The Tuning House: Sharp Words at The Mailbox

A wedge of afternoon sun fell across the parlour carpet, illuminating the dust motes that drifted above Wren Marlowe's head as she crouched over the half-assembled frame of a mechanical sparrow. The sparrow's breastplate lay open in her lap, its mainspring coiled beside it, a sliver of brass not yet seated home, and a row of tiny screws rested on the floorboard like spilled rice. From somewhere deep in the works, a thin rhythmic click click click marked the cadence of her thoughts.

Then a shadow passed the parlour window. A blue-and-white dish, held aloft like a magistrate's standard, stopped it.

A knock fell against the front door.

Wren's hand stilled. The sparrow's wings shivered once, then went slack.

"Mrs. Marlowe? Only me, Mrs. Hatch, from next door."

Wren set down the screwdriver. She brushed the filings from her knees, and she glanced toward the net curtain. Through the gap between its folds, Mrs. Hatch stood on the front path in a hat pinned with celluloid cherries, a casserole dish swaddled in a tea towel gone grey from washing, and the polite broadcast smile she wore when she intended to be difficult about something.

Wren opened the door. The afternoon smelled of cut grass on the common, the coal-yard down the rise, and someone's distant roast.

"Mrs. Hatch," she said. "Lovely."

"Isn't it, though," Mrs. Hatch said, and stepped past her without being invited. "I have brought you a cottage pie. Or rather, I have brought the Marlowe household a cottage pie, since your auntie always did say my shepherd's was a great improvement on hers, and I do think when a body is unwell one ought to have something proper. Where is she, by the by? I haven't seen Cordelia at the window all week."

The last word held a small, precise barb.

"Cordelia's away," Wren said. She closed the door behind them both. "For some weeks now."

"Oh. Away." Mrs. Hatch set the dish on the side table with the care of a woman laying down evidence. "Away where, dear?"

"Family business. Up north."

"Of course," Mrs. Hatch said. "Of course. Up north." She smiled the smile she used on beggars at the door. "And which one of us is minding the shop?"

There was no shop. There had never been a shop. Cordelia was a clockworker, the sort who took commissions in a parlour that doubled as a workshop, and Tinkerbell Lane had been quiet about it for twenty years until, in the last six months, it had not been quiet at all.

Wren gestured toward a chair. Mrs. Hatch took the armchair; she always took the armchair; she always arranged herself on it as though posing for a photograph of a respectable old age.

"Sit yourself down, dear," she said. "No, no, I shan't keep you. Only a moment. Only a few little things I thought I ought to mention while Cordelia is away. Though I'm sure, my dear, you have things in hand. I'm sure."

The clock on the mantel ticked. The mechanical sparrow on the carpet ticked in counterpoint, a fraction faster, a fraction higher.

The second tick was the thing Mrs. Hatch had come about.

"Mrs. Marlowe." She leaned forward and lowered her voice in the manner of a woman entirely confident her whisper carried three gardens away. "I come as a friend. I want that on the record. I have known you and yours since before you could walk. I have eaten Christmas pudding at that table. I have held your father's hand, rest his soul, when he went. So when I say what I am about to say, I want you to understand that I say it out of affection. Pure affection."

"Mrs. Hatch." Wren sat opposite her and folded her hands. "I can see you have something on your mind."

"I simply cannot abide the little clicking in your parlour at all hours."

There it was.

"Dear, dear." Mrs. Hatch laid a hand flat against her collarbone. "Night and morning. Through the floorboards and into my sitting room. Mr. Hatch is woken at three in the morning by the sound of it. Three! Mr. Hatch, who is never unwell, is becoming unwell. The colour has left his cheeks. I have asked him to take a tonic, and he has taken a tonic, and the tonic has not helped, because the clicking is not a complaint of the stomach, is it, Mrs. Marlowe. The clicking is the complaint of the parlour next door."

"The sparrow is a commission," Wren said. "A customer asked me to finish it. The customer is on a deadline."

"Finish it then," Mrs. Hatch said. "Or stop beginning it."

"It's intricate work."

"Everything is intricate when one is not wishing it to stop, dear."

The clock ticked. The sparrow ticked. Mrs. Hatch's mouth twitched at the corners, watching Wren for a response.

"Now, I won't pretend," she continued, lowering her voice further. "I won't pretend otherwise. This is not what Tinkerbell Lane was built for. When we all came here we came for birdsong and roses and a nice quiet cup of Bovril at half past four. We did not come for clocks, and we did not come for clicking, and we certainly did not come for whatever it is your auntie had begun doing these last few years. I am a woman who minds her own business. Ask anyone. Ask Mrs. Quill, ask Mrs. Foy, ask the curate. I mind it. I mind my own."

Wren let the silence do its work.

Mrs. Hatch did not permit the silence to do its work.

"Your auntie was a clever woman, no one denies. Clever as paint. But the trouble with clever women, Mrs. Marlowe, and forgive me, dear, is that clever is not the same as sensible. Sensible is leaving other people's nerves alone. Clever is making sparrow noises at three in the morning and never quite saying who they are for."

"The customer is private."

"Of course, dear."

"The work is private."

"Naturally."

"That is the nature of commissions."

"Of course."

"And," Wren said, carefully, "the work is not unlawful."

Something shifted in Mrs. Hatch's face. It was a thing Wren had seen before, in the wake of the Ministry men who had come and gone that spring, in the small enquiries the Bureau had made about Cordelia's lodger, the apprentice, the particulars of the parlour's new furnace, the unusual brass filings in the scullery grate. Mrs. Hatch, in those days, had stood behind her own net curtains with her hand on her throat and her eye to the glass.

Then, as now, the shift was small. A tiny dent of worry at the corners of her polite mouth. A flicker of calculation behind the eyes, the arithmetic of a woman totalling up what the neighbours might say.

"Unlawful," Mrs. Hatch said. "I never said unlawful."

"I did not say you had."

"Dear, I never said a word about unlawful. I came about clicking."

"The clicking is the problem."

"Only the clicking."

"I heard you."

Mrs. Hatch's smile returned. It was a smile that meant she had won a small engagement, and would return for the next.

"Now. The pie," she said, brightening, as though the matter were already settled and dusted. "Eat it while it's good. I'll send Mr. Hatch round for the dish on the morrow, if I may. He has a kindness about him, Mr. Hatch. He would walk through fire for a neighbour. Anything I can do to set your mind at rest, dear, you have only to ask. Tea? A drop of brandy? A word at the gate? I am at your service. I am not proud, Mrs. Marlowe. Never have been. Never shall be."

She rose. The armchair gave up its claim on her with a creak of worn springs. She patted her hat, which had not required patting, and moved toward the door with the careful gravity of someone exiting a cathedral she had deigned to attend.

"Just one more little thing," she said, pausing at the threshold.

Wren's hand tightened on the door frame.

"If you should hear from Cordelia, dear, you will let her know that Mrs. Hatch, of Number Four, sends her love. And will gently remind her, when she writes, about the fence panel. The one that came down in the March winds. She promised she would mend it. We are very patient on this lane. Very patient. But the patience of Tinkerbell Lane is not inexhaustible, my dear. Not at all."

She tipped her head. The celluloid cherries on her hat caught the light, trembling slightly with the motion.

"Do give my regards to your auntie's clicking."

The door closed. The parlour held the ghost of her perfume, something powdery and over-sweet with the faintest vinegar undertone, and a silence that was not silence at all but the watchfulness of a woman who would now go home and write down everything she had heard, and most of what she had not.

Wren stood with her hand on the lock. Through the wood, faintly, she heard the gate latch click shut. Then a second sound: the slow, deliberate drawing up of a net curtain at Number Four.

She crossed back to the carpet. The mechanical sparrow lay where she had left it, its open breastplate rising and falling almost imperceptibly, the mainspring coiled beside it like a sleeping viper. The little brass screws waited in their row. The afternoon light had moved off the carpet now, and the parlour had taken on that greenish watery cast it got when the sun dipped behind the chimneys of the Hendon steamworks.

Wren sat down. She picked up the screwdriver. She did not use it.

Instead she listened, head tilted, to the sound Mrs. Hatch had come to complain of. Click click click. Patient, private, identical. A signal, technically, in the simple optick code her aunt had taught her at six years old, when Cordelia had taken her on her knee and said, This is how the sparrows speak to each other when the world is not listening.

The signal was simple. It said the same thing it had said every hour for a fortnight, sent from somewhere in this house and answered by something even smaller, hidden behind the parlour wall.

Come home, come home, come home.

Wren pressed her thumb against the brass body of the sparrow. It was warm. It was always warm.

"Alright," she said to it, very quietly. "I'm listening."

Outside, beyond the parlour window, the curtain at Number Four twitched once. Settled. Twitched again.

The letter arrived with the second post.

Wren heard the postman's tread on the stairs before she saw him: the particular drag of a man who climbed four flights and resented every one of them. She did not move from the parlour floor, where she sat cross-legged with the mechanical sparrow cupped in her palms, its open breastplate catching the lamplight in a thin gold line. She had reassembled it, mostly. Two screws remained loose in her lap.

The tread stopped at her door. Something slid through the letterbox with a papery hiss.

Then the tread went on up to the floor above, where old Mr. Pewley kept a parrot that screamed at the dust.

Wren set the sparrow gently down on the carpet. She crossed to the door and crouched, her knees protesting. The envelope lay face-up on the worn linoleum, bone-white and unaddressed on the front. When she turned it over, her own name sat in the lower left corner, written in a copperplate so precise it looked less like handwriting than engraving.

There was no return address. There was no stamp.

She touched the flap with one fingertip. The paper was good quality, thick, faintly textured, the kind sold by the sheet in stationers' shops on Wigmore Street. It had been sealed with something waxy that had already cracked, as though the writer had pressed too hard, or as though the letter had been opened and resealed.

Wren carried it to the parlour and sat down again. She did not open it at once. She looked at the postmark, or rather at the absence of one. She looked at the handwriting. She thought of the tidy, reasonable letters her Aunt Cordelia used to bring home from the parish vestry, the ones that began Dear Madam and ended with assurances of Christian fellowship and contained, between those pleasant lines, every species of quiet cruelty.

She broke the seal.

Inside was a single sheet, folded twice. The same copperplate. The same self-possessed nib.

She read.

Madam,

It has come to our attention that you continue to harbour in your rooms certain contrivances of a mechanical nature, the like of which are not, and never have been, suitable to the character of a respectable street in a respectable parish. We do not write in anger. We write as neighbours, and from a sincere concern for the welfare of your own soul, which cannot but suffer from such close and prolonged commerce with these abominations.

We understand that your late aunt's trade may have given you certain habits of mind that are not easily set aside. We do not judge her. We judge only what is plainly before us: a young woman alone, in a house not her own, surrounded by ticking and whirring that disturbs the sleep of honest people and quickens the pulses of children in ways their parents do not approve.

We therefore request, with all due civility, that you remove these abominations from our parish within the fortnight. Should you fail to do so, we shall have no alternative but to inform the proper authorities, who, as you are no doubt aware, take a dim view of unlicensed mechanical activity in domestic premises, and a still dimmer view of those whose names have been previously associated with the Bureau of Civic Order.

We remain, in Christian charity,

Your well-meaning neighbour.

Wren read it twice. Then she read it a third time, moving her lips over the words the way she had done as a child when Aunt Cordelia had handed her a long word and told her to taste it before she swallowed it.

Abominations. Unlicensed mechanical activity. Previously associated.

She set the sheet down on the carpet beside her, face-up, as though it were a small creature she wanted to keep in her sight. The mechanical sparrow clicked at her left hand, patient, indifferent to paper threats. Click. Click. Click. Come home, come home, come home.

She pressed her thumb to the envelope flap, where a trace of the wax remained, and rubbed it between finger and thumb until it was a smear.

Someone in this street had bought good paper, had heated wax over a candle, had written out these tidy phrases with a steady hand, and had then, with that same steady hand, walked to her door and pushed the letter through without a stamp. Without a return address. Without the courage to sign.

She thought of the curtain at Number Four. She thought of Mrs. Hatch's breathy performance of concern on the doorstep earlier that afternoon. She thought of the half-dozen other landladies and lodging-house keepers on Tuning Street, each of whom watched her corridor the way a cat watches a mousehole.

Any of them. All of them.

Wren folded the letter carefully along its original creases and slid it back into the envelope. She stood up. Her knees cracked. The parlour smelt of brass oil and the lavender polish old Mr. Pewley used on the stairs, a combination that had no business being pleasant and was.

She went to the kitchen and put the kettle on. She needed tea. She needed to think. She needed, very badly, to speak to Finnian, who would have something sensible to say and would say it in that soft, flustered way of his, leaning against the doorframe of the back workshop with his sleeves rolled and a smear of oil across one cheek.

But Finnian was not here. Finnian was at the Tuning House until half past five, and it was not yet half past four.

Wren poured the boiling water over the tea and carried the cup back into the parlour. She sat. She did not drink at once.

The letter lay on the carpet like a summons.

Abominations. She mouthed the word. It tasted of schoolrooms and parsons and the particular brand of outraged gentility that had, in her experience, usually been written by someone holding a poker in one hand and a prayer book in the other.

Proper authorities.

The tea cooled in her hands. Wren watched a skin of tannin form across its surface, then drank it anyway, grimacing. It was bitter and over-steeped and exactly what she deserved for letting her thoughts run away from her like a clockwork mouse off a table.

She set the cup down on the parlour carpet, where it would leave a ring, and stood. The house was quiet around her, quiet the way a held breath is quiet. She could hear the tick of the mantle clock her aunt had repaired the summer Wren turned twelve, the one with the little painted shepherd that bowed every quarter hour. Tick. Bow. Tick. Bow. She had never noticed how lonely the rhythm sounded until tonight.

Proper authorities. Wren crossed to the window and looked out at the lamplit street. The gas lamps had just been lit, and their haloes turned the cobbles the colour of weak tea. The garden gate stood below her, painted green last spring, its iron scrollwork coming loose in three places. Beyond it, the pavement. Beyond that, Mrs. Hatch's bay window, bright as a stage.

She had a sign. She had made it three weeks ago, in a fit of something between optimism and defiance, and it had been leaning against the scullery wall ever since, because pinning it up felt like the kind of decision one could not take back. The brass was thin and the letters were punched by hand. The Tuning House. Repairs, Refreshments, and Rest for Automata in Need.

She had thought, when she made it, that Cordelia would have laughed. Would have said, "Too many commas, little bird," and then, more quietly, "Yes. That is exactly the point."

Wren fetched the sign from the scullery. She fetched the tin of small brass nails from the drawer beneath the kitchen counter. She fetched the claw hammer from the hook by the back door, though she would not need it for nails. She fetched them all because fetching things steadied her, and because her hands had begun to tremble, and because she knew that if she stood still she would think about the letter and the word abominations and the proper authorities and she would do nothing at all.

She put on her boots. She took a shawl from the peg, though the evening was not cold. She went out into the garden.

The garden was small and mostly brick: a square of paving, a wooden bench her aunt had built from offcuts, a planted tin of rosemary that had somehow survived the winter. The gate stood at the far end, between the garden and the pavement, its latch undone since the morning. Wren looked at it for a long moment, the sign tucked under one arm, the nails clutched in her fist.

She thought of her aunt. She thought of the letter. She thought of the way the Bureau man had smiled at her last Thursday at the greengrocer's, a smile that had nothing in it of warmth. She thought of the small painted shepherd on the mantle clock, bowing and bowing, and the way it had kept bowing after Cordelia vanished, faithful to its mechanism, faithful to its instruction.

Wren positioned the sign against the upper rail of the gate. She chose a spot just left of centre, where the wood was sound. She took a nail from her fist and pressed its point against the brass. She raised the hammer.

Her first stroke missed. The hammer glanced off the nailhead and stung her thumb. She hissed, sucked the hurt, tried again. This time the nail bit. It went in crooked. She pulled it out with her teeth and started over.

The second nail went in straight. The third. She worked in the lamplight, her breath coming faster than the work required, her shoulders drawing up toward her ears. The brass caught the gaslight and threw it back at her in small flares.

She was halfway through the fourth nail when the bay window across the street brightened further, and she knew without looking that the curtain had twitched. She kept on hammering. The fourth nail sank home. The sign shifted and steadied against the rail.

There. Done. Wren stepped back, the hammer hanging loose in her hand, and read the words aloud to herself in a voice that shook only a little.

The Tuning House. Repairs, Refreshments, and Rest for Automata in Need.

Below it, in smaller letters she had almost forgotten she had punched: Established for the Service of the Borough of Clerkenwell, by C. Marlowe, Tuner.

She had not been certain she would leave that line in. She had not been certain it was a kindness or a cruelty to Cordelia, whose name the Bureau had scrubbed from the trade register that very winter, whose tools had been boxed and removed by men in coats that did not fit them well. She had left it in because the sign was not the point. The sign was a door. What mattered was who was willing to walk through it.

The knock came at the garden wall, three brisk taps that made Wren's heart lurch into her throat. She turned. Mrs. Hatch was leaning over the low brick, her face arranged in that particular configuration of helpful alarm that Wren had learned to dread.

"Miss Marlowe." Mrs. Hatch's voice was breathy and carrying, the Essex vowels she usually kept in check now slightly bolder, as if the evening had given her permission. "Miss Marlowe, only look at the hour. Whatever are you about, love, hammering away out here all alone?"

Wren did not move from in front of the sign. "Fixing a sign."

"I can see that, dear. I can see that very well." Mrs. Hatch's smile did not reach her eyes. Her gaze slid past Wren to the brass, and her mouth did something complicated, the corners twitching inwards. "And what a lovely sign it is. Reads very nicely. Very professional. Only I wondered, only I thought, you might have mentioned to your landlady that you were putting up a, well, a sort of, a notice, you see, because there are forms, aren't there, for things affixed to property, and I shouldn't like to think of you falling foul of the borough's regulations, not with your uncle being so lately, well."

The pause was deliberate. Mrs. Hatch had known perfectly well that Wren had no uncle. She had known perfectly well that the person who had lately been, well, was a woman, and that the word uncle was a small cruelty she could not resist.

Wren's grip tightened on the hammer. She made herself breathe. "My aunt. The word is aunt."

"Your aunt, yes, of course, I only meant, with everything that has been, with all the upset, I worry for you, that's all." Mrs. Hatch pressed one hand to her chest, fingers spread over her collarbone, in the universal pantomime of a woman who is very sorry and very concerned and entirely sincere, every inch of her. "I worry, and I think a body ought to mind her step, don't you, especially a young woman on her own, putting up signs that might be, you know, read the wrong way. By the wrong sort of person."

"Which wrong sort of person, Mrs. Hatch?"

The question landed. Mrs. Hatch's mouth pursed, then released. "Only anyone, dear. Anyone at all."

Behind her, in the bright bay window, a shadow moved. The shadow belonged to a second figure, shorter and broader than Mrs. Hatch, in a coat that did not fit him well. Wren saw it and felt the ground tilt very slightly beneath her boots. She did not let it show.

"The sign," she said, "is staying."

"I'm sure I don't mean to give offence, Miss Marlowe."

"You haven't given offence. You have given me a piece of unsolicited advice on a Tuesday evening in my own garden. I have declined it."

Mrs. Hatch's smile sharpened into something almost honest. "I shall say, shall I, that I tried."

"You may say whatever you like to whomever you like, Mrs. Hatch. You generally do."

The words came out harder than Wren had meant them to. They hung between them in the damp air. Mrs. Hatch held her gaze for a long moment, then drew herself up, sniffed once, and retreated from the wall in a rustle of shawls. The gate at the side of her house clattered shut. The bay window's curtain fell back into place.

Wren stood where she was for a long time, listening to her own breathing and the faint tick of gas in the lamps. The shadow in the bay window did not move again.

She turned back to the sign. She read it once more. The brass was cold under her palm when she laid her hand flat against it, and she could not tell whether her fingers were trembling from the hammering or from the rest of it. She suspected the rest of it.

There would be a man at the door in the morning. She was almost certain of it now. They would have words, those words would be polite, those words would carry weight. She would have to choose, then, what to say, and what to show them, and what to hide behind the clock on the mantle that bowed every quarter hour, and what to keep inside her own chest.

But that was the morning. Tonight there was a sign, and it was hers, and it said a true thing.

Wren picked up the tin of nails and the hammer and went back inside. She latched the garden gate behind her. She bolted the kitchen door. She set the kettle on again, because she had never finished her tea, and because there was no sense letting a perfectly good cup of tannin go to waste.

In the parlour, the small painted shepherd bowed. Tick. Bow. Tick. Bow.

Wren sat down in her aunt's chair, the one with the worn arms and the sprung seat, and waited for the water to boil.