The Time Corps Chronicles (Complete Series)

by Heather Blackwood

  Miss Sanchez gave a delicate snort and he saw that she was looking at a crumpled newspaper on the work table. “Legal, right.”

  “Mr. Connor,” said Mr. Gouedard, placing his tools and testing mechanisms back into his case. “The engine is not functioning at all. Mr. Kemp and I will be taking it back to the manufactory. It should be repaired within a few weeks.”

  Seamus heard Miss Sanchez gasp.

  “I’ll be needing it sooner than that,” said Seamus. “In fact, I need a functioning machine immediately.”

  “If you have any concerns, you are welcome to speak with Mr. McCullen. As I understand it, you are acquaintances?”

  It took effort to keep his reaction in check, but he managed it. He and Mr. McCullen were more than acquaintances. They had once been cellmates.

  “I believe I will do just that.”

  Mr. Kemp went outside and returned with what looked like a trunk with wheels. The two men lifted the machine into the trunk, secured it in packing material, and fastened the leather straps. They rolled it through the hall, carried it down the stairs and loaded it into a waiting steam carriage. Seamus watched from the window as the carriage drove down the street, a trail of steam puffing out of its shining brass exhaust pipe.

  “You have to talk to this McCullen person,” said Miss Sanchez, from beside him. The window was narrow, so she had to stand close to him to see out. Her shoulder touched his upper arm. “Without that machine, there’s no way to get me home.”

  “I assure you that I will be paying a call on him.”

  “Look, they’re back,” said Miss Sanchez. A steam carriage with the McCullen name painted on the side pulled to a stop in front of the house.

  “No, that’s a different one.” Seamus snatched up a bag and started cramming things into it. “Where is the tube I gave you?”

  Miss Sanchez opened an empty teapot and pulled it out. A drop of cold amber liquid clung to the bottom.

  “Are you mad, woman?” He took it, wiped it with his pocket handkerchief and slipped it into his pocket.

  “You said to hide it.”

  “Hide it, not ruin it. Now help me or get out of the way.”

  She blinked in shock at his harsh tone. He was immediately contrite. He had to remember not to lose his temper with the feral woman. She couldn’t help her ignorance.

  “Those men downstairs,” he said more gently. “They’re the ones who were summoned by the radio signal. The first two really were regular concierges who were checking on me. McCullen probably sent them special and told them I’d likely take the thing apart. He was right, of course. He knows me. But those two men below are certain that I’ve been mucking about with it. And that’s against the legal terms in the contract. Even if they hadn’t been summoned by the radio signal, the first two men would eventually inform the legal team of my misconduct.”

  The front door knocker rapped three times. The upper gallery blocked his view of the men below, but also their view of him. He pulled up the window and climbed out onto the gallery. He put his finger beside his nose to indicate that Miss Sanchez should remain silent. She followed him, struggling for far too long to get her skirts through the window frame. She managed it, eventually, and turned to slide the window shut.

  Seamus led her across the gallery to his bedroom window. He hated the idea of a neighbor witnessing Miss Sanchez entering his bedchamber, but there was nothing for it. He slipped into the room first and listened at the door while Miss Sanchez maneuvered herself through the window. It was no wonder she struggled with the dress if she had spent her entire life in those workmen’s trousers.

  Once Seamus was certain that Mrs. Washington had let the men inside his laboratory, he led Miss Sanchez into the hall and down a back staircase which was plain and dark. The door to Mrs. Washington’s room was ajar, allowing a glimpse of the multi-colored quilt that covered her bed and the oil lamp she kept on a table with some writing paper. Miss Sanchez peeked inside as if she were in a museum.

  How lost she was in this world. At first, he had been excited by the idea of meeting a person from the future. But now that she was in his house, living alongside him, she was no longer an intriguing phenomenon, but a living person. She was even more out of place here than he had been coming from Ireland to America. This world was entirely alien to her and she could never live a normal life in it.

  More importantly, a life depended upon her return, and if she was trapped forever, that death would hang upon him. It wouldn’t be the first life he was responsible for ending, but this was an innocent and a child.

  He had been powerless to save the children during the famine, those within his family and in his village. And he had been powerless to prevent the death of his tiny nephew. Perhaps that had been why he had made that fateful choice when he was eighteen. Perhaps it had been a way to have a shred of agency, of control, in a cruel and uncaring world. And in that instant, with that choice, his life had changed forever. He had lost everything, his family, his friends, his homeland. Had it been only seven years? It seemed like so much longer, lifetimes longer.

  But he was no longer a penniless farm boy. He would get Miss Sanchez home, safe into the arms of her family. He could bring her to her nephew’s bedside, ensure that he got the medicine he required. This time, things would be different. The child would live. The family would be reunited.

  “We need to hurry,” he whispered. He led Miss Sanchez into the back garden.

  The yard was filled with magnolias and crepe myrtle, and Seamus had purchased a white wooden table with matching chairs so he could sit outside and enjoy a pipe and a drink. It helped him think. The garden was a little overgrown, but he rather liked it that way. They passed the garden shed, opened the back gate and hurried down the alleyway that ran behind his row of houses and those of his back neighbors.

  “Where are we going?” asked Miss Sanchez once they were far away from the house.

  “Somewhere I can get a better look at this device,” he said. “I need more time with it so we can figure out how to get you home.”

  Chapter 9

  As she descended from the coach, Felicia understood why Southern women of old always took men’s hands when exiting a carriage. All her attention was focused on getting out without tripping over her skirts and falling ass over teakettle. Seamus leapt down from the coach and set down his bag. He turned to offer his hand, which she gratefully accepted. The width of her skirts prevented her from seeing the collapsible metal step, so she moved slowly. Once she was safely down, Seamus paid the driver.

  They were once again at Jackson Square. Now that she wasn’t so dizzy, Felicia was able to take it all in. St. Louis Cathedral faced the Mississippi with a square grassy area between them. The cathedral had three gray slate-topped steeples, two on the sides and one in the center. The building was built in layered stories, almost like a rectangular cake, with the bottom three layers the same size and the fourth just large enough to support the tallest middle steeple. This steeple was topped with a metal cross. Each story of the building had decorative Roman columns at intervals and multiple narrow, round-topped cutouts, like doors. In Felicia’s world, the cutouts were simply indentations in the façade of the building. But here, each cutout looked like it had a seam down the center, as if it could open.

  The shining white clock face at the center of the building was larger than she remembered, with huge bronze hands and gleaming bronze numbers. The front doors to the cathedral were large and wooden, with black iron handles. Stone steps led up to the entrance instead of concrete, and there were no hand railings.

  Four brick pathways led from the center of the grassy square to each edge. At the intersection of the paths rose a shining bronze statue of Jackson astride a rearing horse. No sharp-tipped iron fence surrounded it, as in her day. And no fence surrounded the square, giving it a more open feel. The
square seemed to include more space this way, as if it also encompassed part of the Mississippi and the Café du Monde at the far corner.

  Seeing the Café du Monde serving up sugar-sprinkled beignets and coffee made Felicia feel like she was in more familiar territory. Though on closer inspection, she saw that only white people were seated at the tables at the front of the shop. There was a window near the back where a black man was making a purchase.

  The Mississippi was just as muddy and wide as she recalled. An enormous white paddle-wheeled riverboat and a flat-topped barge moved upstream.

  Seamus picked up his bag. “We’ll be heading into the cathedral. There’s a door out back in St. Anthony’s garden that we can use.”

  “Why not just go in the front?”

  “There is a room upstairs that I can use to get a better look at our little treasure,” he said, patting his pocket.

  A boy played violin near the cathedral steps, his case was open in front of him, empty except for a single coin. He tipped his face up into the sunlight, his eyes closed, and Felicia recognized him.

  “Look, it’s Henry,” she said.

  “Ah! That’s excellent. There’s something I need to ask of him.”

  They stood a few yards away from Henry as he played his piece, a slow, mournful song that somehow made Felicia think of a mother losing a son in a war, though she couldn’t say why she felt that way. Something about the lilts and the sorrowful long notes and the way Henry played. It was as if it had too much of a person imbued into it.

  Felicia had listened to violin music before and she had seen people playing guitar or drums out around Jackson Square. But something about being so close to this boy, seeing his expression and the tremble of his fingers on the strings made it different. Were people able to play like that without knowing great pain? She hoped so, but part of her knew differently. The boy didn’t go to school, had no money, and now that she looked closer, she saw that his lip was swollen and red. It had not been so earlier in the kitchen.

  Seamus looked away, into the distance at nothing in particular. Something flickered in his eyes. When Seamus noticed Felicia studying him, his face changed and he gave her a little nod. She knew that he had not wanted her to see him like that. She had invaded his privacy somehow.

  Another man stood nearby, apparently lost in thought. He had an upturned nose and Felicia caught a glimpse of graying orange hair under his bowler. He looked like he was waiting for something.

  Henry finished and opened his eyes. He looked at the single coin with disappointment. When Seamus’s shadow passed over the violin case, Henry looked up. The boy’s face lit up, and Felicia understood how fond of Seamus he was. Seamus handed him a coin.

  “Thank you,” Henry said and pocketed it. He also took the coin from the violin case. He attached the bow inside the lid of the case, laid the violin in gently and closed the lid. Only one of the latches was working, and he fastened it. He did not use the case’s handle, but held the case like one would a baby, cradled against his body.

  “You play beautifully,” said Felicia. Henry looked at the ground and thanked her. Felicia wished she had money to give him. Now that she had accepted that he was no historical recreationist, she wanted to feed him and see that he was washed up and she wanted to give him a warm, soft bed to sleep in. That must be her maternal instinct talking. It was different from the feeling she had when she worked on a patient. It was less clinical and came from a quieter, deeper place.

  Seamus pulled Henry aside and bent down in a discussion with him. Seamus gave him a few bills and Henry nodded vigorously. Then he patted Henry’s shoulder and offered his arm to Felicia.

  Henry pulled the brim of his cap. “Good-bye, Miss Sanchez. See you in a bit.”

  As Felicia and Seamus moved away, Felicia saw a man approach Henry. It was the orange-haired man who had been standing nearby.

  “Where did you send Henry?” Felicia asked.

  “There are a few things I’ll be needing,” said Seamus.

  “Like what?”

  “A few items from my laboratory and my study that we didn’t have time to get. Mrs. Washington can help him.”

  “Don’t you worry about him?”

  “Henry? No. He’s tough as old boot leather. Clever too.”

  Seamus took her around the cathedral to the back and held the wooden gate open for her. An ivy-covered fence with gates on either side surrounded St. Anthony’s garden. Birds hopped in the branches of an oak tree that shaded half the garden. Marigolds surrounded a white marble statue of some robed saint, presumably St. Anthony.

  The clock face on the back of the cathedral was smaller than the one on the front. Felicia noticed that the doorway-shaped cutouts on this side of the building had no seams.

  Seamus rapped on the door, and a few moments later a barefoot man in a rope-belted brown monk’s robe answered.

  “Brother Stephen, good afternoon. I would like to introduce Miss Sanchez,” said Seamus.

  The brother nodded but did not speak. Felicia wondered if he had taken some kind of vow of silence and unsure if she should curtsey or say something, she settled on giving him a smile. Brother Stephen held the door open and she and Seamus passed inside. A staircase rose immediately on their right, lit only by the sunlight filtering in from the windows to the garden. Seamus led the way upstairs and Brother Stephen vanished through a downstairs doorway.

  She followed Seamus down a dark hallway and through a door to the left. The room appeared to be a storage room and workshop. A single table sat under the room’s only window and a decent amount of light shone through the small, grimy panes.

  Stacked among the boxes of various sizes along the walls were a number of life-sized mannequins. No, she thought. On closer inspection she saw the seams and joints. Then she spotted one figure that was half apart, its interior components exposed. These were mechanical people in varying stages of completion.

  A mechanical man lay in one corner. He had a bushy beard, no shoes, and wore ragged brown robes. His skin was metal, but painted in a fleshy color and his glass eyes looked to one side. On the work table sat two arms and a head. Part of the head’s face had been removed, but the part that remained looked like the face of a young woman with pale pink lips. A wig, long and brown, sat in a tangle to one side. Felicia thought she had seen similar body pieces in Seamus’s home laboratory.

  Seamus stood with his back to the window, arms crossed and watching her with the air of a proud father.

  A torso of another man lay on the floor to one side. The man’s body was thin, with ribs protruding and a large red wound on one side. The wound was actually a long slit in the surface of the cover, and she crouched down to see that there was some kind of mechanism behind it with a red cloth rolled up inside.

  She thought of the seams in the cutouts on the front of the cathedral and thought she understood what these were. They were mechanical people in the form of religious figures.

  “This is extraordinary,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You built these?”

  “Some of them. I work with Brother Joe and together we get them ready for the high holy days.”

  “And they come out of the front of the cathedral, right? Like one of those expensive cuckoo clocks that have bobbing goats and German girls swirling around with beer mugs?”

  “Goats? I’d love to see one of those clocks. But to answer your question, yes, there is an automaton display.”

  “Automatons,” Felicia said the word with a chill. It somehow made the mechanical people a little frightening, as if they were more alive. She noticed that some of the boxes were long and human sized, like coffins. “We never had anything like this in my world.”

  “No? What did you have? Something more complicated?”

  “We never
had automatons of any kind. Well, we have cuckoo clocks and the little animatronic people at amusement parks. But nothing like this. And certainly not at a church.”

  “So no widespread use of automatons in your world, correct?”

  “Right.”

  He nodded to himself, as if confirming something. “I’m sure you already realize this, but you are not in your world’s past.” His voice was gentle, and he was watching her in the same way he had when they had driven by the hospital where she worked, as if she might cry or faint.

  “I’m getting that. It must be some kind of alternative universe or something,” she said.

  “Alternative universe? What an interesting phrase.”

  “I saw it on a TV show with my housemate. He watches a lot of shows like that.” She was about to explain what TV was, knowing that Seamus would be interested, but he had already taken out the little blue tube with its attached mechanism and set it on the table. He opened a nearby box and selected what looked like a jeweler’s loop from a boxed set. He positioned it over his eye.

  Felicia examined the other automatons, trying to guess who they were. The torso of Christ was easy, and she guessed that the bearded man in rags was supposed to be John the Baptist. As to the half-faced woman, she couldn’t guess, but no Catholic automaton display would be complete without an appearance by the Virgin Mary. Felicia herself wasn’t Catholic, but her grandmother was. She tried to think. It was February, so Ash Wednesday would be the next holy day.

  A few items of clothing, both men’s and women’s, hung on a rack to one side of the room and she sorted through them, noting that some of them were of very fine quality. Slaves and children on the streets wore clothing worse than the automatons.

  “Professor?” Felicia said, reminding herself of the proper form of address. “Henry was hurt. Did you see?”