Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (11 page)

"Wait, wait!" Monty called, switching to English. "Wait, will you, you idiot? This is the best day of your life, young William! But for us, you might have entered a life of miserable bondage. Instead, you will enjoy all the fruits of liberty, rewarding work, and comradeship.

We take care of our own here at Saint Aggie's. You'll have top grub, a posh leg, and a beautiful crutch that's as smooth as a baby's arse and as soft as a lady's bosom. You'll have the freedom to come and go as you please, and you'll have a warm bed to sleep in every night. And best of all, you'll have us, your family here at Saint Aggie's. We take care of our own, we do."

The boy looked at us, tears streaming down his face. He made me remember what it had been like, my first day at Saint Aggie's, the cold fear coiled around your guts like rope caught in a reciprocating gear. At Saint Aggie's we put on brave faces, never cried where no one could see us, but seeing him weep made me remember all the times I'd cried, cried for my lost family who'd sold me into indenture, cried for my mangled body, my ruined life. But living without Grinder's constant terrorizing must have softened my heart. Suddenly it was all I could do to stop myself from giving the poor little mite a one-armed hug.

I didn't hug him, but Monty did, stumping over to him, and the two of them bawled like babbies. Their peg legs knocked together as they embraced like drunken sailors, seeming to cry out every tear we'd any of us ever held in. Before long, we were all crying with them, fat tears streaming down our faces, the sound like something out of the pit.

When the sobs had stopped, William looked around at us, wiped his nose, and said, "Thank you. I think I am home." who couldn't make it as apprentices, neither, kids who'd spent their working lives full of such awful misery that they were
bound
to fall into a machine. And being sundered from their limbs didn't improve their outlook.

But it wasn't home for him. Poor William. We'd had children like him, in the bad old days, children who just couldn't get back up on their feet (or foot) again. Most of the time, I reckon, they were kids who couldn’t make it as apprentices, neither, kids who’d spent their working lives full of such awful misery they were
bound
to fall into a machine. And being sundered from their limbs didn’t improve their outlook.

We tried everything we could think of to cheer William up. He'd worked for a watch smith, and he had a pretty good hand at disassembling and cleaning mechanisms. His stump ached him like fire, even after he'd been fitted with a better apparatus by Saint Aggie's best leg maker, and it was only when he was working with his little tweezers and brushes that he lost the grimace that twisted up his face so. Monty had him strip and clean every clockwork in the house, even the ones that were working perfectly—even the delicate works we'd carefully knocked together for the clockwork Grinder. But it wasn't enough.

In the bad old days, Grinder would have beaten the boy and sent him out to beg in the worst parts of town, hoping that he'd be run down by a cart or killed by one of the blunderbuss gangs that marauded there. When the law brought home the boy's body, old Grinder would weep crocodile tears and tug his hair at the bloody evil that men did, and then he'd go back to his rooms and play some music and drink some brandy and sleep the sleep of the unjust.

We couldn't do the same, and so we tried to bring up William's spirits instead, and when he'd had enough of it, he lit out on his own. The first we knew of it was when he didn't turn up for breakfast. This wasn't unheard of—any of the free children of Saint Aggie's was able to rise and wake whenever he chose —but William had been a regular at breakfast every day. I made my way upstairs to the dormer room, where the boys slept, to look for him and found his bed empty, his coat and his peg leg and crutch gone.

"He's gone," Monty said. "Long gone." He sighed and looked out the window. "Must be trying to get back to the Gatineau." He shook his head.

"Do you think he'll make it?" I said, knowing the answer but hoping that Monty would lie to me.

"Not a chance," Monty said. "Not him. He'll either be beaten, arrested, or worse by sundown. That lad hasn't any self-preservation instincts."

At this, the dining room fell silent and all eyes turned on Monty, and I saw in a flash what a terrible burden we all put on him: savior, father, chieftain. He twisted his face into a halfway convincing smile.

"Oh, maybe not. He might just be hiding out down the road. Tell you what. Eat up and we'll go searching for him."

I never saw a load of plates cleared faster. It was bare minutes before we were formed up in the parlor, divided into groups, and sent out into Muddy York to find William Sansousy. We turned that bad old city upside down, asking nosy questions and sticking our heads in where they didn't belong, but Monty had been doubly right the first time around.

The police found William Sansousy's body in a marshy bit of land off the Leslie Street Spit. His pockets had been slit, his pathetic paper sack of belongings torn and the clothes scattered, and his fine hand-turned leg was gone. He had been dead for hours.

The detective inspector who presented himself that afternoon at Saint Aggie's was trailed by a team of technicians who had a wire sound-recorder and a portable logic engine for inputting the data of his investigation. He seemed very proud of his machine, even though it came with three convicts from the King Street Gaol in shackles and leg irons who worked tirelessly to keep the springs wound, toiling in a lather of sweat and heaving breath, heat boiling off their shaved heads in shimmering waves.

He showed up just as the clock in the parlor chimed eight times, a bear chasing a bird around on a track as it sang the hour. We peered out the windows in the upper floors, saw the inspector, and understood just why Monty had been so morose all afternoon.

But Monty did us proud. He went to the door with his familiar swagger and swung it wide, extending his hand to the inspector.

"Montague Goldfarb at your service, Officer. Our patron has stepped away, but please, do come in."

The inspector gravely shook the proffered hand, his huge gloved mitt swallowing Monty's boyish hand. It was easy to forget that he was just a child, but the looming presence of the giant inspector reminded us all.

"Master Goldfarb," the inspector said, taking his hat off and peering through his smoked monocle at the children in the parlor. All of us sat with hands folded like we were in a pantomime about the best-behaved, most crippled, most terrified, least threatening children in all the colonies. "I'm am sorry to hear that Mr. Grindersworth is not at home to the constabulary. Have you any notion as to what temporal juncture we might expect him?" If I hadn't been concentrating on not peeing myself with terror, the inspector's pompous speech might have set me to laughing.

Monty didn't bat an eye. "Mr. Grindersworth was called away to see his brother in Sault Sainte Marie, and we expect him tomorrow. I'm his designated lieutenant, though. Perhaps I might help you?"

The inspector stroked his forked beard and gave us all another long look. "Tomorrow, hey? Well, I don't suppose that justice should wait that long. Master Goldfarb, I have grim intelligence for you, as regards one of your young compatriots, a Master—" He consulted a punched card that was held in a hopper on his clanking logic engine. "William Sansousy. He lies even now upon a slab in the city morgue. Someone of authority from this institution is required to confirm the preliminary identification. You will do, I suppose. Though your patron will have to present himself posthaste in order to sign the several official documents that necessarily accompany an event of such gravity."

We'd known as soon as the inspector turned up on Saint Aggie's door that it meant that William was dead. If he was merely in trouble, it would have been a constable, dragging him by the ear. We half-children of Saint Aggie's only rated a full inspector when we were topped by some evil bastard in this evil town. But hearing the inspector say the words, puffing them through his drooping mustache, that made it real. None of us had ever cried when Saint Aggie's children were taken by the streets — at least not where the others could see it. But this time around, without Grinder to shoot us filthy daggers if we made a peep while the law was about, it opened the floodgates. Boys and girls, young and old, we cried for poor little William. He'd come to the best of all possible Saint Aggie's, but it hadn't been good enough for him. He'd wanted to go back to the parents who'd sold him into service, wanted a return to his mam's lap and bosom. Who among us didn't want that, in his secret heart?

Monty's tears were silent, and they rolled down his cheeks as he shrugged into his coat and hat and let the inspector—who was clearly embarrassed by the display — lead him out the door.

When Monty came home, he arrived at a house full of children who were ready to go mad. We'd cried ourselves hoarse, then sat about the parlor, not knowing what to do. If there had been any of old Grinder's booze still in the house, we'd have drunk it.

"What's the plan, then?" he said, coming through the door. "We've got one night until that bastard comes back. If he doesn't find Grinder, he'll go to the sisters, and it'll come down around our ears. What's more, he knows Grinder, personal, from other dead ones in years gone by, and I don't think he'll be fooled by our machine, no matter how good it goes."

"What's the plan?" I said, mouth hanging open. "Monty, the plan is that we're all going to jail, and you and I and everyone else who helped cover up the killing of Grinder will dance at rope's end!"

He gave me a considering look. "Sian, that is absolutely the worst plan I have ever heard." And then he grinned at us the way he did, and we all knew that, somehow, it would all be all right.

"Constable, come quick! He's going to kill himself!"

I practiced the line for the fiftieth time, willing my eyes to go wider, my voice to carry more alarm. Behind me, Monty scowled at my reflection in the mirror in Grinder's personal toilet, where I'd been holed up for hours.

"Verily, the stage lost a great player when that machine mangled you, Sian. You are perfect. Now, get moving before I tear your remaining arm off and beat you with it. Go!"

Phase one of the plan was easy enough: we'd smuggle our Grinder up onto the latticework of steel and scaffold where they were building the mighty Prince Edward Viaduct, at the end of Bloor Street.

Monty had punched his program already: he'd pace back and forth, tugging his hair, shaking his head like a maddened man, and then, abruptly, he'd turn and fling himself bodily off the platform, plunging 130 feet into the Don River, where he would simply disintegrate into a million cogs, gears, springs, and struts, which would sink to the riverbed and begin to rust away. The coppers would recover his clothes, and those, combined with the eyewitness testimony of the constable I was responsible for bringing to the bridge, would establish in everyone's mind exactly what had happened and how: Grinders was so distraught at one more death from among his charges that he had popped his own clogs in grief. We were all of us standing ready to testify as to how poor William was Grinder's little favorite, a boy he loved like a son, and so forth. Who would suspect a bunch of helpless cripples, anyway?

That was the theory, at least. But now I was actually standing by the bridge, watching six half-children wrestle the automaton into place, striving for silence so as not to alert the guards who were charged with defending the structure they were already calling the Suicide's Magnet, and I couldn't believe that it would possibly work.

Five of the children scampered away, climbing back down the scaffolds, slipping and sliding and nearly dying more times than I could count, causing my heart was thundering in my chest so hard, I thought I might die upon the spot. Then they were safely away, climbing back up the ravine's walls in the mud and snow, almost invisible in the dusky dawn light. Monty waved an arm at me, and I knew it was my cue and that I should be off to rouse the constabulary, but I found myself rooted to the spot.

In that moment, every doubt and fear and misery I'd ever harbored crowded back in on me. The misery of being abandoned by my family, the sorrow and loneliness I'd felt among the prentice lads, the humiliation of Grinder's savage beatings and harangues. The shame of my injury and of every time I'd groveled before a drunk or a pitying lady with my stump on display for pennies to fetch home to Grinder. What was I doing? There was no way I could possibly pull this off. I was wasn't enough of a man — nor enough of a boy.

But then I thought of all those moments since the coming of Monty Goldfarb, the millionfold triumphs of ingenuity and hard work, the computing power I'd stolen out from under the nose of the calculators who had treated me as a mere work ox before my injury. I thought of the cash we'd brought in, the children who'd smiled and sung and danced on the worn floors of Saint Aggie's, and —

And I ran to the policeman, who was warming himself by doing a curious hopping dance in place, hands in his armpits. "Constable!" I piped, all sham terror that no one would have known for a sham. "Constable! Come quick! He's going to kill himself!" anyone foolish enough to stray near her. That none of us shed a tear was lost on her, though she did note with approval how smoothly the operation of Saint Aggie's continued without Grinder's oversight.