Fatal Inheritance (27 page)

Carl let go of me and ran into the tower. I followed him, up one flight, two, three, four – the staircase went round and round in a crazy square that seemed never to end, and my chest was burning; Carl was ahead of me, but Mrs Cavendish was already at the top and out onto the narrow walkway, high above the water, under the stars. We heard a jagged scream, muffled by the thick stone walls, and I did not hear, but imagined I heard, the faint sound of a splash far below. Panic overwhelmed me. I clamped my hands over my ears, but I heard my own voice from within myself, crying in uncontrollable horror. Carl came down and wrapped me in his arms, then opened his coat and wrapped it around me as well, pressing me to his chest. We remained so for long minutes. Then I looked up at him.

Carl had offered me love and admiration and his help and protection at this critical moment. But life makes our decisions for us, for his arms as he held me did not have the power to still the shuddering inside me, and I longed for something else: for another pair – for someone who alone could help me reason away the dreadfulness of it all, by showing me that every other alternative to what had just happened would have been worse. Carl was at my side, but I knew now that he meant nothing to me. I looked up at him and saw the face of a kind stranger.

‘I need Arthur,’ I heard myself say.

His blue eyes were filled with understanding and resignation.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Come. I think we must first go to the police. There are things that must be done.’ He laid my head against his chest and patted Mrs Munn’s bonnet gently. ‘Do not worry. I will not leave your side until you are safe at home in Cambridge where you belong.’

The fame of geneticist Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), reclusive monk and scientific genius, is so widespread today that it is difficult to imagine that the importance of his work was entirely unrecognised, and the work itself ignored and forgotten for several years after his death.

Like Darwin and other scientists, Mendel compared the effects of cross and self-fertilisation on plants whose characteristics were simple and easily identified and compared. But the difference is that Mendel was able to explain his observations via the theory of alleles and the theory of probability. His seminal paper dates from 1865; Darwin certainly knew nothing of it, since he made no mention of it in
The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom,
published in 1876, in which he gives detailed results of very similar experiments to Mendel’s, without, however, deducing the theoretical model explaining them.

Carl Franz Joseph Erich Correns (1864–1933) learnt of Mendel’s work through a botanist friend of his parents who had been acquainted with them. The ideas contained there fascinated him enough to set him to try to reproduce them, as soon as he found himself with a university position that offered him the freedom to organise his own experiments. It took him eight years of work to confirm Mendel’s results, and he published his findings in 1900, championing their originator and giving the name of
Mendel’s laws
to the probability theory governing heredity. Strangely enough two other scientists, Hugo de Vries and Erich von Tschermak-Seysenegg, published similar rediscoveries of Mendel’s work in that very same year (de Vries without citing Mendel’s work, causing something of a conflict between him and Carl Correns). It seems that at the turn of the century, the time was finally ripe for Mendel’s discoveries to emerge and be generally understood. Coming as it did contemporaneously with Freud’s discoveries in psychology, this was the beginning of the application of Mendel’s theory to explain the inheritance of human traits, both physical and mental (insofar as many mental traits are also of physical origin), culminating in the work of the Human Genome Project.

As for the story of the medium Hélène Smith, it is entirely historical down to the last syllable of her Martian language. Quite famous at the end of the nineteenth century, when automatic speech and writing were highly fashionable, Mlle Smith’s visions gave rise to a number of written analyses. The most important of these was the book
Des Indes à la Planète Mars (From India to the Planet Mars)
by the Swiss professor Theodore Flournoy, which was the main source of information on this subject.

In what concerns the musical aspect of the book, it should be noted that the professors of the Royal Academy who appear there, Prosper Sainton, Alexander MacKenzie, Alessandro Pezze and Hans Wessely, were all real people, as was the young student Wolfe Wolfinsohn, who (although in reality he was about a decade younger than in the story) indeed went on as predicted to become an extraordinary chamber musician, first violin of the legendary Stradivarius quartet. The description of the difficulties facing women cellists at the time is also historically accurate; there was, however, a small number of enterprising young women who did manage to overcome all obstacles to reach the pinnacle of international success. One of the first of these, if not the very first, was May Mukle, a student of Alessandro Pezze. The Wolfe Wolfinsohn String Quartet Prize and the May Mukle Prize for cello students are both still awarded yearly at the Royal Academy of Music.

The Three-Body Problem

Flowers Stained with Moonlight

The Library Paradox

The Riddle of the River

Fatal Inheritance

C
ATHERINE
S
HAW
is a professional mathematician and academic living in France.
Fatal Inheritance
is her fifth mystery novel.