CHAPTER 3
The teakettle boiled dry, and Marinda barely noticed the whistle. Stunned into an instinctive response, she tried to utter the Watchmaker’s benediction, “All is for the best,” but the words would not come out of her mouth. A small voice in the back of her mind said that she should have prepared herself for the imminent, inevitable reality. Now, Marinda had no plan to follow.
She stood in her father’s room for an incredibly long moment, just staring as time stood still. The clockwork Regulators marched into the room and stood at respectful attention. Because their faces were merely painted on their copperpot heads, the mechanical companions could express no overt sorrow, but their demeanor had changed, as if sadness now flowed through their hydraulics.
All Marinda could hear was the ticking of clocks out in the main room and the whirring machinery of Zivo, Woody, and Lee. The shrill screech in the background had fallen silent…and she finally realized that it had been the teakettle on the stove. She would attend to that later.
Marinda shed tears, but wiped them away because she had much to do and many things to deal with. It was time to be stoic. Methodical, she went to the kitchen and the writing desk, from which she removed a sheet of paper, then a fountain pen, the same one she had used to balance the household accounts…the same fountain pen her father had used to sketch his inventions and to write notes to himself. She sat at the same table where they had eaten the frugal meal of soup and day-old bread the night before.
The clockwork Regulators stood at attention as she wrote out a brief note for Benjulian Frull, informing him of her father’s death and requesting instructions as to what she should do. Since this important mission should be entrusted to a member of the elite Black Watch, and Lee with his black uniform was the closest option at hand, she handed the note to him. His articulated fingers closed around it.
“Take this note to Lugtown and deliver it to Mr. Benjulian Frull. He will return with you.”
With humming gears and a burst from the steam vent by his ear, Lee left the cottage and marched down the path. The other two clockwork Regulators waited for instructions, but Marinda gave them none. Instead, she returned to her father’s bedroom, looked at his motionless form. Angry and helpless, she turned the key in the Watchmaker’s Lifeclock, trying to start it working again, but the mechanism was broken.
Needing to see her father’s face again, she gingerly removed the straps and buckles, lifting away the helmet contraption. Arlen’s expression looked content with whatever he had seen inside the ocular enhancement device.
Feeling a large hole in her heart, Marinda realized she would never know the real story of his years in Crown City with the Watchmaker and the Clockwork Angels. In due time, he had said…but time had come due for him, and the opportunity was missed. She wondered what her father had been looking at in his dreams, if he could see anything at all.
She had never tried on the helmet herself, since her eyes functioned just fine, but now she needed to see what he had seen. She owed it to him. With some trepidation, she lifted the helmet, adjusted the visor, and noticed that it contained two images. Arlen had been viewing the second one when he died, but because Marinda chose to do this in an orderly fashion, she reset the optical projector, moved the visor in place, and activated the chronograph.
An image appeared with an intensity that exceeded reality: a moment, a person frozen in time—a mysterious and beautiful woman with a distant gaze and an aloof smile. Marinda realized she had seen this woman before in her father’s old scrapbooks, the ones she had never seen him browse, even when his vision had been perfect.
This was her mother, Elitia Peake. Marinda barely remembered the woman who had left them when she was just a little girl, and yet Arlen projected her image into his dreams every night.
But that wasn’t the image he’d been viewing when he died. The second chronograph contained her own face—a young woman in her late teens, someone who looked beautiful and happy. In the chronograph, Marinda was smiling, her hair loose. It was an accidental moment, just the briefest glimpse of how her life might be…
She couldn’t remember when that chronograph was taken, yet her father had captured it somehow. How had he known to be there to see that small carefree moment? Or maybe such moments had happened more often than Marinda herself had noticed, years ago.
She didn’t bother to switch back to the chronograph of her mother, since Elitia had left them long ago. Long ago, Marinda had decided to pack up the rest of her anger toward her mother, lock it in an imaginary box, and store it in a place deep inside herself. Her father had refused to speak ill of his wife, insisting that Elitia must have had her reasons. That woman was no longer relevant to either of them, and Marinda and Arlen had made a very acceptable life for themselves.
And now Marinda was alone.
Far more interested in how her father regarded her, she continued looking at the image of herself for some time. Was this how Arlen saw his “sparkling daughter”? She would never question the accuracy of a chronograph, but it seemed a paradox to her. When she held the images, both of these people seemed like strangers to her.
Fortunately, the solicitor knew exactly what to do. Through long experience, he already had a plan in place.
He accompanied the clockwork Regulator back to the cottage two hours later—two of the longest hours in Marinda’s life. Frull’s round face bore a look of deep concern. “I am deeply sorry for your loss, Miss Peake. Arlen loved you very much, but all is for the best.”
“All is for the best,” she managed to respond. “But…what do I do now? How do I arrange a funeral? How do I transfer ownership of our property? I assume there are efficient and established ways for a person to get her life back to normal?”
“There are ways,” Frull said, but he looked troubled. “As soon as I received the message from your representative”—he looked down at the black-garbed Regulator, who stood ticking and whirring in place—“I began to take care of matters. Ah-hem, since Arlen had previously informed me of his wishes, to save you the trouble, we had already filed a plan with the undertaker.”
Marinda felt a wash of relief. “Thank you.” Naturally, there would be a standard routine for such things, not just in Lugtown but across Albion. The Watchmaker himself might be nearly immortal with more than two centuries of the Stability, but normal people died, and it reassured her to know that everything would be taken care of.
Marinda had not yet grasped the ways in which her life would change, though—what this cottage would be like without her father’s presence, what she would do with all his unwanted books and contraptions. She did not know how to maintain the three clockwork Regulators; no one in Lugtown did. The apothecary and the physicians had tried to fix Arlen Peake, and they had not been successful. She supposed that even clockwork Regulators must wind down and die.
“I’ve already contacted the Lugtown newsgraph office to send out announcements,” said Frull. “You, meanwhile…it would be best if you just stayed here, enjoyed your cottage for a little while longer.”
She sensed something behind his words, something he wasn’t saying, but Marinda’s heart was too heavy to consider it. She lifted her chin and drew a deep breath. “It will never be the same here without my father, but I will try my best to get back to normal.”
On the morning after the funeral, Marinda had an appointment at the solicitor’s offices, where he would read her father’s will. When she arrived, Benjulian Frull was waiting for her behind his desk. He wore a formal brown jacket and a gray vest complete with pocket watch. His expression was serious—which Marinda appreciated, because this was no light social call. A neat stack of stamped and notarized papers rested in front of him on the desk blotter. Glancing at the top sheet, Marinda saw Last Will and Testament of Arlen Peake.
She took a seat primly on the other side of the desk and folded her hands in her lap. Without bothering with pleasantries, Frull picked up the papers and studied them as if searching for something he knew wasn’t there; he was more than familiar with the document, since he had written it himself in close consultation with her father. He cleared his throat. “I have to warn you, Miss Peake, that this is, ah-hem, not what you expect.”
Marinda was impatient. “You’re going to tell me that my father did not actually have a stockpile of gold, and that all those stories about working for the Watchmaker were just fanciful tales like the ones in his books. Well, I loved my father regardless, and I managed to run my household all these years without any extra bricks of gold. I’m sure I can manage now.”
The solicitor looked up at her. “Oh, it’s not that, Miss Peake. Not that all. Your father did indeed have substantial wealth locked away in the Watchmaker’s Bank, and to the best of my knowledge—though I can’t prove it—he did spent his early years in Crown City before he retired young and moved to Lugtown, made a home, married your mother and”—he shuffled the papers awkwardly—“well, you know the rest.”
Marinda frowned. “Then what is the problem?”
Frull searched among the papers, withdrew one. “Ah-hem. Perhaps I should let Arlen explain it in his own words, which he dictated to me. We had several private meetings so he could get his last letter just right.”
He handed her a brief document, which Marinda read while he fumbled with the lock on his large burlwood desk.
My sparkling daughter, it seems the only thing I can do in these last years of my life is sit and think deep thoughts, and many of those thoughts are about you, the life you have and the life you should have had. Your mother disappointed us, but that was so very long ago. I am more concerned with how I failed you. And now that I have passed, this is the way I can make it all up to you. Trust me, I have considered every detail. All is for the best—and I want only the best for you.
Marinda looked up at the solicitor, her brow furrowed. “What does he mean? This isn’t a time for ambiguities.”
“Oh, he was very clear in his wishes.”
Marinda kept reading.
Because I made you abandon the life you should have had in order to care for me, I give you the gift of many other lives. I want you to see the things that might have been, the people you should have met, the experiences that could have been part of your own story—and still can be. Therefore, I have arranged for you to have all the journeys of a great adventure—and in doing so, you will live your own life as well. I wish I could have joined you.
At first you will hate me for this. Then you will love me for it.
Your father.
Frull opened the wooden desk drawer and lifted out a large burlwood showcase box, which was also locked. He removed the pocketwatch on his vest chain and used a gold key dangling from the fob to open another locked desk drawer, from which he withdrew a second key and finally unlocked the burlwood case. “Important things must be kept under lock and key.”
He lifted the lid and removed a leatherbound book with an oxblood red cover stamped with clockwork gears and inset with alchemical symbols. Next, he pulled out a small crystal vial that contained a thimbleful of blood, sealed tight, and set it on the desk. Finally, fumbling with the spine of the book, he plucked out a long golden needle that had been inserted into the binding, its head crowned with a dull, rough diamond that looked like the result of a failed alchemical experiment.
Marinda had no idea what he was doing.
The solicitor cleared his throat and recited, “By the direct and clear wishes of Arlen Peake, who was of sound mind when he gave me his instructions, you are to be removed from your home in five days’ time, and the cottage will remain vacant until certain conditions are met. All of his financial accounts are also frozen, and you, his daughter, will have no access to any funds except for a very specific stipend.”
He slid the tome closer to Marinda. “He did however leave you this book.”
Marinda couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “I don’t want a book. I have plenty of them on our shelves already. What about my home?” Flustered, she opened the cover of the volume, to find that the title page said Clockwork Lives. She turned the page, but the paper was empty. She flipped to another, and another, then through the entire volume. “There’s nothing written here. It’s blank.”
“Nothing yet.” Frull looked at her intently. “This is a special volume, created just for you, each page impregnated with the most complex alchemical infusions.”
Growing more and more upset by this nonsense, she said, “A magic book? There’s no such thing as magic.”
“Not magic—science. Alchemy. Your father was quite a genius.”
“This is absurd, Mr. Frull. You know that.”
“What I know is that your father left no room for doubt when he explained his wishes to me.” Frull picked up the papers again, straightened them, and handed them to her. “There are instructions. This book is designed to collect stories. The pages are alchemically treated to react with human blood in a very specific fashion.” He nudged the golden needle closer to her. “Collect a blood sample from your volunteers. One drop of blood will spread out on the pages and record that person’s story.”
He touched the tiny crystal bottle of blood, gave her a wan smile. “And this is a sample your father preserved for you, his own story. To get you started.”
Though Marinda sat frozen, he was finished with the meeting. “I am not allowed to release your inheritance until you have filled this book with other lives—a full spectrum of people, interesting characters from all walks of life.”
“But…but this is entirely irregular,” she said. Since she had spent her adult years tending for her father, Marinda had no money of her own; the household possessions, furniture, financial accounts, everything but her clothes and a few personal items technically belonged to Arlen Peake. As the weight of the pronouncement pressed down on her, she began to feel a sense of desperation. “I will contest it.”
“You can try to contest it, but since I am the town’s only licensed solicitor, I must advise you that you are not likely to win.”
“But why would he do this to me?” Marinda felt lost. “Didn’t I already give up enough to care for him? What did I do wrong?”
“Ours is not to understand. Arlen’s reasons were sufficient to him.” He handed her the book, shaking his head sadly. “You have five days to vacate your residence. If you refuse to obey these instructions, you will be forcibly evicted. Your father’s funds and possessions will be placed in safekeeping in the meantime. I suggest you spend the time planning.” He smiled and said in a bland, rote voice, “All is for the best.”
Marinda gathered the will, the book, the vial of blood, and the golden needle, then left the solicitor’s office, stepping out into a world where she had been cast adrift.