Mechanica (29 page)

“Ye—yes, sir.” Blood rushed through my ears.

“Well, I’m more confident in your abilities than ever. I’ve more than one of your mother’s creations in my study. Fascinating, wonderful work she did . . . though I know most people believed the work was your father’s. The more fools they.”

There would be time, I was sure, to discover how Lord Alming had known my mother. So much time. I smiled more widely than I ever had in my life. I couldn’t find my voice, so I could only hope that all my gratitude and happiness showed on my face.

“Well, Miss Lampton, we certainly have a lot to discuss.” He gestured toward the carriage door, looking hopeful. “If perhaps we might try a spin in this delightful contraption?”

I shook my head. I’d just caught sight of a very round, very golden sort of girl, wearing a red wool cap and stroking Jules’s nose. “I have to talk to a friend first.”

I felt a weight press down on my buoyant spirit as I remembered all the things Caro and I had to talk about, all the ways I might lose her friendship before we were done.

Lord Alming smiled in a way that suggested he was bemused at my youthfulness again. “Well, you have my card, Miss Lampton. Please do call upon me at your earliest convenience; after the show closes today, perhaps.”

“I will,” I said. “Oh, thank you again.” I looked up at him. I’d never been close enough to notice before, or perhaps it was the brightness of the winter sunlight, but I saw that the freckles on his face looked faintly blue.

He tipped his green top hat and vanished into the crowd.

I turned back toward my friend; I thought it would be best to get this over with quickly.

“Caro!” I cried.

She turned and beamed at me, and all the complicated feelings I’d had about her since last night were swept away in an instant. She ran toward me with her arms open, I opened my own, and we wrapped each other up in such a strong embrace that I lifted her off the ground.

“Oh, Nick,” she said, a little breathless, “I’ve been hearing all about it!”

There was no jealousy, no anger in her voice. She sounded, to my complete and utter confusion, happy.

“Er . . .” After my exhausting heart-to-heart with Fin and my unexpected encounter with Lord Alming, I was somewhat less than articulate. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, come on now. You know.” Caro squinted at me, and whatever she saw in my face made her smile fade. “Here,” she said, in a softer tone. “Let’s go in your lovely carriage and talk about it. Fin’ll be stuck in there all day, but the three of us can talk together later on.”

“All right.” I suddenly wondered why on earth I hadn’t at least tinted the glass I’d used for the walls; we’d be as plain as day talking in there. And yet, what other option did we have?

And would there be a “three of us” at all by the end of the day?

I opened the door for Caro and followed her in, then shut the vents.

“The glass does block a fair bit of sound,” I said, looking around us, “and at least people seem to be keeping some distance.”

“Well, sure,” Caro said with laughter in her voice. “Due deference to their future Queen.”

There was still nothing in her face but cheerful amusement. I had to ask her outright, I decided. We all had to keep being honest.

“Don’t you love him?” I asked.

Caro shot me perhaps the most sardonic look I’d ever seen, and I’d lived with Stepmother for years. “Course I do,” she said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

I stared at her. Was she leading me on? “But surely—surely you know how he feels about you.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, I wished I could take them back; honesty on my own behalf was well enough, but what if Fin hadn’t meant Caro to know this secret?

Caro shook her head. “Fin can be so
dramatic,
” she said. “Ask him where his heart belongs most days, and he’ll say Esting. As he should . . . Lord, but I’m glad you know he’s the Heir now. He should have told you a long time ago, I always said, but it was up to him. And anyway, it’s true that he had to be careful, with his father so paranoid about everything.” She rolled her eyes. “But the whole business about, you know, me. It’s just that he gets a bit moony sometimes.” She made a small, frustrated sound, and I had the feeling that she was struggling to explain in the right way, without doing a disservice to either of them. “The thing about Fin is this: he’s wonderful, and I really do love him. But he has some growing up to do, and I think he’ll always make me a better friend than he would a lover.”

Caro’s being so calm, so clearheaded about all of this, was what befuddled me. Was it really that easy? And didn’t she ever . . .

“Sure,” she went on, dismissing the question that still burned in my mind, “I’ve felt for him sometimes, only I’m not so . . .
exclusive
about it as he is. Remember how I said I make friends too easily?” She laughed. “I fall in love the same way. A few times a year at least.”

I regarded her, a little bit in awe. To go through this—this summit and plunge, this love and heartbreak—
often?
And to be able to speak of it easily and laugh while you’re speaking?

“But, Caro,” I whispered, “how can you bear it? I feel exhausted just from this one . . .” I remembered Lord Alming’s words. “This one drama. How can you bear the heartbreak?”

She looked at me as if I was the one who didn’t understand. “How can you bear not loving people? Where does your love go?”

I blinked. Years with the Steps flooded my memory—hard years of drudgery and mutual scorn and the even harder first months, when I’d wanted so badly to love them.

That was all over now, I told myself. It had ended today.

Yet those empty years still echoed through me, and in them I could see Caro’s question:
How can you bear not loving people?

For a long time, I’d walked through a fog, thinking my love had died with Mother and then Father, obeying the Steps because none of it mattered anyway. When I found the workshop, I’d thrown my love into it, working and working, and I loved Jules and even the insects more than I could express.

I thought of how much I’d come to rely on Jules, how much I loved him. Had my bubbling, frenetic love for Fin been only an outlet . . . a place, as Caro said, for my love to go?

And finally I remembered the books I’d read about Faerie as a child, the descriptions of the friend-families the Fey could make. I remembered what I’d told Caro at the Night Market when I’d helped her buy the lovesbane.

Caro’s hand pressed down warmly on mine. I found myself blinking back tears.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said, squeezing my hand more tightly, “I was just trying to explain . . . I think you just haven’t met enough people worth loving. Not yet, anyway. You’ll see, Nick. A year from now, I bet you’ll be telling me all about some new paramour.” She shook her head. “But even if it’s still Fin . . . even if it’s always him, or it’s him for both of us at the same time . . . it’ll be all right.”

“How? How can you know that?”

She twined her fingers through mine and took a slow breath, looking thoughtful. “I suppose I can’t promise beyond any doubt,” she said, “though I can tell you that Fin and I have weathered many a worse storm, these nineteen years, than one of us being in love with an inconvenient person—even when we are those inconvenient people.

“But anyway, we’re friends, aren’t we? Fin and I, you and me, you and Fin, all the pairs that can be made of us, and the three of us together, too.” She shrugged, and her smile broke out again. “I just don’t see that changing anytime soon.”

I turned this over in my mind, thinking of the Fey families with longing.

I looked back at Caro and shared in her smile.

Neither did I.

“I
T’S
not that simple, of course,” I said over my shoulder.

At the table behind me, Fin and Caro laughed.

“What isn’t?” Fin called.

I took my kettle off the Bunsen burner and poured boiling water over clary-bush leaves in a glass teapot. Two silver spiders pulled a machine-knitted tea cozy around it for me. Mother’s cuckoo clock chimed and twittered on the wall.

Outside, I could hear Jules nicker in his stable; since the Exposition, I’d kept him well supplied with the best charcoal. He mostly stayed there; he seemed to prefer the indoors. I’d asked him a few times if he wanted to go riding, but he always shook his head. I wondered if his new home was a comforting reminder of the stable-box he’d slept in for years.

I had to admit that I was still a little frightened, too: frightened that someone would realize he wasn’t simply some technological marvel, but magic. There had been plenty of near miracles at the Exposition, and I thought he had seemed like one of them, but I couldn’t bear the thought of losing him again.

And I still didn’t know what the Ashes were. I’d brought them with me too—I knew, at least, that nothing so potentially powerful should be left in the hands of the Steps.

Someday I would have to find out their true nature. I had given myself the gift of waiting, though, the gift of time to do all the other things I’d dreamed of doing for so long: leaving the Steps, setting up my own workshop in Esting City, beginning to save some money. The day when I could buy back Lampton was approaching faster than I could have hoped for.

I would face the Ashes, and their meanings, in time. Thinking of them felt ominous in the same way as thinking of the oncoming war . . . and it seemed no one could deny that it was coming now. It hurt Fin more than he could bear, I knew, that he didn’t yet have the power to stop it—and the thought of war made me almost physically sick.

But all of this was still in the future, and Caro always said that until there was something we could do to help, it did no good obsessing, or encouraging Fin’s obsession.

Still, somehow the Ashes and the war were connected in my mind. My heart quailed when I thought of either of them. But I knew Caro was right, and there were enough other things to occupy our minds and hearts for now. Sometimes you have to put things away for a while.

“Tea getting cold there, Nick?” came Fin’s teasing voice.

“Patience,” I called back, rinsing three cups with hot water. “Don’t be such a prince.”

I brought the tea set to the table, where sinnum buns Caro’s mother had sent me were set out on a chipped yellow plate that was considerably emptier than it had been when I’d gone to boil the water.

As I settled into a chair opposite Fin and Caro, a dragonfly swooped low over the table, glass wings sparkling, and cleared away a few crumbs.

“Lord, Nick, you’ve got them well trained,” said Caro. “Hard to believe you’ve only lived here a month.”

“Mm,” I said, “one glorious month.”

I’d left Lampton Manor the day of the Exposition, parading up to the house in Jules’s carriage, not even thinking of ombrossus or hiding, not even thinking of fear.

It was still strange to remember how easy it had been just to . . . leave. I simply held my head high and walked through the front door, straight past the parlor and the Steps’ gaping faces (Chastity’s nicely bruised), and down into the cellar and the workshop to gather my things. The insects followed me back up like pilgrims, and I was pleased to see that they left tiny soot trails wherever they could. The Steps never uttered a word, and I hadn’t seen head nor tail of them since I’d moved into Esting City, though a slipper-shaped sign announcing my name and trade stood outside my door for all to see.

However hard they’d tried to keep me, and to hurt me when I was theirs, it seemed they didn’t dare come near me now. It would have been anticlimactic if it hadn’t been so oddly funny—or maybe it was the other way around.

Either way, I was free of them.

“What’s not so simple, Nick?” Fin asked, talking through a mouthful of sinnum bun in a very unprincely fashion. Caro rolled her eyes and tsked at him, in just the same way I’d seen her reprimand her younger cousins a few days ago. Visits to the palace, and especially its great labyrinthine servants’ quarters, were quickly becoming a favorite part of my new routine.

I gestured out the window at my cheery, brightly painted sign. “I can’t sell people glass slippers without telling them the truth.”

Fin groaned histrionically; Caro and I shared a private look. She’d been right about his tendency toward the dramatic. This was one thing, at least, that made him very different from the Fin I’d talked with in my mind so often: that Fin was steadier, more thoughtful, and gentler than this one. I was learning to pay attention to those differences.

“Lord Alming’s having a whole new factory built, just for them,” I said. “I don’t want people to think I’m a liar, in the end. I don’t want to
be
a liar.”

“No one thinks you’re a liar, Nick, for goodness’ sake,” said Caro. “You tell the truth to anyone who comes asking.”

“Yes, but . . .” I wasn’t sure how to explain. “But so few people come
asking.
They just want to stare, and giggle, and assume I’m betrothed. And so many of those who do ask refuse to hear the truth when I tell it to them.”

Fin poured a cup of tea for me, one for Caro, and finally one for himself. “I told you they’d love the story,” he said. “I can’t say how many court ladies I’ve seen wearing those slippers, even the ones who know I’m still free for the taking.” He shot a pointed look at Caro, who ignored him. She’d been chattering about a redheaded stable hand named Bex all morning, and I highly doubted that Fin’s hints would have any effect on her.

“Ooh, did I tell you what Bex did on Tuesday?” Caro asked. She didn’t wait for either of us to answer before she plunged ahead with a long story involving an unbroken horse, a very high fence, and a daring rescue. This time it was Fin and I who shared a private look, and the only tension it held was that of affectionate frustration. He smiled his charming smile and tapped a finger against the rim of his teacup.

His winks, his small flirtations, had affected me less and less in the past weeks too. My heart still fluttered or skipped when he smiled suddenly or touched me when I didn’t expect it, but I no longer felt the sheer longing I’d developed before the night of the ball.