the young whore, the stranger did not seem disinclined to take that statement at face value. “What kind of…?” he began, not unrespectfully.
The seaman did not have time to complete the sentence before a new voice cut in, saying: “I do not think, sir, that the professor’s work is any concern of yours.”
Mathieu and the stranger both turned to the open doorway, where Sir Julian Templeforth was now standing. The briefest sideways glance at the clock told Mathieu that the baronet was as punctual as ever.
The stranger looked the baronet up and down, and lowered his eyes reflexively in the face of that brilliant blue-eyed stare.
“Who is this, Mathieu?” Sir Julian demanded, with a note of accusation in his voice.
“I don’t know his name, sir,” Mathieu was quick to say, “but he came to my aid when I called for help just now, and frightened off a man who was attacking me—a burglar, I suppose, who must have thought the dwelling empty, having seen no light from the front.”
“I’m Thomas Dean, merchant seaman,” the tall man supplied, promptly, “lately second mate on the SS Hallowmas.”
Thomas Dean waited politely, but Sir Julian did not introduce himself. Instead, he reached into his jacket pocket for his pocket-book, saying: “We’re grateful for your help. Perhaps….”
“I don’t want your money,” the seaman interrupted, his voice turning harsh. “I want to know what’s going on here. I want to know what that girl was doing here this afternoon, and whether the same thing that was done to her, whatever it might be, was also done to my sister Caroline.”
Sir Julian’s eyes narrowed, and his hand fell away from his jacket pocket towards his britches, where there was a very conspicuous bulge. If Sir Julian wanted to carry a revolver, Mathieu thought, he might do better to wear looser-fitting trousers with more capacious pockets—like the ones the sailor had on. He found, somewhat to his alarm, that he could not remember Caroline Dean at all. He was at least fifty per cent sure, though, that the girl who had died—the only one, so far as he knew, to have died since he came to London—had had a different name.
“Mr. Dean followed a man who brought a young girl here this afternoon,” Mathieu said, trying to let his patron know, without giving the game away, that the seaman did not appear to be aware of the connection between Cormack and Sir Julian. He made a private observation that the lack of any such awareness made it unlikely that Thomas Dean had been the man who was watching the house in Holland Park on the previous night, before adding: “He thinks the same man might have taken his sister away. If so, Mr. Dean, he did not bring her here. He probably supplies girls to more than one client.”
Dean’s gaze went from Mathieu to Sir Julian and back again, then made another thoughtful tour of the laboratory. He made no attempt to hide his suspicions. “In that case,” he said, “I’d best take what I know to Scotland Yard, and let the police….”
The seaman broke off as Sir Julian produced the revolver from his pocket, but a slight smile flashed across his lips. Mathieu inferred that Dean’s suspicions had just been turned into certainty. As an officer on an ocean-going vessel he was presumably required to carry a gun himself on occasion, and he did not seem to be in the least intimidated by the weapon. Mathieu, on the other hand, knew that Sir Julian was as expert with a pistol as he was with a blade, and was certainly reckless enough to make use of his expertise if the impulse came upon him. The baronet had obviously leapt to the conclusion that Caroline Dean had been the girl who had died, even though he had a poorer memory for names of that sort than Mathieu.
Sir Julian closed the door behind him and turned the key in the lock. “You should have taken the money, lad,” he said, softly. “By the look of you, I doubt that your blood has anything to contribute to the professor’s research, but a man of science can always find a use for such stuff, if it comes to that. If you behave yourself, though, we’ll settle for tying you up and putting you to bed in the professor’s cupboard for a little while.”
Mathieu groaned audibly, knowing that the situation was now beyond all possibility of control. “What about the other one?” he murmured. “What if he turns out to be the one who was watching us in Holland Park?”
Sir Julian evidently had not considered that possibility. After a moment’s pause, though, he shrugged his shoulders. “We can’t stay here now, in any case,” he said. “It looks as if we’d best be Ireland-bound, no matter how much trouble the goddam rebels are causing over there. We’ll have to go ahead with tonight’s treatment, as planned, but then we must start packing up. Do you have some rope with which to tie the fellow up?”
“Only twine,” Mathieu said, looking towards the shelf that accommodated a stout ball of sturdy string.
“Best do a good job, then,” Sir Julian said. “He’s a sailor, after all, well used to dealing with knots. If he gets loose, I’ll have to shoot him—and that’s not what any of us wants.” This statement was, of course, intended to impress the logic of the situation upon Dean rather than Mathieu, but Mathieu could see, as he reached for the ball of string, that the seaman had made his own estimate of that logic.
Mathieu had quite forgotten the scalpel, and Sir Julian evidently had not noticed that Thomas Dean was carrying anything. The instrument was, after all, quite small and the seaman’s hand was larger than average. Mathieu’s blood ran suddenly cold as the sailor suddenly flipped his wrist and sent the scalpel hurtling towards Sir Julian’s face. The baronet saw it coming too late, and probably had no idea what it was until the object struck him full in the face. The sharp blade sliced into the cheek, about an inch below his right eye, and cut through the flesh until its progress was arrested by the cheekbone.
Sir Julian howled, more in wrath than in pain, and jerked his head to one side.
The wound bled copiously, but Mathieu could not imagine that it was serious. The blade fell to the floor, but Sir Julian had closed his eyes reflexively even as he raised the pistol in order to take aim. Before the baronet could open his eyes again, in order to complete the threatening gesture, Dean had grabbed Mathieu and pulled him into position as a human shield. Dean’s left arm was now around Mathieu’s neck, while the right held a much larger knife, with a curved blade and a serrated edge, which he must have had concealed about his person.
While Mathieu felt the point of Dean’s knife digging suggestively into his neck, not far from the carotid artery, Sir Julian tried to stem the blood coursing from his cheek with his left hand, while holding the revolver as steadily as he could in his
right. Eventually, the baronet fished a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to the wound. The white cotton turned red, but the further flow of blood was inhibited. The baronet’s eyes were livid with anger, but he was in control of himself and his right hand was not trembling.
“Now,” said Dean, a trifle hoarsely, “let’s take stock. It seems that the man I put to flight might not have been a common-or-garden burglar after all—in which case, he might come back. On the whole, though, we’re not likely to be disturbed, at least for a little while. Time to complete the introductions, I think. Who are you?”
“Go to hell,” Sir Julian said. If Mathieu could read the sky-blue eyes correctly, Sir Julian was weighing up the possibility of taking a shot anyway, carefully weighing up his chances of hitting the seamen in the head without Mathieu ending up with a cut throat.
“I’m Mathieu Galmier, late of the Sorbonne and the Institut Pasteur,” Mathieu was quick to say. “I’m doing research in immunology, in parallel with Elie Metchnikoff in Paris. I didn’t hurt your sister, although I did put some of her blood through a special filter to remove certain infectious agents. If she never went home, it wasn’t because of anything I did.” He was by no means convinced that that was true, even if his memory could be trusted in its conviction that Caroline Dean had not been the girl who had died, but he hoped that he sounded believable, and that his word as a man of science might carry some weight with the seaman.
“And who’s he?” Dean demanded, meaning Sir Julian.
“He’s my patron,” Mathieu said, carefully refraining from supplying a name. “He’s also my patient—which is to say, one of my experimental subjects. As you can see, no harm has come to him by virtue of his involvement in my work.”
“I’ve rarely seen a man in such good trim,” the seaman admitted, suspiciously. “What are you treating him for—the pox?”
“That’s not your concern,” Sir Julian put in. “If I put down the gun, will you put down the knife, so that we can discuss the matter as civilized men?”
“It was you who uncivilized the situation in the first place,” Dean pointed out. “It’s not as easy to mend things as it is to break them, though. If you had nothing to hide, you’d hardly be planning to tie me up and flee to Ireland, would you?”
Silently, Mathieu cursed Julian Templeforth’s loose mouth and propensity for hasty action. “You don’t understand, Mr. Dean,” he said. “So many people simply don’t understand, even though the notion of drawing blood is perfectly familiar in medical practice. My syringes are neater and safer by far than leeches or cupping, but hollow needles still seem to intimidate the popular imagination, and the mere concept of experimentation seems to send shivers down the backs of many common folk. Have you any idea of the abuse that Louis Pasteur, the greatest benefactor of humanity this century has seen, has had to endure in the course of his researches, for his temerity in regarding the human body as a legitimate object of experimental study? If you had the least conception of the persecution that Ignatz Semmelweis underwent at the hands of physicians, for proving the necessity of sterile technique and demonstrating that they were infecting their patients with mortal diseases, you would not be in the least surprised that I prefer to work in secret, or that those who depend on my work might be a trifle over-anxious to preserve that secrecy.
“I am working for the betterment of the human condition, Mr. Dean, and would far rather do so in the open—but I need blood to feed my investigations, which no one is willing to supply but whores. If some misfortune really has befallen your sister, it was most likely the result of some infection that might have been curable two hundred years ago, if only the Age of Reason had been allowed to extend its viewpoint to the human body. If you want to blame someone for her misfortune, blame the acolytes of ignorance, superstition and horror who have surrounded medical research with all manner of prohibitions!”
Mathieu felt the pressure of the knife-point relax somewhat, and knew that he had made an impact of sorts. The seaman was no fool; whether or not he had ever heard of Pasteur and Semmelweis, he could follow the gist of the argument.
Sir Julian, on the other hand, was still pointing the gun as if he were avid to use it. The cut on his cheek was not serious, but he was exceedingly sensitive about his appearance, and he was not a man to take such an insult gracefully.
“Listen!” Mathieu said, speaking to them both. “There is, I think, a way to set Mr. Dean’s mind at rest. Let him witness the treatment for which you came here tonight, my lord. Let him see that there is nothing to fear in the mere process of drawing blood and reinserting it into the body. Let him see, at any rate, that you are not afraid, and that you trust me to work in your best interests. Then perhaps, we can all agree that there is nothing sinister going on here, let alone anything diabolical.”
Sir Julian only needed a few seconds to see the wisdom of the move, if only as a temporary delay. He had, after all, already offered, albeit in a somewhat cavalier fashion, to put his gun away in order that he and Dean might discuss matters like civilized men. “I’m agreeable to that,” he said—but he flashed a warning glance at Mathieu, as if he were afraid that the scientist might give away too much.
Thomas Dean was evidently curious. “All right,” he said. “I’ll settle for that, for now.”
4.
After a little further discussion, Sir Julian agreed to deposit his revolver on the coat-stand in the hall, while Thomas Dean placed his knife on a shelf in the laboratory. Then there was a pause while Mathieu closed and locked his front door. He took time then to inspect the cut on Sir Julian’s cheek, which he sealed as carefully as he could and dressed with gauze.
“It might open again when I replace your blood, because of the anti-clotting agent,” he said, anxiously, “but you should be able to staunch the flow without overmuch difficulty.”
“It’s only a scratch, damn it!” the baronet said. “Better a little bleeding than go without the treatment.”
The seaman watched, with evident fascination, as Mathieu sat the baronet down in the chair that had recently been occupied by Judy Lee, and carefully inserted the hollow needle into his right forearm. Sir Julian did not flinch, although it was becoming far harder to connect with his veins than it had been to get into the girl’s. From the corner of his eye, Mathieu saw the seaman bite his lip in sympathy. He switched on the pump that would assist the extraction.
Mathieu had set aside the apparatus that had circulated Judy’s blood through the filtration matrix, having already abstracted the filtrate from the matrix. The filtrate was now being maintained in solution in a few milliliters of fresh blood, held in a rotating flask dipped in lukewarm water-bath. That was necessary because the agent lost its properties if it were completely isolated from its natural environment. When Mathieu had drawn off half a liter of Sir Julian’s blood he put it in a second flask, which had already been warmed to body-temperature in the same water-bath. He detached the first flask, added the small sample of enhanced blood to the larger quantity, and then set the second flask to rotate.
“My patron’s blood-type is such that he can receive blood of any other type without an adverse reaction,” Mathieu said to Thomas Dean, “but it would not matter if there were some slight reaction, because the transfer of the agent is not dependent on compatibility. The agent does, however, require dilution before reinjection, in order that its effects may be properly generalized.”
“What effects?” Dean understandably wanted to know.
“Increased resistance to certain innate infections,” Mathieu said, employing deliberate circumlocution.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Dean protested. “How can taking blood from a sick child-whore—and I saw the girl who was brought here this afternoon, Mr. Galmier, so I know that she was sick—help increase resistance to disease in a healthy man?”
“It may seem strange,” Mathieu told him, smoothly, “but one of my former colleagues at the Institut Pasteur, Elie Metchnikoff, has demonstra
ted that the body has its own innate defenses against infection. The reason that Jenner’s vaccine works, we believe, is that exposure to the relatively-harmless cowpox stimulates the production of some kind of reactive agent, which is also effective against the much more dangerous smallpox. Even when the reactive agents within a human body are fighting a losing battle, they can be filtered out and concentrated, and used to arm a healthy body against the same infections that were defeating them in their original host.”
Dean was, indeed, no fool. He was able to take the argument a step further than Mathieu had assumed. “And what effect does the removal of the reactive agents have on the original hosts?” he demanded, after only a moment’s thought. “Does it not weaken them, and hasten them on heir own way to death?”
“We think not,” Mathieu was quick to say, hoping that the lie was not transparent. “Indeed, I believe that my filtration process removes infective agents as well as reactive ones, preserving exactly the same balance as before in the donor—but the infective agents are held in the filter when the reactive agents are abstracted, and I am careful to destroy them there.”
“In that case,” Dean said, “If you were to reinject the separated reactive agents back into the donor….”
“Their condition would almost certainly improve,” Mathieu agreed, making haste to get the half-truth out of his mouth, in order to return to safer argumentative ground, “and that is, of course, my long-term goal. The eventual aim of my research is to find a means of multiplying the reactive agents in isolation, so that they can then be redeployed, not merely in their original host or a single new host, but in a hundred or a thousand individuals. Given time, and sufficiently effective filters, we might not only put an end to dozens of infectious diseases, slow down the aging process and….” He paused in response to Sir Julian’s warning glare, and then finished, a trifle lamely: “and accelerate the healing process in wounds inflicted by bullets and blades.”
“I see,” the seaman said, studying Sir Julian’s face and figure carefully. “Well, your patient certainly looks well on the treatment—all the more so if he really does have the clap.”