Eros Element (28 page)

“There's always conflict in the myths. In most fairy tales, if you think about it.” She looked at him, and her dark blue eyes held sorrow. “They always have to fight for their love and overcome obstacles to make it work.”

“Forgive my skepticism, but I've recently recovered from my airship crash injuries. Are you suggesting I put myself in further danger?”

“Let me do it. You figure out the tones using the device, and I'll run the experiment. I've seen you go through the procedure enough times.”

Edward waved her away from the clockwork device. Although she'd betrayed him, he wouldn't allow her to put herself in danger of permanent disfigurement. “I'll do it. I just need to know what settings to start with.”

“Whichever ones help you calculate the time of the dark moon. By the way, that's when the experiment needs to be run.”

“Are you sure? How do you know?”

She smiled at him. “I know you can't trust me in much, but do me this favor and believe me when I tell you that you need pure sunlight without any chance of reflection from the moon for this to work.”

“Very well. The moon turns new tonight, so I will run it at dawn tomorrow.”

When Iris emerged from the temple, a rough hand grasping her elbow made her struggle against the bruising hold before she recognized her fiancé.

“Let me go,” she said and pulled her arm away.

“Were you alone down there?” he asked. The muscles of his face clenched so hard that lines appeared under his round cheeks and jowls.

“No,” she said, “I'm not going to lie to you. I was discussing the experiment's next step with Professor Bailey.”

“Are you an idiot?” Scott snapped. “You're an engaged woman, but that doesn't preserve your reputation.”

They walked across the square toward the hotel, and Iris counted the steps until she could feign a headache and escape from his company. No, she couldn't do that. She would honor Edward by sticking to a strict code of honesty.

“I'm not stupid,” she said. At least that was the truth. “And we don't have much time. I can't accomplish what I need to if I have to go running for a chaperone every time I need to talk to one of my male colleagues.”

“Enjoy it now,” he snapped. “Because once we get back to England, you're not seeing any of them again.”

Iris managed to slip away from him on the crowded sidewalk and stalked into the hotel. The first person she saw was Marie, who stood between Radcliffe and O'Connell with a guilty look on her face.

“You seem to have lost something,” Radcliffe said and handed her the limp clockwork worm.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Trattoria Domani, Rome, 27 June 1870

“We have to stop meeting like this,” Iris told Radcliffe once the four of them were seated at a corner table at the trattoria they frequented regularly. It was off the square and therefore quieter. “People will start to talk.”

He didn't crack a smile. “You didn't need to spy on us. If you had questions for me, you could have asked me. I'm not interested in playing your and Mister Bledsoe's game.”

O'Connell's size had struck Iris as potentially dangerous, but Radcliffe's intensity and the way his gray eyes hardened with anger made her want to scoot away.

Big hairy ox's bollocks, I've already been manhandled by Jeremy Scott today, and I'm not backing down from this.
Iris tried to assume a stern expression. “You say you're not deliberately keeping secrets, but there's something you haven't told us. Don't ask me how I know, I just do. Why are you really along on this crazy mission? It has to be more than showing off your Greek.”

Radcliffe and O'Connell exchanged glances.

“She's a smart one like Claire,” O'Connell said. “Even if her maid isn't as sneaky as she thinks. Maybe they can help, give you a woman's perspective.”

The doctor held his hand up to the waiter, and once the stone carafe of wine appeared, and four cups had been poured, he looked at Iris, and the way his eyes filled with pain, which must have taken a lot of energy to suppress, nearly broke her heart. Nearly.

“There's a girl from Boston,” he told her in the sort of tone men used when they spoke of their true loves. “She's white. I'm…” He held out his hands. “Well, as you know, I'm not. She didn't care, and her father was a tinkerer and her mother a tutor, so they had more liberal views on such things. But she had an aunt who didn't.”

“A narrow-minded, stubborn woman if I've ever seen one,” O'Connell added. “I studied with the girl's father, and her aunt manipulated the family through money, and they were always short.”

“But Claire saw through it.” Radcliffe spoke with a kind of professional detachment, but sorrow came through. “I managed to enlist in the army as a field hospital doctor to save some money so I could marry her. I proposed to her at her eighteenth birthday party—I was on leave for the holidays—and she accepted though all I could give her was a small ruby.”

“It was a lovely ring,” O'Connell said. “Everyone thought so too, until the aunt saw it.”

“She wasn't supposed to be there, but I went ahead and proposed. The look on her face, as sour as Claire's was happy. Her parents felt badly and allowed me to drive her home in my new steamcart. I should have known better.”

“What happened?” Marie asked.

“A horseman, one of the draftee hunters, came out of nowhere. It reared, and its hooves landed on the boiler, which exploded and sent the cart flying. Claire caught the worst of it on her hands and arms and tumbled out of the cart and down an embankment.”

“How awful!” Iris said.

“Yes, for when she awoke, she had no memory of what happened and very few of the year leading up to the accident. The doctors cautioned me and her parents that seeing us could trigger further injury to her mind. So, with the aunt's help, Claire went to college in Vienna. She's almost done, and my time of mandatory service is over, so I hoped…” He looked into his now-empty wine cup. “I thought I could go and see if she would react negatively to seeing Patrick, whom she also knew during the time she'd forgotten but who wasn't on the list of people she shouldn't see.”

“Did she?” Iris asked.

“Looked right through me like I was invisible,” O'Connell said. “Didn't respond when I spoke to her or called me by name.”

“Her mind is still injured,” Iris said. “That must be horrible for you.”

Radcliffe continued, “So when I got a message from Parnaby Cobb that he would allow me to join this expedition, I had a faint hope that whatever we discovered may help her, heal her. Asylum doctors have been working on electricity and the brain, and while their results have been promising for melancholia, they haven't done anything for psychic shock. It's a small chance, but I'll take anything.”

Iris fiddled with the buttons on her gloves. “I wish I could give you some hope, but I don't know what we're dealing with.”

The bell over the trattoria door opened, and Jeremy Scott walked in. Iris shrank into the shadows and hoped he wouldn't spot her. He didn't seem to.

“If nothing else, listen to me,” Radcliffe said. “You don't get many chances at true love. Some say you get one. Don't throw that away out of fear.”

“I can't go back on my word, and he holds the mortgage on my house.”

“You're clever. You and the professor will figure it out,” O'Connell said.

Formerly, Iris would have thrilled at someone acknowledging her intelligence, but now it didn't seem like enough. “I don't even know if Edward has feelings for me after my betrayal.”

“Love isn't so easily killed,” Radcliffe said. “I believe Claire loves me, that her regard for me is somewhere in her fractured mind. Edward has been moving toward healing in both mind and body, and his feelings for you are part of that.”

If only it was that easy.

“Well,” Iris said, “shall we order an early dinner since we'll be stuck here for a while?”

Something different about the atmosphere woke Iris before dawn the next morning. Marie snored through the wine she'd drunk as she slept on the cot in the room. Iris's head felt stuffed with gravel, but she wouldn't have traded the previous evening with Radcliffe and O'Connell for anything except maybe a similar one with Edward where they could bare all their secrets and interact as themselves. She grabbed the courtesan's poison case from its hiding place and put it in her pocket to serve as a reminder that no matter what happened, history would erase all but the most solid of details.

That line of thought produced more stomach upset, so Iris rose, dressed, and tiptoed from the room in search of tea. Or one of the coffee and milk concoctions the Italians drank in the morning would do. The morning kitchen staff gave her a cappuccino and two sweet rolls, and she carried them outside.

Light barely streaked the sky, and something tugged Iris toward the temple. Had Edward solved the puzzle? Would he be there doing his experiments in the pure dawn? Before she knew it, she was across the piazza and descending the ramp. The fog hung heavy around the entrance as if it guarded the place from prying eyes.

Iris plunged into the gloom and emerged into a candlelit world.
Is this romantic or some other sort of atmosphere?
Edward stood behind the altar, and the circles under his eyes told Iris he hadn't slept. He set up his apparatus and kept consulting his watch. His movements were slow like one of the statues.

“Do you need something to eat?” Iris asked. The ordinary question hung in the air between them, but it pulled Edward out of whatever trance he'd been in.

“Iris? What are you doing here?”

“I brought you something.” She held out one of the rolls and handed him the rest of the coffee drink. “You can't work on an empty stomach.”

She thought she remembered her mother saying something similar to her father back when the two of them got along, and she couldn't imagine herself taking care of Lord Jeremy like that. Not that he would need it—he would always put himself before his work.

“Thank you.” He quickly ate and returned to calibrating his equipment. “I'm going to try this at sunrise. You're welcome to remain, but please stay back since I don't know what will happen. It could be dangerous.”

He's concerned for my well-being. That's a start.
“You've calculated the proper frequencies, then?”

“There are a couple of possibilities based on Pythagorean mathematical principles such as the Golden Mean. I'm going to start with the most likely one. Will you assist me by watching and taking notes? Here's a spare watch.”

Iris took a set of goggles out of the box by the altar and moved to the aisle on the side so she could duck behind a pillar if she needed to. A ray of sunlight passed through the high windows and hit the altar above where Edward's glass globe stood.

“How soon?” she asked.

“Two minutes.”

Iris counted heartbeats, but hers was faster than the second hand of Edward's watch.
It's amazing how emotion and frequency can be linked.

“Starting the vacuum process,” Edward said.

Iris noted the time and smiled at the excitement in his voice. No matter how far apart they ended up, they would always have the joy in scientific discovery in common. The sunbeam now pierced the top of the glass.

“Vacuum chamber closed.”

Iris hardly dared to breathe so as to not create any interfering noise.

“Striking tuning forks. Silence, please.”

If Iris listened hard enough, she could hear the two frequencies, but they were complementary enough they augmented the tone that vibrated through the air as a single sound.

That has to be it.
Iris peered around the pillar and watched as Edward touched the two tuning forks to the copper globe. The aether formed in the glass one, but it looked the same as before, and it dissipated as soon as the sound did.

“What happened?” Iris asked.

“Nothing.” Edward rested the tuning forks on the altar. “Now we try the other one. Stand back because it will be less harmonious and therefore more dangerous.”

Iris moved one pillar back and again kept notes and watched as Edward went through the procedure. Although the two new tones made Iris's ears buzz at first, they intertwined and formed a new sensation. Edward touched those forks to the copper globe, and while the aether remained stable for longer and glowed brighter, it disappeared after about thirty seconds.

Edward looked at the two tuning forks in his hands and frowned. “That second one should have worked.”

In spite of the space being small, it had some reverberation, as Iris found when she walked to the altar. The air hummed with the second new tone.

“Perhaps we should try it all together.”

Edward's frown deepened. “That could be dangerous, unpredictable. Are you sure you want to risk being injured and disfigured?”

“What do I have to lose? A marriage to a man I don't love. And I have a major scientific discovery to gain if it does work.”

“Very well. You strike the first two tones and hold them to the copper globe, and I'll do it with the next two. But if the glass looks like it's going to shatter or the aether threatens to expand beyond it, duck under the altar. The stone may protect you.”

Iris nodded. Now her stomach fluttered with a new frequency, but she didn't show her anxiety.

They made sure their goggles were firmly in place, and she struck the two original tuning forks on the altar. The vibrations traveled up her arms and felt like they went to her heart, but she ignored the strange sensation and placed their ends on the copper globe. The aether appeared much as it had in Edward's lab, as a glowing, writhing, opalescent snake eating its tail. Then he struck his forks.

A note of dissonance came into the sound, and he hesitated, but Iris mouthed, “Do it.” He placed the ends of those tuning forks on the copper globe, and the aether brightened considerably. It also increased the frequency of its undulations until its motions were too fast for them to see. Iris had to look away from the searing glow, and when she tried to blink the after-image from her eyes, she noticed the sound waves had quieted.

“I think it worked,” Edward whispered. He gazed at the glowing mass at the center of the glass globe. “It's not dimming or disappearing.”

“You've made a new element.” Iris placed the tuning forks on the altar. Edward swept her into his arms like the hero of the novels she'd stolen from her mother long ago, and their lips met. Now the opalescent colors bloomed behind her eyelids, and her heart beat in harmony with his. She wanted to merge with him to become a new, different, better person.

“Professor Bailey, I would thank you to unhand my fiancée.”