Steampunk! Part 9

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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d's creatures and rus.h.i.+ng into things w.i.l.l.y-nilly. But Mam's scolds never lasted long, and soon we were cooking companionably side by side, just as we did at home.

"And what's the use," she asked, "of that great clumsy machine by there?"

"That is the kitchen maid," I said. "Betty. There is all sorts of things she can do - once I learn how to use that properly." I c.o.c.ked my chin at the pipe, which I'd stuck on the mantel.

"Kitchen maid, is it?" Mam spluttered - disgust or laughter, I could not tell - and fetched flour for the crust of a savory pie. When it was mixed and rolled out, she laid down the pin, wiped her hands on her ap.r.o.n, went to the dresser, got out one of Mrs. Bando's ample blue pinafores and a ruffed white cap. She set the cap on Betty's polished metal head and tied the pinafore around her body with the strings crossed all tidy, then gave a nod.

"Not so bad," she said. "With clothes on. But a G.o.dless monster nonetheless. A good thing Susan Bando is not here to see such a thing in her kitchen. I hope and pray, Tacy, my little one, that you will not regret this choice."

"Do you pa.s.s me those carrots, Mam," I said, "and stop your fretting."

When Da came in and saw Betty, he laughed until I thought he'd choke. Then he pulled a pipe from his own pocket and sent Betty rolling back into her pantry with an uncouth flight of notes.

"This pipe is Sir Arthur's own invention, look you," he said, proud as a c.o.c.k robin. "A great advance on the old box-and-b.u.t.ton system it is, all done with sound waves. Not easy to use, look you - all morning I've been learning to make them come and go. But clever."

I wanted a lesson right then and there, but Da said Sir Arthur would be wanting his dinner, and I must find a clean table for him to eat it on. Mam read me a lecture on keeping my eyes lowered and my tongue between my teeth, and then they were off and I was alone, with a savory pie in the oven perfuming the air, ready to begin my life as the housekeeper of Cwmlech Manor.

A ruined manor is beautiful to look at and full of mystery and dreams to wander in. But to make fit for human habitation a house where foxes have denned and mice bred their generations is another pair of shoes.

Had I a notion of being mistress of a fleet of mechanicals, with nothing to do but stand by playing a pipe while they worked, I soon learned better. First, Betty was my only helper. Second, her treads would not climb steps, so ramps must be built and winches set to hoist her from floor to floor. Third, I could not learn to command her to do any task more complicated than scrub a floor or polish a table.

Like speaking Chinese it was, with alphabet and sounds and grammar all against sense, a note for every movement, tied to the keys and not to the ear. Da, who could not tell one note from another, was handier with the pipe than I. It drove me nearly mad, with my ear telling me one thing and Sir Arthur's diagrams telling me another. And my pride in shreds to think I could not master something that should be so simple. Still, the work had to be done, and if I could not make Betty wash windows, I must do it myself, with Ianto Evans from the village to sweep the chimneys and nail new slates over the holes in the roof and mend the furniture where the damp had rotted the joints.

For the first month, Sir Arthur slept in the stable on a straw mattress. He took his noon meal there too, out of a basket. His dinners he ate in the kitchen, with a cloth on the table and good china and silver cutlery to honor his t.i.tle and his position. Not that he seemed to care where he ate, nor if the plates were chipped or the forks tin, but ate what I put before him without once lifting his eyes from his book.

Fed up I was to overflowing and ready to quit, except for what Mam would say and the coins I put by each week in a box under my bed. But I stuck to it.

For whatever I might think of the baronet, I loved his house. And as I labored to clean the newest wing of the house and make it fit for human habitation, I felt it come alive again under my busy hands.

Finally, one rainy June evening when Sir Arthur came in to his dinner, I led him up the kitchen stairs and down a corridor to the morning room.

In silence he took in the oak paneling, all glowing with polish, the table laid with linen and china and silver, and a fire on the hearth to take the damp from the air. I stood behind him, with needles p.r.i.c.king to know what he thought, half angry already with knowing he'd say nothing. And then he turned, with a smile like a lamp and his eyes bright as peac.o.c.k feathers under his thick lenses.

"It looks like home," he said. "Thank you, Tacy."

I blushed and curtsied and pulled out a chair for him to sit on, and then I served his dinner, each course on a tray, all proper as Mam had taught me. Even Sir Arthur seemed to feel the difference. If he read as he ate, he looked up as I fetched in the courses. And when I brought up a currant tart with cream to pour over, he put down his book and smiled at me.

"You've done well, Tacy, with only Betty to help you."

My pride flashed up like dry tinder. "Betty to help me, is it?" I said with heat. "It was Ianto Evans swept the chimney, look you, and I who did the rest. There's worse than useless, that old pipe is."

Sir Arthur raised his brows, the picture of astonishment. "Useless?" he said. "How useless?"

I wished my pride had held its tongue, but too late now. His right it was to ask questions, and my duty to answer them. Which I did as meek as Mam could wish, standing with my hands folded under my ap.r.o.n. After a while, he sent me for a pot of coffee, a notebook, and a pencil, and then again for a second cup. Before long, I was sipping at the horrid, bitter stuff, writing out music staffs and scales. Telling him about intervals I was, when he leaped up, grabbed my hand, hauled me down to the kitchen, and thrust my pipe into my hand.

"Summon Betty," he ordered.

Halting and self-conscious, I did that.

"Play 'The Ash Grove,'" he said. And I did. And Betty spun and lurched and staggered until I could not play for laughing. Sir Arthur laughed, too, and wrung my hand as though he'd pump water from my mouth, then ran off with his notebook and my pipe to the stables.

As soon as Sir Arthur had puzzled out how to make a mechanical dance to a proper tune, he took the Porters apart and set about rewiring them. That time was heaven for me, with Sir Arthur pulling me from the West Wing, where I was evicting spiders and wood pigeons and rats from the corners and walls, to play old tunes to the mechanicals.

And then, at the end of June, a cart arrived at Cwmlech Manor, with a long wooden crate in the back.

Sir Arthur organized the unloading with anxious care, he and Da tootling away unharmoniously while the mechanicals hoisted the crate and carried it into the workshop, like a funeral procession with no corpse. I'd vegetables boiling for a potch, but I pulled the pot off the stove and went to watch the unpacking.

"Go to your work, now, Tacy, my little one," Da said when he saw me. "This is none of your affair."

"If that's a new mechanical," I said, "I'd dearly love to see it."

Sir Arthur laughed. "Much better than that, Tacy. This will be the future of mechanicals. And I shall be its father."

He lifted the lid and pulled back the wood shavings. I took my breath sharp and shallow, for it might have been a dead youth lying there and not a mechanical at all. The head was the shape of a human skull, with neat ears and a slender nose and fine-cut lips and oval lids over the eyes. Face and body were covered, eerily, with close-grained leather, creamy pale as pearl.

"I bought it from a Frenchman," Sir Arthur said as he rummaged through the shavings. "It's only a toy now, a kind of supersophisticated doll that can stand and walk. When I make it speak and understand as well, it will be a humanatron, and the science of mechanicals will have entered a new phase."

Over his head, Da and I exchanged a look of understanding and laughter mixed. It had not taken us long to learn that Sir Arthur Cwmlech was like a b.u.t.terfly, flitting restlessly from idea to idea. Yet in some things, you might set your watch by him. Dinner he ate at six of the clock exactly, and he always had coffee to drink afterward, never tea, and with his sweet, not after.

My seventeenth birthday came and went. Sir Arthur abandoned the Porters half-rewired to read books on sonics and the human auditory system and fill reams of foolscap with drawings and diagrams. He never set foot in the village. He never went to church nor chapel, nor did he call upon his neighbors. Da and old Dai Philips the post excepted, not a mortal man crossed the threshold of Cwmlech Manor from week's end to week's end. You may imagine my astonishment, therefore, when I heard one evening, as I carried him his coffee, a woman's voice in the morning room.

In a rage of fury she was, too, demanding he look at her. Now, a lady might have left them to fight it out in private. A servant, however, must deliver the coffee, though she'd better be quick.

When I entered, I saw Sir Arthur reading peacefully over the bones of his chop, as though there were no girl beside him, fists on hips and the insults rolling from her like water from a spout. Near my age she was and wearing nothing but a nightdress with a soft gray bed gown thrown over it. Then I saw the long dark stain under her left breast and my brain caught up with my eyes, and I knew that at last I looked upon the ghostly Mistress Angharad Cwmlech of Cwmlech Manor.

Sir Arthur roused himself from his book. "Ah, coffee!" he said. "And is that gingerbread I smell?"

Mistress Cwmlech fisted her hands in her disheveled hair and fairly howled. I dropped the tray on the table with a clatter.

Sir Arthur peered at me curiously, his spectacles glittering in the candlelight. "What's wrong? Did you see a rat? I heard them squeaking a moment ago."

"It was not a rat, Sir Arthur."

"You relieve my mind. I've nothing against rodents in their place, but their place is not my parlor, don't you agree?"

Mistress Cwmlech made a rude gesture, surprising a snort of laughter from me so that Sir Arthur asked, a little stiffly, what ailed me.

"I beg pardon, sir," I stammered. "It's only I've remembered I left a pot on the stove -"

And I fled, followed by the ghost's bright laughter.

A gulf as wide as the Severn there is, between the wanting to see a ghost and the seeing it. But Mam always said there was no shock could not be cus.h.i.+oned by sweet, strong tea. In the kitchen, I poured myself a cup, added plenty of milk and sugar, and sat in Mrs. Bando's rocking chair to drink it.

Thus fortified, I hardly even started when the ghost appeared on the settle. Her arms were clasped about her knees, which were drawn up with her pointed chin resting upon them, and her dark eyes burned upon me.

"Good evening," she said.

I could see the tea towels I'd spread on the settle faintly through her skirts. "G-g-g." I took a gulp of tea to damp my mouth and tried again. "Good evening to you, miss."

"There," she said, with triumph. "I knew you could see me. Beginning to feel like a window I was, and me the toast of four counties. In my day . . ." She sighed. "Ah, but it is not my day, is it? Of your kindness, wench - what year is it?"

I pulled myself together. "1861, miss."

"1861? I had not thought it was so long. Still, I would expect a better welcome from my own descendent, look you."

Sad she sounded, and perhaps a little frightened. "The Sight is not given to everyone, miss," I said gently. "Sir Arthur is a good man, though, and very clever."

"He's too clever to believe in ghosts," she said, recovering. "There is pity he's the one Cwmlech in upward of two hundred years with a need to hear what I have to tell."

I sat upright. "The Cwmlech Treasure?"

"What know you of the Cwmlech Treasure, girl?"

"Only what legend says," I admitted. "There's romantic, miss, to defend your home with your grandfather's sword."

Mistress Angharad Cwmlech laughed, with broken gla.s.s in it. "Romantic, is it? Well, it was not romantic to live through, I will tell you so much for nothing. Not"- with a rueful glance at her bloodstained skirts -"that I did live through it."

Shamed I was, and thrown into such confusion, that I offered her a cup of tea along with my apologies. She laughed, a real laugh this time, and said her mama had been a great believer in the healing property of tea. So I told her about Mam, and she said to call her Mistress Angharad, and I was feeling quite easy with her until she demanded to be told about the mechanicals, which she called "those foul and unnatural creatures infesting my stables."

Recognizing an order, I did my best to obey. I explained about clockwork and sound waves, and then I called Betty out of her pantry. A bad idea, that. For when Betty trundled into the kitchen, Mistress Angharad vanished abruptly, reappearing some minutes later in a pale and tattered state.

"Sorry," I said, and piped Betty back to her pantry with "The Bishop of Bangor's Jig."

"Mark my words," Mistress Angharad said. "That soulless thing will be the ruin of the House of Cwmlech."

"If Sir Arthur cannot hear you," I said shyly. "Do you tell me where the treasure is hid, and I will pa.s.s the word on to him."

"And he would believe you, of course," she said, her scorn thick as paint. "And drop all his precious experiments and maybe knock holes in the walls besides."

I bristled. "He might, if I put it to him properly."

"Maybe," the ghost said, "and maybe not. In any case, I cannot tell you where I hid the treasure, were I ever so willing. Your ears could not hear the words."

"Show me, then."

She shrugged mistily. "There are rules and restrictions upon ghosts as there are upon young ladies of gentle birth. Given my choice, I'd be neither."

Past eleven it was, and Mam waiting for me to come in before she locked the door. I racked my tired brain. "Can you not invent a riddling rhyme, then? Leave a trail of clues?"

"No and no. Only to Sir Arthur may I reveal the hiding place -"

"And Sir Arthur doesn't believe in ghosts," I finished for her. "Or the treasure, come to that."

"I wish I need not tell him anything," she said peevishly. "Great blind old fool that he is. But tell him I must. I'll not know a moment's peace until the House of Cwmlech is safe and sound."

So began Mistress Angharad Cwmlech's ghostly siege upon the doorless tower of Sir Arthur's indifference.

There is not much a ghost can do to affect the waking world, but what she could, she did. She blew in his ear, ruffed his hair, pinched his arm, spilled his coffee, knocked his food from his plate. The result of her hauntings was no more than a wry remark about drafts or fleas or clumsiness, at which she'd howl and rail and curse like a mad thing. Sometimes it was all I could do not to laugh.

This had been going on for perhaps a month when Sir Arthur told me, after I'd brought up his coffee one chilly evening in July, with the rain coming down outside in knives and forks, that three gentlemen were coming to dine with him on Sat.u.r.day.

"These gentlemen, sir," I said, mild as milk. "Will they be staying the night?"

"Yes. Is there a problem?"

Mistress Angharad, hovering by the hearth, giggled.

I put my lips together and sighed. "Perhaps you did not know, sir, there's no mattress in any bedchamber save your own, nor a whole sheet to make it up with. And while you may be happy to take mutton pie in the morning room, there's shame to serve no better to your guests, and they come all the way from London."

"Oh!" he said. "I hadn't thought. Can't have Mr. Gotobed sleeping on straw, either - he'd take offense, and that would never do. These guests are important, Tacy. What are we to do?"

I was tempted to take a page from Mistress Angharad's book just then and tell him what I thought of inviting guests without notice. But, as Mam was always telling me, he was the tenth Baronet Cwmlech and I was Tacy Gof, the smith's daughter. Friendly we might be, but it was not a friends.h.i.+p to survive plain speaking, however justified. "We must do what we can, Sir Arthur," I said, dry as sand. "Buy mattresses, for one thing, and cloth for curtains. Bed linen, of course, and wool coverlets that can double as blankets, and -"

"Oh, d.a.m.n," Sir Arthur said with feeling. "I hadn't thought - oh, d.a.m.n. You must buy what you see fit, of course, but please remember that I am ruined."

"Ruined?" I echoed blankly. "But the carriages and the mechanicals . . ."

"Are all my fortune, Tacy. With work and luck all will be restored, and you may bring Cwmlech Manor back to its full glory. But first I must secure a patent on the new pipe and find someone to manufacture it for general use."

He might have been speaking of flying to the moon, so hopeless did he sound.

"Come, now," I said. "That should be easy enough for a man clever enough to invent it in the first place. Da will help you, I'm sure. As for your guests, you may leave their entertainment in my hands."

His smile was clouded with worry, but it warmed me nonetheless. "Thank you, Tacy. I have every confidence in you, at least."

Which is a heady thing for a girl just past her seventeenth birthday to hear. As I cleaned the kitchen, I chattered of lists and plans to Mistress Angharad until she lost her temper.

"It is dull you are, bleating about roasts and beds like an old ewe. Have you not asked yourself who these gentlemen are and what they're after, out in the damp wilds of the Borders when the London Season is at its height? Lombard Street to a China orange, they're up to nothing good."

"All the more reason to be thinking of roasts and beds," I said shortly.