The Pierced Heart: A Novel (27 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE
 

F
IFTEEN MINUTES PAST THREE
. It is quiet in Buckingham Street. In the drawing-room, the French clock ticks, and Maddox sits in his accustomed chair. There is a large leather-bound book on his knee, which he is affecting to read, but more than half of his attention is being lured away by Betsy, Nancy’s little daughter, who sits cross-legged on the sill at the open window, one small arm about the cat, pointing out people in the street to him as they pass by. Thunder is, as Maddox well knows, more than able to fend for himself, but the little girl lacks his sense of self-preservation—or at the very least his perfect sense of balance—and more than once the old man has had to issue a stern warning about leaning out too far. It sounds stern, at any rate, but there is a special quality in his voice that renders his watchful love perceptible even to the child. The little girl’s voice chatters on, more voluble with the cat than she ever is with the human inmates of this house—“
that’s Mrs Shoap, she’s nice but she has two big dogs so you won’t like them, and that’s the muffin man, I call him Joey but I don’t know if that’s his real name
”—until it is broken, suddenly and unexpectedly, by the peal of the doorbell downstairs. Betsy must be becoming bored with her monologue, because she immediately jumps up and races off
downstairs. The cat, suitably unfazed, stretches unhurriedly, scratches behind one ear, then leaps lightly down and disappears through the door.

Maddox returns to his book, hearing, on the edge of his mind, the sounds of voices downstairs. One is Abel Stornaway’s—slow, Scottish, wary—but the other he does not recognise. What he can discern, however, is the agitation in the man’s words. And so it does not surprise him that the door soon opens, and Abel appears around it.

“A Mr Causton to see ’ee, guv. Says young Mr Charles told ’ee what it’s about?”

Maddox looks up from his book. “He did. By all means, show him in.”

The man, when he enters, is not quite as Maddox had envisaged him. He is smaller, slighter—there is no stage charisma here, no presence to command the eye. For unlike Charles, Maddox has indeed heard of this man, even if he has never seen the marvels he manufactures.

“You are known as Professor de Caus, I believe. In your professional capacity?”

The man flushes; and Maddox senses that he may have become uneasy both with his part and his past, and he wonders whether it is his return to England that has occasioned this, or what has happened to his daughter.

“The name is not merely a play on your own, I take it, but a reference to Salomon de Caus?”

The man starts. “There are few who know that name, these days. But yes. It was a deliberate choice.”

Maddox turns a page of his book. “Hydraulic engineer, theorist of perspective, eminent mathematician, contriver of mechanical miracles and speaking statues, optical illusionist, and even, some say, occult magician. Yes, I should say it was indeed a suitable choice.”

The man comes closer. “That book—”

Maddox turns to the title page; the paper is mottled with age, the leather dry:
New and rare inventions of water-works shewing the easiest waies to raise water higher than the spring by which invention the perpetual motion is proposed. A work both usefull, profitable and delightfull
.

“That’s the John Leak translation of 1603,” says Causton, in wonder. “That book is extraordinarily rare. And extraordinarily expensive.”

“I collect books,” says Maddox simply, closing the volume and placing it carefully on the table beside him. “And in any case, the subject is of interest to me. Do, sit down.”

Whatever Causton might have expected in this house, it was clearly not this. He takes a seat, but sits on the edge of it, like a nervous pupil. And Maddox notices now that he, too, has a book in his hands.

“What brings you here, Mr Causton? I would be happy to explain my great-nephew’s scheme of charges, if that is what concerns you.”

“I feel so foolish—I could have given this to him before, but I was distressed—I was not thinking coherently—”

He is still clutching the book, and Maddox sees that there are various loose sheets interleaved between the pages.

“It is a scrapbook,” he explains, seeing Maddox’s eyes upon it, and flushing again. “Lucy—my daughter—began it as a child. It is a record of my work—of
our
work.”

Intrigued now, Maddox holds out his hand and Causton gets up and brings it to him. “But the chief reason I have brought it here is because it contains portraits of Lucy—I thought you might be able to send one to your nephew, so that he is familiar with her appearance.”

He opens the book on Maddox’s lap, and leafs quickly through a handful of playbills and newspaper cuttings. “These at the back are the most recent. Here—this is very like.”

And there she is. Softly shadowed and sepia-toned. Curls of bright hair hang about her face, but how dark her eyes might be Maddox cannot guess, for her eyelids are closed and her chin lifted, trance-like.

“Is it the effect of the daguerreotype that she looks thus?” he asks, for the girl’s skin seems agonisingly pale.

Causton shakes his head. “I wish it were, but no. It is the consequence
of her condition. She has suffered from night spasms and sleepwalking since she was very young, and most especially since her mother’s death. Some of the doctors who examined her diagnosed a chronic and pernicious
chlorosis
—”

“A form of anaemia?”

“Indeed. But in recent months there have been other symptoms, other phenomena, which none of them could explain. Or could explain only as the proof of madness, or hysteria.”

“I do not take your meaning.”

“For some years Lucy has assisted me in the
phantasmagoria
, indeed she exhibited an uncommon facility for it, even as a child—”

“She must take that talent from you.”

The man flushes. “Lucy is not, in fact, my daughter, though I have long since regarded her as my own and loved her as such. I married her mother when Lucy was five years old—we met when I worked for a short time with a travelling fair where Margaret, also, was employed. She was a widow, and had been supporting both herself and Lucy for several years. That, of course, was before I met Monsieur Étienne-Gaspard Robertson. Before”—this with a lift of the chin—“I had my own establishment.”

Maddox nods. “My apologies—I should not have interrupted you. You were saying—your daughter has been your amanuensis.”

“It was more than that—Lucy has been the prime mover in many of our most successful representations—she would play the armonica, operate the lantern—”

He stops, and a cloud crosses his face.

“But then something changed,” says Maddox. It is an assertion, not a question.

Causton sighs. “I have wished, so many times since, that I had acted differently. Lucy was averse to the idea from the start, but I persuaded her—I said it would make our fame, secure our future. And our need for money was very great. The popularity of the
phantasmagoria
was waning, and our expenses were considerable. But of this, of course, she knew nothing. I did not consider it a subject fit for a young woman.”

Maddox waits, having learned, many years before, the value and use of silence.

Causton takes a deep breath. “I created a new spectacle. A new purpose for the magic lantern. One in which Lucy played the most vital and central part.”

“And what was it that you had her do?”

“She spoke to the souls of the departed. She summoned the spirits of the dead.”

“I see.”

There is silence awhile. The ticking of the clock, the shouts of children on the street, and a sudden furious yowling as Thunder defends his territory in the yard behind the house.

“Clearly,” says Maddox eventually, “your daughter did not communicate, in truth, with the dead. So in what did this performance consist? You had, I take it, some kind of mechanism—some stage apparatus?”

“I employed an Influence Machine. A glass ball, which would spin and glow when Lucy laid hands upon it. My intent was to produce a suitably spectral appearance, while suggesting that the apparitions were conjured by the miracle of science, not the deceptions of sorcery.”

“It was a deception, all the same.”

“That was Lucy’s view. But I said it would do no harm. How wrong I was, how wretchedly wrong. And yet how could I have known that the harm it would do would be not to those who witnessed it, as she feared, but to Lucy herself?”

“She was injured in some way?”

He nods. “She said she found the touch of the machine—distressing. That it produced a sensation of heat and pain in her nerves. But as it made no such impression on me, I was disinclined to take her words seriously.”

Maddox eyes him, wondering whether he, too, had eventually come to see his daughter as either mad or hysterical. Is that what kindles his
guilt now? Because it is guilt that drives him, there is no question of that. Love, yes, but guilt more.

Causton looks up and sees Maddox’s face. “You must understand—the things she described—there was no physical cause—no discernible illness that could possibly have occasioned them. And then later, when she started to talk of seeing things in the glow of the machine—of brightly coloured flames of cold light—no sane person sees such things, Mr Maddox. The doctors I consulted insisted that an asylum was the only remedy—”

Maddox frowns. “But you did not, I deduce, take that course.”

“No, I did not. Because it was then that I remembered something I had come upon when I was preparing the new spectacle. In the course of my research I had read mention of the work of an Austrian nobleman—of studies he had conducted which led him to conclude that certain sensitive persons may perceive the touch of crystals upon the skin as heat or, conversely, cold. I could not recollect where I had read this, but I did recall that he had carried out an experiment with a young woman in which he gave her a magnet to hold which had been exposed to the light of the moon, and water to drink which he had steeped for many hours in the same light. The water induced violent vomiting, while contact with the magnet produced a sensation of the most distressing uneasiness, and the feeling of an inward struggle in her breast and head. Apparently the effect was even more pronounced if she remained in a darkened room for some hours before the experiment took place. The symptoms—the very language used—was exactly what my Lucy had described. It came to me at once that
this
might be the explanation—that it might be the magnetic current generated by
my own machine
that had caused her new affliction, and the many hours we spent in the dark, in the
phantasmagoria
, had only served to accentuate it. I ceased our performances at once and wrote that very day to this Baron Von Reisenberg. I received a reply from him by return of post. He informed me that he had conducted several such experiments on individuals he termed ‘sick sensitives,’ and that young females were particularly susceptible to the phenomena he described.
He said he would be in England for the Exhibition, but he was willing to travel earlier, if that would assist me, and see Lucy at our house in Whitby.”

Causton gets up and walks to the window. “I wonder now if any of it was true—whether all his so-called experiments were merely a blind—a means to obtain unhindered access to innocent and vulnerable young women.”

Maddox nods slowly. “But he did, indeed, treat your daughter?”

“If you may call it that. He claimed she was a most interesting case.” His voice is bitter now. “That she had enabled him to draw a vital new conclusion which he was confident would lead to a momentous step forward in his work.”

“Did he say what that was?”

“Not specifically. But I remember that he became most animated when he discovered that Lucy had been diagnosed with
chlorosis
. And that her cycle of menstruation coincided always with the time of full moon. He was so confident, I was foolish enough to hope for a cure—that he might be able to restore her to health. And now—”

Maddox leans over, rather laboriously, and fumbles for the bell-rope. “If you will forgive me a moment,” he says, reaching now for paper and pen, “I must wire at once to my nephew. With luck, I may be able to get a message to Folkestone before he arrives there.”

A few moments later Billy puts his head round the door, and is dispatched to the Post Office on the Strand, with an injunction to go at once and no loitering. Billy stares with undisguised curiosity at Maddox’s visitor, and then at the paper he has been given, but as he cannot read, he’s unlikely to find much enlightenment there.

Causton, meanwhile, has been watching, clearly torn between relief that something is happening, and bafflement as to what that might actually be. When the door closes, Maddox turns again to him.

“If you can leave me an address where I might find you, I will ensure that you are kept informed of my nephew’s progress.”

“You wish to keep the scrapbook?”

“If I may. Should my nephew fail to apprehend this man before he
leaves the country, I will ensure that a picture of your daughter is sent on to him.”