The Jekyll Revelation Page 10

  I only wished that I could oblige.

  Fanny, too, was growing irritable. She missed the hustle and bustle, the engagements and even intrigue, of more cosmopolitan surroundings. She had long since worn out the excitements of the few establishments in the valley, where the fashions leaned towards lederhosen and dirndl skirts, and the stock in trade was seldom replenished. At the Belvédère, she had earned the animosity of several guests with her American candour, though it must be said her native colouring alone had predisposed many of them to place themselves at one remove. I overheard a chambermaid referring to her as ‘the Mexican’, and though I had experienced this before, I resented it, and found myself, in consequence, harbouring no few resentments of my own.

  To their credit, Randolph Desmond and his companion displayed no such prejudice, and so we found ourselves thrown into their society more and more often. So long as Lloyd’s affections for Miss Wooldridge were kept in check, these gatherings, at the skating pond or sledding hill, dining room or grand salon, were pleasantly benign. On occasion, Symonds joined us, though the conversation was plainly beneath his usual level of discourse; Desmond had scraped his way through Harrow, been sent down from Oxford after less than a semester, and made no bones about any of it. By subtle, or even overt, means, Symonds would attempt to draw me off into some separate colloquy. For some reason, he had taken it into his head that I was wasting my talents on adventure tales for boys and poetry for sickly children, when I could be better employed dilating on the moral characters first sketched by Theophrastus. ‘Your gifts are a river not to be denied,’ he said, stroking his beard, ‘but think what a sublime contribution they could make if their course were but better directed.’ I think he does not, in this respect, understand me at all.

  But do I understand myself any longer? Where once I might have answered the question readily—‘I am a belletrist in the tradition of Hazlitt and the gentle Lamb’—I would now careen between such undistinguished posts as chronic invalid and wandering Scotsman.

  Or worse.

  Increasingly, when the night nurse had fallen sleep, and my fevered brain could not be calmed, I would slip from my cot, put on my red silk robe and deerskin slippers—a recent gift from Fanny’s shopping expeditions to town—and creep slowly down the stone-walled corridor. In the pocket of the robe, I kept a biscuit or a bit of beef from my dinner, and when I had reached Lord Grey’s cell, I would stop and peer inside. The first time or two I had done this, the wolf had thrown himself at me in a frenzy, but as he became more accustomed to my presence and learned that my visits preceded a morsel or two of food, he had come to tolerate, and even quite possibly relish, my intrusions.

  For my part, I pitied the animal. He was kept on a chain in a dark, dank cell, and though I could not fathom why, he occasionally showed evidence of having been subjected to some experimentation of his own. I could see patches of linen bandages on his limbs and a furtive look in his once fierce eye. Though Yannick was appointed his keeper, he was an oaf who, left to his own devices, would long since have starved or beaten the beast to death. I had once come upon him taunting the animal with lashes from a birch rod extended through the bars, and even with one lung artificially collapsed, I had summoned enough strength to wrest the stick from his hand.

  From under his thatch of thick blond hair, he regarded me with a mask of dull incomprehension. (Which of Theophrastus’s moral characters, I wonder now, would Symonds have said he most resembled?) ‘Give that back to me,’ he said.

  Bending my knee, I snapped the rod over it and tossed the pieces onto the ground.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ he said, now with menace in his voice.

  ‘Don’t ever let me find you at such a game again.’

  ‘It’s just a damn wolf. Once the doctor has taken as much of his blood as he wants, he has promised the creature to me.’

  This explained the bandages at its joints and jugular.

  ‘The pelt is a fine one, and I can use it to make a coat for my son.’

  ‘Why would Rüedi want its blood?’ I asked, in a voice made less commanding by shortness of breath.

  Yannick snorted. ‘Why indeed,’ he said, surveying my rickety body. ‘What do you think he has been pumping into you through those needles of his? Claret?’

  The doctor had taken pains to conceal the syringes from my view, a practice in which he was aided by my own aversion to the sight of a long, sharp point puncturing my skin. When I had asked about the injections, he had assured me they were composed of iron for the anaemia, mixed with the extracts of various local flora rich in nutrients. After exhausting my forearms, he had resorted to making the injections in my calves and buttocks. Coming upon me fresh from a bath, Fanny had joked that I looked as if I had been sitting on a pincushion.

  The revelation that I had been infused with the blood of a wolf was enough to send me reeling, and the next day, instead of waiting for the doctor to summon me to his examining rooms, I accosted him in his laboratory, among the beakers and bottles, the surgical models and instruments. A human skeleton dangled like a marionette from a hook on the white plastered wall. Looking up from his microscope, he squinted to see who was trespassing in his inner sanctum, and when I challenged him, he sighed and said, ‘Where did you hear such nonsense?’

  ‘I have seen the evidence myself. I have seen Lord Grey.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The wolf.’

  ‘You have a name for him?’

  ‘What can you have hoped to gain by such barbarous experiments?’

  ‘Progress.’

  ‘Without so much as my consent?’

  ‘Your consent was, and remains, implicit, so long as you are under my care. While the plombage allows your lung to rest and heal, the course of injections is designed to attack the bacillus in your lymphatic systems. Your blood is weak and febrile. The blood of an Alpine wolf is perfectly adapted to the rigours of a high altitude and harsh climate; it is richer in oxygen than any other, and the blood in the veins of your so-called Lord Grey is richer than that of any specimen I have ever seen. A wolf like that, the leader of its pack, can cover fifty kilometres in a day—can you go fifty feet without stopping?’

  It was doubtful.

  ‘That wolf can break an antler between its teeth. Yours would crack at a soup bone.’

  His eyes flicked to something behind me, and I turned to see a brooding hulk blocking the doorway.

  ‘I’m sorry, Doctor,’ Yannick sputtered. ‘I didn’t see him go by. Do you want me to get rid of him for you?’

  ‘What I want is for you to learn to keep your own counsel in future.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You seldom do. Suffice it to say, if you arouse another patient with ill-advised comments on my research, I’ll sack you on the spot. Do I make that much understood?’

  Yannick, fuming, grunted, and Rüedi dismissed him with a flick of his hand. If there had been any doubt in my mind, I knew now that I had just made a sworn enemy of the worst kind.

  Returning his attention to me, the doctor said, ‘I have drawn and distilled a more than adequate amount of the grey wolf’s blood. It’s being kept in an icebox. And the infusions you’ve been given have already made a marked improvement in your condition.’

  ‘How would you know that?’ I scoffed, though, truth be told, I had indeed felt slightly more vigourous for the past day or two, even with only the one lung working.

  ‘See for yourself if you don’t believe me.’ Vacating his stool, he gestured at the microscope. ‘It’s a sample taken from you yesterday.’

  I had certainly seen a microscope before—no one who had consulted as many physicians and scientists as I had could have avoided them—and had even ventured to put my eye to a lens more than once. Bending to this one now, and adjusting its focus, I saw a pink sea swimming with tiny amorphous creatures, gambolling like dolphins before a ship’s prow. ‘What am I observing?’

  ‘Blood cells—red and white�
��and what my late colleague Dr Max Schultze, at the Anatomical Institute in Bonn, has dubbed “spherules”. Those are the smaller and more purplish bodies.’

  It was a world of wonders, as colourful and complex as anything seen through the kaleidoscope kept in the grand salon for the amusement of the guests.

  ‘It is an English physician, a Dr Richard Hill Norris, at Queen’s College in Birmingham, who has best described their purpose.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘To coagulate at the site of an interrupted endothelium.’

  Although I understood the words, my expression must have said otherwise.

  ‘They stop the bleeding where you have received a wound or injection. Without them, you would have been leaking blood like a worm-eaten wine barrel by now.’

  Under normal circumstances, the doctor would not have been nearly so forthcoming, but I had gathered the impression that he wished his methods to be made comprehensible to the man who might one day help to make his name famous. I resolved to do nothing to disabuse him of that notion—not yet, at least.

  ‘And the end game?’ I asked innocently. ‘How will any of this effect a cure?’

  He all but rubbed his hands together with glee and confidence. ‘By injecting the wolf with your own diseased blood, I have been encouraging his much stronger constitution to create an antigen to the bacillus.’

  ‘As with smallpox inoculations?’

  ‘Precisely. And then, by returning that fortified and oxygenated serum to your own bloodstream, I intend to root out and eradicate the bacillus wherever it may hide.’

  Though being no physician, still I could see the ingenuity, and with any luck the efficacy, of the scheme.

  ‘Your red blood cell count has already trebled,’ he said, arms folded, beaming with pride. ‘When we reverse the effects of the plombage, you will feel the full measure of the treatment.’ He leaned back against the wall, the limp skeleton hanging by his side like a mute conspirator. It was a tableau I could not shake from my mind, try as I might, as I ascended into the hotel. The skeleton had all but grinned at me. Trudging up the winding stairs to my attic bolthole, I debated, and not for the first time, whether my intrusion on the doctor had brought me into the company of a genius, or a madman.

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  Seth’s grubby fingers tore into the contents of the trunk, pulling out one item after another, shaking it out, tossing it on the counter, then burrowing deeper, like a terrier pursuing a rat.

  But Rafe could see he was becoming more and more frustrated as the musty old clothing piled up on the counter. The smell alone was bad enough.

  “What the hell,” he muttered, yanking out a flat black board that only upon shaking popped up to reveal itself as a battered top hat. Onto the stack it went with the black frock coat, the black pants and leather gloves, the silk brocade vest, the pale pink cravat—once no doubt scarlet—the scuffed high-button boots with the tips of nails protruding from the heels. “God damn, is it all nothing but this shit?”

  Miranda had stepped a few feet from the counter to get away from the smell of mildew and rot, but Rafe stayed close, wondering just how long this trunk could possibly have been lying at the bottom of the lake. He was no expert on the history of fashion, but these clothes looked to him like something people wore in the late 1800s. The only place he’d ever seen anything like them was in old oil paintings and some movies.

  “Are you kidding me?” Seth said, stretching open what appeared to be a black shoulder cape with a high velvet collar. “Who was this guy—Batman?”

  Alfie laughed, grabbed the cape, and despite the stink, wound it around his shoulders. “Watch me—I can fly!” he said, twirling around so fast he banged into a display table, knocking over a jar of incense sticks.

  “It’s an opera cape,” Miranda said.

  But Seth’s eyes had suddenly lit up, as he pulled from the trunk a bamboo scabbard, and then drew from that a long knife with an elaborately carved wooden handle. “Now, this I can use.”

  Rafe didn’t want to think too hard about what he’d use it for—especially as he had just noticed, at the very bottom of the nearly empty trunk, an iron strongbox about the size of a DVR.

  Once Seth had finished waving the blade around in the air, he, too, spotted the strongbox and, wedging the knife under his belt, exulted, “Finally!”

  Maybe it was time, Rafe thought, before the box was opened, to establish just who had really found it—that he and Heidi had dredged it out of the lake and that anything of value it might contain belonged, first and foremost, to any rightful heirs who could be found; considering the age of what he’d seen so far, however, he doubted if that would be possible. Still, even if the contents went unclaimed, they were probably the property of the state of California, since both he and Heidi were in the government’s employ when they’d recovered the trunk, and on state-owned land to boot.

  Seth already had the box on the counter and was fumbling at its lid, locked tight. “Give me that hammer,” he said, keeping his eyes on the box but extending his hand like a surgeon expecting the nurse to slap the tool into his palm.

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?” Seth said, blinking in disbelief.

  “I mean, this trunk, and everything inside it, doesn’t belong to you.”

  “What are you talking about?” Alfie exploded. “We found it! We dug it up! It’s ours!”

  “You didn’t dig it up, and I know where you found it,” Rafe said. He calmly explained just where things stood, while Seth and Alfie got madder and madder.

  “What if there’s money in that box?” Seth said.

  “Even if there is,” Rafe said, “think about it. Look at all this junk. Look how old it all is. Any currency that old will be worthless by now.”

  “Jewels wouldn’t be,” Alfie challenged. “Gold wouldn’t be.”

  True enough, Rafe thought, so he took a chance, lifted the box, and shook it back and forth. The only sound was the rustle of something shifting from side to side. It sounded like a book, or maybe a bunch of old letters, and weighed no more than that.

  “Open it up and let’s see,” Seth demanded.

  “A hammer won’t do it,” Rafe said, “and I don’t see a key. Do you?”

  Seth stuck his head into the vile-smelling trunk and groped wildly through the remaining items—loose buttons and broken combs, scraps of cloth and bits of paper, a dented flask, a crumpled bonnet with a faded blue band. Coughing, but empty-handed, he emerged no less truculent than before.

  “You’re just going to steal whatever’s inside it for yourself. Don’t think I don’t know that.”

  “You want a receipt?”

  “A what?”

  “Miranda, have you got a pen and paper around?”

  She produced a pad with an elf sitting under a toadstool and a pen with lavender ink. Printing carefully, Rafe wrote out and dated a receipt. “One steamer trunk and its contents,” he declared, “found by Land Management officials and transported to Cornucopia of Topanga by the undersigned.” After scrawling his own signature on it, he turned the paper around and said, “Sign your names and print them underneath. You can file a claim with the state if you want.”

  Seth and Alfie looked terribly uncertain, but when Rafe said, “You can keep the knife—I’ll pretend I never saw it,” Seth grudgingly scribbled his signature on the paper and shoved it toward his partner to do the same. When Alfie hesitated, Seth said, “Just do it—we’ll come back. This isn’t over by a long shot.”

  On the way out, Seth seized the painting he’d been looking at earlier, stuck it under his arm, and waited for them to object. Miranda knew enough to write it off, and they slammed the door so hard the wind chimes rattled and clacked like bones on the porch outside. Rafe looked at Miranda, who breathed a sigh of relief at their departure and said, “Let it go. I never could sell that one anyway.”

  25 December, 1881

  No so
oner had the last candle been lit on the Yule tree than Yannick, his arms filled with firewood for the hearth, burst through the French windows and into the grand salon. A gust of icy wind accompanied him, and Fanny exclaimed, as the candles guttered in their metal jackets and several went out altogether, ‘Quick—close the windows!’

  Yannick kicked a booted foot at them, but it took another servant, who put down his tray of liqueurs and, bending his shoulder to the frame, bolted the windows tight against the raging wind outside.

  For several days, the temperatures had been dropping precipitously, and the skies, once a cerulean blue, had turned the dull grey colour of a stagnant weir. The surrounding mountains, whose snow-covered peaks usually cut a jagged profile around the valley, had been obscured by a legion of low, scudding clouds, until it was as if the Belvédère was a ship lost in a fog bank and all its inhabitants but spectral figures caught in the same strange limbo.

  But it was only at dawn on this, Christmas day, that the tempest had finally descended in all its fury, enshrouding the hotel in a white and blinding embrace. From my eyrie that morning, I had been able to see nothing but frost on the windowpanes, and hear nothing but the incessant howling of the Alpine blast. Doors rattled and loose shutters banged, draperies rustled at vagrant drafts, and fireplaces sighed through cracks in the flue. Even Woggin had lost his native zeal, huddling under the bed with his ears flattened against his head and his head cradled between his paws.

  ‘Of all people, it was the Protestant reformer Martin Luther who is said to have first affixed candles to an evergreen,’ Symonds was saying to anyone close enough to the decorated tree. ‘The Northern cultures, of course, were already predisposed to the worship of various trees. The oak was sacred to the Germanic Chatti tribe until it was replaced by the fir, whose triangular shape, it was suggested by Saint Boniface, pointed the way towards Heaven.’