The wooden board went forgotten as Zan picked up the missing page. Instead of the explanation of the diagram that she had been expecting, there was another diagram—a cut away of her uncle’s machine revealing that the spherical metal dome and the stand weren’t solid at all but hollow.
“Miss Hu, where would you like me to put this?”
She looked up to find that Mrs. Philomon had sent Isadora down with a dinner tray. “On the table please. Let me clear away these notes first.”
As she gathered up the papers she had spread on the table, the maid remarked, “Are you looking over Mr. Waterstone’s notes? I thought he burned them a while ago.”
“That was what I had thought as well. But I found these. I confess, I find it terribly curious as to why my uncle would go through all the deception to fool us. To fool me.”
“Perhaps he was just being extra careful, Miss Hu. Perhaps he didn’t want any of us to accidentally talk about his notes. Didn’t he say at one time that some inventors are a rather unscrupulous lot?”
“No doubt, you are probably right, Isadora. What is for dinner? It smells quite different.”
“Boreas is trying a new recipe from some South Seas merchants he met at the marketplace. Saffron rice, trout, and sweet potatoes in some sort of milk sauce. I hope you don’t mind him ringing up the accounts with all the imported food he obtained. Simkins was telling him he was being foolish, but he insisted since you have a patron now.”
“The cook can have his indulgences, but it’s best not to encourage him to take any of it for granted,” said Zan. “After all, patronage could be withdrawn at any time.”
“Wise words, Miss Hu. Oh and there is one thing that Mrs. Philomon and I had wished to confer with you earlier. In cleaning up Mr. Waterstone’s bedroom, we wondered whether you wanted to leave it as it is or to turn it into another guest room.”
“I see no reason to let space go to waste. You may use it as a guest room.”
“There were also some of Mr. Waterstone’s personal papers there. We put them on the shelf in his, er, I suppose it is now your study.”
“What sort of papers?”
“Actually, it was a book. A notebook or journal of sorts. There were some sketches of machines in it so we had supposed it contained some of his thoughts on his experiments.”
“If it isn’t too much trouble, could you bring it down to me?”
“Certainly, Miss Hu.”
When Isadora turned to head back upstairs, Zan took off the lid and sniffed at the food. Generally, Boreas was a fine cook, but she was also leery whenever he chanced to try something new. Sometimes, new recipes did not go so well the first time around and at the moment, she wasn’t particularly in a mood to be adventurous—to try a failed culinary experiment. But her stomach growled in protest so with a few reservations, ate a spoonful of the steaming yellow rice. The rice was a bit spicy, but palatable. The trout turned out to be tender and flaky with the faint tang of ginger sauce. And the sweet potatoes with milk sauce was as creamy as pudding.
As she ate, she turned her attention to the page she had found. The inside of the electricity machine apparently had moving parts as well. There were two pulleys that rotated a belt. One of the pulleys was located inside of the metal dome, the other at the base. When the pulleys moved—either by an attached power supply or manually in some fashion, Zan assumed as her uncle had not drawn that part of machine—the belt would move. The belt itself brushed against a metal spike or needle of some sort embedded in the interior of the stand, near the bottom.
At first glance, the electricity machine was quite puzzling. What did it do and what purpose did it have? But then she remembered that her uncle had built an earlier version of the machine that was smaller than the one in the diagram. At his demonstration at the Academy, Elliot had explained about moving charges. From what she could recall about his lecture, the machine made use of the fact that rubbing different materials together exchanged electrical charges. When the belt rubbed up against the spike or needle, the belt would gain a negative charge which it would carry up to the metal dome. The dome itself acted like a storage unit for the extra charge but when something of the opposite charge touched the dome, like a finger or a glass rod, there would be discharge and one would be able to see a spark between the metal dome and the object. Sort of like a miniature bit of lightning.
“Here’s Mr. Waterstone’s journal, Miss Hu.” Isadora had returned to put a slim, leather volume beside the dinner tray. “What should I tell the cook about his new recipe?”
“Quite good,” Zan replied. “The trout was perfect. I assume the sweet potatoes are dessert since they are so sweet? The rice is a bit spicy though. Boreas might want to tone down on what he put in it.”
Isadora nodded. “I’ll tell him.”
Zan made herself finish the rest of dinner and left Isadora to clear away the dishes before she opened the journal. She wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Certainly, Isadora and Mrs. Philomon might have seen diagrams, but it could have been anything. Even with her uncle gone, she felt guilty about peering into the journal. It was one thing to read a man’s laboratory notes and quite another to read his personal diary. It was an invasion of privacy and it made her slightly nervous that she might be delving into secrets that her uncle might have kept from her.
She slowly flipped through the pages and gave a small sigh. So far, the journal entries were about Elliot’s days at the lab, the lectures he attended or made at the Academy, and meetings he had with some of his colleagues. Then she stopped at an entry dated about a month before.
“My niece brought up an excellent point. About the storage of energy in certain materials. This reminds me of Tarlton’s efforts on making a battery—a fuel cell to store energy to power other machines. If chemical energy can be harnessed, why not the electrical as well? We vaguely know of some materials such as amber that have the potential to store charge. I will have to ask Tarlton what he thinks of this.”
Tarlton was one of Elliot’s colleagues at the Academy who worked on a variety of things at any given time. Sometimes it was analyzing the physical properties of various materials—such as the elasticity of various metals and fabrics and woods or the tensile strength of those same things—or he was dabbling in the mysterious forces of magnetism by mapping out what he called the “magnetic field” by studying the interaction between magnets and bits of iron. Like many of the scientists and inventors at the Academy, Tarlton was a harmless old, abet eccentric, man.
The next couple of entries, Zan skimmed. They were mostly notes about her uncle’s discussion with Tarlton about various materials he might use for his next electricity machine interspersed by brief irritated comments about his rival Pendergrast and Pendergrast’s idiotic efforts to trump him. Then, there was a final short and enigmatic entry dated a week before Elliot’s death and then the blank pages took over. That week—that day—was when her uncle had made a big show to her and the staff that he was burning his notes.
“I ran into him today. He claims that he originally paid a visit to the Academy for other reasons, but I am not convinced. He was most adamant for a proposal of his which has made me quite suspicious about his motives. And if what he hints is true, I cannot trust anyone. Like this new machine of mine, it appears that everyone possesses a dual nature.”
Zan closed the journal and tapped her fingers on the cover. Who was he? And what sort of dual nature did the machine possess?
