The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (56 page)

By sheer volume, the north wing must have more clockwork than the rest of Summerfall combined – a peculiarity that does not, most fortunately, continue into the library itself. It is a very handsome set of chambers, spreading over three stories and a charming mezzanine. Pale walnut shelves, naturally, take up most of the walls, though the mezzanine has seven long windows of colored glass, and a few panels near the fireplaces are covered with creamy damask. Desks, armchairs and pink plush couches are scattered throughout.

One room in particular captured my interest. It is, I believe, the farthest north in Summerfall, and one massive window would look out over the gardens if I could successfully manhandle its brocade curtain aside. The desks were lost beneath an avalanche of books which bore no conceivable relationship to each other – the collected romances of Roland, an anonymous sheath of ballads, Christopher of Cloud’s celebrated treatise on clockwork. I paused on finding this last, as it lay open to a page with innumerable notes scrawled in the margins.

Here is what I have managed to copy of the page’s text:

It is a frequently criticized aspect of the automatic arts that only the smallest clockworks are self-perpetrating, that is, may continue their so-called lives without their Maker’s interference
. [Here, Monsieur Cloud makes a digression on the religious parallels evident in this circumstance.]
To this, we reply that no other state could be desired. What Clockmaker fails to remember the case of Malory Gerard, whose automata king went mad one day, escaped the music box for which he had been built, and proceeded to do battle with Monsieur Gerard’s collection of exotic songbirds? (This breed of insanity, incidentally, seems most common with automata whose tasks are ceaseless and repetitive. The jaquemarts of an actual clock have fifty-nine minutes between each hourly procession in which to stabilize, whereas Madame Gerard’s king waltzed constantly to the same facile tune.) While this anecdote is rather amusing, it takes little imagination to provoke a shudder at the thought of what a life-sized rampaging automata might do to his erstwhile masters.

Most of the scribbled notes were illegible, but I could make out two or three:
patronizing idiot – Malory Gerard’s taste in music would drive anyone mad – hold the bloody thing in place and you wouldn’t have this problem!
The handwriting was distinctive, not for its illegibility, but for the qualities that made it illegible: a hard leftward slant, trailing loops in its ‘y’s and ‘q’s, an overall suggestion of hastiness that came not from negligence, but from an intelligence too avid to work slowly. It should come as no surprise, then, that when on another pile I found an entire folio volume filled with the handwriting of the Margravine of Blois, I took it back to my rooms for further study.

Here is the title, embossed on crimson leather binding in a heavy copperplate:

A Catalogue of the Works of the Celebrated Margravine of Blois, compiled by Herself in the house called Summerfall.

Two entries in particular caught my attention. I reproduce them here, with their accompanying marginalia:

The Clock of the Bride of Death is kept in Summerfall’s guest apartments at the top of the eastern wing.
[My apartments – from the following description, I gather this is the clock by my dressing table whose incessant humming disturbs my sleep.]
It is the most populous of the house’s clocks, with over fifty individual automata, and the only one set to music – the late Évariste of Blois’s ‘Waltz for Dead Lover’. The key figures are as follows: the skeleton dancers, one couple for every hour; Death with his mask and violin; the Bride, who emerges at midnight with a shower of miniature rose petals; and Évariste, who leads each reprisal of the waltz from his perch at the stroke of twelve.

[The last segment is crossed out, and this penciled in above it:
Évariste insisted on revising his waltz with each reprisal. He has been allowed to retire to the Clock of Waters in the music room.
]

The other entry covers the last pages of the catalogue.

The Celebrated Carousel of the Margravine of Blois contains four and twenty automata, none less than twelve hands tall. Beginning with the pair of blood bays and circling left, they are: the bays, Hesperus and Phosphorus; Prometheus the black bear; the Cockatrice, the Phoenix, the Chimera, the Sphinx and the Manticore; Terpsichore the zebra, Ambrosias the elephant, Gamaliel the lion, Caesar the panther; the three white horses of the moon, named Artemis and Luna and Selene; the three black horses of the sun, named Apollo and Helios and Sol; the dragons, Boreas and Ariel; Lucien the serpent, Zephyr the eagle, Clytemnestra the ox and Antigone the silver dolphin.

[In fainter ink near the bottom of the page:
Clytemnestra does not like the current Duke of Cloud. Gamaliel will only carry virgins if their lovers are riding Caesar, and Caesar will not carry men over forty who wear too much musk. Phosphorus will suffer no mistress but my own – the lady Porphyrogene.]

Of the page’s final bit of marginalia, I can only read the name
Hesperus
, and a word that might be
killed
.

27 September

The weather has become unbearable – the lightning burns the sky without pause, the thunder’s roll is as constant as the sea’s – and today I have found the first evidence of Summerfall’s ghosts.

One manifestation I am quite familiar with, and it points – however unsteadily – to the ghost’s identity. No matter how many times I return the Margravine of Blois’s catalogue to its place on the shelf, it appears on a desk the next morning, always open to the entry on the carousel. This has happened now four days consecutively, and I can find no natural cause. (Of course, Jean-Baptiste will not hear of me spending the night in the library.)

The other circumstance is subtle, so that I hesitate to mention it at all, yet I have gathered enough incidental evidence to be certain that something is in fact taking place. The clocks of the Margravine of Blois are
dying
.

Having studied the Margravine’s catalogue on the night of the twenty-third, I took an inventory of the thirteen clocks in my apartment. That night, all of them seemed to operate passably; but on the twenty-fourth, the Clock of Ravens was missing three of its birds. The next night, the prince from the Clock of the Seventh Slumber would not awaken, no matter how many times his clockwork princess kissed him; and yesterday evening, Death laid down his violin and refused to play. I repeat that I know little of the Clockmaker’s art, and moreover, I do not know if such occurrences as these have been frequent in the past, or if this is a new development. I shall have to read more of Monsieur Cloud before I draw any conclusions.

Strangely, while I am glad to have made some progress in my investigations, these discoveries do not relieve the restlessness that has plagued me for days. When I think of a ghost in Summerfall, I feel – dare I say it? – a sort of vague and simmering envy.

Why should Porphyrogene be haunted by the woman she loved?

Why should I
not
be?

28 September

Dinner with Porphyrogene again. Whatever her business is outside of Summerfall, the rain must keep her from it. She was terribly restless all afternoon, turning every surface beneath her fingertips into an impromptu and poorly tuned pianoforte.

My news about the Margravine’s catalogue did not impress her – “We all have our lullabies, don’t we, m’sieur?” was her cryptic response – but my report on the clocks seemed to plunge her into melancholy.

“No,” she said in response to my enquiry, “it is not new, though it seems to be accelerating. How terrible …” She closed her eyes and laid a hand across the lids. “Do you miss your wife, M’sieur Saint-Pierre?”

I literally choked on my wine. “Madame, you may as well ask if I breathe.”

“She doesn’t haunt you, then?”

“No,” I said, remembering my thoughts from last night. “Forgive me, but I don’t think—”

“Do you know that the carousel is broken? It hasn’t worked in twelve years.” She lifted her hand from her eyes. “It’s a terrible thought, isn’t it, M’sieur Saint-Pierre, that all their work dies with them?”

Involuntarily, I shuddered.

“There are days you wish, don’t you, that you had something of hers – a letter, a lock of hair – something you could hold and say,
this is her
. This exists because she did.” Porphyrogene stood and began pacing between the parlor windows. “The rhymes didn’t lie entirely, you know. I did leave her blankets turned down. As if
that
was all it would take to keep her here.”

Keep her here
, she said – not
bring her back
. There was a brief silence. I said, quite softly, “I understand.”

She turned to me, and I felt my face heating. “Violeta could have moved the world,” I said. “When she died, I could only watch as it rolled back into place.”

“The cruelest things on earth,” Porphyrogene said, “are that it never changes and it never stops. Grief, M’sieur Saint-Pierre, is a carousel. You get on and you ride as fast and as hard as you can, but it only brings you back to where you started.”

We finished the meal in silence. It must have been clear from my eyes, as I know it was clear from hers, that neither of us was whom the other wanted to see across the table.

30 September

That dream again. I am standing on the shore as the sea rolls in, staining the bleached stones with all the colors of a jewel box. Suddenly, the smell of lavender and fever. I turn and see the Margravine of Blois.

This time, I reach for her. Her face becomes Violeta’s the moment before it slips through my fingers like foam.

1 October

I have found the bedroom of the Margravine of Blois.

It is at the end of a long corridor in the north wing, which I discovered by means of a concealed passage behind one of the library shelves. I cannot say the existence of the passage surprises me very much. From what I have seen of Summerfall, and of Jean-Baptiste’s miraculous powers of apparition, I’d expected to encounter one sooner or later. On emerging behind a standing clock of prodigious size, I had planned merely to look around, perhaps trying the keys from Porphyrogene’s ring; but upon seeing in one room the distinctive handwriting of the Margravine of Blois, I abandoned caution and went to investigate.

The writing, incidentally, which arches over the bed and would normally be hidden by the curtains, quotes only a line of poetry:
Here I took my rest; my joy came in other places
. I cannot imagine why, as the chamber itself seems cheerful – enough, I was going to say, but truly a great deal more than that. The walls and bedclothes are covered in golden silk, painted, in the case of the former, with emerald branches that serve as perches for dozens of painted birds. A portrait over the dressing table shows Porphyrogene seated on a garden bench, the Margravine of Blois kneeling at her feet. There is only one clock in the room, standing on a window ledge, its hands formed by a pair of racing blood bays.

As I came closer, I saw that there was a slip of paper wedged into the door of the pendulum box, yellowed and ratty, as though it had been taken out and stuffed back in many times – more times, indeed, than its contents seem to warrant. Here they are, transcribed from the writing of the Margravine of Blois:

13 April

Ha! You see, madame, that I bow as always to my lady’s request. Though your sad little jest alone could not tease laughter from these lips, your command shall be to me as God’s.

19 April

Another, my love? Are all your riddles so miserable? Pray bring something more cheerful, lest I am forced to drastic measures to steal a smile from your sweet mouth
.

24 April

I am forced to reply in kind: what goes on scales in the morning, on feathers at noon, and sleeps at the end of the day on flesh and bone?

24 April

A ring, madame: the jeweler’s scale when it is made, to the down box in which I purchased it (at no small cost, I might add), to my lady’s finger, if she is clever enough to undo the knot with which it is bound to Phosphorus’s neck!

And indeed, the miniature bay on the hour hand still wears a silver ring. Though tempted, I did not try the knot.

2 October

I had been hesitant to pull the golden cord, but curiosity, as always, had finally gotten the better of me. For days I had pondered a question to which, it seemed to me, Jean-Baptiste would know the answer.

“Why did she ask me to come here?”

He blinked, his large pale eyes moving slowly down and up. “Monsieur?”

“Be honest, Jean-Baptiste – you know there is no ghost in Summerfall. Certainly no ghost of the Margravine of Blois.”

He nodded slowly. “I suspected so, monsieur. She was not the sort to linger. I myself have seen nothing – nothing but the clocks, and while they are haunting enough in their own way, I daresay Monsieur Christopher of Cloud could put them in their place.”

It occurred to me to wonder how familiar a servant could be with Monsieur Cloud, but I let it pass. There is no denying that the Margravine of Blois was a genius Clockmaker; perhaps it permeated her conversation, even with her lover’s valet.

Jean-Baptiste was watching warily as I paced the room. “Monsieur? Will that be all?”

“No,” I said. “I know Porphyrogene is no fool. What did she expect to gain from me, if this place isn’t haunted?”

“Perhaps she
wants
to be haunted, monsieur.”

It took every ounce of self-control I possess to limit my reaction to a raised eyebrow.

“I beg your pardon, monsieur.” He waited until I gestured for him to go on. “Porphyrogene is not grieving for the Margravine of Blois. It seems to me she cried all her tears for the woman twelve years ago. But for the artist, the builder of the carousel? That is a hard thing to let die.”

“I suppose it is,” I said. And weak fool that I am, I began to cry.