Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables (17 page)

Bran grasped Bucko’s strong rough hand and shook.

“Now for another yard of ale to seal the deal! You, too, sonny!”

Bran managed to quaff a few inches of his powerful drink before Bucko needed a third.

A week later, the fateful night arrived, a temperate evening in May. Warner Gilead was in the nation’s capital, attending the impeachment proceedings against President Johnson. Bran had provided Bucko MacMahon with a map of the house. He had given the servants a night off, left the back door ajar, and then gone off to see a play,
The Silver Lining
, at the Adelphi Theatre in Court Street.

As he strolled back to the Charles Street establishment, Bran tried to feel some relief and satisfaction at this fait accompli. Soon he would have the secrets of his birth in hand with no real cost to
anyone. He could satisfy the hot urges of his soul. What he would do with the information about his blood father remained unknown. But why feel guilty at reclaiming what was rightfully his? And Warner Gilead could certainly spare whatever cash resided in the safe….

As Bran neared home, he began to encounter a crowd surrounding some commotion. He hastened his pace.

Leaping flames illuminated a Dantean scene. A riot of avid gawkers surrounded several of the new steam-powered fire engines spraying the burning upper story of the Gilead manse. The efforts of the firemen seemed to be effectively containing the destruction to one corner of the house.

“What happened?” Bran yelled to a stranger.

“Some kind of explosion, I heard!”

When Warner Gilead returned to Boston from Washington, he found Bran temporarily ensconced at the Revere House Hotel on Bowdoin Square, with repairs to the manse already begun. After some stern quizzing, the old man eventually absolved Bran, and moved on from the disaster.

A week after the explosion, Bran received a delivery.

The scorched packet that bore his name, glimpsed but once, frustratingly, five years past, and a brief penciled letter sans signature:

N
ow Bran knew all. His mother’s willing abandonment of Gilead, her lawful spouse. Her wild love for Hedley King. Their erotic cohabitation, resulting in Bran’s own conception and Pella’s
perhaps preventable death. The deal struck between the two rivals. All contained in that singed folder! What a melancholy yet stirring saga. Bran had previously encountered its like only upon the stage. But now it formed his ineluctable personal heritage.

The knowledge had engendered some changes in his feelings and attitudes: shifts surprisingly smaller than he had envisioned, prerevelation, and less predictable in tenor.

He found himself pitying his father more. Poor Warner Gilead, richer than Midas, yet deprived of the woman he loved above all. Bran could see how his own presence had been both a balm and a gall, explaining why the old man alternately clasped Bran to him, then pushed him away.

Bran’s idealized sentiments toward his mother had changed the least. Despite any romantic treacheries in her heart, she remained an idol to him. He clutched now at the locket containing her hair, which hung as always at his bosom.

His feelings for Hedley King, his blood sire, that enigmatic Colossus bestriding his imagination for so long, had altered strangely. He could not regard him as a cowardly scoundrel. After all, Pella had seen fit to love him, and Gilead had forced the man to remove himself from Bran’s life. In an alternate existence, Bran might have grown up as the loved and pampered Roland King, heir to his actual progenitor. There was no way of determining Hedley King’s real feelings and responsibilities in the matter without meeting him.

But what most intrigued the son now was a heretofore unknown aspect of King’s character: his apparent flair for the natural sciences, and his inventorly skills. What was this “Morphic Resonator” for which King had been willing to bargain away his son? It must be a treasure beyond price.

For any number of reasons, Bran simply
had
to meet his natural father! He was prepared to strike out on his own, against Gilead’s wishes. But where? The otherwise chatty documents contained no information regarding Hedley King’s current location, and not even a clue to his destination eighteen years ago, when he had been ejected from Bran’s life.

For several days Bran contemplated the matter. And then, suddenly recalling that old image of his mother surrounded by workmen, he went to see Stan Lambeth, one of the few survivors of that era.

Warner Gilead’s fortune, now diversified across many ventures (including heavy investments in several important national politicians), had been founded upon his machine tools enterprise, still the thriving core of his holdings. In fact, the recently ended War Between the States had bolstered the enterprise’s income, owing to heavy demand for armaments and the milling machines and lathes involved in their production.

The sprawling, noisy factory buildings of Gilead Toolmakers occupied a plot of land in Brighton, a town adjacent to Boston proper and given over to various industries. Once a part of Cambridge, Brighton had seceded in 1807 and become the abbatoir of New England, rife with slaughterhouses and stockyards. Authorities had recently mooted a scheme seeking to upgrade the ambiance of the place by naming a small residential district after famed local artist Washington Allston, dead some years before Bran’s birth. But for now, the town’s pestilential and noxious nature kept property taxes low, which suited the economical Warner Gilead.

At the works, Bran tracked down Stan Lambeth on his own, careful not to alert any supervisors to his presence, for fear news of his visit, however innocuous, should get back to his father. Bidden to speak privately, Lambeth willingly adjourned to a shed containing stocks of angle iron.

Rail-thin and taciturn, Lambeth wore his advanced age of forty-five years well, his slim physique toned from his labors. All the staff at the works liked Bran, and Lambeth greeted the lad now with a certain parsimonious Yankee warmth. But when Bran broached the reason for his visit, Lambeth grew less welcoming.

“Young sir, you’ll excuse my frankness, but I have to ask if you mean to persecute poor Hedley King further, on your father’s behalf?”

“By no means!” Bran explained himself, and Lambeth resumed his cordiality.

“Well, then, know ye this. Hedley and I have remained in contact all these years, exchanging regular letters. We were always enamored of each other’s skills and insights into natural science, though I confess he long ago transcended my meager talents. His latest requests for my thoughts on his researches have been met with utter incomprehension on my part, I am humbled to report. In any case, I can tell you that he resides in the vicinity of Windsor, Vermont, at an estate called Mount Golden. He supports himself by working at the Robbins and Lawrence Company, a venture akin to your father’s setup here.”

Bran clapped the older man spontaneously on the shoulder. “This is splendid! I can go see him immediately, and try to repair all the injustices of the past two decades.”

“And your father will give his consent?”

Bran grew crestfallen. That eventuality seemed dicey. He would either have to make a complete break with his father or lie.

As fate would have it, lying proved the much easier route, a fib practically falling into Bran’s lap.

The month was late June, and Bran had matriculated in May from the newly established yet prestigious Thomas Parkman Cushing Academy, a boarding school some forty miles outside the city. His best friend at the school had been the affable giant Baldrick Slowey, whose family lived in Brattleboro, Vermont, and had a share in the Estey Organ Works in that burg. One day soon after his interview with Lambeth, a letter arrived from Baldrick, inviting Bran to spend part of the summer in Vermont. He promptly wrote back to Baldrick, politely declining. But the original invitation he showed to his father at the dinner table.

Warner Gilead pondered the letter with some gravity. “You really should be studying all summer, to get a leg up at Harvard in the fall. But I suppose all work and no play makes Bran a dull boy. You may go, but only for three weeks or less.”

“Thank you, Father,” said Bran, trying to damp down his guilt.

Only when, days later, he had at last transferred to the carriages of the Central Vermont Railway Company did Bran truly
feel that his plan stood some chance of success. Up till then, he had expected a parental hand to clamp down at any second and drag him home.

Payment to the affable conductor easily extended his prearranged passage north from Brattleboro to Windsor.

The station at Windsor was situated hard by the burly yet tamed Connecticut River. The Main Street establishment of Robbins and Lawrence, he learned, was but a short walk distant.

As he walked through the neat, leafy little town at the base of mighty Mount Ascutney, his nerves felt afire and his stomach aboil. What would be his first words to Hedley King? He had rehearsed many, but none seemed just right.

Bran hesitated at the door of the L&R Armory, then went in. He applied to the office manager, and learned that Hedley King was not on the premises.

“King works but irregularly,” said the mustachioed Pecksniff, whose name Bran had promptly forgotten in his nervousness. “His own endeavors keep him busy, and he comes in for a stint of labor only when he runs short of funds. Begrudges every second of his employment, too. If he weren’t so damnably talented, the bosses wouldn’t put up with his insolence and independence, you can mark my words.”

Bran just nodded noncomittally, and obtained directions to Mount Golden, the King estate. He found the hire of a horse and carriage, and was soon on his way.

The precincts west of Windsor grew increasingly sylvan and wild, like something out of one of Thomas Cole’s more apocalyptic paintings. Hoary giants, the densely arrayed trees radiated an immemorial sense of brooding. A swampy patch seemed the gateway to some stygian netherworld. Strange bird cries attendant upon the close of day rang out like a chorus of lost souls.

The sun was going down, and the last house had reared its shabby form some miles back, when Bran’s driver, a young lad of Apollonian thews who smelled not unpleasantly of horses, announced, “There ’tis.”

Bran saw no welcoming manse, only a rutted, ill-kempt drive close-hemmed
by overgrown yews. He stepped down, and the lad asked, “Shall I wait, sir?”

Bran hesitated, then said with more boldness than confidence, “No, I’m expected. You may return to town.”

Bran retrieved his portmanteau, the lad jockeyed the horse around, and in a minute Bran stood alone in the dusk.

He moved cautiously down the drive, as if half expecting to encounter some ogre around the bend.

A large, decaying house—its clapboards mossy, featuring an ill-composed assortment of turrets and gables, and flanked by several skewed outbuildings—loomed out of the darkling air. Candlelight shone from one window.

Bran climbed to the broad granite step at the front door and knocked. No immediate response met his signal. But then the door was flung inward precipitously, and Bran stood waist-to-face with a scowling, disheveled malformed dwarf who, unprompted, shouted in a foreign accent, “And you can go straight to hell!”

H
edley King, Bran’s natural father, poured another glass of dark red wine for himself. Bran declined a refill, the two cups he had already quaffed leaving him muzzy-headed. How strange to be sitting here with this intimately connected stranger in a fusty candlelit parlor, full of ancient bric-a-brac, dispassionately discussing their separate lives as if they had met by chance on a train. Although Hedley King was not the ideal father Bran might have chosen for himself, Bran had quickly discerned that the man possessed a certain intensity of purpose and engaging sharpness of intellect that offset his less delicate behaviors.

Bran had already disburdened himself of the broad outlines of his youthful career, right down to his arrival on the step of Mount Golden (so christened by its prior owner, an eccentric named Trafton Shroud who believed without a shred of evidence in the existence of rich veins of ore upon his property). Hedley King seemed pleased that Bran had been motivated to search him out,
although of course whenever mention of Warner Gilead intervened in the boy’s narrative, the older man grew resentful and irate, still plainly nursing his old grudges against the plutocrat.