The Technologists (34 page)

“I’m afraid that wouldn’t help. Only time will undo the effects, Miss Maguire. By tomorrow morning—”

“The morning! Am I to spend the night as a darky until then?”

“Oh, Lilly, you’ll be all right, I promise!” said Agnes, though in the back of her mind she could not help feeling a little pleased at her comeuppance.

Marcus pulled a rope to call for Darwin Fogg, who promised to bring the stricken girl home in the Institute’s carriage. Free of their interloper, Agnes looked at Marcus and they both exploded in guilty laughter.

Marcus brought Agnes into a room with large arched windows on each wall and a marvelous variety of alien contraptions on tables and platforms. He explained that, when it was finished, this would be the first laboratory of physics in the entire country, and would raise experimental science to new heights.

“What is that?” she asked of a machine that had two large glass plates with brass poles coming out horizontally, all mounted on a wood base.

“It is an electrical machine,” Marcus said. “A very good one, we think. When the handle is turned, the plates generate electricity against the
rubber pieces, and the brass extensions become prime conductors. Oh, and come see this one.”

He brought her over to the phonautograph machine he and Edwin had assembled and began to turn the handle, his pride evident. “You see, the trumpet on this end is a device that captures sounds, then there is a type of stylus that records a visual impression of every vibration on this membrane below—it can be a voice speaking, or someone singing, or the sounds of freshmen boots trying to leave a classroom at the same time the sophomores are trying to enter. Even the air.”

“The air! What a fantastic idea. To capture the air.”

“It is a dream,” he said, “that this discovery might one day replace all forms of stenography and allow us a sort of photograph of sound to reproduce each person’s particular tones.”

“Imagine being able to register, say, the voice of Jenny Lind for our children’s generation!”

A smile crept over his face. The words
our children
, and their unintended connotation, hung over her. She bit her lip and wondered whether she should apologize, but he gallantly moved on without a fuss. “You know, Mr. Mansfield, I had heard your name before I ever met you.”

“Had you?”

“Indeed. Soon after I began at my position, I overheard the professor speaking of you to a caller from New York who was asking about the students at the college. He said, ‘Marcus Mansfield is Tech.’ That you were one never expected to come this far, not expected to thrive, yet you were doing so.”

“I only pray it is true. Thank you for telling me that. Here,” said Marcus. He handed her a piece of thin, membranelike black paper with white lines that moved in curves across the length.

“What is it?”

“That is our conversation just now—you see, there are hundreds or even thousands of vibrations to every species of sound. Now, since you’ve spoken of wishing to see more of science, I thought we could have a demonstration on the electrical plate machine.”

“Oh, please!”

Marcus showed her two figurines that he had brought, sculpted by Frank during their time in prison, of a young man and woman. He placed them on a metallic plate, with another plate suspended above them from the prime conductor of the electrical machine. When he turned the machine, the two figures were drawn upward to the plate above them, then toward each other, then back down, and up again, all while moving around each other in a dance.

“Why, the electricity is attracting them!”

“They actually become conductors,” he corrected her. “Then when the electricity escapes, or is discharged, they return to their positions, but are attracted once again by the electric current. Now watch this …” he said, as he made an adjustment to the machine. When he turned the handle this time, the dancers moved in the opposite direction.

“You reversed their dance.”

“Exactly. I reversed the current of electricity. It is the same principle in the telegraph; the operator controls the current depending on the direction the charge is to travel. In our demonstration, it causes our miniature gentleman and lady to revolve the other way.”

“You invented a charming dance!”

“Far better than my own feet can manage, I assure you, Miss Agnes! If only we had music for the little dancers.”

“No, we needn’t any—this is marvelous! Can you show me something more of the machine?”

“Will you draw the curtains?”

Agnes hesitated, then, embracing their excursion and the delicious fact that this was no normal circumstance, did what would normally be forbidden. As she darkened the room, he modified the position of the dancing figures, and this time instructed her to turn the handle of the electrical machine. When she did, feeling the power of all science in her fingers, the dancers resumed, but this time in the dark, with luminous electric sparks passing between them.

After they watched the performance, he led her outside and they walked hand in hand through the dusty plains that, it was said, would one day be filled with the finest museums, hotels, and homes in Boston. Marcus brought her along to the freight cars, or “dirt cars,” as they
called them around Back Bay, that transported gravel day and night, and they looked at the same giant steam shovels that had so fascinated her as a child, though at the moment they were all at rest, like horses drinking water. The workmen would have to wait for the rain to pass.

“Do not tell your papa you were here,” Marcus said laughingly.

“No!” Agnes said more seriously than she intended.

“I would not want him cross at you. I have arranged for a carriage to come that will bring you close enough to Temple Place that no time will be lost, as far as the other serving girls are concerned. Agnes, I must ask you something.”

“Yes,” Agnes said, her heart pounding.

“I need your help again with something important.”

She realized this was a professional matter he was to discuss, and, despite a quiver of disappointment, took hold of herself. “Do go on, Mr. Mansfield.”

Marcus explained that he wished to see a list of the individuals and companies supplied with a specific combination of chemicals over the last few months from the excess wares of the Institute, and that the ledgers were kept inside Temple Place.

“I would never ask if it were not a serious matter. This may allow us to carry out Rogers’s work to its conclusion.”

“Then you are not just sitting on your hands waiting. You are doing something!” she marveled. “I know where the ledgers are, but I will need your help trying to identify the markings in them.”

“I will give you all the information you need.”

“Have you found how those disasters happened?”

“I think we are getting closer. As for the reason anyone would commit such horrors, well, that judgment may reside with religion. The dark and light shades of the soul.”

“Well, I have been giving confession since I was eight years old, so I do understand about
that
. It is something to know how many misdeeds you have already committed after living less than ten years. Anyway, Papa will not permit my sisters to hear about what has happened and has confiscated all the newspapers. Of course, at Temple Place all the maids talk about it.”

“I can see why your father would not wish it to be a topic of conversation. This is the work of the devil. I think it has stopped,” he added, putting out his hand, and then folding the umbrella.

“You ought to be awfully careful attributing to man the work of the devil.”

“Why?”

“People say the same thing about Tech, don’t they?”

“I suppose so,” he said thoughtfully.

“Do they have requirement for chapel at Tech?”

“Our laboratories are our chapels,” he answered.

“Really!”

“It is not a matter of not holding religious sentiment. My friend Edwin carries his Bible with him to read when we are not in class.”

“What it must be like to go to college!”

“There are several girls’ colleges, you know.”

“I am at the age where I can try to be a child nurse for a year or two, if I am accepted. Then, I am to marry a good Catholic gentleman if I do not become a religious.”

“A religious?”

“It means to enter the holy orders—to go to the convent and become a nun.”

“You are far too pretty for that,” Marcus said, very seriously.

“There are many pretty women among the nuns, only their hair is cut and hidden under skullcaps and veils, so you do not know.”

“It seems it would be a shame to have so few choices.”

She shrugged self-consciously. “I know I sound like a featherbrain, a housemaid asking about serious subjects.”

“Did your cousin tell you that?”

“That is presumptuous, Mr. Mansfield,” Agnes replied, shaking her head. “But the answer is yes, she did. I suppose you are not influenced by what your companions do and say.”

“Too often,” Marcus said quietly, “I’m certain.”

“Lilly also says that there can be no such thing as a friendship between a man and a woman.”

Marcus laughed. “Is Miss Maguire so accomplished a belle that she knows everything about men?”

“A man who does not wish to make romance has no use for a woman, she says.”

“I see. Does she say anything about me?”

“Indeed. She says you are not a Catholic, and therefore you would never court or marry a girl like me because of the fear that your friends and family will shun you.”

Bells rang in the distance.

“Miss Agnes.” He parted the hair from her forehead. “Tell Miss Maguire I am not afraid.”

I
F ONLY HE COULD STOP TIME
,
thought a frustrated Marcus the next evening. Just now it was against them in a mighty way. This was the second consecutive night that he was strolling the city in a roundabout manner, watching by gaslight for any signs of enemies on his track. He traded greetings with tradesmen and beggars, talking of nothing more important than what an outrage it was that the snow shovels were still out in May. He periodically stepped behind a wall or into a doorway, to use Bob’s opera glass to examine the vicinity, in an attempt to recognize a face he might have seen the hour before or the evening prior after he parted from Agnes; and to see if those whom he had approached were questioned by any other night wanderer.

He liked to think that if Hammie had not been standing beside him when that strange false prophet had appeared at the Institute, he would have given chase and at least gained some basic information about him, but the visitor had so taken him by surprise it was hard to be sure how he would have reacted. Then there was Professor Runkle. Had he witnessed the confrontation unfolding below his window, which Marcus had afterward noticed was open? Marcus had walked past Runkle in the corridor several times since then, but the professor, who was busy tending to Rogers’s duties as president pro tempore, didn’t glance his way.

After a thorough examination of their chambers in the basement when the others were not present, Marcus had satisfied himself that the speaking tubes had not been redirected or tampered with, and that their conversations could not be overheard through the ventilation fans. That meant either they had a traitor in their midst or someone out there
was
watching them.

But with this second night of rambling through the city, he still found no sign of the hooded man or his carriage, or, as far as he could tell, his agents. There was also the stranger’s threat to expose them. If the stranger reported the Technologists to the authorities at the Institute, it would mean expulsion. Worse still, if the stranger went to the newspapers and city authorities, it could mean the most serious kind of trouble for themselves and the entire Institute, not to mention leaving the citizens of Boston vulnerable to the experimenter, with the matter entirely in the hands of Louis Agassiz and an overmatched police department.

Marcus knew he had to find the scarred man before any of that could happen. But despite all the considerable determination he mustered, the menace remained at large. Finding the narrow, labyrinthine streets more and more desolate, Marcus started back for Mrs. Page’s, taking a detour to Temple Place. He checked whether Agnes had deposited another note for him in the hidden spot at the garden fence. She had left a message earlier, detailing various complications in her quest to obtain the list of chemical purchasers, but she had described her ingenious solutions with a game optimism and promised the list would be ready by the next morning. Nothing new yet in their hiding spot.

As he was about to leave, he heard her voice call his name from one of the open windows. He did not see Agnes, but a few moments later she emerged from the servants’ door, running right into his arms.

“Oh, I did it, Marcus!” she exclaimed.

“You did?”

She wore a flush of excitement and broke into a joyous laugh. “An opportune moment presented itself! Oh, it was delightful. Not even Lilly knows what I did. Do you see?”