But Branwell had never physically harmed anyone but himself. Kavanagh scrambled away, snatched up something that lay in the shadows beyond his lamp. He returned, brandishing an axe.
“No!” I fled to the far end of the cage and cringed.
“Pull yourself together, man,” Slade ordered, and I heard the desperation beneath the authority in his voice. “Think rationally. You know Lord Eastbourne has treated you ill. You’ve seen Stieber’s spies sniffing around, trying to nab your invention. But what harm have we ever done you? None! We shouldn’t be punished for everyone else’s sins.”
“If you kill us, you’ll just make things worse for yourself,” I said. “You’re already wanted in connection with the deaths of Mary Chandler, Catherine Meadows, and Jane Anderson. Two more murders, and you’ll surely hang.”
Kavanagh gaped, stricken. “You know about my experiments?” Then he giggled. “You won’t live long enough to tell.”
He swung the axe. Slade ducked. I screamed. The blade struck a bar of the cage with an ear-splitting, echoing clang. Kavanagh reeled, off balance. He hauled back for another swing.
“For your own good, don’t!” Slade shouted. “Cooperating with us is your only hope of surviving, let alone getting the recognition you want.”
Kavanagh’s mood shifted yet again, with lightning speed. Mischievous cunning gleamed in his bloodshot eyes. “Maybe you’re right: you can do me more good alive than dead.”
36
Kavanagh abruptly turned and departed. His figure vanished into the darkness of the dungeon. His shuffling footsteps receded down a passage; then a door slammed shut. Slade and I looked at each other in bewildered surprise.
“What can he intend?” I asked.
“I haven’t the foggiest idea,” Slade said, “but we’d best get out of this cage.”
He yanked on the lock, but it held firm. I tested the bars, which were too sturdy to break. Slade stretched his arm through them, but it reached a fraction of the distance to the footstool. The key glittered there like fool’s gold, bright and mocking. We then tried to move the cage, but it was bolted to the floor. Slade removed his coat, grasped one sleeve, and flung the garment at the key. He only managed to knock the key off the footstool. It bounced on the floor and landed farther out of reach. Slade said, “Damnation!”
“Maybe we can pick the lock.” I lifted my hands to my hair and was about to remove a pin, when we heard wheels rattling. Slade signaled me to desist. He hurriedly donned his coat. We stood and waited, endeavoring to look innocent. I hoped Kavanagh wouldn’t notice that the key had been moved.
He reappeared, pushing a cart laden with boxes, casks, and various tools. “This is my invention. I’ve made up my mind that people must know what I’ve accomplished before I die. You shall have the honor of being the first.” Kavanagh bent over a box on the cart and removed the top. Inside, cushioned by straw, were a dozen glass jars with metal lids. “Look!” He held a jar aloft on his palm, displaying its powdery, brownish contents; he beamed with pride. “The culmination of my scientific research.”
“That’s the disease-producing material you used to infect those women in Whitechapel?” Slade said.
As we gazed upon the jar with repugnance, Kavanagh laughed. “No, no. Those experiments were but an early stage in my work.” He shook the jar; the powder swirled inside. “This is a culture of something far more serious. Have you ever heard of woolsorter’s disease?”
I nodded. Woolsorter’s disease was an ailment of cattle, sheep, and goats, also of farm folk who handled animal products; hence, its name. In the cities it was known as ragpicker’s disease, afflicting people who manufactured buttons from animal horns and brushes made from bristles, worked in the leather industry, or handled cloth that had touched persons suffering from the disease. The symptoms were a cough, sore throat, fatigue, and severe difficulty in breathing. Woolsorter’s disease was usually fatal within days. There was no cure, and no prevention except to boil the victims’ clothes and bedding, wash down their rooms with lye, and cremate their dead bodies. The disease was one of the oldest and most dreaded in history, believed by some to be the sixth plague mentioned in the Bible. Outbreaks had frequently ravaged Europe. Now Slade and I were horrified to realize what Niall Kavanagh’s invention was.
“This one jar contains enough animalcules to infect an entire city.” Kavanagh tossed the jar up into the air and barely managed to catch it. He giggled at our fright. “Would you like to know how I cultured them?”
“First we would like you to put that jar down,” Slade said. “Then we would like to come out of the cage.”
“Never mind what you want,” Kavanagh said, although he did set the jar in the box. “I want you to know the details of my research, so I will tell you, and you will listen.”
He assumed the pedantic manner of a professor lecturing. “I traveled to the countryside, talked to farmers, and located a field where some cows that had died of the disease were buried. I dug them up.”
I had heard that the disease could afflict people or animals who disturbed such gravesites, even decades after the burial. The disease was commonly thought to arise from a curse put on the fields. Niall Kavanagh had proven this theory wrong.
“I wore protective garments like these.” Kavanagh delved into a box and removed a rubber suit with a hood, boots, and gloves attached, and a cloth mask. “That’s how I avoided contracting the disease.
“I collected samples of the remains. I took them back to my laboratory and exposed some live sheep to them. When the sheep became ill, I drew their blood. I put it under the microscope and saw the animalcules-tiny, wormlike creatures. I found the same creatures in fluid from the lungs of the sheep after they died. I experimented with cultivating the animalcules. First I grew them on plates of blood, meat broth, and gelatin. Then I discovered that the best medium is the aqueous humor from cows’ eyes, which I obtained from a slaughterhouse. I incubated them at the same temperature as the human body. When I had achieved the purest cultures I could, I introduced them into the nostrils of healthy sheep. They all contracted the disease.” Kavanagh’s voice rang with the excitement he must have felt at the time. “I had discovered its true cause!”
Now we knew what purpose the sheep, the glass plates, and the equipment at the laboratory had served. The glass box with the gloves had protected Kavanagh while he worked with his cultures.
“I discovered that the animalcules could be heated, dried, and ground into powder, yet retain their disease-causing properties. I have made the greatest breakthrough in the history of science!” Grandiosity sparkled all over Kavanagh. I was sadly reminded of Branwell during his rare moments of triumph, when he’d managed to publish a poem.
“At first I thought to report it to the Royal Society,” Kavanagh said. “I hoped it would regain me the honor I’d lost when I was expelled by those fools who dare to call themselves scientists. But they were so set against me that they might not believe I had accomplished something so tremendous. My discovery contradicted all the accepted theories about disease. No, I told myself; I mustn’t hand it over to the Society men to reject and ridicule. Why should I? Why did I need their esteem any longer?”
Spreading his arms, laughing exultantly, he whirled about the room. “I had outshone them. I was like a god above mortals. I need not curry the favor of small, inferior men anymore.” Kavanagh stopped whirling, swayed dizzily. “But I couldn’t bear to keep my discovery to myself, to marvel at alone. What should I do with my knowledge? How could I use it to gain the recognition I’d craved all my life?” That it might endanger mankind didn’t seem to have occurred to him. “One day I was sitting in my laboratory, wondering what to do next, when suddenly my mind made a dazzling leap to a higher plane of intuition. Suddenly I realized that my discovery was even greater than I’d first thought. Whoever has this-” He gestured at his jars of deadly cultures “-owns the very power of life and death!”