“It’s ether!” I’d had an unfortunate and unforgettable experience with ether in 1848.
Slade and I dodged more bottles that shattered. We covered our noses and mouths with our sleeves and hurried toward the far end of the cellar, but the fumes overtook us. Slade said, “I have to put out the candle or they’ll ignite the fumes.” He blew on the candle. Above us, the trapdoor slammed shut. We were plunged into darkness. The fumes filled the cellar. I couldn’t help breathing them. Lightheaded and drowsy, I collapsed, then fell into deep, impenetrable unconsciousness.
A throbbing headache awakened me. I opened my eyes to dim, hazy, yellow-tinged light. My body was stiff from lying on the hard surface under me. Slowly the world gained definition. I saw a ceiling made of rusty metal a few feet above my face. When I turned my head to my left, fuzzy vertical stripes, crossed at wider intervals by horizontal ones, emerged from the haze. I blinked, and the stripes turned into iron bars. My wits came back in a cold rush of dread. I remembered the cellar, the cage, the breaking bottles, and the ether fumes, which I no longer smelled. But where was Slade?
I turned my head toward my right. He lay near me, flat on his back. His eyes were closed, but his chest rose and fell with even breaths. He was unconscious but alive. My sigh of relief caught in my throat as I realized that we were inside the cage… and that there was someone else in the cellar with us. I could hear breathing that had the ragged, wheezy sound of bad lungs. Paper rustled; a pen scratched. I smelled liquor and a fetid, sour human scent. A man sat on a stool some ten paces from the cage, a lamp on the floor beside him. He hunched over a notebook propped on his knees, writing furiously. His white shirt and dark trousers hung on his thin body. Tousled, shaggy red hair partially concealed his face; I could only see a beaked nose and the glint of gold-rimmed spectacles. He lifted a wine bottle, his hand trembling as he gulped a thirsty draught. His visage struck such a bolt of dreadful recognition into my heart that I sat up and stared.
During the earlier part of the adventures I describe herein, I had encountered the ghosts of persons beloved to me, and now it was happening again. Many times had I seen the man before me in just such an attitude, on nights when drink and drugs tormented his mind and he scribbled poems until he collapsed from exhaustion. Many times had I heard him laboring to breathe while the consumption ravaged his lungs. Three years ago I had stood by his deathbed. And here he was, resurrected.
“Branwell,” I said, my voice raspy from the ether, cracking in disbelief.
He started, dropped his pen, and turned to me. Now I realized that this apparition was not my brother. His nose was not as long or sharp as Branwell’s, his face not as gaunt. Branwell had died at age thirty-one; this man was at least a decade older. Yet the resemblance was still astounding. He had the same coloring, the same flush of liquor on his cheeks. He, too, had once been handsome. He had a similar loose, sensual mouth, and brown eyes that were sunken and bloodshot, fevered by madness. He rose and walked toward me with Branwell’s unsteady gait. Stopping short of the cage, he glared at me.
“Who are you?” Although his voice was deeper than Branwell’s, it had a familiar inflection-an Irish accent not quite erased by an English education.
Addled by the ether, shocked by the sight of him, I couldn’t speak.
“Who is he?” The man pointed at Slade.
Slade stirred, groaned, and propped himself up on his elbows. “Charlotte?” His voice was furred with sleep. He gazed in bleary confusion at the man before us. “Who-?”
Now I realized who the man was. “This is Niall Kavanagh.”
Slade rubbed his eyes. “Well,” he said, at once bewildered and gratified. “Dr. Kavanagh. At last.”
“How do you know who I am?” Fear joined suspicion in Kavanagh’s manner. “Who are you people?”
“My name is John Slade, and this is Charlotte Bronte.” Slade added, “My wife,” as though he’d momentarily forgotten we were married. He dragged himself over to Kavanagh. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.” He extended his hand through the cage’s bars.
Kavanagh recoiled. Slade noticed the cage and the fact that we were inside it. His gaze moved to the stout iron padlock that held the door shut. He frowned. “Did you put us in here?”
“Yes.” Kavanagh grinned.
“Did you throw the bottles of ether at us?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Because you were trespassing.” Kavanagh uttered a giggle tinged with hysteria. It raised a chill on my skin, for I had often heard it from Branwell. My dead brother truly seemed to live inside Niall Kavanagh, whose humor abruptly turned to angry belligerence. “Why did you come?”
“Let us out of the cage,” Slade said, “and we’ll explain.”
“No!” Kavanagh faltered backward. “If I let you out, it’s all over for me.” Again I heard the echo of Branwell in his voice. It’s all over for me, Branwell had often said during fits of black despair. “You want to destroy me and steal my work-just like everybody else!”
I remembered Branwell claiming that the world was against him, that everybody was in league to plagiarize his poems, wring all the artistic talent from him, and toss him aside like a dry husk. “We don’t want to hurt you,” I assured Niall Kavanagh in the soothing voice I’d employed with my brother. “We came to help you.”
“Why should you want to help me? I don’t know you. How do you know me? Who are you?”
I opened my mouth to speak. Slade said, “Charlotte.” His tone warned me that our captor might react badly to the truth about ourselves or our motives. I turned to Slade. “We owe him an explanation.” I then told Kavanagh, “I’m an authoress. My husband is a former espionage agent for the British crown. We’ve learned that Lord Eastbourne at the Foreign Office employed you to build a device based on your research on animalcules.”
Kavanagh pounced on this news with all the temper that Slade had anticipated. “Lord Eastbourne said my invention was worthless. He ordered me to cease working on it. He reneged on our contract, the bastard!” Kavanagh’s expression turned sly. “But he didn’t fool me. Lord Eastbourne wanted to steal my invention and take credit for it himself.” He didn’t seem to have considered the possibility that Lord Eastbourne had realized that the weapon worked far too well and was far too dangerous to be built and deployed. Now Kavanagh regarded us with heightened suspicion. “Are you working with Lord Eastbourne?”
“Far from it,” Slade said. “He did me a bad turn, too.”
“Any enemy of Lord Eastbourne’s is a friend of mine,” Kavanagh said, although he sounded less than amicable. “But I don’t need help. I’m quite all right on my own.”
“No, you aren’t,” Slade said. “You’re in a lot of trouble.”
“How would you know?”
“You were in such a hurry to quit the British Isles that you left your things behind,” Slade said. “Not to mention that you look like a wreck.”
Kavanagh’s distrust deepened. “How did you find me?”
“We spoke with your parents,” Slade said. “They told us you were here.”
Kavanagh huffed out angry breaths; he clawed his hair. “They promised to keep it secret! The traitors!”
“They’re concerned about you,” I hastened to say. “You told them that someone is after you. They said you were terrified.”
“Not anymore.” Kavanagh’s quaking body and the haunted look in his eyes belied his words. “I ran away from Lord Eastbourne. Surely he’s stopped looking for me by now.”
“He hasn’t,” Slade said. “A few days ago he went to your laboratory in Tonbridge. He burned the place down. What do you think he’ll do when he catches up with you?”
Kavanagh wobbled. Fear paled the flush in his cheeks. “He’ll never find me here.”