Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables (16 page)

Newly preeminent among these niggling unvoiced queries were all those concerning the nature, history, and current status of the mysterious man who had sired him.

Just the past week, upon his thirteenth birthday, Bran’s father had revealed to him that there existed no ties of blood between Warner Gilead and the boy he called his son.

Diffidently intruding into Bran’s bedroom that anniversary
evening, after the muted, lonely celebration of his son’s birth—a nighttime visit heretofore unprecedented, save once when Bran had been worrisomely ill with the bloody flux—Gilead had manifested some discomfiture totally at odds with his usual self-possessed sangfroid. Sitting himself down on the edge of Bran’s mattress and petting his silvery muttonchops, he awkwardly began to recount what seemed at first to Bran to be some kind of modern fairy tale, but which soon revealed a startling personal relevance.

“There’s something I feel you are now old enough to know, son, and so I wish you to listen closely to me now. You see, Brannock, your mother—my dear wife—had the misfortune to be gulled and seduced by a villain, some short while before you were born. The fellow was the essence of insolence and temerity, a cheap hired hand whose name shall forevermore be stricken from the rolls of humanity. Pella was a smart woman, but one in whom animal passions ran strong and sometimes countervailing to her usual good sense. In this case, she should certainly have heeded her better angels. When the flippant dastard callously tossed her aside, laden with child—that embryonic lad was your innocent self, of course—I magnanimously took her back into my home. But she perished giving birth to you, ascending to her heavenly reward, and so you and I were deprived thenceforth of the comfort of her companionship.”

Bran’s father—and what exactly did that term represent, in the light of this startling revelation?—paused in his account and looked with a surprising beseechingness into Bran’s eyes, an intimately imploring gesture he seldom made.

“You won’t think any the less of our father-and-son relationship, I hope, Brannock, just because of the accidental and unfortunate nature of your conception? I was intensely in love with your mother, and those lingering sentiments incline me to regard any legacy from her actions, however unwise, as part and parcel of my own estate. So as far as I and the world are concerned, your inheritance and position as a Gilead are secure and unquestionable.”

Bran had been hopefully awaiting the word
love
to be applied to him, just this once. Instead, he had been deemed a mere “legacy.” And since his father’s speech seemed definitely to have concluded without any emotion-laden label for their relationship forthcoming, the lad resigned himself with a sigh to that word’s continuing and unsurprising absence.

“Rest assured, Father, that all remains between us just as before.”

Warner Gilead arose with a small smile, tousled his son’s hair, and departed.

In the subsequent week, the idea of learning the identity of his blood father had never left Bran’s mind once. He had even dreamed about the man, a bulky, hazy figure emerging beckoningly from a cloaking mist. So compelling had been the urge to know more that it had even driven Bran, this weekday afternoon, into his father’s study, a room generally forbidden to him.

Warner Gilead was attending a meeting with Governor Bullock concerning next year’s presidential election, and so could be counted on not to intrude.

Bran went to work searching his father’s papers, sliding open heavy wooden drawers, lifting the brass-hinged tops of box files, and riffling through overstuffed bellows folders. Such a lot of dry, boring paperwork, all given over to numbers and schemes. Bran swore he’d never let his adulthood be dominated by such stifling drudgery. He’d live a life of adventure, such as he read about weekly in
The Young Men of America
magazine.

In a bottom desk drawer Bran came upon another ambrotype of his mother, one he had never seen before. She stood in the middle of a cluttered workshop, smiling, surrounded by somber leather-aproned men. Bran recognized one, Stan Lambeth, a machinist still employed by his father. Could one of these other fellows be his mother’s paramour, and Bran’s sire?

Bran pondered the frozen image for a very long time, but no clues obtruded themselves. When he eventually restored the picture to its hiding place, long evening shadows were stretching across the study floor. He’d have to hurry!

Bran had been saving the big safe for last. He thought he knew the combination, having once overheard his father entrust the information to his secretary, Griffin Stumpf. So to the safe’s dial Bran moved.

The sequence he had memorized failed to unlock the safe. But after cudgeling his memory, he tried a minor variation and succeeded!

He had the weighty door open just long enough to register the image of some bundled currency, gaudy certificates, a revolver—and a ribbon-tied envelope bearing a red-bordered paper label that carried Bran’s own name! Then came the sound of someone approaching!

Bran closed the safe door as quickly as was consonant with silence, spun the dial, and stepped away from the vault.

Warner Gilead entered the room, accompanied by the dour and pox-faced Griffin Stumpf.

“—General McClellan’s a fine soldier, I give you that, but as president—”

Gilead espied Bran. The older man’s face suffused with choler. His level voice was grave. “What are you doing in this room?”

Bran could make no reply.

Gilead turned to his assistant. “Mr. Stumpf, please fetch Hoskins, and have him bring a good wide length of leather.”

Stumpf departed, and Gilead and Bran remained frozen, as if locked into some dull holiday charade. Bran saw his father’s eyes flick toward the safe, and appear to register relief that it had not been tampered with.

The brawny, sweaty Hoskins—a gentle man with horses, an expert saddle repairer, and an unerring farrier—trailed behind Stumpf. Dragged from his stables, the man looked miserable.

“Mr. Hoskins, you are to administer five applications of your strap across my son’s buttocks. There will be no need to bare his skin, I think.”

Hoskins eyed Bran ruefully. “Aye, sir.”

Bran was made to bend over the desk. After the first apathetic blow, Gilead said, “Are you malnourished, Mr. Hoskins? If so,
perhaps you could find other employment that offered heartier board.”

The next four blows were sufficiently mighty to satisfy Warner Gilead’s sense of punishment, drawing stifled grunts from the boy.

Bran retired to his bedroom without supper, nursing both his feelings and his bottom. He passed a couple of hours contemplating schemes of revenge and a further raid upon the safe. Then came a knock.

His father entered, carrying something concealed in his fist.

“Son, I know you miss your mother. So do I. That’s why I wish to give you this.”

Gilead opened his hand and displayed a small oval silver locket, chased with filigree. Bran regarded it with a curiosity even his smoldering anger could not totally swamp. Gilead fumbled open the clasp.

Inside rested a few delicate, almost luminous strands of golden hair.

“Yes, they came from Pella, your mother. Keep this locket with you, and you will always have her close by.”

Bran accepted the locket with an uneasy mix of gratitude and disdain.

The next time he dared approach the study, he found the door locked with a new mechanism.

And when he eventually got past that barrier, a replacement safe boasted not one but two dials, neither of which accepted the old combination.

These obstacles between Bran and the packet that bore his name proved insurmountable, and he took solace in the locket, which he wore always on a chain about his neck, vowing that when he got older, he would find a way to secure that information, Warner Gilead be damned!

I
n the first half of the nineteenth century, Boston’s Fort Hill had acquired a reputation as an elegant neighborhood. A steep and
formidable eminence suited only for residences, despite its developmentally tempting proximity to the waterfront and central commercial districts, the mount had hosted numerous mansions and the beautiful Washington Square atop its crown.

But by the middle of the century, a disturbing change had occurred. The district had become a slum, filled mostly with unsavory, poverty-stricken Irish immigrants. Warehouses ringed the foot of Fort Hill, and over one hundred saloons dotted its filthy warren of alleys and lanes, along with several charitable poorhouses and a lone hospital ensconced in a former armory. “Fort Hill rowdyism” had became a byword for bad behavior.

By the year of Bran’s birth, upstanding citizens were already agitating for the pit of iniquity literally to be leveled, as other hills in Boston had been, the burden of its soil being used as fill elsewhere. By the time Bran was attempting to burgle his father’s safe, solid schemes for the razing were being drawn up. Action commenced in the year 1866, when a gigantic trench had been driven through the middle of Fort Hill, to carry Olive Street from one side to the next. But in the year 1868, when Bran attained his eighteenth birthday, work had stalled, leaving the bifurcate hill like a troughed Christmas pudding, still a stew of illegality and want, with makeshift bridges spanning the chasm of Olive Street.

Now Bran labored up the nighted, slops-wet pavements of Fort Hill, his way lit by the occasional lonely gas lamp out of sight of any mates. Bold doxies and judys leered and gibed from doorways; raggle-taggle children who should have been long abed solicited money and offered to run errands; and shady gonophs and bludgers seemed to lurk just within every pool of shadow between buildings. Bran nervously patted the pointed hoof pick in his pocket, which he had secured from the stables. It offered scant protection against knives or guns, but at least it was some kind of weapon.

Finally Bran reached his destination, a tavern whose partially occluded signboard read SPITALNY’S GROT. He entered the fusty, low-raftered, candlelit cauldron of smells and noise.

None among the seedy clientele took particular notice of him,
obviously deeming Bran one of the Beacon Hill swells who often visited Fort Hill for their own illicit purposes.

A description, Bran ruefully acknowledged to himself, that fit him perfectly.

Bran approached a harried barmaid. “Can you please tell me where I could find Mr. MacMahon?”

“Bucko? That’s him over there, playing at darts.”

Bran approached the gamesters, but did not immediately choose to interrupt their loud-voiced sport, for much seemed to be riding on the outcome, judging by the threats and boasts being batted about. The fellow preparing to shoot wore a look of intense concentration, the tip of his wet tongue protruding from the stubbled corner of his mouth. A shapeless cloth hat slanted over one eye. Shattered capillaries mapped his big nose. His patched suit appeared to have been fashioned from sackcloth. This unimpressive lout, then, was Bucko MacMahon, Bran’s only remaining hope for discovering the secrets of his past.

Apparently confident of his aim and prowess, Bucko let fly with the dart, scored a bull’s-eye, and was greeted with a roar compounded of cheers and razzing.

“Now I’ll claim me prize!” Bucko strode to the bar and accepted a tall narrow yard glass filled to the flaring brim with nearly a quart and a half of dark ale. He raised the bulb-bottomed vessel to his lips, tilted his head back, and drained the beer in seven seconds flat. After handing back the empty glass, he wiped the froth from his lips, spotted Bran, and, with a broad wink and gesture visible at least a mile out to sea, indicated that Bran should join him at a corner table.

Once seated, Bucko leaned in close to Bran, who responded instinctively by lowering his own head. The pungent odor of garlic frosted with hops assailed Bran’s nose and nearly made him recoil. But he maintained proximity, not wishing his business to be overheard.

“Mr. MacMahon, I understand you’re a cracksman.”

Tracking down such information had been a long and laborious process for Bran, with his dearth of underworld connections,
and he quailed for a moment at the possibility he had been misinformed. But reassurance came instantly.

“Aye, none better, boyo!”

“Well, if I were to secure you unguarded access to a certain safe, with the promise of much reward inside, provided only that you pass over to me a designated packet of papers from the haul, would you be interested in the job? I have no money to invest up front, I fear.”

Father Gilead kept Bran on a tight allowance, despite his near-adult status.

Bucko rasped his stubble with one paw. “I might be willing to venture such a job. Is the treasure easy to convert to beer and wimmen, as it were? I’m not perzackly set up to trade in stocks and bonds, you know.”

“Do five hundred Indian Head gold dollars seem reasonably susceptible to such a transformation?”

“Describe the safe to me, lad.”

Bran did so. Bucko said, “Sounds like an old Adams-Hammond Patent Salamander model to me. Piece o’ cake!”

Bran had almost been hoping to hear the job deemed impossible. Now he would have to commit himself to this assault on his father’s property. Well, what choice had the old man given him? None!