“How are we feeling today, Dr. Haworth?” Dr. Hughes asked. He tented his fingers and loomed over Harry Haworth, who sat up straight and resolute at his tea table.
“Fine,” Haworth lied, willing himself to control his shuddering. He was not fine and he knew Dr. Hughes knew that, but they did this dance of plausible deniability every four days.
“Are you sure that’s the most… accurate description for how you’re feeling?” Dr. Hughes asked. “People who are fine do not usually throw hot tea on their nurses.”
“People who are fine don’t usually need nurses, and yet here we are,” Haworth retorted flatly. She’d chosen the wrong day to comment on his extra tea biscuit. He had no patience to spare today.
“Eventually there won’t be any nurses left to care for you. Your behavior is in dire need of correction,” Dr. Hughes said in thinly veiled threat.
“That sounds like a discussion you should have with Dr. Verloc,” Haworth said, calling his bluff. They both knew Verloc never permitted punishments for Haworth’s outbursts. He was mad, after all, and mad men didn’t know what they were doing or what they were being punished for.
“In any case, you don’t look fine,” Dr. Hughes said, abandoning that tack in favor of one that had proven to be destabilizing in the past. “You seem to be a bit sweaty.”
“It’s a tad warm, that’s all,” Haworth deflected.
“And yet you’re shivering,” Dr. Hughes persisted. “I suppose you might be coming down with something?”
“The nurses are always bringing in some new bug.”
“You have very constricted pupils too.”
“Because it’s brighter than a thousand suns in here.”
“If I didn’t know better… I’d say these were withdrawal symptoms.”
Haworth met Dr. Hughes’ stare and raised him a defiant scowl.
“They are obviously not.” That was exactly what they were. “You know I’ve had my Joy today. You were there. You pushed the button. You took notes on it.”
“Yes, it’s really quite curious. You should smell the way you did yesterday, like mushrooms and bleach and honey.” Dr. Hughes leaned down closer and sniffed. “But today you smell like… charcoal. And rotten roots.”
“Thank you,” Haworth said sarcastically. His mouth pulled into a straight, displeased line at Dr. Hughes’ creeping further into his personal space.
“There’s something else,” Dr. Hughes said, inhaling loud and deep and entirely too close. “Rose of Gilead.”
“The soap is made with them,” Haworth dismissed. And it was true; Haworth didn’t care to smell like flowers but the soap was made in the Village and as with almost all things in Wellington Wells, options were limited. Rose of Gilead soap also served to disguise the smell of medicated healing balm.
“Is the soap made with rowan berries also?” Dr. Hughes asked pointedly, giving Haworth another accusatory sniff. If he got any closer, Dr. Hughes’ nose was going to touch his jaw. Haworth sat stock-still and resisted the want to recoil from Dr. Hughes’ proximity.
“Possibly? If it is, I can’t tell. I’m not that kind of doctor,” he said, staring straight ahead.
“I think we can safely assume it’s not made with blood,” Dr. Hughes said. Haworth flinched at that. His left shoulder hitched up defensively to guard the spot in his neck where Verloc had injected him with Crash that morning, but he played it off as a twitch of nervous discomfort. How could Dr. Hughes smell blood? The puncture had been treated with healing balm and bandaged, and the bandage since had been disposed of. If Dr. Hughes could still smell blood after all that, the man had the nose of shark.
Or maybe he was bluffing, extrapolating from what he assumed. If he smelled healing balm, there must be a wound it was applied to. Haworth reminded himself that it didn’t matter if Dr. Hughes knew Verloc was dosing him with Crash or not. Without solid proof, he could do nothing with that information and to accuse Verloc outright would only get him fired.
“I nicked myself shaving,” Haworth lied.
“You know, Dr. Haworth, as a fellow man of science, I would hope you too would find it offensive if Dr. Verloc was manipulating data or sabotaging test results,” Dr. Hughes ventured. “It could call the credibility of the entire lab into question.”
“Is that an accusation?” Haworth asked, arching an eyebrow. He ignored Dr. Hughes’ appeal to vanity; despite the name, Haworth Labs weren’t his anymore and he no longer had a reputation that a scandal could reflect poorly on.
“Not at all!” Dr. Hughes retreated, both verbally and physically. He vacated Haworth’s personal space, much to his relief, and paced back and forth in front of the observation window. “Merely a supposition. As far as I can see, however, the only reasonable explanation for your consistently inconsistent data is that Dr. Verloc must be doing something that disrupts that data – inadvertently, I’m sure! – when he comes to visit you after breakfast.”
“He visits both of us after breakfast,” Haworth parried. “If that were true, Plantagenet’s data would be inconsistent too.” A spurious conclusion, but maybe Dr. Hughes would take the bait?
“Unless he does something special for you.” No such luck. “Or to you. You are his favorite, after all.”
The very notion that he was Verloc’s favorite anything made Haworth gag. The nurse had said something similar at tea time, that she’d brought an extra biscuit for Verloc’s favorite pet. She probably meant it as an endearment, but it erred too closely to Haworth’s reality for him to take it well. Any other day, the Coconut Joy would take the edge off any feelings he was having about his situation, but on a Crash day, he was entirely too emotional to ignore a comment like that. So he had poured out a nice, hot cup of tea and then tossed it in her face. She screamed bloody murder over it, but in truth, her white mask had shielded most of her skin from the splash.
“His favorite?” Haworth asked with a strangled chuckle. “Did he tell you that?”
“He doesn’t have to. Why else would he refuse to let us give you a proper dosage? And why would he lower it back down to five hundred milligrams every time the formula changes? He lets you get away with the most atrocious behavior too.”
“None of that is preferential treatment. Those are all precautions you should be taking with an older patient,” Haworth argued. In truth, he knew all of those things to actually be about conquest. It wasn’t enough to have stolen his labs out from under him, to ruin his reputation, and to have him declared mad and remanded into his care. Verloc kept his dosage low so that Haworth never forgot the predicament he was in. Similarly, Verloc let him act out without consequences because it only reinforced the knowledge that everyone thought he was out of his mind and didn’t know what he was doing. “And Dr. Verloc doesn’t let you punish Plantagenet for his behavior either.”
“But he does allow us to sedate him as needed,” Dr. Hughes pointed out, “whereas we have been ordered to treat you… delicately.”
“Another precaution you should take with an older patient,” Haworth excused. “Honestly, don’t they teach you anything at Wellington Health? Plantagenet’s half my age; he recovers from manhandling and sedation a lot faster than I would.” Haworth hadn’t actually known they been ordered to be hands-off with him until now, but it made sense. Verloc wouldn’t want them sedating him because the Crash would interfere with any drugs they administered. When the sedative didn’t last as long as expected, they’d get suspicious.
“I have a hypothesis,” Dr. Hughes declared, changing his tactic again. “I think you’re of perfectly sound mind.”
“Do you?” Haworth asked in a bored tone.
“Quite. I also don’t think you have Joy intolerance. I think those are things Dr. Verloc says to justify you being kept here.” Dr. Hughes waited for Haworth to say something in response, but Haworth remained silent and kept his stare steady. He wasn’t exactly sure where Dr. Hughes was going with this – it was a new tactic – but he understood he was being invited to volunteer information or at least his opinion. The best course of action was to say nothing and force Dr. Hughes to elaborate first, which he did. “Suppose that Dr. Verloc was not in the position to decide that for you.”
“I’d rather not. Entertaining flights of fancy only makes this situation worse.”
“Indulge me a moment,” Dr. Hughes said. He came back over to loom again. “Let us imagine that Dr. Verloc was… set aside. Whoever replaced him would be at liberty to reevaluate your needs. If they found that you were sane and able to take your Joy… well, you wouldn’t need to be in here, would you?”
“I suppose it would be you replacing him in this hypothetical scenario?”
“I believe I would be the most likely candidate, yes!” Dr. Hughes’ grin grew wider at Haworth’s correct assumption. “However, in order to get Dr. Verloc out of the way, we would need to call his leadership into question. And as I’ve said, something like tampering with data, especially on a project as important as Coconut-“
“I see what you’re asking,” Haworth cut him off, “and I do wish I could help. Truly. I’d love to see him ruined too.”
“But…?”
“He’s not doing anything to disrupt my data,” Haworth lied.
Dr. Hughes planted his fists on the table, leaned down close, and got within menacing distance of Haworth’s face.
“We both know that’s not true.”
“Do we?” Haworth said in that same bored tone from before.
“We do. And I am truly perplexed as to why you would keep his confidence about it.”
“I’m not keeping secrets for Dr. Verloc,” Haworth said as if the very idea was absurd which by all rights it should’ve been. “But if I were, it’d be because there’s nothing to say it would be you the Executive Committee would replace him with. They could just as easily decide to scrap this project and I could end up in a cell at Wellington Health instead, getting infected with God knows what for my trouble. If I had any information to give,” he went on, careful to speak only in possibilities, “there would be just too many variables to make it worth the risk without a guarantee.”
The reality was that Haworth had considered a plot like this himself ages ago and decided that all the possible alternatives to Verloc’s care would be worse. Especially Dr. Hughes’. Haworth noticed that he hadn’t actually promised to release him, just to “reevaluate his needs”. Haworth had come to be a lot better at spotting that sort of evasive language in recent years. Doctors were always complaining about the shortage of human test subjects and Haworth had little doubt that if Dr. Hughes were put in charge, his reevaluation would find him still in need of care.
And Haworth had seen what Dr. Hughes’ did to his toys when there were no rules. Plantagenet hadn’t been completely insane when he’d arrived here, after all. He was obsessed with his own genealogy and he seemed to think one of his friends had conspired against him to land him here, but he hadn’t thought he was the rightful King of England yet. Extreme dosages of Coconut had brought that on. His was just the latest mind Dr. Hughes had ravaged with his experiments. Haworth rather suspected that, if given carte blanche to do as he pleased with him, Dr. Hughes would want to make up for time lost on all the restrictions Verloc had placed on his care.
As humiliating as it was to more or less be considered Verloc’s property, Verloc was careful with his possessions. He wasn’t going to let Haworth be driven genuinely mad on his watch. It wouldn’t be as satisfying keeping him if he wasn’t fully aware of the indignity he was subject to.
More to the point, much as he dreaded Crash days, they were also his only hope of escape. Coconut Joy dulled unpleasant feelings, all feelings really, but it also made it difficult to think about more than one thing at a time. Coming up with a multi-step course of action was nigh impossible when under its influence because you’d forget the last step as soon as you thought of the next. Miserable as withdrawal was, if he was particularly determined and didn’t let his emotions distract him, he could use the reprieve from Coconut to formulate and enact escape plans. Since Verloc was the only perceivable person who would want to give him Crash, it remained in Haworth’s interests not to jeopardize his position.
“So you’re content to spend the rest of your life being kept as Verloc’s pet then?” Dr. Hughes asked, trying to cajole Haworth into rash agreement.
“Obviously not, but I have no wrongdoing on his part to leverage,” Haworth lied once more. He forced out a cheery little smile. “I do wish you luck in finding someone who does though. Lord knows he could do to be taken down a peg.”
Dr. Hughes relented as he realized Haworth wasn’t going to be swayed today. “Very well. I’d best check up on Mr. Plantagenet then.” He stepped past and made to leave.
“Mind your fingers,” Haworth warned with as much cheek as he could muster. Once the door shut and he was alone again, Haworth let out the tension in a long huff.
Dr. Hughes was getting bolder and it reminded him of Verloc in the worst way.
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