Mechanized Masterpieces: A Steampunk Anthology (36 page)

My mother’s room felt like just another room in the house, for years had passed, and I was older. I missed her daily, but taking on her responsibilities had helped me to see my place as I grew into adulthood.

This day was different from my usual cleaning routine. Something caught the toe of my shoe while I crossed the room, and I stumbled. On investigation, I discovered that the offending object was the corner of a loose board in the floor. Without hesitation, I knelt and began to pry it out, curious to see what had caused it to come loose.

In the hole beneath the board was a cloth packet, tied with string.

I reached down and pulled it free, and after a moment, decided to unwrap it. The old, stiff cloth peeled away heavily to reveal a leather journal and a stack of letters in envelopes. Most were sealed, many unaddressed. Two were addressed to me, but the second of these had the heading “On Your Wedding Day.”

I opened the first.

My dear angel Elizabeth,

If you are reading this, then I am gone, and I must yield unto you a part of my deepest self, and reveal several things which may come as rather a shock to you. You must not reveal any of this information to your Victor or to my husband, your father. If you cannot promise me these things, you must hereby burn these letters and bury the journal in the soil. There is no shame in this, my dear one, but if you choose to read on, you must be strong, for all our sakes. Flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone you are, Elizabeth, and from your state and mine shall never be parted, bliss or woe, no matter what happens.

I paused in my reading. This was most unprecedented. But even as I pondered the meaning of this, the vision of my fever dream, my mother in spectacles and accoutered like a surgeon over my prone form, sprang before my eyes.

There was no way about it but to read on, know the unknown, and keep my mother’s secrets.

When my mother was a young girl, she wrote in her careful, sweeping hand, she and her family, called Beaufort, encountered a small company of gypsies on the road to Paris. The gypsies had broken a wagon wheel, and it was such that my mother’s mother longed to hurry by without stopping.

But my mother’s father was a kind gentleman, and he ordered the coachman to slow warily and ask if the little ragged family was well or if they required assistance. Mrs. Beaufort insisted that this was a certain invitation for trouble and robbery, but Mr. Beaufort refused to hear her.

It was such that the gypsies were not of ungrateful stock. The patriarch of their patchwork family doffed his cap and thanked the gentleman kindly for his offer.

“Our wheel has broken, monsieur,” announced the gypsy man, “and we can go no further. We are too far from town and my wife is with child. We cannot walk.”

He gestured to the woman, seated on the slanted wagon, her belly round and full. She had a sad, knowing look about her, and when Mrs. Beaufort peered out the coach window to see with her own eyes, the gypsy woman sat up straighter.

“Your own daughter, madame,” pleaded the gypsy woman suddenly, reaching out to her. “She is your life’s light, your only joy. You would do anything to see her comfortable and happy.”

Mrs. Beaufort was doubtful, for she feared that there would be dishonesty behind the sentiment, but the pregnant woman seemed gentle and true, despite her destitution.

“If your servant assists us,” said the gypsy man, “I will offer a few coins to spare, although it isn’t much to the likes of you. But my wife, she tells fortunes.”

There was then an obligatory squabble between my mother’s parents regarding the legitimacy of the offer. Mr. Beaufort, in his infinite kindness, agreed to let one of their servants step down from the coach and assist the attachment of a new wheel to the gypsies’ wagon. When the deed was done, Mrs. Beaufort held out her hand from the window, saying, “Very well, read my palm.”

The gypsy woman slowly came alongside the coach, and squinted at the palm proffered to her. “You will have your heart’s desires,” she said, “but it is not your fortune I am meant to tell, madame. It is hers.”

“Whose?” demanded Mrs. Beaufort.

“Your daughter’s.”

At this point, my mother, a polite girl of eight, stood up inside the coach and peered out the window at the gypsy with curiosity. The gypsy woman smiled at the little girl.

“Your mind exceeds your heritage, child,” said the woman kindly, “and your accomplishments will be grand and extraordinary, though few will credit them to you. Do not be disheartened by this, for your own son someday will be an extraordinary mind, too. His dreams will see fruition, but it will be at a terrible price which cannot be avoided.”

“This is foolishness,” said Mrs. Beaufort, upset. “Caroline is but a child!” Mr. Beaufort shushed her. The gypsy had more to say.

"There is one thing that may redeem your son: your daughter. When you have a daughter, she will be an angel from heaven, if you have the means to save her. Do not let your own brilliant mind be wasted in preparing for your children’s future." The gypsy turned away, leaning on her husband for support, and the husband thanked the couple for their generosity again.

“What does that mean?” demanded Mrs. Beaufort, but the fortune was told and done.

For years, my mother toiled over what the prophetic words could mean. As she grew older, she read a great many books and was considered 'unhealthily educated' by her mother. Thinking perhaps the gypsy meant there would be something wrong with her daughter when the girl was born that would require fixing or even prevention, she read all she could about surgery and medicine.

She studied anatomy and engineering and sciences to further her understanding of life, the mechanics of the human body, and the untapped potential therein. The words regarding her son were full of praise and success, linked inexorably to the fate of her daughter. If she could save her future daughter, her son would also be saved.

When her father died, my teenaged mother was taken into the care of her father’s friend, a man called Frankenstein. A romance bloomed there, and ultimately, they were married. She bore him a son, Victor, so-called for his predestined victory in whatever field or profession he should chose. The next child to be born was also a son, whom they named Ernest. My father would have been quite settled with these two healthy boys, but my mother was determined that a daughter should be born.

“Then, my dearest Elizabeth, the unthinkable happened,” wrote my mother. “I was, at last, with child again, but tragedy struck me, and the infant was lost. The doctor revealed to me after the incident that it had been a female child, and I lost much of my health and ability to carry on, thinking very much that I had failed my prophecy. The doctor advised your father to take me to Italy for warmer, more temperate climes, and so we went. It was there, my dearest girl, my true angel, that we found you.”

I realized that I had been holding my breath for a little too long. I sat back and breathed, closing my eyes for a moment to clear my head. The rest of this letter was professions of faith and love, and reassurances that I would be well all the days of my life if I entrusted myself to Victor faithfully, and cared for him in deepest love and honesty.

I studied the second fat envelope, marked “On Your Wedding Day.” This first letter was the hitherto untold story of my mother’s journey up to her most generous adoption of myself. What else could possibly lie unsaid? Curiosity spread through my veins like poison, and I ran my fingers over the paper. I wanted very badly to open it and read it, though it was not my wedding day. With Victor away at his studies, I had no idea when that day would come, I realized with a sad twist in my gut.

I shook my head to clear it of confusion. My mother hid these things knowing—or at least hoping—that I would find them someday, and I must trust her to know when the truths would be most rightly revealed.

I hid the journal and letters back in the floorboards, replacing it and carefully dusting everything with a rag, so as not to betray any one place that had more or less dust than the hiding spot. I would wait. I had to wait. I would continue to do her proud by caring for the family, and loving Victor, even in his absence, and waiting for the day of our marriage.

The time passed like hazy, fitful dreaming. My nights were haunted by memories of my mother, both merry and sad ones. Most prominent of all these visions was the fever dream that I tried so hard to understand, and it pained me to have no one to turn to for advice or soothing words. Although Victor visited with us at home from time to time, he was never the same as he had once been as a boy.

Where in youth he had been lively and eager and curious, he entered adulthood with pallor and exhaustion in his eyes, like a man starving for rest and food but unable to afford the time to stop and feed his body. When asked of his studies and research, Victor’s replies were often cryptic and very terse, even defensive and cold at times.

Our father was a little worried, but in his aging years and ongoing grief in the absence of his wife, he had little of his previous energy to bestow upon worrying endlessly over the matter; this task, then, fell to me.

As often as Victor was home, I did the best I could to try to divine the nature of his scientific inquiries. I sought his journals and notes, but whenever I caught a glimpse of anything important, it was either indecipherable to my eyes or snatched away by Victor himself. He did not seem to suspect me of anything, however obvious some of these instances became. Victor’s world was contained mostly within his own mind, and little else penetrated his keen focus. It was as though he saw things beyond the normal range of sight, and his mind was constantly working to interpret them.

I had no doubt of Victor’s brilliance. But I yearned for the days of our childhood when his inquisitive nature was shared with me fully, and our adventures were of equal footing. His newly detached, distant nature put me ill at ease and made me worry, especially knowing what the gypsy had told my mother.

To distract myself from my concerns about my betrothed, I snuck into my mother’s old rooms anytime I was able, and studied the open letters in the packet under the floorboards. Many were of a strangely poetic nature; some of my mother’s correspondences were with a Frenchman, a doctor of some kind, whose name on the pages had been rather obscured by time and smudging.

It took three or four letters for me to consider that they may be mostly in code, that being a possible excuse for my confusion at the importance of seemingly vague literary drivel. If my mother was so desperate as to hide these correspondences beneath the wooden boards of her bedroom floor, it wasn’t too great a stretch to consider the possibility of encoding the messages.

I puzzled over it all, wondering helplessly what on earth could be so important as to force my mother to this level of secrecy?

Then I found the sketches.

These were not a lady’s idle dalliances into the realm of art and portraiture. These were serious, detailed illustrations and diagrams of myriad unknown apparatuses, some which looked like carriages, some like weaponry of varying kinds; some resembled exaggerated and unique versions of ordinary items, like tea kettles, stovetops, bookshelves. Mixed into the pile were several diagrams of certain organs in the human body, including a heart, lungs, and stomach, yet which in every apparent way were devised of materials other than the organic tissue which comprises our forms. The annotations of these sketches were as blurry and ill-written as some of the letters, the handwriting hurried and sharply slanted, as though scrawled in excitement.

The connections between all these seemingly informational sketches were utterly lost on me, no matter how long I studied them, no matter how I tried to decipher the writing. I longed for understanding, but without my mother to interpret, and no one to consult on the matter, I was alone with my questions, these thoughts which haunted my dreams and waking hours both with even and equal ardor.

Victor was away again when the unthinkable happened.

My two younger brothers, my father, and I had gone for an evening stroll in the warmth of the May twilight. The teenaged Ernest was very fond of the young, round-faced William, who had been born just a year before our mother’s death, and it was comfort to Father to watch them play together. Ernest reminded me so much of our father, and little William recalled Victor in looks, but they both shared the loving temperament of our mother.