OXFORD, JUNE 1884
Grace had worked all week on the interferometer. Term would end on the fourteenth of June – tomorrow – and then it would be too late. Accurate measurements would be impossible in London, where there were trains above and below ground and building work everywhere. That was why the American’s experiment had gone wrong. He had been in the cellar of a naval academy with five hundred men running drills above his head. But she was hopeful now. She had done everything properly: re-run the original calculations, found the errors, corrected them. As she had taken the last of her notes from the last of her stack of reading, she started to feel a bubble of lightness coming up through her ribs. It had been very fragile at first, but she thought now it was made of something stronger than suds. The new experiment would work. She would still have to go back to London for a little while, but not for ever. Once the paper was published, the college would have her back.
She had set up in Lady Margaret Hall’s deep, silent cellar, where everyone left her alone. Mostly alone. Matsumoto called every day at three o’clock to make sure that she hadn’t blown herself up. She had tried to explain that she hadn’t got any explosives and therefore couldn’t explode, but he only said it was dangerous to imagine she wouldn’t find a way.
It was nearly three o’clock now. Having balanced the last mirror on the interferometer, she straightened up. In the way things do after a long period of concentration, the room looked inexplicably different. It was bigger, and fuller. Along the back wall was the college’s infant wine collection. Everything else was hers. She had set up a trestle bench, scattered with bits of mirror and several hacksaws. Next to that was the font she had borrowed from New College chapel. Sitting within it was a flat plane of wood, on which sat the four arms of the interferometer in a cross shape. Although one could still do proper science with a magnet and some iron filings, it felt professional to have made something that looked like a mutated windmill. Science had to have some mystery, otherwise everyone would find out how simple it was.
The can cut into her forearm as she poured the first of the mercury into the font. It glimmered and swam. When she poured in the second can, the mercury already in the font jumped and splashed, but nothing like as much as water. It was too heavy. She moved the can around, making shapes in the surface, which dented under the new weight pouring in.
A cane tapped on the door.
‘Coming in, Carrow,’ Matsumoto called. ‘Anything nasty I should know about?’
‘Yes, stay back a bit. You shouldn’t breathe in these fumes.’
He pushed the door open with the handle of his cane. ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’
‘It’s mercury.’
‘I can see it’s mercury, Carrow, the question is why is there mercury in this otherwise delightful cellar?’
‘Wait, last one,’ Grace said. She was breathless now. The mercury cans weren’t big, but they were so heavy that they might have been steel all the way through. ‘It deadens vibrations. It’s heavier than water.’
‘I’ve brought some friends. I thought it might do you good to see other humans.’
‘What?’ Grace put down the empty can and straightened up to find that six of Matsumoto’s minions were already halfway down the steps. They were all dressed in close-cut jackets and silk ties that rippled with magnificent petroleum colours. When they came into the lamplight, they made polite, appreciative noises at the cluttered room. One came across to her and bowed too formally.
‘Albert Grey. I think we might have met once, but I may have been preoccupied at the time.’
He meant he had been unable to tear himself away from his Ancient Greek. Grace shook his hand carefully, her fingers stiff from lifting the heavy cans. ‘Sorry about the fumes.’
He glanced at his palm and rubbed it against his trousers. ‘What’s all this machinery, then? Some kind of wonderful alchemy?’
‘N–o, it measures light.’ She heard a clink and had to jerk past Grey to take one of the mirrors from somebody else. ‘Don’t touch anything, please.’
‘Physics a rather analytical pursuit for a woman, don’t you think?’ Grey said, dipping his finger into the mercury pool.
‘Oh, don’t be such an ass,’ Matsumoto snapped, just as Grace opened her mouth to defend herself. ‘We all know you fancy yourself a bit of an enlightenment man, but face facts, for God’s sake. You’ve got the analytical capacity of a dead rabbit. No need to bad-mouth real scientists to cover it up.’
There was a small, shocked silence. Matsumoto never lost his temper with anyone. Grey looked across at him with the startled eyes of a suddenly rebuked child.
‘You should all leave,’ Grace said at last. ‘These fumes are poisonous if you breathe them for too long.’
But Grey, anxious now, tried a false little laugh. ‘Only poison? Matsumoto here was telling us about explosives. Apparently you nearly blew up the college once. Are you certain you aren’t behind the Whitehall bombing?’
‘The what?’
Matsumoto’s eyes widened. ‘Carrow. I’ve been bringing you a newspaper every day.’
‘I’ve been … meaning to read them later.’
‘The bomb at Whitehall? Destroyed Scotland Yard? Fenians?’
‘Oh, Christ – were they all killed? The police I mean?’
‘No, they were all out.’
‘Then why is it important?’
‘Can you hear yourself, I wonder?’
Grace heard a small splash and spun around. ‘Get your fingers out of my bloody mercury, Grey! Matsumoto, if I wanted to speak to humans, I would go upstairs and eat in hall. Everyone get out. I said not to touch it,’ she said, and smacked Grey’s hand with a steel ruler, hard. He gasped and snatched it back.
‘All right, I’ll see you all at dinner,’ Matsumoto said. He herded them back toward the steps. They went in a quiet cluster, Grey last. He caught the arms of two others when he reached the top. Men in Oxford seemed to occur in chains, like conspiratorial atoms. She wished it would stop. A gale of laughter came down the stairs, and she knew that the joke had been about her.
‘You didn’t really think I’d be overjoyed about having them climb all over my experiment?’ she said to Matsumoto. ‘My very important experiment, which has taken a week to build?’
‘No, but medicine never tastes good.’ He sighed and came to look at the mercury. Compared to the others, he had a quiet, unpretentious way of standing, but just at that moment, Grace resented it. He enjoyed his own ease.
‘Being solitary isn’t a disease that needs a cure—’
‘Invariably a claim made by the imminently hysterical. The man who looked after me when I was small spent all his time alone and became quite psychotic before long. Anyway, this mercury no doubt has some kind of purpose veiled to the unscientific. Is it dangerous? This isn’t going to be like the magnesium thing again, is it?’
‘It isn’t explosive,’ she said, for the fourth time that week. ‘And the crater wasn’t that bad, and your eyebrows were perfectly all right.’
‘I think you’ll find the crater is still perceptible in the lawn, despite the valiant efforts of the gardener.’ He looked up. ‘You know I hope you haven’t gone around involving the other girls in all this chemistry stuff.’
‘Why, because they’d burn off people’s eyebrows?’
‘No, because then they would know how to make bombs, and what would happen if you gave someone like Bertha a bomb?’
Grace paused. ‘She does classics. And the others are biologists, which means they spend all day with yeast and … ooze.’
‘All right, what is all this, if not lethal?’
‘It is an interferometer.’ She even liked saying the word. She gave it a gentle push and it spun slowly on the mercury, mirrors winking. ‘It measures the speed of light as it passes through ether.’
‘Ether is like air to sound. Light has to … move through something.’
‘You remembered,’ she said, surprised.
‘I do sometimes remember science by accident,’ he sighed. ‘What’s the point?’
‘The point,’ said Grace, ‘is to prove the existence of the ether. Usually, ether just sits – it permeates everything. It’s very fine: imagine something that makes grains of icing sugar look like boulders. But the earth is moving through it, which drags it, so you get what’s called ether wind, or ether drag. That’s very useful, because we can measure it. If you can show ether has a flow, you show it exists in the first place.’
‘How, I ask dutifully?’
‘With light. It’s the only substance affected purely by ether and not by air. The device has four arms, as you see, and mirrors at the end of each arm in order to reflect light back and forth. The light that moves in the direction of the ether flow will go quicker than the light that moves horizontally across it. Just like a boat following the current of a river will go faster than one crossing it. This mirror here puts the two light beams together again and feeds them into this telescope, which is casting what are called light fringes on this piece of paper. They look like coloured lines as the waves overlap. If the light is moving through ether, the lines won’t match up properly. If it isn’t, they’ll be very clear.’
‘I see. And why is that useful to know?’
‘Any of number of reasons,’ Grace said, ignoring his expression. ‘If we can prove ether, it could explain a great deal. Ether penetrates everything, including vacuums, including the human brain, so the impulses there assuredly affect it.’
‘Thinking is a physical process, Matsumoto, it’s electricity flashing and chemicals moving, it’s not magic. Moving things push ether about.’
He looked put out. ‘Electricity.’
‘Yes. Anyway?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Anyway,’ she repeated, ‘ether could explain how real mediums work, and how ghosts could exist, generally how thought has physical effects beyond the cranium. If you could study ether, you would be halfway to understanding what happens to your consciousness after you die.’
‘Oh,’ said Matsumoto, sounding more interested. ‘What happens now, then?’
‘Now, I have to turn off all the lights, and turn on the sodium lamps here to tune it, and make some observations.’
‘It’s already boring,’ he said, but he helped her turn off the lamps on the desk until only one was left. She used it to find the switches for the interferometer’s powerful sodium lamps, then blew it out too.
‘I’m going to make sure the arms are exactly the same length. Look at that piece of paper by the telescope.’
‘Look for what?’
Grace tweaked one of the arms. ‘Can you see dark stripes on it now?’
Matsumoto looked startled. ‘Yes.’
‘Those are the light fringes I was telling you about. Tell me when they sharpen.’
‘How sharp?’
‘As if you’d drawn them with a pen.’
‘Now,’ he said after a moment.
Grace checked. ‘Good. Right, now we’ll use white light.’ She relit her lamp and turned off the sodium lamp.
‘What? What the devil difference does it make?’
‘White light splits into colours. It’s easier to count the lines because the colours will change as they radiate outward. You get lost if you try counting only in grey.’
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, sounding unsettled.
‘Something wrong?’
‘No. This is all very bizarre. I feel rather as though God has put some malicious booby traps into everyday objects.’
Grace laughed. ‘They’re not malicious, they’re rainbows. Right, we’ll start. We’re hoping for little lines to start appearing between these strong ones. It should make them look fuzzy.’
She put the sodium lamp on to the edge of the turnstile so that it glowed towards the central mirror. On the piece of paper, the dark stripes turned coloured, except for one black line in the middle.
‘They still look pretty sharp to me,’ Matsumoto said. He jumped when a small camera attached to the telescope took a picture of the lines. Grace had rigged the shutter to snap every five seconds after the light was turned on.
‘Hm.’ She turned the interferometer in the mercury. The lines winked out until the light aligned through the telescope again. They were exactly the same as before. They remained exactly the same through three hundred and sixty degrees, and then again when she tried in the opposite direction. She had expected only faint interference lines, hence photographs that could be accurately examined and measured, but they should have been visible to the naked eye. A nasty weight settled in her stomach.
‘I’ve done something wrong,’ she said.
Matsumoto took the lamp off the turnstile. ‘Enough for now, the mercury is making me dizzy. Would it be stupid to say that perhaps there is no such thing as ether?’
‘It’s there, we know it is. All modern mathematical models of the universe predict it.’
‘Enough for now,’ he repeated, and tugged her away. Once they were at the top of the cellar steps, he patted her arm.
‘No, no, I need to try it again, I’ll have just misaligned something, or—’
‘Fresh eyes. You’ll have them in ten minutes. Come along.’
After the gloom of the cellar, the daylight looked too yellow. It was lancing in through the open door in perfectly straight lines. Light travels in straight lines, but is a wave. Not for the first time, her brain bumped against the question of what, exactly, was doing the waving. It was a tired, stale question.
‘I don’t want to be out for long,’ she said. ‘I won’t have access to a laboratory after tomorrow.’
‘Why?’
‘Term ends. I’m going home.’
‘I thought that horrible aunt of yours left you her house in Kensington? Set up there.’
‘It was left as part of my dowry.’
‘So marry some poor bastard and then boot him out. Didn’t somebody pass a law recently saying that what’s yours is yours, regardless of passing menfolk? The Bertha crew were rather jubilant for a while, I recall.’
‘Y–es, but it’s not mine. My aunt didn’t settle it on me, she settled it on my father, for me. He thinks anyone related to my mother must be just like her and therefore wouldn’t trust me to efficiently manage pencil shavings. It will never be in my name. When I marry it will be my husband’s, in the good old-fashioned way. Which would mean I’d have to find a husband who didn’t mind ether experiments in the cellar. Which I think is unlikely. Unless you’re willing. There’s a house in Kensington in it for you.’
He laughed. ‘I’d be delighted to, but unfortunately an English bride would cause a horrible scandal. The English are too ugly.’
Grace cleared her throat. ‘Charming.’
‘Have you seen Japanese women? Such delicate creatures. Anyone meeting an Englishwoman in Kyoto could be forgiven for thinking he had run into some sort of troll. Oh, speaking of trolls. Are you going to the Foreign Office ball tomorrow? Your father’s friends with the minister, isn’t he?’
‘Yes. That’s why I can’t stay here a few days longer. Are you?’
‘The ambassador invited me. You’ll like him. He’s just like me.’
‘Well, if you hear I’ve shot myself beforehand, you’ll know why.’
Grace pushed her hands into her pockets as they began their usual walk around the edge of the lawn. She had to duck an overhanging rose. Everything was left semi-wild here. Even the college looked as though it might have grown. She glanced back – the Virginia creeper across the wall had finally turned red, nearly purple at the bottom, where it blended into lavender bushes. It would all be glorious for a fortnight, then become a mess of bare stalks for the autumn.
She had once met a scientist who worked in more or less the same area she did, one Oliver Lodge of the University of Liverpool. He lectured on ether, and on electricity. She had gone up to Liverpool last year to hear him. He had explained how the electrification of particles, including water particles, would make them coalesce; he had even manufactured a fine rain in the lecture theatre. It was fascinating stuff, and if it was developed properly it would have applications in weather control and in the search for ether, which was only extremely rarefied particles. But she had a feeling that Lodge was one of a kind, and he was already married. What was left, down that road, was to find someone willing to make a bargain, house for laboratory, but since she was neither charming nor personable, she couldn’t imagine how she would go about anything like that.
What she could imagine were two paths. Down one, she found some stupid mistake in the experiment and mended it, and wrote a decent paper, and secured a teaching position; down the other, there was no mistake, and it was all wrong, and perhaps, if she was lucky, she would be able to teach schoolgirls how to make little magnesium fireworks between their literature lessons and sketching. She didn’t much like moments when things split so clearly. It was much better to be able to think that anything could happen, even if it couldn’t. Seeing it made her feel claustrophobic, though dark cellars didn’t.
‘Where will you go once term ends?’ she asked.
‘Japan. I shall take a leisurely route through Europe, though. No rush.’
Grace frowned. ‘So is that it, after London? You’re going home from there? You didn’t say.’
‘You didn’t ask.’
‘Withholding basic information until someone asks is a bit vain, don’t you think?’
He lifted his eyebrow. ‘And making a point of not asking is … ?’
‘Whatever I do, you’ll construe it as an infatuation,’ she said irritably, though it was just his usual teasing. But her temper was ragged from the heat and the experiment, and sometimes, there was an edge to his playfulness.
‘You were the one who asked me to marry you a moment ago.’
‘For God’s sake, Matsumoto, what is this, Camelot? Marriage and love are not the same thing. In fact, they tend quickly to become mutually exclusive.’
‘You used to take my arm,’ he said.
She stiffened. ‘What?’
‘And then you stopped,’ he said, without bothering to repeat himself. ‘I am flattered, but I hope it won’t make things difficult. It has been splendid knowing you, but I’m afraid my family simply would not approve.’
She had stopped six months ago, when she caught herself thinking how charming he was. It was bizarrely difficult to keep resisting somebody who, although not naturally striking in any way, behaved as if he were Adonis. ‘Nor would mine. I stopped taking your arm when you started wearing that god-awful cologne.’
‘I see,’ he said. He didn’t sound convinced. ‘In that case, I do apologise.’
‘Good. Listen, I’m going inside, I’ve got to see if those mirrors were misaligned, I’ve still got nearly an entire day before I must be in London.’
‘I’ll see you in London, then?’
‘Perhaps, but if you call at the house, do use the back door; the servants will laugh if you try the front.’
As she turned away, she saw him frown. She didn’t stop. She had always known that he strove for regard so that he could laugh at it, but she didn’t think she had known him to be spiteful before. It clanged around inside her head and made her wonder if he had been laughing at her all along.