The Falling Machine (16 page)

She rolled open the top drawer and picked up one of the guns.

Taking up the other half of the back wall was a large mirror firmly set into an oaken frame. Sarah took a pose in front of it, with the gun in her hand. “The Industri-lass!” she said to herself with a whisper.

She suddenly felt quite foolish, and she turned to put the gun back into the drawer. As she rolled the cabinet closed she saw a sheet of paper sitting on top of the cabinet, a straight pin still stuck through it from where it had been attached to some other object. A note was scrawled across the front of it:
“Section 106 removed and reordered as requested
.”

A clue!
she thought to herself with delight, and folded up the paper and put it into the pocket of her jacket. Then she stuffed the gloves into her pockets as well.

Realizing that she still needed to find the way out, Sarah began to slide her hand around the gilt edges of the mirror frame. The mirror was obviously about the same size as a door, but she could find nothing but polished wood and dust.

Sarah turned her head to look for any other object that might conceal a secret entrance when she saw that on the right wall was a large wooden button in the center of a brass ring. The word “Exeunt” had been painted underneath it in precise letters. Perhaps there was no need to have a hidden switch inside of a hidden closet….

The button depressed easily, reaching its end with a satisfying click. A moment later the mirror quietly swung open. A cool breeze flowed in, bringing a moist, earthy scent, and the gas lamp grew a little brighter as it devoured the fresh air.

There was only one more task she needed to complete before she could escape: Grabbing up the dreaded bustle, she slid herself around to the other side of the table and kneeled down. She could see the long strip of black material that had been torn away when she pulled herself free, and she grabbed it close to where it had been trapped under the door.

From this angle it came away easily, and she shoved the cloth down into her already-stuffed pocket.

When she grabbed the mirror it swung open easily, and beyond it another gas lamp was already illuminating the way down the corridor.

“The light,” she said to herself with a gasp. She had almost forgotten to put it out. She turned around to head back in the room and then stopped herself. A second control, placed just outside the exit, would be just the kind of detail that the old professor would think of.

Sarah stepped into the corridor. The floor was packed earth, and the heels of her shoes sank slightly into the damp soil. Yet another clue to her presence she'd have to hope her father wouldn't find.

When they had been children, she and Nathaniel had always been convinced that any self-respecting mansion should be riddled with secret passages and hidden doors. They had spent years trying to uncover them, but never seemed to manage to actually find anything.

Nathaniel had convinced her to give up their search after years of failing to find the slightest clue. It was both exhilarating and disappointing to discover that she had been right all along. “Nathaniel,” she said with a small amount of disgust, and shook her head. Once he'd left childhood behind he always seemed to desire a world that was less amazing than it appeared. In contrast, for all his reliance on rigorous science, Darby had constantly shown her that the world was more magical than even she had been capable of imagining.

Sarah smiled when she found the switch exactly where she had expected it to be. Even after death, Sir Dennis was providing an occasional miracle. She twisted the dial around the outside of the igniter, and when she looked back into the secret closet it had gone dark.

Grabbing the brass handle on the back of the door she pulled it shut behind her. There was a familiar clicking sound as the mechanism that held it tightly in place reengaged.

The dank corridor was only a few feet wide, and she was barely able to drag her bustle behind her as she moved through it. She considered leaving the beastly thing behind, but it would hardly do to have come this far only to have her father discover her treacherous garment abandoned in a secret hallway.

After a few feet she reached a short set of unpainted wooden stairs, where the corridor made a T. If Sarah's sense of direction was working properly, then the way to the right clearly led to some secret exit out to the grounds. As excited as she was by the idea of uncovering a new way to escape the house, she was hardly dressed for another adventure.

She turned left, and as she reached the end of the tunnel she saw a small viewport built into a secret door at the end of the corridor. Peeking through it she was given an almost completely unhindered view of the basement. Sarah wondered if her father had ever surreptitiously watched her while she had been down here going through her mother's moldering belongings.

But whether he had ever spied on her or not, the truth was that as long as she was in this house she would never truly be her own woman in any way that really mattered. And giving in to her father's constant and growing pressure for her to find a husband would, she imagined, only be trading one kind of imprisonment for another. Another bustle to tie her up and slow her down, while the men in her life traveled down secret corridors to unknown destinations.

Sarah could feel a rising sense of self-pity. Perhaps it was her proximity to the basement, always her favorite place to engage in a bout of melancholy. “Back to it,” she said, banishing her negative thoughts, and opened the door. The gas lamps in the secret corridor extinguished themselves behind her, and Sarah felt like Alice traveling through the mirror as she stepped back into the house, once again leaving the world of the Paragons behind.

She held out her hand and let it brush against the boxes of her mother's things as she walked to the stairs. She'd need to get back up to her room before anyone found her missing.

Climbing up to the cellar door, she opened it and gave her eyes a moment to adjust to the daylight. She winced as she heard Jenny Farrow's voice calling out to her,
“There
you are! Your father has been looking for you for
hours.
He's got the whole staff in a panic wondering where you are.”

Sarah opened her mouth to protest, but the maid cut her off before she could even say a word. “I've got no time for your nonsense today, Sarah.” She grabbed the bustle out of her hand and instantly discovered the place where Sarah had ripped away the fabric. “And what did you do to
this?
I've told you that you shouldn't be mucking around down in the basement in your day clothes. Your father is already close to being in one of his moods without you playing around in the dirt.”

Sarah tried to get a word in edgewise. “Jenny, I…”

“Well, there's no time for that now,” Jenny said, giving her no chance to plead her case. Before she could protest Jenny's hands were fluttering to and fro across her clothes, flicking away stray bits of dust and smoothing down ruffled bits of her garment in an attempt to make her presentable.

Then the maid's wandering arms were in her pockets, pulling out the strip of torn cloth. “At least you had the good sense to keep this. I'll see what Mary can do about repairing the damage.”

“And what's this?” Jenny said, pulling out the gloves. She stared at them, clearly having a moment of recognition, and then looked directly into Sarah's eyes. They had known each other long enough that Jenny didn't need to say a word—her disappointed frown did all the speaking for her.

Sarah expected Jenny to reach back into her pockets again and pull out the folded paper. Instead Jenny shook her head twice and stuffed the gloves down into the front pocket of her apron. “I'll put these up in your room, and we can talk about it later.”

She spun Sarah around and shoved her forward. “You're still a mess, but you need to get to your father's office right away—before he gets any angrier than he already is, if that's possible.”

“Thank you, Jenny,” she managed to blurt out. The discovery of the pilfered items, along with the fussing, had completely robbed Sarah of all the feelings of self-pity and righteous anger that she been wallowing in just a minute before. Instead she traveled down the corridor in a daze as the maid pulled her along to the entrance of the very same room that she had just worked so hard to escape from.

The door was open, and she saw her father sitting at his desk as Jenny reached the entrance. “Mr. Stanton.” The housemaid's voice was practically a whisper.

“What?” he replied, obviously annoyed.

Sarah saw his head rise up over Jenny's shoulder. “I'm here, Father,” she said to him.

He waved her in with a broad gesture. “Yes, all right. Come in and take a seat.” He gathered up the papers and daguerreotypes on his desk into a pile, clearly trying to hide Paragon business from his daughter's eyes.

While normally Sarah would have been hungry to catch any scrap of information regarding the heroes, it now took every ounce of willpower that she could muster to not let her eyes lock onto the iron safe as she walked past it. Instead, she forced herself to stare at the blank spot on the wall where she had removed her father's portrait and put on the warmest, widest smile that she could possibly muster. Hopefully her father would think it was him that she was staring at, but she couldn't bear to meet his eyes.

Reaching the chair on the nearest side of the desk, she put her hands solidly on its back, digging her fingers into the soft padding under the red leather as if she were clutching onto a log in the middle of a raging river.

Her father looked up at her with a frown on his face, but it wasn't her he was scowling at. “Is there anything
else
I can do for you, Mrs. Farrows?”

When she turned her head, Sarah saw the maid staring wide-eyed at the safe. “I just wanted to…”

“What did you want to see me about?” Sarah said to her father, then turned to glare back at the maid. She put every ounce of her will into getting Jenny to look at her.

“What did you say?” Jenny turned to face Sarah and Alexander, withering instantly under the combined stares of the Stanton family. “Nothing, sir.”

“Then that will be all, Jenny.” He tapped twice on the pile of papers in front of him. “And if you could please close the door behind you?”

“Certainly, sir.” She shuffled quickly across the floor and swung the door shut behind her with a heavy thud.

The whole tenor of the room changed as the outside world vanished behind the solid oak. When she had been here without her father the office had been a place of mystery and adventure, but with him sitting there in front of her she felt like Theseus, attempting to escape but ending up back at the center of the minotaur's maze.

“The door was acting in a most peculiar way a little while ago. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you, Sarah?”

She turned her head slightly to the side. “Peculiar how, Father?”

He shook his head. “No, of course you wouldn't. From the look of you, you've been far too busy playing around in the mud.”

She bristled. “I've been going through some of Mother's things in the basement.”

“Again,” he huffed. “You spend far too much time digging through those relics. I'm starting to think it would be better for both of us if they weren't around anymore.”

Among all the emotions she had been manufacturing to try to create a sense of realism she suddenly felt a genuine pang of fear rise to the top. “You wouldn't, Father!”

He looked up at her. “Sarah, I…” Stopping, he shook his head. “Let's start again. This isn't the conversation I want to have with you—not at all.”

She sat quietly for a moment and watched him deflate. For an instant it seemed as if all his usual bluster and bravado had deserted him. It made him look a bit sad and old. “I'm sorry, Father. I didn't mean to make you angry. What is it you wanted to discuss?”

After a moment he looked up into her eyes. “I know that the last few weeks have been very difficult for you, and I know you must be angry at me for the way I've been acting.”

There were a million things she could say, but she had no idea what particular bit of behavior it was that he was about to apologize
for
, and it seemed that her best course of action would be to sit there quietly and find out what he was going to say next.

“Having a man die in your arms…” he continued. “Although why he brought you up there in the first place I'll never know.”

“Because I was curious, and because he thought I was intelligent.”

“I don't doubt that he did. And here you stand, smart as a whip, educated beyond reason, and still unmarried.”

Sarah opened her mouth to reply when her father lifted up a hand and shook his head. “No. I'm sorry. I don't mean that, either.”

“Then what did you want to tell me, Father?”

“I don't know, exactly, but I don't want to fight with you. Having someone you care about die in your arms is a terrible thing.” He paused for a second. Sarah didn't know the exact details of her mother's death, but she knew he had been by her mother's side when her mother had taken her final breath.

“And,” he continued, clearly trying to push back the emotions that were welling up inside of him, “it's something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, let alone have it happen to my own daughter.”

“You don't have to worry about me, Father. I'm not as fragile as you think I am.”

He smirked. “Nor are you quite as tough as you believe yourself to be.”

Sarah folded her hands and stared at the floor. She could feel a blush rising up in her cheeks. “What's past is past.”

“Death is never that easy, I'm afraid. And as you grow older you'll discover that the past has a way of catching up with you.”

He was attempting to reach out to her, and yet every word that came to mind had a stinger hidden in it. She struggled to find something neutral to say. “If you say so” was the phrase she chose. As she said it Sarah realized her contempt was right out in the open.

“I do say so!” he replied with a bit of thunder in his voice, although he was obviously trying to keep it under control. “I know that you must be angry with me about keeping you away from the Paragons since Darby died, but it's clear to me now that allowing you any relationship with that part of my life has brought this family nothing but tragedy.”