Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion (11 page)

Charlotte…

“Hoy, Miss! You can’t…!”

Footsteps on the bridge now, but Angela was beyond any ability to respond. Cold metal dug into the flesh of her fingers, and the wind took her skirts and buffeted them around her, dragging at her, nudging at her thighs like an eager lover. She took a breath, closed her eyes, and stepped forward into empty air.

Death was white, and agonising cramps wracked her body. Her limbs were so heavy she couldn’t lift them. There were voices, but she couldn’t hear what they were saying. All was pain, blinding white light, the smell of heated copper in her nostrils, immobility fading once more into darkness…

Angela…

That had been her name, in the time before her death. She could feel something, a pressure on her chest, just below her left collarbone, and heard a voice with a strange metallic timbre. Could it be…?

Her lips moved, her raw throat worked, and she managed to whisper. “My Lord?”

There was a chuckle. “Hardly! Do you know where you are, Mrs Porter?”

“Am I… dead?”

“You were, for a few minutes. Can you remember what happened?”

“I was on the bridge…” Falling, the icy wind striking her face, ripping at her skin, her stomach in her mouth, the briefest vision of Clifton swirling end-over-end, scattered like a box of child’s bricks, wind, darkness.

“You’re very fortunate.” She blinked. She could see him now, this doctor who sounded so calm, so efficient. He was wearing a brown leather smock over his white coat, and he had a stethoscope slung around his neck and what looked like a hammer in one hand. He busied himself with the sheets that covered her, humming thoughtfully. “Oh yes, that’s good… The wind caught your skirts and they billowed out and slowed your descent. That saved your life. That and the fact that you hit mud at the bottom, rather than rocks. You’re a lucky woman.”

“Lucky…” She thought of Charlotte, of Howard, and she squeezed her eyes tight against the tears that burned there.

“We were able to save most of you.”

“Most of me?” She struggled against the invisible bonds that held her, suddenly desperate to sit up, to see what was left of her under the sheet.

“Yes.” The doctor coughed, rubbed his nose, apparently embarrassed. “You don’t have to worry about your other… little problem any more either, if you know what I mean. We’ve cured that too.”

Angela felt the heat rush to her face, tightening the skin across her cheeks. “You know about that?”

That had been the last straw, the thing that had finally sent her rushing out of the house that morning — this morning? A week ago? A month? — the letter from her doctor confirming that Howard had brought her an extra gift last time he came home from Rhodesia. The Frenchman’s Condition, they called it delicately, condemning her to years of discomfort, eventually insanity, and lingering death. She had had nothing to live for anyway, might as well make it quick. Then Howard would be free to live with his blackamoor molly-girl, and Angela would be with Charlotte.

And now this doctor, with his kind blue eyes and amiable chuckle, he knew her shame, the scandal of it. If she could have moved, Angela would have crawled under the sheet to escape his sympathy. She managed to choke out her thanks.

“Yes, well…” The doctor clapped his hands, suddenly all business once more. “It will take some time to get used to, I expect. The modifications… are you ready to see them?”

“Modifications?”

“There was a lot to fix.” He looked suitably humble. “I think we did the best job we were able to, under the circumstances. A lot of the procedure was experimental, so you must tell me if you feel any discomfort at all.”

He slipped an arm around her shoulders, helping her to sit up, and she coloured at the intimacy. Only Howard had ever held her this close, cheek to cheek, breath against her neck. Did he hold his molly as tightly as he had once held her? The sheet still covered her from the neck down, tight as a shroud, and she could see the swollen humps of her arms and legs beneath it.

The doctor withdrew, rummaged in the cupboard next to the bed, and poured Angela a snifter of brandy. She shook her head. “I never touch drink, doctor.”

“I thought you might need it, for restorative purposes.” He set the glass on the side table, just within reach. He reached for the sheet at her throat, and Angela closed her eyes, not wanting to see the mangled ruin of her body, or what the doctors had done to it. She felt the sheet sliding down over her torso, and the cold air brushing across her skin.

The doctor sounded proud. “You can look now, Mrs Porter.”

She looked. She looked down at her arms and legs. Where her arms and legs had once been. Her body, clad in a white vest to protect what little dignity was left to her, was human from the waist upwards. They had saved that much. Below the mess of scar tissue around the bottom of her ribs her skin was smooth again, but with the smoothness and sheen of copper and brass, of rivets and steel plate.

“Your legs should be perfectly functional. We tested them in the laboratory, on orphans…”

Angela barely heard him. She groped for the glass by instinct, her fingers clumsy and awkward, knocking it to the floor where it shattered. She looked down, at the spreading puddle of brandy, at the hand that had knocked it flying. Bronzed, riveted, two fingers and a thumb horribly elongated, pinched together in a tight metal claw.

It was then that Angela started screaming.

“Mrs Porter? Your husband is here…”

Angela had been staring out of the window. They had moved her from the hospital to a grand house in Hotwells. She could see the curve of the river from her barred window, but she couldn’t see the Suspension Bridge. She had been able to see it from the first room she was in, but her carers had moved her swiftly. They couldn’t stand the screaming.

Now she could see the grey snake of the river, and the ships shuttling backwards and forwards, carrying sugar and slaves and rum to and from the port, blowing steam from their funnels, paddle-wheels churning. They were steel and brass, riveted, like her. Only strong, and free.

“Tell him I don’t want to see him.”

“He’s very insistent.” But the nurse bobbed her head and withdrew. She could never look Angela right in the eye.

Howard would come up anyway, whether Angela wanted to see him or not. She sighed, smoothing her crinoline with her right claw, snagging the fabric and snipping a hole. The right claw was smaller than the left; they had done that last, when their technique was improving, but it was still clumsy, creaking and hissing when she opened and closed it, and it was hard to know how much pressure to apply to cups and glasses before they shattered.

In the two months since she left the hospital at Frenchay she had learned to do many things she thought would be impossible. Walking, swinging out her heavy jointed legs at the hips in a slow, straddling stride that left footprints three inches deep in the soft mud of the garden. Eating solid food, although she tried not to eat much because the disposal of waste through a series of tubes and bags was embarrassing and messy, and she had to have someone help her because her clawed hands tore through the sanitary linen like tissue paper. This morning she had managed to brush what was left of her hair, trying to conceal the metal plate that Doctor Charles told her was the only thing keeping her brains inside her skull.

Actually, yes, let Howard see her like this. He had brought her to this low, and the scandal if he left her would blacken his name from here to Bath. She sat, carefully, in the reinforced chair by the window that groaned under the extra weight, making sure the sun was behind her so that he would have to squint, and waited for his footsteps on the stairs.

The door swung open. He had lost weight, and hair, in the last six months, his tan skin drawn back over his cheekbones. He still wore his moustache in two pencil thin lines, one side, infuriatingly as ever, a trifle higher than the other. He twisted his top hat in his fingers, and cleared his throat. “Angela?”

“Howard.” Her voice was metallic. Under the fresh scar on her throat was an artificial voicebox. She had lost hers six weeks ago, to infection, but it was remarkable what the doctors could do. They were pioneers, and she was their new frontier. That was what Doctor Charles kept telling her, anyway. When she spoke, puffs of steam issued from the sides of her mouth, the way they did from her joints when she moved. Charles assured her it was just compressed air, shifting the pistons in her limbs, but she always thought of it as steam.

“My god! What have they done to you?” He swept into the room and dropped to his knees in front of her, reaching for a hand that wasn’t there. Behind him, in the doorway, Angela could see the nurse lurking with her hand pressed to her mouth. She glared, and the little woman vanished, closing the door behind her.

“She’s gone. You don’t have to pretend to be solicitous any more, Howard.”

He straightened at once, the false smile falling away to leave his habitual sneer. “You stupid woman! What did you jump off a bridge for?”

“You gave me a sickness, from your… from your Rhodesian whore!”

He stepped back, a wary look in his eyes. She never defied him. Always quiet, always willing. Even after she had fallen down the stairs carrying Charlotte and he had flung a bandage at her as he stepped over her on his way to the Seven Stars. Even after Charlotte had died four months later in St Michaels, of scarlet fever. Even after the Frenchman’s Condition condemned her to slow death. But she was different now. A changed woman.

“Can you walk?”

“I can. I’m not going to win any races, but I can get about.”

Howard came closer, his eyes widening as he digested the full horror of what his wife had become. Her claws twitched in her lap under the scrutiny, but she let him appraise her, touching the metal of her thighs through the cloth of her skirt, the steel plate that crowned the back left-quarter of her skull, the seams where her new arms met her old torso. He dropped back on his heels and let out a low whistle.

“At least you kept most of your face, I suppose. When are you coming home?”

“I’m not coming home.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Angela. You can’t live here for the rest of your life.”

“I want a divorce.”

Howard leapt to his feet with a snort of derision. “A divorce? Out of the question! Think of the scandal if I divorced you after you were crippled. Besides, I’ve decided to take a diplomatic post, and a divorce would ruin my chances.”