Steamlust (11 page)

It does not matter what I do. All of it may not be real,
but it does not matter what I do.
I have real freedom here, for the first time in my life, and I use it to taste the hot, wet insides of his mouth, the curve of his shoulder, the firm smoothness of his chest—and to my delight, he gasps when I do. Mr. Hartley, who in life is as stoic as a block!

Oh, what an invention he has made here. What a delight! I kiss him and kiss him until he is quite wild with it, until—even better—he takes my hand in a kind of frantic clutch, and pushes it down between his own legs.

Ah, he is a wanton
, I think, and love him for being so. I want to touch him as he touched me, and I do so with an abandon I don’t actually possess. I circle my hand around that thick, stiff pole he has, and feel its exact shape and size. I feel how it gives beneath my touch—only slightly—and how he bucks into my grasp when I tighten it.

And then I thank Mr. Hartley, for letting me see and feel all of this. I could never have created it on my own, never. I would hardly know how to begin with something like this—even the smoothness of the shaft is a surprise to me. So many things about it are a shock to my own half-held imaginings, and most of it comes from Mr. Hartley panting that I should not stop.

When he looks at me with his suddenly heavy-lidded eyes, his body all strung tight like a bow and his mouth so close to my own, I am sure I would do anything for him. I do not know why he even feels the need to demand—in truth he does not need to.

I want to give him everything he wants. I tell him to.

“Take me,” I say, and he covers my body with his own.

How great he seems, how heavy and all encompassing. I shrink beneath him, and yet it hardly takes anything to spread my legs around the hard push of his body. It is more difficult for me when he looks into my eyes and won’t let me turn away, then asks me if I have ever known how much he has wanted me. How much he longs for me.

I cannot answer. It is splitting me in two, this lie inside myself. This
truth
inside myself—that I have always thought so much of him. That is, after all, what this device is for. I can see it clearly—it is intended to draw out the viewer’s deepest fantasies. Their most closely held desires.

And here is mine, in all its slow, sad, rawness. My love for Mr. Hartley is like a hand, reaching out to clasp at nothing.

“I love you, darling Elspeth,” he says, and I know that isn’t true because Mr. Hartley would never say such a thing. Not ever—not even when naked and entwined with his lover.

Still, I feel it strongly when his stiff shaft slides through my folds and finally, finally pushes deep into that empty hollow inside me. I think I cry out, though this time I do not care if it is dream or reality—it feels so different and so lovely compared to the thing I had expected that I am sure no one would care.

My sister has spoken often of the pain, the pain, but there is no pain here. It feels instead like I have a fist tight around something, something that needed pressure and firmness in a way I had never thought about. And when he ruts against me, rough and completely shameless, great ripples of pleasure run through my body.

I can hardly believe it. I don’t believe it. This is not real, I think, then cling to him anyway, rocking hard against that delicious sensation so that when I am old and gray I can remember it. I will have it always now, this thing, this memory of sex-that-isn’t-quite-sex, and oh, Mr. Hartley I am so grateful to you for that! I do not care what your intentions are, I do not care what this machine was built for.

I only care that you have given me this, this feeling of someone hard and good in my arms, his mouth on my upturned throat and the sense of him inside me, rubbing against nerves that feel like stars, bursting.

“I love you,” he tells me, over and over, and I cling to him as tight as I can. I try to absorb everything—the feel of his skin when my nails bite in, the taste of him, so salt-sweet. The climactic reaches of that final sensation as it pulses through me, and the sound of him groaning as he takes his own measure of it.

It is almost like being wrung out, to have to come back
to reality. In the background I can hear the machine winding down, but for a long moment I don’t want to open my eyes. The images are gone, but I don’t want to open them.

If I do, perhaps I will forget what all of that was like.

“Elspeth?”

Kitty has put a hand over mine, so I suppose I must look. One cannot remain with one’s eyes closed forever—though it is even more of a disappointment than I had dared to think of, when I finally open them.

No one has even noticed what went on inside of me. They are all twittering amongst themselves about the elephant they saw in their heads, or the memory they had reenacted that they had believed was long forgotten.

And I suppose I should be grateful for that. I should be grateful that the device truly is about drawing forth a person’s most secret wishes, and that I have not shamed myself in some way with strange noises or movements or any other such thing.

I should, but I am not. I stand quite reluctantly and then just stare at Mr. Hartley’s turned back. He is fiddling with his machine, now, and hardly seems to register that people are leaving—though he asked them to, not a minute since.

Of course they all obey, because Mr. Hartley is a genius. Mr. Hartley is a cold, reclusive genius, and we must all put up with his odd ways if we want to be asked back.

Though when I think about it, something about that attitude seems very unkind. It is, after all, steeped in the assumption that I had of Mr. Hartley only a few short minutes ago—that he is cruel, and unkind, and worst of all…miserly.

And this thought gnaws at me so hard that I wait, I wait and wait until everyone has left his parlor and it is only him, standing by his machine. When he turns, I am fairly certain he believed everyone had gone—the look on his face says as much.
It is naked, briefly, and quite full of that same aching loneliness I had felt, upon realizing that I would never experience anything like that in reality.

“Is everything quite all right, Miss Havers?” he asks, and for a second I wonder if he knows. But then the second passes and that urge wells up in me again, that urge to correct my long assumptions about Mr. Hartley—even though he cannot know I have them.

“You are so very generous, Mr. Hartley,” I say, because that is the truth. “You are so very generous to share an invention like that.”

Of course I expect him to dismiss me in some way—or laugh, perhaps. But he does not. Instead he takes my hand quite suddenly and all the electricity in the world pours through him, to me. And then he says, with his eyes flashing fierce and bright—just as they had in my dream—

“I did it for you, Miss Havers. I made dreams come to life for you.”

I
was deep in the heart of the windmill’s mechanism, wrench in hand, when someone banged the knocker down hard on the front door.

“Get that, would you, Smithy?” the professor called, raising his voice above the faint hum of machinery. The fact that I must crawl out from a tightly confined space while all he had to do was step down from the low wooden platform on which he stood did not seem to occur to him. The professor never answered his own door, not when he had an assistant to act as a buffer between himself and the outside world.

I didn’t complain, even as I scraped my knee against a jutting piece of metal in my haste. I had known about the man’s many infuriating habits from the day we met, yet I was prepared to overlook them all for the honor of working alongside him.

The heavy iron knocker slammed against the door again, more insistently this time.

“Coming!” I yelled, speculating as I did on the possible identity of our unexpected caller.

We almost never received visitors. The professor had chosen to live in such a remote location deliberately to discourage anyone who might interfere with his work. Only those with the most urgent need to see him would trek down the rutted cart path that led to the windmill.

Or, I realized as I opened the front door, someone with a financial investment in the professor’s many projects. Standing on the threshold, shaking drops of water from her heavy black umbrella, was his current benefactor.

“Lady Portway, how pleasant to see you. Do come in out of the rain.”

“Thank you, Miss Smith.”

As I ushered her inside and helped her to remove her overcoat, I felt as ungainly and awkward in her presence as I always had. Not only did I stand a head taller than her, even with her in dainty boots that laced to the knee, but there were smudges of engine grease on my face, grime under my fingernails and a button missing from the front of my overalls. Lady Portway, in contrast, despite the length of her journey from the metropolis, looked sweetly feminine and fresh as a daisy.

“Let me go and announce your presence to the professor,” I said, once she had made herself at home in the big armchair before the parlor fire, the one warm and cozy place in the vast, drafty living space beneath the windmill.

The professor’s irritation at being disturbed melted away when I informed him who was calling. “Make tea for us, would you, Smithy?” he asked, running a hand through his unruly black curls before going to greet his guest. “And see if we have any of those caraway biscuits left.” His smile of dismissal was distracted, but still had the power to bring a sudden flush to my cheeks.

Waiting for the kettle to boil, I reflected that without the
assistance, albeit indirect, of Lady Portway, I would not be here to bask in the glow of the professor’s smiles. My initial dream, when it had become obvious I was by far the brightest in my class at school, had been to attend one of the great universities. However, my mother had objected strongly. It was less a question of the money involved than her fear that further education would render me barren and unsuitable for marriage. In her eyes, Lady Portway had made the ideal career choice, using her great beauty to acquire a much older husband in ailing health. Within nine months of their wedding night, Lord Portway was dead, which did not greatly surprise London society. What did was his newly wealthy widow’s decision to use some of her fortune to help Professor John Braithwaite finance his experiments in mechanical motion. The professor’s work had been highly praised in the scientific journals I devoured on visits to the town library, and I dreamed of being able to aid him in his pursuits. How much could an eager, inquisitive mind learn from time spent in his presence? I wrote and expressed my willingness to work under his tutelage, but given his lack of money it had seemed an impossible dream. That was until Lady Portway’s generous financial input had enabled him to take me on, almost a year ago to the day.

I was grateful to her, naturally, but on walking into the parlor carrying a laden tea tray, the emotion that gripped me most strongly was one of jealousy. They made a handsome couple as they stood by the bureau, her blonde, ringleted head barely reaching his shoulder. She appeared to be hanging on his every word as he showed her one of his newest creations, a bejeweled clockwork songbird that hopped and trilled as prettily as any linnet.

“Oh, John, it’s beautiful,” she murmured, her tone utterly sincere. No one who saw the professor’s creations could fail to
be impressed by the way they moved and acted, as though a strongly beating heart pumped life through their body, rather than an intricately designed mechanism. The songbird was, in truth, little more than an amusement, one of his first attempts to breathe vital essence into a mechanical being. The culmination of his work would be to create a similarly realistic mechanical man, the project on which he and I currently toiled.

I set the tray down with a clink of china, the sound causing the professor and Lady Portway to turn in my direction. Deftly, I poured tea for the pair of them, adding a generous splash of milk and two sugar lumps to the professor’s cup. Lady Portway took hers without milk and rejected my offer of a biscuit. It took more discipline than I possessed to maintain her enviably slender figure, I thought, filching a couple of biscuits from the plate to munch as I worked.

“Do you need me for anything else?” I asked. “If not, I’ll return to what I was doing.”

“We’re converting the windmill so it has the ability to be powered by steam,” the professor explained to his guest. “We’re hoping our work will enable mills to be built in areas where there isn’t sufficient wind to power the sails.” Turning his attention to me, he continued, “I would like you to stay for a moment, Smithy. What Bella has to say concerns both of us.”

Placing her cup delicately in its saucer, Lady Portway regarded us with her wide blue eyes. “I’m holding a soirée next week, to mark the international symposium at the Royal College of Science. Some of the finest minds in the field are going to be there. Martin Parnell, whose theories on the future of clockwork automata are attracting significant attention in Boston, I believe. Gunther Strondheim, of the Berlin Institute…”

Though she dropped the name casually, she must have known the effect it would have on the professor. Strondheim’s
experiments in the field were well advanced; indeed, it was rumored that he had already publicly exhibited a fully functioning mechanical humanoid, though we had as yet seen no written record of such an event.

“People are naturally curious to know how your own work is progressing, John. They believe I should by now be expecting a return on my investment, to prove this is more than just an act of charity on my part. So I thought it might be—diverting—if you were to present a demonstration of your clockwork man at the soirée.”

“Why, Bella, I’d be delighted to.”

I was shocked by his answer. Only this morning, he had been complaining about the lack of progress he was making on the project; now here he was, agreeing to show the finished result to an invited audience in a week’s time. Lady Portway’s powers of persuasion were clearly considerable. Or perhaps he was simply prepared to do whatever it took to impress her, in the same way—if he only realized it—I sought to impress him.