by J M Bannon
4:30 p.m. The town of Belfort, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region of France
“This is silk from Lyon, it is the same quality you would find in Paris, Lilith,”
“Paris would have silks from China and Siam; I want something exotic, cosmopolitan, not what the other provincial girls can get,” she replied. The girl continued to rummage through the bolts of cloth in the fabric shop.
“Mrs. Remult, are you able to place a special order from overseas?” asked Lilith.
“Oh no, Lilith, that is too expensive. You would have to buy the whole bolt. I don’t understand, these silks are sought after in London and New York. Belfort is sophisticated in its own right, ours is one of the largest towns in France and we do a brisk trade with the Swiss and Germans over the border,” consoled Mrs. Remult.
“You don’t understand,” murmured Lilith.
“I think I comprehend far more than you do. You forget, I was once a young girl growing up in the country. I have already had my time thinking life would be grander somewhere, anywhere else than here,” replied the elderly French woman.
“Did you ever leave and live somewhere else?” Lilith brightened seeking any avenue to break the mundane, even a story from the old lady Remult.
“I could make a world big enough for myself here Lilith,” replied Mrs. Remult as she put the fabric away.
Lilith made her way out to the street; the cart and horses were waiting. Emil, one of the farm boys sat holding the reins. It was his need to pick up hardware at the supply store that gave Lilith a chance to go into town. Lilith talked him into taking her along. Lilith knew Emil had affection for her and would go against her father’s wishes and bring her to town.
Belfort was the biggest town Lilith could remember. She was born in Paris but had no recollection of the capital city. Her father moved the two of them to the country when she was a toddler. Belfort was the only town her father would allow her to travel to and until recently it was always with a chaperone. She thought of herself as being from Belfort, but in reality, her life was largely the farm and more so, the chateau where her father managed dairy production for the Monastery. She had little connection to the town’s people as they saw her and father as outsiders from the city, not farm people who worked the dairy and creamery at the cloistered monastery.
“Emil, do you ever think about leaving Belfort?”
“Occasionally, I guess I will in a year or so, maybe join the service and become a cavalry trooper. I am a good rider,” he said.
“Even you, a lad has more prospects of getting away than I do,” lamented Lilith, at fifteen he was just two years younger than the girl, but in her mind, she possessed a decade of maturity on him.
Emil guided the horse cart along the road that ran beside the Savoureuse River out of Belfort. High above the town sat the citadel, a series of fortress expansions designed to protect this area from Austrian or Prussian invasion.
“Maybe you should socialize more in town, go to the dances and meet an officer in the Corps to sweep you off to foreign lands?” suggested Emil with a smile, looking up at the fort on the hill.
“Don’t mock me,” Lilith brooded the remainder of the ride back to Monastère de la Prairie vallonnée.
The reason her father moved out to dairy country to manage the estate was he blamed her mother’s illness and death to the putrid conditions of city life. Lilith had no memory of her mother or her death. As the cart progressed onto the property, her father rode out to meet her on horseback.
“I have been calling after you, and now I see you were not even on the property,” yelled Lilith’s Father.
“Emil was going to town, and I had finished my studies, so I thought I would go to have a look at the shops and see if there were any new fabrics,” she explained.
“Emil, was that the only place you went?” asked the dairy farmer.
“He is not my chaperone,” injected Lilith. The dairy farmer ignored his daughter and stared at the boy.
“Yes sir, just the one shop, Mrs. Remult.”
“Girl, get yourself into the house. I have to check on the evening milking, but we are not done with this discussion.” The Farmer turned to Emil and continued. “Don’t take her to town without my expressed consent or you’ll be looking for a wage elsewhere. Now take the wagon over to the workshop and get it unloaded.”
Lilith hopped off the cart and stormed into the chateau, a home of the privileged by the standards of most in Belfort.
At the door, she stopped. “You have me spend hours with Madame Levi studying and learning all about the world and then lock me in this prison,” she yelled back at him.
* * *
5:15 p.m. Monastère de la Prairie vallonnée, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region of France
Perhaps the dairy farmer had placed his daughter Lilith in a precarious situation. He had hired the most qualified governesses from the city to educate his daughter, but then kept her a recluse out on the farm for her safety. He adored her so much he craved to preserve her from the city’s filth and corruption. He saw it everywhere he looked when he had to travel back to Paris.
Lilith’s father rode from the main residence to the dairy to check on the production of the milkmaids. The young girls arrived at the farm early in the morning to milk, then returned in the late afternoon for the five o’clock milking. Hands were leading the herd in and out of the dairy building.
Formerly a monastery, the estate was known as the Monastery of the Rolling Meadow, where a Catholic order operated the dairy farm, creamery and cheese production. A new order was given the estate by Napoleon, the Brotherhood moved into the monastery, but they did not work the dairy farm or creamery, instead the commercial activities were run by the farmer and his hired locals. Under his supervision the dairy farm had risen into renown, acknowledged for its superior cheeses in France and Italy. While not a farmer originally, he had taken to the lifestyle and cherished his days in his pastoral playground away from the theater of Paris. Each trip back to the metropolis drove him to demand more of country living.
He stopped and dismounted his nag at the creamery, the source of wealth on the estate and a large commercial operation with dozens of workers making, curing and stocking cheese wheels. He didn’t spend much time in this area of the operation and proceeded below to the catacombs. In these naturally occurring limestone caves, the monks had been aging cheeses for hundreds of years. The freely occurring molds and atmospheric conditions created the creamery’s signature cheese.
Passing the racks of cheese wheels, he stopped where two of the laborers were rotating inventory. The creamery followed an arduous process of moving the racks of cheese on a weekly course along the racks on the left side of the grotto to the back and then to the front of the grotto on the right side. This had been the way for generations to guarantee the character of the stock.
He proceeded to the back of the cave system to where they kept the reserve stock of cheese and his wine store, behind a sealed door. Upon entering he lit a lamp and locked the door behind himself. The farmer adjusted the wick length, lamplight grew in intensity as the oil wicked and the smoke cleared from inside the wind glass. At the rear of the room he approached a cheese rack filled with dust covered wheels of cheese. The farmer reached towards the back and unfastened a latch, releasing the rack to swing away from the wall to reveal another door.
The farmer opened this hidden door with another key entering the operations of his most vital project. Here there was superior illumination with gas light and as much action as the upstairs creamery, but rather than field hands, this operation was staffed by Necronist acolytes, specifically those of the White Wyrding, the research division of the guild.
The farmer strode out on the observation walkway looking over his Necronist brothers working on the animation project. He looked across the group of Acolytes and seers but did not see his second in command. Recently Seer Allard had been missing and unwilling to account for his time. The farmer shouted. “Where is Alla
rd, is he back yet?”
“I am here, Guild Master Hume,” declared Henri Allard. Looking up from behind one of the reanimation tubes.
“Where have you been?”
Seer Allard scurried up from the main floor to the side of Guild Master Hume. “I have been here, but occupied, I suspect we have just missed each other in our busy day,” proposed Allard.
“It seems you and Lilith feel you can come and go as you please. She is an impulsive teenager, but you are a Seer and answerable for the operations when I am elsewhere.” scolded the Guild Master.
Hume was not outwardly angry but stern. The Necronist Guild Master held great responsibility. One of six in the eternal circle, the leader of the White Wyrding and the chamber master of Cenaculum Mortale Rejuvination. As the lead technologist, he had swayed his order to establish a facility outside of the city to conduct clandestine research. The aim being to keep the secret work away from the prying eyes of Napoleon’s government and to also fulfill Arno Hume’s personal ambition of getting away from the tumult of Paris and the politics of the eternal circle.
Here he could live under the pretence of farmer and property owner rather than a Necronist, an adept and leading mind in the experimentation of metaphysics.
“Seer Allard, I apologize, the comparison to my daughter was tasteless. I have to know you are fulfilling your obligations here as I am stretched in many directions and will repeatedly need to travel back in Paris on Guild business. The unaccounted disappearances are to end.”
“My heartfelt apologies Guild Master, any time away is just to relieve myself of the stress of this project,” Allard stepped closer and spoke quieter as the two walked further into the underground laboratory. “I have not shared with the others what I have been up to; the truth is, I am hunting down abnormalities and deviations in the results.”
“Explain,” prompted Hume.
"The flesh golem life span, continues to thwart us," offered Allard.
The flesh golem project was the main work at the Monastery. The Monastery still served as a cloistered Necronist training facility for new recruits, but Hume’s group explored the metaphysics of life and death and how to harness and control life energy.
The ultimate expression of this technology was the Cenaculum Mortale Rejuvination, the basement chamber of the Necronist headquarters in Paris where the eternal circle used to augment and extend their lives and that of Emperor Napoleon. Hume was instrumental in its evolution. However, the critical element for the success of the technology was the use of one human life to strengthen that of another human. Hume sought a substitute life essence from an animal source as a means to unending life without the cost of another soul.
The purpose of the Monastery's research was to perfect a process to use animal life force to augment human life. The experiments failed. An offshoot of the research was the flesh golem project that had been showing progress. The golem project held the promise of the creation of artificial life.
“The initial charge of Bovine life essence now preserves the golem for fifteen days,” said Allard.
“That is a noticeable improvement compared to the early subjects, but no luck with recharging the life force?” asked Hume.
“None so far. It is the recharging that causes behavioral aberration and aggression or cessation of animation,” noted Allard. “We have another assembly, subject fourteen, awaiting your review before we conduct tests,” Allard requested.
"Well, let’s look at the subject," suggested Hume.
"Sir, may I advise you to dress appropriately for the laboratory, for the Acolytes," guided Allard.
"Ah yes," Hume went back down the hall to his secret laboratory entrance, removed his waistcoat and cravat then donned his White Wyrding smock. Similar in design to the long, high necked coats of the Necronist, his was a lightweight material, white rather than black, a hybrid of medical and religious garment in appearance.
The two men walked the length of the laboratory as Seer Allard gave Hume updates on the various mundane tasks and items requiring advice or decisions of the director. Hume then rattled off what he wanted done or deferred to his second’s experience.
The two passed the section of the lab where cattle were drained of life. It had an eerie resemblance to the milking pen but instead of a milk maid a Necronist administered a cabled harness connecting the beast to a large machine. This drew the life force into a ruby crystal where the bovine life essence was collected then imbued into a flesh golem.
Hume knew what the others called the creations when he wasn’t around; meat puppets. The artificial life forms were originally constructed for experimentation and equipment improvement. With the ingenuity of Allard's process, they had altered the Cenaculum Mortale Rejuvination procedure using it not to extend life but to imbue life into dead flesh. The Necronists used life force drawn from cattle then invigorated the spirit into human shaped constructs stitched together from the muscle, nerves and sinew of cows.
The elder Guild members approached a crafting area. The space resembled a butcher shop putting cattle through a life draining process then broken down and reshaped into man shaped creatures.
The Necronists were crafting future test subjects, six in various stages of construction, the standard biped subject for testing. The creature was grotesque to observe. Without skin, it resembled a flayed stunted, stocky man, no facial features other than a mouth and nostrils.
Hume and Allard entered the main area of the lab where subjects were reanimated. Allard interrupted the Acolyte overseeing the subject fourteen test.
“Acolyte Rousseau, can you please detail the specifications for subject fourteen?” Allard called as he observed Rousseau and another Acolyte holding the man shaped mass of raw muscle to be immersed in ichor and infused with life force.
“Yes, Seer Allard,” Rousseau said with a slight bow of the head. “Subject fourteen is formed of bovine muscle connected to a wooden armature. A simplified organ structure sustains the life form: respiration, circulation, a nervous system and gut. The design intent is to be ambulatory and maintain minimal biological functions mimicking a human being. Subject fourteen has been animated for twelve days. Today we will complete a two-hour treatment to see if we can extend the animation beyond our record of fifteen days and without agitating the subject.”
“Thank you, Acolyte. Can you tell us what is special about this procedure that will deliver different results?” asked Guild master Hume.
“I, well we, have developed a new cartridge with a hybrid gas mix in the ampule. This allows for a higher life force charge; we can concentrate or super charge the ampule. Our hypothesis is a concentrated life force will extend animation,” explained Rousseau exchanging glances at his colleagues, hoping for encouragement.
The creature crouched in an awkward posture, using its arms and legs it moved more like a beast than a man. The Acolytes used prods and man catchers to grasp the being and move it into the rejuvenation chamber. Once inside the vessel the subject sat slumped until the ichor filled, and it became suspended in the black fluid.
Hume stayed and studied his minions, “start the procedure,” he ordered. The chamber was imbued with life force. The ichor took on a translucent green glow, the subject writhed as the energy was absorbed. Outside of the thumps against the glass and metal, there were no sounds but the whirring of the machine and the Necronists scribbling notes. If the subject felt pain from the process, it had no vocal cords to make a sound in its agony.
From Hume’s observation nothing appeared different in this experiment. While his Acolytes scurried to observe, record and report the results; Hume was thinking about how he wanted to sustain his life as a dairy farmer. A life that was as artificial as the life of subject fourteen.
4
Monday the 4th of March
4:58 p.m. Presley Dress Makers, Cumberland Market
Violet looked into the window of the dress shop. An eye-catching evening dress with a bertha neckline had stopped her mid-stride
en route to the market. French Chantelle lace, embroidered silk, and layered petticoats sent her mind to parties and cotillions.
“Stunning, isn’t it?” Violet was so enamored with the gown she hadn’t seen the young woman approach and was startled by the young lady’s comment.
“Yes, but I am sure it is too dear,” lamented Violet.
“You would be surprised; the Presley sisters are a bit stuffy but reasonably priced. I have had my eye on it since they placed it in the window a few days back,” said the girl, she was wearing a yellow floral brocade, high necked dress with a crinoline small bustled skirt and long pagoda sleeves. She played with her curled blonde hair, pinned up in the latest fashion.
“Oh, then I wouldn’t give that frock a second thought, you have dibs on it,” stated Violet as she moved away.
“Nonsense, I am far too pale, it is better suited for your color and figure. You must try it on. Follow me, I will introduce you. Where are my manners? My name is Anna Moore.”
“Violet Caldwell,” she said timidly, looking sideways, just wanting to leave.
“A pleasure, Miss Caldwell, now let’s see how you look in that dress,” gushed Anna as she pulled Violet into Presley Dress Makers.
“Mrs. Presley?” called Anna.
Two women responded yes in unison and that made Violet and Anna giggle, both Mrs. Presleys peered over their spectacles at the girls. One sibling moved back to the register and the closer of the two approached the young women. “How may I help you ladies today?”
“My friend here, Miss Caldwell, was admiring the dress in the window and would like a fitting,” announced Anna setting down her handbag on the settee.
The elderly Presley gave her a look up and down “That gown is one pound twelve shilling”
Violet wasn’t happy with the tone and look.
“Well, until we know it suits her we are not interested,” challenged Anna.