Mechanized Masterpieces: A Steampunk Anthology (4 page)

“When I trust you within five thousand miles of my family, we will go to England, but not a day sooner.” My voice sounded cold and flat.

“Trust me?
Trust
me?! You are a monster—a horrid, beastly monster!”

“Better to say an ape.”

She started at the words and glanced up at me. I stared at her blandly. She rose and went to the sideboard. She feigned concealing a fit of tears, but I knew it a ploy to add rum to her orange juice. My mind filled with images of my brother sharing his morning with the polar opposite of my angel wife. I jabbed my fork into the fish on my plate.

The tines hit something hard and screeched across the china. The exposed and torn gut glinted in a stray shaft of sunlight. Dumbfounded, I stared at the mess.

Bertha returned to her seat, glass in hand, once again the very image of a model wife. I carefully slit open the fish’s gut and spooned out the innards.

“That really is the best part, you know,” Bertha instructed, her cheeks pouched with gobbets of her own mackerel. “After the eyeballs, of course.”

I scraped away the offal, and there it was: Yvette’s pendant, chain and all. It felt as if the sun burst free of heavy clouds the moment I laid eyes on it. A freshening breeze cleared the cobwebs from my mind. I could breathe again. I still tumbled in unforgiving surf, but I thought, perhaps, I could at last get my feet beneath me.

“What is that, my love?”

I blinked, brought back to reality by the face beaming devotion from across the table. I pushed the crystal out of the sunlight with my fork. “Nothing. Just a bit of rock I found in the fish.”

Bertha rose, her eye fixed on the stone. “A gift from the sea! A jewel, Fairfax. Let me see it.” She reached for the plate, but I withheld it and picked out the stone.

“No, Bertha. It is indeed a gift from the sea and I mean to keep it.”

She eyed first me, and then my fist wrapped around the gem. Had she been a cat, her hackles would have stood on end. Her tail would have been a bottle brush. “Give it to me, Fairfax,” she hissed. “I must see it. You do not understand the portents!” She lunged for my hand and fought uselessly to wrench open my fist. “Crystals possess great power!”

“I understand more than you ever will, my darling wife. And, just now, you come precious close to rousing my temper. Now sit down and finish your breakfast.”

My tone brought her up short. I held her gaze, implacable and threatening. She released my arm and retreated to her seat. Wide-eyed, she stared at me as I slipped the crystal into my breast pocket.

“What is that?” Her voice came low and sinister, and it seemed all the shadows in the room collected about her.

Startled, I followed the direction of her glare to where I had been absently twisting Yvette’s ring around my finger. I stared at it, baffled—and not—that I had not jettisoned it with the crystal when she broke my heart. Rather, it felt as if the weightless trifle had become part of my soul, and nearly my flesh.

“It is from her!” Bertha’s wrath exploded with the crystal and china as she flew at me from across the table, her claws bared and aiming for my eyes. “That pasty little bitch you mooned over for so long! That whore who cannot bear the sight of your ghastly face!”

I grappled with her as she clawed at me. Despite her size and surprising strength, I quickly pinned her, prone, her head to the floor with one hand, and her wrist to her spine with the other. I bore down my weight into the middle of her back with my knee, her face pressed into the tiles.

“Heed me, woman,” I hissed into her ear. She struggled to free herself and clouded the air blue with invectives to make a stevedore blush. I pressed her more firmly into the ground.

“Calm down, Bertha.” As I waited, I forced my temper into better control. She exhausted herself in her struggle, but at last, I felt her cede to my greater strength and lie still. I released her and sat upon the floor. Her face purple, gulping down great droughts of air, she pushed herself up onto her haunches, murder glinting in her eyes. Her rage throbbed in her jugular.

“Here we are, wife,” I sighed. “You and I, the very picture of blissful domesticity . . . Howsoever we came to this pass, what do we do with ourselves now? A vexing conundrum indeed.” She merely glared at me, wild-eyed and feral.

I leaned my elbows on my knees and watched her attempts to regain control. I could not accept the ruin before me as the sum total of my life. I refused to surrender to that fate.

“As my lawful wife, you are duty-bound to obey me. Thus, I will tell you our course of action. You have only to listen and obey.”

I rose to my feet, brushed myself off, and stepped away. I prayed for wisdom, guidance—the smallest inspiration to help me salvage something of that farce. I formulated a plan on the fly.

“We will stay on Jamaica. For now, we will stay at West End. Daughter of a common tradesman you may be, but now, there is nothing for it. You are also the wife of a gentleman. Ladies of your station have no truck with the day labor. You will not traipse through the cane fields like a naked pickaninny. Julian and Josie have left our employ. Starting today, I will engage and discharge our domestics. When you—”

“You cannot—”

“You will
not
interrupt me. When you have earned my trust, when I believe you honestly wish a proper marriage—”

“A proper marriage?! You wear that ring and dare—”

“You
will
remain silent!” I paused, waiting for her to clamp her tongue. I must have appeared the devil himself, for she retreated.

“When you conduct yourself as a proper wife should,
and
I trust your intent, we will take a house at Spanish Town. But you will earn it. With your obedience, your manners, your attempts at civility, your adherence to the rules of common decency. Do you understand me?”

“You cannot hold me prisoner here.”

“Indeed, I cannot. You are free to do whatsoever you like, go where you wish, but I control your purse strings. You have already made me a cuckold. I will
not
allow it to continue. I
will
govern my wife.”

“I have my fortune. I do what I like!”

“No, my sweet one.
I
have your fortune. All thirty thousand pounds of it.”

“You cannot—”

“Yes, I can. I will—unless, of course, you choose to return to your father’s house. In that case, I will willingly, gladly, dance my way to the solicitor’s and sign over every last pence with the divorce decree.”

“Never! I am a Rochester!”

“Indeed. Then, I suggest you convince me you can act like one.” I walked away but paused at the door. I turned to her. “I received a letter from Heinrich Rottstieger this morning. He wishes us both joy—”

“You
told
him?”

“He writes to inform me he extends his stay in England. Our partners building the engine manufactory find they need him on site. I rather imagine he will stay there indefinitely. He tells me he feels younger—lighter—than he has in more than a year.”

She rose to her feet. Blood had smeared across her face. I almost felt a twinge of guilt to see the minor cuts the glass had inflicted—almost.

“I do not divorce you now, Bertha, because I made vows before God and I mean to retain what honor yet remains to me. Blame my silly English conscience. You are my responsibility.

“I am fool enough to suppose that with time and care—and a great deal of determination—we two can nurture this marriage into something akin to love, or at least respect. Perhaps we could even achieve a measure of happiness. Decide now which you will have: keeper and kept or husband and wife.”

Her face contorted with bitter derision. “Grunts the ape.”

“As you see.” I again turned to the door.

“Do not come to me tonight, Fairfax. The thought of your touch revolts me.”

“Indeed, madam, you need not fear me scratching at your door.” I produced the crystal and tossed it in the air. It flashed brilliance before it landed in my hand. “Shackled together we may be, but I am free.”

I left the room. The shriek of rage and shattering china that blasted on the door as I shut it evoked a bitter smile.

Advance nearly five years. In the cloying heat of a sweltering tropical summer, I sat at my desk in a puddle of light, the clatter and roll of my calculations machine and the clock on the wall breaking the silence of night. The hollow sound of footsteps on the wooden stairs did not slow my work, but I looked up when the latch turned and the door swung open. I stared at the nebulous shadow, back-lit by dim bulbs high in the hangar, until it moved into the light.

“So, you finally made it, then.”

“Rough passage. I cannot believe you enjoy flying.”

“A storm is brewing, isn’t it?”

“Even so.”

“I cannot believe that as well-traveled as you are, you still have difficulty with it.”

“She always preferred the railroad.”

“Airships would have been kinder.”

“In some ways.”

We fell silent. Stared at one another through the darkness. The sound of my chair scraping across the floor made him jump.

“You look like hell.”

“And you don’t. How is that?”

I shrugged. “Heavy labor. One gets on.” I extended my hand, Rowland grasped it, then pulled me into his embrace. I stiffened, but just for a moment. In all my life, he had never demonstrated such affection. I chose not to analyze it and took comfort where I found it—the comfort we both needed, desperately.

“I promised her we would not quarrel,” he choked into my shoulder.

“And we shall not.” I thumped him on the back and released him.

“Fairfax . . .” he stammered. Words would not come. His eyes flitted about, and if they managed to settle on my face, they rose no higher than my chin. The tension in his jaw and pooling tears further emphasized the storm of sensibilities roiling within him. I watched him expectantly, and he produced from his breast pocket a fat packet of letters bound up in a bit of ribbon.

He laid them upon the desktop. My heart leapt to my throat. The entire year of my correspondence to Yvette appeared worn from much perusal but carefully preserved. “I found them,” Rowland murmured. “After she— . . . She kept them in her writing desk. I thought . . . I thought you might want them back.”

I swallowed hard. “Did you read them?”

Rowland shook his head, almost in a panic. “No. Never. She was so good to me, but I made a wretched husband. She deserved the comfort these letters gave her. I did things . . .”

My head jerked up. “Do not make me your confessor. Let me believe you made her happy. Leave me with my delusions and I shall leave you with yours.”

Rowland nodded his agreement, swallowed hard, and blinked back a tear. I deposited the letters in the safe. “If you will wait just a moment, I need to get these papers ready for the packet for London.” I nodded toward the window looking into the hangar. “Fancy a tot? Or have you had enough on the trip over?”

Rowland snorted and moved to the étagère. “Light?”

“The lamp’s electric—there at the base.”

His nightcap forgotten, Rowland flipped the switch like a toddler. “Fancy that. Electricity? Here?”

“I’ve worked up a magneto—no steam; only a sunlight-dynamo array and wind-power. It will power Spanish Town and Kingston both with the cable run.”

Rowland’s brow twitched as he processed the idea, then redirected his attention to the range of bottles and carafes on the étagère. “I wish Father would have lived to see this.” He held his snifter before the light, and the liquid glowed like molten gold. “The best rum to be had. He would have been proud.” He snorted. “He would have been rich . . .
er
.”

“ ‘Anything doing is worth doing right.’ . . . How
is
Herr Professor?”

“Well . . . Heartbroken. She was light, Fairfax. She was heaven on earth—an angel—a pure angel. Everyone loved her . . . She wanted a child so badly.”

I pretended not to hear Rowland’s morose self-indulgence. I tried not to blame my brother; I knew firsthand Yvette’s determined nature, but three miscarriages in four years exceeded all decency. The fourth time . . .

He should have left her be. He should have loved her enough to deny her. He should have . . . something—not allowed her to die . . . not had a hand in her death.

“Those are sinister-looking things. What the devil are they?”

I looked up. Rowland waved his snifter at the window. Below, a dozen eight-foot behemoths lurked in the dark, ranked along one side of the hangar floor. “My new automatons—an improvement on steam-driven mechanoids. Mine are made of the same material as our airships. I made them to harvest the cane.”

“Still working on them, eh?”

“No. I just can’t use them. With the unrest in Haiti, it is not wise.”

“Why the devil not? It looks like one of those would replace five human workers.”

“Ten, actually. But, I refuse to force that many men out of work. Haitians are starving for lack of employment. The oppression there is terrible. The French use their mechanoids to literally crush any uprising. The colonists will be murdered in their beds one day. I will not have it spread here. Until I have other jobs for the men, I will not use the automatons.”