A Winter Encounter

Tuesday, 11 Jan 1870
Finch & Son Precision Instruments and Chronometers
No. 3 Old Burlington Street W1
London, England
05:30 am, GMT

Ariadne had risen early before her husband, eager to return to her research and experiments before Pieter woke up. She quit the bed with some regret. It was cozy and warm as only they could make it and the air was chill from the winter weather outside. Ariadne tucked the covers around her husband tenderly, warding him from the drafts, and resisted smoothing his hair from his forehead. As much as she adored doing it, she didn't want to wake him. Instead she pulled the minimum required dress from their wardrobe and took off for the bath down the hall to change. The tile-lined room was colder than their bedroom. It was Cook's half day off and the fireplaces all over their little residence lay banked to embers, instead of crackling merrily and warming the rooms. Finches would have to fend for themselves until Cook returned. Ariadne went downstairs to fire up the stove and put the kettle on. She got a tray together as she waited for the water to boil. She managed to catch it before it could shriek and once she poured the water over the leaves, she took tray upstairs to her study.

It wasn't really a study, not in the strictest sense of the word. It was the room at the rear of the ground floor shop she and Pieter lived over. Floor to ceiling shelves, at one time it held the myriad parts and inventory of the watch shop but soon after she moved in as Pieter's wife, they'd turned it into a place for her books and her work. So they spent their days quite happily, he in the front at his bench with the clocks ticking away all around him on the walls, she in the room right next to his, surrounded by her books and experiments. They might go hours without saying a word to each other but they had the comfort of each other's presence, of being just a few short steps away.

Ariadne poured her first cup of the day and listened to the clocks as she sipped it, soaking in the soothing rhythm before getting to work. She went steadily through her notes and had written up her first set of results when she heard Pieter's step on the stairs. She smiled at her paper as she tracked the little noises he made as he settled to the day's tasks, following his progress with her ears as easily as she would have watched him with her eyes. It was the constant background to her days and far from distracting her from her work, it helped her shut out the rest of the world's distractions. So it was with some surprise that she heard the bell over the shop door ring and she could not help but listen in.

"Oh," she heard Pieter say with that tone she knew so well, pleasant and accommodating. It would be accompanied with owlish blink as he adjusted his glasses along with his train of thought to deal with the customer in front of him. "Can I help you?"

"Yes." It was a woman's voice, not quite so pleasant and accommodating. Her words were accompanied by a rattle and a clack as something was laid down on the counter. "I was told you could fix … that."

"Oh." Ariadne heard him pause and she imagined him adjusting his glasses again. "Let me take a look."

Something slid across the counter. A soft grating sound, like a box lid sliding back, drifted through the doorway to her study. Ariadne remained in her chair, hidden from view, and listened harder. Far from being annoyed at the interruption of her work, she found that she enjoyed listening to and picturing the situation playing out unseen in the next room. Nothing but the ticking of the several dozen clocks came to her for a moment. Then …

"Hmm," Pieter said. Ariadne imagined a slight frown puckering his brow. "It appears to be … a … camera lucida combined with some sort of … microscope."

"It's an embryoscope," came the curt reply.

Embryoscope? Even as her mind broke the unfamiliar word down to its roots to better divine its meaning, Ariadne had to put it out of mind, lest she miss what happened next.

"So you say. Um …Hmm." Ariadne imagined Pieter examining the mystery object closely. "It's a bit … damaged. May I … ask what happened to it?"

"I threw it against the wall."

"Against the wall?" A pause, then rather delicately, "May I ask why?"

"It wasn't working." There was rising annoyance there.

"And you want me to fix it."

"Yes."

"Um. Please give me a moment." Ariadne heard Pieter's tone change to one of dawning recognition. "You're—."

"Yes."

"Ah. Just a moment." A rustle and Pieter's voice was a little louder. "Ariadne? Could you make some tea for our honored guest?"

Honored guest? Now this was odd. Who did Pieter have out front with him? Ariadne quit her desk and took off for the stairs down, thinking if Pieter felt the person important enough to offer tea, it would be rude to make whoever it was waiting.

At her back she heard the guest say somewhat quizzically, "So you … order your wife around like she's your servant?"

"No," came Pieter's placid reply. "I got the tea last time, so it's her turn."

"You take … turns."

The turning of the stairs cut off whatever reply Pieter made from her ears. Ariadne sighed, disappointed at missing the conversation. At least she wouldn't have to wait very long for the water to heat. She'd gotten the stove fired well earlier and the kettle was warm from sitting on the hob. Ariadne pulled another tray together with their fancier cups and a plate of biscuits from yesterday's baking, and got everything back upstairs. She walked slowly to avoid slopping anything and as she hit the turn, she heard Pieter speaking somewhat abstractedly and knew he was peering closely at the instrument.

"Now, these lenses … This one is, um …."

A silence, broken by the honored guest's reply, colored by surprise and suspicion.

"Why did you… bite … the lens?"

"I was testing the, ah, type of glass it is. To determine if it was crystal or not."

"You … bit the glass to find out if it was crystal."

"Yes. It's a method a friend of mine taught me. He's a jeweler and it actually works quite well."

Ariadne gained the ground floor and paused on the landing between the front and back rooms. Taking a deep breath, she pasted a pleasant but neutral expression on her face and walked forward to the front. She entered behind the counter and looked for a clear space to put the tray down. Pieter stood at the counter itself, talking to the customer.

"This is some sort of crystal with mica mixed into it. Did you need heat transfer properties?"

"I don't know," came the cross reply. "I bought it."

"Well," Pieter said patiently. Ariadne pushed a small stack of boxed parts aside with the tray and poured a spot of tea to check the color. Behind her, she heard her husband say, "Do you want me to … fix this?"

"Well, yes. I've been trying to make drawings with it and it doesn't work!"

At the tone, Ariadne turned around and nearly dropped the teapot. Standing in their shop, dressed in fur cape and hat against the weather, stood none other than Selene Dashwood Saulnier, woman scientist and genius. Selene Dashwood Saulnier? Here? Ariadne was rooted to the spot, transfixed by shock, recognizing someone whose work she ardently followed, who she admired as a trailblazer for women's advancement in the scientific field. Ariadne quite literally could not move or put two single coherent thoughts together. Her husband Pieter suffered no such disability.

"Well, how does it not work?" Pieter was the epitome of patience and politeness.

"The pictures are not … It's supposed to project the pictures. I'm supposed to look through it and it's not coming out clear and now it's broken." Selene Dashwood Saulnier gave the intrument a disgusted little shove and Pieter adroitly caught it before it could fall off the counter.

"Yes, I can see that," he said smoothly.

"How long is it going to be?"

"Just a moment, I want to …" Pieter turned aside to get his jeweler's loupe and peered through it at the instrument. Ariadne could see it was indeed a camera lucida, its distinctive brass arm and lens somehow attached to a modified microscope. Ariadne put the teapot down and took a step closer, intrigued enough by the instrument to get over her star-struck state. Her husband continued, "This glass is slightly bluish. Is that your intention?"

"Well, no. That's how it was." Selene Dashwood Saulnier's tone lowered from anger to puzzlement. Ariadne wondered if the woman's hackles, hidden by her cape, were also lowering.

"Oh, well that's fine then." Pieter picked up a magnifying glass. "Excuse me, but could I look at something? You have very large—."

As Pieter stepped forward and raised the glass to her face, Selene Dashwood Saulnier snarled and swept his hand away. Ariadne snatched the first thing she could lay hand on—a teaspoon—and stood ready to defend her husband.

"I also have very large ears and very sharp teeth," Selene growled. "I don't see why that makes a difference."

"Yes. Well." Pieter turned around and saw Ariadne. If he noticed the spoon, he made no sign of it. He went on as if it were perfectly normal to be threatened in his shop by nasty-tempered cat women. "Oh, Ariadne. This is Lady Saulnier … Dashwood?" He turned for confirmation.

"Dashwood. Just Dashwood."

"Honored guest indeed," Ariadne gathered the wit to say, putting the spoon on the saucer and pouring the first cup. "Well, then. How would you like your tea?"

"Plain." Selene Dashwood's ears flicked with annoyance, then steadied at the prospect of having tea. "Plain is fine."

"Um, yes. But to get back to your eyes," Pieter said, carefully taking up the glass but not making a move toward Selene's face. Ariadne very carefully handed the cat woman her tea. The shock of recognition—to say nothing of her momentary fright at possible attack—had evaporated and it took considerable effort not to reveal her pleasure at having her professional hero standing not three feet away. Ariadne busied herself preparing Pieter's cup just the way he liked it. It steadied her and by the time she turned around again, Ariadne had herself firmly in hand. For all her elevated status, Selene Dashwood was simply another customer looking to have her instrument repaired.

"Yes, yes, yes. I'm a cat." Selene Dashwood said impatiently. Ariadne had the feeling that the cat woman was weary of explaining herself and she empathized. How often had Ariadne herself needed to justify her gender before anyone would take her seriously in her research? Far too many.

"What does that have to do with anything?" she said sincerely.

"Well, you are staring at me," Selene replied, ruffled as only a cat could convey. "Isn't that why you're staring at me?"

"No," Ariadne replied, appalled. It quite made her lose hold of her tongue. "I've followed your work for quite some time. I saw you at the … At the Society, when you gave your presentation. It-it was a horrible thing that those … those miscreants did to you, in front of-of God and everyone. I could not believe my—they really should have—they should have been horsewhipped!"

So much for maintaining proper decorum and control. Ariadne clapped her hand over her mouth, simply mortified at her behavior. Why couldn't she have said she admired Selene Dashwood's work and left it at that? Why must she have lost control and brought up what must have been a very embarrassing incident and cause her guest pain in remembering it? Oh why could she not have been the proper lady and said nothing at all?

"They were paid by … well. Never mind that." Selene Dashwood dismissed it with a twitch of her ears and whiskers, annoyed but apparently willing to put it aside.

"Well," Pieter said in the pause that followed. "What I wanted to say was the problem that you're having is with your eye—."

"There's something wrong with my eyes?" Selene interrupted.

"No, no," Pieter reassured her. "It's not with your eyes. It's with the embryoscope and the shape of your eye. It's—."

"The focal length," Ariadne interjected, gratefully seizing on the problem and shedding her embarrassment. She might not excel social interaction but science was another matter entirely. "It needs to be adjusted, does it not?"

And Pieter, bless him, immediately backed her up.

"Yes, yes. Your eyes are roughly three times the size of a normal human eye. I'm guessing you see quite a bit more sharply than a normal human would. I think that's the problem you've been having."

"Oh," Ariadne said, thinking of an acquaintance from her childhood who constantly had to have her spectacles adjusted. "Do you have headaches?"

"Only from the idiocy of the world," Selene snapped, annoyed again.

"Well that's good. It means you're not suffering eyestrain." Ariadne was beginning to think that Selene Dashwood was suffering strain of an entirely different order. Annoyance seemed to be the woman's constant state of being.

"Eyes. I see." Selene Dashwood gestured at the embryoscope. "So you're saying this thing's worthless."

"Oh I didn't say it was worthless," Pieter said, picking it up and looking at it closely. "I said it's not calibrated correctly to your eyes. I think if we were able to get some lenses, we might be able to build a new device. One that suits your eyes better. What you need is a larger ocular piece … Perhaps …" Pieter turned the device in his hands, thinking aloud. "If we did it right, with probably even better magnification given what your eyes are capable of bringing in … but … um … Yes. Yes, let me get some pieces."

Pieter turned for his work bench and straightaway began fiddling with the device. That left Ariadne to deal with their guest and in a flash, she found herself the object of intense scrutiny by one Selene Dashwood.

"Ariadne … Finch." The cat woman looked at her sharply as if trying to put her face to the name.

"Yes," Ariadne replied, wondering where this conversation was going.

"You wrote that monograph on … Fixed Measurements of Aetheric Density, yes?"

"Yes," Ariadne said, startled and thrilled that Selene had actually read anything she had written. She couldn't keep the wonder from her voice as she asked, "You read that?"

"Yes, it was … poorly written but I couldn't find any fault with the factual information or with your conclusions."

"Thank you." A backhanded compliment, perhaps, but Ariadne took it as praise of high order. She couldn't fault my intellect. Style, well. That will get better with practice. But! She couldn't fault my intellect. A smile broke forth at the thought and Ariadne let it shine, too pleased to suppress it.

"Well," Selene Dashwood continued, her ears canted a touch defensively. "There's not many women in our chosen field. I have to admit, I'm …" She sighed and picked up her tea. She sipped and changed the subject. "You wouldn't happen to have any meat, would you? I'm afraid I don't really eat breads or vegetables all that much. My stepmother has dentures and she does, but I've never developed a taste for them."

"I'll check our larder." Ariadne smiled and took herself back downstairs to poke through their pantry, thinking that perhaps her awestruck regard had made the other woman uncomfortable. She found a bit of rare roast beef in the cold box that Cook had left for them. Remembering the difficulty the cat woman had in getting her lips around the teacup rim, Ariadne diced the meat and speared each chunk with a toothpick. It took some time to arrange everything attractively and Ariadne hoped sufficient time had elapsed to allow their guest to recover from any embarrassment. Even so, she couldn't resist dancing a little delighted dance on the landing before walking into the front room again.

Walking in, she saw Pieter had disassembled the optical array and was trying out several lenses he had on hand. She put the plate of meat before their guest with a smile and a nod and turned back to her husband.

"Darling," she began. "Would it not work better if it had its own light source?"

"I suppose," Pieter said without turning around. He tinkered with the device as he spoke. "But I'm working with what I have. I am mainly interested in getting the right combination of magnifiers. I believe if we added two intervening lenses to allow for extra magnification and to turn the image around, we might be able to get a better image."

"I don't know," Ariadne stepped closer and peered over her husband's shoulder, drawn in by the challenge. "The aperture through which she must peer seems awfully small."

"That was the other thought I had, that perhaps a larger aperture would work better for a larger eye."

"Hmm." They were doing it again. Working on a problem in tandem and trying out ideas with the speed and intensity of a tennis match. Ariadne blinked and turned to their guest. "Excuse me, Miss … Dashwood, is it?"

"Yes." Selene said with a swallow, the meat already half gone.

"Do you normally work in conditions of low light or high? It would affect the size of your pupil and thus require a larger or smaller aperture through which to peer at your work."

"I work in … any sort of light. Dim light works for me. Bright light works for me."

"Hmm." Undaunted, Ariadne turned the information over in her head. Variable light conditions would require variable apertures … "Darling, could you devise an iris-controlled aperture on this so she could better adjust it to her pupils? Would that work?"

"Um … an irised aperture underneath the plate would work better than what you suggest. It would limit or expand the light coming through. Miss Dashwood," Pieter added, looking up from his bench. "I think I can help you but I'm going to need a day or so to inspect the apparatus. Then I will need your assistance because I cannot see what you can see."

"So you're not going to fix it today."

"I'm not going to fix it so much as replace it. The original manufacturer was …." Pieter turned the instrument in his hands, looking for the maker's mark. "Oh. Watkins and Hill. Ohh, they don't—well, Watkins retired over ten years ago and Hill never … well. I think, yes, I will need to build a new device from these parts and a few extras. But it will probably take me a day or so. Could you come back, say, Thursday?"

Pieter's query caught Selene Dashwood with her mouth full and the cat woman had to swallow before she could reply.

"I need it sooner than later. I can't do the drawings without it." She sighed, not quite a growl. "I have a monograph due in two weeks. I need this as soon as possible."

"I could help you," Ariadne said before she thought. Both Selene Dashwood and Pieter looked at her, confused.

"Help?", "Do what, dear?" they both asked.

"I could help …," Ariadne looked at one and then the other, unable to call her words back and trying to decide who to address. In truth, she'd been thinking aloud and hadn't considered how it would have been understood. Taking a deep breath, she said to both of them, "I could help you build the device, Pieter, or I could perhaps help you with your drawings, Miss Dashwood. Surely two sets of hands, or eyes, must be better than one set alone."

"Do you have any experience with drawings of cell nuclei?" Selene Dashwood sighed.

"No. Not as such, no," Ariadne felt compelled to say. "But I do have experience in scientific drawing." After all, she had several flat drawers of her own work. She watched Selene Dashwood growl under her breath as she thought it over.

"Fine," came the cat woman's answer, flat with annoyance. "If you come with me now, we can get started."

"I'll be just a moment. Don't leave without me." Ariadne smiled and turned for her workroom. If she remembered correctly, she'd hung her winter coat in there along with her hat and mittens. She would grab her pencil bag as well. After all, she had some drawing to do.

---

Return to The Story Thus Far
Return to Gathering Storms Main Page
Return to Victoriana Campaign Index
Return to Dr. Penguin's Iceberg