Page 59 of A Devilish Element
Bell coughed into his fist. “Chemistry is not his natural occupation. It’s taken some considerable effort to get to this point. I daresay he might be pleased of someone to show it off to.”
She was intrigued. “Is it something to do with his puffing devils?”
“Lord, if only,” Bell gave a dry chuckle, and ushered her in so that he could finally close the door behind her.
Jem must have heard them, for he turned toward them, his eyes flashing green and gold. A grin then stretched across his face, broad and welcoming. “Eliza.” He made come hither motions until she joined him by the table. “You’ll excuse my state of dress, I trust. I thought you busy with Lady Linfield, or I’d have hunted you down to assist with all this. Brewing potions is more your field, I think, than mine. Really, I could use the expertise of my cousin Pip, but I think I have this all working nicely now. The heat source has been the worst of it.”
Indeed, it was her forte, at least in terms of brewing herbal remedies. “Should I be donning an apron?” Doctor Bell passed her exactly such an item. It was of the sort more usually found on a butcher but served the desired purpose of keeping her clothing clean. “What is this? Not your usual sort of experiment.” A flame sat heating a bubbling vessel, from which a glass pipe led to another larger vessel situated upside down in a vat of hot water. She had seen depictions of such arrangements attributed to Lavoisier for the collection of gases.
“No, the mysteries of steam and pressure have been sidelined in favour of chemistry today. I have one of Davy’s pamphlets.” Jem rustled through a sheaf of papers covered in scrawled calculations but didn’t seem to find what he was looking for, until he looked up and spied Bell and the book. The doctor had reopened it and was studying its pages again.
“Ah, you have it. Do you know of him, Eliza? Not Bell, I mean, Davy. In his role as a superintendent of the medical pneumatic society he’s been studying the effects of an array of newly separated gases. This is what I’m trying to replicate.”
Of course, she had heard of Davy. He was busy shaking up many of the fundamentals of chemistry, and while she wasn’t as well versed in the subject as she’d like to be, she did follow along as best she could.
“Will it help drive your engine?”
“Oh, heavens no. No, I don’t think so. These are his instructions for the preparation of nitrous oxide. And the study of its effects on the body. The earlier preparations involved zinc, which would have been a problem as I don’t have any, but the later ones involve bubbling nitrate of ammoniac though water and then collecting the gas.” He pointed out the inverted jar.
“I see, but to what purpose?”
Jem frowned, but quickly shrugged off the question and gave her a smile. “Well, you may have heard tell of laughing gas. It’s been quite the thing in certain circles of late.”
She had. Her friend Bella Rushdale, now the Marchioness of Pennerley had written to them of an evening soiree she’d attended with Lord Pennerley and all manner of artists and bohemians, where silken balloons containing the substance were passed around, and had succeeded in making everyone quite giddy and dreadfully merry. “And this is that?”
He nodded with great enthusiasm. “So then, are you saying Lord Linfield demands you produce it to use as a form of entertainment?”
Doctor Bell gave a curious guffaw. Whereupon he and Jem exchanged equally curious glances that ended with Jem shaking his head, and Bell relinquishing the book into his hands. This Jem immediately passed to Eliza and turned out to be Davy’s treatise on the subject, published only the year before.
“In a sense. However, you needn’t worry. His intention isn’t to pass it around his guests. It’s purely for his personal consumption. And he didn’t so much deliver me the task as I suggested the experiment.”
“Because he cannot wait until he returns to town to sample its effects?”
Lips pursed and cheeks sucked in, Jem seemed to be determinedly fighting off a smirk. “I guess you might say that’s about the gist of it. Linfield’s not what you’d call a patient man. What he wants, he generally wants right now.”
That was usually the case with the aristocracy; impatience was baked into their marrow. At least it was a relief to find Linfield wasn’t intending to cajole his guests and his poor wife into partaking of this newly discovered laughing gas. Fortunately, but slightly bilking too, since it would mean she’d be deprived of the opportunity to experience the effects for herself, out of a purely academic interest, of course.
“Will you not sample it too?”
Jem nodded at once. “Oh, definitely. Any true scientist knows that you ought to verify outcomes and potencies for oneself.” He tapped a finger against the pages of the open book in her hands. “There are a range of reported effects according to this study. The only way I can be certain I’ve collected the correct gas is to test it by inhaling and verifying the results.”
How quick he was to smile. How full of vitality he seemed in that moment. The very air around him seemed to thrum with excitement. This was how she’d observed him in the engine sheds at Stags Fell as she showed off his workspace, his engines, and the rudimentary plans to create his own puffing devil locomotive.
“Options besides dosing yourself are available,” Bell remarked. “It is not always necessary to experiment on oneself, or even advisable.”
“In your line, perhaps,” Jem replied.
“Practicalities abound.”
“Yes, I don’t suppose one can really extract one’s own heart in order to poke about in the vessels to determine how it malfunctions.” Eliza’s remark succeeded in making both men gawp at her. Jem’s surprised gurn cracked first. “Oh, I think she has the right of you there, Bell. You do like to poke around in viscera.”
Bell rolled his eyes. The tilt of his head set his wig at an even more alarming angle. Irritably, he straightened it. “You might be more thankful for my studies. If it were not for myself and other anatomists, medicine would not be progressing, and the various quacks and charlatans would still hold reign with their archaic notions of humours and bloodletting.”
“I’m delighted to find you don’t hold to those practices,” Eliza said. “For it is a novelty to be sure to find a physician who doesn’t rely entirely upon cupping and drawing as if it were some magical panacea. I only pity the poor souls whose cadavers you torture to obtain such knowledge.”
“I see you question my ethics, Miss Wakefield.”
Indeed, she did. Ludlow Bell was precisely the sort of carrion crow that paid to have decent folks’ endless peace disturbed by having them dug out of their graves and dissected on his table like giant joints of meat.
