‘It’s a choice between them though, I only have the two.’
‘Thank Christ for that, or we would be here all night!’ he said from under the bed, his voice humming strangely in the resonance of the china chamberpot. He found the stud and crawled out to start pulling at his collar again.
Marie Maclish was not normally a woman to engage with such coquettish uncertainty; the rest of her stern life was run on simple facts and basic commodities, but she was enjoying herself. This little charade of choice took her back to the highlands, to her grandmother’s house and the girls’ play of dressing up in women’s lives.
He had finished with the collar but his twisted tie looked limp and apologetic. He was admiring it, when she laughed.
‘What?’ he demanded.
‘What? Oh William, look at the state of it!’
‘The state of what?’
She put the dresses down and went over to adjust the tie, smiling playfully. He bristled at her touch. The more she pulled, the more he stiffened. As her smile fizzled out, his warmth drained away.
‘It was perfectly fine, woman, now it’s a mess,’ he said, pushing her fingers away. ‘We haven’t got time for this, we can’t be late.’
She said nothing and went back to her dresses; they seemed shrunken and indifferent. He looked over his shoulder.
‘Where’s the blue?’ he said, against the fret of disappointment that was filling the room. ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about, it’s not you they will all be watching tonight,’ he concluded, grabbing his coat and yanking the door open.
She watched him disappear out of the room. After a few static moments, she dressed and went down to wait beside him for the arrival of the car to take them to the celebration. She looked graceful and quiet, standing in front of the house, her hair and eyes accentuated by the green of the dress, her husband too caught up and curt to notice.
The doctor waited for ten long minutes after the headlights of the car had vanished from the road. Then he made his way to the reinforced door of the slave house, letting himself in with a set of keys that nobody knew he had. He put his bag down on the central table and lifted the bundle out. He was just about to strike the gong when he heard a footfall on the metal stair. He turned to see the herald of the Limboia descending slowly, a vacant grin on his face.
‘For Orm?’ said the herald in flat, dead tones.
‘Yes,’ said the doctor nervously. He had never been here without Maclish, and the place and these creatures unnerved him. His skin crawled every time he came close to the herald.
‘What to do?’ it asked.
The doctor explained the specific requirements of the task and how it must be done. ‘You won’t need a scent or a trace this time,’ he insisted and the herald seemed to agree.
‘This time seeing one stays, stays till after.’
The doctor thought for a moment, nodded, picked up his bag and left. The herald tenderly picked up the bundle and held it to his chest.
That was that. Now he would talk to the insolent Tulp girl and hush her defiance; she was in no position to argue, not in her condition. He made an appointment to call on her, and was surprised at the address. He had never been to 4 Kühler Brunnen, but knew of it; he had conducted business by association and at a distance with it. Why did she live there? Surely it was not a property owned by her father or some other member of her significant family?
He had mentioned the Tulps, and indeed the Lohr family, while treating August Daren’s wife, who, it transpired, was a victim of the Touch, the right side of her body being mildly paralysed, as if by electric shock. It was then that he had the idea of treating the afflicted with generated bursts of galvanic energy. It had worked for Mesmer, why not for him? A combination of shock and barbiturates would have them flapping their pocket books at him like performing birds; all that wonderful equipment he would be able to buy to furnish his experiments: Van de Graaff generators; spinning wheels; sparks and the scent of ozone; copper wires, glass wires; porcelain resistors like giant shining pearls. His laboratory would look magnificent. As soon as he got these distasteful matters out of the way, he could begin.
‘The Tulps are new blood, second generation merchants made good,’ Daren had told him. ‘Lowlanders from Leiden, or maybe Delft originally. Good businessmen with an ambition to become burghers. Three generations away from gentry, if we let ‘em. Now, the Lohrs are quite different; here before mine, they were; old wealth. Comparable to emperors, they were; unlimited funds.’ Daren sat back in his chair in awe of that amount of worldly ownership, believing that the Tulps probably viewed him with a similar reverence. He roused himself at the thought of the Lohr family demise. ‘A bit gone to seed now though,’ he added, with the tiniest relish of spite. ‘Just that strange daughter to run all that wealth and influence here in the Old Country.’
The doctor was absorbing every word, weighing every gram of possibility.
‘Did you know she was born blind?’ asked Daren.
‘I have had some knowledge of her case, but I am unable to speak of it, you understand,’ lied the doctor.
‘Oh, yes, of course!’ said Daren, without a moment’s doubt, his finger coming to rest on his closed lips.
Maclish had relaxed his strict social rules and accepted some wine in the name of self-congratulation. After many dry, disciplined years, he drank it in toasts to various companions, who stood and drank to him in return, with words of extreme gratitude. Nobody had ever said such things, and he had no defence. He swam in the flood stream of it, basking after the third glass and hugging his wife ferociously after the fifth; at least, he thought it was his wife. By brandy, he was slipping back into his origins, where all sorts of vermin and jokers waited to greet him. Marie had been escorted to a seat four rooms away, and sat in the middle of her worst nightmare, with the herd of directors’ wives. She had nothing in common with the women and nothing to say, and they all knew it. What was more, she feared William was on a steep decline and she was not with him to steer the outcome. She hoped he might collapse, that he might pass out before his long-sleeping fangs came out. The prospect snapped her to sense and she acted without stopping to think, cleverly approaching the most senior frauen.
‘I do apologise, but I am afraid that my husband has not taken his medicine,’ she announced in such a strong, music-hall Scottish accent that it surprised even her. ‘Please, I must go to him.’
Allowing a wife to intrude on the gentlemen’s part of the evening was unheard of, but it seemed a matter of severe need, so a maid was called and told to take Mrs. Maclish to the hall of the gentlemen’s room.
Marie bowed, fluttering and thanking those present until she was outside the room. Then she clicked into action, running through the corridors with the astonished maid in tow. Outside the smoky door, she told the maid what to do and made herself scarce. The lowly accomplice waited for her to leave, then knocked at the heavy door. Eventually, a bleary man opened it, seeming surprised to find anybody there.
‘Please, sir!’ the maid said. ‘Mrs. Maclish has been taken poorly, she needs to talk to her husband about her pills.’
‘Mrs who?’ spluttered the man.
‘Mrs. Maclish, the guest wife.’
‘Oh, oh, of course,’ said the man, vanishing back into the room.
After a prolonged time, during which the sound of moving furniture and broken glass fanfared his arrival, the soggy head of Maclish came around the door. There were no fangs, just a stupid grin. His concealed wife peered around the corner to make sure the coast was clear, then, at her command, they both pounced and dragged him out of the door and across the hall. Mercifully, there was no resistance, and the three of them staggered towards the entrance and the waiting automobile.