In the dingy, mold-stinking room over the livery, Pascal Levesque looks up, peering out of his one skewed and splintery window. It’s almost full dark. The rain is coming down, as it’s been for weeks, a thin mizzling sop that permeates everything. He feels damp all the time, even when he’s technically dry. Pascal is always cold, always hungry these days, not only from the meager rations he’s kept on but perhaps because he’s burning so much of his energy merely by shivering. He’s never been a large man, but he’s alarmingly thin now. On top of the hunger, the ache in his hand has become a hot burn, and he fears that it’s not only the wet and the cold that are making him shiver now.
He fights the urge to pick at the soiled bandage, which covers the place where he’d once had an index finger. Only a stump remains now, extending to just under the second knuckle; Pascal is thankful that Lyman has left him that much, this time. The little finger on his right hand was taken entirely, down to the palm, two months ago.
He looks out the window again, but can see nothing, just the dark and the steady drip of water from the eave. There’s a gassy, grassy stink from the horses below him, the smell of wet hay and damp shit but, aside from that, he could be anywhere, trapped in yet another of the cold, dingy rooms Lyman finds for him in one town or the next, since Pascal had lost the finger on the right hand for his own recalcitrance and been separated from Mercy and the others. Whether to keep his disobedience from inflaming the rest or only as another punishment, he’s not sure. Likely for both reasons, really.
The rooms are always the same. The doors, which lock from the outside. The poor food: thin soups and stale bread, stringy meat when he’s lucky. Water that is none too clean, a compensatory bottle of cheap liquor from time to time. No company but his own, or Lyman’s, which is worse than being alone. When they’re on the road, he’s kept in a locked coach, which has been kitted out as a sort of mobile prison. Like he is some beast in a traveling circus. Which, in some ways, he supposes he is. A clever ape called upon to dance to his master’s tune. Comme il est devenu tellement ridicule.
Sometimes Pascal fantasizes that the rooms are all in fact the same one, that he’s not moving at all, just stepping back out of the coach after bouncing around in a long circle, returning whence he came. Over and over and over.
He doesn’t know where Mercy is, exactly, where the others are, but he knows they’re close. Pascal knows he’s kept nearby, near enough for Lyman’s convenience, far enough for Lyman to keep him on this leash. Keep him cowed, still this new disobedience before it becomes a tasteless habit. Two fingers gone. Perhaps this is enough, yes? Please, Pascal. It pains me to have to do this. It pains me, Lyman had said, each time. Don’t make me do this. But still, the shears had closed and Pascal tried, unsuccessfully, to bite back the screams. And now we must show the others, Lyman had said with a sigh, his plummy, affected accent so mournful. We must show them.
Pascal picks at his bandage again, smiling to himself. It had been a gamble, this second finger, but he’d guessed correctly. Hadn’t he? To Lyman, what is a punishment, but a teaching moment? It was laughable, really: only a self-absorbed fool like Lyman could have ever believed that he, Pascal Levesque, would actually try to escape, in earnest. Leave Mercy, for whom he’d already lost one finger? Of course not. Jamais. But, perhaps, such things are simply unfathomable to a man like Lyman Rhoades.
And so, Pascal had transgressed again and a demonstration had been required. A lesson. A message sent to Alexander and Mercy and the rest, reiterating, once more, just who is in charge of the medicine show, and all in it.
And, of course, another message, unknown to Lyman. Along with it, one small bottle on which his hopes now rest.
Pascal smiles again, riding the swelling burn of his growing fever. He thinks it will be enough. If not, well, he has more fingers, after all.
He wakes from the dream, the one of home. The same one, always. He wakes and, in the dream-dark night, wishes again, only the one simple thing: that he’d never gone north to Paris, those years long ago. Full of himself, ready to make his name. Lavoisier, Gay-Lussac, Laurent, Levesque. The hot, swollen pride of youth, the dreams of imminent glory. Now, though, in this stinking, shivery room, Pascal dreams only of his childhood home: the touch of the hot, dusty mistral on sweating skin, the warm dry perfume of lavender, the humming of the bees. If there is a more perfect place in this world, he has not found it but, like all perfect things, he’d recognized its perfection only when it had passed from him. The quiet south should have been enough. He should have found a plump, pretty wife with a comfortable competence to add to his own, should have settled on becoming just another provincial doctor who dabbled in chemistry. A gentleman scientist from the long French tradition thereof. Had he never gone to Paris, he would not be here in this wretched room, now, mooning about the lost past, wrapped up in the same useless, bitter dream.
Never this, never that, he thinks. Never, never, never. Putain de merde, always never. These are stupid thoughts from a stupid old man. Thoughts will get him nowhere, and crying about it is so much wasted time.
Angrily, he swipes the back of his wrist across his watering eyes, sits up, cradling his wounded hand. It will all be paid back soon enough. Pascal lights the lantern, looks at the bottles and jars on the cockeyed little table in the corner of the room, the small retort and gas burner he’s been given. The notebook, open to a page of figures and symbols. His work, such as it is, that to which he has been put. What does Rhoades think he can accomplish here? In a wretched succession of rooms, with a few basic chemicals, some battered instruments. A book or two. Pascal knows that he is no Lavoisier, regardless of the dreams he had in his youth. And Lavoisier himself wasn’t working from a chipped and wobbling table above horse stalls, with no more equipment than that of a small-town apothecary.
Soon enough, though, there will be no more need to curse Rhoades, curse this place, the wet and the cold and the rest of it. No need for ludicrous experiments that make no sense. No more missing fingers, no more worries about Mercy’s safety. Two nights more, he hopes, and they will be free. Pascal will take Mercy and disappear, then; it is all in motion now. It must be. They’ll ride to San Francisco and a ship and, after a few months, will be back to where they belong, back to that perfect place. There’s a spacious house in Vaison-la-Romaine waiting for them, the very one in which he had been born, all those years ago. They’ll have picnics at the little bastide near Séguret that was built by his grandfather; they’ll eat fresh bread and heavy, creamy cheese, dry salami and wine that tastes like summer. Sitting by the stream, listening to the bees, hot southern sun on their faces. He’ll find Mercy a husband, a kind and gentle man, a good provider; soon enough he, Pascal, will be bouncing grandchildren on his knees. He has plenty of money salted away, enough for a simple life. If Mercy wants to sing, she can sing to her children, lift her voice at Mass. It will be a good life, for all of them. It will be enough.
Pascal moves to the rickety wooden chair. Shivering, he wraps a thin, scratchy woolen blanket around his shoulders. It smells like mold and horse sweat; he’s sure he doesn’t smell much better. Two days more, though, that’s all. Two nights.
He scratches his fingers through his greasy hair, hissing as he inadvertently rubs the end of his stump, sending a hot knife of pain up to his elbow. For a moment he’s nauseated; he takes a swig from the almost-empty bottle of whiskey on the table, trying to keep his guts down. Look at him, drinking this filth. In France, he drank good wine and better brandy. He wouldn’t have used the contents of this bottle to clean paintbrushes, much less washed his belly with it. Look at him. How has his life come to this? He takes another drink.
But soon, soon, soon. Soon they will be free.
Pascal thinks of Alexander.
He, himself, has done his own part, and now Alexander must do his. There is no guarantee, but Pascal has faith in Dr Potter. Alexander is afraid, of course, and for good reason, but sometimes all a man needs is a push. Sometimes a man needs that. Pascal looks down at his hand, fussing at the bandage again, and then reaches over and carefully picks up the little sprig of flower that he’d saved, left over from the bundle he’d managed to collect on one of the very rare, supervised, constitutionals that Lyman has allowed him since taking him away from the others. A sign from God, perhaps, stumbling over them like that, on the path outside whatever little town that had been. Just flowers, Monsieur Rhoades, he’d said when Lyman, walking beside him, had asked. Only flowers. A bit of color for my room. Lyman had merely grunted, continuing on with his blather about essential spirits.
Only flowers, nothing more. Just lovely blue blossoms. Aconitum columbianum, common western monkshood, among other names. Wolf’s bane, devil’s helmet. But they are les fleurs du mal, the aconitums. The Queen of Poisons, another of their vulgar names.
Lyman Rhoades, the supposed man of science, the learned, is no naturalist, or he would realize that he had signed his own death warrant the moment he’d let Pascal botanize, that day.
If all went as planned with Alexander, of course. There are so many, many things that can go wrong, still, and neither of them is foolish enough to underestimate Lyman. It’s a fair chance Pascal has fashioned, a good one, maybe, nothing more than that. Pascal tells himself this, tells himself again that he shouldn’t raise false hopes. But still, but still.
Better to fail in this attempt than make no attempt at all.