The Girl with the Iron Touch
Page 3

He held her gaze—longer than was proper. It wasn’t what he’d said that bothered her, but rather that he’d said it in front of the others. What she felt for Griffin was…private. Calling attention to it was very unEnglish of him.
And made her very aware that perhaps Jack’s feelings for her were still much deeper than friendship.
“My mistake,” Jack conceded, his voice soft. “Tea would be lovely, thank you.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d dropped that awful affectation of his in front of her. Doubtful that the others even heard him, especially Sam and Emily, who were having their own conversation, er…argument.
“Have a seat,” she said, and rang the bell for a fresh pot and another cup.
Finley didn’t speak to him while they waited for the tea, but her silence wasn’t because she didn’t know what to say—it was because Jack had gone straight to Jasper, leaving her standing by herself. Her hearing was exceptional, but she couldn’t eavesdrop on Sam and Emily and his conversation with the cowboy.
For a moment, despite being in this beautiful house as someone who belonged there, Finley was struck by the feelings of being an outsider that had plagued her for most of her life.
She did not like it.
“Oi!” she cried. All eyes turned to her, but her gaze was on Jack. Perhaps she was a little mad—certainly her mind seemed to be scattered lately—but she couldn’t stand to be left out, not just by Griffin, but by everyone else. “You said you had information?”
Jack arched a brow at her bad manners. It took all of her strength not to look away. “Quite,” he said, moving toward the sofa. The others closed in, too, and seated themselves around the room just as fresh tea and sandwiches arrived.
Finley poured Jack a cup, fixed it how he liked it and offered it to him. She did not meet his gaze—the bounder already understood her too well.
“You certain ’is Lordship ain’t available?”
“Decidedly,” Emily replied, setting a strange contraption on the tea table in front of Jack. “Would you mind if I record you, Mr. Dandy?”
“Call me Jack, darling. All the pretty girls call me Jack.”
Finley rolled her eyes.
Emily grinned at him, bright eyes sparkling. “No doubt they call you many things, some of which they might even repeat in polite company.”
“You come here to talk or to flirt?” Sam demanded.
Jack smiled. “Unlike you, mate, I’m able to do two fings at once.” He winked at Emily before turning to Finley. “Somefin strange ’appened Thursday last— somefin I reckon you lot will find very interesting.”
Finley perched on the edge of the sofa near Emily and waited for him to elaborate. Instead, Jack picked up his cup and saucer and took a sip. He didn’t even slurp. Then, he reached out and took a little cucumber sandwich off the tray and proceeded to eat it with better manners than she expected.
When he moved to take another sandwich, she pushed the plate just out of his reach. “Talk first. Eat later, Jack.”
His gaze narrowed, but there was a twinkle in his eye. “You’ve become cruel, Treasure. An ’eartless minx what delights in denyin’ a man ’is proper tea. A little suspense is good for the digestion.”
Was everything a joke to him? Yes, she supposed it was. To be Jack Dandy was to treat every day as a novelty and to never take anything—himself included— too seriously.
Still, he had to take some things seriously—he wouldn’t have a reputation as a lord of the criminal underworld without having done something to deserve it.
It was a battle of wills, one she knew she wouldn’t win—not before the others decided to toss her out the window. She pushed the plate toward him. “I would hate to discombobulate your digestion.”
He flashed straight white teeth and snatched another sandwich. “Fanks. So, as I were sayin’, about a fortnight ago I was contacted by a bloke about circumnavigating a transportation dilemma ’e ’ad discovered.”
“I thought you said it was last Thursday?” Sam demanded, stuffing a biscuit in his mouth.
Jack gave him a patently condescending look. “I’m setting the stage, chum. Creatin’ a mood, if you will. Listen carefully and our pretty little ginger will explain the words you don’t understand.” What sort of fellow deliberately baited a creature such as Sam?
Apparently a fellow much like herself.
Sam opened his mouth to respond, but Jack cut him off. “I’m just ’aving a bit of fun. No need to get all red in the face and cosh me over the ’ead with those meat ’ooks you call ’ands. As I were saying, I was approached by a bloke who offered me enough coin to keep me mouth shut and just do the job.” He plucked another sandwich from the tray.
“Which was?” Finley prodded. Honestly, he was being deliberately difficult.
Jack chewed and swallowed. He hadn’t even gotten any crumbs on himself. He’d been taught proper manners, she’d bet her left arm on it. “Transportin’ a crate from the docks to an underground station on the Metropolitan line.”
“Which station?” Jasper asked. Finley hid her surprise that he was even paying attention. He never used to be so quiet or distant. Granted, she hadn’t known him well prior to going to New York, but he had changed when Mei died, and this was not that same fellow she considered a friend.
“St. Pancras. It were a fairly large crate, weighed at least nine to ten stone. I ’ad to ’elp load it onto the carriage.” He shuddered, as though the thought of manual labor was beneath him, but Finley didn’t buy it.
“Where on the docks?” she asked.
“Not far from where that building collapsed a few months back.” His gaze traveled to each one of them. “I reckon you’re all familiar with it.”
Finley’s blood froze in her veins. He meant the building Griffin had brought down with his power—the building the man known as the Machinist had used as his automaton workshop. The Machinist was a man named Garibaldi, and his corpse hadn’t been found when authorities searched the wreckage.
“The man who hired you, what did he look like?” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Emily’s tense expression and knew her friend had the same thought she had.
“Blond and blue-eyed,” Jack responded.
Emily glanced at her, sharing relief that it wasn’t Garibaldi. There was no way he could have survived that building coming down on top of him. Was there?
Jack continued, “Looked almost Albinese. Great big fat ’ead. I didn’t get the feeling ’e was new in town, but I weren’t familiar with ’im. Bit of a Geordie, if my knowledge of dialects is up to snuff.”
Finley didn’t doubt he could identify a person’s regional origin with three miles. “You didn’t ask what the cargo was?”
He looked affronted. “Course not, but somefin about it felt off, right? I’ve survived on luck, intuition and not being a bloody idiot. Every instinct I ’ave told me this weren’t good. So, before I delivered the crate I opened it.”
He’d lost some of his swagger and the sparkle in his eyes. That couldn’t be a good sign. He took a drink of tea and made a face. Perhaps he really wanted something a bit stronger. That didn’t bode well. Dandy was not easily disconcerted.
“What was in the crate, Jack?”
“An automaton. I think.” His accent lost much of its affectation. “Unlike any metal I’ve ever seen.”
The unease pooling at the base of Finley’s spine intensified, but it was Emily who asked, “How so?”
Jack chuckled, but there was little humor in it. “She—and it was definitely a girl—was na**d, and she—” he swallowed “—she had bits of skin on her, like she was a patchwork quilt without all its pieces.”
“It must have been a waxwork,” Emily suggested, perhaps a bit condescendingly.
Dark eyes turned to her. “That’s what I told myself— before I touched her. Skin and hair. I fancied I could see lungs beneath her metal ribs. One eye socket was empty, the other had an eyeball in it—it was the color of amber.” He swallowed, and set his cup and saucer on the low table at his knees.
Finley reached out and put her hand on his arm. She’d never seen him so rattled, but then she’d only known him a few months. “It must have been a frightening sight, but it was just a machine, Jack.”
He stared at her, then at the hand on his sleeve. It was as though a curtain was pulled back into place, and he was once again the Jack Dandy she knew. “No, Treasure. I don’t fink it were.”
She removed the hand he seemed to find so offensive. If he hadn’t called her “Treasure” she’d start to wonder if he was angry with her. “Why not?”
Jack’s jaw tightened. “It…she spoke to me.”
She had asked the handsome man not to put her back in the dark, but the fleshy stub in her mouth didn’t move the way she wanted and refused to form the words, so all that came out was a moaning noise.
He had looked at her in horror, as though she were a…monster. That was the word. She didn’t quite know what it meant, but she knew it was right. He was disgusted by her. That made her sad, even though she wasn’t sure why, except that he had looked so very pretty to her.
But then, everything looked pretty when your eyes were brand-new, as hers were. She had two now. The second one had started to appear the day after the man opened the ceiling on her wooden domicile.
Domicile. That meant home. She lifted her chin and looked around the room. The other machines had put her here after removing her from the crate. Was this to be her home now? It was ever so much nicer than the hot, smelly box, even though they had set her inside a casket of iron. At least the casket allowed her to stand upright. If only they hadn’t shackled her inside, she might move about a bit. Perhaps that would ease the incessant pressure in her abdomen. It was almost unbear…
Oh.
Hot, wet liquid splashed against her feet. It was coming from inside her. Was it oil? Some sort of chemical for her inner workings? It smelled funny, but at least her belly didn’t hurt. In fact, the release of the liquid felt wonderful. Whatever it was, she’d had a surplus that obviously had to be evacuated. Would this be a regular occurrence?
The door to the room she was in opened, and in scuttled two automatons. One had a shiny porcelain doll head perched atop its squat metal body, and eight reticulated limbs that made it move like an insect. The other appeared as an elderly woman in a tattered gown. It appeared as though her head had been removed at one time and reattached by a clumsy child. It was pitched forward and slightly to the side.
She tried to draw back from them, their monstrous countenances frightening, but there was nowhere for her to go while trapped in the lead box.
“I told you it was going to be female,” the spider said to the woman. Its voice was like the clattering of discordant notes on a piano keyboard.
“We must find some clothing,” the other replied in a voice that was almost human, but with a slight hitch. Whoever had put its head back on hadn’t aligned the voice box correctly. “It would not be proper for her to be seen na**d, but we can no longer keep her restrained now that biological function has begun. Bring someone to clean up her mess.”
The short one made a skittering sound. It wasn’t any kind of language her logic engine could identify, but she understood it, regardless. It was the language of metal, and the spider didn’t like being ordered about.
A clawlike hand lashed out from the “old woman” and struck the other. “You will do as told, or face the wrath of the Master.”
The Master. The mention of him made the gregorite vertebrae of her spine cold. Part of her insisted she bow to him, but another part…that strange part responsible for the gooey eyeballs in her head and the fleshy thing in her mouth, was afraid. Why would she be afraid? She was machine, and machines were not capable of feeling.
Something jumped in her chest. She looked down. Between the two swells of flesh on her chest there was a small expanse of her framework not yet covered over by skin. There, through the gleaming rungs of her chasse she spied a red, wet lump of muscle, ebbing and receding in time with the pulsing throughout her form.
What was happening to her?
The old woman came to her, every step halting, punctuated with a dry, grinding sound. Her thin lips clicked upward into a grotesque parody of a smile.
A smile with no emotion behind it. No humanity. The skin of the machine’s face was gray and lax. There was something wrong with it, but what? Her mind knew she should be horrified, but not why.
And it stank. Stank like death, though she had no idea how she knew that. In fact, she didn’t even know her own name. Did she have a name?
“What are you going to do with me?” she asked. The thing in her mouth was bigger now, and moved when she spoke, so that the words that came out sounded almost as they ought.
How did she know how the words were supposed to sound? Why did she know so much and so very little? Why was she so afraid?
“Don’t worry, little one,” the old woman said, reaching out and touching her with cold, foul fingers. “We have great plans for you.”
Chapter 3
A strange young man stood up when Finley entered the dining room the next morning. He was alone at the table, a half cup of coffee and a plate with a few bites of coddled eggs and ham in front of him.
“Good morning,” he said. “You must be Miss Jayne.” Finley’s gaze traveled down the lanky length of him, from his reddish hair to his shiny shoes. He had a kind face, but she knew that looks could be deceiving. “And you must be?”