Mechanica (4 page)

He looked back at me, smiled a smaller smile than usual, and reached into his breast pocket. He pulled out a small, thin book: Faerie tales. He pressed one long finger to his lips.

I nodded. I understood what he did not say: I must keep the book secret, especially from Father. I would realize later that the book, like the Fey, had become illegal; then it just seemed like a secret between friends.

I knew that he wanted to be alone. I hurried up to my room to spend the afternoon in one of the ways I loved best. Soon I was immersed in a long story about a brave girl, a cave, and a magic fish.

I finished the book not long after supper; I’ve always been a quick reader. I crept back downstairs to the library, hoping to dig through Mother’s engineering tomes and find something I hadn’t yet devoured.

A wand of yellow candlelight lay along the floor where the library door had been left slightly open. Faint whispers followed the light’s path, coming from inside.

I could not help myself: I stood behind the door, listening. I hoped I might overhear my parents reconciling, but the voice I heard was not Father’s.

“ . . . Brethren preachers on every street corner of Esting City,” Mr. Candery murmured, “railing against magic, saying it rebels against the glory of the Lord. They insulted my mother and her kindred as they took to their carriages—and little better than cages they were. I shudder when I imagine what sort of Estinger ships will carry them home.”

I heard Mother sigh. “What is there for us to do?”

Mr. Candery’s voice grew still softer. “What is there for us, ever?”

Just then one of her beetles buzzed past me on its metal wings, flying through the cracked-open door into the library.

“Is the door open?” Mother asked. I heard the rustle of her skirts as she moved toward me, and I scurried away.

I came down to the library for lessons as usual the next day, but Mother was not there to meet me. I waited nearly an hour, ticked out on the elaborate mantelpiece clock Mother had made before I was born, but no one came.

Finally I decided to go to the kitchen to see if I could help Mr. Candery with anything. As I walked down the corridor, though, I saw him emerge from the cellar, closing the door silently behind him. When he saw me, he jumped as if startled—I’d never seen him even close to unsettled before.

“Your mother is ill,” he said gently, handing me a large book Mother usually kept downstairs. “She wants you to spend the day with Copring.”

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked bluntly. I knew it had to be something serious if it kept her from our lessons, and even more so from working.

Mr. Candery looked down at me, his eyes kind and concerned. The fine lines in his blue-freckled face were deeper than usual; I had the sense that a less composed person would have sighed. “Fey’s croup,” he said.

I nodded and tried to look calm, but all I could think of was Queen Nerali, who’d died after contracting the same disease.

After Mr. Candery walked away, I realized that he hadn’t told me not to worry.

I turned the pages of L. Copring’s
Second Treatise on Mechanical Engineering
all morning, but for once I couldn’t focus on my reading. I was overcome with anxiety, but I knew I was never to disturb Mother when she didn’t want me.

My hands would not stay still, so I left my book and spent the afternoon fiddling with a mechanical beetle I’d nearly finished repairing the week before. At last I fastened the new wings I’d made to its back. I wound the tiny key at its head and watched it buzz, lopsided, out through the window.

For weeks, Father forbade me from visiting Mother; Fey’s croup was especially dangerous for the young, he said. He wouldn’t even enter their chambers himself, for fear of infection, but slept in one of the guest rooms. He had Mr. Candery methodically burn her dirty sheets and clothes. Everything she’d touched, he said, was at risk of contamination.

I couldn’t stop thinking about our dead Queen, or the cure that should have saved her.

“Why hasn’t Father bought any lovesbane?” I asked Mr. Candery one day over breakfast; Father and I rarely ate together.

He stared at me. “Have you asked him that?” he said.

I looked away, though I couldn’t tell myself why. “No . . .”

“Good.” His voice grew heavy with relief, but just as quickly turned sharp. “Never mention it, Miss Lampton. Never again.”

It was the first time in my life that I felt I couldn’t ask the question:
why?

He knew me well, though, and he saw what I was afraid to say. “Remember the Queen,” he said. “Remember what your father’s been saying about my—about Faerie. He would be very angry if he heard you talk about buying lovesbane.”

I felt something harden inside me. “He would be frightened, you mean.” And then, with a flash of boldness: “Why don’t you get it for her?”

He turned away. “I gave my savings to my mother when fe left,” he said. “It would be years . . . and your father . . .”

When he turned back again, his face was as impassive as ever. “I shouldn’t be telling you these things, Nicolette,” he said. “Please don’t ask me to. And now”—he gestured at Mother’s elaborate mantelpiece clock—“I have to see to your mother.”

He left before I had the chance to say anything else, but I didn’t know what I would have said.

It was always Mr. Candery who tended Mother. He said he couldn’t catch the croup himself, because of his Fey blood (though my books later told me that wasn’t true).

Neither he nor Father would tell me how she was faring.

I spent all my days in the library, reading more and more and practicing as many repairs as I could on the mechanical insects and small machines that no longer interested Mother. I thought if I could only learn enough, only understand enough of her work, I could bring her back to health somehow. By fixing her machines, I hoped I could fix her, too.

But no one even let me see her.

One night, I crept up to her room. I needed to see her for myself, to see her sickness. . . . On some level I simply couldn’t bring myself to believe that she was seriously ill. She was too vibrant, too strong, for that.

The door to her room seemed heavier than usual when I tried to push it open. The hallway was oppressively dark, but a shifting red firelight flickered over me when I crept inside. Was the fire kept high to speed Mother’s recovery, perhaps to break a fever? I knew almost nothing about the symptoms of Fey’s croup.

I stepped futher in. A too-clean metallic smell filled the air, and suddenly my eyes were watering. There was the huge, red, roaring fireplace, and there was Mother’s old witchwood wardrobe. And there, across the room, shrouded in gray canopies, was Mother’s bed . . .

Over the roar of the fire, I couldn’t even hear her breathing.

Panic rose in my chest, and I flung myself not onto my sleeping mother, but back out the door and into the hall.

There was something terrible happening in that room. I knew Mr. Candery had been right to keep me away. Whatever it was, I couldn’t bear to face it. Sometimes I think I still can’t.

My memories of those last weeks splinter and scatter when I try to gather them up. The last weeks of Mother’s life.

It was the smoke, finally, that told me. Not Father, who never knew how to talk to me to begin with, and not Mr. Candery. I smelled it from the library, where I was resetting the season hand on Mother’s mantelpiece clock. It had been lagging a little in winter, though spring was fully come.

Then I turned and saw it, a dark calligraphy curling in through the open door: the wet, dirty smoke that comes from burning things that aren’t meant to burn. Metal smoke, oil smoke.

All Mother’s linens had been burned outside on the lawn that stretched between the back of the house and the beginning of the Woodshire Forest. That was clean gray smoke, cotton smoke, nothing like this.

I’m not sure how, but I knew. Right away, I knew the smoke was coming from the workshop. Perhaps it was the smell, oil and metal and coal, a perversion of the mechanic’s scent that always hung around Mother.

My body tensed, and I stood still for a long moment, my hand still stretched up to Mother’s clock. Then I ran.

I remember Mr. Candery there, in the cellar. Calm. Putting out the fire, now that its work was done.

Mother had taught me what to do with the different kinds of fires that might result from her experiments. She always said I had to learn how to be safe before I’d be allowed in the workshop.

I knew how to help him, and I did.

I did not think about what the fire must mean until afterward, when we had put it out, to stop it from consuming the rest of the house.

I did not understand until Mr. Candery wiped the soot and sweat from his blue-specked cheeks, his usually smiling face racked with grief.

He’d been burning Mother’s clothes and sheets for weeks, on Father’s orders, but all those things could be replaced. Burning the workshop could mean only one thing.

“It’s . . . she’s . . .” I couldn’t get the words out.

Mr. Candery opened his long arms, and he held me tight as I slumped against him.

He said nothing, but then, he had always been a quiet man.

F
ATHER
had grown quiet in the weeks leading up to Mother’s death, keeping to his new room and barely speaking. But now he was loud, with relief, I think, at his own survival—whether of the disease or of Mother herself I was not sure. He shouted every time he spoke.

I listened to him through a gray haze like smoke, thick in my chest and my eyes.

“We’re safe,” he crowed. “The worst is past. Nothing in the house can infect us now.”

He’d thought the whole workshop must have been rife with infection, and he’d had Mr. Candery burn it all. Mr. Candery then rebuilt and walled over the rest of the cellar, work he insisted on doing himself. From that day until my sixteenth birthday, I had thought Mother’s workshop was, like her, lost to me forever.

Sometimes the haze drifted away, and when it did, I knew Mother would want me to mourn her by learning from her. I couldn’t bear even to look at the cellar door, and I didn’t want Father to know that I still loved the work Mother had loved—he was sure she’d contracted her disease from “some Fey trifle” he’d brought her. Even my beloved clary-bush tea had been burned.

But those things didn’t mean that I stopped working. I still read her books that had escaped the fire, the ones kept in the library or that had happened to be in my room. She had taught me so much, even though I was only nine, and I taught myself more. Without her workshop supplies, I could not build new machines, but I could repair the little helpmeets that were left in the rest of the house. I had a small toolbox and several partially completed models that she had kept in the library to teach me, and I hid them from Father. I could do enough to keep learning.

In a burst of energy the night before Mother’s funeral, I stayed up until dawn removing, oiling, and replacing the series of pistons that operated the large linen-folding machine she had installed last year in an upstairs closet. It ran off of some of the excess heat and smoke that rose up the chimney, so I decided that the chimney needed cleaning as well. I knew that needed a spell, not a machine, so I trotted downstairs to open the secret cupboard in the kitchen, the one where Mr. Candery kept his Fey cleaners—the cupboard he thought I didn’t know about.

I knew it was there, even though I couldn’t see the seamless place Mother had built into the wall and Mr. Candery had disguised. I pressed my hand against it as I’d seen Mr. Candery do a few times when he thought I wasn’t looking. I waited for the metallic
pop
of springs that would precede the opening of the door.

Nothing happened.

I pushed harder, trying not to get frustrated. I knew it was the right spot, just to the left of a framed botanical illustration of silver orchid, one of Lady Candery’s discoveries in Faerie. I never knew what had become of Lady Candery; she hadn’t returned to Esting with the
Bridegroom
’s crew, and the one time I’d asked Mother, she’d dismissively said that she didn’t know.

Candery was a common name, especially among the part-Fey, but I always liked to think that Lady Candery was one of our housekeeper’s ancestresses, and that perhaps she shared his long, thin face and nose (though undecorated with Mr. Candery’s sprinkling of blue freckles), as well as his quiet and gentle demeanor. I imagined her strolling through the jungle and caressing each new blossom or leaf the same way Mr. Candery handled Mother’s finest Fey china.

This was the picture; this had to be the place. Maybe, I thought, I had to visualize it. I imagined the dusty bottles and jars and tins on their dustier shelves behind this hidden door, the slight glow of some, the way others seemed to suck away the light around them.

I pushed as hard as I could; still nothing. I slapped the wall in frustration.

There was a gentle coughing sound behind me. I turned and faced Mr. Candery, who was standing in his black nightclothes and cap with a glowing orb in his hand, watching me with a bemused expression.