Mechanica (7 page)

Sometimes, in passing, it occurred to me that I should worry about all the little illegal magics I used, but Mother had trusted them, as had Mr. Candery. I’d never been able to see them as anything but blessings.

When I had spare moments, I would read the few books I’d hidden away, or repair and maintain the machines that were showing signs of wear. I had not forgotten Mr. Candery’s advice to do whatever I could for myself. I had to be good at repairs—if Mother’s machines had stopped polishing the boots or cleaning the fireplaces, I would never have been able to do everything.

So I led a busy, if haze-smothered, life for the years between Father’s death and my sixteenth birthday, when I found the workshop. I never expected much of anything to happen, and nothing much did. I was in a constant state of waiting for things to begin.

I
OPENED
my eyes to Jules standing on the desk, butting my arm with his glass forehead. He looked up at me, and I could hear the gears inside him ticking. His glass-on-metal whinny scraped my ears, and tiny curls of steam puffed from his nostrils. I smiled down at him.

It was only my third night in Mother’s workshop, and I hated that I’d wasted time by drifting off . . . even though I had been exhausted since that first sleepless night on my birthday, because I’d spent all the time I wasn’t cleaning for the Steps down here. I realized, looking at the little mechanical horse on my desk—something like a dream himself—that I hadn’t dreamed, or slept much at all, in three days.

Still, there was a part of me that didn’t feel tired, that in fact felt awake for the first time in years. I wore myself out reading through the engineering books in Mother’s studio, more advanced than anything she’d kept in the upstairs library; cataloguing her supplies, the pistons and rods and screws, the hammers and wrenches and counterbalances; and learning to work the furnace, the glassblower, and the mechanized drills. This was a bright, sharp kind of exhaustion I felt, the kind that comes from excitement and engagement and
work.
It was the very opposite of the vague haze I’d moved through for the last six years, nearly as asleep as Jules had been in his stable-box.

Besides, I told myself that my chores would get easier with each passing day, as I could now repair Mother’s machines much more quickly, and much more effectively. I even hoped to supplement them with a few inventions of my own.

The first few months after my birthday passed in that buzzing, vibrant exhaustion. I was perhaps most grateful for the sewing machine, which helped me speed through my least favorite chore. It handled in a flash the long seams that used to take me hours, but I still had to step rhythmically on a pedal to power it and guide the fabric with my hands. I did this in the studio, but I would often glance up from my work at the second hidden door, dreaming of the drawers full of gears and washers and screws that lay beyond it, and the tubes and sheets of metal leaning against the walls, calling to me. The glassblower in particular attracted my attention. Jules stayed at my elbow, and every few hours, I fetched him coal, for I’d found there was indeed a tiny furnace in his belly.

Every day I sorted through another corner of one of the two rooms that made up Mother’s workshop, hoping to learn more about all the projects she’d left behind for me to finish. I started by cataloguing her books, and because I read them each as I went, it was a long and slow process. Nearly two months passed before I shelved the last of them.

Most wonderful of all, I found other survivors from Mother’s insect-making days, the buzzers I’d so loved as a child, hidden in little boxes between her books or forgotten at the backs of drawers. By my fourth day in the workshop I had discovered two fat, gold-plated beetles; a week later, a many-jointed caterpillar that made loud ratcheting noises as it crawled across my desk joined their ranks. Within a month, I had found three spiders with needles for legs and steel spinnerets loaded with real thread; a large copperwork butterfly, so light and delicate that even with a metal wingspan the size of my two hands, it could glide and flutter about the room; and a little fleet of five dragonflies, their wings set with colored glass. They flew or crawled or buzzed about just as real insects and spiders do, but they did not seem as intelligent as Jules—just as, I supposed, real insects compared to horses. Jules himself adored them; sometimes he would nicker at the buzzers, and they would seem to do what he told them. I began to think of them as his minions. They were as much of a mystery as he was. They lit up the workshop with their glittering, metallic movements, and it was almost like having bits of Mother back again.

Mother’s fortune had come from little clockwork bugs like these, and I dared to think that if I could learn her secret, I’d be rich enough to buy my own workshop in no time at all. But I couldn’t find anything in her books or journals that explained how she’d made them come to life . . . and I couldn’t begin to fathom how I might recreate machines that moved of their own volition, not without understanding whatever magic she had used. Besides, whatever her secret had been, I knew it had to be illegal now.

But even though I couldn’t replicate her automata, I loved the ones I found. And I loved Jules most of all.

The first time I donned Mother’s goggles, I laughed at my bug-eyed reflection in a metal sheet. When I removed the goggles and glanced in the warped surface again, I looked enough like my memory of her to make me think I had seen a ghost.

I found her journals as I went too, scattered among the encyclopediae and dictionaries and manuals and books of engineering and theory and philosophy. I only ever found one journal at a time, never two together. I began to see that she had written them along with the books she was reading and that the spidery handwriting lining the margins of her books matched up with daily entries in her journal, over a span of at least ten years.

Scattered in the journals were more personal accounts as well, tales of my father early in their marriage, later subsumed by her pregnancy, and then by my infant self. These were all secondary, marginalia to the more important work of her life, which was clearly always her
work.
I had known this as a small child, and sometimes I’d wished I had been her center; now I thought I understood. She loved me—I’d always known that—but she loved her work too, and her inventions would not spring up without her, the way I would grow whether she spent every moment by my side or no.

Nicolette grows so quickly. Already she is not content to sit in her crib, napping or cooing at the mobile I made her. Already she wants to explore, so William has convinced me to keep her above stairs, where the furnace and the metals and the tools cannot hurt her. I miss my girl, but she is so quick, and certainly she will grow without me. My other children will not.

Her other children. I did not know what to make of that. I put Mother’s journals down and decided to focus on building, not reading, for a while. I pretended my heart didn’t ache.

One evening, after I put Jules and his minions away, I had my first revelation. I’d turned away from the shelf that held Jules’s stable-box and back to the sewing machine. It was large, covering a good third of the drafting table that I’d pushed against the wall opposite my desk, but both machine and table were dwarfed by the absurd, frothy volume of fabric for Chastity’s newest dress. I was glad for the machine, but I still hated sewing for the Steps. I resented it for the time it took away from my reading and my inventions. But that night, as I stared at the machine’s iron frame, I realized that with a few modifications, Jules and his minions could do my sewing for me.

After consulting Mother’s books, I selected my tools. I built Jules a harness from the leather laces of Chastity’s too-small winter boots. A pulley system with a weight on the pedal allowed Jules, moving at a steady walk, to power the machine as quickly as I had done. With the minions’ help to guide the fabric, he could at least do my straight seams for me—and depending on how much I, and he, could teach them (for it seemed that just as I could speak to and teach Jules, he could speak to and teach the buzzers), perhaps they could eventually sew curved seams too, or even detailed work.

All those hours of freedom I’d gain . . . I was breathless with relief just imagining them. They were hours I’d spend working, mostly, but doing
my own
work. And—oh, miracle—I could sleep.

As it turned out, they were natural tailors. Soon all I had to do were the finest details, the buttonholes and pleating, which took far less time, though still too much for my taste. I hoped they would learn even those before long. But I also needed to make the Steps believe the work was mine, so I sewed whenever I had to linger in their presence.

I still spent one hour with them each evening to hear Stepmother read Scriptures. This nightly ritual was a remnant from Father’s time, the last lie that kept us a seeming family.

I stitched as easily as I could with my clumsy hands—or, rather, hands that I had often thought clumsy, but that created the machines of my mother’s design with an ease that still felt foreign. Every time I drove the needle into my fingers, I had to remind myself that I was not truly clumsy, only unskilled at this particular craft.

Piety and Chastity sat opposite my little stool, alternately lounging on their purple fainting sofa or staring bluntly out the window. Stepmother read each night’s Scripture with a sensuousness that never entered her voice when she spoke her own words. She had used the same tone to recite her wedding vows to Father—soft and dark, full of hidden seductions. What a lie, her voice.

On one particular evening, though, there were to be no Scriptures. Instead, Stepmother drew an envelope from her apron pocket—though she never lifted a finger for housework, she nearly always wore an apron. It gave her the appearance of constant dutifulness.

She pulled a thick, square card from inside, so rich that it was almost cloth. The edges ran with a tastefully subtle pattern of angled lacework, punched into the paper by no human hand, surely, but by magic or machines.

“His Highness King Corsin,” she announced to a suddenly attentive audience, “invites us to a Cultural Exposition Gala, to be held at the start of the New Year. The judged Exposition will celebrate and support, through a generous Royal Endowment, the advancements of Esting’s most brilliant inventors and artisans, as well as . . .” Her voice trailed off as she scanned the invitation.

Piety and Chastity leaned forward, rumpling their full skirts. My ears tingled to hear what Stepmother so casually omitted. A judged exposition, with funding for inventors!

“ . . . a ball on New Year’s Eve, at the palace, to commence the Exposition festivities.” Here Stepmother’s voice trilled, and a tremble came into her elegant fingers. “My dear girls, your chance has come.”

Piety and Chastity clasped hands and nodded heads, their respective chestnut and yellow curls bobbing in unison. Their faces, Piety’s oval and Chastity’s heart-shaped, equally lovely and equally vacant, shone with rapture.

An Exposition . . . Royal Endowment . . . inventors and artisans . . .
I cringed as my needle stabbed under a fingernail. I looked down at the bloodstain spreading into the pleats on Piety’s chemise. The pain soon fled—as would the blood, with a good scrubbing.

I pulled my work close, hoping to keep my accident from notice.

I had no such luck. “Mother,” Piety whined, “Nick’s ruined my chemise. I need a new one.” Her plump cherry of a mouth turned to pouting.

She and Chastity refused to call me by my full name, Nicolette—I think they were jealous of its cadence, or its lack of implied virtue. They had christened me Nick at Father’s funeral.

“Then of course you shall, sweet one,” crooned Stepmother.

“Me too,” said Chastity, for probably the twentieth time that day. Her words were usually an echo of Piety’s. “Me too, if Pie gets one.” She narrowed her eyes at her sister. Piety wrinkled her nose.

Stepmother silenced them with a raised hand. “My dear girls, you will both have new wardrobes in full by the Exposition,” she cooed.

I barely managed to contain my horror. Was I expected to produce these wardrobes, and by the New Year? Winter was nearly here already. Even with Jules and the minions, I couldn’t see a way.

That night, I doubled my usual hours in Mother’s workshop. I worked so intently that I didn’t notice time passing until a ray of sunlight issued through the one narrow window in the study and hit me square in the eye. It was too late for sleep then—I had to have breakfast on the table by the time Stepmother came down at seven. Even so, ideas buzzed through my head, and I wouldn’t have been able to sleep even if I’d gotten the chance.

Stepmother was clearly excited too. She ate her poached egg on toast with pleasure, even enthusiasm. She usually liked to act as if eating were beneath her, a necessity she only suffered through to stay strong for her dear daughters.