Free This Dark Endeavour (with Bonus Material) by Kenneth Oppel Page A

doorway.
    “Please, sir, wait,” I said, striding forward, taking from my satchel a volume from the Dark Library and putting it on the counter. “I have here a work by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa …”
    Polidori paused. He chuckled sadly and then turned around, barely glancing at the book.
    “Occulta Philosophia. Am I correct?”
    I nodded, startled.
    “Young sir, put it back into your satchel. Add two large stones, say goodbye, and throw it into the deepest part of the harbour.”
    Henry looked over at me, confused. “Is that a spell of some sort?”
    “That is advice, and the best I have to give,” said Polidori. “That book will only bring you grief.”
    “Sir,” I said, “The physician Agrippa—”
    “
Magician
!” Polidori scoffed.
    I persisted. “He writes of something called the Elixir—”
    “Yes, yes, I know,” he said impatiently. “The Elixir of Life. He was hardly the first to dream up such a thing. There are many, many recipes for fantastical potions meant to cure all ills, perhaps even guarantee immortality. Such things are delusions, sir. They do not exist.”
    “I am confused,” said Elizabeth. “I thought you yourself—”
    “Yes,” he said. “There was a time when I too was seduced bysuch fancies and sought them with great passion. I even created an elixir of my own.”
    “And you succeeded with that little girl,” I said.
    Again he laughed. “She was cured,” he said. “But not by me. It was
chance,
or God’s divine power, a miracle! But it was not me.”
    “Why do you say that, sir?” Henry asked.
    Polidori frowned. “You know my name, yet you don’t know my full story? You have not come merely to torment me?”
    I shook my head, wondering why Maria had withheld something. The honesty in our surprised faces must have convinced Polidori, and the suspicion faded from his eyes. He sighed.
    “After that girl recovered, my business flourished. People beat my door off its hinges, wanting the same medicine.” He waved a hand around his shop. “For a short while I was a wealthy man, welcomed into the finest homes in the city. But that elixir I gave the girl, the
very same thing,
was not reliable. Sometimes it made a patient well. Sometimes it had no effect at all. Sometimes it seemed to make a patient worse. Still, people craved it, even though I grew more and more reluctant to prepare it. Some months later there was a ship owner, Hans Marek, a man of some wealth and power in the city, whose wife was very ill. He came to me and demanded the elixir. I told him I was no longer making it. He offered me a great sum in gold, and foolishly I accepted. Marek took my elixir home, and his wife died shortly after taking it. He was so enraged, he wanted me hanged for witchcraft.” Polidori chuckled. “You see, when a medicine works, it is blessed science, and when it fails, it is witchcraft. I was brought before a magistrate, a fine and enlightened gentleman who dismissed the charges as barbaricand primitive. But he forbade me from making the elixir ever again, or practising alchemy.”
    “This magistrate,” Henry asked. “What was his name?”
    The same question had been on my lips as well, and I waited anxiously for the answer.
    “His name was Alphonse Frankenstein,” said the apothecary.
    I felt a great pride in my father’s fairness, but when I saw that Elizabeth was about to reveal our connection, I quickly touched her hand. I did not think it wise for Polidori to know our identities, not yet anyway.
    “I owe Frankenstein my life,” Polidori was saying, “what is left of it. But his ruling offered no satisfaction to Hans Marek. Several nights later I was dragged from my bed by a drunken mob, taken up to the city ramparts, and pushed.”
    Elizabeth gasped.
    “Clearly I survived the fall,” he said. “A small miracle in itself. But I was paralyzed from the waist down.” He patted at his legs. “I have virtually no business now, but I have been frugal with my savings