Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill

Author:C.E. McGill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

16

The most beautiful and elevated problem for the human intellect, the discovery of the laws of vitality, cannot be resolved, nay, cannot even be imagined, without an accurate knowledge of chemical forces.

— JUSTUS LIEBIG, Animal Chemistry

THE MOMENT WE were unpacked, I began my research on ferments in earnest. ‘Unpacked’ was a generous word, perhaps; although Maisie had happily lent us a shelf in the library for our books, as well as the under-stairs cupboard, Henry insisted on keeping the more ‘sensitive’ materials (pertaining to dissection and resurrection and such) in our room, and so I picked my way to bed each night between open trunks and teetering piles of books and notes. Our experimental equipment we put in the boathouse, which – with the addition of a small worktable and the subtraction of several years’ worth of grime – was slowly turning into a proper laboratory. I had not been overjoyed by the boathouse when Henry first showed it to me; besides the dark and the damp, there was hardly any floor space to be had, merely a horseshoe-shaped rim of stone around the central pool. But the pool, as he pointed out, was the most crucial part. It was quite deep, and open to the firth at one end, so that one might steer a rowing boat straight inside and then haul it up into the rafters; or, for our purposes, dive down and secure a net across the open end of the pool, closing the large wooden doors to block the view of any passing ships on the firth. It would make the perfect enclosure.

All that remained now was to make something to put in it; to find out why that one rat had come back to life, when the others had not; to unravel the mysteries of life and death, and weave them back together in a shape of our own choosing. Put that way, it almost sounded simple.

‘Do we have any more lime?’ I asked one day, rifling through our chemistry set. I winced as I leaned too close to one of my bubbling vials, overwhelmed by the powerful smell of yeast. It had, indeed, begun to feel like a brewery here of late, the air pungent and humid.

‘Pardon?’ Henry looked up from his own contraption – a pulley system formerly used to lift boats from the water, which he thought might be used to construct an elevated worktable. He squinted at the bottle in my hand. ‘Is that from the little cabinet? Mary, that’s not ours!’

He was right, of course – for this, along with several other chemical texts, Henry had borrowed from his friend Mr Forsythe before we left London. (I was sure that, had we gone to Mr Jamsetjee again, he would happily have given us all we needed, with no expectation of return – but I refused to entertain any more of his pessimistic declarations that his days of science were over.)

‘Good grief, Henry. It’s only lime, not powdered gold.’ I placed the bottle back in its small velvet-lined drawer and drew out the brass scales instead.

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