Clockwork Heart: Clockwork Love, Book 1

by Heidi Cullinan

  She seemed pleased by this, but when she spoke, she lifted her chin in a manner as only a princess could. “You may offer, Valentin, and how kind of you to notice. I am in mourning, for the state of women in our current society. I shall wear black until we achieve full equality in the eyes of the world.”

  Val blinked, then bowed and kissed her hand, appearing even more impressed than he had been before. Molly, on the other side of the room, looked ready to swoon.

  Indeed, it was difficult not to be swept off one’s feet by Princess Giselle Elisabeth Esterhàzy von Hohenburg.

  * * * * *

  Cornelius continued to produce hearts at his father’s demand, but his work was much lighter now that he could speak to Princess Gisa on the transmitter. Their conversations were painstaking, as he had to translate the series of codes to form her words. She tried to have him build one of the Society’s electronic wireless devices, a clever clockwork that could transform the codes into audible sound using electricity and secondary waves on primitive army radio transmitters in the Alps. It was, essentially, a more grand and flexible example of the telephone system commonplace in the Americas and rare in Europe because of the endless wars. Conny was tempted to construct the device to make their communication easier, but he feared discovery. It was one thing to convince his monitors the complicated transmitter was related to the construction of his surgical clockwork. It was another matter entirely to leave a revolutionary telephone lying about, or worse, be overheard speaking on one.

  The princess was pragmatic, forthright and wildly intelligent, and she did much to bolster Cornelius’s courage as he waited for her to arrange aid. She soothed him too, regarding his mother, who he still hadn’t spoken with and now barely saw—a new tactic by his father to terrorize him, because of course Conny feared his mother suffered greatly, or worse, was dead.

  This is an intimidation tactic, and you must not fall for it, Gisa wrote to him when he confessed his fear. Your mother is a celebrated and valiant spy. She is likely more troubled by your mental suffering than her physical. Aid her by refusing to yield to your father’s manipulations.

  Conny did his best to follow her advice and thanked her for being his emotional lifeline during this difficult trial. His gratitude overflowed, however, when she reported she’d had contact with The Brass Farthing crew. When she returned again to tell him she’d taken his friends under her protection and was preparing with them and the Society to launch a rescue, he nearly broke down and upgraded his transmitter, because he longed to hear Johann’s voice more than anything in the world.

  Is he well? How is his clockwork? Did the attack in Naples leave him with additional damage? Does he seem healthy? Happy?

  He tried to keep his queries appearing to be those of a man inquiring after a close friend, but somehow Gisa saw through his ruse. Your lover is well, but he is greatly concerned for you. He would like to immediately storm the castle keep with an uprooted tree, I think, but I’ve endeavored to convince him this plan would not result in success.

  Conny’s heart swelled with affection, even as he worried what it meant that Gisa knew their secret. He decided to match her bluntness with his own. You are not offended my lover is another man?

  That would be ridiculous, sir, as who you take to your bed is unrelated to my person and therefore irrational for me to take offense over. Though as a point of interest, it’s especially unseemly for me to behave in that manner, as I too foresee myself partnered with a member of my own sex rather than one of the opposite.

  This remark warmed Conny and made him wonder how Olivia and Molly were getting along with the newest member of their motley crew. He did not ask this, however, only requested she pass along his less veiled declarations of affection and his hope to be reunited with Johann soon.

  They spoke intensely about a scheme to get Conny and his mother out, and of ways to use Conny’s transmitter-enabled hearts to the Society’s advantage. The archduke constantly urged Conny to make more hearts and at an increasingly rapid pace. He had tried to force Conny to teach other tinkers how to replicate his work, but Conny did his best to be a poor teacher, and of course neither Savoy nor any other tinker was able to learn on their own. Conny apologized, explaining each heart was a work of art and skill, not meant for mass production, and it would take him far more time to teach others how to make new hearts than it would to do the job himself.

  This was partially but not entirely true. The hearts were complicated, yes, but he had already translated the schematics and instructions into Princess Gisa’s electronic code and sent them to her via the transmitter. She then studied them with Félix and offered her critique of his work, not on the function of the heart as a pump but of the embedded transmitter.

  You do understand you could do so much more than broadcast the location of the heart and by extension the person carrying it. You could control the heart remotely by electricity and wireless transmission. This would of course not allow you to repair physical damage—though I believe it’s possible to construct miniature, even microscopic clockwork designed to travel places human hands cannot go and do the work of flesh and mind via electronic command. It is, unfortunately, only a theoretical, not practical vision at this time. What is entirely possible however is affecting the function of your transmitter-enabled hearts. You could give an electrical charge via wireless to restart them. You could also send a message for the heart to slow, behave erratically or even stop.

  Cornelius had become fluent in the wireless code almost as a language, no longer seeing it so much as French but as its own type of speech he could read and respond to with reasonable ease. This message from Gisa, however, he read several times, then wrote out on paper so he could stare at it for several minutes before burning it in his brazier, his gut churning in horror both at her suggestion and his own temptation to give in to it.

  What she suggested building into the hearts was the possibility of murdering every soldier given the clockwork. Not only the generals but the men who hadn’t joined the army to have their life put in the hands of an Austrian princess and her liberal collective. Men who had not even joined the army at all but had been drafted to serve Cornelius’s father’s vision of a Europe dominated by France. Men like Johann.

  To do what Gisa suggested would do to his own countrymen what he had sworn to Johann his own clockwork heart would never do: control them and their destiny. It was the sort of invention his father would thrill to have and would exploit in ways cruel and terrible, all to justify his vision. To add this capability to the heart would go against everything Conny believed in, every vow he’d taken as a tinker-surgeon and every belief he held as a free-thinking man. It would undo his defiance of his father’s way of viewing the world in a simple collection of wires and circuits designed to receive transmitted code.

  Yet if Cornelius installed this modified heart in enough French soldiers and generals, that collection of wires and circuits would not only ensure his freedom but that of Europe from the archduke’s war machine.

  Conny did not reply to Gisa’s transmission, but her words haunted him all that day. His father had been gone to the eastern front, but he returned that evening, and as had become ritual when the archduke was in residence, Conny was brought first to dinner with him and Savoy and then taken to view simple but significant torture of his mother. Normally during these evenings Conny spent the meal attempting to keep his rage and helplessness from showing, as he knew this was what his father hoped to see. The day of Gisa’s terrible suggestion, however, Conny’s struggle was to keep from sinking into his own reach for power. When he thought objectively of the idea he install a remote control mechanism in the hearts, he knew he would never agree to such a move. When he sat in front of his father, playing the sick game of dining formally before they viewed his mother’s latest lashing or beating or branding with hot iron, Conny’s objectivism evaporated and he wanted to install not only a potential means
of control but a literal time bomb in his father’s own chest cavity.

  This thought, once germinated in Cornelius’s mind, was potent enough on its own merit. After watching his mother weep and plead as the guards waved red-hot coals before her face and tugged at her ragged dress, slapping her cheeks and kicking her behind her knees so she nearly fell into their torture brazier—the idea of giving his father a weaponized clockwork heart was not simply a temptation, it was a cancer.

  He rarely slept the evenings after those performances, but that night he paced the workshop, mind spinning crazily as he wrestled with himself. Though he worked with scores of assistants and stood under the gaze of countless monitors, he craved an advisor, or better yet a master to take this decision from his hands. He could not bring himself to allow this person to be Gisa—he would betray his father and the army, but he could not shed his patriotism so far as to defer wholeheartedly to an Austrian noble. He considered for the span of an hour a scheme to demand an audience with his mother, but even if he could arrange their ability to speak freely, he doubted she could be a voice of reason after her months of imprisonment and abuse. Out of loyalty he considered speaking to Valentin, then acknowledged the person he should seek counsel from was his mentor.

  Except as he began to tap out a message to Gisa, he found himself instead begging her to explain her suggestion in full to Johann, ask his advice and relay his response, whatever it might be.

  He prepared himself for hours of delay, as it was well past midnight and everyone would surely be in bed. To his surprise, however, her reply came in less than fifteen minutes.

  I will brief Mr. Berger now and bring him to the transmitter as soon as he is ready to respond. In the meantime, I am sending the instructions for building an audio transmitter as well as a device for isolating the auditory transmission and delivery. At this point I imagine even you can see the benefits outweigh the risks.

  It was difficult to keep his hands steady as he constructed the wireless telephone. The knowledge that he was about to not simply speak with Johann but hear him overwhelmed Cornelius so much he could scarcely follow Gisa’s instructions. He did his best to pack his emotions away as he had become so accustomed to doing during his imprisonment, but when a blinking bulb that indicated he was receiving an auditory signal began to flash and he put the transmission device to his ear and heard Johann’s hesitant query—“Conny?”—Cornelius burst into tears.

  “Darling—oh, Johann, darling—it’s you. Your voice.” He pressed his hand to his mouth, stifling his sobs lest he draw attention from the night watchman in the hall.

  Johann’s reply, after the transmission delay, crackled with an odd static, fading and breaking in places, yet it remained unmistakably him. “Are you well? Have they hurt you? How is your mother?”

  How like Johann to caretake even from a mountain range away. “They don’t let me see her much, only as a torture. I keep hoping her despair is part of an act—knowing her, she’s playing the part of frail woman to keep them from trying to break her in truth, but it’s still difficult to see.” He shut his eyes, the first tide of emotion at their reunion receding and allowing him to return to the reason he had taken the risk of building the electronic wireless. “Johann, did the princess tell you of her suggestion, of what she thinks I should do to the clockwork heart?”

  It was hard to remember the pause was not Johann’s hesitation but the transmission lag. When his reply finally arrived, it was quiet and full of weight and careful consideration. “She has, and that you want to know what I think about it.” Another pause. “I should tell you we all discussed it here, even before she suggested it to you. At great length, in fact. She suggested it only after both her Society and the Farthing crew and Master Félix agreed it was the best solution.”

  The pause at the end of his speech went on long enough Conny felt he should fill the silence. “But do you think I should do it?”

  He breathed slowly and carefully as he waited for Johann’s reply. In and out. A conscious act, willfully controlling his breath, yet at its core an involuntary mechanism of the human body. As was the pumping of a heart.

  The credo he’d vowed to serve when he took his apprenticeship to study clockwork surgery was to always build clockwork that would serve the body, not supersede it. Was it worth breaking that vow to end the war? To stop his father? To free himself and his mother?

  Would Johann still love the man he’d become?

  Would he be able to live with himself?

  Johann’s first response was a weary sigh that crackled and broke apart in the signal, yet still managed to wrap around Cornelius as warmly as a pair of arms. “I don’t know that I can answer that fairly. I know you want my advice, but I’m not certain it would help you.”

  Conny’s flesh heart slowed, constricted and ached in his chest. “Because you don’t want me to. Because you would hate me if I did it, but you know it’s the only way to stop my father.”

  The delay was almost nonexistent, meaning Johann must have begun speaking before Conny finished, and his voice crackled not with transmission static but the force of his passion and anger. “No. I would never hate you, and I do want you to do it. That’s the problem. I can’t advise you because I don’t just want you to install those terrible hearts. I want you to make them all explode. I want to burn down that castle, then find your father’s burned corpse and grind his bones into meal so I can eat them and consume him completely in his defeat like some barbarian warrior. I don’t care if the whole of France falls, so long as you escape whole and safe into my arms. I want anyone in the world who might exploit you like this destroyed so they can’t ever hurt you again.”

  Conny cried. He wept as softly as he could, but this ocean wave of feelings rolled in from the depths of him, rousing emotional responses he couldn’t hope to control. Any effort to cling to rational discussion of a grave ethical matter crumbled into the surf of decades’ worth of longing for something he had never allowed himself to acknowledge he so desperately wanted.

  That passion and anger was for Conny. Almost a possession, as if he were Johann’s most precious belonging stolen away, and he would lay waste to the world to see his return. No judgment about Conny violating his surgeon’s oath. No condemnation or accusation that here was what Johann had always known Conny would do to him, an act about to be made so much worse than Johann had ever feared. None of this mattered, because all he wanted was Cornelius’s safe return. By any means. At any cost. This ferocity, this consuming demand, this overwhelming instinct to protect—this love.

  This was what Conny wanted more than air. This was what Johann gave him, even from fifteen hundred kilometers away.

  “I’m sorry to be so ruthless.” Johann’s voice was still gruff, though tempered now with apology. “It’s why I cannot help you. I have no objectivity. I only want you safe. I love you, Conny.”

  “I love you too.” Conny wiped his tears away with his fingers and tried to compose himself. “I don’t want to kill innocent men to be with you. I don’t judge you for having killed as a soldier. I wouldn’t care if you carried out your threat and destroyed the castle, or if you or Master Félix installed those self-destructive hearts. But I don’t know that I can do it.” He drew a deep breath and sank into the tide of safety and calm Johann’s passion had aroused. “Yet I will, if you ask it of me. Please, Johann. Tell me what I should do. Please don’t make me be the one to decide. I don’t care if your reasoning is sound or not. I only want you to still love me when this is over.”

  “Then I want you to do it. If you can find a way to make sure as few innocents as possible suffer, then do so. But alter the hearts with clean conscience. At least as far as judgment from me. And from all of us.”

  It was astonishing how much freedom this permission gave Conny, not only to calm but to think more clearly, as if Johann had removed obstructions to a thousand alternate paths. “I could have the tr
ansmitter only slow soldiers’ hearts. For the generals, it could be a more compelling arrest.” He breathed a sigh. “I’ve installed so many clockwork hearts, darling. They make the pieces at my direction, and I assemble them until my fingers bleed.”

  “So there are many out there with a transmitter, but no remote control. Yet they won’t know that. You could feint and tell them the ones affected are only a demonstration.” A pause. “You’ve installed them in officers? How many?”

  “Only a few, but there are more and more interested, as they see how my patients improve with the clockwork. My father wants one as well. I think he is working up the courage to go under my knife but doesn’t want to admit it.”

  “Then there’s your answer. Install the weaponized heart in as many officers as you can, and do whatever you must to get one inside your father. Call back those men you’ve already worked on and offer an upgrade. Can you do something to enhance them further? Make them want new hearts even if they don’t need them?”

  Yes, he could, but oh, that felt terrible. But if Johann wanted him to, he’d do it. “I can. I will, for you.”

  “Don’t bleed for the officers, Conny. If you know one is a good man, then lie and tell him he’s not a suitable candidate. Encourage your father to only give this upgrade to his closest and most trustworthy officers—that will ensure only those who think torturing your mother is an acceptable plan will end up in our crosshairs.”

  That was quite clever, actually, and very helpful. “You’re a fine soldier, Johann. An admirable leader.”

  “I’m a crafty pirate who wants his lover back. As soon as possible.”

  They spoke a bit longer after that, more tender reconnections and wistful plans for their reunion. They couldn’t linger as long as they’d have liked, because Conny needed to maximize time to conference with Princess Gisa about the specifics for these new hearts. All too soon, Johann surrendered the wireless to her. She had the clipped gruffness of an Austrian, but her French was impeccable, more eloquent and polished than his own.