The door of the Tuning House had swollen in its frame, and Wren had to put her shoulder to the wood before the latch surrendered with a thin, cracking sound. Cold air spilled out across the threshold, carrying the smell of machine oil gone stale and dust that had been settling undisturbed for months. Beneath it, almost gone, the faintest trace of bergamot and clockwork grease, the scent her aunt had always carried on her cuffs and her fingertips.
Wren stepped inside and let the door close behind her.
The hall was darker than she remembered. Lamplight found the staircase first, then crept along the wainscot to the long-case clock that had stood against the wall since before she was born. The pendulum had been removed. The hands rested at quarter past four. Above the mantel, the barometer needle hung motionless in the center of its dial, neither rising nor falling, unable to commit to weather.
She listened.
A house that had stopped breathing had a particular quality to its silence. It pressed against the ears. It waited. Wren had spent three nights in the empty rooms above her uncle's shop in Spitalfields after the Ministry men had finished with her aunt's papers, and she knew what that silence sounded like: the held breath of a place that had been abandoned mid-sentence.
Then, from the parlor, a sound.
Not a tick. Something smaller. The polite, deliberate clearing of a mechanical throat.
Wren set her lamp on the newel post and walked toward the parlor door, her boots raising small ghosts of dust from the floorboards. The door was ajar. She pushed it open with two fingers.
On the sideboard, in the exact spot where Cordelia had always kept the kettle for afternoon tea, a copper automaton stood with its spout aimed at a chipped porcelain cup. It was the size and shape of a fat-bellied kettle, but where a kettle had a handle, this one had a slender brass arm terminating in a four-fingered hand. The arm trembled with the effort of lifting a tiny tin pitcher, and from the automaton's throat came the sound again: a soft, anxious tick-tick-tick, like a man trying to apologize.
"Forgive me," it said, in a voice somewhere between a sigh and a kettle coming off the boil. "Forgive me, miss, the joint is stiff, the joint is dreadfully stiff, if you'll give me half a moment I shall have it for you directly, I do apologize, I have been practicing."
Wren crossed the parlor in three strides and stood before the sideboard.
The automaton's face was a copper disk with two small glass eyes set like carriage lamps. Its expression plate had been polished so often that the cheeks gleamed, and someone, Cordelia probably, had painted two faint pink circles on its cheeks with a careful hand. A label in faded ink along its base read: F I N N I A N. Companion Automaton, Domestic Service, Mark III. Tuned and warranted by C. Marlowe.
"Hello, Finnian," Wren said.
The automaton's arm jerked upright. The tin pitcher in its grip wobbled, and a thin stream of something that was not quite water but carried the ghost of tea leaves arced across the sideboard and dripped onto the floor. The automaton's eyes widened in a perfect circle of dismay.
"Oh," said Finnian. "Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear."
"It's all right," Wren said. "I'm not here for tea."
"No," Finnian agreed, "no, I don't suppose you are, and yet here I am with the elbow frozen and the cup tipped and I have been at this for, oh, I do hate to say how long, but the elbow has been frozen since the morning your aunt did not come downstairs, and I have been trying to pour because that is what I am for, that is what I was made for, miss, I was made to pour the tea, and if I cannot pour the tea then what am I, what am I at all, and I am so sorry, I am so dreadfully sorry about the elbow."
"You don't need to apologize."
"I do," Finnian said firmly. "I do need to apologize. It is in my etiquette plates. Apology Section, Subsection Four: Domestic Mishaps Involving Liquid." His arm gave a brave little quiver and the tin pitcher tilted again. "If I might make so bold, miss, may I start again? I should like to start again. I should like very much to pour you a cup."
Wren pulled out a chair and sat down across from the sideboard. The cushion exhaled a fine dust of its own when she settled her weight. She folded her hands in her lap.
"All right, Finnian," she said. "Start again."
The automaton drew a breath it did not need, and its arm lowered, and began the slow, careful arc toward the cup once more.
While Finnian worked, Wren let her gaze travel around the parlor.
It was, she realized, not quite as empty as she had feared.
Beside the fireplace, in a wing chair she had thought was draped only with an old throw, a tall figure sat bolt upright with its hands folded in its lap. The figure was robed from throat to floor in violet, the particular deep mourning violet that had gone out of fashion thirty years ago, and the fabric, though faded, was still rich enough to catch the lamplight and throw it back in soft plum-colored folds. A high lace collar framed a face that was not a face but a long, narrow mask of painted porcelain, features arranged in an expression of politely frozen sorrow. Two glass eyes, clouded with age, stared at the middle distance.
Wren rose from her chair.
"Lady Tillypaine," she said.
The automaton did not move. Then, very slowly, its head inclined by a quarter of an inch. Its mouth did not open. Somewhere inside its chest, a small clock began to tick in a precise, measured rhythm.
"Good evening," said Lady Tillypaine. Her voice was crisp and cold, with a faint whisper on the sibilants that turned every word into something that could cut glass. "How good of you to call. Do sit down. One does not stand in a parlor. It suggests one has nowhere else to be."
"I, ah. Yes. Thank you."
"Has the kettle poured?" Lady Tillypaine inquired, without moving her head. "I do hope so. I have been listening to its apologies for three months and I find the repetition rather wearing."
"It is trying very hard," Wren said.
"It should try harder," said Lady Tillypaine. "Its elbow was tuned by your aunt. I am sure your aunt would have been ashamed." The violet-clad figure paused, and then added, with a note of considerable satisfaction, "I, however, have not required tuning in twenty-seven years. A well-bred automaton knows how to hold her composure."
Wren sat back down. The dust rose around her ankles.
"Lady Tillypaine," she began carefully, "do you know what happened here? Do you know where my aunt went?"
"I know," said Lady Tillypaine, "that I have been sitting in this chair without refreshment since the morning of the fourteenth of October, which is a scandal, since a lady of my standing ought not to be left without her morning chocolate. I know that the clocks have all been permitted to stop, which is unforgivable, and I know that you, my dear, have not called upon me in all that time, which is also unforgivable, though I am willing, as a kindness, to forgive it now that you have. Beyond that, I know nothing. I am not a gossip. I was built for composure."
A faint, dusty sound drew Wren's attention to the hearthrug. On a faded velvet cushion beside the fender, a small shape lay curled in a tight circle. Its fur was the grey-brown of a well-loved cat, stitched in patches that had been mended with darker thread. One ear stood upright; the other dangled by a single wire, swaying gently with the rise and fall of the automaton's mechanical breathing. A label, nearly worn away, was stitched into the velvet beneath it: B I S C U I T. Companion Automaton, Domestic Service, Mouser Class. Tuned and warranted by C. Marlowe.
Biscuit opened one eye. The eye was green glass, and the expression in it was the particular expression of a cat that has been woken from a nap it considers sacred.
"About time," Biscuit said.
The voice was a gravelly little rasp, mewed through the nose, with a sharpness to it that suggested Biscuit had opinions about most things and saw no reason to keep them private.
"I beg your pardon?" said Lady Tillypaine.
"Not you," Biscuit said, and uncurled one stretch at a time, until the small mended body lay along the cushion with its tail flicking once, twice. The dangling ear swayed. "You. Marlowe's girl. About time you came home."
"Biscuit," Wren said, and found that her throat had closed around the word.
"You took long enough," Biscuit said. "I have been guarding the premises. I have been guarding them thoroughly. There were mice. I dispatched them. There were drafts. I endured them. There was a man from the Ministry who came around in November, and I bit him, and he left. Beyond that, nothing. Nothing at all, and you were not here."
"I could not get in," Wren said. "The Ministry had me turned out."
"I am aware," Biscuit said. "I heard the kettle telling the chair, and the chair telling the kettle, and I heard myself telling the rug, and the rug told the grate, and so on. We have kept each other company in the only way available to us, which is to repeat what we already know, and I am tired of it. I am very tired of it. So. You are here now. What is the plan?"
Lady Tillypaine stirred. "There ought to be a plan?" she inquired.
"There ought always to be a plan," Biscuit said. "The kettle has no plan. The chair has no plan. That is why the kettle has been pouring the same cup of nothing for three months and the chair has been sitting in the same square of dust. I, however, am a cat. Cats have plans. I have a plan, which is to lie here until someone with hands brings me oil and a fresh ear, and then I shall continue my patrol."
"Biscuit," Wren said again, and this time she knelt beside the cushion and put her hand, carefully, on the automaton's mended flank. The copper beneath the fur was warm. Warm, and ticking in a small, steady rhythm. "Biscuit, did you see anything? The night my aunt left? Did anyone come to the door?"
Biscuit's ear swung gently on its single wire.
"I saw," the cat said slowly, "what a cat sees. I saw a shadow in the lane at half past three in the morning. I saw a light on the landing. I saw the kettle begin his apologies, which was unusual because the kettle only apologizes when he is upset. I saw your aunt's door close at a quarter to four. I did not see it open again."
The lamp on the newel post flickered once, twice, and steadied. In the parlor, the dust kept falling, and the three automata kept their small, faithful vigils around her: the kettle with his elbow frozen mid-pour, the lady in her thirty-year-old violet, the cat with one good ear and one broken one.
And Wren, kneeling on the faded rug with her hand on Biscuit's flank, felt something shift in her chest, some weight that had been sitting there since October slide sideways and make room, for the first time, for the thing she had not yet let herself feel.
Cordelia had not come back. But the house had not been empty.
The kettle let out a thin, regretful whistle, as if he, too, had been holding his breath and had at last remembered how to let it go.
Wren lifted her hand from Biscuit's flank. The fur was real and warm, and beneath it she could feel the tiny workings of a clockwork heart that had been, until last October, the only steady pulse in the house. She became aware, very slowly, that she was not alone in the parlor. The lady in violet had not moved from her pedestal by the cold hearth, but her head had tilted, almost imperceptibly, in the direction of the kneeling girl. The kettle, frozen on his side table with his spout angled toward the empty grate, had shifted the angle of his apology by a degree. And Biscuit, on the velvet cushion, was watching her with eyes the color of tarnished pennies, the good ear rotating forward and the broken one swinging loose on its wire like a pendulum that had forgotten which way was down.
"You have questions," Biscuit observed, in his gravelly little rasp. It was not a question. "You have many questions, and they are making a noise like starlings under the eaves. I can hear them. Most unbecoming."
"Biscuit." Wren's voice came out smaller than she wanted it to. She swallowed, and tried again. "Biscuit, what do you mean, the house was not empty? Where has my aunt gone?"
Before the cat could answer, the lady in violet spoke.
"Pardon me." The voice was cool, precise, each syllable placed like a pin in a cushion. It carried the faint whistle of escaping steam, but underneath that there was something older, more particular, a lisp that lingered on sibilants as if the speaker had been painted, long ago, by a craftsman who loved the sound of her own Ss. "Before we proceed with what I am sure will be a most affecting and informative exchange, I feel I must insist upon a few small proprieties. We have not been introduced."
Wren turned her head. The lady had not moved from her pedestal. She stood three feet tall, in a gown of violet silk that had been the height of fashion when Wren's mother had been a girl and was now the color of a bruise at its kindest stage. Her hair was piled in curls of spun copper, each curl held in place by a tiny clockwork butterfly whose wings trembled when she spoke. Her face was porcelain, delicately painted, and her eyes were glass the color of a winter lake. In one gloved hand she held a fan of ivory slats, and in the other a longnette on a chain, though she did not raise it to her face. She did not need to. She was, in every particular of her construction, a lady, and ladies do not lower themselves by moving.
"Forgive me," Wren said, and was annoyed, in the moment of saying it, that she did. "I am Wren Marlowe. I am the, I was the, my aunt was Cordelia Marlowe. She was the tuner here. I am the apprentice. I have lived in this house since I was nine. I know where the dust collects on the banister and I know how the kettle complains when the water is too hard and I know that this cushion is where you used to sit in the evenings when the fire was lit. I do not know," she finished, and her voice cracked on the last word, "why any of you are still here."
"Pleased, I am sure," said the lady, with the faintest inclination of her chin. "I am the Companion of Lady Octavia Tillypaine, of the Tillypaine family, formerly of Shropshire and presently of the south wing of the Royal Society. I am known, in polite circles, as the Honorable Miss Tillypaine, though my lady prefers that I go simply by Tilly when we are among friends." She paused, and her glass eyes, which could not blink, somehow conveyed a blink. "I have not, as of yet, decided whether we are among friends."
"Tilly," Biscuit said, from his cushion, and produced a small sound from somewhere in his chest that might have been a purr, if a purr could be played through a phonograph cylinder that had been dropped in a drawer for thirty years. It rattled. It rattled quite magnificently. "Tilly is being polite. Tilly is always polite. It is her worst quality and her best."
"Thank you, Biscuit," said Tilly, with the particular graciousness of someone who has just been insulted in front of a guest. "You are, as ever, the soul of discretion."
"I am the soul of this house," Biscuit replied, "which is more than can be said for some. The kettle is a soul, but he is a damp soul. The kettle has feelings, but he also has a leak, and the two should not be confused."
The kettle, on his side table, let out another tiny whistle. It was the whistle of a man clearing his throat in church.
"Pay no attention to him," Tilly murmured. "He is overcome."
Wren sat back on her heels. Her knees ached against the floorboards. The lamp on the newel post was still flickering, but in a steadier rhythm now, as if it, too, had been holding something in its chest and had decided, at last, to let it out. She looked from Tilly to Biscuit to the kettle, and felt the room around her tilt gently, the way a deck tilts when a ship finds a wave it had been avoiding.
"You were saying," she managed. "About my aunt."
Tilly inclined her head a quarter inch. "We were instructed," she said, "by the late Miss Marlowe, your aunt, in the summer of 1881, to wait. The instruction was specific. It was delivered in the drawing room of this house on the evening of the seventeenth of July, after which your aunt rang for a glass of milk and a slice of seed cake and retired for the night with a headache. The instruction was as follows. I will repeat it verbatim, as I have not forgotten a syllable in eleven years, because I was built to remember and because it is, in any case, the only instruction I have ever been given that mattered."
She straightened her shoulders. The clockwork butterflies in her hair went very still.
"'Tilly,' she said. 'Biscuit. Kettle. I am going away. I do not know when I shall return. It may be a week. It may be longer. It may be that I shall not return at all, and if that is the case, then I must ask you to do the only thing I have ever asked of you that I could not, in the end, do myself. Wait. Wait for the next Marlowe, however long it takes. Keep the house. Keep the hearth. Keep the cat fed, Tilly, I beg of you, he will not feed himself and he will blame you for the empty bowl. When the child comes, and she will come, because there is always a next, you will know her by the way she speaks to the kettle. She will not be afraid of him. She will ask him how he is. That is how you will know.'"
Tilly paused. Her glass eyes did not blink, but the light in them seemed to soften, the way a window softens when the sun goes behind a thin cloud.
"She did not say your name," Tilly added. "She said 'the next Marlowe.' She was, I think, being careful. Names are powerful, in certain circles, and she was not at liberty to speak yours aloud."
Biscuit's good ear twitched. The broken one hung still. "I was given a different instruction," he said, and his voice was quieter now, the rasp smoothed at its edges as if by a hand. "I was told to keep the mice from the wainscoting, which I have done. I was told to keep the sparrows from the eaves, which I have done. I was told to keep the secrets of the house, which I have also done, and that was the heaviest of the three. I was told, and this is the part that matters, that if the next Marlowe did not come by the time the leaves fell for the eleventh time after her departure, I was to go and find her. I was to go and find her wherever she was. I was to scratch at the door until someone opened it."
He blinked, slowly, once.
"The leaves," he said, "fell for the eleventh time three days ago."
The kettle whistled. It was a longer whistle this time, a thin reedy note that climbed and then fell and then climbed again, as if the small brass man inside had heard something he had been waiting eleven years to answer.
"Hush," Tilly said gently, to the kettle. "Hush, you will flood the carpet."
Wren pressed the heel of her hand against her mouth. The carpet under her knees was worn thin in the place where Cordelia had always knelt, in the evenings, to wind the eight-day clock that stood in the corner. The carpet remembered Cordelia's knees better than Wren remembered her aunt's face. The carpet had been holding the shape of her all this time, and Wren had been stepping over it, twice a day, for eleven years, on her way to the kettle.
"She said," Wren whispered, "she said I would not be afraid of him. She said I would ask him how he is."
"He is," said the kettle, in a voice like a small, polite kettle, "overcome."
Wren laughed. She had not meant to. It came out of her like a cork out of a bottle, sudden and sharp and wet, and she pressed both hands over her mouth to push it back in, but it was too late, it was already in the room, and the three automata heard it, and Biscuit began his broken purr again, the one that sounded like a music box dropped down a well, and Tilly's painted mouth curved a quarter inch at one corner, the smallest smile her clockwork face could manage, and the kettle gave a tentative, hopeful whistle, as if he, too, would have laughed if he could.
"You see," Biscuit said, with great satisfaction, and the good ear swiveled toward her, "you are the one. We are sure now. We were sure when you came through the door, but we are surer now. The sureness has increased. It has increased considerably."
"I have not yet decided," Tilly observed, "whether we are among friends. But," she added, and the quarter-inch smile held, "I am inclined to adjourn the question until after tea."
The kettle whistled. The lamp steadied. And in the parlor of the old house on Tuning Lane, where the dust had been falling for eleven years onto the heads of three patient automata, something that had been waiting, very quietly, for a very long time, sat down at last, and took a breath, and began.
The tea, when it came, was not tea at all. It was warm oil and something that smelled faintly of cinnamon, served by the kettle into a porcelain cup that Tilly produced from a drawer with the careful deliberation of a woman who had not opened a drawer in eleven years and wished to do the thing properly. The cup was chipped at the rim. The kettle apologized for the chip. Tilly told the kettle to be quiet. The kettle subsided into a soft, hurt simmer.
Wren held the cup in both hands. The warmth seeped into her palms, and she let it, because her hands had been cold for a long time and she had not noticed until they were not.
"Drink," said Tilly. "It will not harm you. We have not poisoned anything in eleven years, and I see no reason to begin."
"You cannot poison her," Biscuit pointed out from the floor, where he had arranged himself in a loaf shape against her ankle, "because you have no poison. We looked. There was none in the house. There was, however, a tin of buttons and a very old jar of marmalade which I declined."
"The marmalade," said the kettle, in a small voice, "was mine."
"It was Cordelia's," said Tilly. "It is not yours."
"It was in my cupboard."
"Proximity," said Tilly, "is not ownership."
Wren drank. The warm oil tasted, impossibly, of cinnamon and of something else, something she could not name, something that reminded her of the workshop on a winter evening when she was small and Cordelia had lifted her onto the bench so she could watch the soldering. She did not say this. She only drank, and the automata watched her drink, and the lamp held steady above them, and the dust went on falling.
"There is something else," Wren said, when the cup was empty and her hands were warm and the silence had grown large enough to walk around in. "In the workshop. I felt it, when I came in. Something that wanted me to look at it."
Tilly did not move. The painted face, with its quarter-inch smile and its eyes of chipped enamel, regarded Wren with the long, measuring look of a woman who has been asked to trust a stranger and has not yet finished deciding.
"Yes," said Tilly, at last. "There is."
Biscuit stood up. His tail flicked once, twice, three times, the way it did when he was thinking something through, and then he walked ahead of her toward the workshop door, not looking back, because he did not need to. He knew she would follow. He had known it since she came through the door of the house.
The workshop smelled of rosin and iron and the sweet, faint ghost of solder. Candles had been left burning on the bench, though the wicks were nearly gone, and the light they gave was thin and orange and made the shadows long. Wren stood in the doorway and did not breathe for a moment, because she had stood in this doorway a thousand times before, when she was seven and eight and nine and ten, when Cordelia was alive and the bench was always occupied and the air was always full of the small, busy sounds of making.
The bench was occupied still.
There was a figure on it, half-disassembled, half-complete. A porcelain-faced automaton no larger than a child of six, laid out on a cloth that might once have been blue. One arm was attached. The other lay beside it, palm up, the fingers curled as if asleep. The torso was open at the back, and inside it Wren could see the careful, intricate nest of springs and gears that Cordelia had been building for, she calculated, eleven years. Since before. Since the night Cordelia had not come home and the Ministry had come instead, with their forms and their questions and their way of looking at a child as if the child were a piece of evidence.
Wren stepped closer. Her shadow fell across the bench. The figure on it did not stir.
Then one glass eye turned, slowly, in its socket of hammered brass. It found her. It held.
The other eye was missing. The socket gaped, dark and empty, and through it Wren could see the tiny wheel that was meant to turn the eye left and right, and beyond the wheel, deeper inside the head, a small brass key on a chain, wound tight and waiting.
The mouth did not move. The voice came from somewhere inside the open torso, from a reed that had been placed where a voice box should be, and it was thin and breathy and very, very tired.
"Are you," said the voice, "the one who will finish me?"
Biscuit sat at the foot of the bench. He did not look up at Wren. He looked at the figure on the cloth, and his whiskers twitched forward, and he made a small sound in his throat that was not a purr and not a meow but something in between, something that meant, in the private language he and Cordelia had invented, I am here, I have not left, I am still guarding the bench.
Wren set her hand on the edge of the workbench. The wood was cold. Beneath her palm she could feel, very faintly, the vibration of a mechanism that had been wound up long ago and had been running, all this time, on the last of its stored energy, like a heart that had forgotten how to stop.
"I don't know," she said, honestly, because she had not yet learned to lie to automata and did not intend to begin. "I don't know if I am. I don't know if I can."
The eye watched her. The empty socket watched her. The unfinished hand, lying palm-up on the cloth, did not move, but the fingers trembled once, as if they had heard her and were trying, with what little life was left in them, to reach.
"But," said Wren, and her voice was not steady now, and she did not try to make it steady, "I would like to try. If you will let me."
The mouth did not move. The eye did not look away. Somewhere inside the open chest, a gear engaged, and another, and a third, very softly, and the reed breathed out one more word.
"Yes," said the voice. "Please."
The candle on the bench guttered, leaned, and went out. The second candle held. The shadows shifted, and the eye of the little automaton caught the new light, and for an instant it looked almost like the eye of a child waking from a long sleep, and then it was only glass again, and the workshop was only a workshop, and the work on the bench was only work.
Wren did not weep. She had wept enough in eleven years, in the nights after Cordelia vanished, in the long grey days at the Ministry, in the small cold room they had given her above the kitchens where no one remembered her birthday and the radiator clanked at three in the morning. She had wept, and she was done with weeping for now. What she felt instead was something larger and quieter, something that did not need to come out of her eyes to be real, something that settled into her chest the way the warmth of the oil had settled into her hands.
She picked up the unfinished hand from the cloth. It weighed almost nothing. She turned it over. The joint where it met the wrist was clean, the work of someone who knew what she was doing, and there, in Cordelia's careful script, scratched into the brass plate at the wrist, were two words.
CINDER. WAIT.
Wren held the hand for a long moment. Then she set it down gently beside the body, the way one sets down something one intends to pick up again.
"I will come back," she said. "Tomorrow. And the day after. And as many days as it takes."
The eye did not close. The empty socket did not fill. But somewhere deep inside the mechanism, the small brass key gave a single, slow turn, and the last of the stored energy, the energy that had been running down for eleven years, found a new gear to engage, and the gear found another, and the reed breathed out, so softly that only Wren and Biscuit could hear it, a sound that was not a word and not a sigh but something in between, something that meant, in the private language of the unfinished, I have waited. I can wait a little more.
Biscuit stood up. He stretched. He walked to Wren, and he pressed his head against her ankle, and the good ear was warm, and the bad ear was cold, and he began, very softly, the broken purr, the one that sounded like a music box dropped down a well.
Wren bent down and picked him up. He did not protest. He settled into the crook of her arm as if he had always belonged there, which, in a way, he had.
In the parlor, Tilly was waiting. She had not moved from her chair, but the quarter-inch smile had widened, by a hairsbreadth, to a half-inch smile, and when Wren came through the door with Biscuit in her arms, Tilly inclined her head, and the kettle gave a small, satisfied whistle, and the lamp, for the first time in eleven years, burned without flickering.
"Tomorrow," said Tilly. "You will come tomorrow."
"Tomorrow," said Wren.
And in the parlor of the old house on Tuning Lane, where the dust had been falling for eleven years onto the heads of three patient automata, and where, on the bench in the workshop, a fourth was waiting with one eye and one voice and a hand that said WAIT, the lamp burned steady, and the kettle sang, and the cat purred his broken purr, and Wren Marlowe, who had not been afraid, who had laughed, who had drunk warm oil that tasted of cinnamon, stood in the doorway with the work of her missing aunt held carefully in the hand she had not yet lifted, and knew, with the part of her that knew things before her mind caught up, that this was the first night of the rest of her life, and that she would not be coming to the old house alone again.
She would be coming home.