Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë

by Laura Joh Rowland

  I had heard that the disease could afflict people or animals who disturbed such gravesites, even decades after the burial. The disease was commonly thought to arise from a curse put on the fields. Niall Kavanagh had proven this theory wrong.

  “I wore protective garments like these.” Kavanagh delved into a box and removed a rubber suit with a hood, boots, and gloves attached, and a cloth mask. “That’s how I avoided contracting the disease.

  “I collected samples of the remains. I took them back to my laboratory and exposed some live sheep to them. When the sheep became ill, I drew their blood. I put it under the microscope and saw the animalcules—tiny, wormlike creatures. I found the same creatures in fluid from the lungs of the sheep after they died. I experimented with cultivating the animalcules. First I grew them on plates of blood, meat broth, and gelatin. Then I discovered that the best medium is the aqueous humor from cows’ eyes, which I obtained from a slaughterhouse. I incubated them at the same temperature as the human body. When I had achieved the purest cultures I could, I introduced them into the nostrils of healthy sheep. They all contracted the disease.” Kavanagh’s voice rang with the excitement he must have felt at the time. “I had discovered its true cause!”

  Now we knew what purpose the sheep, the glass plates, and the equipment at the laboratory had served. The glass box with the gloves had protected Kavanagh while he worked with his cultures.

  “I discovered that the animalcules could be heated, dried, and ground into powder, yet retain their disease-causing properties. I have made the greatest breakthrough in the history of science!” Grandiosity sparkled all over Kavanagh. I was sadly reminded of Branwell during his rare moments of triumph, when he’d managed to publish a poem.

  “At first I thought to report it to the Royal Society,” Kavanagh said. “I hoped it would regain me the honor I’d lost when I was expelled by those fools who dare to call themselves scientists. But they were so set against me that they might not believe I had accomplished something so tremendous. My discovery contradicted all the accepted theories about disease. No, I told myself; I mustn’t hand it over to the Society men to reject and ridicule. Why should I? Why did I need their esteem any longer?”

  Spreading his arms, laughing exultantly, he whirled about the room. “I had outshone them. I was like a god above mortals. I need not curry the favor of small, inferior men anymore.” Kavanagh stopped whirling, swayed dizzily. “But I couldn’t bear to keep my discovery to myself, to marvel at alone. What should I do with my knowledge? How could I use it to gain the recognition I’d craved all my life?” That it might endanger mankind didn’t seem to have occurred to him. “One day I was sitting in my laboratory, wondering what to do next, when suddenly my mind made a dazzling leap to a higher plane of intuition. Suddenly I realized that my discovery was even greater than I’d first thought. Whoever has this—” He gestured at his jars of deadly cultures “—owns the very power of life and death!”

  Even though I was appalled by the fact of such power in Kavanagh’s irresponsible hands, I was spellbound by it; I couldn’t speak. Slade, too, was dumbstruck.

  “I had a vision of a plague spreading across the world as in Biblical times,” Kavanagh said, “created not by God, but by man. A plague so deadly and so relentless that the combined power of all the nations in the world couldn’t stop it. That was when I conceived the idea of inventing a weapon of war, based on my discovery.”

  Nor had it occurred to him that he might use his knowledge for the benefit of his fellow humans. Their welfare had never meant anything to him, as his mother had explained.

  “From a jar of dust to a weapon of war. That is quite a big leap,” Slade said.

  Kavanagh appeared not to notice Slade’s sarcastic tone. “Too big a leap for small minds to follow,” he said smugly. “I became aware of that when I tried to interest the British government in my invention. I’d run out of money to develop my weapon, and I thought that the government would be glad to provide it.” A scowl darkened his face. “None of the officials I approached was interested. Everyone thought I was a crackpot.”

  “Not everyone,” Slade murmured to me. “I gather that Wilhelm Stieber has spies inside the government who heard about the weapon. That must be how he caught wind of Kavanagh.”

  “All except for Lord Eastbourne,” Kavanagh said. “He advanced me the funds. He was willing to take a chance on me. But he turned out to be a deceitful, dishonorable villain.”

  “Just how do you plan to disperse your cultures widely enough to infect large populations?” Slade said. “By riding around on a bicycle equipped with a bellows, like a circus clown? You would be stopped before you got very far.”

  Kavanagh waved his hand, dismissing the contraption we’d seen at his laboratory. “That was an early concept. I’ve devised a much more effective system. I’ll show you.”

  He crouched by his cart and placed a funnel inside a cylindrical metal canister that was perhaps ten inches tall and six in diameter, with a narrow opening. Then he pried up the lid of a small wooden cask. The odor that wafted from it was smoky, acrid, and sulfurous.

  “That’s gunpowder,” Slade said in dismay as Kavanagh poured it into the funnel and black dust hazed the air. “For God’s sake, man, keep it away from the lamp!”

  “Don’t worry,” Kavanagh said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  Awful realization struck me. “He’s building a bomb!”

  He pointed a blackened finger at me and grinned; his teeth were stained with wine and decay. “The lady is absolutely right.” He removed the funnel and wiped his hands on his trousers. “All it needs is an igniting device and a fuse.”

  He took up a short copper tube, crimped one end shut with a pliers, then filled it with a substance that looked like salt, from a glass jar. Some spilled on the floor. Slade said, “Be careful. Those chemicals are dangerous.”

  “They won’t explode until I’m ready.” Kavanagh threw a pinch of gunpowder into the tube, which he jammed inside the mouth of the canister. He mixed a paste of water and gunpowder and coated it onto a length of thick cotton twine. He stuck this fuse into the tube, then unpacked four jars of his culture, positioned them closely around the container, and secured them with a buckled leather strap. He proudly surveyed his handiwork. “There!”

  Slade and I stared, aghast.

  “When the bomb is detonated, the jars will shatter,” Kavanagh explained. “The blast will disperse the powdered culture. The wind will spread it far, far abroad.”

  “It won’t work,” Slade said, but he looked as shaken as I was.

  “It will,” Kavanagh said, all preening confidence. “The world will see.”

  “What are you talking about?” Deepening horror pervaded Slade’s voice. “How will the world see?”

  “At my demonstration,” Kavanagh said.

  “You mean to set off the bomb?” I said, shocked beyond shock.

  “Yes, in a public place where many people are gathered, where many can witness its effects firsthand.” Kavanagh rubbed his hands together and smiled with gleeful anticipation. “It will be the biggest experiment ever conducted in the history of science!”

  “But the bomb will kill hundreds of innocent people,” I said, even though I knew Kavanagh wouldn’t care. “Hundreds more will become infected with the disease and die.”

  “Thousands, most likely.” Kavanagh was nonchalant. “That’s an inevitable consequence of scientific research—experimental subjects must be sacrificed.”

  There was that chilling word again, which had made me shiver when I’d read it in his journal. Slade said, “You’ll die, too. If the bomb doesn’t blow up in your face, the disease will kill you. You’re not immune to it, even though you think you’re a god.”

  “That’s all right. I’m willing to be a martyr.” The hubris suddenly drained from Kavanagh; he turned sorrowful and resigned. “I haven’t long to live, anyway. This morning I woke up feeling more unwell than usual.” He drew a deep,
wheezing breath, then coughed so hard that his face reddened and he held his ribs. “I must have inhaled some of the culture.” He shrugged. “I’m as good as dead right now.”

  Slade and I looked at each other with fresh consternation. Kavanagh might have infected us!

  “Don’t worry,” Kavanagh said. “You haven’t been exposed to the culture, and the disease doesn’t spread from person to person. You’ll live to tell the world everything I’ve told you, after I’m gone.”

  This, then, was the role he intended Slade and me to fill: he needed his story publicized, his genius revealed, and we were to be his spokesmen.

  Kavanagh tenderly placed the bomb on the cart. “I’ll say goodbye now.” His burning eyes had the farsighted look of a soldier going to the battlefield. He grasped the cart’s handles.

  “Wait,” Slade protested. “You can’t leave us in this cage. How are we going to tell anyone anything while we’re locked up? You have to let us out!”

  “Oh. I almost forgot. Here.” Kavanagh tossed a long, slender object into the cage, at our feet. It was a metal file. “Use that to saw through the bars. By the time you get out, my demonstration will have taken place already.”

  “When?” Slade demanded. “Where?”

  “Within two or three days,” Kavanagh said. “That’s how much time I have before I’m too ill to do it. As to where—” His parting glance at us was mischievous and chilling. “You’ll know soon enough.”

  Then he shuffled away, pushing the cart laden with death.

  37

  “DR.KAVANAGH!” I CALLED. “PLEASE COME BACK!”

  “Come back, damn you!” Slade shouted, rattling the bars of the cage.

  Kavanagh did not heed our pleas. After their echoes faded, all we heard was the draft sighing through the dungeon.

  We looked at each other, and in spite of our dismay, my heart lifted. Even though Slade and I were trapped in this dire predicament, we were together. Our marriage had multiplied our individual powers. If anyone could escape this prison, Slade and I would.

  Slade smiled; he’d read my thoughts. “It may be all over for Niall Kavanagh, but it isn’t for us.”

  “Not yet, at any rate.” I gave Slade my hairpin.

  He set to work on the lock, but the mechanism was stiff; the hairpin broke. So did the others I gave him. Slade took up the file that Kavanagh had left us. He sawed a few strokes on a bar of the cage, then on the shank of the lock. “The lock seems to be made of a softer alloy, and there’s only one piece we need to cut in order to get out.”

  He filed two scratches on opposite sides of the shank, indicating where we should cut. We took turns filing. It was slow, tedious work. The file was dull, and soon became duller. After some three hours we’d barely managed to nick the lock. We developed sore, running blisters on our fingers. The oil in the lamp burned down; the flame went out. Slade and I continued working in pitch darkness. We blindly passed the file to each other. My ears rang with the rasp of metal against metal. The lock seemed to grow thicker as I labored. We must have continued all day, or night, or around the clock—I knew not which. We grew hungry, thirsty, and tired. After an eternity, we stopped to rest.

  “If you have any new ideas about how to free ourselves, let’s hear them,” Slade said.

  I started to say I did not, when a faint noise stopped me. “Did you hear that?”

  We listened to the quiet sound of a door creaking open, somewhere above us, then soft, stealthy footsteps descending. “Dr. Kavanagh is coming back!” I whispered.

  “It’s not him,” Slade said. “That’s not his gait. And there are several people coming.”

  I was so weary, my mind so disoriented by the darkness, that it took me a moment to think who they might be. “Lord Eastbourne and his men?”

  Then I heard low, masculine voices with a foreign accent. Slade tensed beside me as a current of dread ran through both of us. He said, “I would prefer Lord Eastbourne.”

  We stood up in the cage and waited helplessly. A yellow glare burst like a sun in the darkness. All I could see was that brilliant, radiating spot. Slade and I raised our hands to shield our eyes as it drew nearer. Squinting, I perceived three figures approaching. One man held the lantern from which the light emanated. Another walked by his side. Each held a pistol aimed at Slade and me. The third man followed. My eyes adjusted as the two men in the lead stopped at the cage. I recognized their blond hair, their military bearing, the cold, classical handsomeness of one and the puffy, unwholesome face of the other. They moved apart, and the third man came to stand between them. Dressed in black, he seemed made of the same darkness as the shadows in the dungeon. His silver hair, his pale, hooded eyes, and his gold-rimmed spectacles gleamed with a light of their own.

  It was Wilhelm Stieber and his two Prussian soldiers.

  Terror stabbed deep into my heart, which pounded so hard that my ears filled with the sound of my blood roaring. My bowels turned to water; my lungs contracted; I felt weak with cold, sickening despair. All our running to keep one step ahead of Stieber had been futile. He had caught up with us at the worst possible time.

  A smile of gratification curved his cruel, sensual mouth. “Ivan Zubov,” he said to Slade. “But of course that is not your real name. The time for pretenses is long past. John Slade, what a pleasure to meet you again.”

  I sensed the animosity Stieber bore toward Slade, a malicious presence that consumed the air, as threatening as the pistols that his men aimed at us. Slade stood firm, his shoulders squared, his head high. His own hatred for Stieber radiated like a hot, fierce energy from him toward his foe. The space around the two men crackled, as if two bolts of lightning had met.

  “Wilhelm Stieber,” Slade said. “I could say that it’s a pleasure to see you, but that would be a lie.”

  Stieber peered at me. “Ah, Miss Charlotte Brontë. How convenient to find you with Mr. Slade. You have spared me the trouble of tracking you down.” Evil cheer crinkled his smooth skin as he noticed the file lying on the floor of the cage and the lock with the two tiny notches we’d worked so long to make. “Did Dr. Kavanagh imprison you in this cage?”

  “Yes,” Slade said.

  Stieber chuckled. “He did me a favor.”

  “Indeed. How did you find this place? You couldn’t have gotten any clues from Dr. Kavanagh’s laboratory. It was already burning when you arrived.”

  At first I did not understand why Slade would converse so civilly with Stieber when he wanted to lunge at the man’s throat. Then I realized that he wanted to keep Stieber talking, to delay the violence that Stieber surely meant to do us, and give himself time to think of a way to escape.

  “I consulted some members of the Royal Society in London.” Stieber smiled, smug and condescending: he’d seen through Slade’s ploy but he couldn’t resist the chance to show off his cleverness. “Dr. Kavanagh has many enemies among them. When I told them that I was an Austrian police official and Dr. Kavanagh was wanted for a murder in Vienna, they were glad to furnish me with information about his family. I then traveled to Ireland. Imagine my chagrin when his mother and father informed me that you—and your wife—had already been there.” Stieber brimmed with sly humor. “Congratulations on your marriage.”

  “Many thanks,” Slade said evenly.

  “Sir William and Lady Kavanagh were under the impression that you work for the British government,” Stieber continued. “I corrected their mistake. I told them that you were a mercenary hired by the Russians to kill their son. I said that I could save him if they told me where he was. They were more than eager to cooperate.”

  I was horrified that he’d tricked the Kavanaghs. I felt anger flare in Slade, but all he said was, “You’re too late. Kavanagh is gone.”

  “I know.” Stieber’s eyes narrowed with hostility, as if he blamed Slade and me for Kavanagh’s departure. “Where is his invention?”

  “He took it with him,” Slade said.

  I had gathered that Stieber was a man
of rare intelligence and perception; now I watched him review the news about Dr. Kavanagh, combine it with facts already in his possession, and swiftly grasp the situation. “Kavanagh intends to deploy his invention.”

  “Bull’s-eye,” Slade said, pointing at Stieber.

  For the first time I saw Stieber confounded. He turned away, attempting to hide the fact that he’d suffered a devastating blow. For once he appeared fully human.

  Slade hurried to take advantage of Stieber’s weakness. “Kavanagh is going to demonstrate his weapon in public. It will be seen by hundreds of people. It won’t be a secret anymore. And he’s sure to be caught. Too bad for Russia.”

  I’d not thought of how Kavanagh’s actions would affect Stieber. Now I realized that Kavanagh had put himself beyond the grasp of Stieber and the Tsar. But that was small consolation.

  Stieber faced us. He’d regained his smoothest, hardest, most imperious countenance, but the blood showed through his pale complexion. A vein pulsed at his temple; the sinews in his neck tensed like cords of steel. His rage was frightening, and Slade and I were captive scapegoats.

  “Where did Kavanagh go?” Stieber demanded.

  “He refused to tell us,” Slade said, “but he went not long ago. Maybe you can catch up with him, if you leave at once.”

  I prayed that his attempt to send Stieber away would work, but Stieber glared, his rage magnified by contempt. “Do you think I’m so stupid? That I would let you go? After hunting you for so long? After you and your woman have caused me so much trouble?” His laugh flared his nostrils. “Dr. Kavanagh has evidently decided to let you live because he wants you to tell his story in case he can’t.” His intuition amazed me yet again. “But I won’t repeat his mistake.”

  He gestured at the soldiers. The ugly one moved closer to the cage, his gun leveled at Slade’s chest. The other aimed his weapon at me. Stieber said, “Tell me where Kavanagh went.”

  “I already told you, we don’t know.” Slade’s voice was steady, but I knew his thoughts were racing as fast as my own. Staring at the pistol trained on me, I wondered if all my life’s labors, all my striving toward publication, fame, and love, would soon end with a single gunshot. Would my remains never come to light? Would no one ever know what had become of me?