“It must be his experiments,” Slade said, “although I can’t imagine the purpose of them. I don’t see any evidence that he was building a weapon.”
In the dining room we did find mechanical devices-fans with blades like pinwheels, operated by cranks; a bellows attached to a bicycle. When Slade rode the bicycle around the room, the bellows pumped.
“I’m beginning to wonder if Kavanagh was a fraud,” I said. “Perhaps he led the British government to believe he’d invented a new kind of gun but he really hadn’t. Perhaps he fooled Wilhelm Stieber, too.”
“I had the same thoughts,” Slade said, “but I’m not ready to believe I’ve been chasing after a gun that doesn’t exist.”
He stalked from the room. Although I should have been relieved to think that Britain might be safe from the weapon, I couldn’t forget that Katerina had been murdered because of it. Stieber believed the gun existed, and perhaps it really did. We had to keep searching.
The kitchen was the only room supplied with gas. Slade lit an oil lamp he found there, while I extinguished the gaslights. He carried the lamp and we mounted the broad staircase. The rooms on the second story were empty except one in a round tower. Here Niall Kavanagh had lived. An unmade bed with dirty linens stood amid stained clothing, empty liquor bottles, and a chamber pot that contained dried urine and feces. Dishes on the bedside table held moldy cheese and bread crusts.
I think I need not describe the smell.
Slade flung open the window. We glanced at a bookcase filled with scientific texts, then examined the desk, on which were strewn ink pots, pens, journals, and papers. The papers were covered with Niall Kavanagh’s drawings and script. I riffled them while Slade perused a journal. I couldn’t help being conscious of his nearness. Glancing at him, I discovered that he was looking at me. He quickly dropped his gaze. Despite the fact that we were working together and nothing more, we were bonded by love-his confessed, mine undeclared and forbidden.
He handed the journal to me. “I can’t read this aloud. Words like these shouldn’t be spoken to a lady.” I read to myself: I found a whore who was sick with gonorrhea. I paid her to let me scrape effluvium from her puss. I prepared a medium from sheep’s blood and mutton broth boiled with horse’s hooves, poured it in dishes, and let it set. I spread the effluvium on the surface of the medium, then placed the dishes in a bell jar with a lit candle. The candle burned away the air. I incubated the dishes for 3 days. A luxuriant growth of molds, slimes, and scum resulted. I separated the various kinds of growth, repeated the procedure, and obtained cultures of reasonable purity. Now I must find clean women on whom to test the cultures.
“That explains the dishes in the pantry and the sheep, but what was Kavanagh thinking?” Slade shook his head in disgust. “I’m not an expert at science, but I know that what he describes isn’t accepted practice.”
I barely heard Slade; I was too stunned, for I remembered the journal from the Whitechapel house. “He found them.”
“What?” Slade said.
“The clean women.” I told Slade about the journal, summarized the entries for him, then interpreted them. “Kavanagh picked up Mary Chandler, Catherine Meadows, and Jane Anderson on the streets of Whitechapel. He examined them to ascertain that they were clean; then he applied the ‘cultures’ to them.” I pictured hands smearing slime on a woman’s private parts, and bile rose in my throat. “He let a few weeks pass, then reexamined them to see if they had the disease. And he killed them so he could dissect them.” The horror of it choked my voice. “He even made drawings.”
Slade stared. “That’s what you discovered in his house in Whitechapel?”
“Yes,” I said. “Niall Kavanagh is the Whitechapel Ripper. The murder victims were subjects in his experiments.”
“Good Lord.” Slade was awed by the truth about Kavanagh and the fact that I’d discovered it. “Kavanagh wasn’t inventing a gun; his work involved determining the cause of diseases. He thought it was a substance that could be taken from a sick person, grown in a laboratory, and passed to other people.”
Slade leafed through the journal, frowning at the illegible, ink-blotted script. “Kavanagh must have been drunk when he wrote this. Look, there’s wine spilled on these pages. ‘Dutch scientists have studied samples of water, soil, and vegetable and animal material under the microscope. They have observed tiny animalcules moving therein. I have repeated the experiments and seen the animalcules myself.’” We beheld drawings of spherical, ovoid, and wormlike creatures. “‘I have a theory that it is some species of these animalcules that are the cause of all contagious diseases.’”
“My friend Dr. Forbes mentioned Kavanagh’s theory,” I recalled. “He said it was met with ridicule and contributed to Kavanagh being expelled from the Royal Society.”
“Kavanagh deserved it,” Slade said. “His theory goes against hundreds of years of learning, the judgment of the best minds in the world, and all common sense. If Kavanagh believes it, he isn’t just a fraud; he’s mad!”
“Madman or not, he’s still dangerous. He’s a murderer even if he can’t help Russia win a war against England.” I was jarred by a sudden idea. “Perhaps we’ve misinterpreted Niall Kavanagh’s work. Perhaps he really has invented a weapon.”
“What are you talking about?”
My idea sprang full-fledged into my mind while I spoke. “We assumed the weapon was a gun. But what if it’s some completely new kind of device for killing?” Slade looked puzzled, and I rushed on: “No matter that his theory is ridiculous, Niall Kavanagh demonstrated that he could cultivate a substance that causes disease and use it to make people sick. Maybe he discovered how to do those things on a larger scale, how to affect more than one person at a time.”
“One couldn’t apply his animalcules to enough people to make a difference in the outcome of a war. Besides, the disease he gave those women isn’t fatal.”
“Other diseases are,” I said, convinced by my own logic. “Fevers, cholera, typhoid, consumption-they kill thousands of people. And what if Kavanagh invented another way to spread the agents that cause those diseases?”
“That’s preposterous. You’ve been writing fiction for so long that you’ve started to believe-” Sudden, dismayed recollection and enlightenment stopped Slade. “The fans. The bicycle with the bellows. That’s what they’re for-to spread diseases through the air. Damnation. You’re right.” Horror filled Slade’s eyes. “If Niall Kavanagh has perfected a weapon of that sort, it could start a plague!”
It hardly bore imagining. “What should we do?”
“ We aren’t going to do anything. You’re going home. I-” Slade paused.
“What?”
He put his finger to his lips. Now I heard the sound of footsteps approaching the house, and the gate creaking. Slade blew out the lamp. We hastened to the window and saw, far below us, three men coming up the front walk.
“Who in the devil?” Slade muttered.
They carried lanterns, but we couldn’t see their faces. They mounted the stairs and disappeared under the roof of the porch. A moment later there came a loud knocking.
“Kavanagh!” one of the men called. “If you’re in there, open up!”
“It’s Lord Eastbourne,” I whispered. “I recognize his voice.”
“Lord Eastbourne!” Slade’s profile, illuminated by the moonlight, showed surprise. “What is he doing here?”
Now was the time to fill Slade in on the remainder of what I’d learned in Whitechapel. I told him about the letter written by Lord Eastbourne. “He furnished the laboratory. Dr. Kavanagh is working for him.”
“My, my, you’re just full of surprises.” Slade regarded me with amusement.
“But I still don’t understand why, if Kavanagh is working for the British government, Lord Palmerston didn’t know about him and the invention.”
“Lord Eastbourne is an ambitious man,” Slade said. “He must have learned about the invention and gone behind Palmerston’s back to hire Kavanagh.”
“But why?” I heard shuffling and muttered conversation from Lord Eastbourne and his men on the porch.
“Maybe he didn’t know whether the weapon would work, and he wanted to wait until Kavanagh came up with a successful model, and then reveal it to Lord Palmerston and the Queen. That would have done wonders for his career.” Slade thought a moment. “He may even be planning to encourage a war between Britain and Russia. That would give him a chance to demonstrate Kavanagh’s weapon, and a victory for Britain would make him a
