The Mammoth Book Of Steampunk Part 25

"Here you go," I said, offering the box to her. "Take your diamonds. Flee the city. No goodbye necessary. Mazel tov."

"No," she said. "I've changed my mind. I don't want to leave."

Outside, I heard shouting and the telltale sounds of automatons clip-clopping down the street.

"You want to stay?" I said.

"Miss Rosen ... Jessica. I know you may not believe me now, but I could have left yesterday. I stayed because ... because I think I'm-" Her voice was interrupted by the sound of the buzzer; someone was at the door. I heard a shout from down on the street.

"OPEN THIS DOOR NOW!"

"Wait here," I said to Divya, and stepped to the window. Four auto-giraffes, mounted by policemen, waited outside my store. A group of footed officers wielding pistols stood behind an irate-looking Robert and his two bodyguards. A small crowd of pedestrians was forming. I ducked back inside.

"Miss Rosen," Robert shouted. "We saw you in there!"

To Divya I said, "Stay quiet!" I stuck my head out again and said, "And I can see you, too. What on earth is all this about?"

"Good afternoon, ma'am," Robert shouted, using a tone of deference he'd never shown me before. "Do you know the whereabouts of Miss Divya? We would like to speak with her. Is she in there with you?"

"Divya took her lunch break and went out. You're interrupting mine. Come back in half an hour."

"I'm sorry, Miss Rosen, but this is a matter of some urgency. We believe she has stolen something of great value."

"Well, she's not here. Go away."

"Will you let us in, please?" Robert said.

"Just hang on a moment." I retreated back inside.

Divya looked frightened and had backed herself against the wall. "He must have gone home to fetch the diamonds for his meeting with the dockmaster."

"A bribe, probably, for control of South Street," I said.

"It was another lie, wasn't it?" Divya said. "I wasn't his 'darling Hindu G.o.ddess'. He paraded me around in front of the city so he'd have a scapegoat if he got caught with the diamonds. Who would the public believe had stolen them? The poor immigrant girl from Gujarat, or the 'upstanding' citizen, Robert? I was a such a fool!"

"We were all fools, it seems."

"What do I do now, Jessica? I can't go to prison. Who'd take care of my father?"

"Don't worry. I won't let them take you, Divya."

I opened one of the cabinets and pulled out a Confederate Civil War officer's belt with an attached pouch. I shoved the box of diamonds inside the pouch, closed it, and then handed the belt to her. "Hurry, put this on!"

"What for?"

"You're leaving, Divya. Now! Climb down the rear fire escape to the back alley and take Peck Slip over to the airport. Get your father and get the h.e.l.l out of New York."

"But ... I don't want to go!"

"You have no choice," I said. "Stay here and you go to prison. Or worse."

"What about you? They'll arrest you!"

"Don't you worry about me. Now run before they break down my door!"

"Jessica ..." She put a warm hand on mine. "I'm sorry. I wish it could have been different. I wish I could have shown you the real me."

"Me too," I said.

"Perhaps in the next life," she said.

"Cane yehi ratzon. May it be G.o.d's will."

I moved to the rear window. The alley below was absent of police. "Now!" I said, waving her over. "Mach shnel! "

She stepped to the rear window, the window I had watched my crawlers slink out of on a thousand moonlit nights.

Then she was gone.

I heard a policeman's whistle and a chorus of shouts. "She's climbed out the back! She's in the rear!" I peered out the window and saw a man rising from a hiding place behind the trash bin. I knew his voice. It was Elijah. He must have spotted her with his prosthetic, telescopic eye.

"d.a.m.n! Go up to the roof, Divya!" I shouted. "Hop over to the next building if you can!"

Elijah leaped onto the fire escape and ascended the steps, while two more policemen appeared in the alley.

As Divya climbed the rusty ladder, I feared the aged rungs would break off in her hands. The overweight policemen huffed up the stairs slowly; I would not let them catch her. I looked back inside the attic. My crawlers stared mindlessly at me. I quickly turned their control k.n.o.bs to 'programmation mode', and I held out my hand. "Look, my darlings. Fetch these! Digits! Fingers! Hands! Hurry!" The training was brief and rough. I hoped their ageing Babbage engines would understand the command. I turned the control k.n.o.bs back into active mode and watched as they crawled out the window into the daylight.

As Elijah grabbed onto the ladder that led to the roof, little Eve tugged at his finger. He yelped and tried to s.n.a.t.c.h his hand away. She kept tugging, but with his other hand Elijah knocked her off the wall, and she fell forty feet to the alley below. I felt sick at the sound of her crash. Talia, meanwhile, moved toward Elijah's other hand, while Leah and Beth crawled down towards the other two policemen who raced up the fire escape. Elijah, with crawlers Talia and Shoshanna hot on his heels, stepped onto the roof and vanished over the cornice.

I couldn't bear to leave Divya alone to her fate, so I climbed out the window onto the fire escape. I heard the barks of policemen behind me as I climbed to the roof. The treacherous rooftop, steepled some forty-five degrees, was in major disrepair. Shingles slid off and fell from Divya's hands as she scrambled away from Elijah toward the peak.

"Just stay where you are, ma'am!" Elijah said, checking his footing. "It's dangerous and there's nowhere to run!"

"Leave her alone!" I shouted.

Elijah turned back to glance at me; his false eye spun maniacally. "Jessica! Get down, it's dangerous! You shouldn't be involved. This girl is a thief! She stole diamonds from the wharf."

"You imbecile!" I said. "Robert stole those diamonds. You should know better, Elijah."

"I'm sorry, I have my orders, Jessica." He turned back to pursue Divya.

"Get away from me, you pig!" Divya shouted. "You fat American sloth!" She reached the pointed peak and straddled it. Looking down the other side, she wobbled, and I feared she might fall.

"Elijah!" I shouted. "Stop! She's not the one you're after. I stole those diamonds."

"Really? If that's so, then why's she runnin'?"

As he spoke, Divya lowered herself over the other side of the roof so that I saw nothing but her hands.

Talia bit into Elijah's finger, and he yelped, lost his hold and slid twenty feet down the roof. His foot snagged the gutter an instant before he would have plunged to his death. With him immobilized, I climbed to the peak and peered down the other side. The opposing face was twice as treacherous. Shingles slid off the roof as Divya hung on for dear life.

"Give me the diamonds, Divya! I'll tell them my crawlers stole it from Robert's room, that I had them follow you because I was worried about you."

"They won't believe you you heard the policeman."

"I'll show them my attic. They'll have to believe me when they see all my stolen things. You won't go to prison. Hurry. Give them to me!"

With a shaking hand she reached for her satchel. I heard the twittering of a crawler, and turned to see Miriam racing towards Divya's hand.

"Wait!" I screamed. "Stop!"

Miriam clawed at Divya's fingers, and Divya reacted involuntarily by s.n.a.t.c.hing her hand away, the hand which had held her securely on the roof. I stared into her brown, lucid, frightened eyes as she slid down the roof and over the edge. I heard a scream, and after, a terrible silence.

The police found the diamonds on her person, thus proving Robert's accusation. (Divya's possession of a Confederate military belt stolen the month prior from one Lieutenant Geoffrey Dauber's Civil War collection was exhibited as further evidence of her criminal tendencies.) No one came to search my attic. No one came to question me, despite my "confession" to Elijah. I almost wished they would, just so I could speak about her.

I pestered Elijah daily for the location of Divya's body, where she might be interred, but he just shrugged and said he didn't know, which I knew was a lie. I had the haunting suspicion she had been cremated, or dumped quietly out at sea to be forgotten. It had been a long time since I'd prayed, but I dusted off my old siddur and said kaddish for her every night.

A few weeks later I paid a visit to Divya's father. He was a skinny and handsome man, with dark but luminous eyes much like Divya's. The studio apartment that he'd shared with her was smaller than I'd imagined. The single room was worn and dusty, and paint flaked from the dilapidated walls. He sat on the bed and listened to me silently, a man who'd lost everything he'd ever loved in this world. In some ways, I knew how he felt.

"Divya told me you came here to escape the poverty of your home country," I said.

He stared at me, expressionless.

I held out a bundle wrapped in twine. "In this parcel is six thousand dollars. It's my life savings. It's yours now." He took it without changing his expression.

"You're Jessica?" he said.

I nodded. "Yes. Jessica Rosen."

He stood, opened a drawer, pulled out a small envelope and handed it to me. It was addressed to me at the store. "I found this among her things," he said.

I opened it and read the following: Dear Jessica, If you're reading this it means I've left New York. There are many things I would like to say to you, but none of them seem adequate as I write this now. I'm grateful for everything you have done for me. You gave me a job, friendship, support, but most of all you've shown me warmth in a place I thought I'd find none. One day, I hope to be half the woman that you are. Do not forget me, Jessica. I will never forget you. Goodbye.

With love, Divya For a long moment we sat in silence, then after a time I reached into my pocket and handed him my business card. "Tonight is Shabbos, the Jewish day of rest. It's customary to share a meal with family. Come before sunset. The address is on the card." Then I stood, turned and walked past the smells of baking challah all the way home.

Machine Maid.

Margo Lanagan.

We came to Cuttajunga through the goldfields; Mr Goverman was most eager to show me the sites of his successes.

They were impressive only in being so very unprepossessing. How could such dusty earth, such quant.i.ties of it, piled up discarded by the road and all up and down the disembowelled hills, have yielded anything of value? How did this devastated place have any connection with the metal of crowns and rings and chains of office, and with the palaces and halls where such things were worn and wielded, on the far side of the globe?

Well, it must, I said to myself, as I stood obediently at the roadside, feeling the dust stain my hems and spoil the shine of my Pattison's shoes. See how much attention is being paid it, by this over-layer of dusty men shovelling, crawling, winching up buckets or baskets of broken rock, or simply standing, at rest from their labours as they watch one of their number return, proof in his carriage and the cut of his coat that they are not toiling here for nothing. There must be something of value here.

"This hill is fairly well dug out," said Mr Goverman, "and there was only ever wash-gold from ancient watercourses here in any case. 'Tis good for n.o.body but Chinamen now." And indeed I saw several of the creatures, in their smockish clothing and their umbrella-ish hats, each with his long pigtail, earnestly working at a pile of tailings in the gully that ran by the road.

The town was hardly worthy of the name, it was such a collection of sordid drinking-palaces, fragile houses and luckless miners lounging about the lanes. Bowling alleys there were, and a theatre, and stew-houses offering meals for so little, one wondered how the keepers turned a profit. And all blazed and fluttered and showed its patches and cracks in the unrelenting sunlight.

The only woman I saw leaned above the street on a balcony railing that looked set to give way beneath her generous arms. She was dressed with profound tastelessness and she smoked a pipe, as a gypsy or a man would, surveying the street below and having no care that it saw her so clearly. I guessed her to be Mrs Bawden, there being a painted canvas sign strung between the veranda posts beneath her feet: "MRS HUBERT BAWDEN/Companions Live and Electric". Her gaze went over us as my husband drew my attention to how far one could see across the wretched diggings from this elevation. I felt as if the creature had raked me into disarray with her nails. She would know exactly the humiliations Mr Goverman had visited on me in the night; she would be smiling to herself at my prim and upright demeanour now, at the thought of what had been pushed at these firm-closed lips while the animal that was my husband pleaded and panted above.

On we went, thank goodness, and soon we were viewing a panorama similar to that of the dug-out hill, only the work here involved larger machinery than the human body. Parties of men trooped in and out of several caverns dug into the hillside, pushing roughly made trucks along rails between the mines and the precarious, thundering houses where the stamping-machines punished the gold from the obdurate quartz. My husband had launched into a disquisition on the geological feature that resulted in this hill's having borne him so much fruit, and if truth be told it gave me some pleasure to imagine the forces he described at their work in their unpeopled age, heaving and pressing, breaking and slicing and finally resting, their uppermost layers washed and smoothed by rains, while the quartz-seam underneath, split away and forced upward from its initial deposition, held secret in its cracks and crevices its gleamless measure of gold.

But we had to move on, to reach our new home before dark. The country grew ever more desolate, dry as a whisper and grey, grey under cover of this grey, disorderly forest. Unearthly birds the size of men stalked among the ragged tree-trunks, and others, lurid, shrieking, flocked to the boughs. In places the trees were cut down and their bodies piled into great windrows; set alight, and with an estate's new house rising half built from the hill or field beyond, they presented a scene more suggestive of devastation by war than of the hopefulness and ambition of a youthful colony.

Cuttajunga when we reached it was not of such uncomfortable newness; Mr Goverman had bought it from a gentleman pastoralist who had tamed and tended his allotment of this harsh land, but in the end had not loved it enough to be buried in it, and had returned to Suss.e.x to live out his last years. The house had a settled look, and ivy, even, covered the shady side; the garden was a miracle of home plants watered by an ingenious system of runnels brought up by electric pump from the stream, and the fields on which our fortune grazed in the form of fat black cattle were free of the stumps and wreckage that marked other properties as having so recently been torn from the primeval bush.

"I hope you will be very happy here," said my husband, handing me down from the sulky.

The smile I returned him felt very wan from within, for now there would be nothing in the way of society or culture to diminish, or to compensate me for, the ghastly rituals of married life; now there would only be Mr Goverman and me, marooned on this island of wealth and comfort, amid the fields and cattle, bordered on all sides by the tattered wilderness.

Cuttajunga was all as he had described it to me during the long grey miles: the kitchen anch.o.r.ed by its weighty stove and ornamented with shining pans, the orchard and the vegetable garden, which Mr Goverman immediately set the electric yardman watering, for they were parched after his short absence. There was a farm manager, Mr Fredericks, who appeared not to know how to greet and converse with such a foreign creature as a woman, but instead droned to my husband about stock movements and water and feed until I thought he must be some kind of lunatic. The housekeeper, Mrs Sanford, was a blowsy, bobbing, distractible woman who behaved as if she were accustomed to being slapped or shouted into line rather than reasoned with. The maid Sarah Poplin, was of the poorest material. "She has some native blood in her," Mr Goverman told me sotto voce when she had flounced away from his introductions. "You will be a marvellously civilizing influence on her, I am sure."

"I can but try to be," I murmured. I had been forewarned, by Melbourne matrons as well as by Mr Goverman himself, of the difficulty of finding and retaining staff, what with the goldfields promising any man or woman an independent fortune, should they happen to kick over the right pebble "up north", or "out west".

The other maid, the mechanical one Mr Goverman had promised me, lived seated in a little cabinet attached to a charging chamber under the back stairs. Her name was Clarissa I did not like to call such creatures by real names, but she would not recognize commands without their being prefaced by that combination of guttural and sibilant. She was of unnervingly fine quality, and beautiful with it; except for the rigidity of her face I would say she was undoubtedly more comely than I was. Her eyes were the most realistic I had seen, blue-irised and glossy between thickly lashed lids; her hair sprang dark from her clear brow without the clumping that usually characterizes an electric servant's hair; each strand must have been set individually. She would have cost a great deal, both to craft and to import from her native France; I had never seen so close a simulacrum of a real person, myself.

Mr Goverman, seeing how impressed I was, insisted on commanding Clarissa upright and showing me her interior workings. I hardly knew where to rest my eyes as my husband's hands unlaced the automaton's dress behind with such practised motions, but once he had removed the panels from her back and head, the intricate machine-scape that gleamed and whirred within as Clarissa enacted his simple commands so fascinated me that I was able to forget the womanliness of this figure and the maleness of my man as he explained how this impeller drove this shaft to turn this cam and translate into the lifting of Clarissa's heavy, strong arms this way, and the bowing of her body that way, all the movements smooth, balanced and, again, the subtlest and most realistic I had witnessed in one of these creatures.

"Does she speak, then?" I said, peering into the back of her head.

"No, no," he said. "There is not sufficient room with all her other functions to allow for speaking."

"Why then are her mouth-parts so carefully made?" I moved my own head to allow more window-light into Clarissa's head-workings; the red silk-covered cavity that was the doll's mouth enlivened the bra.s.s and steel scenery, and I could discern some system of rings around it, their inner edges clothed with India rubber, which seemed purpose-built for producing the movements of speech.

"Oh, she once spoke," said my husband. "She once sang. She is adapted from her usage as an entertainer on the Paris stage. I was impressed by the authenticity of her movements. But, alas, my dear, if you are to have your carpets beaten you must forgo her lovely singing."

He fixed her head-panel back into place. "She interests you," he said. "Have I taken an engineer for a wife?" He spoke in an amused tone, but I heard the edge in it of my mother's anxiety, felt the vacancy in my hands where she had s.n.a.t.c.hed away the treatise on artificial movement I had taken from my brother Artie's bookshelf. So unbecoming, for a girl to know such things. She clutched the book to herself and looked me up and down as if I were some kind of electrically powered creature, and malfunctioning into the bargain. For your pretty head to be full of ... of cog-wheels and machine-oil, she said disgustedly. I will find you some more suitable reading. My husband officiously b.u.t.toning the doll-dress; my mother sweeping from the parlour with the fascinating book I recognized this dreary feeling. As soon as I evinced a budding interest in some area of worldly affairs, people inevitably began working to keep it from blossoming. I was meant to be vapid and colourless like my mother, a silent helpmeet in the shadows of Father and my brothers; I was not to engage with the world myself, but only to witness and encourage the men's engagement, to be a decorative background to it, like the parlour wallpaper, like the draped window against which my mother smiled and sat mute as Father discoursed to our dinner guests, the window that was obscured by impressive velvet at night, that in daytime prettified the world outside with its cascade of lace foliage.

I had barely had time to accustom myself to my new role as mistress of Cuttajunga when Mr Goverman informed me that he would be absent for a period of weeks, riding the boundaries of his estate and perhaps venturing further up country in the company of his distant neighbour Captain Jollyon and some of that gentleman's stockmen and tamed natives.

"Perhaps you will appreciate my leaving you," he said, the night before he left, as he withdrew himself from me after having completed the marriage act. "You need not endure the crudeness of my touching you, for a little while."

My face was locked aside, stiff as a doll's on the pillow, and my entire body was motionless with revulsion, with humiliation. Still I did feel relief, firstly that he was done, and would not require to emit himself at my face or onto my bosom, and secondly, yes, that the nightmare of our congress would not recur for at least two full weeks and possibly more. I turned from him, and waited not long for his breathing to deepen and lengthen into sleep, before I rose to wash the slime of him, the smell of him, from my person.

After the riding party left, my staff waited a day or two before deserting me. Sarah Poplin disappeared in the night, without a word. The following afternoon, as I was contemplating which of her tasks I should next instruct Mrs Sanford to take up, that woman came into my parlour and announced that she and Mr Fredericks had married and now intended to leave my service, Mr Fredericks to try his luck on the western goldfields. Direct upon her quitting the room, she said, she would be quitting the house for the wider world.

"But Mrs Sanf- Mrs Fredericks," I said. "You leave me quite solitary and helpless. Whatever shall I do?"

"You have that machine-woman, at least, I tell myself. She's the strength of two of me."

"But with no intelligence," I said. "She cannot accomplish half the tasks you can, with a quarter the subtlety. But you are right, she will never leave me, at least. She will stay out of stupidity, if not loyalty."