Once that relaxation of the situation had been agreed, it proved possible to negotiate further reductions in threat. After a little further discussion, Sir Julian agreed to deposit his revolver on the coat-stand in the hallway, while he remained stationed beside the open door for the time being. Thomas Deangate placed his knife on a shelf in the laboratory, and took up a position in front of the shelf unit, distant from the door to the hallway.
That was done, and it seemed that the tension had drained away from the situation. There was a pause while Mathieu checked that his front door was properly locked, and that they were safely isolated. He took time to inspect the cut on Sir Julian’s cheek, which he sealed as carefully as he could and dressed with gauze.
“It might open again when I replace your blood, because of the anti-clotting agent,” he said, anxiously, “but you should be able to staunch the flow without overmuch difficulty.”
“It’s only a scratch, damn it!” the baronet growled. “Better a little bleeding than go without the treatment.”
The seaman watched, with evident fascination, as Mathieu sat the baronet down in the chair that had recently been occupied by Judy Lee, and carefully inserted the hollow needle into his right forearm. Sir Julian did not flinch, although it was becoming far harder to connect with his vein than it had been to get into the girl’s. From the corner of his eye, Mathieu saw the scowling seaman bite his lip in apparent sympathy. He switched on the pump that would assist the extraction.
Mathieu had set aside the apparatus that had circulated Judy Lee’s blood through the filtration matrix, having already abstracted the filtrate from the matrix. The filtrate intended for infusion into the baronet’s veins was now being held in a rotating flask dipped in lukewarm water-bath. When Mathieu had drawn off half a liter of Sir Julian’s blood he put it in a second flask, which had already been warmed to body-temperature in the same water-bath. He detached the first flask, added its contents to second, and then set the second flask to rotate for a moment.
“The agent requires dilution before reinjection, in order that its effects may be properly generalized,” Mathieu informed the seaman, although he knew that it was not really an explanation.
“What effects?” Deangate wanted to know, understandably.
“Increased resistance to certain infections,” Mathieu said, employing deliberate circumlocution.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Deangate protested. “How can taking blood from a sick child-whore—and I saw the girl who was brought here this afternoon, Dr. Galmier, so I know that she was already showing signs of consumption—help increase resistance to disease in a healthy man?”
“It might seem strange,” Mathieu told him, smoothly, “but one of my former colleagues at the Institut Pasteur, Elie Metchnikoff, has demonstrated that the body has its own innate defenses against infection. The reason that Jenner’s vaccine against smallpox works, we now believe, is that exposure to the relatively-harmless cowpox stimulates the production of some kind of reactive agent, which is also effective against the much more dangerous smallpox. Even when the reactive agents within a human body are fighting a losing battle, they can be filtered out and concentrated, and used to arm a healthy body against the same infections that were defeating them in their original host.”
Deangate was, indeed, no fool. He was able to take the argument a step further than Mathieu had assumed. “And what effect does the removal of the reactive agents have on the original hosts?” he demanded, after only a moment’s thought. “More exactly, what effect did it have on my sister? Did it weaken her, and make her more vulnerable to disease, hastening her on the road to death?”
“We’re not aware of any such effect, Mr. Deangate,” Mathieu was quick to say, hoping yet again that the lie was not transparent. “Indeed, I believe that my filtration process removes infective agents as well as reactive ones, preserving exactly the same balance as before in the donor—but the infective agents are held in the gel filter while the reactive agents are leached out, and I’m careful to sterilize the gel before reuse. Your sister left here in no worse condition than she arrived, and perhaps better.”
He could see that Deangate did not believe that, but he could also see that the seaman was trying hard to think through the implications of what he had been told.
“If what you say is true,” Thomas Deangate said, slowly, “it seems to me that if you were to reinject the separated reactive agents back into the donor…”
“Her condition might well be improved,” Mathieu agreed, making haste to get the half-truth out of his mouth, in order to return to safer argumentative ground, “and that is, of course, my long-term goal. The eventual aim of my research is to find a means of multiplying the reactive agents in isolation, so that they can then be redeployed, not merely in their original host or a single new host, but in a hundred or a thousand individuals. Given time, and sufficiently effective filters, we might not only put an end to dozens of infectious diseases, but might be able to slow down the aging process and…” He paused in response to Sir Julian’s warning glare, and then finished, a trifle lamely: “…and accelerate the healing process in wounds inflicted by bullets and blades.”
“I see,” the seaman said, studying Sir Julian’s face and figure carefully. “Well, your patient certainly looks well on the treatment—all the more so if he really did have the clap before you started the treatment.”
Sir Julian scowled at that, but Mathieu moved to fill yet another Pravaz syringe from the contents of the warm flask, and made ready to reinject the baronet’s blood, hoping to distract his attention and soothe his quick temper.
“I can assure you that my patient is not suffering from syphilis or any other life-threatening disease,” Mathieu was quick to say, as he connected the syringe to the needle that was still in place and began to depress the plunger.
“That’s very good news,” said a voice from the doorway, in a pronounced Irish brogue. “Indeed, we could hardly have hoped for better.”
Mathieu, Sir Julian and Thomas Deangate turned simultaneously to the man who had just stepped into the room, carrying Sir Julian’s revolver carelessly in his right hand. He was as tall as Thomas Deangate, and somewhat broader, but much older—perhaps as old as fifty. Mathieu recognized the man that Deangate had earlier put to flight. He was not alone, this time; he had brought reinforcements with him: two younger men, hardly out of their teens, but seemingly robust and vigorous.
It occurred to Mathieu, somewhat belatedly, that he had locked his front door after bidding farewell to Judy Lee, and that the “sneak-thief” from whom Thomas Deangate had saved him must therefore have had some way of turning the key in the lock from the far side of the door, without making any appreciable noise, other than the click of the latch when he actually opened the door.
He guessed, too, that the man who had been watching the house in Holland Park—the older man or one of his companions—had not followed him to the house at all, although he must certainly have followed him to the hotel in Rockley Road and then to his home, in spite of his cursory precautions.
“Never fear,” the newcomer said. “I’m no hooligan, and I’ve not the least intention of using this toy—although I confess that I’d rather have it in my hand just now than see it in someone else’s.”
“Who the hell are you?” Sir Julian demanded.
“I’m Sean Driscoll, Sir Julian, the president of your tenants’ association—of our tenants’ association, at any rate. My friends here are two of my deputies, Michael MacBride and Padraig Reilly. You’ve long been acquainted with Mr. Reilly’s great-uncle, I believe, although I met him for the first time myself last night, under circumstances that were admittedly awkward. We’ve been engaged in talks with your steward for some time, and have urged him as powerfully as we could, but in vain, to fetch you back to your estates so that we might include you in the negotiations. Now, we’re following the advice of whatever wise fellow it was who said that, if the mountain will not come to Mahomet, then Mahomet must go to the mountain—although I hasten to add that we’re all good Catholics.”
“Get this thing out of my arm,” Sir Julian said to Mathieu, tersely. Then, to Driscoll, he said: “What on Earth do you think you’re doing, coming after me here, of all places?”
“Well, sir,” the Irishman said, “that’s a slightly embarrassing matter—although I have to confess that we weren’t sure what sort of a welcome we’d get if we rang the bell at Holland Park, even though young Padraig here is kin to your gatekeeper. The truth is that there are all kinds of rumors running around your estate, sir, about your having made a deal with the Devil, selling your soul in exchange for eternal youth. I never believed them for an instant, of course, being a man who can read and figure as well as most, but I had to admit that I was very surprised when I caught a glimpse of you last night, for the first time in twenty years. I knew your father, you see, and I had abundant opportunities to observe you in the days when you used to favor us with your presence over the water, although I doubt that you ever noticed me. I did not mistake this gentleman for the Devil, of course, even though he’s a foreigner, but I was curious to discover what dealings you had with him. It’s a wise tenant who knows his landlord, sir—especially when he has protests to lodge and polite requests to make. I’d be truly glad to find that your friend is no more than a common-or-garden physician, and that your unnatural good looks are purely attributable to good health…if that really is the case.”
“You’ve got a damned nerve,” Sir Julian retorted. “I think you’ll find that Irish rebels are by no means welcome on English soil, and that you’ll likely end up in jail if I call the police.”
“I’m not a rebel, sir,” Driscoll replied, equably. “I really don’t care one way or the other about Home Rule. What I do care about is justice between landlord and tenant. If I’m fairly treated, it doesn’t matter overmuch whether the land I work is owned by an Englishman, an Irishman or a Chinaman—but given that my fellow tenants and I are not being fairly treated, in my opinion, then I feel obliged to make our position clear. You may call the police if you wish, sir—but if my guess is right, that’s not something you’re overly enthusiastic to do. This other gentleman sent me packing a little while ago, when I thought myself outnumbered again and made another tactical retreat, but if what I’ve overheard in these last few minutes is anything to go by, he has grievances of his own against you, and against your physician too. I have sisters myself, and daughters too, and I know well enough how a man’s ire can be roused when he loses one, or finds one in dire straits through no fault of her own.”
The Irishman paused, and then added: “Would it interest you to know, by any chance, Mr. Deangate—I believe I heard you called by that name—that the man sitting in front of you is fifty-nine years old, and that he looked almost as old when he was thirty-and-one as he does now, and was far less good-looking.”
Mathieu could tell that Thomas Deangate was, indeed, interested to hear that item of information, even though he did not know quite what to make of it.
While the seaman was still puzzling over the unexpected revelation, Driscoll handed him the revolver. “I think this had best be committed to the care of a neutral party,” he said, “while my companions and I explain our grievances to our landlord. With all due respect to the owner of all this fine apparatus, this room seems to me to be a trifle cramped and gloomy for our purposes, so I think it might be best if we and Sir Julian removed ourselves to somewhere more comfortable—perhaps a public house if, as I suspect, he does not care to invite us to his home.”
“You can get drunk wherever you please,” Sir Julian said, standing up, a little unsteady on his feet but evidently determined to stand as firm as he could. “I have no intention of negotiating with you, on English or Irish soil. Any grievances you might have must be taken up with my steward. If you do not leave this house immediately, I shall certainly summon the police—and I think you’ll find them unprepared to take your word for it that you have no rebel sympathies or criminal intentions, given that you’re guilty of breaking and entering.”
Sean Driscoll’s florid face put on a fine show of theatrical insincere distress in response to this declaration, but Mathieu had the impression that the big Irishman had little or no idea what to do next. He was far from home, and must know very well that he would be in a weak position if his contest with an English baronet really did become an issue for English law to settle. Mathieu noticed, too, that there was now only one man standing behind him—although the two of them were just as capable of blocking the door, should they see fit to do so, as three. The young man who had disappeared was the one who had been introduced as Michael MacBride.
“I broke nothing,” Driscoll said, mildly. “The key was in the lock, and it has too long a shaft, allowing it to be turned from the wrong side. What you need, my friend, is a strong bolt, or a sturdy bar.”
“Just a minute,” said Thomas Deangate, finally. “Are you saying that Dr. Galmier really has discovered an elixir of youth? That he’s stealing the health from the blood of young girls and injecting it into his paymaster?”
“Well, now,” Driscoll said, with a slight spontaneous smile, “Dr. Galmier’s certainly not injecting it into himself, is he? Unless, that is, he’s a hundred years old instead of thirty-some.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Mathieu was quick to put in.
“Be quiet!” Sir Julian commanded him, intemperately. “That’s our business, and no one else’s. All these men are trespassing, Doctor, having invaded your lodgings uninvited, whether they broke your door or not. This one has held a knife to your throat and now has a gun. Will you go to Goldhawk Road, if you please, and find the policeman patrolling that beat. Tell him to summon help, and to come armed, prepared to meet violent resistance.”
Mathieu eyed the route to the laboratory door apprehensively, not at all sure that he would be allowed to walk out without meeting violent resistance himself. Nor was he sure that he wanted to leave his apparatus—but he knew that he could hardly round on the baronet and tell him to go in search of a policeman himself if he really wanted one to come.
Instead, he opened his mouth to say that there was no need for any trouble, hopeful that he might be able to find further arguments to support that assertion, but he was interrupted by the noise of movement in the hallway. Padraig Reilly came further into the room as Michael MacBride reappeared in the doorway, in company with another person, who was definitely not a policeman.
It was direly difficult to tell, at first glance, exactly what the other person might be, given that she was clad in a capaciously-hooded cape which, in combination with a thick woolen scarf, hid every feature of the face within, save for the faint gleam of feverish eyes. Mathieu, however, was not in the slightest doubt that the person must be female. The hood testified to that even more clearly than her short stature. Set between the three burly Irishman she looked incredibly frail, even though the bulky cape blurred the sharp lines of her emaciated frame.
Mathieu’s heart sank, and he had a vertiginous feeling of being utterly lost. It was by no means the first time that one of his former “volunteers” had returned in search of help, usually for some condition other than the one he had induced, and they almost always returned in this part of the evening, when the cover of darkness was fully secured but before the London streets became truly hazardous for those incapable of self-defense. None had ever come when Sir Julian was undergoing treatment, however.
Instinctively, Mathieu looked at the clock, and pricked up his ears waiting for the carriage that would doubtless come to collect Sir Julian very shortly, although he no longer hoped that the butler’s mere arrival might save the situation, which had become far too complicated for any kind of easy disentanglement. Mathieu found that he had his mouth open, in the expectation of having something to say, but that he was quite incapable of speech.
“Girl wants to see the doctor,” MacBride reported, laconically. “Hadn’t the heart to tell her that he was busy. Best take her to another room, though, sir, if you have one, while we continue our discussion with Sir Julian.”
Mathieu felt dizzy, and feared that he was about to faint. He could not help staring at those fugitive eyes hidden in the shadows of the hood, even though he was terrified by the idea of meeting their accusatory stare.
He felt a peculiar surge of relief as he realized that he did not have to do that. The gaze of the terrible eyes was not fixed on him at all but on something else—someone else.
Three seconds of awful, pregnant silence went by, while Mathieu observed strangely similar expressions of puzzlement forming on the faces of Sir Julian Templeforth and Sean Driscoll, neither of whom had begun to comprehend what was happening.
Then the girl spoke, and her voice, although it was inexpressibly feeble, struck Mathieu with all the impact of a bomb—because what she said was: “Tom? Is that you?”
Thomas Deangate’s Caroline, Mathieu realized, was definitely still alive, if not necessarily well. That fact would confirm part of his story—but not, alas, the most important elements. For all he knew, Caroline Deangate might have vanished from her family’s ken simply by virtue of the shame of her prostitution, or for some other reason entirely, and must surely made the decision to stay away before the after-effects of her condition had begun to show. He was sharply aware, however, of the fact that the change in her appearance might have made the prospect of going home even less bearable. In a way, the confirmation that she was alive was certainly good news—but in another way, it might be anything but good. Thomas Deangate was still holding Sir Julian’s revolver, and he now knew more than enough about Mathieu’s experiments to know, even if she did not, who was responsible for any deterioration in her appearance.
The seaman did not waste time with idle repetition of his sister’s querulous question. He had a more direct means of discovering whether the girl in the hood was known to him, and he only had to take one long stride reach out his arm to push back the hood.
She flinched, reflexively. She actually raised her hands in order to try to fight him off when he tried to pull down the scarf, but she could not do it.
Mathieu anticipated the general gasp of astonishment a split second before it actually sounded within the room, and the anticipation made it even worse. He knew that there was really no cause for that astonishment, given that Caroline Deangate did not look nearly as ugly as one or two of his other volunteers, but the situation was conducive to melodramatic clichés—and in all fairness, the poor child did look remarkably plain, and considerably older than he knew her to be. He could remember her face quite clearly now: the face that she had lost forever, that is. It had been beautiful. So beautiful that…
He stepped backwards, pressing his spine against the wall in a narrow gap between two sets of shelves.
Thomas Deangate’s automatic response was to exclaim: “You’re not Caroline!”
The girl made no attempt to assert her identity, and seemed to be biting her bloodless lips in anguish over the fact that she had given herself away. She tried to turn and run, but MacBride and Reilly were still blocking the door, and were too stunned to remove themselves from her path.
Sean Driscoll swore, softly. Sir Julian’s handsome face was uniformly white, save for the red stain on the dressing applied to his cut—which did not make it any less handsome, but somehow contrived to augment the insult.
“Caroline?” said Thomas Deangate, helplessly, admitting the truth at second glance in spite of what must have seemed blatant evidence to the contrary. Then he raised the gun, and pointed it at Mathieu. “You did this,” he said, hoarsely. “You really are the Devil.”
“You don’t understand,” Mathieu protested, although it was obvious that everyone in the room understood the fundamental fact perfectly well, however incredible they had found the possibility when voicing it before. They had been no more able to believe in any kind of elixir of youth than they had been able to believe that Sir Julian Templeforth really had made a bargain with the Devil, despite Sean Driscoll’s observation regarding the remarkable transformation of the baronet’s appearance. In isolation, even given what they now knew about what went on in the laboratory, that appearance had merely seemed an oddity, a strange stroke of luck. Now, juxtaposed with its counterpart, it seemed to be something very different, and literally diabolical.
Except, Mathieu insisted to himself, it was not diabolical at all—not literally, or even metaphorically. It was authentically hopeful: a highly significant step on the path of progress; a staging-post en route to the Age of Miracles. That was the understanding he had to convey to them—not just to the dangerous man with the revolver, but to all of them—if they would only give him time.
However dangerous he might be, however, Thomas Deangate was not a stupid man. He did not squeeze the revolver’s trigger, although his stance and expression suggested that he would be perfectly prepared to do so. Instead, he said: “Reverse it! Right here, right now. Take back what you stole, and return it.”
Mathieu knew that he must have gone pale in his turn, but he knew how futile it was to protest when he stammered: “No…you don’t understand…it doesn’t work like that.…” While he forced the words out, his gaze darted around the company, taking in Sir Julian and all three Irishmen before settling on Sean Driscoll’s face.
Even if Thomas Deangate had been alone, Mathieu thought, the gun would have given him the means of backing up his demands, although he would probably have had to put at least one bullet into Sir Julian’s body to force his cooperation. The fact that he was not alone, though, increased his advantage vastly, in moral as well as material terms—and he was not alone in any sense of the term. The Irishmen were outraged on his behalf; they shared his distress, and sympathized with his anguish.
The Irishmen had no reason to love Sir Julian, and certainly would not defend him. Indeed, they might even imagine that they might benefit, in the short or long term, were the baronet to be robbed of his unnatural virility. Even if they had had no advantage of their own at stake, though, they would still have sided with Thomas Deangate and backed him up. They had never seen Caroline Deangate before she had accepted Cormack’s guinea, but they had imagination enough to assure them that she might—must—have been as pretty as any young girl on the brink of puberty. It required little or no creative effort for them to exchange, in the mind’s eye, Sir Julian’s preternatural beauty for her dismal plainness, restoring her lost purity at the expense of his.
In a single visionary flash, Mathieu saw that it really was going to happen. His four unwelcome visitors really were going to force Sir Julian back into the chair, tying him down if necessary, in order to demand that Mathieu must draw out his blood, as he had drawn Judy Lee’s that afternoon, and Caroline Deangate’s some little while ago. Then they were going to force him to inject the filtered produce of Sir Julian’s blood into the girl, just as he had injected the filtered produce of Judy Lee’s blood into Sir Julian mere minutes before.
And he would have no choice but to do it. They would not give him a choice. If he refused, Thomas Deangate would hurt him, and keep on hurting him until he complied. They had no fear of the police now; they were obedient to what they considered to be a higher law.
But they truly did not understand the finer details of the situation. They were thinking in mystical terms; they did not understand the way that the natural world was made. They did not understand the logic of blood incompatibilities and clotting factors, and a thousand other problems; they did not understand that Mathieu’s process was science, not magic, and could not comprehend the harsh implications of that distinction.
“Sir Julian’s blood isn’t compatible with Caroline’s,” Mathieu said, hastily. I can’t inject it into her without harming her. I’ll explain.…”
But Thomas Deangate was inspecting the tangle of apparatus and remembering the explanations he had already been given. “But you have blood here,” he said, pointing to the residue of Judy Lee’s blood. “In any case, you isolate what you call the agent from the blood you leech. You can take a little blood from Caroline, as you did from this fellow, in order to dilute the fluid you extract from Templeforth’s blood, before injecting it back into her.…”
A ship’s mate, Mathieu realized, had to be a quick learner, a quick thinker and a man of action. The Irishmen probably could not have connected up the argument so rapidly, and Caroline was still completely at sea, but the seaman was confident…perhaps unreasonably so. What he was asking Mathieu to do was something he had not tried before, and he was all too well aware of the fact that new ventures did not always turn out as expected, even when the logic supporting them seemed sound.
More seriously, even if the reinjection did compensate, partially or wholly, for Caroline Deangate’s loss, there would be side-effects, one of which was all too predictable.…
Everything, Mathieu realized, was about to collapse: the entire edifice of his work and his life. Catastrophe was looming, unavoidably.
“You haven’t thought this through,” he said. “You mustn’t do it. Believe me.…”
He realized, even as he voiced the final phrase, though, that there was no way that Thomas Deangate, or anyone else, was going to believe him now. He had told too many lies already. He did not deserve to be believed. He had betrayed his own principles, and those of science. The reckoning was nigh, and it would be disastrous. Nothing he could say would be sufficient to persuade the seaman and his new allies that his anxieties were anything more than mere bluster, or that any consequence he identified beyond the one for which they hoped—perhaps in vain—ought to deter them. Their notion of justice outweighed mere practical considerations. Even if he did explain the whole truth, and managed to persuade them of that truth, it would not stop them. It would not stop Sean Driscoll, let alone Thomas Deangate. This was the kind of nightmare from which there was no escape, from which there could be no awakening.
And when it was over, what then? What would become of him—and, more importantly, of progress?