Mechanica (5 page)

“I—I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean—”

“Didn’t mean to wake me, or didn’t mean to prowl around my cabinets?” he asked quietly. “If it’s the latter, I must say I disagree. You certainly did mean it.”

I blushed and wondered if I would be punished . . . but then I saw that he was smiling.

“You are most welcome to prowl,” he said. “It’s only healthy in a child your age, and I’m delighted to see you do anything healthy these days. Here, let me assist you.”

He stood beside me and placed his long, blue-spotted hand over mine. His skin was very warm.

“Allow Nicolette Delacourt Lampton,” he murmured, “if you please.”

I heard a pop and a whir, and the door to the cabinet opened.

“I was just looking for chimney powder,” I muttered, embarrassed. “I knew I oughtn’t to have—”

“It’s all right.” Mr. Candery smiled at me. “It’s for the house’s use that I keep these things, of course. It’s really your father who—well.” He shook his head slightly, and his smile faded. “I’m glad you can use these things, in fact, Miss Lampton. I think they may serve you well in the future.”

He pressed the shaker of chimney powder into my hand and closed the cabinet door again; it faded into the pea-green-painted wall. The orb he carried quenched in his grasp, and he walked away.

I wanted to ask him why he thought these things would come in handy; I’d once read that some of the Fey, even part-Fey, could occasionally tell the future.

But what my future could be now, without Mother, I didn’t think I wanted to know. Besides, I thought Mr. Candery probably meant only that I might find a use for the chimney powder again.

I soon did; it seemed the chimney’s heat powered many of Mother’s helpmeets. But much as I enjoyed fixing what she had left behind and treasured the inventions themselves, I valued her library’s books most of all. I never took them out of the room, for fear that Father would notice, not that he came home much after Mother’s funeral. He wasn’t interested in anything but trade now, especially since his most lucrative business, Mother’s insects, was gone along with her. With King Corsin declaring ever-increasing tariffs on international trade, he struggled just to get by. I knew that if I had been older and had not needed looking after while Father was away, Mr. Candery would soon have been gone as well.

Neither of my parents had been eager hosts; now, with Father so often absent, no one ever visited. It was only Mr. Candery and me. Lampton Manor began to run a little wild . . . and so did I. The furniture grew faded and old-fashioned; the windows warped. I forgot all my studies but Mother’s books, and I lost the few acquaintances I’d had among the local children, the manor hidden away behind the Woodshire Forest as it was.

I became not a finished or educated young lady in any sense that Father would recognize, but educated far beyond my years in my own way. I read everything else in the library that interested me—mostly explorers’ biographies and histories of Faerie. Between the books and Mr. Candery’s stories, I fell in love with the very idea of the place.

My favorite thing about the Fey was their families; perhaps that was because of Mr. Candery, who felt as much like family as anyone I’d known. The books said the Fey thought of family differently than we did: they lived with friends instead of with a spouse and children. If a group of them wished to have a child, they all decided together who would bear it, and together they willed or wished—the translations differed—the child into being. Their rulers were Fey that everyone in the whole country had wished into existence together; they had traits and parentage from everyone they ruled.

When Estingers came to Faerie, they found that the same thing happened: if a human and a Fey both longed for a child together, soon one or the other would find themselves pregnant. This baffled the Estinger scientists who wrote about it, and their descriptions were filled with condemnation.

The historians who wrote about the Fey described this as a kind of savagery too, but I loved it. I wanted to believe that there were friends who loved each other enough to live together, to be families together. That the love between friends could create life too, just as romantic love could in Esting. I wanted to believe in such a family.

So when Father came home from one of his trips to tell me he was engaged to a woman with two daughters, I was thrilled. I thought I’d found the sister-friends I had dreamed of, the kind with whom I could make a new family.

It had not taken Father long to remarry—but, he explained to me, he didn’t have much of a choice.

“We would be on the streets soon enough without the Halvings,” he told me, pulling me onto his knee. I was ten years old then, and Father hadn’t held me in years. He spoke as if he were addressing a small child, and I had to tell myself not to squirm away from him.

“Lady Halving will provide for me—for us both—and that’s not nothing. Her love, and her money, might just be enough to get us back on our feet.” He sighed. “And she is beautiful. My God, I never thought I could catch such a one. You’ll see, Nicolette. It’s nigh impossible not to love her on sight.”

I spent months anticipating that love, waiting impatiently for Lady Halving and her daughters to arrive.

The day of the wedding, I was breathless and nervous. I couldn’t stop my gloved hands from trembling.

I didn’t see them until the ceremony, which was small and simple, it being both Father’s and Stepmother’s second marriages. Piety, Chastity, and I were the only ones there with them, besides the Brother who performed the ceremony. Stepmother had dressed beautifully and modestly for the occasion, in a high-necked gray silk dress with a long line of tiny buttons down the back. She wore a simple headpiece, too, with a gauze veil that covered her face and tucked snugly under her chin. It was pinned in such a way that Father could not lift it, though at first he tried; in the end, he kissed her through the veil.

My new stepsisters, though, were opulent—that was the only word I could think of, watching them. They both wore elegant green dresses, Piety’s the color of moss, Chastity’s of unripe apples. They were beautiful girls, and from the moment I saw them, I was consumed with a longing . . . not to be them, precisely, but to learn from them. Their hair was shiny and curled; Mr. Candery and I barely managed to keep mine brushed. My dress, too, was nothing compared to theirs, a simple beige cotton Stepmother had sent me. I had appreciated the gesture, thrilled over it, even; but the color did not suit me, nor the cut. Watching my new sisters made me feel, for the first time, that I was plain.

Father and Stepmother left for their honeymoon directly after the wedding, and Piety and Chastity still had the rest of the year at their finishing school in the city, so I didn’t get to have my new family quite yet. Instead, I went back to my solitary life at Lampton Manor with Mr. Candery.

I buzzed with energy for that month, fixing every insect I could get my hands on and helping Mr. Candery with anything he asked of me. My most special joy, though, was arranging the two adjoining guest bedrooms that would become Piety and Chastity’s suite.

I agonized over how to decorate their rooms, what would please them best. I hung dried flowers in the corners for scent and color, and I fitted everything up with the little conveniences I’d learned to build with Mother: a lever by the heavy closet door opened it for them; a crank turned the vanity mirror so they could see themselves from different angles; a rotating wheel in the dresser moved their clothes so they could reach all of them easily. I even placed a simple clock of Mother’s on one bedside table. It was a way to connect my old family with my new.

After the rooms were finally ready, with weeks still left before my new family would arrive, I started spending my time there, curled against the wall with whichever book I was reading that day. I would look up from the huge pages with their dense lines of tiny text, and I would picture Piety, Chastity, and myself lying on the floor together, reading to each other or inventing stories of our own. Those rooms were the site of so much imagined friendship; I was sure the reality would only be sweeter. I felt I could not wait for it a moment longer.

As it turned out, I did not have to wait long. They arrived at Lampton a full week before they had planned.

I was in the library when Mr. Candery told me my new family was home. I bounded to the sitting room in a joyful dither.

When I saw them, though, I stopped and stood still, and only stared.

Stepmother’s face, though still lovely, was thin and strained. The lines around Father’s mouth were deeper than they had been even a few weeks earlier, and he glanced around nervously, his gaze never resting anywhere for more than a few seconds. He paced the room, while Stepmother sat in the alcove and stared out the window.

They were frightened. I did not know why, but I could see that much.

Piety and Chastity were not with them.

“I always knew this would happen,” Father muttered, shaking his head.

Stepmother nodded, her hand at her throat. “I know it, William. The Fey are not to be trusted; the Brethren have been telling us so for years. For centuries.”

“Aye,” said Father. “It was only a matter of—” He turned and saw me standing in the doorway. He rushed to me and swept me up in his arms—something he could barely do anymore, now that I was getting so tall. But he never seemed to notice that I grew.

Besides, he seemed to enjoy adding some drama to our reunion. “Nicolette, darling,” he said.

Only Mother had called me darling before.

“I’m so glad you’re safe.”

I pushed back to look into his face, frowning. “Why wouldn’t I be safe?”

He shook his head and put me down. “We have something to tell you girls.” His eyes flicked toward Stepmother, then out the door. “Get your stepsisters, won’t you?”

I had assumed Piety and Chastity were still at school. I hadn’t seen them since the wedding, where they had kept to themselves, whispering and giggling. I had waved then and tried to smile through my shyness, but had not quite been brave enough to approach them.

Even though I was still nervous, I trotted eagerly back upstairs and knocked on their door. I could hear my own quick heartbeat.

I heard that giggling again too, coming from inside. At my knock, it silenced.

“Who is it?” one of them called. That voice’s especially dulcet tones, I would later learn, were Chastity’s; Piety’s voice was always a little thinner than her sister’s.

“Your sister,” I called through the door, unable to keep the smile from my face or my voice. “Father wants us all to come to the sitting room.”

The door opened. Piety and Chastity stood there, shoulder to shoulder, though Piety was shorter.

“Sister?” said Piety. “Who’s that?”

“I think Nic-co-lette means herself,” sighed Chastity, drawing out the syllables of my name until they sounded absurd.

“Oh.” Piety smirked. “Goodness me, I didn’t know who she meant. I think one sister is quite enough, don’t you?”

Chastity lifted one dainty foot and kicked Piety in the shin. “Yes,” she said, her voice cruel, and her sister winced and pressed her shin against her other leg.

“All right, Nic-co-lette, we’ll come down,” Piety grumbled.

I stepped back, intending to hold the door open for them. They pushed past with such force that it knocked against me, leaving what would ripen into a bruise on my arm.

I thought I should probably follow them downstairs right away, but I couldn’t resist looking into their rooms first. I was dying to know how they had nestled themselves in with the decorations and arrangements I had made for them.

But the rooms were not as I’d left them. The dried flowers I had so carefully arranged were crushed into dustbins. The levers I’d made for their mirrors were pulled out, screws scattered on the floor. They had thrown open the dresser, but the rotating wheel was wrenched out—to make more room for all their clothes, it seemed, which even that huge dresser could not contain. Several more trunks, and hat- and shoeboxes by the dozens, littered the room. Stuffed animals cluttered the bedspreads Mr. Candery and I had chosen from the attic; the little embroidered pillows from Grandmother’s time were strewn on the floor. Mother’s clock was nowhere to be seen.

And the books I’d left for them were in a pile next to the fireplace, splayed open, pages crumpled. I rushed forward to gather them up. There wasn’t even one that hadn’t had a page ripped out already. And in the fire I saw a few smoldering scraps of green leather, of the board that went underneath it, and I knew that some of the books were already lost entirely. I knelt at the hearth, and before I could stop myself, I reached into the fire to gather up a few of those scraps. Of the books, at least, I would save whatever I could.

My eyes stung—from the smoke, I thought. Even kneeling by the fire with ashy, blistered fingers, torn-up books in my lap, I lectured myself that I shouldn’t make too much of what Piety and Chastity had done. If I had moved somewhere new, I told myself, I would have wanted to make it my own too.

But I was ten years old, and lonely, and preparing my new sisters’ rooms had become my special delight. I had spent so much time there, dreaming of them, making the rooms just the way I would want my new room in my new house to be, if our places were reversed.

I was embarrassed to find tears pricking at my eyes. I closed the door and started down the stairs to rejoin Father. It was only that they didn’t know, I told myself. They couldn’t have guessed that it was I who had done all of that for them.

I walked back to the sitting room. Piety and Chastity had settled together on the love seat at the far side of the room. Father was still pacing; Stepmother was still perched on the window seat. I took the brocade-backed chair near the fire, the one Mother used to sit in. It felt much too big for me.

“All right, children,” said Father. “We have to tell you something.”

Piety and Chastity looked to Stepmother. I kept watching Father.

“You thought we would be gone another week or so, I know,” he said. “I hope that at least you are glad to see your parents home so soon.”