“There, now, drink this.” Mrs. Barker decanted some of the liquid into a clean glass and held it to Edith’s lips.
Edith sank down onto the bed. Her body relaxed. Her eyes closed and her hands uncurled on the bedclothes.
Mrs. Barker stood up with her head bowed. “I can’t go on. God forgive me, I can’t take this.”
Langton set the bottle down and held Mrs. Barker’s shoulders. The woman leaned against him like an athlete exhausted after a long race.
“I love her so,” she said, her voice muffled by Langton’s jacket, “but sometimes I feel so…so angry at having to look after her. That’s not right, is it?”
Langton knew exactly what Mrs. Barker meant. He remembered pacing the floor of his bedroom over and over and railing against life, against fate and God, and sometimes even against Sarah herself for leaving him alone. And he remembered the guilt that filled him after those thoughts. “We can only do so much, Mrs. Barker, before we break.”
She pulled away and gave him a shadow of a smile that did not reach her eyes. “God tests us, doesn’t he, Inspector?”
What could he tell her? He glanced at Forbes Paterson watching from the doorway, then back to Mrs. Barker. Langton couldn’t repeat the trite sentiments and platitudes offered to him after Sarah’s passing, no matter how well-meaning the phrases. He couldn’t lie.
Mrs. Barker didn’t ask him to; she turned back to Edith and held her thin hand.
Langton picked up his watch from the rug and saw Paterson check the time on his own piece. Twelve forty-seven. Returning to the chair, Langton felt in his pocket the solid weight of the Webley. Would he use it if he had to? He thought about Kepler’s mutilated body, the features pared down to the bone. And he looked at the wasted form of Edith lying close by.
Yes, he’d use his revolver.
Mrs. Barker left the bedside for a moment and tipped coal from the brass bucket onto the dying fire. A plume of bright sparks fled up the chimney. As she returned to the bed, she glanced at Langton but didn’t have to speak. Both knew that the time approached.
Twelve fifty-five. Langton strained to hear the sound of horses’
hooves or footsteps on the cold street outside. Nothing disturbed the calm. He resisted the urge to part the curtains and look down. The waiting drew him out like a cable on a winch drum, stretched tighter and tighter; each passing minute sounded like another click of the drum’s ratchet.
One o’clock became five past, then ten past. Langton glanced at Paterson, who held his gaze. Still no sound from the street, no knock at the door. The fire crackled in the grate. Edith stirred in the big mahogany bed.
One fifteen. One twenty-five. The pressure built up inside Langton, made each beat of his heart reverberate like a steam piston. The Jar Boys would not call, not this late. They had suspected the trap. Or been told of it.
There. Horses’ hooves, faint but getting closer. Stopping in the street outside.
Forbes Paterson nodded to Langton and closed the communicating door. Mrs. Barker stood up, smoothed her dress, and made for the stairs. Alone for the moment with Edith, Langton stood by the bedroom door and listened.
A gentle knock at the front door. The murmur of voices, then footsteps on the stairs. At least two others accompanied Mrs. Barker, Langton guessed. He took his seat and tried to hide his tension.
Mrs. Barker opened the door. “…and this is my brother George, sir, come up from London this very evening to be with Edith at the end.”
The first man behind Mrs. Barker hesitated a moment, looked around the room, then advanced with his gloved hand outstretched. “A most sad occasion, sir. You have my sympathy.”
Langton forced himself to shake the man’s hand but didn’t speak. His face set into a mask.
“And this must be your dear niece, madam.” The man leaned over the bed. “So very sad.”
Examining the man, Langton guessed his age around fifty: neat
grey beard and hair; dark, well-cut clothes in a slightly old-fashioned style. He could have been a physician with a patient. No doubt he hoped to create that impression.
The second man could have been his clerk were it not for the immense shoulders and impassive features like granite. Dressed in an ill-fitting dark suit and high white collar with a tie like butcher’s string, he looked like a suspect waiting to see the magistrate. Hands like shovels reached almost to his knees.
One of those massive hands held a capacious leather Gladstone bag. At a nod from the first man, he set the bag down beside the bed and opened the clasp. Light glinted from metal.
“You’re sure this will help her?” Mrs. Barker said, playing her part well.
“I have absolute faith in the procedure, madam. I could show you many families who would testify in support if it were not for our absolute devotion to privacy and confidentiality.”
Hearing the man, and seeing his confident, skillful words, Langton recognized the consummate professional, the type of trickster who could extract money from old widows or sell false stocks to naïve businessmen. The easy smile and the way he stared at Mrs. Barker intently as he spoke almost hypnotized her.
Then the man turned to Langton. “Perhaps your brother, unfamiliar with the procedure, would like me to explain?”
“Please.”
The man launched into an obviously practiced speech. “It’s really quite simple, sir, and most beautiful; our scientific apparatus will save the departing essence of this poor, suffering girl as she takes her leave of the world of man. Instead of dispersing into the very ether and merging with the lost particles of every confused soul, instead of struggling through the foul atmosphere of this polluted world, she will be gathered into this vessel.”
At this, the other man reached into the leather bag and drew out a cylindrical jar of brown glazed clay with a band of gleaming copper
and green wax at its neck. It looked so ordinary. So commonplace. But Langton remembered the clay burial vessels in the Professor’s Egyptian room; those canopic jars were not so dissimilar to these containers.
“It doesn’t look much,” Mrs. Barker said.
“Indeed, madam, but the jars are like people; the exterior is un-important. What is inside us is the most important.”
Mrs. Barker stared at the jar. “I don’t know…To think of poor Edith trapped inside that thing—”
“Rather than trapped,” the man said, “we prefer to think of the subjects as ‘protected.’ Safe.”
Confined,
Langton thought.
Prisoners. No more, no less.
“Set it over there, Jake,” the first man said, pointing to the small table across the room.
The immense Jake carried the jar in both hands as if afraid to drop it. He set it on the table and returned to the leather bag.
The question rose to Langton’s lips before he could stop it: “What will you do with her?”
“Why, sir, keep her safe. Within the jar, she will feel no pain, no suffering. And should the time come…”
“Yes?”
The bearded man glanced at Mrs. Barker, then said, “Should the time come when science allows us to transfer the essence back into a living host, into a healthy body, then the dear child might live again. I can make no promises, sir, but you have only to think of the great strides science has made in the past few years. Who knows what the new millennium will bring.”
With great difficulty, Langton controlled his anger and kept his face in its blank mask. How many families had these Jar Boys tricked? How many distraught parents, brothers, sisters had heard that slick speech and honestly believed the charlatan’s words?
A new life. That was the hope these swindlers offered. A new life in a new body, God forbid.
Langton wondered what Paterson made of all this. Perhaps he’d heard it before. No wonder he wanted to capture these people.
“Now, sir, if we may continue,” the man said, motioning to his accomplice. “The generator.”
Jake once again reached into the leather bag and brought out an instrument of brass, wood, and shellac or bois durci. He set the machine on the bedside table beside Edith. Lamplight glinted off the generator’s squat cube of metal, its cylinder wound with copper wire, its polished sphere, and its wooden base. Jake unraveled a coil of black wire and left it close to Edith but not touching her body. The two wires emerged from the machine’s sphere and ended in two small copper squares.
To Langton, the generator resembled the apparatus in Redfers’s house but seemed newer, perhaps more modern.
“This won’t hurt her, will it?” Mrs. Barker asked, leaning close to Edith.
“Madam, I can assure you, as a doctor, that your dear niece will feel no pain.”
Langton’s heart jumped. “You’re a doctor?”
“I am, sir.”
“Your name?”
He stared at Langton for a few seconds. “That is unimportant.”
Could this be Doktor Glass? Langton doubted it. These were probably no more than Glass’s subordinates, foot soldiers who carried out his orders.
Langton watched Jake unwind another coil of wire from the generator. This ran along the floor of the bedroom and connected to the copper neck of the jar. Then Jake removed the final component from the bag, a delicate arc of metal that opened like a fan; he inserted this into the jar’s neck, making sure it connected with the wire.
“You see the aerial fixed and ready,” the doctor explained as he fixed the copper squares and trailing wires to Edith’s neck. “I will not
trouble you with the scientific principles behind the procedure, but the machine charges the subject’s emerging essence while the aerial captures it and directs it into the vessel. So the poor soul is not lost to the elements. Jake.”
Jake reached out and flicked a brass switch on the machine. Nothing happened. Langton glanced at Mrs. Barker, then at the communicating door.
“It takes a moment,” the doctor said.
A slight buzzing appeared, as from a fly trapped somewhere in the room. The buzzing grew until Langton felt it at the back of his head. He smelled a faint burning.
The doctor leaned closer to Edith. “Ah, she’s fading. Fading quickly.”
Langton hadn’t seen any change in the girl’s condition. He glanced to Mrs. Barker, who seemed intent on her niece’s face. The whole scene, with the warm lamplight and the figures huddled over the patient, resembled an old oil painting.
The doctor reached into his coat and drew out a flat silver case. Inside, a syringe lay on a green velvet base.
Mrs. Barker said, “What are you doing?”
“A little something to ease her final moments,” the doctor said, and before Langton could leap forward, he’d jammed the syringe deep into Edith’s carotid artery.
Mrs. Barker screamed. Langton slapped the syringe from the doctor’s hand, then thrust the Webley into the man’s chest. “Police. You are under arrest.”
Jake took a step toward Langton, his enormous fists raised, then saw Forbes Paterson advancing from the next room with a revolver ready. Jake froze.
“Oh Edith, Edith.” Mrs. Barker stroked her niece’s face but didn’t cry.
“What’s he done?” Paterson said.
Langton stared into the doctor’s eyes. “Murder.”
The doctor licked his lips and looked between the two inspectors. “I swear I knew nothing. I was told to administer the drug.”
“By whom?”
The doctor shook his head.
“Langton, look.” Paterson stared at the bed.
Mrs. Barker drew back. “Edith?”
“It’s beginning,” the doctor said.
As Langton watched, a fine mist drifted from Edith’s body. Hardly a mist, in fact; the particles seemed so small, so delicate, that it looked like a mere suggestion of vapor, like the last strands of dawn haze before the rising sun. It seeped from Edith’s half-open mouth, her eyes, from her very pores.
Then the mist thickened. It twisted in a lazy spiral above Edith’s head. Still transparent yet tinged with violet and pink hues. As the strange machine whined, the mist hesitated in its motion, then stretched out toward the fan-shaped aerial. Within the mist, small specks of brilliant light, gold and silver.
Langton stared, hypnotized by the stream of bright particles. The mist had its own beauty. Even the course it took, a slender arc, seemed perfect. The first wisps brushed the aerial like pollen settling on a flower.
The jar shattered under Mrs. Barker’s heavy walking stick. She swung it again like a club and reduced the jar to fractured shards. Then, before any of the men could move, she brought the stick up above her head and slammed it down onto the generator like an ax.
Sparks erupted from the machine. The smell of burning metal and insulation.
Jake chose his moment. He charged at Langton and knocked him to the floor. In seconds, the doctor jumped over the two struggling men, yanked open the door, and clattered down the stairs.
Under a shower of blows, Langton clubbed Jake in the side of the head with the Webley and tried to roll out from under him. The thug’s weight pressed Langton to the floor.
Then Forbes Paterson kicked Jake off Langton and jammed his own
revolver into the man’s throat. “After the doctor, Langton. I’ve got this one.”
Langton rolled to his feet and pounded down the stairs. The front door stood open. As Langton jumped to the pavement, two constables ran up to him. One of the men pointed. “We heard someone running, sir.”
Langton led the way. The thick fog destroyed all idea of direction. Gas lamps glowed like isolated pools of yellow gauze. Only the pounding of boots against pavement broke the night’s hush. Crosswise at the top of Plimsoll Street lay the wider thoroughfare of Durning Road. Langton stopped and listened. Silence. Fog rolled in waves.
“What’s that way?” he asked, pointing.
“Wavertree Road, sir. There’s more constables waiting there.”
“And the other end?”
“Edge Hill Road, sir. Again, Inspector Paterson put men on that junction.”
The doctor must have gone straight on. “This way.”
As Langton and the two constables crossed the deserted Durning Road, a police whistle cut through the stillness. Another echoed the first. Straight ahead. Langton ran toward the alarms, through the warren of narrow streets east of Durning. Near a streetlamp, a constable stood above the prone body of another officer.