Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [66]
On the day of my departure, I descended early to the laboratory, intending to add the final touches to my speech before anyone else awoke—only to find that my notes had been rifled through and scattered across the desk. Several pages had fallen to the floor, there to be trodden on like so much refuse. You can imagine my alarm. I woke the house with Herculean wrath and demanded that every maidservant be questioned. They swore that no one had entered the laboratory during the night. It had in fact been securely locked, by me, before retiring, and the lock had not been tampered with. I had the only key, but I did not believe them. Someone must have entered the laboratory and examined my work. Someone!
My interrogation of the staff might have continued all day had not the urgent need to prepare for my departure intervened. I gathered up the notes in a fury, secured my valise, and rushed out to where my carriage was waiting to whip me to the station. Margaret farewelled me at the steps, in something of a state herself. Unnatural noises in conjunction with physical disturbance added up to a poltergeist in her mind, and she was reluctant to remain in the house without me to protect her.
It would be easy to say that she had been reading too much fabulous fiction—but that would ignore a facet of her character that I had always admired, and which is essential for any wife of mine: an open mind. Some would say that I have said much stranger things, and indeed I proposed a few of them that very day.
I said “peers” earlier, when I referred to my audience at the Royal Institution, but what I mean is my critics. You may not be familiar with my most recent theories—of life on this earth as a river, and an individual, such as you or me, as an eddy in that river, a self-sustaining whirlpool of vital dynamism that endures even though the particles of water comprising it constantly change. This philosophical principle has received a warm welcome in some quarters—but the same cannot be said of the theories of transportation that naturally arise from it. Doesn’t it strike you as odd, Michaels, that we lug this ponderous sack of tissues around with us every time we go hither and yon? Wouldn’t it be easier to abandon it and adopt an identical one when we arrive—to move the eddy alone and leave the river behind?
Well, you are not alone, and some of my critics dislike my methodology as much as my philosophy. If I am so interested in transportation, they say, why base myself in Exeter, so far from the great steel machines of the north? There, I say, is the answer. Those machines are not in my vision. They crush the landscape and foul the sky. They are the nightmare, not the dream.
Yes, yes, the ghost. I am getting there, have no fear, if by my own slow and tortuous path.
It was well after nightfall by the time I returned home. I was exhausted. My ears rang with the bleating of pedants, and I was in no mood for what greeted me. Who would have been? The house was in an uproar, due to a rash of “manifestations,” as Margaret called them, from eerie whispers to strange explosions; even a minor earthquake, I was told, that had upset a row of plates in the kitchen, shattering every one. I was inclined to regard at least the last of these incidents as carelessness, perhaps even willful trickery, but in the face of Margaret’s distress I could not dismiss them all. Something was afoot. The question was, what?
Two of the servants had resigned, citing good, Christian horror at such devilish pranks, though not above accepting generous severances if they kept silent in the parish. My presence reassured those who remained, and when they had gone home, leaving me and Margaret alone in