Set in Stone, Chapter 15.
The breakfast table had achieved something approaching normality. Lydia was complaining about the sausages. Kitty was not listening. Elizabeth was attending to her tea with what Darcy had learned to recognize as tactical absorption in a neutral task.
Mr. Bennet set down his coffee and said, with the air of a man who has been waiting for the proper moment and has decided this will do, “Dr. Darcy, I have been meaning to tell you that your Rutinum compositum is functionally the same as moly.”
Darcy looked up from his plate. “I beg your pardon?”
“Moly,” Mr. Bennet repeated, as though this clarified everything. “Hermes gave it to Odysseus before he went to see Circe. White flower, black root. Renders the recipient immune to transformation. I believe Homer describes it as ‘hard for mortal men to dig, but the gods can do all things.’“ He paused, and added with visible satisfaction, “You appear to have managed without divine assistance, which I suppose reflects well on modern horticulture.”
Darcy was aware, in the pause that followed, that Elizabeth had stopped pretending to attend to her tea.
“The primary component,” he said carefully, “is Ruta graveolens. Rue. Vervain and St. John’s Wort in the supporting—”
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Bennet said, waving this away. “I have no doubt you have a very impressive scientific rationale. I am merely observing that the result is moly. Or at least serves the same purpose of suppressing a dangerous magic.”
“Circe wasn’t dangerous,” Lydia objected. “She was hospitable. She gave them all dinner.”
“And turned half of them into pigs,” Mr. Bennet said.
“Well, yes, but she turned them back afterward. Eventually. I don’t see what she did that was so terrible.”
Kitty, who had been following this exchange with the expression of someone watching a familiar play from the cheaper seats, said, “I think the point is that she shouldn’t have turned them into pigs to begin with.”
“Perhaps they deserved it,” Lydia said.
Elizabeth said, in a voice that Darcy could not quite identify, “I believe we are straying from Papa’s original observation.”
Darcy looked at her. She was looking at her father. Her expression was…amused, possibly, with something else underneath the amusement that he would prefer not to examine.
“My original observation,” Mr. Bennet said, “is that Dr. Darcy has gone to considerable trouble to develop a treatment rooted in empirical neurology and peer-reviewed research, and has arrived at precisely the same place as Homer. I find this both reassuring and faintly undignified.”
“Undignified,” Darcy repeated.
“For modern science, I mean. Not for you personally.” Mr. Bennet considered. “Although I suppose there is something leveling in the notion that the cutting edge of specialist medicine is still taking its cues from Bronze Age poetry.”
Darcy found that he had no immediate answer to this. The problem was that Mr. Bennet was not, strictly speaking, wrong. Rue had featured in the materia medica for disorders of the nerves since Dioscorides. Its use in cases exhibiting the particular symptomatology Elizabeth’s condition produced was documented in sources Darcy had considered pre-empirical and had consulted anyway, in the methodical desperation of a man who had tried everything else.
That the compound worked was observable fact. That he did not entirely understand why it worked was a private frustration he had not shared with anyone, least of all the patients to whom he administered it. Homer’s references to moly had flitted across his mind once or twice while developing the compound, but he had always put them firmly aside.
“Homer,” he said at last, “did not provide a dosage.”
“No,” Mr. Bennet agreed. “I don’t suppose he did. One assumes Hermes handled that part. Being a god and all.”
“The therapeutic dose and the toxic dose are uncomfortably proximate. The administration requires adjustment according to the patient’s presentation, the severity of prior episodes, and the degree of— ” He stopped. Elizabeth was still watching him. He was explaining himself, which he did not generally do at breakfast, to a man who had just reduced six years of careful experimental pharmacology to a question of whether one had read the right bits of the Odyssey. “The point,” he said, “is that the process is rather more exacting than ‘dig up the flower and hope for the best.’“
“Oh, undoubtedly,” Mr. Bennet said. “I’m not suggesting you’ve contributed nothing. Only that you might have saved yourself some time with a classical education.”
Kitty made a noise that might have been a suppressed laugh.
Lydia said, “Does this mean Elizabeth is Circe?”
“No,” Darcy and Elizabeth said simultaneously.
Lydia looked between them with interest. “But if the medicine is the same—”
“The mechanism is not the same,” Darcy said. “Circe’s transformations were volitional acts performed on other people. Elizabeth’s condition is involuntary and affects her own body…” He stopped again. This was not a conversation to be having over sausages. “The parallel is inexact.”
“But close enough to be Going On With,” Mr. Bennet said, in a tone that suggested he was quoting someone and expected to be recognized for it. “Which I think was rather my point.”
Elizabeth said, “Papa, are you suggesting that Dr. Darcy is Hermes?”
The question was directed at her father. Darcy found it necessary to look at his plate.
“Not at all,” Mr. Bennet said. “Hermes was a psychopomp and a cattle thief. Dr. Darcy is a medical researcher with a specialty in neurological conditions of obscure origin. The comparison would be inapt.” He paused, and added with the appearance of careful thought, “Although I suppose there is something to be said for the Hermetic role as an intermediary. Between worlds, as it were. Those who know and those who do not.”
Darcy was still looking at his plate. It had not become more interesting.
“And on that note,” Elizabeth said, “I believe I shall take a turn about the garden.”
She rose and left the room with what looked to Darcy like unnecessary speed. Kitty and Lydia began debating whether Odysseus had been right to tie himself to the mast, a conversation that showed no signs of requiring his participation.
Mr. Bennet caught his eye across the table and said, mildly, “You did know it was moly, I assume.”
“I did not think,” Darcy said, “that a mythological name would meaningfully contribute to the patient’s acceptance of the treatment.” This was after all why he no longer called the compound Medusin.
“Quite right,” Mr. Bennet said. “Much better to let her think you invented it yourself.” He returned to his coffee with the satisfied air of a man who had made his point and did not intend to belabor it.
Darcy finished his breakfast in silence and excused himself as soon as it was decent to do so.
He did not, at the time, recognize the conversation as significant. It was only later in the study, reviewing his notes on the case, contemplating the gap between suppression and cure, that he found himself thinking about moly again. Not the plant itself but what it had been for. Immunity to transformation. Protective, yes. But Circe had been the one to tell Odysseus how to break the spell on his men. The gods provided the defense; the witch provided the restoration.
The blood of Medusa. One side healed; the other killed.
He had been thinking of the compound as the solution. What if it was only half?
He did not pursue the thought that morning. There were other matters requiring his attention, and the notion wanted more research. But it stayed with him, filed in the part of his mind that collected problems not yet ready to be solved, and waited.
At dinner that evening, Lydia referred to him as Hermes. Kitty corrected this to “the god of travelers and also thieves, so really not a compliment,” and the matter devolved into a tedious debate about the Greek pantheon that Darcy did not attempt to adjudicate. Elizabeth, at the far end of the table, met his eyes for half a second and looked away. The corner of her mouth had done something he chose not to interpret.
Mr. Bennet, behind his wine, looked insufferably pleased with himself.