Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (21 page)

Sir Arthur came running up to me, his eyes wild behind his spectacles. "Tacy! What the devil is going on here? Are you hurt?"

I hefted my weapon — a hammer it was. "Not a bit of it. But I think

I may have broken Mr. Gotobed's arm. Earned it he has twice over, the mess he's made of things."

Side by side, we surveyed the workshop then. Like a battlefield it was, with oil stains in the place of blood. Not a mechanical but was dented, and more than one stood armless or headless and dull eyed, its motive force gone. Not a machine but bore smashed dials and broken levers. Most pathetic, the French automaton lay sprawled like a puppet whose strings have been cut, one arm at a strange angle and the leather torn over its shoulder to show the metal underneath.

Sir Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's ruined," he said, a mourner at a wake. "They're all ruined. And there's no money left— not enough to repair them, anyway. I'll have to sell it all as scrap, and that won't bring enough to keep Cwmlech Manor on."

It hurt my heart to hear him say so. "What about the treasure?"

He shook his head. "That's a legend, Tacy, like the ghost—just a local variant of a common folktale. No. I am my father's son, a gambler and a wastrel. Mr. Whitney will have Cwmlech Manor after all."

"Do not lose hope, Sir Arthur, my little one," I said. "Do you lock those bad men into the tack room while I make a pot of tea. And then we will talk about what to do."

When I returned with the tea tray, Mr. Gotobed and his rogues were nowhere to be seen. Two chairs had been set by the forge fire, which was blazing brightly, and the automaton back upon its table, with Sir Arthur beside it, nibbling on his thumbnail.

I poured two cups with sugar and milk, took one for myself and carried the other to him. He thanked me absently and set down his cup untasted. I breathed in the fragrant steam, but found no comfort in it. Abandoning my tea, I set myself to search grimly among the tools and glass and pieces of metal on the floor. Like looking for a needle in a haystack it was, but I persisted and turned up Mistress Angharad's key at last under one of the broken machines.

"Here," I said, thrusting it into Sir Arthur's hand. "Maybe it's just run-down she is, and not ruined at all. Do you wind her and we'll find out."

Muttering something about putting a sticking plaster on a mortal wound, he inserted the key, turned it until it would turn no more, and then withdrew it.

The eyelids opened slowly and the head turned stiffly toward us. Sir Arthur whooped with joy, but my heart sank, for the eyes were only brown glass, bright and expressionless. Mistress Angharad was gone.

And then the finely carved mouth quirked up at the corners and one brown eye winked at me.

"A legend, am I?" said Mistress Angharad Cwmlech of Cwmlech Manor. "There's a fine thing to say to your great-aunt, boy, when she is on the point of pulling your chestnuts from the fire."

It would be pleasant to write that Sir Arthur took Mistress Angharad's haunting of the French automaton in his stride, or that Mistress Angharad led Sir Arthur to the treasure without delay. But that would not be truthful.

Truthfully, then. Sir Arthur was convinced that the shock of losing Cwmlech Manor had driven him mad, and Mistress Angharad had a thing or two to say about people who were too clever to believe their own eyes. I was ready to shut them up in the workshop to debate their separate philosophies until one or the other of them ran down.

"Whist, the both of you," I said at last. "Sir Arthur, there's no harm in hearing what Mistress Angharad has to say, do you believe in ghosts or not. It can be no more a waste of time than arguing about it all night."

"I'll speak," Lady Angharad said. "If he'll listen."

Sir Arthur shrugged wearily. "I'll listen."

The Cwmlech Treasure was hidden in a priest's hole, tucked all cozy into the side of the chimney in the Long Gallery. In the reign of Harry VIII, masons had known their business, for the door fit so neatly into the stonework that we could not see it, even when Mistress Angharad traced its outline. Nor could all our prodding and pushing on the secret latch stir it so much as a hairsbreadth.

"It's rusted shut," Sir Arthur said, rubbing a stubbed finger. "The wall will have to be knocked down, I expect."

Mistress Angharad put fists on her hips. Very odd it was to see her familiar gestures performed by a doll, especially one clad in an old sheet. It had been worse, though, without the sheet. Mute and inert, an automaton is simply unclothed. When it speaks to you in a friend's voice, however, it is suddenly naked and must be covered.

"Heaven send me patience," she said now. "Here is nothing that a man with an oilcan and a chisel and a grain of sense cannot sort out."

"I'll fetch Da, then," I said. "But first, breakfast and coffee, or we'll be asleep where we stand. And Mam must be wondering what's become of me."

Indeed, Mam was in the kitchen, steeling herself to go upstairs and see whether Sir Arthur had been murdered in his bed and I stolen by Mr. Gotobed for immoral purposes. The truth, strange as it was, set her mind at ease, though she had a word to say about Mistress Angharad's bedsheet. Automaton or not, she was the daughter of a baronet, Mam said. She must come down by our house to be decently clothed — and explain things to Da, while she was about it.

High morning it was before we gathered in the Long Gallery, Da with his tools, Mam with the tea tray, and Mistress Angharad in my best Sunday costume, with the triple row of braiding on the skirt, and my Sunday bonnet covering her bald head.

Da chipped and pried and oiled and coaxed the door open at last, amid a great cloud of dust that set us all coughing like geese. When it settled, we were confronted with a low opening into a darkness like the nethermost pits of Hell, which breathed forth a dank odor of ancient drains and wet stone.

Da looked at Sir Arthur, who bit his lip and looked at me.

"God's bones!" Mistress Angharad cried, and snatching up the lantern, set her foot on the steep stone stair that plunged down behind the chimney.

Sir Arthur, shamefaced, followed after, with me and Da behind him, feeling our way along the slick stone wall, taking our breath short in the musty air.

It could not have been far, but the dark made the stair lengthen until we might have been in the bowels of the earth. It ended in a stone room furnished with a narrow bed and three banded boxes, all spotted with mold and rust. Da's crowbar made short work of the locks. He lifted the lids one by one, and then we looked upon the fabled Treasure of Cwmlech.

A great deal of it there was, to be sure, but not beautiful nor rich to the eye. There were chargers and candlesticks and ewers and bowls, all gone black with tarnish. Even the gold coins in their strongbox and Mistress Angharad's jewels were dull and plain with time and dirt.

Mistress Angharad picked a ring out of the muddle and rubbed it on the skirt of my Sunday costume, revealing a flat-cut stone that winked and glowed like fire in the lantern light.

"What think you of your variant folktale now?" she asked Sir Arthur.

He laughed, free and frank. "I see I shall have to speak better of folktales in the future."

All I recall of the rest of that day was the steady stream of police and masons and men from the village come to deal with the consequences of the night's adventures. When Sir Arthur sat down to dinner in his parlor at last, Mr. Gotobed and his thugs were locked up tight as you please in the magistrate's coal cellar, and the treasure had been carried piecemeal from the priest's hole and put in the old tack room with Ianto Evans and two others to guard it. Mam cooked the dinner, and served it, too, for I was in my bed at home, asleep until old Mrs. Philips's rooster woke me next morning to walk to the Manor in the soft dawn as usual, as if my world had not been turned upside down.

First thing I saw when I came in the kitchen was Mistress Angharad, sitting on the settle in my Sunday costume.

"Good morning, Tacy," she said.

A weight dropped from me I had not known I carried. I whooped joyfully and threw my arms around her. Like hugging a dress form it was, but I did not mind.

"This is a greeting after a long parting, Tacy, my little one," she said, laughing. "Only yesterday it was you saw me."

"And did not think to see you again. Is it not a rule of ghosts, to disappear when their task on earth is done?"

The automaton's face was not expressive, and yet I would swear Mistress Angharad looked sly. "Yet here I am."

I sat back on my heels. "Is it giving eternity the slip you are, then? The truth now."

"The truth?" She shrugged stiffly. "I am as surprised as you. Perhaps there's no eternal rule about a ghost that haunts a machine. Perhaps I am outside all rules now and can make my own for a change. Perhaps" — she rose from the settle and began her favorite pacing — "I can wear what I like and go where I will. Would you like to be trained as a mechanic, Tacy, and be my lady's maid, to keep me wound and oiled?"

"If you are no longer a lady," I said, with a chill that surprised even me, "you will not need a lady's maid. I would prefer to train as an engineer, but if I must be a servant, I'd rather be a housekeeper with a great house to run than a mechanic, which is only a scullery maid with an oilcan."

A man's laugh startled us both. "Well said, Tacy," said Sir Arthur from the kitchen door, where he'd been listening. "Only I have in mind to make your mother housekeeper, if she will do it, with a gaggle of housemaids under her to keep the place tidy. You I need to design a voice for my humanatron. You will learn engineering. Which means I must command tutors and books from London. And new tools and a new automaton from France, of course. Perhaps more than one. I suppose I must write my lawyers first and finish work on the pipe. And the foundation needs work, the masons say." He sighed. "There's so much to do, I do not know where to begin." "Breakfast first," I said. "And then we'll talk about the rest."

There is a ghost in Cwmlech Manor.

She may be seen by anyone who writes a letter that interests her. Mr. Whitney came all the way from Pittsburgh to talk to her. He stayed a month, and Sir Arthur persuaded him to invest in the humanatron.

She travels often, accompanied by her mechanic and sometimes by me, when I can spare the time from my engineering studies and my experiments. Last summer, we went to London and Sir Arthur presented us to Queen Victoria, who shook our hands and said she had never spoken to a ghost before, or a female engineer, and that she was delightfully amused.

A woman and a girl. A man and a boy. And witnesses, people who were interested to see them go up the mountain separately, then come down together, the boy carrying the girl's basket, and the woman's hand resting on the man's arm. As pairs they were already notable, and when they started keeping company, they presented a real puzzle to the flourishing gossips of Gethsemane.

For a start, it wasn't usual for anyone to speak to the girl in public. The stallholders in the market would never take money from her hand; she had to leave it on the counter and they'd pick it up once she'd moved on. The girl was a witch. She lived in a dark crib in an alley off Market Square and was followed everywhere by the woman, a silent, white-eyed figure.

The boy and man weren't locals. They'd arrived in the Shackle Islands on the
John Bartholomew.
Ships that came into the port of Gethsemane would usually unload quickly, then pick up a cargo of sugar. But the
John Bartholomew
stayed. She was three days in the dock, unloading a cargo of equipment for the South Pacific Company's thermal project. Drills and gantries, steel cable and steel beams were piled up on the wharf, then carried off along the road to Mount Magdalene. The ship then anchored out in the channel, where its crew weren't at any easy leisure. They idled and fumed within sight of the port, and only the captain came and went freely. And then the boy and the man began to appear — inexplicably exempt from the rule against shore leave.

The boy was only a steward on the ship, but the
John Bartholome
w's captain seemed to favor him, and the talk in the port was that he was some shipowner's son getting a maritime education. This, because of the captain's odd partiality and the fact he had a servant—for it was assumed that the able seaman who accompanied him everywhere was his servant. The man was in late middle age, grizzled, wiry, and as weathered as any aging sailor, but there were those who said that this was only a disguise, and that he was in fact an old family retainer. He seemed too tender of the boy — tender with a familial tenderness. He was black, and the boy white, so, given the tenderness, it followed that he couldn't be simply a shipmate.