The Pierced Heart: A Novel (10 page)

Hour upon hour my father shut himself up alone, going through his journals and his learned books, until he came to me one evening, when I was eating my dinner, and sat down on the chair next to mine.

“Look,” he said, opening a journal to where he had marked the place with a slip of paper, and placing it on the table by my plate. It was a drawing of a wooden table, and above it, a large glass ball, suspended between two metal prongs.

“What is it?”

“It is called an Influence Machine,” Father said. “And the name seems strangely fortuitous, given the use to which it might be put. I saw one demonstrated, many years ago, and I cannot understand why I have not thought of it before. You see the handle at the side of the table? It connects to a mechanism in the prongs which causes the globe to revolve. The glass itself has been evacuated of air, and a very small amount of mercury inserted, such that when the glass is set to spin it gives off a strange green radiance if touched. It does indeed have the most uncanny appearance.”

He must have seen my look of alarm. “The science of it is easily explained, and in any case it is not the science that need concern us. I lighted upon it just now because of this note,” he said, pointing, “which seems appended almost as an afterthought. It says the creator of the machine called the light it emits ‘the glow of life.’ As if it were some hidden and secret energy, which the action of the machine makes visible to man.”

“Do you believe it, Papa?” I asked, as I ran my eyes down the paragraph he had marked.

“I confess I find it unlikely, as a hypothesis. But for our purposes, it might do very well.”

I could see now, where his thought was tending. “You believe we might harness this secret energy,” I said slowly, “to render the spirits of the dead perceptible to the living?”

He smiled. “Clearly we would only
appear
to do so. But we can make that
‘appear’
seem only too real to those who witness it.”

And that was how it came about. My father procured the apparatus required from a scientist in Ingolstadt, and then spent some weeks adapting it to our purpose, until he announced, with some excitement, that he believed it ready for our first essay. I cannot describe the sensation when first I touched the pillars that suspend the globe, and put my fingers to the hissing glass. The rush of heat across my skin, and the sudden agonising spasm that sent me staggering from the apparatus, my hand at my side. I reached half-blind for the nearest chair as my father came running towards me. “Was it too strong? Are you hurt?”

I shook my head, feeling suddenly, and for the first time by daylight, that same strange claustrophobia I know only too well, when I wake from sleepwalking to the taste of metal in my mouth and a low insistent humming in my ears.

But I told my father none of this, wishing to spare him any self-reproach, and asking only that he adjust the machine a little before we attempted it again. And when I tried it a second time, the effect was indeed lessened, though I could still feel a sharp tingling in the nerves of my hands. But I told myself I could bear it, and I did not wish my father to waste the work of so much time. And yet each month that passes it has worsened, and now I feel myself diseased, as if the mere touch of my hand will taint, and my blood runs not red and full but brackish, like filthy water clogged with soil.

I am not mad—I have told myself again and again, I am
not mad
, but I do so in desperation, and with a rising panic that clutches at my heart. For if it is madness to distrust one’s own senses, to see what others cannot perceive, then in truth perhaps I
am
mad. For now, when the room darkens and I place my hands on the machine and the
globe begins to spin, I see other colours, brighter and far more beautiful than the sick greenish glow of the glass—spirals of iridescent light lifting coldly into the air, red and blue-white plumes that curl and entwine like water, and waver sometimes like flame in the wind. The night when first it happened I looked across at my father, wondering if this was some new trick—some new effect he had devised to surprise and delight me—but his face was impassive beneath its mask. And when I told him, afterwards, what I had seen, he said, a little sternly, that I must be mistaken. But it was the morning after, I am sure, that he first he talked of England, and of home.

CHAPTER FIVE
 

L
ONDON
, J
UNE
1851

T
HE CITY HAS NEVER
been so crowded, so excited, so proud, so dangerous. It has taken nine months, a million square feet of glass, and eighteen acres of Hyde Park, and London now boasts a modern wonder to rival all seven of the ancient world. “Vast, strange, new and impossible to describe,” it is a stately pleasure dome decreed by no less a personage than the Prince Consort himself. A temple to technology tall enough to top living trees, furnished with more than one hundred thousand “Works of Industry of all Nations,” and designed (in both senses of the word) to fanfare to those self-same nations that Great Britain is not only the world’s workshop, but its pre-eminent imperial power. The visitors pouring through the doors of this Great Exhibition each day can see printing presses and folding pianos, silk tapestries and Sèvres porcelain, American pistols and Canadian fire-engines, statuary and stained glass, microscopes and mill machinery, looms and locomotives, a steam hammer that can bend metal and yet scarcely crack the shell of an egg, and the Koh-i-Noor diamond (uncut at present, so rather a drab disappointment to most), as well as a stuffed elephant to display the Queen’s
howdah
, and a tableau
of stuffed kittens done up in dresses in the German gallery, which is said to be Her Majesty’s personal favourite of the whole display.

Six million will meander this miracle of rare devices before it closes in October, from families, to foreigners, to factory-owners; thousands on special Thomas Cook trains from the provinces; and hundreds as exhibitors touting for trade; the fashionable from town, the Sunday-bested from the suburbs, and today—a designated “shilling day”—flocks of smocked-clothed agricultural labourers ripe for the ripping. For the thieves are thick among the gadding crowds, and despite the ranks of specially recruited constables, some of whom we can see even now sweating under their tall hats this hot June morning, there’s nothing that pulls in a pickpocket more than a courteous English queue. A scuffle breaks out briefly, as a rather more seasoned officer spots a ragged lad with his fingers where they’ve no right to be, but within moments calm is restored, and the momentary flutter of anxiety among the matrons is forgotten as the throng gets its first breathless glimpse of the splendour in the glass.

Less than three miles away, Buckingham Street is far enough from the dust and press of the Strand, and close enough to the river, for a breath of air to lift the summer heat. Down in the basement kitchen Nancy Dyer is toiling at the tub, her pretty face red with the effort of the morning’s laundry, while her little daughter Betsy sits rolling marbles for a large black cat which shows precious little inclination to pursue them, having secured with an unerring feline instinct the only cool corner of the kitchen floor. In the drawing-room two storeys above, the master of the house sits at a small table by the open window, one hand slowly turning pages, and the other holding down the book—holding it a little stiffly, as we now see, which suggests that the stroke he suffered some six months ago has not fully left him. In the far corner of the same room Maddox’s former henchman, Abel Stornaway, is
helping Billy the servant lad to clear the table of the remains of breakfast, fussing a little, as is his wont, and loading the tray just a little too heavily for the boy to manage. And up in the attic, Charles Maddox, too, is at the window, looking down towards the Thames where a barge loaded with coal is toiling heavily against the tide.

It’s a long way from the asylum at Melk, and you may well be wondering how such a distance has been travelled. As well as calculating, perhaps, after looking back a page or so, that it is nigh on three months since we last encountered him. Charles is standing at the window now, so we can deduce that he did not—though it was a close-run thing—lose his leg to the attack at Castle Reisenberg, but when he turns finally and moves towards his desk we can see that he is limping. Limping in an impatient furious way, as if he’ll be damned to acknowledge it, far less let it hinder him. The document on the desk is a letter, and as he resumes his pen to complete it, we may perhaps be able to gather rather more of what has happened to him in those last few missing weeks.

Buckingham Street, 16 June

He stops, pen in mid-air. He has said little—nothing, indeed—of what he endured all those weeks in the asylum, as if refusing to frame it in words might help expunge it from his mind. But the images, when they come, are unrelenting. Waking up in that place and knowing it for what it was. And then, day after day, night after night, the stench of urine, the wailing of the demented, and the pitiful shouting of those imprisoned by mistake, or malice. The chains biting into his wrists and ankles, and the whimpering of the man shackled likewise to the next bed, huddled and rocking, hour by endless hour. And worse than any of these, the silent attendants standing every morning on either side of his bed, wrenching his jaws open and pouring the bitter gruel between his teeth, after which he would lie for hours, half-dazed, staring at the stained and seeping ceiling, trying to force his mother’s face from his mind, telling himself that he is not insane—telling himself that this is not his family curse—that it is not his punishment for allowing Elizabeth to be lost—

The sound of the doorbell downstairs breaks into his thoughts, and he listens intently for a moment, before quietly resuming his task. It is five minutes and more before there is a knock on his attic door and Billy’s pink face appears around it.

“Mr Wheeler to see yer, Mr Charles.
Sergeant
Wheeler, now, should I say.”

Charles sits back; he was not expecting his old colleague today—indeed any day—and he wonders if it is purely a social call. Half his heart will be happy to see him, and glad for his promotion, but Sam is far too sharp not to realise something serious has happened, and Charles is not sure yet if he has a story that will stand inspection. “Show him to the office,” he says eventually, getting to his feet. “And ask Nancy to make us some coffee.”

Sam hates coffee, Charles knows that well enough, but it serves as a
way of dismissing the boy and avoiding his shrewd Cockney stare as Charles shuffles down the stairs like a stiff old man.

By the time he gets to the office Sam is happily ensconced, his feet up on the desk, eating an apple. He gets up smartly when he sees Charles and comes over to shake him by the hand, but he notices Charles’s injury at once—just as Charles knew he would.

“How did that ’appen?” he asks, as Charles lowers himself painfully into the hard wooden chair.

“I’m afraid I had a less-than-cordial encounter with one of my host’s guard-dogs.”

Sam eyes him, chewing. “And there were me finking it were a nice easy number you’d got yerself. All expenses paid and a little ’oliday thrown in besides. So that were why you were away so long? Yer uncle didn’t seem to know when I called ’ere last week.”

Charles nods, avoiding his gaze. “It took longer to heal than expected. And then I could not travel as quickly as I should have liked.”

That’s not the half of it, Sam guesses that at once, but this is a friend not a felon, and he knows better than to press him. If he needs to know, Charles will tell him in his own good time. And in any case, this is not, as it turns out, a social call.

“It were the Inspector as asked me to come. Inspector Rowlandson. ’E thought you might be able to ’elp us. ’Cause we’re stumped wiv this one, Chas, I don’t mind telling yer.”