Mechanica (18 page)

I couldn’t resist my amusement when Piety returned from Market with a satchel full of glass beads—my own handiwork, that I’d have recognized anywhere. She poured a dozen or so into her hand and held them up to catch the light—“Look how fine, Chas!”—and while Chastity and Stepmother ignored her, I hid my sniggering in the crook of my arm. When Piety shot me a cold look, I told her the beads were “very fine, indeed,” and I would happily sew them into her next gown.

I could produce a basic knitting machine, start to finish, in only an hour now. The beadwork went quickly too, and I began experimenting with finer glass craft: more intricate boxes and bowls, covers for my machines, and floral pendants. Thinking of the Steps’ Heiress fantasies, I created a delicate headpiece of clear glass, not quite a tiara, not quite a circlet.

I told myself I would sell it later, but I kept imagining myself at the ball, spinning in the arms of some dark-haired lover I wouldn’t let myself clearly picture, the headpiece twinkling in my hair and a full skirt swirling around me. It was a dream I knew my stepsisters often indulged. Could I not allow myself the same luxury?

My favorite dream, however, was still of the Exposition that would follow the ball. I worked on my masterpiece every night, leaving the creation of my Market wares for the days, when the Steps were gone. In between, I found myself smiling more and more, humming while I cooked breakfast, singing while I fetched wood.

I was singing to myself one night when I heard a knock at the cellar window. I jumped and squinted at the slat I’d put up to block any intruders—not that I needed to worry about the Steps, who minced from parlor to carriage to parlor, avoiding sunlight for the sake of their complexions. But I did worry about mice. Besides, the ombrossus oil was old, and I wanted to give it all the help it could get.

“Oy, Nick.” The voice was cheerful, young, female. Caro. “It’s only me.”

I sighed and pulled the slat down, revealing her smiling, plump face, gold curls escaping from that same red knit cap she’d worn the last time I’d seen her.

“Can I come in?” she asked. “I’ve grown devastatingly curious about your gigantic orders from Market. I had to come see your work for myself.”

I looked around at my cluttered desk and the walls covered in layers of sketches and notes. It always felt like something just teetering on a state of barely controlled chaos to me, but looking at it as I imagined she would, as someone who had never seen it before, I knew it must look interesting. Exciting.

“All right,” I said, and found that I was almost shy again. I hadn’t thought of myself as shy, in all the years I’d lived with the Steps. I had been forthright and talkative enough with Mr. Waters, hadn’t I? But it seemed with people my own age, I was nervous. I didn’t entirely like that about myself, but I wasn’t sure if there was anything I could do about it.

Then I realized there was a more pressing problem with letting Caro into the workshop than my reticence.

“If I can’t enter from inside, I have to go through the window . . .” I said carefully.

Caro examined the narrow window frame before her. “Well, there’s no way I’ll fit through there,” she said with an easy chuckle.

I smiled; I hadn’t known if I would offend her. If I’d implied there were some narrow space Chastity couldn’t fit through, she would have thrown a tantrum—and Chastity’s figure was not even as generous as Caro’s.

“Hmm.” I stood on tiptoe to look out the window at the sliver of dark sky I could see beyond her. Then I glanced back at the large cuckoo clock on the wall behind me, the one I had unearthed only a week ago. Mother had built it full of nesting mechanical birds, and they tweeted and chattered with no regard for any particular time.

“The Steps are in bed, but I’d like to wait a bit longer to be sure they’ve gone to sleep,” I said. “Can you wait until midnight?”

Caro rapped a bag she kept at her side, which made a flat, wooden sound. “I’ve my book here,” she said. “I can wait forever and be just fine—got the whole night off. Right near had to beg Cousin Louisa to cover for me, but she owed me the favor—well. I’ll tell you the story when I get in.” She glanced back toward the forest. “Shall I come tap on the window again?”

“No, I’ll come out to you, and then I can sneak you in.”

She nodded, another curl escaping from her cap. I glimpsed her brown skirts and boots for a moment, and then she was gone.

I looked around the workshop again, and decided a bit of cleaning triage was in order before I had my first-ever guest. I shuffled the papers on my desk into some semblance of neat stacks, grabbed a dustpan and collected the tiny grommets that had fallen onto the floor, and poured them back into the little tin storage box where they belonged.

Then I went back to the furnace room and finished welding the needles to my newest sewing machine. After that, just over half an hour had passed, and I supposed the Steps must surely be deep asleep. I took my coat and crept up the cellar stair, into the hallway. All was still.

I opened a disguised servants’ door in the hall, covered in the same simply patterned paper as the walls—after Mother’s death, Father had covered over the Fey wallpapers she had loved so much, the ones with flowers that grew and faded to match the seasons—and slipped into a narrower, plainer hallway, this one with bare wooden walls. From there, it was a quick journey out the back of the house and across the snow-covered lawn.

I thought I would have to walk all the way to the Forest Queen’s ruins before I would find Caro, but she was perched on a low-hanging tree branch just at the edge of the forest. The snow that had accumulated on the branch was swept into neat little drifts on either side of her, and she sat with her back curved and one hand under her chin as she read, utterly intent on her book. It was a bulky pink volume, and the title—stamped in black on the cover, in a fanciful font—simply read
Stories.

“Caro?”

It seemed she didn’t hear me; her brown eyes continued to flicker over the words, and she chewed her bottom lip. She was entranced.

“Caro?” I repeated, a bit louder. “It’s midnight; you can come inside now, if you like.”

She looked up then, finally, startled. Her eyes widened, and the book slipped in her hand.

“Oh! Hullo, Nick, I’m sorry,” she said. “I just go some other place when I read, I guess.”

I smiled at her. “I’m the same way,” I said, “though I don’t get to read much but engineering texts these days, and my mother’s old journals. The Steps took most of my books away years ago.”

Caro’s mouth twitched; the sympathy in her eyes was far deeper than I had anticipated. “Goodness. I’ll bring you more novels from Market, then. There’s a traveling peddler due back next week who sells wonderful books.” She tapped the one she held before earmarking its page and stuffing it back in her patchwork bag. “I must’ve read this twenty times already, but they’re some of my favorite stories from when I was small. Just silly little things—what people used to call Faerie tales before the quarantine. Magic stories. You can’t get much magic in stories anymore—but I can lend you this one for a bit, if you like. It’s that good.” She pulled the book from her bag again and held it out to me.

I knew it was a dangerous offer, a sign of trust. I felt sure she and I would like the same books. I took it happily and tucked it under my arm.

She smiled fondly at it. Then her eyes narrowed as she looked at me, though they never lost their good humor. “Just be sure you give it back, now.”

I made my face as serious as I could and crossed my heart. “I swear it,” I said, as if I were vowing knighthood. “I shall defend it with my very life and treat it most reverentially until I return it to your ladyship.”

She giggled. “Oh, no need for reverence,” she said. “You’ll see I’ve folded and unfolded every page in there to mark my place, and written in it too. Books are meant to be well-loved. So long as I can still read it when I get it back, you can be a bit rough with old
Stories,
if you like.”

I grinned; we understood each other still better than I’d thought. “I do the same to my books,” I said. “Nothing like a good argument in the margins with someone who’s already said all they have to say on the subject.”

She nodded, smiling broadly, and we set off across the lawn together.

I took Caro in through the servants’ entrance, and together we crept through the night-dark hall to the cellar door.

“I didn’t want to take a candle in the halls, lest Stepmother see us,” I explained, “but I have some stashed at the bottom of the stairs. The treads are uneven; you’ll need to be careful. Just put your hand on my shoulder, and I’ll go down first—you’ll feel how to follow.”

“All right,” Caro whispered in assent. Then she giggled quietly and said, “I’m not worried about your Steps, you know. They don’t scare me.”

I laughed a little bit, wishing I could say the same. Soon, I hoped.

I opened the cellar door and felt her gentle touch at my back.

We crept down the stairs together, our steps in perfect tandem. At the bottom, I tapped Caro’s hand. She let go, and I fetched my candlestick. Her eyes and hair glinted in the flickering new light. I took out my key.

As the door began to ratchet its way open, I heard her catch her breath. “Oh!”

I grinned, remembering my own wonder when I had first discovered that entrance. If the door alone impressed her, I thought, I could have faith in the workshop to carry the day.

Inside, Caro kept darting around the room, looking first at a pinned-up diagram, then the huge tome on my desk that was spread open to some particularly long and obscure-looking formulae, then to a large metal sheet I’d leaned against the far wall, where she saw herself reflected back in absurd lines and whorls, her beaming, pretty face distorted past recognition. Then she approached the cuckoo clock, and as she did, one of the starlings popped out of its perch and tilted its head at her curiously. It cooed and ruffed its metal feathers, and Caro lifted a cautious finger to it, then glanced back at me.

“Can I?” she asked.

I shrugged, then nodded.

“I mean—is it safe?”

“They won’t hurt you.” I started to smile.

Caro stroked one careful finger along the bird’s head. It cooed again, then warbled and nuzzled against her finger.

“Oh!” she cried. “Oh, Nick, it’s lovely!”

I laughed, glad she wasn’t frightened, glad she understood.

Envious of the attention she gave the starlings, I supposed, one of the beetles buzzed up to her, hovering goldly in front of her face before perching on her shoulder. A dragonfly looped past them, the red glass in its wings glittering in the workshop’s gaslight.

I felt a small twinge of jealousy, for a moment, that Caro received a warmer welcome from the menagerie than I had. I’d had to find Mother’s animals; they flocked to Caro as if she were a shepherdess.

“Nick.” Caro turned back to me, stroking a caterpillar that had nestled in a coil in her palm. “This is wonderful. Remarkable. If I didn’t know better, I would say these things—this place—are full of magic.”

I laughed, and the sound was harsher than I expected. “Magic?”

Her smile faded and she nodded, somber again.

I set my mouth and nodded back. “Yes, at least a little. I know it’s not quite legal, but, well—I can’t bring myself to think there’s anything really wrong with it either. At least not with this sort of magic.”

“Of course not,” she said firmly. “And you should see all the little spells we use in the servants’ quarters, even at the palace. King Corsin hasn’t scrubbed the place of magic half so well as he’d like to think.”

I was intrigued, and I knew it showed on my face. “Magic at the palace? Really?”

“Oh, certainly.” Caro laughed. “Just yesterday my cousin Jamie nearly got caught with it. He was polishing some silver, you see, which isn’t the worst work, but long and monotonous, and just the kind of thing an eight-year-old boy would hate to do and would be trusted with, too. Crystal, for instance, is prettier, but the children will break it, sure as I stand here. Anyway, Jamie’s friend Mell told him about this spell she’d been using to clean some of the copper at the stables, and Jamie figured it could help him speed up the silver cleaning. He said just the words he’d been told, but the metals are different, of course, and the silver turned green—just as green as you please. He had to scrub twice as hard and twice as long as before to get the color out, and he was up long past his bedtime too . . . or he would have been, if some of the other cousins hadn’t stepped in to help him. We’ll all have green fingers for the next week, I swear it.”

She wiggled her hands at me. Indeed, the pads of her fingers were stained a weird, mottled green.

I laughed, and so did she. “It was kind of you to help him,” I said. “If I’d made a mistake like that when Mother was teaching me something, she’d have had me clean it all up myself, no matter how long it took, just to be sure I’d learned the lesson.” I paused. “She wasn’t cruel, though. Just—she wanted me to learn.”

Caro nodded, but the way she looked at me made me feel almost uncomfortable, as if I were being disloyal to Mother. “It’s just the way of things up at the palace,” she said. “So many of us, and someone always getting into scrapes. If we don’t look out for each other, who will?”

“Who will?” I repeated. I didn’t know, really.

Caro walked over and squeezed my hand, then pulled me over to the desk. “Now, I want to hear all about everything you’re doing,” she said.

I found my throat had caught, and I took a breath. “Well, I’ve been working on the knitting machines a lot,” I said. “They’re the first things I’ve been able to make entirely by myself. I’ve been making repairs in the house for years, working out of the kitchen and the servants’ quarters, but I didn’t find the workshop until my birthday, back in the autumn. Everything my mother did started here. She made machines too—especially sewing machines, things like that. She said she had no talent for what she called feminine handicrafts, so she wanted to make machines that did. That’s what gave me the idea for my knitting machine. I’m a little bit better at sewing and things than she was, I think, but not by much. I wanted to try to give myself a way out of the chores I like least—a bit like Jamie and the silver polish, I suppose. I haven’t turned anything green yet, though.”