“If that happens,” he went on. “I feel sure that James Ledyard will be more than happy to comfort Alice—and even squire her around the tombs of Egypt, if she wishes it. Ledyard has a genuine flair for the interpretation of early history.”
“And you still propose that we should be on our way tomorrow for Lichfield?” asked Pole. “You are really willing to let Philip Alderton, James Ledyard and Alice Milner resolve the rest of this matter between them?”
“I think so.” Darwin yawned and rose heavily from the table. “It is no longer our business. Come on, Jacob. I want to take a look at Philip Alderton, and it’s getting late. We’ve had a busy day. One way or another, we’ve ended a family line, removed a Beast from the pit, and killed an Immortal. Now I have to go and look at a patient.”
THE SOLBORNE VAMPIRE
It was late afternoon on the shortest day of the year. An iron frost had lain since noon on the ground outside, and now it was settling on the flat roof of the square brick warehouse.
At nine o’clock of that same morning, the building roof had been comfortably warm. The temperature inside had been scorching hot, well over ninety degrees. The explosion of the boiler, at twenty-seven minutes before midday, had taken out every window and scattered fragments of glass and black iron a quarter mile in every direction. The inside heat had been bleeding away ever since. Wet towels were turning rigid, and soon once-boiling water in jugs and bowls would freeze.
The injured had been treated and the dead removed. The clean-up crew had done their best and were leaving. Shards of metal, embedded deep in solid brick walls, would have to wait, as would a thorough examination of the shattered relic in the middle of the room.
Just two people remained. The younger, a man of about forty with a gloomy, introspective face, was pacing one wall. He would not look at the ruined steam engine.
“That’s it,” he said. “It’s all over. I should never have left Glasgow. I’ll not build another one, no matter how you and Matthew urge.”
Erasmus Darwin had been picking up bloody rags and swabs and dropping them into a bucket. Now he straightened. He had worked through the previous night with a difficult delivery, and awakened to come to the Birmingham suburb after only three hours of sleep. His fat face was grey and he drooped with fatigue, but he permitted no sign of that to show in his voice.
“You won’t build another tonight, Jimmy, that I will admit. But tomorrow? Wait and see. I’ll wager you will see differently.”
“You would lose. I’m finished with all of this. I’ll go back to instrument making.”
“You cannot do that.” Darwin bent to pick up one last rag, grunted at his aching bones, and moved to where his medical chest stood on a work bench. Somehow, despite his weariness, the smile on his pockmarked face managed to be reassuring. “You must labor on, Jimmy. The world awaits the perfection of your ideas. The day will come when they”—he swept a hefty arm to take in the whole of the north of England—“will use your engines to drive a million spinning jennys. Your inventions will run the world. A hundred years from now, water power will be one with Nineveh and Babylon.”
“Waterwheels at least do not kill and maim.”
“One man died here—miracle enough, seeing the force of the explosion. And I gather that Ned Sumpton disobeyed your orders.”
“I told him not to start without me, that I would be busy at the Soho works until noon.” For the first time, the balding Scotsman glanced at the wreckage of the engine that reflected so much of his dreams and labor. “Ned was so impatient. I said to him, time and time, steam is not a toy, it’s a force of nature. You treat it lightly at your peril. And then to ignore the pressure, and never to check the safety valve…”
“Whatever he did, he paid for that and more.” Darwin closed the brass clasps on his medical chest. “Jimmy Watt, if you have trouble handling your job, how would you deal with mine? You’ve seen just one death today. Do you realize that it’s my second, and close to being my third? I was able to save the mother—I hope—but the baby died within two hours of delivery.”
“I couldn’t handle your job, Erasmus. I know it, and you know it. Even if I had your medical knowledge, I lack your fortitude.”
“As I lack your skills as engineer. There is space in the world for many complementary talents. As for fortitude, that is not innate. It is acquired by practice.” Erasmus Darwin glanced out of the nearest window, now a ragged square of emptiness in the whitewashed wall. “Jimmy, tonight I think I will have to throw myself on your hospitality. I do not see a trip home as feasible unless I abandon the sulky. Even then it would be difficult. The roads were bad coming, and now they’ll be like iron.”
“Of course.” The other man roused himself. “I’m a barbarian. You must be exhausted and starving. And in any case, if I sent you off without his seeing you, Matthew would never forgive me. You can stay with me. Let’s go and have dinner now—if you feel ready for it?”
“I can hardly wait.” Darwin hefted his medical chest and braced it against his broad chest. “I am famished. Will we eat at your home, also?”
“Oh, I think not. I’m not much of a one for eating, the way that you are.” Watt surveyed Darwin’s ample stomach, and for the first time since the accident a glint of humor came to his eye. “I think we’ll dine at Matthew’s. He has more money than both of us together, and he keeps a far better table. And he’ll be agog to know what new ideas you’ve had since the last Lunar Society meeting.”
“You mean I will have to sing for my supper? What makes you think I am ready for that?”
“If you’re not, it will be the first time ever.” Watt was leading the way through a battered warehouse door that hung crooked on its hinges. “Come on. A wash, a nap, and a good meal. I’ll send word to Lichfield that you won’t be home tonight.”
As the first night of winter put its lock on the land, the chance of more visitors to Matthew Boulton’s sprawling and battlemented house seemed small. The house turned inward, shutters barred and doors bolted. Outside, a light fall of snow had begun. It was too cold for large flakes. The tiny stinging crystals did not settle where they fell, but blew restlessly across the surface in response to variable breaths of wind too weak to move tree branches. Small drifts built up against the hedgerows. Badgers burrowed deeper in their sets, and foxes followed their noses across the frozen countryside in search of winter hares.
Within the house, all was snug and festive. Christmas was only four days away, and ivy, holly, and mistletoe hung above the fireplace of the great dining room. At the long table, dishes came and came: smoked eel, broiled turbot, veal and ham pie, quails stuffed with chestnuts, stargazy pie, capons stuffed with onions and oysters, a great smoking round of roast beef flanked by roast parsnips and potatoes and carrots, brandied plum pudding with candied peel and hard sauce, and finally a whole wheel of Stilton cheese. Boulton, owner of the finest metal works in Europe, knew his man. He offhandedly apologized for the absence of roast goose and suckling pig. The staff had scheduled those closer to Christmas. If only he had known that Darwin would be here…
“You would have done no differently.” Restored by an hour of sleep and a mountain of food, Darwin was in his element. An appreciative audience inspired him. Between mouthfuls of dried apricots he had been enlarging on Dr. Withering’s extraordinary and recent success with the humble foxglove to alleviate or even cure cases of dropsy, and the potential of that new dried-leaf decoction to supplement Jesuit-bark, aloes, and guaiacum. Even Watt seemed, in his interest in the subject, to be forgetting the day’s disaster— except at some deep inner level always present in the gloomy, self-doubting Scot.