Trying to tell the story of how "joie-de-vivre" HG turned into "end-the-world" HG involves some trips to some dark places. So, um, TW in this chapter for bad things happening in Victorian mental hospitals. But hey, there's Pete/Myka banter later on to lighten the mood.
It's past dark when Charles returns to his flat in South Kensington. His landlady has left a tray of food outside his door; it's cold when he picks it up but, famished, he eats it anyway, perched at his small table. Mutton, potatoes, cabbage.
On his desk, where he left them, lie the neatly-stacked articles his tutor has asked him to read for tomorrow. He rolls his neck once, feeling the joints pop and crack, and then hunches down over the first of the stack, candle pulled close.
Seconds pass by. Then minutes. He realizes he hasn't even processed the title of the paper. The soft creak of the rocking chair against the hospital floor echoes between his ears. Helena's eyes, dull and vapid, staring through the floor near her feet while he read her own story, in his words, back to her.
He remembers her eyes when they were children. When they were ten years old, when Helena had attempted to teach him to skip stones across the water of the river near their Essex home. Her stones shuttled across the surface like water-bugs, frightening the gulls roosting on the far side, while his dropped immediately to the bottom with a loud (if remarkably satisfying) plonk.
"You're choosing good rocks but you must set them spinning, Charlie," she'd said, laughing. "It's the spin that keeps it from breaking the surface of the water."
Of course, he thinks. Of course she knew at ten years old what surface tension was.
A few minutes later, she'd invited him to visit old man Suzuki with her. He was teaching her to fight in some special way they'd developed over in Japan or China or whichever Oriental country the man was from (Helena would natter on about the differences between all those countries, but damned if he could keep it all in his head). Charles had declined; he had never been one for conflict, even in practiced settings. He spent another thirty minutes practicing throwing his stones, and the next day, when he showed Helena how he'd mastered it, she'd clapped her hands and said "Good! Next, we must teach you how to whistle like a proper sailor." She put her fingers between her lips and demonstrated.
Charles is violently jolted from his reverie by the sting of hot wax against the back of his hand; it's his candle, breaching the cup of its holder as it melts. It's gone down by over an inch since he sat down, and he still hasn't turned a single page of his readings.
Bollocks, he thinks. Of all the damned bollocksing bollocksed bollocks. Balls and damn.
He stands, collects his jacket from the hook by the door, and makes his way down the stairs. There's a pub a few blocks down that he's never visited, and this is a night for a pint.
The Morlock's Arms is an unremarkable pub, modern, with its interior stained in dark wood. It's not busy at this late hour, but it's not empty, either. A handful of patrons sit on high stools at the bar, gazing into their pints with varying levels of despair. Charles joins them. He orders a lager and stares into its depths, thankful that the reason this thing can't meet his gaze is because, well, it doesn't have eyes.
"You've the look of a man who's had a day."
Charles glances to the side. The speaker is a man of about his age, sitting three chairs over. He's well put together, hair neatly combed and clothing in good condition, but his face is pale, his eyes marred by dark circles.
"I have indeed, sir, but it seems I could say the same about you," Charles says.
The man laughs and shakes his head. "It's true," he says. "I work for Scotland Yard. The pressure we're under, right now, with that serial killer running about…"
"The Ripper?" Charles asks.
"That's the one," says the man.
It's morbid to think of serial murders as a distraction, but if Charles is perfectly honest with himself, it's hard to imagine that anything less shocking could displace the images in his mind.
"Name's Charles Wells," he says, as he offers a hand to his bar-mate.
The man smiles and accepts the handshake. "William Wolcott," he says, "but my friends call me Wooley."
Charles smiles. "Well, Wooley, I'd be fascinated to hear the Scotland Yard perspective on those murders. There's so much fluff in the papers, it's hard to know what to believe."
/
Valerie Jones has been a nurse at Bethlem Hospital for thirty years. She's seen many changes in that time. She's seen the emphasis on physical restraints decrease, the emphasis on relaxation and more… occupational types of therapies increasing to take their place.
Her attitude about the patients has changed, too. She's an adaptable, progressive woman, she likes to think, open-minded enough to learn new things even at her old age. When she first took the job, she had felt strongly that the patients were there because they were somehow deficient; they were closer to animals than humans, most of the time. But as she's spent more time here, gotten to know more of them, she's realized that most are, simply, ill. Some moreso than others, of course, but they all deserve to be treated with respect.
She keeps this in mind as she works with her girls, shows them how to change the sheets on the dormitory beds, guides them through the process of doing laundry, instructs them on the peeling and chopping of vegetables so they won't cut themselves.
But sometimes, she thinks, sometimes a patient comes along who proves exceptionally difficult to categorize.
Take that Wells woman, there. She folds the corners of the bedsheets in perfect, crisp, 45-degree angles, every time. She peels carrots faster and more efficiently than even Valerie herself does, to the point where Valerie wonders whether she should speak to Dr. Austin about the possibility that the woman may be obsessive-compulsive. Despite that, she is, most often, quiet, and reasonably pleasant, and truly seems to not belong here in Bedlam at all.
And then, out of nowhere, she'll have episodes like the one she's having now, wherein someone will have said something innocuous—in this case, "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree"—and she'll begin, softly at first, to talk about how one can learn about why apples don't fall far from trees by studying Newton. Then she'll move on, louder, to say that once one has mastered Newton's theories one can continue to expand one's mind by studying Bernoulli or Lagrange, or by visiting a library and reading the more recent publications and contemporary scholarship. And by now she is agitated, shouting, exclaiming that even the classics, even Aristotle, had theories that might have explained why apples never fell far from trees, but nobody here would know that, would they, because nobody has access to any bloody books, not even literature, let alone science, and how on earth is she supposed togrow and heal as a person if she hasn't any tools or materials for learning anything, if nobody will offer her some kind of intelligent conversation?
And now a guard is approaching her, now he's got his arms around her to restrain her, and now she's using—as she's used before—a combination of high-precision kicks and strikes to free herself, and now there are three of them, now there are four, and they're restraining her, and now here comes young nurse Sandra with the laudanum, and the guard is pinching Miss Wells's nose so she'll open her mouth, and there now, there, she'll be calm soon.
/
"Charles," Helena says in a cracked whisper, "I need you to help me."
They're strolling in the garden, along one of the carefully-trimmed hedges. Helena has taken his offered apple but this time she isn't eating it. She's holding it, turning it in her palms.
"What kind of help?" Charles asks.
"I'm going to go mad in here," she says. "I wasn't mad when I arrived but I fear I'm…." she crosses her arms in front of her abdomen, holding herself tight. "Between your visits, I might as well be alone. If I try to have a conversation…" she trails off as they cross paths with a guard; Charles notices she ducks her chin, glances up at him through her eyelashes.
"Miss Wells," the guard says, with a brisk nod and a quirk of the lip.
"Mr. Rodney," she replies, nodding back with a tight-lipped, downcast smile. She watches him continue his round before turning back to her brother, her smile vanished, eyes wide.
"Do you see what this place has made of me?" she whispers. "I bat my lashes at the guards, I remember their names and smile coyly at them in the hope of convincing someone that I'm no longer some kind of sexual deviant. But if ever I try to have a conversation with anyone about anything more substantial than the weather they stop me. They tell me not to exert myself, that my feminine countenance will not support it."
Charles sighs, runs his palms over his hair, pulls his thumb and forefinger down the edges of his moustache. "What would you have me do, Helena?"
"Write to Papa for me? You were always his favorite anyway." Her eyes are watering again, and Charles thinks he's seen her cry more often on these visits, within these walls, than in their entire lives before that. "They only way I can, by law, be released from here before the doctor deems me cured is to be released into his custody."
"I can write," Charles answers, "but mightn't it be best if you wrote him yourself?"
"I have." Helena swallows. "Not to ask him to fetch me, of course. The doctor would never send such a thing. I've written him to talk of the kinds of vapid things they permit us to discuss in here."
"And?"
"He's never written back. Nor has mother. I write to both of them."
Their walk takes them past a woman, sitting still and silent on a bench. Younger than him, Charles thinks, with fair hair and a pleasant, round face. Helena bends down a little and touches her shoulder; the woman's eyes slide up to her face. Helena is offering her apple on an outstretched palm. Wordlessly, the woman takes it, brings it to her lips, dispassionately chews, then looks back up at her, the corner of her mouth curling upward, like she learned how to smile by imitating a painting.
"She was pregnant when she arrived here a month ago," Helena says, as they continue their walk. "The baby was born last week and she hasn't laid eyes on it since."
"What's she here for?" Charles asks.
Helena shrugs. "Depressive tendencies associated with hysteria and the wandering womb," she says.
Their walk takes them back to the doorway into the hospital. They pause there; dusk approaches, and they both know that Charles must begin his return to South Kensington.
He pinches the bridge of his nose. "I'll write to him," he says. "I'll do my best."
/
Dear Charles,
That you have written me on your sister's behalf fills me with pride. I have raised you well, to look out for her, and I am happy to hear that you are visiting her when you can. I can only assume that such support will aid in her recovery.
I hope I have also raised you well enough to understand why I will not petition for Helena's release, and why I most certainly will not accept custody of her. I assume she has explained what happened, and how she came to be hospitalized. Words cannot express the shame she has wrought upon this family. You know, of course, that Helena was the instigator of the problem; lovely young Tina would never have participated in such degenerate behaviour without your sister's influence. Your mother was ill in bed from the mortification of it for two weeks. She nearly lost her hard-earned position as a lady's maid and still fears what might happen if her friends learn the secret. We are fortunate that the Taylors decided to move, thereby saving us from having to do so; they are wealthier than we, after all, and have family in Manchester who can take them in, while we would have been driven to start from nothing in a new place.
In full awareness of the severity of my language, hear this, Charles:
Helena will stay in that hospital until the doctor deems her cured and releases her on her own merits, or until she rots. I will never again be held responsible for her actions.
When you have a moment, I do hope you'll write again with updates regarding your studies at university. I've been helping the neighborhood boys to improve their bowls in cricket. It's great fun.
Your father,
Joseph Wells
/
He tells Helena because he decides it would be more cruel not to. He watches her eyes turn wet and he opens his arms, reaching for her, but she steps back. She looks up, as though she can raise the brim of her lids to hold the tears back.
"I just need a moment, Charles," she says quietly. "Please. If I cry, the nurses will come running with more of that miserable laudanum."
On the way out, Charles stops to speak with Dr. Austin.
"You seem a responsible fellow and I'm certain that you would do your best to provide Miss Wells with the kind of environment her continued recovery requires," the doctor says, "but no, I'm afraid it's a violation of policy and of the law for me to release her into the custody of anyone other than her father or her husband."
That night, at the pub, Charles and Wooley talk about Scotland Yard and public safety over their pints. When he lies in bed later that night, Charles wonders what it says of his character that he's grateful for the distraction a serial killer offers from his concerns about his sister.
/
Dr. Jonathan Austin is the consummate professional. He's practiced psychological medicine for over twenty years, and stays up-to-date on the latest literature and treatments. His wife accuses him, at times, of feeling too much empathy for the wretches whose care he oversees, but it's important, he says, to care for those who cannot care for themselves.
He's packing up for the day, now, having finished his final round of patient checks in the wards and dropped off an updated list of medications and suggested treatments with Nurse Valerie. He's filing his paperwork into his briefcase, looking forward to an evening by the hearth, when—
Who on earth would be knocking now?
"Come in," he says, in a tight, deep tone which, he hopes, conveys both annoyance at being disrupted at the end of his day, and evidence that he's working to contain said annoyance in the interest of civility; he is, after all, polite.
The door opens and closes almost immediately; in the brief gap between, a woman has slipped in, dressed in the patients' drab grey.
"Miss Wells," Jonathan says. "How can I help you? Can I fetch a nurse for you, perhaps?"
"Oh, no, Dr. Austin," she says. Her arms are behind her back, one wrist held in the opposite hand, and she's walking toward him, slowly. Sauntering. "I had hoped to catch you privately."
"Now, Miss Wells. We have rules in place for a reason. They aid in everyone's recuperation." Jonathan clicks his case shut on his desk.
"Oh, I do understand, sir," she says, as she comes to a gentle halt in front of his desk, eyes cast down toward the hard wood. "I simply wished to stop by to thank you for all of your help and support as I've worked to combat my, er, my affliction."
Her eyes are moving now, slowly upward, tracking along the front of his clothing, up toward his face.
"I feel I've made great progress," she says, and her voice has never been quite so low in pitch, before, has it?
She's moving again, now, eyes fixed on his, she's stepping slowly along the edge of his desk, to its side…
"The restful activities, the practices in domesticity," she says in that rough timbre, and it's only after several seconds pass that he realizes he's staring at her lips. "I find myself feeling so very feminine, nowadays. It's lovely," she says, and she's behind the desk now, alongside him, and how did he allow that to happen?
"Miss Wells," he says, and coughs. "I'm certainly pleased to hear you feel you're doing so well."
"Oh, you've no idea!" she says softly, smiling, and she does have a lovely smile. She is, in all respects, quite lovely to look at; he'd be blind, a fool, or a sexual invert himself not to notice it. And now her hand is on his sleeve, on his arm, her fingers resting lightly there. He glances up at the door, wills it to open.
Wills it to stay closed.
"I'd no idea what peace I was lacking, before," she's saying, and her fingers are moving now, up the inside of his forearm, and back down again. Up, and down. "How… tormented I was."
"Yes, that's…" the doctor swallows. "That's common for women in your condition." He has a wife. A wife. A lovely wife, at home, waiting for him, waiting for his return so that they might eat supper together.
"But I hoped you might help me with something, doctor." Her hand stops its caress, fingers wrapped around his forearm.
"What might that be, Miss Wells?"
"You've proven so reliable, such an admirable man in my life—" she squeezes his arm tighter, in emphasis—"and I've found, as my deviancy has loosened its grip on my psyche, that I simply cannot stop thinking about you."
She has slid her slight body between him and the desk. She has slid her hand over, to the front of his shirt, to the buttons there; she's letting her fingernails catch on the buttons, over and over.
He has a wife. A wife who has given him two children, a boy and a girl, both healthy and wonderful.
"That's a common result of these treatments," he says. "We must work to redirect your attention to a more—"
"—suitable candidate?" Miss Wells interrupts, with a coy smile, looking up at him from between fluttering lashes. "I consider myself to be a woman of high standards, Dr. Austin," she says. Her hands are sliding down, now, to his waistband. They're unfastening the button there.
It was treatment, he tells himself thirty minutes later, when they've dressed again and they finally leave his office. She needs to have these emotions reinforced if they're to stabilize. It was an investment in her long-term health.
Miss Wells returns to her ward. Jonathan returns home, to his family.
Most employees of the Imperial War Museum in London's borough of Southwark know that they share their space with the ghosts of the former patients of the Bethlem Hospital, from before Bethlem was relocated to a new facility in Croydon.
Were any of them to look out the window at exactly the right moment, one day in 2010, they would see a woman in her thirties standing beside the old artillery guns mounted for display outside the front entrance of the museum building that used to be the hospital.
They would see her rest her open hand against the base of one of the guns. They would see her lean on it, and then see her fist close slowly, fingernails grating along the surface, flecks of blue paint scraping free.
They might, if they were to look very, very closely, see the darkness that swamped the woman's eyes like oil across water. More than likely, they would mistake her for some kind of radical—a pacifist, perhaps, infuriated by the presence of a museum that archives and displays the vehicles and weaponry of wars past.
They might be inspired to call museum security, even.
But there would be no need, because the woman stays only a few minutes, and never enters the building. Then she turns and walks back toward the tube station, the set of her jaw firmer than it had been just a few minutes before.
/
James learns very, very quickly that the Warehouse reports and anecdotes of Wells's genius have not been exaggerated.
In the café, where they go for breakfast, she asks for the seat against the wall and spends most of the meal surveying the room. When they walk out, she carries herself differently than when they walked in; a little less stiffly, with a little more… well, for lack of a better word, more swagger.
They stop in a shoe store and she immediately chooses three pairs from the display, and once she's found the right size she asks James to buy them all for her. She walks out in a pair of heeled boots perfectly suited to the thirty-something professional look he's helped her to cultivate.
She shushes him when he attempts conversation at the airport gate. Her eyes cant low, resting unfocused on the floor a yard in front of her feet. She spends much of the flight in the same detached silence, but when she speaks again upon their arrival in London, her accent has slipped out of its Victorian formality, becoming thinner and sharper and substituting the occasional T-sound with a glottal stop.
Only a day out of bronze, and one would have to interact with her for quite some time to notice that she was in any way unusual.
James takes her to her hotel by tube. Once she's checked in, he purchases her a disposable mobile phone and a London A-Z to help her identify the tube stations nearest her destinations; he programs his own number into her phone and shows her how to use it to reach him. Then he insists that she sit down opposite him at the room's small table so that he can debrief her on the Warehouse's current agents.
He opens a file and turns it around so that the text and photographs are right-side-up for H.G. "The Warehouse currently operates the field with a skeletal staff of one supervisor, two agents, and a trainee," James says. "I would prefer it if we could avoid doing any lasting physical harm to the supervisor, Arthur Nielsen, but the others are disposable."
"Do they pose any real threat?" H.G. asks. "I've never been fond of taking life unnecessarily."
James smirks. "Such nobility, coming from the bronze sector."
Her eyes dart up from the files and James feels his smile drop. If looks could kill, he thinks, and swallows hard.
"They might," he says. "I believe I've taken care of the young one, Claudia Donovan. She shouldn't be an issue. If you confront any of them, it will be Bering and Lattimer. They're decent agents, but still green. I don't know what they'll know about you. I don't know if they'll recognize you; I don't even know if they know to look for a woman. Lattimer operates on intuition, Bering operates by observation. If you meet them, choose your approach based on which you'll feel most able to confound."
While James watches, a lopsided smile pulls across one of H.G.'s cheeks as she scans the paperwork. "I'm almost disappointed," she murmurs, mostly to herself. "a man's libido is so very easy to confound. I'd hoped for a challenge, my first hop out of the bronze." She closes the folder and tucks it into her bag. "Where and when shall we reconvene, Mr. MacPherson?"
"Your flight back to America departs in two days," he says. "We shall rendez-vous in Rapid City and make our trip to the Warehouse together from there."
"And you'll have the anti-matter," she says, her voice gravelly, one eyebrow cocked at him. "Any arrangement we have will be annulled if you fail to deliver me the means to make the vest work."
"I'll have it," James says. He has no idea what she intends to retrieve from the Escher Vault. He doesn't care, except insofar as she refuses to help him find the Trident until she has collected her possessions from the Warehouse.
"The only things that matter to me in this world are in that vault," she says. Her eyes have lost focus, reaching off into the middle distance. "Until I have them in my possession again, I couldn't possibly focus on any other task."
Again, James is struck by a wave of cold emanating from her like an aura. He paints on a gentlemanly smile and says, "Of course, my dear. You retrieve your vest, I'll obtain the anti-matter, and we'll reconvene in South Dakota."
"South Dakota," H.G. echoes. James watches her hand drift to the base of her throat and curl into a fist.
/
If there's one thing Pete should be used to after working with Myka for a year, it's being made to feel like an idiot.
It's their groove, right? Impulses are his department, and the whole knowing-things thing is hers, and that's why they work, and it's also why they kind of want to kill each other half the time. And it's why he's cool with it when she makes an ass of him—because that's her job. That's what she's there for, is to know stuff he doesn't know, just like he's there to do stuff when she's too busy thinking about it.
Still: he's walking out of H.G. Wells's house with his tail between his legs, no doubt about it, and it's not even Myka that put it there. Yeah, he can take his licks and admit that today has maybe not been his finest, between the thing with the actor and then, you know, the other thing, with the bad guy. Girl. You know.
And the whole thing was just freaky. Like, she was one person, and then snap, she was another person. And sure, maybe sometimes he's got to be hit by a mack truck before he starts being observant but it's weird, how she just flipped it, like a switch. One second she's looking at him all doe-eyed, kissing in a way that makes him want to take a hop back to the 19th century to see if everyone's that good or if it's just her, and then bam, her accent's different and she's looking at him like a math problem instead of, you know, a really tasty cheeseburger. And then there was the tesla under his chin. Let's not forget about that. Let's not talk about it, either.
It's just not normal, to be able to switch on and off like that.
Not that there's anything normal that ever came out of the Warehouse. The woman is practically an artifact.
"You should at least take a girl for coffee first next time, Lattimer," Myka is saying, laughing, elbow jabbed into his side as they walk to the corner to hail a cab back to the hotel. He winces: he's got bruises from that fall from the ceiling.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Pete rolls his eyes. "I'll have you know that she was the one who wanted to, uh, skip straight to dessert." He straightens his collar and pops his neck. "Yep, what can I say? I'm irresistible to the ladies."
"Are you, now," Myka says, over her sunglasses.
"Hey man, if you don't feel it, that says more about you than it does about me. Just saying."
/
Myka feels something, all right.
She's kind of embarrassed by it. There are things she should have noticed. The handwriting that had put Edward Prendick's name in the guest log was, in retrospect, so obviously a woman's, and had the Warehouse not taught her anything about what happens when you make assumptions?
What an ass she made out of you and me, Pete, she thinks.
Pete's the one who thinks to grab Tubman's thimble from Artie's office before they head to the Escher vault.
"I've got an idea," he says mid-zipline, with that slightly choked tone that indicates he knows she won't like it.
"Pete," she says. "What is it."
He waits until they've landed before he starts to explain, but he only gets halfway through before she stops him.
"Seriously? Why can't you wear the thimble? Just because I'm a woman, I have to be the one to bat my eyelashes at our smarmy super-villain of the week? I'm a lousy flirt, you know."
"Trust me," Pete says, "I know—"
"—Pete!" Myka knows she set herself up for that one, but still, he didn't have to go there, did he?
Pete holds his hands up between them, as if that could really hold back her irritation. "—But," he says, "I was talking to Artie about this artifact and he said that the person wearing the thimble needs to be able to call up a mental image that's, like, identical to the person they're trying to look like, especially in the face. And you're the one with the magical memory. So." He holds the thimble up between them, between his thumb and forefinger, and thrusts it toward her.
Myka doesn't even try to keep herself from rolling her eyes. "You're the one who had your tongue down her throat, Pete."
"Right, and there are other of her… ahem… assets that I could probably replicate perfectly, but her face is a little fuzzy, I gotta admit."
Myka groans. "You are impossible. Fine." She takes the thimble and, holding her left hand up, fingers wide like she's about to do a magic trick, plants the thimble on her ring finger. Instantly she feels a twisting, tugging sensation, like she's a wet rag being wrung out, and then there's a brief feeling of dropping, and then it's done. She looks at her outstretched hands, paler and squarer than her own, with shorter fingernails.
"Okay, then," she says, and chuckles at strangeness of the shape of the vowels in her throat, forming that impeccable British accent. "How do I look?"
When she looks up again Pete's eyebrows are halfway to his hairline and his chin has dropped to his collarbone.
"Damn, Myka, you're making me want to get all up-close and personal with that face again, and that's just weird because it's you."
She punches him in the shoulder, hard.
"Ow!" Pete yelps, hopping back. "Yeah, you're still Myka in there, aren't you."
"Stuff it, Pete. Let's just get this over with."
It will be awhile, some time yet, before Myka will admit to herself that the clarity of H.G. Wells's face in her mind has very little to do with her eidetic memory.
Then, for the second time in her life, Myka watches somebody commit murder, and knows that whatever her reason for remembering Wells's face the first time around, she can say with absolute certainty that she'll never forget it now.
