The Quiet Engines of Marrowfen: The Broken Automaton

door stuck again. Widow Harlow leaned her shoulder against the warped oak and pushed, feeling the hinge complain beneath her weight. Damp air from the fen rolled in behind her, carrying the green-rot smell of the lowlands and the distant braying of a tethered goat. She clutched the bundle against her chest with both arms.

Inside, Posy Underbough stood on a stool, reaching for a jar of brass screws on the top shelf of a cabinet that listed gently to one side. Her fingers closed around the glass, and she turned at the sound of the door.

"Miss Posy," Widow Harlow said. "Oh, my dear, I am so sorry to disturb you."

"You're not disturbing anything." Posy tucked the jar under her arm and climbed down, her boots finding each rung with the practiced ease of a child who had spent her life in this room. "I was just trying to find the right size. There's a pocket watch on my bench with a mainspring that's started to uncoil, and I need to..."

She trailed off. Something in Widow Harlow's face had caught the light wrong, or perhaps the light itself had changed, dimming to the color of old pewter. The widow's hands were shaking where they gripped the bundle, and the cloth she held was the deep burgundy of mourning, frayed at the edges from years of being folded and unfolded.

"Widow Harlow." Posy set the jar on the workbench and came closer, her steps small and careful on the uneven floor. "What's happened?"

The widow did not speak immediately. She looked down at the bundle in her arms as if she had forgotten what it was, and then a soft, shuddering breath moved through her.

"It's Marigold's rabbit," she said.

Posy's hand rose halfway, then lowered. Marigold. The name opened a door in Posy's memory, and behind it stood a girl with hair the color of autumn bracken and a laugh that had carried across the boarding house garden like wind chimes. Marigold Harlow, who had been older than Posy by several years, who had taught her to skip stones across the drainage ditches, who had died in the second winter of the famine.

"She kept it under her pillow," Widow Harlow continued, her voice taking on that distant quality it sometimes held when she spoke of things too heavy to lift without a tremor. "Every night. The key was always wound tight, and the eyes would catch the candlelight, and she said it watched over her dreams."

She held out the bundle. The burgundy cloth fell open in her lap, and there it was: a clockwork rabbit, no bigger than a kitten, its body forged from copper and tin and plated with a thin skin of silver that had long since tarnished to the color of a bruise. Its ears were long and jointed, hinged with tiny brass screws. Its paws were shaped with surprising delicacy, each toe tipped with a minuscule claw.

And its eyes, once two gleaming cabochons of sea-glass blue, were dark. Dark as the bottom of a well. Dark as the hour before sunrise in the deepest part of winter.

Posy reached out and took the rabbit from Widow Harlow's hands. It was heavier than she expected, and colder. The metal should have been at least lukewarm from the widow's body heat, but it sat in her palms with the chill of river stones.

"May I?" Posy asked.

Widow Harlow nodded, though her jaw worked as if chewing something bitter.

Posy turned the rabbit over, examining it. The key was a small brass thing, no longer than her thumb, shaped like a shepherd's crook. She fit it into the winding port at the rabbit's back and turned.

Nothing.

The key resisted, as though something inside had seized or swollen or rusted into a single immovable mass. Posy pressed harder, her small fingers whitening around the brass. Still nothing. The mechanism inside was locked, frozen, dead.

"The key won't turn," Posy said, and heard in her own voice the faintest edge of fear. "Widow Harlow, when did this happen?"

"Last night.

The word fell into the space between them like a stone into still water.

Last night. Only the night before, the rabbit had been winding and ticking and hopping its small mechanical hops across a child's bedroom floor. Only the night before, it had been whole. Now it sat in Posy's hands with the dead weight of something that had once been alive, and the key would not turn, and there was nothing to be done about it here in the parlor with the kettle going cold on the hob.

"Widow Harlow," Posy said, and her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to, "I need my workbench. And I need light. The good lamp, not the taper."

Widow Harlow rose from her chair with the careful, unfolding motion of a woman whose joints had begun to disagree with her about the day's plans. "Oh my dear, you needn't trouble yourself, I only brought it because I thought perhaps, well, I thought perhaps if anyone could, but I know it is broken, I know it must be beyond, and I ought not to have come up the hill at my age, but I could not bear to leave it lying in the drawer where Mira used to keep her treasures, and I could not bear to throw it out, and I did not know what else to do, so I thought of you, which is what I always think when there is something nobody else can mend."

Posy waited, gently, for the flood to pass. She had learned that Widow Harlow's sentences arrived the way rain arrived in the fenland, in long slanting bursts that soaked everything whether you had your coat up or down.

"I'm glad you came," Posy said, when the widow had drawn breath. "Truly. But I cannot promise anything until I have looked inside. Will you wait? There's tea, and Grandmother keeps biscuits in the tin with the dented lid."

"I will wait," Widow Harlow said. "I will wait as long as you need. I have waited eleven years already, my dear. Another hour is nothing."

She said it lightly, the way she said most things that were not light at all, and Posy understood that the eleven years referred to something she was not yet ready to ask about. She tucked the rabbit inside her apron and carried it through the low doorway into the back of the cottage, where the workbench waited beneath the good lamp.

The workshop smelled, as it always did, of brass shavings and pine resin and the faintly acrid ghost of solder. Posy's grandmother, Cora Underbough, had built the bench from a slab of old ship's timber, and the surface was scarred with the pale commas of a thousand small burns. Posy set the rabbit down and reached for the lamp.

The wick took to the flame on the second try. Light spilled across the bench in a steady amber pool, and the rabbit's tarnished flanks kindled into something almost alive, the silver plating picking up the glow and throwing it back in soft, bruised highlights. Posy pulled her stool close and sat.

She began, as she had been taught, with her hands still and her eyes first.

The rabbit was old. Older than the widow, perhaps. Older than the cottage. The plating was not merely tarnished; it was worn through in places, the silver gone to reveal the copper beneath, and the copper itself had that particular dull bloom that spoke of decades rather than years. The hinge pins of the ears had been re-hammered at least once, the brass showing the flat thumbprint of a maker who had not had proper tools. The paws had been shaped with a file, not cast, which meant they were a later addition, a repair. Someone had loved this thing enough to mend it by hand.

Posy turned it belly-up. The winding port was set into the spine between the shoulder blades, a small hexagonal recess that ought to have seated a proper key. The key that had come with the rabbit was a rough shepherd's crook, filed down to fit, which meant the original key had been lost decades ago. Inside the port, just visible when she tilted the rabbit toward the light, the teeth of the winding arbor were bent.

That was why the key would not turn. Not rust, not swelling. The arbor itself was bent, and bent in a way that suggested force, not time. Something had wrenched the mechanism from the outside, or the inside had seized under a load it was never meant to bear.

She set the rabbit down and crossed to the shelf where her grandmother kept the small tools, the ones meant for watches and music boxes and the delicate innards of clocks no larger than a fist. She selected a brass-bodied screwdriver with a flat blade no wider than her thumbnail, a pair of long-nosed pliers, and a tin of penetrating oil that smelled faintly of cloves. Then she hesitated, and added a small magnifying lens on a hinged arm, because the rabbit's screws were smaller than any she had worked on before.

Back at the bench. She drew a breath, and began.

The first screw came out of the rabbit's belly plate with a soft hiss. The second followed. The third she had to coax with the tip of the screwdriver, because the slot had been burred over by the same hasty hammer work that had re-pinned the ears. She worked in the quiet, the only sounds the small metallic complaints of the screws and the distant hum of Widow Harlow's voice in the parlor, talking now to Cora, who had come in from the garden when she heard the knock.

Posy lifted the belly plate free.

Inside was a city.

She had seen clockwork before. She had taken apart her grandmother's music boxes and the insides of three different pocket watches and once, with trembling hands, the mainspring housing of a longcase clock that had not chimed in twenty years. She knew what clockwork looked like. But she had never seen anything like this.

The rabbit's interior was layered, tier upon tier of brass plates and steel wheels and tiny pinions no bigger than grains of rice, all nested together with a precision that made her catch her breath. There were wheels she could not name. There were levers she could not trace. And threaded through it all, running from the mainspring barrel at the rabbit's chest to a series of cams at the hips, was a single coiled spring of blue-black steel, so fine it was almost invisible until the light caught it and threw back a sliver of white.

The mainspring.

Posy leaned in. The magnifying lens swam into focus.

The mainspring was broken.

She sat back on her stool and let out a breath she had not realized she was holding. The break was clean, almost surgical, the two ends of the spring separated by a gap no wider than a thread. And it was not at the coils. It was deep in the chest cavity, at the anchor point where the spring seated against the barrel wall, and the seat itself was cracked. The steel had not simply tired. Something inside the barrel had failed, and the failure had sheared the spring at its root.

She thought of Mira, whoever Mira was. She thought of a child asleep in a bedroom with a rabbit on the floor, the rabbit winding down toward silence the way all wound things do, tick by tick, until the last tooth of the last wheel clicked against the next and found nothing to push. She thought of the moment, somewhere in the dark, when the spring had finally let go.

"Widow Harlow," she called, not loudly, because the cottage was small and her voice carried. "Widow Harlow, I need to ask you something."

A pause. The creak of a chair. Footsteps in the hallway, slow and deliberate. Widow Harlow appeared in the workshop doorway with a cup of tea in one hand and her shawl pulled tight across her shoulders.

"Oh my dear," she said, looking at the open rabbit on the bench, at the tiny screws lined up like soldiers on the wood beside it, at her granddaughter's face. "Oh my dear, it looks worse than before."

"It looks like the truth," Posy said. "That's usually better, even when it's worse. Did Mira wind it herself? A child her age, did she wind the key every night?"

Widow Harlow set the teacup down on the corner of the bench, careful of the tools. "Every night," she said. "Every single night she wound it before bed, and every morning it was sitting on her pillow. She was very particular about that. She said the rabbit liked to watch her sleep."

"And she wound it to the same number of turns each time?"

"Oh my dear, I could not say. I only know she was a careful child. She did not take chances."

Posy looked at the snapped spring, at the cracked seat, at the way the failure had originated not at the coils but at the anchor. The math of it sat in her chest like a cold stone.

A child could not have done this. Not by winding. Not by any force a small pair of hands could put through a shepherd's crook filed down to fit a hexagonal port. The mechanism inside had been pushed past its limit by something mechanical, something with leverage, something that had turned the key far past where any winding should have stopped.

She did not say this. She was not ready to say this. Instead she reached for the pliers and began, very gently, to lift the broken ends of the mainspring from their housing, so that she could see the fracture face up close, so that she could be certain.

She was certain.

The break was not a fatigue break. It was not the slow surrender of old steel grown brittle with the years. The fracture face was bright, bright as new coin, and the grain of the steel ran straight and true on both sides, which meant the spring had been sound. The break had happened all at once, in a single moment, under a load the mechanism was never built to carry.

Posy set the spring down on the bench beside the screws. She sat with her hands in her lap and stared at the open rabbit, at its city of brass and steel, at the dark gap where the mainspring used to be.

"Widow Harlow," she said, very quietly. "Who else has wound this rabbit?"

The widow's teacup sat untouched, the steam thinning to nothing. In the parlor, Cora's voice rose in a question, and then fell silent. The lamp on the bench flickered once, though there was no draft, and the shadows in the rabbit's open chest shifted, and Posy thought, for the first time, that this was not a thing about a spring at all.

The widow did not answer at once. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, her fingers laced tight, and the lamplight caught the silver of her hair and the wet shine at the corners of her eyes. Her mouth opened, and then it closed, and Posy watched the small struggle of it, the way a word would come up to her lips and then slide back down again like a fish that saw the shadow of a heron.

"There was a man," the widow said at last. Her voice had gone thin, and the tremor in it was no longer small. "A stranger. He came to the boarding house a fortnight past, on the Tuesday, when the fog was so thick you could not see the gate from the kitchen. He said he had heard I had a curiosity, a mechanical rabbit, and he offered a great deal of money for it."

She paused. Her hands unfolded, and one of them crept up to the lace at her throat.

"I would not sell," she said. "I would not, even for what he offered. It was a gift, you see. It was a gift from my husband, before he passed, and it played the song he used to sing to our girl on her birthday. Our girl. She is gone now too, but the rabbit remembers."

The teacup on the bench gave off the last of its steam. In the parlor, Cora's voice had gone quiet, and Posy could hear, faintly, the sound of Lily Pennywhistle saying something low and cautious, and Mr. Bunting answering in his careful way.

"What did the man do," Posy said, "when you would not sell?"

The widow's hand at her throat tightened on the lace. She looked at the open rabbit on the bench, at the dark gap in its chest where the spring used to be, and her eyes filled.

"He said he was sorry for me," she said. "He said he was sorry, and he asked to see the rabbit anyway, just to look, just to look, he said. So I let him hold it. I was a fool, oh my dear, I was a fool. He turned it over in his hands, and he smiled, and he said it was a beautiful piece, and he put it back in the cabinet. He did not seem to do anything. He did not seem to do anything at all."

She drew a breath that shuddered on the way in.

"That was the last time it played."

Posy looked down at the rabbit. She looked at the bright fracture face of the broken spring, and she thought of a man turning it over in his hands, of leverage applied with a smile, of the moment the steel gave way inside the housing where no one would see. She thought of a key wound past its stop, of a mainspring pushed past the limit by someone who knew exactly how to break it without leaving a mark on the outside.

She did not say any of this to the widow. The widow had enough. The widow had enough.

"I can fix it," Posy said. She said it quietly, and she said it as if she were promising something larger than a spring. "I have a spring that will fit. It will take me a quarter of an hour."

The widow looked at her. The lamplight made the wet on her lashes shine like tin.

"Will it remember," she said, "the song?"

"I will wind it gently," Posy said. "I will wind it the way it was wound before. The song is in the cam and the bellows. The song has not been hurt. Only the spring is hurt, and I can mend a spring."

She reached into the leather pouch and took out the spare spring she had brought with her, the one she had cut and tempered that morning before she knew why she would need it. It sat in her palm, bright and coiled, and she set it down beside the broken one, and the two springs looked at each other across the bench like relatives who had not seen one another in a long time.

She picked up the soldering iron. She lit the small spirit lamp beneath it and waited, her hand steady, her breath even, while the tip warmed. The parlor had gone quiet now, and the only sounds in the kitchen were the soft tick of the lamp and the widow's small, careful breathing, and the faint whisper of the flame under the iron.

When the iron was hot, she laid the broken spring on the bench and held the new one beside it, measuring the coils with her eye, comparing the gauge of the steel, the curve of the arch. She fitted it into the housing with the long-nosed pliers, easing it down into the barrel, seating the outer end against the post, the inner end against the arbor. She soldered the cap back into place with a quick, clean touch, the smell of hot tin sharp in the air, and she wiped the joint with the rag while it cooled.

She closed the back plate. She set the screws into their holes and turned them down with the small screwdriver, and each screw went home with the same satisfying little bite. She wound the key three turns, slowly, feeling the tension build under her fingers, feeling the new spring take the load. She set the key down.

"Now," she said, and her voice was not much more than a breath.

She set the rabbit on the bench, upright, its ears catching the lamplight. She reached out and pressed the small lever at its side, the one that had been pressed a thousand times before, the one the widow's husband had pressed on a hundred birthdays.

The rabbit hopped.

It hopped forward once, twice, three times across the bench, its brass feet clicking on the wood, and at the third hop its belly opened and the cam turned and the bellows squeezed, and out of the grille in its chest there came a sound, thin and sweet and a little worn at the edges, like a voice that had not been used in a long while. It was a tune Posy did not know, a tune with six notes that climbed and then came down again, and it played all the way through, and then it played the tune a second time because that was what the rabbit had always done, and then the cam came to its rest and the bellows sighed, and the rabbit sat still on the bench with its ears pricked and its eyes bright and the last of the music hanging in the kitchen like the smell of warm bread.

Happy birthday, dear Emmy, happy birthday to you.

The widow made a sound. It was not a word. It was the sound a person makes when something they had thought was lost comes back to them from a place they had stopped looking, and it came up from her chest without any warning, and her hands went to her mouth, and the tears that had been gathering at the corners of her eyes ran down her cheeks and into the lines at the corners of her mouth.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, my dear. Oh, my dear, my dear."

She reached across the bench and her hands found Posy's hands, and she held them, and her fingers were cool and a little rough from years of scrubbing and kneading, and they shook. She held on as if Posy were the only solid thing in a room that had begun to turn.

"Emmy," she said. "That was her name. That was my girl. She would have been thirty-two this October. She would have been thirty-two."

Posy did not speak. She sat with her hands held in the widow's hands, and she let the widow cry, and the tears fell onto the bench and onto the brass casing of the rabbit and onto Posy's fingers, and the tears were warm.

After a while the widow let go. She took out her handkerchief, a square of white linen with a hem stitched by someone who had been very patient, and she dabbed at her face, and she drew a long breath that shook only a little on the way in.

"You have done a kind thing," she said. "You have done the kindest thing anyone has done for me in a long time. I will not forget it. I will not, Posy Underbough. I will not."

She folded the handkerchief and put it away. She looked at the rabbit on the bench, at its bright eyes and its pricked ears, and her face did something that was not quite a smile but was near to one.

"Sunday," she said. "You will come to Sunday dinner. You will come, and you will bring your mother, and I will roast a chicken and there will be potatoes and there will be gravy, and we will sit at my table and we will eat, and you will tell me how the spring works, because I would like to know, even if I will not understand a word of it. You will come. It is not a question, my dear. It is an invitation, and it stands."

Posy looked at the widow. She looked at the rabbit. She looked at the bench with its litter of screws and pliers and the two springs, the broken and the whole, lying side by side in the lamplight.

"Yes," she said. "Yes. Thank you."

She began, very carefully, to gather her tools. She wound the soldering iron in its cloth, and she set the pliers and the screwdrivers back into the leather pouch, and she laid the broken spring on the bench because she was not yet ready to throw it away. She would take it home, and she would look at the fracture face again under her grandmother's lamp, and she would think about the man who had come in the fog, and she would think about leverage, and she would think about what a person might do to a thing that belonged to someone else.

But that was for later. That was for the workshop and the long evening and the quiet work of thinking.

Now there was only the kitchen, and the widow drying her eyes, and the rabbit sitting on the bench with its song still in the room like a candle that had not quite gone out. In the parlor, the clock on the mantel ticked, and Mr. Bunting said something about the weather, and Lily Pennywhistle laughed, and Cora's voice rose again, asking about the teapot, and the kitchen door was half open, and through it Posy could see the warm light in the parlor and the shapes of the people in it, and she thought that this was what a house sounded like when it was full of the right kind of quiet.

She closed the leather pouch and buckled the strap.

"I will see you Sunday," she said.

The widow nodded. She put her hand, very lightly, on the rabbit's head.

"Sunday," she said. "Bring an appetite, my dear. I will not have you going home hungry."

Posy stepped out of the kitchen and into the parlor, and behind her the lamp on the bench burned on, and the rabbit sat with its ears pricked, and the widow sat with her hand on its head, and the broken spring lay on the wood between them, waiting to be carried home and read like a letter.