Clouds rolled across the afternoon sky, mirroring her darkening mood. A stiff breeze tugged at Zan’s clothes as she fumbled with the house key. She could feel Caradon’s stare at her back as she let herself into 42 Warden Street. Once inside the foyer, she shut the door away from any prying eyes.
Now alone, she took off her hat and felt somewhat unsettled. She had decided to tell him nothing. It was certainly all right not to reveal information. After all, didn’t everyone have secrets to keep? But why did she feel like she had lied to him?
The household staff was nowhere in the vicinity. She supposed Mrs. Philomon and Isadora were putting the house to rights or were out with Simkins to obtain the weekly supplies. Boreas was most likely in the kitchen preparing dinner.
She slipped down to the basement laboratory, finding that the only lamp left burning was the one sitting on the central table dividing the room in half. Zan put her hat and gloves on the table before retrieving her reticule with her uncle’s notes from the drawer she had stashed it in earlier.
She took the notes out and spread them on the table. The loose leaf papers were all dated and numbered and mostly sorted in order. After shifting them to a more precise order, she noticed that the notes were dated from the past month and detailed the electrical experiments that her uncle had been conducting prior to his death. Most of the notes detailed the results of failed experiments due to incorrect parameters. One sheet immediately caught her eye. It was a diagram of a new apparatus that she vaguely remembered her uncle had begun building just before his death. She had not been paying so much attention since he had simply remarked to her that he was building an ‘improvement’ to the one he had built for an Academy demonstration.
The Museum now was in possession of that half-assembled machine.
Zan looked up from the table, surveying Uncle Elliot’s half of the laboratory. She narrowed her gaze, gauging the bits and scraps of material that had been left behind. There were sheets and rods of different metals, pipes, cranks, ball bearings, bits of wood in all shapes, glass jars of all sizes, bolts of fabric, gears, nails, coils of wire, and even a stack of old newspapers. If she had the inclination, she was sure she would have built the electricity machine out of all the left over materials. Or at least most of it. The diagram of the machine called for a ‘storage capacitor,’ an iron sphere as big as her head to help collect negative electrical charge.
She looked closer at the diagram which at first glance was a simple drawing of a sphere on a stand, and then the next page for further explanation. But to her surprise, she found the next page missing. She frowned, feeling uneasy about it all. From what she had, she could build the machine, but she would have no understanding of it.
For the next hour, she poured over the writing, trying to cobble together a mental picture of what her uncle had been doing by piecing together his brief notes and trying to remember what he had told her about the subject during his lecturing moods.
“It was the Ancients who first realized that lightning and subtle fire, the highly energized state of certain materials, were related,” he uncle had told her. Perhaps the lecture had occurred during lunch or dinner or in the laboratory when she had been watching one of her own experiments slowly coming to a boil. At any rate, it was the lecture and not the surroundings that stuck in her mind.
“Someday we may be able to study the phenomenon of lightning directly,” he had continued wistfully, “but for now we must content ourselves with something safer—the subtle fire or electrostatics of common objects. Stationary electrical charges, as some would say.”
“Electrical charges?” she had asked, unsure of the terminology.
“The stuff that gives certain objects that kind of energy that you can sometimes sense by touching and getting a nasty shock. The curious thing about charge is that it comes in two types called positive and negative. Just terms, of course, to indicate that the two are in opposition. It is no different if they were called right and left or stop and go. The two different charges attract each other while the same charge repels. In a way, it’s quite beautiful that nature has provided such symmetry.”
“Symmetry?” said Zan. “There was a recent Academy lecture on the grouping of chemical elements that rely heavily on symmetry. Perhaps that is what nature basically is—symmetry.”
“You may be right,” her uncle had replied. “We animals are symmetrical. Plants and flowers are symmetrical. Why not the inanimate world as well? I would not be surprised if the other forces of nature such as gravity, magnetism, and magic are inherently symmetrical as well.”
Ah, if magic were only so easily understood! Zan had and still mused not with a little bitterness. Her control of that particular energy was shaky at best.
“Charge can be transferred or built up whenever you create friction between two objects. Curiously, though, we only see the spark, the physical manifestation of electricity when some sort of metal is used. An interesting property, don’t you think?”
“I suppose that property could be used as an aid in classifying chemical elements,” Zan had agreed. “But what about materials that can carry that subtle fire, that charge, but are not metal? If you rub amber long enough, it begins attracting various things—similar to your attracting positive and negative charges.”
“Like the bits of amber we can find along the sea shore?” said Uncle Elliot. He had given her an enigmatic smile. “Why Zan, I haven’t thought about that before. But you are right, some non-metals can store electrical potential with some proficiency. The Ancients had in fact called amber elektron—which is the origin of the word electricity. It is also something to note, isn’t it, that the Ancients also considered amber an essential ingredient in spells and magical amulets? Amber was regarded as ‘solidified sunlight’ and it is said that witches wear necklaces of amber for rituals. Perhaps there is something about both electricity and magic. After all, both can be stored….”
“Miss Hu, I didn’t realize that you were already back from your ride at the park.”
She looked up to see Mrs. Philomon standing in the stairway with her arms crossed along her ample bosom. The housekeeper was frowning.
“I’ve been down here quite a while, Mrs. Philomon. I apologize for not informing the staff of my return.”
“Huh,” she replied. “Well how did the outing with Mr. Caradon go? I hope he did not try anything funny.”
“As well as it could be expected,” she replied, remembering the alarming declaration whispered in her ear and then the silent, tense ride back to her house. “I haven’t, uh, scared my patron off.” Or intimidated him. In fact, it was quite the opposite. At least she hadn’t given in to his not so subtle demand for answers.
“As you say, Miss Hu,” said Mrs. Philomon. “Will you be taking dinner upstairs?”
“No. I would like dinner in the laboratory this evening. There is some work I must see to before I turn in for the night.”
“As you wish, Miss Hu.”
When the housekeeper left, she looked down at the notes again and became aware of something not quite right nagging at the edge of her mind. She concentrated, trying to capture that elusive thought, but it continually flitted away, hovering just beyond her consciousness. She shook her head. It still did not come.
Instead of dwelling on that frustrating lack of insight, she got up from her seat at the table and began perusing the shelves filled with raw material. She might as well start making a model of the machine from the notes that everyone seemed to want. Looking for an adequate base for the machine, she pulled out a rectangular board of pine from a bottom shelf. As she lifted the board up to stand on the floor, a piece of paper slid down the underside of the pine board.
