name, I am sure. Owner of the Behemoth Formulary and Gun Works in Delaware. For himself he made the hand—and others like it. Said he’d lost his own in a foreign war—or with the Injuns or in a sword fight. His stories changed with his audience.”
“So do yours,” Lloyd pointed out.
“W-ell … yes …” stammered St. Ives. “A man must be flexible, given the unkindness of fate. But I am inclined to think that he was the cause of his own misfortune. He had the marking of an acid burn on his face as well. My belief is that one of his experiments backfired on him. He was always fiddling with new combinations of chemicals—schemes for weaponry. And other things. Weirder things. ‘Better to be the head of a louse than the tail of a lion’ was his motto, and if ever there were a fellow to plant the head of one creature upon another he was the one. His estate was like nothing you can imagine.”
“How so?” Lloyd asked, certain that he could imagine much more than St. Ives.
“He called it the Villa of the Mysteries, and the name was apt. There were lightning rods all about, and he had hung up effigies around the grounds to keep the meddlesome townsfolk from spying. That and his dogs, a breed I had never seen before and hope never to see again. Gruesome beasts.”
“Go on,” Lloyd said.
“Well … I know this will sound like flapdoodle, but he carried a seashell around with him. Like a polished black conch. He listened to it—as people sometimes do with shells, thinking they can hear the sea. But he did it often and, stranger still, he spoke into his.”
“What did he say?” Lloyd asked. “Who was he talking to?”
“I wish I knew.” St. Ives sighed. “He spoke in a language I could never understand. To whom, I have no idea. I assumed he was touched in the head. And I had good reason to think so. The estate had an artificial lake, and on the water he had a fleet of automatic model ships that reenacted the British defeat of the Spanish Armada. And there was a greenhouse full of orchids that looked like they were made of glass, but they were alive and grew. God’s truth. He loved books and fine things, but most of all he prized unexplainable things.”
“How do you mean, unexplainable?” Lloyd asked. There were not many things you could actually perceive that could not be explained, he felt. Even the way the fancy woman with the medicine show had seemed able to be in two places at once back in Zanesville. It was the things that went unnoticed that were mysterious.
“There was a collection of paintings. Flemish, I think,” the gambler continued, puffing. “Milky, watery landscapes without much obvious interest—except that over time they changed.”
“You mean with the light?”
“No!” the gambler exclaimed. “I mean changed. One day a peasant in the picture would be pitching hay, the next day a hay cart would be seen departing—a cart that had not been there before!”
Interesting, Lloyd thought.
“And Rutherford had a huge aquarium that he would swim in himself. He had a kind of vessel built—it looked like a diamond coffin—in which he could stay submerged for long periods of time. He used it to study his electric eels and those jellyfish creatures we call the Portuguese man-of-war.”
Lloyd gave a low whistle. He would have liked some eels himself.
“Yes!” St. Ives shook his head. “You see, I would not have been in his service had I not found something in him to admire—and there was much to hold my interest. The trouble was I found too much to admire and ended up taking too much interest in his wife, an auburn-haired beauty with eyes like sapphires.”
“You fell in love—with his wife?” Lloyd blurted, but when he spoke an image of Miss Viola rose up in his mind. A glimpse he had had of one of her corsets. It had become confused in his mind with his mystic twin.
“And she with me!” St. Ives replied. “My beautiful Celeste. Never will I experience such bliss in this life again!”
A storm of rage passed through the gambler’s eyes.
“Rutherford was cruel to Celeste and ignored her—spent too much time with his compounds and machines. He was also addicted to a narcotic that he manufactured himself. A transparent liquid, tinted a faint blue—like damson plums. He called it Mantike. Every night he would inject some of the foul