by Lev AC Rosen
“I did. Good tobacco, too. Want to try one?”
“One of your cigarettes? I’d die, I would.”
“I hope you won’t,” he said, took out another cigarette, and gave it to her. She took it, and he lit it for her. She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes. “I wish I were a duke,” she said.
He laughed. “Now you have to call me Ernest,” he said. She nodded. He liked her smile, her freckles, the leanness of her body. They finished their cigarettes in silence, and she stood up.
“I have to go back to the kitchen,” she said, leaning down and kissing him on the cheek. “Thanks for the cigarette, Ernest.” She grinned, and he leaned up and kissed her on the mouth. She kissed him back and left. Ernest had another cigarette before going back to the party.
Del came to his room that night, and many nights after that for the next year and a half. She was a wonderful lover with a quick mind. She listened to Ernest talk about his inventions, asking questions when she didn’t understand him, the long fan of her orange curls on the pillow, her arm around his chest. She was the one he cried in front of, when, eleven months later, his mother died, and the one whose arms he slept in after the funeral. He never thought he loved her, and she told him quite clearly that she wasn’t fool enough to let herself fall for a duke, but they were friends, and they laughed together, smoked, and made love. Then she left the house, married a butcher, and moved to the country.
She couldn’t meet his eye when she told him she was getting married, but he could tell she was happy, which made him smile as he lifted her chin to look at her. “Course, I’ll be sad to leave you behind,” she said, pinching his cheek. “You’re a good fella, Ernest. A nice bloke. You’re almost like a big brother, I think. Except for when we’re naked. I think I do love you a little. But don’t think I’m going to call off this wedding.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to,” Ernest said honestly. “I just want you to be happy.”
“I am,” Del said, glowing.
“I’ll miss you, too.”
After she left, Ernest quit smoking and went back to paid sex, sometimes indulging in another maid, or a young widow, but he rarely made any sort of connection as he had with Del.
And then, one day, he decided it had all been enough for him, and he turned all his energies to science and the school. He had been chaste for nearly two years now. He dragged himself to his quarters and prepared for bed. He wondered if he had ever experienced passion. He had read a poem or two in his time, and the way they described love seemed quite absurd to him—the longing of hearts and bodies, the need involved. Ernest had never felt need like that, never felt a desire he could not quell with reason. Why, then, when his lips reached for Ashton’s, did it feel as strong as magnetic force, completely unavoidable? Is that what the poets meant? How horrible, to have every love affair be so overwhelming and out of one’s control.
Kissing Ashton did not make sense in the list of his experiments, either. Even now, lying in bed in his pajamas, he was aroused by thoughts of Ashton in ways he could not explain. He had never felt this way toward other women, and he had certainly never felt this way about any man. He reimagined the argument, and then the kiss, and touched his own lips as he did so. But as he thought more and more about it, Ashton blurred, his hair growing longer, his body curvier, the passion in his eyes unchanged—and taking on a guise strikingly similar to Ashton’s sister, Violet. He was no invert, Ernest told himself, tossing in bed; it was just the confusing nature of twins. The thought was quite a relief. True, he had behaved badly with a student, but he hoped that awkwardness would pass with time. He would just have to avoid Ashton for a while.
He was suddenly aware of how hungry he was. Cecily had brought him a dinner plate, but he had left it in the lab. He glanced at the clock. It was nearly ten. Supper would be cold, but edible. He walked downstairs to his lab and turned on the lights. Miriam stood alone in the room, looking surprised and guilty for a moment before her face returned to its usual passive gaze.
“What are you doing here, Mrs. Isaacs?” he asked, heading for his dinner plate.
“Miss Cecily asked that I retrieve certain materials from your lab for her experiments, sir,” Mrs. Isaacs said, bowing her head slightly. The duke wondered when she changed out of her black high-collared dresses, or if she ever let her hair out of its tight bun.
“Well, take what you need from the cabinets. But not from the tables, please. I’m working with what is on the tables.”
“I already searched, sir; you don’t have what she needs. I will need to go to the chemical lab.”
“Very well. Good night, Mrs. Isaacs.”
“Good night, sir.”
Mrs. Isaacs bowed and swept out of the room like a shadow while the duke took a bite of his chicken.
* * *
OUT in the hall, Miriam headed for the basement. She had lied to the duke, but she had her reasons. She had been searching his lab not for materials, but for evidence, an explanation for what she had seen in the basement.
Miriam had tried to repress her curiosity. She had tried to distract herself by making Cecily’s German lessons harder for both of them, by studying Cecily’s complex chemical formulae, or in long weekends in bed with Toby and his achingly skillful hands, but the truth was, Miriam wasn’t very good at being restrained. She could cover things up, but actually restraining of any part of her for very long wasn’t in her grasp. She couldn’t restrain her desires, she couldn’t restrain her confidence, and she couldn’t restrain her curiosity.
And unfortunately, she thought, wandering the basement halls alone, she couldn’t restrain her stupidity. Ashton had gladly made her a mechanical torch, but hadn’t explained that to keep the light constant would require constant squeezing of the trigger. Miriam nervously squeezed it every other second or so, more often than she needed to, so that the light stayed steady, though her finger was tight and cramped. She spent some time trying to find the mark she had left previously, an uneven line through the dust on the walls. Already it had begun to fill in with more dust, but it was still visible with the light shining on it. She ran her finger through it again as she stalked through the halls, making it deeper, easier to see. The friction of the rough stone and dust made her fingertip raw. She had come alone because she needed to see the automata again, needed to verify that it was the duke’s features she had seen, but she couldn’t tell anyone that. It implied a secret too dark for her to share with anyone, even Toby. And she liked the duke. He was a good man to work for, and if her fears were proved true—if he wasn’t entirely human—then she would weigh that information against what she knew of him as … if not a man, as a being. And a good one, overall. She didn’t need to reveal his nature to anyone else. She just needed to know for herself.
Miriam wasn’t a scientist. She didn’t know how one could make a mechanical man as lifelike as the duke, or if it was even possible, but she had seen many things she thought previously impossible since coming to work at Illyria, and one more didn’t seem out of the question. There was one time last year when she had walked in on him in his lab with what seemed to be a metal thigh on his own leg. He had seemed flustered, and told her that he was merely making a part for Bunburry, in case he had another accident, which at the time seemed reasonable, but Miriam wondered if maybe she had been seeing something else—the duke making a new part for himself, or perhaps his actual skin, under his clothes.
Miriam stopped walking as something brushed against her dress. She pointed the torch at her feet, but saw nothing. The beam of light seemed very small compared to the vastness of the basement. It seemed to get darker every time she was down here. Distantly, she heard a door swing shut, and something that sounded like giggling. She could hear the sound of the wall of gears, too, pulsing dimly in the darkness, like soft footsteps.
What else was happening in the basement? She had asked a few of the other servants about it, but they just shrugged or walked away. The only one who had spoken to her, the girl wh
o made her bed, told her that she didn’t think anyone went very far into the basement. Anything that was stored down there was a few yards from the stairs. The other servants weren’t fond of Miriam. They didn’t like that a Jew with dark skin seemed to have more rank than they did, that they had to change her sheets and serve her meals. She wished now that she could have made the servants like her more. Perhaps one of them had made a map of the basement, or at least knew something about it, but all of them claimed it was unused.
But it wasn’t. There were closing doors and laughter with no sources and warm, unseen things that brushed against her dress and a cluster of skeletal automata. Except—Miriam saw as she came to the point where the line in the wall ended—those seemed to be gone, too. It was definitely the right place, a turn in the hall with a small alcove sticking out of it and a strange handleless door. But the automata were gone.
Quietly, Miriam crept forward, pointing the torch at the floor. It was clean all around the door and alcove. Everywhere else, inches of dust lay undisturbed. Someone had swept. And taken the automata away.
She approached the door. It was more like a doorway, sealed over with metal. There was no handle, no gap, just a great archway with smooth bronze behind it. If it was a door, the door behind which the automata were taken, she could see no way to open it. She swept her palm over the front of the door, searching for some sort of keyhole. In the center, she found a slight circular depression, about the size of her thumb. The back of the depression seemed to have some sort of engraving in it, and when Miriam shone her light directly at it, she could see a small pattern of gears. The pattern seemed familiar, though, so Miriam leaned in closer. Then she heard footsteps behind her. She froze, and her torch flickered out. She held her breath, waited for another noise.
More footsteps, from somewhere down the hall. Miriam backed into a corner, pressed herself flat against the wall. It was almost completely dark, but she could see a shadow—the shadow of a tall man, she thought—at the end of the hall. He walked slowly, but because he was only a shadow, Miriam did not recognize him. She swallowed, wondering if it was the duke, come down here to check on his brothers. But the shadow passed by, leaving her alone in the darkness. She put her hand on her chest, feeling her heartbeat pound quickly. It was time to leave.
After waiting for what seemed a long enough time—maybe five minutes, maybe an hour—Miriam walked slowly back to the entrance. She turned her torch on only when she absolutely needed to, and listened carefully for footsteps. When she finally emerged from the basement, she was coated in dust, grime, and sweat. Her hair, normally bound back tightly, had fallen loose and was wet. Her hands shook and her back ached. She walked back to her room and drew a bath for herself.
Christmas break would be upon Illyria soon. Toby was going to take her to the south of France, where they could pretend to be a married couple, and no one would really care anyway. She was looking forward to leaving behind eerie basements and blackmailing students and the constant grinding of gears. Illyria was beautiful and wondrous when she first arrived. Now she saw beyond the brightly lit bronze-and-gold halls filled with genius, and into the shadows produced by the tooth of each turning gear, the shadows themselves turning, sliding over the walls and gears, like a net wavering in the breeze.
XX.
LONDON in winter wasn’t white like the country in winter. It was gray and silver, the color of iron and stone. Outside was steadily falling snow, heavy fog, specks of white on a pewter background, and through all that, a depth of monochrome, smoke and shadows of buildings, all shimmering, all unreal. This was lost on Gareth Bracknell, who did not care much about the beauty of the physical world. Even though he had been studying the stars since he was a child, he saw them only as points of light, like marks on a map. In fact, he hated snow. Hated the way it covered the dome of the astronomy tower and didn’t slide off, creating strange gray shadows in the classroom. Hated the way it blotted out the sky at night, creating confusion over whether things were a falling star or snowflake. And he hated the cold. He had on several thick sweaters, a scarf, and mittens, and it was still cold in the astronomy tower. He tucked his hands under his arms and felt his teeth chatter. The students looked at him from their desks, waiting for him to start, apparently unaffected by the cold. They had on little jackets and shirts, and the fat one wore a ridiculous-looking sweater, but none of their teeth chattered, none of them shivered. Bracknell hated them for their warmth.
“Fuck all,” Bracknell said. Violet had stopped trying to pay attention in Bracknell’s classes since discovering that he was going to be nasty either way. When she tried to please him by studying hard and getting every answer right, he called her a sissy, and when she didn’t pay attention or got an answer wrong, he called her stupid. Not paying attention was easier.
“I don’t see the sodding point in trying to have an astronomy class in the snow,” he said, “but your headmaster, the bloody Duke of Idiocy, said that I have to do something. He paused, looked out the window. A smile crept onto his lips. Violet didn’t like it.
“I know,” he continued. “How’s about a little test? A test-y. Oh yes. It won’t be your final exam, of course—those aren’t until the third trimester—but a test. You have to work. I don’t. Sounds perfect. Everyone take out a piece of paper.”
With audible groans, the students all took out paper and readied their pens.
“Good,” Bracknell said. “Draw me a map of the stars as they will look on Christmas from the observatory this year. Use your books if you need to, but if you do, do realize that you have shit for brains and haven’t learned a thing.” With that, Bracknell sat down at his desk and pulled out a book—some serialized adventure novel for boys—and began reading. The class, feeling a little thrown off, waited a few moments before starting their work.
A map of the stars on Christmas. Violet thought it over and began to draw. Christmas was only a week away. This was their last class before they went home for Christmas holiday. It would be sad this year without her father there. Mrs. Wilks would be there, and Ashton, of course, and probably Jack, but they had no extended family who visited, and no neighbors who would visit for more than a few minutes. Violet drew star after star, dot after dot of ink, and labeled each constellation. Looking around the room, she was happy to see that no one had opened their books. She saw Bracknell looking up and noticing the same thing, but with disappointment. Their eyes met and he glared at her before going back to his book. Violet wondered how such a man had become a scientist—or a professor.
When the class was over, Bracknell stood, grabbed each piece of paper from the students, even if they were still writing, and left. Violet felt she had drawn the stars correctly and easily, and hoped her success would irritate Bracknell over the holiday.
“Happy Christmas, Professor!” Merriman called after Bracknell as he vanished down the stairs. Bracknell’s grumbles echoed slightly before the door slammed shut.
“Well,” Jack said, “time to go home, then.”
Fairfax stood and left the room in silence.
“Happy Christmas, Roger!” Merriman called after him. Fairfax did not reply. “I love Christmas,” Merriman said to no one in particular.
Violet smiled. “Have a very Happy Christmas, Humphrey,” she said to Merriman, who beamed. “You, too, James.”
“Thank you,” Lane said, standing. “To all of you as well.” He gathered his books and left.
“I want to go out on the tower once before we leave,” Violet said to Jack.
“It’s slippery,” Jack said. “That’s a bad idea.”
“I’ll go,” Merriman said.
“Good,” Violet said. She walked over to the glass door and opened it, letting in a whistling rush of cold wind that scattered loose papers.
“Bracknell’s not going to like it,” Merriman said.
“Bugger Bracknell,” Violet said, stepping out onto the snow-covered rooftop. Jack and Merriman followed. Jack was right: It was slippery,
and the wind was strong, but it smelled fresh and felt cold and wet on Violet’s skin. She walked slowly over to the statue of Leonardo da Vinci atop a lion and rested her hand on it for support as she looked out over the city. Behind her, she heard Merriman try to follow and slip and fall with a thud. Jack helped him back up. The wind pressed into Violet, and she wished that she still had her long hair or her skirts so that they could be blown around. She wished her breasts weren’t bound, so that her whole body could be as loose as the wind. She took a deep breath and turned back.
Merriman beamed at her. “It’s cold out here,” he said, “but it feels great.”
“It does,” Violet said. “It feels free up here. And we’re surrounded by geniuses,” she said, patting the lion on the head. Merriman laughed, and Violet and Jack each supported him on one side as they went back in.
“I really had a good first trimester,” Merriman said in the lift down. “I never thought I’d get in here, and then I thought for sure I’d flunk out, but…”
“It’s been good for me, too,” Violet said.
“That is because you’re both brilliant,” Jack said, slapping them both hard on the back, “but I could give a ferret’s arsehole about that. I want to get home for presents,” he said, and darted out of the lift when it stopped at the dorms.
“Happy Christmas, Jack!” Merriman called after him as he ran down the hall. “Happy Christmas, Ashton.” Violet walked after Jack. “Happy Christmas, Ashton,” Merriman repeated.
“Happy Christmas, Humphrey.” Violet smiled then hurried to her room. She had forgotten for a moment that she was Ashton. She clearly needed a vacation from this ruse. In the room, Jack was throwing clothes haphazardly into a case. Of course, going home and pretending to be the perfect lady for Mrs. Wilks was just another ruse, but for some reason, she found herself looking forward to it. Which ruse, she wondered, was more true to her own character? Woman or scientist? And why did she have to choose?