The Technologists (23 page)

Hailing her, she seemed as surprised as he had been.

“Mr. Mansfield, how unexpected,” she said, tidying her dress and bonnet with a quick motion.

“I had some business for the Institute at the harbor—you, Miss Agnes?”

“With so few of us at the house at Temple Place, we have to share the errands. I must gather this list of things for Miss Maguire to cook for our supper. I suspect my cousin liked very much the idea I would smell of fish the rest of the day.”

Marcus laughed.

“Have you found extra hours somewhere?” he asked.

She nodded. “A few evening hours here and there with a woman of society who needs some help getting around the city. It is something, at least, until things are normal again. We hear little more than rumors from Philadelphia, only that the professor remains in a worrisome state. Well, I suppose you must be on your way,” she said firmly. “As I must be.”

“As you please,” Marcus said, bowing.

“I must admit,” Agnes added quickly, “I do not usually come to the harbor, and may not have followed Lilly’s instructions as well as I intended.”

“Do you mean you are lost?”

Agnes looked around and gave him an embarrassed frown. “I might be.”

“May I escort you?” he asked.

“Only until I know where I am, mind,” she said, shaking her finger at him.

“That might be a while,” he said, taking her arm and glancing at their surroundings.

“Why, do you know where we are, Mr. Mansfield?”

“Do I?”

“Do you?”

He gave a little shrug and they kept walking. Something remarkable had happened. He felt light and unworried, and the captain’s harsh interrogation had vanished entirely from his thoughts after only a few minutes of the housemaid’s company.

*   *   *

W
ITH EVERY SPARE MINUTE
,
they made use of their private laboratory, the single key passed among themselves until they were able to access the right equipment on the second floor to forge several extra sets. Little by little, they were mixing compounds and constructing equipment, with the next fellow who had a free interval doing the next step and leaving modified instructions for the one after him. Marcus was locking the laboratory after one of his turns when his eye was caught by a piece of paper tacked with laboratory pincers to a wooden beam in the corridor. He reached up and unfastened what turned out to be a crude drawing of a slender woman in peaked hat, tied to a broomstick, about to be lowered into a boiling caldron.

As he studied the caricature he took a step back against the wall. He heard a clicking sound, then the muffled ringing of a gong from somewhere in the basement before the door to Ellen Swallow’s laboratory was yanked open.

“Aha! You! What do you want?” The mystery lady herself peered out at him, her marble-white face and long neck a stark contrast to the basement gloom. She was a year or two older than Marcus, and four or five years older than most of his fellow seniors at Tech, even though she was only a freshman. That made her life there even more difficult than it already was. Her eyes were dark and intense as she stared at him and added, “I do not know you.”

“I am Marcus Mansfield, Miss Swallow. We spoke on the stairs …”

She clucked dismissively. “I know your name, Mr. Mansfield. That’s not what I meant.”

“I am sorry for disturbing you. I didn’t realize you were there.”

“Then you are even stupider than the others. I am
always
here. I cannot
attend classes with the other freshmen, lest I offend or elope with a man. This is where they cage me between my private sessions with professors; and that is how I like it. Are you down here to spy on me?”

“Miss Swallow,” he said, thinking he would show her the drawing he’d found and express his sympathy. Surely she was accustomed to vandals among students who did not want her there, and a cartoon depicting her burned alive was probably the least of it. He remembered his freshman year, the whispers of “factory boy” dogging him. He crumbled up the paper and stuffed it in his pocket. “I assure you that I’m not spying,” he said, holding her steady gaze.

She blew out an impatient sigh. “At the moment, Mr. Mansfield, I do not have the time to be misanthropic. If you are looking to drive me away from Tech, I must proffer my own apology. I am here for a reason—and
will
stay. What are you doing in there?”

“Where?”

“The metallurgical and blowpipe laboratory. You are a civil-engineering student.”

He hesitated, taken by surprise that the Institute’s hermit knew so much about him. “We have a society. It is called the Technologists.”

“How I should like to belong to a society! The Technologists,” she repeated in singsong, still staring a hole through him. “What is it this society of yours does, exactly?”

He hadn’t thought about how to answer that.

“It isn’t philanthropic?”

“Oh, no. We are a …” He stalled.

“A
secret
society.” The voice was Bob’s, who was entering with a jaunty step from the dark stairwell.

“Tech has no secret societies, Mr. Richards,” Ellen protested when he joined them.

“Until now it indeed was lacking in them,” Bob said.

“How good for the Institute,” she said dryly. “It is not very secret if I, of all forsaken people, know the identity of all its members.”

“Ah, we are only but two representatives of its membership, Miss Swallow,” said Bob.

“Then I suppose your other pet, Edwin Hoyt, is another.”

Neither Bob nor Marcus answered, but both appeared nonplussed. “Eddy is the smartest fellow in this place. Smarter even than Hammie,” Bob finally blustered.

“It seems very queer,” she went on, her long arms locking tightly on to each other. “I am cut off from all earthly ties in this private laboratory, not permitted to attend classes up there with the other freshmen, instead shut up down here like a dangerous animal. I have kept in my corner and worked for myself because I believe God is using my hardships to prepare me for something. Yet by choice you isolate yourselves down here in a dark, unused room, under the farcical guise of some society. Why?”

From inside Ellen’s laboratory a strange noise sounded, like a baby crying or babbling some new word. Marcus could not help but picture the caldron in the cartoon—the awful power of suggestion—and imagine an orphan baby, whose eyelashes and toenails she used in experiments. To make matters more enigmatic, a pungent, stale odor like mold drifted out from her chambers.

“What was that noise?” Bob asked, quick to turn the questioning away from them. He took a step toward her room.

“This is my
private
laboratory, Mr. Richards—it is my sanctuary, my mecca, from crude boys like you two.” But her advantage on them had weakened. “My time is too precious to waste in chitchat and gossip,” she said, turning her back to them.

“Go back to your mecca, then. And I mean Salem!” Bob called out as she closed and latched her door behind her, silencing the weird noises inside.

As they walked back upstairs together, Bob worried aloud. “If she has an inkling that we are doing something out of the way, the faculty will hear about it at railroad speed. She will give us up without a murmur.”

“I agree. She is placed in a position where she might feel she should take any opportunity to please the faculty. It is best not to draw her attention.” Marcus hesitated, but continued. “It sounds like you wish her to leave the school.”

Bob shrugged. “If she does, I should hold the door open for her like a gentleman. I have too many things to do to worry much on it. You
know, it sounds very much like you wish to defend her, or accuse me, Mansfield!”

“We just need no other set of eyes looking at us.”

“I wonder that hers don’t turn us to stone,” Bob quipped.

“I have had a conversation or two with her. She is never dull.”

“Dull, perhaps not. She read our faces like we were signboards. Up close, her looks are rather striking—I mean, as struck in the face with the fist of an ogre. Did you notice one of her eyes is larger than the other?”

“No.”

“From too much time looking through her microscopes, I’d wager. And each finger is stained another color of the rainbow from the myriad vials of acids and chemicals she handles. It makes me glad to work with metals. Turn the page, Mansfield—we have much to accomplish.”

Bob told Marcus his latest plan: With the dinner break about to begin, Edwin would stay behind in the laboratory to finish sketching their salvage equipment, while the two of them would go back to State Street.

“Come, then, on to the sports fields,” Bob said.

“I thought we were going to the business district.”

“We will do both. Bryant Tilden is going to help.”

“Tilden? Are you cracked?”

“I promised you I’d find a way to leave without being noticed, didn’t I?”

When they reached the fields, which had been dusted with snow overnight, those eleven who had come to play looked to Bob, as usual, for direction.

He announced, “This afternoon, men, let’s play baseball!”

There were audible groans, and many turned away. In their occasional baseball games, Bob, naturally the pitcher, had never found more than five men, who then had to do double duty, running back and forth between sides in each play. It was not easy to build enthusiasm.

Tilden stepped forward, relishing the moment.

“What a scrubby choice of game, Richards. I say those who don’t want to play this scrubby baseball go to the fields over there and play football with
me
.”

Bob nodded with satisfaction at Marcus as the athletes fell in behind
Tilden. Marcus tried to hide a grin under a forced cough, as he, Bob, and Edwin were left standing triumphantly by themselves.

As soon as Tilden and his cohorts were safely away, the three bolted—Edwin circling back to the rear entrance on Newbury behind the building, and Marcus and Bob racing each other through the streets to the horsecar station.

S
TATE
S
TREET REMAINED IN DISARRAY
though the businessmen, as Boston businessmen will do, tried to go about their endeavors as if everything around them were normal. Sheets and towels were draped over windows that were still missing their panes, and on street corners there were piles of lumber stacked high from furniture that had been broken in the crush of people trying to escape buildings. As had been the case near the harbor, much of the public stayed away out of fear or superstition or both. Workingmen, by contrast, were in great abundance, installing new windows and removing debris, a process that had been stymied by dismal weather.

“We are in the very shadow of the Boston Massacre itself in these streets, Mansfield. Right there in front of that door, a mob formed, shouting from all sides, ‘Drive out the rascals!’ ” Though Marcus had been in Boston ever since he was taken out of Smith Prison during the war, Bob still took pride in pointing out the historical sights of the city, and while he meant well, it reminded Marcus that Boston did not run through his blood. “Though I know not whether strangers to our city wish to find such sights anymore—it is the smokestacks of the East Cambridge Glass Manufactory, not Bunker Hill’s sublime granite finger, that the eyes of visitors search for in our skies these days. What is it you wanted to look for, anyway?”

“Something I was thinking might be of use to us there, at the Old State House,” Marcus replied, gesturing toward the quaint brick façade of the building. “First we will need you to be measured for a suit.”

“Mansfield, you are sounding dangerously like me. What do you have
in mind?” As Bob accompanied Marcus up the steps he listened gamely to the plan.

The Old State House had stubbornly retained its maiden name long after it had traded its government function for a commercial one. The lower story was mostly lawyers’ offices, and there were several tailors above. Marcus rang at the door of a tailor’s office that faced the State Street side.

Marcus frowned when there was no answer. “Perhaps they have not returned to work yet since the incident.”

“I have known a few Boston tailors in my life, Mansfield, and if I can say one thing about them it’s that they would have their tape measures at hand as they are lowered into their caskets.” Bob rang the bell again sharply, and this time the old tailor opened the door and greeted them with gusto, as if welcoming the first customers to a new shop. With the streets around this location so empty, business had no doubt slowed to a trickle.

The tailor was a slight, shriveled man who was probably easy to miss outside in the world but expansive and enthusiastic in the kingdom of his shop. “You must be Harvard boys,” he guessed.

“As a matter of fact,” said Bob, “proudly so. I need a suit made. Graduation events coming upon us, you know, balls and so on, and the Boston rule is you can never decline an invitation. Let’s cut a splurge! The latest from Paris, if you please.”

“Of course, dear boy!” the tailor replied, dropping an array of needles from inside his sleeve into the palm of his hand, as proudly as a cat showing its claws. “Come stand over here, if you please.”