The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (57 page)

2 October, later

In the northernmost room of the library, there is a book by the Margravine of Blois called
Clockwork Souls
. I have always thought it was a silly concern, and a quintessentially artistic one – what happens to automata after they die? In all probability, they are simply gone, vanished as if they never were. With all my experience, I have never met a clockwork ghost.

Nor have I met the ghost of the Margravine of Blois. Does this mean that she, too, is simply gone? And even her clockwork is vanishing – the carousel is broken, the clocks are dying or dead.

Isn’t it a terrible thought, that all their work dies with them?

And here is a worse thought:

The night Violeta died, I climbed up to the rain-slick roof and looked up at the sky. One by one, the heavy clouds were clearing and the stars emerging from the darkness. In a feverish fantasy, I imagined that there had been a time, when the world was young, that stars filled the sky – made it a solid sheet of light arching over the earth. But one by one, the stars began to die – and Man, having a poor memory, began to believe that the sky had always been black.

I am a widower. I am the black spot left in the sky when a star has guttered out.

9 October

For a week, I have been gone with fever. I need not detail my dreams, save to say that they were the haunting grounds for more than one ghost. I woke this morning to find Porphyrogene standing over me, a moist cloth in one hand and a look of profound unease on her face.

“You were calling for Violeta,” was all she said.

I flopped back on my pillows, and found myself staring at the portrait of the Margravine of Blois hung over my head.

“Why did she leave?” I asked.

Porphyrogene followed my gaze, her lips pressed thin. “An accident,” she said finally. “On the carousel. The simple fact, M’sieur Saint-Pierre, is that all clockwork goes mad eventually, and she built that carousel too big. We thought it was going to be Phosphorus first – he was such a violent, crazy thing, and wouldn’t be tame for anyone but me – but it wasn’t. It was his brother.”

She chaffed her wrists, heedless of the cloth in her hand. “Hesperus was carrying Évariste of Blois – the Margravine’s cousin, son of the famous composer. The carousel had stopped, and the Margravine was helping me down from Phosphorus’s saddle. Hesperus reared suddenly. She managed to roll out from under his hooves, but Évariste fell.”

“Was he … ?”

“Trampled. The corpse was unrecognizable.” Porphyrogene looked down at her hands, then swiftly dabbed at my forehead with the damp cloth, as if that glance had brought it back to her mind. “I begged her to stay, of course. It was a nasty scene all around. She said Hesperus’s madness had been a much-needed awakening, showing how enslaved she had become to me – a gelding, like Phosphorus when I held his reins. Those were the last words she spoke to me. She did something to the carousel before she left, and it hasn’t worked since.”

“You said she died here – because of the carousel.”

“I think …” Porphyrogene frowned, biting her lip. “I think she wanted to reawaken it. She was terribly sick by then – consumption – she knew she was dying. I think she wanted to leave something behind.”

I sat up. It was a slow, laborious process, and it left the room buzzing around me like a swarm of bees. “Why is it so hard,” I asked when I’d caught my breath, “to believe she came back for you?”

Porphyrogene shook her head, smiling or grimacing.

“I’m serious. Why does it have to be the carousel – some unfinished business, left behind for you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You should get some rest, M’sieur Saint-Pierre, after your fever …”

“I want to be haunted, Porphyrogene.” She looked at me as if I had gone mad – as if I were about to trample something, or go battling songbirds. “I told you that Violeta doesn’t haunt me, and it’s true. Horribly, unbearably true. When I think of everything she was, the quick ripostes over dinner, the magnificent letters she wrote when we were away from each other, her way with languages … it makes me sick. All of it is gone.” I felt a moistness on my lip, and licked it away, thinking it was sweat; but it tasted sweet, the briny sweetness of tears. “Anything that could remain of her, I would take. A disembodied footfall, a slip of mist, a cool breeze in the night. A book that could not stay shut. And if I thought here was a man who could draw ghosts to a house—”

“How dare you,” Porphyrogene interrupted, “compare your flippant little wife to the Margravine of Blois?”

“You’re trying to build a ghost, Porphyrogene. You want to be haunted.”

She flung the cloth at me and ran from the room.

10 October

All this time, she has been going down to the carousel.

It explains the persistent reopening of the Margravine’s catalogue, and Jean-Baptiste’s familiarity with Christopher of Cloud – what valet, after all, is not familiar with his mistress’s reading? For six years, perhaps longer, she has been trying to reawaken the carousel of the Margravine of Blois.

The rain let up sometime over the seven days of my sickness, and I went down this afternoon to the gardens. Years of neglect have left them as barren and white as salt flats. In the center of the desolation, as red and black and golden as the Margravine herself, is the carousel and its twenty-four clockworks. Even from a distance, I could see their characters from their poses and expressions: clever Antigone, balanced nearly on her tail, and graceful Ambrosias with his trunk held high, and proud Clytemnestra striding firmly across the metal stage. Closest to me, the bays Phosphorus and Hesperus lay peaceful and dormant on folded legs.

I did not stay long, as I knew Porphyrogene would be coming down shortly. But I will confess, there is something terribly captivating about the carousel. When I lay my hand against Phosphorus’s flank, it felt as warm as living flesh – or as warm as metal that living hands had touched.

13 October

This shall be my last night in Summerfall. As I said to Jean-Baptiste, there is no sense in me staying on when the only ghosts are made of metal.

“I understand, monsieur,” he said, then looked at me oddly. “I know she has done little to show it, but the lady Porphyrogene is grateful that you came. It was good to have this bed filled again, if you understand me.”

“I beg your pardon!” I exclaimed, leaping up from the furniture in question.

“That bed, monsieur. It was Porphyrogene’s, while the Margravine of Blois lived in Summerfall.”

“The very bed whose blankets poets satired, I don’t wonder.” Weariness came over me then, and I leaned heavily against the wall. “You know, Jean-Baptiste, I wish I had followed Porphyrogene’s example. The last thing my wife touched was a silk blanket, to pull it closer around her. I wish I had never moved that blanket, so that
something
could remain as Violeta had put it.”

“Ah,” Jean-Baptiste said, eyeing the bed pensively. “But then where would monsieur have slept?”

14 October, early morning

In my dream, Violeta is riding the carousel of the Margravine of Blois. I am watching her from the gravel walkway, my heart pounding in my throat, and she waves each time she passes me, standing gracefully in the blood bay’s stirrups.

But something is wrong. With each cycle, her color drains a little more. Soon she is nothing but a streak of white, like a tearstain… and then she is gone.

Still, the carousel turns.

14 October

I found Porphyrogene out in the gardens before dawn. She had a sheaf of papers spread across Clytemnestra’s broad back, and a stack of tools piled at her feet. I crossed the gravel walkway in two strides and leapt onto the carousel stage with a reverberant clang.

“What are you doing here?” Porphyrogene snapped, not looking up from her book. From where I stood, I could see that the page was rimmed with slanted marginalia. I came up on the other side of the ox and flipped the treatise closed.

“I have a gift for you,” I said, and when Porphyrogene looked up at me, I held out a silver ring in the palm of my hand.

The change in her was sudden and terrible. Her eyes widened, her lips pressed thin and pale, the long bridge of her nose tightened into a web of wrinkles. “How dare you!” she said, snatching the ring from my hand. “How—”

“How dare I what, Porphyrogene? She bought that ring for your finger, not for a clockwork horse.”

“I thought you of all people would understand.” Her fingers closed into a fist around the ring, as though she could crush it. “What harm could there be in keeping everything the way it was, before … ?”

“Are you happy, Porphyrogene?” I interrupted.

She shook her head, not looking at me. “How can you even ask?”

I circled around Clytemnestra, past Antigone’s silver tail, and crouched down by Hesperus’s head, where the pile of tools gleamed. A steel pike lay across the top, its slender tip designed to pry open the nearly seamless clockwork. I took it in my hand, feeling its cool weight up through my arm like the trail of a phantom finger.

“There are three things in the world you can never change,” I said. Turning from Hesperus’s wild eyes, I found myself facing the paper-thin membrane of Antigone’s tail. “The first is that the Margravine of Blois
lived
.”

Swiftly, before Porphyrogene could stop me, I drove the spike through the silver dolphin.

“No!” Porphyrogene shouted, but I continued over her protest.

“She
lived
, she built this carousel and a thousand brilliant clocks besides, and she laughed at your riddles because you told her to. She loved color and she loved this house and she loved you.” I punctuated each phrase with a blow to one of the clockworks: Clytemnestra’s smooth flank, Zephyr’s outspread wing, Lucien’s undulating tongue. Porphyrogene made no move to stop me, though her eyes were darkening with fury. I could only hope she was listening to my words.

“The second,” I said, “is that the Margravine of Blois died, and her genius died with her.”

Was it my imagination, or did a look of relief come into Boreas’s snarling face as I drove the spike into his belly?

Porphyrogene caught my wrist as I turned to Ariel. Tears brimmed unchecked in her eyes. “And the third?” she said.

“The third is that you cannot bring the Margravine of Blois back from the dead, and it’s killing you to try. That’s the thing with ghosts – even metal ones.” I broke her grip and slashed at Ariel’s claws. “There are things the living and the dead cannot share. The Margravine of Blois isn’t any more dead because her clockwork no longer runs, and she wouldn’t be any more alive if it could. But we have a choice, Porphyrogene – between me and a ghost, between you and a carousel. The living or the dead.”

I held out the spike to her, as I had held out the ring. “Choose however you want,” I said, “but you must choose. You cannot jump on Phosphorus’s back and hope the world doesn’t change anymore while you’re going in circles.”

For a long moment, Porphyrogene looked at me. She opened her palm, slid the silver ring onto her finger. Then she took the spike.

That, madame, is the tragedy of the celebrated carousel of the Margravine of Blois. The remains are buried in Summerfall – where, as you may see from the address on this package, I have decided to stay on. Porphyrogene has begun to expand her library, Jean-Baptiste is designing some small clockworks, and I am continuing my investigations, but the house seems large enough to accommodate all these imperialistic pursuits.

Though there is one room, at the end of a long corridor in the north wing, whose purpose we have agreed upon; it houses a pair of clockwork bays, their elegant legs folded beneath them in repose. Should these be of interest to you, madame, you are most welcome to come some day to Summerfall and we shall introduce you. They are really quite beautiful, a testament to the enduring genius of the celebrated Margravine of Blois.

On my return from PlausFab-Wisconsin (a delightful festival of art and enquiry, which styles itself “the World’s Only Gynarchist Plausible-Fable Assembly”) aboard the P.R.G.B.
ri George Bernard Shaw
, I happened to share a compartment with Prem Ramasson, Raja of Outermost Thule, and his consort, a dour but beautiful woman whose name I did not know.

Two great blond barbarians bearing the livery of Outermost Thule (an elephant astride an iceberg and a volcano) stood in the hallway outside, armed with sabres and needlethrowers. Politely they asked if they might frisk me, then allowed me in. They ignored the short dagger at my belt – presumably accounting their liege’s skill at arms more than sufficient to equal mine.

I took my place on the embroidered divan. “Good evening,” I said.

The Raja flashed me a white-toothed smile and inclined his head. His consort pulled a wisp of blue veil across her lips, and looked out the porthole.

I took my notebook, pen and inkwell from my valise, set the inkwell into the port provided in the white pine table set in the wall, and slid aside the strings that bound the notebook. The inkwell lit with a faint blue glow.