“Should we check the fountain, Mr. Holloway?” the boy asked, breaking him out of his daydream.
Shem glanced at Neptune’s fountain, currently occupied by three very drunk young men: one sitting in the water up to his waist and the others, shirtless, copying the pose of the great statue for the benefit of a squealing crowd of women who were clearly no better than they ought to be.
“Have some sense, boy.”
The boy’s eyes were wistful, and he wet his lips a little before venturing, “But they might need our help, Mr. Holloway.”
Like that, was it? Shem could see they were pretty, for drunken louts, the water slicking across their bare, muscled chests, and the coloured lights which hung in the surrounding trees washing them with a gold-and-purple glow. Still, anyone who stripped off in a fountain on a June night in England deserved to get pneumonia, and he wasn’t going to let his apprentice lust after buffoons. “The constables will be along in a moment to help them all the way to the dock.”
“But, Mr. Holloway….”
“Come along, boy.” Shem firmly steered the boy away.
He wasn’t expecting a firm clap on his shoulder and an all-too-familiar posh voice to say, “There you are, Holloway. Must say the entertainment’s changed in tone a little since I was last here.”
“I can assure you that the management does not….” Shem started and protested as Marchmont plucked the key from his hand and unlocked the gate in the hedge. “My lord, the paths are for employees—”
“I’m on a retainer,” Marchmont said cheerily, pushing them through the gate. He was still in evening dress, but there was a lot more ink smudged across his cuffs.
A loud splash and a roar of jeering laughter sounded behind them, and both Marchmont and the boy craned in that direction, as if they could see through three inches of dense laurel hedge. Irritated, Shem said, “We weren’t expecting you quite yet, my lord.”
“Oh, I couldn’t stop thinking on it. I’ve revisited all my notes, and the standard reference texts, and now I must see the bird in situ. You’ve restored it to its post?”
“Some hours ago, sir.”
The boy was quivering with curiosity, so Shem said to him, “Nightingale No. 48. Show me that you can find the way.”
The boy darted ahead a little, and Marchmont commented, “It’s a veritable maze behind the scenes. You could make a fortune opening this up to the public. Mazes are all the thing, you know. I designed revolving hedgerows for the one at Blenheim.”
“We do try to keep undesirables out of the staff areas, sir,” Shem remarked. Marchmont seemed to have relaxed considerably since the afternoon, and Shem eyed him suspiciously. Was he drunk?
“Luckily, I am considered quite the catch,” Marchmont said as a money capsule went rattling through the pneumatic tube attached to the side rail of the path. “I say, what do you do about rust?”
“The exteriors are specially treated,” Shem said, relaxing a little. Mechanics he could talk about comfortably. “We also replace sections during the quiet season.”
The boy came rushing back. “There’s guests there, Mr. Holloway.”
“We’ll wait for them to be done,” Shem said.
“The devil we will,” Marchmont snapped and marched straight out into the glade. Shem just had time to glimpse a corpulent gentleman with his hands busy on the bare bubbies of the girl on his lap, before Marchmont swept by with a comment of, “Evening, Shackleton. How’s your wife?”
Within moments, they had the grove to themselves.
“Was that necessary?” Shem asked. They did need to keep the customers happy, after all.
“Absolutely,” Marchmont said. “Can’t stand the man. Tried to court one of my sisters, but Rosalind has far too much sense to be taken in by that type.”
The boy piped up to ask, “Do you have many sisters, my lord?”
Shem clipped him on the ear. “Don’t ask personal questions, boy. It’s impertinent.”
“But—”
“And I’ve told you not to talk to gentlemen.”
The boy looked rebellious, and Marchmont was smirking at them over the nightingale, so Shem pointed to the gate in the hedge and said, “Mr. Ferrars needs another pair of hands at the dock. Off you go.”
The boy trailed off, and Shem turned back to Marchmont, who said, with a note of amusement, “Five, for the record.”
“Sir?”
“Five sisters, all my elders, from Rosalind down to Miranda.”
“That’s nice, sir,” Shem said, ignoring the little twist of bitterness. He had no family.
“You’re supposed to make a remark about my family’s evident fondness for Shakespeare,” Marchmont informed him, sprawling comfortably on the bench. “No? Ah, no small talk from the working man? I hope you’re not going to be dull, Holloway.”
“I shall endeavour to entertain you, my lord,” Shem said drily.
He was rewarded with laughter, and Marchmont delved into his pocket to produce a slim notebook. “To work, then. What time did you wind the bird?”
After a while, Marchmont patted the seat beside him with an irritated look. “Sit, will you? You’re giving me a crick in my neck.”
It felt strange, sitting down in the middle of the garden with a handsome man. He’d never come here as a guest, and it felt oddly sinful to just sit and talk, even if they were exchanging technical details. Marchmont was jittery, obviously desperate to take the nightingale apart again, and so he talked freely, ideas and explanations bubbling out of him. He wasn’t drunk at all, Shem realized gradually, just so caught up in the problem the nightingale posed that he couldn’t be calm. He seemed to want Shem’s reactions now, leaning forward to gesture at him as he described literal castles in the air. It was fascinating, principles Shem worked with every day sliding up against each other in unthinkable ways to make the impossible possible, and it made him a little breathless at times. As Marchmont’s face lit up in response to his careful questions, he wondered if the man had anyone at home who understood his ideas.
A few guests stumbled into the grove, but the sight of the two of them sitting comfortably sent them away again, several sniggering into their gloves.
“What’s wrong with them?” Marchmont demanded.
“They’re probably assuming the worst,” Shem said, shrugging uncomfortably. Dawkins knew Marchmont was here and why, so his reputation was safe at work, but he didn’t like the idea that strangers were judging his morals. “There’s some gentlemen have a taste for engineers.”
“For engineers?” Marchmont echoed, as if he had never heard such an absurdity. “Really?”
“It’s to do with the tool belt, sir, or so I’m told.”
“Oh,” Marchmont said and then added thoughtfully, “Hence Viola breaking Lord Rochester’s nose in the workshop all those years ago. I always wondered why she hit him so hard.”
Shem really didn’t want to know any more than that, but had to ask, “How old were you?”
“Fourteen,” Marchmont said absently. “I should really make her something to say thank you. Do you think her children would like a mechanical pug?”
“I think children like anything mechanical,” Shem ventured, keeping his voice steady.
“I could adapt a design,” Marchmont started and then was off into flights of fancy again, even as Shem swallowed back fury. If it had been one of his apprentices….
He reminded himself that Marchmont was not a defenceless boy and had clearly had his own protectors.
By the time the sky began to lighten and the crowds thin, Marchmont was yawning. His gaze remained fixed on the nightingale, but he was beginning to slump sideways, tilting closer toward Shem’s shoulder with every yawn. Shem did his best to prop him back up with a discreet nudge, but Marchmont merely smiled vaguely and slid back down.
“When,” he asked as the closing trumpets sounded, “do we call it a night?”
“Not yet,” Shem said, watching the small brass shape atop the pill
ar. It looked very sad, with its head slumped and its wings still, and he wondered how much of his sympathy for it was simply because he now knew it had feelings.
As the garden began to sink to earth, and Marchmont made a little notation of the time in his book, the bird stirred. Its head lifted, and its wings whirred, and a strange music burst out of it: a string of notes from one of its melodies jarring into another in a patchwork, inelegant song.
Marchmont froze, his fingers tightening on his pencil.
A shadow flitted out of the trees on the edge of the grove, landing softly on top of the abandoned cage. As the brass nightingale fell quiet, the real nightingale sang in reply, its song arching up into the dim dawn, throbbing with yearning.
And the brass nightingale began to sing again, clumsily matching its song to the little brown bird’s until the two threads of music merged into a hopeless, lonely whole.
Marchmont was still spluttering incomplete and incoherent sentences when the Gardens finally landed, so Shem marched him back through the hedge paths to the staff canteen. They were greeted by the scent of bacon frying. The tea urns were hot, so Shem deposited the earl at a table, got them each a sturdy mug of the strong milky stuff, and went to join the queue of yawning night-shift men waiting for their breakfast.
Dolly, behind the counter, winked at him when he asked for two plates and replied in a hoarse whisper, “Who’s your fancy man, Shem?”
“That’s Lord Marchmont, come to examine his inventions,” Shem said, and there was a rumble of interest around him.
“Never knew a lordship to eat his breakfast with us before,” Dolly said. “I hear he’s not married, girls.”
“Think he’d fancy you, d’ya, Doll?” someone shouted from farther back, and there was a wide roar of laughter.
Shem, embarrassed, said, “Enough. I doubt he fancies more than a fry-up right now.”
Dolly nodded vigorously. “Looks like he needs a good feed. Reckon them lords and ladies don’t know how to eat proper.”
“Pay a fortune for Vauxhall fare every night, don’t they?”
“Maybe they think that is good food.”
“Can we just feed the man, Dolly?” Shem asked quietly as the conversation rolled on.
She slipped an extra bit of bacon onto the plate and winked at him. “That’s for him, and don’t you growl and scare him off, Shem, my boy.”
No one else had heard, but Shem narrowed his eyes at her anyway, even as she turned to the next in line. She’d known him too long, had Dolly, ever since they sat in the orphanage schoolroom together.
Back at the table, Marchmont had started sipping his tea. He put it down as Shem approached and said, his voice bewildered, “It’s in love.”
“Looks that way,” Shem said and passed him a plate. “Eat your breakfast.”
“That wasn’t in my design.”
He looked so genuinely taken aback that Shem had to hide a smile behind his mug. “That’s what happens when you play god, sir. I’m fairly certain God was surprised when we started building steam engines.”
“Not a believer in providence?” Marchmont asked.
“Not a believer in arguing religion over breakfast,” Shem said quellingly, and had taken a good mouthful of bread and bacon before he remembered that Marchmont wasn’t one of his apprentices.
“I won’t take out the empathy chip,” Marchmont said fiercely.
“I didn’t think you would,” Shem said. “Your bacon’s getting cold.”
“Oh,” Marchmont said and began to dip the edge of his bread into his egg in a distracted way, until he said suddenly, “I’ll replace it! I’ll take it home with me, and it can sing in my garden, and I’ll give Vauxhall a new one, free of charge.”
It was a generous offer, because a mechanism like the nightingale didn’t come cheap, but something still troubled Shem. It was the end of a long shift, so he took his time to tease it out as he ate. It wasn’t until his plate was clean that he said, “What about the other nightingale?”
“The real one?”
“Are you going to take it to your garden too? Put it in a cage there?”
Marchmont blinked at him. “Oh.” He frowned, putting his knife down.
“Don’t waste food,” Shem said automatically.
Marchmont started eating again, the frown still knotting his brow. At last he said, “One of them has to be in a cage, either way. The brass nightingale—its wings don’t work.”
“Why not?” Shem asked.
“It wasn’t necessary for its original function, and so the weight…. Unless I apply…. I could extend its wings…. Membranes and some gliding function…. It’s not…. I need a pencil. Paper!”
“In your pocket,” Shem reminded him, and Marchmont blinked at him. Amused, Shem said, “No, not now. Go home and sleep on it.”
“But the nightingale!”
“Will still be here when you wake up.”
“I need it in my workshop.”
“I’ll bring it by,” Shem said. He’d had a few apprentices like this, boys who got so entranced by mechanical problems they couldn’t bear to eat or sleep, and knew quite well that Marchmont would just keep going until exhaustion overwhelmed him if he took the nightingale now. The poor bird deserved better.
“When?”
“When I’ve slept,” Shem said. It was his half day, but the nightingale had caught his heart, and he didn’t mind giving up a few hours of his afternoon to help save it. “That will have to do.” And, belatedly again, he remembered to add, “My lord.”
By the time he made it across the river, Shem was already beginning to regret his offer. He had lived out his entire life in the confines of Vauxhall, moving from the orphanage to the boarding house across the road. He rarely ventured far from the comfortable green shade of the Gardens. This side of the Thames felt like a foreign country, for all it was shrouded in the same heavy pall of smog. He tensed at every steam carriage that came looming and huffing out of the fog, chimneys chugging dark smoke into the mist. How did the rest of London stand it, when they didn’t have the freedom to soar above the murky streets every night?
When the great bell in the new Westminster tower boomed out two o’clock, he jumped. He hadn’t realized he had walked so far, so he pulled his muffler up, braced himself against the wind, and turned away from the river. The Gardens’ advertising claimed only at Vauxhall could Londoners experience a true English summer, and Shem wondered what these streets had been like before the invention of the steam engine. Had Westminster ever been green?
On his arrival in Albemarle Street, his heart sank. The Marchmont town house was huge, with tiers of windows. The black door was framed by pillars, with gleaming brass numbers. It wasn’t the sort of door Shem could ever imagine approaching. Looking at it, he was ready to turn tail and scurry back to Vauxhall. He could send a courier with the nightingale.
He was no coward, though, so he pushed open the gate to the basement stairs and walked down to the tradesman’s entrance. He knocked, but there was no reply.
Then he noticed a small sign tacked to the side of the door frame. A neatly drawn arrow pointed to an ornate brass daffodil, and the sign read, in scrawling handwriting, This is a BELL!!
Dubiously, Shem poked it.
Like a fan, the door folded up into the corners of its frame, revealing a sheet of metal studded with dials, sliding panels, and cogwheels. Another shutter rose to reveal a round-keyed typewriter. At just above his eye level, there was a clack of rotating flaps which revealed the command PLEASE ENTER YOUR DE—Another whir and it now read LIVERY NUMBER OR THE—It whirred again.—PURPOSE OF YOUR VISIT.
Shem reached for the typewriter warily and tapped in shem holloway bringing the nightin—
The panel slid down before he was done, almost catching his fingers, and Shem stepped back indignantly as a bell began to ring and the flaps whirled again to reveal red letters reading ERROR!
“Obviously,” Shem told it.
He shifted
uneasily from foot to foot as the bell kept shrilling. He really hadn’t anticipated such a palaver. He was ready to shove the nightingale at the first servant he saw and leave.
Then the entire door—panels, typewriter and all—slid silently sideward into the wall to reveal Lord Marchmont.
“Why are you at this door?” he demanded. “I told the footman to expect you.”
Shem decided not to try explaining. There wasn’t much point arguing about class with folks who were rich enough to disregard it at a whim. Instead, he proffered his package. “The nightingale, my lord.”
“Well, of course,” Marchmont said, backing away into the basement. He didn’t look as immaculately tidy as he had the day before: his hair was standing on end in places, and he had clearly been chewing his fountain pen, because his lips were stained blue. He hadn’t shaved, and although he had abandoned his dinner jacket, he still wore last night’s shirt, its sleeves now grease-streaked. He grinned at Shem as if it were Christmas morning. “Come on, now. My workshop is this way, and I’ve been experimenting with wing components, but all the aerodynamic principles in the world are no use without experimental data, and….” He stopped and stared at Shem, who was still standing on the doorstep, feeling too bulky and grubby to set foot in a place that was too pricey for him to spit at.
The thing was that it never lasted. Shem had kissed a few gentlemen in the shadows of the Gardens, before he learned better, and none of them had looked for him again. One or two had even walked past without a glimmer of recognition. A gentleman could indulge himself by befriending a working man, for an hour or a day, but it was his whim that governed when and how the friendship ended. God help the ordinary man who misjudged that friendship or overstepped his mark. Shem was used to the ground moving under his feet, but everything else in his life needed to be steady to compensate. He didn’t want to be charmed by Marchmont, or risk responding to his excitement, only to be frozen out when the technical challenge was solved.
The Clockwork Nightingale's Song Page 2