Aether Spirit

by Cecilia Dominic

  “I’m fine.”

  “We both know that’s not true.” The slump of his shoulders showed how defeated he felt. “I was hoping that using the Eros Element to heal your psyche would work, but it seems I’ve only caused more problems for you.”

  “It’s not that—”

  “Let me finish, Claire.” His gray eyes darkened with his own pain. “Whatever I’ve wrought on you with my foolish experimentation, I’m not going to harm you further. Work with Patrick on the aether weapon or whatever else you like. I’ll return to my post at the hospital, and then once you help the general end the war, we can go our separate ways.”

  “No!” Now the sharp pain centered in Claire’s chest. “I know we once had something. I’m willing to do what it takes to get that back.”

  “But I’m not willing to damage you to get there.”

  Calla arrived. Her dark eyes widened when she looked from Claire’s tears and the grim expression on Chad’s face.

  “Am I interrupting something?” she asked.

  “No, please stay with Doctor McPhee,” Chad said. His expressionless doctor mask descended over his face. “Please ensure she gets a good night’s sleep.”

  Claire laughed at the absurdity of the command. “Right, because Doctor Radcliffe thinks he can dictate what’s best for everyone and control the details of their lives.”

  “And we’re going to say goodnight,” Patrick said and steered Chad out of the room by his shoulders. “I’m getting him out of here before he can say anything else daft.”

  “Were you and Doctor Radcliffe a couple?” Calla asked once the men had left. “I’m sorry if I’m overstepping my bounds, but you look like you’ve just had a lovers’ quarrel.”

  “We were at one time,” Claire said.

  “Here, lay back. I’ll massage your neck and head.”

  Claire did as she was told, and Calla massaged her temples with cool hands. The pain in Claire’s head subsided, but the ache persisted around her heart.

  Is it possible to mourn something you can’t remember having? And what did the creature mean, he couldn’t break my heart again or we’d die? Are we in danger now?

  Her shiver had nothing to do with her temperature and everything to do with her underlying fear that they tread on supernatural ground none of them understood.

  * * * * *

  The next morning, Patrick opened the new workshop with the key the general had given him and took a moment to appreciate the quiet. The walls insulated him from the sounds of the base and helped him to focus on what he had to do that day, which was to build a weapon that would end a decade-old war but not cause undue side effects to those who used it. It would be based on a substance no one fully understood and which could screw with the minds of those who were exposed to it too much.

  No pressure.

  At least he’d kept his leather diary with him, the one that had the notes from the experimentation in Paris with what frequencies were safe and which would cause emotional turmoil, so he hadn’t lost it when whoever it was had ransacked their room in the barracks. Chad had gone outside the “safe” range for his aether therapy device, particularly as it was supposed to lead to emotional reactions.

  As for what had appeared to them in Claire’s room… Were they all hallucinating?

  Claire walked into the workshop just as the sun was rising over the eastern wall of the base.

  “You’re up early,” Patrick said. She looked like she’d hardly slept at all, poor girl.

  “It’s a military base. Didn’t you hear Reveille at six o’clock? At least it gave me time to write my letter to Aidan and bring it by Longchamp’s office to go out with the mail today.”

  “Aye, and you were awake anyway, weren’t you?”

  She nodded and caught her glasses when they went askew and almost fell.

  “Here,” he said. “I ordered new frames for you when Longchamp asked what I needed, and they ended up with our supplies. Give me a moment, and I’ll transfer the lenses for you. We’re going to be working with light refraction, so we might as well get warmed up.”

  “Thanks.” She didn’t laugh at his attempt at a joke, and she handed him her glasses. “I can’t see a damn thing without them, so I’ll just wait while you take care of them unless you need me to…” She blinked and shook her head. “I’m useless right now. I’ll just wait.”

  Without the glasses, the dark smudges under her eyes were especially apparent.

  “Did you have any more disturbances last night?” he asked.

  “No, thankfully. Having Calla there seemed to help.” She felt behind her and lowered herself on to the one bench in the workshop. Then she clasped her hands between her knees. “Did he mean it, do you think? That we’ll have to say goodbye forever?”

  Patrick weighed the advantages of lying to her, but he decided to stick with his assertion that she was stronger than she or Chad thought. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to look at her when he replied.

  “He did, but I’m not saying his mind can’t be changed. He’s fiercely protective of those who matter to him. You can take it as a compliment that he’s willing to sacrifice his own feelings to keep you safe.”

  “And what about my feelings? Is me being alive and miserable worth me being safe? And you heard the creature’s warning.”

  Patrick remembered Iris Bailey’s descriptions of some of the strange things she’d seen. “Those things aren’t necessarily reliable, and he’s going to go with his gut rather than what some non-scientific entity told him.”

  “And his gut says to stay away?”

  He handed her the new frames, and she put them on and shook her head. The glasses didn’t budge.

  “Oh, this is much better! Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. And to answer your question, he gets confused between his head and his gut sometimes.”

  “I’m not surprised.” She stood. “I’m ready to work on something to distract myself. How about you give me a crash course on aether, and I’ll tell you what I can remember of my father’s work with lenses?”

  “Aye, lass. But first tell me what you did when you first saw it. I’ve never seen it react like it did to you.”

  Claire didn’t want to talk about what she had done because it wouldn’t make scientific sense, not to mention add to the concern about her suffering from some sort of hysteria. But if she’d learned anything in the past twenty-four hours, it was that science couldn’t explain everything.

  “I could feel what it felt,” she said and braced herself for an argument.

  “Meaning…?” O’Connell asked and looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Go on.”

  “Well,” she said. “Let me demonstrate.” She whisked the covering off the new glass orb and watched the round of isolated aether inside. It undulated with the rhythm of a heartbeat—how had she not noticed that before? She ensured that the connecting tube from the glass sphere to Radcliffe’s aether therapy device hose was closed and took a deep breath.

  “Right now it’s in a neutral state,” she said.

  “Aye.”

  “How do you get it to change to a different one?”

  “When we were experimenting in Paris, we would use a small engine to generate a certain frequency, which would then excite it and cause it to flow through the tubes.”

  “That makes sense. But watch.” She pressed her gloved fingertips to the glass and tried to draw a sense of what the aether was experiencing. Its light went from opalescent white to gold.

  O’Connell didn’t say anything, just watched and took notes.

  “What are you doing?” he finally asked.

  “Trying to determine what it’s feeling. Right now it’s just curious like a small child, wanting to know more about the world around it.”

  “And you can feel that?”

  “Yes.”
She removed her hand from the glass and hoped the aether wouldn’t develop into a strange being like the first one had. Or did something else happen with that one, like when the shell came through the roof of the previous workshop, and it was released with chaos and destruction around it?

  “And can you feel what others feel, other people?” he asked.

  She hesitated before answering.

  “If we’re going to work on this together, I need to know,” he said. “Trust me, I’ve known stranger. Did I ever tell you about the greatest actress in the world and what she could do?”

  “No.”

  “Her name is Marie St. Jean, and she can make anyone believe she is whatever role she’s playing.”

  Claire laughed. “That’s what actresses do.”

  His bushy red eyebrows drew in toward his nose. “No, I’m serious. Her talent went beyond mere acting. She tried to run from her abilities, and it ended up in disaster for her until she finally embraced them. If you can do something like that, don’t deny it. Is that what makes you a good neuroticist?”

  Claire backed toward the door. “I don’t want to have this conversation. It’s already established that my mind is broken. Can we please drop what I can or can’t do?”

  “Only if you’ll tell me with full honesty you can’t communicate in some primal way with the aether.”

  Claire shook her head. “I can’t tell you anything.”

  “How long have you been able to do it, sense what others are feeling?”

  She didn’t want to say it, but she felt his desperate need to know. “Since the accident. Since I came to in that horrible place in Paris and was overwhelmed by the chaos of the emotions around me.”

  “So you can feel what Chad feels for you.”

  “Yes, as much good as it will do.”

  He crossed the workshop in two strides and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Then don’t give up. He doesn’t realize it, but he needs you even more than you need him. Now as for our aether weapon, will I need to direct it with my mind somehow? And can you show me how?”

  “I don’t know.” She tried to sense what he felt, but the only emotion she could detect from him was determination.

  It must be nice to have one’s life be so mission-driven. Makes things simple.

  “First, let’s figure out the frequency which will be best for the weapon to concentrate the light energy from it. This is where we need your knowledge of lenses and how light passes through different materials. You do remember that, right?”

  “Yes, my father taught me well.” She decided she needed one piece of information. “Just tell me one thing. Were Doctor Radcliffe and I engaged or otherwise seriously committed to each other? I feel like we were.”

  He reached out and drew her hand from her right temple, which she rubbed with an index finger. “You and I both know you’re not ready for that answer.”

  But I really want to know.

  She vowed she would find out…and soon.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Fort Daniels, 28 February 1871

  When Chad arrived at the hospital, he was in a foul mood. He’d barely slept, having kept an ear out for any more strange noises coming from Claire’s room. Plus he struggled with the knot of anger in his chest tied to the weight of guilt in his stomach over being so eager to try the aether therapy device on her. It had worked beautifully with Amelie Lafitte and her recent trauma-induced hysteria, but it had backfired with Claire, having caused strange hallucinations rather than curing them.

  As for the creature they had seen in Claire’s room, he knew there must be a scientific explanation for it. Shared hysteria, perhaps? There were the experiments by Charcot where he hypnotized his female hysterics into having the same symptoms as an example patient, typically a male with some sort of paralysis or anesthesia in a specific body part. Chad and Patrick hadn’t been hypnotized, but they’d experienced psychic shock as a result of their rooms in the barracks being broken into, and perhaps later hearing Claire’s story had planted a suggestion in his own mind.

  He especially keenly felt the loss of Claire’s engagement ring, which might explain the creature’s warning. Plus, he and Claire had both had exposure to the aether that afternoon, and he knew it could transmit emotion—hence Edward Bailey’s and Patrick’s strange melancholia in Paris—so maybe it could transmit other hysterical symptoms as well?

  It was all a strange question and he disliked not having empirical evidence to fall back on. Even more, he disliked the loss of control—however temporary—of his own mind and senses.

  The first person he saw when he walked into the hospital was—oh, great—Nanette.

  “Doctor Radcliffe, Private Smith wants to have a word with you.”

  “And how is our consumptive today?” he asked, but he didn’t really want to deal with the patient/prisoner, who had proven to be a pain in the posterior since he arrived.

  “He’s difficult, as usual, but he insists upon seeing you.”

  “I’ll be there in a moment.” He went into the office and shut the door. The pile of charts for the patients he and Claire were going to see together the previous afternoon still sat on the desk. Not that they would now—her skills as a tinkerer were needed more for immediate use rather than the long-term work of a neuroticist, and he told himself it was better for him if she wasn’t around the hospital.

  Still, the charts represented the soldiers whose minds hadn’t recovered from their battle wounds as their bodies had. What was he to do with them? He suspected that when the war was over, they’d all be sent their separate ways, and what then? It seemed the military treated its men as it did its horses and other equipment, and damaged ones were to be used as much as possible then discarded.

  He placed the charts on the shelf behind him and tried to put his dark thoughts up with them. He needed his wits to deal with the so-called Private Smith.

  The only thing they had managed to figure out about consumption was that it was an airborne disease, not a hysterical one, so Chad put on a cloth mask over his nose and mouth before going into the patient’s room. Private Smith lay back in the bed and looked much worse than when he had first come in. He seemed to have lost ten pounds since being there, and his cough had deepened and produced more blood than mucous.

  “I understand you wanted to see me?” Chad asked. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m dying,” Private Smith said. “And I am being haunted.”

  “You and everyone else,” Chad muttered under his breath, but aloud he said, “Let me listen to you, and then you can tell me whatever it is you want me to know.”

  Smith’s lungs confirmed the boy’s statement about his impending death. Chad straightened and couldn’t keep the sympathy from his tone. “You’re correct in your assessment, and I’m sorry we can’t do more for you. Is there someone we should notify when you pass on?”

  “Do you know when that will be?”

  The temperature in the room dropped, and what little color the boy had in his face disappeared. Chad resisted the urge to cross his arms.

  “I suspect it will be sooner rather than later.”

  “It matters not. Can’t you tell whatever it is, it’s here, watching and waiting to snatch me up when my soul flies?” He looked around the room, his green eyes wide with fear.

  “Do I need to fetch the priest?”

  “Not yet. I feel I have at least another day, but I’m frightened. Can you move me to a different place?”

  “No, I fear our other private rooms are occupied. I’ll think on what to do. The priest may be able to exorcise whatever this is and take your last confession.”

  “And pressure me to reveal secrets of the army at Fort Temperance. No, thank you. Leave me be, let me die here alone and miserable.”

  Chad didn’t know what to say. He wondered if the boy was delirious, a
nd perhaps they shared a delusion like he had with Claire the night before.

  “I’ll send the nurse in to check on you later.”

  Smith turned his face to the wall, and Chad got the message—he was dismissed—but thinking of Claire had given him one idea.

  “I’ll have the nurse bring in paper and pen for you so you can write a letter to your sweetheart or mother or whoever might need to know when you’re gone.”

  “There’s no one. Both my mother and my sweetheart are dead.”

  “Then perhaps one of them is haunting you, or you feel they’re close. That happens to some people when their souls are preparing for death.”

  “Perhaps. Thank you, I’ll ponder that. Goodbye, Doctor.”

  * * * * *

  The last thing Claire wanted to encounter when she returned to her room that night was a hysterical ghost, but when she arrived after a quiet late dinner, she found the ghostly Emma Morley sitting and sobbing on her bed. Claire had eaten with Beth, who kept her apprised of Bryce’s progress, and was exhausted and feeling guilty that she hadn’t seen him that day. Still, she couldn’t help but feel sorry for the girl. What would she do if the man she loved was near but couldn’t see her?

  Oh, wait—she did know what that was like, to be invisible as a woman and only present as a set of symptoms in a fragile shell.

  “What’s wrong?” Claire asked.

  “He knows I’m there, but he thinks I’m a vengeful spirit who’s haunting him,” the girl-ghost said.

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing, but wherever I go, it gets cold. It’s nothing like the warmth of our lo-ove!” She sobbed again.

  Claire supposed she should be glad the girl was dead. Otherwise, her blankets would be soaked. Still, the dramatic teenage tears broke her heart, and she guessed the young soldier must be suffering too, especially if he was dying and knew his love had preceded him to the grave. Was he wondering if he would see her again? People believed different things about what happened after death.