She thought for a moment. “I would say through the door of her music room, which opens onto an Indian tea terrace. But I don’t think it’s possible to get in that way. It’s equipped with a very formidable-looking lock. I suppose we could try—”
“Show me to the terrace,” he ordered.
Cordelia didn’t waste any time with words. She simply turned and moved off through the trees.
* * *
Charlotte winced as the muddled shadows gave way to a bright, blinding burst of flames.
“‘Let there be light,’” said Julianna, extinguishing the taper she had used to ignite the three oversized Argand lamps.
A quick look around the room they had just entered showed it was a well-equipped laboratory fashioned from polished steel, white tile, and varnished wood. Gleaming brass instruments sat on the spotless counters, reflecting an abstract beauty . . .
If only it hadn’t been twisted by an unstable mind.
“Isn’t it divine?” said Julianna.
Charlotte turned. “You think yourself the Almighty?”
A shrug. “An archaic concept. There are powerful forces beyond the understanding of ordinary minds—and ordinarymortals. When I prove that death can be transcended, all the old beliefs will give way to a new world.”
“So have thought countless charlatans and lunatics in the past”—she was growing heartily sick of her captor’s cat-in-the-cream-pot smile—“until their quackeries crumbled into dust.”
Anger flared in Julianna’s eyes, but it was chased away by a nasty laugh as she gave an airy wave at the far corner of the laboratory. “We shall soon see who is right and who is wrong.”
On spotting the massive, coffin-like wooden box, bristling with the assembly of metal plates and copper wires, Charlotte felt her innards give a sickening lurch. It was a trough battery—the most powerful type of voltaic pile. Placing the metal disks and pads side by side within a waterproofed box, rather than stacking them upright, where the weight would squeeze the electrolyte solution out of the assembly, allowed it to generate a frighteningly strong current of electricity.
Adding to the horror, it was sitting on a table next to a padded table with leather restraining straps.
“Strip off your shirt and breeches, and put this on.” Julianna held out a simple knee-length linen chemise, with a row of buttons that allowed it to open in the front.
“M-May I keep on my boots?”
“If you like.”
Steady, steady—she must find a way to keep her captor talking. Like Raven and Hawk, Charlotte carried a knife in her boot. A moment of distraction was all that was needed. But she wouldn’t get a second chance.
“If I’m to be sacrificed to your unique genius,” said Charlotte as she began to change her clothing, “might I at least hear how you figured out your momentous discovery?” In her experience, hubris loved an audience. “After all, Galvani and Aldini, the leading scientific minds in the field of electricity, came to the conclusion that reanimation of the dead was not possible.”
Julianna made a rude sound. “That’s because their ideas on the subject were flawed. They failed to understand the missing element.”
“Oh?” Charlotte was aware of needing to choose her words with care. She must dance along the razor’s edge between needling and flattering, provoking just enough emotion . . . “You mean to say you are smarter than they are?”
“Precisely. You see, I understood that the secret to reanimation was that mere metal and chemicals weren’t enough to raise the dead. The surge of electricity also needed to be powered by some essence of Life.”
Charlotte’s blood turned cold. “You mean you had to add some sort of human fluid to the electrolyte?”
A beatific smile. “Yes.”
“And so began the Bloody Butcher murders?” she said.
“Tsk, tsk, such a hysterical moniker,” responded Julianna. “It’s quite simple when you think about it. I realized that one had to use like-to-like—a dead body needs a human essence, along with the electrical stimulus, in order to bring it back to life.”
Perhaps there was a mad sort of logic to the idea. But no abstract concept could change the fact that her captor’s experiments were nothing more than cold-blooded murder.
“And thus you began killing random victims?”
“I merely chose the victims and watched as Sir Kelvin did the actual blade work,” said Julianna. “Until he lost his nerve.”
