The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(149)
Jane felt equally angry, but as they entered Charing Cross station she told her husband to keep his voice down.
“Return to a state of calm, Bertie, unless you want to draw attention to yourself with your shouting.”
But that only incensed Wells more, and he repeated his vociferations as they descended the stairs to the concourse. All of a sudden, Wells came to a halt, pallid and stiff as a snowman. After struggling for breath for a few seconds, he raised a clawed hand to his chest and fell in a heap on the steps, on the exact same spot where dozens of his consumptive twins had collapsed in various parallel worlds. However, Wells’s diagnosis was very different: his frustration and rage over their fruitless search had formed a ball of anguish that had blocked one of the arteries in his heart.
Had he had access to drugs from his own universe, Wells would have made an instant recovery. However, medicine was still in its infancy in his adopted world, and he was prescribed only an extract of the herbaceous perennial digitalis and several weeks’ rest. Laid up in bed, stymied by that rudimentary medicine, Wells felt more powerless than ever. What further could he and Jane do? They had found the solution to the problem, but that didn’t seem to be enough to atone for his sins.
For her part, Jane momentarily forgot the fate of the universe, as she was far more concerned with that of her husband. Seeing him collapse like that while walking along, she had feared the worst, and afterward she devoted herself to caring for him as tenderly as ever, infinitely grateful that her husband had resisted death’s first approach. She prepared vinegar compresses for him and occasionally in the afternoons she would read him adventure novels by authors from their adopted universe who simply invented things with words, such as Stevenson, Swift, or Verne. When he had fallen asleep, she would begin to weep silently. Jane knew that this first attack was only a stab in the dark and that very soon another, possibly fatal thrust would come. And although she had often thought about death, it had never crossed her mind that she and her husband might die separately. They had always done everything together, by mutual agreement; why change things now? But Bertie apparently planned to precede her in that final adventure, and she found it inconceivable, shameful almost, that she should carry on living in a world without him. She found devastating not only the pain but above all the shock of no longer being two. She and Bertie had been together for longer than she could remember, and she did not think she could go on living with such a wound to her heart. But she would have no choice, for if that happened, then, frail and diminished as she was, there would be no one else standing between the universe and its annihilation.
Fortunately, as the days went by, Wells appeared to recover. His cough was gradually abating, and some color returned to his cheeks. However feebly, he still clung to life. One afternoon, when he was feeling stronger, he called out to Jane. She entered that room reeking of old age, medicaments, and deferred death and sat down in the armchair beside his bed. Wells tried to speak but instead began to whoop joyously, as though ascending the musical scale. Jane took his hand and waited for the coughing fit to subside, contemplating him with a tenderness that time had smoothed, as water polishes pebbles on the riverbed. She couldn’t bear to see the man with whom she had shared her life so vulnerable, so exposed to death, that man who had loved her with the rationality decreed by the Church of Knowledge and with the passion dictated by his heart, and who had been responsible for offering her whatever happiness life had allotted her.
“I’ve been thinking, my dear,” she heard Wells say in a reedy, almost childlike voice when she had regained her composure, “and in my opinion we shouldn’t go to any more séances. It is getting us nowhere.”
Jane was taken aback. She had assumed that when her husband recovered they would resume their search, no matter how unpleasant they both found it, incapable of shirking the responsibility they had taken on.
“What other options are there?” Jane asked, aware that giving up wasn’t one of them.
Wells took a deep breath before replying. “I think the only thing left to do is . . . give the book to them.”
“To them? But, Bertie, we decided not to involve them in this, to let them get on with their lives, remember?”
“Of course I remember, my dear. But I fear we have no choice. Look at the two of us. We don’t have much time left. You and I will soon . . . disappear, and if before then we haven’t given the book to an Executioner, or entrusted someone else with that mission, we might as well never have written it. And the entire universe will die without ever knowing it had a tiny chance of being saved.”
“Even so, Bertie, I don’t think we should make them shoulder this terrible burden,” Jane stammered. “They are still young; it will ruin their . . .”
“Their lives?” Wells said gloomily. “What lives? If we do nothing, no twin of ours in this multiverse will live to be old and decrepit like us.”
Jane nodded, and they both smiled sadly. Then Jane laid her head on her husband’s chest and let herself be lulled by his slow but tenacious heartbeat. It was the sound of a worn-out drum, but she didn’t want to go on dancing if it ever stopped. Presently, she heard Wells’s voice.
“Have you never wondered what was behind that feeling of urgency that made us move away from Oxford to be near them when they were born, that mysterious certainty we sensed that we had to be part of their lives?”