The Heiress Effect (12 page)

By the time she reached home, Jane could
scarcely breathe. Her chest heaved uselessly against her corset and
spots danced in front of her eyes.

The housekeeper greeted her in the entry,
glancing once out the door. But she didn’t ask any impertinent
questions—questions like,
Where is the carriage?
or
Why
are you gasping for air?

Jane answered those unspoken queries anyway.
“I left the carriage behind,” she said. “I thought a brisk walk
would be nice.” In truth, with the market in full force today, it
would have taken her forty-five minutes to bring the conveyance
around. It had taken her fifteen minutes of quick marching to make
her way home.

“Of course,” the housekeeper said, as if it
made sense for Jane to be heaving in the entryway like a fish
landed on the dock.

Jane’s hair was falling out of its careful
arrangement. The curls at her ears were tilting; the hairpiece of
long brown curls pinned to the nape of her neck had come askew.
Pins jabbed into her scalp. She reached up a hand, tried to arrange
it all into some semblance of order, and gave up when her fingers
encountered chaos.

The housekeeper didn’t move from her spot.
“The exercise has brought color to your complexion.”

Ha. Sweat beaded on Jane’s forehead. She
could feel it trickling down one cheek, tickling her skin as it
slid. She didn’t need a mirror to tell that her face was bright as
brick.

“I’ll just go see my sister, then?” She threw
this out airily.

Mrs. Blickstall was just turning onto the
street behind her, puffing heavily.

“Yes,” Jane said. “I’ll go talk with Emily.
Just like I always do when I return home.”
Coming at a dead run,
just like I always do.
She clamped her lips together.
Shut
up, Jane.

The housekeeper gave her a pitying look—one
that said,
Really, Miss Fairfield, don’t bother with the lies.
We all know how this is supposed to work.

Jane sighed and slipped her a coin. It
disappeared almost instantly.

“She’s in the east parlor, with Alice and
Doctor Fallon. I’ll see you’re not disturbed.”

Jane nodded and started grimly down the
hall.

She found her sister sitting at a table. One
sleeve was rolled up; the arm that was bared had been strapped to
the table, exposing the pale skin of her scars.

Strips of white cotton were wound about her
wrist and forearm, holding metal plates in place. These were
attached to wires, which in turn were attached to some kind of
contraption. Jane had no idea what it was. Some evil-looking,
foul-smelling collection of jars.
Galvanics. Electrical
batteries.

But at least Emily looked to be bored rather
than in pain. She brightened at the sight of her sister.

“Jane!”

“What is this all?” Jane asked.

“We’re waiting for a seizure to come on.”
Emily rolled her eyes.

“Miss Emily,” said the man standing by the
curtains, “I believe I have told you before. You must not move.
When you wiggle your leg like that, you jar the contacts. They
might come loose, and if they’re slack at the wrong time, I can’t
complete the circuit.”

Emily gave Jane a speaking look of waggling
brows and compressed lips. “Yes,” Emily said, “Meet Doctor Fallon.
He’s been hard at work this morning.”

Doctor Fallon was a trim man of maybe forty.
His chestnut-brown hair had not yet started to gray. He had a
curling mustache and brown, bristling sideburns.

Jane strode forward. “I’m Miss Jane
Fairfield, Emily’s sister. Would you mind explaining your
methods?”

He frowned in puzzlement. “But I’ve already
told Mr. Fairfield everything.”

“I take an interest in medical advances.”
Jane settled into a chair next to her sister. “I would like to hear
about yours.” She made a face at him that she hoped passed for a
smile.

He seemed taken aback for a moment and then
responded with a rusty smile of his own. “I am a galvanist,” he
said earnestly. “Which is to say, I practice medicine of the
galvanic sort. To wit, I have discovered that passing current
through the human body can produce a number of effects, such as
numbness, pain, convulsions…”

He glanced down at Emily, whose lips had
pressed together into a thin line.

“Ah,” he said, “and, ah, I have found a few
useful effects as well. For instance, the application of galvanics
can cure malingering.”

Oh, Jane was sure it did. Delivering an
electric shock to a patient who was pretending to be sick would no
doubt be very effective. It would probably “cure” lesser illnesses,
too.

“That’s lovely,” Jane said. “Good work,
having found that out.”

He smiled uncertainly.

“I’m positive,” Jane continued, “that there’s
absolutely nothing at odds with your oath as a physician in
delivering—what was it you called it?—galvanic current to your
patients.”

He flushed. “Ah, well, you see. In my case,
doctor
is something of a courtesy title.” He brightened. “A
rank bestowed upon me by dozens of grateful patients.”

So he was a complete quack. Jane folded her
hands and wished, not for the first time, that her uncle was not so
dreadfully gullible.

“Interesting,” she said. “Have you ever cured
anyone with a convulsive disorder?”

“Ah, no. But I have
caused
convulsions, and, ah…” He looked down at Emily, as if not quite
sure he should speak on in her presence.

If he could deliver an electric shock to her,
he could damned well tell her what he was doing. Jane made a
gesture for him to continue.

“It’s a theory I have, you see. Galvanic
current flows. It has a direction. If current can cause convulsion,
flowing in one direction, then when someone is having a convulsion,
one ought to be able to stop it by applying an equal and opposite
current in the other direction. It’s a simple application of
Newtonian laws. With sufficient experimentation, I am sure I can
calibrate the precise amount to apply.”

“You are
sure?”
Jane asked dubiously.
“Is
sure
the proper word to use to describe your
theory?”

“I am…hopeful,” he amended. “Quite
hopeful.”

Maybe a few years ago, she might have let him
try. But Jane had heard a dozen men make equally grandiloquent,
equally ridiculous claims about how their particular form of
torture would cure her sister’s fits. None of their treatments had
worked, and they’d all been painful. And there were Emily’s burns.
She felt the corners of her mouth curl up in a snarl.

“So let me understand. You are proposing to
deliver as many electric shocks as you like to my sister, for an
indeterminate amount of time, on a theory for which you have no
evidence other than a wild guess.”

“That hardly seems fair!” he squawked. “I
haven’t even had a chance—”

“Oh, no,” Emily said, speaking up at last.
“He’s demonstrated that he can cause a convulsion in me with his
current. I told him that it wasn’t the same
kind
of fit that
I have. It doesn’t feel the same at all. But it is, after all, only
my body. What do I know?”

Jane couldn’t speak for the black rage that
filled her. She’d wanted to protect Emily. Why did her uncle have
to bring in these fools?

“Exactly,” the charlatan said. “I am the
expert on galvanics. What would she know?”

Jane particularly remembered the man who had
insisted that the convulsions were an invention of Emily’s mind.
Since they were so, he’d insisted that he needed only offer her an
incentive to stop. Those burns along her sister’s arm—matched by
the ones on her thigh—had been his version of an incentive. What
did
Emily
know, after all?

“Well.” Jane’s voice shook. “There’s only one
way I can think of to find out what Emily knows.”

“Your pardon?” The doctor shook his head.

Jane tried not to snarl at him. “I propose to
take the radical course of asking her. Emily, what do you think of
this course of treatment?”

Only the tremble of Emily’s hands really
answered that question. Jane swallowed her anger and waited for her
sister’s reply.

“I would rather have the fits, thank
you.”

Then Fake Doctor Fallon could go to hell, for
all Jane cared. The only difficulty was how to send him there. She
turned to him. “Thank you very much,” she said, “but your services
are no longer needed.”

He looked shocked, glancing from his
acrid-smelling jars to Emily, and then back to Jane. “You can’t
discharge me,” he finally said. “This is my chance. I could write
this up, make my name…”

There was a good reason why Jane always kept
a few bills in an inner pocket. She found these now and unfolded
them, holding them out. “I am not discharging you, Doctor Fallon.
You may have these twenty pounds if you walk away right now. You
only need tell my uncle that you have determined that your
treatment is ill-suited to my sister’s condition. He will pay you.
I will pay you. And we will all profit from it.”

He scratched his head. “But how can I know if
my treatment is ill-suited without further experimentation?”

Sometimes Jane wished she were good at
diplomatic speeches. She wished she’d mastered coquettish looks and
innocent smiles. But she hadn’t. She was singularly bad at those
forms of persuasion. She was good at handing out money and
opinions.

“You won’t know,” she told him. “You will
have to live in ignorance. That is what it means to accept a bribe.
I give you money; you tell what lies you need to tell.”

His eyes had widened as she spoke. “But that
would be dishonest!” he protested.

God. Her uncle had found an
honest
charlatan this time. The others had all been only too happy to be
offered the money.

“Twenty-five pounds,” Jane tried. “Twenty for
you, five more that you might donate to the parish as a sop to your
conscience.”

He hesitated.

“Come,” Jane said, “do you want the parish
poor to suffer simply because you hadn’t the bravery to walk away
from this house?”

He reached forward, fingers outstretched
toward the bills. But before he could take them from her, he
snatched his hand away, shaking his head in outrage. “This,” he
said, his voice shaking, “this is an ungodly household.”

Jane could have struck him. He wasn’t even a
real doctor. He wanted to torture her sister. And
she
was
the ungodly one? Maybe she should offer thirty pounds.

But Emily was the one who smiled and peered
innocently up at him. “Oh,” she said, in a deceptively naive voice,
“but it is. It
is.
We all tell lies, all the time. You
wouldn’t want to stay around here. It might be catching.”

Ironically, Jane thought, that was the actual
truth.

“You should accept our filthy lucre and be
shut of our wretched lies,” Emily continued.

He looked between the two sisters.

“Here,” Jane said, adding a third bill to the
ones she already held. “Have thirty pounds. Leave tonight. You can
still catch the six o’clock train.”

He hesitated, unspeaking.

“Alice will pack your things for you. Won’t
you, Alice?” The maid had been sitting at the window—presumably to
function as a chaperone for Emily when she had been alone with the
doctor. But, like all the servants in the Fairfield household, she
recognized an opportunity to earn a little extra when it was
presented. She jumped to her feet and came forward. Doctor Fallon
made no motion to stop her from wrapping his jars in cotton.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “This doesn’t seem
right.”

“Well, if you would like to stay,” Emily
said, “you are more than welcome to.”

Jane sent her sister a surprised look.

Alice undid the wires attached to her sister
and Emily stood. She took a swishing step toward the doctor. Jane
would have admired her form, but the cotton strips trailing from
her arm rather ruined the effect.

“As you said, we are an ungodly household. We
pray to Ba’al,” Emily said earnestly. “Every evening. And to
Apollo, god of the sun, at daybreak. We would like it very much if
you joined us.”

Jane had to clamp her lips together to keep
from bursting into laughter.

“There are
so
few heathens in England,
and you look like a big, strapping addition—”

Doctor Fallon turned bright red and grabbed
the bills from Jane’s hand. “You are right,” he said coldly. “I
cannot—I
must
not stay in this household.”

Alice wordlessly handed him the wicker case
she had packed, which now contained the implements of his
trade.

“I take my leave of you,” Doctor Fallon
proclaimed. “I will not come back, no matter how you might beg,
until you repent and accept—”

“What is going on here?”