Invisible Things (12 page)

“Why not, though?” Sophie asked, climbing into the backseat. “Couldn’t thought be transmitted on invisible waves, like radio, and we just don’t yet have the instruments to detect it?”

“It is a false analogy,” Bohr said. “Forty or fifty years ago, yes, I’ll give you that it still seemed a genuine possibility. But we are now living in the world of the invisible. We would be able to detect
something
—the fact that we cannot do so mitigates strongly against it, though telepathic communication between human beings seems to me at least minimally more probable than, say, the ability to see the future or to move objects by the power of the mind alone.”

Sophie shifted slightly in her seat, feeling guilty at having kept from him her own confusing and contradictory mass of experiences around clairvoyance, spiritualism, and all the rest of the uncanny apparatus of her otherwise straitlaced Scottish upbringing. She herself had believed for many years that the whole thing was complete bunk, until she began hearing the voices of the dead. Those experiences had receded into the back of her consciousness during this Danish sojourn, and now seemed almost as unlikely as the childhood conviction, based on dreams, that one can actually float effortlessly along the ground without one’s feet touching.

“If you’d seen the show, though, Professor,” Mikael said earnestly, “you’d be racking your brains right now to work out how he pulled it off. It can’t have been that he chose objects in a prearranged order—I’d swear there was no collusion with audience members. And though it’s a common trick for these people to have a code, let’s say an agreed-upon set of letters whereby if the speaker’s sentence begins with a word whose first letter is
S
, the person wearing the blindfold guesses
scarf
or
shoe
based on some private arrangement, I am fairly certain that he wasn’t feeding her enough words to make that sort of thing possible.”

“Yes,” Sophie interjected, “I thought he was very careful at that point to reduce the patter, just so he couldn’t be suspected of communicating information to her on the sly by what he said. It is difficult to see how it would be worth his while to plant quite so many people in the audience. But, Mikael, how do you think he could have done it?”

“Ventriloquism?” Bohr suggested, sounding lively and interested. The topic had fully engaged his attention, seemingly erasing much of his fatigue.

“What do you mean?” Sophie asked.

“Am I using the right English word, Mikael?” Bohr asked.

“Yes, if you mean throwing the voice so that it appears to come from some other person or object,” said Mikael. “Do you really think that might have been it?”

“In fact, the blindfold and the face coverings would make it easy,” Sophie said slowly. “You wouldn’t need to match the words so closely to the movement of the other person’s lips.”

“When I was a boy,” Bohr said with enthusiasm, “I had a wonderful set of encyclopedias called
The Books of Knowledge
. There was an entry on the religion of ancient Egypt that for some reason particularly captivated me, and one of the most striking observations was that the Egyptian priests made images of the gods speak by means of ventriloquism.”

“But how could we test the hypothesis?” Sophie asked.

“Does it really matter, Sophie?” Mikael said. “Surely we’re dancing around the question—how on earth can that fellow have had a message for you from the wretched Mrs. Tansy?”

Guessing Bohr’s likely puzzlement, Sophie leaned forward into the space between the seats in the front and briefly filled him in: how she had met the spiritualist medium at a Friday-evening séance in Heriot Row, that Mrs. Tansy had given Sophie a strange message that later turned out to have originated with Alfred Nobel himself—but that the medium had been murdered shortly afterward by someone playing a bit part in an intricate plot involving government manipulation of the perceived threat of European war.

“I knew, of course, that Nobel took an interest in you, Sophie,” Bohr said pensively.

Mikael steered carefully around a corner and slowed again to allow a small marmalade cat to finish crossing the road.

“I am slightly alarmed, however,” he added, “to learn that assorted charlatans throughout the Hanseatic states have been apprised of the arrangement also! Why, oh, why must Nobel encourage these rogues?”

“I don’t like it much myself,” Sophie admitted.

“Could either of you make any sense of the so-called warning the fellow issued?” Bohr asked.

Mikael and Sophie confessed their joint incomprehension.

“Rather worrying for you, Sophie,” Bohr said.

They had reached the mansion, and pulled up in front to let him out.

“Let me know if you have any other encounters like this, won’t you, Sophie?” Bohr said as he got out, Sophie moving to the front seat to keep Mikael company for the rest of the ride home. “And, Mikael, I know I can count on you to keep an eye out. Nothing’s too minor to be worth mentioning—in fact, we should all be on the lookout, with things as they are in the world just now.”

“You really think war will be declared before too much longer, don’t you, Professor?” Mikael asked.

Bohr didn’t answer directly.

“You’re both coming to my birthday party next week, aren’t you?” he asked. “Sophie, you have not yet seen inside the Mansion of Honor, my distinguished residence—it is quite over-the-top, really excessive for one man and his family to live in, but it is a wonderful place for a party! I think you will like it very much.”

Back at the institute, as they walked upstairs—it was very late by now!—Sophie’s thoughts wandered off in another direction. Why did she feel so ashamed of having seen Lilly abase herself to the mentalist? Was this notion of women wanting men to marry them, but only if they wanted to, a commonly held one? It struck Sophie, uneasily but forcefully, that she could imagine the state of mind that might prompt one to utter such a remark, but that she would rather undergo the most relentless inner and outer mortification than ever actually say such a thing. It was undoubtedly easier to talk about conspiracies and plots and politics than about what Sophie had come to call, sarcastically and only in her thoughts,
the mysteries of the human heart
.

Once they were ensconced in the sitting room with the mugs of hot cocoa that Fru Petersen inevitably pressed upon one to counteract the effects of the night air, and with the real, original Trismegistus settled along the back of the couch next to Sophie’s head, Mikael said, “Sophie?”

“Yes?” she asked, flushing. She was glad he could not read her thoughts—she had been remembering the look on Lilly’s face as her body strained toward the mentalist’s.

“Since you’ve been here in København,” he said uncertainly, “have you . . . you know . . . ?”

“No, what?”

“Have you been hearing the voices of the dead?”

“Oh, no,” Sophie said, surprised. “At least, not so far as I’ve noticed—and I’ve been near all sorts of radios and telephones and so forth. There’s been nothing at all anomalous, thank goodness. . . .”

“Why do you think that is, though, Sophie?” Mikael asked. “Do you think what happened in Edinburgh was— oh, I don’t know what to call it—a one-off? Or is this, now, just a sort of interlude, a lull, and the whole thing might start up again at any time?”

“I hope it’s more than a lull,” Sophie said fervently. “I would be very glad never to have any such thing happen to me again! Thinking of what we saw in the darkroom that night sends shivers down my spine. And every time I make my mind blank so as to visualize the answer to a problem in geometry or algebra, I’m afraid I might be opening myself up to images transmitted from the mind of a dead person.”

“Yes,” Mikael said meditatively. “Sophie, don’t misunderstand me; it’s not that I question the reality of what we saw that night—rationally, I believe it really happened—but somehow, though it’s not honestly all that long ago, I feel almost as if it must have been a dream. . . .”

“I know what you’re saying,” Sophie said. She let her fingers rest on Tris’s lush coat. She liked the feel of the bones of the cat’s shoulders, and the way they structured the whole shape of him in this particular configuration. “Mikael, do you really think that the mind-reading trick this evening was a simple matter of ventriloquism?”

“If it weren’t so late at night,” he said, “we could telephone the ventriloquists in the phone directory and see what they have to say for themselves!”

The actual day of Niels Bohr’s birthday—October 7—had been declared a national holiday by the government, with Bohr’s slightly mournful face and heavy brows also set to adorn a new postage stamp. (It had been a deliberate policy in the Hanseatic countries to legislate against the old preference for not representing a living person on currency or postage.) There was no news regarding Elsa Blix, and Sophie felt as though her hands were completely tied when it came to the investigation of the questions raised by Tabitha’s letter. Her generally irritable mood that week was exacerbated on Tuesday afternoon by Fru Petersen making her try on a dark blue velvet party dress with a white lace collar. The daughter of one of Fru Petersen’s friends had grown out of it; it fit Sophie perfectly.

“That’s what you’ll wear on Friday, then,” Mikael’s mother said with satisfaction. “Those ballet slippers will be fine, as far as shoes go, and I think you’ve still got a few pairs of tights without holes, haven’t you, Sophie?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Sophie grumbled.

Sophie thoroughly rejected the notion that clothing should have a strongly decorative component—of course, some people liked to wear attention-getting things, but really it would be better if everyone just wore navy-blue boilersuits and stout leather boots and didn’t have to worry about the silly convention of wearing different clothes on different days of the week and at different times of day or in different settings. Sophie had never been an unequivocal admirer of school uniforms, which she felt drew too much attention to natural differences between girls’ looks—not just their figures but their general sense of style—but at least they let one blend in. Hanna Adler’s school, because it was so “advanced,” did not require uniforms, which meant that Sophie could wear a very similar dark-colored shirt and skirt and cardigan every day, and since all the clothes had been purchased in København by the stylish and sensible Fru Petersen, they enabled Sophie to achieve what seemed to her almost the only really worthwhile goal of clothing, namely not to stand out in a crowd.

She felt somewhat deceptive wearing the slippers, having never performed a step of ballet in her life, but they were much cheaper than other kinds of party shoe, and Fru Petersen had already persuaded her that it did not amount to a fraudulent misrepresentation to wear a piece of clothing strongly associated with an activity one did not practice, adducing as the clincher to her argument the facts that plus-four trousers were worn even by people who didn’t play golf, and that Fru Petersen herself—Sophie was not really sure it was the same thing, but had allowed herself to be persuaded—had been known to use scientific glassware for making jam.

“If you really hate the dress, we can buy something new! Only it seems a pity to buy something you’ll almost certainly grow out of without having worn more than a few times,” Fru Petersen mused. “I’d rather see you spend the money on a really good-quality winter coat, with room to grow into it—we must go to the shops one of these upcoming weekends and see what they’ve got. Sophie?”

“The dress is perfectly fine,” Sophie said hastily. “Really, you can choose anything you like for me; I am sure it will be nice enough, only I strongly prefer not to have to go shopping myself!”

“You sound just like Mikael!” Fru Petersen said.

“Will it be a nice party or a dull one?” Sophie asked.

“Dull,” Fru Petersen said firmly, though her eyes were twinkling, “but I can promise you that there will be wonderful sweets!”

It was very cold all week, almost uncannily so, with record low temperatures for Denmark at that time of year. Trismegistus actually crept beneath the duvet that night and slept right up next to Sophie, after making it known, with an imperious dig of the claws, that he wished to situate himself
under
rather than
on
: a prepositional development more hospitable to warmth than to relaxation, as the cat stirred restively every time Sophie turned over to try to find a position comfortable enough to let her drift off.

Flurries of snow could be seen on Wednesday morning, and on Thursday after school so much snow fell that Mikael and Sophie borrowed a pair of tea trays from the lunchroom under the eaves and went and sledded on a modest hill nearby. It was surprising how much speed one could build up even on quite a short hill, and this particular one had a helpful flat section of packed snow at the bottom that allowed one to shoot off horizontally like a cork out of a well-aimed champagne bottle.

They were cold, wet, and a bit battered when they got back to the institute: Sophie would have a huge bruise on her hip the next day, and had tweaked some minor muscle in her side that made laughing slightly painful, but their exertions gave relish to the ample meal provided by Fru Petersen.

After they had both finished their homework, Sophie and Mikael found themselves leaning on the deep windowsill in the sitting room and watching the snow continue to fall outside in the cones of illumination the street lighting cast. København’s first street lamps had been a seventeenthcentury innovation spearheaded by the astronomer Ole Rømer, who wanted to make the city safer by lighting its streets at the public’s expense. Rømer had also made a set of observations that led to his being the first person to propose that light has a finite speed, a phenomenon for which he had coined a phrase almost more magical than anything Sophie had ever heard:
the hesitation of light.

“The hesitation of light!” she said now, enjoying the feel of the words in her mouth and their sound in her ears.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said, a little ashamed of the childish pleasure she took in the ring of certain words and phrases regardless of their meaning.