Only when the sound of the swarm started up again did I realize that I had drifted over to the rear door of the coach house and stood with my ear practically pressed against it. Embarrassed, I cast a furtive glance around and hurried to the bookshop.
Immanuel was there, and he had no more than said “good-day” to me when I launched into an excited narrative about the strange sounds coming from our coach house. I explained about Dr. Polidori and that he had some idea of aiding Lord Byron through some of his maladies. It would be tragic, after all, I opined, if one of the greatest poets of our time was hostage to the frailties of mind and body. In truth, I was ravenously curious about what Dr. Polidori could be doing that required such industry.
It was not until we were walking side-by-side to our park bench that I realized how quiet was my partner. I laughed. “I must strike you as a feather-brain, indeed, to go on so about what is probably nothing at all.”
“No, not at all,” said Immanuel.
I glanced up at him sharply, for the tone of his voice was uncharacteristically solemn and heavy, his words slow and measured. His expression, likewise, seemed to have lost some of its vivacity and his eyes...
“Immanuel, what is wrong? Please tell me that nothing has happened to Lucille.”
“No. Lucille is well.”
“And everything is all right between you?”
His mouth gave a wry little twist that nearly broke my heart.
“Have you fallen out with each other, then?”
He shook his head—a strange, awkward movement—and it struck me suddenly and forcefully that his gait, his posture, even his face were subtly less graceful than usual.
“I seem to have fallen out with myself.”
I stopped him at the bench. “You are ill? Well, come with me, then, and see Dr. Polidori. Perhaps he can offer some medicine.”
He smiled at me, then, and some animation returned to his face. “Something that Dr. Dessins cannot offer?”
I laughed at myself again for having forgotten what studies my friend pursued. “Now you must really think me silly.”
“Never,” he said, and together we sat and chatted.
But though he conversed with me and smiled again, and his eyes occasionally sparkled, still there was something indefinably wrong about him. His speech was not as quick, his facial expressions less refined, his movements almost graceless at times. I went away from our encounter with a creeping dread that he was ill and knew he was ill and simply did not wish me to know it.
Arriving at the villa, I took my time passing by the coach house and heard, coming from it, the same sounds as before, except that this time, the strange buzzing was sustained and I distinctly heard John Polidori cry out, “That’s it! By God, that’s it!”
Another voice said something in response that I could not make out, though the lilt of the voice was distinctly Italian and had the inflection of a query. One of the servants, then. Perhaps even Polidori’s man, Paolo Foggi. Polidori’s reaction to whatever the other man had said was swift and emphatic: “No! Nothing! You will say nothing until we have made it work on...!” He paused and pitched his voice lower so that I could not hear.
I found myself edging closer and closer to the rear door of the building, wondering if I might peek through the door frame. I had reached out my hand to the latch when I heard Polidori’s voice again just on the other side of the barrier.
“Yes, yes!” he said impatiently. “The rabbit. We want the rabbit.”
I retreated swiftly to the house, where I found Percy and George in the drawing room conversing idly over snifters of brandy.
“George, what is Dr. Polidori building in the coach house?” I asked.
Lord Byron stared at me over his brandy as if I’d spoken to him in Hindustani. “I have no idea what John is building. Indeed, I thought his talk of a machine was sheer fabrication—a dodge. What makes you ask?”
I sat upon a low ottoman and described what I had heard, including the shouting just now. “Clearly, he’s done something he considers exciting. You have no idea what he’s working on?”
George shook his head. “None. Except, of course, that it’s supposed to cure me or save me from my various curses. God, was ever a man so vexed?”
I stared at him. Perhaps no man, but many a woman was, including myself. I could have reminded him what I had suffered in the past two years: losing a daughter born too early, waking numerous times each night and running to William’s crib to make sure he still breathed, flying to the Continent like a frightened bird to flee entanglements in England. I think, for a moment, I almost hated my beloved’s narcissistic friend.
“Surely, Dr. Polidori will soon have some great medicine to offer you,” said Percy. “He works in his lab day and night and what might he be working at but your salvation?”
“Will you ask him, George?” I inquired. “Will you ask him what he’s doing?”
“If it pleases you,” said George indolently, but I could see that I had lit the fire of curiosity in him and it wasn’t long before he rose and excused himself to go outside. “For a walk,” he said, but I watched him from the front window and I saw that he went toward the coach house.
I was upstairs with William and Elise some half-an-hour later when Percy came into the nursery with a bemused expression on his face.
“What is it, love?” I asked.
“He won’t let George in.”
“He...you mean Polidori? Dr. Polidori won’t let Lord Byron into his own coach house? Extraordinary.” I laughed at the thought of the good doctor holding the lord at bay. George was nothing if not assured of his rights in the world and I could only imagine what response Polidori’s refusal evoked.
Percy nodded, a curl falling across his brow. “George was beside himself, at first—you should have heard him. It took John fifteen minutes to calm him down.”
“What reason did he give for his secrecy?”
“He doesn’t want to disappoint his patron—to raise his hopes only to dash them. He wants to be sure that he can offer the best possible solution to his problems.”
Well, he had certainly disappointed me. “He would divulge nothing?”
“Only that it was the complete solution he was working on. Not a palliative. Not a brace for the club foot or a medicine for the black moods, but rather a complete cure for ills both physical and spiritual.” He smiled and Helios rose from the horizon. “If he can do that for George, Mary, might he not also expel my demon moods?”
Might he? “Is such a thing possible?”
“John Polidori thinks so, and therefore, George thinks so.”
When Percy had left the room I turned to Elise and found her looking at me shrewdly.
“Here, you wily miss,” I said, “what are you thinking?”
“That you want to know what goes on in that coach house, Mam.”
I smiled at her, and suddenly we were two young girls, plotting together. I leaned forward, prompting my darling Willmouse to peep in surprise, then cradling him more comfortably, I said, “An Italian servant works with Dr. Polidori.”
She nodded slowly. “His valet, Paolo Foggi. I sometimes take him his tea when the downstairs maid is not available.”
“Do you now? And does he sometimes want a bit of conversation with his tea?”
“Scopriamo,” she said, her eyes wide and uncharacteristically innocent.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Let’s find out.”
Foggi was not immediately forthcoming, but Elise was nothing if not persistent. She began to take him his tea every day—for which the downstairs maid was grateful, given Clara’s many demands—and, over a period of several weeks, M. Foggi conceived the notion that Mlle. Elise was enamoured of him. As I had hoped, the desire to impress her began to loosen his tongue.
The doctor was keeping small animals in his lab and had charged his man with their care and feeding. This was the first intelligence that Elise brought me. I had suspected the presence of animals in the lab
, of course—or at least of rabbits—but Elise had discovered that there were squirrels, cats, dogs and even a capuchin monkey.
Elise laughed in the telling of all this. Paolo had divulged it in high disgust.
“I am valet, not a veterinary or a zoo-keeper,” she mimicked in a thick Italian accent. “Whatever are Lord Byron and Dr. Polidori thinking to impose so upon a man’s station?”
I was quite enjoying the thrill of all these de cape et d’épée goings-on. Every day, while Willmouse slept, I would slip into Petit-Lancy to regale Immanuel with my tales of subterfuge. I told him about the animals, the fact that the machine the doctor had built was full of gears and wheels and connecting rods and that it “made lightning.”
Or so Paolo Foggi said. The lightning, he confided in Elise, was molto bello, indeed, molto romantico with its blaze of blue-white light. “Come scrittura con il fuoco,” Paolo said. “Like writing with fire.”
Immanuel, who had shown very little interest in my revelations this day, at last showed a spark of curiosity. “Electricity?” he murmured. “He works with electricity?”
I was thrilled at his interest, for his new moodiness troubled me greatly, as had the fact that he had taken to wearing a broad-brimmed hat that left the upper part of his face in shadow.
“Yes. What can it mean? The animals, the machine, the electricity?”
He shrugged, then grimaced as if the action was uncomfortable. “I can’t imagine. Although, I have read...no, it’s too absurd.”
“What?” I begged. “What’s too absurd?”
“In my reading of the London Medical Journal,” he said, and I realized with dismay how laboured his words had become, “I’ve come across mention of an alchemist named Johann Dippel who proposed that convulsive disorders might be ameliorated through the induction of a seizure. He claimed to have somehow harnessed electricity to cause this. Over one-hundred years ago.”
“One hundred years! How extraordinary! I had no idea serious men of medicine concerned themselves with such things.”
“Well, as I said, he was an al-alchemist and a theologian.” He shrugged stiffly. “Born to wealth, though, I gather—outside of Darmstadt, Germany at Castle Frankenstein.” He chuckled, a low, grinding sound that raised hairs on the back of my neck despite the warmth of the day. I recalled how lovely his laugh had sounded when we met. “The rumours say that he dug up fresh bodies to experiment on.”
I shivered. “How horrible. Why would he do such a thing? What could grave robbing possibly have to do with treating convulsive disorders?”
“T’wasn’t his only interest. Dippel was looking for the elixir of life. For immortality. Men are fools—and worse—who wish to be immortal,” he added, and I could not mistake the bitterness in his voice.
I put a hand on his sleeve and he winced, but did not pull away. “What’s wrong, Immanuel? You...you seem...unwell.”
“Unwell...I am unwell.” He turned to face me, though the brim of his hat kept me from seeing his eyes.
What I could see of his face looked...different somehow. His jaw heavier, his skin roughened. “Mary, I cannot come to town for a time. My studies, you understand. I’m not sick, precisely, but I’ve slept poorly of late and have gotten behind.”
I was crushed, in part, because I enjoyed our dialogues so much and could not disown my anxiety for him, and in part because I knew he was lying. Something was wrong and he was simply refusing to tell me what it was. I wished with all my heart that he had introduced me to Lucille so that perhaps she might confide in me, but in all our conversation, he had never even given me her surname.
“I shall miss our discussions,” I said, for lack of anything better to say.
“No more than I, Mary. You have been a d’light.” The last word came out slurred and, with a queer little jerk of his head, he rose, turned and moved quickly away.
I watched him go with mounting concern, for he shambled along, rolling a bit from side to side as if his legs were stiff or painful. I almost rose up and went after him, but I lacked the courage.
This bothered me, and when I reached home to a new report from Elise regarding Polidori’s doings, it bothered me yet more.
You’re a cowardly thing, I told myself harshly as I listened to Elise’s newest intelligence. Sitting like a lump on a park bench when a friend requires aid, sending a servant as a snoop to satisfy your curiosity. Whatever are you about, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley? And what will you do next—hire someone to read Percy’s poetry and offer their critique as your own?
I had worked up a most righteous dudgeon against myself by the time the gentlemen retired to the drawing room—all of the gentlemen, including Dr. Polidori. Clara (I had finally gotten used to calling her that) went to bed early with a headache, leaving me rather at loose ends. I could have just gone to the drawing room with the others—we didn’t stand on that silly ceremony of separating the men from the women—but I’d found that their conversation could be somewhat tedious in the first throes of postprandial satisfaction. At least until coffee stimulated or brandy relaxed.
I could have gone in...but my curious and self-deprecating mind seized on another plan of action. I would go to that damned coach house and find some way to peer within. Paolo Foggi was at his own dinner in the staff dining room, the evening was fine (for once) and I was now all but suffocating with curiosity about Dr. Polidori’s Machine.
I left the dining room and moved lightly up the stairs. I had a black velvet riding habit with a split skirt. It would be ideal for an evening’s sleuthing.
Polidori’s Machine
I had donned my riding habit and pulled a soft black toque Percy had given me over my coiled braid when Elise came into the bedroom.
“Why, Mam,” she said curiously, “where are you going at this hour?”
“To the coach house,” I said, tucking a few wisps of hair under the cap. “I intend to find out what sort of machine our dear doctor is building that requires the use of a small zoo.”
Elise’s eyes glinted in the lamplight. “I’ll come with you...that is, if you like, Mam.”
I shook my head. “I’ve been altogether too passive, Elise. Sending you to do my snooping for me. I’m ashamed of myself. You don’t have to carry on like a spy any longer.”
Elise took a step toward me. “Oh, but I want to, Mam. Please, won’t you let me come with you?”
I stared at her a moment, then smiled. Elise was more than my son’s nanny. She was a co-conspirator. “Have you anything black to wear?”
She had—an old black dress of thin wool that she’d made for a funeral. She didn’t say whose, but she didn’t seem to mind wearing it for such nefarious activities as I had planned.
We slipped out by a garden door that gave onto the grounds from the conservatory on the south side of the house. The moon gave sufficient light by which to find our way across the fifty or so yards to the coach house. I became concerned, as we approached, that perhaps we would have to light one of the candles I had stuffed into the pockets of my riding costume, but as we reached the rear of the building, I saw that we were in luck—a lamp had been left burning within. Its dim light seeped from the crack between the upper and lower portions of the dutch door.
We pried at the door to no avail. Nor could we peep through the meager slit between its halves. We moved to the windows next, but those on the ground floor were shuttered and locked. Finally, I decided we must hope that the entrance from the stable had not been so carefully done up.
Alas, it had been, and at length, we stood in the center aisle of the stable in silent frustration, ready to give up. I glanced around, hoping for an epiphany or a miracle. I got neither, but I did catch a flash of light shining on a tumble of hay high up in the loft. This, despite the fact that the stable itself was in complete darkness.
I touched Elise’s shoulder and pointed upward. “The hayloft,” I murmured.
Up we went. My split skirt made the climb easy, but after two attempts, Elise
was compelled to roll her skirt up around her waist, and climbed the ladder displaying her shockingly white knickers.
At last, we were rewarded, for the neat bales of hay hid a large, square door in the shared wall. This provided access to the stable loft from the adjoining coach house. I had hoped for a crack large enough to see through. I got something much better—the door was poorly fastened and stood slightly ajar. The latch was on this side of the door as, of course, it had to be, for on the opposite side was a two-story drop to the coach house floor.
I opened the door and gasped aloud. There was nothing between us and the cobbles far below but the broad, heavy beam from which hung the pulley and rope necessary to hoist hay up to the loft. But that was not what made me gasp. My surprise and awe was for the collection of items that inhabited the shadowy interior of Dr. Polidori’s laboratory.
There two tables or beds—both really, and yet neither. Both were fitted with odd leather harnesses. And there were cages, just as Elise had reported, each with an occupant or two. I saw dogs, cats, rabbits, and yes, the capuchin monkey. He must have had them all brought in under cover of night, while we were asleep or otherwise engaged in the main house. I promised myself I would try to be more wakeful from now on.
The thing that captured my attention most awfully was the Machine. It sat between the tables and was half-again as long—perhaps nine feet. It was, as Elise had said, an amalgamation of wheels and gears and rods and strange little cylinders, and at its apex, which was perhaps four feet from the low trestle it sat upon, were two thin rods that curved toward each other like lovers frozen just short of embrace.
The hay rustled and Elise whispered, “Is there a way down, Mam?”
I peered at the beam. “Just that. We could possibly lower ourselves to the floor using the ropes and pulleys.”
Elise looked at the apparatus sceptically. “I don’t know, Mam. It’s a fair piece down.”
Shadow Conspiracy Page 2