The other maid, the mechanical one Mr. Goverman had promised me, lived seated in a little cabinet attached to a charging chamber under the back stairs. Her name was Clarissa-I did not like to call such creatures by real names, but she would not recognise commands without their being prefaced by that combination of guttural and sibilant. She was of unnervingly fine quality, and beautiful with it; except for the rigidity of her face I would say she was undoubtedly more comely than I was. Her eyes were the most realistic I had seen, blue-irised and glossy between thickly lashed lids; her hair sprang dark from her clear brow without the clumping that usually characterises an electric servant"s hair; each strand must be set individually. She would have cost a great deal, both to craft and to import from her native France; I had never seen so close a simulacrum of a real person, myself.
Mr. Goverman, seeing how impressed I was, insisted on commanding Clarissa upright and showing me her interior workings. I hardly knew where to rest my eyes as my husband"s hands unlaced the automaton"s dress behind with such practised motions, but once he had removed the panels from her back and head, the intricate machine-scape that gleamed and whirred within as Clarissa enacted his simple commands so fascinated me that I was able to forget the womanliness of this figure and the maleness of my man as he explained how this impeller drove this shaft to turn this cam and translate into the lifting of Clarissa"s heavy, strong arms this way, and the bowing of her body that way, all the movements smooth, balanced and, again, the subtlest and most realistic I had witnessed in one of these creatures.
"Does she speak, then?" I said, peering into the back of her head.
"No, no," he said. "There is not sufficient room with all her other functions to allow for speaking."
"Why then are her mouth-parts so carefully made?" I moved my own head to allow more window-light into Clarissa"s head-workings; the red silk-covered cavity that was the doll"s mouth enlivened the bra.s.s and steel scenery, and I could discern some system of rings around it, their inner edges clothed with india-rubber, which seemed purpose-built for producing the movements of speech.
"Oh, she once spoke," said my husband. "She once sang. She is adapted from her usage as an entertainer on the Paris stage. I was impressed by the authenticity of her movements. But, alas, my dear, if you are to have your carpets beaten you must forgo her lovely singing."
He fixed her head-panel back into place. "She interests you," he said. "Have I taken an engineer for a wife?" He spoke in an amused tone, but I heard the edge in it of my mother"s anxiety, felt the vacancy in my hands where she had s.n.a.t.c.hed away the treatise on artificial movement I had taken from my brother Artie"s bookshelf. So unbecoming, for a girl to know such things. She clutched the book to herself and looked me up and down as if I were some kind of electrically powered creature, and malfunctioning into the bargain. For your pretty head to be full of...of cog-wheels and machine-oil, she said disgustedly. I will find you some more suitable reading. My husband officiously b.u.t.toning the doll dress; my mother sweeping from the parlour with the fascinating book-I recognised this dreary feeling. As soon as I evinced a budding interest in some area of worldly affairs, people inevitably began working to keep it from blossoming. I was meant to be vapid and colourless like my mother, a silent helpmeet in the shadows of Father and my brothers; I was not to engage with the world myself, but only to witness and encourage the men"s engagement, to be a decorative background to it, like the parlour wallpaper, like the draped window against which my mother smiled and sat mute as Father discoursed to our dinner-guests, the window that was obscured by impressive velvet at night, that in daytime prettified the world outside with its cascade of lace foliage.
I had barely had time to accustom myself to my new role as mistress of Cuttajunga when Mr. Goverman informed me that he would be absent for a period of weeks, riding the boundaries of his estate and perhaps venturing farther up-country in the company of his distant neighbour Captain Jollyon and some of that gentleman"s stockmen and tamed natives.
"Perhaps you will appreciate my leaving you," he said, the night before he left, as he withdrew himself from me after having completed the marriage act. "You need not endure the crudeness of my touching you, for a little while."
My face was locked aside, stiff as a doll"s on the pillow, and my entire body was motionless with revulsion, with humiliation. Still I did feel relief, firstly that he was done, and would not require to emit himself at my face or onto my bosom, and secondly, yes, that the nightmare of our congress would not recur for at least two full weeks and possibly more. I turned from him, and waited-not long-for his breathing to deepen and lengthen into sleep, before I rose to wash the slime of him, the smell of him, from my person.
After the riding-party left, my staff waited a day or two before deserting me. Sarah Poplin disappeared in the night, without a word. The following afternoon, as I was contemplating which of her tasks I should next instruct Mrs. Sanford to take up, that woman came into my parlour and announced that she and Mr. Fredericks had married and now intended to leave my service, Mr. Fredericks to try his luck on the western goldfields. Direct upon her quitting the room, she said, she would be quitting the house for the wider world.
"But Mrs. Sanf-Mrs. Fredericks," I said. "You leave me quite solitary and helpless. Whatever shall I do?"
"You have that machine-woman, at least, I tell myself. She"s the strength of two of me."
"But no intelligence," I said. "She cannot accomplish half the tasks you can, with a quarter the subtlety. But you are right, she will never leave me, at least. She will stay out of stupidity, if not loyalty."
At the sound of that awkward word "loyalty" the new Mrs. Fredericks blushed, and soon despite my protestations she was gone, walking off without a backward glance along the western road. Her inamorata walked beside her, curved like a wilting gra.s.s-stalk over her stout figure, droning who knew what pa.s.sionate promises into that pitiless ear. The house, meaningless, unattended around me, echoed with the fact that I was not the kind of woman servants felt compelled either to obey or to protect. Not under these conditions, at any rate, so remote from society and opinion.
I stood watching her go, keeping myself motionless rather than striding up and down as I wished to in my distress; should either of them turn, I did not want them to see the state of terror to which they had reduced me.
I was alone. My nearest respectable neighbour was Captain Jollyon"s wife, a pretty, native-born chatterer with a house-party of Melbourne friends currently gathered around her, a day"s ride from here. I could not abide the thought of throwing myself on the mercies of so inconsequential a person.
And I was not quite alone, was I? I was not quite helpless. I had electric servants-the yard-man and Clarissa. And I had...I pressed my hands to my waist and sat rather heavily in a woven cane chair, heedless for the moment of the afternoon sun shafting in under the veranda roof. I was almost certain by now that I carried Cuttajunga"s heir in my womb. All my washing, all my shrinking from my husband"s advances, had not been sufficient to stop his seed taking root in me. He had "covered" me as a stallion covers a mare, and in time I would bring forth a Master Goverman, who would complete my banishment into utter obscurity behind my family of menfolk.
But for now-I straightened in the creaking, ticking chair, focusing again on the two diminishing figures as they flickered along the shade-dappled road between the bowing, bleeding, bark-shedding eucalypt trees-for now, I had Master Goverman tucked away neatly inside me, all his needs met, much as Clarissa"s and the yard-man"s were by their respective electrification chambers. He required no more action from me than that I merely continue, and sustain His Little Lordship by sustaining my own self.
I did not ride to Captain Jollyon"s; I did not take the sulky into the town to send the police after my disloyal servants, or to hire any replacements for them. I decided that I would manage, with Clarissa and the yard-man. I had more than three months" stores; I had a thriving vegetable garden; and I did not long for human company so strongly that stupid company would suffice, or uncivilised. If the truth be told, the more I considered my situation, the greater I felt it suited me, and the more relieved I was to have been abandoned by that sly Poplin girl, by Mr. Droning Fredericks and his resentful-seeming wife. I felt, indeed, that I was well rid of them, that I might enjoy this short season where I prevailed, solitary, in this gigantic landscape, before life and my husband returned, crowding around me, bidding me this way and that, interfering with my body, and my mind, and my reputation, in ways I could neither control nor rebuff.
And so I lived a few days proudly independent, calling my mechanical servants out, the yard-man from his charging shed and Clarissa from her cupboard under the stairs, only when I required them to undertake the more tedious and strenuous tasks of watering, or sweeping, or stirring the copper. And I returned them thence when those were completed; I kept neither of them sitting about the place to give the illusion of a resident population. I was quite comfortable walking from room to empty room, and striding or riding about my husband"s empty property unaccompanied.
After several days, despite fully occupying myself as my own housekeeper and chambermaid, I began to feel restless when evening came and it was time to retire to my parlour and occupy myself with ladylike pursuits. Needlework of the decorative kind had always infuriated me; nothing in my new house was sufficiently worn to require mending yet; I had never sung well, or played the piano or the violin as my cousins did and my brother James; I could sketch, but if the choice was between reproducing the drear landscapes I moved in by day, and stretching my heartstrings by re-creating remembered scenes of London and the surrounding countryside, I felt disinclined to exercise that talent. My husband had bought me a library, but I found it to contain nothing but fashionable novels, most of which gave me the same sense of irritation, of having my mind and my being confined to meaningless matters, as conversation with that gentleman did, or with women such as Mrs. Jollyon, and it was a great freedom to cease attempting to occupy my time with them.
Then, one afternoon, I set Clarissa to sweeping the paved paths around the house, and I sat myself at a corner of the veranda ready to redirect her when she reached me. I was labouring on a letter to Mother-a daughterly letter, full of lies and optimism, telling the news of my own impending motherhood as if it were wonderful, as if it were ordinary. I looked up from my duties at the automaton as she trundled and swept, thorough and inhumanly regular and pauseless in her sweeping. My disinclination to continue my letter, and the glimpse I had had of Clarissa"s workings through the opening of her back combined with the fragmented memory of a diagram I had examined in Artie"s treatise-which I had borrowed many times in secret after Mother had forbidden it me, which I had wrestled to understand. In something like a stroke of mental lightning I saw the full chain of causes and effects that produced one movement, her turning from the left side to the right at the limit of her sweeping. I could not have described it; I could not even recall it fully, a moment later. But the flash was sufficient to make me forget my letter, my mother. Intently I watched Clarissa progress down the path, hoping for another such insight. None came, and she reached me, and I turned her with a command to the right so that she would sweep the path down to the hedge, and still I watched her, as dutifully she went on. And then, in the bottom half of my written page, I drew some lines, the shape of one of the cams I had seen, that had something of a duck-bill-like projection from its edge, a length of thin cable coming up to a pulley. The marks were hardly more than traces of idle movements; they were barely identifiable as mechanical parts, but as they streaked and ghosted up out of the paper I knew that I had found myself an occupation for my long and lonely days. It was more purposeless than embroidery; it would produce nothing of beauty; it would not make me a better daughter, wife, or mother, but it would satisfy me utterly.
She never failed to unnerve me, smiling out in her vague way when I opened the door of the cabinet under the stairs. Her toes would move in her shoes, her fingers splay and crook and enact the last other movements of the lubrication sequence. Her beautiful mouth, too, pursed and stretched and made moues, subtle and unnatural. Un-mouthlike sounds came from behind the indiarubber lips, inside the busy mechanical head. Her ears were cupped themselves slightly for the sound of my commands.
"Clarissa: Stand," I would say, and step back to make room for her.
She would bend forward and push herself upright, using her hands on the rim of the cabinet.
"Clarissa: Forward. Two steps," I would command, and she would perform them.
Now I could see the loosened back of the garment, the wheels and workings coming to a stop inside her. I left them visible now, unless I was putting her to work outside, so that I would not have the same troubles over and over, removing the panel from her back. I brought the lamp nearer, my gaze already on the parts I had been misdrawing in my tiredness at the end of the day before. I would already be absorbed in her labyrinthine structure; even as I followed her to the study I would be checking her insides against the fistful of drawings I had made-the "translations," as I liked to think of them. She was a marvellous thing, which I was intent on reducing to mere mechanics; by the end of my project it would no longer disturb me to lock her away in her cabinet as into a coffin; I would know her seeming aliveness for the illusion it was; I would have diagrammed all the person-ness, all her apparent humanity, out of her. She would unnerve me no longer; I would know her for exactly what she was.
By the time Mr. Goverman returned home I had discovered much more than I wished to. I made my first unwelcome finding one breathlessly hot afternoon perhaps three days before he arrived, when I had brought Clarissa to the study, commanded her to kneel and opened the back of her head, and was busy drawing what I could see of her mouth-parts behind the chutes and membrane-discs and tuning-forks of her hearing apparatus. Soft gusts of hot wind ventured in through the window from time to time, the gentlest buffetings, which did nothing to refresh me, but only moved my looser hair or vaguely rippled the b.u.t.toned edge of Clarissa"s gown.
It was frustrating, attempting to draw this mouth. I do not know what exclamation I loosed in my annoyance, but it must have included a guttural and a sibilant at some point and further sounds the doll mistook for a command, for suddenly, smoothly, expensively, she lifted her arms from her sides where she knelt, manipulated her lovely fingers, her beautifully engineered elbow and shoulder joints, and drew her loosened bodice down from her shoulders, so that her bosom, so unbodily and yet so naked-seeming, was exposed to the hot study air. I heard in the momentarily still air the muted clicks and slidings within her head-I saw, indistinctly in the shadows, partly behind other workings, the movements of her mouth readying itself for something.
I rose and stood before her; she remained kneeling, straight-backed and shameless, presenting her shining b.r.e.a.s.t.s, gazing without embarra.s.sment or any other emotion at my belly. The seam of her lips glistened a little with exuded oil, and the shiftings in her weighty head ceased.
I crouched before her awful readiness. I knew how tall my husband was; I knew what this doll was about. Like one girl confiding in another, like a tiny child in play with its mother or nurse, I reached out and touched Clarissa"s lower lip. It yielded-not exactly as if it welcomed my touch and expectations, but with a bland absence of resistance, an emotionless acceptance that I knew I could not muster in my own marriage-bed.
I pushed my forefinger against the meeting-place of the automaton"s lips. They gave, a little; they allowed my fingertip to push them apart. Slowly my finger sank in, touching the porcelain teeth. They too moved aside, following pad and joint of my finger as if learning its shape as it intruded.
Her tongue-what cloth was it, so slippery smooth? And how so wet? I pulled out my finger and rubbed the wetness with my thumb; it was a clear kind of oil or gel; I could not quite say what it was. It smelled of nothing, not perfumed, not bodily, not as machine-oil should. It must be very refined.
I put the finger back in, all the way to the knuckle. I thought I might be able to reach to the back of the cavity as I had seen it from within, the clothy, closed-off throat with its elaborate mechanical corsetry. Inside her felt disconcertingly like a real mouth; I expected the doll at any moment to release my finger and ask, with this tongue, with this palate and throat and teeth, what I thought I was about. But she only held to my finger, closely all around like living tissue, living muscle.
And then some response was triggered in her, by the very tip of my finger in her throat. Her lips clasped my knuckle somewhat tighter, and her mouth moved against the rest of my finger. Oh, it was strange! It reminded me of a caterpillar, the concertina-like way they convey themselves across a leaf, along a branch; the rippling. Back and forth along my finger the ripples ran, combining the movements of her resisting my intrusive finger with those of attempting to milk it, ma.s.saging it root to tip with a firm and varied persuasiveness. How was such seeming randomness generated? I must translate that, I must account for it in my drawings. Yet at the same time I wanted to know nothing of it; there was something in the sensations that made my own throat clench, my stomach rebel, and every part of me below the waist solidify in a kind of horror.
What horrified me worst was that I knew, as a married woman, how to put an end to the rippling. Yet the notion of doing so, and in that way imitating the most repellent, the most beast-like movements of my husband, when, blinded, stupid with his l.u.s.t he...emptied himself into me, as if I were a spittoon or the pit of a privy, stilled my hand amid the awful mouth-movements. I was on the point of spasm myself, spasms of revulsion, near-vomiting. Before they should overtake me I jabbed the automaton several times in her lubricious silken throat, my knuckle easily pushing her lips and teeth aside, my finger inside her mouth-workings cold, and bonily slender, and pa.s.sionless-unless curiosity is a pa.s.sion, unless disgust is.
Clarissa clamped that cold finger tightly, and some workings braced her neck against what should follow upon such prodding: my husband"s convulsions in his ecstasy. It was as if the man was in the room with us, I imagined his exclamations so clearly. I shuddered there myself, a shudder so rich with feeling that my own eyes were sightless with it a moment. Then the doll relaxed her grip on me, and my arm"s weight drew my forefinger from her mouth, slack as my husband"s member would be slack, gleaming as that would gleam with her lubricants. Quietly, dutifully, she began a mouthish process; her lips parted slightly to allow the stuff of him, the mess of him, the man-spittle, to flow forth, to fall to her bosom. Some of her oil welled out eventually onto her pillowy, rosy lower lip. I watched the whole sequence with a stony attentiveness. When the oil dripped to her shining decolletage, such pity afflicted me at what this doll had been created to undergo that I stood and, using my own handkerchief bordered with Irish lace, cleaned the poor creature"s bosom, wiped her mouth as a nurse wipes a child"s, and when I was certain no further oils would come forth I restored her the modesty of her bodice; I raised her from her kneeling and took her, I hardly knew why, to sit in her cabinet. I did not close her in, then-I only stood, awkward, regarding her serene face. I felt as if I ought to say something-to apologise, perhaps; perhaps to accuse. Then-and I moved with such certainty that I must have noticed-without-noticing this before-my hand went to a pleat of the velvet lining of the lid of the cabinet, and a dry pop sounded under my fingertips, and I drew forth a folded slip of creamy writing paper, which matched that on which Clarissa"s domestic commands were written. I opened and glanced down it, the encoded list of Clarissa"s tortures, the list of my own.
Revulsion attacked me then, and hurriedly I refolded and replaced the paper, and shut the doll away, and went and stood at the study window gazing out over the green lawn and the dark hedge to the near-featureless landscape beyond, the green-gold fields a-glare in the unforgiving sunlight.
Clarissa"s other activities-I began to study and translate them next morning-were more obviously, comically, hideously calculated to meet a man"s needs. She could be made to suffer two ways, lying like an upturned frog with her legs and her arms crooked around her torturer-without an actual man within them they contracted tightly enough to hold a very slight man indeed-or propped on all fours like any number of other beasts. In both positions she maintained continuous subtle rotations and rockings of her hips, and I could hear within her similar silky-wet movements to those her mouth had made about my finger, working studiedly upon my husband"s intangible member.
To prevent her drawers becoming soaked with the lubricant oil and betraying to Mr. Goverman that I had discovered his unfaithfulness with the doll, I was forced to remove them. When I exposed her marriage parts my whole body flushed hot with mortification, and this heat afflicted me periodically throughout the course of her demonstration. Studiously applying myself to my drawing, and to the intellectual effort of translating the doll"s mechanisms into her movements, was all I could do to cool myself.
If they had not been what they were, one would have considered her underparts fine examples of the seamstress"s craft, or perhaps the upholsterer"s. A softly heart-shaped area of wiry dark hairs formed something of a welcome or an announcement that this was no child"s doll, with all such private features erased and denied. Then such padded folds, cream-velvety without, red-purple and beaded with moisture within, eventuated behind these hairs, between these heavy legs, that I shook and burned examining them. My own such parts I had no more than washed with haste and efficiency; my husband"s incursions within them had been utterly surprising to me, that I should be shaped so, and for such abominable usages. Now I could see them, and on another, one constructed never to feel a whisper of embarra.s.sment. That I should be so curious, so fascinated, disgusted me; I told myself this was all in the spirit of scientific enquiry, this was all to a.s.sist in a complete translation of the doll"s movements, but the sensations that gripped me-the hot shame; the excruciating awareness, as I examined her fore and aft, of the corresponding places on my own body; the sudden exquisite sensitivity of my fingertips to her softness and her slickness and the differing textures of the fleshy doors into her; the stiffness in my neck and jaw from my rage and repugnance-these were anything but scientific.
In a shaking voice I commanded her, from the secret list. The room"s atmosphere was now entirely strange, and I shivered to picture some person walking in, and I made Clarissa pause in her clasping, in her undulations, several times, so that I could circle the house and rea.s.sure myself that the country around was as deserted as ever. For what was anyone to make of the scene, of the half-clothed automaton whirring and squirming in her mechanical pleasure, of the cold-faced human seated on the ottoman watching, of the list dropped to the floor so as not to be crumpled in those tight-clenched fists?
Mr. Goverman"s return woke me from the state I had plunged into by the end of the week, wherein I barely ate and did not bother to dress, but at first light went in my night-dress to the study where Clarissa stood, and all day drew, surely and intricately and in a blistering cold rage, the working innards of the doll. Something warned me-some far distant jingle of harness carried to my ears on the breeze, some hoofstrike beyond the hills echoing through the earth and up through the foundations of the homestead and into my pillow-and I rose and bathed and clothed myself properly and hid my translations away and was well engaged in housekeeperly activities by the time my husband"s party approached across the fields.
Then duties crowded in on me: to be hostess, to cook and prepare rooms; to apologise for the makeshiftness of our hospitality, and the absence of servants; to inform Mr. Goverman of the presence of his heir; to submit to his embraces that night. My season of solitude vanished like a frightened bird, and the days filled up so fully with words and work, with negotiations and the maintaining of various appearances, that I scarcely had time to recall how I had occupied myself before, let alone determine any particular action to take arising from my discoveries.
Days and then weeks and then months pa.s.sed, and little Master Goverman began at last to be evident to the point where I was forced to withdraw again from society, such as it was. And I was also forced-because my husband conceived a sudden dislike of visiting the vestibule of his son"s little palace-to endure close visitings at my face and bosom of the most grotesque parts of Mr. Goverman"s anatomy, during which he would seem to lose the powers of articulate speech and even, sometimes, of rational thought. His early reticence and acceptance of my refusals to have him near in that way were transformed now; he no longer apologised, but seemed to delight in my resistance, to take extra pleasure in grasping my head and restraining me in his chosen position, to exult, almost, in his final befoulment of me. I would watch him with our guests, or conferring with Mr. Brightwell, the new manager, and marvel at this well-dressed man of manners. Could he have any connection with the lamplit or moonlit a.s.sortment of limbs and hairiness and animal odours that a.s.saulted me in the nights? I hardly knew which I hated worst, his savagery then or his expertise in disguising it now. What a sleight-of-hand marriage was, how fraudulent the social world! I despised every matron that she did not complain, every new bride as she sank from the glow and glory of betrothal and wedding to invisible compliant wifeliness, every man that he took these concealments and these changes as his due, that he took what he took, in exchange for what he gave a woman, which we called-fools that we were!-respectability.
By the time Mr. Goverman left for the city in the sixth month of my pregnancy, I will concede that I was no longer quite myself. Only a thin layer of propriety concealed my rage at my imprisonment-in this savage land, in this brute inst.i.tution, in this swelling body dominated by the needs and nudgings of my little master within. I will plead, if ever I am called to account, that it was insanity kept me up during those nights, at first studying my translations (What certain hand had drawn these? Why, they looked almost authentic, almost the work of an engineer!) and then (What leap into the darkness was this?) re-translating them, some of them, into new drawings, devising how this part could be subst.i.tuted for that, or a spring from the mantel-clock in a spare room could be added here, how a rusted saw-blade could be thinned and polished and given an edge and inserted there, out of sight within existing mechanisms, how this cam could be pared away a little there, and this whole arm of the apparatus adjusted higher to allow for the fact that I could not resort to actual metal casting for my lunatic enterprise.
Once the plans were before me, and Mr. Goverman still away arranging the terms of his investment in the mining consortium, to the accompaniment, no doubt, of a great deal of roast meat and brandy, cigars, and theatre attendances, there remained no more for me to do-lamplit, lumbering, discreet in the sounds I made, undisturbed through the nights-but piece by piece to dismantle and rea.s.semble Clarissa"s head according to those sure-handed drawings. I went about in the days like a thief, collecting a tool here, something that could be fashioned into a component there. I tested, I adjusted, I perfected. I was very happy. And then one early morning Lilty Meddows, my maid, knocked uncertainly at the study door to offer me tea and porridge, and there I was, as brightly cheerful as if I had only just risen from my sleep, stirring the just-burnt ashes of my translations, and with Clarissa demure in the armchair opposite, sealed up and fully clothed, betraying nothing of what I had accomplished on her.
Life, I discovered, is always more complex than it seems. The ground on which one bases one"s beliefs, and actions arising from those beliefs, is sand, is quicksand, or reveals itself instead to be water. Circ.u.mstances change; madnesses end, or lessen, or begin inexorable transformations into new madnesses.
Mr. Goverman returned. I greeted him warmly. I was very frightened of what I had done, at the same time as, with the influx of normality that came with his return, with the bolstering of the sense of people watching me, so that I could not behave oddly or poorly, often I found my own actions impossible to credit. I only knew that each morning I greeted my husband more cordially; each night that I accepted him into my bed I did so with less dread and even with a species of amiable curiosity; I attended very much more closely to what he enjoyed in the marriage bed, and he in turn, in his surprise, in his ignorance, ventured to try and discover ways by which I might perhaps experience pleasures approaching the intensity of his own.
My impending maternity ended these experiments before they had progressed very far, however, and I left Cuttajunga for Melbourne and Holmegrange, a large, pleasant house by the wintry sea, where wealthy country ladies were sent by their solicitous husbands to await the birth of the colony"s heirs and learn the arts and rituals of motherhood.
There I surprised myself very much by giving birth to a daughter, and there Mr. Goverman surprised me when very soon upon the birth he visited, by being more than delighted to welcome little Mary Grace into the world.
"She is exactly her mother," he said, looking up from the bundle of her in his arms, and I was astonished to see the glisten of tears in his eyes. Did he love me, then? Was this what love was? Was this, then, also affection, that I felt in return, this tortuous knot of puzzlements and awareness somewhere in my chest, somewhere above and behind my head? Had I birthed more than a child during that long day and night?
Certainly I loved Mary Grace-complete and unqualified, my love surprised me with its certainty when the rest of me was so awash with conflicting emotions, like an iron stanchion standing firm in a rushing current. I had only to look on her puzzling wakefulness, her innocent sleep, to know that region of my own heart clearly. And perhaps a little of my enchantment with my daughter puffed out-like wattle blossom!-and gilded Mr. Goverman too. Was that how it went, then, that wifely attachment grew from motherly? Why had my own mother not told me, when I had not the wit to ask her myself?
Mr. Goverman returned to Cuttajunga to ready it for Her Little Ladyship, and in his absence, through the milky, babe-ruled days of my lying-in, I wondered and I floundered and I feared, in all the doubt that surrounded my one iron-hard, iron-firm attachment in the world. I did not have leisure or privacy to draw, but in my mind I resurrected the drawings I had burnt in the study at the homestead, and laboured on the adjustments that would be necessary to restore Clarissa to her former state, or near it. If only he loved me and was loyal to me enough; if only he could control his urges until I returned.
Lilty was at my side; Mary Grace was in my arms; train-smoke and train-steam, all around, warmed us momentarily before delivering us up to the winter air, to the view of the ravaged country that was to be my daughter"s home.
"Where is he?" said Lilty. "I cannot see him. I thought he would be here."
"Of course he will be." I strode forward through the smoke.
Four tall men, in long black coats, stood by the station gate, watching me in solemnity and some fear, I thought. Captain Jollyon stepped out from among them, but his customary jauntiness had quite deserted him. There was a man who by his headgear must be a policeman; a collared man, a reverend; and Dr. Stone, my husband"s physician. I did not know what to think, or feel. I must not turn and run; that was all I knew.
The train, which had been such a comforting, noisome, busy wall behind me, slid away, leaving a vastness out there, with Lilty twittering against it, senseless. The gentlemen ushered me, expected me to move with them. They made Lilty take Mary Grace from me. They made me sit, in the station waiting room, and then they sat either side of me, and Captain Jollyon sat on one heel before me, and they delivered their tidings.
It is easy to look bewildered when you have killed a man and are not suspected. It is easy to seem innocent, when all believe you to be so.
It must have been the maid Abigail, they said, from the blood in the kitchen, and the fact that she had disappeared. Mrs. Hodds, the housekeeper? She was at Cuttajunga now, but she had been at the Captain"s, visiting her cousin Esther on their night off, when the deed was done. Mrs. Hodds it was who had found the master in the morning, bled to death in his bed, lying just as if asleep. She had called Dr. Stone here, who had discovered the dreadful crime.
I went with them, silent, stunned that it all had happened just as I wished. The sky opened up so widely above the carriage, I feared we would fall out into it, these four black-coated crows of men and me lace-petticoated among them, like a bit of cloud, like a puff of train-steam disappearing. Now that they had cluttered up my clear knowledge with their stories, they respected my silence; only the reverend, who could not be suspected of impropriety, occasionally glanced at my stiff face and patted my gloved hand.
At Cuttajunga Mrs. Hodds ran at me weeping, and Mr. Brightwell turned his hat in his hands and covered it with muttered condolences. Then that was over, and Mrs. Hodds did more cluttering, more exclaiming, and told me what she had had to clean, until one of the black coats sharply interrupted her laundry listing: "Mrs. Goverman hardly wants to hear this, woman."
I did not require sedating; I had not become hysterical; I had not shed a tear. But then Mary Grace became fretful, and I took her and Lilty into the study-"But you must not say a word, Lilty, not a word," I told her. And as I fed my little daughter, there looking down into her soft face, her mouth working so busy and greedily, her eyes closed in supreme confidence that the milk would continue, forever if it were required-that was when the immense loneliness of my situation hollowed out around me, and of my pitiable husband"s, who had retired to the room now above us, and in his horror-for he must have realised what I had done, and who I therefore was-felt his lifeblood ebb away.
Still I did not weep, but my throat and my chest hardened with occluded tears, and I thought-I welcomed the thought-that my heart might stop from the strain of containing them.
Abigail, Abigail: the name kept flying from people"s mouths like an insect, distracting me from my thoughts. The pursuit of Abigail preoccupied everyone. I let it, for it prevented them asking other questions; it prevented them seeing through my grief to my guilt.
In the night I rose from my bed. Lilty was asleep on the bedchamber couch, on the doctor"s advice and the reverend"s, in case I should need her in the state of confusion into which my sudden widowhood had plunged me. I took the candle downstairs, and along the hall to the back of the house.
I should have brought a rag, I thought. A damp rag. But in any case, she will be so bloodied, her bodice, her skirts-it will have all run down. Did he leave the piece in her mouth? I wondered. Will I find it there? Or did he retrieve it and have it with him, in his handkerchief, or in his bed, bound against him with the wrappings nearer where it belonged? It was not a question one could ask Captain Jollyon, or even Dr. Stone.
I opened the door of the charging chamber. There was no smudge or spot on or near the cabinet door that I could see on close examination by candlelight.
I opened the cabinet. "Clarissa?" I said in my surprise, and she began her initiation-lubrication sequence, almost as if in pleasure at seeing me and being greeted, almost the way Mary Grace"s limbs came alive when she heard my voice, her smoky-grey eyes seeking my face above her cradle. The chamber buzzed and crawled with the sounds of the doll"s coming to life, and I could identify each one, as you recognise the gait of a familiar, or the cough he gives before knocking on your parlour door, or his cry to the stable boy as he rides up out of the afternoon, after weeks away.
"Clarissa: Stand," I said, and I made her turn, a full circle so that I could a.s.sure myself that not a single drop of blood was on any part of her clothing; then, that her garments had not been washed, for there was the tea-drop I had spilt upon her bodice myself during my studies. I might have unb.u.t.toned her; I might have brought the candle close to scrutinise her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her teeth, for blood not quite cleansed away, but I was prevented, for here came Lilty down the stairs, rubbing her sleepy eyes.
"Oh, ma"am! I was frightened for you! Come, you"d only to wake me, ma"am. You"ve no need to resort to mechanical people. What is it you were wanting? She"s no good warming milk for you, that one-you know that."
And on she scolded, so fierce and gentle in the midnight, so comforting to my confusion-which was genuine now, albeit not sourced where she thought, not where any of them thought-that I allowed her to put the doll away, to lead me to the kitchen, to murmur over me as she warmed and honeyed me some milk.
"The girl Abigail," I said when I was calmer, into the steam above the cup. "Is there any news of her?"
"Don"t you worry, Mrs. Goverman." Lilty clashed the pot into the wash basin, slopped some water in. Then she sat opposite me, her jaw set, her fists red and white on the table in front of her. "They will find that Abigail. There is only so many people in this country yet that she can hide among. And most of them would sell their mothers for a penny or a half-pint. Don"t you worry." She leaned across and squeezed my cold hand with her hot, damp one. "They will track that girl down. They will bring her to justice."
The Unbecoming of Virgil Smythe.
Ramsey Shehadeh.
RAMSEY SHEHADEH writes software by day and short stories by night. His fiction has appeared in Weird Tales and Fantasy & Science Fiction. He lives near Washington D.C., and blogs at www.doodleplex.com. Of this story, he writes, "Some time ago, I became obsessed with Agatha Christie"s Murder on the Orient Express, and decided that what I needed to do was write an updated version of that story. It would take place on a similar train, with similar characters working their way through a similar mystery, and contain only a bare minimum of interstellar monsters. It didn"t quite work out the way I"d planned: the train survived, but my Edwardian characters shaded inexorably Victorian, the monsters gained a voice and a cause, and the simple mystery morphed into a fractured tale of causality subverted. All of which seems, in retrospect, entirely appropriate."
1: THE LADY ON THE PLATFORM.
THE CLOCK ON the platform struck eleven, and Philip George Herbert"s head, sinking slowly down the front of his body, shot back up to its summit and spun around to regard the clockface. "Oh, felicitous tidings, m"lady!" he said. "The train will arrive at any moment. Your gentle patience is rewarded at last!"
"Yes, thank you, Philip," said Chloe, stiffly. "I too can read the time."
"It is my pleasure, m"lady." He trundled into her field of vision, and smiled up at her. She thought it was a smile, at any rate. It was often difficult to tell. Dromedons did not have mouthes, as such: rather cunning arrangements of flesh and orifice that suited the purpose. Ragged ochre fins ran down the sides of his head, and flecks of purple mica swam in the greys of his eyes. "May I fetch you a stool, m"lady? You must be weary indeed."
"Thank you, no."
"It would give Mademoiselle"s humble servant great pleasure."
"No," she snapped. And then, in a more moderate tone: "Thank you." Her patience, in point of fact, was wearing thin. She"d spent six weary months in the company of Philip George Herbert. He was obsequious to the point of mockery: always shuffling underfoot, offering to carry this, or fetch that, or brush arrant flakes of dandruff off of her shoulders. Always pointing out puddles whose "upsplash might soil the hem of m"lady"s vestments," or prowling ahead when she went out to take the air, exhorting the crowds of dromedons she inevitably encountered to make way for the auspicious lady. Chloe had instructed him on many occasions not to refer to her in that manner, but Philip George Herbert persisted; and so she often found herself striding mortified through throngs of parted dromedons, feeling keenly the dull resentment burning in their dull eyes.
She"d arrived in Hampshire Bubble six months ago, at the behest of its Viceroy, and her father, Lord Peter Gammen. She was to be his helpmeet and social factotum, arranging dinners at the manse, standing in at ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and generally serving as the ornament at his side. Despite appearances, it was difficult work. One had to be beautiful at all times, and lively, and skilled at that species of conversation wherein wit obscured the necessary ba.n.a.lity. All very exciting, at first, but when the novelty waned her days became first a ch.o.r.e, and then a torment.
It wasn"t just the dromedons. Nor was it the constant crush of duty, or the tedium, or the tiresome provinciality of the colonials. All of these annoyances played their part, of course, but she was princ.i.p.ally put out by the shocking impertinence of time. She"d lived her entire life in the sequential world, where one could expect events to occur in some sort of order. Out here in the between, events had a much more liberal view of their responsibilities.
To be fair, the causality bubble that surrounded Hampshire colony was generally quite successful in enforcing the natural order of cause and effect. Even so, Chloe sometimes found herself arriving at market before she"d left the house, or finishing afternoon tea before she"d poured it. Once, she glanced at the hall mirror and saw an old crone staring back at her, poached skin and age spots and thin hair and sunken eyes, tendons standing out in her neck like hawsers. The image was gone as quickly as it appeared, but it occasioned the first of many tearful appeals to her father: send me home.
Lord Gammen was, for all his vices, a doting and considerate father, who could not bear the sight of his daughter"s unhappiness. And so, in due course, her entreaties had the desired effect: her pa.s.sage back into the coherent universe was booked on the Taurus Express. In a first-cla.s.s berth, of course.
The sound of a whistle clove the murmuring silence of the platform. She turned, with all the others, to study the mouth of the tunnel. It was a simple, unadorned brick archway, a hemisphere of darkness embedded in the side of the mountain that towered over the station. The track that issued from its mouth was real, as was the archway"s intricate brickwork, but all of the rest-the mountain, the cottonball clouds floating in the bright blue sky, the sky itself- was illusory, an anti-chaos simulacrum manufactured by frightfully complex machinery sunk into the weft of the bubblewall. It was a convincing illusion, and Chloe often found it possible to forget the insanity that it concealed.
Presently, a rush of steam blurted out of the tunnel, and hung roiling before the wall. There was something faintly disquieting in the way the steam moved, something slick and undulant, a species of incorporeal serpentry. Chloe pursed her lips in distaste, but did not look away.
And then, with a deafening blast of its whistle, the train burst through the steam and lanced into the station, rippling the hem of her skirts and upsetting her hat. She put a steadying hand on its crown and watched the cars blow by: engine, lounges, dining cars, sleepers, caboose-all gleaming black metal, red and green striping, bra.s.s fittings.
"Goodness," she whispered. "What a lovely sight."
"Not so lovely as m"lady," said the dromedon, each word sodden with the usual unctuous flattery. Chloe rounded on him, her patience spent at last.
And froze.