by JL Merrow
And flexible ones they are and all, I thought but didn’t say.
“I’m glad to hear it, Mr Tunstall,” Miss Pandora says, all gracious like, and bobs a fine curtsey. “And I promise I shan’t let you down.”
Old Arthur’s face got redder, and he turned away, muttering, Naow, naow.
I put on my best coat, the one without the grease stains, borrowed a bowler from my old dad, and took Miss Pandora straight round to the Criterion. The manager sniffed, but let her step up on the stage, and she trod them boards like she was born to it, her figure poised and graceful like one of them Greek statues and the limelight catching the perfection of her skin. Her hair glowed like a halo, putting the golden curlicues on the fittings to shame, and her violet eyes flashed, richer than the velvet stage curtains.
Then she opened her mouth, and a pure, clear note rang out, filling the theatre all the way up to the gods. The manager’s eyes lit up and his jaw dropped open, as if preparing to catch all the coins that’d surely fly his way once he got a performer like her on the bill.
Miss Pandora carried on singing, a heart-breaking ballad about roses and a lost love. The sound of hammering and the whistles of the stage-hands faded and stopped, until all the men were standing still, staring wide-eyed at the stage, more than one of them with a tear in his jaded eye. The girls from the chorus, who’d been shuffling and gossiping in their sequins and their feathers as they waited to practice their dance, hugged each other. And I grabbed hold of a pillar for support, my knees turned to water and my heart fit to burst, because it felt as how she was singing just for me.
At the end of the last verse, the final note rang in our ears and then faded away, to leave a hush so profound and reverent it didn’t seem as how anyone would ever dare to make a sound again.
Blow me if Miss Pandora doesn’t launch straight into another song, a jaunty one this time, all about a girl what’s gone farther than she ought. Tears turned to smiles, and I spied a bearded old gent with his hands full of sheet music, shaking his head and muttering, like a prayer of thanksgiving, “Perfect pitch! Perfect pitch!”
When she finished this time, there was such a thunder of applause you’d have thought the world was ending. We was all still clapping when the manager staggered forward, right to the edge of the stage, and looked Miss Pandora in the eye as if she was his long-lost daughter, turned up on his doorstep carrying a golden goose in one hand and the keys to a distillery in the other. “You’re hired,” he croaked. “Starting tonight.”
“But you haven’t seen me dance yet,” Miss Pandora protested.
“With a voice like that, coming out of that face? I don’t give a monkey’s if you can dance or if you stomp round like an elephant what’s got two wooden legs and an ague. You’re hired.”
I grinned so wide my ears ached, and offered Miss Pandora my arm for the walk back to Tunstall’s. And didn’t we get a few stares, promenading around the streets, her looking like a society miss what’s run off from her mother and picked up a bit of rough?
Old Arthur, Lord love him, had showed his confidence in our success by celebrating early, and was passed out in his chair by the fire, the gin bottle still dangling from limp fingers. I rescued it, put up the fire guard so’s he wouldn’t go up like a Roman candle should sparks fall on the rug, and led Miss Pandora upstairs.
“We’ll clear out a room for you,” I said. “There’s one next to mine that’s full of bits and bobs and gewgaws, but we can shift them easy, and then I’ll find you bed linen.”
“Am I not to sleep in the workshop, then?” She sounded surprised, as though she’d taken if for granted that the workbench was her bed.
I raised a brow. “A fine lady like you? Miss Pandora, the very idea!”
She stepped closer. “And am I not to sleep with you? For we both know I’m not really a fine lady, but you, my dear Hodgkins, are the truest gentleman I’ve ever met.”
I stepped back, and nearly fell downstairs. “M-miss Pandora? There’s something you don’t know about me. I ain’t a man.”
“No? I know your body is female, for my eyesight is quite extraordinarily fine, for which I thank you. But I did wonder if perhaps you’d been made…not quite to your liking? That perhaps Mother Nature had intended you for a man, but by some mischance had only the parts for a woman in her workshop?”
I shook my head. “I know there’s some like that, but I ain’t never felt wrong in my body, and if it weren’t that no one would trust a woman to be a tinkerer, I’d own up to being a girl all right.” I frowned. “Well, that and the trousers. I never did get on with petticoats—too apt to get caught in the gears.”
“I can see they would be a hazard in your profession. But does Mr Tunstall know?”
“That I’m a lass, not a lad?” I pursed my lips and shook my head. “I never know what that old bugger knows and what he don’t, nor what he’s guessed and what he’s told himself so often he thinks it’s true. But I reckon if I don’t make it so he has to know, then he’ll be happy in his ignorance and no harm done.”
“And your…family?”
“Mum’s got Lily to talk fripperies with. And Dad says he don’t care if I’m a man or a woman or something in between, a proper profession like tinkering ain’t nothing to be sniffed at.”
“Then I’m glad. And I’m glad, too, you don’t feel wrong in your body. Because”—and here she looked to her toes, darting out from beneath her petticoats—”I happen to be of the opinion that you are quite perfectly crafted, and I should hate for us to disagree on anything.”
Now I was looking at her toes, them being prettier than my own, and my face was hot like I’d been soldering with a mouth-blown lamp all day. “I ain’t nothing special. ‘Sides, you ain’t never seen me without my clothes.”
Miss Pandora took my broad, rough hands in her dainty white ones. “Now you come to mention it, that doesn’t seem fair. After all, you’ve seen me without clothes.”
Without skin, neither, and a prettier set of pistons and gears I’d wager has never graced this earth. Lord, I worshipped the very ground she trod upon. “Would you want to see me?”
“I would. Very much, dear Hodgkins.”
“Harry,” I croaked. “My given name’s Harriet, but call me Harry.”
“Harry. I think it’s the loveliest of names.” As God is my witness, when she said it, all gentle and low, you’d have believed it to be true. Then she kissed me, my hot face in her cool hands.
Her lips were soft, as I’d fashioned them to be, and eager, as I’d never dared to hope for. She pushed at my coat, slipping it from my shoulders, and I let it fall upon the floorboards as we worked at each other’s’ fastenings.
I was unclothed faster than she was, on account of men’s clothes consisting of vastly fewer layers and a deal less buttons. My fingers trembled as I unlaced her stays—not that she needed any such thing with her trim figure, but ‘twouldn’t be decent for her to go without—and I laid a kiss upon her bare white shoulder to cover my confusion.
“So gentle,” she breathed, standing there in her chemise like a spirit of the city or a goddess of the forge, and Lord, I wanted to take my hammer to all who’d been rough with her in the past, who’d treated her as less than a person.
Miss Pandora smiled as she ran her hands over my breasts, newly freed and still reddened from their bindings. Her cool touch made my nipples harden and sent a jolt of animal galvanism to my very core. “The left, I fancy, is larger, is it not?”
“It is.” My voice trembled, and I ached for her to touch me all over, inside and out. To know me, as I knew her.
“Such perfect imperfection.”
I almost wept, then, because she understood. She understood.
* * * *
Well, that was ten years ago now, and I don’t need to tell you what’s happened since, not unless you was born yesterday and likely not even then. Miss Pandora Piper’s fame has spread to all four corners of His Majesty King Victor’s empire, and it ain
’t stopped there neither.
Old Arthur Tunstall retired, and married the widow who kept the gin-house he favoured. It was a short retirement, for the cirrhosis took him six months later, but a happy one by all accounts.
My little sister Lily got her wish to work for a lady what ain’t a battle axe, for she dresses Miss Pandora Piper, the London Lark, every morning and night. Folks say it’s down to her talent with paint and powder that Miss Pandora don’t appear to have aged a day since first she graced the boards. I tell ‘em it’s down to a happy marriage—for yes, while she keeps her stage name for professional purposes, Miss Pandora was married some years ago, in a quiet ceremony in Ludgate Hill. So quiet, in fact, not even the priest noticed it’d happened, but then he popped his clogs three months later after a bilious attack brought on by too many oysters in Mrs Merkin’s bawdy-house, so he ain’t about to cast doubt upon the tale.
And her husband? Or wife, as I’m free to be, when we’re at home tucked up in our cosy bed? It’s a fine and private place, my Pandora likes to joke, because we die in there nightly. But only a little death, mind.
Harry Hodgkins, Esquire, Master Tinkerer, and Keeper of Contrivances and Contraptions at the Criterion Theatre. At your service, gentlefolk.
THE END
ABOUT J.L. MERROW
J.L. Merrow is that rare beast, an English person who refuses to drink tea. She read Natural Sciences at Cambridge, where she learned many things, chief amongst which was that she never wanted to see the inside of a lab ever again. Her one regret is that she never mastered the ability of punting one-handed whilst holding a glass of champagne.
She writes across genres, with a preference for contemporary gay romance and the paranormal, and is frequently accused of humour. Find her online at jlmerrow.com.
ABOUT JMS BOOKS LLC
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