Anne Barbour (23 page)

“No, those have taken place since my last visit. I plan to make another trip there next summer, however, and will try to participate in those excavations.”

“Ah!” Hilary cried involuntarily. “How I envy you. I wonder if the time will ever come when a woman can simply leave her encumbrances behind—just for a while—to go a-traveling on her own.”

James glanced at her, startled. He had never really considered the matter, but he had always assumed that the contribution of women to the world of science and letters was minimal because of an inherent inferiority in the female intellect. It had never occurred to him that women were often held back intellectually solely because of the obligations of family and rigid social dictates.

Observing the wistful sparkle in Hilary’s eyes, he knew a desire as strong as it was startling, to sweep her off on a journey to distant lands, to watch her golden gaze widen at the sights he could show her. What would be her reaction to the splendor of the Parthenon, glowing palely in the moonlight? Or the rosy, earth-sprung pillars of the temple at Petra? And what wonders could they discover together? The fabled walls of Troy, perhaps, or the lair of King Minos on Crete. His pulse quickened at the prospect, and he found himself dwelling on the prospect of days spent on the heat-drenched summer isles of Greece—and of throbbing nights under star-strewn. Mediterranean skies. He pictured her garbed in the filmy draperies of the maidens portrayed on Grecian friezes. Remembering the feel of her mouth under his, he imagined his lips pressed against skin that was like scented satin.

He sat up with a jerk. Good God! What the devil was the matter with him, weaving prurient air dreams like a spotty-faced adolescent? He shot a glance at his companion. He had decided on their first meeting that she was not the type of female to inflame a man’s passions. Why, then, were his thoughts so continually entangled with her physical attractions? Attractions that he had heretofore considered negligible. The whole thing seemed inexplicable, and to his relief, he observed that they were entering the outskirts of Gloucester.

Cyrus Bender occupied a house on the edge of the city, in a small lane just off Lower Southgate Street. It seemed too large for a single gentleman, but James observed cryptically that Cyrus required a great deal of room. For some moments, there was no response to their knock, but at last the door was opened by a rather untidy fellow garbed in the sober raiment of a gentleman’s gentleman.

“Mr. Bender?” he replied vaguely to their query, as though he had never heard of the man. “Oh. Yes,” he said at last. “Yes, he is home, I think, but I’m not sure...” He trailed off disconsolately, as if he were wishing himself elsewhere, absolved of all responsibility for his errant employer.

“Perhaps if we could come in...” said James, ushering Hilary through the door. The gentleman’s gentleman gave way unhappily, and led the way through a dark corridor smelling of must and mouse droppings to a spacious and surprisingly well-furnished drawing room.

The gentleman’s gentleman, perhaps recalled to a sense of his duty said stiffly, “Mr. Bender don’t like t’be disturbed when he’s workin’. If you could come back—”

“Nonsense,” interrupted James impatiently. “He’s always working. We must speak to him. Now, will you please search him out and tell him that James Wincanon is here to see him?”

The man sighed. “Well, it might take awhile, as I ain’t sure exactly where he is. In fact, he might be out in—”

This time, the man was interrupted by a thunderous crash that came from directly overhead. Hilary jumped.

“Ah,” said James. “It appears we have discovered his location.”

He rose, and over the servant’s faint mutterings of protest, led Hilary from the room. Following the sound of the thud and ensuing minor crashes and tinkles, they soon located the source of the uproar. Throwing open a door, they plunged into another large room. Hilary gasped. She had never beheld such a chamber, and rather fancied this was what Aladdin’s cave must look like. The room was lined with shelves upon which rested rocks of every size from small pebbles to largish boulders. Some were polished to a glowing sheen, others sparkled with exposed crystals. Almost all of them were either oddly shaped or strangely colored, or both. More rocks lay on tables and even chairs scattered about the room. Also prominently featured were beakers of bubbling fluids, copper tubing that coiled like gleaming serpents around the beakers, and great glass jars filled with unidentified but somehow sinister-looking liquids.

Standing at one of the tables, engaged in pouring the contents of a large beaker into a small iron pot was one of the tallest men Hilary had ever seen. He was also one of the thinnest, and thus presented the aspect of a restless stork. As he moved, various papers, obviously notes, fluttered about him like molting feathers. He looked up as James and Hilary entered the room.

His expression was not welcoming, and it was only when he peered myopically for several seconds from behind a pair of large, thick spectacles that a smile appeared on his angular features.

“James!” he cried in pleased accents. “Welcome to my minerals room.”

Cyrus placed the beaker on the table and moved toward James. “I do not believe we have seen each other for some time. Have we?”

“Indeed, no. However, I see you are still carrying on in great form.” James turned to Hilary. “Lady Hilary Merton, allow me to present Cyrus Bender, friend and scientist extraordinaire.”

Cyrus bent awkwardly over Hilary’s hand before speaking to the gentleman’s gentleman, who had entered behind the pair.

“Digweed, we have guests. Do be a good chap and bring us up some refreshments.”

“We don’t have any,” replied the serving man in a surly tone. “Leastways, there’s some of the cakes we had last night, but they were stale then. Prob’ly hard as them rocks by now.” He swept an arm about the room.

“Ah,” replied Cyrus, unfazed. “Just bring ‘round a pot of tea, then. And some cups,” he added, apparently as an afterthought.

With meticulous care, he removed the rocks from the only two comfortable chairs in the chamber and gestured to Hilary and James to be seated. He settled his own spindly frame on a three-legged stool. Evidently feeling he had discharged his duties as host, he gazed expectantly at his guests.

James cleared his throat and glanced at Hilary, who was eyeing him in some amusement. “What are you working on now, Cyrus?”

“Oh. Several things, actually. I’m experimenting with black powder at the moment, and a device for measuring static electricity, and—Oh, you mean in here?” He glanced around the “minerals room.”

“Yes,” said James patiently. To his surprise, Cyrus blushed.

“Um, well about a month ago, Septimus Hodge—a colleague of mine—wrote that he had been doing some experiments with base metals. He said that he believed he had come across a method for transforming a certain iron alloy into—well, a precious metal.”

“You mean, gold?” asked Hilary incredulously. This time, Cyrus flushed to the tips of his prominent ears.

His voice sank to a whisper. “Well, actually silver,”

“Good God!” exclaimed James. Once again, he felt Hilary’s gaze on him, and he turned to intercept a warm look of shared mirth that he felt down to his toes. With an effort, he bent his attention again to his friend. “Are you actually dabbling in alchemy, Cyrus?”

Cyrus blinked. “No, of course not,” he replied, his tone frosty. “I wrote immediately to Septimus, telling him his theories were ludicrous. I was merely repeating his procedures to prove him wrong.”

“I see,” said James.

“And is he?” asked Hilary. “Wrong, I mean.”

“Well, I have yet to produce so much as a scrap of silver so far.”

“Ah,” said James again, following which a dispirited sort of silence fell over the little group.

“Perhaps,” said Hilary at last to James, who appeared to be sinking into Cyrus’s wooly cloud of abstraction, “we should tell Mr. Bender why we are here.”

James jerked slightly. “Of course.” He swung about to face his friend directly. ‘Tell me, Cyrus, is it possible to create an artificial bolt of lightning?”

Cyrus snapped to immediate attention. “Actually,” he said pedantically, “lightning cannot be duplicated, as it is a unique phenomenon. However, sparks similar in form to lightning can be formed, and I have done this many times.”

“Excellent! And are these—sparks—very, er, large?”

“It depends on what you call large,” replied Cyrus thoughtfully. “They do not compare, of course, to the ordinary strikes that occur in a thundercloud. Those can produce up to several hundred million volts. I have achieved flashes of barely a hundred volts—although they transverse a distance of several centimeters. Real flashes, of course, we measure in meters.”

“I see.” James, who had straightened hopefully at the beginning of Cyrus’s statement, now sank bank in his chair.

Hilary, too, knew a moment of discouragement, but she asked tentatively, “But do you think it would be possible to produce something larger—in a workshop—that would be comparable to a natural flash?”

“Well, now.” Cyrus’s face lit with interest and he launched into a very nearly incomprehensible monologue that featured phrases such as, “coalescence of droplets,” “mass movement of charge by air flow,” and “negative and positive charge centers.”

Within a few moments, Hilary felt as though she were drowning under the deluge of Cyrus’s information on the formation of lightning. James reached to touch her hand lightly, and she was instantly brought back to the moment at the villa when he had grasped her shoulders and brought his mouth to hers. She lifted dazed eyes to his.

“Wh—wha—?” she murmured.

“What, what?” asked Cyrus, interrupted mid-flow.

Hilary blushed hotly. Lord, she was behaving like a schoolgirl with a crush on her dancing master. Murmuring a disjointed apology, she was forced to remind herself firmly—realizing that she seemed to be doing this with increasing frequency—that she had no interest in James Wincanon beyond his formidable intellect and his interest in her own hobbyhorse, Roman Britain.

Cyrus droned on for several more minutes, before James finally interposed. “If I am correctly following the thread of your discourse, Cyrus, you are saying you can, indeed, reproduce a bolt of lightning equivalent to that of a natural flash.”

“Um,” replied Cyrus. “That is, yes. I think so.”

“Do you think you could create this phenomenon outside a laboratory?”

“Yes. I think so,” responded Cyrus again after a reflective pause. “That is, in what sort of environment will I be working?”

James and Hilary had previously decided to say nothing to Cyrus about Rufus and their efforts to transport him through time. There was no reason to believe Cyrus would treat their story with anything less than the contempt any true scientist would display toward such an obvious taradiddle. Thus, James merely described the interior of the Roman tower.

“Hmm,” said Cyrus consideringly, his eyes narrowing behind his spectacles. At last, his head bobbed approvingly, making him resemble a stork drinking from a pond. “Yes, such an enclosed structure should serve admirably. When do you need to produce this phenomena?”

“The sooner the better,” said James heartily. “How about next Tuesday?”

He glanced at Hilary, who nodded in agreement. She had grown fond of Rufus and she would hate to say good-bye to him. In addition, there was still much she wished to learn from him. However, it was obvious that the old warrior was not thriving in the nineteenth century. Whether it was an illness that would have come upon him in the natural course of his life, or whether traveling through time was detrimental to the human condition, could not be determined. However, they could not, in good conscience, keep him here any longer than necessary.

At this point, Digweed returned, shuffling under the weight of a tray containing an ancient, tarnished, and slightly dented teapot and the requisite accoutrements. Having been politely requested by Cyrus to do the honors, Hilary poured tea into mismatched cups and James watched with delight as she passed them around with the grace and aplomb of a duchess in a London drawing room. After they had refreshed themselves, Cyrus led his guests to another chamber at the top of the house. Here, he displayed with pardonable pride his “electrics room,” in which could be seen an astonishing array of totally incomprehensible equipment. Wire lay in great coils on floor and shelving, and pieces of metal of assorted sizes were stacked haphazardly. A humming sound filled the air, coming, apparently, from a large metal object shaped a little like a small stove on wheels.

“Whew!” exclaimed James. “Does all this stuff actually do something?”

Cyrus smiled in a superior fashion. “I realize it does not look like much to the layman, but this”—he indicated the stove on wheels—”is a generator. It produces electricity, which can be stored in a Leyden jar.” He gestured to a glass container lined with foil and capped with metal. After several seconds, Cyrus turned off the generator and struck the lid briskly with a metal mallet, which he held by a wooden handle.

Instantly, with a sizzling pop, a blinding spark flew upward from the glass jar, dissipating as it rose to the ceiling.

“Now, you see,” said Cyrus, as though nothing out of the ordinary had taken place, “by applying the same principles, only using a much bigger jar, one produces lightning.”

“My,” said Hilary faintly. To tell the truth, she had been momentarily terrified at the unexpectedness and the blazing vehemence of the spark. James’s fingers curled around hers and she grasped them gratefully.

“An impressive display, old friend,” said James. “And you believe you can reproduce this effect in the tower I have described?”

“I should certainly think so.” Cyrus spoke with a studied nonchalance but it seemed to Hilary that she detected a certain eagerness in his tone. “Of course, it will involve a much larger jar. Fortunately, I have such a one on hand. I had it blown specially for me some months ago for an experiment of a different sort. I will have other items to bring with me, as well, of course.” He waved an arm vaguely to encompass the generator, several other pieces of unidentified equipment, and what seemed like several miles of the ubiquitous coiled wire.