The self-driving brougham rounded the corner onto Tinkerer's Lane with the ponderous grace of a beetle negotiating a flowerbed. Lord Cassius Plimsoll sat rigid on the leather seat, one gloved hand pressed flat against his knee, the other clutching the head of Percival against his chest. The automaton's brass collar dug uncomfortably into his ribs, but he did not shift. He had found, over many years, that discomfort was best borne in silence, like a minor toothache or an unkind letter.
"Percival," he said, his voice low and even, "kindly cease the hissing."
The automaton's chest cavity wheezed. Three words in, the steam valve stuttered, releasing a thin curl of vapor that smelled of lavender water and machine oil.
"P-p-pardon, my l-l-lord. The v-v-v-v- the apparatus is, if I m-m-may s-s-s-say, somewhat ag-g-grieved by the j-j-j-jostling of the r-r-road."
"It is not the road," Plimsoll corrected. "It is your throat mechanism. Have the pennyworths at the Cogworth Consortium look at it before we arrive. The last thing I require is for you to embarrass me in front of that girl."
Percival's eyes, which were made of two small disks of polished obsidian, rolled upward in what Plimsoll had long ago decided was the automaton's attempt at conveying mortification.
"I w-w-w-would n-n-never d-d-dare, m-m-my l-l-lord."
"You have dared. Twice on Tuesday. Four times on Wednesday. And now again. You are a mechanical butler, Percival, not a steam kettle on the boil."
"Y-y-yes, m-m-my l-l-lord."
The brougham gave a gentle shudder as it adjusted its course around a pile of coal that had fallen from a passing dray. Plimsoll's fingers tightened on the automaton's skull. He had not wanted to bring Percival on this errand. He had wanted to come alone, to speak softly, to offer his condolences with the practiced sympathy he had cultivated for just such occasions. But Percival had developed his affliction three days prior, and Plimsoll could not in good conscience leave the automaton to the tender mercies of his housekeeper, who had already threatened to put him out with the slag heap.
Besides. There was something useful, he had discovered, about appearing vulnerable. A lord clutching a stuttering brass servant evoked a particular sympathy in the middle class. He had made a study of it.
The brougham slowed. Through the beveled window he could see Tante Maren's workshop, or what was left of it. The sign above the door read PENNYWHISTLE DAUGHTER, WORKERS IN FINE MECHANISMS, ESTABLISHED 1843, in faded gilt lettering. Below the sign, the door itself was shut, but the cobbles before it were spotless, scrubbed within the last day. From one of the upper windows, a wisp of pipe smoke curled into the grey morning air.
Plimsoll straightened his cravat. He released Percival's head and settled the automaton upright on the seat beside him, arranging its limbs with the care one might give to a child at a funeral.
"Listen to me carefully, Percival."
"Y-y-yes, m-m-my l-l-lord."
"When we enter the workshop, you will say nothing unless directly addressed. If she addresses you, you will answer in as few syllables as possible. No more than three. Understood?"
"P-p-perfectly, m-m-my l-l-lord."
"And if your throat begins to stutter, you will raise your hand, like so, and I shall speak for you. Do you understand?"
Percival's hand rose, trembling slightly. A small puff of steam escaped from the grate behind his left ear.
"W-w-w-w-w-w-w-wonderful, m-m-my l-l-lord."
Plimsoll closed his eyes for a brief moment, the way a man does when he has been handed a small and persistent grief. Then he opened them, adjusted his monocle so that it sat precisely against the orbit of his right eye, and pressed the brass button that would unfold the brougham's step.
The door of the Pennywhistle workshop opened before he had time to knock.
A young woman stood in the doorway. She had tied her auburn hair back with a leather thong, and there was a smudge of graphite along the bridge of her nose that she had not noticed, or perhaps had noticed and did not care to remedy. She wore a canvas apron over a wool dress of indeterminate color, and her hands, at her sides, were stained with oil to the second knuckle. Behind her, deeper in the gloom of the workshop, a small copper automaton with too many arms was perched on a stool, watching with the avid stillness of a sparrow on a fence.
"Lord Plimsoll," the young woman said, after a moment's pause in which her eyes traveled from his face to his cravat to the monocle and back again. "We've not met. But I know who you are."
"Willa Pennywhistle, I presume." He offered a small bow, which was as deep as he ever went for anyone. "I had the honor of corresponding with your late aunt. A correspondence, I must say, that I had hoped would continue for many years."
"Had hoped."
"Yes."
Willa leaned against the doorframe with the practiced ease of a woman who had learned, in the absence of a workshop owner, to answer her own door and her own questions. Her gaze passed behind Plimsoll, where the self-driving brougham stood with its lamps extinguished, and came to rest on Percival, who was halfway down the step, his brass feet catching on the edge of the carpet runner Plimsoll had laid down for precisely such an occasion.
"And this," she said, "would be your butler."
"My household automaton, yes. His name is Percival, and he has lately developed a slight irregularity in his speech apparatus. I do apologize in advance."
Willa tilted her head. Behind her, the small copper automaton, which was in fact Sprocket, swung around on the stool with a soft whir and a faint creak of well-oiled joints.
"Is he broken?" Sprocket asked, in a voice that was half curiosity and half hope.
"Sprocket," Willa said, without turning around.
"I am only asking in the professional capacity of a fellow mechanician," Sprocket replied. "A loose valve, perhaps. Or a regulator spring gone slack. It happens to the best of us. It happened to me once, and Tante Maren fixed it with a pin and a very stern word."
Plimsoll stepped forward, smoothly, so that he stood between Willa and Percival, drawing the conversation back to himself.
"Miss Pennywhistle. May I come in? My errand is a delicate one, and the street is no place for it."
Willa regarded him for another two heartbeats. Then she stepped aside, pushing the heavy oak door wider with her hip, and gestured him in with a tilt of her chin.
Percival, with a great wheeze and a clicking of gears, followed his master over the threshold. His hand rose, trembling, halfway to his collar, and Plimsoll, without looking back, gave a single short shake of his head. The hand lowered.
The interior of the workshop was as he remembered from his last visit, two years ago, when Tante Maren had still been alive and still had the upper hand in their correspondence. The workbenches ran in long parallel rows, their surfaces scarred by a hundred thousand dropped screws and slipped screwdrivers. The lamps hung from chains overhead, their reservoirs filled with pale oil that gave off a faint scent of beeswax. There were automata in various states of repair ranged along the walls: a clockwork sparrow missing a wing, a child-sized mannequin with no face, a rack of brass limbs sorted by size and joint.
But the most striking feature of the room was its silence. Plimsoll had expected, somehow, a hum. Tante Maren's workshop had always hummed, with the working of half-finished mechanisms and the quiet industry of a woman who had never quite stopped building. This workshop was still. The only sounds were Sprocket's small whirrs as he hopped from the stool to the floor, and the faint, papery hiss of the automaton's breath.
"You came about the patents," Willa said, from behind him.
It was not a question.
Plimsoll turned, slowly, so that the morning light from the doorway fell across his face in a soft and flattering wash. He let his monocle catch the light, as he had been taught to do in his first public speaking lessons.
"I came," he said, "to offer my condolences on the loss of your aunt, who was a woman of immense talent and rarer kindness. I came to inquire after your welfare, which I understand is now in a precarious state. And I came," he paused, here, for effect, "to discuss, if you are at all amenable, the future of certain intellectual properties that your aunt and I have, between us, spent many years cultivating."
Willa did not blink. Sprocket, who had crept to within four feet of Percival's heels, tipped his head at an inquisitive angle.
"What properties," Willa said, "would those be, my lord."
"Your aunt's patents," Plimsoll said, "for the variable-tension mainspring and the self-aligning cam. Two of the most elegant mechanisms to come out of the Cogbridge workshops in the last fifty years. Patents which, as I believe you are aware, are now in your sole possession."
Willa's mouth, for the first time, moved into something that was not quite a smile and not quite a sneer.
"And you have come to buy them from me."
Plimsoll inclined his head, very slightly, in a motion that could have meant yes or could have meant only that he wished to hear more of what she had to say. It was a gesture he had perfected over decades of council meetings.
"I have come," he said, "to offer you a path out of a difficult situation. Your aunt left debts, Miss Pennywhistle. I do not say this to wound you. I say it because the entire street knows it, and because pretending otherwise would be an insult to the intelligence of both of us."
"And what," Willa said, "would your path cost me."
Percival, in the background, emitted a long and sorrowful hiss through his chest grate. Plimsoll did not turn to look at him.
"It would cost you," he said, "exactly what you can no longer afford to keep."
Cassius Plimsoll watched the girl consider his offer. He had spent forty years reading faces across council tables and negotiation chambers, and this one was easier to read than most. Willa Pennywhistle was frightened, and she was stubborn, and she thought that those two qualities together made her strong. He had known girls like her in his youth. One of them had been his intended.
Behind him, without his turning, Percival gave another of those sorrowful hisses through the grate in his chest, and this time the sound resolved into something that was almost a word. Almost. The breath of it. The shape of a consonant held too long. Plimsoll kept his gaze on Willa and his hands folded at the small of his back, one over the other, the fingers of the right hand resting precisely upon the third knuckle of the left.
"You have three months," he said, "before the first creditor takes action against the workshop. Six, if you are fortunate and they are patient. Neither condition has historically applied to the Pennywhistle accounts."
"How," Willa said, "would you know the state of my aunt's accounts."
"Because I am the largest of her creditors, Miss Pennywhistle. I have been so for eleven years. The loans were made in your aunt's name and signed by her hand, and they are now, by every legal instrument in this borough and the next, due to be repaid in full by the inheritor of her estate. Which is you."
He let the words settle. He had rehearsed them on the carriage ride over, and he was pleased with their effect. Willa's chin came up by a fraction of an inch, and her eyes, which had been warm with defiance, cooled by a single degree. Sprocket, the small automaton at her heel, made a worried little whirring and pressed himself against the back of her calf.
"My aunt borrowed money from you," Willa said. "For what."
"For the patents," Plimsoll said. "For the variable-tension mainspring, which required a machine of her own devising to test, and the self-aligning cam, which required materials she could not afford. The borrowed capital was the seed of the patents' development. The patents are the fruit. The loans are the debt. I trust the arithmetic is not beyond you."
"I know my sums, my lord."
"Then you know what you owe me."
Percival hissed again, longer this time, and Plimsoll heard the faint click of a pinion slipping inside the old automaton's chest. The sound irritated him the way a tuning fork pressed against a nerve irritated him. He did not turn. He kept his eyes on Willa and let the corner of his mouth lift by the smallest possible degree, so that his face retained the shape of courtesy while offering none of its substance.
"What I am proposing," Plimsoll said, "is not a sale in the ordinary sense. It is a transfer. The patents pass to me, the debts pass with them, and you retain the workshop, the premises, the goodwill of whatever clients remain loyal to the name, and a small annuity for your upkeep. You keep the roof over your head. I keep the property that was always more mine than hers."
"That is not how a loan works."
"It is how this loan works. Your aunt and I drew up the papers together, eleven years ago, in this very room. We were, I assure you, both of us in full possession of our faculties at the time. She understood the terms. She signed them. And she signed, in addition, a clause of forfeiture in the event of her death or incapacity, which transfers the patents to me upon the dissolution of her interest in them. Her interest dissolved when she disappeared. The patents are, as of that morning, mine by right of contract."
Behind him, Percival made a sound that was not a hiss at all. It was a thin, reedy note, almost like a kettle coming to the boil, and then a series of clicks in rapid succession. Plimsoll heard Willa's gaze leave his face. He heard the small sharp intake of her breath.
"Percival," she said, not to him, not to Plimsoll, but to the old automaton standing in the corner like a piece of furniture she had only just noticed had begun, against all expectation, to breathe. "Percival, what is it. What are you doing."
Plimsoll turned at last, because the sound had begun to concern him. He had heard automaton distress signals before, and they were not sounds one ought to ignore in a workshop full of temperamental springs and stored ether.
Percival had not moved from his place against the wall. His optical plates were fixed on a point somewhere in the middle distance, slightly above Willa's shoulder, and his right hand, the one that should have been at his side in the position of rest, was raised to the height of his chest. The fingers were closed around nothing. They were shaped, with a precision that ought to have been impossible for a hand with no object in it, around the handle of a teapot.
"Oh," Sprocket said softly from the floor, his brass face tilted up. "Oh, oh. He's looping."
"He's what," Plimsoll said, and his voice, for the first time since he had entered the workshop, lost its silk.
"Looping," Sprocket said, in that thin and anxious tinny voice of his. "He's caught on something. A memory. A stuck cog. He'll go round and round until someone finds the burr and lifts it out."
Percival's lips, which were only painted metal, began to move. The voice that came out of him was his own and not his own. It was the voice of a much younger mechanism, still uncertain of its own registers, still learning the shape of the words it had been given to speak.
"Madam," Percival said, to the empty middle distance above Willa's shoulder, "shall I pour."
Plimsoll felt the room go very quiet. He heard the clockwork in Percival's chest. He heard, beneath it, the smaller clockwork in his own wrist, which had begun to run faster than was proper. He knew what was coming. He had known Percival was in this room when he had chosen to make his visit, and he had judged the risk acceptable. He had been wrong about the risk.
"Percival," Willa said, and her voice was different now, lower, careful, the voice of someone approaching a creature they suspected was wounded. "Percival, can you hear me."
"Madam," Percival said again, "the tea is steeping. Shall I pour for the lady. Shall I pour for his lordship. Shall I pour for the young mistress."
Plimsoll closed his eyes. He opened them. He kept his face arranged in the expression he had been wearing, which was the expression of a man who found the interruption mildly tiresome, and not the expression of a man who had felt the floor shift beneath his polished shoes.
"Who," Willa said slowly, "is the young mistress, Percival."
"Miss Elowen, madam. Miss Elowen Avery. His lordship's intended. The young mistress."
The room was very quiet. Sprocket had stopped whirring. The lamp on Willa's workbench guttered once and then steadied. The smell of the room, which Plimsoll had catalogued upon entering as brass polish and cold tea and the faintly sweet reek of machine oil, now seemed to sharpen in his nostrils, to become a smell he had not smelled in sixty years, which was the smell of the morning of the engagement, when the house had been full of hothouse flowers and the tea had been steeping in the blue Spode pot that had belonged to his mother.
"Percival," Willa said, and she had moved closer now, and her hand was hovering near his raised one without quite touching it. "Percival, where are we."
"We are in the parlour at Cragside, madam. The east parlour. The morning of the fifteenth of April, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twelve. The household is at breakfast. His lordship's mama has requested the blue Spode. His lordship has requested that the young mistress be served first. The young mistress is wearing the cream silk with the seed pearls. His lordship has not yet been able to tell her what he means to tell her after the breakfast is concluded, which is that he wishes to make her his wife, and that he has purchased for her, in honour of that intention, a brooch in the shape of a linnet in flight, set in seed pearls and blue enamel, which is presently resting in the left-hand pocket of his waistcoat, in a small velvet box, and which he intends to present to her in the garden, after the breakfast, under the copper beech."
Plimsoll's hands, behind his back, had gone into fists. He had not known Percival had remembered the brooch. He had not known Percival had remembered the copper beech. He had not, in sixty years, allowed himself to think of either.
"His lordship," Percival continued, and the young voice inside him was gaining confidence now, settling into its registers like water settling into a glass, "is wearing the new morning coat. His lordship has been up since six. His lordship's mama is pleased. The young mistress's mama is pleased. The young mistress herself is speaking now to his lordship about the quality of the marmalade, and whether she might trouble him for the butter, and he is smiling at her, and he is happy, and the morning is the morning of his life."
"Percival," Willa said again, and this time her hand did touch him, very lightly, on the wrist. "What happens next."
Plimsoll took one step forward. He had not meant to. The motion was involuntary, and he caught himself almost at once and stood still again, his weight on his heels, his hands now in front of him and folded at the waist. Willa did not look at him. She was watching Percival, and her face had the particular attentiveness of someone who was beginning to understand that she was hearing something she had not been meant to hear.
"I am pouring," Percival said. "The pot is heavy. The pot is heavier than I had been informed. My grip is not yet properly calibrated. I have only been in service eight months. The handle is wet from the steam. The handle is wet and the pot is heavy and my grip is not yet calibrated, and I am pouring for the young mistress, and the young mistress has leaned forward to receive the cup, and her sleeve, the cream silk with the seed pearls, is in the path of the pour, and I am trying to correct, and the correction is wrong, and the pot is falling."
Percival's hand, the one shaped around the phantom handle, opened all at once. The fingers splayed wide and then curled into themselves. A shudder ran through him from the shoulder down to the hip, the way a shudder runs through a struck bell.
"The pot is falling," Percival said, "and the young mistress is rising, and the young mistress's mama is rising, and his lordship is rising, and the blue Spode is on the cream silk, and the cream silk is ruined, and his lordship's mama is speaking, and the young mistress is weeping, and his lordship is trying to speak, and he cannot speak, and the brooch is in his pocket, and the morning is over."
The lamp on the workbench guttered again and went out. In the half-darkness Percival's optical plates caught the last of the light and held it, two pale discs floating in his metal face. Willa's hand was still on his wrist. Sprocket had climbed onto the workbench and was crouching there, his small brass face turned toward Plimsoll with an expression that, on a human child, would have been suspicion.
"Miss Elowen Avery," Willa said softly, "was your intended, my lord."
Plimsoll said nothing. He let the silence answer her.
"Sixty years ago," Willa said. "In this very house. And Percival was the one who broke the engagement."
"Percival," Plimsoll said at last, "broke nothing. The pot fell. The silk was ruined. Miss Avery's mother withdrew her consent. These things happen. They happened then. I have no comment to make upon them now."
"You have every comment to make," Willa said, and her voice was no longer warm and no longer edged. It was something harder and colder than either. "You have come into my workshop to threaten me with debts, and your servant has begun to weep in the corner, and you expect me not to notice."
"I expect you," Plimsoll said, "to mind your own business."
"This is my business," Willa said. "This is my house. He is my automaton now. Whatever happened here in 1912 is between you and him, and he is going to keep telling it to me until I understand it. So you may as well tell me yourself."
Plimsoll looked at her. She looked back. Percival, in the corner, had begun again from the top, his young voice rising through the registers.
"Madam," he said, "shall I pour. The tea is steeping."
The teacup in Willa's hand did not tremble. She had been trained, first by her aunt and then by necessity, to keep her hands steady when the work demanded it. She set the cup down on the workbench beside Sprocket, who eyed it with the bright attention of a small bird offered something shinier than expected.
"Lord Plimsoll," she said. "I would like you to step outside for a quarter of an hour."
He did not move. His eyes, pale as his servant's discs, stayed on Percival in the corner. The automaton had begun again to arrange an imaginary tea service on an imaginary table, his brass fingers moving with the ghost of long habit.
"I beg your pardon," Plimsoll said.
"I would like you to step outside," Willa repeated. "Into the yard. There is a bench by the apple tree. Sprocket will bring you a cup of tea and a slice of the seed cake my aunt used to keep for difficult customers."
"I am not a customer."
"No," Willa said. "You are a man who has just remembered, in front of a stranger, something you swore you would never speak of again. And I would like to give you the grace of not being seen while you recover from it."
The room was quiet. Even Percival's murmuring had paused, as though the old automaton were waiting too.
Plimsoll looked at her. For a long moment she saw him not as the industrialist who had come to threaten her workshop, but as an older figure standing at the edge of a memory he had paid to have buried. He inclined his head, very slightly.
"A quarter of an hour," he said.
"A quarter of an hour," she agreed.
He turned and walked out through the shop door. Sprocket hopped down from the workbench, his treads whirring, and went after him with the kettle already in his small hands.
Willa knelt beside Percival.
"Old fellow," she said softly. "Old fellow, I am going to open your housing now. I need your permission."
Percival's voice came from very far away, thin as a needle. "Madam, shall I pour. The tea is steeping."
"Yes," Willa said. "I know. I am going to help you with the tea."
She took the small screwdriver from her apron pocket, the one her aunt had given her on her fourteenth birthday, and began to unfasten the panel beneath Percival's collar. The brass came away with the faint sweet smell of old oil and lavender. Her aunt had polished him with lavender. Willa had not known, until this moment, how much she missed the smell.
Inside, the memory spool was the colour of tarnished silver, mounted between two small brass posts. It was turning. She could see it turning, the engraved ribbon sliding past the reading head, and on the ribbon she could just make out the fine lines of the recorded day. A parlour. A pot. A young man in a high collar. A young woman with her hands folded.
The loop was caught on the third second. The same three seconds, over and over, the spool unable to advance because the next frame had been recorded with a fault, a corruption, a single bad syllable that the reading head could not parse. Willa could see the corruption. It looked like a hairline crack in the ribbon, no wider than a thought.
She lifted the spool out gently, the way she would lift a sleeping bird out of a hedge. Percival's voice cut off mid-word, the silence sudden and complete.
"Sprocket," she called, low.
From the yard, faintly, the small automaton answered. "Here, miss!"
"I need the spool mender. Top drawer of the bench. And the recording stylus. And the small bottle of oil with the blue label."
"Right-o, miss."
She heard him scrabbling back across the cobbles. She kept her hands still around the spool. The ribbon was warm from sixty years of being read.
When Sprocket returned, panting slightly, hissing from one valve, she took the tools from him and set them in order on the floor beside her knee. She uncorked the oil. The smell of it joined the lavender. She cleaned the corruption, very carefully, with the tip of a needle. Then she took the stylus.
This was the part that required the lie.
A memory spool, once corrupted, could be rewritten. Not entirely. The broad strokes of the day would remain, because they were etched into the metal and could not be altered. But the small details, the exact words spoken, the precise sequence of who had done what, those could be smoothed over. A careful mender could replace one second with another, could change a single action into a different single action, and the automaton would thereafter remember the new second as if it had always been so.
Willa did not, as a rule, lie to machines. Her aunt had taught her that an automaton's memory was its conscience, and a mender who altered a conscience without consent was no better than a confidence man who altered a letter without permission.
But Percival could not give consent. Percival was caught, forever, in the act of being blamed. And Lord Plimsoll could not give consent either, because the man in the memory had been a different man, and the young woman had been dead for forty years.
Willa took a breath. She held the stylus over the ribbon, where the corrupted second had been.
She wrote, in the smallest possible lie, this: that Percival, on the afternoon of the twenty-third of September, 1912, had stepped forward of his own accord and tipped the pot himself. Not by accident. Not by clumsiness. But because he had seen, in the young lord's face, a terror of being loved, and had chosen, in that single merciful moment, to be the villain of the piece. He had ruined the silk. He had broken the match. He had taken the blame into his own brass hands, and he had carried it, without complaint, for sixty years, because he had believed it would spare his master the shame of having been seen.
It was not true. But it was the kindest thing that could be made true.
She set the stylus down. She replaced the spool. She closed Percival's housing and fastened the panel beneath his collar.
"Percival," she said softly.
His discs opened. They focused, slowly, on her face.
"Madam," he said, and his voice was his own again, the elderly proper voice, the smooth and measured tone. "I do believe I have dozed. Forgive me. Was there something you required?"
"There was," Willa said. "There was something I required. I have it now."
She stood. Her knees ached. The oil on her fingers smelled of lavender.
"Sprocket," she said. "Bring Lord Plimsoll back in."
"Right-o, miss."
Plimsoll came through the shop door alone. Sprocket had abandoned him somewhere near the apple tree and was now perched on the windowsill, swinging his legs, watching with the bright attention he gave to anything interesting.
Plimsoll stopped when he saw Percival. The
Plimsoll stopped when he saw Percival. The automaton stood beside the workbench in his old coat, his discs steady, his bearing correct, and something in Plimsoll's chest tightened as if a clock hand had caught on a tooth.
For a long moment he did not speak. His gloved hand found the edge of the counter and rested there, the leather creaking softly as his fingers curled. Outside, the apple tree made its small papery sound. Somewhere a rook complained of the weather.
"Percival," Plimsoll said at last, and his voice was careful, each syllable placed like a card in a house of cards.
"Lord Plimsoll," Percival answered, and inclined his head the precise degree that good manners required. "It has been some years. You are looking remarkably well. The years have been kind to your lordship's complexion, if I may say so."
Willa did not laugh. She had thought she might, hearing Percival's proper old voice again, but the laughter would not come. She watched Plimsoll's face instead, and what she saw there was the careful blankness of a man who has just heard a sound he cannot quite place.
"Sit down, my lord," she said. "Please. There is something I have to tell you, and I would rather not say it to the side of your face."
He did not move at once. Then, as if remembering how legs were meant to work, he crossed the room to the armchair and lowered himself into it. The leather wheezed under his weight. Sprocket, on the windowsill, went very still, his small hands gripping the painted wood.
"Your aunt," Plimsoll said quietly, still not looking at her. "She kept her promises, then. She said she would never speak of it."
"She did not speak of it," Willa said. "She wrote of it. I found the spool tonight. It was in the false heel of her work boot, behind the rivet, the way she always hid the things she could not bear to throw away."
Plimsoll's mouth thinned. "The boot in the window."
"The boot in the window," Willa agreed.
"She was a sentimental woman." Plimsoll's voice was flat, but not steady. "She was always a sentimental woman. It was her great weakness. It was what undid her."
"It was her great kindness," Willa said. "And it is what I am about to ask you to remember."
She told him. She told him the whole of it, slowly, the way Percival had told her, with the pauses in the right places and the small precise sounds of a voice that had been silenced for sixty years and was glad to speak again. She told him about the young lord who had stood in a garden in the summer of 1852 with tears on his face and a terror of being loved. She told him about Percival stepping forward of his own accord. She told him about the silk dress ruined, the match broken, the lie told and kept and never questioned because no one had any reason to question it. She told him that the scandal which had undone Tante Maren's family, which had lost her the young lord she might have married, which had driven her to open a workshop in a Yorkshire town and live alone with her machines for the rest of her life, which had been the silent engine of Plimsoll's own coldness and his long appetite for the Pennywhistle patents, was a story that had been told by an automaton to spare a frightened boy the shame of being seen.
When she had finished, the room was very quiet. The clock on the mantel ticked. The apple tree tapped at the window. Plimsoll's hand, still gloved, rested on the arm of the chair, and the leather was stretched over his knuckles like a drum.
"You expect me to believe this," Plimsoll said at last.
"I expect you to listen to it," Willa said. "What you believe is your own affair."
"It is a great convenience," Plimsoll said, "to discover, sixty years after the fact, that one's entire grievance was a misunderstanding."
"Yes," Willa said. "It is."
"And you expect me to be grateful."
"I expect nothing, my lord. I am an apprentice in a workshop that owes you money. I have no expectations to trouble you with."
Plimsoll laughed. It was a short, ugly sound, more like a cough. "You are your aunt's niece," he said. "You have her trick of answering a question without quite answering it."
"I have her trick of telling the truth and letting people do what they like with it."
He turned then, and looked at her fully. His face, in the lamplight, was the face of a man who had been told, very gently, that the ground he had built his house upon was not ground at all but a kind of cold fog.
"What do you want from me, Miss Pennywhistle?"
"I want you to stop coming to this shop," Willa said. "I want you to send your man away. I want you to leave Tante Maren's patents where they are, in the drawer where she kept them, until I have earned enough to apply for a proper patent of my own. I want you to remember, when you think of this shop, that there was a young lord in a garden who was frightened of being loved, and that an automaton loved him enough to lie for him, and that the lie has cost three generations of Pennywhistles everything they had."
She paused.
"And if you cannot do any of that," she said, "I want you to know that Percival remembers it. And Sprocket remembers it. And I remember it. And Tante Maren, before she disappeared, wrote it down in her own hand and put it in the false heel of a boot and set that boot in a window, so that one day someone would find it and the lie would at last be finished."
Plimsoll was silent for a long time.
Then he drew off his gloves, one finger at a time. He laid them on the arm of the chair, folded together like a small animal at rest.
"Percival," he said, without turning. "Come here."
Percival crossed the carpet in his neat, measured tread. He stopped at the chair.
"Yes, my lord."
"Did my father," Plimsoll said, "did my father ever speak of you, in his later years? Did he ever say your name?"
"He did, my lord," Percival said. "Frequently. He spoke of you as well. He said that you had your mother's wit and your grandfather's temper and a heart he could not account for. He said he hoped, when you were older, that you would find someone kind enough to be afraid of being loved by."
Plimsoll closed his eyes.
"He was a sentimental man," he said. "He was always a sentimental man."
"That is what I have just told you, my lord," Percival said, and there was something in his voice, then, that was almost, if not quite, a smile. "Several times now."
Willa pressed her folded hands against her mouth. She did not trust herself to speak.
Plimsoll opened his eyes. He looked at her. He looked, for the first time since she had known him, as if he did not entirely know what to do with his face.
"I will not promise you anything tonight," he said. "I have had a great deal to take in, and I have never been good at taking things in. But I will send my man away, and I will not come to this shop again uninvited, and I will think about what you have said. I will think about it very carefully. Is that enough for one evening?"
"It is enough for one evening," Willa said.
He stood. He collected his gloves. He gave Percival a small, stiff bow, which Percival returned with a perfect one of his own.
"Miss Pennywhistle," Plimsoll said, at the door.
"My lord."
"Your aunt. If she should return. Will you tell her that Cassius Plimsoll asked after her, and that he was, on the whole, sorry for the trouble?"
"I will tell her," Willa said.
He went out into the evening. The shop bell rang its small bright note behind him, and then the street, and then the dark.
Sprocket hopped down from the windowsill and skidded across the floor to Percival's side and took hold of the hem of his coat.
"Percival," Sprocket said, in a very small voice. "Percival, are we all right?"
Percival looked down at him. His discs focused, gently, on the small anxious face.
"We are all right, Sprocket," he said. "We are better than we have been for a long time. Run along now and put the kettle on. I think we are all in need of a cup of tea."
Sprocket nodded, very hard, several times, and went off to the kitchen. His small feet made a sound like a clock that had got ideas above its station.
Percival turned to Willa. She was standing by the workbench, her hands at her sides, her face very tired and very calm.
"Madam," he said. "Thank you."
"You did the bravest thing," Willa said. "Sixty years ago. And tonight. And I am very glad, Percival, that you are home."
"I am glad to be home, madam," Percival said. "I am very glad indeed."
Willa sat down in the armchair, in the warm leather where Plimsoll had sat, and pulled her knees up, and looked at the ceiling, and waited for Sprocket to bring the tea. The kettle began its small industrious whistle in the kitchen. The lamp ticked softly as the oil fed the flame.
The spool sat on the workbench, silent now, its tiny work at last complete. Outside, the apple tree made its papery sound, and somewhere far off, over the rooftops of the town, the clock at St. Martin's began to strike the hour, one clear note after another, like a voice that had at last found its tongue.