natural, somehow, caught in the burning gaze of Monty
Goldfarb, who had the attitude of a master in his shop, running
the place with utter confidence.
“Capital.” He nudged Grinder with his toe. “That meat’ll
spoil soon enough, but before he does, let’s have some fun, shall
we? Give us a hand.” He bent and lifted Grinder under one arm.
He nodded his head at the remaining arm. “Come on,” he said,
and I took it, and we lifted the limp corpse of Zophar
Grindersworth, the Grinder of St Aggie’s, and propped him up at
the head of the middle table, knife handle protruding from his
chest amid a spreading red stain over his blue brocade waistcoat.
Monty shook his head. “That won’t do,” he said, and plucked up
a tea-towel from a pile by the kitchen door and tied it around
Grinder’s throat like a bib, fussing with it until it more-or-less
disguised the grisly wound. Then Monty picked up one of the
loaves from the end of the table and tore a hunk off the end.
He chewed at it like a cow at her cud for a time, never taking
his eyes off me. Then he swallowed and said, “Hungry work,”
and laughed with a spray of crumbs.
He paced the room, picking up the cutlery I’d laid and
inspecting it, gnawing at the loaf’s end in his hand thoughtfully.
“A pretty poor setup,” he said. “But I’m sure that wicked old
lizard had a pretty soft nest for himself, didn’t he?”
I nodded and pointed down the hall to Grinder’s door. “The
key’s on his belt,” I said.
Monty fingered the keyring chained to Grinder’s thick
leather belt, then shrugged. “All one-cylinder jobs,” he said, and
picked a fork out of the basket that was still hanging from my
hook. “Nothing to them. Faster than fussing with his belt.” He
walked purposefully down the hall, his metal foot thumping off
the polished wood, leaving dents in it. He dropped to one knee at
the lock, then put the fork under his steel foot and used it as a
lever to bend back all but one of the soft pot-metal tines, so that
now the fork just hand one long thin spike. He slid it into the
lock, felt for a moment, then gave a sharp and precise flick of his
wrist and twisted open the doorknob. It opened smoothly at his
touch. “Nothing to it,” he said, and got back to his feet, dusting
off his knees.
Now, I’d been in Grinder’s rooms many times, when I’d
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brought in the boiling water for his bath, or run the rug-sweeper
over his thick Turkish rugs, or dusted the framed medals and
certificates and the cunning machines he kept in his apartment.
But this was different, because this time I was coming in with
Monty, and Monty made you ask yourself, “Why isn’t this all
mine? Why shouldn’t I just take it?” And I didn’t have a good
answer, apart from fear. And fear was giving way to excitement.
Monty went straight to the humidor by Grinder’s deep, plush
chair and brought out a fistful of cigars. He handed one to me
and we both bit off the tips and spat them on the fine rug, then lit
them with the polished brass lighter in the shape of a beautiful
woman that stood on the other side of the chair. Monty clamped
his cheroot between his teeth and continued to paw through
Grinder’s sacred possessions, all the fine goods that the children
of St Aggie’s weren’t even allowed to look to closely upon. Soon
he was swilling Grinder’s best brandy from a lead crystal
decanter, wearing Grinder’s red velvet housecoat, topped with
Grinder’s fine beaver-skin bowler hat.
And it was thus attired that he stumped back into the dining
room, where the corpse of Grinder still slumped at table’s end,
and took up a stance by the old ship’s bell that the morning child
used to call the rest of the kids to breakfast, and he began to ring
the bell like St Aggie’s was afire, and he called out as he did so,
a wordless, birdlike call, something like a rooster’s crowing,
such a noise as had never been heard in St Aggie’s before.
With a clatter and a clank and a hundred muffled arguments,
the children of St Aggie’s pelted down the staircases and
streamed into the kitchen, milling uncertainly, eyes popping at
the sight of our latest arrival in his stolen finery, still ringing the
bell, still making his crazy call, stopping now and again to swill
the brandy and laugh and spray a boozy cloud before him.
Once we were all standing in our nightshirts and
underclothes, every scar and stump on display, he let off his
ringing and cleared his throat ostentatiously, then stepped nimbly
onto one of the chairs, wobbling for an instant on his steel peg,
then leaped again, like a goat leaping from rock to rock, up onto
the table, sending my carefully laid cutlery clattering every
which-a-way.
He cleared his throat again, and said:
“Good morrow to you, good morrow all, good morrow to the
poor, crippled, abused children of St Aggie’s. We haven’t been
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properly introduced, so I thought it fitting that I should take a
moment to greet you all and share a bit of good news with you.
My name is Montreal Monty Goldfarb, machinist’s boy, prentice
artificer, gentleman adventurer and liberator of the oppressed. I
am late foreshortened—” He waggled his stumps—”as are so
many of you. And yet, and yet, I say to you, I am as good a man
as I was ere I lost my limbs, and I say that you are too.” There
was a cautious murmur at this. It was the kind of thing the Sisters
said to you in the hospital, before they brought you to St Aggie’s,
the kind of pretty lies they told you about the wonderful life that
awaited you with your new, crippled body, once you had been
retrained and put to productive work.
“Children of St Aggie’s, hearken to old Montreal Monty, and
I will tell you of what is possible and what is necessary. First,
what is necessary: to end oppression wherever we find it, to be
liberators of the downtrodden and the meek. When that evil dog’s
pizzle flogged me and threw me in his dungeon, I knew that I’d
come upon a bully, a man who poisoned the sweet air with each
breath of his cursed lungs, and so I resolved to do something
about it. And so I have.” He clattered the table’s length, to where
Grinder’s body slumped. Many of the children had been so
fixated on the odd spectacle that Monty presented that they
hadn’t even noticed the extraordinary sight of our tormentor sat,
apparently sleeping or unconscious. With the air of a magician,
Monty bent and took the end of tea-towel and gave it a sharp
yank, so that all could see the knife-handle protruding from the
red stain that covered Grinder’s chest. We gasped, and some of
the more faint-hearted children shrieked, but no one ran off to
get the law, and no one wept a single salt
y tear for our dead
benefactor.
Monty held his arms over his head in a wide “vee” and
looked expectantly upon us. It only took a moment before
someone—perhaps it was me!—began to applaud, to cheer, to
stomp, and then we were all at it, making such a noise as you
might encounter in a tavern full of men who’ve just learned that
their side has won a war. Monty waited for it to die down a bit,
then, with a theatrical flourish, he pushed Grinder out of his
chair, letting him slide to the floor with a meaty thump, and
settled himself into the chair the corpse had lately sat upon. The
message was clear: I am now the master of this house.
I cleared my throat and raised my good arm. I’d had more
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time than the rest of the St Aggie’s children to consider life
without the terrible Grinder, and a thought had come to me.
Monty nodded regally at me, and I found myself standing with
every eye in the room upon me.
“Monty,” I said, “on behalf of the children of St Aggie’s, I
thank you most sincerely for doing away with cruel old Grinder,
but I must ask you, what shall we do now? With Grinder gone,
the Sisters will surely shut down St Aggie’s, or perhaps send us
another vile old master to beat us, and you shall go to the gallows
at the King Street Gaol, and, well, it just seems like a pity
that …” I waved my stump. “It just seems a pity, is what I’m
saying.”
Monty nodded again. “Sian, I thank you, for you have come
neatly to my next point. I spoke of what was needed and what
was possible, and now we must discuss what is possible. I had a
nice long time to meditate on this question through last night, as
I languished in the pit below, and I think I have a plan, though I
shall need your help with it if we are to pull it off.”
He stood again, and took up a loaf of hard bread and began
to wave it like a baton as he spoke, thumping it on the table for
emphasis.
“Item: I understand that the Sisters provide for St Aggie’s
with such alms as are necessary to keep our lamps burning, fuel
in our fireplaces, and gruel and such on the table, yes?” We
nodded. “Right.
“Item: Nevertheless, Old Turd-Gargler here was used to
sending you poor kiddees out to beg with your wounds all on
display, to bring him whatever coppers you could coax from the
drunkards of Muddy York with which to feather his pretty little
nest yonder. Correct?” We nodded again. “Right.
“Item: We are all of us the crippled children of Muddy
York’s great information-processing factories. We are artificers,
machinists, engineers, cunning shapers and makers, every one,
for that is how we came to be injured. Correct? Right.
“Item: It is a murdersome pity that such as we should be
turned out to beg when we have so much skill at our disposal.
Between us, we could make anything, do anything, but our
departed tormentor lacked the native wit to see this, correct?
Right.
“Item: the sisters of the simpering order of St Agatha’s
Weeping Sores have all the cleverness of a turnip. This I saw for
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myself during my tenure in their hospital. Fooling them would
be easier than fooling an idiot child. Correct? Right.”
He levered himself out of the chair and began to stalk the
dining-room, stumping up and down. “Someone tell me, how
often do the good sisters pay us a visit?”
“Sundays,” I said. “When they take us all to church.”
He nodded. “And does that spoiled meat there accompany us
to church?”
“No,” I said. “No, he stays here. He says he ‘worships in his
own way.’“ Truth was he was invariably too hung-over to rise on
a Sunday.
He nodded again. “And today is Tuesday. Which means that
we have five days to do our work.”
“What work, Monty?”
“Why, we are going to build a clockwork automaton based
on that evil tyrant what I slew this very morning. We will build
a device of surpassing and fiendish cleverness, such as will fool
the nuns and the world at large into thinking that we are still
being ground up like mincemeat, while we lead a life of leisure,
fun, and invention, such as befits children of our mental stature
and good character.”
*
Here’s the oath we swore to Monty before we went to work
on the automaton:
“I, (state your full name), do hereby give my most solemn
oath that I will never, ever betray the secrets of St Agatha’s. I
bind myself to the good fortune of my fellow inmates at this
institution and vow to honor them as though they were my
brothers and sisters, and not to fight with them, nor spite them,
nor do them down or dirty. I make this oath freely and gladly,
and should I betray it, I wish that old Satan himself would rise
up from the pit and tear out my treacherous guts and use them
for bootlaces, that his devils would tear my betrayer’s tongue
from my mouth and use it to wipe their private parts, that my
lying body would be fed, inch-by-inch, to the hungry and terrible
basilisks of the Pit. So I swear, and so mote be it!”
There were two children who’d worked for a tanner in the
house, older children. Matthew was shy all the fingers on his left
hand. Becka was missing an eye and her nose, which she joked
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was a mercy, for there is no smell more terrible than the charnel
reek of the tanning works. But between them, they were quite
certain that they could carefully remove, stuff, and remount
Grinder’s head, careful to leave the jaw in place.
As the oldest machinist at St Aggie’s, I was conscripted to
work on the torso and armature mechanisms. I played chief
engineer, bossing a gang of six boys and four girls who had
experience with mechanisms. We cannibalized St Aggie’s old
mechanical wash-wringer, with its spindly arms and many
fingers; and I was sent out several times to pawn Grinder’s fine
crystal and pocket-watch to raise money for parts.
Monty oversaw all, but he took personal charge of Grinder’s
voicebox, through which he would imitate old Grinder’s voice
when the sisters came by on Sunday. St Aggie’s was fronted with
a Dutch door, and Grinder habitually only opened the top half to
jaw with the sisters. Monty said that we could prop the partial
torso on a low table, to hide the fact that no legs depended from
it. “We’ll tie a sick-kerchief around his face and give out that
he’s got ‘flu, and that it’s spread through the whole house. That’ll
get us all out of church, which is a tidy little jackpot in and of
itself. The kerchief will disguise the fact that his lips ain’t
moving in time with his talking.”
I sho
ok my head at this idea. The nuns were hardly geniuses,
but how long could this hold out for?
“It won’t have to last more than a week—by next week, we’ll
have something better to show ‘em.”
Here’s a thing: it all worked like a fine-tuned machine.
The kerchief made it look like a bank-robber, and Monty
painted its face to make him seem more lively, for the tanning
had dried him out some (he also doused the horrible thing with
liberal lashings of bay rum and greased its hair with a heavy
pomade, for the tanning process had left him with a smell like an
outhouse on a hot day). Monty had affixed an armature to the
thing’s bottom jaw—we’d had to break it to get it to open, prying
it roughly with a screwdriver, cracking a tooth or two in the
process, and I have nightmares to this day about the sound it
made when it finally yawed open.
A child—little legless Dora, whose begging pitch included a
sad little puppetry show—could work this armature by means of
a squeeze-bulb taken from the siphon-starter on Grinder’s cider
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brewing tub, and so make the jaw go up and down in time with
speech.
The speech itself was accomplished by means of the horsegut
voice-box from Grinder’s music-box. Monty surehandedly
affixed a long, smooth glass tube—part of the cracking apparatus
that I had been sent to market to buy—to the music-box’s
resonator. This, he ran up behind our automatic Grinder. Then,
crouched on the floor before the voicebox, stationed next to Dora
on her wheeled plank, he was able to whisper across the horsegut
strings and have them buzz out a credible version of Grinder’s
whiskey-roughened growl. And once he’d tuned the horsegut
just so, the vocal resemblance was even more remarkable.
Combined with Dora’s skilful puppetry, the effect was
galvanizing. It took a conscious effort to remember that this was
a puppet talking to you, not a man.
The sisters turned up at the appointed hour on Sunday, only
to be greeted by our clockwork Grinder, stood in the half-door,
face swathed in a ‘flu mask. We’d hung quarantine bunting from
the windows, criscrossing the front of St Aggie’s with it for good
measure, and a goodly number of us kiddees were watching from
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