“Glamours can cover that, as you know very well. Your Majesty,” Irrith went on, as if eager to escape and change her attire, “the Marvellous Menagerie has nothing of faerie in it. Dr. Andrews says someone else wrote that handbill, to bring audiences in.”
Galen straightened. “Did you say Dr. Andrews?”
Lune raised her delicately arched eyebrows. “You know him?”
“An acquaintance of my father’s, who has offered to be my patron in visiting the Royal Society. That menagerie you went to was his?” They hadn’t mentioned the name, only the location.
“There might be two Dr. Andrews in London,” Irrith answered, shrugging. “This one looked like he had one foot in the grave.”
Blunt, but not inaccurate. “Indeed—he’s a consumptive. I fear his health is very poor indeed.”
“Could he be of use?” Lune asked.
The idea had already occurred to him. Galen bit his thumbnail in thought—a habit his mother had tried and failed to break him of. “I confess, when I thought of the Royal Society, I was considering astronomers more than anything. But I’m not certain they can do much for us; it seems unlikely there’s any effective way to trap the Dragon upon its comet. Which means we are looking for some means to defeat it on the ground. Dr. Andrews is a physician, and also perhaps something of a chemist—well, intellectual men learn about all kinds of things, and I imagine he’s no different. His primary learning, however, is in medicine.”
The Queen folded her fan one stick at a time, fingers trailing over the edge. “It would not be the first time a physician’s been of use to us. My preference, I admit, would be to kill the Dragon; at this point it seems the only way to ensure it never troubles us again. And perhaps this Dr. Andrews might know something that could help.”
“He seemed pretty clever, madam,” Irrith said, with a curtsy that proved she did not often wear so elegant a dress. “And he knows about all kinds of strange things.”
“I will try, madam,” Galen promised the Queen. Visions danced before his mind’s eye: a gathering of fae, like a second Royal Society, and himself standing before them, presenting a scientific plan for the slaying of the Dragon. He would never be able to ride at it in armor, lance in hand, like a hero of old—but this, he could do.
And then Lune would look at him, and those silver eyes would warm, and then—
Irrith was watching him. Suddenly afraid that his thoughts were showing on his face, Galen blushed and took his leave. Dreams of heroism did no one any good if he did not put them to action.
PART TWO
DESTILLATIO
Winter 1758
If the Scale of Being rises by such a regular Progress, so high as Man, we may by a parity of Reason suppose that it still proceeds gradually through those Beings which are of a Superior Nature to him; since there is an infinitely greater space and room for different Degrees of Perfection between the Supreme Being and Man, than between Man and the most despicable Insect […] In this System of Being, there is no Creature so wonderful in its Nature, and which so much deserves our particular Attention, as Man, who fills up the middle Space between the Animal and Intellectual Nature, the visible and invisible World, and is that Link in the Chain of Beings, which has often been termed the nexus utriusque Mundi.
With stately grace, the planets mark the passage of time, scribing out the different arcs of their years. The ellipses contract as the comet moves inward, the years growing ever shorter, as if time itself runs faster. They cluster about the sun, the little planets do: round balls of stone and stranger things, Mercury, Venus, Mars.
And in their midst, Earth.
It is scarcely a speck in the distance. Scarcely even that. The sun is god to the comet, the beacon that calls it home and bids it farewell as it leaves, and the sun is bright in the void. But for the creature that rides the comet, the sun is nothing: only the spark that will set it alight once more.
Earth is everything. For while the beast sleeps, it dreams, and remembers the City where it was born.
A light snow began falling as Galen disembarked from his chair outside Dr. Andrews’s house. He welcomed the sight; it had been a gray, dreary Christmas, and a bit of sugar frosting might make London more attractive—at least until the coal smoke turned it to black crusts.
He paid the chair-men and hurried across to the door, shivering. The footman took a dreadfully long time to answer, and bowed deeply as he let Galen in. “My apologies, Mr. St. Clair. Dr. Andrews is in his laboratory at present. If you would be so kind as to wait in the parlor, he will be with you shortly.”
Galen agreed, and was led upstairs to the back parlor. While he waited, he chafed his cold hands in front of the fire and surveyed the room. It had the kind of vague ordinariness that characterised the homes of many bachelors; Andrews put out sufficient effort to furnish his parlour with chairs, tables, and so on, but with no wife to make it fashionable, the result was utterly forgettable.
“Ah, Mr. St. Clair.” Dr. Andrews entered behind him, still buttoning his waistcoat. “I was unaware of the hour, or I would have been more ready to receive you.”
“Quite all right. Your footman said you were in your laboratory…” Galen’s voice trailed off as he noticed a smear on the back of Andrews’s hand.
The doctor saw it and hastily fetched out a handkerchief with which to scrub it away. “Yes, in my basement. I have a room down there where I conduct dissections. My apologies; I don’t usually come upstairs with blood on my hands. Shall I have the maid brew coffee for us?”
He rang a bell, and gestured Galen to a chair. “I never touch spirits myself, and only occasionally take wine,” the older gentleman confided, “but coffee has become my great vice.”
Faced with that admission, Galen didn’t try to hide his own guilty smile. “Mine as well. Its effects are most wonderfuclass="underline" it clears the mind, steadies the hand, aids digestion—”
“It’s fortified my own health wondrously,” Andrews said. “Indeed, just last week I advised a certain lady to adminster regular doses to her sickly child, to fend off infections.”
“Very wise,” Galen said. “But I was under the impression you don’t practice medicine any longer?”
Andrews made an indeterminate gesture that could have been meant to convey anything at all. “By and large, no. But I make exceptions for a few trusted families.”
No doubt the most influential and respectable ones. Galen quite understood. “Your time is mostly taken up with your studies?”
“And illness,” Andrews said bluntly, as the maid entered with the coffee tray. Judging by the speed of her return, the doctor had not been lying about his fondness for the drink; it must have been nearly prepared already when Galen arrived. She laid the tray on a pillar-and-claw table to one side, then curtsied out of the room again when Andrews waved her off. He poured the coffee himself. “You will have guessed, I am sure, that I suffer from consumption.”
“My heartfelt sympathies,” Galen said. “I had an aunt taken by the same disease, and two of her children.”
Andrews passed him a coffee bowl. “With so many diseases in the world, I sometimes wonder that any of us reach maturity. But it produces this happy coincidence in my life, that my time is occupied by two facets of the same issue.”
“You study your own illness?”