The upper floors of the town house overlooking Holland Park were almost completely dark, because the windows were shuttered in the continental style and all the shutters had been closed. Chinks of white gaslight showed through the wooden slats in one of the ground-floor rooms—Sir Julian Templeforth’s study—and it was just possible to glimpse the ruddy glow of firelight in the master bedroom, which was doubtless being made comfortable in advance of the baronet’s retirement. The unshuttered windows of the servants’ quarters in the basement were, by contrast, all aglow with yellow candlelight; the staff still had two hours of the working day ahead of them.
Mathieu Galmier paused outside the railings of the house, no longer certain of what it was he wanted to say to the baronet. He had made his resolution before setting forth, complete with supportive arguments: he had to continue, come what may; he had to see it through; he was so close; he could not possibly stop. But now he remembered thinking exactly the same thing last time he had come to beg for money, and since then, the costs of his failure had multiplied, spiraling out of control. It was not so much the material repercussions that he feared, although those might be bad enough, but the costs to his soul, into which remorse and shame had already penetrated deeply.
His hiding place was no longer secure; although the letter that had reached him, asking for a meeting, had promised complete confidentiality, it had been a bombshell. If its writer had been able to locate him, then others could, and surely would, if they had a mind to do so. Unidentifiable threats were lurking in the darkness, perhaps closing in.
And yet, he really did feel that he was so close.
Dare he trust that feeling, which had proved so treacherous before, or should he be finally be prepared to admit that it was reckless egotism, verging on madness, and already over the line of criminality?
He actually turned around, but stopped dead. That would be to accept defeat. If he had been going to accept defeat, he should never have sent the note to Sir Julian asking to see him before tomorrow’s treatment. The one thing he must not do, whatever the final outcome might be, was show weakness to the baronet, whose wrath was only barely contained as things were. If it were to burst forth…the man was capable of anything.
He took off his hat before he rang the bell at the gate, acutely conscious of the fact that a Frenchman—even a physician once attached to the famous Pasteur Institut—was expected to be humble in this part of London, even before lackeys. It was a long time since Britain and France had last been formally at war, but no one in the British Isles had forgotten the name of Waterloo, and those who read the newspapers knew that any vestiges of French dignity that had survived Bonaparte’s fall had been shattered and ground into the dust at Sedan, less than twenty years ago.
The porter, Reilly, scowled at Mathieu as he opened the gate for him, and did not trouble to accompany him to the perron, to which Sir Julian always referred as “the front steps”. Cormack, the butler who answered the door in response to the second bell, was too haughty to scowl, but that did not mean that he looked upon his master’s guest with any conspicuous approval. Cormack was duty-bound to accompany Mathieu to the study door and introduce him, once he had collected the visitor’s rain-soaked coat and hat, but he was not required to purge his conscientiously-schooled voice of all disdain, and he took full advantage of that license.
Sir Julian was endeavoring to relax in a leather-upholstered armchair with a glass of hard liquor and a volume from Mudie’s library, but he gave the impression of having a great deal on his mind. He made no show of being glad to see his visitor, but he did not allow any anxiety to become manifest either. He simply got to his feet, smoothed the creases in his blood-red waistcoat and adjusted the ruffed sleeves of his old-fashioned shirt.
“Come in, Doctor,” the baronet said, suppressing a sigh and inviting Mathieu with a casual gesture to take his armchair’s twin, positioned on the other side of the fireplace. “Is there a problem with regard to tomorrow’s appointment?”
Mathieu sat down. His heart was beating rapidly, although he tried with all his might to match Sir Julian’s discipline and conceal his anxiety. That was by no means easy, although he had surely had practice enough concealing it from himself before his conscience had begun to break through the carefully-constructed wall of his scientific objectivity and cultivated inhumanity.
The baronet went to the sideboard, where there was a crystal decanter of whatever he was drinking—probably Irish whiskey—and refilled his glass. Sir Julian invited Mathieu to take a glass by means of a quasi-theatrical gesture, to which Mathieu endeavored to reply in the negative, albeit a trifle tiredly, in kind.
The baronet held up his glass so that the crystal caught the light, in a hand that did not tremble at all; the slight overabundance of its contents might have betrayed something of his concealed alarm Mathieu thought, or might simply be evidence of a habitual overindulgence.
Cormack was waiting by the door for further orders. The baronet waved him away; the butler closed the study door behind him, ostentatiously clicking the catch to emphasize that his master’s privacy was guaranteed.
“Well, spit it out,” Sir Julian said, sitting down again. “What’s wrong now?”
“If fear that there is a problem, Sir Julian,” Mathieu said, hesitantly. “As I warned you at the time, I was unable to retain enough of the agent following the last administration to continue the principal course of the experimental scheme for longer than a few days. Given the desperate need to find a means of reproducing the agent, if the project is not to reach an impasse.…”
“What you mean,” Sir Julian said, cutting him off rudely, “is that you want me to bring you more money tomorrow.”
“I do need more money, Sir Julian,” Mathieu said, still trying not to let his anxiety show, “but…”
“But that’s not all,” the baronet finished for him. “You also need an extra…volunteer. In one sense, that’s less problematic than the money, at present, but in another…well, you know as well as I do that if those purchases go on, people will talk, add things up, and word will get around. The law can’t touch me, or Cormack, but if there’s a scandal…well, this isn’t the way it was supposed to be when we made our deal. This isn’t what you promised.”
Mathieu was very well aware of that, and it frightened him in more ways than one. If the experiment had only gone to plan…but it hadn’t, and now he was counting the cost in more ways than one. If he had been able to back out of his arrangement with Templeforth, he would do have done so before now, but they had both come too far. Sir Julian knew that there was no way for him to go now but forward, and hope that his hireling achieved a complete success, at least with regard to his own treatment, before the situation became critical. And while Sir Julian saw things in that light, he would not tolerate Mathieu seeing them any differently, no matter how great the corollary human costs became. For the baronet, even deaths were simply a cost to be borne, not to be regretted in the slightest, provided that they could be concealed. The minor losses, in his eyes, were trivial…as long as they were not his.
“My promises were reckless, it seems,” Mathieu murmured. “I…”
Templeforth cut him off. “Promises have to be kept,” he said, sternly. “You’ve had considerable success, or else I’d never have brought you out of France and funded your laboratory. I’m the living proof of the accuracy of your theory. The snag is most unfortunate, but as you’ve said yourself, all along, the solution is merely a matter of time and effort. That’s up to you—but you know that tomorrow’s treatment absolutely has to go ahead as planned. There can’t be any delay.”
“I’m not asking for a delay,” Mathieu was quick to put in. “As for time and effort. I’m working as hard as I can, believe me. But we’re both prisoners of the logic of the situation in which we find ourselves. If your need for the agent continues to increase—and I’m fearful that you’ll need increasingly frequent doses to maintain your condition.…”
“Then the supply has to be increased commensurately,” Sir Julian finished for him. “But when will it end?”
“I told you when we began this project that I couldn’t put a firm price on the achievement, nor specify a time-limit,” Mathieu protested, weakly. “Organic chemistry is in its infancy, as is microbiology. Believe me, I’m doing my best—but I’m not a magician. Science can’t be done with a magic wand, even when its effects duplicate those of ancient legend.”
Templeforth scowled. The expression emphasized his nascent wrinkles, but in essence, it simply made him look ugly—the worst imaginable effect, in the circumstances. There were certain effects of circumstances and temperament that the agent could not counter. The baronet was familiar with the effect, and he always tried suppress his surges of ill humor, in order to remain serene and handsome—but his powers of self-control were limited.
“I don’t understand your obsession with inducing the so-called agent to reproduce,” Sir Julian said, when he had regained his impassivity. “The point is to make the effect last, to make it permanent. You should be searching for a medicine that will prevent it from decaying in my body. That’s the key to the problem.”
From your viewpoint, yes, Mathieu thought. But from mine, you’re not the only one who matters. You’re just as much a trial subject as the poor donors.…
“Originally,” he said, babbling slightly. “I thought the extract might function like Jenner’s vaccine, that one dose might confer lasting immunity…and even when the effect proved temporary, I hoped to find a means of stabilizing in vitro, but it seems to me now that the agent is definitely alive, and mortal—in which case, finding a means of reproduction becomes vital to its preservation as well as its multiplication.”
Templeforth waved his hand, airily. “If you say so—but you’d better be right, and you had better deliver the answer soon. If not…” He let the sentence die there, not so much because he wanted it to sound like a threat, although he did, but because he did not want to contemplate the consequences of Mathieu’s ultimate failure. He had too much at stake.
After a brief pause, he went on. “I understand that explorers don’t always find what they’re hoping to find right away, Dr. Galmier, but when they don’t, they have to adapt their plans, or perish. Cormack can get you more raw material easily enough, and I have no alternative but to keep funding the operation, but don’t expect my patience to last forever. East End sluts are cheap enough, and there’s no shortage of supply, but you’re costing me dear in rent, laboratory supplies and living expenses. There’s a limit to the indulgence you can expect in terms of messing about with your damned serums and substrates.”
Sir Julian was now staring at Mathieu in a markedly insistent fashion, as if he were attempting to mesmerize his visitor, or at least to dominate him by the power of his will. The stare was difficult to resist, even though it had no occult force. Mathieu had to admit that the baronet presently had the appearance of an idealized natural aristocrat, possessed of an innate right to rule. Sir Julian’s title was meager, but his bearing was not; he gave the impression, for the moment, of being a seventeenth-century Cavalier displaced into the nineteenth century by some freak of time, reminiscent of a lush Dutch portrait of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, and he seemed genuinely to believe that if he only handed out his orders firmly enough, they would simply be obeyed, without regard to the limits of possibility.
Sir Julian Templeforth was a handsome man nowadays, Mathieu thought, proudly. There was nothing in the least unmasculine about him—indeed, he had an exceptionally robust and virile frame—but only a few days ago his face had had a particular perfection of form and complexion that was rarely seen in a male of the species. His black hair had been sleek and glossy, with a hint of a natural curl, and his sky-blue eyes had a clarity that was quite marvelous, even in the Celtic type that routinely combined dark hair with blue or green eyes. The tarnish that was now beginning to set in was slight, as yet, but no one looked in a mirror quite as sensitively and scrupulously as Sir Julian, and the baronet was well aware by now how rapidly his trivial symptoms deteriorated. By the end of the week, if the treatment were not renewed, he would be manifestly unhandsome even to the most casual glance.
If ever there was such a thing as an irresistible stare, Mathieu thought, the one presently aimed at him surely qualified; but he knew that he had to resist it, if he could. Given that it was, in a sense, his invention, or at least his production, he felt that he ought to be able to do it.
“I am making progress, Sir Julian,” he hastened to add, as much to convince himself as his client. “The extraction process runs much more smoothly now that I’ve mastered it. I’ve also improved the filtration gel considerably, and if the color is a reliable guide, the purity of the agent is much greater now—which might help to stabilize it, with luck. The purification is vital, because some of the girls that Cormack has brought were carrying multiple infections, none of which we understand fully as yet.”
Sir Julian’s eyes narrowed again. “Are you saying that, in spite of all your precautions, I might catch something from one of your injections?”
Mathieu cursed himself for leaving an opening for Templeforth to take that inference. “That’s highly unlikely, Sir Julian. The filtration is highly effective, with regard to bacteria.”
“But not for your damned agent, which you now claim to be alive. If that can get through.…”
Templeforth was not a stupid man, and his argument was by no means unsound. Mathieu fell back on the standard tactic of the scientific smokescreen. “It’s true that the range of microbial agents now seems to be wider and more varied that was first believed,” he said, judiciously. “I’ve been keeping close track of the Institut’s publications, especially Elie Metchnikoff’s immunological work, Monsieur Pasteur’s quest for new vaccines and the latest advances in apochromatic microscopy. The new findings, however, seem to support my theory that the great majority of entities in the blood that can be considered independently alive are inoffensive or benign. Pathogens are the exception, not the rule. Thus far, you haven’t shown any symptoms of accidental infection.”
Sir Julian got to his feet, perhaps hoping to increase the dominating effect of his stare, but after looking down at his visitor for a few seconds he turned away. His eyes went to the portrait hanging over the fireplace: the portrait of his father, who had fought at Waterloo as a mere subaltern and had subsequently commanded a brigade in the Crimea, where he had somehow avoided being singled out by The Times as yet another glaring exemplar of British military incompetence. Sir Malcolm Templeforth had not been a handsome man, and his son did not resemble him at all. His own army career had taken him to India, but had surely involved far more strutting and socializing than fighting. It was there that he had become a dandy, as well as bringing his monumental arrogance to a curious perfection.
“Things are bad in Ireland and getting worse,” Sir Julian said, suppressing another sigh and allowing his train of thought to deviate. “Ever since Gladstone gave the rebels that first inch they’ve been determined to take far more than a mile. Even with an honest steward in place, the estate’s revenues are sinking like a stone. The poor fellow’s under siege. Even bog-Irish peasants are taught to read nowadays, it seems, and are encouraged to delude themselves that they’re capable of philosophical thought. What they read, alas, is the radical press, and the form their philosophy takes is an obsession with the so-called rights of man, trades unions and all that nonsense. My tenants have formed some sort of association, it seems, and they’re badgering my steward daily with lists of grievances. He’s demanding, on their behalf, that I go over there—not requesting, you understand, but demanding. He won’t believe me when I say that I can’t, although we both know full well that I can’t leave London for any length of time now. It wouldn’t do any good, of course, if I did go over—the wretches complain bitterly about what they call absentee landlords, but they make it impossible for anyone to operate comfortably in residence.”
Mathieu did not know how to respond to that tirade, and began to wish that he had accepted the offer of a glass of whiskey, if only to have something to do with his hands.
“Anyway,” Sir Julian went on, “my purse isn’t bottomless, and I’m feeling the pinch at present. There’s no way I can increase my funds, except perhaps by marrying again, but the marriage market isn’t what it was twenty years ago. I could probably snag some American bitch in heat whose father’s in steel or oil, although they all seem to want an earldom, at least, but that would take time.” He paused before adding: “You’re not thinking about looking for another backer, are you? You do realize how unwise that would be?”
The way the two questions were phrased made them appear to be defensive moves in the face of a hypothetical threat, but Mathieu knew that they constituted a serious threat in themselves, and perhaps a deadly one. He had always known that Templeforth was a dangerous man with whom to deal, untrustworthy as well as violent, but he had not been in a position to argue when the Englishman had offered him a refuge outside France. The Sûreté had been on his heels, and Paris had become unsafe.
Unfortunately, it seemed that London might become even less safe, even though no one here had been able to track his early experiments with the same facility as certain interested parties in France. Here, he was a foreigner, and automatically under suspicion, just as poor Metchnikoff was in Paris, in spite of his well-deserved reputation for benignity.
When he had first arrived in the English capital, Mathieu had been utterly convinced that he was on the very brink of the crucial breakthrough, that the victory was only months away—a year, at the most—and that Sir Julian Templeforth would be the perfect advertisement for his capacity to improve the human condition. Now he was nearly three years older, and the ultimate objective of his research seemed to be as far away as ever, in spite of all his efforts. He was no longer able to set a hypothetical time-limit on his project, and was uncomfortably aware that it might, in fact, take forever. Except, of course, that it couldn’t, because the corollary damage was too great, and every casualty of his endeavor added to the heavy burden on his conscience.
No, he thought, he could not go on forever, or very much longer. It was a truism of his profession that doctors could bury their mistakes, that their diplomas were, in effect, licenses to commit murder—but that was on condition that they committed their murders by the book, and not by effecting novel treatments that awoke an instinctive revulsion. It also required the cultivation of a particular kind of arrogance and an anesthetization of the conscience that Mathieu had never fully acquired.
After a long pause for thought, Mathieu said, softly: “There’s no need to threaten me, Sir Julian. You might think of yourself as my backer, as me as a pawn in a risky speculation, but so far as I’m concerned, you’re my patient, and it’s my duty to do everything possible to maintain your health for as long as humanly possible.”
“It certainly is,” the baronet retorted, “given that my present…troubles are partly of your making. It’s the faults in your own treatment that you’re trying to repair.”
That was not strictly true, Mathieu knew. On the other hand, he was even more fully aware than Sir Julian of the risk of iatrogenic aftereffects. If the treatment were to stop now, for whatever reason…
The baronet sat down again. “I sometimes wonder whether you might be playing me like a fish,” he said, “keeping me hooked by deliberately doling out your drug in doses that become less effective by degrees, simply in order to keep extracting money for me to fund your greater ambitions. Your obsession with so-called progress and the greater good of humankind is unhealthy as well as absurd. The only kind of progress either of us should be interested in is personal progress: our own goals. If that’s egotistical so be it…but you need to look out for your own interests if you’re going to see this through”
“I’m trying,” Mathieu assured him. “And I’m certainly not deceiving you, in any way. You know full well that I’m no charlatan, that the treatment does work, within its limitations. It’s just a matter of overcoming those limitations. We need to trust one another.”
That was true, but it was an unrealistic hope. Neither of them had ever trusted the other, and the awkward progress of the experiment had not contributed to the burgeoning of any trust within their wary relationship.
Templeforth did not have time to comment on that fact, if he had any intention on doing so, because there was a discreet knock on the door, which Mathieu was now capable of recognizing instantly as the product of Cormack’s knuckles.
The butler waited for his master to call out a summons before he opened the door, and came in, hesitantly. “I’m very sorry to disturb you sir,” he said, “but I thought you ought to know that there is someone watching the house from the bushes in Holland Park. According to Reilly, he took up his post immediately after Mr. Galmier’s arrival, and might perhaps have been following him.”
Sir Julian fixed Mathieu with a different kind of stare, which testified eloquently to the extent of the lack of trust between them.
“I had no idea!” Mathieu protested. “I wouldn’t have been able to get a hansom, even if I’d tried, because of the rain.…”
“That wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference, you fool,” Sir Julian said, hotly. “The point is, who is he? And how did you attract his attention in the first place?”
Mathieu shook his head, helplessly.
Sir Julian was a man of action, and not one to waste time in procrastination. He went to the cabinet beside the door and took out his father’s old saber, with a promptitude that implied very strongly that he always relished an opportunity to do so. Mathieu knew that rumor suggested that the baronet had killed at least three men in duels—though none, as yet, on English soil—and he was prepared to believe that, for once, the rumor was not exaggerated.
“Tell Reilly to work his way around behind the fellow if he can,” Templeforth instructed Cormack. “He’ll need a stout cudgel, but tell him not to wield it too brutally. We want to question the man, not split his skull. We’ll leave five minutes, and then we’ll come out of the front door and make directly for the spy.”
Cormack nodded, and hurried away to relay the order. Sir Julian raised the saber and weighed it in his hand, in eager anticipation.
“The fellow can’t see anything, with all the shutters closed,” Mathieu pointed out. “His vigil will be wasted.”
“Even if he didn’t follow you here,” Sir Julian said, “he’ll probably follow you home, given the chance. If appearances are correct in suggesting that he’s aware of our association, and interested in it, it means that he probably knows too much—enough, at any rate, for us to need to know exactly how much he does know, and what his interest is.”
The baronet put on his black coat, handed to him by Cormack. His bearing assumed a kind of emphatic swagger that he probably thought of as “Wellingtonian”. The butler had brought Mathieu’s coat too, which was shabbier by far, along with his hat and his cane.
When the five minutes had elapsed, Sir Julian made for the main door of the house, beckoning to Mathieu as if he were commanding a footman. Mathieu followed him, quite content to remain three paces in rear.
Sir Julian bounded down the steps and raced through the open gate, crossing the deserted street in three strides—but there were iron railings around the park, and the nearest gate was ten yards to one side, requiring an awkward detour. As Sir Julian headed for the gate there was a flurry of movement in the bushes beyond the railings, and the quarry set off like a startled hare.
Reilly, alas, was no greyhound. By the time Sir Julian had reached the place where the watcher had been stationed, the porter had already engaged the spy in a brief scuffle, but had been knocked down without being able to bring his cudgel into play.
When Mathieu finally caught up with his patron, the baronet was fulminating at his aged retainer. Reilly complained in vain that the unknown man had been considerably taller, younger and stronger than he was, and that the grass had been exceedingly slippery after the rain.
Sir Julian rounded on Mathieu then. “This is your fault,” he declared, although he had no real reason to suppose that to be true. “Make sure that no one follows you home, if you can. I’ll come tomorrow, at seven, as arranged. You’ll have the usual delivery before noon, and I’ll make provision for another before the end of the week. I’ll bring some extra money for you—but I warn you that I expect results. You’d better find a means to grow your vaccine in a flask pretty damned quick, else you and I will need a further reckoning.”
“This kind of adventurous research can’t be done to order,” Mathieu said, tiredly, feeling obliged to mount some kind of formal protest. “There’s no precedent to guide us.”
“Necessity,” Sir Julian stated, with not a hint of irony, “is the mother of improvisation. It was you who put yourself under its spur—where I’ve long grown used to living. There’s no use complaining that you need more time when the sand has all but run through the hour-glass. If that was a policeman, he’s far more likely to be after you than me—which means that you need me even more than I need you, and not just for money. Whether you walk back to your lodgings or take a cab, keep looking behind you.”