Read Online Tenfold More Wicked by Viola Carr - Free Book Online

“You mean Lady Lovelace?”
    â€œThat’s the girl. Not a countess then, of course. Merely the daughter of some gloomy aristocratic poet. Endless rude questions about some magical ointment of mine. Witchcraft, love potions, a cure for piles, whatever it was. I don’t rightly recall.”
    â€œNot the elixir?”
    â€œGoodness, no. Far too clever for that! Something wrong with her, I should say, the way she muttered and kept on . But she never made anything stick. Ha-ha! Brave Marcellus, victorious! Down with the tyrants!”
    Finch was already vanishing behind an array of brass scales and centrifuges, Hippocrates dashing at his heels. Charts and graphs were pinned crookedly to the walls, scribbled with formulae and alchemical symbols in Finch’s copperplate handwriting, alongside an annotated periodic table and a diagram of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man .
    She recalled that crucified Christ, dripping with SirDalziel’s blood. “Do you know anything about devil worship, Marcellus?”
    â€œWhy? Planning to give it a whirl? A spell, say what, like Lady Lovelace, for the lover of your dreams?” Finch tinkered with a retort, adjusting a leaping yellow flame beneath an apparently empty flask.
    â€œYou have me, sir. All over London, witty scientific geniuses with obligingly hefty fortunes shall faint at my feet.” She shoved past a pile of evil-smelling herbs. “You know I don’t believe in hocus-pocus. This murder had ritual elements, that’s all.”
    He turned a glass tap to trap some invisible gas in a phial, and jammed in the cork. “Behold! My new prophylactic against stupefying gas attacks. Steels the lungs, fortifies the intestines. Doubles as a hangover cure, and repels ants. A marvelous breakthrough!”
    â€œSounds fascinating . . . No, you’re too kind, I oughtn’t.”
    He thrust the warm phial into her hands. “I insist. Grimy-fingered republicans blowing things up on every corner, disseminating frightful toxic stenches, and who knows what. We’re all doomed! Just don’t inhale too hard. Rots the tonsils, eh? What were you saying? Ritual, bah! Bad excuse for debauchery. Still,” he added happily, “one ought to try everything. No such thing as forbidden knowledge. True science knows no boundaries, all that.”
    â€œBravo.” She stuffed the phial into her bag. “It isn’t as if we’ll be flattened by lightning bolts from on high, after all.”
    â€œLet’s hope not.” Finch stirred a beaker of scintillating blue goo. “I do enjoy a lovely murder. Gruesome, was it?” he added hopefully.
    â€œParticularly.”
    Finch popped the cigar ash onto a dish, poured in the blue substance, and brandished a sparking electrical wire. “En garde!”
    Bang! The ash exploded, shattering the dish in a puff of blue mist.
    Eliza cleared her throat. “Well. That was unexpected.”
    Finch sucked a scorched thumb. “Alchemy, as you say. Reactive to aether. An hallucinogenic intoxicant, by the spectral range. Did he smoke the whole cigar, perchance?”
    â€œIt looked like it. Something one might use in an unorthodox ritual?”
    â€œOr a debaucherous one. Heightens the sensations, eh? Not that I’d know anything about that. Veritable stoic, that’s me. Utterly sober at all times.”
    â€œI’ve the victim’s blood sample, too. Might you test for toxins?” She scraped dried blood from her skirt onto a glass slide. Lafayette’s olfactory analysis still dangled, a tantalizing loose end. Chinese opium, or some such. His wolfish nose was a precision instrument. If he couldn’t identify it . . . or wouldn’t?
    Finch dabbed a forefinger into the blood, and licked it. “I say. Drunk as a skunk, was he? Scotch, single malt, well aged?”
    She laughed. “You can taste that?”
    â€œAll eminently scientific, dear