( Pause.)
True enough, Excellency. I reckon the King don’t need to hear all the awful bits.
The other Camp Followers resented me getting what they called special treatment. Why, you hardly have to work at all, it ain’t fair, they griped. I just shrugged, not wanting to admit that I’d rather’ve been with the Diggers, many of them famil iar faces from Voltagetown. I never believed those boys capable of the horrors visited on me by Sir Manager.
The private secretary, Miss Lola, warned me he always took the youngest, prettiest girl for his special pet, until an even younger and prettier one come along.
I was his favourite up ’til a year ago, she said, which shocked me. Miss Lola looked about fifty. Turns out, she was eighteen. The ugly scar on her face come from Sir Manager lashing out at her with the spur of his boot while he was in his cups. That’s what being Sir Manager’s favourite meant. Ruined, crushed, tired-out and old before your time.
( Sound of Lady Laura sobbing.)
Yes, thank you, Excellency. I’ll take a moment to collect myself. Could I trouble you for your pocket hanky? Been fifty years, but I still recall the torments that fat bugger visited on me like it were yesterday. I still wake at night sometimes, thinking his belt’s round my neck again.
( Sound of Lady Laura voiding her glands. )
One day, we were warned a high ranker was coming, a general with the Princess Priscillas. Isaac, of course. He showed up looking all splendid in his redcoat uniform to inspect the workers. The Digger boys stood in a raggedly line in their shit-brown overalls, fingerspelling W for What the hell? over and over again, so scared they wanted to burrow back into the protection of the tunnel. Like worms.
I stood at attention beside Sir Manager, who I could tell was nervous. He squired Isaac around, showed him the new tunnel the boys were digging and explained about how we needed a longer vertical slope to boost what’s called the head. The farther the water falls, the bigger the head, the more force to the turbines, the bigger the electrical charge, and the more miles they could send it. He explained to Isaac about how the tunnel would harness power for the Ring of Death, a line of high-voltage electric cannons set up along the gorge, linked to the turbine room by a wire that run from Niagara Falls all the way to Queenston.
And how many fusiliers would be required in the field to man these cannons? Isaac wanted to know.
Sir Manager puffed himself up. None at all, General. The transmission line carries the firepower. Once the tunnel’s dug deep enough for the turbines to give enough amperage, why, I just flick a switch and the cannons will discharge electric volleys across the river. The Staters’ revolutionary brains will boil inside their skulls before they can even think of skedaddling.
Sir Manager ordered the Diggers to give a demonstration, lighting up the sky with cannon fire from guns a half-mile along the gorge. When one of the boys didn’t skip lively enough to his post, Sir Manager smacked him to the ground.Tell him what he’s to do in that lingo of yours, Sir Manager ordered me. I fingerspelled to the boy: Open the sluice gates on the eastern side. The boy nodded and scampered away.
How did the girl make herself understood to the lad? Isaac asked Sir Manager.
Sir Manager grabbed me by the arm and jerked me back in line beside him. It’s a dumb show the deaf ones use among themselves, he said. A language for girls and idiots, which comes to the same thing in my experience. Laura seems to have a knack for it, even though she can speak well enough when she’s a mind to.
I noticed Isaac looking at me with an expression I couldn’t quite figure. Maybe he was curious about a young Camp Follower who could talk with her hands.
Afterwards, Isaac give us a little pep talk about what a brilliant job we was all doing for Her Majesty, etcetera, etcetera. At the end of it, Sir Assistant Manager got up with a pitch pipe and led the few of the boys who could still hear in a rousing chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Isaac looked embarrassed.
Isaac was tall, way over six feet, with pink skin and blond curly hair. Good-looking by anyone’s standards. Before he left the station, he asked Sir Manager if he could have a private word with me. Sir Manager looked dismayed but told me to be a good girl and go with the General.
I thought Isaac wanted a quick push but once we was alone together in the office, he touched the front of his tall black hat to me. Ma’am, he called me, which sounded funny since I were only sixteen years old. This sign language you used with the boy, where did you learn it?
I always knowed it, I told him. Everyone in Voltagetown does, ’cause so many men are deaf from the machines.
Isaac sat down in Sir Manager’s big leather office chair, and motioned me into one next to him.
Show me, he said, adding: If you please.
Surprised that anyone this grand would want to fingerspell, I went slowly through each letter. For A, make a fist with your thumb pressed on the knuckle of your pointer finger. For B, put your hand flat up with your thumb in your palm. And so forth.
Spell my Christian name, he asked.
Pinky finger up for I, clenched fist for S, two A’s like I showed you, and a cupped hand for C. Isaac tried it after me.
You must know your letters well to use this language, observed Isaac.
Yessir, I agreed.
So you have schooling, then?
I shrugged. My momma taught me my letters by reading the Good Book.
Isaac smiled and said: The Staters are wily. They intercept our messages as quickly as we can send them by wireless. This finger language could be useful. Soldiers could pass information from a distance with nothing but one hand and a telescope. I would like to master this silent language and I can think of no abler teacher, nor no prettier one, than you, ma’am. If I may be so bold, are you dedicated to Sir Manager?
I cast my eyes down at the floor, trying not to make a show of my eagerness to leave my monstrous master.
I’m sure you outrank Sir Manager, General, I said.
True enough. It’s settled, then. You’ll come to my headquarters in Queenston for a week or two and teach me the finger language. Where shall I fetch you from?
When I told Isaac where Momma and I lived, he wrote it down with a silver pencil in a little book.
* * *
Back at home, Momma had rationed enough power to pull in Red Ensign on the Marconi, her favourite patriotic-religious show. The preacher, a Loyalist named the Royal Reverend Nigel St. James, sang “Jerusalem” in a shaky tenor voice and explained how lucky we was to be living in an empire where the sun never set, even though I’d noticed it setting just the day before.
After the hymn, the Reverend started in on the prayers, Momma reciting along with her eyes squoze shut, fingering her rosary beads, strung together from old musket-shot:
St. Michael Faraday. (Pray for us.)
St. James Prescott Joule. (Pray for us.)
St. Heinrich Hertz. (Pray for us.)
Lord William Thomson Kelvin. (Pray for us.)
Sir Alexander Graham Bell. (Pray for us.)
Marquis William Marconi. (Pray for us.)
The Most Reverend Nikola Tesla. (Pray for us.)
Maid of the Mist. (Pray for us.)
All the saints and martyrs of Her Majesty’s Royal Electrical Corps of electricians, engineers and journeymen, who lay down their lives to boost the voltage of hydraulic armaments in the Lord’s name. (Pray for us.)
Shower your blessings upon Niagara, O Lord, the great engine of Loyalist civilization, powered by the turbines of the Royal Hydroelectric Commission, praise be to Her Majesty, May She Reign Forever. Without thy Divine Right, there would be no divine light by which to smite the revolutionary Staters for their heretical war on our beloved Kings George III and IV, King William IV, and Queen Victoria. Thou hast graced us with thy holy mystery, the Alternating Current, in this most holy place, Niagara Falls, to create a perfect circuit of hydropower and fry the brains of our enemies in their heads. O Lord, we beseech thee.
After she’d finished hearing prayers, Momma kissed her musket-shot rosary and closed the wireless. Then she had me read aloud to her from the Good Book: Hawkins Electrical Guide, A Progressive Course of Study for Engineers, Electricians and Those Desiring to Acquire a Working Knowledge of Electricity and Its Applications. Momma took comfort from hearing of conductors and insulators, resistance and conductivity, magnetism, electromagnetic induction, basic principles of the dynamo and other holy mysteries. When she started to snore in her chair as I read about armature construction, I closed the book and tiptoed off to bundle up my few things for the trip to Isaac’s headquarters.
* * *
Isaac come to get me before supper hour. At first, I thought his asking me to teach him the finger language was just a dodge, that he really wanted to open those red breeches of his and get down to business on the daybed. Instead, he presented himself politely to Momma and said I was to be his helper for a fortnight, so he was riding me out to his Queenston quarters on his electric horse, Alfred. I never seen the like. Alfred’s head and body was made of caramel-coloured leather and his steel legs could gallop as fast as a real horse, without ever tiring or needing hay. Isaac pulled a cord from Alfred’s tail and plugged him into the socket-pump in our cabin so he’d have enough juice to carry us the ten miles to Queenston. Momma was too awed of Isaac to tell him he’d sucked enough electricity to keep us out of rations for a week. She watched him put his hands around my waist and lift me into Alfred’s saddle, then jump up behind, wrapping his arms around me to take the reins. We must’ve cut quite the figure, Excellency. Before we galloped off, Momma scraped up her nerve to press the Hawkins Electrical Guide into my hand, along with a pair of asbestos gloves she got from an electrician in trade for a quick push. When I leaned low in the saddle to kiss her farewell, she whispered in my ear: Read the Good Book every day and you’ll have power, no matter who your master may be. And remember to put on the gloves before you touch any live wires.
* * *
We rode the trail through the bush along the gorge, following the transmission line the Commission strung to charge the hydroelectric cannons positioned every quarter-mile or so –the Ring of Death. At Queenston, Isaac took me through a field to a ten-room stone house, which were his and his alone: such was the privilege of being an officer of Her Majesty in that never-ending war against the Staters.
He hitched Alfred to a charging post connected to a transmission wire slung off the Ring of Death. He smiled and said, I don’t think anyone will begrudge a few volts to nourish my steed, do you?
I shook my head, shy to be taken into his confidence. Feeding off a power line warn’t legal, strictly speaking; you had to ask the Queen’s Own Electricians to ground them, a perilous job. But people done it anyway.
In the sitting room, he had a sweet cake and a bottle of sparkly wine set out. We ate and drank, then sat facing one another and I repeated the alphabet, slow, letting Isaac mirror me. We went from letters to words – easy enough, I thought, but when we started talking back and forth, Isaac sounded like a baby.
You got to go fast enough for letters to blur into words, General. That made him laugh, but I didn’t know how to say it better. Fingerspelling isn’t just a bunch of letters, it’s a language.
True enough, Isaac allowed.
* * *
After our lesson, he showed me a room with an actual feather bed, first I ever seen, warmed by another wonder – an electric fireplace. To my surprise, he made no move to poke me, just bowed low and wished me a good night. I got the whole room to myself.
Next morning, he showed me the wood stove and the larder. I was surprised when he brought the eggs in from the hen coop with his own hands, putting them on the table in a bowl, something I never seen a man of his rank do before. Momma had said he’d no doubt have a house full of servants but so far, there warn’t no one there but him and me.
Ain’t you got no girl to do for you, General? I asked.
He looked sad and shook his head. The last cook and scullery maid proved Disloyal so I’ve been seeing to my own needs.
You mean your help turned traitor? What happened to them?
Escaped to the other side of the gorge with my battle maps sewn into their corsets, unless they drowned in the river crossing, said Isaac.
I tightened the apron strings around my middle. Good thing I’m here, I said. Which was when I took on the job of being Isaac’s housekeeper as well as his teacher. I was determined to make it worth his while to keep me around for longer than a fortnight.
* * *
Fast enough, we fell into a routine, like an old married couple. I’d rise before Isaac to stoke the fire, clean the ashes and lay out his breakfast. After that, we had an hour of lessons. I made him talk to me using only his hand.
Pass the salt, if you please.
Would you care for more coffee, sir?
Thank you kindly, Miss Laura.
He fingerspelled that one so often, we shortened it to TYKML.
* * *
Middle of the day, Isaac was mostly away soldiering on Alfred but sometimes he took guests at the stone house, like a certain Lieutenant Barnfather, who Isaac called the finest military officer in British North America. Despite his qualities, Barnfather warn’t never going to make Colonel, Isaac said, as he’d adopted the company and habits of Her Majesty’s Indian allies, the Mohawks, himself being Mohawk on his mother’s side. Instead of red wool breeches and leather boots, he wore deerskin leggings and moccasins, growed his hair long and daubed on face paint to go to battle. On account of his native ways, not to mention his blood, Barnfather warn’t considered fit company for British gentlemen of a certain rank. Time and again, he’d ride into Queenston with a splendid retinue of Mohawk warriors on horseback. Much as Alfred was a mechanical wonder, the smell of manure and real horseflesh made me homesick for Voltagetown. Barnfather was the most agreeable of Isaac’s acquaintances, the only officer who didn’t gape and leer at me as if to suggest that I was just hanging around to satisfy Isaac’s fleshly needs. When he observed me fingerspelling, he cottoned to its usefulness right off, saying the Mohawks had their own sign language to communicate silently, a boon when you never knowed who’d be behind the next tree, friend or foe.
I am late to learning this silent tongue, but my teacher is making up for lost time, Isaac told Barnfather. Woe betide me if I miss a single lesson.
* * *
One night, Isaac come home looking weary and thoughtful. At lessons, he was forgetful and clumsy, the letters slipping out of his memory like sand off a beach at low tide. He finally stilled his fingers and took my hands in his.
I must declare myself, dear Miss Laura, he said. Since your arrival here, I find myself consumed by thoughts of you. It’s all I can do to keep my mind on my guns and maps. Do you care for me, at least a little bit?
When I confessed that my feelings for him matched his affection for me, he kissed me long and hard, caressing me like no one ever done to me before. Finally, he took me to his four-poster bed and asked permission to take all my clothes off, which I granted, then ’scused himself and come back naked, ’cept for a leather harness buckled low on his skinny hips. A pouch at the front held a prosthesis, like that of Momma’s client, Guy, but made of creamy porcelain with masculine curves and bulges and a wreath of shamrock, thistle, rose and maple leaf painted daintily around its head.
I guess I were gape-mouthed ’cause Isaac asked: Are you frightened of Old Toby, Laura?
I shook my head. I seen one like that before, just not so pretty. Did you get your bits shot off?
No, said Isaac, real quiet. Then he added softly: Old Toby is actually a cleverly engineered device, of French design and British manufacture, for the release of feminine tension. It is said our own dear Queen Victoria has taken comfort in such a device, ever since the death of her beloved Prince Albert. It works by electrical stimulation – shall we try it together?
After what I’d gone through with Sir Manager,
you’d think I’d’ve hemmed and hawed and tried to put Isaac off. But I figured if the Queen liked it, why not?
Excellency, I don’t know how to describe the lush pleasure Isaac give me. When he put Old Toby between my legs and made him hum, I spasmed for the first time ever. In my ignorance, I thought I’d been electrocuted! When I thrust up my hips, offering myself to the machine, Isaac obliged, all the while moaning and crying out my name, so I knowed he liked it too. Old Toby’s vibrations tickled Isaac’s nerves and mine, that was the science in it. But more than that, Isaac took pleasure in my pleasure. Even started calling me by a pet name, Hydro-Girl.
( Laughter.)
I ain’t trying to embarrass you or myself, Excellency. As the poet wrote, the grave’s a fine and private place but none do there embrace. If I don’t say my piece now, I’ll be dead ’fore I get the chance. If his Majesty wants the story of my life, can’t I get the joyful bits in, along with the horrors?
Prudishness don’t suit a man of your rank, Excellency. All you need do is listen, and let that Hansom scribe of yours write it all down exactly as I say.
Now, then. Being with Isaac were different from being with Sir Manager, and not just because of Old Toby. Sir Manager were hairy and fleshy, but you could feel the muscle under all that flab, the way you’d expect with a man, even one gone soft. Isaac, on t’other hand, were smooth and hairless and pink as a baby and though he was tall, his body under the red serge tunic were slender and delicate as a bird’s. Round his chest he wore a tight band, like a corset – at first, I thought to hold in his guts ’cause of a war wound. But one morning I watched him through slitty eyes and seen him unstrap Old Toby’s harness and unwind the corset from his chest. Isaac had no bits at all, but a cleft like mine between his legs, and his chest showed swellings same as mine, too, if not as big. Light dawned, as they say.
Isaac warn’t a man.
How a woman come to be a soldier, then a general, was a puzzler and a question that I never got any answer to. You probably heard stories like this before, Excellency – I learned they ain’t rare, especially in times of war. Isaac – or whatever his woman name was – had height, looks, learning and courage. I’ve known natural-born men who got less going for them, no offence.
Clockwork Canada Page 20
