by KW Jeter
"Look," he said, mastering his emotions with visible effort. "Your old man was a very clever guy – all right? Let's just say he got… interested in musical stuff. And maybe he, like, built himself a violin player. I mean, a clockwork figure that could play the violin." Behind the blue lenses, the hidden points of his gaze probed into my visage. "What would you know about something like that?"
There; it was out; plain as simple day. Through some means, some hidden current of rumour, this scalawag had heard of the affair at the church of Saint Mary Alderhythe and the Clerical Automata that my father had left in place, but never animated before his death. Though my attempt to set the elaborate array of devices into operation had met with disaster, this Scape – if that were his real name – had evidently conceived the notion that one or more of the automaton figures – perhaps the priest, or the choristers – could be altered to suit the purposes of performing in music-halls. To one of his coarse sensibilities, there would be perhaps no difference between a chorus'd evensong and a collection of jigs sawed out of a fiddle; if a clockwork figure had been invested with any musical talent, this fellow no doubt believed that it should be as capable of one performance as the other.
"I have no knowledge of such a device." This, in strict truth: while my father had certainly eclipsed Jacquet-Droz, by giving his Clerical Automata a fair approximation of human vocal powers through ingenious assemblages of rosined wheels rotating against a set of tuned strings, he had not, as far as I knew then, ever envisioned a clockwork violinist.
Scape's mouth set into a bloodless line; his hands throttled the shaft of his walking-stick, as through he were about to bring its length down upon my insolent head. I took a step backwards from the counter, fearing such violence, only to start about in surprise when a soft hand laid itself upon my arm.
"Mr Dower–" Scape's companion had, during our verbal jousting, stepped quietly beside me. Her gaze, half-shaded behind her sable lashes, and intimating smile held me speechless as she interposed herself between shopkeeper and soi-disant client. Her hand traced a feather's touch up to my shoulder. Somehow, it seemed that while she had been outside the field of my vision, the edge of her gown's bodice had crept lower, revealing an immodest aspect. My dazzled eyes could not avert themselves from her white throat or the uplifted forms below. A delicate vein swelled with her pulse from beneath a lace-fringed shadow, as though it were a stream trickling beneath fields of snow that gave off an unaccountable warmth. "You know," she said, as I watched, mesmerised, the words formed by the coral bow of her mouth, "you seem like a nice guy. A real nice guy."
(Torturing memories! I sit at the prison of my desk, gnashing my teeth and grinding my pen-nib into the mocking white expanse of the paper under my hand. The coaxing words of a very Delilah! Had I but known what lay beyond them!)
"My buddy – I mean, Mr Scape – he gets a little excited sometimes. You know?" Miss McThane's hand strayed to the top of my cravat, one slender finger teasing a loop of silk free from the knot. "Like when he's talking about something he's really hot on. Know what I mean?"
"Yes…" The word was no more than a squeaking gasp. The loosening of the constriction around my throat did nothing to aid my breath past the stone that had formed inside it. I felt my spine come up against the wall at the end of the counter; my legs, as though acting as the reservoir of all the moral steadfastness that had drained from the rest of my body, had effected my retreat from the woman's continuing onslaught.
"Like…violins…"
The back of my head struck the silver case of one of my father's more elaborate clocks. The force of the blow triggered the delicate mechanisms inside; dimly, I was aware of small doors opening above me, and a circle of uniformed mannikins tinkling a theme from Handel's Jephtha as they paraded in and out of the encircled numbers. Behind my own brow, other small doors were opening, emitting darker figures shrilling melodies more dizzying, as I watched the sinuous grace of Miss McThane's finger rise to lay its point upon my chin.
"Violins" I choked.
"Yeah There's just… something about 'em. Drives him…wild."
I strove to speak, but could not. A scent of lilacs, borne across the dwindling distance between us by the warmth of her bosom, enveloped my head. She seemed suddenly of greater stature, looking down at me from a height. Faintly, I realised that whatever virtue normally resident in my limbs had fled from them as well, and I was sliding slowly down the wall.
Her smile grew wider, her eyes even more shaded. "Violins…" she whispered.
(Temptress! With a start, the dog looks up from his doze by the grate, hearing the snap of the pen in my fist. I blot the spilled ink from my desk, draw forth a fresh sheet, and begin again.)
Suddenly, as though from a great distance, I heard a clatter and a hubbub of voices. The chain that held my eyes fast upon Miss McThane's was broken, as she jerked her face about towards the source of the noise. I heard my own name being shouted.
"Mr Dower!" It was Creff, in full cry, his harsh accents, echoing down the hallway behind the shop. "Thieves! Murdering thieves!"
The excitement in his voice roused me from my unwitting haze. I pulled myself upright and brushed past Miss McThane, shaking away the restraining hand she placed upon my sleeve.
At the end of the hallway the workroom door stood open. In the circle of light cast from the bench's lamp, Creff and Scape could be seen, wrestling over the mahogany cabinet held between them. Catching sight of me, Creff shouted, "It's the Ethiope's accomplices! He's sent 'em here to cosh and rob us!"
I ran towards the struggling pair, unmindful of any danger. The prospect of alteration to the odds against him spurred Scape to greater effort: he wrenched the device left behind by the Brown Leather Man away from Creff, and bulled head-downward at me. I fell from the impact of his shoulder into my chest; he charged past me, but I managed to snare his legs within my grasp, bringing us both sprawling on to the floor of the shop. Scape's hands splayed open, and the mahogany casket slid a few inches further, impelled by momentum.
Miss McThane bent down to pick up the casket, but was unable to lift it owing to its great weight. Creff, brandishing a broom handle as a truncheon, vaulted over the prostrate forms of Scape and myself, and menaced her away from the object of the pair's felonious desire. With unladylike facility, she raised the hem of her dress and forcefully placed the point of one reversed-calf boot in a sensitive portion of my servant's anatomy. Thus crippled, Creff fell in a knot upon the casket.
"Get offa me, for Christ's sake," said Scape. He struggled to his knees, breaking free of my grip. My flailing hands sought what purchase they could on him; my fingers hooked behind the blue lenses of his spectacles, and pulled them from his face. The nature of the struggle changed dramatically thereby.
"Shit!" He staggered to his feet, bent double and pressing his hands against his eye sockets. The dim glow of the shop's gas brackets, turned low for economy's sake, wrought obvious pain in him, as though he were some earth-burrowing animal rudely scooped to the surface by a rustic's hoe. Tears streamed from under his palms. "You sonuvabitch," he shouted blindly in my direction. The lenses splintered under his unguided boot. The sight unfolded Creff from his immediate personal concerns. He gaped at the stricken man as Miss McThane, abandoning her pursuit of the casket, rushed to aid her companion.
Emboldened by this turn of events, the wine of excitement drowning any remaining dregs of caution, I picked up the broom handle Creff had dropped, and laid it smartly across Scape's back. "Out you go, sir!" I cried. "Your custom's not wanted here."
"You turkey–" the agonised man spat the words in the direction of my voice.
"Come on. Later for this crap." Miss McThane dragged him to the doorway. A hansom cab waited in the dark outside; she soon had the hunched-over figure deposited inside; with no instructions given, the driver whipped the horse to speed, carrying the two away in extreme haste.
Creff, maintaining gingerly balance, peered out the window at the cab vanishi
ng into evening mist. "The Ethiope," he said, turning towards me. "Those were his henchmen, no doubt about it." He gestured at the cabinet sitting in the middle of the floor. "Sent 'em here to steal that ruddy thing."
A tremor had replaced the strength in my arms. I laid the broom handle on the counter before it dropped from my hands. "There would be little reason," I said, "for the gentleman to whom you refer, to hire others to steal that which he himself brought here. If he wished to have it, why would he not merely keep it in his possession to begin with?"
Creff scowled, turning this argument over in his mind, looking for its flaws.
"No," I went on. "I believe our last visitors to have some conception of this as an article of value. They apparently felt it easier to take it from our custody rather than the rightful owner's."
Unconvinced, yet unable to say why, Creff nodded. "Here," he said, looking up. "What was all that palaver about fiddles?"
"I have no idea," I said wearily. He had apparently been listening from some post upon the stairs. Fortunately so; from such a vantage point he had likely seen Scape's furtive actions.
These events had taxed me sorely. I directed Creff to carry the casket back to the workroom. I briefly considered notifying the constabulary of this foiled robbery, but thought better of it. The article over which we had struggled – and which I could identify as to neither purpose nor value – might well have been impounded for examination, and I would thus lose a valuable commission.
Some time after my first arrival at the shop, Creff had directed my attention to a secret repository well hidden under the floor of the workroom. Upon examination, it had revealed nothing but a few of my father's mechanical sketches and a flask of antimony. In this hole, the Brown Leather Man's property was entrusted for safekeeping, the concealing cover placing it beyond an outsider's easy discovery.
As the reader might well imagine, my mind was greatly preoccupied with the perplexing nature of the day's events. From the appearance of the Brown Leather Man in my shop, and the puzzling spillage of sea water in the workroom – a detail dream-like in its apparent insignificance and nagging incongruity – to the blue-lensed Scape of jerkily animated mien and strange words, his companion of yet more frightening demeanour, and the pitched battle that had ensued over the mahogany casket, the hours had been spanned from one baffling occurrence to another. As though some great unseen Clock, ticking out with regular monotony the passage of my life, had reached a zenith and set its bells into previously unheard clangour and alarm – so we mistake Peace, and describe it as Eternal, when the hand is already poised to strike the hour of dreadful change.
So deep were my musings that the pangs of hunger reminded me of the engagement to which I was committed for that same evening. One of Clerkenwell's more prosperous watchmakers (that prosperity owed more to the cheapness of his goods than to any other quality), whose snobbishness made him anxious to associate with one bearing my renowned father's name, had renewed his invitation to me. The opportunity of a meal beyond that afforded by my meagre larder and Creff's slight culinary skill enabled me to endure the man's stultifying company.
Leaving Creff, armed with the broom handle and the kitchen-knife of which I had relieved him earlier, in vigilant guard over my shop and home, I made my way the short distance to my colleague's residence.
Nothing in the man's conversation, or that of his wife, intruded upon the continuous hidden flow of my thoughts. I was able to maintain a fiction of polite society with a few appreciative comment, a murmured "Oh?" or "Indeed" over the boiled potatoes, while all the while the spectral figures of the day's drama trod the stage and declaimed their lines inside the theatre of my skull.
Only when my host and I were draining a resinous Oporto at the edge of the fire, did his comments enter my consciousness.
"Peculiar thing – eh? – these street costers – most peckuliar." he poured himself another tumblerful. "Peddle the damnedest stuff. Never seen the like."
"Pardon?" Perhaps I had finally grown weary of turning the thin pack's cards over in my mind. I emerged from my thoughts to hear his oration on the London Street vendors.
"The other day – just yesterday, it was–" He leaned forward to impart this confidence. "I was in the Tottenham Court Road with my little daughter." (I knew the child, a wretched pug-nosed creature.) "An old Irish woman, dirty as a pig, selling dolls from a basket, approached us. 'Shure they're bhutiful dolls,' she says." He imitated the accent with mocking scorn. "'Shuted for them angels of the worruld,' meaning my daughter. With that sort of blandishments, soon enough my little Sally must have one of the wretched things." (I had often heard the child in the street outside my shop, whining for some gimcrack or lolly.) "The old witch wanted fourpence – can you credit it? – for one of the things, and eager enough she was to sell one, too, until my Sally sees a few wrapped in tissue at the bottom of the basket, and says she wants one of those. Then damned if the woman doesn't go all coy on me, refusing to bring one of the bottom ones out, saying they weren't 'shuted' for such a fine child and such-like, until my Sally was near choleric to have one. I finally had to pay sixpence to entice the woman to hand it over – and a fine show of reluctance she made, too, even then! – and when she had scuttled away with her basket, and my Sally unwrapped the doll, damned if she didn't scream and drop the thing on the street! I'm sure it's quite the ugliest creation possible, and a wicked joke to sell for the hands of a child." His broad face was red from the port and indignation, as he stood up and opened the doors of his writing cabinet. "Here the thing is – see for yourself."
I took the object he thrust towards me, and with but small curiosity examined it. It was a doll as is often sold in the streets, cheaply manufactured of pappy-mashy, as the costers term it, dipped in wax. The striking aspect was its extraordinary face: a crude parody, as though the maker's rude art had meant to represent some animal other than the human. Sloping forehead, goggling rounded eyes, and protruding lips over a non-existent chin; these features, in combination with the greenish cast of the wax, gave a distinctly piscine impression, as if a herring fresh off the fishmonger's slab had been dressed in a plaything's clothes. For a moment, as I turned the thing over in my hands, I again felt as if I were toiling through the rigours of a dream; it reminded me of the sea water – from where? – on the floor of my workroom.
"Extraordinary," I agreed. I reached to hand it back to my host, but he waved it away.
"Keep the damned thing," he said.
"Your little girl–"
"Faugh. She can't abide the sight of it. No, no, do us a kindness and take it away from here."
I laid it on the arm of the chair. My thoughts drifted away, to their former channels, as my host expostulated on some other subject. My hands came to rest on my stomach – stuffed to bursting against future famine – and I felt a circular shape in my waistcoat pocket. The coin the Brown Leather Man had paid me; idly, as the other's voice droned on, I took it out. A familiar shape and weight; perhaps not familiar enough of late. I looked down at it in my palm, and felt my gut hollow beneath the half-digested meal.
The face, in profile, on the coin was the twin of the hideous doll.
A sudden panic pushed me up from the depths of the chair. I made a hasty excuse to my host and, gathering up my hat and cloak, rushed from his house. Outside, I realised that the doll had found its way into my hands along with the coin. I thrust them into my pocket to remove them from my sight.
The mist had thickened, swallowing every aspect of the houses and the railings in front of them. Under the sulphurous glow of the street lamps, mere smudges of light swathed in grey, indistinct forms scurried from one dark cranny to the next. I hastened home, guided by memory rather than sight, unable to look behind me to see what blurred shadow might be entwined with my own.
3
Mr Dower Investigates
I awoke the next morning, half-believing that the preceding day's events had been but a dream, driven by its own eccentric machinery
to a baffling conclusion. My sleep had been vexed with shadowy figures, darkskinned and sombre, or with eyes hidden by blue glass and spouting incomprehensible obscenities; I would have been grateful to shake them out of my muddled head, to disappear with all the nocturnal phantoms that had gone before them. My waistcoat had been left draped over the chair by the side of my bed; reaching out my hand from under the covers, I felt the shape of the Brown Leather Man's coin in the garment's pocket. With my thumb I could trace through the wool the oddly shaped profile that had been twice revealed to me in my dinner host's parlour. If it were a dream, I had not been released from it yet.
Once dressed, I scarce touched the breakfast that Creff brought to me. I pushed aside the scant fare and set before me on the table the tangible remnants of the previous evening. The doll stood upright, its ichthyomorphic face goggling at me. A crude thing; if its ugliness could be attributed to its maker's lack of skill in capturing a human physiognomy, it would have been only a sad bit of rubbish, and no more. Its power to disturb, however, lay in what seemed the craftman's intent: however awkwardly formed, these were the features he had meant it to have.
