by Eden Bradley
Brace doubted he could bring the lady lower than that, and yet he could live for a year on that much money, and no one he knew had so much to lend. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“You can see her as h’often as you like, as long as you ‘ave the coin. If you come this early, I’ll make sure you have ‘er first,” Mrs. Teagarden promised. “I think that’s a fair bargain.”
Clearly his net worth had been calculated and found wanting. Unfortunate that the old whore had such an accurate meter, but after all, men were her business.
“I’ll be wanting a discount for frequent business,” he warned. How would he ever borrow, beg, steal so much? But he’d need to visit Celeste again to reassure her, and soon.
“I take care of my customers,” she promised.
One of the bearded men cleared his throat. Brace nodded to Mrs. Teagarden and took his leave, noting the tall, bulky man dressed in coarse wool lurking in the shadow of the stairs in the entryway. Had he been there when Brace entered? He couldn’t be sure, but clearly the girls were guarded as well as enslaved by the clockwork.
He returned to his rooms and tried to fall asleep, but Celeste’s perfect face, strong fingers and scars tossed in his brain through the night while the heavy rain assaulted his ears in an irregular pattern.
~ * ~
The next day was Saturday, only a half day on his stool at the law office. He fidgeted it away then sidled up to his friend, the senior clerk, as they left. Five pounds was all the man had available. He wandered through a greengrocer’s, two old school chums’ flats, even his uncle’s house on Cavendish Square. The most he could raise was thirty pounds. Not surprised by this amount, he decided to write a letter to his grandfather, who might remember the Flaherty family from the old days and feel inclined to assist. But he would write the letter tonight, after he visited one last friend in Camden Town.
Jonathan Seton lived in the last of a faltering row of houses with a discouragingly filthy front step. The bricks were stained as if painters had been testing dabs of color on the surfaces for years. A little community of inventors, they shared a distain for blown-out windows and heavy smells, as well as gardens littered with machinery and metal bits, though a tool would never be found uncared for around these parts, especially as most of them had been handcrafted by the inhabitants.
As Brace climbed the step, he saw something fly from a second-floor window next door. He cupped his hand over his eyes to filter out weak winter sun rays and saw what appeared to be a metal dragonfly circle the yard and fly back through the window again. It gave him an idea. Could he somehow fight technology with technology?
He rapped the door knocker against the door for a couple of minutes, but wasn’t surprised to receive no answer. Jonathan mostly lived in his workshop out back. Brace went around to the alley and opened the sagging gate. He heard loud banging from the shed at the south-west corner, a freshly-painted building better maintained than the main house, and knew his friend was home.
When he opened the door, he saw the man in shirtsleeves, waistcoat and leather apron, leaning over a table while he pounded at a silver disk.
Brace stepped forward with a sigh. “Burned through your trousers again, Johnny?”
Jonathan shook his head like a wet dog, then went still for a moment before turning. His saturnine features lifted in the always surprisingly angelic smile. “Brace! What brings you by?”
“Doom and disaster,” he said, wishing he’d brought a bottle of something with him.
“My specialties. You wouldn’t make your way out here without them.” He held up the silver oval with a gloved hand. “What do you think?”
“What is it?”
“A pendant, I think.” He frowned at the shape. “A chap I know wanted to mount an old Greek coin on silver for his wife.”
“Glad to see you are profitably employed.” Maybe Jonathan would have a good supply of money to loan him.
Jonathan picked up an irregular-shaped piece of gold and tossed it at Brace. “See?”
Brace stared at the small image of a stern woman with curled hair and a battle helmet on the old coin. “Athena?”
“You bet. That, old chum, is more than a thousand years old.”
He handed it back. “Wish I had a few of those in a drawer somewhere.”
“Maybe your grandfather does in an attic somewhere at the Park. They are quite small. Some were minted in Gaul. Not so far away.”
“Must be worth a fortune,” Brace mused. Jonathan had a point. Plenty of trunks moldered in the attics of his family estate, but he doubted his grandfather’s much younger second wife would allow him to abscond with any treasures he discovered.
“A small one. Why? Are you in need of a fortune?”
“I met an old friend last night,” Brace said. “And I need one hundred pounds to get her out of some trouble.
“Her, eh? What’s she done?”
“Not her, her father. Now he’s up and died, leaving her in a dreadful mess.”
“Fathers will do that. So you are here in hopes that I can cough up a few of the queen’s coins for you?”
“If you have them.”
“I do not. Put all my ready cash into silver. I’ll get paid when the pendant is done, but no sooner.”
Brace sat down on an old cane chair and sighed. “You were my last hope. I’m short seventy pounds.”
Jonathan whistled. “Anything you can pawn?”
“Not a thing, except my father’s old watch and my mother would have my head if I did that.”
“It’s not worth seventy.”
“No. Say, what do you know about clockwork?”
Jonathan snorted and placed the coin back into a velvet-lined box, then closed the lid. “What don’t I know? I apprenticed in a clockmaker’s shop in Switzerland for two years.”
“I thought you made talking heads or some such nonsense there.”
“Not until my last few months there. I repaired many a clock at the start.”
Brace put his elbows on his thighs and his chin on his hands. “Can you keep a secret for your entire life?”
Jonathan raised a finely cut eyebrow. “You know I can.”
“Her name is Celeste Flaherty.”
“Who is she to you?”
“A childhood friend. She had a profligate father but her family was as good as mine. You know, younger son of a middle son, distantly related to some baronet or other, the occasional knighting in the family.”
“Right.”
“I lost track of her, as one does, when her family moved into London, just about the time I was discovering the fairer sex. I had no idea what had become of her. Hadn’t thought of her in years, though she was the daily playmate of my youth.”
“But you found her again.”
“In a brothel, no less.”
“Oh, dear.” Jonathan wetted his lower lip with his tongue and pulled a long, low table away from the wall. He balanced one boot on the wood surface.
Brace winced at the sight. “That pose leaves nothing to the imagination. Can’t you find a pair of trousers?”
Jonathan turned, offering Brace the hint of hairy ass curves under his shirt. “Ah, I have just the thing.” He rustled in what looked like a pile of rags in one corner, then came up with a frayed pair of wool trousers. When he had them buttoned up he spun around. “Fetching, eh?”
“Ghastly.”
“I am not the young dandy you are,” Jonathan said, his nose in the air. “At least they cover the necessary. Back to your Miss Flaherty.”
“Too right. I chose her from a portrait wall. That’s what this place does, offer their young ladies via portrait. I meant to gamble with friends but it caught my eye and the next thing you know I’d paid for an hour. It wasn’t until after that she told me her real name and I recognized her. It had been nearly a decade.”
“After?” Jonathan chuckled. “You rogue. No reason you’d have known her.”
Brace didn’t find the situation very humo
rous. “She’s trapped. Not at all the practiced whore, even after nearly three years. They have some sort of clockwork mechanism literally pierced to her throat. It sets off an alarm if she tries to leave.”
“How does it work?”
He shrugged. “The proprietress has a key. If it isn’t wound the alarm gets louder and louder, depending on how much time is set.”
Jonathan’s fingers fluttered, as if he played with imaginary gears. “Did you try to make a deal with her?”
“The proprietress said it would cost me one hundred pounds to buy Celeste’s contract.”
“A nasty business.”
“Any ideas? It would take me years to come up with the money.”
Jonathan scratched his nose. “You feel it completely necessary to help her?”
“There isn’t anyone else. She was a sweet girl. This shouldn’t have happened. Not at all her fault.”
“If you pay for time with her, and can get the infernal device off her body, could you escape from her chamber?”
Brace considered this. “The window has iron bars outside. I checked. We’d have to leave the room and get out either through the door, past the enormous brute who waits by the stairs, or from the top of the house, over the roofs.”
“Without the alarm at her neck sounding. Tell me about this clockwork. Perhaps we can disable it.”
“It’s a brass case with some kind of pin at the pack pierced through her flesh in two places. There’s also an iron chain choker around her neck.”
“Tell me about the clockwork.”
Brace closed his eyes. “Iron, I think, nothing fine. Heavy and durable.”
“You say the clock hands are iron?”
“I think so. They certainly aren’t silver or gold. It didn’t look delicate or decorative at all.”
Jonathan leaned over and patted his knee. “There you go. That’s the answer.”
“What is?”
The corners of Jonathan’s thin mouth rose. “Magnets. With a powerful magnet, you can disrupt the hands, turning the clockwork off, as it were. Simple enough.”
“Really?”
“You wouldn’t even need to be in the room to do it. We could take an iron cylinder, wrap some wire around it, copper might be the least expensive, then attach the ends to one of Mr. Bunsen’s cells and there you go. A magnet.” Jonathan pulled his boot from the stool, went to one of his workbenches and fiddled for a few minutes.
Brace got up and stepped over so he could watch his friend encircling a few inches of iron with brass wire. Jonathan left the ends dangling. Then, he pulled a large cylinder to himself and attached the wires to either end.
Immediately, all the metal fragments on the table slid toward the foul-smelling cylinder. Jonathan quickly disconnected one end and grinned. “That will stop your friend’s clock.”
Had his friend been sniffing too many foul odors? “I couldn’t walk into the brothel with that thing.”
“Can you get onto the roof above her room? It still ought to work.”
Brace rubbed at his chin, bristly with whiskers after a long day. “I’ll pay a call on her again and figure it out. At the very least I need to share the plan.”
“I suppose you can hardly send around a note to a whore,” Jonathan agreed. “Remember to keep the wire off the battery until you are ready to act.”
“I can’t thank you enough.”
“Better my skill than my money,” Jonathan said.
~ * ~
As soon as the door closed on Mrs. Teagarden the next night, Celeste rushed into Brace’s arms. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t come back.”
“I told you I’d help you,” he reminded her, then rubbed his hands sensuously up and down her back. “I’m a man of my word.”
Celeste kept smiling but behind the expression tried to decide what he expected of her now. His cock was a thick bar against her belly. He’d paid for an hour again. Mrs. Teagarden had wound the clock at her neck with her own key. Did he want the embraces he’d paid for? Or did he want to speak to his childhood friend? The cost of this life had been a split in her personality. It had kept her sane. Inside she was still Celeste, the girl from a good family who’d had an idyllic childhood. Outside, she was the clockwork whore. But as long as she kept her inner life private, nothing a man did to her could ever matter.
Brace wasn’t any customer though, but her old friend. He’d grown to manhood exceptionally well. His long, lean body and attention to her pleasure had made for an incredible hour. Remembering, her breasts felt full, her cunny wet and empty. Desire was unfamiliar to her, but she recognized the signs.
What she felt for Brace was different, but could she be sexual with him without falling back into her Liza persona? And what did he want?
She held back a wince as his fingers caressed her bottom. Her last customer early this morning had given her a solid caning.
“Celeste,” Brace murmured into her hair. “I’ve been unable to stop thinking of you.”
The embraces. That was what he wanted. How would the time stretch as he strung her along, claiming rescue plans while he took his pleasure with her? Of course, he’d given her the best carnal experience of her life, but that might simply be his kink. Variations on men’s sexual desire seemed endless. Maybe a woman’s pleasure fueled Brace’s own. They’d been too young to think of such things when she’d moved to London.
“You’re always on my mind,” she whispered back. It was true enough, though her thoughts had been as much about rescue as about his strong legs, thick cock and rounded ass.
His hands moved up her torso, but stopped just under her breasts. She felt his breath on her ear. “You should be able to escape this place tomorrow night.”
Her breath seemed to freeze in her breast. Escape? Had she judged his motives too soon?
~ * ~
THREE
“An inventor friend helped me come up with a plan,” Brace said.
Celeste was glad his mouth was so close to her ear. Anyone could be in the corridor listening. Her nipples slid against his coat, barely protected by her thin gown, distracting her. “But how?”
“We’re going to stop that clock of yours, then escape over the roof.” His fingers played with the undersides of her breasts. “I’ve spent the day wandering this street. I used money I borrowed to rent a room in the house next door.”
She touched the medallion at her throat, her constant companion for nearly three years. How she longed to say goodbye to the ticking and the alarms forever, but the sounds would probably haunt her dreams for the rest of her life.
“There’s a trapdoor,” he continued. “I’ll climb out, and since the buildings are linked, it’s easy to get onto the roof here. I’ll set the device my friend gave me, which should stop the clocks in the house, and then you can climb out the trapdoor here .We’ll be in my rented room in under five minutes.”
“Are you sure you can stop the clockwork?” She didn’t care about the climbing since she’d never feared heights.
“Not everyone has an inventor for a friend. First Mrs. Teagarden and now me. It took an inventor to create this mess, and now an inventor has found a way out.”
His breath tickled her ear. “I can’t stay on the street. They’ll find me and bring me back.”
“We have to get you to Camden Town immediately so my friend can cut the medallion off you. I haven’t quite figured that part out yet. I think we’ll have to rent a carriage and leave the magnet, otherwise your alarm will go off.”
“Is that a problem?”
“The magnet smells terrible, for one thing. Someone might find it. But we’ll manage somehow.” He stroked his hand down to her waist. “Yes, I’ll have the carriage waiting tomorrow night. Mrs. Teagarden promised me your first appointment of the night so you should be free of this monstrosity by midnight tomorrow.”
And then she’d only have to figure out the rest of her life. How much would Brace do to help her? Would he be reminded of what she was? She
blinked and willed away all these thoughts. Decisions could come tomorrow. Tomorrow would be overwhelming enough.
She smiled in her practiced way at Brace. “I cannot thank you enough.” Slowly, she slid to her knees in front of him.
He watched her fingers slide up his legs. She set her cheek at the hem of his coat and nosed the fabric away at his waist.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said, unclasping her hands from his thighs and warming them in his own large palms. “I didn’t come here for that reason.”
“But I want to,” she said, knowing this was true, now that she knew he really meant to help her.
“I want it too, but I have something else in mind.”
“You do?” Wondering what he meant, she allowed him to pull her to her feet and walk her to the bed.
“I can’t keep my hands off you,” he confessed. “And I’d love to have your mouth on my cock, but you know how much I like to taste you.”
“I noticed that last time.”
“Let’s share the experience.”
She almost smiled at the eager tone. Life hadn’t jaded her Brace yet. “No one has ever wanted to do that before.”
“Good. I haven’t either. It will be a first for both of us. That’s good, right?”
Her smile was genuine this time. “Perfect, Brace. Just perfect.”
Her clockwork medallion chimed, reminding them that their first ten minutes were gone. A bubble of nausea popped in her belly at the sound, but Brace laughed. “By tomorrow night that sound will be gone from your life.”
He pulled up her gown while she undid buttons and fastenings. When his boots were gone he tripped over the trousers and underdrawers still tangled on his legs and fell onto the cot, pulling her down on top of him.
She lifted her chin and kissed him. Then, realizing what she’d done, she levered herself up on her arms and took stock of him, his face a scant inch from hers. Kissing wasn’t a whore’s tool, but a courtesan’s or even a wife’s. What kind of relationship did their future hold?
Before her she saw a man still young. In the gaslight she saw traces of the freckles he’d sported as a child still dotting his nose, though she imagined his days of running through fields and climbing trees were long gone. His hair was thick and sandy, a shade or two darker than his childhood hue and she realized his fingers were covered in traces of ink. Not a schoolboy anymore, but a clerk.
