Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl (16 page)

Gideon had never seen so many houses crushed together, never seen so many people living beside, on top of, and beneath each other. He tugged at his collar, suffocated just by the sight of the city. The sky had gradually disappeared behind a low-lying fog fed by chimneys as far as the eye could see, contributing plumes of black and gray smoke to the choking layer of smog that reduced the sun to a pale yellow orb struggling to pierce the murk.

The omnibus’s speed on the M-Route had meant they made good time to the outskirts of London; now the vehicle crawled along Maida Vale, the roads clogged with bicycles, horse-drawn carriages, steam-cabs, and pedestrians. The omnibus beeped its air-horn repeatedly as children ran blithely in front of the lumbering leviathan, and velocipede riders wove in and out of the slow-moving traffic.

Gideon’s disquiet at the revelations in Einstein’s book was momentarily set aside; like so many new to London’s sights and wonders, he was agog. He could see the soaring towers reaching into the smoggy clouds, smell the combined stench of a city home to six million souls wafting through the open windows of the omnibus. And the noise! He had never heard such a racket, such a relentless clamor. Machinery clanked, bells tolled, horses whinnied, people shouted, music tinkled, drunks roared, and babies cried. Gideon jumped as a face appeared at his window, a man in a creased suit and a battered brown derby, teetering on stilts as he kept pace with the omnibus, waving strings of picture postcards at them until the vehicle, entering the wider, more orderly thoroughfare of the Edgware Road, gained more momentum and pulled jerkily away.

The electric lights strung along Marylebone Road were fizzing into orange life in the artificial dusk brought on by the thickening smog, and the omnibus had to pause at the junction of Bayswater Road and Oxford Street as a marching band traversed the road in front of them.

“Look!” said Gideon, leaning across Maria to peer through the window. “Hyde Park! And the Taj Mahal!”

The Indian temple to true love glowed pinkly in the afternoon sun, and beyond it Gideon saw sweethearts punting on the Serpentine or walking in the shade of the trees. Everything he had ever dreamed of, everything he had thought he would only see in newspaper illustrations or grainy photographs, was laid out before him. Hungry for more, he peered far to the west and he saw the hazy shape of the Lady of Liberty flood barrier. She held her torch high in the sky, and though Gideon couldn’t see it from where he sat, he knew she clutched with her left hand the book bearing the date of the failed revolution, April 18, 1775. He had always wanted to see America and dreamed that one day he would go there. He longed to see the vast plains peopled with the mysterious Red Indians, witness the ever-higher skyscrapers being built in New York, the city determined to be the grandest in the Empire. He even hoped he might visit New Spain, where the ancient lost cities of the Aztecs and Mayans had, for many years, inspired a long-lasting architectural fashion in London.

But yes: London. America could wait; he had never truly thought he would visit London, let alone New York or New Spain or Nyu Edo, and here he was. Dirigibles crisscrossed the sky—perhaps on their way to the Americas—and tethered blimps floating just above the rooftops advertised Cadbury’s Cocoa, Beecham’s Pills, Bovril, and, with a leering, painted devil, McIlhenny Tabasco Sauce.

Gideon yelped delightedly as there was a thunderous clattering from overhead, and he craned his neck back to Maria’s window to watch the rapid-transit electric stilt-train rattling on its elevated rails across Hyde Park and toward Big Ben. Barely able to absorb any further wonders, he sat back in his seat, beaming broadly, as the omnibus crossed Piccadilly, heading between the tall townhouses toward the greenery-garlanded steppes of the Victoria Ziggurat. The omnibus entered the artificial illumination of the cavernous transport ziggurat and was waved into a bay by a uniformed employee.

“We’re here,” said Gideon needlessly.

“Yes,” said Maria, and if Gideon noticed the quiet dullness of her voice, he did not mention it. He led her off the omnibus and gasped. As he stepped on to the stone apron where the omnibus settled in a hiss of steam, he thought the Victoria Ziggurat might very will occupy him forever. Teeming masses crushed into its vast pyramid, which was styled after the ruins explorers had discovered in New Spain. London’s high society was still delighted with the legends of human sacrifice and lost civilizations.

Travelers hurrying for their transport elbowed each other out of the way as match girls and flower sellers moved between them, forging serene paths through the chaos. A small boy with a dirt-lined face waved a rolled up newspaper and hollered, “Jack the Ripper strikes again! Late afternoon edition! Jack the Ripper strikes again!”

A fat man in a top hat and bristling whiskers barged past them, dragging a train of children and a subservient, bonneted wife behind him, separating Gideon from Maria. As he was whirled away by the push and shove of the crowd he saw her face looking for him, and something inside him suddenly felt heavy and leaden. He had barely been able to look at her since reading Einstein’s book. Yet, his heart insistently leaped each time he did meet her eyes, against everything his mind told him was right and proper. Gideon shook his head and forged through the masses until he was back at her side.

“We should get out of here,” he said. “I can’t think straight with so many people.”

He cast around for an exit, took Maria’s hand—not cold, not clammy, but still a thing possessed of strange, unholy life—and pulled her to where the crowds seemed thinner. They paused before a newsstand. Gideon momentarily delighted in a clanking ten-foot- tall brass man with oil lamps for eyes who danced in a heavy, marching gait. Steam hissed from his joints and onlookers threw coppers into the hat of his owner, who played a merry jig on a fiddle. A smiling man with a tidy goatee beard and an extravagantly ruffled shirt walked toward them, strumming what appeared to be a lute strung on a leather strap around his neck.

“Care for a song from the Guild of Scientific Troubadours?” he asked, grinning broadly and fixing a monocle to his right eye.

“You’re American!” said Gideon with excitement. He had never met anyone from the New World before.

The man bowed low and doffed his cloth cap. “That I am, sir. Floridian, my family was, though we relocated north during the Clearances, when they built the Mason-Dixon Wall and the slavers began to strike in the far south. Now me and my fellow guildsmen sell songs, ha’penny a shout. What could I sing for you? ‘Isopods In My Aquarium?’ perhaps? Or maybe ‘Sixty- Four Actuators’? What about ‘My Fingertips Are Weightless’?”

Maria pulled Gideon away, and she was about to murmur something in his ear when he spotted one of the periodicals hung up by a clothespin on the newsstand.

“
The Adventures of Captain Lucian Trigger Special Summer Issue
!” he gasped. Gideon took the magazine down from the newsstand and leafed through it. “All the Captain Trigger adventures of the last six numbers, in one edition. Plus a brand new, exclusive story.” He looked at Maria. “May I buy it?”

She shrugged. “You may do as you wish with that money, Mr. Smith. But there is something I must tell you. . . .”

Gideon paid for the penny magazine and stuffed it into his bag. “Maria? Did you want to say something?”

She looked at him with what he thought was sadness, and it stabbed him in his chest. Then she said, “Mr. Smith . . . I fear I am . . . winding down.”

Gideon took Maria into a quiet alley close to the transport hub and wound her back into clockwork life. She stood facing a red-brick wall with her hands braced against it while Gideon unlaced her corset and exposed her back and the small, brass- ringed aperture at the base of her spine. For one moment he considered leaving her, propped up against the wall, and fleeing. The thought shocked him.

He was Gideon Smith of Sandsend, seeker of adventure, avenger of deaths. Not Gideon Smith, abandoner of women. No matter how unreal they were. What did it mean, this collision of heart and mind, this thudding in his breast and sickness in his stomach? Maria was undoubtedly beautiful. But beautiful in the way that a well- turned piece of furniture was, or a work of art. She walked and talked and smiled—oh, how she smiled!—but no heart beat in her chest, no blood ran in her veins. The only part of Maria that could truly be said to be real was the brain that pulsed in her head . . . and that was not her own. Gideon had not had much time for girls, but he was still a man. Maria fascinated him, despite what she was. He pushed the thoughts away. What was the point? So he inserted the key, to a shallow gasp from Maria, and turned it until it held fast and she was once again herself. After winding Maria’s workings and hiding the key back in the cotton bag, he stood awkwardly as Maria fixed her clothing, as though they had shared a most intimate act. His stomach rebelled, or fluttered. He didn’t know which, or what it meant.

“What should be our next step, Mr. Smith?” she said.

“We should perhaps go to Fleet Street,” he said. “They will be able to put me in touch with Captain Trigger.”

“The man in the periodical?” said Maria. “Mr. Smith, could you tell me more of your errand in London? Perhaps we could take tea in one of the street cafés near the station.”

They took a table on the street and ordered sandwiches and a pot of tea. Gideon goggled at the prices. “Is everything so expensive in London?” he hissed.

Maria sipped at her tea. “Now, Mr. Smith, your tale.”

“And you think this Captain Trigger can aid you in your quest for justice?” she asked when he had finished.

Gideon nodded, taking the magazine from his bag. “He is the Hero of the Empire. He has faced the creature before. He will be able to help me defeat it and save Sandsend.”

Maria contemplated her beverage. She said, “Mr. Smith? Would you awfully mind telling me about your father, and your childhood? What recollections I have are mere shadows, and I fear not even under my ownership, and would very much like to hear about where you grew up.”

Gideon slowly closed out the sounds and bustle of London all around him, and transported himself back to Sandsend.

“I remember being happiest when I was ten years old. I had an older brother, Josiah, who was like all older brothers: joshing and harrying one moment, protective and loving the next. My mother was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and she was having another baby. Dad worked hard on the trawlers. We never had more money than we needed, but only rarely less. Sandsend was a wonderful place for a little boy, Maria. Tall cliffs and a beach, a river running down to the sea. We would walk along the sands to Whitby on market days, and on Sundays we would climb Lythe Bank to St. Oswald’s Church. My dad didn’t hold much with religion, but Mother insisted.”

“It sounds idyllic,” said Maria happily.

“It was,” he agreed. “Then, that winter . . . Mother died in childbirth. I would have had a baby brother, but he was not strong enough to survive either. Josiah had to look after me, and he gave up his schooling to help keep the house. But that didn’t matter, because he was going into the business with Dad. He would have been a great fisherman.”

“Would have been?”

“Six years ago he died from influenza. I took it very badly. He had been like . . . well, like a mother to me, or another dad. He looked after me. I had always been a bookish child, and sometimes the other boys poked fun at me.” He smiled. “Not that I couldn’t give as good as I got. I had always been strong. Just like Josiah.” His smile turned to a frown. “That didn’t save him from the influenza, though. It had him in the grave in a week.”

“So it was just you and your father?”

Gideon nodded. “We were as happy as we could be, given what we had lost. Until that monster took him away from me, and left me with nothing.”

Maria placed a hand on his. “So you are out for revenge. It will not bring your father back, I am sorry to say. No one returns from the dead, not even through vengeance.”

Gideon shrugged. “Perhaps. But I cannot let his death lie. I must seek reparations. And who knows what evil the creature plots? It might have claimed more lives in Sandsend already.”

“And you intend to return to Sandsend with Captain Trigger?”

He nodded, then realized he had also promised to help Maria find Professor Einstein, or at least some answers to her dreams. He knew the answer already, but he couldn’t tell her out of . . . pity? Fear? He didn’t know. Instead he spoke softly, forcing out each hateful word he knew he must utter. “Maria, I do not expect you to accompany me any further. You are free of Crowe and in London, as you wished. If you decide to go forth alone to find your . . . your creator, then I will not hold you to your pledge to aid me. We can part company now, if you desire it.”

“If I desire it,” she said leadenly. Gideon went to settle exorbitant bill in the café. When he returned she was dabbing at her cheek with a paper napkin.

“Maria?” he asked, frowning.

She smiled, blinking at him. “It is quite all right, Mr. Smith. Merely a slight . . . leakage of fluid. It happens, on occasion.”

They stood together in an awkward silence. Gideon said quickly, “I did not mean for us to part immediately, Maria. Come with me to the offices of
World Marvels & Wonders,
at least. Who knows, you might learn something about yourself in Fleet Street.”

She smiled again. “I am already learning much about myself, Mr. Smith. But thank you, your offer is very kind, and I accept. Shall we take a steam-cab?”

By the time the steam-cab - another new experience for Gideon — deposited them before the imposing facade of the offices of the London Newspaper and Magazine Publishing Company, Gideon was feeling wretched. Reverend Bastable would, he considered, be very proud of him. Despite the fact Gideon knew in his bones Maria was a good person, he had tried his very best to reject her, to push her away from him. He was a fool. And now, perhaps, it was too late. She was becoming increasingly distant from him, and when he had excitedly gripped her arm as they saw the famous Iron Guard patrolling outside Buckingham Palace, she had carefully extricated herself from his grip.