A Spark Unseen

12

Just move a trifle more quickly, my dear,” Mr. Babcock panted, pulling me down the corridor toward the stairs. “You are wanted.” And as soon as we had climbed the stairs and the shelf door was opened, I could hear the yelling, though the noise did not sound like one of my uncle’s tantrums; it did not sound like any noise I had ever heard from him before. Tired, hoarse, and beyond panic, like an animal that has fought to the point of exhaustion.

“I will remain here,” said Mr. Babcock. “I have tried to help Mary, but my presence, it seems, is as distressing to him as the lack of yours.”

Mr. Babcock was in a state, I saw, his beloved face creased with worry, and the workshop was not much better, a mess of spilled tools and overturned chairs, toys, and mechanical body parts flung here and there, one piece of ripped pink cloth folding down from the wall. And then I became aware of thudding, something heavy and slow, making the room shudder. I ran across the workshop, faster than I had just run down the street, dodging the debris, to the bedchamber door.

At first glance I found Mary, tears running streaks down her face, her back pressed tight against the wall, and then I saw my uncle. He crouched on the floor in the opposite corner, and he was bloody, crimson ribbons streaming from his head and from the knuckles of both hands, his white nightshirt covered with it. The noise I had been hearing was his head, rhythmic as it banged against the wall, a brown-red smear staining both his hair and the pink cloth.

“Uncle!” I yelled, running forward to stop him, hearing Mary’s warning of “Wait, Miss!” too late to avoid the arm that was instantly flung out as I reached for him. The blow twisted my neck, heat blossoming across my cheek. I took a step back and, through raised fingers, saw the wrench that was still clutched in Uncle Tully’s hand. He wasn’t looking at me; I’m not certain he even knew I was there. He yelled, his head lifted, and then slammed against the wall.

I felt Mary trying to pull me away but I shook my head, and again approached my uncle. This time I was ready for the hand. I caught it as I knelt down beside him, prying the wrench from his fingers, the weakness of his grip frightening me much more than the blood. I let the tool clatter to the floor as Uncle Tully wailed. The wall shook again with the impact of his head.

“Uncle, stop!” I pleaded. I risked inflaming him further and put out a hand to cup his skull, cushioning it, trying to think what to do. I’d only ever once glimpsed my uncle having a fit like this, and it was Lane who had calmed him. Lane had known how to restrain him, and in a way that reassured rather than punished, allowing no harm. Physically I did not have that capability; I could only use what I possessed.

“Uncle Tully,” I said, still loud, but this time with authority rather than fear. He tried to hit his head again, instead crushing my hand. I flinched at the pain, but did not remove my hand.

“Open your eyes,” I commanded. “Uncle, Marianna says to open your eyes.”

The drooping lids fluttered, then half opened, their usual blue now a dull, clouded sky. I gave them time to focus.

“What is ninety-seven times one hundred and three, Uncle Tully?”

He lifted his head to bang it again, but the movement was slight, and my hand took only a glancing blow. One of the wounds on his temple oozed but had almost stopped bleeding. He had been doing this a long time, while I had been next door, eating a four-course dinner. My guilt squeezed inward, tightening like a vise.

“Look at me, Uncle Tully. Ninety-seven times one hundred and three?”

“Nine …” his voice was croaking, “… thousand … nine hundred and … ninety, plus one.”

“That’s right.” There was no need to know the answers; his numbers were always correct. “Do you know who I am, Uncle?”

He hit his head again, and I bit my lip against the hurt. He said, “You are Simon’s … Simon’s baby.”

“That’s right. Your little niece. Twenty-seven times twenty-four?”

“Six hundred and forty-eight.” His face crumpled as if he might cry. “I … little niece … I don’t know where I am!”

“I know it, Uncle.”

“I can wait in the wrong place for twenty. I waited for twenty. …” His voice rose to a yell again, rasping as his sentence trailed away. He lifted his head to bang it, and behind him I saw the clock Mary had put on the bedside table, chosen because it was a particular favorite of my uncle’s, all its cogs and gears exposed rather than hidden inside a cabinet. My hand took another hard blow.

“Uncle Tully,” I said, “listen, do you hear the clock?” His head twisted in my hand, telling me no. “Listen, Uncle Tully, listen. What is the clock telling you?”

Uncle Tully finally went still long enough to hear an audible tick, and when he did, he froze. I held my breath. Mary must have been doing the same because the room went deathly still, the tick, tick, tick, tick like a mechanical heartbeat. My uncle’s eyes closed, his battered face intent.

“What is it telling you, Uncle?” I whispered.

After a long time he said, “It says that it is right, that its pieces are working, and that the when is now.”

“And the clock is working even in a different place, isn’t it?” He moved about in my hand a little, but he was not trying to hit his head. “I told you that when you woke up, that we would have done just what Marianna said to. Do you remember that, Uncle?”

“I waited … for twenty …”

“But you don’t have to wait for twenty here, Uncle, because this place is not wrong. It’s a place Marianna made for you. We did just as Marianna told us.”

My uncle frowned. “But Marianna said that when the men come, that … that I am to wait … in the tunnel.”

I looked hard at my uncle, watching his short, panting breaths. Every now and again he was capable of remarkable penetration, as if a light had somehow beamed through his fog. “Yes, Uncle,” I said softly, “that’s exactly right. Only this time the men knew all about the tunnel. So Marianna made another place, a place where you could make new toys and where they would be safe. That is where we are now. And you can hear that the clocks are ticking.”

Which to my uncle meant that the world was still turning on its axis. I waited, hardly daring to draw breath, to see if he would accept this explanation. If he did not, I had no other plan. His mouth turned down again, ready to cry. I was ready to cry with him.

“But … where is … the house? And Mrs. Jefferies? The girl is here. …” I chanced a glance back at Mary. She had sunk to the floor, her back against the wall. “Did the water take it all away? Like before? I don’t understand. …”

“The water didn’t come this time, Uncle, and it’s all right to not understand. I’ll stay with you until you do. But now you are very tired. Would you come with me and lie down, and have some —”

Uncle Tully’s eyes snapped open. “Will I get too tired, Simon’s baby? Will I go away? The forever kind, like Marianna?”

I paused, my uncle’s head still cupped in my hand, his white hair and white nightshirt stained with blood, pale skin stained with coming bruises. And he was searching my face, puzzled, the mind that could confound the best the scientific world could offer, asking if someday he would die. The thought filled me with a pain that I could not show him.

“I don’t want you to go away, Uncle. I want you to stay with me. But if you did … if you did get too tired, then we would not forget. We would remember. Always.”

Uncle Tully sighed. “It is right to remember,” he said, eyes dropping. “That is what Marianna said.”

He was relaxing now. I slowly took my hand away from his head, before he could realize it was there, letting his bleeding temple rest against the wall. “Would you like to come with me, Uncle Tully, and look at Marianna’s new place, and all your things that we’ve brought?”

He winced, eyes remaining closed. “My head hurts, little niece.”

“Yes. And it has gotten very dirty. Will you let me use the cloth on it? The cloth will touch, not my hand.”

Mary brought a warm cloth, and my uncle allowed me to not only clean his head but his face and the backs of his hands as well. He tottered upright and we helped him to his bed, bloody nightshirt and all. The slowness of his movements woke all my slumbering alarm. But he drank his tea and ate a piece of toast, and I wrapped the blankets tight around him, sitting beside his bed while Mary sponged the bloodstains from the walls. And the last thing I remembered was watching the rise and fall of my uncle’s chest, up and down, up and down, counting each precious breath.

I sat up, startled, a blanket sliding down from my shoulder. I was on the floor of my uncle’s bedchamber, heart beating hard for no reason I could name. One gaslight flickered in the windowless room, and in the glow I could see that my head had been on a pillow, though I had no memory of it being put there; I had no memory of going to sleep. I blinked, then spun about to look behind me. My uncle was right where he should be, beside me on the little cot, still wrapped tight and sleeping heavily, as he often did after being upset. He looked terrible in the gaslight, but at least this sleep was natural, nothing like the forced unconsciousness I had subjected him to.

When the clocks in the next room began to strike — a soft noise in this sound-deadened place — I stopped watching my uncle, got to my feet, pushed my own wild hair out of my face, and wandered out of the bedchamber. I felt each and every ache earned from a night on a hard floor, but those pains were nothing compared to the seething hot guilt in my middle. Lane had taken much better care of him.

I paused, adjusting the clock that had been just a bit behind the others, and looked about the room. Ten o’clock in the morning, but the light from the high windows was barely there, the sun a mere thought behind low-hanging clouds. Someone — Mary, I supposed — had been cleaning since last night; the toppled chairs were righted, spilled tools back in their boxes, and the automaton pieces organized by body part on the tables and against the walls. A bit of metal shone out from beneath a cloth at my elbow, bright in the room’s dimness, and beneath the wrapping I found the flower of brass, one of my favorite things Uncle Tully had ever made. The metallic petals alternated buffed dullness with a high polish, the bloom narrowing at the bottom to the point of a stem. It was nothing grand or spectacular, no engines or steam, just a small piece of wonderment that fit in the palm of my hand.

Glancing once over my shoulder — I knew better than to be caught touching my uncle’s toys — I set the flower on the workbench, one finger on the top to hold it upright on the narrow stem, and gave a quick jerk to the string that had been threaded between the petals. The string came free, a wheel softly whirred, and when I removed my finger the flower was spinning, slow and unaided on the tiny stem point, the petals opening and closing with soft clicks. Mr. Wickersham had held this flower once, examining not its beauty but the spinning gyroscope in its center, the same mechanism that was in my uncle’s fish. I watched the flower turn, a thing perfectly and unnaturally balanced. Could there really be something inside this little flower that could sink an ironclad ship?

The little toy spun on and on, never losing momentum, a bloom perpetually losing and then finding its sun, and suddenly I knew that I was homesick, not just for the Stranwyne I’d left but for the Stranwyne I’d known before. For the grandeur of Uncle Tully’s workshop, and Lane at a workbench, smelling of smoke and paint, for the summer sun on metal and the steam engines thrumming and my uncle’s joy when he wound up his toys. The sheer injustice of the loss twisted all my melancholy into anger. How I wished I’d shot Ben Aldridge when given the chance. Lane and I had that in common.

I stopped the flower’s spin with one finger, its gyroscope coming abruptly to a halt. My uncle’s vibrant, spinning world may have been shrunk to the size of this attic, but I would extract every drop of happiness from it that he could possibly have. I would live away from my home, tell every lie that was needed, and be the lady Mr. Babcock required. And I would bring us Lane. If we could not have our life at Stranwyne then we would build our old life here, cog by cog and stone by Parisian stone. This I would do. Somehow. Would not rest until it was done. For my uncle. And for myself.

I straightened my back in the would-be workshop and carefully covered the flower, letting it wait for its sun.