Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Sir Arthur frowned. “I cannot write that to the president of the Royal Society!” he wailed. “Oh, this invitation could not have come at an unhappier time! What if he wants to see the Illogic Engine? And Mr. Holmes and his Reasoning Machine may be here at any moment!” He turned an anxious blue gaze on Tacy. “What am I to do?”

  “Meet Mr. Spottiswoode for lunch, of course,” she said briskly. “And you must go with him, Angharad. Nobody who has spoken with you would think of taking you apart, not for any reason.”

  Angharad was silent, glass eyes glimmering slightly. “Well. I’ll charm the old noddlepate—for Arthur’s sake, mind. It may be amusing.”

  Tacy knew a moment of pity for Mr. Spottiswoode. “Not too amusing, I hope. Arthur, pray do not concern yourself over Mr. Holmes and his great detective. I will engage myself to answer any questions they may have.”

  He smiled at her warmly. “Yes, of course. Bless you, Tacy. We shall go at once.”

  * * *

  After packing Angharad and Sir Arthur off to Burlington House in the steam carriage, Tacy retired to Sir Arthur’s workshop, with the intention of doing a little investigating of her own.

  The workshop had been a conservatory when Sir Arthur first took the house, roofed and walled with glass panes, its tile floor cluttered with dying ferns, orange trees in tubs, aspidistra, and sentimental marble statuary. Sir Arthur had replaced it all with bookshelves and tables covered with papers; mechanical instruments; tools; books strayed in from the library; and boxes of assorted gears, springs, escapements, fuses, and fittings. To Ethel, the workshop was a wilderness of tiny objects she was not allowed to move. To Tacy, it was a model of Sir Arthur’s mind and hers. She knew precisely where she might lay her hand on any tool or paper she needed. Or at least she had, before Inspector Gregson had wantonly reduced it to a chaos of paper, brass, and steel.

  Tacy picked up a box containing a set of miniature tools, set it on its shelf, gathered an armful of papers, and began to sort them.

  As the clock in the church on the corner struck one, then two, Tacy worked steadily clearing the floor. By three, with the room restored to its usual state, Tacy set to examining the window latches with a hand lens. By four, when Swindon brought in the tea tray, she was spreading the inward parts of a guard mechanical across a workbench. Her hair had unraveled down her back, her skirt was streaked with oil and dust, and her cuffs were in a high state of grime.

  At the clink of china on silver, she turned. “Oh, Swindon, it’s you! Is Sir Arthur returned?”

  “No, miss.”

  “Any word from Mr. Holmes?”

  “No, miss.”

  She bit her lip impatiently. “I wonder what is keeping him?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, miss.”

  His tone was repressive, but Tacy was too distracted to notice. “I do wish he’d come. I have more data for him, or at least for that mechanical detective of his.” She turned suddenly. “You’re a clever man, Swindon. Tell me what you think.”

  The butler’s small eyes widened. “I hardly think, Miss…”

  “I’ve examined everything,” she went on, “doors, windows, floor—with a hand lens, look you. But apart from the fact of the missing Engine and its notes, I can find no sign of anyone other than ourselves—and Gregson, of course—having entered the room. Do you not think it curious, Swindon, that a thief should leave no trace at all?”

  “No, miss,” said Swindon.

  “Well, perhaps you are right. Only in romances are thieves so obliging as to leave piles of ash or flecks of mud or monogrammed pocket-handkerchiefs behind them.” She rubbed her forehead, smudging it with oil. “And then there’s the question of the jammed mainsprings. Every clockwork object in the house, Swindon, saving only the kitchen clock, which runs on a pendulum. How could Gotobed possibly know how to jam them?”

  She gazed expectantly at Swindon, who frowned. “Perhaps he learned the trick in prison, miss.”

  “Perhaps he did. And perhaps he learned patience, as well. For, between the two of us, the Gotobed I knew was a vicious bully. Grievous bodily harm and destruction of property is what I’d expect from him, not a carefully plotted robbery.”

  Swindon appeared to give the point some thought. “Perhaps Gotobed did not plot it.”

  “Ah!” said Tacy. “Well-thought-of, Swindon! I wonder…” She fell silent, her eyes fixed on vacancy. Something hovered at the edge of her mind. If only Arthur would return! She always worked better when she was able to talk things over with him. He wasn’t particularly clear-headed, but he was brilliantly intuitive. And kind, and dear, and … Oh, where was he?

  “Will you drink your tea, miss?”

  To her surprise, the supercilious butler sounded positively avuncular. She blinked at him. “Oh. Yes. Thank you, Swindon. I expect Sir Arthur and Mistress Angharad will be home any moment. Send them in when they come, will you?” She picked up a tiny turnscrew and bent over the workbench again.

  At six, Swindon came to collect the tea tray and inquire whether Mrs. Swindon should hold dinner.

  Tacy laid down the clarinet, with which she had been endeavoring to soothe her excited nerves. “Yes—wait, no. I’ll take it here on a tray. I confess, I do not know what Sir Arthur is about, to stay so long with Mr. Spottiswoode when the fate of the Illogic Engine is still unknown!”

  “As you say, miss.”

  “Swindon,” she said impulsively, “you don’t think anything could have happened to them, do you?”

  Swindon’s mouth tightened. “I shouldn’t think so, miss. But I could send Ethel around to the Royal Society to inquire.”

  Tacy shook her head. “Thank you, but no. I’ll wait a little longer.”

  And wait she did, as the workshop grew cold and her heart grew colder. Would stealing the Illogic Engine satisfy Gotobed’s hunger for vengeance? Would he progress to abduction, even murder?

  By the time Swindon brought in her tray, Tacy had made up her mind.

  “Order a hackney carriage for me, Swindon, please. I am going to Pall Mall to consult Mr. Holmes.”

  * * *

  When Tacy reached Mr. Holmes’s lodgings, the landlady informed her that the inventor was not at home. “He and that Reasoning Machine of his went out yesterday, and not a word have I heard since. The gentleman comes and goes like a mouse, with never a word to me. He’ll be back when he’s back, and not a moment before.”

  If Tacy had been the kind of woman who wept with frustration, she would have wept then. As it was, she nodded briskly, hailed a mechanical two-wheeler, and directed it to drive her to the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police in Great Scotland Yard. The police will listen, she told herself firmly as the hansom whirred across St. James’s Park. They have to listen.

  Listen they did—at least, to the extent of sending her up to Inspector Gregson’s office without argument. Inspector Gregson, however, received her story with scant sympathy.

  “Sir Arthur’s late to dinner, is he?” he said with a rather offensive jollity. “No doubt he’s still putting that fancy automaton of his through her paces.”

  “Mistress Cwmlech is not an automaton,” Tacy said hotly. “She is a baronet’s daughter and a lady.”

  Gregson shrugged. “As long as she needs to be wound up with a key, she is not a person under the law, and I can take no official note of her absence—unless you wish to report her as stolen property?”

  Tacy glared blue murder at him. “And what of Sir Arthur?”

  Gregson leaned over his desk. “I will be frank, Miss Gof. Your standing in this matter is uncertain.”

  “Uncertain!” Tacy exclaimed. “I am Sir Arthur’s articled apprentice, sir!”

  “Apprentice? Oh, come!” Gregson’s tone was jocular. “Pretty young women are not commonly inventors’ apprentices—particularly when the inventor’s father was a notorious rake.”

  Shaking with rage, Tacy rose to her feet. “There’s a foul, low mind you keep between your ears, Inspector.�
��

  “That’s as may be,” said Gregson. “It’s nothing to me if you’re his inventive lordship’s mistress. My superiors, however, take a dim view of females demanding attention to which they have no right.” He picked a piece of paper from the jumble on his desk. “If Sir Arthur and his automaton have not turned up in a day or two, you may send word. In the meantime, Miss Gof, I wish you a very good evening.”

  * * *

  That night, the mystery of Sir Arthur, Angharad, and the Illogic Engine kept Tacy tossing in her bed until, abandoning all thoughts of sleep, she drew a shawl over her night-dress and descended to the workshop. Winding up the heater, she aimed it at Sir Arthur’s ratty leather club chair and settled in, determined to think through the case from the beginning.

  Annoyingly, her mind drifted to the interview with Inspector Gregson. Mistress, indeed! Was that what the world thought? The idea was ridiculous. Why, Sir Arthur might have been her brother. No, she thought, oddly repelled—her cousin. Dear and much loved—as a relative is loved, of course. He and she worked well together, like perfectly balanced gears. If something had happened to him—or to Angharad or the Illogic Engine—she did not know how she would bear it.

  All at once, she burst into a fit of weeping like a downpour in the mountains, all wind and water and thunder. When it exhausted itself, she fell into an uneasy doze and awoke at dawn feeling like a wrung-out tea towel.

  A bath and breakfast of pheasant pie and porridge did much to revive her, and by half past seven, she was back in the workshop with a fresh pot of tea, a stack of foolscap, and the silver propelling pencil Arthur had given her for her birthday, ready to think about jammed mainsprings.

  She began with a sketch of the bust Sir Arthur had made to house the Engine: a male head based on an antique model, articulated to reflect all the human emotions of fear, introspection, joy, anger, and love that the Engine would allow it to feel and express. It was not a beautiful or particularly natural-looking object. Sir Arthur’s great gifts as an inventor lay in theory and design rather than aesthetics. Around the bust, she sketched the gears, escapements, springs, pins, pallets, and wheels that made up the Engine itself.

  Having filled one sheet with sketches, she took up another for a list of things known to snap, stress, or otherwise wear mainsprings. Dirt, she wrote. Excessive tension. Excessive motion. Sound waves. She paused. Had she not recently read something on the subject of metallurgy and harmonics? She rubbed her forehead. So much had happened in the last two days. Oh, yes—the monograph. In the sitting room, it had been, waiting for Arthur to return from the Yard. The author was not familiar to her, but she was sure his name began with a C. Cantor? Cuspid?

  Thanks to Gregson’s sad effect on Ethel, the sitting room had not been dusted and the monograph still lay under the chair. Tacy snatched it up. Ah, yes. “The Effect of Sound Waves on Divers Alloys,” by Peter Cantrip, Esq., DSc(Oxon). She carried it triumphantly downstairs and took up a fresh piece of paper.

  Some time later, Swindon came in with a tray of sandwiches and fresh tea to find Tacy playing Welsh hymns on her clarinet.

  As the tea cooled, Tacy played on, her fingers dancing over the silver keys while the scientific method, Amos Gotobed, revenge, music, theories of harmonics, artificial emotions, the process of building a mechanical, mainsprings, gears, and Angharad’s insistence on clinging to her worn body danced through her mind, arranging and rearranging themselves into different patterns.

  The clarinet dropped from her lips. Suddenly she knew, as if she had seen it, how the Engine had been stolen, and was a good way towards determining who had stolen it. Not Gotobed, whatever Gregson thought. What she needed was proof, and she thought she knew how she might get it. No inventor, once having the Illogic Engine in his hands, could resist trying to duplicate or even improve it. For that he would need materials, most particularly a certain finely-machined gear made to Sir Arthur’s specifications by Steyne & Sons. Number 475-S, it was, the “S” for the ten tiny sapphires set in it to prevent wear. There were dozens of them in the Illogic Engine—and a pretty penny they’d cost, too. She’d teased Sir Arthur about buying jewels for his mistress until he hardly knew where to look, poor lamb.

  A hasty consultation of the London Directory yielded an address for Steyne & Sons in Shoreditch—not a safe place for a lady to walk alone. And Steyne & Sons were unlikely to look with favor upon a request to open their ledgers to her. It seemed Tacy needed a man—a gentleman, by preference. And she needed him quickly.

  She rang for Swindon, asked him for the Times, then went out to the garden to cut a willow branch. When he returned with the paper, neatly ironed, on a silver tray, she was whittling industriously.

  He set the tray at her elbow and Tacy snatched up the paper. “Mistress Angharad found an advertisement yesterday—a military man, it was, seeking employment. Ah, here it is! A doctor, too—even better! Swindon, I will send a telegram.”

  “Very good, miss.”

  Some minutes later, Ethel ran to the post office with the following telegram:

  DR JOHN WATSON STOP SITUATION AVAILABLE TO BEGIN ON MUTUAL AGREEMENT STOP REPLY UPON RECEIPT TACY GOF 9 CURZON STREET STOP

  Dr. Watson’s reply arrived just as Tacy thought she must run mad with worry. It contained an address on Baker Street, which led her to a cheerful tearoom that smelled deliciously of baking and strawberry jam. Looking about, she saw a lean, slightly shabby figure hunched at a back table and approached it. “Pardon me,” she said. A pair of grave brown eyes rose to her face. “I am Miss Tacy Gof. I believe you are here in answer to my telegram.”

  The man scrambled to his feet, holding out a broad, brown hand. “And I am Dr. John Watson. Please sit down, Miss Gof. Would you like tea?”

  Miss Gof would—and some food as well, as it was past noon. As the doctor summoned the waitress, Tacy studied him. He had a pleasant face, she thought, with a firm mouth, though his expression was a little stern. His skin was weathered by the fire of a foreign sun and his mustache was touched with grey, making his age hard to determine.

  The luncheon ordered, he turned his attention back to Tacy. “Well, Miss Gof. How do you wish to proceed? I will confess before we start that this is my first interview of this kind.”

  “Your candor does you credit,” Tacy said in a businesslike manner. “You might begin by telling me something of your history. Where, for example, did you train?”

  His first answers were short and factual, but gradually he grew more forthcoming. He was the son of a country gentleman who had come to London to train at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Upon receiving his qualification, he had joined the army and shipped out to Afghanistan as a surgeon. A badly treated bullet wound had led to a fever that so weakened his constitution that he had been sent back to England.

  “And why, if I may ask, did you not hang out your shingle? There are not so many good surgeons in England that you would want for patients.”

  “Most patients prefer an older man—I am only five and twenty. Furthermore,” he went on, “I am done with pretending I know anything about healing. My year in Afghanistan left me with an oppressive sense of my own helplessness in the face of the damage artillery can inflict on fragile human bodies. While I was in hospital, I thought I might try my hand at improving the mechanical limbs currently in use by the army. Clumsy, monstrous things they are, forever having to be adjusted. The men hate them.”

  Tacy smiled encouragingly. “There’s a fine ambition. And a practical one.”

  “Not without extensive training in mechanics, which I can by no means afford. Thus my advertisement.”

  “Indeed.” Tacy made her decision. “The position is yours, should you choose to accept it. That will make a beginning, at any rate. I can at least promise you a mystery, and perhaps even an adventure. But first, I must give you a little background.”

  Their food arrived, and over Brown Windsor soup and a chop, Tacy recounted everything she thought he needed to know of Angharad and Sir A
rthur and the Reasoning Machine. When she had finished, the doctor regarded her with wonder. “An extraordinary story,” he said.

  “I suppose it is extraordinary,” she said, surprised, “if you haven’t been living in the thick of it. Just my life, it is to me, nothing out of the way in it at all.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “If I understand correctly, you need a kind of bodyguard-cum-fellow-conspirator to help you find your colleague and your friend.”

  Tacy had not thought of doing the finding herself, but as soon as the doctor suggested it, she knew that was what she wanted. No empty waiting, no fearful imagining, no endless explaining. No Gregson.

  Her heart lightened. “That’s it in a nutshell, Dr. Watson. Will you do it?”

  “I will, if only so I may make the acquaintance of Sir Arthur and Mistress Angharad Cwmlech. What do you need me to do?”

  “If you will procure a cab, Dr. Watson, I will tell you as we go.”

  * * *

  After the bright shops of Baker Street, Shoreditch was unrelieved grey. The sky was grey, the streets were grey, the high walls of the manufactories were grey with smoke and soot. The mechanical hansom dropped Tacy and Dr. Watson at a huddle of grey stone structures built around a yard. A smart sign with the words STEYNE & SONS painted on it in gold hung over a shop displaying trays of brightly polished gears.

  “Only remember,” Tacy said. “Your name is James Watkins, and I am your sister.”

  The young doctor looked at her gravely. “I know my part, Miss Gof. Do not be anxious.”

  “I am not anxious,” Tacy said. “Should I be caught spying, I will have the vapors. Men can seldom withstand a thoroughgoing fit of the vapors.”

  Inside the shop, a clerk approached them inquiringly. He was a small, square man, amazingly hairy as to the jaw and eyebrows and bald as to the head. Dr. Watson introduced himself as a neophyte eager to learn. The clerk, a true enthusiast, professed himself glad to answer his questions, and they were soon deep in discussion.

  Grateful, for once, for the masculine prejudice that dismisses all females as more or less decorative featherbrains, Tacy wandered to the back of the shop, where a promising-looking ledger stood open upon a high desk. A wary glance forward confirmed two masculine backs bent over a tray. She drew a small notebook and silver pencil from her bag and prepared to snoop.