A long while later, he returned to his room, poured himself a large measure of whiskey, and drained it in one long swallow. The alcohol burned its way to his stomach but couldn’t burn away his pain.
Almost without volition, he found his eyes drawn to the mirror over the mantelpiece and the reflection within. It had been a long time since he’d seen his own reflection. He’d almost forgotten what he looked like anymore, because with Rose his damaged face hadn’t mattered.
He could simply be himself.
The face that now stared back at him was a monster’s face. He couldn’t bear to look at it. He didn’t want to ever look at it again. With almost demonic strength, he tore the mirror free from its moorings and lifted it. Then he hurled the mirror across the room, where it shattered against the far wall and fell to the ground in a shower of glass and dust.
Then he opened a new bottle of whiskey and set about the business of getting himself seriously drunk.
…
“Poor George called while you were out today,” Rose said.
Jenny—dark, pretty, and, for the moment, enormously pregnant—looked up from the sock she was darning, her dark brows drawing together in worry. They were sitting in the sunny parlor of Jenny’s New Haven home in the quiet hour between lunch and tea.
“He didn’t propose again, did he?”
Rose smiled wryly. “Of course he did. The thing is, I don’t think he really wants to marry me any more than I want to marry him. It’s Louisa. She managed to convince him at some point that he is in love with me, and you know how he is.”
“I certainly do,” Jenny said grimly. As she bent her dark head back over the sock, the white fringe of her lace cap flopped forward to conceal her forehead and brows. “I hope you told him not to make an ass out of himself anymore.”
“Something like that,” Rose said.
“Good.” Jenny examined the sock she was darning with a critical eye, then added absently, “The new professor of classics has a daughter who would suit him very well. She’s the managing sort—exactly what he needs. I ran into him the other day in the library, and he was wearing one red sock and one black. He really does need a wife—but not you.”
Rose took a deep breath and set down her needle and thimble. In the month she had spent beneath Jenny’s roof, the flower she had been embroidering on the tiny white christening dress Jenny’s mother had made for her first grandchild had only grown by a single petal.
Rose had always despised needlework, not least because she was terrible at it.
“The thing is, Jenny,” she now said carefully, putting the dress back into her sewing basket, “I can’t stay here forever.”
Jenny looked up so swiftly. “Nonsense,” she said. “You can stay here as long as you like.”
“You and Laurence have been very patient and kind, but you cannot wish to have an outsider staying with you indefinitely.”
“You are my best friend, not an outsider, and you have been an immense help. Without you, my mother would surely have driven me utterly insane already.”
“Well, that’s very kind of you to say, but I’ve been thinking that what I really ought to do is find a teaching position somewhere.”
Jenny scowled. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Professor Fielding’s sister runs that girls’ school in Farmington. I wrote to her last week. She is looking for a teacher qualified in chemistry and that if I was interested, the post was mine.”
“But there’s that new law professor who has been making cow eyes at you—”
“His ears stick out,” Rose said. “And anyway, I don’t think I want to ever get married.”
Jenny lifted her head and gave her a sharp look. Rose kept her face impassive. She knew her friend was desperately curious to know what had happened in New York, but Rose had refused to speak of it, and Jenny hadn’t pressed.
“I think it would be very nice to teach,” she said.
“Perhaps,” Jenny said. “But in any event, I need you here when the baby is born.”
“But Laurence—” Rose began.
“He doesn’t get a say. Stay at least until the baby is born,” Jenny said.
Rose hesitated. She didn’t want to be a teacher, though she knew it was the logical thing to do.
She wanted the life she had had with Sebastian—laughter and roses and the constant wonder of science, the thrill of discovery, the joy of invention.
She loved him.
But he hadn’t been strong enough to love her back.
Staring out the parlor window, she closed her eyes on a wave of agony, then fought back the emotion savagely. She wouldn’t become one of those weak, clinging women she had always so despised. She moved her head, as though she might shake away the pain and the memories of Sebastian that wouldn’t stop coming back: the touch of his hand, the pressure of his lips, that bitter, self-mocking smile.
But she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life pining for him. She was made of sterner stuff than that.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll stay until the baby is born.”
…
A month and a half after Rose had gone, Sebastian walked into his rose garden one morning, Ashputtel prowling at his heels, to discover that his rose bush, the bush that he had hacked to pieces the night Rose had first arrived, was covered with huge, velvety, blood-red blossoms.
For a moment, he stared at it in disbelief. He had planted the damned thing years ago, and he had never seen so much as a bud on it. And yet now—after he had all but hacked it into pieces—it was blooming.
He sank onto his knees before it and pressed his nose into the nearest blossom. Its rich, heady fragrance filled his senses, and in that moment, the truth he had been ignoring for so long hit him with the force of an electricity shock.
He had been a fool to let Rose go.
A sound escaped his throat. He came to his feet, staggering backward a few steps before falling painfully onto the bench. Even above his harsh breathing, he could hear the steady tick of his clockwork heart.
Rose had told him that he was a coward, and she had been right. Crippled as much by his fear as his injuries, he had buried himself alive in this mausoleum of his past, a pathetic specimen of useless frustration, of wasted potential.
But he could no longer dwell in the shadows of the past; he owed it the ones who had died, to live every day of his life. To do otherwise, to turn his back on the second chance he had been given, was to dishonor their memories.
For the first time since Rose had left Cavendish House, peace settled inside him, filling the dark, empty spaces in his soul.
She had told him that she loved him. He understood now the worth of that gift, and the senseless waste of refusing it.
It’s your life, she had said to him.
He dropped his head into his hands.
There are better ways of atoning.
She had told him that she wouldn’t be coming back, but now he knew exactly what he would have to do. He stood, painfully, scooping up the disgruntled cat in his arms, and hobbled toward the stairs. He climbed them as quickly as he could, cursing his bad leg.
The laboratory was filled with light, as clean and well-swept as it had been when Rose had left. He set Ashputtel down, but didn’t head for the teleportation device. Instead, he swept a large work table clear of the debris and tools that cluttered its surface.
He selected his materials carefully: the light alloy skeleton of a wing from a flying machine, a silk parachute, an old apron of soft, supple leather. When he was finished, he found a pencil and a scrap of foolscap. He sketched quickly, immediately rejecting two or three designs before settling on one that pleased him.
Then he set to work. For the next week, Sebastian worked day and night, stopping to eat only when he was hungry, to sleep when he was tired. It took him five days to discover the error he had made in one of his Cartesian equations, and which had, on that snowy February morning he would never for
get, resulted in the implosion of a critical portion of the device above the battery.
Even when he wasn’t working on the teleportation device, he remained in the laboratory, tinkering with new inventions: a music box, an electric candle, the small clockwork mouse that soon became Ashputtel’s favorite toy. It seemed now that in setting aside his obsession with the past he had unstoppered some fount of creativity, which now poured forth in a rushing torrent.
The first day of April was warm and cloudless. Sebastian stepped back from the teleportation box and knew that it was flawless and complete.
He rang for Greaves, who appeared ten minutes later in the doorway.
“I intend to seek Miss Verney,” Sebastian said. “I need you to operate the machine for me.”
“Of course, sir,” Greaves said.
Sebastian explained quickly to the old man which switches to hit and when to pull the lever. Then he placed a punch card set for New Haven into the engine, climbed into the box, and allowed himself to fall forward into the darkness.
He felt a great rushing sensation, as though the world were spinning away from him. He wanted to put out a hand to steady himself, but knew it wouldn’t help. At last, feeling as though he had been flung around the inside of a tornado, his feet touched solid earth.
When he opened his eyes, he stood on a street corner in New Haven. For a moment he remained still under the memories that assailed him. It was here, at Yale, away from his unhappy parents and the silent tomb that was Cavendish House, that he had first entered into his full heritage of scholarship, sports, and friendship. It was here that he had developed his love of science, here that he had first learned to build the machines that would become his all-consuming passion, his curse, and now, at last, his salvation.
As he stood there, the ghosts of his old companions seemed to crowd around him, greeting him. Edward Thompson, the chemist, who had devoted his life to the study of truth serums and had seldom been seen without his brass goggles hanging around his neck—Edward, blasted to pieces at Gettysburg. Peter Haythornthwaite, who had once fallen from the roof of Connecticut Hall while declaiming Ovid’s lament to Corinna’s dead parrot and leapt up unscathed, now lying in a Virginian hospital, blind and crippled. Eustace Ames, his best friend and laboratory partner, gone missing during the Peninsula Campaign and presumed dead.
For a while, he lingered among his old haunts, listening to the shouts and laughter of a small group of undergraduates, but eventually he made his way to the bursar’s office, where the old man greeted him with surprise and pleasure. They spoke briefly of the university and their old friends and then Sebastian got to the point.
“I’m here in New Haven to see Professor Verney’s younger daughter,” he said. “I believe you are acquainted with her. I understand she is living with her sister, a Mrs. Louisa Howard. Would you happen to know their direction?”
“Louisa?” the bursar said, his great bushy brows flying upwards and a look of amusement crossing his face. “Yes, of course, I know her address. But if you’re looking for Rose, she isn’t there.”
“Isn’t there?” Sebastian repeated, his heart sinking. If she wasn’t there, then where had she gone? Had this trip been wasted, after all?
“No, indeed,” the bursar said. “She is currently staying with a friend, a Mrs. Laurence Dean. Just had a fine young baby boy, you know.”
Sebastian blinked, bemused. “Miss Verney?”
The bursar chuckled. “No, no. Mrs. Dean.”
“Yes, of course,” Sebastian said. “Will you give me the address?”
Ten minutes later, Sebastian ascended the steep, hilly incline of Prospect Street. This he accomplished without undue difficulty, and soon found himself standing in front of a small, tidy house.
When he knocked, a plump, rosy-cheeked maid answered the door.
“Is Miss Verney in?” he asked.
The maid nodded. “She’s in the garden, sir, just around the back. Shall I show you the way?”
“No, thank you,” he said.
He moved quickly around the side of the house. The gardens behind were large, well-tended, bursting with the first flowers of spring, but nevertheless, he saw the slender, well-remembered figure at once. She sat on a bench, her face raised to the sun, her hair streaming unpinned down her back.
Noting without surprise the pounding of his clockwork heart, he said her name.
She looked up. When she saw him, she stood in a movement that seemed almost involuntary, her mouth parting on a breath. Her eyes, as they took him in, seemed to reflect a happiness so intense and uncontrollable he came to a stop.
Then he said her name again, and she crossed the small distance that separated them, and he enfolded her into his arms.
As Sebastian’s arms closed fiercely around her, Rose raised her face to look into his, hardly daring to believe he was there in Jenny’s garden, holding her.
“Sebastian,” she said, unable to think of anything else to say.
In one of the trees behind her, a bird broke into song.
“You were right,” he said. “I was a coward. After the war, it seemed…easier…to stop trying. And then you came, and it seemed wrong to hope that things could change, or that I could possibly deserve you.”
His hand came around to cradle her chin, and the other moved gently against her cheek, like a blind man relearning the face of one he loved.
“And you were right when you called me selfish. I am selfish. Selfish enough to want you, if you will still have me. Because you were wrong about one thing. You were wrong when you said that I didn’t love you more than my vanity, or my obsession with the past.”
She drew a choking breath. “Oh, Sebastian.”
“I finished your father’s machine,” he said. His voice was low and husky. “But it would have been easier if you had been there. To help me.”
She shook her head, her throat too tight for words even if she could remember how to speak.
“It was your fault, you know,” he added, one big hand moving up along her spine to lift the mantle of her hair and cradle the back of her head.
She swallowed and forced her dry lips to move.
“My fault?” she repeated, the words raspy.
“When the machine malfunctioned,” he said. “It was because of one of the Cartesian equations. I miscalculated, and you didn’t notice, so the wires attaching the battery exploded. But I fixed it and now it works. It’s how I got here.”
She smiled even as tears prickled behind her lashes.
He had finished her father’s machine. For her.
“And your leg?” she asked in a whisper, remembering the way he had moved across the path, his steps light and quick and sure.
“I made a new brace,” he said quietly. “The metal is a great deal lighter than the brass was. It makes it easier to walk. You were right about that, too.”
She nodded, swallowing hard against the ache in her throat.
“I love you more than I have ever loved anyone or anything in the world,” he said. “Do you believe me?”
She nodded, the tears spilling from beneath her lashes.
“Yes,” she said.
“Then come home with me,” he said. “Marry me and help me build machines. Have my children and grow old with me.”
She tilted back her head, smiling through her tears. “I don’t know,” she said demurely. “Are you certain your funds are sufficient for my services?”
“I might be the only man in the world who can afford you.” His voice was dry. “Were you aware that a coil of copper wire costs more than ten new gowns? You’ll have to marry me, Rose. Who else would indulge your very expensive and peculiar tastes in entertainment?”
She pretended to reflect. “Poor George, perhaps? He does pine so.”
“I told you once that I refuse to give up the best laboratory assistant I have ever had to someone named Poor George,” Sebastian said. “And I certainly wouldn’t let him have the woman I love.”
&
nbsp; “It seems I have no choice.” Her heart might actually explode from the force of her joy. “I’ll have to marry you.”
“You certainly will,” agreed Sebastian. “I’m selfish, remember? You told me so yourself. I’m not going to let you go. Not even for your own good.”
“There’s nowhere in this world I want to go without you,” she said.
A soft wind blew through the gardens, rustling the leaves. In the boughs overhead, a bird raised its voice, calling to its companions, who answered in a series of trilling notes.
The sunlight that streamed over them was warm as a promise.
Sebastian bent his head and kissed her. As their lips met, she was awed and humbled by the tremendous power of his love for her, which, once unleashed, had allowed him to save himself from destruction and ruin and despair.
“I love you,” she said.
He smiled against her mouth, and beneath the palm of her hand, she could feel the slow, steady beating of his heart.
About the Author
Lily Lang lives in New York City, where she studies history, eats a lot of cookies, and may or may not dance on bars when the moon is full. To her dismay, she has no teleportation powers. Visit her at lilylangbooks.com.
The Clockwork Bride
Patricia Eimer
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Patricia Eimer. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.
Entangled Publishing, LLC
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Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.
Edited by Kerri-Leigh Grady and Guillian Helm
Cover design by Jessica Cantor
Ebook ISBN 978-1-62266-064-3
Manufactured in the United States of America
A Riveting Affair (Entangled Ever After) Page 9
