All Bedlam Courses Past (part thirteen)

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

Chapter One

The Peculiar Nature of Logical Science

(part thirteen)

 

 

Élucide might well be in Kempf’s office. The sensible thing was to turn, and make back towards the building.

“Its qualities,” a voice caught up, “the drug…its actions, are known. That is, if the tincture produced effects, these would be as expected, and follow a particular pattern.”

“Though sometimes a drug will take the individual…” Ebrach took a hand from his pocket, to sketch an arc. Off-kilter, he’d been thinking, but wanted a better word.

“It isn’t that sort of story. No, the tincture did its work. All that was noted down, daily. The records kept during the time of the test had been meticulous. No, but you understand. Tunley couldn’t be told he was getting this, because the object was to have a norm to weigh against. Those explanations he invented for the symptoms he perceived, were the very gist of the matter.”

Placing shoes to avoid the scat of stray animals, safer on the graveled path laid for the undertaker’s wagon, they labored, falling apace of each other. Ebrach stopped. An oak limb, rotted out of its core, lay indifferent on a number of toppled stones.

Kempf stared beyond the hump where Woolsaver’s experiments rested eternal, down to Everard, resting from his labors. He muttered under breath what’s she getting up to now, and said aloud: “Your girl hasn’t the experience to dispense funds. It can’t be true someone on the board has given her license to hire…”

For this turn of direction at Kempf’s rear, Ebrach allowed himself a smile. Here was a careful search for the most offensive import deliverable in the least offensive phrasing. “She errs, no doubt, on the side of charity. Tunley…he was a suicide?”

“Found in the shed down there. Putrefaction somewhat advanced. But appeared to have died of natural causes.”

“Not occurring at a cold, or a very hot season, this accident?”

“He was dehydrated. The autopsy showed heart failure.”

“And the electric?”

“Truthfully,” said Kempf, “he’d begged us to give him the treatment. But that was nothing to do with the test. Tunley had become convinced he had…mad notion…worms in the brain.”

 

“An insult to the blood is another circumstance altogether. Suppose, after all…”

If Old Richard had extended his battle with Shad to the front of gentlemanly conduct, he would not loll on his haunches, holding a standing woman in thrall.

But Élucide, interrupting with a restless move, was made the rude one.

An acted sigh. “I bore you, likely. But then I don’t ask you to hear me out.”

“You don’t hurry your point along, either. Suppose…?”

 

 

14

 

 

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He gave her a grin, a simple, unshaded one. “I have been farming a patch of land, and I’ve bought myself, out of my own funds, a workhorse. Comes a time my landlord evicts me, and to settle my debt I allow him to take the horse. It isn’t mine any longer. One day I learn he has starved it, or tied it up and whipped it to death. Do I not feel personally affronted…do I not feel that a thing belonging to me has been cruelly wasted?”

His father, so Lawrence said, had studied at lawyering. “Are you just exercising your mind, Mr. Everard?”

“I am driving home, ma’am, in my old rattletrap vehicle. I bear on an observation of your own. There are people hereabouts, I know of one such… They won’t like thinking their kin were treated poorly, even though they had, within the letter of the law, abandoned them.”

“You know of one?”

“In my good time. You’re a Gremot, and those things you come across, you make profit of. You have got a plan. Shad tells me this, I won’t hide it from you. You…but you haven’t got a cause. You’ve got your teeth on those bones, like a stoat on a rattlesnake.”

She thought he was giving voice to random thoughts, old drunk that he was. His characterization was only his opinion of her father. And if she had no cause to pursue, coming to this work, it pleased her to be mere trouble…trouble to the town, to Kempf, her turning over stones a thing that itched under the skin—

“Verbena could never leave the dead alone.”

“What!” Élucide woke. “She’s fine, isn’t she?”

He said after a minute, “Ah. She does sometimes remark to me that she hasn’t seen you, or your sister, these many years. But she is well, since you ask.”

“You’re not living with Lawrence now?”

“My wife and his wife are not able to keep house together, no.”

This was the most productive gossip she’d picked up, regarding Everards. But it wasn’t news of Richard.

“Mary Paton gets on with Sanderson?”

“You don’t believe so, do you?”

He started, then, on a perfectly undisguised excursion about those who could afford avoiding their nuisances by living in hotels, when Shad came clanking toolheads.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15

 

 

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Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part fourteen)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2023, Stephanie Foster)