The Paid Companion | Herophine

Chapter Thirty Eight

Josephine

Parker pulled his gold watch from his pocket and checked the time again. “Another half-hour until my employees leave Tiffin neatly bound and secured, in the iron cage in the chapel above this room.”

“You mean your men know about this laboratory?” Josephine asked, astonished.

“What do you take me for?” He gave her a disdainful look. “Do you think that I would risk telling a couple of footpads such a great secret? They were given instructions to secure Tiffin, leave him locked in the cage in the back of the chapel and then depart. No one knows about this place except me.”

“I now know about it,” she pointed out.

He inclined his head, amused. “I stand corrected.” He looked up at the vaulted ceiling. “And, in a short time, after the cage is lowered through the hidden trapdoor in the floor of the chapel, Tiffin will learn of it also. I trust the two of you will both be suitably cognizant of the great honour that I have bestowed upon you.”

“The honour of allowing us to view the secret laboratory of England’s second Newton?”

“You sound so scathing, Miss Langford. Really, you wound me.” He chuckled and reached out to take hold of a handle on Jove’s Thunderbolt.

“But you will change your tune after you see what this device can do.”

He began to turn the crank very quickly.

Josephine watched uneasily. “What are you doing?”

“Building up a strong store of electricity. When it is ready, I will use it to activate the machine.”

She studied the device with mounting anxiety, paying close attention now. “How does it work?”

“Once the charge of electricity has been properly stored, I can release it by turning that knob on top of the machine.” He pointed to it. “That is also how one turns off the thunderbolt. When the sparks of electricity come in contact with the three stones in the chamber it excites the energy stored in them, just as the old alchemist predicted. A very narrow beam of crimson light is released. I tested it once, just before my grandmother had me carried off. It worked perfectly.”

“What does the beam do?”

“Why, the most amazing thing, Miss Langford,” Parker exclaimed. “It destroys whatever happens to be in its path.”

She would not have thought it possible to be any more terrified than she had been already. But when she saw the madness burning in Parker’s eyes, the icy sensation in the pit of her stomach became a thousand times more intense.

She knew then that whatever else he planned to do with Jove’s Thunderbolt, he intended to turn it on Hero and herself first.

Hero

Hero had thought that the darkness would be the worst part of the business, but in the end, it was the odour that bothered him the most. The smell that emanated from the enclosed riverbed was so foul that he had been forced to wrap his neckcloth around his nose and mouth to block the stench.

But at least he hadn’t had to walk along the narrow, rat-infested banks of the lost river, Hero thought, dipping the pole back into the black water. He had found a small, shallow bottomed boat and a pole at the secret dock beneath the old warehouse.

“Treyford kept extra boats and poles at both the entrance to the laboratory and here in the warehouse,” Lady Wilmington had explained when she had led him down into the dark basement of the abandoned building and showed him the secret underground dock. “He told me that this way he could enter or leave the laboratory through the abbey or this place, according to his whim or if it became necessary to escape due to some disaster with an experiment. Parker appears to have followed the same practice.”