The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (38 page)

“Damn! Go up to the roof, Divya!” I shouted. “Hop over to the next building if you can!”

Elijah leaped onto the fire escape and ascended the steps, while two more policemen appeared in the alley.

As Divya climbed the rusty ladder, I feared the aged rungs would break off in her hands. The overweight policemen huffed up the stairs slowly; I would not let them catch her. I looked back inside the attic. My crawlers stared mindlessly at me. I quickly turned their control knobs to ‘programmation mode’, and I held out my hand. “Look, my darlings. Fetch these! Digits! Fingers! Hands! Hurry!” The training was brief and rough. I hoped their ageing Babbage engines would understand the command. I turned the control knobs back into active mode and watched as they crawled out the window into the daylight.

As Elijah grabbed onto the ladder that led to the roof, little Eve tugged at his finger. He yelped and tried to snatch his hand away. She kept tugging, but with his other hand Elijah knocked her off the wall, and she fell forty feet to the alley below. I felt sick at the sound of her crash. Talia, meanwhile, moved toward Elijah’s other hand, while Leah and Beth crawled down towards the other two policemen who raced up the fire escape. Elijah, with crawlers Talia and Shoshanna hot on his heels, stepped onto the roof and vanished over the cornice.

I couldn’t bear to leave Divya alone to her fate, so I climbed out the window onto the fire escape. I heard the barks of policemen behind me as I climbed to the roof. The treacherous rooftop, steepled some forty-five degrees, was in major disrepair. Shingles slid off and fell from Divya’s hands as she scrambled away from Elijah toward the peak.

“Just stay where you are, ma’am!” Elijah said, checking his footing. “It’s dangerous and there’s nowhere to run!”

“Leave her alone!” I shouted.

Elijah turned back to glance at me; his false eye spun maniacally. “Jessica! Get down, it’s dangerous! You shouldn’t be involved. This girl is a thief! She stole diamonds from the wharf.”

“You imbecile!” I said. “Robert stole those diamonds. You should know better, Elijah.”

“I’m sorry, I have my orders, Jessica.” He turned back to pursue Divya.

“Get away from me, you pig!” Divya shouted. “You fat American sloth!” She reached the pointed peak and straddled it. Looking down the other side, she wobbled, and I feared she might fall.

“Elijah!” I shouted. “Stop! She’s not the one you’re after. I stole those diamonds.”

“Really? If that’s so, then why’s she runnin’?”

As he spoke, Divya lowered herself over the other side of the roof so that I saw nothing but her hands.

Talia bit into Elijah’s finger, and he yelped, lost his hold and slid twenty feet down the roof. His foot snagged the gutter an instant before he would have plunged to his death. With him immobilized, I climbed to the peak and peered down the other side. The opposing face was twice as treacherous. Shingles slid off the roof as Divya hung on for dear life.

“Give me the diamonds, Divya! I’ll tell them my crawlers stole it from Robert’s room, that I had them follow you because I was worried about you.”

“They won’t believe you – you heard the policeman.”

“I’ll show them my attic. They’ll have to believe me when they see all my stolen things. You won’t go to prison. Hurry. Give them to me!”

With a shaking hand she reached for her satchel. I heard the twittering of a crawler, and turned to see Miriam racing towards Divya’s hand.

“Wait!” I screamed. “Stop!”

Miriam clawed at Divya’s fingers, and Divya reacted involuntarily by snatching her hand away, the hand which had held her securely on the roof. I stared into her brown, lucid, frightened eyes as she slid down the roof and over the edge. I heard a scream, and after, a terrible silence.

The police found the diamonds on her person, thus proving Robert’s accusation. (Divya’s possession of a Confederate military belt stolen the month prior from one Lieutenant Geoffrey Dauber’s Civil War collection was exhibited as further evidence of her criminal tendencies.) No one came to search my attic. No one came to question me, despite my “confession” to Elijah. I almost wished they would, just so I could speak about her.

I pestered Elijah daily for the location of Divya’s body, where she might be interred, but he just shrugged and said he didn’t know, which I knew was a lie. I had the haunting suspicion she had been cremated, or dumped quietly out at sea to be forgotten. It had been a long time since I’d prayed, but I dusted off my old
siddur
and said
kaddish
for her every night.

A few weeks later I paid a visit to Divya’s father. He was a skinny and handsome man, with dark but luminous eyes much like Divya’s. The studio apartment that he’d shared with her was smaller than I’d imagined. The single room was worn and dusty, and paint flaked from the dilapidated walls. He sat on the bed and listened to me silently, a man who’d lost everything he’d ever loved in this world. In some ways, I knew how he felt.

“Divya told me you came here to escape the poverty of your home country,” I said.

He stared at me, expressionless.

I held out a bundle wrapped in twine. “In this parcel is six thousand dollars. It’s my life savings. It’s yours now.” He took it without changing his expression.

“You’re Jessica?” he said.

I nodded. “Yes. Jessica Rosen.”

He stood, opened a drawer, pulled out a small envelope and handed it to me. It was addressed to me at the store. “I found this among her things,” he said.

I opened it and read the following:

Dear Jessica,

If you’re reading this it means I’ve left New York. There are many things I would like to say to you, but none of them seem adequate as I write this now. I’m grateful for everything you have done for me. You gave me a job, friendship, support, but most of all you’ve shown me warmth in a place I thought I’d find none. One day, I hope to be half the woman that you are. Do not forget me, Jessica. I will never forget you. Goodbye.

For a long moment we sat in silence, then after a time I reached into my pocket and handed him my business card. “Tonight is
Shabbos
, the Jewish day of rest. It’s customary to share a meal with family. Come before sunset. The address is on the card.” Then I stood, turned and walked past the smells of baking
challah
all the way home.

We came to Cuttajunga through the goldfields; Mr Goverman was most eager to show me the sites of his successes.

They were impressive only in being so very unprepossessing. How could such dusty earth, such quantities of it, piled up discarded by the road and all up and down the disembowelled hills, have yielded anything of value? How did this devastated place have any connection with the metal of crowns and rings and chains of office, and with the palaces and halls where such things were worn and wielded, on the far side of the globe?

Well, it must, I said to myself, as I stood obediently at the roadside, feeling the dust stain my hems and spoil the shine of my Pattison’s shoes. See how much attention is being paid it, by this over-layer of dusty men shovelling, crawling, winching up buckets or baskets of broken rock, or simply standing, at rest from their labours as they watch one of their number return, proof in his carriage and the cut of his coat that they are not toiling here for nothing. There must be something of value here.

“This hill is fairly well dug out,” said Mr Goverman, “and there was only ever wash-gold from ancient watercourses here in any case. ’Tis good for nobody but Chinamen now.” And indeed I saw several of the creatures, in their smockish clothing and their umbrella-ish hats, each with his long pigtail, earnestly working at a pile of tailings in the gully that ran by the road.

The town was hardly worthy of the name, it was such a collection of sordid drinking-palaces, fragile houses and luckless miners lounging about the lanes. Bowling alleys there were, and a theatre, and stew-houses offering meals for so little, one wondered how the keepers turned a profit. And all blazed and fluttered and showed its patches and cracks in the unrelenting sunlight.

The only woman I saw leaned above the street on a balcony railing that looked set to give way beneath her generous arms. She was dressed with profound tastelessness and she smoked a pipe, as a gypsy or a man would, surveying the street below and having no care that it saw her so clearly. I guessed her to be Mrs Bawden, there being a painted canvas sign strung between the veranda posts beneath her feet: “MRS HUBERT BAWDEN/Companions Live and Electric”. Her gaze went over us as my husband drew my attention to how far one could see across the wretched diggings from this elevation. I felt as if the creature had raked me into disarray with her nails.
She
would know exactly the humiliations Mr Goverman had visited on me in the night; she would be smiling to herself at my prim and upright demeanour now, at the thought of what had been pushed at these firm-closed lips while the animal that was my husband pleaded and panted above.

On we went, thank goodness, and soon we were viewing a panorama similar to that of the dug-out hill, only the work here involved larger machinery than the human body. Parties of men trooped in and out of several caverns dug into the hillside, pushing roughly made trucks along rails between the mines and the precarious, thundering houses where the stamping-machines punished the gold from the obdurate quartz. My husband had launched into a disquisition on the geological feature that resulted in this hill’s having borne him so much fruit, and if truth be told it gave me some pleasure to imagine the forces he described at their work in their unpeopled age, heaving and pressing, breaking and slicing and finally resting, their uppermost layers washed and smoothed by rains, while the quartz-seam underneath, split away and forced upward from its initial deposition, held secret in its cracks and crevices its gleamless measure of gold.

But we had to move on, to reach our new home before dark. The country grew ever more desolate, dry as a whisper and grey, grey under cover of this grey, disorderly forest. Unearthly birds the size of men stalked among the ragged tree-trunks, and others, lurid, shrieking, flocked to the boughs. In places the trees were cut down and their bodies piled into great windrows; set alight, and with an estate’s new house rising half built from the hill or field beyond, they presented a scene more suggestive of devastation by war than of the hopefulness and ambition of a youthful colony.

Cuttajunga when we reached it was not of such uncomfortable newness; Mr Goverman had bought it from a gentleman pastoralist who had tamed and tended his allotment of this harsh land, but in the end had not loved it enough to be buried in it, and had returned to Sussex to live out his last years. The house had a settled look, and ivy, even, covered the shady side; the garden was a miracle of home plants watered by an ingenious system of runnels brought up by electric pump from the stream, and the fields on which our fortune grazed in the form of fat black cattle were free of the stumps and wreckage that marked other properties as having so recently been torn from the primeval bush.

“I hope you will be very happy here,” said my husband, handing me down from the sulky.

The smile I returned him felt very wan from within, for now there would be nothing in the way of society or culture to diminish, or to compensate me for, the ghastly rituals of married life; now there would only be Mr Goverman and me, marooned on this island of wealth and comfort, amid the fields and cattle, bordered on all sides by the tattered wilderness.

Cuttajunga was all as he had described it to me during the long grey miles: the kitchen anchored by its weighty stove and ornamented with shining pans, the orchard and the vegetable garden, which Mr Goverman immediately set the electric yardman watering, for they were parched after his short absence. There was a farm manager, Mr Fredericks, who appeared not to know how to greet and converse with such a foreign creature as a woman, but instead droned to my husband about stock movements and water and feed until I thought he must be some kind of lunatic. The housekeeper, Mrs Sanford, was a blowsy, bobbing, distractible woman who behaved as if she were accustomed to being slapped or shouted into line rather than reasoned with. The maid Sarah Poplin, was of the poorest material. “She has some native blood in her,” Mr Goverman told me
sotto voce
when she had flounced away from his introductions. “You will be a marvellously civilizing influence on her, I am sure.”

“I can but try to be,” I murmured. I had been forewarned, by Melbourne matrons as well as by Mr Goverman himself, of the difficulty of finding and retaining staff, what with the goldfields promising any man or woman an independent fortune, should they happen to kick over the right pebble “up north”, or “out west”.

The other maid, the mechanical one Mr Goverman had promised me, lived seated in a little cabinet attached to a charging chamber under the back stairs. Her name was Clarissa – I did not like to call such creatures by real names, but she would not recognize commands without their being prefaced by that combination of guttural and sibilant. She was of unnervingly fine quality, and beautiful with it; except for the rigidity of her face I would say she was undoubtedly more comely than I was. Her eyes were the most realistic I had seen, blue-irised and glossy between thickly lashed lids; her hair sprang dark from her clear brow without the clumping that usually characterizes an electric servant’s hair; each strand must have been set individually. She would have cost a great deal, both to craft and to import from her native France; I had never seen so close a simulacrum of a real person, myself.

Mr Goverman, seeing how impressed I was, insisted on commanding Clarissa upright and showing me her interior workings. I hardly knew where to rest my eyes as my husband’s hands unlaced the automaton’s dress behind with such practised motions, but once he had removed the panels from her back and head, the intricate machine-scape that gleamed and whirred within as Clarissa enacted his simple commands so fascinated me that I was able to forget the womanliness of this figure and the maleness of my man as he explained how this impeller drove this shaft to turn this cam and translate into the lifting of Clarissa’s heavy, strong arms
this
way, and the bowing of her body
that
way, all the movements smooth, balanced and, again, the subtlest and most realistic I had witnessed in one of these creatures.