The Diabolical Miss Hyde (9 page)

Sweating, she tucked the flasks into her bag and proffered a swab in a glass tube. “I've a sample I'd like you to analyze. I found this in a murder victim's mouth. Some kind of stupefying substance, fast-acting. Not fatal, at least not immediately or in small doses.”

Finch held the tube to the light. His glittering pince-nez
polarized, prisming the light into rainbows. “Hmm. Not an opiate. Not an alcohol-based solvent, either. I smell . . . cherry blossoms, or . . .” He popped the cork, sniffed at the contents, and swooned, stumbling against the counter. He fumbled for his smelling salts and waved them under his nose. “Brr! Yes, I see your concern.”

“I'm wondering if it's . . . well, you know.”

“Hmm? Did you say something?”

Hipp's cogs whirred, an electric guffaw, and Eliza hid a smile. Marcellus was being even more vague than usual. “I said, do you think that substance could be unorthodox?”

“Aha! Alkahest, say what?
Ignis fatuus,
a splash of
aqua vitae
?” Finch beamed and wiped his dripping nose. “What did I say it smelled of, again?”

“Cherry blossom.”

“Ah. Fascinating.” He stuffed the cork back in the tube and scribbled a note. “I'll see what I can do.”

“Thank you. Come along, Hippocrates.” She turned to leave. “Oh,” she added over her shoulder, casually, as if it were an afterthought, “I received a letter last night. From
him
.”

Finch didn't look up from the berries and salts he'd started crushing in a little stone mortar. But his grip on the pestle whitened. “Oh? And what did
he
want?”

“He wants to see me. Tonight.”

A tiny warm smile. “Be on your best behavior, then. Wouldn't do to upset him.”

Ever since she'd grown old enough to wonder, it had baffled her that Henry Jekyll had left everything to this A.R. and not to her, his only child. Sometimes it hurt, distantly, like a long-healed wound. As if Father hadn't wanted her to be her
own person. As if he hadn't trusted her. If she were a boy child, would he have done the same?

She'd often suspected Finch knew more than he was saying about her father's mysterious friend. But what if A.R.
was
Finch? Disguising his handwriting, hiding in shadow so she wouldn't feel in his debt? She depended on him enough already. Trained as a physician she might be, but she was no alchemist, to brew arcane potions.

And heaven knew, Marcellus had always been fond of her, watched over her, kept her secrets safe. It was he who'd taken her in when Henry died, wrapped her in a blanket before the crackling fire in his laboratory and placed a cup of strange-smelling tea into her chilled little hands.
I've a very sad thing to tell you, Eliza. Promise me you'll be brave.
He'd walked beside her in her father's funeral cortege, held her hand when she cried.

She lingered. “You and my father were close. Who do
you
think A.R. is?”

Finch continued his crushing, a little too enthusiastically. “Haven't the faintest idea. I correspond with him only by letter, and rarely at that. In my line of work, it's best not to ask too many questions.”

“But—”

“No, there's simply no use in your fishing for information I don't have.” He bashed harder at the mixture, seeds scattering. “You know the fellow wasn't named in Henry's will. It simply said ‘my friend and benefactor,' and Henry had many strange friends.”

“How vexing that no one thought to inquire.”

Finch glanced up, arching his pointed white brows. “Well, the lawyer knew, obviously. Mr. Utterson, later called to the bar at Gray's Inn, like generations of scoundrels before him. Tiresome fellow. Always pestering Henry for this document, that codicil, the other signature in triplicate.” He waved his pestle in the air. “Gabriel, I'd say, Gabriel, you obtuse old bean, leave the man alone. Can't you see he has higher concerns? Precious good he was when your mother passed, too,” he added. “God rest her soul. We had the devil's own trouble convincing them all that Henry had nothing to do with it. Why does everyone assume it's the husband? It was a robbery gone wrong, nothing more. These accidents happen.” Finch sniffed, indignant. “Pfft. God-rotted lawyers. Bottom of the Thames, say what—”

“Marcellus,” she interrupted gently.

“Eh?” His expression cleared. “Oh, yes. Henry's will. As I was saying—you really shouldn't interrupt me, dear girl—as I was saying, Gabriel's dead these fifteen years. Buried in Highgate, you know, beneath the most spectacularly hideous black marble monstrosity. And no one else needed to know. Secrets were Henry's habit, especially towards the end. I know only that he trusted this ‘friend' implicitly.”

“As he did you.”

Finch's gaze didn't drop. “Naturally.”

She widened her eyes innocently. “What
is
that you're working on, Marcellus? I believe you've spilled it.”

He looked down at the crushed berries and roots. A pungent leafy smell rose. “This? Another prophylactic. Not strictly conventional, my dear. Hush-hush.”

“Against cholera?”

“Against a curse.” He scraped the fragments into a pile using a folded paper, stuck one finger in, and popped it in his mouth. “Hmm. Needs more eel droppings. Oh, wait,” he added slyly, “one more thing.”

“Mmm?”

“Your Royal Society captain. Lafayette, was it? On the army list?”

She'd mentioned him in her wire. “Yes?”

“Arrogant gunslinger type, red uniform, smart mouth? Old money, East India Company, British army after the Mutiny, lately a bounty-hunter in darkest Bengal? Returned abruptly from the subcontinent under shady circumstances? Perhaps a tad too familiar with
la belle France
for comfort?”

“Yes?” She held her breath.

Finch winked. “Never heard of him. Good day, Eliza.”

B
Y THE TIME ELIZA REACHED BETHLEM ASYLUM FOR
Pauper and Criminal Lunatics, it was nearly eleven o'clock, and clouds scudded along the horizon in a chilly breeze. The asylum's three-story edifice loomed, topped by a narrow green dome in the center between two long wings. The forbidding brick wall surrounding the complex was topped with spikes and broken glass and a coil of electrically charged wire spitting blue sparks and rust. More like Newgate Prison than a hospital.

She trotted up the steps, Hippocrates following reluctantly at her heels. Between the tall columns, beneath the twin statues of Mania and Dementia, their naked marble bodies contorted in chains, and into the stone entrance hall.

Poor Hipp scuttled straight into a corner, grinding his cogs forlornly and flashing his red
unhappy
light. He couldn't compute lunatics. They discombobulated his tiny brass brain.

“You can stay here, Hipp,” she soothed. “Don't wander off this time.” Sometimes, the more cooperative lunatics were allowed to sun themselves in the hospital garden. She'd found Hipp hiding beneath a hedge, fighting off a squealing girl
who was convinced she'd found Snookums, her long-lost kitty.

“Stay here,” Hipp muttered, and settled on folded legs with a sullen
click-click!
“
Felis catus
. Does not compute.”

Eliza hurried along a narrow passage towards the office of the surgeon in charge. The stale air smelled of disinfectant. In the distance, an inmate wailed. Faded, forgotten photographs in frames stared down from the picture rail.

As always, she spared a glance for one in particular. In a dusty laboratory amongst his firebrand scientific associates stood Henry Jekyll, young and confident, wearing the black suit and elaborate cravat of the period. His expression showed that absent impatience she associated with thinking people and research scientists.
Not now, child, I've work to do. Run along and play.

People said Eliza had his eyes. From the photograph, she couldn't tell.

The brass plaque on the open office door read S
IR
J
EDEDIAH
F
AIRFAX
FRCS. Eliza knocked,
rat-a-tat!
and entered.

Books and medical specimens in jars lined the walls on tidy shelves. A weak ray of sun dribbled in the narrow window. Above the desk hung a black-edged portrait of the late Lady Fairfax, a young and pretty woman wearing a white morning dress. On the desk itself—wooden, broad, not a speck of dust—sat papers and files, a single white rose in a tall vase, and a fat glass jar of preserving fluid, in which floated a pale, wrinkled human brain.

Mr. Fairfax—he preferred his surgeon's address, and never mind the knighthood, which he despised as the relic of a cor
rupted age he considered bygone—didn't look up from his journal.

“You're late, Dr. Jekyll.” His neat steel-gray hair gleamed. Spotless black suit, an immaculate knot in his black cravat. Everything about him was tidy.

Eliza clutched her box of Finch's prescriptions under one arm. “My apologies—”

“When I agreed to take you on, madam”—Fairfax closed his book and meticulously set the pen aside on his blotter—“I did so for your late father's sake. Not for your amusing company. Certainly not for your superlative medical skills. Kindly be punctual in future.”

A paper scrap dropped from her bag, and she scrambled to pick it up. “Certainly, sir. I'll do better.”

“I'm sure you will.” Carefully, as if he feared his face would shatter, Fairfax offered a smile. He had deceptively soft eyes, and the smile almost reached them. “I trust nothing alarming detained you?”

He was thin, she noticed. Pale. Faintly, she smiled back, and took the handwritten list he offered her. “Not at all. I'll get to work.”

He rose. “After you, madam. I've rounds of my own to make.”

“Oh?” She hurried beside him towards the stairs. He had a firm, energetic stride that belied his years, which had to be at least sixty. He was still physically vital, a skilled surgeon, and unlike his absentee predecessors in the asylum director's position, he preferred a radical, hands-on approach to mad-doctoring. Eliza remembered him from long ago as an arrogant but frustrated fellow—standing beside a childlike Marcellus
Finch in that photograph in the corridor—contemptuous of authority and driven by ambitious ideas. He hadn't changed, except perhaps by growing even more dismissive of idiots who got in his way.

“Indeed.” Fairfax rubbed his bony hands, a hint of indecorous relish that made her shiver. “I'm testing a new treatment regime for the intractable lunatics. The potential is limitless.”

“I see.” She had to trot up the stairs to keep up, gripping her box under one arm, her bag in the other, with the list clutched in one fist. They passed a big woman in a dirty white nurse's uniform, carrying an armload of bloody sheets.

Fairfax made a careful frown. “Again, sister?”

“Yes, sir.” The nurse kept her eyes down.

“Put her in the whirling chair, then, and do it properly this time. As I was saying, Dr. Jekyll, I'm not a believer in brain surgery. Believe me, I've tried it extensively and it's a lazy last resort at best. There's no such thing as incurable insanity. Only stubbornness and lack of will.”

“If you say so, sir,” said Eliza.

A pale glance. “Do you disagree?”

“Well,” she ventured carefully, “I think that in certain cases, the lunatic longs for peace, but the cure is . . . more elusive than accepted medicine would have it.”

“Ah, well!” Another eager rub of palms. “Then we must advance our medicine, madam, until it measures up to the task. Precisely what I'm attempting here. Would you care to observe?”

They reached the landing. The smell of filth and piss and the curious goaty odor of mad people washed over Eliza like greasy water.

A locked gate of iron bars sat immovable. Beyond, keepers in protective leather tabards strolled, steel cages like boxes on their heads and electric truncheons hanging from their belts. These were the common wards, where the non-violent lunatics could socialize, play games, dance, even be let out to spend an hour in the courtyard's chilly sunshine.

At Fairfax's nod, a warder unlocked the gate. This was the female section. Crowded, dim, noisome, the only light leaking in from barred slits too high to reach. A blunt-faced nurse with a bucket mopped at a dark wet smear on the floor.

A few of the women hooted and howled and plucked at their filthy smocks. Some just sat quietly, playing cards or reading, the kind who were neither violent nor truly mad. Just troublesome and inconvenient.

An old lady staggered in determined circuits around the room, shaking with palsy but holding her head high like a queen. Her frayed skirt was edged with ragged lace, and she twirled an imaginary parasol and nodded graciously to imaginary subjects. There were at least three queens in Bethlem, along with numerous duchesses and lords and even one genuine incarnation of God Himself.

Eliza dodged a ragged-haired woman who crawled on hands and knees, singing, her voice raw and ruined.
“She wheeled her wheelbarr-oow . . . through streets broad and narroow . . . cockles and mussels . . . alive, alive-OOOH!”

In Eliza's head, Lizzie sang along raucously.
She was a fishmonger . . . and sure 'twas no wonder . . .

Impatiently, Eliza nudged her to silence, resisting the strange urge to sweep up her skirts and dance.
For so were her father . . . and mother before . . .

A girl with rough pink skin and trotters for feet drooled in the corner, plucking lice the size of small butterflies from her hair and stuffing them into her snout.

Eliza bent to touch her cheek. “Don't do that, Annie. They're not food. Sister, can we give this girl a bath, please?”

Annie the pig girl stared at her, baffled. The nurse grunted. “She's had one, Doctor. The lice just come on back for her. Like home for them, she is.”