Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (9 page)

With a clatter and a clank and a hundred muffled arguments, the children of Saint Aggie's pelted down the staircases and streamed into the kitchen, milling uncertainly, eyes popping at the sight of our latest arrival in his stolen finery, still ringing the bell, still making his crazy call, stopping now and again to swill the brandy and laugh and spray a boozy cloud before him.

Once we were all standing in our nightshirts and underclothes, every scar and stump on display, he let off his ringing and cleared his throat ostentatiously, then stepped nimbly onto one of the chairs, wobbling for an instant on his steel peg, then leaped again, like a goat leaping from rock to rock, up onto the table, sending my carefully laid cutlery clattering every which-a-way.

He cleared his throat again, and said, "Good morrow, to you, good morrow, all, good morrow to the poor, crippled, abused children of Saint Aggie's. We haven't been properly introduced, so I thought it fitting that I should take a moment to greet you all and share a bit of good news with you. My name is Montreal Monty Goldfarb, machinist's boy, prentice artificer, gentleman adventurer, and liberator of the oppressed. I am late foreshortened"—he waggled his stumps—"as are so many of you. And yet, and yet, I say to you, I am as good a man as I was ere I lost my limbs, and I say that you are, too." There was a cautious murmur at this. It was the kind of thing the sisters said to you in the hospital, before they brought you to Saint Aggie's, the kind of pretty lies they told you about the wonderful life that awaited you with your new, crippled body, once you had been retrained and put to productive work.

"Children of Saint Aggie's, hearken to old Montreal Monty, and I will tell you of what is possible and what is necessary. First, what is necessary: to end oppression wherever we find it, to be liberators of the downtrodden and the meek. When that evil dog's pizzle flogged me and threw me in his dungeon, I knew that I'd come upon a bully, a man who poisoned the sweet air with each breath of his cursed lungs, and so I resolved to do something about it. And so I have." He clattered the table's length, to where Grinder's body slumped. Many of the children had been so fixated on the odd spectacle that Monty presented that they hadn't even noticed the extraordinary sight of our tormentor sat, apparently sleeping or unconscious. With the air of a magician, Monty bent and took the end of the tea towel and gave it a sharp yank, so that all could see the knife handle protruding from the red stain that covered Grinder's chest. We gasped, and some of the more fainthearted children shrieked, but no one ran off to get the law, and no one wept a single salty tear for our dead benefactor.

Monty held his arms over his head in a wide V and looked expectantly upon us. It only took a moment before someone—perhaps it was me — began to applaud, to cheer, to stomp, and then we were all at it, making such a noise as you might encounter in a tavern full of men who've just learned that their side has won a war. Monty waited for it to die down a bit, and then, with a theatrical flourish, he pushed Grinder out of his chair, letting him slide to the floor with a meaty thump, and settled himself into the chair the corpse had lately sat upon. The message was clear: I am now the master of this house.

I cleared my throat and raised my good arm. I'd had more time than the rest of the Saint Aggie's children to consider life without the terrible Grinder, and a thought had come to me. Monty nodded regally at me, and I found myself standing with every eye in the room upon me.

"Monty," I said, "on behalf of the children of Saint Aggie's, I thank you most sincerely for doing away with cruel old Grinder, but I must ask you, what shall we do
now?
With Grinder gone, the sisters will surely shut down Saint Aggie's, or perhaps send us another vile old master to beat us, and you shall go to the gallows at the King Street Gaol, and, well, it just seems like a pity that . . ." I waved my stump. "It just seems a pity, is what I'm saying."

Monty nodded again. "Sian, I thank you, for you have come neatly to my next point. I spoke of what was needed and what was possible, and now we must discuss what is possible. I had a nice long time to meditate on this question last night as I languished in the pit below, and I think I have a plan, though I shall need your help with it if we are to pull it off."

He took up a loaf of hard bread and began to wave it like a baton as he spoke, thumping it on the table for emphasis.

"Item: I understand that the sisters provide for Saint Aggie's with such alms as are necessary to keep our lamps burning, fuel in our fireplaces, and gruel and such on the table, yes?" We nodded. "Right.

"Item: Nevertheless, Old Turd Gargler here was used to sending you poor kiddies out to beg with your wounds all on display, to bring him whatever coppers you could coax from the drunkards of Muddy York with which to feather his pretty little nest yonder. Correct?" We nodded again. "Right.

"Item: We are all of us the crippled children of Muddy York's great information-processing factories. We are artificers, machinists, engineers, cunning shapers and makers, everyone, for that is how we came to be injured. Correct? Right.

"Item: It is a murdersome pity that such as we should be turned out to beg when we have so much skill at our disposal. Between us, we could make anything,
do
anything, but our departed tormentor lacked the native wit to see this, correct? Right.

"Item: The sisters of the Simpering Order of Saint Agatha's Weeping Sores have all the cleverness of a turnip. This I saw for myself during my tenure in their hospital. Fooling them would be easier than fooling an idiot child. Correct?
Right"

He levered himself out of the chair and began to stalk the dining room, stumping up and down. "Someone tell me, how often do the good sisters pay us a visit?"

"Sundays," I said. "When they take us all to church."

He nodded. "And does that spoiled meat there accompany us to church?"

"No," I said. "No, he stays here. He says he 'worships in his own way.' "Truth was he was invariably too hungover to rise on a Sunday.

He nodded again. "And today is Tuesday. Which means that we have five days to do our work."

"What work, Monty?"

"Why, we are going to build a clockwork automaton based on that evil tyrant what I slew this very morning. We will build a device of surpassing and fiendish cleverness, such as will fool the nuns and the world at large into thinking that we are still being ground up like mincemeat, while we lead a life of leisure, fun, and invention, such as befits children of our mental stature and good character."

Here's the oath we swore to Monty before we went to work on the automaton:

I, [state your full name], do hereby give my most solemn oath that I will never, ever betray the secrets of Saint Agatha's. I bind myself to the good fortune of my fellow inmates at this institution and vow to honor them as though they were my brothers and sisters, and not fight with them, nor spite them, nor do them down or dirty. I make this oath freely and gladly, and should I betray it, I wish that old Satan himself would rise up from the pit and tear out my treacherous guts and use them for bootlaces, that his devils would tear my betrayer's tongue from my mouth and use it to wipe their private parts, that my lying body would be fed, inch by inch, to the hungry and terrible basilisks of the pit. So I swear, and so mote be it!

There were two older children in the house who'd worked for a tanner. Matthew was shy all the fingers on his left hand. Becka was missing an eye and her nose, which she joked was a mercy, for there is no smell more terrible than the charnel reek of the tanning works. But between them, they were quite certain that they could carefully remove, stuff, and remount Grinder's head, careful to leave the jaw in place.

As the oldest machinist at Saint Aggie's, I was conscripted to work on the torso and armature mechanisms. I played chief engineer, bossing a gang of six boys and four girls who had experience with mechanisms. We cannibalized Saint Aggie's old mechanical wash wringer, with its spindly arms and many fingers, and I was sent out several times to pawn Grinder's fine crystal and pocket watch to raise money for parts.

Monty oversaw all, but he took personal charge of Grinder's voice box, through which he would imitate old Grinder's voice when the sisters came by on Sunday. Saint Aggie's was fronted with a Dutch door, and Grinder habitually opened only the top half to jaw with the sisters. Monty said that we could prop the partial torso on a low table, to hide the fact that no legs depended from it.

"We'll tie a sick kerchief around his face and give out that he's got the flu, and that it's spread through the whole house. That'll get us all out of church, which is a tidy little jackpot in and of itself. The kerchief will disguise the fact that his lips ain't moving in time with his talking."

I shook my head at this idea. The nuns were hardly geniuses, but how long could this hold out for?

"It won't have to last more than a week — by next week, we'll have something better to show 'em."

Here's a thing: it all worked like a fine-tuned machine.

The kerchief made him look like a bank robber, and Monty painted his face to make him seem more lively, for the tanning had dried him out some (he also doused the horrible thing with liberal lashings of bay rum and greased his hair with a heavy pomade, for the tanning process had left him with a smell like an outhouse on a hot day). Monty had affixed an armature to the thing's bottom jaw—we'd had to break it to get it to open, prying it roughly with a screwdriver, cracking a tooth or two in the process, and I have nightmares to this day about the sound it made when it finally yawed open.

A child — little legless Dora, whose begging pitch included a sad little puppetry show—could work this armature by means of a squeeze bulb taken from the siphon starter on Grinder's cider-brewing tub and so make the jaw go up and down in time with speech.

The speech itself was accomplished by means of the horse-gut voice box from Grinder's music box. Monty sure-handedly affixed a long, smooth glass tube—part of the cracking apparatus that I had been sent to market to buy—to the music box's resonator. This he ran up behind our automatic Grinder. Then, crouched on the floor before the voice box, stationed next to Dora on her wheeled plank, he was able to whisper across the horse-gut strings and have them buzz out a credible version of Grinder's whiskey-roughened growl. And once he'd tuned the horse gut just so, the vocal resemblance was even more remarkable. Combined with Dora's skillful puppetry, the effect was galvanizing. It took a conscious effort to remember that this was a puppet talking to you, not a man.

The sisters turned up at the appointed hour on Sunday, only to be greeted by our clockwork Grinder, stood in the half door, face swathed in a flu mask. We'd hung quarantine bunting from the windows, crisscrossing the front of Saint Aggie's with it for good measure, and a goodly number of us kiddies were watching from the upstairs windows with our best drawn and sickly looks on our faces.

So the sisters hung back practically at the pavement and shouted, "Mr. Grindersworth!" in alarmed tones, staring with horror at the apparition in the doorway.

"Sisters, good day to you," Monty said into his horse gut while Dora worked her squeeze bulb, and the jaw went up and down behind its white cloth, and the muffled simulation of Grinder's voice emanated from the top of the glass tube, hidden behind the automaton's head so that it seemed to come from the right place. "Though not such a good day for us, I fear."

"The children are ill?"

Monty gave out a fine sham of Grinder's laugh, the one he used when dealing with proper people, with the cruelty barely plastered over. "Oh, not all of them. But we have a dozen cases. Thankfully, I appear to be immune, and oh, my, but you wouldn't believe the help these tots are in the practical nursing department. Fine kiddies, my charges, yes, indeed. But still, best to keep them away from the general public for the nonce, hey? I'm quite sure we'll have them up on their feet by next Sunday, and they'll be glad indeed of the chance to get down on their knees and thank the beneficent Lord for their good health." Monty was laying it on thick, but then so had Grinder, when it came to the sisters.

"We shall send over some help after the services," the head sister said, hands at her breast, a tear glistening in her eye at the thought of our bravery. I thought the jig was up. Of course the order would have some sisters who'd had the flu and gotten over it, rendering them immune. But Monty never worried.

"No, no," he said smoothly. I had the presence of mind to take up the cranks that operated the arms we'd constructed for him, waving them about in a negating way — this effect rather spoiled by my nervousness, so that they seemed more octopus tentacle than arm. But the sisters didn't appear to notice. "As I say, I have plenty of help here with my good children."

"A basket, then," the sister said. "Some nourishing food and fizzy drinks for the children."

Crouching low in the anteroom, we crippled children traded disbelieving looks with one another. Not only had Monty gotten rid of Grinder and gotten us out of going to church, but he'd also set things up so that the sisters of Saint Aggie's were going to bring us their best grub, for free, because we were all so poorly and ailing! It was all we could do not to cheer.

And cheer we did, later, when the sisters set ten huge hampers down on our doorstep, whence we retrieved them, finding in them a feast fit for princes: cold meat pies glistening with aspic, marrow bones still warm from the oven, suet pudding and jugs of custard with skin on top of them, huge bottles of fizzy lemonade and small beer. By the time we'd laid it out in the dining room, it seemed like we'd never be able to eat it all.

But we et every last morsel, and four of us carried Monty about on our shoulders — two carrying, two steadying the carriers — and someone found a concertina, and someone found some combs and waxed paper, and we sang until the walls shook: "The Mechanic's Folly," "A Combinatorial Explosion at the Computer Works," and then endless rounds of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow."