Steamy Cogs

by Jessica Ripley

  Steamy Cogs

  A collection of steampunk romances

  Bess Hamilton

  Laurie Stewart

  Jessica Ripley

  Bonnie Lynn Carroll

  Edited by

  Jackie Lefebvre

  Copyright © 2017

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Bess Hamilton

  Jewel Bearing Heart

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  About the Author

  Laurie Stewart

  Contessa

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  About the Author

  Jessica Ripley

  Clockwork Journey

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  About the Author

  Bonnie Lynn Carroll

  Sing a Song of Freedom

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  About the Author

  Also from Eighth Ripple Press

  Jewel Bearing Heart

  Bess Hamilton

  1

  The sun wouldn’t be up for hours and a heavy fog obscured the view from her studio window. The streetlights cast a sickly yellow glow through the mist. She sighed at the view and turned back to her sketchbook. Faith Merriweather told herself that she was here to work because there was so much to do, so many faces to put back together. But really, she hadn’t been able to sleep and had felt confined in her room in the women’s residence.

  Faith didn’t so much mind being one of the “surplus women” that newspaper editorialists wrung their hands over. Even if the war hadn’t eliminated great swaths of eligible men, she’d very likely have chosen the spinster life.

  What she minded was the lack of adventure in her life. Her work was gratifying. Giving veterans of the Great War new faces was the best use of her skills. In a time so far in the past it felt like a different world, Faith had taken drawing lessons and learned to paint on china. Genteel talents fit for a life that no longer existed. Still, it kept her tied to London, tied to this studio, tied to a regular schedule of work.

  It was a sin to say it, a sin to even think it, but she missed the war. She missed the excitement, or rather, the constant nagging fear that passed for excitement. Even the boring times in between had been exciting because she had never known what would happen next.

  If asked what she’d done during the war, she’d smile and say, “Oh, I drove an ambulance,” which wasn’t exactly the whole story, but it was close enough. If she’d been a man, she’d have joined up and would have likely died in a trench. That’s what had happened to so many of the boys she’d grown up with.

  A clatter from the workroom broke through the early morning silence and made her jump from her seat. Faith threw her pencil down. Her heart beat fast and she laughed at herself a little. All winter, she and her studio partner Freddie had been fighting a rat infestation. They shared a horror of rats thanks to their time in France.

  She opened her desk drawer and slid out the false panel to reveal her revolver and a box of bullets. She loaded her gun and quietly pushed her chair back. It’d been a long time since she had to shoot anything. The gun felt comfortable, familiar in her hands. She crept to the door that separated her small studio from the workshop.

  The door creaked as she pushed it open. Faith reached around the frame and, by feel, found the button for the lights. She pushed it and came into the room, hoping to surprise the rat with the sudden burst of light.

  Before she even realized that she saw a man, Faith had her gun out and aimed for his middle. He held up his hands, but stepped towards her. He had a bandage on his left cheek. Shattered glass covered the worktable. All around the room, plaster casts of the studio’s clients stared down at them.

  “You won’t shoot me,” he said in a tone just above a whisper. “It wouldn’t matter if you did.”

  “Come any closer and I will,” Faith said. She held her arms steady. She kept her stance stable and wide, but he kept moving towards her. It had been a long time—years—since she shot a man. She’d rather not do it tonight.

  Moving quickly, he stepped in close to her, crowding her and grasped her wrist. He was much stronger than his slender frame hinted. Faith gritted her teeth. As they stared into each other’s eyes, he tightened his grip. His eyes were wrong somehow. They were a very bright, clear blue, like cobalt glass. They shone as if lit from behind. And yet, despite that, he was handsome. This is what being alone had done to her; she was attracted to a thief.

  Faith had to choose between letting him break her wrist and letting go of the gun. In her experience, those who meant to kill generally didn’t wait. Her wrist, though, she needed for her work. She dropped the gun and he caught it easily, his strange eyes never leaving her face. He pressed the gun to her temple.

  “I need help,” he said.

  “I can’t help you. We don’t have any money or valuables here,” she said.

  “I know that,” he said. His voice was hoarse. Or no, not hoarse. It buzzed. “I need your skills, your supplies.” He propelled her to the worktable.

  “We make prosthetics for soldiers with facial injuries,” she said.

  He nodded. “Yes. I know. It’s why I’m here.”

  He fished in his pocket with his free hand and took out a piece of paper. He slapped it down on the table and jabbed at it with his index finger. The skin on his hand was almost completely smooth: no lines, pores, creases or marks. It was as if he wore a glove of fine leather. “Can you make that?” He asked.

  “First, stop shoving that thing at my head. You won’t shoot me,” Faith said.

  “How do you know I won’t?”

  “You’d have done it. Please. It’s not necessary.”

  He sighed. But he took the bullets out of the gun and put them in an ashtray. He slipped the revolver into his waistband.

  She flicked on the overhead light. “There, now I can see,” she said.

  He kept his head down and his gaze fixed on the floor.

  “I think I can make this. But my partner would probably be better at it. I’m an artist, not a chemist,” Faith said.

  His cheek had been slashed and just past the edge of the bandage, something in the wound caught the light, reflecting it back. Unable to help her curiosity, Faith reached out. He flinched back from her touch.

  “Where did you have this made?” She asked. “We use enamel over copper. This looks like some kind of rubber.”

  “If I tell you—” he started to say. He sighed and collapsed on a chair beside her. She recognized the sag in his shoulders, the frown. Since the war, Faith and Freddie had made new faces for dozens of men who’d been made into monsters by their wounds. The doctors could save their lives, but couldn’t build new bones, muscle, or skin.

  “My name is James Paige. I was killed in action at Passchendaele and resurrected by a mad man. You might think I’m mad, but look.” He removed the bandage from his face. His fingers were long and elegant. Faith watched as he grabbed an edge of the slash on his cheek and pulled it back. Underneath was a skull of metal
and she could just see something like clockwork underneath.

  He pushed his skin back into place before Faith had enough of a look. She wanted to see more, to understand what she’d glimpsed. Her disappointment must have showed on her face.

  “You’re not surprised?” He asked, laughing a little. “Who are you?”

  “I’ve seen a lot. I’ve lost my capacity to be surprised,” she said. This wasn’t exactly true. His story was fantastic. But fantastic things had happened in the war. How many would want their dead loved one back, even if it was some sort of amalgam of metal and man?

  The clock chimed the hour. It was six o’clock. Freddie would arrive in two hours, whistling and carrying hot muffins made by his housekeeper. Her visitor saw her glance at the clock and the door. He was observant.

  “My partner comes in around eight. He’ll help you. I know he will. Why don’t you tell me why you’re here?” She reached out to touch the back of his hand, but her fingers only hovered there until James took her hand. His hand was cold, but the skin was soft like an infant’s.

  He smiled, but it didn’t go to his eyes. She knew that smile too. It was bitter. It acknowledged the grim comedy of their lives now.

  “Why I’m here? I ask myself that every day.”

  His story clearly required a drink or two—or several. She fished out Freddie’s whiskey bottle from its hiding place in a vase and poured some out into a mug of water. She passed James a mug and made herself one.

  “Tell me.”

  He didn’t take up the mug, but he did begin to speak.

  Before the war, James had been a programmer, an expert at talking to the new computers.

  “I petitioned the government to use smart machines instead of men if we got pulled into war. They didn’t listen to me. They were stuck in the past and had visions of Waterloo in their heads. There’s no glory in machines,” James said. “They could have saved millions of lives. But they didn’t care.”

  “Why did you enlist then?”

  “I couldn’t stay behind. Not when my friends were willing to risk it all.”

  He had died. But the medic who found him had pounded him in the heart a couple times and got it going again. He didn’t know this part for sure because he’d been unconscious for most of it, but he’d made it back behind the line. Still, in triage, one look at him and the doctors said they’d take him after the more salvageable ones, if he were still alive. He thought maybe he could remember his uniform stiffening with his blood. But he wasn’t sure.

  Then he’d been transported by someone. He’d been selected out of the pile of would be corpses. He woke up for a bit in a hospital somewhere and had some indistinct memories of a man with intense, nearly unblinking eyes staring at him from above and who had ranted at him about the future. Dream-like memories followed. Details were fuzzy as if he’d been in a fever dream. And then he’d woken up and known his body wasn’t his body anymore.

  “Disassociation,” she said. “It happens. It’s a kind of battle fatigue.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe. But in my case, it’s true. This isn’t my body. The only thing of mine is the brain in here.” He tapped his forehead. His face, like his hand, she saw was totally smooth. It was very convincing. Maybe other people wouldn’t see it, or they’d have the sense something was not quite right, but wouldn’t be able to say. Even his voice was almost right. Other than the slight buzz that made him sound hoarse, he spoke expressively.

  She sat back in her chair and took a long drink.

  “You’re the first person outside of the laboratory I’ve told.” He picked up his mug and made a face at it before sitting it down. “I can’t drink, but I want to. I don’t need it.” He laughed. “I run like a watch.” His laugh turned hysterical and before she quite understood what had turned in him, he put his head down on the worktable and sobbed.

  “You’re not afraid of me,” he said. His eyes unnerved her though, as he stared up at her. They were glass. They had to be. They were too shiny otherwise and she’d handled enough glass eyes to know what those looked like. But his were somehow different. The irises moved in response to light, but he hardly blinked, as if his eyes didn’t need to be wet.

  She shrugged. “You’re not the most frightening person I’ve ever met,” she said. He smiled. It lit up his face. Then it faded like a cloud-covered sun.

  “I need help,” James said.

  “I know. Your face,” she replied and reached out to run her fingers along the top of his cheek.

  He shook his head. “No. I need to go back. Go back to where I came from and stop them. Stop him.” He spread out his fingers, which had clenched into fists. He rubbed at his face. His body sagged a little. Without that small signal, Faith would have had no idea how tired James was. There were no circles under his eyes, no slackness to his face.

  “Why don’t you lie down?” She said. “We keep a cot in Freddie’s office.”

  “I—don’t sleep. I don’t need it. I’m just. You know how if a man loses a hand or a leg, he feels it?”

  She nodded. Some of her clients complained about this. They were haunted by their bodies’ ghosts.

  “My whole body’s like that. I remember being human. And—I’m tired. My brain is tired. But I don’t really need sleep anymore. Sometimes, I rest. But I can’t sleep. I don’t dream anymore. Is that strange?”

  “Lie down anyway. So what if you don’t really need it?”

  “I don’t want to be alone. I got used to never being alone,” James said. Faith remembered that feeling. She’d so rarely been alone during the war that when she first came back to London, she couldn’t sleep. Something could happen if there was no one awake to watch.

  Another hour and Freddie would be here. Why did she care if James rested or not? He’d broken in here, threatened her. His story was unbelievable. Men made of metal? But there was his face. And his sorrow. It filled the air around him.

  “Put your head down on the table and I’ll keep watch,” Faith said.

  “Can you talk to me?” James asked.

  “About what?”

  “You.”

  She told him about her work at the clinic. How she rebuilt faces for men who’d been disfigured in the war. Doctors had saved their lives, but had been unable to rebuild their shattered faces. They deserved better than to scare children and be the kind-hearted monsters of fairy tales.

  Before the war, she’d been an artist. Those days were long gone. When she’d come back, she’d burned all her pretty watercolours of flowers and gardens and animals. She painted what she’d seen, but no one wanted to hang horrors on their walls. Freddie had asked her to work here with him. She’d known him for a long time. He was an artist too, but he’d been a doctor and then a medical illustrator to pay the bills and finance his art. They had shared a studio before the war.

  They’d been ambulance drivers. Freddie had been rejected as a soldier. He had a clubbed foot. But he could drive. So Faith and Freddie had packed up and headed for the front. They had thought they’d be heroic. Maybe they had been.

  James put his head up, rested his hand on his chin. His cobalt eyes gazed at her. “No. That’s not the whole story. What did you really do?”

  “I was a spy,” Faith said. She’d never told anyone that before. “Both of us were. We really drove ambulances too. But we also sent information back. What we saw. We could get into places others couldn’t. We were officially neutral.”

  He nodded. “And you and this Freddie—are you married? Those free love people?”

  She laughed. The idea of her and Freddie was absurd. “No. I never wanted to get married. And Freddie, well, let’s just say I’m not on the programme for him. You?”

  He put his head back down on his folded arms. “No,” he said, his voice muffled. “She married someone else.”

  “Do you want me to keep talking?”

  “Yes. Tell me something happy. Something from when you were young.”

  So she prattled on about he
r grandmother telling fortunes with tea leaves. How she used to dress her cat up and make the poor creature play a part in her games. She talked about how she and Freddie met when he was at school with her brother.

  Finally, she heard Freddie’s key in the door and his cheerful whistle. “Put the kettle on dear! Mrs. Baxter has made us some lovely biscuits.”

  His progress through the workspace was noisy. Freddie whistled and sang as he moved about, putting his coat and hat away. He narrated his progress through the room in snatches of song.

  “Oh. Hallo. I didn’t know we had anyone on the docket today. How do you do?” Freddie stepped forward, hand extended. “I’m Freddie Vance.”

  “James Paige. I’m not a client. Not—exactly.”

  Faith rushed to explain. As she spoke, Freddie arranged his long limbs in a chair. His normally cheery face took on a serious, professorial aspect. He nodded along, glancing now and then at James.

  “Cigarette?” He asked, holding out his case to Faith and James. “No? I find they help me think. Get the brain juices flowing.” He lit one and took a long drag, blowing smoke out in a long plume.

  “Who’s in charge of this?” He asked James.

  “Dr. Gareth Brice.”

  Freddie nodded. “I know him. Small world. Well, small circles.”

  Faith flicked through her memory, rifling through names of her brother’s schoolmates, boys she’d gone to dances with, men they’d both known in the war. “I don’t know him.”

  “Darling Fido, I do know some people you don’t.” She’d long since given up on Freddie ever using her real name. He loved to show off his Latin and, as he’d told her when they met, his beloved childhood dog had been named Fido. The nickname wasn’t an insult, but a mark of true esteem, he claimed. “No, I went to medical school with him. He was all fired up then about the possibility of applying mechanics to anatomy. I thought he was out of his mind—making people out of parts. Well. Look at you, dear boy.”