Johann stopped with the water closet door half open. “No.” He waited until Cornelius looked up, and then he smiled. “I like you talk.” He paused, frowned and corrected. “Your talking. When you talking.”
Heart melting, Conny bussed a kiss on Johann’s cheek. “You’re a darling. Now go ahead and—”
A hard knocking on his bedroom door cut him off. “Cornelius, love? Make yourself decent, because I’m coming in.”
All the blood drained from Cornelius’s face. “Oh God. That’s Valentin. Hide, Johann, hide.”
“I hide,” Johann echoed, and shut the water closet door behind him.
More knocking sounded on the door. “Conny? I hear you in there. I’ve come to collect you. You’ve been holed up in here far too long. The boys weep for the loss of you, and I’m getting bored drying their tears alone.”
Cornelius did a quick sweep of the room to make sure nothing incriminating lay about. He’d been tweaking Johann’s arm, so all those tools were on the table, but that wasn’t anything Valentin would notice. Conny focused his attention on stacking sets of dishes so they looked like piles, not pairs. He’d decided he was almost in the clear when he spied the pallet by the hearth, and he unmade it with his heart in his throat.
Now Valentin was using his entire fist on the door. “Cornelius Francis Stevens.”
“Calm down, I’m coming,” Conny called. Tossing his pillow onto the bed, he kicked the pile of sheets into the corner and headed for the door. Before he opened it, though, he messed up his hair and rubbed his eyes, trying to give himself the look of one who had been working too hard.
He barely had the latch pulled before Valentin burst into the room, dragging a cloud of scent behind him. He positioned himself in the center of Cornelius’s workshop, propping his walking stick on the toe of his ivory suede boot as he took in the room with an eagle eye. “My God, this place is even more of a sty than normal. You haven’t let the maid in? If you tell me you truly have been working on one of your bits of nonsense all this time, I swear I shall throw it in the bin.”
“I have been working.” Conny tried to think of what he could say he’d been working on, since he couldn’t very well produce Johann from the water closet. “A project for Master Félix.”
Valentin rolled his eyes and collapsed into an easy chair, pushing several scrolls of clockwork schematics aside as he did so. “Tedious. And no signs of sex at all. I thought this might have been another one of your slums with some dog from the docks. We all know how you love to dirty your knees for something rough. But it appears you have, inexplicably, been a nun.” He opened his legs and palmed his crotch with a naughty wink. “You must be gagging for it, sweetheart. If you want to take the edge off with me, I won’t mind.”
He and Valentin hadn’t done anything more suggestive with one another than dance since they were in university together, so he knew the offer wasn’t serious, but the thought of Johann hearing Valentin’s salacious tones through the water closet door made him blush and purse his lips. Yes, he was a terrible tart—but not with Johann.
“Enough.” Conny waved a hand. “You’ve made your point. I’ll come to the café tonight. But not for long, and I’m not taking anyone home. I have…a great deal of work to do.”
“You’re the bastard son of Guillory and a rich English actress, living off an allowance and tinkering with clockwork nonsense in a demented old master’s shop. You have no work to do. Nothing you can’t shunt aside for an evening.” Valentin’s eyes narrowed. “Which means there’s something here you don’t want me to see.”
Don’t look at the water closet. Don’t look at the water closet. “That’s nonsense. I’m not in the mood for your games.”
Valentin rose with a snort of disbelief and poked about the piles of clutter. “God bless, Conny, you’ve never been any kind of a liar.” He sighed as he toppled a pile of laundry and kicked aside more schematics. “I’ve never seen you this panicked for me not to find out, though. Most intriguing. This is why I love you, darling. You never let me get bored.”
“There’s nothing to find. I’ve been a hermit, simple as that.” He struggled for a whisper of truth to sell his lie. “I…haven’t been myself since the night the corpse barge came through. It upset me, seeing so many men dead for such a stupid reason.”
Valentin pursed his lips. “Yes, I hear that was terribly grisly. All those stinking Austrians, rotting in your backyard. You should have rung for me, my love. That isn’t the sort of thing one should contemplate alone. I know I was in Paris, but I would have come home for you.”
“I wanted…to work. So I’ve been working.”
“Such a terrible affliction, this yen of yours to work. I blame your mother.” He stopped still at the bed, poked the pillow with his stick, then crowed in triumph. “Ha. I knew it. You have a lover tucked away in here.”
Cornelius’s stomach lurched. “What? I do not.”
With a smirk, Valentin held up one of Johann’s long, dark and slightly curling hairs from the pillow. “You do. This hair says he’s been here, and your zeal to remove me says he’s here right now. I knew you hadn’t lost your inner whore.” His gaze shifted to the water closet, and he laughed. “But of course.”
Cornelius climbed over the easy chair and pressed his body against the door before Valentin could get there. “No. You can’t. Val, you can’t.”
All humor left Valentin’s expression. “Any lover who has you this terrified to introduce him to your friends is no one good at all.”
“I’m not terrifi—” Conny bit off the lie and changed course. “It’s not what you’re thinking. I’m not ready, is all. For introductions.”
Valentin’s eyes went wide. “Don’t tell me you’re sleeping with a woman.”
Conny pressed his hands against Valentin’s chest and gazed pleadingly into his face. “Please—please let it go. You…you can meet him.”
“Yes, as soon as you step aside.”
“No.” Conny curled his fingers into Val’s shirt. “Tonight. You can meet him tonight. I’ll…bring him. To the café.”
“Why on earth can’t I see him now? Is his cock pathetic? You know I’ve endured that before, and I won’t hold it against you. Sometimes they make up with their hands what God has taken away from their root.”
For the first week when Johann had been unconscious, Conny had used a catheter to relieve him. No, there was nothing pathetic about Johann’s penis. “Please. Please, Val. I’ll do anything you ask. Only give me until this evening.”
He wasn’t sure Val would agree, not until he got that tic in his jaw that said he didn’t like it, but he’d endure it. “You’re answering all my questions tonight. And so is he. This smells fishy, and I’ll have the rotten out of it. I’ll be watching the highway too—if you try to run him out of town, I’ll know.”
“I won’t run anyone anywhere. We’ll be there. I promise.”
Val brushed kisses on either side of Conny’s cheek, the greeting he normally would have given at the door. “Be well then, until tonight.”
Conny stayed plastered against the water closet until Val’s footsteps echoed on the stairs, at which point he tore across the room and bolted them inside. Then he pressed his face to the wood as he sank to his knees.
A minute later, he heard the water closet open before the creak, creak of gears announced Johann was crossing the room. He crouched beside Cornelius awkwardly, losing his balance briefly on his mechanical knee. He rested his clockwork hand on Conny’s shoulders. “What happen? Was is passiert?”
“Everything. Everything has gone wrong.” Conny covered his face with his hands. “Oh, why did I let him think you were my lover? I could almost make it work, but how can I keep you in the dark on that point when they behave the way they do? When they know how I normally behave?”
Johann said nothing, only kept up the comforting pressure
on Conny’s shoulders.
“What a cock-up. I’d even scandalize my mother this time.” Conny bit his lip to stop a wave of tears. “But what was I to have done? Let you die? I couldn’t. I should have, but I couldn’t. I have to come up with a fiction. I have to hide as much of your clockwork as I can, and I must invent you a story of origin. I could tell them you were mute, if I could account for the fact that you don’t understand French to the same degree you can’t speak it. Because you’ll be a scandal as soon as they hear your accent. I could lie and say you’re from Berlin, but the least respectable German still knows French. They also don’t have an arm full of Austrian Army tattoos. God help me, this is worse than if I showed up on the arm of a pirate—”
He stopped, lifting his head as the plan unfolded before him.
“Yes. That’s it.” He took Johann’s face in his hands. “You’re going out with me tonight, darling. You’re going to pretend to be my Austrian pirate lover.”
Johann stared at him, uncomprehending.
Cornelius sighed. “Right. I’ll try to figure out how to explain.”
Johann, still unaware of anything Conny said, smiled.
Conny let out a breath to resist kissing that hand. “Sometimes, Johann, I think you’re an avenging angel, come to torture me for my wicked ways.” Patting him on the head, Cornelius rose to his feet. “We’ll start by making a few modifications to your clockwork.”
* * * * *
Cornelius was upset about something, this much Johann understood. Everything else that happened that afternoon was a mystery to him.
As Cornelius unhooked Johann’s right leg, he chattered away in French, making many gestures out the window toward the docks. He kept talking as he took the leg to his workbench and unscrewed the knee. Since Johann had no hope of understanding what Cornelius had to say, he focused on what his friend did. He took the mechanical leg apart for some reason—it wasn’t broken, that Johann could tell, but sometimes Cornelius liked to fuss and fiddle with things simply because he could. This seemed a more involved procedure, though Johann couldn’t work out why it was happening at all.
He gasped in shock when Cornelius sawed off the wooden leg of a small side table and attached it with a screw below the artificial knee.
“Pirate,” Cornelius kept saying, as he attached what was essentially a peg leg onto Johann’s otherwise beautiful, intricate clockwork limb.
Was Cornelius sending him away? He understood the visitor earlier this afternoon had upset his host, but he hadn’t realized that encounter would be the reason he was sent away. He didn’t want to overstay his welcome, but he wasn’t sure he could properly care for his clockwork parts, and without them he had a single hand left of his formerly four functional limbs. He couldn’t even properly crawl from one beggar’s corner to another.
Had this visitor known of Johann’s past, and that was why Cornelius was finished with him?
He was certainly sending him off well-kitted. All afternoon Cornelius had tinkered with Cornelius’s clockwork parts—and then he’d hidden them all. Long black leather gloves covered Johann artificial hand, and what the glove couldn’t manage, great leather cuffs did. Boots hid his left foot, and breeches tucked around his right knee disguised any hint of the clockwork knee and thigh. The peg leg had been roughly screwed into the delicate machinery.
Johann’s amber eye was hidden behind a leather eyepatch. Most of Johann’s body was covered in leather—leather vest, leather coat with long tails that brushed the floor, wide-brimmed leather hat. It had to have cost the earth to procure—and from where it came, Johann didn’t know, only that Cornelius left without it and returned with a wheelbarrow full of parcels. It was well-gilded stuff too, full of filigree and ornament and rivets. Once he had Johann kitted out, he sat him down on the bed and stared intently into his eyes as he spoke slowly and carefully.
“You are pirate,” he said, touching Johann’s leather vest. “Sky pirate.”
Johann’s heart sank. “You take me to ship?”
“Non, un faux pirate.”
Johann shook his head in confusion. “Je ne comprends pas.”
Cornelius bit his lip, and as always the nervous tic tugged at Johann’s heart. He would miss that lip-biting more than anything else.
Cornelius stood and paced, murmuring to himself. Eventually he stopped and took Johann’s hat and eyepatch away, and put them on himself. “Grr, je suis un pirate.” He hunched down as he said this, playing out a rather bad caricature of story-time pirates. He swiped several random tools from his workbench, still growling at random. Then he winked, smiled and put down the tools as he shook his head. “Non, je ne suis pas une pirate. Je suis inventeur.” He mimed fixing the lower half of Johann’s leg. “Je ne suis pas une pirate. Je suis un faux pirate.”
Johann did a rough translation. I am not a pirate. I am a…something pirate.
Cornelius pointed to his eyepatch. “Ce n’est qu’un déguisement.” He took the patch and hat off and put them back on Johann. He made his rather bad pirate face again. “Voilà, maintenant vous êtes le pirate.” He winked and shook his head. “Non, vous êtes un soldat. Vous êtes un faux pirate.”
Johann’s eyes widened. I’m not a pirate, I’m a soldier. But I’m…pretending? “I am pretend pirate? No ship?”
Cornelius beamed. “Non. No ship.”
Relief rolled off Johann like fog. Dare he press his luck? He had to know, though. “Johann…is stay with Cornelius?” He mimed picking up a bag and walking in place from his chair before nodding at the door. “I no go?”
Cornelius gasped. “Non.” He clutched Johann’s hands tightly. “Vous restez avec moi.”
Johann was fairly sure Cornelius had just said he must stay with him. He let out a ragged sigh. “Merci, Cornelius.”
Cornelius drew their joined hands to his mouth and kissed each of Johann’s sets of knuckles. Then he rose and brought Johann to his feet as well before handing him his cane. “Come. We go outside. Together.” He tucked Johann’s arm into his. “I will help you walk.”
They walked together out the door to Cornelius’s room, into a narrow hallway, then down a set of open stairs leading to a small kitchen, where a young lady was bent over a kettle of laundry. She scolded Cornelius in angry French, but she regarded Johann warily. As far as Johann could tell, she was demanding to know who Johann was and where he had come from.
Cornelius responded breezily, calling Johann pirate and repeatedly putting a hand on Johann’s chest. It felt nice, and he was sorry when Cornelius stopped touching him and urged him out of the kitchen and through the workshop.
There was a tiny tinker shop in a larger village near Johann’s back home, but it was nothing like the one he walked into now on Cornelius’s arm. Shelves towered over him, stuffed full of clockwork. There were a few mechanical body parts here and there, but not many. Most were tools, household gadgets and several things Johann couldn’t imagine a utility for, like a clockwork mouse.
A man stood at a workbench in the middle of the room, an old man with a long, shaggy white beard and thick spectacles—they had some kind of extended lens on them which reminded Johann of his false eye. When the old man saw Cornelius, he took off the spectacles and greeted him warmly. As he noticed Johann, his expression went still, an unreadable mask. “Who is this?”
“My pirate friend,” Cornelius said, leaning on Johann’s arm. “He’s staying with me.” Cornelius gestured from the old man to Johann. “Johann, this is Master Félix. Master Félix, Johann.”
Félix began to rattle on in French, until Cornelius let him know Johann didn’t speak much. “A foreign pirate?” Félix clucked his tongue. “You will get into trouble.”
Cornelius winked and placed a hand on Johann’s chest. “Trouble is so much fun,” he said in a saucy voice that made something tingle in Johann’s groin. Though that may have been because of the wink.
The tingling sensation lingered as Cornelius led Johann out of the shop. Johann still walked clumsily with his mechanical legs, but the wooden stump was even clumsier to maneuver, and he feared knocking over the delicate clockwork, equipment spilling over every available surface. He told himself fear made his insides feel funny, not the lingering memory of the way Cornelius had looked at him. The wink. The tone of his voice.
Johann had no idea what that had been about. Cornelius touched him all the time, but something about that touch, that look…what had that been for? And why did thinking of it make Johann feel like his one real knee would go out? Why did it make his guts tangle in a way that made him ache for Cornelius to look at him again?
Cornelius didn’t look at him, though. In fact, as they descended the steps of the emporium to the street, Cornelius seemed especially subdued, almost blushing. He wore his velvet top hat and a natty jacket with a silk scarf wrapped around his throat, and he seemed to shrink into them both, until someone he knew greeted him, at which point he became flirty and touchy again.
Cornelius was very pretty, Johann thought. The fine clothes suited him.
Uncharacteristically, however, Cornelius didn’t chatter, not even a little bit. Something was wrong, but Johann had no idea how to fix it. As they rounded the corner onto a main street, Johann stopped under a gaslight and put his good hand on Cornelius’s shoulder.
Cornelius startled, jumpy as a cat. “What’s wrong?”
That was what Johann was going to ask Cornelius. He indexed his French for a different query. “You are not happy. Sad. Afraid. Why?”
Cornelius bit his lip, but this time the tic made Johann ache for him. “We must pretend. For my friends.”
Clockwork Heart: Clockwork Love, Book 1 Page 3