“Chicken pox,” Bird said happily. “You gave us lard and stewed onion poultices. I hardly itched.”
“Ah! Good, good,” he exclaimed, equally pleased. “That’s wonderful. So you—”
“Asked how you came to be here,” I interrupted.
“I received a letter,” he explained, white side whiskers flaring like a hissing tomcat’s. “A
most
disturbing correspondence, regarding the recent … the rumored child deaths. Is the
Herald
to be believed, are they merely a hoax? You and your
insolent
brother were the first to introduce me to this sordid affair, and so I at once sought you out at the Tombs, having now been
personally
engaged. I wish to help you. Chief Matsell directed me here.”
“About this letter,” I said slowly.
“I have it, if you—”
“Let’s look at it somewhere
else
,” I said emphatically.
Dr. Palsgrave tugged at his waistcoat, running his palm over his tightly constricted torso. “Follow me, then. My practice is only two blocks from here.”
Quitting the stone meetinghouse unnoticed, as Moses Dainty seemed to be occupied plying voters with coffee, we walked west along Chambers. It didn’t much surprise me that Dr. Palsgrave kept
his office on the most prestigious street in the city for a medical professional and, as we approached the end of City Hall Park at Broadway, I was struck with an odd sense of time going the wrong direction. It was the route I’d traveled as a roundsman, only done backward. Then we passed the teeming, sweltering, pedestrian-packed intersection and were greeted by more stone houses, these with their flowerboxes nicely watered and their windowpanes slashing sunlight at our eyes.
At his own heavy oaken door, marked at the side with dr. peter palsgrave, physician to youth on a brass plate, Dr. Palsgrave pulled out his keys. Catching a glimpse of Bird as he did so, he frowned.
“Why, may I ask, is she—”
“I’d prefer if you didn’t,” I answered.
If Peter Palsgrave hadn’t thought much of copper stars before, I wasn’t making us any headway, for he glowered. Something about his swift shifts between innocent delight and bristling ill humor satisfied Bird extremely. Every time his lips pursed like a shutting clam, Bird’s tilted up at the edges. As the doctor stormed his way into his richly carpeted front hall, hanging his slick beaver hat on a peg, I nudged her arm.
“Friend of yours?”
She nodded as we trailed after the mincing little physician. “He always shams not to remember anyone. Always. It’s sweet, I think.”
“Why is that?”
“He likes to
save
kinchin, doesn’t he? He’s a flash doctor, you know, and if he diaries our names and later sees us … well, then we’re sick again, aren’t we? He failed. He’d rather forget, and never know us once we’re grown, than remember and lose out to whooping cough.”
I’d meant to answer her, since the insight was pretty handily reasoned for a ten-year-old. But the chamber we were led into, part
study and part laboratory, froze my tongue a bit. For I’d never seen anything like it in my life.
The large room was divided in halves, in a sense. The side flooded with light from two garden-facing windows was a fully outfitted laboratory. Sparkling blue glass jars sealed with wax, copper kettles buffed to a rich coral finish, all manner of clever glass tubing. There was a hulking iron stove, a huge table on which rested vials and measuring instruments and open notebooks filled with crabbed doctorly handwriting. On these walls hung gaudily illuminated pages in careful frames, flowing Italian script marking out the properties and principles behind skulls and trees and wellsprings and hearts.
Meanwhile, the windowless side featured massive bookshelves—far richer than the Underhills’ library, and it struck me that it was for excellent reason that the very learned doctor and the very learned reverend worked so closely together aiding the Protestant poor. But these weren’t literature, nor holy scripts. These were medical tomes, gigantic and sober in their garb of cracked leather, gilt-edged chemistry textbooks, dozens of foreign language titles with gold leaf painted onto their spines, thick with strange symbols. Alchemy volumes. They had to be, for I’d just remembered what Mercy had told me Peter Palsgrave’s
other
project was, apart from healing sick kinchin.
“How goes the elixir of life?” I asked in a friendly way.
He whirled like a top, with his neat little boots and his thin-stockinged legs and his puffed-out chest in its rich blue coat. Bird’s smile cracked wider.
“How could you … oh, of course. Yes,” he sighed. “I sent you to Mercy Underhill. She must have mentioned my magnum opus. It isn’t the elixir of life, really, but a healing cordial. It is tremendously abstruse experimentation, not the sort of thing I can explain to a layman.”
“Try me,” I said, nettled.
Peter Palsgrave looked pretty set upon, but he told me all about it. And he was fascinated enough by his subject that even Bird was swept along for the ride, cocking her head and twirling a bit of reddish hair around one finger.
Alchemy, he told me, was the science of creating processes that could turn one element into another. And alchemists, having sought long and hard after the wisdom required to achieve impossible things, had done just that. They’d distilled liquids so pure that they were merely
one
thing and not many—alcohol, for instance. They’d created glass so transparent that it was entirely invisible. But purification and refinement, he told us, were a means to an end. Intended by some villainous types to lead to such wicked achievements as turning lead into gold, which would destroy any healthy economy, he added in a weary voice.
The elixir of life, which had long been the Holy Grail of alchemy, was an impossible goal, he told us, with a light in his eye that couldn’t be dimmed by the lowliness of his audience. Man was created to return to dust one day. But a cordial capable of curing any illness in the living—that was an achievable dream. Children, he explained passionately, were so fragile. So vulnerable to contagion. But if one could only discover the perfect remedy by combining the latest advancements of medicine with the most ancient truths of alchemy and the noblest techniques of chemistry—
there
was a prize to be won not for the sake of wealth or of fame, but of humanity, the queer little man standing dapper and impassioned with his golden eyes and his corseted figure told us. The young and the helpless would no longer be subject to the evil whim of miasma. What form precisely it would take he did not know, though he’d long been following the threads of suspicions. Subtle but distinct clues.
It was mesmerizing.
Dr. Palsgrave was practically throwing off golden sparks, words clattering headlong down an iron railway, braking madly to keep
himself in some sort of check. And what a goal it was. Of course it was utterly cracked, and yes it was wildly romantic and seemingly impossible. But what a goal. To take a desperately ill child and restore it to health, to die of old age one distant day. Improbably, I loved the idea. Without supposing with any hope it could be accomplished, but who knew? With all the magical discoveries already unearthed, what else in the world silently waited to be fully understood?
“I occasionally wish that my own condition were not so … precarious,” he concluded, waving his hand toward his rheumatic fever–impaired heart. “But perhaps, were I a sound man, I should not have been inspired to my calling with such fervor. And for the children, every discomfort is but a small price. Now, Mr. Wilde. Tell me.” He paused, smoothing his palm down his silk-covered rib cage in his queer self-calming gesture. “Have the police truly found, north of the city … have they—”
“They have,” I affirmed. “Nineteen of them.”
The fact seemed to offend him physically, a sentiment I heartily respected. Dr. Palsgrave waved a vial of smelling salts under his nose. “Despicable. Monstrous. I must see the bodies at
once
, I may be able to help you. Don’t touch that, you foolish girl, it’s poisonous!” he snapped at Bird, who swiftly set down a small crystal decanter.
Once the potion was safely out of her delicate hand, he instantly relaxed. He gave Bird a warm smile of apology, his anger evaporating as if it had never bubbled up at all, and in that moment I could see why she liked him so well. The gruffness was wholly an act, the welfare of youth a genuine obsession. I liked him too.
“By all means,” I agreed. “Under condition of utmost secrecy, even from the rest of the copper stars. I’m the only one pursuing this. About your letter.”
“It nearly finished me,” he muttered, the electric-blue kerchief reappearing. “Take it, I never want to see it again.”
I glanced at Bird, still investigating the chemistry kit, but with her hands dutifully behind her back now. Then I sat down and read about the oddest thing I’ve ever come across:
I can see only it.
Once there was a man who did the work of his God and when that man saw what his work must be, he felt ashamed, though he knew it was his burden, and he hid himself, and he wept at becoming the Angel of Death.
I can see it and nothing else see it ever and ever amen only the body so small and so broken. Ravaged like that. And nothing else.
So small it’s an abomination no I’ve chased it away now for a moment but now there again, back at once, God help me, God save us, I’d tear out my eyes if I could but I would still see the body painted into the holes. And you, when you see the little ones with their eyes gone white and still as bone what can you do, how do you manage it? I can see only them. With their dead eyes like nothing. Like cold stars. Fish scales frosted over.
I am a broken jawbone.
Finish your work and stop this they have no sight any longer and they need you to finish it as do I finish at once. Mend the broken things. I must break another, and I will for it all to stop. No nearer, let me go no nearer.
“It’s unsigned,” I said, clearing my throat.
It was a shabby attempt at a clever observation. But my eyes didn’t quite fit in my head any longer. Palsgrave scoffed at me, rightly, but it ended on a shudder. Robbed him of his point scored a bit.
Staring at the thing, I tried to make a better go of it. I’d read the
letter in Val’s company that morning much too quickly, the first one at my digs in Elizabeth Street slower. Had I still possessed them, I could try to match up papers, handwriting maybe, ink color, because the sentiments within were largely the same. As it was, I’d a rum job in the physical sense to compare the first documents to this new, differently painted piece of dementia. I could find the first in the
Herald
if I liked, but in type. Not much use when it came to studying appearances. But I did my best to mull it over from memory.
I cast my mind back. Both original letters had been poorly spelled, of a purpose maybe. This was mad but highly articulate. The others had been done in large, clear, blockish writing such as a beginner might scrawl, writ entirely in capitals, revealing nothing of personality or character—perhaps because the author was capable of naught better. But perhaps he meant his script to be masked. This had been done with an educated but badly palsied hand, in parts barely readable. As if the writer was terrified of his own words. Under the influence of liquor or a drug, maybe, shying back from phrases full of a sad venom that hurt his eyes. Finally, the others had been suspiciously gleeful, melodrama ripe enough for me to suspect them sensationalist nonsense. To
hope
they were nonsense, as I now admitted to myself. For the city’s sake, for the Irish, for the copper stars, maybe even for Val’s bloody Democratic Party. There was dread here, though, not gloating, and the dread sounded genuine.
“I don’t suppose you know this hand?” I ventured.
“It’s nearly
illegible
, you imbecile, and why should I?”
“This person obviously knows of your work.”
“Everyone knows of my work!” the strange little man cried. “That is why this—this—
malignancy
was addressed to me! I am a physician who works exclusively with
children
, I am the
only one
, I—
Put that down
!” he thundered, the skin around his silver whiskers flushing with lively pink rage.
Bird dropped a sinister knife blade with some sort of herbal residue yet clinging to it. Clasping her hands again, in front this time, penitent.
“I won’t hurt myself, I promise.”
“Oh, God. Thank you,” he breathed gratefully. “I would consider it a tremendous boon.”
“Will you go to the Tombs and examine the bodies?” I questioned. “Matsell, when you’ve found him, will show you personally. You must speak to no one else.”
“I’ll go at once.”
“May I keep this?”
“Mr. Wilde,” he hissed, “if I never see that piece of depravity again in all my days, I will be a man who ends on a note of satisfaction. Get it out of my home. Come along now, you—you
child
. Quick march. Mr. Wilde, you imply that you do not intend to accompany me.”
“I’ve another line of investigation,” I explained as we quit the building. “If you’re game, I’ll stop by here tonight. See what you’ve learned.”
“If you must, and I suppose you must, mustn’t you,” he sighed. “Farewell, then.”
“Good-bye, Dr. Palsgrave,” Bird said.
“What
does
she want? Ah,” Palsgrave huffed fondly, pulling a wrapped caramel from his pocket and tossing it to Bird. “Kinchin. Such alarming creatures, really. Good day to you.”
“That man is mad,” I noted as the ramrod-spined gentleman waved for a hackney with his bizarre blue kerchief.
“Fit for a cranky-hutch,” Bird agreed as she unwrapped the candy. “He’s grand, isn’t he, Mr. Wilde?” Her face darkened as she looked up at me. “Is that letter you have from … from the man in the black hood?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, turning back from the road to help
Bird up into the hack I’d just flagged down. “But I will find that out if it is the last thing that I do.”