The Clockwork Woman

by Claire Bott

  Peter hurried me in, and pushed the door shut behind us with his foot. There was a large, strong-looking man standing in the corridor, raising a slab-like eyebrow at the pair of us; and to him, Peter said, ‘Fetch Bella, would you, Dan?’

  The mountainous Dan rumbled an agreement, and lumbered off. Peter waited impatiently, clutching my arm, until a stout, blowsy woman waddled into view at the end of the corridor. ‘Bella!’ he greeted her. ‘See what I’ve brought you!’

  She came closer, and looked me up and down. ‘I do see. Petey, don’t yer ever rest? Yer supposed to be on ’oliday, and ’ere you ’ave sent me two already.’

  He nudged her jocularly in the ribs with his elbow, clearly in high good humour. ‘When I see an opportunity, Bella, I take it. And this was an opportunity not to be missed!’

  Bella – a strange name for a woman so unbeautiful! – looked me over once more. ‘Very nice indeed, Petey, but where do I put ’er? The other one took up me last spare room.’

  He shrugged indifferently. ‘Put them in together then.’

  ‘I suppose I shall ’ave to. Dan!’

  The mountain-man appeared at the end of the corridor, and came over to our little group by the door.

  ‘Dan, take this lady up and put ’er in with the other one.’

  Peter’s grip on my wrist tightened. ‘Money first, Bella.’ His tones, that had been so jocular, had turned suddenly soft and icy.

  Bella sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘Really, Petey, don’t yer trust me?’

  ‘Frankly, no.’

  ‘Oh, all right then, here’s yer money!’ She fumbled at a purse that hung from her belt, drawing forth several large coins and shoving them into Peter’s hand. ‘Now will yer let Dan take ’er?’ she inquired sarcastically.

  Peter let go of me, and bowed with an exaggerated flourish. ‘By all means.’

  Dan wrapped his huge fingers around my arm, and half-led, half-dragged me along the corridor and up the stairs at the end of it. At the top of the stairs was another corridor, this one with doors running along either side of it. At the very end of the corridor, Dan stopped and rummaged in his pocket for a moment, before pulling out a key, unlocking one of the doors, thrusting me through and shutting the door behind me. I heard the sound of the key turning again in the lock.

  At the other end of the room, a woman stood, her head bowed, looking down through the barred window at the street outside. For some reason, she seemed oddly familiar –

  In another moment, I knew. You will think that I ought to have been overcome with relief, that I should have been glad that I was not, after all, alone. I regret to say that my first feeling was one of sudden anger. I had been anticipating a quiet life, doing the things I had done many times before, not thinking, not caring. Now that was snatched away, for here was someone I knew, who had already proved her ability to disrupt my life; had I not lost everything when I had rescued her and her friend? Now that I had found, it seemed, a place where I could come to a halt once more, would she take this from me, too? But then she began to turn, and I saw the confusion and fear in her face. My anger was swept away by a flood of concern. Bitterly ashamed of my feelings of but a moment ago, I hurried across the room to her and caught both her hands in mine. ‘Emily, it is you! But how did you come here?’

  She shook her head, clearly bewildered by my sudden appearance. ‘I don’t know. I crashed that glider thing, knocked myself out, and woke up here.’

  ‘I suspect,’ I said darkly, remembering the conversation I had overheard downstairs, ‘that Peter had something to do with it.’

  I later discovered that my supposition was correct, and that Peter had stumbled across the crashed glider and had then hired a farm-hand and his hay-cart to make the journey with Emily, bamboozling the man’s simple wits with a trumped-up tale of a sister prone to madness and fainting fits, and of a London sanatorium that was the only place that could effect a cure. But this is by the by.

  ‘Peter?’ Emily asked. ‘Who’s Peter?’

  I shook my head. ‘An unpleasant man. It does not matter.’

  She shrugged, letting the subject drop. But a moment later I wished she had not, for the next question she asked was, ‘What is this place, do you know?’

  I would rather have answered a thousand questions about Peter than reply to that. I had not forgotten her reaction when she had asked me what I was made for, and I had begun to answer. But she had a right to an honest reply. ‘A brothel,’ I said softly. ‘This is a brothel.’

  For a moment, her face was shattered with horror. Then she clenched her fists, and hardened her features. ‘If anyone comes near me,’ she said in a voice that barely shook at all, ‘they’re going to regret it.’

  I looked at her, and knew what would happen. I knew some things about brothels; Sir Edward enjoyed making them the settings of the little scenes he would sometimes have me act out. So I knew that, for a new young whore, one not used to the trade, there would be a time of ‘training’. So it was called; but this was not the learning of skills. What it meant was that someone, a man employed by the house, would rape her, over and over again. There would be deliberate humiliation, meant to shatter her spirit. This would go on until they broke her.

  Emily was strong, and would not break easily. Maybe she would never break, maybe she would die first. Perhaps she would kill herself, rather than suffer what she would have to suffer, here, in this house. In the back of my mind, a quiet voice said, ‘You can’t just sit by while people are getting hurt, or might be or will be hurt.’

  I dashed to the door, and pounded on it hard with both fists. There was no response. I hammered harder. Finally, Dan’s voice said, ‘Quiet in there!’

  ‘I have a proposition for Madam Bella,’ I said quickly, before he could leave. ‘A business proposition, which will make her a great deal of money if she accepts. If she finds out you kept her from hearing about it, she will be very angry with you. Fetch her!’

  There was a long silence; then I heard the floorboards creak as Dan walked away. I waited there, standing before the door, to find out whether he had gone for his mistress, or only shrugged and walked away.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Emily asked from behind me.

  ‘Something that I hope will work,’ I replied, without turning.

  Finally, after what felt like an eternity, I heard footsteps ascending the stairs, and coming down the corridor towards our door. The key scraped in the lock, the door opened, and Bella stood there, with Dan looming behind her.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘What do you ’ave to offer me?’

  ‘Myself,’ I said calmly. ‘Or rather, my skills. I am not only beautiful, Madam Bella, I am very, very talented. I can do things to your gentleman visitors that will drive them near-insane, and make your brothel the most frequented, and the most expensive, in the whole of London. But this I will do only if you accede to my requests.’

  ‘What requests?’

  ‘Those I am about to put to you. First, I want three good, wholesome meals a day, and not laced with opium, either. Secondly, I want a hot bath brought up to my room every day before the gentlemen arrive, and I wish to be alone while I bathe. Thirdly, I want a maid. A personal maid, assigned to me alone. She must not be one of the girls of the house; I will not have my maidservant corrupted by sluttish tricks. Her only job must be to attend to my needs.’

  Bella regarded me narrowly. ‘If yer can do what yer say yer can do, the food and bath I can give yer easy. But maids is expensive.’

  ‘No maid, no bargain.’

  Bella considered this for a moment. Then, suddenly, she brightened. ‘What about ’er?’ she asked, pointing over my shoulder at Emily. ‘Never been part of the house yet – new, yer see. She ’ull make yer a nice maid, I’ll be bound. And if she ain’t so clever at it, well, yer can always train ’er up.’

  I nodded graciously. ‘T
hat would be acceptable.’

  I thought I had succeeded, and was surprised to have found it so easy. But then Bella, leaning against the door-frame, asked shrewdly, ‘But ’ow do I know yer as good as yer say yer are?’

  ‘Can you risk dismissing the possibility?’

  ‘Oh, I ain’t going to turn yer down. But what I am going to do is make yer prove yerself. Dan, stay ’ere, and make sure these ladies stay ’ere too.’

  She waddled off down the corridor. A short while later, she returned, towing Peter behind her. ‘Do ’im,’ she said. ‘Do ’im for me, an’ I shall watch. Then we shall see.’

  It would be Peter, of course. And before them all, before Bella and Dan; and worst of all, before Emily. I did not look at her, I could not look at her. If I did, I would falter, and I could not afford to falter. Instead, I smiled sweetly at Peter as though he were my closest friend in the world, and began to unlace my bodice.

  Afterwards, when Peter had pulled on his breeches and stumbled, breathless and bow-legged, out of the door, Bella nodded to me. ‘Yer on,’ she said, and left the room without further comment, Dan following behind her.

  I pulled on my dress again, and sat on the edge of the bed, smoothing my hair back into place. I heard footsteps behind me, and then the bed creaked as Emily sat down. She took my hand, and held it between both of hers. I looked up. I thought I saw tears in her eyes, but it might have been only a trick of the light.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said simply.

  I smiled at her, then. ‘You are very different from your friend.’

  ‘My friend?’

  ‘Honoré.’

  Her hands tightened on mine. ‘Honoré? How is he? Is he safe?’

  ‘Quite safe, when last I saw him.’

  ‘Where – no, start at the beginning. How did the two of you get away?’

  I told her, in as few words as possible, the story of our escape and what had followed. When I had finished, she sat musing for a moment, then gave me a long look.

  ‘You’re a remarkable person, Dove.’

  I raised my brows. ‘Person?’

  ‘Oh, don’t talk that way! You are a person, I know that you are.’

  I shrugged, uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken. I did not know quite what I was, and preferred not to think about it, if possible. In a clumsy attempt to introduce a new topic, I said abruptly, ‘Where do you come from, Emily, you and Honoré?’

  Her face became grave. ‘That is two different questions, Dove.’

  I frowned, confused. ‘What do you mean?’

  She looked away from me for a moment. ‘I... am not from the same place and time as Honoré.’

  ‘Place and time?’ This was new to me. I had not known that travel through time was possible, and said so.

  ‘Nor do most people.’ She drew her hands away from me, and sat staring at them as though the answers to all the riddles of the world were written on their palms.

  ‘How then do you travel? By what means? How did you come to Honoré’s time, if you were not from there?’

  She laughed in a way that was neither amused nor glad. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  ‘Neither do I. I...’ she gestured in a helpless way, then let her hand fall to her lap again. ‘I have amnesia, Dove.’

  I knew that word. I must have found it in my reading through Sir Edward’s library. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, and I was. It must be awful, I thought, to have whole areas of your memory unavailable to you.

  ‘I don’t know who I am, Dove,’ she said quietly, ‘I just don’t know. I know my name, and that’s all.’

  ‘A name is something valuable to know,’ I offered, in an attempt to comfort her.

  She shook her head. ‘It’s not enough. I can’t remember my parents, my childhood, where I come from. I know I came through time and space, but I can’t remember what happened. And I don’t know why!’ Her voice cracked on the final word. If I had had a heart, it would have broken for her then. Instead, I put my arms around her and drew her head down to lie against my shoulder. She wept very softly into my hair.

  After a while, she squeezed my hand silently and sat up, pushed her hair back and became suddenly very businesslike. ‘Right. The first thing we have to do is work out a way of getting out of here.’

  I looked up at her wonderingly. The question of trying to escape had not even occurred to me.

  ‘The bars on the window are padlocked from the outside,’ she went on, ‘so that’s no use. The next time Dan comes in, one of us could distract him while the other slips past –’

  ‘I do not think that Dan is very easy to distract, somehow.’

  ‘All right, then, we could overpower him.’

  I laughed outright at that. ‘I doubt if Samson and Hercules, working together, could overpower him.’

  ‘Well then, we could dodge past him.’

  ‘How? He fills almost the whole doorway.’

  ‘Yes, but he’ll have to come all the way into the room at some point, won’t he? To bring the baths and meals. We could try to escape then.’

  I looked at her eager face, and sighed. ‘If such an opportunity arises, then yes, I will try to escape with you.’

  She left it at that.

  The days went by, and no such opportunity arose. Emily, as my maid, fetched my (or rather, her) meals and baths herself, with Dan accompanying her every step of the way. She was turned out of my room while I was entertaining the guests, and sent to sit in Bella’s tiny parlour, but again Dan accompanied her from and to my room. As for me, I was never allowed out of the room at all. I was far too valuable to Bella for that. We were, it seemed, caught fast.

  I would be lying if I said I was dismayed by this. To tell the truth, I was happy. My duties were not onerous to me – there was nothing the gentlemen could ask me to do that Sir Edward had not required of me at some time – and Emily was there. For the first time in my life, I had a friend, and I revelled in it.

  I was, as I have said, happy. But Emily was not. The confined nature of our lives told on her nerves, and the fact that we were dependent on our captors maddened her. There were other things, too, that distressed her. I found out about one of them after we had been several days in the brothel. It was after I had been entertaining one of the gentleman visitors. Dan escorted her back into my room, and closed the door on us. She walked past me without speaking, and went to stand by the window, looking down at the street.

  ‘I saw that man on the stairs,’ she said. ‘The one who was – visiting you.’

  ‘Did he look pleased?’ I asked.

  She snorted. ‘Oh yes. Very happy.’

  ‘Good.’

  She rounded on me. ‘Why is it good? Why do you do the things you do, just to make men like that happy? They aren’t thinking of you as a person, you know, Dove – just as a – a kind of thing.’

  I smoothed my skirts. ‘Well, perhaps I am just a kind of thing.’

  Emily stamped her foot. ‘You are not! Don’t say that about yourself, it’s not true. You deserve better than all this!’

  ‘But, Emily, all this is the only thing I know.’

  ‘Then learn something new!’ she cried, exasperated.

  ‘Something – new?’ I faltered. New was frightening, new was dangerous. Far better to stay with familiar things.

  She sighed, and her gaze softened. Leaving the window, she walked across the room to me and put her hands on my shoulders. ‘Dove, you do have a right to choose, you know. And if this was the life you’d chosen, I wouldn’t say a word. But it’s not. It’s what you do because you’ve always done it, because it’s what you were taught, because you think you don’t have a choice. Well, you do. You could do something different if you wanted to.’

  ‘But why would I want to? This life is familiar
to me, and comfortable.’

  Emily shook her head. ‘If all you wanted was familiar, comfortable things, why didn’t you stay on Sir Edward’s estate when you had the chance?’

  I struck her hands from my shoulders, and turned away. ‘Why do you do this?’ I cried. ‘Why must you ask me questions that you know I cannot answer? Why must you keep making me think? I was content before you and Honoré came, I was safe!’

  ‘Dove,’ Emily said gently, ‘were you happy?’

  All the anger left me in a rush. I turned back, and met her steady gaze. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I was not happy.’

  It was several days after that that I first met Sir Richard. He was one of Bella’s gentleman guests, and he bounded enthusiastically into the room; a tall, muscular fair-haired man, with a familiar glint in his eye when he looked at me.

  ‘You must be the wondrous Dove that Bella has been telling me about. I am Sir Richard Hampden.’

  I extended my hand. ‘I am pleased to meet you, my Lord.’

  He took my hand and bowed over it, brushing it with his lips. When he straightened up, there was a faint smile on his face. ‘Indeed, a dainty morsel. The only introduction most whores seem to know is, “Lie down there while I take me drawers off.”’ He took a step back, and gazed at me. ‘But you – ah, you are magnificent! A night with you would be a reward well worth having, indeed.’