“He was feeling unwell and was not himself.”
Angelika did feel cheered by how certain Lizzie sounded. “I’m sure a nice night’s sleep will restore him.” She began to chatter mindlessly about the weather outside.
Lizzie tried her best to keep the doubt from her eyes, and they held hands over the almost-dead man once more.
*
Arlo died his third death right before dawn, but Angelika was highly persuasive. When he was resettled again into his body, she put her face into a pillow and howled.
*
Arlo was still alive at breakfast time. When Dr. Corentin assured her he would look after Arlo for a while, Angelika excused herself in search of Victor. “He’s gone running,” Lizzie had mumbled in her sleep.
“Running,” Angelika repeated as she went downstairs. “Victor is running, in the pouring rain, when I need him?” Whatever she was hoping the doctor would produce from his leather valise did not exist. “He needs to invent a solution. Yes, yes, I will be back,” she shouted over her shoulder at the gaggle of servants who slowly emerged from the shadows of the halls. “He lives, and I will be back.”
To her intense irritation, Victor was not in the laboratory putting the finishing touches on an elixir to restore Arlo. “Time-wasting idiot,” she seethed, and seized upon his notebook. “I will have to do this alone.”
She began leafing through it backward from the most recent entry. It was, of course, in his secret shorthand code. “I can’t read it,” she complained out loud, in the exact tone from her childhood. “But wait, this is about Arlo.”
There was a sketch of the wound on Arlo’s hand, and the measurement. As she flipped back, she realized Victor had been measuring it every two days. It had not healed a fraction. “I have never listened to what Arlo was trying to tell me.” She swallowed her rising panic, cast the notebook aside, and began lining up various compounds and glass beakers. It was here that Victor found her sometime later, hunched over the bench, alternately cackling and wheezing with panic.
“And they call me a mad scientist,” he said. Then his smirk faded. “I think you should be sitting with him.”
“I’m inventing a way to cure him.”
With gentle pity, her brother replied: “You won’t find it in here.” He ignored her collection of foaming, poisonous previous attempts on the far bench. “Come inside.”
She dipped a spoon at random into a jar of magnesium sulphate. “Do you have the monopoly on genius and talent? Did you achieve everything in your life alone? Am I mentioned even once in your notebooks? Does Herr Jürgen Schneider curse my name also? Will I be remembered in history?”
A speechless Victor was her favorite kind. She continued her rant.
“Everything you have ever done is because I helped you. Your conceit is exactly equal to my delusion. But despite these personal failings, we carry on.”
Lizzie would definitely want to steal that entire monologue.
Angelika shoveled the powder into a fresh beaker, cast around for an additive, then hesitated. She was so tired she could not remember which reacted with what. But because Victor was watching, she filled the beaker with cold water and set it above a burning flame.
“You are thinking of giving him a warm magnesium tonic?” Victor pondered this. “It will have to be administered with a throat tube. But it may assist in keeping his joints and muscles softened. He said you have a marvelous salty bath solution that helps with the pain. Good thinking, Jelly.”
Angelika was so relieved to have created anything at all, she wept all the way out the door, up the path, through the manor door, and up the stairs.
With one hand holding the beaker and apparatus, Victor patted her shoulder with the other, repeating, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Dr. Corentin stood as soon as they entered. “I am called away for a childbirth.”
“Absolutely not,” Angelika countered, but Victor nodded to the man. She was aghast. “Victor, he is otherwise engaged, working here.”
“There is a baby wishing to live who needs me more,” the doctor replied as he picked up his case. As he passed them on his way to the door, he added sadly, “Ma chère, take my original advice. Pray for his soul and prepare yourself.”
“Victor!” Angelika was unable to move her feet as her brother closed the door behind the departed doctor. “You’re going to let him just leave? Offer him more! All that I have, take it!”
Victor’s mouth was in a rueful line. “What if it were Lizzie one day, giving birth, needing him to come at once? He’s right,” he tried to impress on her, but Angelika was turning redder than an apple. “Jelly, he does not have the expertise. There’s nothing more he can do.”
“Shut up.” She crawled up onto the bed and put her ear to Arlo’s mouth. “He’s still alive. Come on, help me.” Hating Victor’s reluctance, she wrenched the tube and funnel from him. “I have no idea how to do this.” Arlo’s body did not accommodate the intrusion willingly, but after several sweaty minutes she had poured the entire beaker into his stomach. “There,” she said, rolling up the wet tube and thrusting it back at her brother.
“Good work” was his reply. “Can’t hurt.”
Arlo’s body jerked. He vomited, and began choking. “Roll him,” Victor directed, and they caught the expunged liquid with towels. “His body still has these kinds of base reactions,” he told Angelika as they pounded his back. “I think this is a good thing.”
“A good thing?” Angelika wiped Arlo’s mouth. Her voice rose. “A good thing? You know what I see? You, standing about, being absorbed in yourself, jogging in the forest, working on your own precious body, doing absolutely nothing to improve this situation. Is it because he was originally a priest? Or is it because he loves me?”
“Jel—”
“You’ve never wanted anyone to love me. You’ve always laughed at my infatuations, and told me I am a fool, and nobody would ever want me.”
“I never laughed at you,” Victor said uneasily. “All right, maybe I did. But I was joking.”
“You were never joking, and you weren’t joking when you said it last night. But he loves me, and it’s not for my fortune or my face. He loves my flaws. He makes me feel like I could be a better person. We are connected, at a blood level.”
“I do not doubt the depth of your love.”
She ignored that. “You are going to be right, as always. Being dead is the ultimate in unattainable, wouldn’t you say?” In her rage, she was calmer than she’d ever been. “I will die of heartbreak. There’s a plot vacant beside his grave. Put me there. That is my wish.”
Victor’s complexion turned ashen, and he said nothing.
She turned her back on him. “Get out, and don’t come back until you can do something useful.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
The following morning, the foyer of Blackthorne Manor was well-occupied. “I can’t get a word out of her,” the cook, Mrs. Rumsfield, was saying like a complaint, before she jumped and clutched her chest. “Christ almighty, missus!”
Angelika was descending the stairs. She was gray, droopy, and her eyes were sunken into her skull. She smelled. If anyone had been able to look past this ghastly apparition, they would see that the portrait of Caroline was highly concerned.
“You look ruddy dreadful!” Mrs. Rumsfield hollered. Sarah appeared in the doorway to the kitchen hall, wiping her hands on a cloth. At the foot of the stairs, Angelika was surrounded by all the house servants, Jacob the stablehand, and even some of the garden laborers. She searched in vain for the face she ached for the most, and then dropped to sit on the bottom stair.
“He lives. Again.” She wrung her hands. “We must all rally together these next few hours.” She was touched by the worry in the faces looking down at her. Every single one of these people had been impacted by Arlo in some way; his kind leadership had brought them to Blackthorne Manor and, in turn, awoken the estate from its deep sleep.
Mrs. Rumsfield said, voice rich with self-importance, “I have some broth ready for when he wakes.”
“Very good,” Angelika replied, even though her hopes were fading. “But now, while he is asleep, we must make Arlo—ah, you know him as Will, but he is now called Arlo Northcott—we must make him proud, and do our best to run the house—”
She stopped when Mrs. Rumsfield tutted. “You are all done in, miss. Time for something to eat and some sleep.”
“There is no time. Boys,” Angelika commanded the ragtag crew, now knowing what needed to be done, “I want you all to begin planning the apple harvest.”