Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë (39 page)

He reappeared, pushing a cart laden with boxes, casks, and various tools. “This is my invention. I've made up my mind that people must know what I've accomplished before I die. You shall have the honor of being the first.” Kavanagh bent over a box on the cart and removed the top. Inside, cushioned by straw, were a dozen glass jars with metal lids. “Look!” He held a jar aloft on his palm, displaying its powdery, brownish contents; he beamed with pride. “The culmination of my scientific research.”

“That's the disease-producing material you used to infect those women in Whitechapel?” Slade said.

As we gazed upon the jar with repugnance, Kavanagh laughed. “No, no. Those experiments were but an early stage in my work.” He shook the jar; the powder swirled inside. “This is a culture of something far more serious. Have you ever heard of woolsorter's disease?”

I nodded. Woolsorter's disease was an ailment of cattle, sheep, and goats, also of farm folk who handled animal products; hence, its name. In the cities it was known as ragpicker's disease, afflicting people who manufactured buttons from animal horns and brushes made from bristles, worked in the leather industry, or handled cloth that had touched persons suffering from the disease. The symptoms were a cough, sore throat, fatigue, and severe difficulty in breathing. Woolsorter's disease was usually fatal within days. There was no cure, and no prevention except to boil the victims' clothes and bedding, wash down their rooms with lye, and cremate their dead bodies. The disease was one of the oldest and most dreaded in history, believed by some to be the sixth plague mentioned in the Bible. Outbreaks had frequently ravaged Europe. Now Slade and I were horrified to realize what Niall Kavanagh's invention was.

“This one jar contains enough animalcules to infect an entire city.” Kavanagh tossed the jar up into the air and barely managed to catch it. He giggled at our fright. “Would you like to know how I cultured them?”

“First we would like you to put that jar down,” Slade said. “Then we would like to come out of the cage.”

“Never mind what you want,” Kavanagh said, although he did set the jar in the box. “I want you to know the details of my research, so I will tell you, and you will listen.”

He assumed the pedantic manner of a professor lecturing. “I traveled to the countryside, talked to farmers, and located a field where some cows that had died of the disease were buried. I dug them up.”

I had heard that the disease could afflict people or animals who disturbed such gravesites, even decades after the burial. The disease was commonly thought to arise from a curse put on the fields. Niall Kavanagh had proven this theory wrong.

“I wore protective garments like these.” Kavanagh delved into a box and removed a rubber suit with a hood, boots, and gloves attached, and a cloth mask. “That's how I avoided contracting the disease.

“I collected samples of the remains. I took them back to my laboratory and exposed some live sheep to them. When the sheep became ill, I drew their blood. I put it under the microscope and saw the animalcules—tiny, wormlike creatures. I found the same creatures in fluid from the lungs of the sheep after they died. I experimented with cultivating the animalcules. First I grew them on plates of blood, meat broth, and gelatin. Then I discovered that the best medium is the aqueous humor from cows' eyes, which I obtained from a slaughterhouse. I incubated them at the same temperature as the human body. When I had achieved the purest cultures I could, I introduced them into the nostrils of healthy sheep. They all contracted the disease.” Kavanagh's voice rang with the excitement he must have felt at the time. “I had discovered its true cause!”

Now we knew what purpose the sheep, the glass plates, and the equipment at the laboratory had served. The glass box with the gloves had protected Kavanagh while he worked with his cultures.

“I discovered that the animalcules could be heated, dried, and ground into powder, yet retain their disease-causing properties. I have made the greatest breakthrough in the history of science!” Grandiosity sparkled all over Kavanagh. I was sadly reminded of Branwell during his rare moments of triumph, when he'd managed to publish a poem.

“At first I thought to report it to the Royal Society,” Kavanagh said. “I hoped it would regain me the honor I'd lost when I was expelled by those fools who dare to call themselves scientists. But they were so set against me that they might not believe I had accomplished something so tremendous. My discovery contradicted all the accepted theories about disease. No, I told myself; I mustn't hand it over to the Society men to reject and ridicule. Why should I? Why did I need their esteem any longer?”

Spreading his arms, laughing exultantly, he whirled about the room. “I had outshone them. I was like a god above mortals. I need not curry the favor of small, inferior men anymore.” Kavanagh stopped whirling, swayed dizzily. “But I couldn't bear to keep my discovery to myself, to marvel at alone. What should I do with my knowledge? How could I use it to gain the recognition I'd craved all my life?” That it might endanger mankind didn't seem to have occurred to him. “One day I was sitting in my laboratory, wondering what to do next, when suddenly my mind made a dazzling leap to a higher plane of intuition. Suddenly I realized that my discovery was even greater than I'd first thought. Whoever has this—” He gestured at his jars of deadly cultures “—owns the very power of life and death!”

Even though I was appalled by the fact of such power in Kavanagh's irresponsible hands, I was spellbound by it; I couldn't speak. Slade, too, was dumbstruck.

“I had a vision of a plague spreading across the world as in Biblical times,” Kavanagh said, “created not by God, but by man. A plague so deadly and so relentless that the combined power of all the nations in the world couldn't stop it. That was when I conceived the idea of inventing a weapon of war, based on my discovery.”

Nor had it occurred to him that he might use his knowledge for the benefit of his fellow humans. Their welfare had never meant anything to him, as his mother had explained.

“From a jar of dust to a weapon of war. That is quite a big leap,” Slade said.

Kavanagh appeared not to notice Slade's sarcastic tone. “Too big a leap for small minds to follow,” he said smugly. “I became aware of that when I tried to interest the British government in my invention. I'd run out of money to develop my weapon, and I thought that the government would be glad to provide it.” A scowl darkened his face. “None of the officials I approached was interested. Everyone thought I was a crackpot.”

“Not everyone,” Slade murmured to me. “I gather that Wilhelm Stieber has spies inside the government who heard about the weapon. That must be how he caught wind of Kavanagh.”

“All except for Lord Eastbourne,” Kavanagh said. “He advanced me the funds.
He
was willing to take a chance on me. But he turned out to be a deceitful, dishonorable villain.”

“Just how do you plan to disperse your cultures widely enough to infect large populations?” Slade said. “By riding around on a bicycle equipped with a bellows, like a circus clown? You would be stopped before you got very far.”

Kavanagh waved his hand, dismissing the contraption we'd seen at his laboratory. “That was an early concept. I've devised a much more effective system. I'll show you.”

He crouched by his cart and placed a funnel inside a cylindrical metal canister that was perhaps ten inches tall and six in diameter, with a narrow opening. Then he pried up the lid of a small wooden cask. The odor that wafted from it was smoky, acrid, and sulfurous.

“That's gunpowder,” Slade said in dismay as Kavanagh poured it into the funnel and black dust hazed the air. “For God's sake, man, keep it away from the lamp!”

“Don't worry,” Kavanagh said. “I know what I'm doing.”

Awful realization struck me. “He's building a bomb!”

He pointed a blackened finger at me and grinned; his teeth were stained with wine and decay. “The lady is absolutely right.” He removed the funnel and wiped his hands on his trousers. “All it needs is an igniting device and a fuse.”

He took up a short copper tube, crimped one end shut with a pliers, then filled it with a substance that looked like salt, from a glass jar. Some spilled on the floor. Slade said, “Be careful. Those chemicals are dangerous.”

“They won't explode until I'm ready.” Kavanagh threw a pinch of gunpowder into the tube, which he jammed inside the mouth of the canister. He mixed a paste of water and gunpowder and coated it onto a length of thick cotton twine. He stuck this fuse into the tube, then unpacked four jars of his culture, positioned them closely around the container, and secured them with a buckled leather strap. He proudly surveyed his handiwork. “There!”

Slade and I stared, aghast.

“When the bomb is detonated, the jars will shatter,” Kavanagh explained. “The blast will disperse the powdered culture. The wind will spread it far, far abroad.”

“It won't work,” Slade said, but he looked as shaken as I was.

“It will,” Kavanagh said, all preening confidence. “The world will see.”

“What are you talking about?” Deepening horror pervaded Slade's voice. “How will the world see?”

“At my demonstration,” Kavanagh said.

“You mean to set off the bomb?” I said, shocked beyond shock.

“Yes, in a public place where many people are gathered, where many can witness its effects firsthand.” Kavanagh rubbed his hands together and smiled with gleeful anticipation. “It will be the biggest experiment ever conducted in the history of science!”

“But the bomb will kill hundreds of innocent people,” I said, even though I knew Kavanagh wouldn't care. “Hundreds more will become infected with the disease and die.”

“Thousands, most likely.” Kavanagh was nonchalant. “That's an inevitable consequence of scientific research—experimental subjects must be sacrificed.”

There was that chilling word again, which had made me shiver when I'd read it in his journal. Slade said, “You'll die, too. If the bomb doesn't blow up in your face, the disease will kill you. You're not immune to it, even though you think you're a god.”

“That's all right. I'm willing to be a martyr.” The hubris suddenly drained from Kavanagh; he turned sorrowful and resigned. “I haven't long to live, anyway. This morning I woke up feeling more unwell than usual.” He drew a deep, wheezing breath, then coughed so hard that his face reddened and he held his ribs. “I must have inhaled some of the culture.” He shrugged. “I'm as good as dead right now.”

Slade and I looked at each other with fresh consternation. Kavanagh might have infected us!

“Don't worry,” Kavanagh said. “You haven't been exposed to the culture, and the disease doesn't spread from person to person. You'll live to tell the world everything I've told you, after I'm gone.”

This, then, was the role he intended Slade and me to fill: he needed his story publicized, his genius revealed, and we were to be his spokesmen.

Kavanagh tenderly placed the bomb on the cart. “I'll say goodbye now.” His burning eyes had the farsighted look of a soldier going to the battlefield. He grasped the cart's handles.

“Wait,” Slade protested. “You can't leave us in this cage. How are we going to tell anyone anything while we're locked up? You have to let us out!”

“Oh. I almost forgot. Here.” Kavanagh tossed a long, slender object into the cage, at our feet. It was a metal file. “Use that to saw through the bars. By the time you get out, my demonstration will have taken place already.”

“When?” Slade demanded. “Where?”

“Within two or three days,” Kavanagh said. “That's how much time I have before I'm too ill to do it. As to where—” His parting glance at us was mischievous and chilling. “You'll know soon enough.”

Then he shuffled away, pushing the cart laden with death.

“D
R.KAVANAGH!” I CALLED. “PLEASE COME BACK!”

“Come back, damn you!” Slade shouted, rattling the bars of the cage.

Kavanagh did not heed our pleas. After their echoes faded, all we heard was the draft sighing through the dungeon.

We looked at each other, and in spite of our dismay, my heart lifted. Even though Slade and I were trapped in this dire predicament, we were together. Our marriage had multiplied our individual powers. If anyone could escape this prison, Slade and I would.

Slade smiled; he'd read my thoughts. “It may be all over for Niall Kavanagh, but it isn't for us.”