He pulled the cork from the bottle and slopped a fair amount of the liquor into a tin cup on the table.
Ikey shook his head.
Cross popped the cork back in and pointed it at Ikey. “You’re not one of those temperance nutters, are you?”
Ikey shook his head again.
“Two things, then.” Cross flipped the bottle into the air, caught it, and snapped it onto the table with a thud. To Ikey’s disappointment, none of the music boxes whispered a thing about it.
“First,” Cross said as he held up a finger. “You knock off the nodding business this bloody minute. It ain’t respectful. A man asks you a question, you bloody well give him an answer. Got that?”
Ikey nodded.
Cross sighed and hung his head.
“All right,” he said with a shake of his finger. “One and a half. You either nod or shake your head again after I ask you a question, I will punch you. Got that?”
Ikey straightened his back. “Yes, sir.”
“For the Lord’s sake, man! One and three-quarters. Knock off the sir rubbish as well. I told you in the carriage. Call me Cross. On the ship, you can call me Chief if you have to. Got that?”
“Yes, Cross.”
Cross picked up the cup, took a swallow, and sucked at his teeth a few seconds. “Well, that’s a start.”
He held up a second finger as he took another drink. “Second, glad to hear you’re not a temperance nutter. Ain’t no one’s bloody business what a man decides to put in his body. You don’t like alcohol? Don’t drink. That simple.”
Ikey’s attention drifted past Cross and washed up against the wall of music boxes.
“Never mind that rubbish,” Cross said. “This is your concern right now.” He pointed to a stool beside the table.
As Ikey sat, Cross launched into detail about the heart of his ship, the Kittiwake, and how the tanks were used to generate hydrogen gas to be fed into a series of cells made of goldbeater’s skin and a coal-fired boiler powered the whole thing and as Cross droned on, punctuated with swallows from his cup, Ikey’s attention drifted through the thick glass of the tank and gravitated towards the shelves along the wall. There, a few half-finished music boxes offered far more mystery and possibility than a tank smudged with lye and bristled with an array of electrodes.
“Got that?” Cross asked.
Ikey looked up at Cross and nodded.
“Good.” He lifted his cup to his lips, then paused. “Wait. Did you just bloody nod at me?”
“No, s—Cross.”
Cross lifted an eyebrow. “You lying to me?”
“No.”
“Good,” he said into his cup. “I’ll have none of that rubbish. Get to work, then.”
Ikey blinked at Cross. He hadn’t a clue what the man meant.
Cross shook his head. “Oh, bloody Nora.” He jabbed a finger at the wall of shelves before Ikey. “Over there. Find me two coils like those in the tank, but with a larger gauge. Were you paying attention that time?”
“Yes,” Ikey mumbled as he slid off the stool. He had managed an awful start, but at least Cross hadn’t struck him yet. His dad would have knocked him clear of the stool for drifting off.
After he rounded the table, Ikey scanned the shelves for coils. Locating them quickly might regain some ground. None laid in the open, so he sifted through the various boxes, filling the shack with a metallic tumble as he dug around. Once he worked his way up to the eye-level shelves, Ikey pulled back one of the boxes. Before he turned away to set it on the table, his attention snagged on a series of rods and a hinge joint pushed against the wall. It resembled a mechanical arm.
Ikey placed the box on the table as Cross busied himself with disassembling the array attached to the tank lid. Ikey slid several boxes aside until he revealed a mechanical hand back in the shadows.
Ikey glanced back at Cross, who poured himself another drink.
On his tiptoes, Ikey grasped the arm. He lifted it over the boxes and gasped as he brought it into the dwindling daylight. Compared to the utilitarian and purposeful arm sported by Smith, this arm was a work of art. Smith’s arm offered power and a full range of function to the one who wore it. To achieve it, the designer had piled into it all sorts of gears and escapements and no end of hardware; each piece giving one unit of function to the overall system. The complications that went into the arm made it powerful and capable, but at the cost of diminished elegance and extra weight.
The arm in Ikey’s hands was stripped to essentials. Graceful. Instead of a dizzying array of interacting parts to dole out the arm’s movement, simple bands of rubber and lengths of dense twine ran along the rods and wrapped around pulleys. The pulleys turned small, delicate chains or tiny, thin cogwheels that wound springs.
Ingenious. Ikey twanged one of the rubber bands and imagined an entire mechanical man. One in which the twine and rubber bands ran into a chest to be manipulated by other tension-based systems timed on counterweights. It was unlike anything Ikey had ever thought of before.
He wiggled his index finger and thumb between a rubber band and a rod of steel. There he pinched a length of twine and gave it a slight tug.
In Smith’s hand, the shifting gears and escapements resulted in a jerking, mechanical quality of motion. This hand—Cross’s mechanical hand—clenched in a smooth, fluid motion regulated by rubber bands manipulating hand-rods mounted in ball-and-socket joints lined with felt. The hand’s movement was indistinguishable from real, human movement as the fingers closed across the palm, and kept closing until their tips touched the wrist.
Ikey released the twine. The fingers resumed their previous position. He imagined rubber bands stretching under skin. Felt-lined hinge joints curled under the tug of counterweights and pulleys as the hand picked up a knife and began to slice a carrot.
It didn’t feel proper to place the arm back where no one could admire such work.
He turned around and presented the arm. “Did you make this?”
Cross glanced up from his work. “Does that look like a bloody coil to you?”
The arm sank a few inches.
“I…” Ikey began.
“Goddamn it, man! Didn’t Daughton pick you up to be useful or something?”
Ikey looked at the arm. The elegance and grace of it demonstrated a brilliance that both shamed Ikey and his uncle and buoyed him with inspiration. Why hide the arm at the back of a shelf? Why mess around with an airship when Cross had the ability to make things as stunning as his intricate music boxes or mechanical limbs that moved with a dancer’s grace?
This was beauty. This would change the world.
“Are you deaf?” Cross asked. He sat up to his full height on the stool. “Chuck that damned rubbish aside and find me those coils now!”
Ikey lifted the arm a bit. “Why?”
Half a smile crept across Cross’s face before he let out a chuckle. “Why? You daft fool. Because if you don’t do what I say, then you bloody well aren’t shit for an apprentice, are you? So stop wanking off over there and—Oh, bloody Nora,” Cross said. He pushed himself up from the table with both hands. At his full height, he stumbled back a step before catching himself on the back wall.
Ikey’s grip on the arm tightened.
“You know what’s keeping the Kittiwake from lifting off? Do you?”
“No,” Ikey said.
“Ballast. Damn thing is weighted down with a ton of wet excuses. Ain’t got a half-decent mind among the lot of them, and yours is certainly no prized addition.”
As Cross staggered forward, Ikey slipped away from the shelves, arm held out before him.
“Damn buggering idiots can’t even come up with half-decent excuses. Morons. The lot of them. And that Admiral Daughton? Biggest daft bugger of them all. Wants his damn ship straight away, but won’t let me hire my own crew. Sticks me with a bunch of whimpering, shit-pantsed sprogs who don’t know a screwdriver from their mother’s nipple.”
Cross stopped before the
shelves.
“How the hell am I to get anything done?” Cross flung an arm out over the table in exasperation. The left arm steadied him against the shelves. “I mean, look at you.” He waved a hand in Ikey’s direction. “You don’t drink, and you couldn’t find a bloody coil if it was wrapped around your blasted pecker.”
Cross reached into a box and pulled two coils out. “See? Now I ask you, what is the point of having you around if you can’t even find me two coils after I told you exactly where they were?”
Ikey looked to the arm again as if it held the excuse, or the explanation. The response. And there it was.
He presented the arm again. “I understand.”
A shadow passed over Cross’s glare. He leaned against the shelf and shook his head. “You understand what?”
Ikey hefted the arm higher, offering it. “How it works. What you did. What it means.”
Cross’s Adam’s apple bobbed. The wooden shelf creaked under the increasing burden of his weight. He reached for the arm. His fingers paused an inch from one of the rods, and there they hovered, quivered a moment in the gathering dusk.
“Go,” Cross said.
The arm dipped again, and once cognizant of the slight ache in his own arms, Ikey let his arms fall until the mechanical arm rested against the tops of his thighs.
Cross’s face was blank and long. No indication of what he meant lingered in his expression. “Go on.” He jerked his head toward the house. “Get washed up. Rose will have dinner on the table soon.”
Ikey stood a few seconds more. Putting the arm back in the shadows wasn’t right. But it was Cross’s workshop, and Cross’s arm. He returned the arm and replaced the box that hid it. With a parting glance at Cross, he scurried from the workshop, and with each step toward the house, his heart beat harder against his chest at the thought of seeing Rose, seeing her move, seeing the art of Cross’s genius at work.
Chapter Six
In the scullery, Ikey unslung his satchel and dropped it under the basin. Tools clinked as it disappeared into the shadows. He washed his hands and scrubbed his face. He looked up. The blank face of brick stared back from where a mirror should have hung. He grabbed the towel from a rod protruding from the wall and dried himself off. After replacing the towel, he stepped over to the doorway.
Cross’s lantern remained on the table by the backdoor. No matches were near it. Ikey squinted into the shadows around him. No matchboxes or cups sat in the open. He looked back to the workshop door. It remained shut and gave no hint of when Cross intended to come inside.
Ikey turned around. He grasped the brass doorknob of the dining parlor and twisted it until the latch clicked. He pulled the door back. Hinges squeaked in protest. No light spilled out across his face. He might as well have opened a closet door if not for the familiar odor of boiling chicken, an odor which sat atop the musty smell of old air in enclosed spaces.
The floor creaked as he stepped inside. The wraith of light drifting through the scullery evaporated in the dining room. Darkness curled around him. Ikey pulled the door shut. The latch clicked back into place. As his hand left the knob, the door disintegrated into nothingness. For a moment, he blinked into the black and waited for dim shapes of furniture to surface into vision. They did not come. The dark remained thick, impenetrable, a large and slow beast that took up the room with its shaggy fur. No one could see in such conditions.
Stairs creaked. Ikey looked in their direction. No glow pulsed or surged with the footsteps of whomever approached. Ikey’s breath slowed. He peered into the dark until his eyes watered and showed him the little flits and flicks of white that streaked his vision whenever he stood in pitch blackness.
Footsteps reached the top of the stairs and tracked across the wooden floor. Chimes tinkled and murmured between the snaps of heels from a pair of women’s boots. The spaces between heel clicks spooled out into long, quiet seconds in which the dark music boxes settled to the cusp of sleep before the next strike of heel stirred them into murmurs anew. No other woman stood so tall. A skirt whispered as it approached.
Ikey closed his eyes and recalled the floor’s layout as Cross had rushed him to the workshop. A dining table sat nearby. But if Rose approached him, how could she see him? Did she see him? He opened his mouth to call out. The smack of his lips parting, the snap of his tongue dropping from the roof of his mouth sounded as loud as her boot heels. But the words never came. He held on to them, ready to take the brunt of her in exchange for a chance to feel the force behind her momentum. Maybe even fling his arms out in surprise and clutch at her arm, prod at her for a clue of what lay underneath.
Rose’s path shifted. Her skirt brushed past his leg. He gasped in surprise. His arms reached out to touch her, to trail the tips of his fingers over the satin sleeve. His fingers brushed the cheek of darkness.
“Did Cross send you in here for something?” Rose asked. Her footsteps stopped near the end of the room. An item was placed on a wooden surface. Something with a little weight to it, but not much. The scent of potatoes and parsley wrapped around him.
“To wash up,” Ikey said.
“He’ll be in soon, then?”
“Yes, ma’am. I suppose so.”
Her skirt rustled and her heels clicked as she approached again. “Take a seat, then.”
Ikey concentrated on the snaps of her heels and the creaks of the floorboards to locate her position. Each sound pinged in his head. In his mind he imagined her in a particular spot, only to hear another footstep several feet beyond. It sparked disorientation. Yet Rose moved through the room as if it brimmed with daylight. It left Ikey grappling with impairment, as if a color existed, or a whole set of colors, that others could see and he could not, and it left part of the world invisible to him.
The stairs crackled with Rose’s descent.
Ikey stood in the dark, unsure of his position or where the dining table sat. The world was blackness, and he was adrift in it. Back home, the darkness had always welcomed him. After his dad had settled in for the night in the back room, and Uncle Michael had settled into sleeping in a chair in the front room, Ikey relished the dark and its reprieve from the squalid surroundings. He matched his breathing with his dad’s until he could imagine the deep, gasping breaths as his own, and he lay alone on the floor, the only one left in the whole world; safe in solitude.
But now the dark overwhelmed. It coursed around him, thick and heavy and wide and deep. Boundless.
A pan clattered in the kitchen.
Ikey swung toward the sound. It left him feeling like he caught a glimpse of a pulsing lighthouse on a distant shore. He sucked in a deep breath and pictured the room to the best of his ability. He extended his left arm out from his side. Rose had passed through this space. There had to be a width of at least one person between himself and the table.
Ikey turned 90 degrees to his left. He took a slight step forward. His outstretched hand drifted through emptiness. He redrew the map in his head, then took another step forward. His hand passed through more nothingness. He swept his arm in a slow arc and groped for anything that might tell him where he stood.
Nothing.
The stairs creaked again.
Ikey wished to be seated when Rose reached the top of the stairs. As he took another step forward, the top of his thigh caught the hard edge of the table. The table legs yelped with the force of his stumble.
“Ikey?” Rose asked.
Ikey placed his palms on the table and hung his head. “I’m all right.”
At the top of the stairs, Rose asked why he hadn’t lit a lantern.
Ikey looked in her direction. “I didn’t have a match.”
The backdoor opened. Footsteps entered the scullery. Their muffled thumps stopped, and the hissing of pipes permeated the room.
“You should have waited for Cross.” Rose’s steps crossed the room. “You’ll break your neck stumbling about in the dark.”
The hissing stopped. Footsteps approached the door as R
ose strolled past. The scent of bread filled her wake.
Ikey opened his mouth to ask why she didn’t light a lantern, but then the scullery door opened and spread gray-gold lantern light across the table beneath his hands. A dinner setting waited at the head and foot. A third sat across the table from himself.
“What the bloody hell, man?” Cross asked from the doorway. “You too thick to light a lantern?” The shadows of the furniture shifted back and forth as Cross wavered slightly on his feet.
Ikey turned around.
Rose passed between them as she walked away from a sideboard where she had set a basket of bread. “Dinner will be served in a few moments. Sit down.”
“I didn’t have a match,” Ikey said to Cross.
Cross smirked and shook his head. “There are matches in the cupboard over the sink. You best keep a few on yourself while staying in this morgue.”
He strolled to the table and placed the lantern in the middle of it, next to Ikey. Cross’s fingers traced the wooden surface as he passed around to the head of the table and drew out his chair.
Ikey circled the other direction and sat at the side setting. For future reference, he noted the locations of the table, the six chairs around it, and the sideboard tucked into a corner of the room. Next to the sideboard stood a glass-fronted hutch filled with china. Beside the scullery door sat a serving cart with a tea set. He twisted around and took in the rest of the room. A dark set of double doors interrupted the red diamond wallpaper and the shelf that encircled the room and brimmed with music boxes. An iron candelabra hung above with many long, curved arms and flourishes like leaves. Stubs of pale and dust-laden wax poked up from bundles of cast iron leaves. Alone in the dark, the room crowded around Ikey, strange and alien. Buried in that drifting dark had been a spark of excitement. Discovery. By what way did Rose navigate the darkness? But with Cross and his lantern in the room, everything felt broken. The dark candles. The closed doors. The room choked off from the outside as if light was a vaporous poison.
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