Page 9 of The Lawrence Browne Affair
“I could . . . if you wished, I could teach you.” If there had been enough light in the room for Turner to see him, Lawrence might not have had the courage to speak. But since he was facing away from the window, all the moonlight fell on Turner’s face, not Lawrence’s own.
And Turner’s face, coolly impassive as ever, revealed nothing. This was not the face of a man with a burning desire to hear about voltaic piles. It was certainly not the face of a man who was harboring carnal desires towards his employer. Of course it wasn’t. Lawrence must be growing even more delusional.
“Never mind. I have neither the time nor the temperament for tutoring secretaries in natural philosophy.”
There was a pause that lasted too long. “Good night, my lord.” And then Turner left, closing the door soundlessly behind him.
Only later did Lawrence realize that for the first time in years, perhaps ever, he felt disappointed to be left alone. As sleep eluded him, he sought comfort in the certainty that he preferred solitude, that he hated being bothered with company, and that therefore he could not now be lonely.
CHAPTERFIVE
“Explain it again.”Slooooowly, Georgie wanted to add. He leaned back in his chair and waited for the show.
At some point over the last few days, Radnor’s coat had gone missing. Probably Georgie ought to make some effort to find it. But he wouldn’t, not so long as the man kept working in shirtsleeves, rolled up to expose thick forearms that were dusted with hair.
“No,” Radnor said, his voice gravelly and his tone rude. “I’ve already explained it twice. You don’t seem like an imbecile, which means you’re being deliberately obtuse.”
True, Georgie already more or less grasped the concept, but as Radnor talked, he stroked his beard with those big hands. Georgie could watch him all day. It wasn’t a burden to listen to him either. Radnor didn’t have the slick and polished drawl of most of his peers. Instead his voice rumbled and slurred, lilted and skipped. He looked and sounded more like a blacksmith or a woodcutter than an earl.
And somehow, without either of them ever alluding to their conversation in the earl’s bedchamber, Georgie had become Radnor’s pupil. Instead of grunting and swearing, Radnor favored Georgie with technical explanations and disquisitions on some Italian fellow. Georgie, who fancied himself more skilled in faking an education than in actually acquiring knowledge, was surprised by how drawn he was to Radnor’s world of invisible particles. He felt like he was in on a secret that few others knew.
“Now you repeat it back to me,” Radnor commanded. “I’ll tell you when you’ve got it wrong.” He sat, propping his feet on the table that held the device he had finished assembling that morning. Composed of metal and wire, scraps of cloth, and fragile-looking tubes of acid, it looked like something that would be equally at home in a sorcerer’s workshop or a torture chamber. It was hard to say which looked more dangerous, the equipment or its burly, scowling creator.
“All right.” Georgie smoothed his trousers and crossed the newly cleared floor. It had taken the better part of a week, but Georgie had made progress with this sty of a room. The papers were properly cataloged; the rubbish was burnt in the fire he insisted the earl let him light. He had even brought a kitchen cat upstairs to frighten away the mice, despite Barnabus’s vocal chagrin. He truly wished someone else were here to bear witness to all he had accomplished, because God knew Radnor didn’t seem to notice or care. But Georgie felt like a magician.
For one reckless moment, he thought that maybe honest work wasn’t such a bad idea after all. But no. If a man were born in the gutter, honest work couldn’t take him far enough away from it. He would always be able to smell the stink of the gutter, waiting for him with one month’s missed rent, one costly doctor’s visit. Georgie wanted to be safer than that.Neededto be safer than that.
“This,” Georgie said, pointing at one part of the apparatus, “is a stack of disks that will kill me if I touch them at the wrong time.”
“It’s called a pile, or a battery, and the disks are copper and zinc electrodes.”
“And I die if I touch them. Don’t forget that part.”
The earl made a grumbly noise that Georgie took to mean that death was a trifling, petty scruple. “I may have exaggerated the danger. Or maybe I didn’t. Either way, don’t touch.”
Georgie’s eyebrows shot up. Was that humor he had detected in the earl’s tone? Wonders never ceased. “In between each disk is a piece of your bed quilt that you cut up and soaked in seawater.”
“Electrolyte,” Radnor corrected. When he frowned, which was almost always, his eyebrows were dark diagonal slashes across his forehead.
“And this,” Georgie said, pointing to what looked like a pair of miniature trestles connected by wires, “is what will burn the house down or eat a hole in the floor, depending on how things wind up going awry.”
“Electric telegraph.” If Radnor had detected the facetiousness in Georgie’s tone, he did not acknowledge it.
“Right.” The trestle had thirty-odd wires, each in a glass tube filled with some doubtlessly poisonous liquid. The wires coiled together for a yard, then separated where they connected to another small trestle. At each point where the wires met the trestles, a letter or number was inked on the wood in Georgie’s own neat hand. “On one trestle, you apply the current to the wire for whichever letter you wish to send, and bubbles pop up on the other trestle next to the corresponding letter.”
“More or less,” Radnor conceded.
“Has anyone managed to make something like this work? To actually send a message, I mean?” Georgie tried not to sound as if he were really asking if the earl was deluded.
When Radnor rubbed the back of his neck with one broad hand, a strand of hair the same color as the copper disks escaped his queue. “A fellow in Munich did something similar. And Standish will try once I send him the final plans.”
By now, Georgie did not need to ask who Standish was. For all he was a hermit, the earl was an enthusiastic letter writer who maintained regular correspondence with several men of science. Every post brought a stack of letters.
“With longer wires, messages could be sent over greater distances,” Radnor continued.
“From the house to the village?”
“From the coast to London, more like.”
