Of Dubious Intent

by J. A. Sutherland

  Roffe’s rooms. That was where anything of interest to her would be.

  She set the candle and its reflector to shine on the door’s lock. The gas lamps would provide better light, but she didn’t want to light up the room’s windows once she was inside. If Clanton returned unexpectedly, she’d have to dash out and lock the door behind her, but he’d know regardless if he saw the room’s windows lit.

  The lock was stubborn, more complex than others in the house. More complex, even, than the locks set to her as tests.

  Roffe has something he wants kept hidden.

  It gave way to her picks eventually, though.

  Cat sat back on her heels with a satisfied smile and rolled up her picks. She tucked them into the small of her back, then wiped her face and neck. She’d actually started perspiring while picking the lock, despite the cold in the unheated hallway. She eased the door open and entered, pulling it closed behind her.

  The room, shadowed as it was in just the light of her single candle, was still much as she’d expected. A large canopied bed took up most of it, with chests and bureaus against the walls. Rich carpets on the floor and hangings on the wall, all dark colored and adding to the shadows.

  Cat made her way to the bedside to see what was on the table there.

  Nothing but a candle in a holder, and nothing in the drawers at all.

  She began going around the room methodically, checking each surface and drawer, careful to return things to their place if she moved them. The surfaces had a slight layer of dust, so she avoided moving anything there.

  Nothing out of the ordinary, though, simply clothing and the sorts of every day devices a man might make use of.

  She worked her way around the room, but paused as the light from her candle revealed a wide space between two cabinets. Instead of wall hangings, this space held a painting.

  Cat moved closer and held her candle up.

  It was a large painting. A portrait of three people — Roffe, only much younger, with a woman and infant. Roffe stood while the woman sat, his left hand on her right shoulder. Cat moved closer, there was something about the woman’s face —

  “My brother’s family.”

  Cat jumped, almost shrieking in startlement, and dropped the candle. It went out as it struck the floor, droplets of hot wax stinging her feet.

  She spun to face the now darkened room, eyes darting about for some sign of who’d spoken.

  There was the rasp of metal on flint and a gas lamp came on, illuminating Roffe in the room’s far corner. He moved to the next lamp and lit it as well, then around the room, all the while saying nothing.

  Cat alternated between watching him and examining the room as it grew brighter. How had he known to be here? How had he even got here, with her in residence all day? She’d not seen him arrive.

  Once the lamps were lit, Roffe moved to her side and looked at the portrait.

  “Long gone, all of them,” he said.

  Cat looked at the portrait as well, then narrowed her eyes. In the better light, the man pictured looked even more like a younger Roffe, but it was the woman who drew her attention. She hadn’t noticed before, but the woman sat slightly turned away from the man. She cradled the child with its head toward the edge of the canvas, as though she were sheltering it from the man who stood beside her. None of those pictured were smiling, but the woman’s face, especially, seemed unhappy.

  This was not a happy family, Cat thought to herself.

  Still, there was something about that face that she couldn’t quite place — the face and the woman’s copper hair, falling in waves around it.

  “Long gone?” she asked.

  “Quite,” Roffe said, without elaborating. He turned and walked away.

  Cat turned as well to keep her eyes on him. She supposed she should offer some explanation for being in his rooms — especially for having picked the lock as she had.

  “I’m sorry, Mister Roffe, I —”

  “Do you think I am unaware of everything you do, Catherine? Or that you are not predictable?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Roffe raised his eyebrows. “You don’t ask why I’m here.”

  “It makes little sense to ask a man why he happens to be in his own bedroom.”

  “True, but if he’s there unexpectedly, your impertinence in asking might buy you a bit of time to think of a reason for your own presence.”

  “What on earth are you doing here?”

  Roffe smiled. “Better.” He gestured toward her. “I was waiting for you.”

  Cat frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you suppose it was some accident that Clanton decides to spend an evening away just after you’ve managed to master those lock picks tucked into your skirt?”

  “So, this is some kind of test?”

  “Everything is a test … or if not a test, then an opportunity for me to learn more about you. Do not think for one moment that I am not still judging your every action.”

  “Then, what? You expected me to break in here?”

  “After so long without your curiosity about me being satisfied and then being given this opportunity? I should be quite disappointed in you if you hadn’t.” He started for the door. “Come along — you’ll find no answers about me in there. Only the odd bit of clothing.”

  Cat followed him to the stairs and then up to the third floor.

  “I’ve converted this floor to servant’s rooms, as I’ve no family to take them and another use for the top floor,” Roffe said. “They’re empty, so explore them as you wish.”

  He continued upward to the top floor, which would be where the maids would sleep in other households.

  As her head crested the floor she saw that he had, indeed, made other use of it. The entire floor was one open space, with all the walls knocked out and only necessary support columns still standing. Well, open space in the sense that there were no walls, as the space was filled with benches, tables, cabinets, and chests.

  “My workshop,” Roffe said, spreading his hands wide.

  Cat looked around, trying to take in as much as she could. The workbenches were covered in metallic bits that meant little to her and the walls were covered with large sheets of paper covered in drawings that made no more sense. One entire wall appeared to be nothing but huge slabs of slate covered in chalked writing and drawings. The skylight which let light into the stairwell had been expanded over the street-facing end of the house and a large metal tube stuck up through it. Cat found that odd, because its ends went nowhere, unlike the myriad copper pipes that ran from lower floors to this one and around the room to various devices.

  Cat wandered about the room, very aware of Roffe watching her every move.

  I wonder if my reaction is to be some sort of test, as well.

  She came to one bench covered with a cloth. She glanced at Roffe, but he didn’t appear concerned, so she lifted the cloth. Underneath, covering the work surface, were coils and lengths of copper wire, all wrapped in different substances. Some leather, others cloth, and some that seemed to be wrapped multiple times, with other metals as well.

  “Electricals,” Roffe said. “Useless, really, when they’re entirely inoperable six or seven days of every month and utterly unreliable the rest.” He walked over to the tube stuck through the skylight. “But I had this thought that perhaps … here, come and look at this.”

  Cat went to him and Roffe pointed at a smaller, glass-ended tube sticking out of the larger.

  “Put your eye just here,” he said.

  Cat did so, then jumped back quickly as an image of the moon filled her vision. She looked from the tube to the skylight, where the moon itself was visible, full and near, but not nearly so large as she’d just seen.

  “Like a spyglass, then? Only writ large?”

  “Indeed.” Roffe gestured for her look again.

  She leaned over and placed her eye to the glass again, this time prepared for what she saw.

  The m
oon, larger and clearer than she’d ever seen. Each of the many craters finely outlined and the deep gash of Halley’s Crevasse facing her fully, like a mouth cut across its face. She could tell just how deep it went and the odd coloring of it, so unlike the grey rest of the orb, was even more striking than with the naked eye.

  Cat straightened and looked up through the skylight again.

  “Was it truly whole once?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Roffe said. “Round as an orange. Before my time, of course.” Roffe shook his head slowly. “Halley. Poor man, really. To be so lauded as a great scientific mind for predicting the comet’s return, and then to be vilified and blamed when it came right in earlier than predicted and struck like that. I know they say he hung himself, but he was quite old when he finally saw his prediction realized. I rather think he had some help along the way. The Mob is … unforgiving in its reactions.”

  Roffe stepped quickly from the giant spyglass toward the bench of electricals.

  “Now, my theory,” he said, whipping back the covering.

  Cat thought that he was quite a different person up here. He seemed genuinely enthusiastic about his workshop’s contents.

  “So,” Roffe continued. “We know that the material either left behind or exposed in Halley’s Crevasse has some effect. We see them on those days the Crevasse most faces us and the moon looms larger.”

  “The pigeons dance,” Cat said. It was a sight to see, with all a market’s pigeons lining up and shuffling about, unable or unwilling to fly and all moving together as though marionettes on the same strings.

  “Exactly,” Roffe said. “And as the pigeons dance on those days, so do compasses. Which makes navigating a ship somewhat more complicated, you see?”

  Cat nodded. She did know that compasses had something to do with ships, but wasn’t entirely clear on what. For her part she didn’t see why they didn’t just pick a spot on shore and steer for that. She knew the oceans were large, but how much larger could something be than the Thames at its widest?

  “Electricals,” Roffe said, waving at the items on the bench, “are much more sensitive to these effects for some reason. They’ll spark and spit and do their best to kill a man for six or seven days of the month.” Roffe grinned. “Much like a wife.” He barked laughter. “I had the thought that if distance and the angle of the moon in relation to the Crevasse mitigate the effects, then there might be some material that would shield my electricals from it and allow the electricity to work as it should.” He sighed. “If that were possible, then it might work on compasses, as well. Ships that could sail true when all others are amiss would turn a much greater profit.”

  Roffe flung the cover back over the bench.

  “Sadly, I found nothing which would work for that.”

  Cat stared at the bench for a moment. She had questions — many questions about the room in general and all of its contents. There was something about the workroom she found oddly appealing, with its benches covered with half-assembled bits that must have some purpose she longed to know. She wondered how much of this Roffe might be willing to teach her, in addition to the thievery.

  Her brow furrowed. “What’s this electricity, then?”

  Chapter 14

  Cat returned to the upper room, which she dubbed the Mechanicals Room, as often as she could in the weeks that followed — on those days when she was resident in the townhouse, that was. Clanton, with little rhyme or reason she could determine, would drive her back to the manor for days on end, then retrieve her back to the city.

  The days at the manor were both wonderful, in that she was able to spend time with Emma, and horrid, in that she must endure the lessons of Mistress Hinds — the townhouse was equally dichotomous, with the fascinating mechanicals and those lessons Clanton taught. Most of those latter were interesting to an extent, and more useful, Cat thought, than the endless etiquettes of Hinds, but his attempts to teach her to fight continued to leave her battered, despite Clanton’s infrequent grunts of what she thought might be approval.

  The mechanicals, though — well, they might make all the bruises worth it. Cat rushed through whatever tasks Clanton set her, not laxly, for that would prompt a beating, but the promise of free time prompted her to great efforts.

  Alone in the Mechanicals Room, she studied both the devices and their associated drawings. Questions to Roffe, in those infrequent times she saw him, about their purposes were rebuffed, but she did learn, to her surprise, that few of the devices there actually worked. The townhouse, it seemed, was not Roffe’s primary workspace, but rather a dumping ground for failed projects.

  Nevertheless, Cat studied them.

  The drawings were an odd lot, each seemed to have been done originally in different hands and styles. The lettering itself, she took for other languages, and could make no sense of it. On all, though, a second, or rather the same hand, had made notations — not so neatly as the original, frequently scrawled, almost illegible, and often scratched out and blotted in what Cat took for frustration on the writer’s part.

  These writings looked like Roffe’s hand to her, and he seemed to be expressing his thoughts, and then frustrations, at attempting to make the devices work as they ought.

  Does he take in failed projects from other artificers? Cat wondered.

  One device in particular caught Cat’s attention. A bit over two feet across, and circular, it stood several inches tall, but on a low set of swiveling wheels. The drawings indicated a tightly coiled spring inside a well-sealed box, wound, she saw, via a steam powered drive on the wall.

  This house, like the manor, lacked nothing in the way of piping, either for hot water or steam.

  Clanton looked on in amusement as she stoked the kitchen fires for the boiler and then rushed upstairs again.

  The winding mechanism appeared to be functional and, when she threw the switch on the wound device, the spring did release its energy into its workings, but the device itself merely sat there while some few of its inner gears spun round.

  Cat sat back and stared at the drawings again, understanding the frustration in Roffe’s notations and quite wishing she could scribble a few choice words herself.

  The more she stared at the drawings, though, the more she thought there was something just a bit off with them.

  With no little trepidation at what Roffe might think, she took up tools and began disassembling the device to see its workings for herself, carefully setting each piece and screw she removed aside and making notations as to how it should go back to its place.

  The more she peered into the device and compared its workings to the drawings, the more she concluded that something was quite off indeed. It was assembled as it should be, as the drawings said, but … well, she became convinced that would never work at all.

  No, the drawings must be wrong — curiously, and almost deliberately, she thought, for there were several key mistakes which certainly bolloxed up the whole.

  This gear should mesh with that and not the other. The hose from the little pressure tank of steam should lead here. This bit? Well, that appears to have no purpose at all, other than to block these others, and if we remove it … and move this just here, well then …

  Cat stood and watched in sheer delight as the flipped switch now sent the little device skittering across the floor, propelled by the tightly wound spring, which also drove long, round brushes in its underside. Steam billowed around it and hissed straight up into the air from a linen-covered screen on its top.

  She laughed out loud as it reached a wall and the ingenious bumper on its front clicked loudly. That triggered it to reverse, change the angle of its wheels just a bit, and move forward again, just as she’d thought it might. In a moment, the little scamp had bumped the wall several times, each at a different angle, then scurried off again having found a clear path.

  The path behind it, though, was its true purpose, for the grimy, scuffed floorboards of the Mechanicals Room were left clean where the device passe
d. Well … cleaner, for this room was truly filthy, but the device did make a difference. The steam out its bottom loosened the grime while the brushes scrubbed, and then the steam venting out its top sucked much of it up to be caught in linen-covered screens.

  In minutes, the thing ran to a stop, steam sputtering and hissing as the last of it ran out. Cat’s mood went from delight to disappointment that it hadn’t cleaned nearly the whole of the room’s floor, but then she dashed to the workbench in sudden excitement.

  Of course, the first wouldn’t do a whole room, it was just a toy, really — a sort of way of proving that the thing could work, she thought. Now that she’d seen it, though, the way was clear. A larger spring, a larger steam tank — that was all that was needed. Her mind spun like the brushes on the cleaner’s underside.

  What if it encounters a stairway? Wouldn’t want it damaged. We could block the stairs off, but that’s a chore — what if …

  Yes, exactly, she thought, scribbling furiously.

  Just a bit of a piece, much like the wall bumper, to detect the floor falling away — then reverse away to safety!

  She was still working at it, trying to figure the way of getting proportions right in the drawing, when she heard a voice behind her.

  “What are you about?”

  Roffe stood at the head of the stairs, staring at her with narrowed eyes.

  “Mister Roffe … I’m sorry, perhaps I shouldn’t have …” Cat’s eyes darted around the room. Her eyes and neck ached, and her fingers were cramped from drawing — she had no real idea how long she’d been at it, and worried that Roffe would be angry, thinking she might break his devices.

  “But look —” she hurried on, wanting to show him what she’d done.

  Cat quickly charged the device with steam, its spring wound, and she placed it on the floor. She set the switch and it began moving.

  “You see?” she asked, grinning. “It was only a bit of —”

  Crack!

  The sound stunned her nearly as much as the blow, Roffe’s hand against the side of her face. Even with Clanton’s training, it was so unexpected that she didn’t even raise a hand in defense before she was flung to the floor.