“So let me understand. You are proposing to deliver as many electric shocks as you like to my sister, for an indeterminate amount of time, on a theory for which you have no evidence other than a wild guess.”
“That hardly seems fair!” he squawked. “I haven’t even had a chance—”
“Oh, no,” Emily said, speaking up at last. “He’s demonstrated that he can cause a convulsion in me with his current. I told him that it wasn’t the same kind of fit that I have. It doesn’t feel the same at all. But it is, after all, only my body. What do I know?”
Jane couldn’t speak for the black rage that filled her. She’d wanted to protect Emily. Why did her uncle have to bring in these fools?
“Exactly,” the charlatan said. “I am the expert on galvanics. What would she know?”
Jane particularly remembered the man who had insisted that the convulsions were an invention of Emily’s mind. Since they were so, he’d insisted that he needed only offer her an incentive to stop. Those burns along her sister’s arm—matched by the ones on her thigh—had been his version of an incentive. What did Emily know, after all?
“Well.” Jane’s voice shook. “There’s only one way I can think of to find out what Emily knows.”
“Your pardon?” The doctor shook his head.
Jane tried not to snarl at him. “I propose to take the radical course of asking her. Emily, what do you think of this course of treatment?”
Only the tremble of Emily’s hands really answered that question. Jane swallowed her anger and waited for her sister’s reply.
“I would rather have the fits, thank you.”
Then Fake Doctor Fallon could go to hell, for all Jane cared. The only difficulty was how to send him there. She turned to him. “Thank you very much,” she said, “but your services are no longer needed.”
He looked shocked, glancing from his acrid-smelling jars to Emily, and then back to Jane. “You can’t discharge me,” he finally said. “This is my chance. I could write this up, make my name…”
There was a good reason why Jane always kept a few bills in an inner pocket. She found these now and unfolded them, holding them out. “I am not discharging you, Doctor Fallon. You may have these twenty pounds if you walk away right now. You only need tell my uncle that you have determined that your treatment is ill-suited to my sister’s condition. He will pay you. I will pay you. And we will all profit from it.”
He scratched his head. “But how can I know if my treatment is ill-suited without further experimentation?”
Sometimes Jane wished she were good at diplomatic speeches. She wished she’d mastered coquettish looks and innocent smiles. But she hadn’t. She was singularly bad at those forms of persuasion. She was good at handing out money and opinions.
“You won’t know,” she told him. “You will have to live in ignorance. That is what it means to accept a bribe. I give you money; you tell what lies you need to tell.”
His eyes had widened as she spoke. “But that would be dishonest!” he protested.
God. Her uncle had found an honest charlatan this time. The others had all been only too happy to be offered the money.
“Twenty-five pounds,” Jane tried. “Twenty for you, five more that you might donate to the parish as a sop to your conscience.”
He hesitated.
“Come,” Jane said, “do you want the parish poor to suffer simply because you hadn’t the bravery to walk away from this house?”
He reached forward, fingers outstretched toward the bills. But before he could take them from her, he snatched his hand away, shaking his head in outrage. “This,” he said, his voice shaking, “this is an ungodly household.”
Jane could have struck him. He wasn’t even a real doctor. He wanted to torture her sister. And she was the ungodly one? Maybe she should offer thirty pounds.
But Emily was the one who smiled and peered innocently up at him. “Oh,” she said, in a deceptively naive voice, “but it is. It is. We all tell lies, all the time. You wouldn’t want to stay around here. It might be catching.”
Ironically, Jane thought, that was the actual truth.
“You should accept our filthy lucre and be shut of our wretched lies,” Emily continued.
He looked between the two sisters.
“Here,” Jane said, adding a third bill to the ones she already held. “Have thirty pounds. Leave tonight. You can still catch the six o’clock train.”
He hesitated, unspeaking.
“Alice will pack your things for you. Won’t you, Alice?” The maid had been sitting at the window—presumably to function as a chaperone for Emily when she had been alone with the doctor. But, like all the servants in the Fairfield household, she recognized an opportunity to earn a little extra when it was presented. She jumped to her feet and came forward. Doctor Fallon made no motion to stop her from wrapping his jars in cotton.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “This doesn’t seem right.”
“Well, if you would like to stay,” Emily said, “you are more than welcome to.”
Jane sent her sister a surprised look.
Alice undid the wires attached to her sister and Emily stood. She took a swishing step toward the doctor. Jane would have admired her form, but the cotton strips trailing from her arm rather ruined the effect.
“As you said, we are an ungodly household. We pray to Ba’al,” Emily said earnestly. “Every evening. And to Apollo, god of the sun, at daybreak. We would like it very much if you joined us.”
Jane had to clamp her lips together to keep from bursting into laughter.
“There are so few heathens in England, and you look like a big, strapping addition—”
Doctor Fallon turned bright red and grabbed the bills from Jane’s hand. “You are right,” he said coldly. “I cannot—I must not stay in this household.”
Alice wordlessly handed him the wicker case she had packed, which now contained the implements of his trade.
“I take my leave of you,” Doctor Fallon proclaimed. “I will not come back, no matter how you might beg, until you repent and accept—”
“What is going on here?”
Jane and Emily turned to the door as one. Oh, God. That was all this farce had needed. Uncle Titus had come into the room. He looked around in blinking confusion—at Doctor Fallon, waving a wicker case that smelled of acid, at the notes that fluttered between his fingers. He looked at Emily, smiling up at the man winsomely.
“Girls,” Titus repeated, “what is going on here?”
“This house!” Doctor Fallon said. “This house—it is a place of heathen infamy. I have been lied to, seduced…” His eyes slid to the bills in his hand, and he clutched them to his chest. “I have been bribed,” he said hoarsely. “I wash my hands of the lot of you, may the devil take you all.”
So saying, he snatched up his case and marched out. It was a good thing, Jane mused, because if he had stayed, he might have explained to Titus that he meant his last statement as the literal truth.
Their uncle watched him go in stunned silence. He waited until he heard the front door slam, before turning to Jane and Emily.
This, Jane thought, was going to be tricky. Very tricky.
“I was in my room,” Jane said cautiously. “And I heard noise. It was the sound of…of ranting.”
“It’s true,” Emily said. “I was sitting here, waiting for a fit to come on so he could test his methods, and suddenly he was pointing his finger at me and making all kinds of horrid accusations.”
Emily was better at lying, and so Jane let her do it.
“I don’t know what set him off,” Emily said earnestly. “He just kept…he kept looking at me. Just looking at me and muttering to himself about how I was seducing him. But I wasn’t. I was just sitting down. I wasn’t doing anything.”
It was a good story, Jane thought. Emily was uncommonly pretty, and even Titus understood what that meant. For a moment, Titus nodded his head, his brow wrinkling in sympathy.
“Who knows where he got that?” Emily said. “He had already started ranting about Ba’al. No doubt he intended to reject Mammon, too.”
It was too much. As Emily spoke, Jane caught her eye. They exchanged a look—an unfortunate look that she never could have described to anyone else. It was a look that only a sister could understand, sly and happy and furious all at once. It let Jane know that she wasn’t alone in the world.
It was too much. Involuntarily, they both broke into betraying laughter.
“Jane,” her uncle said, shaking his head. “Jane, Jane, Jane. Whatever am I supposed to do with you?”
In lieu of giving her opinion on the matter—she’d made enough trouble for herself already—Jane looked around Titus’s office.
She wasn’t sure why he called it an office. It wasn’t as if he did real work in it. He had students, but they rarely met here. The only time he did work was when he grew enamored of some idea he heard at some lecture. For months when she had first come, he’d talked of nothing but some man’s take on the Odyssey; another time, he’d become fascinated by a visiting lecturer’s discussion of workers and capital. He’d read industriously, scribbling his own ideas on paper. But eventually, he always gave up, moving on to the next item that caught his attention. It didn’t matter what subject he pored over. Her uncle never altered. He always took whatever it was that he was doing too seriously, and imagined that his involvement, puny though it was, was vital for the intellectual health of the community.
Their discussions had much the same pattern. She couldn’t count the number of times they’d had this particular conversation.
“Jane,” Titus said, “I am so disappointed with you.”
She had been nothing but a disappointment to him ever since he’d found himself guardian to a handful of girls two years ago.
“This was an honest effort,” he told her. “From a good man, one who was willing to take on a patient who offered so little reward as Emily.”
“Did you even ask for his credentials?” Jane said. “Or speak to happy patients he had cured?”
But, no. He looked at her in bewilderment. “He was a good man,” he repeated.
“I had not noticed that there was a paucity of doctors offering to experiment on my sister,” Jane tried again, and then bit her lip. That was enough. She had no reason to antagonize him further. Best to hold her tongue. He’d shake his head at her and be disappointed. And then he’d forget and get wrapped up in the question of which map of the world he should purchase to grace the south wall of his office. They’d hear of nothing but various projections and cartographers for months, and finally he’d settle on just the right thing.
“Up until this point,” Titus said, “I have forgiven your many, many foibles.” He shook his head gravely. “You are argumentative and stubborn as befits the indelicacy of your birth. I have always hoped that my kind, patient attentions would prevail upon you to change your ways.” He steepled his fingers and looked upward. “I begin to despair of my object.”
Quibbling with the label argumentative had somehow never altered his opinion of her.
She donned an expression of contrition. “I’m sorry, uncle,” she said, as meekly as she could manage. “I am trying.”
The faster she expressed an apology, the sooner they could have this conversation over with. The one good thing about having a gullible uncle was that Jane could usually apologize her way out of anything.
But he didn’t start in on the usual lecture, the one she almost had memorized. There was no temporizing over the immoral tendencies that she had so clearly inherited from her mother, the ones she needed to guard against. Instead he frowned.
“What worries me this time,” he said, “is that you appear to have wrapped your sister up in one of your ploys.”
Jane swallowed.
“I had thought that I would serve as a softening influence on you, but I fear that the reverse is happening. Your ways are instead extending to your sweet younger sister. In her innocence, I suppose she imagines that you feel affection for her.”
“I do,” Jane protested. “Do not doubt that, if you doubt anything.”
He simply shook his head. “If you cared for her,” he said, “you would not draw her down your dark path.”
“What dark path?”
“The path of lies,” Titus said gravely. “You have taught your sister how to lie.”
Emily hadn’t needed any teaching on that front.
“If this continues,” Titus said, “I will have to send you away to my sister. Lily is not as kind as I am. She wouldn’t allow you to gad about to party after party without making an attachment. She tells me on a regular basis how I have erred with you. She’d have you married off in no time.”
Marriage—marriage to any man—would have been bad enough. As a married woman, she simply wouldn’t have the excuse of living in her uncle’s home. Her husband might take her away from Emily for months at a time. But marriage to a man her aunt favored…
Jane clutched her skirts under the table. “No,” she said. “Please, Uncle. Don’t send me away. You haven’t erred. I am trying.”
He didn’t accept her apology. Instead, he shook his head as if Jane had run to the end of even his vast gullibility.
“Jane, you bribed the good doctor to tell lies,” her uncle said patiently, holding up a finger. “You convinced your sister to tell him falsehoods about our prayer habits, when I have done my best to raise you both as good Christians.” Another finger went into the air. “You interrupted him and drove him off before he had a chance to see the effect of his treatment on Emily. The treatment he described was sound.”
“It was quackery,” Jane said. “He exposed her to electric shock, Uncle, and he planned to do so repeatedly just to see what it would do.”
She shouldn’t have spoken, shouldn’t have argued. But this time, he didn’t lecture her on her recalcitrance. He simply shook his head sadly. “And that is not all. Even I, as insulated as I am from the madness of the social whirl, have heard tales of your behavior.”
Only Titus would refer to the tepid occasional dinner engagements held in Cambridge as “the madness of the social whirl.” Most Cambridge events were unsuitable for young women, seeing as how they involved young men who were pretending to be adults for the first time in their lives.
Titus had a healthy competence that paid a few thousand pounds a year. Because of that, he’d never needed any sort of profession, and consequently, he hadn’t bothered to get one. He’d enjoyed his years at Cambridge so much that he was now something of a hanger-on. He styled himself a tutor. “A tutor for the right sort of boys,” he often told others, jovially.
He had only one such boy this year, and she suspected he preferred matters that way. He attended lectures, halfheartedly looked for students who wanted his assistance in studying for the Law Tripos, and generally imagined himself a figure of greater importance than he was.
“Why is it,” Titus said, “that nobody likes you?”
It stung, those words. Even though it was a reputation that she herself had assiduously cultivated. Jane flinched.
“My information does not say that your behavior is improper,” her uncle said, “and for that, I am grateful. But there is improper behavior, and there is behavior that is unacceptable, and by all accounts yours falls into the latter.”
The unfairness of it stung her.
“A right-thinking lady,” her uncle said, “never insults a gentleman. She never talks when her betters speak. She eats very little, and that with her mouth always closed. She always knows the correct fork to use. She never uses her hands, except when it’s appropriate.”
“Appropriate!” Jane said. “How am I supposed to know what is appropriate? Every other girl has had a governess since birth. Some of them attended finishing schools;
the others were finished by aunts and mothers and sisters—anyone willing to spend the years necessary to make sure they knew all the rules. How to curtsy, and to whom. How to eat. How to speak to others.”
She drew in a ragged breath, but it didn’t assuage her hurt. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t.
“My father,” Jane said, “put his wife and daughters away for nineteen years. Mother passed away when I was ten. For nine years after that, I lived on an isolated manor, begging my father to do something with me. I had no governess. I learned no rules.” Her voice was shaking. “And then you inherited me and decided I needed to be married off. What did you imagine would happen when you tossed me out in polite society with no training?”
“A true lady,” Titus said primly, “would have known—”
“No, she wouldn’t have. Or there would be no finishing schools. Babies aren’t born knowing how to curtsy. They aren’t born knowing what subjects of conversation are not allowed.”
He looked mulishly stubborn.
“I didn’t know,” Jane said. “I didn’t know anything. You threw me out to society with no preparation or instruction, and you have the temerity to criticize me because I didn’t take?”
“Jane,” her uncle said, “I don’t want to hear this disrespectful claptrap again.”
She opened her mouth to argue once again, before remembering that it would do no good. He had already made up his mind. And that—despite her angry words, despite how things had started—at this point, she bore a great deal of responsibility for her own reputation. She’d made that choice. Mostly.
“I think,” Titus said, “that I will give you another chance. My every rational impulse counsels against such a thing. I will not let your sister follow in your footsteps. But…” He sighed.
“If you’d only let her out, sir. She is—”
He cast her a look. “Enough of that. She is too fragile to be allowed out. I’m giving you another chance, Jane. Don’t use it up before you leave this room.”
Shut up, Jane. Learn when to shut up. She closed her mouth and swallowed all her protests. They tasted bitter.