The Pierced Heart: A Novel (30 page)

“You know very well why I’m here.”

The Baron snaps the book shut. “I am afraid I do not. But what I
do
know is that you were not invited. And are not welcome.”

“I have come for Miss Causton. Her father sent me to bring her home. To ensure that she is safe.”

“In that case you may consider your duty discharged. Miss Causton is perfectly safe. She is my guest, and while she is under my roof she is under my protection. I can assure you—and her father—that she came here, and stays here, most willingly.”

“You actually expect me to believe that?” Charles’s eyes are blue ice.

The Baron smiles. “But of course. I am what you English delight in terming a
gentleman
, and you—” He hesitates a moment, “—no doubt consider yourself the same. You are honour-bound to believe me, are you not?”

“An
English
gentleman would bring her here, and let me speak to her myself.”

“That is not possible. She is resting, and cannot be disturbed.”

“I have her father’s authority, and I am therefore in a position to insist.”

“You are in no such position. You are in my house, on
my
private property. I have any number of servants at my call. And you should know by now, that I am not a man who makes idle threats.”

There is a pause. A pause of lengthening and deepening hostility.

Then suddenly Charles turns and begins to walk up the room, slowly, deliberately, between the glass cases and the scientific instruments, noticing as he did before, but with new knowledge this time, that one brass microscope still bears a slide of some thick red residue. And noticing, also, that a number of the mineralogical samples are missing from their allotted places. On an impulse he reaches into one of the cases and seizes a chunk of some dark uncut ore which is gravelly and scratchy to the touch. He is aware of the Baron behind him, unmoving, watching, and he lets the moment prolong almost to impossibility before turning to face him, tossing the piece of rock from one hand to the other, one hand to the other, one hand to the other.

“Before I left London,” he begins, “I was convinced that you were some sort of fiend. A monster who took a depraved pleasure in murder and mutilation—”

“That is an outrageous and slanderous accusation.”

“—but when I received a wire from my uncle, at Folkestone, I was forced to think again. To admit that I might have been wrong about you, all along.”

He pauses, but the Baron will not take his bait.

“Very well, I will continue, whether you wish to hear it or not. My uncle wrote to inform me that he had received a visit from Alexander Causton, during which he had spoken at length about his daughter’s state of health. And then I recalled what you told me, not ten yards from this very spot, of the years you spent studying the afflictions of the mind. Of somnambulism, and night terrors, and hysteria, and neurasthenia—all those disorders that have terrified mankind for so long, and given rise to so many barbaric superstitions, condemning the sufferers to incarceration as dangerous lunatics. And I wondered suddenly
if that very word—
lunatic
—might be the key to it all. Because I remembered then a slip of paper I found in your apartment in the Albany, and a chart of obscure letters and numbers I could make no sense of, at the time. But now I began to speculate whether those numbers might refer to the phases of the moon—and whether
that
might be the answer. The answer I was seeking, and that you had already found.”

He stops, but still the Baron is not to be drawn.

“All the way across on the steamer, hour after hour, as I followed your trail, I followed your
mind
. And it came to me eventually, what must have happened. I think all those years of study led you to conclude that those age-old superstitions had at their heart a vital grain of truth. And it was then—at that very moment—that you first heard about Lucy Causton, and when you travelled to England to meet her, what you discovered came upon you with the force of a revelation. Not only were the symptoms of her mental condition particularly marked at the moment of full moon, but she suffered also from a severe form of
chlorosis
, moreover her
menses
coincided exactly with the lunar cycle, such that her blood ran unnaturally thin at the very moment when her affliction was most manifest. And as your theory took shape, you began to posit a direct relationship between thinness of the blood, and lunacy, and the influence of the moon. And you believed you had, at last, found the answer to all your years of searching. Why the symptoms of mental distress are always most pronounced when the moon is at the full; why those symptoms abate so noticeably if the sufferer is kept indoors, secluded from all exposure to its rays; and why—above all—those who are most prey to these conditions are young
women
, whose bodies ebb and flow to the same monthly cycle as the moon and the tides. Am I correct, thus far?”

The Baron’s eyes narrow, but he says nothing. And if Charles’s tone has been coolly objective thus far, there is a treacherous silkiness to his voice now. “And then, of course, it all began to make sense to me. Why
you purchased the scarificator only
after
you had met Lucy Causton. Why you sought out those girls in London, and bled them so brutally. Why they died, all of them, at full moon. And why you dismembered their bodies when you had finished with them. I never could understand why we found no trace of what you removed—rats and dogs might have accounted for the missing hearts, but the
heads
? Surely some vagrant or scavenger would have come upon those by now. But they were never there to be found, were they? You kept them—kept them and brought them back with you in those boxes the steward at the Albany saw loaded onto your carriage. Carefully preserved in ether so that you could dissect them here, at your leisure, and prepare your proof. Because that’s what you wanted with those girls, wasn’t it.
Proof
. Incontrovertible physical evidence to substantiate your theory. To force the establishment whose approval you so desperately crave, to take you seriously. To acknowledge you as a
true scientist
.”

The Baron laughs sardonically. “This ludicrous diatribe proves one thing and one thing only, and that is the lamentable depths of your own ignorance. For all your claims to scientific understanding you are nothing but a
dilettante
—a rank amateur—”

Charles comes closer now, step by slow menacing step. “I may be a mere amateur but I know that no scientific enquiry, however high-minded, however well intentioned, gives the man who undertakes it the right to use other human beings as you do—to behave as if they were some baser form of life without rights or lives of their own—to cut them open like animals on the vivisection table
while the blood is still warm in their veins
—”

And now, finally, his fury fires fury in return.

“I paid those damn whores and paid them well, and all of them—
all of them
, I tell you—left my apartment alive. They are still on the streets plying their squalid trade, for all that I, or you, or that uncouth policeman Wheeler know of the matter. Yes, I bled them, but it was in the interests of medicine—in the interests of
science
. But as to the rest of what you allege, Maddox, I deny absolutely doing any such thing—it would be the act of a madman—”

He stops, for Charles is smiling now, in the coolly triumphant manner of a chess player who has just manoeuvred his opponent into a trap of his own making.

“So you admit it. Those girls
were
in your apartment in the Albany. At last, we are making some progress. Let us assume, then, for a moment, that you are telling the truth. That when you were done with them, you let them go, even if in so weakened a state they could scarcely walk. Perhaps you could explain to me—as a mere
amateur
—what use such an experiment could possibly be. I can only assume you wished to see if it was possible to induce a hysterical episode—whether a thinness of the blood, artificially engendered, could make an otherwise healthy young woman susceptible to the influence of the moon. Leaving aside whether such a procedure is in any way justifiable, its scientific method is surely utterly flawed—you would have to observe them over weeks, months even, and with no knowledge of their previous state of health—what valid conclusions could you possibly draw in but a few hours—”

“You know nothing about it,” snaps the Baron. “Nothing at all.”

Charles smiles again. “That may indeed be true. But there are other things I
do
know. I spoke of my uncle’s message, but I did not tell you all it contained. He told me—and I am sure you will correct me if I am wrong—that Causton first came upon your name in the pages of a journal. A journal which gave an account of other experiments you had undertaken; experiments of quite a different order, and quite a different purpose.”

“That is entirely irrelevant,” says the Baron, but he has turned away now and will not meet Charles’s eye.

“On the contrary, it could not be
more
relevant. Because it explains something that has puzzled me ever since that night you had me attacked—”

The Baron turns on him. “Attacked? What kind of a man do you take me for?”

But Charles will not be distracted. “I have only fitful memories of that night. And for a long time I distrusted even those, fearing my own mind had deceived me, but there was one thing I could trust, and that
was my own handwriting. I wrote something in my notebook before it happened—three initials, and a number, that was all. It could have meant anything, or nothing. But as soon as I saw the word
journal
in that wire from my uncle, it all came back to me. It was something I’d seen here, something I
read
here. In that room upstairs. In the
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
for 1847.”

He turns to replace the piece of ore carefully in its case and then faces the Baron once more. “I cursed the delay at Paris, but it gave me time—time to go to the Bibliothèque Nationale and find that article again. You think you’ve found it, don’t you? The secret that eluded the alchemists. The occult energy that animates the universe. The Holy Grail of all science for over a thousand years. And it is
your
work that will reveal it,
your
name that future generations will revere. Yours is the one great unifying theory that explains
everything
—not just the madness of lunacy, but all those other things you talked of—the
aurora borealis
, the ancient temples of standing stone, the ghostly apparitions seen at graves. That’s why you were so interested in the Forman papers in the Ashmole bequest, and that’s why you experimented on those girls. Because you want to know why Lucy Causton can perceive that energy—make that darkness
visible
—while others can see nothing but the night. You wanted to find out what it is that makes her so special—whether it’s the thinness of her blood that so sharpens her perceptions, or some other quality that only ‘sensitives’ like her possess. She isn’t the only one, is she? There have been others with her precious gift. That young Dutch woman whose mangled body was found under your walls, that girl I heard with you here in the castle—the girl
you
denied was ever here. This science you practice is as much a Moloch as the vilest superstition, and I will
not
allow Miss Causton to be the fodder for it.”

They stare at each other, all pretence at an end. Charles can see the blood pulsing under the Baron’s eyes, and the clench of the thin cadaverous fists.

“You are not the first,” the older man spits, a line of saliva hanging
from his sallow teeth, “to come here flinging wild and unfounded allegations in my face. Others have stood where you are now and accused me of even more evil crimes. But whatever you
or others
believe, I am not a fiend. My work strives for the good of mankind, and no such advance has ever come without a price.”

“Whether that is true or not, you have no right to force others to pay that price—others who do not even know what you are asking of them. That last young woman—the one you mutilated in the Vine Street morgue—she had a
child
. A child no-one has since been able to find.”

The Baron makes a dismissive gesture. “That brat, if she lives, will become nothing better than the trash her mother was. And I say again, I have mutilated no-one, and as for contemplating such an act in the precincts of a police-station—” He smiles a thin smile. “I may be many things, Mr Maddox, but I am
not
a fool.”

There must be something in Charles’s face, for the balance between them seems suddenly to shift.

And it is the Baron’s turn, now, to advance in menace. “You will leave my house, Mr Maddox, and you will not return. My work, and those who assist me in it, are none of your concern. You will not be warned again.
You
, of all people, know of what I am capable, if I believe myself threatened.”

“I will go to the authorities—I will tell them what you are doing here—”

The Baron laughs. “And you think they would believe you? They would think it the ravings of a lunatic. And then they would consult their records and see that you have only recently been released from the Melk asylum. Indeed, they might consider it their duty to have you returned there—that the madhouse is the only fit place for one so prey to dangerous delusions. Are you prepared to take such an enormous risk?”

“I will not leave without Miss Causton.
I will not leave her here to die
.”

“I have more of a care for that young woman than you can ever know.” The Baron is so close now that Charles can smell his breath.
“She has a rare gift—an extraordinary talent. I will see no harm comes to her, you may be sure of that. And you may tell her father so. Not that he merits such consideration—he is nothing but a jumped-up charlatan who uses her for his own ends.”

“You can stand there and say that, when you are doing the same, and worse—when you have used her in the foulest possible way—”