Rebel Mechanics

by Shanna Swendson

  Olive’s arrival put a halt to the conversation. She hugged her uncle, then came over to me. “Miss Newton, I am sincerely sorry for falling asleep last night when you were reading me a story,” she said, her head bowed in contrition.

  I patted her on the shoulder. “That’s quite all right. I was reading you the story to help you sleep.” She brightened instantly and took her seat to nibble at a slice of toast.

  Henry met my eyes, and for a second I caught a glimpse of the man who lay behind the absentminded mask. The mask returned when Rollo entered, bright-eyed and eager. “Did they burn down the city?” he asked.

  “It probably won’t be in the newspaper until the afternoon edition,” his uncle said, “but there was little damage around here.”

  “Oh.” Rollo’s shoulders sagged with disappointment as he turned to fill his plate from the sideboard.

  “But until we know more,” Lord Henry continued, “I’ll walk you to school this morning. I’d rather not have Olive and Miss Newton that far from home on their own.”

  I barely swallowed my cry of dismay. I’d hoped to give my article to Nat on the way home from the school. “Do you really think it’s that bad?” I asked, trying to sound as though the answer was immaterial to me. “They’ll hardly riot in daylight.”

  “I’m probably being overly cautious,” Lord Henry agreed. “But please indulge me this once.” I couldn’t argue with that, not without raising suspicions, but I needed to find a way to get out, however briefly.

  Mrs. Talbot entered the breakfast room and said, “Sir, there’s been a message from the school. Classes are canceled for today. There was some damage from last night’s unfortunate events. Repairs are being made, and classes should resume tomorrow at the usual time.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Talbot,” Lord Henry said with a nod, and she departed.

  Rollo jumped out of his seat with a shout of triumph.

  “If I weren’t absolutely certain that you didn’t leave the house last night, I’d suspect you of having done the damage yourself,” Lord Henry said to his nephew. “However, your celebration is premature. You’ll have lessons today with Miss Newton and Olive.”

  “That’s not fair!” Rollo blurted. “Everyone else in my class will have a holiday.”

  “Then you’ll be ahead of them.” To me, Lord Henry added, “I think you should work on his reading and writing. Math and science aren’t a problem, but his writing is barely literate. Perhaps some Latin drills, as well.”

  A steady thunk, thunk told me that a sulking Rollo was kicking his heels against his chair legs. Although I understood Lord Henry’s reasoning, he hadn’t done me any favors. It would tax my skills to work with two such different pupils, especially when one of them resented having to take lessons. It also made delivering my article even more difficult. At this rate, I’d never get away from the house.

  Rollo came to my rescue. “Can’t we at least go out and see what happened?” he begged.

  Lord Henry hesitated, and before he could deny the request, I hurried to say, “I doubt he’ll be able to concentrate while he’s so curious. Perhaps I could make it his writing exercise. He could write an essay on the aftermath of the riot.” Worried that I sounded overly eager, I added, “That is, if you don’t think it’s too dangerous. We would stay within sight of the house.”

  “I would like to read this essay when it’s written,” Lord Henry said.

  Rollo bounced out of his seat. “So I can go out?”

  “After you’ve finished eating and when Miss Newton is ready.”

  Rollo immediately set to wolfing down the rest of his breakfast with great enthusiasm, his sulk entirely forgotten.

  Flora drifted into the room, dressed in a morning dress but with her hair still loose. “You’re up early,” her uncle remarked dryly.

  “I had such a restful night, there was no need to linger in bed.”

  “A restful night?” Rollo asked with a snort, and Olive giggled.

  Flora turned around from serving herself from the sideboard. “What’s so funny about that?” she asked.

  “You didn’t hear anything odd last night?” Rollo asked, his eyes wide with disbelief.

  “Was there anything to hear?”

  “Only a huge riot that came up the avenue, with hundreds of people shouting and throwing rocks and setting fires.” He waved his arms vigorously as he spoke.

  “There was no such thing. Stop making up stories. That’s so very childish.”

  “There was a riot,” Lord Henry said. “Our house escaped unscathed, but our neighbors lost some windows.”

  “You’re in on it, too,” she accused.

  “Really, there was a riot,” I said. “You must sleep very soundly not to have heard it. Mrs. Talbot even went into your room to ensure your safety.”

  “Rollo’s school is closed for the day because of the damage,” Lord Henry added. “He’ll be having lessons at home. I believe you already have your reading for the week.”

  “I do?”

  “The book your aunt lent you?” At her blank look, he prompted, “You’re supposed to go with Miss Newton to discuss it on Thursday.”

  “Oh, yes, that,” she replied, her cheeks tinting delicately with pink.

  “You forgot about it completely,” Rollo chortled.

  “I did not. I merely set aside time this week to read it.”

  The instant I put down my fork, Rollo was out of his seat like a shot. “Hat, gloves, and coat!” his uncle called after him. “It’s cool this morning. Autumn has definitely come to us.”

  When I went up to my room to get my own hat, gloves, and coat, I folded my article into a narrow packet and tucked it into my left glove, against my palm. Now all I needed was to find someone to take it from me, for I feared I wouldn’t get out again.

  Rollo practically danced with impatience in the foyer while he waited for me to button Olive’s coat. He tore down the front steps to the sidewalk, where he stopped and looked up and down the avenue. When Olive and I reached him, he complained, “There’s hardly anything to see.”

  “That’s what your uncle said. It appears they made a lot of noise but did little damage.”

  We walked down the sidewalk to the neighbor’s house. The front windows on the lower level had been boarded over, and servants were scrubbing a great red stain off the white marble façade. Other servants picked trash out of the front garden. I found these blots on the perfection of the block shocking, but Rollo kicked at the ground in disappointment. “That’s all?” he asked.

  “One would think you sympathized with the rioters,” I teased.

  The white picket fence at the next mansion was charred. Tears trickled down Olive’s cheeks. “That was such a pretty fence. I liked it. And the roses burned, too. They shouldn’t have burned the roses.”

  “When people get that angry, they don’t think about things like that,” I said gently.

  “Why were they angry?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “They won’t come back, will they?” Olive asked, her lip trembling.

  “I don’t know that either.”

  Rollo and Olive got into an argument over the best way to get rid of invading rioters, in case they came back, and I took advantage of their distraction to look around for a possible newspaper contact. The only people in sight were servants and workmen cleaning up the mess. Could it be one of them? None of them appeared to be wearing the Mechanics’ symbol, and none of them seemed to notice me.

  At the end of the block, I led the children across the avenue to walk on the park side of the street back toward the house. They were now debating whether we should have thrown things at the rioters as they passed. “I bet they wouldn’t have expected that,” Rollo said.

  “But then they’d have been mad at us, and they’d have hurt our house,” Olive countered.

  When we stood across from the Lyndon mansion, it was striking how untouched it appeared in contrast to its neighbors. Most of the d
amage to the nearby mansions was merely vandalism, but it still looked unseemly against the gleaming, virginal white of the Lyndon home.

  “Why didn’t they attack us?” Rollo wondered out loud.

  “We may never know,” I said. I was about to suggest that we return home for lessons when a glint of white against the dark stones of the park wall caught my eye. The Mechanics’ gear symbol had been scrawled there in chalk. At first, I thought it was a signature claiming credit for the riot, but then I noticed a gap in the stones at the middle of the gear where the mortar was missing.

  I’d read a novel once in which the spies left secret messages in a gap between stones in a wall. They’d called it a “drop.” Was this my drop? The children were busy arguing about which house on the block was most badly damaged, so I slipped the folded paper out of my glove and tucked it into the niche before saying briskly, “Enough of that, you two. It’s time to get to our lessons. Rollo, you may make all your arguments in your essay.”

  As we crossed the avenue, I hoped I hadn’t misinterpreted the symbol. It would be dangerous for my article to fall into the wrong hands.

  * * *

  It proved to be my busiest day thus far in the Lyndons’ home. I not only had to teach Rollo along with Olive, but we also got word shortly before lunch that neither the drawing master nor the music teacher would be coming that day. The police were restricting access to the magisters’ district, and only residents were allowed to pass the barriers. While Rollo and Olive worked on their assignments, I concocted lesson plans for the afternoon.

  Lord Henry was absent from lunch, and I had my hands full keeping the three children from turning their squabbling to physical violence. I barely caught Rollo before he flung a spoonful of soup onto Flora’s skirt. Even Olive, who was usually so obedient, tried to roll peas across the table. “You’re behaving like slum hoodlums,” I finally snapped in frustration, startling Rollo and Olive into temporary silence while Flora smirked.

  That afternoon, I moved lessons to the family parlor so I could make sure Flora was reading her book. She sighed dramatically a great deal while she read, but she was regularly turning pages. I assigned Rollo some Latin conjugations to do while I supervised Olive’s piano practice on the parlor’s grand piano.

  I had the strangest feeling that I was being watched, and I glanced over my shoulder to see Lord Henry standing in the doorway, a folded newspaper under his arm. He caught my eye, gave me a grim nod, then put on a smile and strode into the room, saying cheerfully, “I think it’s time for a break. You may go upstairs and do whatever you like for an hour.”

  “But I don’t need a break!” Olive protested.

  “I suspect Miss Newton does. If you want, you may continue your practice in the schoolroom.”

  When the children had gone, he said, “I hope I wasn’t being presumptuous, but you appeared to be somewhat frazzled. This is more than is usually expected of you.”

  “It’s been no trouble at all,” I lied.

  “And I wanted to show these to you,” he said, heading to a table where he unfolded his newspaper. “They published extra editions for the afternoon to report on the riots.” He leaned over to read the headlines, then grunted in disgust. “As I expected, the Herald has little to say on the matter, other than reporting the extent of the damage—and probably inflating the estimates.” He pulled a second newspaper out from under the first, then glanced at me. “Don’t tell anyone you saw me read this.” It was the World.

  He leaned over to scan the headlines, and then all the color drained from his face. “Oh, dear Lord,” he whispered. “They couldn’t!”

  Even though I was fairly certain I already knew, I asked, “What is it?”

  Still ashen, he shook his head in disbelief and said, “British troops fired on some slum children who were playing in the Battery park. It doesn’t appear that they were following orders, but it still says a lot about the way the British regard the colonists.”

  As he spoke, he jabbed his finger repeatedly at the article, as though it was the article’s fault. I leaned over and saw that the author was “Liberty Jones.” “That’s—that’s awful,” I stammered, shaken by the thought that he was reading my words.

  He moved on to the next article. “Apparently, the people of the slums were so outraged that they rioted uptown in magister districts. The authorities are baffled about the riots. No one knows how the rioters got past the barriers set up after the shootings and came this far without being noticed. When the police finally arrived to break it up, they found no rioters at all. They simply vanished. How can an entire mob appear out of nowhere, and then vanish?”

  “That is odd,” I murmured as I leaned over to read my article. I wanted to be certain they’d printed only what I wrote, with no lies added to it.

  “It is the World,” he said. “They can be inflammatory, but I can’t imagine them making up something about the rioters coming and going mysteriously.”

  I let out a faint relieved sigh when I saw that the article was exactly as I had written it. My friends might not have been totally honest, but they hadn’t betrayed my integrity. I looked up at Henry, who was still frowning at the newspaper. His reaction to the shootings and the riots sounded rather revolutionary for a magister—yet another thing about him that didn’t fit.

  Someone behind us cleared her throat, and both of us whirled guiltily. Mrs. Talbot stood in the doorway. “His Grace the Duke is here to see you, my lord. Are you at home to visitors?”

  “Is he here to see me or the children?” Lord Henry asked.

  “He specifically asked to speak with you, on a personal matter.”

  Lord Henry suddenly seemed very young, like a schoolboy dreading a meeting with his headmaster. “I suppose I have to talk to him. Have Chastain send him up.”

  “Up here, my lord? Not to the formal parlor?”

  “He is family, isn’t he? Yes, send him here.” When she was gone, he said, “I feel so small in the formal parlor, and that’s the last thing I need when I face him.”

  I remembered the newspapers and hurried to fold them up, the World inside the Herald. “Oh, good thinking, Ver—Miss Newton,” he said with a gulp. “If he’d seen that…”

  “I’ll get these out of the way, then,” I said. “I can go see how the children are doing.”

  He caught my arm. “No! Don’t leave me alone with him!” He sounded desperate. “If there’s a witness, he’ll have to be careful what he says to me.” With a crooked grin, he added, “Please be my chaperone.”

  I glanced down at the newspapers I held, then stuffed them behind a potted palm in the corner. A second later, the governor entered. Lord Henry put on a smile and moved to greet him, stumbling over the edge of the carpet. “Your Grace, what brings you here today?”

  “Lyndon,” the governor began, but then he turned as if noticing me for the first time.

  “I believe you’ve already met our governess, Miss Newton,” Lord Henry said. “We were just conferring on her plan for the children’s lessons.”

  The governor frowned at me, then stared at Henry and waited. Lord Henry looked back at him guilelessly. It took all my self-control to school my face once I realized what was happening. The governor didn’t want me there, but it was up to Lord Henry to dismiss his employee. After a long, silent battle between the two men, the governor gave an exasperated huff and said, “I’m sure you’re aware of last night’s events.”

  “Yes, we heard the mob go past the house. It was quite harrowing.”

  “Your house seems to have been spared.”

  “No doubt because they feared the repercussions of inciting your wrath, Your Grace.” Henry somehow managed to say that with a perfectly straight face.

  “I wanted to assure you that nothing like it will happen again. The city is now under martial law, and the queen is sending additional troops from England by airship. That should put an end to talk of rebellion.”

  IN WHICH I GAIN A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON THE CITY


  I was glad the governor wasn’t looking at me because my dismay had to be evident on my face. “Oh?” Lord Henry said with the mild interest he usually showed for Flora’s talk of clothing. “Then I can tell the servants we don’t have to keep an armed watch tonight. Will there be a curfew? I’m studying nocturnal species, and my research will be hampered if I can’t go out at night.”

  The governor glanced heavenward, as though offering a silent prayer for patience. “The curfew won’t apply to magisters, but I’d prefer you remain home with my grandchildren until the crisis has been contained. Or if that will interfere with your studies, I would be happy to send them to England, where I can ensure their safety.”

  “Surely that won’t be necessary,” Lord Henry said tightly. “I’m confident those highly disciplined and brave British soldiers will be able to maintain the peace and protect us from the dangerous radicals. The children will be fine. Would you care to see them? I can have them come down.”

  “Not today, Lyndon. I only came to check on your household and let you know about the restrictions before they’re announced. You’ll be allowed anywhere, of course, but tradesmen may undergo particular scrutiny, so you’ll need to plan accordingly.”

  “Just make sure that Flora’s music teacher can get here, or she’ll drive me quite mad,” Lord Henry said with a smile.

  “Consider my offer to send the children to England, Lyndon. Good day. I’ll show myself out.” With a brusque nod to me, the governor headed for the doorway. Then he paused and turned back. “Miss Newton, is it? I don’t suppose your father is a Professor Newton at Yale?”

  “He is, Your Grace.”

  He smiled ever so slightly and nodded. “I met your parents once, years ago, when I sponsored an academic symposium of colonial scholars where your father presented an important paper. I trust your parents are well?”

  “My father is, but my mother is no longer with us.”