Chapter 4 Enter Septimus Pike #2
But I was growing older. I came out very young, as all my sisters did, for my mother could not abide the thought of missing the chance to snare a husband.
Soon hair curlers and dancing lessons were most seriously impinging on my research time.
I found I loathed dancing at balls. I hated getting a step wrong, hated the stilted conversation with some partner or other who had only asked me in order to ingratiate himself with one of my sisters, and most of all, I hated the moment when the dance ended, and I sat down and overheard those about me praising the grace and charm and beauty of every Miss Bennet but I.
If there was one guest enjoying Meryton balls as little as I, it was Pike.
Few mammas would allow their daughters to waste their time with a lowly clerk.
Of course they could not refuse a request to dance unless they wished to sit down the rest of the evening, so I often watched them flee before he could greet them.
And so, at many a ball, Pike and I had no one to speak with but each other.
“It is not your fault, you know,” I assured him on one occasion.
He fidgeted with his cuffs, tucking away a loose thread. “It’s only their presumption that irritates me. They flee to avoid a request I had no intention of making.”
“You do not dance?”
“Not with these—” He bit back the end of the thought. “These ladies.”
“Ah.”
“I will dance with you, if you like,” he said, glancing at me sideways.
I made a face. “Must I?”
“I suppose you, too, have been instructed not to waste your time with me.”
“I may have been. Mamma talks so much that one loses track. But it’s not you. I would much rather not dance at all. It is a torture for me, those who watch me, and the feet of the young man who partners me.”
He laughed at that. “It is true. You are quite the worst dancer in the county.”
I found his honesty rather a relief.
“So why did you speak to me?”
“I wanted to ask if you could get me some more sheep’s blood. You see—oh, drat, here comes Mamma. And she’s got Tim Lucas in tow. Pretend you have just offered to turn for me at the piano after supper.”
“Why pretend?” he asked, and took my arm and led me over to the piano, where we perused sheet music and discussed the price of sheep’s blood.
Ball after ball passed this way. Months turned to years.
My sisters acquired suitors; I did not. I could not regret any man in particular—they invariably failed to please my sensitive nose—but it was rather humiliating, to be left standing alone time and again.
Nor did my dancing improve. I very soon gave relief to all of Meryton society by deciding that I would dance no more.
Pike and I used our meetings at balls to conduct business and ignored the way everyone else was ignoring us.
Abetted by the small but steady revenue of my business with Pike, I was able to modestly improve my little laboratory.
A full sized electrical rig remained a distant dream, but I got hold of some makeshift Leyden jars and a bit of chemical equipment.
I was attempting to discover what made up the living self—not the mere dead flesh, but the spark of life , as I’d heard all those year ago.
The theory of bodily humors is, of course, considered hopelessly old-fashioned, but I believed it might have been discarded too quickly.
You see, I was inspired by the great strides humanity was making in the study of chemistry.
Every day, it seemed, new elemental chemicals were identified and isolated.
If the physical world was made up of such building blocks, I reasoned, ought it not be possible to distill humanity down to its purest components as well?
There must be reasons, after all, why we were the way we were.
Suppose I could derive the source of Jane’s sweetness, or Elizabeth’s charm, or Papa’s indolence, and bottle them up to study in their purest form?
Imagine what a relief it would be if, before a ball, I could simply take a spoonful of medicine that would transform me into the sort of girl who liked balls!
It remained purely theoretical. However, I did find that by subjecting the blood of farm animals (procured for me by Pike) to a process I designed of dilution, basification, exposure to a mild charge, and induced precipitation, I obtained very different results based upon the species and, indeed, even the individual.
Some had a meaty stink and were nearly as clear as water; others smelled sweet and were thick and dark; and everything in between.
They had strange properties. One batch of serum remained an eerie blood-warm temperature no matter how long it remained in a phial.
Another looked almost metallic and seemed to move in response to my voice.
My results were inconsistent, however, and nearly impossible to quantify.
I was sure that I was on track to discovering what might be called the elements of life; but how to prove it?
I could find no way to use these serums, interesting as they were, nor to demonstrate that they were the building blocks I believed—until a lucky bit of feline carnage. I refer to the bird Cariad.
Cariad was the first recipient of what I now call the Procedure.
You see, I had been performing the usual electrical experiments—making the legs of a recently deceased frog twitch and jump, etc.
—when one day I heard a thump overhead. I opened the skylight and in sauntered a great black tomcat from the barn with something struggling in his jaws.
I got there just as the poor little bird, with a desperate flutter, expired under Jack’s needle-sharp teeth.
He then lost interest and, seeing me, laid the little corpse at my feet with a proud swish of his tail.
It was a tiny finch— Carduelis spinus , if I am not mistaken—and its brilliant green-yellow feathers practically glowed against the dull floorboards.
It would have made a pretty painting, were it not for the bloody hole in its chest.
I looked from the poor little finch to my electrical equipment. The stuff of life.
I laid its little body in a tub of salve I had recently synthesized from pig’s blood, which seemed to have some interesting conductive qualities. I wrapped wires around its exposed heart. Then I turned the crank on my little electrostatic generator.
I expected no more than the kind of grisly twitch I got from the frog’s legs.
But after a moment, the creature fluttered its eyes open.
Frantically it pecked at the wires trailing into its chest, which luckily were not attached very tightly or else it might have ripped its own heart out.
I held it down and carefully freed it from the wires.
It flew around the room in a frenzy, and then landed on a beam overhead.
I held out a finger. Cautiously, it flew down and perched.
I examined it, holding as still as I could. It cocked its head, examining me with one bright little eye that had been dull moments before. I had initiated the Procedure at the instant of death—but it had been dead. Electricity and one of my serums had brought it back.
Subsequent attempts to replicate the bird’s revival were unsuccessful.
Either I had not isolated the role of the serum, or the animals were too far past the point of death, or—as I increasingly suspected—my current equipment was not powerful enough.
My little bird colleague remained, though, reminding me that it was possible.
It lived on seeds and nuts like a normal bird, and though it sometimes grew listless, I found that a few sips of the dark sweet serum soon had it chirping and alert.
And yet, the gaping hole in its chest never healed.
It never seemed to distress it, though I could see its little heart fluttering in the open air.
I longed more than ever for a proper rig.
With more power, who knew what I might do?
I know I ought not to have named it. It is a research subject, not a pet.
But it happened by accident. Cariad sings so much, you see, and his whistles and chirps reminded me of one of the postboys who come through Meryton.
He is Welsh and very musical—always singing or whistling is Owen.
And when he helps change the tired horses, he talks to them.
“There now, cariad,” he croons. “You’ve done a good day’s work. Time to rest now, cariad.”
It means “beloved” in his tongue. Once it popped into my head, I could not seem to shake it off—the bird was Cariad, and that was final. He soon learned to perch on my shoulder, singing merrily, heedless of the hole in his chest.
So captivated was I by this development, and so bent upon repeating it, that I failed to notice that my business associate had begun to regard me in a new light.
As I had grown into a plain young woman, Pike had become rather a handsome young man.
Several times he abandoned me for weeks on end in pursuit of some young lady or another.
I did not mind; he had, I thought, excellent taste, and I liked watching their pretty faces laugh and blush and sigh.
It seemed he could be quite charming when he chose.
Still, those liaisons always ended the same way.
Pike was too poor even to make a go of it as a fortune hunter.
After a ball or two, the flirtation would be cut off, and Pike would end up back at my side.
And then he had to go and ruin it all by asking me to marry him.
It began—as practically everything does in this stultifying town—at a ball.
During supper I played two most difficult concertos, as usual, and Mr. Pike turned for me, but when the musicians came back from their rest he abruptly held out his arm and said, “Miss Mary, will you do me the honor of dancing the next set?”
“What?” I said.
He looked faintly annoyed. “I asked you to dance.”
“I know. I am not deaf. Why?”
Again, that flicker of irritation. But he smoothed it away. “Is it strange,” he said, with a smooth little bow, “that I should wish to dance a reel with the loveliest and most amiable young lady in the room tonight?”
Ah. Now I believed I understood. He wished to practice his gallantry upon me. Perhaps there was some young lady in the crowd tonight to whom he wished to make his addresses, and he wanted to try them out on me.
Well. I supposed I owed him for all the page-turning, not to mention the sheep’s blood. “Oh, all right,” I said, “but only one set, mind,” and I gave him my arm.
I tried not to look too bored as he led me through the dance. He was really not such a bad dancer, but I could not conceive of why he would waste our time this way.
“Your uncle has a fine house,” he said.
“Hmm? Oh. I suppose.” My uncle’s house had no room suitable for a laboratory, and the lights of town would quite likely obscure any attempts at viewing the rings of Saturn.
“It would be an excellent home for a respectable gentleman’s family. It is too bad that they never had any children of their own.” He did not sound very sorry.
“Do you think so?” My aunt Phillips, at least, had always seemed perfectly content to borrow my younger sisters, Lydia and Kitty, and send them home when she tired of them.
I wondered if any natural philosophers had ever examined the motherhood-by-proxy instincts of childless aunts.
I was sure I had observed it in sheep as well as humans.
Perhaps mother love was so strong that it must find an object, even an unnatural one, as with the ewe in our barn that I had observed insistently raising a chicken.
Whilst musing upon this I realized belatedly that my dancing partner had continued talking. “—not imagine a more charming helpmeet,” he was saying.
“Hm? Oh. Certainly.” The music had stopped. “Will you take me back to the piano, please?”
He bowed over my hand and—this was a novel affectation—kissed it. I took little note. My mind was on the ewe.
At the next few balls, however, his performance was repeated.
After supper he would rise from the piano, bow, and ask me to dance.
It grew quite tedious, listening to him talk of his future prospects instead of something sensible, like the price of fox blood, while doing my best not to turn the wrong way and slam into some Lucas’s behind.
I looked forward to the day he would talk sense again.
I began to notice, between counting steps and nodding to Pike, that we were attracting no little attention. When we danced I felt many pairs of eyes upon us. There were whispers, too.
“… throwing herself away…”
“… likely to be an old maid, otherwise.”
“The cheek of him!”
“Best she can hope for.”
I know, I know. I am not so unworldly that I cannot understand such talk.
I simply never imagined they were talking of me .
No one had ever speculated before that I was forming a romantic connection, suitable or not.
Besides, I had hit upon a method of using stars of equivalent brightness to estimate the age of the earth.
The calculations occupied my mind even on the dance floor.
It was at a public ball when the truth was thrust upon me. I was dancing with Pike—well, my feet were dancing; my head was concerned with the brightness of Polaris—when suddenly I became aware of what my partner was saying.
“Be sure to be at home tomorrow afternoon,” he told me. “I mean to come and speak to your father.”
“How nice,” I said, then, “What? What can you have to speak to my father about?”
He smiled tightly. The dance pulled us apart, and when we were back together he tugged me a little closer. “To ask for your hand, of course,” he said. “Come, do not be coy.”
“Coy?” I hissed. “My hand ? Do not be absurd.”
“I beg your pardon?” His hand, hot and sweaty, gripped mine too tight. “You have done nothing but encourage my advances.”
“Stuff.” I tried to pull away, but he held me too tight. He made a visible effort to master himself.
“You have sat with me for hours.”
“ You sat with me .”
“You dance only with me.”
“Yes, because I hate dancing. I was being nice .”
His jaw clenched. “I am entirely beneath your notice, is that it?”
“No, I just—”
“It is an excellent alliance for you. I flatter myself that you will not find a better,” he said. “Pray think on it. I am probably your only chance at matrimony. You are too plain and too poor to expect another.”
With that I wrenched my hand from his and stopped moving.
Maria Lucas bumped into me from behind with an oof .
I was disrupting the dance, but I did not care.
“I would not marry you if you were the richest, handsomest man in England!” I hissed in a whisper, and although the dance was only half done, I stalked away without waiting for an escort.