The Pennywhistle Workshop: The Rivertree Sisters And The Aroma

Sprocket's eyes flashed amber twice in quick succession, the color a gear and a gear-half past warning, and before Willa could ask what had set the little automaton off, the shop bell screamed.

She set down her wrench. Oil smeared her knuckle to the wrist, black as boot polish and twice as stubborn. The Crankford Model Seven could wait. She crossed the workshop floor in four strides and pulled the door open.

A woman filled the doorway. Not metaphorically. Petra Underhill stood five foot three in her stockinged feet and had the build of a dockside crane, arms roped with muscle and dusted pale with flour to the eyebrows. She wore a leather apron over a flour-sack dress and she was breathing hard, chest heaving, sweat cutting runnels through the powder on her temples.

Behind her, half-suspended in a web of canvas straps and straining ropes, slumped Aroma.

Willa's breath caught. She had seen the bakery automaton only twice before, both times through the window of the Underhill Curio Shop on Bell Lane. Aroma was built for two purposes, tea brewing and gossip dispensing, and she performed both with the gentle, hissing precision of a kettle that had learned manners. Today, something was wrong.

"What happened to her?" Willa reached for the nearest rope, bracing her boot against the doorframe.

"Salt," Petra said. "She put salt in a sweet cake. She put sugar in the bread dough.

She put sugar in the bread dough. She switched the treacle for lamp oil in the Christmas pudding. My best customer spat it across my counter, Willa. Spat it."

Petra's voice had the clipped precision of a woman who had run out of words for the day and was now speaking in headlines. She untied a knot with her teeth and spat hemp onto the floor.

"Bring her inside. Carefully."

Willa and Petra hauled Aroma across the threshold. The automaton's chassis was polished walnut, dark with age and etched with a pattern of trailing vines that had been inlaid with mother-of-pearl before the salt air of the harbor had taken the shine off. Her arms hung loose. Her head lolled against her collarbone, steam leaking from her ear valves in thin, defeated wisps.

Sprocket had already cleared a space on the workbench. The little automaton had shoved aside the disassembled innards of the Model Seven with its shoulder plate, making a clatter that made Willa wince. Its eyes were still amber, cycling between warning and what she had come to recognize as concern.

"Hold her steady," Willa said. "Petra, get her onto the bench. Sprocket, fetch me the magnifier lamp and the Number Four probe set. And the oil cloth. She's leaking somewhere I can't see."

Sprocket whirred once, a high thin sound like a teakettle remembering it was angry, and skittered across the floor on its little brass feet. Petra braced her boot against the bench leg and lifted. Aroma settled onto the wood with a groan of leather straps and a soft, wet hiss from somewhere deep inside her chest cavity.

"Right." Willa wiped her hands on her apron, crossed to the lamp, and clicked it on. The magnifier threw a circle of white light across Aroma's face. The automaton's expression plate was frozen in what Willa could only describe as polite horror, eyes wide, mouth a small round O of apology.

"She was fine yesterday," Petra said. She had stepped back, arms folded, flour still ghosting her hairline. "She was fine at four this morning when she started the proving drawer. By half past six she was serving breakfast and calling Mr. Abernathy 'dear little fish.' Mr. Abernathy does not like being called dear little fish."

"How long has she been like this?"

"Three hours. Maybe four. It got worse."

Willa leaned closer. The smell hit her first, not the warm flour-and-brine smell of Petra's skin but something metallic and slightly sharp, the smell of a winding that had been forced past its tolerance. She pressed her ear to Aroma's chest plate and listened.

The sound was wrong. Not the steady clack-click-hum of a healthy automaton's primary resonator but a stuttering rhythm, a hiccup every fourth beat, and beneath it a faint and unwholesome grinding like a fingernail drawn across the teeth of a comb.

"Sprocket. Hold the lamp for me."

Sprocket stretched one thin arm up and clamped its brass fingers around the magnifier's swivel joint. The light steadied. Willa took the Number Four probe, the smallest one, and began to work the seam of Aroma's nasal resonator. The part in question sat just above the automaton's upper lip, a delicate grille of copper filigree that warmed incoming air and gave Aroma's voice its particular soothing hiss. Willa had always liked the design. Tante Maren had once told her the grille was modeled on a piece of Italian lace.

The probe caught on something. Willa stopped breathing.

"Stay still," she murmured, to Aroma, to herself, to whatever gods watched over apprentice mechanics who worked on machines older than their careers. She eased the probe a quarter turn and pulled.

It would not come. Whatever was lodged in there had a grip. Willa reached for the long-nose variety, slid it alongside the first probe, and began to work the obstruction loose by millimeters. The grinding inside Aroma's chest grew louder, then softer, then louder again.

"Willa." Petra's voice came from somewhere over her shoulder. "What is it?"

"Hold on."

The obstruction gave. Willa drew the long-nose out slowly, clamping its jaws tight, and pulled the thing free of the nasal resonator into the circle of lamplight.

It was a beetle. Tiny. The length of Willa's smallest fingernail, no wider than a thread. Its shell was copper, tarnished to a dusty rose, and its legs were six fine wires bent at the joints. It twitched once, twice, and went still in the grip of the pliers.

The grinding noise in Aroma's chest stopped.

"The smell," Willa said slowly. "Petra. When did you last open the spice cabinet?"

Petra's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"Tuesday. I opened it Tuesday for the saffron. I had to dig behind the cardamom pods and there was a box I hadn't seen in years, little copper thing with a spring closure. I thought it was a sweetmeat tin."

"Aroma must have inhaled it," Willa said. "She takes her air through the resonator for the speech valves. The box tipped, or it was already open. Either way, the beetle crawled inside and lodged itself in the grille."

"And the salt."

"The beetle's legs. You saw them, the wires. They were crossed across the resonator's intake valves. Every time Aroma tried to draw breath for speech, the wires interrupted the signal. The command that should have been 'salt' was being chopped. It came out as the closest approximation her voice box could manage. Sugar. Treacle. Whatever she had in stock."

Petra pressed both hands to her face. Flour sifted from her knuckles and powdered her eyebrows white.

"I put a beetle in my sister's head."

"It's not your fault. The box was old. The spring was shot. These beetles were common thirty years ago; my aunt used to find them in clockwork shipments from the continent. They eat the copper windings."

"Your aunt?"

Willa did not answer. She turned back to Aroma and began, very carefully, to inspect the resonator for damage. The grille was scratched, but intact. She cleaned each filament with a soft-bristled brush and a drop of clockwork oil, working slowly, feeling the metal warm under her fingers.

"Sprocket."

The little automaton was still holding the lamp. Its amber eyes had not changed color, but its chest was doing something Willa had never seen it do before. A thin line of vapor was leaking from the seam where its throat met its shoulder plate. Not steam from the boiler, not condensation. This vapor was warm and damp and it curled upward in a wisp that caught the light.

"Sprocket," Willa said again, gentler. "Put the lamp down. Come here."

Sprocket set the lamp on the bench with exaggerated care. Its feet made tiny clicking sounds as it crossed the wood. It stopped beside Willa and looked up at her with its amber eyes, and the vapor kept coming, curling from its shoulder like breath on a winter morning.

"You're crying," Willa said.

A sound came out of Sprocket. Not a word. Not a chirp. A long, wavering note, the sound a kettle makes just before it begins to whistle, low and full and terribly sad. Its little brass hands reached up toward Aroma's face, then stopped, hovering an inch from the walnut cheek, afraid to touch.

"She can't feel it," Willa said quietly. "She's not in pain. She doesn't know what happened. The resonator is fixed. When I restart her she'll think she woke up from a bad dream."

Sprocket's hands did not move. The vapor kept curling.

Willa set down her tools. She picked Sprocket up with both hands, lifted it from the bench, and held it against her chest. The little automaton weighed almost nothing, two pounds of brass and copper and one small steam heart. Its feet dangled. Its eyes flickered amber, amber, amber, and then dimmed to a steady, soft gold, the color Willa had only seen once before, the morning Sprocket had first opened its eyes and seen her standing over the workbench.

"Listen to me," Willa said. "I need you to do something for me. I need you to hold the oil can while I re-lubricate the resonator joints. Can you do that?"

Sprocket's whirring slowed. The vapor thinned.

"Steady now. That's right. Just hold the spout."

Willa lowered Sprocket back to the bench. The little automaton's hands were trembling. It reached for the oil can and gripped it with both sets of fingers, knuckles white with effort, and held the spout where Willa directed.

She worked in silence for several minutes. The oil went on drop by drop. Aroma's voice box gave a small click, then another, then settled into a low, steady purr that Willa recognized as a healthy idle. The polite horror on Aroma's expression plate softened by a degree.

"Sprocket," Willa said. "I want you to do the restart sequence. You've watched me do it a hundred times. Primaries first, then the voice coils, then the gesture actuators. You know the order."

Sprocket looked at her. Its eyes were still soft gold.

"I trust you."

The words came out before Willa had decided to say them. They sat in the air of the workshop for a moment, alongside the smell of clockwork oil and the distant flour-dust smell of Petra and the faint mineral tang of the beetle's tarnished shell. Sprocket's hands tightened on the oil can. Then it set the can down, precisely, on the spot where it had found it, and turned to face Aroma.

It placed one small brass palm against the automaton's cheek. The vapor was gone. The trembling was gone. What remained was a stillness that Willa had never seen in the little machine, a focus that was almost solemn.

Sprocket began the restart sequence. It worked slowly, carefully, with a tenderness that made the back of Willa's throat ache. When it reached the voice coils, it hesitated, then leaned close to Aroma's ear and spoke in a voice so small that even Willa had to lean in to hear.

"You're all right now."

Aroma's eyes opened. They were the color of weak tea, the color of a kettle that has just been poured. Steam curled from her ear valves in a long, slow sigh.

"Oh," she said. Her voice was a hiss and a whisper. "Oh, my. Where am I, dear?"

"The workshop," Willa said. "Petra brought you. You had a visitor."

Aroma's gaze drifted. It landed on Petra, who was standing very still by the door with her arms folded tight across her chest, and then it moved to Sprocket, who had not moved its hand from Aroma's cheek.

"Hello, little one," Aroma said softly. "You're new."

Sprocket's eyes flickered gold, amber, gold. It did not answer. It did not need to.

Willa stood with her back to the bench and her face to the wall and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until she saw stars. She did this for five seconds, ten. When she turned back around, Sprocket was helping Aroma to sit up, one brass arm around the old automaton's waist, and Petra was watching them with an expression on her flour-powdered face that Willa had never seen her wear before.

Outside, somewhere down the cobbled hill, the church bell struck the half hour. A cart rattled past in the street. Somewhere a dog barked twice and stopped.

Willa crossed to her workbench and picked up the copper beetle in her long-nose pliers. It was heavier than it looked. She turned it over in the lamplight and saw, stamped into the underside of its thorax in tiny, precise letters, a maker's mark she did not recognize. The mark was a circle, and inside the circle was a feather, and inside the feather was a single open eye.

She set the beetle down on the bench and did not pick it up again.

Willa did not sleep that night. She told herself she was waiting for Sprocket's diagnostic cycle to finish, but the truth was simpler and stranger: she was afraid that if she closed her eyes, the copper beetle would be gone from the bench when she opened them, and with it the only thread she had to whoever had been in this workshop before her.

She sat at the bench with the lamp turned low. Sprocket had tucked itself into its charging alcove in the corner, its eyes dimmed to a single amber ember, but it was not asleep; she could hear the soft tick of its thinking-gears turning over. Aroma had been settled into the old wing chair by the stove, wrapped in a quilt Petra had fetched from upstairs. The old automaton's chest rose and fell in the rhythm of slow steam, a sound like the sea heard through a wall.

Petra had gone home at half past nine. She had stood in the doorway for a long moment with her coat half-on and her hand on the frame, looking back at the three of them, and then she had nodded once, sharply, as if confirming something to herself, and stepped out into the lamplit street. Willa heard her footsteps on the cobbles fade, and then the bell over the curio shop door chime faintly as she locked up.

The workshop was quiet.

Willa turned the lamp up a quarter-turn and looked again at the beetle. She did not touch it. She had not touched it since she had set it down. In the lamplight the maker's mark seemed to shift, the open eye inside the feather seeming to look first one way and then another, though she knew this was only the play of the flame and the tarnish on the brass.

Circle. Feather. Eye.

She did not recognize the mark. She did recognize, with a small cold certainty, that Tante Maren would have. Her aunt had known every guild insignia in the northern counties, every back-alley workshop's private stamp, every borrowed or stolen mark that passed between the tinker families of the moors. The beetle had been hidden beneath the loose floorboard. It had been hidden with care.

Someone had been in this workshop. Someone had left the beetle here, or someone had come looking for it, and Tante Maren had hidden it before she went.

Willa sat very still for a long time.

Then, from somewhere above her head, she heard a sound.

It was the faint scrape of wood on wood. A creak of a floorboard, the kind that came from someone pacing in a small room. Then a different sound: the soft grind of a pulley, and the whisper of rope running through a guide.

A small hatch in the ceiling, set between the joists and painted over so many times that it was almost invisible, swung open on old hinges. Willa stared up at it. She had lived in this workshop for three weeks and she had not known there was a hatch in the ceiling. She had not known there was a room above the workshop.

A rope descended through the hatch. At the end of the rope was a tray.

The tray was old, dark wood, the corners worn to a soft shine by years of handling. On it sat a small pile of pastries, each one crimped at the edges in a pattern Willa recognized: the Underhill twist, a family recipe Petra had once described to her without quite explaining why she knew it. There were four of them, golden-brown, still faintly warm. Beside them, propped against a small pot of clotted cream, was a folded piece of paper.

Sprocket's eyes flickered awake. The amber embers brightened to gold, then to a pale, watchful yellow. Aroma stirred in the wing chair, a soft whistle escaping from the seam of her shoulder.

"Willa," Sprocket whispered. "Up."

"I see it," Willa said.

She reached up and untied the rope. The tray came away into her hands, lighter than she had expected. The hatch above remained open for a moment, and in the square of darkness she glimpsed the shadow of a figure stepping back from the edge, and then the hatch swung shut again, and the ceiling was once more only ceiling.

She set the tray on the bench, beside the beetle. She did not look at the beetle. She unfolded the paper.

The handwriting was cramped and slightly uneven, the letters pressed hard into the page by a pen that had been held too tightly. The ink was brown, the color of strong tea.

Two words. Centered on the page.

WELCOME, GRANDDAUGHTER.

Willa read the note three times. She read it a fourth time. She set it down and picked it up again.

Granddaughter. Not niece. Not child. Granddaughter.

She looked at the pastries. She looked at the hatch in the ceiling. She looked at Sprocket, who was watching her with the fixed bright attention of a small creature that did not understand what was happening but understood that it mattered.

"Sprocket," she said, and her voice came out strange, "who lives upstairs?"

"I don't know," Sprocket said. "There was no upstairs yesterday."

"There was always an upstairs," said Aroma, from the wing chair. Her voice was a slow hiss, like a kettle remembering how to sing. "There has been an upstairs for thirty-seven years. There has been someone in it for almost as long. He does not come down. Petra brings him his meals on Tuesdays and Fridays. He does not ask for company. He does not ask for much of anything."

"You knew," Willa said.

"I know many things," Aroma said. "It is what I was built for. Knowing, and saying, and saying again. Though I find," she added, with a small rueful exhalation of steam, "that I have not been able to say much of anything for some time."

"The hatch," Willa said. "It was painted over."

"Many things have been painted over in this building," Aroma said. "Some of them deserved to be."

Willa stood at the bench with the note in her hand and the pastries cooling beside the copper beetle. She thought about Tante Maren, who had disappeared without a word and left her a workshop full of debts and wonders.

The thought arrived uninvited: that Tante Maren had known, and had said nothing, and had vanished all the same. That was the shape grief kept taking tonight, a hook turning in her chest, a question that would not settle.

"Miss Pennywhistle," Sprocket said, from somewhere near her elbow. His little gears were ticking very fast. "Your hand is shaking."

"I know," she said. She looked down at the note, at the letters her aunt had written in a hand she would know anywhere, steady and slightly forward-leaning, like a woman walking into a wind. She smoothed the paper against the bench. She breathed in, through her nose, the way Tante Maren had taught her to breathe when a piece of automata was being stubborn. In for four. Out for six. In for four. Out for six.

"Aroma," she said. "Is his name Bram?"

Aroma's copper brow shifted, just a fraction, a polite mechanical blink. "I am not certain I should say."

"I am not certain you have a choice," Willa said, and was startled by the steel in her own voice. "My aunt has disappeared. Someone has painted over a hatch in your shop. And there is a young man upstairs who, according to the woman who brought me here, is a person who does not exist. So you will tell me what you know, or you will tell me nothing, but you will not tell me that you are not certain."

The shop was very quiet. Even the street noise seemed to pull back, the way it did in the Pennywhistle workshop when a piece of clockwork was wound too tight.

Aroma exhaled. A long, slow breath of steam that smelled faintly of bergamot and something older, oil and dust and patience.

"His name is Bram Underhill," she said. "He is Petra's nephew. He came to live above the shop eleven years ago, after the accident."

"Accident," Willa repeated.

"The one no one speaks of," Aroma said. "There was a fire. There was a young woman. There was a young man who was not burned but who believed, for a long time, that he should have been. Petra took him in. She has been keeping him ever since. She sends him books. She sends him parts. She sends him, on Tuesdays and Fridays, the pastries you saw, though she bakes them herself and lets the baker take the credit, because he will not eat anything that comes from her hands if he knows whose hands they are."

"Why?" Willa said.

"Because he blames her," Aroma said, simply. "He has blamed her for eleven years. He will blame her until he understands that she is not the one he is angry with, and then he will be very sorry, and she will forgive him before he has asked, because that is what she does. That is what she has always done."

Willa looked at the hatch. She looked at the pastries.

"He came down," she said. "Last night. He came down through this hatch and he left the pastries and he took my aunt's note from the back of the workshop."

"Yes," Aroma said.

"And Petra painted over the hatch this morning, before we arrived, so I would not know there was a way up."

"Yes."

"Because she is afraid I will go up and find him and he will be angry and she will lose him again."

Aroma made a small sound, not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. A mechanical acknowledgment. "Partly," she said. "And partly because she is afraid of what you will see when you do. He has been building, Miss Pennywhistle. For eleven years, in that room, he has been building. She does not know what. She is afraid to ask."

Willa set the note down. She picked up one of the pastries, the little one with the almond slice on top, and turned it in her fingers. It was still faintly warm. He had been here, in this kitchen, perhaps only an hour before she had walked in. He had held this same pastry. He had stood at this same counter.

She thought of Tante Maren's workshop, of the rows of half-finished automata, of the debts that had piled up while her aunt worked on something she would not name.

She thought of the note. Granddaughter. The word she had not expected. The word that had landed in her like a stone in deep water, still sinking.

"Sprocket," she said. "Do you think Tante Maren knew about the grandson?"

Sprocket considered this with the grave attention of a small automaton faced with a very large question. His chest whirred. "Tante Maren knew about everything," he said, finally. "She just decided what to say about very little."

Willa laughed, and the sound surprised her, because it came out wet and ragged at the edges, but it was a laugh, and Sprocket looked pleased, and Aroma's brow shifted again in that polite mechanical way, and for a moment the three of them were only what they were: a girl and her little machine and an old copper woman in a wing chair, in a kitchen that smelled of bergamot and cooling pastry, on an evening that would not end.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She squared her shoulders. She picked up the note and folded it, carefully, into the pocket of her apron, where it sat against her ribs like a second heartbeat.

"I am not going up there tonight," she said.

Aroma made no comment. Sprocket looked up at her.

"Not tonight," Willa repeated, and this time it sounded more like a decision and less like a postponement. "Tonight I am going to go home. I am going to feed Sprocket. I am going to wind down the workshop. I am going to sleep, if I can. And tomorrow I am going to come back here, and I am going to talk to Petra, properly, about what my aunt owed her and what her nephew has to do with it, and I am going to find out why Tante Maren left that note in the workshop and not at home."

She looked at Aroma.

"And you," she said, "are going to tell me everything you remember about the summer my aunt came to this shop and never spoke of it again."

Aroma's brow shifted a third time. "That," she said, "is a great many things."

"I have time," Willa said. "I am very good at waiting for things to cool."

She meant it. She surprised herself by meaning it.

She gathered up the pastries, all of them, and put them back into the cloth Petra had brought, because they were not hers to leave, and because, if she was honest, she wanted Petra to know that she had seen them and had not pretended otherwise. She set Sprocket on her shoulder. She nodded to Aroma.

"Thank you," she said. "For the tea. And for telling me."

Aroma's lids half-closed, the way a kettle does when it is settling into its simmer. "Come back," she said, and the steam in her voice made the words sound almost like a blessing. "I find I have a great deal to catch up on."

Willa stepped out into the back alley. The evening had gone fully dark while she was inside, the kind of dark that smelled of wet stone and chimney smoke and the first cool breath of autumn. Sprocket clung to the collar of her coat. The little beetle in her pocket ticked, faintly, against her hip.

She stood for a moment with her face turned up to the sky. There was no moon. There was only the low orange glow from the city and, far off, the sound of someone playing a violin, badly, with great feeling.

She thought about a young man in a room above a shop, eleven years into a grief he had mistaken for guilt. She thought about a woman who baked pastries she would not let him see. She thought about an aunt who had carried a secret across a continent and a war and a thousand small workshops, and had pinned it, finally, to a board in a back room, for whoever came next.

Her name was Willa Pennywhistle. She was nineteen. She owed a great deal of money. She had not slept properly in three days.

She started walking home, and the little beetle ticked against her hip like a second heart learning a new rhythm, and Sprocket hummed a tuneless little hum against her collar, and the violin played on, badly, with feeling, somewhere in the dark.