Mechanica (17 page)

The thought set my heartbeat into a skitter.
One step at a time,
I told myself.
One small, small step at a time.

Caro’s letter, I remembered, was still waiting unread in my coat’s other pocket. Feeling a bit ashamed for my fixation on Fin’s gift, I sat down in my desk chair to read it. I put my feet up on the desk; when the Steps had ransacked the studio, they’d knocked my chair over and destroyed the adjustable screws Mother had built into its legs. The chair was stuck too low for me until I could find time to repair the mechanisms, but I couldn’t do that without taking it apart at great risk to its old, ornately carved witchwood frame. I couldn’t bear to damage any more of Mother’s things, given how much had already been lost. In the meantime, it felt pleasantly rude and rakish to put my feet up on the desk, even if no one but the insects saw me do it.

The letter was a thick one, and I wondered how a girl I’d met only twice could have so much to say to me. I slid my finger under the cheap candlewax seal on the envelope, remembering my search for the key behind Grandmother’s portrait. I’d hidden the workshop key under my mattress since my birthday, but considering recent events, I made a mental note that it would probably be wiser to keep it on my person.

Dear Nick,

It’s possible that I ought not to write you a letter as long as I already know this one will be, or any letter at all until we’ve been friends for years, and probably I shouldn’t hug you so tight the next time I see you as I did the last. Certainly I shouldn’t feel as fond of you as I already do. For, oh, in my mind we are such good friends already! Already you are dear to me!

My mother says friendship should be slowly and carefully cultivated, like a rose garden, like a romance in a story. That every reason you care about someone should be rational. She says I care too quickly.

I suppose she is wise; I know she has been hurt fewer times than I have, though she has twice as many years to her credit. But friendship has never been something I could do halfway. When I met Fin, he was scarcely more than a baby—and I a toddler myself, not far from my mother’s eminently logical apron strings—and I announced that very day that he was my favorite person. Our mothers thought it was only that he was such a lovely baby; Fin does insist on being obnoxiously beautiful, doesn’t he? But no, it was simply that he was already my friend, or, to be more precise, that I was already his. And it was the same, Nicolette, with you.

Nicolette, so baffled at Market and yet so brave, with such marvelous things that you’ve made, such marvelous hope in your eyes. Who could not wish to be your friend? It was beyond my small capacity, at least.

I had to laugh. I’d thought that all my eyes showed was loneliness, or perhaps a certain hard desperation, a determination to continue my mother’s work. To hear that someone else had looked at me and seen something else, something better than what I saw in myself, was like a reassuring hand laid on my shoulder. I could hear every word of the letter in Caro’s cheery, laughing voice too. It was like having her here in the room with me. Father’s letters had always been cordial and stiff. Mother’s journals were thoughtful and informative, but they were in an inventor’s voice, not a friend’s, and they had always been, above all, a reminder of her catastrophic absence from my life.

Caro’s letter went on for ten and a half crowded pages, mostly stories about the scrapes she and Fin got into growing up (
. . . and would you believe it, his brother never found out where we hid them! It was in the ruins, of course . . .
) and, more recently, the scrapes from which she was continually trying to rescue her younger cousins (
. . . thirty-seven first cousins, just first cousins alone, Nick, and all but two of them working at the palace—you can imagine how busy that keeps a girl . . .
).

Busy indeed, I thought. How on earth did Caro find time to write a tome of a letter like this, with all her troublemaking cousins underfoot?

Really, though,
she continued,
I’m glad I dive headfirst into caring for people. There’s so much warmth in anybody, if only you reach out to find it. As pretty as Fin’s always been, even, and as privileged as some people think he is, he can be overserious and a bit melodramatic sometimes. There aren’t enough people who know how thoughtful and kind he can be. You brought that out of him at Market, you know, Nick. That’s one of the reasons I liked you so well straightaway.

And, oh, please understand that this isn’t pity, but I think you might need someone to talk to . . . or, as is the best I can do in these letters, someone who can talk to you. I think most of the voices you hear are cold.

Anyway it is nearly morning now, and I have to get back to my chores, but I will send you more stories and—I hope!—laughter soon. You see, I can’t stop talking even when my mouth is shut. Mother says I must make music boxes because I’m never content unless I have some kind of voice—talking, or music, or reading stories, or writing letters. So this letter is in fact very selfish and a welcome outlet. Do forgive me.

Whatever Mother might say about my foolishness, though, I have to believe it’s right to be a warm voice, a companion if I can be, as soon as ever I find a friend. However I can be that friend to you, Nick, I hope you believe that I will do so.

All best of the best from,

Caroline Hart

PS: The ribbon is a little favor the servant girls like to give to each other here. Blue is for courage. You have plenty of that! But they are called friends-ribbons, and I thought you would like one.

I wound the ribbon around my wrist absentmindedly, imagining Caro as she wrote this letter: probably by the guttering light of the cheap candle she sealed it with, probably blinking with exhaustion from finishing one long day’s work and getting ready for another. Much as she claimed to not be able to help talking all the time, I knew she was doing me a real kindness, taking time out of her harried day to give me a warm voice, as she called it.

I was grateful. I would tell her so, I promised myself, the next time we met.

I took the blue ribbon off my wrist and looked at it: it was thin, and long enough, perhaps, to . . . I looped it around my neck. It hung down to my sternum, and if I kept it under my dress, it would hide the workshop key perfectly.

And there was something else I could hide too. I’d placed Jules’s fragments in a glass box I’d made a few weeks earlier; I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away, or even to reuse the few parts that would still function.

I picked up one of his largest gears; it had been attached to a piston that moved one of his hind legs. I took the biggest piece of glass, too, the almost-round fragment that read
II.
I brought both of them, and the ribbon, into the back room, and I turned one of the iron wheels on the left side of the furnace. It rumbled into a higher heat, and I selected the smallest, thinnest poker, more a needle than anything else, from the wide selection hanging next to it. This would be a delicate, fiddly operation: I had to melt the edges of the glass fragment without ruining the etching in its center.

I strapped on my heavy smith’s apron, goggles, and work gloves, and I pulled the now-glowing poker from the furnace. I ran it slowly along the edges of the glass.

An image of Jules twitching on my bedroom floor, Chastity’s foot coming down to finish him off, flashed suddenly through my mind and made me wince. I flinched and the poker shook in my hands, dragging a hot line through the glass.

I wanted to cry. Even this, even this, I had ruined. Mother’s workshop, Jules—I had let the Steps damage all of them. I pressed the glass into the gear quickly, before it could harden again, before I could ruin it further.

And yet . . . yes, they were damaged, the workshop, the last piece of Jules. But they were not ruined, not beyond repair. I had fixed the workshop again, the best that I could, and I was going to keep working. That was all I could ever do.

I straightened my back and took a deep breath. Looking down at the charm I’d just made, I saw that the damage was not so bad after all. The line I’d made when my hand slipped was small; it was just enough, in fact, to slide a ribbon through.

I picked up the charm with a small pair of tongs and hurried back into the studio, where I placed it on the windowsill so that it could cool in the frosty air. My broken window—damaged, but not ruined. Damaged, but more useful now, because it let me come and go from the house undetected.

Damaged, but somehow better, nonetheless. I started to smile.

The charm was still warm, but safe to the touch, and I strung Caro’s ribbon through the line I’d accidentally made. The glass was perfectly clear and glinted in the light; the small weight of the charm made the necklace spin a little, back and forth. I tied a neat knot in the ribbon and hung it around my neck.

I turned back to the workshop, broken but not ruined, and thought about my next task. I still had to decide what to show at the Exposition. . . .

My coat was flung carelessly across my desk. I picked it up and hung it on the door, so as not to forget to bring it upstairs; I would have to haul in fuel in the morning.

The sculpture Fin had given me was in the coat’s right pocket. The Steps were likely to find it, eventually, if I kept it in my room. . . . I remembered Jules’s stable-box, still empty and waiting in its place on the shelf. Suddenly the box seemed like the perfect place to keep Fin’s gift. It could be a sort of memorial.

I took up the box and placed it on my desk, running my fingers reverently over its seams, then undid the leather buckles at its clasp and opened it; the carved lid’s heft always surprised me. I tucked the horse gently inside, touched its nose once more, and closed the lid again.

I turned back to the shelf—and saw a seam in the wall, where the chest had been. I ran my hand along it, recognizing Mother’s way of keeping secrets by now.

There was a catch at the end of the seam, just by the bookshelf’s corner. I pushed down, and the back of the shelf creaked open.

Of course I thought of Jules, and of the insects, and I closed my eyes and reached my hand inside, wishing, wishing there might be another automaton sleeping there.

Instead my fingers brushed dry paper and leather. Lifeless.

With my other hand, I touched my new necklace, the relic of my old friend, the ribbon from my new.

I opened my eyes and shivered, forcing my hand to drop. I had no time for mourning today. I looked at the clock on the wall—one of Mother’s designs, large and ornate, always a few minutes fast—and cringed when I saw the time. I had to move quickly before the Steps came home.

Reminding myself not to expect too much, I plunged both hands into the secret compartment and pulled out its contents. The leather I’d felt was binding for a journal, stuffed with so many extra papers and notes that the top cover jutted up at almost a thirty-degree angle.

I returned to the witchwood chair and sat down. Mother’s handwriting was spidery and sometimes nearly illegible, but I’d seen enough of it by now that I could make sense of her entries quickly.

The first pages were fairly standard measurements and formulas and temperatures, and the drawings were a series of pistons. A few pages in, though, I had to stop.

I gasped and took a few deep breaths to slow down my heartbeat.

The series of mechanisms on this page had a definite shape. I cast about in my mind for other things it could be, not wanting to give myself false hope. But there was no other possibility.

It was a leg, a decidedly equine leg, with a pattern of gears and pistons and chains that I knew well.

My hand flew up to my neck again, clutching at Jules’s gear. I hugged Mother’s journal to my chest and laughed, hardly believing my luck. I owed Fin yet more thanks: if he hadn’t given me this new horse, I might never have moved the box.

I wanted to start reading right away, but I had so little time left, and I had to work on my knitting machines. There were enough supplies left in the furnace room for at least a few more. When I returned tomorrow, I would still need to decide exactly what I would make to show at the Exposition. My whole future depended on that one event, and I needed to save all my machine and bead proceeds toward putting together something truly spectacular. My loneliness for Jules, much as it howled behind my every thought, would have to wait.

Minutes later, as I welded the knitting needles onto their base, I stopped and gasped again. My torch slipped in my hand and nearly burned through my thick gloves.

I’d had my revelation after all. I needed a showstopping Exhibition piece, and I desperately wanted Jules back—could I not combine the two?

I dashed to my desk, poring through Mother’s notes again.

Yes, I thought, it would be easy enough to scale—some changes to the weight-bearing structures, of course—and I’d need quite a lot of charcoal . . . I laughed again, and felt the muscles in my face start to ache from smiling so wide. I imagined myself at the Exposition—the entrance I’d make!—and I saw Fin’s face in the crowd, his eyebrows raised with admiration, that easy grin on his face.

I shivered again, though the workshop was still warm from my metalwork.

Then I went upstairs, knowing I had little time to spare before the Steps’ return. I’d burned my wrist in my haste, but it was a small price to pay for the day’s wonders.

Just as I closed my bedroom door, I heard the crunch of the Steps’ carriage wheels on our snowy driveway. One of the horses whinnied, and I thought of Jules, and of Fin’s sculpture, too. I pressed my necklace to my throat, imagining things to come.

The Steps were often gone in the next weeks, attending teas and parties, touring the palace, and hoping to catch a glimpse of the Heir. They went out daily, to town or on social calls, or on Saturdays, to Market.