Mechanized Masterpieces: A Steampunk Anthology (28 page)

But a haunting pall draped itself across Hargreaves’ brow, shadowing his eyes and casting a grim atmosphere over his words. Something in the inventor’s manner made Ebenezer wary of the man.

They parted amicably enough, Hargreaves leaving an ornate visiting card with Ebenezer. Rose asked about the man and the boy when she returned to their booth.

“Who is he? And what does he mean, treating a child with such neglect? The boy shivered so. Why, his clothes had hardly enough stitching to be called garments.”

“He is an inventor, my darling. A man of science, he says,” Ebenezer replied. He turned the conversation away from Hargreaves, still feeling unsettled by the suspicions forming in his mind.

Ebenezer and Rose stayed together talking into the evening, until time came for Rose to help with closing up the house for the night. Ebenezer left with promises to return the following day, as he always did. He exited the warmth and went out into the chill London night. As he walked to his rooms, he slipped Hargreaves’ visiting card into his breast pocket, not knowing why.

Ebenezer had no dreams of employing Hargreaves’s device, not even when the first signs of Rose’s illness made themselves known. But when the doctor confirmed their worst fears, Ebenezer made the trip to Hargreaves’s home at the edge of the city.

They spoke in hushed tones over tea that Hargreaves poured from a battered silver service. Ebenezer took in the unkempt condition of the man’s parlour. The cold hearth. The dust laden mantle. Fearing he would be turned out for it, Ebenezer admitted to his own poverty, but the inventor seemed not to care.

“We will manage matters of finance as they come. For now, rest assured that I shall help should your wife’s condition prove as is feared.”

Despite his worry for Rose, Ebenezer found Hargreaves’ obsession harder still to swallow. “Why, Hargreaves? What prompts you to such toying with the Lord’s work?”

Hargreaves drew forth two tattered scraps of paper from the pocket of his waistcoat. On one, Ebenezer saw an image of the inventor standing next to a pregnant woman. On the other, he and a young child stared, as though entranced. Their eyes seemed to follow Ebenezer’s as Hargreaves held the images out to him with a shaky hand. The boy looked familiar. In the clothes of a street urchin, he would be the young lad Ebenezer saw with Hargreaves the day the gypsy accosted them both.

“Who are they? And what manner of trickery makes the pictures seem alive?”

“These are photoetchings, Scrooge. I had them made by a Frenchman, a fellow inventor of sorts. My wife and I spent summers on the Continent. Even in her condition, we traveled. A tradition, well, against the doctor’s advice, but one we kept then, and which I keep, still. At least, until very recently. This,” Hargreaves said, looking around the dismal parlour, “this is my only home now.”

Ebenezer knew the pain of loss as well as any man, and his ears resonated with the sorrow in Hargreaves’ voice.

“They were taken from me too soon, Scrooge. My wife, by seizures after our Robert was born, and the boy not some few weeks after my first meeting with you. I could not save them. My device was not yet ready. It could not . . . could not perform the task I’d set for it. I—”

Ebenezer sipped at his tea while Hargreaves regained his composure.

“I could not save them. But I will not see love stolen from you as it was from me. If your Rose should succumb, I will revive her. And death may go hunting for another sheaf!”

Ebenezer clawed through the final layer of earth, his fingers catching on the shroud that held his Rose. Hours after seeing her buried, he drove a horse-cart heaped with straw on top of Rose’s body to the old manor in east London. He rapped gently on the door in the pattern of knocks he’d been advised to use. Tap-tap RAP, tap-tap RAP.

Hargreaves opened the door, peering out at Ebenezer from behind a candle flame.

“You weren’t seen?”

“No,” Ebenezer managed. His voice shook around the word, as though he’d confessed to murder before a judge.

“Around the side of the house. Go. I’ll unbar the gate.”

Hargreaves had built a laboratory in an old carriage house. Ebenezer carried Rose’s body from the cart and, with Hargreaves’s help, laid her onto a rickety table in the middle of the room. Hargreaves wheeled a heavy iron cabinet out from the shadows. He opened it, revealing a wooden case with a seat built into it.

Together, they placed Rose’s body in the seat where she reclined in death, as cold as the iron jacket itself. Hargreaves arranged straps inside the cabinet to support Rose’s torso and limbs. Feeling a chill course through his bones, Ebenezer pulled his gaze from Rose’s face and cast his eyes about the room.

Thick curtains framed a threshold before the back of the room which loomed in ominous shadow beyond the heavy draperies. At the near end of the space stood two chairs of stout, dark wood. Bands of metal on the arms and around the back sat open on hinges, waiting to restrain a body seated there. Domed metal bonnets lurked above the chair backs on slender copper arms, hinged to an array of clockwork behind the chairs.

The mechanism linked into metal cabinets fastened on the near wall, beside the door. The cases bristled with pressure gauges and an array of softly illuminated dials, the whole appearing as if waiting for an infusion of energy to spring into life. Thick coils of copper wire sprouted from atop the housings, aiming towards a solitary gray iron post that hung suspended from the rafters.

From the top of the post ran several tubes of copper and one of gleaming brass. The copper pipes connected to more metal compartments along the far wall. These, too, waited quiet and cold. The brass pipe descended the far wall to a coupling that bridged it to a solitary metal box faced with a series of levers.

A scattering of spanners and cutting tools lay across a workbench beneath the box. A second branch of the brass pipe extended from the box and ran the length of the wall and to the rear of the space, ending at a hollow formed between two more workbenches.

 The whole brought to Ebenezer’s mind the great steam-works he had seen at the shipyards where his uncle had accompanied him the day prior. His future, he’d been told, lay in international commerce, and the future of trade lay in steam and its power to move great bulks up and down the Thames and out to the open sea. Ebenezer should have been a captain of those industries, like his father, rather than struggling to begin again as an investor. He took no delight from the irony that he might now be in a position to fund the very enterprises he once stood to inherit.

He shivered as the reality around him settled into his bones. There he stood, in a dusty carriage house. With his wife’s corpse strapped into an iron cabinet.

Studying his beloved’s cold, pallid face, Ebenezer begged, “Can you do it, Hargreaves? Can you bring my Rose back to me?”

“Of course,” Hargreaves said, dismissing his guest’s concern with a wave of his hand. Seeming to reconsider, Hargreaves turned a sympathetic gaze to Ebenezer. “I will do all I can. You must know I cannot make a promise in this matter. There is much to be done that I can and will do. And yet there remains much to learn, that I could not learn in time to save my wife and son. But, with the benefit of your investment, I may purchase the final pieces of equipment I require. And with hope, with luck, yes. Your Rose shall return to this life. Once again, you shall have her by your side.”

Hargreaves clasped a hand to Ebenezer’s upper arm as if the two were brothers setting out to make their fortunes together. A thin smile sought Ebenezer’s mouth, but it could not wrest his muscles from the grip of sorrow, and so he turned to leave the laboratory. He gazed one last time at Rose, his Rose, left in Hargreaves’ hands.

The inventor’s words stopped Ebenezer at the door. “You . . . you made the deposit, Scrooge? As you’d promised, yes?”

“Yes, Hargreaves. The money is in your hands.”

“Tomorrow then, Scrooge. Come after lunch. I doubt I will have made sufficient progress before then.”

Ebenezer nodded to confirm and left the laboratory without the benefit of the horse and cart. Hargreaves had needed the nag, he said, forcing Ebenezer to walk back to his rooms. He did so, hiding his soil-stained hands in his pockets like a commoner. And what better manner of appearance could he affect? Regardless of his newly gained wealth, was he not still a commoner himself? Stripped of connection to his family’s name, and for all intents, as empty of pocket as of heart.

Through the dank fog, Ebenezer stalked the empty streets of east London, a ghost among the mists, lost without the sun. Tomorrow, he told himself as he approached his rooms. Tomorrow would be a new day, and whatever may come of Hargreaves’s tinkering with God’s creation, Ebenezer Scrooge would begin tomorrow as a new man with a new station.

The next morning, Ebenezer stood outside his uncle’s townhouse looking up at the elegant façade. He took a deep breath and mounted the freshly scrubbed steps. The butler held the door for him and announced him as they entered the breakfast room.

“Ebenezer, my dear boy, have you breakfasted? Come, come, help yourself. The kidneys are quite fine today.” His uncle stood and vigorously shook his hand. Ebenezer tried to smile, but the chill, within and without, kept his face stiff and cold.

“My thanks, uncle,” he choked out. The thought of eating gagged him, but he helped himself to some tea and toast.

“How can you keep body and soul together eating like that? I suppose yesterday must have put you off your food. Sad business, that, but we must move on, eh?”

Ebenezer inhaled sharply at the reminder of Rose’s burial and unearthing, the loamy scent of freshly-turned soil filling his nostrils, and the feel of her cold, cold body in his arms as he laid her gently in the cart.

“Yes. We must move on, as you say. You mentioned a promising business venture in your note.”

“Indeed, indeed. An old friend of mine, his son has need of a partner. Well, he is in need of funds, but with those funds comes a partner—you. Young Marley is waiting for us in the drawing room. If you are done with your breakfast?”

Marley stood as Scrooge and his uncle walked into the drawing room. His frame dwarfed the delicate gilt and wood furniture and his hand engulfed Ebenezer’s.

“It is my pleasure to make your acquaintance, Scrooge! Your good uncle has been so kind and generous. My luck is sure to improve now that I have you by my side. I look forward to a long and prosperous partnership!” Marley’s booming voice filled the room. His smile was infectious and Ebenezer smiled back, the ice inside him thawing a little.

“Marley. I, too, look forward to a most prosperous partnership.” Ebenezer hoped neither his face nor his cool reply would betray the shock within his breast caused by the untoward announcement. This great blustering oaf of a man, his partner? But his uncle held the pen in this matter, Ebenezer knew. His own role was merely to be the ink.

With almost prescient grace, his Uncle Neville proclaimed the deal sealed. “Ah, good, good, then, it’s all settled. I’ll leave you two, must be off. Congratulations on the establishment of Scrooge and Marley. I bid you good day.”

Left alone, the new partners surveyed each other, Ebenezer, with a hint of suspicion, and Marley, composed, but still appearing unsteady within, as if ready to burst in another fit of bluster at any moment. Finally, Ebenezer pulled his checkbook from his pocket, flinching as the coat lining tore slightly.

“Shall I write you a bank check for my share of the partnership? My uncle has deposited funds into my account, so the money is there, despite my outward appearance.” Marley voiced agreement, an almost too-eager agreement, that the check be written promptly. Ebenezer thus took his time to print carefully before handing it over.

Marley examined the document and pursed his lips.

“Ah—I understood the sum to be higher, my dear Scrooge. Your uncle had promised more.”

“Yes, but you see, I have certain expenses that must be met from the sum he gifted me. That is all I have left, though ’tis still a princely sum. I trust this will not threaten our venture? I am sure I can invest the money elsewhere.”