The Diabolical Miss Hyde (35 page)

Hipp beeped, his lights flashing double-time. “Off you go,” she murmured, and he dashed away under the tables, hunting rats.

An electric light hung low from a hinged metal arm, casting a pool of light around Clara Morton as she worked. She wore the same drab gray dress, her hair arranged in a tight
coil. Her freckled face looked sallow, drawn with fatigue. Perhaps she, also, worked too hard. It wasn't easy for a woman who wanted a career in science. You had to be better than your male colleagues, brighter, more determined.

“You again.” Clara didn't cease her polishing. “Clear off.”

“I'm sorry we seem to have gotten off to a bad start,” Eliza began, with a harmless little smile. “I don't mean to intrude. As I said, I'm a police physician, and—”

“What do you want?” snapped Clara, not looking up. “I'm very busy.”

The woman's attitude stung. “Then I'll keep it short,” said Eliza rudely. “I need to ask you some questions about the murder of Ophelia Maskelyne.”

Clara just scrubbed harder at the anode, liquid splashing in her pail. “Poor woman. An actress, wasn't she? I don't know anything about it. Just what I read in the papers.”

“Well, that's strange, because I saw you at the crime scene, on the very morning Miss Maskelyne was found dead.” Eliza plonked her bag on the table, atop a pile of handwritten notes, and folded her arms. “And we have a witness who saw you arguing with the victim at the theater, just hours before she was killed. Obstructing a police investigation is a crime, Miss Morton. Care to revise your story?”

Clara halted, and then she sighed and let the anode slip from her hands into the liquid. “We talked, that night,” she said, in a small voice. Did her chin tremble? “I left the Egyptian sometime after one, and that's the last I saw of her. I don't know what happened. Please, Ophelia was my friend. I really don't want to talk about it.”

“I understand,” said Eliza gently. “But two women are dead, possibly more. We have a murderer to catch. Can you think of anyone who wished Ophelia ill?”

“No. Everyone loved her.” A catch in her throat. “But it's not always those who hate us who cause the most pain, is it?”

“What do you mean? What did you talk about, that night in the yard?”

Clara wiped her hands on a towel. “Her brother was in the habit of mistreating her. I urged her to stand up to him.”

“By doing what? Finding a husband to protect her? I understand she had a sweetheart.”

Clara laughed, bitter. “Another man, to beat her as Lysander did? To lock her in her room and order her about? Trust me, Ophelia wasn't the marrying kind.”

“Then what would you have had her do? What was the fight about?”

Still, Clara avoided her gaze. “She didn't want to leave. She could have, you know. There are places such women can be safe.”

Deft fingers tugged at the back of Eliza's mind, a thief's hand at her skirts. But she couldn't grab it. “Could she have lodged with you, for instance? Where do you live?”

“I have a room at a ladies' hostel near Sloane Square.”

“But she refused?”

Clara shrugged.

Eliza recalled Ophelia's letter.
I wished we could vanish together. Perhaps one day we shall . . .
“And what happened then?”

“Lysander called for her, and Ophelia went back inside. I walked home. I'm afraid I don't know anything else . . .”

“Are you acquainted with a young man named Geordie Kelly?”

“Geordie?” A little laugh. “A feeble-minded lad. He followed Ophelia around like a lost lamb, making eyes at her. A pest. Harmless, I suppose.”

“He told me you don't like him. That you would chase him away.”

“Yes. He became tiresome. Always eavesdropping on our private conversations.”

“Could he have been eavesdropping that night, in the yard?”

Clara's expression froze. “I didn't see him if he was.”

Eliza held out a sheet of paper. She'd copied the teleporter diagram from the old diary, minus the technical notes. “Do you know what this is?”

The scientist leaned closer, frowning, but color flooded her cheeks. Relief at the change of subject? “Looks like an oversized capacitor, or . . . I say, this is a very strange design. Where did you get this?”

“What might such a machine be used for?”

Clara shrugged, opaque. “It looks like something an electrical chemist might use. For plating anodes such as these here, or synthesizing new chemicals.”

Images of a certain apothecary's laboratory fizzed in Eliza's mind. Galvanic cells, wires coiling from beakers of fluid, voltmeters, vacuum flasks, unorthodox spectrometers . . .

Marcellus Finch had been her father's colleague, privy to his secrets. And he knew enough about electrical fluid phenomena to synthesize alchemical solutions, at least. Was Marcellus involved somehow? She'd perused his hidden cache
of books at New Bond Street before and never found anything like this.

What if Finch was still in league with Fairfax? Henry Jekyll's old cabal, still hiding their secrets? Storing their most provocative codices at Bethlem, where no one would ever think to look?

Eliza's mind boggled. Finch's strange medicines. Fairfax's radical treatments. What was going on?

“But this machine is far too large to be practical,” Clara added. “The resistance alone would fry the circuit in minutes.”

“It could function only for a limited time?”

“Yes. A few minutes only, even if you had an extremely efficient voltage discharge method.”

“Such as what?”

“A heat sink the size of this room. Or a directed explosion. A lightning strike, if you like. Where did you say you got this?”

“That's confidential.” From her bag, she pulled the diagram's other half. Beneath the bag, Clara's notepapers piled, their edges curling. Ornate handwriting, the letters swiftly but finely penned, with careful flourishes and swirls on the capitals . . .

Eliza's heart skipped.

Harley's words from Ophelia Maskelyne's crime scene echoed in her mind. He'd been twitting Lafayette about his handwriting:
That “T” looks like an “F.”
No one drew their letters in exactly the same fashion.

The initial at the foot of Ophelia's correspondence, for instance. A simple ‘G.' Or, with a swirling flourish at the bottom . . .

Oh, my.

She held the diagram out to show Clara, damp fingers sticking to the paper. “What if you paired such a machine with this one? What purpose might it have then?”

Clara stared. “I insist that you tell me where you got this.”

“Why? Does it look familiar?”

Clara's cheeks pinked. “No, I just . . .”

“Worried someone might have stolen your ideas?”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

Eliza watched her closely. “It's easy to do, especially from a woman. No one would believe you had priority, would they? They'd assume you were taking the credit for some male scientist's work. Look, I'm not from the Royal, Clara. You can tell me. Have you built something like this before?”

Clara sighed. “Not exactly . . .”

“Not exactly. A smaller, more rudimentary one, then, for the stage. For Ophelia's vanishing act.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Oh, come.” Eliza unfolded Ophelia's letter from her pocket. “‘I watched you disappear tonight,'” she read. “‘It was better than I could have hoped. You were fabulous, and I wished we could vanish together. Perhaps one day we shall.'” She showed the letter to Clara. “This is your handwriting, isn't it? And your initial ‘C' at the bottom? The perfume of violets that you bought for her?”

“What if it is? We were friends. There's no crime in that.” But Clara's square chin quivered, and her fierce eyes glistened, wet.

“‘My dearest love?'” Eliza quoted from memory. “‘Your one and only truthful servant?'”

“I think you should leave now.”

“What really went on between you in the yard that night? What did Geordie Kelly see that he was too scandalized to tell me?”

Grief washed green like cholera over Clara's face. “You horrid thing. Get out of my laboratory.”

Eliza's heart brimmed with sympathy, but she resisted it, with a spike of Lizzie's coarse practicality. Now was the time to be brutal, to move in for the kill. “An illicit liaison. My, my. The Maskelynes were very keen for us to believe that these letters came from someone else. And now I discover you're building the very type of machine the killer is using to escape the scene of his—or her—crimes. It smells of cover-up, wouldn't you say? I should think my inspector will be pleased to hear of this.”

Briskly, she tucked the papers into her bag. “Thank you so much for your time, Miss Morton. That will be all for now . . .”

“Do you know what it's like?” The rage in Clara's tone roasted Eliza in her place. “For women like me? They call us mad, or hysterical. They lock us up. When I was sixteen, my mother was so ashamed of me that she took me to see a doctor. He suggested I have relations with a man immediately, to ‘set me right,' or I'd have to be put away.”

Eliza blanched. She knew all too well the fate of women who loved other women. The Bethlem cells were frequented by those who harbored “unnatural desires.” “Miss Morton . . .”

“Yes, I loved Ophelia.” Viciously, Clara wiped her nose, but the tears kept streaming. “And she loved me. Is that so hard to stomach? Are you disgusted,
Doctor
?”

“Not at all,” said Eliza steadily. “I'm sorry for your loss.”

Clara stared, white. “You know,” she said at last, her voice small and trembling, “you're the first person who's said that to me.”

The injustice burned at Eliza's heart like poison. Had Clara been a man, she'd be inundated with messages of condolence. To live forever in secret, never sharing, never admitting the truth . . .

She swallowed. “I don't mean to pry, Miss Morton. All I want is to find out what happened, and catch the murderer.”

Clara wiped her swollen face and nodded.

“The family didn't accept you.” Not a question.

Clara snorted. “Her brother is a beast, his wife just as bad. They loathe me. Can't abide the scandal. Their darling girl's
unnatural
. You'd think she'd sprinted through the streets naked.”

Eliza's palms itched at the callousness of it, and she wanted to scrub them clean. Mrs. Maskelyne's story was a spiteful half-truth. Lafayette was right: so much for the downtrodden wife.
Miss Ophelia is much admired,
they'd taught the housemaid to say. Pointed the finger at an innocent half-witted boy. All to cover up the scandalous truth: Ophelia's secret lover was a woman.

“Lysander and his wife as much as told me your letters were from Geordie Kelly,” Eliza admitted angrily. “They'd let him go on trial for murder to keep their secret.”

A flat, humorless laugh. “Forgive me if I'm unsurprised. Lysander had already threatened to marry her off against her will. They'd shackle her to anything in trousers if she'd have it, but she point-blank refused. And word was getting around.
None of Lysander's cronies would have her. That night, he found her with my letters and lost his temper. Told her he'd marry her to the old man who cleans the latrines if she didn't ‘come to her senses.'”

“And later, you came to see her?”

“I wanted her to leave with me. She wouldn't. Afraid of what might become of her without her livelihood, I suppose.” Clara wiped her reddened face again. “As you can imagine, I didn't see it quite like that at the time. We argued. I left. That's the last I saw of her. I returned the next morning to make it up to her, and there she was in a pool of blood, surrounded by a police barricade. I swear to you, I don't know what happened.”

“I believe you.” The grief and distress crumpling Clara's face looked real. Briefly, she wished for Captain Lafayette's canine facility for sniffing out lies. “And the disappearing machine . . . ?”

Clara shrugged, rueful. “A party trick. It didn't really work. All it did was momentarily disrupt the aether and make it look as if she'd vanished. You needed a mirror and some tricks with the lights to get the effect.”

“I see.” Eliza considered. “Do you think it could work, though? In principle?”

“A vanishing machine?” Clara made her best effort at a smile. “It does sound far-fetched. But the new science makes anything possible. I suppose if the apparatus were large enough . . . well, who knows?”

“Who indeed?” Eliza tucked her bag under her arm. “One more thing. Are you acquainted with Sir Jedediah Fairfax?”

“Not personally. Surgeon, isn't he? A knighthood for tending some princess's brain fever? I recall Dr. Percival mentioned something about it.”

“What about Marcellus Finch?”

A blank look. “The name isn't familiar.”

“He's a galvanic chemist. Among other things.”

For a moment, true fear shadowed Clara's gaze. And then she visibly composed herself, her cold mask dropping into place. Apparently, some types of scandal scared her more than others. “I don't know anything about those other things, Dr. Jekyll,” she said smoothly, arranging her skirts. “Now forgive me, I'm very busy. Good day.”

Two hours on a traffic-blocked Strand later, Eliza burst back into Inspector Griffin's office, with Hippocrates and her precious diagrams tucked safely in her bag. “Harley, I . . .”

Inspector Reeve waved at her from behind Griffin's desk, chewing on a cigar.

She halted, thoughts whirling. “Where's Inspector Griffin?”

“I'm afraid Griffin was called away. His wife has only hours to live, they say. Tragic.” Reeve didn't sound as if he cared one whit.