‘You did start the conversation.’
They moved on down the corridor.
‘Point taken. I don’t really know. I can’t really think about an “after”. I think about now, and what’s already happened. And the future as far I need to see past the end of the current job. I try to picture my perfect life and I see nothing. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.’
‘You see nothing? Not even a person?’
The next door was locked. Camille jerked the handle in frustration.
‘You will have to tell James about your relationship with Ada won’t you?’ continued Guil.
‘I will. But it’s not the right time.’
‘My father would say avoiding a problem is adding interest to a loan you cannot afford.’
‘I am not avoiding it!’ Camille aimed a hard kick at the door.
The brittle wood shattered under her boot, splintering the door frame as the lock was forced from its setting.
She and Guil surveyed the destruction.
The door swung open, revealing a dim room containing a cot bed, and a card table strewn with candle stubs and broken clay pipes.
And a man, watching them with curiosity.
Camille stopped dead.
He hesitated, and then a menacing smile spread across his wolfish face as he recognised her.
She’d already recognised him.
Dorval. The duc’s henchman.
Dragging Guil with her, she turned and ran.
10
The Chapel
In the end, it hadn’t taken much searching to find what Ada was looking for.
The duc’s research notes weren’t locked away. They weren’t even in a drawer. The sheets of paper had been wrapped in a leather folder and weighed down with a pair of forceps. The loose sheets were of varying age, some crumpled and smoothed out again, some stained and torn, others crisp and fresh, the ink still shiny. She’d ignored them at first, distracted by the anatomical drawings and notation. But when she pulled the first sheet out, she realised what they were.
2 février 1778
Reports from London and Geneva tell of progress in the reanimation of corpses through the means of Electric Galvanism, but I believe we are truly the first to turn our attention to the application of electricity at the formation of life. The foetus is a creature of pure possibility, imbued with the essence of the divine maker’s spark – if only we can pass through the child a current of our own making, one in tune with the world itself, then what new depths of understanding might we reach in that unceasing quest to comprehend our own nature?
Ada glanced up at Olympe, heart racing. This was it. The record of Olympe’s creation.
Olympe was engrossed in a diagram of a Leyden jar for storing electricity. Turning to one side so the notes were half-concealed by her arm, Ada read on. Her hands shook as she turned the pages. It was sick – terrifying. The duc had experimented on Olympe’s mother while she was pregnant.
And they’d thought the Revolutionaries were the monsters for locking Olympe up.
Maybe they’d been protecting her from someone far worse.
13 mars 1779
I confess myself curious as to an unknown aspect of the child. We began this undertaking with a human foetus, and it was more than clear once it was birthed that it was human no more – no matter how much the mother dotes on it. It is cold like a lizard, with eyes like a devil from hell itself. Yet still one question plagues me. What of its soul? To be sure, the foetus must have begun with one. What have our actions done to its God-given soul?
