Steampunk Hearts

by Jordan Reece

  He slapped the table with great offense. The cups bounced. “That isn’t news. Somebody else did it. And Kyrad Naphates herself wrote a letter to the editor saying there’s no age limit for a woman to get drunk and dance on a table, and she’s only sorry there weren’t photographs of it because she has on good account since she can’t remember it that she did a hot cha-cha.” He waved away their questions to finish his story. “That didn’t work out how the up top was hoping, I’d wager. She laughed, so all of Rosendrie laughed with her. The paper wanted to make her look like a fool, but she made the paper the fool for reporting on it. Of all the letters we got about that article, nine out of ten took her part and told the paper to get back to reporting real news.”

  He sighed gustily. “But that’s what they’ve reduced me to: underwear stories. And that’s why I’m going. If I wanted to write underwear stories, I would be at the Freetie.”

  “How does one get on this list of the hated?” Jesco asked.

  “The Tralonn Corporation is headed by a board of rich old men who take a spite to certain people for various reasons. I don’t sit in on their meetings and I don’t know. But the superintendent was embroiled in a controversy about allocating more money to the poorer schools. It’s been put off for years and those children sit in termite-ridden shacks while people dither about the budget. Fanli cut some things to fund it and all hell broke loose. The pampered, preening little princes and princesses at Ford could make do without the newest whirly-gigs in science class for a year while those schoolhouses went up. That was what got him on the list, I daresay, and Rotham was on it for fighting a gentlemen’s business club to gain admission and winning. Naphates is probably on it for her style of mine practices and she made S. Pecost & Sons look like the greedy demon seeds they are in that great collapse a decade ago. Remember that?”

  Jesco shook his head and the man said, “They had gotten what they wanted from the area and walked away before the bodies were even cold. She swept in with all of her charity agencies to bring food and start funds for the orphaned children, and to see if they could pull out the bodies. They couldn’t, not more than a few nearer to the surface, but at least they tried and she paid for the funerals. Every last one. That meant the world to people. She’s made good in life but they still see her as one of them. She is one of them. She did that same work long ago. She can pull up a chair right at their sides and share stories with them about relatives lost in collapses, downed by mine dropsy. She treats people like they’re human beings, not cogs in a machine, and there was a huge backlash against S. Pecost & Sons. Every bit of kindness she showed to those miners and their families who weren’t even her problem made stark how vicious and cold S. Pecost & Sons was being. They had to come back and make some recompense to save face, and there’s still egg on it all these years later. South Press reported on that, back when the paper was reputable. It wasn’t my story, but I remember it very well. Excuse me a minute.” He got up and went to the lavatory.

  “Well?” Jesco asked Scoth, who was scribbling in his pad of paper. “It doesn’t sound like this is anything. Any one of her servants or escorts could have walked into that office, asked to speak to a journalist, and talked all about our visit. They would publish it without caring if it was the whole story, or even true.”

  “No,” Scoth said as he wrote. “Why didn’t that journalist publish it under his or her own name? Why use this man’s instead? Someone who couldn’t admit to it wrote this article, and slapped the name of a respected journalist atop it so people would give it more credibility.” Underlining so fiercely that he almost punctured the paper, he looked troubled. “This may be nothing. But I’m curious about who is on the paper’s board and the nature of the spite against her. I also want to know what man Tallo Quay was so desperately seeking.”

  “We don’t know what play it was, or which theater, or even a firm time period.”

  “But we do know that this man worked for a mine, and in a significant position. He was significant enough as a person that his social engagement was printed in a newspaper. A regular fellow would not be of note.”

  Gordano returned to the table and resumed speaking without delay. “I’ll tell you something that gets my goat about how the paper has changed. Go after a fellow for his underwear choices, but don’t go after a fellow who skimmed money off the poor twenty-five years ago to build up the empire he has today. Celebrated as a man of the people when he used them up and spit them out, when he beats prosties, when he has a dozen children off a dozen women and refuses to acknowledge or support them . . . oh, no, don’t look into him! There’s a list of people we’re supposed to go after and a list of people we aren’t, most of them top drawer in business. I know for a fact that a member of the board is a friend of Selef Bly and he’s the biggest criminal on the wrong side of the bars in Ainscote. If I were to write a word about him, it would never see the light of day.”

  “Naphates aside, are there any mine owners or mine workers upon either of those lists?” Scoth asked.

  “It’s not a physical list but a mental one that you hit time and again when you try to write about people. I don’t usually write about the mines, so I don’t hit it. Davia Oard, she’s hit that wall repeatedly in trying to write about Corey Wiffleman and his shambles of an operation that’s got more citations than ore. But no, better to spend time smearing Naphates! It’s a shame. She’s a decent person, and there are scant few of those.”

  “Perhaps someone doesn’t want her to get that liaison position,” Jesco said.

  “Who cares if she gets it?” Gordano said in exasperation. “In the end, it isn’t going to make much difference. She broke the wall decades ago when she made her mines have standards. The other mine owners were mad at her then, mad that the government pressed harder and made them comply. It isn’t going to hurt them to make a few small changes now. The big changes are long in the past. That cabal of old men is going to the grave as we speak, the mines passing on to their feckless, pompous, spoiled, soft-handed progeny that have servants wipe their arses and chew their food for them.”

  Scoth was out of questions, and they parted. The autohorse clopped faithfully away from the pub as Scoth said, “It did not seem prudent to mention to him that I grew up in a wealthy family.”

  “I didn’t know there was any humor in you for years,” Jesco said in amusement.

  “I’m a riot,” Scoth said flatly. “And I’m taking you to the asylum. I’m going to be in various Halls of Records doing legwork tomorrow and you can’t help with that. If it all comes up dry, we’ll resort to the doorknob.”

  Jesco was rather sorry to be returning to the asylum. This had been a most interesting trip, and if he was honest with himself, a most interesting companion. “Will you keep me up to date if you can?” he asked once the carriage was parked in the asylum’s driveway and his belongings were unloaded. “I know I’m not truly your partner, but I’d really like to-”

  “A fair sight better of a partner than Ravenhill’s been,” Scoth grunted. Calling to the autohorse, he swung the door shut and nodded to Jesco as the carriage pulled away.

  Jesco’s disappointment at a reprieve from the case could not be sustained for long. He was swarmed with shouting children upon his entry, smiles and greetings from the nurses and attendants, and Matron Beebee called over the hubbub that he’d received a letter from Isena and to stop at the nurses’ station so someone could read it to him. Older othelin invited him to join a game of chess in the garden later on, and though this was a very odd family to have, it was Jesco’s and he loved it.

  His dirty clothes were borne away for special cleaning. Two of the children had tried to enter his room in his absence to play with his whirly-gigs. They’d been soundly scolded at the time, and scuffled their feet in embarrassment as a nurse gave them a second scolding in front of Jesco. “But we’d brought our winter gloves!” one protested when the indignity became too much. “We weren’t going to touch them bare-handed. We know!”


  So then Jesco took a few of the whirly-gigs to the drawing room and any child who wanted to could wear gloves and partake in a demonstration. Sfinx had a short thrall at one. It did not scare him but make him smile, and he said, “Sir! Sir! This one is going to be in a museum! Property of the late Mr. J. Currane, seer of the Cantercaster Police Force, it says on the card, and people are looking through the glass to marvel at it.”

  “But it’s new!” someone exclaimed. “New whirly-gigs don’t go in museums.”

  “But it’s old then!” Sfinx said happily, coming back to the present. “One hundred and fifty years old and we’ll all be dead, and people not even born today will be staring and gawking at it.” Everyone swarmed around that particular whirly-gig, trying to peek into the future through it just as those future people in the boy’s thrall were trying to peek into the past.

  There was dinner to be had and a nurse read Jesco the letter from his sister. She and the children were well, and they were planning a trip for the end of summer to visit him. The hotel room had been booked for five days, just a quarter-mile from the asylum so they could pick him up every day and take him along on their sightseeing. Jesco could hardly hold back his smile. Included in the envelope were shorter letters from his nephews, and little Gemina had sent a picture she had drawn of two identical horses, one helpfully labeled an autohorse so that he could appreciate the difference.

  He would go shopping in the meantime and buy all of them gifts. Taking the letters back to his room, he returned the star to the wall and readied for bed.

  . . . she had been a very bad girl . . .

  Of all the memories to haunt him, this one was quite benign. It just put him in mind of Collier, which was never a bad place to be. But when he went to sleep, he dreamed of Scoth. Scoth at home, stubble on his cheeks and his hair a mess, tools in his pockets and the tension of work subdued within him. Jesco sat in the chair in the upstairs workroom as Scoth fiddled about, people appearing in the skylight to peer in. Hasten Jibb with a bloody chest, a mother and daughter with ribbons in her hair . . . Jesco didn’t mention them and Scoth didn’t look up, and the dream went on in that fashion with Jesco vaguely aware that it was a dream.

  The next morning passed in idleness, and in the afternoon, one of the rucaline patients died. The man’s heart had given out. The very large family stormed in on waves of grief and fury, their shouts filling the corridors when they refused to be contained to the presiding doctor’s office. At first they attacked the doctor and nurses for incompetence, and then their anger turned upon one another. It was Cousin Nammie’s fault for giving him the rucaline and his mother’s fault for not caring for him at home and his brother’s fault for not taking him in when his mother couldn’t do it anymore. They fought about what little inheritance the man was leaving behind, should it go to his mother or his siblings or his wife of two months at the time he overdosed. She was now raising his ten-year-old daughter that he had never met, and she was the only one of the lot with any common sense. No one could speak without screaming and the child was getting upset, so the mother ushered her out the front doors and did not return.

  The rest of them fought about what should be done with the body, burial or cremation, where and when, and on and on it went in chaos for the better part of two hours until the attendants threw them out. Peace was restored to the asylum, though the nurses grumbled at one another that Doctor Haskins was too soft and should have expelled them much sooner. Then Nelle toddled over to Jesco, who was sitting upon a sofa in the drawing room. She was crowing about her toy and clambered up beside him, and pressed it to his cheek when she lost her balance.

  He hadn’t had time to move, and suddenly was in thrall. Someone yelled, “No, no, no!” and yanked the girl with her toy away. She burst into shrieks and the collar zapped her.

  “Be glad to put this day to bed, all of us,” a nurse said with a tired shake of her head as she brought the wheelchair to the sofa. Jesco’s strength was returning already. It had been a fairly new toy and the touch brief. But he did not trust himself to walk, and let the nurse steer him to the dining hall.

  “Her shoes are starting to pinch her feet,” he said from being Nelle temporarily.

  The nurse had known him for a long time, and took his word for it. “I’ll pass it along. What I wouldn’t have given to have you around when my children were small and couldn’t explain to me why they were fussing!”

  They said a prayer for the deceased man that he might find a home among the angels, and dinner was served. The children ate quickly and fled the room, since an attendant had promised to show them a magic trick if they bathed and dressed for bed without delay or complaint. The adults filtered out in twos and threes, and Jesco had just finished a refill of his soup bowl when Scoth appeared in the doorway. His eyes went over the patients and stopped upon Jesco, and then he strode in, snagged an empty chair, and plunked it down on the other side of Jesco’s private table.

  “Why are you in the wheelchair? What did you bloody well do to yourself this time?” he snapped in disapproval.

  “It was an accident, and a small one,” Jesco said. “A child touched me with her toy. She only wanted to show it to me. What brings you here?”

  “I was coming back from the Hall of Records on Cornice Street and it takes me right past the asylum.”

  “Sure, right past it if one goes completely out of the way.”

  Scoth’s lip quirked. “You know what I named the destination card for the asylum? Prick Pick-up. Now be quiet and listen to this. I looked up a lot of things today, starting with the Tralonn Corporation. It’s a wealth management branch of a bank, handles billions of dollars in client assets. It seems that the Rosendrie South Press wasn’t doing well financially, which was why the Armex family put up a part of it for sale. Tralonn owns half of it and took over the daily operations; the family owns the other half and stepped back.”

  “The paper became the mouthpiece of a bank, or a division of it.”

  “There are twenty-five members on the board. Eight of them have ties in some way to Ainscote mines. The ones that interested me most are two men named Ivan Camso and Torrus Kodolli. Merlie couldn’t remember the name, but all of her attempts had similarities. Camso’s father-in-law owns Shayner Gems, an operation at the southernmost tip of Ainscote. Now, Kyrad Naphates’ mines do precious little in way of gems. Oil shale, limestone, rock salt, potash for fertilizers, those are the larger chunk of her gigs and they’re spread out all over this country and abroad.”

  “They aren’t competitors,” Jesco said.

  “No, they aren’t. Then I looked into Kodolli and things got more interesting. He’s got competing interests in his company named Agrea, and Agrea makes S. Pecost & Sons look like sweethearts who care. Half the mining deaths in the last one hundred years were in Agrea-owned mines. Fought or flat-out ignored every regulation in all that time, and only conceded reluctantly when the government started to fine Agrea outrageous amounts. That was after Naphates changed her mines. It was a domino effect, really, what she started. She increased the wages, made it safer, recognized the union, let government officials inspect, and all of that. Miners at other companies began to agitate for the same treatment, walking off the job and costing the owners money. I can see why the heads of the industry would have a grudge against her. They were doing things exactly how they pleased and one of their own betrayed them. Old Cluven Naphates let the fox into the henhouse when he married a former miner, and I mean it as a compliment to the fox.”

  Gavon stopped at the table with a bowl of ice cream and Scoth interrupted himself to scold, “You can’t give that to him! You’re touching it with your bare hands!”

  “It’s all right,” Jesco said. “For some reason, Gavon doesn’t impart memories to my belongings. Gavon, could I have a second bowl for the detective here?”

  “Oh, sure,” Gavon said placidly. Even the stern homicide detective was five years old in his head, and he asked, “Do you like chocolate o
r vanilla?”

  “I don’t need-” Scoth started.

  “I’ll get you a scoop of both and you can decide.”

  “I don’t need-” Scoth repeated helplessly to Gavon’s retreating back.

  “When’s the last time you ate?” Jesco asked. “Oh, that’s right, you haven’t yet today. You’ve been working, and hunger is for the common man.”

  “I had something at breakfast,” Scoth grumbled.

  The attendant returned with a bowl and spoon, which he handed to Scoth. “Now, mind you, don’t touch Jesco’s table. He’s a seer.”

  “I am,” Jesco confessed.

  “Ruddy insane, the whole lot of you,” Scoth mumbled, and pushed a heaping spoonful of chocolate into his mouth.

  “Did you learn anything else today?” Jesco asked.

  “I’m getting to it,” Scoth said, swallowing ravenously on a second spoonful. “Kodolli is a very old man with homes and business offices all over Ainscote. He also maintains a home and office in the Sarasasta Islands.”

  “Is he of such influence that a newspaper would mention him attending a Cantercaster play?”

  “Don’t skip ahead. He married his wife Cliya Burne when they were in their thirties. Burne is a well-known acting family in the theater world. She acted herself when young, never top-bill but she didn’t have any trouble getting cast in smaller roles. Whether that was talent or her family name, I can’t say. She retired upon her marriage and bore two sons, Morgan and Flike, and one daughter Sherra. Flike fell off a cliff at a party and killed himself at fifteen.”

  “How did he manage to do that?”

  “Bunch of young fools being daredevils and it cost him his life. So that was the end of Flike Kodolli. Sherra took her mother’s maiden name of Burne when she became an adult and is still acting today under it. She’s married to another actor, no children, and her company tours in northern Ainscote.”