Sparks of Light

by Janet B. Taylor

Tesla’s long face looked ravaged as he stared around at what had once been the center of his universe.

  “It will burn,” he said. “All of it, gone.”

  “Professor!” I shouted. “Please. Listen.”

  Tesla’s expression cleared as I explained what we needed.

  “Oh. Y-yes. I see. Of course.”

  While the professor and Doug searched the rubble, Phoebe smoothed back her grandfather’s thinning hair.

  “Tell me he’s going to be okay, Hope. Tell me.”

  “I don’t . . .” I hesitated. Stalling, I pressed the heel of my hands hard between my eyes. I mumbled, “This should work. In . . . In theory, this should work.”

  Mac stirred. His eyelids fluttered. Bleary blue eyes focused on Phoebe and he tried to smile, but his too-pale brow furrowed as he struggled for breath. “Kids—” Wheeze. “Where?” Wheeze.

  “Shhh,” Phoebe told him. “It’s all right, Mac. We’re here. And all of us, right as rain.” Her lips trembled as she held tight to her grandfather’s hand. My throat constricted as Mac squeezed his eyes shut, a tear rolling down each side to dampen his faded red hair. His lips barely moved as he murmured a Gaelic prayer.

  “Aye,” Phoebe choked. “But you rest now. Because you’re going to be fine. Just fine.”

  I had to look away, unable to bear it as she laid her small head on her grandfather’s chest. Mac’s hand rose and stroked her hair. His gaze roamed until it found his grandson. “Proud . . .” he wheezed. “Of you . . .”

  Collum’s Adam’s apple bobbed convulsively. He leaned down and kissed his grandfather on the forehead. “I know, Mac,” he managed. “You tell me every day.”

  Exhausted, Mac looked at me, the words escaping on a sigh. “Hope. Our precious . . . lamb.”

  Mac—​the first person I’d met when I arrived in Scotland, the first person to make me feel like maybe I didn’t have to be all alone in the world—​smiled at me. “Tell Moira . . . I’ll wait . . . by . . . picnic ta . . .”

  His eyes drifted shut as he passed back into unconsciousness.

  Everyone gathered around once the supplies were ready. Mac’s lips were blue and his fingernails dark. His chest barely moved now. As Collum handed me a tiny knife, my hands shook so hard my fingers wouldn’t work.

  “I . . .” I couldn’t see past the tears. “I can’t . . .”

  Collum nodded, clasped the knife. “Guide me.”

  Bran put a hand on his shoulder, his eyes filled with sorrow. “I can do it if—”

  “No.” Collum shook his head. “No. I’ve got it. Hope?”

  I bore down, focusing a needle-sharp light on everything I had ever seen, read, heard about the procedure for evacuating a collapsed lung.

  Coughing and coughing. Sweating and coughing again. Finally, I nodded.

  “Pour the alcohol over everything. His skin. The knife. Over and through that glass tubing.”

  The room filled with the eye-watering aroma of whiskey from a silver flask.

  Mac’s breathing suddenly stuttered. His back arched as his mouth opened, struggling for air. His cells were starving for oxygen. He was drowning in his own blood now, the fluid inside the collapsed lung shoving its way across his chest cavity to smother the one good lung he still had.

  “Hope!” Phoebe cried. “What’s happening?”

  “Hold him down! Okay, Collum,” I said. “Right there!”

  I touched a fingertip to the space just between the fifth and sixth ribs. With a thrust, Collum slit open the skin. “Deeper,” I said. I held back the skin as Collum sunk the knife through the tough cartilage. “That’s good,” I said. “Here.”

  He took the glass tube from me and pushed it carefully through the cut. “More,” I urged. “More.”

  I was choking on smoke and tears now as Collum pushed the tube in farther still. Something popped deep inside. Blood gushed from the end of the tube and splattered across the floor. Air hissed out after.

  “That’s it!” I cried. “You did it! You did it!”

  Collum turned to me, beaming.

  We waited.

  “Mac?” I said, when nothing happened. “Mac, you . . . you have to breathe, now. Please. Just breathe. Please!” But my pleas did no good, because we were too late. Phoebe was lying across her grandfather’s still, still chest, clutching him. Wailing. And Doug was leaning over her, holding her so tight. And Bran was looking at Collum and me, and his eyes looked sad. So very, very sad.

  He spoke the words gently. “I’m sorry, Collum.” And I knew then that it was over, because I had never, ever heard Bran call Collum by his real name. “You tried. You tried so hard.”

  Chapter 46

  ACROSS THE STREET FROM NIKOLA TESLA’S LAB, we watched the fire consume the building and everything inside. The inferno seemed appropriate somehow. Ruin and devastation and loss. We’d made it down the stairs with Mac’s limp and lifeless form only seconds before the fire and the smoke would have made escape impossible.

  As Collum and Doug laid Mac carefully across the carriage seat, Nikola Tesla sat next to me on a stoop with his head in his hands.

  The structure shimmied, as if its bones had become porous, like an elderly woman’s fragile spine. Fire shot up from the roof in puffs of orange. Muffled bangs shook the ground beneath us.

  “That would be the gas reserve in the basement.” Bran, leaning against the brick wall on my other side, spoke in a rasp. “If I had to guess.”

  Our voyage from Tesla’s lab to the street below had been nothing short of hellish. Hellish in the most literal sense. Though Blasi’s grenade had badly damaged the fourth-floor landing, Bran, Doug, Tesla, and Jonathan bridged the gap using ropes and tabletops. They braced the makeshift staircase with the only object sturdy enough to support our weight . . . the single intact tower. Dismantling the mushroom top had taken Tesla only seconds. But he’d flinched when the others hoisted it through the door and dropped it down onto the next level.

  Like Charon escorting souls across the river Styx, Collum—​ignoring any offer of assistance—​carried his grandfather’s body through the flames.

  “I’m sorry, Professor,” I told Tesla. “I wish there was something we could have done.”

  Tesla raised his head, and it might have been only the reflection of the flames . . . but there was a peculiar, almost unearthly luminosity in his eyes as he turned to look at me.

  “God has spoken,” he said. “And has set his judgment against this venture. I am finished. For many years, I spent my time searching for an object that I now know will ever elude me.

  He cupped his hands. Let them drop.

  I glanced over at Bran. Just after we’d made it to street level, he showed me what he’d collected seconds before we ran. His pockets had been stuffed with dozens . . . no, hundreds . . . of scribbled notes, newspaper clippings, pages torn from books. A few pieces even looked like bits of ancient parchment.

  Though the items were from completely different eras, each and every one mentioned a single thing.

  The Nonius Stone.

  Tesla was fiddling with his jacket. He held out his palm, and the firelight glinted off the pin he’d hidden beneath his lapel.

  Ah. So that’s what all that business with Astor and Vanderbilt was about.

  Tesla’s gaze rose to the ruin of his life’s work. “I only entered the brotherhood as a means to further my search. What good will this do me now?”

  He let the pin drop onto the sidewalk between us.

  “I believe I shall travel,” he said. “I have long wished to see the West of this nation. But hold one moment, if you please. I—​I have something for you. Please, take it. But do not open it until you are far from this place. Do I have your word?”

  When I nodded, Tesla reached for a shoebox-size bundle at his feet. Wrapped in burlap and tied with twine, it smelled like smoke and regret.

  “Thank you,” I told him.

  “You may not say that once you have opened it.”


  He took my hand in his. “Goodbye, Miss Walton. Go with God,” he said. “And remember, every man is but a spark of light in an infinite darkness; soon extinguished but might and brilliant all the same.”

  And then Tesla, the greatest mind of his age, turned around and walked away.

  Collum trudged over to us, head hanging. “It’s time.”

  From down the street, alarm bells rang. A horse-drawn fire truck raced toward us.

  Doug led Phoebe to the carriage. She looked like someone who’d been scourged from the inside out. Face swollen with tears, she started to climb up. Her head turned as she spied Jonathan Carlyle. After a quick consultation with Doug, she kissed him and walked over to Jonathan.

  “May I speak with you for a moment?” she said.

  “Of course,” Jonathan replied, taking her arm.

  It didn’t take long. Jonathan drew back in horror at whatever she said. Collum watched them, and I thought he might try to intervene. But he turned away and climbed up beside his grandfather’s body without a word.

  At the riverbank, the low tide had left a gravel strip along the water’s edge just large enough for us to enter the cattle tunnel. Dawn had broken, though the sun was hidden by low clouds. The city around us was mist and smoke and everywhere . . . everywhere . . . everywhere gray.

  Moira MacPherson was a Scot. Her eyes were dry when they lowered her husband into the earth beside his ancestors in the small graveyard near the manor. As the piper’s song spread out over the moors and mountains, Moira lifted her eyes to the Scottish Highlands as if she could see Mac there, waiting for her.

  I’d paused to retie my shoe as the rest of the family passed out of the fenced graveyard, and so was the only one to hear Moira’s quiet voice as she placed a hand on the granite headstone. “Fare thee well, my only love. Fare thee well a while . . .”

  So many people came to the wake. I served punch in the library, with Bran at my side.

  “It’s so strange to see them here,” I said.

  “Who?”

  I tilted my head toward the fireplace, where painting of a young woman and her large brood now shared space with Jonathan Carlyle’s family portraits. The other daughter—​Penelope—​had been taken by a flu epidemic, only a year after she would have perished beneath the ice.

  Destiny, I supposed. Fate. Something like that.

  But there were many photos and paintings of the older girl, Catherine. As a pretty teenager. A wedding photo alongside her smiling husband. Elderly, surrounded by her children, and her children’s children.

  Phoebe had done it without hesitation or remorse. She’d simply told Jonathan Carlyle the truth. As far as we could tell, there’d been no global disaster as a result. No mass murderer in the family tree. And apparently no one of that branch had joined the “family business” either, though we would have a lot to explain to Lu once things settled.

  A young man had brought his wife and twin boys to the wake. He stood now, looking up at the portrait of his great-great-grandmother, pointing her out to his squirming sons.

  “Can you take her?” My mother walked up, my wailing sister on her shoulder. “She’s colicky, and I want to take some tea up to Moira. She’s resting.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Come here, chubs.” I took Ellie, but she squirmed and grunted in my arms, clearly unhappy with life at the moment.

  “Hang on. I know a little trick.” Bran hustled over to the broom closet. The real one, not the hidden entrance to a world of risk and danger and glory that most of these people would never know existed.

  Bran came back pushing a vacuum cleaner. “All right,” he said over the noise. “Give that little dove to me. This will work. Plus, all babies love me.”

  Ellie did love him. Of course she did, which irritated me no end.

  It also made every muscle in my body go gooey as warmed caramel, watching Bran Cameron run the vacuum while crooning softly to my baby sister.

  When he turned it off, Ellie was sound asleep.

  “I—​I used to do this for Tony,” he said. “He was such a horrid little thing. I was the only one who could quiet him.”

  Bran had a long and private talk with Aunt Lucinda. Neither one had yet revealed what was said. But I had seen the stunned look on Lucinda’s face when the door to her office opened. Whatever Bran told her . . . it wasn’t good. I’d eventually get it out of Bran, though I had a feeling it had to do with Blasi’s and Gabriella’s statements about the restoration of the True Faith and whatever the two priests had told.

  We’d had little time alone in the few days since our return. Mac’s death had ripped a piece of all our souls away, leaving aching, empty space behind. Watching Phoebe grieve and Collum shoulder the blame had made it ten times worse.

  “Go for a ride later?”

  My breath caught at the soft, husky tone. I looked up at Bran, and heat fired to life from some new place deep inside me, rising . . . rising to color my face.

  He saw it, and that cocky grin began to spread across his lips. Blue and green eyes went sleepy and heavy-lidded. At the promise I saw in those eyes . . . at the intensity . . . the heat inside me went from a soft simmer to a roiling boil.

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “If Ethel’s not too mad at me.”

  “She can get a bit surly when she’s not paid enough attention.” He rocked Ellie in his arms. “I wonder who she gets that from?”

  I kicked him under the table. He yelped, startling the baby.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” he said, but he was grinning at me in that Bran way that made me want to smack him and kiss him and roll around in the heather with him all at the same time.

  “Who’s got a surly sister?” he cooed to Ellie. “You’ve got a surly sister, yes you do.”

  “This would be one of those stop talking moments, Bran.”

  “Then I stick by my statement,” he said. “Surly.”

  He looked down into my sister’s chubby face. She grasped his finger and his smile wavered. “I’m going to get my brother out of there, you know.”

  I swallowed. Nodded. Felt my own smile fade. “I know.”

  After the initial storm passed, Aunt Lucinda met with Collum, Phoebe, Doug, and me privately. “I’ve spoken with Brandon,” she told us. “And I’ve agreed to let him stay here for the time being.”

  Aunt Lucinda met each of our eyes in turn. She was looking better. More color in her cheeks, despite the pain etched permanently around her eyes. Mom had mentioned that the treatments were going well.

  Curled up beside Doug on the aged leather, Phoebe appeared shrunken. She wore baggy shorts and a loose tee. Most disturbing was her hair, still the same demure auburn she’d chosen before we left, to better match the wig.

  Back in his usual gold-framed glasses, Doug was watching the girl he loved. He looked different too. Older. Some of the gentleness siphoned away.

  “From the information Hope and Brandon have shared,” Lucinda said, “I believe we are now dealing with an entirely new threat. Gunnar Blasi and Gabriella de Roca have their own agenda. We must be on our guard at all times.”

  Lucinda sighed and selected one of two objects from the table beside her. After we’d returned to Christopher Manor, alone in my room, I had unwrapped the bundle Nikola Tesla had given me. When I saw what was inside, I stared down at it for a long, long time. Then I gave it to Lucinda. Though gifted to me, the contents affected us all.

  My aunt’s faded-denim eyes skimmed over the words inscribed on the piece of yellowed parchment, sealed between two thick panes of glass.

  “Nikola Tesla told Hope that he located this several years ago in his research on the Nonius Stone,” she told us.

  She laid the glass on the table. Everyone leaned forward to read the elaborate script. Everyone but me. I didn’t need to read it again.

  To my most noble Friend,

  A development has come to light on the Objecte dear to both our hearts. I shall first share with you the history I have so recentl
y uncovered.

  From ancient times, a clandestine Order of nuns, said to be endowed with Holy mystical knowledge, kept the Objecte in strictest secrecy. Only one per generation was trusted with its location, passing the secret on to a younger, worthy Sister upon the old one’s impending death.

  This I have traced back over four hundred years to the last person known to possess this information. A close confidante of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine herself, it seems. Unfortunately, the good Sister died before she could pass the secret to her successor. The secret, then, died with her. Or so I believed.

  I admit, I was faire perplexed. The trail gone cold, I was not certain where to turn. But oh, dear Lady, I impart to you the most joyous of news. As you know, I have consulted the stars often of late, and they have been disturbingly vague. But at last, noble Friend. At long last.

  Today, I received an unexpected visit from an old acquaintance. Edward Kelly is a brilliant man. One with whom, until recently, I held a close friendship. I had not seen him in some months, not since our disharmonious parting in Prague. He came to beg my forgiveness for events which I shall not mention to one so pure as your great Self.

  Kelly knew I sought the stone. Burdened by guilt and shame, he revealed that he located the Objecte nigh on two years ago, and hid the fact from me. Now, out of sorry recompense he . . .

  But I digress. His words are of no matter against what he brought with him! The Objecte, Lady! Oh, and it is the true Objecte. My assistant Michael, a bright and promising young Scot, is also familiar with the Objecte’s lore, and has seconded my initial verification. As he transcribes this letter for me now, I see him nodding his agreement.

  Great Lady, I shall soon travel to London, and lay in your hands that which has so long eluded us.

  Written from Mortlake, this Saturday, the xvi of July, year of our Lord, 1588.

  As always, I remain your most constant and humble servant,