Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

  I allowed her the abrupt change in subject and we assessed the suitability of the dresses. My eyes lingered on one that had been cut from a vast tapestry that was meant to form a pictorial narrative. Reordered and abridged by the seamstress, the pictures made little sense. Cranes flew over blue skies, oxen ambled over starry rivers, and long-faced women danced. Of all the dresses, I found it hard to believe this was created to be this way, that it had no former life as a tapestry.

  In the end, the decision we came to did not matter.

  There was tapping at my door and I opened it to the sight of a silver tree. On its branches was an enormous eagle with a parcel at its feet. The bird regarded us with its round, orange eyes and twitched its ear tufts as we read the note. It bore only the curious rhyme:

  Bäumchen, rüttel dich und schüttel dich,

  wirf Gold und Silber über mich.

  I wrinkled my nose, recognising it from the fairy tale.

  “The Pale Queen was always known for her sense of humour,” said Miss Davenport as she laced me into the high-waisted dress.

  “I would rather not think of her as my mother,” I said. “Dress or no dress.”

  Miss Davenport winced at that, her hands fumbling. She murmured an apology and said, “Regardless, you will have to wear it. She probably just thinks it funny to reference a magical tree that grants dresses.”

  “A tree that grows on her mother’s grave.”

  She gave a high, forced laugh and abruptly changed the subject: “Aren’t you looking forward to the dancing?”

  The white dress was banded in gold and silver brocade. Its layers were confusing to say the least. The voluminous sleeves of the high-necked chemise were to be pulled through and pinned into row upon row of silver-trimmed slashes.

  It was nothing like the high-waisted gown my mother wore in one charcoal sketch my brother and I had of her, evoking none of the classical simplicity or elegance of that past. Instead it was that stiffness of portraiture in the Vandyke style, reminding me of old attic dresses and moth-riddled doublets.

  And yet for all its layers, it had an airy, almost immaterial lightness.

  “You are also going, right?” I said, as Miss Davenport twisted my hair into an ornate tumble. Jewelled pins disappeared into my hair and I had but her reassurance that the results were pleasing.

  “Stay still,” she said, her mouth still full of pins.

  “You’re avoiding the question,” I pointed out, crossing my arms with impatience. “I do notice when you do that.”

  “You won’t miss me.”

  “So you aren’t going?”

  “Mab hasn’t given me a dress and demanded I appear, has she?” Miss Davenport paused and tucked a stray curl of mine behind my ear. “I suspect she’s getting bored of me and I’d really rather not remind her I exist. She’d only try to entertain herself and…” She stopped herself before she finished that thought.

  For once, I did not need her to finish to know what she meant to say and I felt no urge to push her.

  “Technically,” said Miss Davenport. “She’s only invited the fae.”

  “But aren’t you–”

  “Changeling.”

  “I thought–”

  “Many people do.” She smiled a tight, wavering smile before bundling me out of the room.

  She did not elaborate.

  I descended from my tower room, gloved hand pressed against the stonework to steady myself. I was not used to the shape of the dress, with its high waist and columnar skirt. It was lighter than my usual garb and the lack of petticoats and cinching corset distracted.

  Step followed shaky step. The airy slippers were gossamer thin and just as light. Movement was suddenly different and unfamiliar.

  It was a strangeness that it was tempting to call freedom, yet this unanchored movement unsettled me. It filled me with a sense of falling, heart lurching to my throat and a tempest roiling within my chest.

  The long gallery and the corridors of the castle had been transformed. Mab’s servants had covered every wall and ceiling of the corridors with innumerable mirrors and shards of glass. They were of all shapes and sizes, framed in brass and bronze, wood and wonder. They fragmented the light and made the spaces seem at once vast and yet so small compared to the infinity within the mirrors.

  Passing one of the larger mirrors, I caught my reflection in it. There was no illusion to hide that fatigue written on my features. I had not slept well for days, if not weeks. Still, it strangely reminded me of a badly preserved renaissance painting. Time had taken its toll and my paint had aged and flaked, fading the tint of my skin. My eyes looked hollow and sunken, as though the black ink of my eyes had smudged. My dress was a wash of white, where once an artist had painstakingly detailed lace and pearl and slash. All that remained was the rich gold that banded the bodice and the sleeves.

  Behind me, the corridor was reproduced perfectly in its glassy depths, but everything looked colder and darker. I saw all the other mirrors, a hundred thousand reflections, all reflecting. It created a hypnotic pattern.

  Peering like this in a looking glass, it was all too easy to believe such reflections to be the sum of existence, that all was but shadow upon shadow, that the endless worlds were all centred on me, wide-eyed, pale and very afraid.

  Chapter 22

  The Dances in the Clockwork

  Wondrous Ingenuity. – Mr Coppelius Warner, an ingenious watchmaker and jeweller, who occupies a stand at the Polytechnic Institution, has completed the model of a high-pressure steam-engine – so small that it stands upon a fourpenny piece, with ground to spare! It is the most curious specimen of minute workmanship ever seen, each part being made according to scale, and the whole occupying so small a space that, with the exception of the flywheel, it might be covered with a thimble. It is not simply a model outwardly, it works with the greatest activity, by means of atmospheric pressure (in lieu of steam) and the motion of the little thing as its parts are seen labouring and heaving under the first influence is indescribably curious and beautiful.

  Mr Warner is a practised hand at such curiosities. His cases abound with articles manufactured for elfin use. He has scissors so minute that some hundreds of them go to the ounce; and there are knives belonging to the same family, which, small as they are, open and shut with a smart click. Mr Warner, we should imagine, works exclusively for the fairies – no doubt he is entitled by letters of patent to wear Oberon’s arms over his door.

  V.N., “Notes and Notices”, The Mechanics’ Magazine,

  Museum, Register, Journal & Gazette, 1844

  The Masquerade was like clockwork.

  Most use that as an expression, to simply mean that things went smoothly or that there was an element of ritual to the proceedings, but I do not mean that.

  At first it was not obvious to my eyes. Beyond country dances, I had never been to a ball before and it was overwhelming. Dressed and masked, the guests of Mab were scattered. They spoke to each other in small, intimate clusters, feathered fans snapping back and forth with each quip of the conversation. They danced with precision, wheeling across the floor, each step of their tiny slippered feet clicking to the distinctive thirds of waltzing music.

  Above, the ballroom was lit by glittering chandeliers of sinuous tentacles, like jellyfishes of glass. Each feathery tentacle held within its grip a lit candle. They swayed, though not with the music.

  In the minstrel’s balcony, a multitude of birds sang in perfect, rhythmic harmony. This was not the messy, exuberant birdsong of the mornings, nor the lone undulating twitterings of a nightingale. They did not sing the way people would either, warbling a cacophony of notes to create music.

  Instead, each bird sang but a single perfect note and they passed the melody between them. The blackbird would begin the song with a note and then twist its head to the next bird to open its beak.

  The magnificent ceiling was obscured behind glassy ice. Gleaming icicles hung from the ceiling, clinging to the arched rib
s. The painted pendants and moulded bosses of the ceiling were all encased in ice.

  Such augmentations distracted me from immediately noticing that, like any other room of the castle, the lines of it were wrong. The curved ribs of the ceiling supported nothing. The carved pendants and moulded bosses were scattered randomly with no structural purpose, less ornamentation and more the act of uncomprehending mimicry.

  “Cathy!” came my brother’s voice.

  I spun around to find Laon behind me. For all that he reeked of brandy, I smiled at the sight of him. The domino mask did little to hide who he was. Though his costume did rather alter his shape. His black doublet and cape made his shoulders seem wider, and given the slightness of my own slippers, he stood all the taller. He loomed over me and I felt that prickle of annoyance that I have known all my life about his height.

  “You- You’re…” he hesitated before finishing, “You’re quite pretty.”

  The knot within my heart tightened.

  I could simply not remember the last time he had remarked upon my appearance. He said nothing when I twirled before him in old dresses on the eve of my first dance at the squire’s house. Nothing when the village girls and I gigglingly contemplated the prospect of marriage and asked his assessment. Nothing when I attended his first sermon in my best dress and mother’s brooch.

  He must not have done so since we were children.

  My brow furrowed, trying to make sense of that knot within me. It ached with a visceral familiarity, as though I had borne it within me all my life without knowledge of it.

  “I’m sorry,” said my brother. “I should not have said anything.”

  “No,” I told him. A halting reassurance. “I didn’t mean the silence. I was just… I hadn’t realised how long it was since you last said that.”

  A smile wavered at the corners of his lips.

  At the edge of my vision, I could see the unnatural, jerking repetition of a single wave. A grey-haired gentleman stood in a bottle green tailcoat. His left hand held a wineglass which lurched in a single sharp motion towards his lips. He would then tilt back ever so slightly from the waist, snap back, and his hand would resume its former position before moving again towards his lips.

  The wine in his glass did not diminish.

  “Is that man quite alright?” I said, inclining my head towards the odd sight. “He’s… repeating himself?”

  “Do you mean the man in green?”

  I nodded.

  As we watched, wondering if we should approach, a gaunt man in a simply cut frock coat and dishevelled cravat strode over to the man with the wineglass. At the click of his fingers, the music stopped and the room became completely still. Not a single one of the many guests moved. He tugged at the grey curls of the now motionless gentleman, pulling forward the head and clicking something at the back of the man’s neck. The ceramic mask swung open to reveal a ticking interior of clockwork.

  Laon and I watched in fascination as the gaunt man tapped at each of the brass cogs. In the silent stillness of the room, I could hear him humming atonally to himself as he worked.

  I glanced at Laon to ask if he had any idea what was happening, but before I could even utter the words my brother shook his head.

  “I’m afraid I have no idea,” he whispered. “I’ve not seen anything like it before.”

  The man closed the mask and fiddled with whatever controls he had at the base of the clockwork man’s neck. He then strode over to us and reached up behind Laon to manipulate his neck before my brother turned sharply.

  “Whatever are you doing?” demanded Laon.

  The man adjusted his thick spectacles and laughed, an odd staccato sound. “You’re not one of my automata!”

  “Indeed we are not,” said Laon.

  “My most profound apologies,” said the man, proffering his hand for shaking. “Mr Coppelius Warner, watchmaker and jeweller. Always delighted to make the acquaintance of other humans in Arcadia.”

  My brother did not allow Mr Warner’s excessive familiarity to faze him and gave his hand a firm shake. He introduced himself to the watchmaker.

  “You are the missionary! I have heard ever so much about you,” said Mr Warner.

  “I am indeed,” said Laon.

  “Though you need not work your words on me, I am baptised true and true. I am, for my sins, an Englishman,” said Mr Warner.

  “And this is my sister, Miss Catherine Helstone.”

  “Delighted.” The word rolled off his tongue as though a sickening caress. “It is rare to see a thing of beauty within the fae realms. And you are a sight for sore eyes.”

  “Have you been here so long that the pendulum sun and fish moon no longer bring you wonder?” I said, angling the question as a pleasantry even as I was curious about where he fitted into the Pale Queen’s web.

  “I have been here far too long by most counts. But someone has to keep things ticking around here.” The watchmaker made an airy gesture and barely glancing at my brother he said, “I had thought the missionary had a wife, not a sister.”

  “I have no wife.” Laon was staring hard at Mr Warner with a subdued intensity. “Though if you mean Roche, I believe she never left England.”

  “Of course, Roche, the Oxfordian!” The watchmaker did not take his milk-white eyes off me. “I had heard about him. Determined fellow. Man of many questions, but not ones I can really answer. I was touring with the Lady of the Green at the time. Though I do hear he was the one who started this fashion for theology in Arcadia. Soon all the lords and ladies will be acquiring themselves missionaries and situating them in decorative grottos. I should think you’d still look quite fetching in sackcloth.”

  “I should not think myself so wildly clad that my food should be locusts and wild honey,” I quipped.

  “Locusts?” He blinked blindly at me.

  “John the Baptist?” I glanced down, embarrassed; I was too used to how familiar Mr Benjamin was with the Bible. At his uncomprehending silence, I mumbled a hurried explanation: “I had thought you were making a reference to him preaching in the wilderness of Judea? Generation of vipers fleeing the wrath of God? It’s all about urging people towards the waters of repentance.”

  “Ah, a thousand apologies. I was speaking of garden hermits. I had thought them all the rage of late, paying some poor man to wear sackcloth, wander around your folly and spout mystical utterances.”

  “Ah, I see,” I muttered as I felt my brother tense beside me. I too felt the slight and thought again to all the times the Pale Queen called my brother her pet missionary.

  “I think the Weld family had a most excellent hermitage built for theirs in Dorset. All very delightful and pastoral, as you can imagine. Setting up a little home for the hermit and a scatter of rustic possessions. Inviting guests to go ask questions of–”

  “I am not an ornamental hermit,” said Laon, his anger spilling over. I placed a hand on his shoulder and he flinched at my touch but calmed.

  “Heavens, of course not! I was not implying such–”

  “Neither was my predecessor.”

  “Ah, well, yes. Pardon. Great man, of course.” He awkwardly cleared his throat. “I am just a watchmaker. Theology is not my strong suit. Hell and sin and all that.” He strained a laugh and tapping his brow with a finger, he added, “I just work these entertainments.”

  “It is rather impressive,” I said, conceding the change in subject.

  Mr Warner preened at the compliment, an oily smile spreading over his lips. His drawl became all the more pronounced. “I do hope you will pardon my mistaking you for one of my automatons. This is rather my most ambitious work to date.”

  “There are a lot of figures,” said Laon in his most measured tones.

  “Are all of these your automatons?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes. All you see around you. All on Queen Mab’s orders,” said the watchmaker. “The Pale Queen has a deep love of intricate, interlocking machinery. If you want a masquerade to look righ
t, you can’t leave it up to chance. And gentlemen do have a growing reputation for shunning dance.”

  “I see.” I was still rather taken aback by the revelation. My eyes darted about me, taking in each of the figures. A cold chill spread up my spine as I realised none of the people around me were real.

  “The fae are well acquainted with the art of the simulacrum, but the ones they create are… well, shall we just say they aren’t very predictable. They aren’t very good at working with the metals. Dolls of flesh just aren’t the same. Too many variables. Excellent people, but just terrible machines. Too much thinking, or at least too much thinking that they’re thinking.” He clapped his hands together, a sharp motion not unlike one of his automatons. “I should get back to work, though. And for all that I’ll be here for eternity, this needs to be perfect by tonight. The Pale Queen’s orders.”

  He clicked together his fingers and the birds in the minstrel gallery began to sing again, each quivering note filling the icy hall with its clear perfection. The automatons moved in their patterned steps to the beat of the music.

  It was like an enormous automata clock.

  “Cathy, do you think me handsome?” asked Laon as we watched the dancers wheel around us.

  The answer tripped from my tongue before I could stop it and I said, without hesitation: “No.”

  My brother frowned.

  “I didn’t mean for it to be unkind, Laon,” I said. “It’s a silly question. I’ve not looked at you…”

  I caught his gaze. Smiling uncertainly, I cocked my head to one side. I smoothed his furrowed brow with my cold fingers and tucked a lock of his dark hair behind his ear.

  I took a step closer, to see him better. A flush rose within me, unaccustomed to the nearness of him. Without asking, I reached behind him and undid the ribbon of his domino mask. It fell free of his face, and I kept staring.