Ruth Wolf waited patiently for the librarian and vicar to be fully apprised of all things pertaining to miniature calculating devices and riverside corpses, a miraculous cure for Rokesmith’s rigoritis, and a cellar filled and then suddenly made bereft of merchandise from the Terra Incognita.
“There is this as well,” said Antonia Bocker, handing Upwitch the card of invitation that had come from Janet Pyegrave.
The vicar responded by asking Antonia,“Just what is to be celebrated on July 15? The fact that another crate of expensive champagne has been hauled up to the Summit for the exclusive relishment of the Petit-Parliament?”
“Perhaps I should defer to our Outlander guest to tell it,” said Antonia with a nod to Miss Wolf.
Ruth Wolf beheld the faces that stared in rapt attendance within the close room — beheld them as if from some great height, for was it not true that the nurse had situated herself upon quite the lofty precipice in this engagement? For a moment I began to fear that she intended to go back on her word — that gathering us together was merely a ploy by which to receive as much intelligence as we were willing to give her and then renege on her promise to be equally forthcoming with us.
Muntle was thinking along the very same lines: “There are five people in this room, Miss Wolf, who have put a good deal of the puzzle together, but we cannot finish it without your help. We pose no danger to you, should you withhold the fact of our society and all that we know from those who could do us harm. But mark me, madam, we may do great harm to you if you decide to change your mind about cooperating with us. We could tell every man, woman, and child in this valley the details of your clandestine activities here. I wager that you wouldn’t be sitting within this room entertaining our suppositions and receiving our facts, if you did not yourself nurse terrible qualms in your own breast about what you have been asked to do in the name of this mysterious ‘Project’ that manages our lives, exploits us, and preys upon our ignorance. Something is afoot. We know it now and we know that we have been put in the way of some great veiled peril. You are the link between that which threatens us and the means by which we may save ourselves. Do you wish to help us, madam, or do you wish to doom us all — yourself included — to whatever destruction these people are capable of inflicting?”
Ruth Wolf looked to me. Then she took a measure of the other anxious faces within the room. Finally she drew breath to say, “While I wish to help you in whatever way that I can, I cannot bring back your brother, Muntle, nor yours, Trimmers. Nor do I know what has happened to your nephew.”
“You know nothing of Newman?” I asked, quite astonished to hear the words, given what I now knew of her rather circuitous efforts to inform me of Newman’s present involuntary tenancy in Bedlam.
“I assure you I do not.”
“I don’t believe you, and you know why I do not believe you.”
“How on earth could I have knowledge of the boy’s whereabouts?”
“Because you work in Bedlam and because I found proof that he is being kept there and because you are the very one who led me to that proof.”
“I can’t possibly apprehend your meaning, Mr. Trimmers.” Ruth Wolf turned away so I could not scrutinise her face for the sincerity I should certainly find lacking there.
I was set to offer the theory put to me by my friend Sir Dabber — delivering it, if circumstances required it, to her very back and shoulders, but was deterred by the staying hand of my friend Muntle. “Leave it to rest for now, Trimmers.”
“Yet how can I trust anything else that this woman now says?” I rejoined in an undertone and with a hard look at that person whom I now believed, in spite of her earlier efforts to put a balm upon my mind with regard to my nephew, was now working against the release of that same cruelly sequestered child.
Antonia answered my rhetorical question with a concrete answer: “She will tell us what she wishes us to know, and we will have to decide what is true and what is not. For all we know, Trimmers, the woman will prevaricate when necessary to keep us in check — to prevent our storming the walls of Bedlam as if it be our own Bastille. We cannot have that, now can we, Miss Wolf? The five of us, dashing about, forming militias, creating havoc, ruining your plans to get away with Bevan Dabber and make a life for yourself far, far from this doomed place. Am I close to your ultimate purpose here, Miss Wolf — a purpose that would be compromised, perhaps altogether obliterated, should we all go about half-cocked and disturb the peace of this valley in such a way as to cause all your selfish schemes to go awry?”
Miss Wolf turned to face her inquisitor, and in so doing, to face all of the rest of us as well. She did not colour, nor did her expression change from that of stoic impassivity. “It’s largely rubbish, of course. Most of what you just said. But I am in agreement with the predicate of your premise, Miss Bocker: that panic and havoc and precipitant action would not be wise — would induce retaliation upon a rather grand scale. Now I am happy to tell you what I know of the Tiadaghton Project and to explain what my role has been in it, but only for the purpose of helping us all to keep our heads, to effect a careful and studied analysis of present circumstances with all the tools of cool intellect that have marked your previous fortnightly gatherings. Mr. Graham knows what I mean, do you not, sir — your being a man who has spent a long and fruitful life in dispassionate research — in investigations divested of unproductive emotionality. Is this not the wisest course, sir?”
Mr. Graham blushed at what he perceived to be a compliment (for never before had he been commended for his dispassionate, emotionallydivested investigations).
Miss Wolf continued: “In this matter you must all approach your present situation just as I approach my own rueful position — one from which I do eventually hope to extricate myself — without giving license to dangerous, sudden impulse.”
“Yet,” struck in Mr. Upwitch, “do you or do you not intend to steal away with young Mr. Dabber in the dark of some forthcoming night and be done with all of this — with all of us?”
“Do I wish to leave this place and never return? I most certainly do. Is it my wish to go arm-in-arm with the man I love? Yes. One hundred times yes. But it is my fate to remain here for the present. I am powerless to do much more at this unfortunate juncture than that for which I was hired: to maintain through sophisticated chemical therapies the illusion of the disease you call the Terror Tremens.”
“So that is what you do,” said I.
“Surely you had figured it out by now.”
“So you will confirm for us,” joined in Muntle, “that there is no such mental affliction.”
“That I most certainly will confirm or I should never have been given a job here,” replied Miss Wolf matter-of-factly.
“You say ‘to do much more than that for which I was hired,’” I interposed, “yet you have healed Bevan. I saw him. I spoke with him. You were not hired to do this.”
Miss Wolf nodded again, this time with obvious discomfiture. She lowered her eyes and could very well have been at that moment mistaken for a different sort of woman altogether — one made suddenly ineffable by thought of love. “I have done a little here and there to assuage my conscience, which grows more troubled by the day. I plan, as well, to give drugs to your Dr. Timberry to administer to young Florence Scadger. The medicine will treat her tuberculosis and eventually heal it. Outside this valley the disease is quite manageable with proper treatment and rigourous attendance by the patient to a specific pharmacotherapeutic protocol.”