by Hall, Ian
As they came near, she shook her arm free from his grip, and he shrugged gruffly, leaving the two of us together.
She eyed me suspiciously. “What do you want?”
Again, that rugged, harsh accent, and this time from such pretty lips. “Lisa Scherk?”
“Schenk,” She shook her head slightly. “My name is Annalise Schenk.”
I supposed that through such a twisted route to find her, I could have mis-heard the name. “I’ve been told that you are a telegraph operator.”
Her eyes clouded, and she looked at me with suspicion. “I can do the telegraph.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, and held out my hand. “I am Paul Chapman of the Pinkerton Detective Agency…”
“No!” she screamed, “He finds me!”
In an instant, the man stood at her side, brandishing his broom in my face. “Out! Raus!” He snarled.
I knew that there had been a huge misunderstanding. “Frau Schenk?” I pleaded with my best smile while the broom swung at my face. “I need a telegraph operator! I’m here to offer you a job!”
“A job?” she stepped forward, pushed the old man aside with ease, and moved closer. Although her hair had been unceremoniously tucked back under a wrap of hessian, and her face looked grubby, her eyes shone with a deep blue. “You are not from him?”
Not knowing who ‘he’ was, I shook my head. “No, Ma’am.”
She turned to the man. “Nicht hier.” And shooed him away. “He is Ukranian, he knows little proper Deutch.” She said as he retreated. She took a moment to gather herself. “You are not from him, not from my husband?”
“No madam. I am not.” I spoke clearly. “I am from the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and we are looking to employ a telegraph operator, a woman.”
“How much will you pay?” She came straight to the point.
I had been allowed up to twenty-five bucks a week for a top operator. “I can offer you seventeen now, but if you prove your worth, that could rise to twenty-five in a year.”
“Do you have five dollars in your pocket right now?” she asked, glancing behind her at the steaming cauldron.
“Yes,”
“Give it to me.”
With a puzzled look, I picked a five dollar bill from my pocket, and placed it into her damp wet-wrinkled hand.
“Okay, mister detective man, you have just bought me for a week in here.” She turned back to the shop floor. “I’ll be back in two minutes.” She said over her shoulder with a smile.
An intriguing friendly smile.
Harvard’s Best Kept Secret
Francis Smalling, Smalling Apple Farm, Sangamon County, Illinois
November 12th 1866
It seemed to take Margaret an age to release me from her embrace. “You’re suffocating me.” I said in mock whimper.
“It serves you right.” She scolded, suddenly pushing me away. “You don’t send enough letters.”
I laughed. “I did write, though.”
“But not enough,” she began, then looked round to see if Mamma was nearby. “And you don’t give me enough details, you know, about the murders.”
“I thought I was being too grisly.”
“No,” she scolded. “I need it. I was there that night too, remember?” Passion and fervor swept across her face like a storm passing.
“Okay, sister dearest,” I held her face in my hands to calm her. “I’ll remember. I’ll write more often, and give more details, especially the grisly, gruesome ones.”
“Thank you.” She whispered, releasing a sigh.
When she eventually let me inside, I found mamma quietly sitting in front of the kitchen range. I could smell fresh griddle scones. “Hello, Francis,” she said. What passed for a smile crossed her lips, but penetrated no deeper. Her eyes held no response, and she soon turned back to the stove, seemingly intent on her baking.
Bending down to her chair, I hugged her from behind, then turned to see Margaret standing in the doorway. “She’s getting worse.”
“I can see that,” I replied with heaviness in my heart. “How did the harvest go?”
“Well enough. David and the boys did most of it, and I’ve been making regular trips into town to keep the business side going.”
“Excellent,” I motioned her out of the kitchen. “What’s the extension?”
She led me through the living room, then to a new passageway. “My new room.” She opened a door, and walked into the open area which, although the floor had been properly finished and sanded, had neither roof nor solid walls. “David reckons it’ll be finished in a week or so.”
I gave her a sideways look. It had been the second time she’d mentioned the foreman by name in two minutes. “Why the move?” I asked.
“It’s not the same without you, Francis.” She frowned, retreating back into the house. “I got rid of Rebekah’s bed, but the memory can’t be erased. I had to move. It seemed the only way.”
I’d like to say that my trip back home was a highlight of my year, but it fell considerably short. After the initial excitement of her greeting, Margaret proved to be withdrawn and it seemed that our relationship of old had died somewhat.
Mamma lived in a state of a constant sleepwalker, rarely emitting a sound from one day to the next. For a week I busied myself in the summer house, and gave David and the boys a hand in getting walls and a roof on Margaret’s new bedroom. But, despite my new journals from Springfield, and my letters from abroad, the time at the farm passed exceedingly slowly. I simply hankered for Harvard and its laboratories.
Having forced myself to stay to the limit of my promised two weeks, I rode from Springfield to Mattoon with some relief in my heart. Home on the farm just simply wasn’t the same anymore. I purchased a train ticket to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and realized that my overland journey had started again.
On this, only my second trip east, I found myself quite the seasoned traveler. In no time, I had passed half of a continent, and lodged my horse in stables nearby my digs.
Professor Wattles seemed pleased to see me, and in the coming days we pored over my new journals, duplicating the experiments both on our own, and with some of the students.
On one late night visit, as I sat in a remote corner of the laboratory, reading under a dim lantern, I noticed movement near our latest experiment, a treatise of a new kind of electricity first developed by Guillaume Duchenne in 1855. The figure looked slim, and as he examined the wiring, he began to touch the connections, scrutinizing the circuit.
I got to my feet, and walked quietly across the wooden floor. “Do you require assistance?” I asked. To my shock and surprise, the figure almost jumped a foot in the air, startled by my sudden appearance. “I’m sorry, sir, I did not mean to…” My words petered out on my lips as the figure turned to me. Even in the dim lighting in the laboratory, I could see that despite the jacket and trousers, the person was actually a woman.
“Shh,” she said, putting a finger to her pursed lips. “Keep your voice down.”
“I can assure you, madam, that we are quite alone here.” I walked closer. “Professor Wattles went home at least an hour ago.”
“I know,” she said softly. Her cheeks dimpled as she spoke. “He is my uncle, he told me of your experiments.” I must have frowned, because she gave me an indignant look. “Do you not think women can appreciate science?”
“No, madam, it is just a rarity.” I stammered. “And I know women are not allowed at Harvard.”
She indicated her clothes. “Thus the disguise,”
I noticed the slight swell of her bosom under her jacket, and the pronounced hips within her trousers, and deduced a slim, petite figure, although she seemed to be almost my height. “And do you often creep around Harvard’s hallowed halls at night?”
“Indeed it is the only time I can do so,” She gave a slight smile, which somehow seemed to brighten the room. “For if I were to be caught, I would be thrown out on my backside.”
I advanced m
y hand into the space between us. “Francis Smalling, at your service, ma’am.”
She shook my hand softly, her small fingers tiny in my hand. “I am Emily Bradford Hettinger, as I said before, the niece of Professor Ernest Wattles. He has spoken highly of you.”
I felt intrigued by this young woman of no older than twenty. “So what brings you to this experiment in particular?”
“Alternating Voltage is a strange concept,” she said, surprising me by her terminology. “Uncle explained the switching method, but I had to see it for myself to understand it properly.”
“Let me bring more light,” I offered, lifting a lamp closer. I paused for a moment, the lamp illuminating her pretty cheeks more clearly. “When we wind on this handle, a coating of copper on the shaft automatically switches the polarity of the batteries back and forward.”
“I looked at your wiring,” Emily said, shaking the cloth coated copper wire. “There’s another way to get the same effect. Can I?” She looked at me for permission to uncouple one of the contacts.
I nodded. “Of course, feel free.”
“If we take these wires away, and connect this part in series, we get the same results on your iron filings,” she began to turn the handle, “But we lose the volt drop across the extra copper.”
I stood back in awe of this chit of a woman/girl, who knew so much about a subject denied to her by Harvard. Then looking up suddenly, she caught my expression. “You seem surprised.”
“Eh, no, not surprised,” the words died on my rapidly drying tongue. “More intrigued that a member of the fairer sex should show such knowledge, such proficiency.”
“Do you recognize the name Caroline Herschel?” Her hands rested on her hips in defiance.
“Of course,” I quickly began. “Who has not heard of the wife of the great astronomer?”
“And yet you call her ‘the wife’, rather than a co-worker, and fellow astronomer in her own right.”
I had somehow gotten on the wrong side of this little firebrand, and scrambled in vain to regain my earlier ground. “It was a slip of the tongue, Miss Hettinger.”
“Mary Somerville?” She stabbed at me.
“Scottish scientist,” I began, determined to give her a proper title, rather than just a writer with scientific undertones. “James Clark Maxwell actually mentioned her as a peer, and stated that her books influenced him greatly.”
“When did he say that?” She seemed to wrinkle her face into a question mark. “I’ve read all his papers.”
“In one of his personal communications to me; last year, if I recall.”
At last her defensive posture began to crumble. “You have written to Maxwell?” Both her tone and expression exuded a definite source of her being impressed.
“Maxwell and I have exchanged correspondence for some time.” I said, seemingly recouping old ground. “We have both become stuck in the quest to build a moving coil indicator.”
Her brows furrowed. “Why would you need such a device? We already have galvanometers.”
Again, her grasp of the field shone. “We need a standard, Miss Hettinger. To begin to accurately measure the electricity that we dabble with so much,” I indicated the circuit before us. “Volta gave us the formula for one volt, Ohm took it further, but around the world, we all have a different representation of the value of what one volt actually means. The value of the moving arm of a galvanometer is restricted by the magnet, and no one produces magnets of a uniform magnetic value.” I could see the fire in her eyes, and knew that I’d regained my previous ground, and had perhaps even climber higher. “But imagine if we could have a coil of wire, driven by a voltage that runs inside an iron core. It would need no outside magnetism to work…”
“Because it would produce its own!” She shrieked.
I actually stepped back. “Eh, yes.” I said, still slightly dumbfounded. She had made quite a scientific leap, and done it extremely quickly. “The amount of turns on the rotating arm could be calibrated to produce the same ‘volt’ the world over. There would be universal uniformity.”
Even in the dim lamps of the laboratory, I could see work and calculations being performed at lightning speed behind her seemingly blank stare. I had never before met such a keen and enquiring mind, and the fact that she was both female and extremely pretty made the combination both heady and exotic.
“How do you foresee the physical aspect?” Her eyes suddenly fastened on mine. “The actual design?”
“The problem is, of course, complex. When the coil becomes magnetic, it will be attracted to the surrounding iron core which is necessary for it to move. Both Maxwell and I have tried to draw a taut wire system, but we have both fell short.”
She picked up a lamp, and walked to one of the large blackboards on the north wall. “Hold this.” She handed the lamp to me.
“A spinning wheel spins from two bushes, and it’s very stable; it never rocks or deviates.” She sketched quickly on the board. “If we could use that principle, and somehow get your electricity onto the spindle through the bushes we could eliminate any need for a taut wire system, and keep the actual moving part very upright, secure in the middle of the iron surrounding it.”
I could see her system immediately and even noticed ways to improve. “We’d have to have a far more efficient bushing system.”
“Metal on metal.” She nodded. “Like the arm of a telegraph machine.”
“But with more range of movement!”
I felt so good I turned to her in euphoria. In seconds we’d worked out a principle that the greatest minds in the world had thus far missed. Stepping forward, I swung the lamp wide, and embraced her with my free arm.
Then the world changed.
As my arm swept over her shoulder, and clapped her firmly on the back in celebration, her chest got pushed onto mine, and for the first time in my life, I found myself embracing female bosom parts that were not related to me.
But before my exaltation could diminish, with her head slightly upturned, her lips met mine in a celebratory kiss, and I felt lost to the world. Her lips only really grazed mine, but I felt the dry exterior, then as her mouth pushed harder, the hint of moistness beyond.
Startled, I stepped immediately backwards, panting and breathless. For myself, I felt embarrassed to have become so suddenly forward, so suddenly brazen and shameless. “My apologies, Mistress Emily,” I blurted, my breathing suddenly irregular and shallow.
Her head had bowed slightly, her eyes now staring at the floor. “Apology accepted, Francis Smalling.”
Paul Chapman, Galway Tavern, Chicago, Illinois
November 9th 1866
I knew the premises well, and the snug bar of the Galway Tavern that held eight at a push was usually quiet until after five o’clock. To prevent any interruptions to our noon-time conversation, I had the door locked, and the only method of ingress was the small hatchway to the bar itself which now sat firmly closed. On the low dark stained table, my beer lay untouched; Annalise Schenk had already consumed half of hers.
I felt unsure if the fire in the main bar had been lit, but in any case, the heat had not yet reached the small adjoining room, so I kept my coat on, unbuttoned.
“I should never have married Stanley,” she said, wiping her lips with her sleeve. “It was a bad move, but my father knew his father, and he was a good man, until the war.”
“He fought?”
“No,” Annalise shook her head and allowed a dry smile to her lips. “He worked.” She sat for a moment, her head bowed to the table. “And he gambled.”
“And where is he now?” I asked.
“Probably in our apartment, waiting on me coming home.”
“So you have not actually left him?”
She shook her head. “Not yet, but by God’s help I will now.” She grabbed the beer glass with such ferocity that I thought it would surely shatter. With slow deliberation, she drank half its remaining contents in one. “I swear I will not return to that man.”<
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I instantly wanted to be both her savior and protector. If I had indeed found our telegraph operator, I felt resolute to assist her make a break for freedom. “How did you learn the telegraph?” The woman intrigued me and I determined to learn more of her story.
“Ah, my husband was an operator, before he took to the gambling and the drink.” She raised the glass, draining it, and motioned to the hatchway with the empty glass, obviously wanting another. I got to my feet and crossed to the small doors and knocked. “He worked with Western Union, in south Chicago.” She continued. “Our first months were quite delightful. We shared his interest in the new-fangled device, and he taught me how to work it. But it turned out to be one of the worst moves I’ve ever made.”
The hatch opened, and I ordered a beer and bourbon.
“When I had reached a sufficient level of proficiency, he began to slacken; he made me do part or all of his work shifts on the device. So he could gamble, or drink, or both.” She looked up at me. “I lived like that for two years. Then we got caught. I wasn’t an employee of the company, so Stanley got fired for not being on duty. Then, of course, he began to blame me for our misfortune.”
I returned to the table and placed the new brew in front of her. “So that’s how you learned the telegraph?”
“Yes. We moved a few times, and the technical parts were always changing. But he taught me the new ways so I could work and enable his habits.”
She fell silent for a moment, seemingly in contemplation. “I need to get away from Stanley.” She said eventually.
“You can do that.” I said trying hard to be helpful, but non-committal.
“But he would find me, I’m sure.”
“We can change your name, your appearance; you could in essence, disappear.” I said, “And you’d be working for the Pinkertons, we’ve got some muscle, you know.”
“Where would I stay?”
“Our building is over the river, and there are always empty apartments for rent nearby.”
She gave me a long hard stare. “And you would help me?”