Be This Beautiful ch. 2
For my Loralove. SO OVERDUE OMG. Ch 1 is here. The third chapter ought to be the last one. I know what happens so hopefully there won't be so long between chapters this time ^^;
Wordcount: 4,200
Heat is an intangible liquid of negligible mass. Her Majesty's scientists said so in ringing tones at the frequent public lectures they gave. Gloriana donated bread and winter-wrinkled apples and salted fish to those who'd attend the whole lecture, seeking to educate her subjects to a level she found pleasing. Guardsmen in their crisp crimson cloaks lined the square, checking pockets and clothing for pilfered food-Gloriana’s gifts were to be eaten at the lecture or not at all.
Paul remembered attending one such with his father, back when he'd been too small to reach a door-knob on his own. Da Fleming was a pleasant enough man so long as he encountered no opposition. He had firm ideas on the sort of man he expected his son to become, and so took his eldest to the lecture, leaving his wife and daughters home, Tina scooping a froth of soap scum and dead fleas from her wash-basins.
The lecture today had been preceded by a Luxembourg hanging, and the poor brute would dangle from the gallows-tree until rot or the gore-crows picked the bones bare. Paul averted his face and focussed on the yeast-and-salt taste of his loaf, but Da turned his head and made him look. “Don’t go hiding from the world, boy. The dead can’t hurt you.” He hooked Paul with an arm around his waist and shook him toward the executioner so that he squeaked and swung. “But him! I’ve heard tell he loves his work too well. I’ve half a mind to invite him home for your mother.”
When Paul was on his own he took the long-way home to avoid the gallows-tree, but Da didn’t see the point.
***
Jolene brought home a sack of sooty loaves-they’d fallen soft and fresh into the pan of ash the scullery-maid swept out of the fireplaces and ovens. The scullery maid-Jolene’s friend Ariadne-had taken the loaves, too ruined for the high table, and squirreled some away for Jolene, who’d then brought home to share with the rest of the family. Bethy brought one of these, sliced thick and toasted and running with clear butter, and shallow bowls of thin soup, one each for Paul and Michael. “Get that in you, then,” she told them. “Paulie, you’ve got to clean the kitchen before you sleep-Tony’s burned his finger and needs to keep his hand in snow for a bit longer.”
“Who let him in the kitchen on his own,” Paul said, rising, but Bethy wound her hand firmly in Paul’s curls and forced him back onto his perch on the edge of the pallet. “None of that then, Master Fleming,” she told him. “You’re to eat, and get a little work done on that thing ere you sleep,” and she jerked her sharp chin at the automaton. “Or did you think they’d hold Da’s job forever?”
***
A watchmaker on the edge of the slums had given Paul some of his older, more worn tools, tiny pincers and gears and miniature screws so small, and with such finely-crafted flutings, that they could become wedged beneath a finger-nail. Paul used these to craft the automaton’s articulations; the deep curl of the palms and the wrists that were thicker than Paul’s own, struts from someone’s broken oboe-fingerings and the wire of a half-dozen discarded harpsichords. These, and parts scavenged from Charlie’s cart or this or that trash heap, whatever he could find as he found it, ever redesigning the metal man to use what he had. Sheets of oily paper, scavenged and re-used, even scraps of vellum, drippings of irongall and scratches of other people’s thoughts that Paul inked over with his own.
He showed these to Michael not even knowing why he had to- not because Michael had asked but because Paul wanted to tell him, had to talk to *someone*. Michael shuffled through the schematics without comment, but he looked at them, and Paul was reassured. These past days his family had helped with the work, they’d tended him when he fell asleep with his face pressed to the table top (and when he’d woken the creases in the wood were written on his skin), but none of them had wanted to talk about it with him.
“It looks finished to me,” Michael said. He’d taken to coming by in the evenings, stroking the automaton’s skull with his dye-stained hands and watching Paul with eyes like wet glass.
Paul shook his head and the winter-split ends of his hair caught on the linen of his neckcloth. “Many of the smaller mechanisms are only partially articulated, and the connections to the heart are the last things I’ll affix.”
Parts of the metal man’s skin were butter-soft leather, and some were tight-stiched layers of greased canvas, and some were finely joined chinks of metal-chips burnished bright and scaled together like the feet of a bird. Michael tapped his fingernails on these and chewed on his lip till it was in danger of bleeding at the cracks.
“I ought to have the face finished to-morrow?” Michael said doubtfully, and left without satisfying Paul’s desire for conversation, as if someone with so large a family could be lonely. The ache was lessened but it wasn’t gone.
A day later he returned, bearing a face cast of bronze on his open palm and bringing a waft of icy air and the lingering acrid smell of a forge. His socks were colourful with frequent mendings. Paul smothered a yawn, and his apology for such ill-manners was interrupted by a second.
“Have you been burning the midnight candle?” Michael said. “No, that can’t be right.”
“Midnight oil,” Paul said, and dragged his fingers through his hair. “Or the candle burnt from both ends.”
“Either one,” Michael said, and set the empty face on the coverlet beside the automaton. “Have you slept at all?”
“Some,” Paul said, and left out the part about falling asleep on the table and later asking little Shannon to pick the splinters out of his chin.
“You know sleep is the glue binding mind and body,” Michael said. “Or so the lecture usually goes.”
Paul wobbled a little when he stood. “Come sit, I’ll bring tea-”
Michael pressed both hands to Paul’s shoulders, gently leaning his weight until Paul subsided. “Can we pretend I’m family and let me bring the tea?”
Paul moved to refuse on instinct, but Michael squeezed Paul’s shoulders and bent in, slow, like a settling bird, resting his cheek on the crown of Paul’s head briefly. “Just this once? Please? You welcomed me in when it was cold.”
“That was the only thing to do,” Paul said.
“Well, now you’ve got to let me help, because I’m a guest and to do otherwise would be impolite.”
Exhaustion has a way of blurring the world, as if a layer of waxed paper had been laid between the senses and things perceived, so that imaginings wavered to closely to the real and memories had a way of shouldering their way forward and rearing boldly. Paul rubbed his forehead. “Tea would be a godsend,” he said, suppressing the guilt that always came with being served.
Michael shyly pressed a kiss to Paul’s curls, and Paul felt a flush of warmth, like a sunbeam for the heart, or a full belly and a cup of tea on a cold evening. “Thankyou. Don’t let Bethy or Jolene bully you, if they catch you there. Tell them I said it’s alright.”
“There,” Michael crooned, and left the room.
Paul rested his forehead on his crossed arms for a moment, the desk a rickety and old familiarity, and then he stood carefully and made his way over to the bed. The automaton was complete but for its face and the spark of life, almost-life, motion-electricity? The creature’s near-completion raised questions Paul hadn’t anticipated and told himself he couldn’t afford to contemplate. Couldn’t afford not to. How else was the family to thrive?
The face was quiet-neither peaceful nor animate, but quiet. It lay on Paul’s age-flattened pillow and the white of the linen showing through the blank eyes made Paul wince. He lifted the face and traced the features. Not exact, but close enough? Wouldn’t it have to be?
“It won’t dent,” Michael said, and Paul startled. “You needn’t worry,” Michael said, and bustled with the tea, careful not to spill so much as a drop. A floor-panel-dark metal patched with pale wood-creaked beneath his weight.
Paul found himself shaking. He wasn’t sure when he’d dug his fingernails into the mask’s mouth but the cast bronze was immovable, it compressed Paul’s fingertip until the flesh showed white.
“That isn't how his face looked! This won't do,” Paul said, his voice half-choked by the tension in his throat.
Michael left off with the tea-things and approached gently, as if he feared that Paul might bolt. He trailed his fingers over the still metal features. “Why not?"
"It's meant to take his place!" Paul shook his head hard. “How can it do that if it isn’t his twin in likeness?”
“Shh, just so,” Michael said, and brushed Paul’s skin with fingers crusted in patches with seeping burns. “And so it shall. There’s nothing to stop me from modifying it. And I think you fear too much-men see what they wish to. The illusion will hold."
"Art a witch, then?"
"No more than any purveyor of art."
“Hmph,” Paul said, a noise he’d borrowed from Charlie at her most irascible. Michael just sighed. Paul backed away, shaking his head, only stopping when his shoulders struck the doorjamb. “It won’t do. No, Michael.”
“Shh. Alright. Come, can you tell me what to change so it’ll look like him? Shh. Come sit, take some tea.” Michael approached again, gently uncurling Paul’s clenched fingers.
Paul leaned against Michael’s shoulder for a long time, gaze locked on the mask’s empty eyes, Michael’s stained and reddened fingers on the metal. “Nothing the matter with it,” he said eventually. “Not really. I don’t know how you made it look so like him when you had the good fortune never to meet the man.”
“If it can be improved even slightly I shall take it home and do so,” Michael said, then, tentatively, “Telling of it might ease the ache,” and Michael was coaxing, but grief and anger and hate had closed a fist around Paul’s throat and he found himself unable to speak.
Michael didn’t press the matter. He had the gift of easy conversation, and he told stories about his cousins and the foibles of the artists he worked with, a light patter of innocuous storytelling as Paul hunched over the fiddly articulations of the automaton’s left hand. Paul let the world narrow to the tiny bits of metal and Michael’s voice and the faint smell of cooling tea, and he startled when he felt the woolen scratch of a blanket settle over his shoulders.
“Easy,” Michael said, “But the lateness of the hour grows, and I’ve got to hie myself home. I’m not sure I’ll be able to visit tomorrow-”
“Shall I come calling, instead?” Paul blurted, and flushed. “If it isn’t too much trouble, I could fetch the, I could-”
Michael came to crouch beside Paul’s chair, and his green neckcloth brightened his eyes and the ginger of his hair. “That would be smashing-i could show you some of the painting’s I’ve-if you wanted to, you could see-”
Paul found himself grinning foolishly, and for once wasn’t fearful of being thought weak because of it. “I’ve a moment between shifts, after noon bell.”
“I’ll have the kettle on,” Michael promised. “I’m crushing mushrooms all day for the yellow, so I’ll be in.”
“I didn’t know there were yellow mushrooms,” Paul said, and smothered a yawn.
“Oh, I’m sure there are, somewhere in the world,” Michael said. “But these ones are brown, like a linnet-bird, and very small.”
“Who in the world would look at a brown mushroom and know it contained yellow dye?” Paul marveled.
Michael smothered a laugh with the back of his hand. “The bloke who sat on them in white trousers?” he said, and pointed shamefacedly at himself.
“Well,” Paul said, delighted, “Who am I to say a stroke of genius is less worthy because it was the ruin of a pair of good trousers? Some might argue that increases the value.”
“Hush, you horrible villain. I’ll expect you tomorrow,” Michael said, shyly brushed his knuckles along Paul’s jawline, and showed himself out.
***
Paul fell asleep on the table, tea notwithstanding, and slept there until Tina ghosted in shortly before the witching hour. She had the faint pleased lines around her eyes she had after one of her ladies had been blessed with an easy birth, and she stroked Paul’s hair with hands that smelled of lavender soap until he woke.
“You’ve slept on the table again, dear,” Tina told him. He squinted at her in the diffused glow from the witchlights in the hall. False hail-frozen drips of condensation from the Plate-pattered on the roof and would melt and half-freeze into sheets of rotten soot-infused ice. Paul gave an abbreviated stretch and reflexively checked his face for pressure-embedded flecks of metal. There weren’t any this time.
Tina rested her hands on Paul’s shoulders, and he leaned his head into the spare softness of her belly. “I’m sorry momma. I think Bethy told me to clean the kitchen.”
“Your young Michael helped our Mitchell with it,” Tina said, her tone layered with concern and affection and the hints of a question.
“Oh,” Paul said, and flushed. “I’m meeting him for tea. He’s made a face for it.”
Tina turned her face to the automaton without quite looking at it. “I’ll be glad not to see the metal bones anymore, Paulie. Get some sleep?”
Paul closed his eyes. “I will. After I finish this.”
Tina didn’t say anything else. She smoothed Paul’s hair with her palms and kissed his forehead and darkened the witch-lights in the hall as she passed.
The glow-stone on the worktable dimmed to a ruddy ember-glow at Paul’s touch, inhaling most of the light in the room so the shadows could come, and Paul didn’t notice at first that Tina had covered the automaton with a sheet. Not a blanket, as if it were cold, but the full drapings of a funeral shroud.
***
An intermittent second-snow fell as Paul trotted through the twisting lanes of Artisan’s Row. The wind blew in fits and starts, scraping any unpacked snow from the eaves like a scornful hand. In summer the streets of London were littered with the derelict dregs of humanity, the lame, the destitute or insane, but in winter the cold drove them elsewhere, or it killed them.
Michael lived on the uppermost floor of a narrow, leaning house on the corner of Ashfall and Primpton Lane. The attic was without a roof and had been given over entirely to the wilds of the sky. The interior of the roof had been sealed with artist’s gum, and under the thick layer of insulating snow the little rooms weren’t warm, but they were comfortable.
Paul let himself in and climbed the creaking, squeaking, twining staircase. There was a dark, damp patch on the first landing, and Paul held his breath to avoid learning whether it had a smell. The staircase ended at a splintery door that peeled fat flakes of white-wash at the touch. Paul knocked on the smoother wood of the wall beside it.
Michael’s voice was came muffled through the door. “Hestia? Or is it Edmund? Either way, I don’t have anything else for you to do-go away, I’m up to my elbows in dye.”
“Neither one,” Paul said, and from within came a rattle of ceramics, the clatter of a stool being kicked over, and quick footsteps toward the door. Paul tugged at his neckcloth and was still smoothing flyaway strands when the door opened, and he clasped Michael’s hand with melted snowflakes on his palm.
“Um. I hope it’s been a pleasant morning,” Michael said, then swore and jerked his hand out of Paul’s. “Oh! I am a thoughtless lout. Let me get a little linseed oil,” he said, and bustled off, leaving Paul in the doorway to examine himself in confusion. “And it’s not like I didn’t know the wretched things leach dye like anything-oh, come let me clean it for you-”
Michael was stained to mid-forearm a cheery yellow, and now his handclasp marked Paul’s skin in the same merry hue.
“It ought to come out, it hasn’t had much time to set-” Michael continued, trotting back to Paul with a bit of rag and a vial of pale oil, which he dampened a corner of the rag with. “Here-” he said, reaching for Paul again, then paused. “Oh, I’m all over colours-”
Paul relieved him of the rag, unable to contain a smile. “I’ll do it,” Paul said. Michael nodded and hovered close by, and most of the dye sopped into the rag at Paul’s blotting. Michael shifted his weight. “My father lives on the first floor- he doesn’t like stairs. I don’t see him much. He seems happy to be avoided. And the tenants don’t like this floor because it’s cold, and the smells of the dyes.” Michael blurted, then shuffled his feet. He wore slippers of soft tartan and an artist’s smock that was more paint than cloth. “Come in-”
The tiny room where Michael mixed his dyes and prepared paints was closed off from the slightly larger living area, but the cracked-open window let in the cold which helped to deaden the thick paint-smells. Paul scraped his boots a second time, and left them on in deference to the holes in his stockings.
Michael covered the little pots of thick new dye and laid a square of cheesecloth over the wizened baked-crisp mushrooms he was grinding to powder with mortar and pestle. He dipped his hands in a shallow pan of linseed oil and wiped it away on the curtain. He shrugged at Paul. “It’s easier,” he said. “I wash them weekly and the water turns all colours, you should see.” He dropped his chin and lifted one shoulder. “The alternative is an enormous pile of rags and drips of oil every-which-way and then they get so messy and there’s nothing you can do to prevent that, and they pile up and fall all over the place and stain the floorboards, and it’s utter chaos, I can’t bear it.”
Paul wiggled his toes through the holes in his stockings and let a smile crinkle his eyes. “Tony-my brother Tony-is a little like that, he likes things a certain way and grows distressed a-times if things aren’t as he feels they should be.”
Michael tossed Paul a rather distracted expression and ushered him towards a narrow door in the back wall. “Would you come through? I haven’t set the kettle on yet, but it ought not to take long-”
“I have a little time,” Paul assured him. His position as a music tutor paid well, but he worked at the whims of the children, and he had arrived today to find that they were attending a fancy dinner in honor of some distant relative’s being awarded an entry into a prestigious gentleman’s club. And thus, thank-you, his services would not be required at this moment.
“I’ll just go fluff the fire and get the kettle going,” Michael said, and went immediately to the little iron-banded pot-bellied stove, leaving Paul to lean his shoulder against the doorjamb and stare.
The room was lit by more witch-lights than Paul had ever seen in a single place-tiny broken fragments and scavenged chips stuck to the roof or high-suspended from string, strong yellow light like the summer sun at mid-day, and on all the walls and beams of heavy wood, up the legs of the table and the sides of the shelving, Michael had painted tender green leaves and breathless blades of grass, dewdrops that seemed to glow and flowers of all hues. Clean gleaming colour like a fairy kingdom in the heart of London. A single corner-the cubby in which Michael’s low pallet nestled-was painted winter-white and scattered with branch-empty trees and snowdrops, and high near the roof in a tangle of branches, a cardinal red as desire.
“Oh Michael-”
“I have a few cheesy biscuits-they’ve gone a bit tough, but-”
Paul wasn’t sure what his face showed. His expression made Michael flush up with colour and twist away, fussing with the the smudged copper teapot and brushing at his hair, his shoulders turtled up to his ears.
“Michael,” he tried again, but couldn’t think of anything to say. Paul drifted along the wall, knotting his fingers at the small of his back so he wouldn’t be tempted to touch. The delicate leaves looked like they should be tender and wet, the snow seemed on the verge of drifting into the rest of the room.
“It’s just, in my free time-when I can’t sleep-” Michael seemed had a thickness and a hesitation in his voice, a fascination with the teaspoon he held. “There’s always paint left-over, or in the mixing-pots-I don’t approve of waste,” he finished.
“This is beautiful,” Paul managed, and settled on the edge of the bed, ignoring the creak of dry rope and the squeak of the straw-filled ticking. The cardinal preened in a high winter tree while a false summer blazed all around.
Michael’s flush hadn’t abated by the time he set the little plate of cheese-biscutes on the table and perched on the three-legged stool. Paul settled on the other stool-more of a very small chair-and politely took a biscuit. “The other day Mitchell said-when we were taking you home from the harbour-Mitchell said you light the lamps, sometimes.”
“Most nights,” Michael said, his head lifting. The flush was slow to fade. “The babies aren’t scared of the dark in the water, but they need light on the docks or they panic.”
Paul covered his mouth with the back of his hand, fighting a smile. “Michael-” he started.
“The, the face, yes,” Michael blurted, and lurched off his stool to find it. His fingers were bandaged in places. “Here, I think I got it right-”
Paul touched the white linen that looped Michael’s knuckles. “Thank you. It’s perfect.”
***
Charlie’s knee-high boots sagged drunkenly together in the entryway. Paul tidied them aside and shook half-melted snow from his scarf, closing the door behind him. The boiler hummed, distant clangs traveling through the hollow pipes, distant shouts. He hung his damp things on a few of the myriad hooks and sat to remove his shoes.
The sitting room was Jolene’s room, when she was home. Sometimes when Tiff couldn’t sleep she’d sneak in and poke Jolene awake, and they’d whisper in the dark like children. Only to Jolene did Tiffany reveal how upset she had been to lose her hair. And their father.
***
Charlie had loosened her neckcloth and pushed her cap high on her forehead. In summer she tanned brown below the cap and the strip of her forehead where the band rested stayed lady-white. She and Tina nestled together on the ottoman, heads touching as they sipped their tea and examined the tiny embroidered prayer on a smudged baby-blanket Charlie had found in her rounds. A few silken threads had pulled loose, catching the light, and they were debating how best to remove and replace the damaged silk without ruining the design as a whole.
Paul leaned in the doorway, the automaton’s face well-wrapped in cloth and tucked against his ribs. Shannon had fallen asleep on Tiff’s leg, Tiffany herself nodding over a tattered pamphlet. Tony had a tangle of cloth in his lap-he’d begged and begged until Tina taught him to sew. It was so much easier to do things unbecoming of boys without Da around to disapprove. Beads of condensation formed on the walls in places; Tina kept rags in a ring round the edges of rooms and changed them regularly to keep the floor dry. The roofs sloped so water-beads ran along to the edges, rather than falling like rain as they pleased.
Charlie gave him a look and touched her own forearm and the well-covered tattoos there. He nodded-Charlie defied definition, but she was the most capable person he knew. She’d promised to sit with him when he woke the automaton, she’d promised not to let anything happen that could not be set right.
***
Wordcount: 4,200
Heat is an intangible liquid of negligible mass. Her Majesty's scientists said so in ringing tones at the frequent public lectures they gave. Gloriana donated bread and winter-wrinkled apples and salted fish to those who'd attend the whole lecture, seeking to educate her subjects to a level she found pleasing. Guardsmen in their crisp crimson cloaks lined the square, checking pockets and clothing for pilfered food-Gloriana’s gifts were to be eaten at the lecture or not at all.
Paul remembered attending one such with his father, back when he'd been too small to reach a door-knob on his own. Da Fleming was a pleasant enough man so long as he encountered no opposition. He had firm ideas on the sort of man he expected his son to become, and so took his eldest to the lecture, leaving his wife and daughters home, Tina scooping a froth of soap scum and dead fleas from her wash-basins.
The lecture today had been preceded by a Luxembourg hanging, and the poor brute would dangle from the gallows-tree until rot or the gore-crows picked the bones bare. Paul averted his face and focussed on the yeast-and-salt taste of his loaf, but Da turned his head and made him look. “Don’t go hiding from the world, boy. The dead can’t hurt you.” He hooked Paul with an arm around his waist and shook him toward the executioner so that he squeaked and swung. “But him! I’ve heard tell he loves his work too well. I’ve half a mind to invite him home for your mother.”
When Paul was on his own he took the long-way home to avoid the gallows-tree, but Da didn’t see the point.
***
Jolene brought home a sack of sooty loaves-they’d fallen soft and fresh into the pan of ash the scullery-maid swept out of the fireplaces and ovens. The scullery maid-Jolene’s friend Ariadne-had taken the loaves, too ruined for the high table, and squirreled some away for Jolene, who’d then brought home to share with the rest of the family. Bethy brought one of these, sliced thick and toasted and running with clear butter, and shallow bowls of thin soup, one each for Paul and Michael. “Get that in you, then,” she told them. “Paulie, you’ve got to clean the kitchen before you sleep-Tony’s burned his finger and needs to keep his hand in snow for a bit longer.”
“Who let him in the kitchen on his own,” Paul said, rising, but Bethy wound her hand firmly in Paul’s curls and forced him back onto his perch on the edge of the pallet. “None of that then, Master Fleming,” she told him. “You’re to eat, and get a little work done on that thing ere you sleep,” and she jerked her sharp chin at the automaton. “Or did you think they’d hold Da’s job forever?”
***
A watchmaker on the edge of the slums had given Paul some of his older, more worn tools, tiny pincers and gears and miniature screws so small, and with such finely-crafted flutings, that they could become wedged beneath a finger-nail. Paul used these to craft the automaton’s articulations; the deep curl of the palms and the wrists that were thicker than Paul’s own, struts from someone’s broken oboe-fingerings and the wire of a half-dozen discarded harpsichords. These, and parts scavenged from Charlie’s cart or this or that trash heap, whatever he could find as he found it, ever redesigning the metal man to use what he had. Sheets of oily paper, scavenged and re-used, even scraps of vellum, drippings of irongall and scratches of other people’s thoughts that Paul inked over with his own.
He showed these to Michael not even knowing why he had to- not because Michael had asked but because Paul wanted to tell him, had to talk to *someone*. Michael shuffled through the schematics without comment, but he looked at them, and Paul was reassured. These past days his family had helped with the work, they’d tended him when he fell asleep with his face pressed to the table top (and when he’d woken the creases in the wood were written on his skin), but none of them had wanted to talk about it with him.
“It looks finished to me,” Michael said. He’d taken to coming by in the evenings, stroking the automaton’s skull with his dye-stained hands and watching Paul with eyes like wet glass.
Paul shook his head and the winter-split ends of his hair caught on the linen of his neckcloth. “Many of the smaller mechanisms are only partially articulated, and the connections to the heart are the last things I’ll affix.”
Parts of the metal man’s skin were butter-soft leather, and some were tight-stiched layers of greased canvas, and some were finely joined chinks of metal-chips burnished bright and scaled together like the feet of a bird. Michael tapped his fingernails on these and chewed on his lip till it was in danger of bleeding at the cracks.
“I ought to have the face finished to-morrow?” Michael said doubtfully, and left without satisfying Paul’s desire for conversation, as if someone with so large a family could be lonely. The ache was lessened but it wasn’t gone.
A day later he returned, bearing a face cast of bronze on his open palm and bringing a waft of icy air and the lingering acrid smell of a forge. His socks were colourful with frequent mendings. Paul smothered a yawn, and his apology for such ill-manners was interrupted by a second.
“Have you been burning the midnight candle?” Michael said. “No, that can’t be right.”
“Midnight oil,” Paul said, and dragged his fingers through his hair. “Or the candle burnt from both ends.”
“Either one,” Michael said, and set the empty face on the coverlet beside the automaton. “Have you slept at all?”
“Some,” Paul said, and left out the part about falling asleep on the table and later asking little Shannon to pick the splinters out of his chin.
“You know sleep is the glue binding mind and body,” Michael said. “Or so the lecture usually goes.”
Paul wobbled a little when he stood. “Come sit, I’ll bring tea-”
Michael pressed both hands to Paul’s shoulders, gently leaning his weight until Paul subsided. “Can we pretend I’m family and let me bring the tea?”
Paul moved to refuse on instinct, but Michael squeezed Paul’s shoulders and bent in, slow, like a settling bird, resting his cheek on the crown of Paul’s head briefly. “Just this once? Please? You welcomed me in when it was cold.”
“That was the only thing to do,” Paul said.
“Well, now you’ve got to let me help, because I’m a guest and to do otherwise would be impolite.”
Exhaustion has a way of blurring the world, as if a layer of waxed paper had been laid between the senses and things perceived, so that imaginings wavered to closely to the real and memories had a way of shouldering their way forward and rearing boldly. Paul rubbed his forehead. “Tea would be a godsend,” he said, suppressing the guilt that always came with being served.
Michael shyly pressed a kiss to Paul’s curls, and Paul felt a flush of warmth, like a sunbeam for the heart, or a full belly and a cup of tea on a cold evening. “Thankyou. Don’t let Bethy or Jolene bully you, if they catch you there. Tell them I said it’s alright.”
“There,” Michael crooned, and left the room.
Paul rested his forehead on his crossed arms for a moment, the desk a rickety and old familiarity, and then he stood carefully and made his way over to the bed. The automaton was complete but for its face and the spark of life, almost-life, motion-electricity? The creature’s near-completion raised questions Paul hadn’t anticipated and told himself he couldn’t afford to contemplate. Couldn’t afford not to. How else was the family to thrive?
The face was quiet-neither peaceful nor animate, but quiet. It lay on Paul’s age-flattened pillow and the white of the linen showing through the blank eyes made Paul wince. He lifted the face and traced the features. Not exact, but close enough? Wouldn’t it have to be?
“It won’t dent,” Michael said, and Paul startled. “You needn’t worry,” Michael said, and bustled with the tea, careful not to spill so much as a drop. A floor-panel-dark metal patched with pale wood-creaked beneath his weight.
Paul found himself shaking. He wasn’t sure when he’d dug his fingernails into the mask’s mouth but the cast bronze was immovable, it compressed Paul’s fingertip until the flesh showed white.
“That isn't how his face looked! This won't do,” Paul said, his voice half-choked by the tension in his throat.
Michael left off with the tea-things and approached gently, as if he feared that Paul might bolt. He trailed his fingers over the still metal features. “Why not?"
"It's meant to take his place!" Paul shook his head hard. “How can it do that if it isn’t his twin in likeness?”
“Shh, just so,” Michael said, and brushed Paul’s skin with fingers crusted in patches with seeping burns. “And so it shall. There’s nothing to stop me from modifying it. And I think you fear too much-men see what they wish to. The illusion will hold."
"Art a witch, then?"
"No more than any purveyor of art."
“Hmph,” Paul said, a noise he’d borrowed from Charlie at her most irascible. Michael just sighed. Paul backed away, shaking his head, only stopping when his shoulders struck the doorjamb. “It won’t do. No, Michael.”
“Shh. Alright. Come, can you tell me what to change so it’ll look like him? Shh. Come sit, take some tea.” Michael approached again, gently uncurling Paul’s clenched fingers.
Paul leaned against Michael’s shoulder for a long time, gaze locked on the mask’s empty eyes, Michael’s stained and reddened fingers on the metal. “Nothing the matter with it,” he said eventually. “Not really. I don’t know how you made it look so like him when you had the good fortune never to meet the man.”
“If it can be improved even slightly I shall take it home and do so,” Michael said, then, tentatively, “Telling of it might ease the ache,” and Michael was coaxing, but grief and anger and hate had closed a fist around Paul’s throat and he found himself unable to speak.
Michael didn’t press the matter. He had the gift of easy conversation, and he told stories about his cousins and the foibles of the artists he worked with, a light patter of innocuous storytelling as Paul hunched over the fiddly articulations of the automaton’s left hand. Paul let the world narrow to the tiny bits of metal and Michael’s voice and the faint smell of cooling tea, and he startled when he felt the woolen scratch of a blanket settle over his shoulders.
“Easy,” Michael said, “But the lateness of the hour grows, and I’ve got to hie myself home. I’m not sure I’ll be able to visit tomorrow-”
“Shall I come calling, instead?” Paul blurted, and flushed. “If it isn’t too much trouble, I could fetch the, I could-”
Michael came to crouch beside Paul’s chair, and his green neckcloth brightened his eyes and the ginger of his hair. “That would be smashing-i could show you some of the painting’s I’ve-if you wanted to, you could see-”
Paul found himself grinning foolishly, and for once wasn’t fearful of being thought weak because of it. “I’ve a moment between shifts, after noon bell.”
“I’ll have the kettle on,” Michael promised. “I’m crushing mushrooms all day for the yellow, so I’ll be in.”
“I didn’t know there were yellow mushrooms,” Paul said, and smothered a yawn.
“Oh, I’m sure there are, somewhere in the world,” Michael said. “But these ones are brown, like a linnet-bird, and very small.”
“Who in the world would look at a brown mushroom and know it contained yellow dye?” Paul marveled.
Michael smothered a laugh with the back of his hand. “The bloke who sat on them in white trousers?” he said, and pointed shamefacedly at himself.
“Well,” Paul said, delighted, “Who am I to say a stroke of genius is less worthy because it was the ruin of a pair of good trousers? Some might argue that increases the value.”
“Hush, you horrible villain. I’ll expect you tomorrow,” Michael said, shyly brushed his knuckles along Paul’s jawline, and showed himself out.
***
Paul fell asleep on the table, tea notwithstanding, and slept there until Tina ghosted in shortly before the witching hour. She had the faint pleased lines around her eyes she had after one of her ladies had been blessed with an easy birth, and she stroked Paul’s hair with hands that smelled of lavender soap until he woke.
“You’ve slept on the table again, dear,” Tina told him. He squinted at her in the diffused glow from the witchlights in the hall. False hail-frozen drips of condensation from the Plate-pattered on the roof and would melt and half-freeze into sheets of rotten soot-infused ice. Paul gave an abbreviated stretch and reflexively checked his face for pressure-embedded flecks of metal. There weren’t any this time.
Tina rested her hands on Paul’s shoulders, and he leaned his head into the spare softness of her belly. “I’m sorry momma. I think Bethy told me to clean the kitchen.”
“Your young Michael helped our Mitchell with it,” Tina said, her tone layered with concern and affection and the hints of a question.
“Oh,” Paul said, and flushed. “I’m meeting him for tea. He’s made a face for it.”
Tina turned her face to the automaton without quite looking at it. “I’ll be glad not to see the metal bones anymore, Paulie. Get some sleep?”
Paul closed his eyes. “I will. After I finish this.”
Tina didn’t say anything else. She smoothed Paul’s hair with her palms and kissed his forehead and darkened the witch-lights in the hall as she passed.
The glow-stone on the worktable dimmed to a ruddy ember-glow at Paul’s touch, inhaling most of the light in the room so the shadows could come, and Paul didn’t notice at first that Tina had covered the automaton with a sheet. Not a blanket, as if it were cold, but the full drapings of a funeral shroud.
***
An intermittent second-snow fell as Paul trotted through the twisting lanes of Artisan’s Row. The wind blew in fits and starts, scraping any unpacked snow from the eaves like a scornful hand. In summer the streets of London were littered with the derelict dregs of humanity, the lame, the destitute or insane, but in winter the cold drove them elsewhere, or it killed them.
Michael lived on the uppermost floor of a narrow, leaning house on the corner of Ashfall and Primpton Lane. The attic was without a roof and had been given over entirely to the wilds of the sky. The interior of the roof had been sealed with artist’s gum, and under the thick layer of insulating snow the little rooms weren’t warm, but they were comfortable.
Paul let himself in and climbed the creaking, squeaking, twining staircase. There was a dark, damp patch on the first landing, and Paul held his breath to avoid learning whether it had a smell. The staircase ended at a splintery door that peeled fat flakes of white-wash at the touch. Paul knocked on the smoother wood of the wall beside it.
Michael’s voice was came muffled through the door. “Hestia? Or is it Edmund? Either way, I don’t have anything else for you to do-go away, I’m up to my elbows in dye.”
“Neither one,” Paul said, and from within came a rattle of ceramics, the clatter of a stool being kicked over, and quick footsteps toward the door. Paul tugged at his neckcloth and was still smoothing flyaway strands when the door opened, and he clasped Michael’s hand with melted snowflakes on his palm.
“Um. I hope it’s been a pleasant morning,” Michael said, then swore and jerked his hand out of Paul’s. “Oh! I am a thoughtless lout. Let me get a little linseed oil,” he said, and bustled off, leaving Paul in the doorway to examine himself in confusion. “And it’s not like I didn’t know the wretched things leach dye like anything-oh, come let me clean it for you-”
Michael was stained to mid-forearm a cheery yellow, and now his handclasp marked Paul’s skin in the same merry hue.
“It ought to come out, it hasn’t had much time to set-” Michael continued, trotting back to Paul with a bit of rag and a vial of pale oil, which he dampened a corner of the rag with. “Here-” he said, reaching for Paul again, then paused. “Oh, I’m all over colours-”
Paul relieved him of the rag, unable to contain a smile. “I’ll do it,” Paul said. Michael nodded and hovered close by, and most of the dye sopped into the rag at Paul’s blotting. Michael shifted his weight. “My father lives on the first floor- he doesn’t like stairs. I don’t see him much. He seems happy to be avoided. And the tenants don’t like this floor because it’s cold, and the smells of the dyes.” Michael blurted, then shuffled his feet. He wore slippers of soft tartan and an artist’s smock that was more paint than cloth. “Come in-”
The tiny room where Michael mixed his dyes and prepared paints was closed off from the slightly larger living area, but the cracked-open window let in the cold which helped to deaden the thick paint-smells. Paul scraped his boots a second time, and left them on in deference to the holes in his stockings.
Michael covered the little pots of thick new dye and laid a square of cheesecloth over the wizened baked-crisp mushrooms he was grinding to powder with mortar and pestle. He dipped his hands in a shallow pan of linseed oil and wiped it away on the curtain. He shrugged at Paul. “It’s easier,” he said. “I wash them weekly and the water turns all colours, you should see.” He dropped his chin and lifted one shoulder. “The alternative is an enormous pile of rags and drips of oil every-which-way and then they get so messy and there’s nothing you can do to prevent that, and they pile up and fall all over the place and stain the floorboards, and it’s utter chaos, I can’t bear it.”
Paul wiggled his toes through the holes in his stockings and let a smile crinkle his eyes. “Tony-my brother Tony-is a little like that, he likes things a certain way and grows distressed a-times if things aren’t as he feels they should be.”
Michael tossed Paul a rather distracted expression and ushered him towards a narrow door in the back wall. “Would you come through? I haven’t set the kettle on yet, but it ought not to take long-”
“I have a little time,” Paul assured him. His position as a music tutor paid well, but he worked at the whims of the children, and he had arrived today to find that they were attending a fancy dinner in honor of some distant relative’s being awarded an entry into a prestigious gentleman’s club. And thus, thank-you, his services would not be required at this moment.
“I’ll just go fluff the fire and get the kettle going,” Michael said, and went immediately to the little iron-banded pot-bellied stove, leaving Paul to lean his shoulder against the doorjamb and stare.
The room was lit by more witch-lights than Paul had ever seen in a single place-tiny broken fragments and scavenged chips stuck to the roof or high-suspended from string, strong yellow light like the summer sun at mid-day, and on all the walls and beams of heavy wood, up the legs of the table and the sides of the shelving, Michael had painted tender green leaves and breathless blades of grass, dewdrops that seemed to glow and flowers of all hues. Clean gleaming colour like a fairy kingdom in the heart of London. A single corner-the cubby in which Michael’s low pallet nestled-was painted winter-white and scattered with branch-empty trees and snowdrops, and high near the roof in a tangle of branches, a cardinal red as desire.
“Oh Michael-”
“I have a few cheesy biscuits-they’ve gone a bit tough, but-”
Paul wasn’t sure what his face showed. His expression made Michael flush up with colour and twist away, fussing with the the smudged copper teapot and brushing at his hair, his shoulders turtled up to his ears.
“Michael,” he tried again, but couldn’t think of anything to say. Paul drifted along the wall, knotting his fingers at the small of his back so he wouldn’t be tempted to touch. The delicate leaves looked like they should be tender and wet, the snow seemed on the verge of drifting into the rest of the room.
“It’s just, in my free time-when I can’t sleep-” Michael seemed had a thickness and a hesitation in his voice, a fascination with the teaspoon he held. “There’s always paint left-over, or in the mixing-pots-I don’t approve of waste,” he finished.
“This is beautiful,” Paul managed, and settled on the edge of the bed, ignoring the creak of dry rope and the squeak of the straw-filled ticking. The cardinal preened in a high winter tree while a false summer blazed all around.
Michael’s flush hadn’t abated by the time he set the little plate of cheese-biscutes on the table and perched on the three-legged stool. Paul settled on the other stool-more of a very small chair-and politely took a biscuit. “The other day Mitchell said-when we were taking you home from the harbour-Mitchell said you light the lamps, sometimes.”
“Most nights,” Michael said, his head lifting. The flush was slow to fade. “The babies aren’t scared of the dark in the water, but they need light on the docks or they panic.”
Paul covered his mouth with the back of his hand, fighting a smile. “Michael-” he started.
“The, the face, yes,” Michael blurted, and lurched off his stool to find it. His fingers were bandaged in places. “Here, I think I got it right-”
Paul touched the white linen that looped Michael’s knuckles. “Thank you. It’s perfect.”
***
Charlie’s knee-high boots sagged drunkenly together in the entryway. Paul tidied them aside and shook half-melted snow from his scarf, closing the door behind him. The boiler hummed, distant clangs traveling through the hollow pipes, distant shouts. He hung his damp things on a few of the myriad hooks and sat to remove his shoes.
The sitting room was Jolene’s room, when she was home. Sometimes when Tiff couldn’t sleep she’d sneak in and poke Jolene awake, and they’d whisper in the dark like children. Only to Jolene did Tiffany reveal how upset she had been to lose her hair. And their father.
***
Charlie had loosened her neckcloth and pushed her cap high on her forehead. In summer she tanned brown below the cap and the strip of her forehead where the band rested stayed lady-white. She and Tina nestled together on the ottoman, heads touching as they sipped their tea and examined the tiny embroidered prayer on a smudged baby-blanket Charlie had found in her rounds. A few silken threads had pulled loose, catching the light, and they were debating how best to remove and replace the damaged silk without ruining the design as a whole.
Paul leaned in the doorway, the automaton’s face well-wrapped in cloth and tucked against his ribs. Shannon had fallen asleep on Tiff’s leg, Tiffany herself nodding over a tattered pamphlet. Tony had a tangle of cloth in his lap-he’d begged and begged until Tina taught him to sew. It was so much easier to do things unbecoming of boys without Da around to disapprove. Beads of condensation formed on the walls in places; Tina kept rags in a ring round the edges of rooms and changed them regularly to keep the floor dry. The roofs sloped so water-beads ran along to the edges, rather than falling like rain as they pleased.
Charlie gave him a look and touched her own forearm and the well-covered tattoos there. He nodded-Charlie defied definition, but she was the most capable person he knew. She’d promised to sit with him when he woke the automaton, she’d promised not to let anything happen that could not be set right.
***