“Why, yes!” I gasped again. “How did you know that?”
“Really, Dottore,” he returned, “you must think I am very simple not to be able to figure all of this out. It is so obvious—you name your daughter Camille, and your deadly strain of influenzae, Camillus; you are so prepossessed with discovering a cure to the disease–-Do you think the personal vendetta is so difficult to discern?”
“Yes, I do,” I answered. “I think you are an abnormally clever young man.”
He smiled slightly. “There are others more clever than I. One thing that I do not know is, how did you teach Camille to play the piano so beautifully?”
“You ask the only question that I cannot answer,” I replied. “You see, no one taught Camille how to play the piano. As far as I can discern she has always known how to play. All she has to do is to hear a composition once and she has total recall and can play it back perfectly.”
Camille lifted her tiny fairy hands and brought them crashing down in deep sonorous chords as Niccolo let out a gasp of amazement. “La bellezza dei lampi e dell’ arcobaleno,” he murmured with passionate admiration as he turned his fiery gaze toward Ursula. “‘What do you mean?’ you ask me, signorina, what does it mean to be blissful and abandoned and completely immersed in one’s own senses? That is what it means,” he finished, thrusting a finger toward Camille.
VIII
Of all of the members of the household I think Niccolo got along best with little Camille. He revealed a voracious interest in both her ability and her condition and asked me many questions about her. In answer to his numerous inquiries I explained to him that Camille was not without medical precedent. There were many examples of idiots savants throughout history. Usually, they are human calculators, or individuals who can do complex mathematical calculations in their heads. For example, a little boy who can scarcely talk and who has been raised as an animal because he is subject to strange convulsions might be able to tell you instantaneously that 1729 is the lowest number that can be expressed in two ways as the sum of two cubes: 123 + 13 and 103 + 93. A little girl who never learned to recognize her own mother and father might be able to multiply two twelve-digit numbers faster than the hand could write the solution on a blackboard.
Another variation of human calculators are date calculators. Without batting an eye they can instantaneously tell you that June 17, 1257 fell on a Sunday, and September 29, 412 B.C. was a Saturday. Date calculators have been found to have a correct knowledge of what day of the week a particular day falls on extending beyond seven thousand years, even though, to the best of my knowledge, the longest perpetual calendar that has currently been calculated only extends to about twenty-four hundred years. And yet you ask them what a leap year is and they say they’re not sure, or you ask them how they compute the dates and they say they don’t know, the answer is just inside their heads.
I informed Niccolo that one of the most interesting idiots savants I encountered in my reading was an American slave boy in the 1850s known as Blind Tom. Like Camille, although Blind Tom was mentally retarded and completely incapable of learning on any other level, he could mimic any piano piece played to him. His owner, a man named Colonel Bethune, realized that the boy was a potentially lucrative phenomenon and began touring with the unusual virtuoso, consequently making a fortune in numerous concert tours both in the States and in Europe. Blind Tom became world famous and played for numerous world leaders, including the American President, James Buchanan, in 1860. At the height of Blind Tom’s career it was estimated that he had committed over five thousand compositions to memory, including works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bach, Chopin, Verdi, Rossini, Donizetti, Gounod, Meyerbeer, and countless others— although his vocabulary and verbal capacity were limited to a little over a hundred words, and he was described as behaving “more like an ape than a human.”
As for Camille, she made no explicit acknowledgment of Niccolo’s increasingly frequent presence in the drawing room, but she did add a strange and hauntingly beautiful melody to her musical repertoire. Niccolo seemed to recognize that this was his theme, and a peculiar and silent understanding formed between the two. The odd thing was that the melody was completely unfamiliar to me and as far as I could determine she had composed it herself. If this was the case, it was the first time I became aware that Camille’s talents included original musical work.
As for how Niccolo was getting along with Ursula, this was another story entirely. As the days passed, the interactions between her and Niccolo grew more and more like a snake biting its own tail, a constant repartee. The more negatively he reacted to her character, the more chiding she became. The more chiding she became, the more calmly he accepted it. His solicitude only kindled her outrage, whereupon he would once again calmly point out her faults—that is, her propensity for becoming outraged so easily—and the circle began again. More than once Ursula would storm out of the room in seething and frustrated silence, leaving Niccolo sitting and flicking lint off of his evening jacket with cool disdain. Nevertheless, at the heart of every battle was a fiery game of chess or a fervent discussion of Renaissance art. I didn’t doubt for a moment that each was enjoying their dislike for the other immensely.
It was nearing the end of Niccolo’s second week with us that I found out a most interesting bit of information. I was making my normal rounds at Redgewood when I became aware of the familiar form of Cletus. He was in his laboratory coat and came hobbling out of the receiving ward. He looked at me sharply, and then, to my surprise, he boldly approached. I was astonished. Something rather heavy had to be weighing on his mind to inspire such audacity.
He stopped directly before me and we stared into each other’s eyes with territorial steadiness. If he was nervous he was artfully concealing it. He gracefully lit a Laurens Egyptian cigarette. “Weil, well,” he said, “have you heard the news?”
I bristled.
“Chiswick,” he said simply.
For a brief second the name took me by surprise, but then I remembered. “You mean they found Dr. Chiswick?”
“Yes, indeed,” Cletus returned as he rolled his thin lips pleasurably over his teeth. “And you’ll never guess where...”
“At the Blue Post Saloon,” I quipped.
“In a closet,” he said solemnly.
I pursed my brow.
“It seems that about a month ago an English gentleman checked into a little resort in Interlaken, Switzerland, and after a couple of days he vanished. Of course, no one seemed to notice until his bill came due. In investigating they discovered one of the closet doors in his room wasn’t working properly, and so they had it forced open. Well, the reason that it wasn’t working was because William Chiswick had nailed it securely shut... from the inside.”
“And was he dead?”
“Oh, lord, yes. He’d been in there for weeks. But it’s a damned odd way to commit suicide, isn’t it, to lock one’s self in one’s closet and slowly starve to death.” He gazed at me intently.
I suddenly wondered why the little man had approached me with this information.
“Oh, there’s more,” he added quickly. “You see, papers found in the hotel identified the body as our Dr. Chiswick, but he had checked into the resort under the name of C. William. Following that up, Scotland Yard was able to follow his path as he left the country. It seems that he made a beeline from Dover to Calais and all the way through France and Switzerland without stopping until he reached Interlaken.”
“Without stopping?”
“Not once. It seems that Chiswick was in a very great hurry.” Cletus lowered his head and clasped his hands behind him as he began to pace back and forth in a space about five feet long. “Several people remember him from that first evening, the maître d’hôtel, the desk clerk when he asked for the hammer and some nails. He apparently sealed himself in the closet shortly thereafter.”
“There’s no chance it was murder?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Do you t
hink he killed himself because he was lying to the trustees about making an important discovery?”
“Certainly not!” he snapped angrily. “You don’t put grates on your windows and new locks on your door to cover up a lie. Chiswick was frightened by something, and he was racing madly out of the country to get away from it. I think he nailed himself in that closet because whatever it was that made him crazy with terror showed up at that resort.”
“And what, pray tell, could that have been?”
Cletus stopped pacing and looked at me. There was a knowing glint in his eye. “The only fragment of anything that Scotland Yard has been able to turn up about the case is that a visitor from Italy showed up that evening and asked for him at the desk. They don’t know anything else. They don’t even have a description.” He puffed his cigarette. “I knew William Chiswick for a long time. I saw him walk into houses where smallpox epidemics were raging and I saw him overpower men twice his size so he could cauterize their wounds. I never saw him back down from anything, and if it was that Italian visitor who caused him to go insane with fear, let us hope you or I never confront him, for he was nothing of God’s world.” With that he stared rudely and directly into my eye. “I know there’s no real evidence, but every intuition in my body tells me there’s a connection between Chiswick’s Italian visitor and the arrival of the mysterious Mr. Cavalanti one week later.”
I felt a chill run down my spine. “You think Niccolo had something to do with it?”
“Niccolo?” Cletus asked as he continued to eye me curiously. “Yes, I think Niccolo had something to do with it. Two very strange events have occurred within a very short space of time and I think we’re naïve to think they’re not related.”
For a moment I was almost believing his words, but then I realized Cletus was succumbing to the same irrational fear that Niccolo had warned about. “Don’t be absurd,” I dismissed. “Granted, this Chiswick thing is most peculiar, but there are millions of young Italian gentlemen. The fact that one puts in a brief appearance a thousand miles away is a ludicrous reason to assume that Mr. Cavalanti had anything to do with it.”
Cletus drew back. “Tenuous and circumstantial, yes! But you mark my words, Dr. Gladstone. You just mark my words.” He swelled his chest self-assuredly, and then turned around and strode off.
That afternoon I found a small card in the letterbox with the words J. Sedgemoor, Esq., Chemist, embossed upon it. Scrawled in a crowquill was a brief and simple message: Please come in for consultation. I obliged the request on my way home from the hospital.
I was still both angry and amazed at Cletus’s accusation when I stepped into the little shop on Piccadilly and saw the tall and wispy proprietor standing behind the slate counter, carefully counting out small brown capsules. He was putting them in a glass vial with a rubber stopper. In front of him was a dithery little old woman waiting impatiently. When he finished she took out a neatly folded pound note and stuck it securely into his hand. As an afterthought she asked, “Do you have lemon grass for sachets?”
“No, mum,” Sedgemoor replied. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go to Butler’s, the herbalist, right down the street.”
She took her change, nodded, and left.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Sedgemoor,” I greeted.
“Ahh, Dr. Gladstone,” he returned. “I’m so glad you came right in.”
“Do you have the information I required?” I asked. “I’m not sure,” he answered oddly. He turned around and opened a small cherry cabinet, not unlike a card catalogue at the library. He pulled out a yellow card with a brown envelope clipped to it and emptied the few crumbled remains of the black pill on the counter. “I can’t exactly tell you what it is,” he explained, “but I can tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t in any formulary, and it isn’t anything that any apothecary in the country knows about. I’ve tried everything, but this little pill has a very complex chemical structure—too complex, in fact, for me even to begin to tell you what it is composed of.”
“Does this happen very often?”
“If it hadn’t happened in this instance I would have told you it was impossible. I mean, the English race has a finite knowledge of chemistry and any pill manufactured within the realm of this knowledge can be deciphered by anyone else within the realm of this knowledge. But this pill...” He became contemplative. “Either someone stumbled onto a very strange and complex compound by accident, or they have a brilliant knowledge of chemistry that far exceeds what they’re teaching in the universities.”
“I see,” I said quietly. “Well, Mr. Sedgemoor, if you had to venture an opinion, do you think the pill was an accidental creation or the product of a more advanced knowledge of chemistry?”
He stroked his pointed chin as he nervously poked the fragments of the pill around on the slate. “There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s the product of a more advanced knowledge of chemistry,” he said. “You see, when I was unable to decipher the pill I sent it to a friend of mine at Oxford. He didn’t have any luck either, but he ran a few other tests on the pill, and he’s discovered that it is a phenomenal healing agent. It causes a wound practically to suture itself and it seems to safeguard against infection as well. In short, it is a medicinal substance any chemist in the country would give his eyeteeth to be able to duplicate.” Mr. Sedgemoor’s voice became very hushed as he leaned over the counter. “But come now, Dr. Gladstone, let’s drop this ‘patient of yours’ nonsense and level with me. I could be very helpful, you know.”
“Whatever do you mean?” I gasped.
“I know the business,” he said. “I have the legal acumen and the connections. If you’d only come clean with me we could make a fortune.” His pale hazel eyes became insane with excitement. “You made the pill, didn’t you? Come on, you can tell me.”
“No, I’m afraid I didn’t,” I returned. “I’m as much in the dark as you are, Mr. Sedgemoor?’
“I wouldn’t ask for much of a profit.”
“I didn’t make the pill.”
“Twenty-five percent. That’s not much. One quarter and I’ll do all the work from here on out.”
“How much do I owe you?” I asked briskly.
“Oh, nothing,” he answered. “It’s free, just tell me—”
“Good day, Mr. Sedgemooif I said crisply as I scooped up the remaining fragments of the pill and left the shop.
The revelation about the pill left me with an odd mixture of excitement and apprehension. I was excited, as any physician would be, with the discovery of such a compound, but it raised many questions in my mind. Who made the pill? Niccolo? Lodovico? And if they possessed a knowledge of medicine that far exceeded what we were teaching in the universities, what else did they know, and perhaps more importantly, why were they keeping their discoveries to themselves instead of sharing their knowledge with humanity?
When I arrived home that evening I discovered Niccolo and Ursula alone in the parlor involved in one of their fiery discussions. I asked Niccolo if he felt up to going out for a little walk, and Ursula politely realized I wanted to be alone with him. It was raining, a particularly spectacular rain. The sky was wracked with lightning and the pretentious mummery of thunder. The wind tugged at our umbrellas as we passed a cast-iron street lavatory crowned by a gas lamp. I noticed that a playbill for Oscar Wilde’s Salome was about to be ripped off by the storm. The lightning flashed and for a moment the head of St. John the Baptist was revealed in garish detail before it was swept away in the muddy waters of the gutter.
“You are troubled, aren’t you, Dottore?” he finally stated as the wind died down.
“You don’t have to be overly perceptive to see that, do you,” I returned.
He shrugged. “You won’t tell me what it is?”
“Well,” I began slowly, “today I went to the chemist’s. I had one of those black pills of yours tested...”
“And?”
“And it turns out they’re a very sophisticated healing agent, much more soph
isticated than our medical science could currently produce.”
“So?”
“So, who made them?”
“A brilliant chemist living in Paris—a vampire, of course. But it was Lodovico who devised the formula.”
I straightened with amazement. “And is Lodovico a genius when it comes to chemistry?”
“Probably,” Niccolo answered naïvely. “Lodovico’s a genius in just about everything. You know, he is very old, much older than I, and it’s difficult to have lived as long &3 Lodovico has and not acquire an incredible wealth of knowledge.”
“Are all vampires as knowledgeable as Lodovico?”
“Many of them. I told you, knowledge is our Holy Grail, and I daresay the wisdom possessed by the vampire would boggle your imagination. You see, we don’t have political allegiances to worry about, or religion, or differing mores. We all work together for one purpose: to further our achievements and our learning.”
“Why don’t you share your learning with the common man?” I snapped angrily. “This healing agent alone could save countless lives.”
“Why don’t we share our learning?” Niccolo repeated bitterly and laughed. “We’re feared and hated. Do you know what happens when a being who is obviously not human comes up to the rabble and says, ‘Look, I’ve invented a machine that will take generations for your scientists even to come close to understanding; here, let me help you with it’? Well, I’ll tell you what happens: witch-hunts and inquisitions. I can open the history books and find you the names of hundreds of vampires who were tortured and burned as heretics because they tried to ‘share’ their learning with the common man.”
“But surely that was during the Dark Ages—”
“You’re hopelessly stupid—” he began shrilly, but then lowered his voice as he struggled to maintain his composure. “We’re still in the Dark Ages. The scared and the superstitious savage still lurks behind the mask of civilization and he will remain there for untold generations to come. If wondering why we won’t share the science that created that pill is all that was troubling you, we can consider our conversation ended.” Niccolo pulled his evening coat more tightly around him as his pace quickened and he began to move ahead of me. He struggled to hold his umbrella firmly in the oncoming wind.
The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life Page 10