All Men of Genius Read online

  Shakespeare, twins, and mad science?

  Clearly, it’s for Lauren.

  Author’s Note

  THIS novel is a work of fiction. Even though it may contain characters eerily similar to historical figures, who also happen to share their names, it should in no way be read as an actual historical account, and most definitely should not be used for educational purposes.

  Additionally, any or all depictions of, or suggestions about, science, or the way anything in the world works on a physical, chemical, biological, astronomical, or atomic level should not be analyzed for accuracy, as I’m sure it would be sorely lacking.

  Furthermore, I don’t recommend emulating the behavior of any of the characters contained within. They’re all quite mad.

  The truth is, I have no idea what I’m talking about.

  Except about love. We all know a little about that. Or nothing at all. In any case, we’re all on equal footing.

  I quite agree with Dr. Nordau’s assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr. Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.

  —Oscar Wilde

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  Chapter XLIII

  Special Thanks

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  THE two men sat silently in the carriage. The heat was stifling, but the windows were not open, and the carriage was not moving. The younger man shifted his feet anxiously and risked a glance upward. He could feel sweat dripping down his neck. “That was very kind, sir, what you did for my son.”

  “It was a triviality,” the older man said. His hands clutched the knob of his cane, and he stared at the carriage window, though the curtains were drawn. “Something to distract him and your wife while I took you away for a short while. I haven’t used that key in years. It’s my fail-safe, in case I forget the others.” He looked down at the large bronze ring on his finger and twisted it. The younger man looked at his own hand, adorned with a matching ring. “Those locks have all been changed so many times, I’m not sure it even works any longer.”

  “He’ll enjoy it anyway, sir, I’m sure.”

  The older man sighed. “He’s a smart one. If things … It’s all ending, Volio. Bonne has returned to his island and vanished. Canterville is dead, probably at Rastail’s hands. Voukil hasn’t been heard from in years. And Knox…” The older man looked up at the drawn window again. “I had to kill Knox myself last night.”

  “Sir?” Volio gasped.

  “Poison in his tea. It looked like a heart attack. He was determined to enact that damned plan. Nothing was in place for it; none of us agreed on it. It would have failed, and failed spectacularly. It would have brought the Queen and her guard down on all of us, on all scientists, and on Illyria. I could not have that.”

  “I … understand,” Volio said, looking down.

  “It doesn’t matter if you understand or not,” the older man said. “It’s ending. There are just a handful of us left, and I’m nearly done for, anyway. I’ll be gone in a year or two—”

  “Sir, no—”

  The older man’s ferocity flared up. “Don’t interrupt.” He tapped his cane on the ground. For a moment, the air in the carriage seemed to stir.

  “I’ll be gone in a year or two, and then my son will take over Illyria. He knows nothing of us. And I want it to remain that way. When I am done, so is our Society. You may attempt to keep together the rags of what is left. Teach your sons, if they’re hard enough.” The older man coughed, and then looked at his hands. “Mine isn’t. But keep it secret. Our goals … they are good goals, just, and right.” He stared at Volio. “But they must be carried out in secret. Our Society has failed. For now, anyway. Perhaps in the future, someone will get it right.”

  Volio nodded.

  “That is all I have come to say. Leave me now.”

  Volio gratefully hopped out of the coach and into the warm, fresh air. He mopped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief and turned to look at the coach. It was a great bronze thing, totally enclosed, with black curtains and tinted glass. On the back was the seal of Illyria: a shield with a gear inside it.

  The coach was of the older man’s design. It required no horses, just a man in front who shoveled coal into a boiler and turned a wheel to direct the coach’s movements. He nodded once at the coal-man, who began shoveling, then drove the horseless carriage away amid vents of steam and the sound of aching metal. Volio sighed and went inside to enjoy his son’s birthday.

  * * *

  INSIDE the coach, the man with the cane sank back into the velvet-lined seats. Even though it was hot, he was old, and his bones were always chilly. The coach ran smoothly and quickly back to London, where it stopped in front of Illyria College. He used his cane to climb slowly out of the carriage, but instead of going through the front door, he turned toward the garden and opened a small hidden doorway in the wall of the school. It was a clever door, one he had installed himself to make his comings and goings harder to track. From the outside, the door looked like part of the wall, solid stone, a few ornamental carvings of gears and faces of great inventors. But a simple tug on the nose of the gargoyle with the face of Robert Barron caused the bricks to creak forward.

  He crept down the shadowy stairs inside. He wound up in the basement, which smelled of chemicals, metal, and water. He walked the twisting passages without the aid of a torch and came at last to a great underground train station with a small train waiting at the platform. He had designed it all—the station, the train, the labrynthine basement, the college itself. And now he was dying, and there was no one left who knew it as well as he did. Instead, he had torn up his knowledge into a puzzle, giving each person only a piece of it. The assembled picture, he knew, was too much for any one person to handle without feeling like a god. And the time for such man-made gods was over. Aboveground, in the college proper, his son would rule when he passed on, but here, below, this train … he hoped his son would never need to know about it.

  It was hard work for the old man, but he slowly began disabling the train. He locked the brakes in place so it would not move, and hid the locks. It took hours to finish, and by then, he was tired and dirty, covered in sweat and grease worn like warpaint. No one would be able to enter the tower now, not even members of the Society. That part of him was locked away and safe.

  He headed back to the entrance to the basement, and from there, into the lift, which took him back up to the college. The
lift was in a corner, out of sight from the rest of the college, but he was careful stepping out, making sure no one could see him. He walked through the bronze halls slowly. It was late by now, and he didn’t want to rouse people from their beds.

  “Algernon?” came a voice as he headed toward his living quarters. “Algernon, you’re filthy.” The woman who came forward was younger than he, but not young. She had gray stripes through her dark hair.

  “Ada,” he said.

  “What have you been doing? Where have you been? You missed supper. Ernest and Cecily were frightened, so I made up a story about you working on something in your lab.…”

  “I think,” Algernon said, “I think I need to go take a bath.”

  “Well, you certainly do. You’re covered in dirt and you smell like oil. What have you been doing?”

  “It’s not important now,” Algernon said. “Just let me take a bath, and leave me in peace.”

  “Fine,” Ada said, crossing her arms, “I’ll walk you to your chambers. But you had best tell me everything you’ve been up to when you’re clean.”

  “I don’t answer to you, woman,” he said, not kindly.

  “No, I suppose you don’t. Which is part of your problem. Find your own way to your chambers, then.” She walked away from him, down the hall, stomping her feet angrily. He almost called after her, but didn’t. Instead, he slowly made his way to his quarters, and, once there, to his private bathroom. He was nearly done.

  I.

  VIOLET and Ashton’s father was leaving for America to help decide where time should begin. It was Violet’s duty to retrieve her brother and bring him to the door to say good-bye, but he was not paying her any attention. Instead, he was absorbed in his piano playing. If she had been luckier, she thought, her twin brother would have inherited her father’s obsession with time, at least insofar as learning to play the piano with some sense of it.

  “Ashton!” she shouted. He ignored her. “Ashton!” she shouted more loudly. She was standing by his shoulder. He could clearly hear her, but was pretending not to.

  “If music be the food of love, play on!” Ashton yelled over his rackety playing. Then he attempted to sing the same lines along with the music—to think of it as “in tune with the music” would imply that the music had a tune. Violet, impatient, tapped him on the shoulder with a little force.

  Ashton finally stopped playing and turned to look at his sister. “I think I play the piano rather well. Perhaps not technically well…”

  “Or well at all,” Violet said, smiling.

  “If I were speaking to someone who was about to do me a very large favor—indeed, who was about to assist me in a most unorthodox scheme—I think perhaps I’d be a little nicer.”

  Violet narrowed her eyes. She did need his help, so she forced a falsely cheerful smile. “Anyone can play technically well, brother,” she said sweetly. “But you play with real feeling.”

  “Thank you,” Ashton said with a large grin. “Your compliments mean ever so much to me.”

  “Father is about to leave, and we must say good-bye.”

  “Ah,” Ashton said, and closed the piano. He stood, took Violet’s arm, and walked with her toward the door. The two of them were as attractive a pair as two seventeen-year-olds of fine English breeding could be. Violet was a lovely specimen of her gender, with dark auburn hair, which always seemed to have the look of having been blown in the breeze for a while. She was fair, with rosy cheeks, and though she was a bit tall, she had a fine, womanly figure. Her strong-jawed oval face showed her great intelligence in both the sparkle of her clear gray eyes and the sharply arching smirk of her bow-shaped lips. She seldom took pains with her appearance, and so possessed a carefree beauty that would not have been out of place in a gothic romance of the sort she loathed. Ashton, also with pale skin and auburn hair, had a more dandyish appearance—as carefully dressed as Violet was careless. He often carried a cane, and wore outlandish bespoke jackets made by a tailor in London.

  Their father, Dr. Joseph Cornwall Adams, was one of the leading astronomers in the country, and Violet and Ashton had grown up crawling the winding tower of stairs to the observatory on the top of their manor, where they would stare at the various devices that moved lenses and recorded images of the night sky. But each of the children had learned different things from this. Ashton had focused on the romance of the stars and the night sky, and as he grew, devoted his energies to poetry and the arts, whereas Violet saw the brass instruments her father used and decided she would be the next to design such devices. By the age of eight she had fashioned herself a lab in the basement of the manor, where she taught herself the Great Principles of the Sciences: natural, chemical, and especially mechanical. To deny her genius would be to deny the truth, for she was truly gifted. Since then she had managed to create many marvelous inventions, much to the delight of her brother and the chagrin of Mrs. Wilks, their governess.

  Ashton and Violet headed to the entry foyer and watched the servants load their father’s coach in the rain. It was difficult for Violet to hold still, as she was anxious for her father to go. It was not that she wanted him gone—in fact, she already missed him, and was sad at his parting—but she had spent the past few weeks orchestrating a great scheme, which would help her to fulfill her dreams, and she could not begin it until her father had left.

  “Children,” Mrs. Wilks said from behind them, “come away from the door. It’s a little drafty, and you’ll catch cold.” She beamed at them until they moved away. She had been their governess since birth, and their mother’s maid and friend before that. She had named the twins after their mother died in childbirth, and had raised them as a foster mother. And though she was filled with love for them, she was also filled with worry. Consequently, the twins often regarded her as they would a maiden aunt who loved them nearly to the point of suffocation and would have preferred they stay safe, probably bundled with many quilts and tied to their beds, where nothing bad would ever happen to them and where she could spoon-feed them her love and possibly also homemade pea soup.

  When the carriage was loaded outside, the three of them looked up the stairs as if expecting Mr. Adams to appear with a flourish, bid them all good-bye, leap out the door and into the coach, and drive it away himself. Had that actually happened, however, they all would have fainted from shock, as Mr. Adams was not one for flourish. A moment later, Mr. Adams came carefully down the stairs, holding a bulging briefcase in one hand and a few loose papers in another. He read them as he walked, trusting his feet to find the next step.

  “Father, do be careful,” Violet said.

  “Ah. Violet, Ashton, Mrs. Wilks,” he said, as if he were surprised to see them all standing there.

  “The coach is ready, sir,” Mrs. Wilks said. “If you don’t leave soon, you’ll miss the airship.”

  “Ah, well, I have time to say good-bye, don’t I?” Mr. Adams asked. Mrs. Wilks nodded.

  “Are you excited, Father?” Violet asked, giving him a hug. “America must be wondrous.”

  “Indeed, I am rather excited. Not just to see America, but also for the conference. All the great minds in the field of astronomy and cartography will be there. It seems a great number of them feel that the proper place to put the First Meridian is in Greenwich. Ha!” And here he laughed a little; a sweet, cheerful, sort of coughing laugh, suitable to a man of his years and his temperament. “It is a good thing that we will have a global meridian, of course, but it was a mistake placing England’s in Greenwich. I certainly hope we can fix that by placing it somewhere else for the entire globe.” He smiled, making the creases around his eyes wrinkle into deep lines. Violet smiled also, for her father’s amusement made her happy. He was a short man, about fifty years of age, with a long, gray, bushy mustache. His shoulders were often thrown back a little too far, and his chin was always a little too high, perhaps stuck that way from constantly gazing up through his telescope. His clothes were usually shabby and too loose, but he knew how to
dress himself well if he were going to meet anyone outside the household. His eyes, once a sharp gray like his children’s, had become softened and blurry over time, like dissolving clouds. He blinked perhaps more often than is common, and sometimes had to force himself to smile, because in truth, although he loved his children, he always felt a little sad for having lost their mother, whom he had loved more than the stars.

  “Will you bring me back an arrowhead?” Ashton asked, also hugging his father.

  “One for me as well!” Violet said.

  “Oh? Well, yes, if I find any.”

  “You’re going to be there a year. The conference won’t take that long, will it?” Violet asked.

  “Well, the conference doesn’t even start until October of 1884. But there are a series of smaller conferences beforehand, and some ridiculous social meetings of various astronomers.…” Mr. Adams looked off distantly, as if dreading interacting with his peers.

  “So you can explore! And bring us back arrowheads,” Ashton said, satisfied.

  “I’ll see what I can do. Now, you children must promise to be good, and listen to Mrs. Wilks.” Their father smiled, and they smiled back. They needed him to be comfortable and trusting for what they had planned next. Luckily, he was comfortable and trusting, and his head was so filled with the night sky that he couldn’t see the small deceptions his children would sometimes practice on him.

  “Actually, Father, Ashton and I have decided to spend the season in London.”

  “Well, Mrs. Wilks will go with you, then.”

  “Oh no, Father. Mrs. Wilks needs to stay here to look after the manor. I’ll get a maid more suited to city life. One who knows the most modern hairstyles, and about dresses and hats and things.”

  “Hats?” her father asked.

  “I know about hats,” Mrs. Wilks said.

  “I hear they’re very fashionable. Last time he went to the city, Ashton brought me back a gray top hat with a green ribbon and a white veil. He says all the women were wearing them.” Ashton nodded.