Shapechanger's Birth Read online

  He went on talking about this subject, then finally switched to a last diagram. It showed a smaller oval with a line passing out of it to pass into a larger oval, like a lopsided barbell.

  The three geometric figures were labeled. The small oval was the eye, the line the optic nerve, and the larger oval the brain, where the impulses traveling over the optic nerve were converted into knowledge about the world.

  He smiled. "And there at the brain the subject becomes mysterious, a puzzle we will have to leave to future generations of scientists to discover more of the wonders of what God hath wrought." He made a tiny little bow to the audience to indicate that their humble servant was finished, and accepted the audience's applause with a small, pleased smile.

  Lady Granville waited till the polite applause died down and announced a short break before a question-and-answer session to get refreshments. The snacks and drinks were Graciously Donated by So-and-So. While everyone else got up and milled around, Mary sat back in her chair and thought.

  That was the fourth or fifth time that he had brought up God. Was he just wrapping himself in protection from anti-intellectual church officials? Or was he that pious? And if so what did that mean if she decided to seduce him?

  Mary, Mary, she chided herself, smiling. Get your mind from between your legs.

  It was nearing 10:00 pm. Most of the S&L Society had departed when she walked up to the speaker and his two friends. Dr. Penrose shook the hand of one last Society member and turned to her. She introduced herself and he gave her a slight bow.

  "Honored," he said just as if she were quality.

  "I much admired your talk, Doctor. And your preparation. It was inspiring."

  "Hardly that," but he smiled.

  "Well, exemplary, then. So much clearer and less boring than most."

  "But still boring," he said.

  She ignored the mild flirtation and an impulse to plant her fingers in his light chocolate curls and pull him to her for a kiss.

  "But I couldn't help notice three problems. "

  His smile disappeared, but it was not replaced by a frown. More — considering.

  Yes. That was what she wanted, or it might be.

  Mary knew that being female, young, and obviously Irish gave everyone three reasons to ignore her, or dismiss whatever she said as nonsense. She had to be brash without being — very — obnoxious, challenging but not insulting his intellect, and appreciative of him as a man without seeming interested enough to encourage him to pursue her.

  It was a very delicate balancing act. Mary tuned her mind to its peak performance, which was high indeed, and moved to engage his.

  "First, you left off the nerve paths between the lens muscles and the brain. They obviously have to be there to control on what objects to focus."

  "Yes. I deliberately left them off. In popular talks one has to select the absolute minimum of crucial detail and leave the rest off."

  She nodded in understanding and the four of them turned to look at the S&L Society official who was coming up to them in preparation for closing up the library. They allowed the tall, stooped old gentleman to steer them out the door. Dr. Penrose accepted the old gentleman's thanks for the lecture, and the gentleman's goodnight to them all.

  The four of them walked down the street, no destination in mind but instinctively gravitating toward the entertainment district and its open pubs and cafes.

  Dr. Penrose took off his jacket and settled it around Mary's shoulders, with a murmured apology for his forwardness. With her extranatural control of her body she did not need it, of course, but she accepted his gallant gesture.

  "And objection number two?" Mary looked at the questioner. He was the tallest of the three, a man of dark but handsome aspect, his black top hat placed at an assured angle on his straight black hair. He had a sardonically amused look on his face.

  She looked him up and down for a moment. "You're an attorney, aren't you?"

  "Yes." He gave her a small bow. "Enoch Crowley at your service. So. How did you know?"

  She shrugged. "It was obvious."

  "And objection number two was obvious too, as I recall. Pray tell us what it is?" He seemed to be enjoying himself tremendously.

  "The number of vision cells. It's more like 125 thousand than 25 thousand."

  Enoch looked as if an opposing attorney had jumped to his feet in court with an unexpected objection.

  "And you know this, how?"

  Mary handed the dotted piece of paper to Penrose and went through her reasoning. "You can get a more precise number by placing a checker board on a wall and walking backward till it appears grey. You would want to use several people, and ensure each of them have perfect eyesight. Otherwise their view of the board will blur for reasons other than the one you're measuring."

  Penrose frowned in thought, all thought of her as a woman forgotten.

  The third man spoke up. "All this is fascinating." His expression, of polite but minimal attention, said otherwise. "But where are we going? Oh, and Bertrand Lord Cunningham at your service."

  Mary gave a polite curtsey, "Pleased, milord." She wondered if that was the right form of address.

  She looked around. They were nearing the Cork Opera House, which sat on the quay on the south side the North Channel of the Lee River. The River gleamed darkly in the gaslights on the poles along both sides of the channel. Beyond the Opera House lay the open cafes and pubs and other establishments open only in daytime. At the far end of the line of businesses she could just make out the looming Le Roche Theater.

  Enoch waved to Cunningham, "You decide, Bertie."

  "Quillan and Dougherty," Bertrand said and marched off, the others following close behind.

  Penrose said, "Say, Bertie, isn't that rather crowded? They've got that new singer. We'll never be able to talk."

  Bertrand did not reply. The two men shrugged. Enoch said, "When he gets this way there's nothing for it but to follow along or he'll go off and get in trouble."

  Q&D was the pub where Barbara was working. They should be able to get a table there and Mary would not minding seeing Barbara perform again. She had only done it twice at the pub when Barbara first started there a month ago. Barbara was doing quite well there and was very enthusiastic.

  As they approached the front of the pub, however, they could see a dozen or two people waiting in a line outside the front door. Joining it at the tail Enoch asked the man and woman in front of them why there was a line.

  "It's the Kilrush Thrush. She's singing tonight."

  "Who?" said Lord Cunningham.

  The couple looked at them as if they were rubes from out of town. "It's this new singer. Everyone wants to hear her. She's from Kilrush."

  The couple turned back to look along the line and talk privately.

  Enoch looked along the line, which was not moving, and said to Bertrand, "Any chance of you exerting your viscountship and getting us jumped to the head of the line?"

  Bertrand looked stubborn. Tall dark Enoch sighed, said to Mary, "His lordship is a liberal when it suits him, usually when it doesn't suit us."

  "They why do you stick with him?" she smiled at Enoch.

  William Penrose said, "Because he needs us. Quite unworldly, you know. It's what happens when you're raised in an ivory tower, suckling on silver spoons."

  Bertrand warned Penrose, "If you call me Bertie I'll call you Willy." He looked at Mary, "So what was the third way our Doctor Penrose was obviously wrong?"

  Aha! So he wasn't as bored as he'd seemed.

  "I would question why the color cells were red, blue, and green when any three colors would suffice to encode all colors in the spectrum. But that's a trivial consideration. There just have to be three color receptors. It doesn't matter if they're red-blue-green or..." She waved her hands in the air as if riffling through fabric color swatches. "Or, cyan, vermilion, and orange."

  She turned toward the viscount.

  "Oh, I'm bored with that. Tell me how you got m
ixed up with these two, your lordship — is that address correct?"

  "Titles bore me. Call me Bertrand. We all went to Queen's College here in Cork. We shared a boarding house and, I don't know, it just sort of happened."

  "I know Enoch is an attorney, William is a doctor. What do you do? "

  "I write stories, and literary criticism, and articles on farming and animal husbandry."

  Enoch spoke up. "Actually, he's a farmer. That's what his degree is in. It's really quite nauseating to see him up to his knees in ... stuff." He looked faintly embarrassed. Mary, who had grown up on a farm and been a farmer's wife, knew exactly what word he was avoiding.

  William craned his neck to peer in the door of the pub. They were only the one couple away from the entrance now. "There's no waiting inside. We've almost got a table."

  Dr. Penrose looked at her and continued, "Ber...trand is quite good at it actually. He grew up groomed by his father to take over when the Earl can't handle the estates anymore. I think he even likes some of it, though he'll never admit it."

  "I so like to be talked about as if I weren't here." Bertrand said to the air, then focused on Mary. "Father says — and I agree — that being a lord is more than livestock and crops. It's also people and responsibility. And if the head is ignorant, or the heart is empty, the body of the estate will be sickly."

  He looked embarrassed, looked away down the street.

  Mary thought everyone was getting awfully friendly awfully quickly. It smacked of magic, of some mysterious working of her esoteric powers. Yet she always knew when they were working, even if she did not understand how they worked or what they were doing. And she did not feel anything going on.

  Now the couple ahead of them were being led away to a table and one of the owners of the pub, Quillan, was hurrying toward them.

  "Mistress Mary! Why didn't you tell anyone you were waiting? Come in! Come in!"

  He led them inside and through what seemed like an acre of tables. The interior was large and had high rafters, darkened by an apparent century or two of smoke. There were two bars, one on each side of the room, and scurrying servitors male and female in white shirts or blouses over dark pants or dresses.

  At the far end of the room there was a performance area. Instruments were already set up there though no one was about. One or two shows had already been performed by this time of night. Quillan led them to the low stage and a table right in front of it to one side. It had room enough for eight people but chairs for only half that number. Seated at the table were Elizabeth and Major Denis Leckie, the landlady and landlord of the three Kilrush expatriates.

  The couple stood up and Mary introduced everyone around. At Bertrand's honorific the Major made motions to give up the couple's seats at the tableside closest to the stage.

  Bertrand said, "Nonsense! Nonsense! Sit down, please! I prefer to have the table in front of me." At which he sat down and leaned his elbows on the table, obviously not about to budge an inch. Servitors hurried up with extra chairs and everyone was seated. After a round of pleasantries Elizabeth Leckie said, "She's about to come on! Please excuse us, will you?"

  The Major and his wife turned to look at the stage and Enoch spoke in a low voice to Mary. "How do you rate this treatment? Are you a princess in disguise who's going to make our Ber ... trand toe the line in all his lordly glory?" He pointedly ignored Bertrand's dirty look and William's evident annoyance at Enoch's shoulder-to-shoulder questioning.

  Mary laughed. "No! The performer tonight, who's apparently a star attraction now, is ... sort of my sister. I live with her and my business partner in Major Leckie's house."

  The musicians began to file on stage. They took up a hand harp, a fiddle, a spring-green button accordion, a pipe, and a bodhran drum. The audience applauded politely and the musician began to tune or whatever they did to make ready.

  Then Barbara came out and the applause was deafening.

  In the last few months Barbara's gawky quick-growing frame had settled down and the rest of her had begun to catch up. She was still very slender but her womanly aspect was no longer just a promise. Her skin, which never grew a pimple because Mary had beefed up her resistance to illness, was creamy white and without a flaw except for a beauty mark beside her mouth. Her long curly hair was an impossibly golden hue and shown with a luster as if it were the precious metal itself. Her face was cute and girlish except for bee-stung red lips.

  She was wearing a white pleated dress with faint vertical rose ribbing that started narrow at her waist and flared out below it. She wore no jewelry. It would have been superfluous.

  Barbara surveyed the audience with an apparently casual glance that Mary knew was comprehensive. Her eye caught Mary's and she widened her eyes in welcome. Mary tugged at the collar of her own dress and mouthed Great dress!

  Barbara's miniscule smile widened. Then she bowed her head to gaze at the edge of the stage and raised her hands just above shoulder height. There was complete silence except for a child being hush-hush-hushed.

  In the audience perhaps only Mary saw the slight signal that Barbara gave. Then Barbara stamped one of her feet hard three times in exact unison with the bodhran drum — WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!

  And every instrument in the band exploded into a reel played as fast and loud as humanly possible — or so it seemed. And Barbara was singing right along with it, in Gaelic, so fast that native speaker Mary could barely understand it, about a rooster who chased a hen until the hen turned around and chased the rooster until he ran into a cat who chased the rooster until the rooster turned around and chased the cat until he ran into a dog who chased the cat and so on through a nonsensical barnyard of animals.

  Until the band suddenly stopped and there was complete silence in the pub. Until the audience started laughing and clapping.

  After that the band played a simple conventional reel. Then a jig, and another. People got up to dance. Barbara sang a humorous courting song, then a sad song about a mother losing a child. And so on through not quite a dozen songs. Most of them were done conventionally if unusually well. But occasionally she mixed in a song where she broke a convention or invented a new one.

  Finally she sang a slow sad song and was done.

  There was no clapping or stamping or whistling as she jumped down from the little stage, no one approaching her for congratulations or comments or questions. Instead her audience was leaving the pub, satisfied, going home to sleep and then work the next day, their lives a tiny bit better for having spent most of an hour with genius.

  Mary contemplated the fact that off the stage this genius was a spoiled, self-centered child slowly maturing into a grownup under her own and Bridget's influence, and now that of the Major and his wife. Who just now were hugging and congratulating the singer as if she was one of their own daughters.

  Then Barbara rounded the table and hugged Mary with force that would have brought a protest from an ordinary human. "You made it! You made it! I thought you weren't going to. Wasn't I great?"

  Mary hugged her back. "Yes you were, brat. You were terrific. Here, I want you to meet the man who made me come tonight."

  Mary turned to the blond young viscount and introduced him simply as Bertrand Cunningham. Bertie did not correct her, either because he was still stunned — he had been watching Barbara from the first moment she came on stage as if whacked half senseless — or because he wanted her to like him without the help of his title.

  "Mistress —" Bertie paused. Barbara said, "Just Barbara." He continued, "Mistress Barbara, I have heard singers aplenty and orchestras in Dublin and London. Never have I heard anything like what I heard tonight."

  Apparently Bertie recovered quickly from being whacked half-senseless.

  Barbara grinned at him. "That's the kind of thing my friend Bridget says when she wants to be nice about a bad job. 'I've never seen anything like that.'"

  Bertie laughed. "I never heard anything as good as what I heard tonight. But here, let me present my friends."
He turned and introduced the two other men. Everyone sat back down again, the three young men waiting till Barbara had seated herself.

  Bertie said. "I'm a fan of opera. Have you ever thought of doing it?"

  "Oh, yes. I'm studying right now. Elizabeth —" She gestured at Mrs. Leckie's wife. "She used to perform and she teaches music. I'm learning a lot from her."

  The Major's wife spoke up. "She's learning so quickly that soon I'm going to have to find someone who can offer her more."

  Bertie said, "I know some people who know everyone in opera around here. I'll talk to them and see if they can't suggest someone."

  Mary said, "Barbara and I can't afford a lot of money, Bertrand."

  He shrugged, "Well, there are scholarships you know for really talented students. It certainly can't hurt to just ask. Would you two like me to do that?"

  Barbara looked at Mary, who nodded her head. Barbara said, "It's worth looking into, anyway. If it doesn't work out, we've not lost anything. Thank you Bertrand."

  Mary dug into her hand-purse and located a business card. "Here's where I can be reached."

  William spoke up, "Can I have one, too? I'd like to continue our conversation."

  Mary handed him a card. "I have a long lunch break Saturday, and I'm off Sunday afternoon."

  She stood up. "I hate to break up the evening, but Barbara and I need to get to bed soon."

  Everyone stood up and made their goodbyes. The three men paid their bill and walked out the front door.

  Barbara looked after them. "That Bertrand. He's not married, is he?"

  "I don't think so. But he's ten years older than you."

  Barbara looked dreamy for a moment, then sighed. "Yes. But even if he was right in every way, rich, my age, and so on, I still couldn't marry him. I have to make music, Mary. I have to. I'll die if I don't."

  Mary put her arms around Barbara. "I know, honey. And I'll make sure you do."

  "It's a deal." She released Mary. "You're still going to sleep in the shop tonight?"

  "That's right." Mary did this once, sometimes twice, a week. She needed half the sleep of an ordinary human being, and at the laundry she could study late without bothering anyone or being bothered. More importantly, she could also perform experiments in ways to protect milk and wine from spoiling.