A Midsummer Night's Steampunk

by Scott E. Tarbet

  “Please return to the Golden Gear, fetch Miss Spiegel’s tool bag, and inform her father that we shall be delayed a trifle.” Jenkins’ expression did not change. Wordlessly, he continued in a wide semicircle, and cantered back toward the Serpentine Bridge.

  Clementine watched him out of sight before she stood, dusted her skirts, and addressed Pauline, who remained peering into the steam horse’s belly. “Paulie, I came to the shop this morning because we need to talk.”

  Pauline looked up, surprised. “Oh? What about?” Seeing the look of intense concern and resolve on Clementine’s face, she too stood and dusted her skirts.

  “Our mutual friend,” Clementine said.

  Suddenly, Pauline understood. She stepped forward, threw her arms around the neck of the taller girl, and kissed her cheek. Clementine remained ramrod straight. “Oh, my dearest of friends!” Pauline said. “My boon companion! There can be no doubt that your interests and mine coincide fully.”

  Suddenly, Clementine began to cry, and slumped against her friend. “Truly?”

  “Truly! When I encouraged you to correspond with Lord Spencer, I abandoned all claim to his affections.”

  “But your father . . .”

  “. . . will just have to get used to the fact that I have my own mind, and my own heart.”

  Clementine sobbed openly, and Pauline pulled a utilitarian handkerchief from her sleeve to dry her eyes. When she could speak again, Clementine asked, “So you are determined to go ahead with your promises to your admirer?”

  “I am. More now than ever.”

  “But your father does not know about him yet? They have not met? Your father and this . . .”

  “Alex. Alexander MacIntyre. Oh, they have indeed met, but my father knows him only as the messenger who comes from the palace. We have not yet revealed to him our feelings for one another.”

  “But you have made one another promises?”

  “We have indeed. And, like it or not, my father is going to have to honor them. After all, this is not the Dark Ages. We are on the threshold of the twentieth century.”

  “I should very much like to meet this young man who can sweep away the heart of the redoubtable Pauline Spiegel, despite his meager prospects. You are far braver than I.”

  “I am resolute,” Pauline said. “Prospects mean nothing. I am a woman in love.” She released her friend from her embrace, held her at arm’s length, and looked at her closely. “But why are you so concerned about this, all of a sudden? What do you know that I do not?”

  Clementine’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “I have this morning had a letter from Lord Spencer. He is even now on his way home from Egypt. He is determined to be here to attend the House of Lords’ gala for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee tonight. He sailed on a fast packet, and thinks it possible that he will arrive here ahead of the letter. Why, he could already be in London!”

  Pauline’s eyes twinkled. “Do you see, my dear? This news he imparts to you, and does not think at all about me—the woman to whom his family believes him betrothed. No, I do not think there will be any shadow on your relationship with him because of me. Or because of my family and his.”

  Clementine brightened. “I suppose that is true. I am sorry you will not be at the gala tonight. His mother and his patron—the head of his family, the Duke of Marlborough—will be in attendance. Perhaps we all could have discussed it, and reached an understanding.”

  “I’m sure that time will come,” Pauline said. “And in the meantime, I am inexpressibly glad that I, the daughter of a lowly merchant . . .”

  “Artificer to the Crown!” protested Clementine.

  “. . . albeit Artificer to the Crown,” continued Pauline, “am not subjected to such stultifying occasions.” The girls laughed.

  Hoofbeats thundered. Pauline and Clementine looked up, startled, as a tall, gray-clad rider approached at a full gallop from the direction of the bridge. Barely slacking his roan stallion’s pace, he vaulted from the saddle and ran toward Pauline. He fetched up abruptly when he saw that she was not alone, and walked the last dozen paces with an enforced calm.

  “Miss Spiegel, good afternoon,” he said. He doffed a perfect bowler hat and swept an elegant bow.

  Pauline gave her friend a surreptitious wink, as much as to say, ‘He thinks our relationship a deep, dark secret. How silly of him to think I could keep such a thing from my closest friend!’ Clementine seemed to understand perfectly. Pauline’s secret was safe with her—even from Alexander.

  Pauline smiled formally. “Mr. MacIntyre! Well met, sir. I don’t believe you have had the pleasure of the acquaintance of my dear friend, Miss Clementine Hozier.”

  Alexander bowed low over Clementine’s hand. “Ah, the famous Miss Hozier, Miss Spiegel’s classmate and confidante at the Sorbonne. You are an engineer as well, I believe?”

  “I fear you have me at a disadvantage, Mr. . . . MacIntyre, was it?” Clementine asked, with an arch look for Pauline.

  “Mr. MacIntyre is an undersecretary at Buckingham Palace, Clemmie,” she explained. “He visits us with commissions. The queen is particularly fond of my father’s automata.”

  Clementine smiled graciously. “How do you do, Mr. MacIntyre? To what do we owe the pleasure of your precipitous arrival?”

  Alexander turned to Pauline. “Are you quite all right, Miss Spiegel? I arrived at the Golden Gear with a message from Her Majesty, and met an old stableman arriving at the same moment as I. He said you had suffered a breakdown in the middle of the park . . .”

  Pauline laughed. “A mechanical breakdown, sir. Mechanical.” She turned and pointed at the motionless Phaeton. “He burst a steam line.”

  Alex stared at the machine for a moment. Then, with a guffaw, he swept off the gray bowler from his mop of blond hair and slapped it against his leg. “That’s an automaton! I was in such a hurry that I didn’t even notice it wasn’t a real horse!”

  “Oh, it’s very real,” Pauline assured him. “It’s just powered by coal and water instead of hay and oats.”

  “Marvelous,” exclaimed Alexander. “Exquisite.” Pauline felt herself flush. Alexander’s eyes were locked on her, not on Phaeton. She glanced at Clementine, who suddenly found something interesting to look at in the branches that laced together overhead. A good thing, Pauline thought, she was not really trying to keep anything from Clemmie, because Alex’s enamored gaze and thinly veiled meaning would have been a dead giveaway.

  At length, Jenkins arrived with Pauline’s tool bag, and between the two young engineers, they made short work of the steam line repair. MacIntyre and Jenkins looked on in wonder. When Pauline had remounted and begun the process of bringing up the horse’s head of steam, she turned to Alexander. “By the way,” she said, dropping Clementine another tiny wink, “to what did we owe the pleasure of your visit to the Golden Gear this afternoon?”

  “Oh . . . what? . . . I . . .”

  “I believe you mentioned a message from the Palace? Perhaps an order for a new automaton?”

  “Oh, yes! That was it. A new order.” He seemed grateful for the rescue.

  “Then will you ride with us back to the shop?”

  “I’m afraid I shall be forced to tender my regrets,” he said, consulting a rather ornate gold pocket watch. “It appears that the time I had devoted to this errand has fled. I intended to stop at the Golden Gear only a moment. I have official duties this evening in connection with the House of Lords’ gala, and find myself forced to take my leave very soon.”

  “Oh!” exclaimed Clementine. “The gala! I too am expected to attend.” She gave Pauline a meaningful look.

  “Indeed you are,” said Pauline. “There will be many fascinating people there, will there not? We had best get you home so you can dress.”

  “I will visit the Golden Gear again tomorrow to arrange for that automaton,” Alexander promised. “If you are both quite sure that you can make your way safely home . . .”

  “Oh, we are quite s
afe,” Clementine said with a smile, pointing to the ancient retainer, who seemed to have dozed off sitting astride his stable pony. “We have Jenkins.”

  “Then by your leave, ladies.” MacIntyre tipped his hat and rode away.

  As he galloped eastward, Clementine caught Pauline’s eye with suppressed glee. The girls could maintain their composure no longer. They burst into giggles.

  ToC

  “Will you walk into my parlor?” said the spider to the fly;

  “’Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy.

  The way into my parlor is up a winding stair,

  And I have many curious things to show when you are there.”

  “Oh, no, no,” said the little fly; “to ask me is in vain,

  For who goes up your winding stair can ne’er come down again.”

  —The Spider and the Fly, by Mary Howitt

  Chapter Two

  Meet the Malieuxs

  Black on black, motionless, the towering Zulu mech, Shaka, was nearly invisible in the darkness beneath a spreading oak on the edge of Bethnal Green Poor’s Land. He had stood silently, patiently, the three hours since sunset. In front of him, the nearest rundown tenements, each occupied by several poor families, were distant enough that the light of their paraffin lamps did not penetrate the night to reveal him. At his back, the lightless Bethnal Green madhouse hulked dark and sinister, cloaked in its centuries-old blanket of ivy, the shrieks of its indigent inmates muffled by the thick stone walls.

  The African stood head and shoulders above all but the tallest of Englishmen, easily topping seven feet. His head and left shoulder, arm, and the left half of his torso were flesh, superbly muscled, bare to the warm night. The remainder of his torso, right shoulder and arm, and from the waist down, were a gleaming black metal, matched to the gloss of his skin, formed to follow the musculature of his left side.

  He turned slowly at the faint whisper of wings. Hundreds—no, thousands of velvety wings. Inaudible singly, menacing in their massed unity. What remained in him of the Zulu inyanga witch doctor involuntarily murmured a warding incantation. But the sibilant whisper continued and increased in volume, swirling, rotating, focusing on the spot where he stood. Gradually, he distinguished words: his name? “Shaka! Shhaakaa!” Then more disconcerting still, a breathy laugh. “Haha! Shaka! We have found you at lasst! What a merry chase it has been!”

  The swirl tightened, and gradually he could discern even in the arboreal darkness the passing forms of a whorl of a thousand hawk moths, each the size of a man’s hand, surrounding him, orbiting him tightly. How they spoke to him, he could not tell.

  “Who are you?” he heard himself ask.

  “Over hill, over dale, through bush, through brier, over park, over pale, through flood, through fire, long have we sought Shhhaka! We are Friendsss of the Queen, she who shows usss the light, who bids usss reason.”

  “Who is this queen?”

  “She is your mistress, Shaka, thou abominable namesake of the great Zulu king.”

  “I have no mistress. My master only do I serve: Oberon Malieux, the great doctor, the restorer, the healer.”

  “In matrimony were they bonded, and in matrimony remain they ssstill, though the years are long sssince they walked under the sssame ssstarsss.”

  “Ah! Lakshmi! You serve Lakshmi the Lost!”

  “Lakshmi the Victorious! Lakshmi the Giver of Thought! Lakshmi the Wronged! But sssoon, all shall be ressstored. For are you not Shaka, the thief? He who bore away Jubal of the diamond heart and eyesss? Do you not ssserve Oberon Malieux, the usurper?”

  “I served my master to retrieve and restore to him that which rightfully was his.”

  “Never hisss! Never hisss! Stolen from the Queen. Nevertheless, she comesss, and all things shall be restored.”

  “Let us bandy words no more. Warn your lady to stay away from this place, lest my master’s wrath be sore and she be destroyed.”

  “Our Queen has traversed half the world in her quest for justice. Her possession will be restored. Let your master beware.” And with this whispered warning, the whirling cyclone of wings dispersed as suddenly as it had appeared. Shaka was left wondering, and not a little shaken.

  He was anxious to report, and didn’t have long to wait, for soon he heard his master’s footsteps approaching down the High Street. “Doctor, a development,” he said from the shadows.

  Dr. Oberon Malieux did not break stride. This was, after all, where he had left his servant standing. Why should Shaka not stand motionless for hours?

  “Ah? Something more interesting than the dismal performances, watered gin, and tired doxies at the music hall tonight, I hope? Tell me something to purge the taste of that mindless proletarian drivel.” Malieux swung his knobbed cane and continued his stroll toward his home on the grounds behind the Bethnal Green madhouse. He was a man of erect bearing, impeccably and expensively tailored—incongruously so, for his East End surroundings—of distinguished middle years. His early years as a doctor in Her Majesty’s Army were plain in his carriage and gait.

  Shaka fell into step several paces behind him. “Messengers from your wife, Doctor.”

  Malieux stopped and turned abruptly. “Lakshmi sent messengers? After all these years? My, my! I do believe our little stunt has gained her attention.”

  “Most unusual messengers, Doctor.”

  “Whom?”

  “Moths. Huge moths. Thousands of them. They spoke to me in one voice.”

  Malieux stood a moment in stunned silence. “Zeus! She has done it! She has been working on it for years, but I didn’t believe it possible.”

  “Done what, Doctor?”

  “They weren’t moths. They were mechanical. Micromechs. What was the message?”

  “That she comes to retrieve what is hers. But I warned them to tell her to stay away, lest you destroy her.”

  “You don’t understand! I sent you to snatch away the little toy automaton she loves so much precisely to lure her to me. I need her. I need what she knows. Even more now that she has succeeded with the micromechs.”

  “What is it she knows that you do not?”

  “Her specialty, even when we were brand new physicians, sweltering in the filth of the leper hospitals of Bombay, was the eye, that portal to the brain, the seat of reason.” His voice was husky with excitement. “I sought ways to make the lame walk, she to make the blind see. I strove with long muscles and thick bones, she with nerves slender as hairs and the unknowable vagaries of the brain.”

  “It seems a miracle she can create creatures so small,” Shaka said.

  “Indeed,” answered Malieux. “I strove to mend and control larger and stronger, with you and the industrial mechs like you. She sought to mend and control smaller and more agile.”

  “You succeeded admirably, Doctor.”

  “And so, it seems, has she. Her message to me tonight, clear as the moon, is that she has succeeded. She is more formidable than anyone could imagine. What a powerful ally she would be! And what a daunting foe.”

  As if to punctuate the doctor’s declaration, above them came the whisper of wings. Malieux and Shaka looked up in time to see an eerily glowing, sparking, undulating ball of light appear over the houses on the west side of the green. It advanced swiftly toward where they stood, settled gently to the ground, and dispersed like a puff of smoke, revealing the sari-clad form of the other Doctor Malieux.

  Her husband, regaining his composure, chuckled appreciatively. “Lakshmi, you always did know how to make an entrance. Fireflies, this particular batch of servants?”

  “Friends,” Lakshmi corrected.

  “Yet they do your bidding, as Shaka and my other mechs do mine.”

  “They work their own will. Fortunately for me, the will of the majority often coincides with mine. Unlike you, I do not coerce.”

  Malieux laughed bitterly. “Yet you sent the first flotilla of micromechs to threaten and coerce me.”

  “Not at all,” L
akshmi said. “I came hoping that you would listen to reason and return that which you stole from me.”

  “A man cannot steal what is his own, my dear. You are my wife. What is yours is mine. That you are here begging, and not at Scotland Yard swearing out a complaint, tells me that you acknowledge this. Could it be that perhaps you are hoping to be persuaded to stay? That secretly you long to join me in my work once more?”

  “No, that I am here says more about the respect that I once bore you, and to which I now appeal. Surely there remains some shred of the man I loved and married so long ago and far away.”

  “Long ago and far away indeed. When we met in Bombay, we were young and idealistic.”

  “We were determined to ease the suffering of mankind. It was only natural to believe that we could share our lives together as man and wife, doing good. How could all that was so wonderful become lost?”

  “One of us grew up,” Malieux said.

  Lakshmi sighed. “One of us became jaded and self-serving. And now you have taken something very dear to me. I beg you to return it and let us part, if not as friends, then at least not as enemies.”

  “We should never have parted in the first place, Lakshmi. I wanted you to come with me when I went to Africa. We knew the war with the Zulus was coming. We had learned all we could in the leper hospital, and needed the wounded soldiers—the enemy prisoners—to advance our knowledge. But you abandoned me.”

  “Oberon, even before you left Bombay, your experiments were going too far. I couldn’t believe in what you wanted me to do. It was already far beyond the pale.”

  “It was necessary!”

  “No! The ends do not justify the means. Experimenting on living, breathing, thinking human beings. And without choice or consent!”

  “Prisoners! And Army patients who would have died or spent their lives as invalids without the work I was doing.”

  She shook her head. “You had already abandoned all pretense of preserving the freedom and dignity of your patients, and were treating them as mere tools of economic gain. These industrial mechs of yours, and the life and choices you have forced on them, are an affront to humanity. They should have their freedom.”