Item by item, the basket's contents were restored. But the green thread was not among them. Margarete sighed. "Sometimes," she said wistfully, "I wish that I could be Gretchen. Poor Margarete! She's a good girl who does all her chores without complaining. But Gretchen has all the fun. Sometimes I wish that I could—he's doing it again!"
"He is? I missed it."
Margarete gathered her skirts and stood. "I suppose we'd best go inside."
That was the summer when the pergola came down. It had gone up years before, when Margarete's father decided he could afford to move his warehousing elsewhere and convert the courtyard into a private garden. Her mother had supervised construction of the pergola over the arched carriageway and then, to amuse her husband, trained white roses up the one side and red up the other. Three years later, when the flowering vines finally met and entangled, it was Margarete who was given the honor of explaining to her father that they were reenacting the War of the Roses. He had laughed himself blue, then, and the incident had since become his favorite family story.
The carriageway had to be enlarged, though. The building through which it ran—its tenants had been ousted for an expansion of Faust's workshops—was propped up on jacks and reinforced. Workmen came to chop down, bundle, and cart away the roses. A temporary roof was then raised over the trampled earth of what had been the garden to shelter the smiths and foundry-men laboring there to build a black iron dragon of a machine that they called Locomotive.
Watching, silent, Margarete felt her childhood flitting away.
Through the first half of that long and magical summer, the Reinhardts held a series of evening and afternoon parties under the roses, at which Faust unveiled wonder after wonder. He demonstrated his magic lantern device, which utilized an electric arc light and a series of glass slides upon which Albrecht Diirer himself had been commissioned to paint perspectives of the city, exotic foreign animals, the Nativity, a skeletal Death in conversation with a knight, and a quite striking portrait of Faust himself. Through a cunning optical arrangement, the pictures were thrown up, magnified, upon a wall newly whitewashed for this purpose. Afterwards Faust gave a lecture on a scheme for making these pictures move, as if alive, that dazzled and befuddled all who heard it.
Another time he introduced his sewing-machine. A pretty young seamstress, all ribboned silk and Dresden-doll porcelain skin, had been engaged to demonstrate its use. Pumping the treadle with one slim foot, she sewed together the pieces for a handsome velvet suit in a fraction of the time true sewing required. At the end of the evening Margarete's father went inside to don the suit and emerged amid applause to delightedly pronounce it a perfect fit. Sophia opined that there was something sinful in this new device, that it would lead to vanity and opulence. But "It's no worse than being rich," Margarete said thoughtfully, "and having other people do all your sewing."
Money was everywhere that season. Herr Reinhardt bought a walled garden twice the size of the courtyard, so the parties could continue uninterrupted. It had a fountain and roses as well, bigger ones than Margarete had ever been able to grow, though she did not like them half so well as her own.
Thus it was that, thinking back on it later, Margarete was never sure whether it was in this garden or the other that the midsummer's eve gathering had been held. Faust's primary revelation that afternoon was the ice-box. It was a deceptively simple invention consisting of an insulated cabinet with several shelves for food, a place for a large block of ice, and a drip pan which had to be emptied twice daily.
"But there's no money in it!" her father had objected upon its unveiling. "Anyway, what's the point of a box that keeps food cold?!" Several of the portly distinguished men present nodded agreement; Margarete had observed that they were only truly satisfied with Faust's revelations when they had a clear military application. None of them appeared to notice the quick glances the women threw one another.
"Who's going to buy such a thing?" a foundry-master asked rhetorically.
"I would," Frau Reinhardt said firmly and to her husband's obvious astonishment. "If the ice were readily available."
"That's already arranged!" Faust cried. "Farmers, you know, often harvest ice from their ponds during the winter and pack it in sawdust-lined pits for summer storage. Last winter, I persuaded one to expand his operation. He has agreed to bring in a wagon-load a week. I'm afraid that will limit our production at first—I could convince him to no more—but when they see the profits to be made, other farmers will want to get in on the business. Come spring we can begin selling in earnest. By summer every housewife in Nuremberg will want a box. By fall she will be a discontented woman indeed who does not have one."
As he talked, Wagner, his fanatically humorless assistant, sat at a distance endlessly cranking a secondary invention. "Do you have any idea what that young spindle-shanks is laboring at?" Aunt Penniger asked out of the corner of her mouth.
"I saw him pour in cream earlier," Margarete said doubtfully.
"Maybe it's a new variety of butter-churn," Sophia hazarded.
"There's ice involved, too. See how he shifts the tub? That's because it's cold."
"Who invited the English spy? Does your father know he's here?" Aunt Penniger said suddenly. And, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, "Be sure to watch to see who he leaves with."
"Now, who would he leave with?" Margarete asked, amused.
"A woman, of course. He's a long way from home, after all. I know how men are when there's nobody to keep an eye on them. I myself remember..Her voice trailed off.
"Go on," Sophia urged her.
"No, no—it's not a fit tale for ears as young as yours."
Aunt Penniger loved to imply for herself a romantic past; she was that sort of innocent much given to the manufacture of old affairs from the flimsiest and least promising of materials. On a winter's eve, when her nieces were indulgent and the kitchen fire was burning low, she would fill its ashes and embers with enough soldiers, priests, and dashing adventurers jilted, spurned, and surrendered to, to make her the wickedest woman in all of Christendom.
"Wagner's turning grey," Margarete said.
"He's certainly working hard," Sophia agreed.
"If it is a butter-churn," Aunt Penniger sniffed, "I don't want one. It's easily as much work as the old."
Now Faust went to his assistant and opened up the tub, as he had several times earlier, and this time decided its contents were ready. "Ladies! Ladies! Gather around!" he cried. "Gentlemen too—but let the ladies have the closer places. Come all, and see!"
The party coalesced upon him, women inward, men on the outside, trying not to look curious. Herr Reinhardt stood churlishly aloof, talking with two Dominicans. He glanced once over his shoulder at the gathering and scowled.
All in a flash, Margarete saw her father anew: saw first that he was jealous of his master artificer's successes, then that he was angered by Faust's unsubtle treatment of him as an intellectual inferior, and finally that he resented this characterization all the more for its being true. A sudden giddiness came over her, like the suicide's abrupt realization after she's stepped off the cliff that there's no ground beneath her feet, and no undoing that rash act. Once thought, it could not be denied.
Margarete's love for her father remained constant as ever. But he had dwindled in her estimation.
A cool wisp of steam rose from the open tub. Flourishing a silver spoon he had earlier borrowed from Frau Reinhardt, the master engineer dug into the contents, emerging with something white and firmly textured.
"I shall need a volunteer. You ... you ..The spoon floated high to dip toward first old Pirckheimer's young Heidi, then toward Sophia, who flushed with quick embarrassment. "Or you." It came to rest pointing at Margarete.
Faust thrust the spoon toward her lips. "Open your mouth and close your eyes," he said playfully. Then, when she had reluctantly obeyed, "Now taste."
Margarete closed her mouth upon something cold, smooth, incredibly delicious.
Her eyes opened wide.
Faust chuckled. "It's called ice cream."
The ladies, seeing her reaction to the new confection, pushed forward, clamoring for their own tastes. Sophia was jostled and shoved away from Faust's hovering spoon and fetched up against his assistant's knees, which still clutched the device. Dimpling impishly, she dipped two fingers into the tub to scoop up a taste of the sweet.
But before she could snitch any, Wagner seized her wrist and solemnly shook his head no.
With a crisp swirl of skirts, she turned her back on him.
"Naughty, naughty," Margarete said teasingly. "What would Father Imhoff say if he saw you try that?"
In a fury, Sophia rounded on her. "Oh, it's easy enough for some people! They're never poor, or plain, or at a loss for what to say. Men fall out of the trees at their feet. Their hair is always perfect, and they never have crooked teeth. Their parents never die!"
In tears, she fled the garden.
Margarete stood frozen with astonishment.
The English spy, Will Wycliffe, chose that precise and inconvenient instant to approach her. "At last, Fraulein Rain-hard," he said in his famously odd accent, "an innovation simple enough that even I can understand it—I mean the icebox, of course. You don't suppose your father would be offended if I wrote a description of it back home to my wife? So she could have one made. She'd be ever so pleased with me for doing so, I think—and that's a rare situation for an old married man to find himself in."
"I very much doubt that my father would object," Margarete said distractedly. The garden gate slammed. She could not see which way Sophia had gone.
"That's quite kind of you." Wycliffe took Margarete's arm and led her a few paces away, out of casual earshot of the other partygoers. "There's something else I've had in mind, but didn't want to bother your father over. He's such a busy man, everybody always wanting his help with this or that, it's a wonder he has any time for his family at all. But I'd dearly love to see his new factory, you know. Not that I'd know one end from the other, mind, but everybody speaks of it so. Perhaps you could—"
Margarete drew herself back from him. "Surely you're not suggesting," she said, "that I go there alone with you."
"No, no!" Wycliffe raised shocked hands in protest. "I'm not suggesting anything improper. Of course you couldn't take me there, the two of us alone. Heaven forfend. But if you were to lend me the key, I could nip over and have a quick peek. I wouldn't disturb a thing, I swear, and I'd have the key back to you in a blink."
Straightening into her most witheringly formal posture, Margarete said, "You'll have to speak with my father about that."
"Ah, well," Wycliffe said, "you can't blame a man for trying, now can you?" He gave her a wink and a smile so wry and roguish and self-mocking all at once that Margarete immediately forgave him everything. He was an old scamp, but there was no real harm in him. "And I really do admire your father, you know. He's a good fellow, solid stuff, backbone of his country. He'd be right at home in London." Softly then, as if talking to himself, he said, "But this inventor-man of yours, he's something quite remarkable. I can't imagine where he came from. Something of a prodigy, innee? Like a chimera or a comet in human form. I shouldn't be surprised he's one of the great men of the age."
"Yes, that may very well be. Everyone says he's a great man." Margarete's voice grew thoughtful as well. "But, you know, sometimes I think that he may not be a very good man."
That same summer, to demonstrate his steam engine, Faust had a great wooden wheel erected in the new garden, with swings set regularly about it upon which one might sit and be swung up into the peaceful sky, as high as a church steeple and then back down again.
Margarete loved the wheel. She went on it as often as she was allowed.
On its first day the wheel's riders went up without regard for age or gender, so that the laughter of couples both married and not was to be heard over half the parish. But then the young men realized how naturally a reassuring arm could be placed about a girl on the sudden, giddy elevation, and a swift kiss stolen at the top where, briefly, all was serenity and an unexpectedly buoyant floating sort of sensation, as if the riders had stepped for an instant outside the world and all its obligations. So the Dominicans intervened, decrying the invention as a hazard to the public morals and demanding that women not be allowed on it. An angry delegation from the convent of Saint Clara quickly put an end to that, however, and it was decided that simply segregating the sexes would suffice.
Then it was discovered that while the young ladies were being hoisted into the air, rude boys would stand underneath looking up, hoping for a glimpse of something forbidden. So an officer from the castle was assigned to stand guard with drawn sword to keep the rascals at a distance, a service that was regarded by the young ladies themselves with mingled gratitude and disdain.
On the wheel's third day, Margarete went up with Aunt Penniger. Margarete sat first. While her aunt was being helped onto the swing by a serious-faced monk, she glanced upward, at the very top of the wheel. There she saw, as the monk did not, a girl no older than herself, drawing the attention of the boys by kicking her skirts in a way that deliberately flirted with immodesty. She was as laughing and wild as Gretchen herself. Margarete sighed and crossed her ankles over a fold of her dress as the Dominican directed and, with a muttered word of caution and an abrupt mechanical jerk, was swung halfway up the wheel.
Aunt Penniger shrieked on the upswing and immediately closed both eyes tight. Turning, she clutched at Margarete with strong, bony fingers tight as pincers, and buried her face in the girl's side.
"Do you want me to wave for the monk to stop the wheel and let you off?" Margarete asked anxiously.
"No!" her aunt gasped. "No, I'll just keep my eyes closed." The wheel swung them abruptly down, and she shrieked again. "It's not that bad, really."
Margarete prised her arm from between their bodies and gently, lovingly, stroked her aunt's dry old hair. She was a tiny woman, and comforting her thus gave Margarete a taste of what motherhood must be like. Her heart went out entirely to this small, needy, and good-hearted creature.
It was so pleasant up here! Up she went, high into the cool air and then swooshing down again. She couldn't help but feel happy. All the neighborhood spread itself out before her, as bright and variegated as a patchwork quilt. Then down.
"We have to talk." Aunt Penniger spoke into Margarete's shoulder. Her voice was muffled and indistinct.
"What?"
"Talk! You girls are coming to an age when we have to find you husbands. You know that, don't you?"
"I—I suppose I do." The wheel went sliding down again, and Aunt Penniger's fingers clenched spasmodically. Margarete would have bruises in the morning, for sure.
"Tell me. Do you think Faust would make a good husband?"
Down went the wheel, and Margarete's stomach with it. Marry Faust? Despite everything, she had never seriously considered the possibility. Not that he was too old—ten years was not an unreasonable weight of authority for a husband to possess—but that he was too ... strange. Too intimidating. Faust seemed to her not so much a man as a force of nature—a storm, or volcano, or a tidal wave. "Father's not exactly fond of him, is he?" she said cautiously.
"He may not have the choice/' Aunt Penniger said. "Oh!" she squeaked. Then: "But if not Faust, then somebody must be arranged for Sophia, and quickly."
"Sophia?"
The wheel went sweeping up. It was not an improvement.
"I don't know if you've noticed how changeable she is lately. Disobedient, sulky, given to sudden and inappropriate bursts of anger or tears, forever mooning about Faust's workshops. Oh, I know the symptoms only too well. I remember, when I was young ... well, no matter. A match must be made, and soon. Or there'll be trouble."
"Auntie, I confess I haven't seen as much odd behavior from her as you have."
Her aunt peered up at her from between folds of bunched cloth. It was like looking down into a he
rmit crab's shell at the twin gleams of its eye-stalks. "Well, of course. You two are like sisters, naturally she'd hide it from you. Me, I'm only a foolish old lady—so she thinks. Nobody takes me seriously, and I see a lot as a result. You'd be surprised how much I see."
At the very top, the wheel paused, swinging lightly, while riders below debarked and were replaced. A lively tune, played on drum and sackbut, floated up from the musicians her father had engaged to keep those waiting in line amused. It helped disguise the thumping, clattering, and groaning noise of the engine.
She saw Faust's unsmiling assistant, Wagner, hurry by below, head down and shoulders hunched with concentration. Like master, like servant, she thought. The wheel swung Margarete away.
"How do you know it's Faust? Did she tell you?"
"Tell me? Nobody tells me anything. But it's obvious enough, I should think. Just yesterday, I called for her to take a loaf of bread and some cheese over to Faust and his assistant for their lunch. She came into the room dragging her feet, glowering, sighing with exasperation. But when I told her the errand, oh! how she brightened. She practically skipped, she was so anxious to see him again. Then she returned too quickly to have gotten anything more than a nod and a grunt of thanks—you know how men are—and one would have thought her life was over, her face was so dark and despairing. You tell me. And Tuesday! Last Tuesday—"
As Aunt Penniger prattled, the wheel swung them both to the top again. Margarete saw Wagner stop abruptly as Sophia stepped in front of him, hands on hips. They swung down again.
Like a dumb-show, the story unfolded in a series of still images, one for every topping of the wheel. On the second turn, Wagner had his hands spread out in an attitude of astonishment and protested innocence. On the third, Sophia reached out as if to slap him, but on the fourth it was clear that she had merely tapped him on the cheek. Then she had turned and was striding angrily away. He ran after her. She turned upon him, angry again. He stepped back. She took his hand. She released it. He stepped forward. She turned to leave. He hurried after her.
Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick Page 11