The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black (11 page)

Although they had had offers from every university in the
world, the Vigyanveta family moved to New Delhi several years before Faye was born. Her mother wanted to live abroad, and her father wanted to go back home. Faye’s father accepted a post as head of science at St. Stephen’s College, teaching chemistry and physics. He had been urged to take the job by Dr. Samuel Allnut, with whom he had studied at Cambridge. Faye’s mother was hired as chief chemist for a large British company.

And soon, Faye Vidya Vigyanveta was born.

Two things about Faye were quite clear early in her life. First, she was, without a doubt, a striking beauty. She was always tall for her age, long and lean, with her father’s olive skin and her mother’s apple-green eyes. She looked like she might have stepped out of a painting or sculpture. She was not only considered beautiful, but exotic, her bright green eyes and dark auburn hair standing out in any New Delhi crowd, her beautiful dark skin setting her apart within her mother’s family.

She might have embraced such attention. It might have made her feel like a queen. However, at thirteen, beauty was wholly unimportant to Faye. It had never been important, except when it got in the way. In fact, at an early age, she had found it terribly annoying when people pinched her cheeks, gawked, or otherwise displayed untoward interest in her appearance. As far back as she could remember, she resented the fact that people were impressed with something that was not her own doing. She didn’t create her beauty. She was merely stuck with it.

The second thing evident from a very early age (and this was the one that actually mattered to her) was that Faye had a brilliant mind. And she had an extraordinary knack for building things. It was amazing what she could build—mechanical
things, engineering things, architectural things. She was—and she would be the first to admit it—a genius. From her earliest moments, Faye loved to experiment with devices. She loved to make things with gears and pulleys and springs. When she was three and a half, she took parts from her father’s bicycle and built an electric fan.

(By coincidence, seven thousand kilometers away in London, a boy named Jasper Modest had done the same thing from parts of his toy boat.)

At the time, Faye had been given full reign of the family laboratory. This did not sit well with her father’s assistants, but they never complained or fussed, for two reasons: One, it was an honor to be chosen as an assistant to Professor Vigyanveta, and two, there was a long line of would-be assistants waiting to replace those who chose to complain about conditions.

That said, there were reasons why the young lads working in the laboratory felt disgruntled. A woman, let alone a little girl, was an odd and unwanted sight in a science lab, and this particular girl was arrogant and annoying. After all, her mother was not only a scientist, but also an American, and everyone knew what those Americans were like. Still, they put up with the fact that a gorgeous little girl was measurably more intelligent than all of them put together.

At the age of six, Faye created a contraption that had many gears and pulleys and springs, all attached to an assortment of different-sized hooks. (The myriad items that were sacrificed for this invention are too numerous to be mentioned individually, but their loss in the name of science is duly noted.) The invention could pick up beakers and move them around the laboratory by
the mere touch of a lever. Admittedly, this particular invention was not one of Faye’s most successful. Her parents had been quite encouraging before they knew the quantity of things that would be cannibalized for the creation. After several mishaps in which lab assistants were hauled around the room at the end of assorted hooks and a rather nasty explosion that was the result of improperly combined chemicals tipped accidentally from a flying beaker, the Vigyanvetas had to lay out a new set of rules.

Faye’s parents wanted to give their daughter every opportunity to exercise her talents. They also wanted to protect their belongings from overly capable little hands. So, they had a special table, just her size, built for their daughter, placed on the far, far side of the lab so she could do her own work and, more important to them, not interfere with theirs. Faye was no longer provided unlimited access to her parents’ equipment, but she was still allowed to wander around, taking notes and observing the work going in the laboratory.

Though not everywhere in the laboratory. In the back, there was a room with three very large locks. This room was off-limits to Faye, and it had always been so. Faye could always tell when her parents would be headed to the secret room. They would either begin to speak in whispers, or suddenly receive some missive that they would read, heads together. Then would come the double nod, and off they would go, disappearing behind the great wooden door. Her parents spent hours every day in that room. The answer was always “no” when Faye wanted to follow them in. It was perhaps the only insurmountable “no” that had ever come into Faye’s otherwise perfect life. And life had otherwise been perfect. It really, really had...

The Vigyanveta family laboratory was connected to the Vigyanveta family house that sat on the Vigyanveta family estate. The Vigyanveta family house was a magnificent mansion that had been in the Vigyanveta family for eleven generations. It was surrounded by meadows and orchards full of mango trees and bael trees. There were virtual forests of bamboo and wildly colorful gardens bursting with rhododendrons, ginger, begonia, balsam, clematis, lilies, blue poppy, and orchids brought from the northeast and tended to in greenhouses and beautiful glass bells. There was even the Vidya Vigyanveta orchid, developed by Faye’s great-great-grandfather. And of course, there were the most beautiful roses, like the Viveka Vigyanveta rose—known as the most elegant, stunning rose in India—developed by her great-great-great grandmother. There were vegetable and herb gardens full of cabbages, tomatoes, brinjal, tulsi (basil), mint, and fenugreek. There were groves of banana and tangy pepper trees, and all around, little waterfalls that fell into clear pools on which lotuses and water lilies floated. Huge green and red and blue macaws, toucans, and peacocks (including her favorite white peacock) roamed freely around the land, as flamingoes bathed (before the monsoon season) in the numerous ponds. There was so much property that Faye could walk for an hour and still be on the Vigyanveta family land.

Faye lived, for all intents and purposes, like a princess. There were servants and assistants to attend to her every need. She had only to ask for something—or sometimes, just look as if she might possibly ask—and it would be in front of her before she could get upset about not having it. There was just one thing nobody seemed able to provide.

“I would like a friend,” Faye declared one day, standing beside her father’s desk.

“You have many friends, my little
marmelo,”
her father said, distracted by his work.

“I have no friends,” she said, fiddling with her silver chain, which held an old family heirloom. She had worn the necklace for as long as she could remember. It had been in the family for generations, she had been told. When she felt insecure, she held it close. It had, after all, survived a very long time.

“Mali is your friend,” said her father.

“He is not. Mali is the gardener.”

“Play with his son, little Surya. He can be your friend.”

“Little Surya is thirty-seven years old, and he’s been the head gardener in Ootacamund since I was five,” said Faye. “There are no friends here, Father. There are only servants.”

“Well, I will tell them they must entertain you,” her father said. “I will insist they be your friends.” He gave her a quick smile, then dashed into the back room. She could hear the locks turn, one by one.

Faye never had any problems in school because she never went to school. She had always been tutored. When she was small, she had a series of teachers from France and Spain, and one from Germany. For the last couple years, she had been taught by her
father’s students.

When she came down to the library for breakfast one morning, she thought that the very round man in the black trench coat and black turban, who also wore a monocle with a very dark lens, was her new tutor.

“Are you here for me?” she asked as she was served sweet tea flavored with honey, cardamom, and vanilla.

“Am I..?”

“Are you?” Faye said, sipping her tea.

“Am I what?” asked the man, indignantly.

“Are you my tutor?” Faye knew she was wrong before she asked, but she thought he might tell her what he was actually doing in her library.

“Tutor a child?” He almost spat out the words. “I will have you know that I am here on business, and it is most certainly none of
your
business.”

When Faye’s parents came in, they were immediately and obviously quite agitated, though Faye couldn’t tell whether it was by her presence or the man’s. Her mother pulled Faye close as if to protect her somehow.

Faye clutched the silver chain that hung from her neck.

“Go to your studies, Faye,” her father urged, dismissing her with a sweeping wave of his hand. “We must speak of things that are not of your concern.”

As the three grown-ups left the room, walked through the door of the lab, and into the back room, Faye followed. She listened as the door closed behind them and the three locks turned. Even then, Faye had suspected there was something important about the meeting, but she had had no idea then how that meeting—the
meeting that she was not, in fact, even allowed to attend—would so change her life.

Though Faye Vigyanveta had taken a ferry several times to go from the continent to England, she had been on a real ship only twice before. Faye had been only three months old at the time, and now had no real memory of the experience. This time, she told herself, she would never forget.

The ship they took went from Glasgow and crossed two continents over several days, and Faye quickly discovered that she loved the sea. Though she had always dreamed of flying, and being what felt like miles above the water on the premiere deck of the
Astoria,
she could imagine herself soaring over the ocean, so high she could not even feel the spray on her face from the crashing waves. The train that followed was another exciting ride. She was treated like a queen by the staff of the dining car, who brought delights for her tongue that she happily devoured. Faye enjoyed every minute of the journey to Dayton, Ohio in America.

Well, not every minute. She was moved to extreme grumpiness when she thought how she had been forced into this trip without even being consulted. She had been given mere hours to pack a small bag of anything she wanted. She packed some of her sketches and her favorite notebook, an old birthday card a cousin had sent her mother which had her favorite painting on the front, a small glass hummingbird that she kept on her desk, and a miniature silver spoon that had been hers as a baby. She was sad
when she thought about the elephants and the monkeys and all the secret places that belonged only to Faye in India. None of the servants came with them—servants she had known her whole life, servants whom her father had known his whole life, too. Faye wondered what life would be like without them. Would new servants be provided?