Chapter 22 I Develop a Fixation
I Develop a Fixation
Dear Harry,
Do you suppose there is something wrong with me?
Of course you do. Everyone with sense does. Why, you very gave me a whole book with which to repair it. But I mean something else. Something new.
It is nothing to do with my research. That is proceeding quite well.
I have never had a partner before—well, Pike, I suppose, but not one who could really work with me.
Georgiana is brilliant . I thought myself passable at mathematics, but to her numbers are like playthings.
One glance at a table of figures and she not only commits them to memory but spots trends and anomalies that I might not see even with hours of calculation.
We have been making a more precise study of the effects of various serums. Miss Darcy was unexpectedly missish about inhaling the chromae ourselves, for she reminds me that she is in delicate health, and she worries it would interfere with her medicines.
Instead, we feed the chromae to Cariad. Rather difficult to extrapolate, since our only research subject is a long-dead bird, but still the results have been illuminating. A few key examples:
Color: Canary yellow
Donor: Sir William Lucas
Effect on Cariad: Becomes extremely social.
Clings to my shoulder for as long as he can.
Sings a mournful dirge if I put him away.
Even becomes affable toward G. Once, after giving him a dose, I put him to bed in his cage and awoke the next day to find him asleep next to me on my pillow, making a nest of my braid. He is lucky I am fond of him.
Color: Cyan
Donor: Jane; Emma the milkmaid on Johnson’s farm
Effect on Cariad: He goes to sleep
Color: Apple green
Donor: Miss Figg
Effect on Cariad: Loud complaining, and a bit of intestinal distress
Color: Red
Donor: Me
Effect on Cariad: G and I disagree on this, but I insist that he becomes cleverer.
I devised a little test whereby he must choose which cloth I have hidden a grape under.
He is markedly better at it when dosed with my red.
G says this is because if he cannot find it he simply tears the cloth to bits with his sharp little beak.
G says I am looking at him with too much of a proud mamma’s eye and not enough as a scientist, which is absurd, because he is a dead bird, not my child, even if it is rather adorable how he hops about when he finds his treat.
Color: Beige, threaded through with brown
Donor: Georgiana
Effect: Seems to make Cariad develop a taste for raw meat
Color: Black
Donor: Pike, before his death
Effect: Difficult to pin down. Sometimes Cariad seems quite himself; other times his mood alters.
More analysis needed. That is, needed but unlikely—one common thread of a black dose is that it seems to upset him greatly.
I shan’t give him any more, I think. It is weakness on my part, but there it is. I hate his little cheeps of distress.
We’ve a great deal still to do, of course. However, we progress admirably. Her research is not the problem. No, it is G herself.
Georgiana is here three weeks now, and I fear I am becoming a bit unbalanced regarding her. I think of her all the time. If I am not careful, my notes become crowded with sketches of her hair and hands and eyes. My lips are ever tingling with the memory of that electrical almost-kiss.
It is just having a friend, I suppose. I have never had a proper one before (yourself excluded), and I’d no idea it would feel like this.
She has become so dear to me that when she leaves I sometimes feel I will cease to exist. When other young ladies monopolize her at parties (which they do, of course, for she is clever and pretty and kind), I find myself scowling at them.
I declare it is even affecting my bookkeeping.
I have three tubes less of blue serum and two less of red than I expected.
No great surprise when I spend more time imagining saving her from a fire than I do on taking inventory.
I keep waiting for her to tire of my nonsense, but remarkably she has not.
Indeed just last night she threw an arm about my shoulders and said, “Mary, you are my best friend in the world, you know, but if you do not hurry up with that sodium solution, I shall wallop you.” I blushed and stammered and dropped the saline so we had to start all over.
I suppose it is not me, so much as my lab, and the chance to use it for something that matters. She never looks so alive as she does when we are huddled up there together.
I am not at all sure that my own feelings are so simple.
You know, there is a passage in Fanny Hill where two young ladies X?X?X?X?X?X? X?X? X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X? X?X?X? X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X?X? X? X?X?X?X?X? X?X?
No. That is absurd. It is friendship, that is all. And Papa ought never to have kept Fanny Hill where an impressionable young girl might read it. I believe Quindley would go into apoplexy.
It only stands to reason, I suppose—I have always been excessive, so of course my friendship would burn as hot as the rest of me.
Still, I must strive to control it. I mustn’t let her see how often I think of her.
She would be frightened away, and I mustn’t frighten her away.
I need her. Not merely to satisfy the howling maw that is my affection, but because she was right. Pike is getting worse.
He runs out of serum much more quickly these days. The effectiveness is collapsing toward zero, as Georgiana predicted. Even at the height of its effectiveness, there have been incidents, such as that of my uncle’s house.
Uncle Phillips was Pike’s master in the old days, you will recall.
He treats Pike now as an old friend, almost a son; he seems to believe that Pike regards him in the same light, and he is very familiar and fond whenever they meet.
Pike is by no means as warm in his affections, but he is polite enough to both my aunt and uncle.
Some part of him, perhaps, feels differently.
One night while Georgiana and I were working we heard the clang of bells off in Meryton.
Cariad, too, was agitated, shrieking about the room before settling on my shoulder.
There was a smell of smoke in the air. Looking out the window toward Meryton, we could just see an orange glow in the distance.
“It will be the Longs, I suppose,” I said. “They never get their chimneys cleaned properly, and it has been colder lately.”
But it was not the Longs, nor their chimneys.
Half an hour later my aunt’s carriage pulled up outside Longbourn.
She soon had the house in an uproar. Disheveled, hairpiece askew, smelling of smoke, she had mild hysterics on her sister’s shoulder as my mother, unused to being the one comforting hysterics instead of having them, patted her hopelessly, and Georgiana and I looked on.
“It was some brigand,” my aunt said. “Mr. Phillips said the house will be all right, for I happened to be awake, and I saw the villain take a torch to our back door, and I shrieked and frightened him away, but the front of the house is horribly singed, and the parlor is all over soot, and all the furniture quite ruined.”
“A brigand!” said Mamma. “Why on earth would a brigand want to burn down your house?”
“There’s many who dislike a keen man of business.” Aunt sniffed. “Or perhaps it is one of my old swains. I’d many, you know. No doubt they still pine.”
“You did?” asked Mamma with interest. “I’d no idea you ever had more than one! Who were they?”
My aunt glared at her and asked if we were going to offer her a place to sleep, or if she would have to go home and sleep in the embers. Mamma made up Lydia and Kitty’s old room for her.
A few days later we saw Pike at a ball. He looked a bit shaken, but his manners were still good, and his bow was very smooth when he asked Georgiana for a dance.
“Thank you, but—” she began. I stepped on her foot.
“She would adore to,” I said.
“Why must I dance with him?” she hissed at me after he’d moved away.
“You can talk to him on the floor,” I pointed out. “He’s engaged you for a waltz. Find out what he knows.”
“Why not you?”
I laughed. “You are the jewel of Meryton these days. It would cause comment if he asked me before you.”
“Stuff,” she said. “You are much prettier than I am.”
I did not know what to say to that and merely wandered about arm in arm with her until Pike came to collect her.
I watched them whirl about the dance floor, deep in conversation. When he returned Georgiana to me she looked grim.
“He says it was most likely his doing,” she said. “He woke with no memory of what happened, but his clothes smelled of smoke.”
“Oh dear,” I said. “I suppose we’d better augment the dose again.”
“Yes, that’s what he requested,” she said. “Specifically the red and black portions of it. Don’t you think that’s a bit odd?”
“What?”
“He wants more red and black. The serums you believe make him more aggressive.”
“He believes otherwise.”
“Well, Pike claims he has no memory of the event, and no idea why he chose your uncle’s house. But he had to walk by half a dozen other houses to get to it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean this seems less like a random act of madness than calculated revenge. And if he really was out of his senses, he ought to be glad of any medicine you care to provide that will keep him in them.”
I watched Pike across the room, bowing to Uncle Phillips. He said something, and my uncle laughed and clapped him on the shoulder.
“He’s not like that anymore,” I said. “Not when he’s in his right senses.”
“And what if you’re wrong? What if he is ‘like that’?”
She was gripping my arm. I turned my eyes to hers and forgot what we had been talking of. Her face was much closer than I expected. My stomach swooped as though I’d just leapt from the hayloft.
Why is this happening to me? Is not Pike enough for one girl to deal with?
I cleared my throat. “If I am wrong,” I said, “all the more reason to advance our project.”
Harry, if your spirit would care to visit me in a dream with any advice on how to make my friendship more calm and proportionate, I would be most grateful.