Soon she was perched once again upon the chair at Evan’s desk and bent over to peer through the eyepiece of the aetheroscope. Her skin crawled. Wriggling in the water droplet on the glass slide were hundreds of microscopic organisms.
Evan took one glance and cringed. “Perhaps we ought to consider a more toxic approach, with the primary intent of cleansing the well.”
“Chemicals?” she said. “Sodium hypochlorite would bleach the well. It might work, but it will also kill anything else living there. And once the bleach breaks down…” She shook her head. “The well would need to be monitored on a long-term basis. We don’t know the life-cycle of this parasite. If it forms a cyst—a tough, protective capsule—in response to environmental insult, it could return the moment conditions are once again favorable.”
“We would need to go back to Cardiff to obtain sufficient quantities of bleach to begin treatment. I’ve only enough here to destroy these samples. As to the problem of potential cysts…” He ran a hand through his hair. “We could post warning signs at the well, inform the entire village, but it won’t stop a determined individual from sneaking there in the dark of night and making offerings to the gwragedd annwn.”
Reaching out, she took Evan’s glimmering hand. Frustration had shifted the guanine crystals. She squeezed. “We proceed as planned.” She lifted her gaze to his tight eyes and pulled her shoulders back. “Now is not the time to concede defeat, but to redouble our efforts. You were up all night. What components did you manage to extract from the khu-neh-ari plant?”
“You’re right, of course.” Evan drew himself straight. “I’ve evidence of naphthoquinone…”
They gathered together another collection of plant extracts, chemicals and organic compounds. She reviewed each Petri dish, each test they’d assembled the night before, hoping to find something they’d overlooked.
She didn’t.
Piyali set up a dilution series, testing the effectiveness of the few extremely toxic chemicals Evan kept on hand. At last, weary from work and the previous night’s events, there was little to do but stare at each other across the table, across a wide selection of Petri dishes, containing well water and a new range of potential anti-parasitic pharmaceuticals. With luck, a few hours from now re-examination would reveal a solution, a chemical and its necessary concentration to eliminate any and all life stages of the parasite. But neither their diligence nor their patience was rewarded. Bleach killed off the parasite, but only when used in unusually large quantities.
“Scrofula!” She slapped her forehead and jumped to her feet. Lack of sleep had fogged her mind. “Sarah! She has no ointment. And, really, I must see if there’s a way to convince her mother to allow me to view the bite to her hand.”
Evan handed her a small container of his ointment. “She needs to apply it four times a day.”
He kissed her forehead, and she wanted nothing more than to wrap her arms about his waist, lay her head on his chest, close her eyes and listen to the steady beat of his heart. Instead, she rose on to the tips of her toes and gave him an all-too-brief kiss. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised.
Chapter 9
Back at The White Hare, Piyali found Sarah up and about, hoisting trays laden with stew and ale. She tsked. “Eleven stiches warrant a day off.”
“Father says there’s no place for loafers in our family.” Her eyes lifted to the blackened overhead beams of the ceiling, and her next words were louder. “Not that I’ve seen hide or hair of Mother since I was gravely injured doing her bidding.”
“Her bidding?” Piyali tipped her head.
“I told you the first night you were here.” Sarah swatted a hand in the air. “They want me to marry Evan. They’ve been plaguing and pestering and nudging me in his direction ever since he returned from Brazil.” She wiped down a table. “Handsome as he is, wealthy though he might one day be, not once has he offered me any encouragement. Still, I dutifully stole his handkerchief as instructed and tossed a bent pin in a pool of water, mangling some ancient Welsh blessing. And what happens? Tegan, mad as a hatter, drags me into the water, and I end the night with you sewing my leg back together.”
“How is your leg?”
“Crusty and sore, if in a sparkling sapphire kind of way.” Sarah tipped her head and lifted an eyebrow. “You could have told me. I’m not the type to faint or fret. I do, however, expect you and Evan to provide a cure.”
No one could sum up a situation quite like Sarah. With a bitter laugh, she handed Sarah the ointment and gave her instructions. “Your mother ought to use the ointment as well.”
“It’ll hardly be enough,” Sarah said, pulling a face as she slipped the jar into her pocket. “It’s spread clear up her arm now. I told her to let you look at it. But no—”
“Sarah!” Mr. Parker yelled from behind the bar. His lips were a harsh, bloodless line and his eyebrows formed a sharply pointed V. “Hush your mouth. I’ve raised you better than to gossip about family.”
Sarah opened her mouth, thought twice, and snapped it shut. Piyali touched her elbow in silent sympathy. With a sidelong glance that spoke of the trials she endured beneath the thumb of her father, Sarah hefted a stack of dirty dishes and wound her way through the tables and chairs to the kitchen.
Curious that Mrs. Parker pushed the centuries old Welsh custom upon her daughter. Wanting Sarah to marry well was understandable, but Piyali wouldn’t have pegged Mrs. Parker as the superstitious type.
Now was clearly not the time to press for a visit with Sarah’s mother, so Piyali made her way to her room. She’d compose that letter to Mr. Black, then approach Mr. Parker about sending another message. Perhaps that would be the best time to inquire after his wife.
In her room, she placed pen to paper, then stopped. A frog attack? Her account read like a fairy tale gone horribly wrong. There had to be a better way to relate the odd events that had occurred in Aberwyn. She scratched out her words and tried again. And again. Tossing aside her fountain pen, Piyali fell backward upon the lumpy mattress. Describing the process by which the man she loved was slowly turning invisible simply was not possible in the small square of parchment a skeet pigeon could carry. Her mind was too muddled. She’d rest her eyes a few minutes, then make another attempt.
The sun was low on the horizon when she pried her eyes open. Schistosomiasis! She’d slept away the afternoon. No more time to dally, the evening rush would soon be upon the tavern, and Mr. Parker would only grow more taciturn and gruff without the aid of his wife.
Hastily scratching off a report to Mr. Black containing nothing but bare facts—and trying not to reflect upon how ridiculous it all sounded—she rolled the note into a narrow cylinder, slid it into a tin casing and sealed the end. She bent over her trunk, hunting for another skeet pigeon punch card.
Gone. They were all gone. Her hands stilled as she scanned her belongings. Nothing seemed out of place, and the trunk had been locked. Though, admittedly, her lock was not particularly secure, a mild deterrent. Someone wanted to keep her from contacting headquarters. But who?
Only one person knew she possessed such punch cards. He also happened to be the proprietor of this tavern and inn. Was it Mr. Parker? His wife?
Sarah?
Had her first missive ever reached London?
She slid the message into a pouch hanging from her corset and took a moment to inspect her TTX weapon. Overreacting? No. Her training had taught her it was better to take precautions when one’s nervous system sent out an alert, and from the way the hairs on the back of her neck quivered… The Parkers were an odd bunch, but Piyali could think of no obvious reason they would wish to interrupt her communications.
Hand loosely poised by her hip, she slid down the stairs. Only a few bleary-eyed regular drunks occupied a dark corner beside the peat fire on the hearth. Sarah leaned on the window sill, staring out at the street. Her parents were nowhere to be seen. Careful to move silently, Piyali ducked under the countertop and crept on her toes tow
ard the Parkers’ private quarters. If challenged, she would insist Mrs. Parker required medical evaluation. For now, she listened at the door, to the cadence of what became increasingly hostile voices. Ever so carefully, she nudged the door ajar.
“What more do you want me to do?” Mrs. Parker grumbled. “I have it.”
“What of the plant?” the innkeeper challenged.
Mrs. Parker huffed. “A cutting.”
“Not good enough.” Contempt laced his voice. “We need roots.”
“They’ve killed every live sample we’ve sent,” she snapped. “What good are roots? This time will be different. We take them the vine. They send a botanist to the rainforest to dig up an entire plant. We need to go. Now.”
“No. Not with Sarah injured,” he objected. “Besides, there might be further instructions.”
There was a long silent pause in which Piyali imagined they glared daggers at each other.
“You want her cured,” Mrs. Parker accused. “Yet you’re quite happy to leave me to my fate. After all these years together, you’d sacrifice the queen to save the pawn?”
“I’m not the one who declined treatment.”
“I overheard them. The ointment merely slows down the inevitable. Excision is the only cure. With that woman set upon recruiting help from London, we need to leave.”
“Then shall I sharpen the knife?” Bitterness honed his words. “For amputation at your elbow is now your only opinion. The more natural joints you preserve, the better the prosthetic will function.”
Mrs. Parker snarled back, her words too guttural and mangled for Piyali to understand. No, she realized, not distorted at all. The Parkers now argued in Russian.
Scrofula. They were both spies. Russian spies! Here. Living in the countryside of Wales—according to Sarah—for some years, establishing a cover, raising a daughter, biding their time. Realization dawned. If Mr. Black and Lister University wished to recruit Evan, so too would the Russians. Encouraging—forcing—Sarah to pursue him as a husband was a most excellent strategy.
Mrs. Parker must have been the one to break into Evan’s home, leaving the greenhouse door ajar, rearranging shelf items. Sloppy of her. But what, exactly, had they taken? They’d had three long months since Evan returned from Brazil. The list could be quite long, even if they’d taken pains to steal only small samples of his specimens and tiny fractions of his supplies.
Piyali swallowed hard. They must know she was more than a physician. Why else steal her punch cards? This cast Mr. Black’s silence in a different light. Had the tavern’s rusty skeet pigeon ever taken flight?
Slowly, carefully, silently, she backed away. Evan’s worst fears were about to become reality, but not at all via the channels he’d expected.
She needed to tell him. Now.
Evan scraped his hand through his hair.
Over the past several hours, a gnawing sense of desperation had overtaken him. The latest development—free-swimming parasites infesting Seren’s Well—had escalated the situation beyond anything he could hope to control. If he couldn’t produce a solution, a cure, there would be no choice but to agree to summon Mr. Black and his agents, a most unwelcome conclusion to his struggles. While Lister University might be able to develop a cure, his secret would be in the hands of the British government.
He tried to imagine a positive outcome, but none of the scenarios his mind constructed ended well. Blue-skinned men—or women—with the ability to become invisible, an uncontrollable ability that was entirely subject to the whim of their emotional state. The government would ignore this unfortunate fact and try to mold such individuals into agents, to employ them for the greater good of the British Empire. But when inevitable madness resulted, what then? These agents would go rogue and disaster would result.
No. There was no alternative. A remedy had to be found.
“Copper,” he announced to the empty room as a flash of insight struck.
Turning on his heel, he stared at the bottle of blue vitriol—copper sulfate to be exact. Though it was a substance often used to treat skin diseases, it hadn’t proven equal to the task of eradicating the parasite. Neither had a khu-neh-ari preparation optimized for maximum naphthoquinone content.
However, analysis of the khu-neh-ari vine had also revealed the liana possessed an unusually high copper content. What would happen if he supplemented, rather than reduced the copper content of the new ointment?
Minutes later, an alcohol lamp burned at the base of a ring stand beneath a beaker containing the khu-neh-ari preparation, a yellowish, gel-like substance. Above the flask, a clamp held a glass volumetric burette filled with blue copper sulfate.
Evan stirred the ointment in the beaker with a glass rod until it melted. Then, slowly, he turned the burette’s tap, allowing a drop of the blue liquid to fall into the yellow solution. Drip by drip, the khu-neh-ari absorbed the blue vitriol, gradually turning a reddish-brown as the mixture became more acidic.
Time to place his hypothesis to the test. After pipetting a measure of this new mixture into a Petri dish containing contaminated well water, there was nothing left to do but wait.
Staring at the hands of his pocket watch, he paced the flagstone floor—and lasted all of ten minutes. If this worked, if he could exterminate the parasites in the fairy well, then Mr. Black would not need to be summoned. That would win him additional time for further experimentation, time to determine a method by which to kill the creatures that crept beneath his skin.
But he was getting ahead of himself. First things first.
Recalling how Piyali had operated the aetheroscope, he prepared a slide and slid it into the aether chamber. A hiss. A process of focusing upon the specimen, gradually increasing the strength of the objective until the parasites came into focus.
For a moment, he forgot to breathe. Not a single one of the unicellular parasites moved, all floated motionless inside the small drop of fluid. A number of the wee creatures had lysed—burst—and fragments of their intracellular organelles were strewn about the field of vision.
Heart pounding, he leapt to his feet, knocking over the chair behind him in his haste to return to the solution-filled beaker. With a shaking hand, he lifted an eyedropper to extract a single drop of the anti-parasitic solution. He forced himself to take several long, steadying breaths—in and out—until his shimmering hand returned to a regrettable, yet familiar, blue.
He touched a drop of solution to the skin on the back of his hand and stared intently, praying, hardly daring to hope that it might penetrate the many layers of his skin to eradicate the creatures that burrowed within. Shock, then euphoria, rippled through him as a circle of blue color began to fade, slowly returning to a more normal, flesh-colored shade.
Whooping, he leapt to his feet, a wide grin stretching across his face as he strode across the room toward the door to snatch his coat from its hook. He needed to find Piyali, needed to pull her into his arms, spin her about and make plans for their future.
But before his hand could wrap about the handle, the door burst open and Piyali herself rushed into his cottage, wide-eyed and frantic. Her clothes were rumpled and several strands of hair had pulled free from her normally sleek braid. She slammed the wooden door behind her and fell backward against it, dragging in long, ragged breaths.
“What’s wrong?” Worry shoved excitement to the floor.
“Spies,” she panted, staggering forward. He caught her by the shoulders. “You’ve been living in a nest of them.”
“Spies?” He lifted an eyebrow. “In Aberwyn, Wales?”
“The Parkers,” she said.
As he listened to the rush of words that poured from her mouth, Evan began to pace. Her discovery reframed every interaction he’d had with them these last three months. As the proprietor of The White Hare, Mr. Parker had received and signed for every single item he’d shipped from Brazil during his expedition. Many of those crates had arrived before he himself even set foot on the dirigible that had carried
him home to Britain. He’d not have noticed a few missing grams of dried Tawari tree bark or a few milliliters of Wasai extract. And his plants… Once he’d begun to propagate them here, a missing seedling or two he would have overlooked as a failure to germinate or root in British soil.
Evan turned on his heel. An inventory of his stores, of his plants, might reveal discrepancies, but how could he—at this late date—hope to pinpoint exactly what was stolen? “Wait.” His mind finally caught up with Piyali’s words. “Did you say they pushed Sarah to seduce me?” Her constant flirtations, her wandering hands and the ever-present overflowing bosom accidentally brushing against him at any and every opportunity.
She nodded. “Though I don’t think she knows her parents are Russian. I think she went along with the plan to wriggle out from under their thumb.”
“Instead it would have tightened the noose about my neck.” He strode to the tabletop, slapped a small square of paper upon it and lifted a fountain pen. “We need to send Mr. Black a message. Inform him of the spies and request backup. But whatever you do, don’t mention the frog.”
“What? We can’t. Weren’t you listening?” Her voice rose in volume.
“I’m sorry. Too much, too fast.” His mouth fell open as she repeated herself. “Even if we trusted Mr. Parker to toss the clockwork contraption into the air, he has stolen all my pre-punched direction cards.”
He looked pointedly at the pistol strapped to her hip. “Then we handle this ourselves.”
“I suppose I could shoot them both, then bind them hand and foot,” Piyali grumbled. “Heave them both in your crank wagon and haul them to Cardiff. From there I could contact headquarters, send them a cryptogram over the wire.”
He snorted. “Dr. Piyali Mukherji, bounty hunter.”
“Oh?” Her eyebrows rose. “You don’t think I could?”
“I don’t doubt it for a minute. I’ll help. But first we ought to cure this infection.”
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