Shanghai Sparrow

by Gaie Sebold

  Eveline stood in her shift and stockings, shivering. Miss Fortescue joined her, her arms piled with clothes. Pulling Eveline around like a small child with a new doll, she dressed her, did things to her hair, and crammed a cap on her head. Then she pulled her out from behind the screen and sat her at a table by the window, where a mirror reflected back a small, pallid face under an overlarge tweed cap. “Not bad,” Miss Fortescue said. “But you still look like a girl. Class, pay attention. For a more masculine appearance, enlarge the nose. Just a bit, no need to make a Mr Punch of yourself.” She opened a pot containing a strange pink substance. “This is putty. It’s too pink, but it will do for this occasion.” She looked at Eveline via her reflection. “You’ll learn to make up your own, to match your skin. There’s no use using prosthetics the wrong colour, they’re far too obvious. You’re better off without. A little darkening on the jaw – not too much, just to square it, a brush of stubble. Don’t overdo it or you’ll look like a chimney sweep. Less is more, girls, less is always more.”

  By the time she had finished, a slight but definite boy was looking out of the mirror. Eveline grinned at her reflection. She liked this class.

  Treadwell said something to one of the other girls and an outburst of giggling followed. Miss Fortescue paid it no mind. Eveline noticed, but didn’t let it trouble her overmuch.

  AFTER DISGUISE, SHE was sent to the Old Barn. Low sun spilled across the front of the school, warming the ugly bricks to a gentler glow, and laying long tree-shadows on the rich green grass. The sound of champing and shuffling came from the stables.

  Eveline paused, suddenly overwhelmed with memory. Home. The neighbour’s horses in the field, the chuffling of hens, the chatter of goblins in the roof of the barn. Sweet apples dropping on the grass for the wasps to find, if she didn’t get to them first.

  Aiden, sitting on a branch, swinging his legs, smiling and calling out that she was slow, slow, she should come and see the spider-web all jewelled with dew that he had found for her... he had lifted it entire from its branch and placed it around her neck, flickering and glittering, a dance of tiny rainbows. But when, hours later, she meant to show Mama, it had all melted away.

  She turned away from the sun and the woods and the memory and marched into the barn, her back rigid.

  The Old Barn was a cavern of drifting dust and subtle gleams and pigeon-droppings. It smelled of oil and metal and the ghosts of long-gone hay. Something clanged, and a great plume of steam hissed out past Eveline, making her jump backwards.

  “What is it?” A man appeared out of the steam, pushing back a pair of goggles like those the steam hansom drivers wore. He had a long, sour face and straight, thinning hair, and walked as though his joints had not been properly tightened, all lope and dangling hands. He wore what looked like a butcher’s apron, only made of leather, and thick leather gauntlets. “What do you want?”

  “I’m here for Mechanics,” Eveline said.

  “Hah! Well I suppose you’d better come in.”

  “She’s here to study Etheric science, Mr Jackson,” came a voice. Hastings, also aproned and goggled.

  “Oh, you’re that girl,” Mr Jackson said. “Etheric science. Hah. Hastings, show her the...” He gestured towards the back of the barn and turned away towards some great drum-bodied thing of tubes and dials and ugly dark-red paint like drying blood.

  “Yes, Mr Jackson,” Hastings said. “Come along, all the stuff’s over here. At least, what there is.”

  “But I don’t...” Eveline said. Etheric science? That was her mama’s work. She hadn’t heard the words in so long...

  Feeling a strange fluttering in her throat, she followed Hastings.

  A long, battered table stood by the wall. And on it... Eveline felt a sudden sharp pain around her heart, as though something had sunk its claws into her chest. She backed away, and sat down abruptly on a pile of old sacks.

  Hastings realised she had lost her follower and turned round. “Is something wrong? Are you ill?”

  “I’m not ill,” Eveline said, once she had her breath back, still staring at the machines. “Where’d those come from?”

  Hastings looked at them and shrugged in her turn. “I don’t know, they just arrived. They’re Etheric machines, or that’s what Mr Jackson says.”

  Eveline struggled to her feet. Hay dust puffed up around her, smelling of lost summers.

  She walked over to the machines, carefully, slowly, as though they might turn on her like badly-treated dogs. She reached out her hand and ran it over a dial, stroked a loop of wire, caressed a layer of dust from a gleaming wooden casing.

  “What is it?” Hastings said. “What’s the matter?”

  “These were my mother’s.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure! See that chip?” Eveline pointed to the corner of a rosewood box with a flat, gleaming silver plate set into its top. “I done that when I was little, playing shuttlecock in her workroom. She’d told me not to...” Her voice broke and stopped. She swallowed down her grief, feeling it battling something else, something rising up the other way. “What are they doing here?”

  “They were brought here for you, I suppose. What happened to your mama?”

  “She died. She got some sort of sickness and she died.”

  “Oh.” Hastings crumpled the edge of her apron in her fingers, staring at her feet. “I’m sorry.”

  “Where’s yours?”

  Hastings shook her head. “Birmingham, I think. Do you know how these work?”

  Eveline looked at them, still strange and beautiful, gleaming under their dust. “They sing. They used to sing. But I don’t know how to make them do it, it was my mama did that. I don’t know why Holmforth thinks I can do it. He –”

  Holmforth. He must have got these from Uncle James’s.

  You may have the skills I need...

  Her thoughts were whirling like a carousel at the fair. She stared at the machines, through a blur of tears, wiping them away with her hands.

  “Hastings! Stop chattering and bring me that hammer.” Mr Jackson, head and shoulders inside the red machine, his voice distorted by the drum, gestured vaguely at a rack on the wall hung with tools.

  “We’ll talk in a little,” Hastings said. “He’ll forget I’m here soon, he usually does.” She touched Eveline’s arm. “Sit down, you look awful.”

  Hastings scurried off, and Eveline picked up the machine with the rabbit-ear on top, the one she remembered most clearly, and sat on one of the ancient rickety chairs, holding it on her lap the way she had held Charlotte, so long ago.

  The Crepuscular

  FOX FELT AN impulse in himself to go home... or at least, back. Home didn’t really apply any more. That was gone, such as it had been, and the land where it had stood was covered now with crammed, ugly buildings that no longer carried the scent of his family. No trees stood now to hush in the wind and shed leaves into spice-scented mounds of quick rustling life. The smell of snow was tainted as soon as it fell, and bore no delicate prints pointing the way to prey. Instead it was mushed almost immediately to a granular yellow-grey slush that held few marks, and stank of disease and bitter chemicals.

  But something was happening. Fox knew the wind, he felt its shift, the tiny movements within the greater movements, harbingers of change. It was his necessity and his joy, to dance along the edges of things, seeing the patterns in what those at the centre ignored as insignificant. And something was ruffling his fur, making the fine hairs in his ears shiver. A breeze, thin and tiny as a thread come loose from its reel, which could unspool and set a typhoon spinning. What it was, yet, he didn’t know. But there was something. His mother’s people, such meddlers as they were, were forever poking into things. He had seen nothing yet to tempt his mistress, but he kept his nose to the winds of change, and this still-tiny breeze smelled of brass and oil – and advantage.

  He had spent enough time recently in the Crepuscular, and longed for the crude and bril
liant warmth of his other life. It was time to pass back again, to wear the other mask.

  Sometimes he wondered what his own face looked like, and even if he still had one. But then everyone wore masks. Everyone switched from upper to lower, man to master, bowing the head here and flicking the whip there. He saw all the hierarchies clearly, and though he might dance within them, he knew that it was all a game of masks.

  There was, of course, the girl. She intrigued him. Her cleverness was pleasing, and like him she danced along the edges of things.

  Though, perhaps, not for long. She triggered his sensitive nose. She smelt... significant. Whatever this shift was, she was bound into it.

  Also, he liked her. She wore masks, too, of necessity – but sometimes he glimpsed beyond them.

  Only when he was curled up alone, one eye open on the verge of sleep, did the thought ever creep past his defences of how good it would be not to wear a mask, to rest from the endless dance of hierarchy and favour, and be simply himself. But he was no longer sure he had a self to be.

  The Britannia School

  EVELINE TOUCHED THE machines, running her finger over a lever, or the groove where a ball bearing should run. So hard to remember those voices her mother had drawn from them like fine gold wires. So hard to remember how it had been near the end, when she had started making them all sing together. She could remember it was like being in a wonderful cave all made of music, but she couldn’t remember what it sounded like, or how to make it happen again.

  Her mother’s hands had moved on them so surely. Her own hands were neat and quick at their work, but their work was thieving, not this. Tears kept coming, trickling down her face and soaking her collar. With pounding head and aching throat, she tried to think. Hastings came back.

  “Hastings, how’d you know these were Etheric machines?”

  “I saw some in a book. I told you, I like machines.”

  “Do you know how they work?”

  Hastings gave her a sideways look. She seemed ill-at-ease. “They make noises, and they’re supposed to have some sort of effect on people. That’s all I know. Your mama never taught you?”

  “I was eight.”

  “I’ve been interested in machines at least as long as that,” Hastings said. “It’s why I’m here.”

  “Well I wasn’t interested, not then, all right?” Eveline snapped. “How was I to know she was going to die?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Anyway, what do you mean it’s why you’re here?”

  Hastings fidgeted with a coil of wire that lay on the bench. “I was forever messing with things, taking them apart to see how they worked. Mama tried to beat it out of me. She thought I might make a decent marriage – she was daft. I’m a bastard, no-one respectable was going to marry me. Anyway, she wrote to my father and he got me put in here. She told me it was that or Bedlam. This is better.”

  “She said you’d go to Bedlam?”

  “If I didn’t do as I was told.”

  Eveline grimaced. She’d heard about Bedlam, where all the mad people got kept – but she’d never thought you could be put in there just for liking machines. “She wrote to your father?”

  “Yes. She didn’t normally – he’d only pay for my upkeep if she kept out of his way and didn’t embarrass him.”

  “So they’re not married.”

  “I’m a bastard, like I said.”

  “Well, I’m an orphan.”

  “Orphan’s respectable.”

  “Not if you’re a thief.”

  Hastings shrugged. “Well, he didn’t want me, and in the end nor did she, so it hardly matters, does it? Do you remember how any of these work?”

  “Sort of. Maybe. Some of them. But... I know how to get some of them started, but I don’t know what the noises are supposed to do. Or how.”

  “You don’t remember that?”

  “No. Were there any notebooks, when it was all brought in? Mama had dozens of them.”

  “I didn’t see any, I’m sorry. Why do they want you to study this, anyway?” Hastings said.

  “I wish I knew. It’s why I’m here.” Eveline frowned at the instruments, looking so strange in this big clanging dusty space, bits of her childhood yanked from the past and dropped in front of her. What did Holmforth want, with the instruments, and with her?

  And if she couldn’t make them work, what would happen then?

  “Hastings, you ever done any of this?”

  “What, Etherics? No. Most people...” She hesitated, glanced over where Mr Jackson was still waist-deep in his machine. “No.”

  “Most people what? Come on, you’ve been chewing on something since you said what they were.”

  Hastings sighed. “Most people think it’s nonsense. I’m sorry, Evvie. They either think it’s nonsense or that it’s something only some people have an ability for – that it’s like having red hair, something you’re born with. And it’s mostly women. So, even people who believe in it don’t think it’s important.”

  “Well, if it were something you were born with, I’d know, wouldn’t I? Anyway I don’t believe it. She worked hard, my mama. Harder’n anyone. Day and night, sometimes. She didn’t just know what to do from the day she was born.”

  Hastings looked at the mechanisms, rubbing her nose. “It’s never made sense to me,” she said. “If people get a chance to learn things they can do things, mostly. Some people are better at some things, yes; but I don’t think it’s in you when you’re born. It’s like thinking only men can do engines. I can make an engine work, I learned.”

  “‘Men’re good for doing plenty, but women can do that plus twenty,’ that’s what... someone I know says. She liked mechanisms, too, she just wasn’t much good at ’em. I don’t think it was anything to do with being female, though. It’s not like you gotta hold a spanner in your dick, is it?”

  Hastings frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “You do know what a dick is?” Eveline said. Hastings shook her head. “You know. A chappie’s chappie, his....” Seeing Hastings’ utter bemusement, she said, “What he pisses outa.”

  Hastings clapped a hand over her mouth and choked behind it, her cheeks bright red.

  “’Sall right,” Eveline said. “Jackson ain’t listening.”

  “Yes, well, I was!” Hastings said, her eyes screwed up with laughter. “Oh, don’t let Mr Jackson hear!”

  “He’s got his ears fulla steam.”

  Eventually Hastings got control of herself.

  “So you got no idea how they work?” Eveline said.

  “I don’t even know if they do.”

  “Oh, they do. My mama could make them work. She was getting somewhere, before she got sick. Mr Jackson know anything?”

  “He doesn’t believe in it either, so probably not.”

  “Well that’s a fat lot of good, then.” Eveline sighed and kicked at the straw. “Now what’m I to do? If I don’t work out how they work, I’m like as not out on my ear. Or worse,” she said. “That Holmforth, I don’t trust him a farthing’s worth.”

  “Who’s Holmforth?”

  “He’s the cove what brought me here. He’s the one thinks I know how to make these work, because... wait a minute, he thinks Uncle James could do Etherics. He mentioned him. He never mentioned Mama at all.”

  “I don’t understand,” Hastings said.

  “Never mind. I do. Bloody Uncle James pretended it was his work. Holmforth must have been one of the people he took it to. Don’t know why Holmforth is interested now the miserable old bastard’s dead.” There was a sudden clang and a bout of muffled swearing from the other side of the room.

  “What is that thing he’s fadgetting with?” Eveline said.

  “Jackson’s Velocitator.”

  “Velocitator?”

  “That’s what he calls it. It’s an advanced version of a steam car, much more powerful... or it would be, if... Never mind,” she said.

  “If what?”

  “If he’d let
me work on it. I’ve got lots of ideas. But he’s one who thinks you should have to hold a spanner in... you know.”

  But Eveline was barely listening. She could see that cosy little room, the fatly upholstered armchair, the little embroidered footstool in front of the fire. Her feet, in warm stockings, resting on the footstool. The tines of a fork dimpling the grease-shining skin of a sausage. The footstool was embroidered with blue and yellow lilies, like the dusty stolen curtains in Ma Pether’s room.

  The little room shrank and greyed, fading out of her reach.

  If she displeased him... well, she might just end up dumped in the country miles from anywhere, with no money. If she was lucky. And if she made it back to London... if Holmforth thought Ma wouldn’t know she’d been taken up by someone who smelled like law, within minutes of it happening, he was a fool. Not that he needed to care – he wasn’t the one that would have to try and persuade her to take Evvie in again, convince her that Evvie hadn’t spilled every bean on her plate to Holmforth and whoever he worked for.

  Ma Pether’d never trust her again. Never. Which meant half the Newgate birds in London would have no use for this particular sparrow, neither.

  She had to make the machines work.

  KNOWLEDGE, THAT WAS the key. Without it, she was helpless. She needed to know more about Holmforth and what he wanted, about the instruments and what they did. And until she could speak to Holmforth again, the only person she knew who might know something was Miss Cairngrim.