Power Under Pressure (The Society of Steam)

by Andrew P. Mayer

  Jenny had begged Sarah to end her exile and return to the real world, but so far she had steadfastly refused.

  Sarah believed that the same evil forces that had sent the Ruffian to her apartment were still intent on doing her harm. Jenny had considered going to the authorities about it herself, but it was impossible to live as a member of the Stanton household and not recognize that some problems were simply beyond the usual defenders of society.

  And then there was the matter of the mechanical man. Jenny had to admit that she found the very idea of a mechanical creature that could mimic a living, breathing human disturbing and unsettling on both emotional and spiritual grounds. Surely even the idea of such a thing was an affront to God? But it was equally clear that Sir Dennis Darby had a very different view of the way that the universe worked.

  Jenny had only ever actually met Tom once, and her encounter with the machine had done nothing to alleviate her concerns. That said, she also strongly trusted Sarah’s instincts, and her forthright devotion to the Automaton meant that Jenny was willing to keep an open mind when it came to the true motivations of the mechanical man.

  But hearing about the events at the theater, it was clear that things had changed. Emilio was working to bring Tom back to life, but she could tell by the tone in Sarah’s voice that she was no longer sure that what they were attempting to reanimate was still the same being she had known. In Jenny’s opinion, destroying what remained of Darby’s work would not only put a stop to the danger to Sarah, but quite possibly it could halt whatever mad plan Lord Eschaton had in mind, as well.

  On the bed, Viola let out a grunt and twisted under the sheets, turning her face away from the light.

  Jenny had been standing by Viola’s bedside when she had first woken up. The girl had been rightfully angry when she discovered what had happened to her, although she had never before seen a woman so willing to express her unhappiness through physical violence.

  Jenny had hoped that time would have caused some sort of revelation inside the girl as well, but if anything, her broken beauty had only managed to increase Viola’s anger, and after barely surviving the infection Viola had begun to retreat from the world. She had also taken to smashing things around the house whenever the mood took her. Most of her wrath was focused on any inanimate object with a face or capable of displaying one, and almost every mirror in the house was now smashed or splintered.

  For a moment she considered waking Viola. It was already midmorning, and it would certainly do the girl no favors to simply let her sleep the day away. If there was one thing that Jenny had learned during her thirty-odd years, it was that life and progress marched on, no matter how great the tragedy. In fact, she was coming to believe that tragedy was a driving force that made the world go around.

  There would come a day—and she had to imagine that it would be soon—where Viola would need to be forced back out into the world: scars and all. Jenny let out a quiet sigh. Whatever Viola Armando’s ultimate fate would be, today would not be that day.

  Deciding that she would let the girl sleep, she backed out of the space and into the dark corridor. The journey back through the hallway was easier now, her eyes having adjusted to the gloom, although she was slightly blinded as she headed into the parlor.

  Jenny grabbed a pillow from the pile on the couch, and then let out a shocked yelp when the pile of sheets began to move.

  “Is she?” Jenny heard a familiar voice asking her. She blinked away the sunlight as best she could, and saw Sarah Stanton rising up from underneath the mismatched mass of cloth and cushions.

  Jenny felt herself blush. Had Sarah seen her pick up the bottle? “I’m sorry, Sarah. I called out when I came in, but there wasn’t any reply.”

  “What?” Sarah said, then let out a laugh when she comprehended that Jenny was attempting to apologize. “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. We hardly stand on ceremony around here.” Sarah looked over at the table, and then waved her hand back and forth, as if she were searching for something that wasn’t there. “Having you around can only improve the place.”

  “True enough.” Jenny frowned. There was a casualness in Sarah’s demeanor that she hadn’t noticed before. Something about it reminded Jenny more of an upstart street urchin than a Stanton. “Are you trying to find something?”

  Sarah shook her head and crashed back into the couch. “I guess not.”

  Jenny bustled her way toward the couch and pulled up one of the sheets. She could see it letting off a cloud of dust in the beams of morning light. “I think I’m going to start cleaning up this place whether you like it or not.”

  Sarah rolled her eyes. “Go ahead, Jenny. But once you pull all the junk out of a junkyard, then you just have a yard.”

  “Are you giving me sass, Miss Stanton?” said Jenny, giving Sarah a disapproving look she usually held for the household staff. She frowned more deeply when Sarah pulled back the rest of the covers and revealed her choice of nightclothes. “What is that you’re wearing?”

  Sarah stopped and looked down at her garment. “This thing?”

  “My sentiments exactly.” Sarah was in a man’s robe. It had been belted tightly around her, and though the material was thick enough that it didn’t show her figure in excruciating detail, what it did reveal was shameful enough.

  She wanted to scream at Sarah, but she knew that would only make things worse. “It’s not ladylike,” was all she could muster with civility.

  “What should I be wearing, Jenny? Are you suggesting that I wake up every day and put on corsets and crinoline so I can play the most upper-class girl in the junkyard?”

  “Now you sound like Viola.” Her tone turned cold. “You’re a lady, and you have duties.”

  “To whom?” Sarah replied, her tone rising. “My father? Sir Darby?”

  Jenny could see that the conversation was going nowhere. If there was one thing she had learned over years of teaching and training willful women, sometimes the best way to explore a subject more deeply was to simply change the subject. “There was a Negro man here earlier, I saw.”

  Sarah looked shocked, and then sighed and shook her head. “What does that have do with the price of tea in China?”

  “Who was he?”

  Sarah’s lips curled up in a smile as she stared down at the floor. “The things you don’t know, Jenny Farrows.” It seemed almost startlingly adult, and Jenny didn’t like it.

  Then Sarah looked up her, a flash of anger in her eyes. “But you’re right. I’m supposed to be responsible. That’s how I was raised. That’s how my mother raised me, then my father, and then Darby. But they’re all gone now. So the question that I keep asking myself is, who is left alive that I’m supposed to be a lady for? Nathaniel? He seems to have found happiness being a lackey for the man who murdered his step-father.”

  She took a step forward. “Besides, what has being a lady ever actually done for me, Jenny?” Sarah took a second step, and her next question was louder. “Whose life has it saved?” And then she did it with a yell, “I want you to tell me!”

  The housemaid’s open hand lashed out and struck Sarah hard across the face. For an instant there was a look of grim anger that she had never seen on Sarah’s face before, and yet Jenny almost smiled when she recognized it. Sarah Stanton was, it turned out, still her father’s daughter. “I’m sorry,” Jenny said, “I shouldn’t have.”

  “Sorry for what?” She spoke in a low tone without looking up. “It’s not your fault. You just think that somehow I’m supposed to go out and get my life back, but it’s gone.” Sarah turned away in a flurry of red hair and threw herself on the couch. The robe fell apart, revealing a more-than-shocking portion of Sarah’s leg. She did nothing to cover it. Jenny took a step closer, but she could see Sarah visibly stiffen.

  “The mansion is still there.”

  “And will the walls of the mansion protect us when the Children of Eschaton come for me?” She was shouting again. “They broke through solid granite. Do you think
wood shingles will stop them?”

  Jenny shook her head. “Then what are you planning?” The girl had been living with this nonsense for so long that it had already consumed her. “You can’t just hide here forever, Sarah. This junkyard isn’t a world for you.”

  “While the man who murdered my father is ruling the Paragons, there is no world for me.”

  Jenny knew that Sarah was wrong, but there was no way to avoid the fact that if there were villains intent on taking her life, staying in this ridiculous place might actually be best for her. “Then what are you going to do?”

  Sarah shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to answer that question for weeks. It always seemed so easy for Darby and my father. Whenever things got too hard for them, they’d just invent another machine, or hit something.” Jenny snickered at that. “But I can’t do either of those things. I can’t even bring Tom back.”

  “Then come home. We’ll tell the papers.”

  Sarah looked up at her friend, and Jenny felt a tightening in her heart. “I can’t do that either.” There were clearly tears in her eyes, but somehow they refused to break free and roll down the girl’s face. “I won’t expose you and the others to that danger!”

  “Sarah, if you don’t come home soon, they’re going to take the house away. The lawyers said . . .”

  Jenny jumped back as Sarah jumped up, but the girl was too fast, and she crushed Jenny into a hug. “Then it’ll be over and you’ll be safe, Jenny.”

  Jenny looked down into Sarah’s eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous, girl.”

  Sarah curled her lips up into a smile. “They say you hurt the ones you love.”

  “If you’re so sure that that dreadful man wants the heart, then why not just give him what he wants? If that’s all it takes, you have to end this. It’s madness.”

  “Jenny, before you saw that brute in my apartment, had you ever seen any of the villains that the Paragons fight? I mean, in person?”

  Jenny thought it over. Over the years she felt as if she must have. In the early days there had seemed to be a constant parade of men in costumes around the house. And Jenny had followed the Industrialist’s exploits in the paper. There was a time when it seemed like there was a new villain appearing every day—not just the ones she’d read about, but the stories she’d heard through half-opened doors. “Met them . . . no, I haven’t.”

  Sarah shook her head and stared down at her feet. “Did I ever tell you what my father told me after my mother died? The words he said to me right after he killed the man who had murdered her?”

  Jenny felt a wave of compassion strike her heart. Sarah had been so young when that had happened. No one had ever discussed the details of that day around the house. She supposed there was a time when she could have asked, but Jenny had still been quite young when it had happened. And when she did say something, it was far more important that she tell Alexander Stanton to go and talk to his daughter about her mother’s death than it was to find out the details of a most gruesome incident. A quiet “No,” was the only reply that she could muster.

  “I hadn’t even let myself think about it since that day.” She smiled as she ran her fingers down the tattered lapels of the robe. “I suppose that’s part of what comes with being a lady.”

  “You were so young. Maybe it was better if . . .”

  Sarah laughed, and then looked up with such sadness in her eyes. The tightness in Jenny’s chest became an ache as she realized that the final remnants of the little girl that she had loved for so long had almost entirely disappeared. Now there was a woman in her place. “In retrospect,” Sarah continued, “the Crucible was a ridiculous villain. Truly, he would have been pathetic if he hadn’t been so deadly. Later we found out he’d been a wrestler . . . a former circus performer who had lost one of his arms to a torturer when he’d tried to turn against the Russian royalty. Somehow he replaced it with one that spewed fire. The Czars had burned his face terribly, so he wore a mask as well. You would have pitied the man if he hadn’t been a ruthless murderer.

  “He’d hoped to hold my mother hostage so that he could get enough money to return home and take vengeance on those who hurt him.”

  Jenny wondered if Sarah could see the irony in that. “No one ever seems to be able to let go of their past . . .”

  “No, we don’t. But most men don’t put on a hood and attach a fire-spewing device to the end of their stump, either. Those who do seem a bit more . . . dedicated than most.”

  Sarah looked into the distance. It almost seemed to Jenny as if she were peering into the past. “He wasn’t really much of a villain at all, compared to some, but his torturers must have driven him insane. What they left behind was very strong and utterly ruthless. He’d already burned Mother and Nathaniel’s parents to death when he came for me. He told me that they had been cleansed.”

  Jenny felt a stab of horror. “You didn’t see . . . Not in front of you.”

  Sarah shook her head and looked up at her. “No. Even he wasn’t that mad. But I could smell what he’d done. And just as he was about to send me off to join them, my father came bursting in, with Darby and Tom by his side.” A single tear slipped free. “If he’d come ten minutes earlier . . . But, of course, it was the discovery of my father’s impending arrival that had sent him into a murderous frenzy. He had always known that he would never survive a direct confrontation with the Paragons. He just wanted to make them pay.”

  Did Sarah blame her father? There were so many questions, but would having answers make any difference?

  “The actual battle was short. He foolishly thought he could burn the Automaton. I still remember Tom disappearing underneath the flames. When he stepped out of them, his clothes had almost burned away. But he was different back then. Far more of a machine than a man.”

  Sarah faltered slightly, and Jenny stepped forward to give her support. “Are you all right?”

  “That day at the Darby mansion . . . I thought it was embarrassment, but . . .” Sarah shook her head and stood up. “I’m all right Jenny. Really.”

  Somehow she doubted Sarah’s words, but she had to admit that she was desperately curious to hear the rest. “All right then, go on.”

  “Tom grabbed the Crucible’s weapon and tore it from his arm. The scream the man made when the limb ripped free was terrifying. But it was short. When my father saw me standing there, he shot him in the head.”

  “He just executed him?”

  “‘Don’t anger the Industrialist,’ people used to say. A reputation that I think was well earned.”

  Sarah leaned back. “And then suddenly he was my father again. Even though he was still wearing that black leather suit of his that always terrified me as a child—all full of bullets and buckles—I don’t remember being scared when he held me then. He folded his arms around me and told me that it wasn’t my fault. Although I think it clearly was.”

  This part of the story Jenny was intimately familiar with: it had been Sarah who had revealed the Industrialist’s true identity to the world, and that had made the Stanton family a target for the villain. “Sarah, you were so young.”

  “That’s an excuse. Maybe even a good one . . .” She turned to Jenny and took her hand. “But it doesn’t wipe away the truth.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  Sarah ignored her and continued. “I asked my father why he killed him. I suppose that at the time I didn’t fully understand what was happening. I couldn’t comprehend that the Crucible had killed my mother, although I must have known he’d done something terrible. Or maybe I was just too young to understand just how broken and wrong some men could be.”

  There was a cruel bravery in what Alexander Stanton had done. Compassion, on the other hand, had never been one of his strengths. “What did your father say?”

  “He told me that there were people with terrible powers who had forgotten that there was justice in the world, and that it was up to him to stop them.”

  She doubted tho
se words would provide much comfort to a child who had just lost her mother, then or now. “Sarah, I’m so sorry.”

  “You need to stop apologizing, Jenny. It doesn’t become you.”

  “You’re probably right.” Jenny sat down on the couch and patted the seat next to her. “Can you come sit next to me?”

  Sarah looked down at her for a moment. “You’ve always been there for me. I know it can’t have always been easy.”

  “Stop being so sentimental, Miss Stanton, and take a seat.”

  “All right, Mrs. Farrows.” Sarah sat, and the mood seemed to change almost instantly.

  Jenny grasped Sarah’s hands in her own and realized they weren’t nearly as soft as they had been before. “You’ve always been a good girl, Sarah: smart, trustworthy, and forthright, if a little bit too curious for your own good. And no matter what happens, I’ll stay with you. But you can’t blame yourself for what happened to you mother.”

  Sarah nodded. “Darby once told me that even though God loves us, he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—save us. Instead he gave us the power to do it for ourselves. He told me that men of justice always had to fight alone, and if they didn’t remember that, there was always a price to pay.” Jenny could feel Sarah’s grip tighten around her hand. “That’s why my mother died.” She took a deep breath. “And then I chose to fight, and now that monster has killed two men that meant more to me than anything in the world, leaving me to fight alone.”

  “They were both men of honor, but what can you do?”

  She looked up and smiled. “I’m not sure yet, but I’m trying to figure it out. I know it starts with Tom.”

  “The mechanical man? You know the papers say that he killed your father.”

  “That’s a lie!” Sarah said, and snatched back her hand. “I’m going to bring him back. I have to! And once I do, I’ll show the Children of Eschaton that there is still justice in the world.”

  For a moment Jenny wondered if the girl had gone mad, but there was something in her bearing that seemed to deny it, and when she looked up into her eyes, she realized that Sarah Stanton was her mother’s daughter as well. “I’m going to need your help, Jenny.”