Charles Sheffield - The Amazing Dr. Darwin

“True enough.” Darwin pouted his full lips. “So, we have a mystery.”

He seemed ready to settle back into brooding silence, but Solborne would not allow it. He took the sheet from Darwin and returned it to his jacket pocket.

“A mystery, perhaps, but not the mystery. I would not travel so far afield, in winter, merely for the sake of some calculating device. My concern is with Helen, and Professor Riker. I already told you that I did not care for him, and I requested to Helen that his stay at Newlands not be an extended one. He and his machine departed three days after their arrival, during which time he offered me numerous demonstrations of the engine’s power. Then he left—but he did not go far. He rented a small house along the cliff, less than half a mile from Newlands, where he lives alone. And from that day forward, I saw the decline in Helen.”

“Melancholic?”

“Not at all. I saw—and see—physical decline. She has been losing weight, steadily. She was always fair, but now her skin seems almost translucent. Her eyes are set deeper in her head, and the skin beneath them appears to be almost purple, as though bruised.”

“And her manner?”

“Febrile, intense, yet cheerful. She seems distant from me, in a way that I have never before experienced. When I ask concerning her health, she says only that she is feeling tired, and does not seem able to get enough sleep. That is certainly true. She will nod off during dinner, or as soon as she sits down in a chair. I wonder what is happening.”

It was Darwin’s turn to hesitate. “Mr. Solborne,” he said at last. “It pains me to suggest this, but I assume that the obvious explanation has occurred to you?”

“That Helen and Riker are romantically engaged, and she spends her nights with him? Of course. It is not the case.”

“How do you know?”

“By taking an action that was not strictly honorable. As I told you, the main body of Newlands, including parlors, guest bedrooms, living room, dining rooms, and servants’ quarters, is of brick. However, there are two towers of stone, one to the north and one to the south side, rising from the main house. I have a suite of rooms, including my bedroom and study, in the north tower. Helen occupies the southern one, with her bedroom and parlor and sewing room. There are two entrances to each tower. One leads through to the main body of the house; the other, seldom used and originally built I suspect for use only in case of fire, leads directly outside, onto a path that runs along the cliff. It runs, in fact, to and past the house rented by Anton Riker. Suspecting Helen’s actions, I did two things. First, I placed locks on the outside of the tower doors. No one could then enter or leave Newlands without passing through the main body of the house. The only window in the south tower that can be opened wide enough to admit a person is near the top, overlooking a forty-foot sheer drop to stony ground.

“Second, I moved Joan Rowland, one of the servants who happens to be an unusually light sleeper, to a bedroom next to the inner door of the south tower. She was instructed to tell me if she heard any comings and goings at night.”

“And did she?”

“Not a one. She said that she heard Helen—or someone—moving around in the tower, often late at night when the rest of the house was asleep. But Helen never left her own quarters.”

“A necessary condition for chastity, but not a sufficient one.” Darwin stirred in his chair. “Mr. Solborne, when I was a student at Cambridge, it constantly baffled me that there was a rule forbidding the presence of ladies in college at night, while open access was permitted to any woman during the day. An odd assumption seemed at work: that improprieties take place only at night. What of your sister’s movements during the daylight hours?”

“Dr. Darwin, Jacob Pole warned me of your prescience. You are a mind reader.”

“Not at all. I merely seek to close logical loopholes. During the day?”

“At close of day, which in this season means between four and five o’clock, Helen leaves Newlands and walks south along the cliff.”

“To the house rented by Professor Riker?”

“That was my original assumption, that there was some sort of assignation involved. But it is not the case. As she walks south, he walks north along the shingled cliff to meet her. They stand in full view and talk to each other for five or ten minutes as darkness approaches. They just talk. They do not touch. Before it is fully dark, they part, and she returns home.”

“You have been spying on them?”

“I am very worried about my sister. Daily she has grown more pale and tense, more wan and bloodless.”

“And now we have one more mystery to consider. Timing.” Darwin did not elaborate, but leaned forward in his seat and thoughtfully cut a wedge of Stilton. The room fell silent, except for the sound of steady munching and the wheeze of James Watt’s asthmatic breathing.

“You seem to anticipate everything else.” Solborne finally broke the silence. “So perhaps you have some notion of my real concern—the one I find so improbable that I am reluctant to voice it. The fear that brought me to you.”

“Surely.” Darwin licked his fingers. “All the components are present, are they not? Put aside, for the moment, the question of the calculating engine. Then we have a young woman who encounters a mysterious man from the Continent, perhaps from the central regions of Europe. Rapidly she comes under his sway. They meet every day, but only when the sun has gone from the sky. Access to her quarters cannot be obtained at night except through a high window set in a vertical wall, inaccessible to mortal man. She never goes out after dark, yet every day she becomes weaker, until she is as pale as though the blood itself were draining from her veins. Every day her intensity of manner increases, but so does her indifference to ordinary events. To anyone with a knowledge of European folklore, especially Slavonic traditions, a possible inference is clear.”

“I know. I have seen no puncture wounds on her skin, but Professor Riker is a—”

“An inference that is clear, yet is also total nonsense. Life on Earth admits a huge variety of forms, but everywhere there is a logic, whereby form follows function. I can no more believe in Das Wampyr than I can believe in Sinbad’s roc, a bird so large that it feeds on elephants. By the simple law of proportions, such a creature could never lift itself from the ground. And such a being as Nosferatu , the vampire, hated by all men but totally helpless during the daytime, could never survive the centuries.”

“But if Riker is not that—that thing —then what is he? And if not he, then what is doing this to my sister?”

“I do not know.” Darwin placed his hands over his paunch. The fatigue of the late afternoon had vanished and again he was eyeing the dish of smoked eels. “At this moment, I honestly do not know. But I assure you, Thomas Solborne, that we will find out.”

* * * My dear Erasmus, I told you, did I not, that I was the wrong man for your job? And pox on it, I was right. Tom Solborne hasn’t said one word, but I’m sure he thinks I’m about as much use here as tits on a bull…

Alone in the coach, Darwin tapped Jacob Pole’s letter on his knee, leaned back, and allowed himself to rock back and forward with the sway of the steady movement.

The problem was, Jacob was right. He wasn’t the first choice—or even the second. But what option had offered itself? Solborne had arrived at the height of the season for winter ailments, when Darwin’s locum tenens was already pressed into service elsewhere. Jimmy Watt was deep in the wreckage of his engine, in that mood of solitary thought that made him seem scarcely human. Transported to Dorset, he would see only steam. As for Matthew Boulton, he ran the great Soho factory under his own absolute control and he could not be spared for a day, still less a week.