Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (18 page)

The night the Roundheads broke into the manor, they found her on the stairs, clad in her nightdress, armed with her grandfather's sword. They slew her where she stood, but not a gold coin did they find or a silver spoon, though they turned the house upside down with looking.

It was a sad homecoming her brothers had, I was thinking, to find their sister dead and in her silent grave, with the family wealth safely — and permanently—hidden away.

Her portrait hung in the great hall, over the mantel where her grandfather's swords had once hung. It must have been painted not long before her death — a portrait of a solemn young woman, her dark hair curling over her temples like a spaniel's ears and her gown like a flowered silk tea cozy, all trimmed with lace and ribbon-knots. A sapphire sparkled on her bosom, brilliants at her neck and ears, and on her finger, a great square ruby set in gold. There is pity, I always thought, that her ghost must appear barefoot and clad in her night shift instead of in that grand flowered gown.

I would have liked to see her, nightdress and all.

But I did not, and life jogged on between school and Mam's kitchen, where I learned to cook and bake, and Da's forge, where I learned the properties of metal and listened to him talk of the wonderful machines he'd invent, did he only have the gold. On Sundays, Mrs. Bando told me stories of the parties and hunting meets of Sir Owen's youth, with dancing in the Long Gallery and dinners in the Great Hall for fifty or more.

Sometimes I thought I could hear an echo of their feet, but Mrs. Bando said it was only rats.

Still, I felt that Cwmlech Manor slept lightly, biding its time until its master returned and brought it back to life. But he did not come, and he did not come, and then, when I was fifteen, he died.

A bright autumn morning it was, warm as September often is, when Mrs. Bando knocked on the door in her apron, with her round, comfortable face all blubbered with weeping. She'd not drawn a breath before Mam had her by the fire with a cup of milky tea in her hand.

"There, then, Susan Bando," she said, brisk and kind. "Tell us what's amiss. You look as if you've seen the Cwmlech ghost."

Mrs. Bando took a gulp of tea. "In a manner of speaking, I have. The House of Cwmlech is laid in the dirt, look you. Sir Owen is dead, and his fortune all gambled away. The house in London is sold to pay his creditors and the manor's to be shut up and all the staff turned away. And what will I do for employment, at my age?" And she began to weep again while Mam patted her hand.

Me, I ran out of our house, down the lane, and across the stone bridge and spent the afternoon in the formal garden, weeping while the peacocks grieved among the pines for Cwmlech Manor, that was now dying.

As autumn wore on, I wondered more and more why Mistress Cwmlech did not appear and reveal where she'd hidden the treasure. Surely the ruinous state of the place must be as much a grief to her as to me. Was she lingering in the empty house, waiting for someone to come and hear her? Must that someone be a Cwmlech of Cwmlech Manor? Or could it be anyone with a will to see her and the wit to hear her?

Could it be me?

One Sunday after chapel, I collected crowbar, magnet, and candle, determined to settle the question. Within an hour, I stood in the Great Hall with a torn petticoat and a bruised elbow, watching the shadows tremble in the candlelight. It was November, and the house cold and damp as a slate cavern. I slunk from room to room, past sheet-shrouded tables and presses and dressers and chairs, past curtains furry with dust drawn tight across the windows. A perfect haven for ghosts it looked, and filthy to break my heart —and surely Mistress Cwmlech's as well. But though I stood on the very step where she was slain and called her name three times aloud, she did not appear to me.

I did not venture inside again, but the softer weather of spring brought me back to sit in the overgrown gardens when I could snatch an hour from my chores. There's dreams I had boiling in me, beyond the dreams of my friends, who were all for a husband and a little house and babies on the hearth. After many tears, I'd more or less accepted the hard fact that a blacksmith's daughter with no education beyond the village school could never be an engineer. So I cheered myself with my ability to play any wind instrument put into my hand, though I'd only a recorder to practice on, and it the property of the chapel.

Practice I did that summer, in the gardens of Cwmlech Manor, to set the peacocks screaming, and dreamed of somehow acquiring a mechanical that could play the piano and performing with it before Queen Victoria herself. Such dreams, however foolish in the village, seemed perfectly reasonable at Cwmlech Manor.

Summer passed, and autumn came on, with cold rain and food to put by for winter; my practicing and my visits to Cwmlech fell away to nothing. Sixteen I was now, with my hair coiled up and skirts down to my boot tops and little time to dream. I'd enough to do getting through my chores, without fretting after what could not be or thinking about an old ghost who could not be bothered to save her own house. Mam said I was growing up. I felt that I was dying.

One bright morning in early spring, a mighty roaring and coughing in the lane shattered the calm like a mirror. Upstairs I was, sweeping, so a clear view I had, looking down from the front bedroom window, of a horseless carriage driving down by the lane.

I'd not have been more astonished to see Queen Victoria herself.

I knew all about horseless carriages, mind. The inventor of the Patent Steam Carriage was a Welshman, and all the best carriages were made in Blaenavon, down in the Valley. But a horseless carriage was costly to buy and costly to keep. Hereabouts, only Mr. Iestyn Thomas, who owned the wool mill, drove a horseless carriage.

And here was a pair of them, black smoke belching from their smokestacks: a traveling coach followed by a closed wain, heading toward Cwmlech Manor.

Without thinking whether it was a good idea or a bad one, I dropped my broom and hotfooted after, ducking through the gap in the hedge just as the traveling coach drove under the stone arch and into the weed-clogged courtyard.

Loud enough to raise the dead it was, with the peacocks screaming and the engines clattering and the wheels of the wain crunching on the gravel drive. I slipped behind the West Wing and peered through the branches of a shaggy yew just in time to see the coach door open and a man climb out.

I was too far to see him clearly, only that he was dressed in a brown tweed suit, with a scarlet muffler wound around his neck and hanging down behind and before. He looked around the yard, the sun flashing from the lenses that covered his eyes, then raised an instrument to his lips and commenced to play.

There was no tune in it, just notes running fast as water over rocks in spring. It made my ears ache to hear it; I would have run away, except that the back of the wain opened and a ramp rolled out to the ground. And down that ramp, to my joy and delight, trundled a dozen mechanicals.

I recognized them at once from Da's journals: Porter models, designed to fetch and carry, a polished metal canister with a battery bolted on behind like a knapsack, and a ball at the top fitted with glass oculars. They ran on treads—much better than the wheels of older models, which slid on sand and stuck in the mud. Articulated arms hefted crates and boxes as though they were filled with feathers. Some had been modified with extra arms, and were those
legs
on that one there?

The notes that were not music fell silent. "Hullo," said a diffident voice. "May I help you? I am Arthur Cwmlech — Sir Arthur now, I suppose."

In my fascination I had drifted all the way from the hedge to the yard and was standing not a stone's throw from the young man with the pipe. Who was, apparently, the new Baronet of Cwmlech. And me in a dusty old apron, my hair raveling down my back, and my boots caked with mud.

If the earth had opened up and swallowed me where I stood, I would have been well content.

I curtsied, blushing hot as fire. "Tacy Gof I am, daughter of William Gof the smith. Be welcome to the home of your fathers, Sir Arthur."

He blinked. "Thank you," he said. "It's not much to look at, is it?"

To my mind, he had no right to complain of the state of the house. Thin as a rake he was, with knobby wrists and sandy hair straggling over the collar of his shirt, which would have been the better for a wash and an iron.

"Closed up too long it is, that's all," I said, with knives in, "and no one to look after it. A new roof is all it needs, and the ivy cut back, to be the most beautiful house on the Borders."

Solemn as a judge, he gave the house a second look, long and considering, then back to me. "I say, do you cook?"

It was my turn to blink. "What?"

"I need a housekeeper," he said, all business. "But she'd need to cook as well. No mechanical can produce an edible meal, and while I can subsist on sandwiches, I'd rather not."

I goggled, not knowing if he was in earnest or only teasing, or how I felt about it in either case.

"You'd be perfect," he went on. "You love the house and you know what it needs to make it fit to live in. Best of all, you're not afraid of mechanicals. At least, I don't think you are. Are you?" he ended anxiously.

I put up my chin. "A smith's daughter, me. I am familiar with mechanicals from my cradle." Only pictures, but no need to tell him that.

"Well." He smiled, and I realized he was not so much older than I. "That's settled, then."

"It is not," I protested. "I have not said I will do it, and even if I do, the choice is not mine to make."

"Whose, then?"

"My da and mam," I said. "And they will never say yes."

He thrust his pipe into his pocket, made a dive into the coach, fetched out a bowler hat, and crammed it onto his head. "Lead on."

"Where?" I asked stupidly.

"Your house, of course. I want to speak to your parents."

Mam was dead against it. Not a word did she say, but I read her thoughts clear as print in the banging of the kettle and the rattling of the crockery as she scrambled together a tea worthy to set before the new baronet. I was a girl, he was a young, unmarried man, people would talk, and likely they would have something to talk about.

"Seventeen she is, come midsummer," she said. "And not trained in running a great house. You had better send to Knighton for Mrs. Bando, who was housekeeper for Sir Owen."

Sir Arthur looked mulish. "I'm sure Mrs. Bando is an excellent housekeeper, Mrs. Gof. But can you answer for her willingness to work in a house staffed chiefly by mechanicals?"

"Mechanicals?" Mam's eyes narrowed. "My daughter, alone in that great crumbling house with a green boy and a few machines, is it? Begging your pardon, sir, if I give offense, but that is not a proper household for any woman to work in."

I was ready to sink with shame. Sir Arthur put up his chin a little. "I'm not a boy, Mrs. Gof," he said with dignity. "I'm nearly nineteen, with a degree in mechanical engineering from London Polytechnic. Still, I take your point. Tacy will live at home and come in days to cook and to supervise the mechanicals in bringing the house into better repair." He stood. "Thank you for the tea. The Welsh cakes were excellent. Now, if I may have a word with your husband?"

"More than a word it will take," Mam said, "before Mr. Gof will agree to such foolishness." But off to the forge we went nevertheless, where Sir Arthur went straight as a magnet to the steam hammer that was Da's newest invention. In next to no time, they'd taken it apart to admire, talking nineteen to the dozen.

I knew my fate was sealed.

Not that I objected, mind. Being housekeeper to Sir Arthur meant working in Cwmlech Manor, surrounded by mechanicals and horseless carriages, and money of my own — a step up, I thought, from sweeping floors under Mam's eye. Sir Arthur engaged Da, too, to help to turn the stables into a workshop and build a forge.

Before he left, Sir Arthur laid two golden coins in my palm. "You'll need to lay in provisions," he said. "See if you can procure a hen or two. I like a fresh egg for breakfast."

Next morning, Da and I packed our pony trap full of food and drink. I climbed up beside him and Mam thrust a cackling wicker cage into my hands.

"My two best hens for Sir Arthur's eggs, and see they're well housed. There's work you'll have and plenty, my little one, settling the kitchen fit to cook in. I'll just set the bread to rise and come help you."

Overnight I'd had time to recall the state of the place last time I'd seen it. I was prepared for a shock when I opened the kitchen door. And a shock I got, though not the one I'd looked for. The floor was scrubbed, the table freshly sanded, and a fire crackled merrily on a new-swept hearth. As Da and I stood gaping upon the threshold, a silver-skinned mechanical rolled out of the pantry.

"Oh, you beauty," Da breathed.

"Isn't she?" Sir Arthur appeared, with the shadow of a sandy beard on his cheeks, grinning like an urchin. "This is the kitchen maid. I call her Betty."

There followed a highly technical discussion of Betty's inward workings and abilities and an exhibition of a clarinet-like instrument studded with silver keys, with the promise of a lesson as soon as he found the time. Then he carried Da off to look at the stable, leaving me with the instrument in my hand, bags and baskets everywhere, the hens cackling irritably, and Betty by the pantry door, still and gleaming.

Fitting the pipe between my lips, I blew softly. A bit like a recorder it was to play, with a nice, bright tone. I tried a scale in C, up and down, and then the first phrase of "The Ash Grove."

Betty whirred, swiveled her head, waved her arms aimlessly, and jerked forward. I dropped the pipe just as she was on the point of crushing the hens under her treads.

And that is how Mam found us: me with my two hands over my mouth and the pipe on the floor and Betty frozen and the hens squawking fit to cross your eyes.

Mam closed her lips like a seam, picked up the hens, and carried them outside. When she got back, there was a word or two she had to say about responsibility and God's creatures and rushing into things willy-nilly. But Mam's scolds never lasted long, and soon we were cooking companionably side by side, just as we did at home.