Ignacio Narbondo and Willis Pule: Doctor, Assistant, and Mutual Distrust

Ignacio Narbondo and Willis Pule’s relationship is an uneasy working partnership in which practical dependence never becomes trust. Narbondo directs the experiments and gives the orders, while Pule handles errands, transport, and other necessary work. Yet Pule believes that he has done much of the enterprise’s hardest organizing and expects Narbondo to appropriate its rewards. Narbondo, in turn, suspects Pule of planning to abandon him with the risks. Their cooperation advances the search for materials and the attempt to reanimate Joanna Southcote, but every shared task also exposes the imbalance and rivalry between them.

Positions and Shared Work

Narbondo appears as a doctor whose experiments require unusual materials and assistance; Pule is the subordinate who helps procure and move them. Their work depends on a continuing supply of carp and the gland Narbondo needs from it. On one occasion, Narbondo travels with Pule as the latter arranges for carp to be delivered to 266 Pratlow Street. Narbondo is already anxious about the delay: the remains they hope to restore are deteriorating, and Shiloh is pressing them to produce a result. His reprimand makes the hierarchy plain. Pule is answerable for the errand, while Narbondo sets its urgency and frames the consequences of failure.

Their dependence is practical rather than stable. In a rain-soaked journey by cart, Narbondo orders Pule to take the reins, then opens his bag and works on a fish with a scalpel. Pule drives while Narbondo attends to the specimen. The division of labor is immediate and familiar: Narbondo performs the operation, and Pule keeps the transport moving. The scene also shows how little their collaboration requires mutual confidence. Narbondo gives commands; Pule follows them while occupied with his own thoughts of death and revenge.

Experiments and Their Costs

The attempt to satisfy Shiloh’s demand to see Joanna Southcote restored binds the partners to a shared undertaking. Narbondo needs a carp gland for the procedure, but the specimen he brings back is in poor condition, and the gland has been partly spoiled through Pule’s clumsiness. Narbondo nevertheless tells Pule to prepare for surgery. The episode captures their recurring arrangement: Pule’s mistakes can jeopardize the work, but Narbondo still relies on him to help carry it out. The proposed experiment is not simply scientific research; Shiloh expects a demonstration, and Narbondo knows that payment depends on giving him one.

The partnership belongs to a longer history of increasingly criminal experiments, though the available account does not place Pule in Narbondo’s earlier work with Sebastian Owlesby. Owlesby’s recovered papers describe Narbondo urging him toward more extreme research, including the use of a living person’s brain, and record Owlesby’s own growing recognition that his experiments had become a road from which he could not turn back. In another entry, Owlesby recounts the killing of a young boy during an attempt to obtain material for the work. These disclosures establish the scale of the enterprise Narbondo has pursued before his collaboration with Pule; they do not make Pule a participant in those earlier acts. The distinction matters: Pule’s role is shown through the later errands, thefts, and efforts surrounding the box and the attempt to raise Joanna Southcote.

Rivalry over Credit and Reward

Pule’s private assessment of their partnership sharply contradicts Narbondo’s command of it. He thinks he has been the one to waylay Bill Kraken and obtain the box, organize the recovery of Joanna Southcote, and fetch carp from the oceanarium. From those claimed contributions, Pule concludes that Narbondo is a self-serving braggart who will benefit from work Pule has performed. He expects Narbondo to leave with the emerald and make Pule explain their activities to a judge. This is Pule’s fear and interpretation, not an established account of Narbondo’s final intentions, but it reveals how he understands the relationship: he sees himself as the overlooked engine of the enterprise and Narbondo as the man positioned to take its prize.

The recovered writings about Owlesby add a further contrast to Pule’s grievance. Narbondo’s influence over Owlesby is presented as a force that helped drive the older experimenter toward madness and atrocity. Pule’s complaint, by contrast, centers on present labor, credit, and the anticipated division of spoils. The partnership thus carries both a legacy of scientific corruption and a more immediate struggle over who does the work and who will bear its consequences.

Mutual Suspicion and Unequal Dependence

Narbondo’s suspicions become explicit when he discovers Pule with Bill Kraken and the Keeble box. He interprets the scene as an attempted betrayal: Pule, he thinks, intends to hand the box to Kraken and escape, leaving the doctor to fend for himself. Pule denies this and claims he was bringing Kraken back to Pratlow Street so that Joanna Southcote might benefit from being reorganized. Narbondo responds with a brief joke about Kraken being a man of parts, then asks whether Kraken knows what is in the box. His change in manner does not establish that the suspicion has disappeared; it shows that banter can cover a relationship in which each man remains alert to the other’s possible advantage.

The suspicion runs both ways, though it takes different forms. Narbondo treats Pule as an assistant who can be ordered to fetch fish, drive a cart, and prepare for surgery. Pule regards himself as the more capable organizer but believes that his dependence on Narbondo leaves him exposed. Their work continues because each has something the other needs: Narbondo requires help with procurement and execution, while Pule remains entangled in the doctor’s projects and imagines that the box and emerald may offer a way out. The evidence presents no reconciliation or settled division of reward. Instead, their partnership remains productive, coercive in its hierarchy, and unstable in its loyalties.