“You seem to anticipate everything else.” Solborne finally broke the silence. “So perhaps you have some notion of my real concern—the one I find so improbable that I am reluctant to voice it. The fear that brought me to you.”
“Surely.” Darwin licked his fingers. “All the components are present, are they not? Put aside, for the moment, the question of the calculating engine. Then we have a young woman who encounters a mysterious man from the Continent, perhaps from the central regions of Europe. Rapidly she comes under his sway. They meet every day, but only when the sun has gone from the sky. Access to her quarters cannot be obtained at night except through a high window set in a vertical wall, inaccessible to mortal man. She never goes out after dark, yet every day she becomes weaker, until she is as pale as though the blood itself were draining from her veins. Every day her intensity of manner increases, but so does her indifference to ordinary events. To anyone with a knowledge of European folklore, especially Slavonic traditions, a possible inference is clear.”
“I know. I have seen no puncture wounds on her skin, but Professor Riker is a—”
“An inference that is clear, yet is also total nonsense. Life on Earth admits a huge variety of forms, but everywhere there is a logic, whereby form follows function. I can no more believe in Das Wampyr than I can believe in Sinbad’s roc, a bird so large that it feeds on elephants. By the simple law of proportions, such a creature could never lift itself from the ground. And such a being as Nosferatu, the vampire, hated by all men but totally helpless during the daytime, could never survive the centuries.”
“But if Riker is not that—that thing—then what is he? And if not he, then what is doing this to my sister?”
“I do not know.” Darwin placed his hands over his paunch. The fatigue of the late afternoon had vanished and again he was eyeing the dish of smoked eels. “At this moment, I honestly do not know. But I assure you, Thomas Solborne, that we will find out.”
* * * My dear Erasmus, I told you, did I not, that I was the wrong man for your job? And pox on it, I was right. Tom Solborne hasn’t said one word, but I’m sure he thinks I’m about as much use here as tits on a bull…
Alone in the coach, Darwin tapped Jacob Pole’s letter on his knee, leaned back, and allowed himself to rock back and forward with the sway of the steady movement.
The problem was, Jacob was right. He wasn’t the first choice—or even the second. But what option had offered itself? Solborne had arrived at the height of the season for winter ailments, when Darwin’s locum tenens was already pressed into service elsewhere. Jimmy Watt was deep in the wreckage of his engine, in that mood of solitary thought that made him seem scarcely human. Transported to Dorset, he would see only steam. As for Matthew Boulton, he ran the great Soho factory under his own absolute control and he could not be spared for a day, still less a week.
Darwin comforted himself with the thought that a fortnight was not much time for Jacob to hold the fort, no matter how long it might seem to him.
On the other hand, if Helen Solborne were to die…
Darwin longed for a report from a man with his own keen diagnostic eye for medical matters. Jacob had not been pressed into service, he had gone willingly enough, but he could no more read the facies of impending death or disease than he could swim unaided from Dorset to the coast of France. How sick was Helen Solborne? She’s an attractive little woman, and she said hello to me polite enough. But Solborne is right, a lot of the time she doesn’t seem to be all there. And Lord knows what she’s talking about the rest of the time. Two days ago she asked me if I knew of some Italian type called Fibonacci, and his successions. I asked her if he was that Italian general who’d fought against Austria in the War of the Polish Succession, and she laughed like I’d made the biggest joke in the world and said that Fibonacci had been a good deal earlier and a much greater man, and when she said successions she meant sequences. That was one of our better conversations. Afterwards, Tom said she’d been talking about her mathematics. God help the man who marries her…
Helen Solborne did not sound like an easy dupe—or an easy subject for her brother’s control. Darwin glanced down to the letter sitting on his knee. He had read it often enough to be sure that the information he sought would not be found there. Jacob was too full of his own opinions and interests to serve as impartial observer.
…looks of a starved Spaniard, or maybe a Portugee, though his accent says Hungary or even farther south and east. Either way, I’d bet money that his original name isn’t Riker. I followed him into Dorchester and watched him wander until he found a shop that suited him. He ordered a ton of food and spices delivered to that house he rents, most of it foreign muck as bad as any I’ve seen in Egypt or the Indies. No wonder he’s thin as a rail. He probably eats like a cormorant, but I’ll wager the stuff goes right through him. And the amount of it! You’d be hard pressed to put away all he ordered, ’Rasmus, and you’d make two of him in size.
Two of him in size. Darwin leaned his head back on the stuffed leather of the coach seat, eyes closed but deep in thought. They were skirting the chalky slopes of the Western Downs, rumbling down to Dorchester and Weymouth. Portland was a couple of hours away. The tempering effect of the English Channel could already be felt in the milder air.
Darwin turned to another page of Pole’s letter.
Jacob might not be the best judge of exotic foreigners or of talented young women, but he had other strengths. He evaluated terrain and landscape with the practical eye of a soldier and the methodical approach of a first-rate artillery engineer.
The west side of the Portland peninsula, where Newlands stands, is actually a continuation of a curious feature of the mainland known as Chesil Bank. The bank is a shingle beach that runs offshore of the mainland all its length, eight miles and more. A body of water called ‘The Fleet’ runs between bank and mainland. On the peninsula, however, the bank comes ashore, rises higher, and is more than thirty feet above the sea by the time it reaches Newlands. And Newlands is built on topof that bank. Tom Solborne said that the high window of the south tower was forty feet up. But that’s from ground level. Add in the height of the bank, and the window is more like seventy feet above the water. I checked the wall beneath. It has smooth facings of white freestone. The only way to get in that window would be to fly in, unless a man could run up the sheer wall like a human spider. You can also dismiss the idea of Helen Solborne, like Rapunzel, lowering a rope down to a waiting lover. He would have to be sitting in a boat and he’d get only one grab—the tide runs fast along this part of the shore. Next I examined the door locks. They are padlocks, simple enough for someone with experience. I, for my sins, had them open in a half a minute, without a key. However, the locks cannot be reached from inside the tower. The only other possibility would seem to be an accomplice, opening the lock from outside. In the next day or two I therefore propose an all-night vigil outside the south tower. It’s not as cold here as in Birmingham or Derby, but there’s a dampness that blows in from the sea. Bring plenty of your pills and nostrums with you—I’ll likely need them for my creaking bones.