The Pierced Heart: A Novel Page 7

  I know my mother disapproved of this, lamenting my sad lack of a proper education, and telling me, privately, when my father was not there, that such subjects were not suitable for young girls. And there came a time when I blamed myself for saddening her so, and not noticing that she was growing thinner, and her skin paler, and the shadows were darkening under her eyes, until it was too late, and in my twelfth year she was taken from me. I remember so little of that time now, only scraps and fragments of memory that do not fit with what I have since been told. But I tell myself the explanation is simple—that I loved my mother so much that the pain of her loss was too much for me to bear—that my mind has sought to bury that pain, and it is no wonder therefore if my recollections are confused. I do know that for weeks I never left my chamber, and my father cancelled his performances and remained at my side. Perhaps it was all that time motionless and bed-ridden, perhaps it was because I woke one morning with the white sheets wringing in blood and I had no-one but my father to explain to me what it meant; all I know is that when I was finally well enough to be carried to sit in a chair by the window, I had lost some part of myself that I have never since been able to retrieve. All my happy lightness of heart had gone, all my spirit, and audacity, and careless childish courage. And in their place, the sleepwalking, and the nightmare.

  But of the latter, I have never spoken. Not to my father, and not, absolutely, to the string of doctors he has brought these last days to see me, who have looked into my eyes, and taken my pulse, and questioned my father as to my symptoms, and then looked smugly wise and diagnosed hysteria, or nervous debility, or chlorosis. There was one—a wheezing fat man with a face all noduled with warts—who even went so far as to suggest that it is my playing of the glass armonica, which is to blame. He had seen, he said, many such cases where the use of this instrument has induced not merely melancholy but madness, by reason of the intolerable tingling vibrations that seem to penetrate the skin, and unbalance the tranquillity of the quietest mind. I tried to tell him, then, that he was wrong—that no-one knows more of melancholy than I, and this new misery is not of that order. But my father silenced me—he clung to the man’s words, desperate to believe that my symptoms might have so simple an origin. And to placate him I have not touched the armonica since, vital though it is to the effect of our enactments. But it has made no difference. There has been no respite, frantic as my father is to see one. For it is not my playing that is the cause. I tell him, again and again, that I am not mad—not mad but sick. But all he does is smile sadly upon me, and caress my hair, saying that all will be well. That I must trust him, and all will be well.

  29 JANUARY, MIDNIGHT

  And now the last performance has been given.

  There were so many people who wished to congratulate my father, so many pressing about us and begging, some in tears, for a private consultation before we departed, and holding out towards me the belongings of the dead, as if those forlorn possessions had the power to entice those who once owned them to return. The toys of lost children, the robes of babies taken before their churching, the wedding ring a young wife must once have worn. The grief—and worse, the hope—washed towards me like a wave, and I found myself drawing back as if they sought to suffocate me, as if it were their sadness that takes unseen form and sucks my breath like an incubus in the night. I saw my father’s look of alarm, then, as the crowd of faces and voices closed about me and I felt his hand suddenly upon my shoulder, cleaving through the people and drawing me free.

  “My daughter is unwell,” he said loudly, as some muttered and pointed. “She is exhausted and must return home now to rest. Please, make way.”

  And so it is that I have been sitting here now alone these two hours, among the boxes and trunks that are to go with us tomorrow, hearing the bells chime the quarters, and remembering, remembering.

  It is still all so clear to me, that September morning, when he came rushing to my bedroom, clutching a page of newspaper a friend had posted to him from New York. I have found it, he said, smoothing the page out on the bed and pointing—It is exactly what we have been seeking. A new attraction for our spectacle, a new wonder that will create a clamour of excited gossip among the public, and command respect even from the learned and aloof. And when I took up the paper and started to read I knew at once what he meant. The article was from the New-York Tribune, dated some three weeks before, and it related how three young sisters claimed to converse with the dead by means of rapping on walls, or tapping on wooden floors. The spirits seemed quite amenable to this method of communication, submitting most accommodatingly to different numbers of raps for Yes and No, and for the letters of the alphabet. And yet it seemed that many hundreds of citizens of that great city were more than ready to give credence to it.

  Mrs Fox and her three daughters left our city yesterday, after a stay of some weeks, during which they have freely subjected the mysterious influence by which they seem to be accompanied, to every reasonable test. And to the keen and critical scrutiny of the hundreds who have chosen to visit them. The ladies say they are informed that this is but the beginning of a new era, in which spirits clothed in flesh are to be put more closely and palpably connected with those who have put on immortality; that the manifestations have already appeared in many other families and are destined to be diffused and rendered clearer, until all who will may communicate freely and beneficially with their friends who have “shuffled off this mortal coil.”

  I looked up at my father and smiled. “It is easy to see how one might counterfeit such a phenomenon. The wonder is that anyone else should believe it.”

  He gripped my hand, his eyes bright with eagerness. “But they do, Lucy, they do. These sisters are attracting the most immense audiences. My friend’s letter tells me there have since been dozens of these public séances, attended by people who will pay well to see them. And yet the only spectacle those people see is this bodiless ‘rapping,’ nothing more. There is no unearthly light, no phantasms, no ghostly voices. All those feu d’artifice effects we might produce—that we already produce.”

  And of course he was right, at least in this. We had long employed the tricks of ventriloquism to give our apparitions speech, and the illusion of the magic lantern might as easily clothe in flesh the faces of the departed as it did the spectres and sorcerors that were our stock in trade. But I was, all the same, uneasy.

  I looked again at the cutting, and then up at my father’s face. “And you would be content to create such a delusion—content that we should proclaim to the world that we can commune with the dead, in the full knowledge that it is nothing but a lie?”

  “What harm could it do? Why should we not trumpet this ‘new era,’ as these American girls do?”

  “It is one thing to conjure images any rational person knows to be harmless illusion; quite another, surely, to claim that we bring back the loved ones they have lost. It would be such a deception—”

  “Everything we do is a deception. Of one kind or another.”

  He gripped my hand once more, avid for my assent.

  “And how would you feel,” I began tentatively, “if someone were to deceive you in such a way? Trick you into believing you could speak to my mother—hear her voice again? Would you not feel it a terrible betrayal—the most terrible betrayal of them all?”

  “No,” he replied softly, wiping away the tear that had stolen down my cheek. “Not if I never discovered I had been deceived. I think I would be comforted, and overjoyed to see her one last time.”

  And as he stroked my hand, and I smiled at him through my tears, I found that I agreed.

  We spent many days, after that, exploring how we might harness all the guile of our art to this new end. The magic of the lantern might easily command the dead to appear, and we knew, from long years, that the wish to believe is the strongest power an illusionist may exercise; that we had only to show a ghostly face for someone to claim it as wife, or sister, or mother long years dead. But we had need of s
ome mechanism, some imposing device, that would convince those who saw it that it was by the advancement of science, not the profane practices of superstition, that this new wonder had been achieved.

  Hour upon hour my father shut himself up alone, going through his journals and his learned books, until he came to me one evening, when I was eating my dinner, and sat down on the chair next to mine.

  “Look,” he said, opening a journal to where he had marked the place with a slip of paper, and placing it on the table by my plate. It was a drawing of a wooden table, and above it, a large glass ball, suspended between two metal prongs.

  “What is it?”

  “It is called an Influence Machine,” Father said. “And the name seems strangely fortuitous, given the use to which it might be put. I saw one demonstrated, many years ago, and I cannot understand why I have not thought of it before. You see the handle at the side of the table? It connects to a mechanism in the prongs which causes the globe to revolve. The glass itself has been evacuated of air, and a very small amount of mercury inserted, such that when the glass is set to spin it gives off a strange green radiance if touched. It does indeed have the most uncanny appearance.”

  He must have seen my look of alarm. “The science of it is easily explained, and in any case it is not the science that need concern us. I lighted upon it just now because of this note,” he said, pointing, “which seems appended almost as an afterthought. It says the creator of the machine called the light it emits ‘the glow of life.’ As if it were some hidden and secret energy, which the action of the machine makes visible to man.”

  “Do you believe it, Papa?” I asked, as I ran my eyes down the paragraph he had marked.

  “I confess I find it unlikely, as a hypothesis. But for our purposes, it might do very well.”

  I could see now, where his thought was tending. “You believe we might harness this secret energy,” I said slowly, “to render the spirits of the dead perceptible to the living?”

  He smiled. “Clearly we would only appear to do so. But we can make that ‘appear’ seem only too real to those who witness it.”

  And that was how it came about. My father procured the apparatus required from a scientist in Ingolstadt, and then spent some weeks adapting it to our purpose, until he announced, with some excitement, that he believed it ready for our first essay. I cannot describe the sensation when first I touched the pillars that suspend the globe, and put my fingers to the hissing glass. The rush of heat across my skin, and the sudden agonising spasm that sent me staggering from the apparatus, my hand at my side. I reached half-blind for the nearest chair as my father came running towards me. “Was it too strong? Are you hurt?”

  I shook my head, feeling suddenly, and for the first time by daylight, that same strange claustrophobia I know only too well, when I wake from sleepwalking to the taste of metal in my mouth and a low insistent humming in my ears.

  But I told my father none of this, wishing to spare him any self-reproach, and asking only that he adjust the machine a little before we attempted it again. And when I tried it a second time, the effect was indeed lessened, though I could still feel a sharp tingling in the nerves of my hands. But I told myself I could bear it, and I did not wish my father to waste the work of so much time. And yet each month that passes it has worsened, and now I feel myself diseased, as if the mere touch of my hand will taint, and my blood runs not red and full but brackish, like filthy water clogged with soil.

  I am not mad—I have told myself again and again, I am not mad, but I do so in desperation, and with a rising panic that clutches at my heart. For if it is madness to distrust one’s own senses, to see what others cannot perceive, then in truth perhaps I am mad. For now, when the room darkens and I place my hands on the machine and the globe begins to spin, I see other colours, brighter and far more beautiful than the sick greenish glow of the glass—spirals of iridescent light lifting coldly into the air, red and blue-white plumes that curl and entwine like water, and waver sometimes like flame in the wind. The night when first it happened I looked across at my father, wondering if this was some new trick—some new effect he had devised to surprise and delight me—but his face was impassive beneath its mask. And when I told him, afterwards, what I had seen, he said, a little sternly, that I must be mistaken. But it was the morning after, I am sure, that he first he talked of England, and of home.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LONDON, JUNE 1851

  THE CITY HAS NEVER been so crowded, so excited, so proud, so dangerous. It has taken nine months, a million square feet of glass, and eighteen acres of Hyde Park, and London now boasts a modern wonder to rival all seven of the ancient world. “Vast, strange, new and impossible to describe,” it is a stately pleasure dome decreed by no less a personage than the Prince Consort himself. A temple to technology tall enough to top living trees, furnished with more than one hundred thousand “Works of Industry of all Nations,” and designed (in both senses of the word) to fanfare to those self-same nations that Great Britain is not only the world’s workshop, but its pre-eminent imperial power. The visitors pouring through the doors of this Great Exhibition each day can see printing presses and folding pianos, silk tapestries and Sèvres porcelain, American pistols and Canadian fire-engines, statuary and stained glass, microscopes and mill machinery, looms and locomotives, a steam hammer that can bend metal and yet scarcely crack the shell of an egg, and the Koh-i-Noor diamond (uncut at present, so rather a drab disappointment to most), as well as a stuffed elephant to display the Queen’s howdah, and a tableau of stuffed kittens done up in dresses in the German gallery, which is said to be Her Majesty’s personal favourite of the whole display.

  Six million will meander this miracle of rare devices before it closes in October, from families, to foreigners, to factory-owners; thousands on special Thomas Cook trains from the provinces; and hundreds as exhibitors touting for trade; the fashionable from town, the Sunday-bested from the suburbs, and today—a designated “shilling day”—flocks of smocked-clothed agricultural labourers ripe for the ripping. For the thieves are thick among the gadding crowds, and despite the ranks of specially recruited constables, some of whom we can see even now sweating under their tall hats this hot June morning, there’s nothing that pulls in a pickpocket more than a courteous English queue. A scuffle breaks out briefly, as a rather more seasoned officer spots a ragged lad with his fingers where they’ve no right to be, but within moments calm is restored, and the momentary flutter of anxiety among the matrons is forgotten as the throng gets its first breathless glimpse of the splendour in the glass.

  Less than three miles away, Buckingham Street is far enough from the dust and press of the Strand, and close enough to the river, for a breath of air to lift the summer heat. Down in the basement kitchen Nancy Dyer is toiling at the tub, her pretty face red with the effort of the morning’s laundry, while her little daughter Betsy sits rolling marbles for a large black cat which shows precious little inclination to pursue them, having secured with an unerring feline instinct the only cool corner of the kitchen floor. In the drawing-room two storeys above, the master of the house sits at a small table by the open window, one hand slowly turning pages, and the other holding down the book—holding it a little stiffly, as we now see, which suggests that the stroke he suffered some six months ago has not fully left him. In the far corner of the same room Maddox’s former henchman, Abel Stornaway, is helping Billy the servant lad to clear the table of the remains of breakfast, fussing a little, as is his wont, and loading the tray just a little too heavily for the boy to manage. And up in the attic, Charles Maddox, too, is at the window, looking down towards the Thames where a barge loaded with coal is toiling heavily against the tide.

  It’s a long way from the asylum at Melk, and you may well be wondering how such a distance has been travelled. As well as calculating, perhaps, after looking back a page or so, that it is nigh on three months since we last encountered him. Charles is standing at the window now, so we can d
educe that he did not—though it was a close-run thing—lose his leg to the attack at Castle Reisenberg, but when he turns finally and moves towards his desk we can see that he is limping. Limping in an impatient furious way, as if he’ll be damned to acknowledge it, far less let it hinder him. The document on the desk is a letter, and as he resumes his pen to complete it, we may perhaps be able to gather rather more of what has happened to him in those last few missing weeks.