“Only a few weeks,” Mother repeated, jaw clenched and nostrils flaring. “Then perhaps it is not too late.” She stared hard at Arabella a moment longer, then gave a firm nod and turned to Father. “I am taking the children back home. And this time I will brook no argument.”
Arabella felt as though the floor had dropped from under her. “No!” she cried.
Without facing Arabella, Mother raised a finger to silence her. “You see what she has become!” she continued to Father. “Willful, disobedient, disrespectful. And Fanny and Chloë are already beginning to follow in her filthy footsteps.” Now her tone changed, and despite Arabella’s anguish at the prospect of being torn from her home she could not deny the genuine sadness and fear in her mother’s eyes. “Please, dear. Please. You must agree. You must consider our posterity! If Arabella is allowed to continue on this path, and her sisters too… what decent man would have them? They will be left as spinsters, doomed to a lonely old age on a barbarous planet.”
Arabella bit her lip and hugged herself tightly, feeling lost and helpless as she watched her father’s face. Taking Arabella, Michael, and the two little girls to England—a place to which Mother always referred as “back home,” though all of the children had been born on Mars and had never known any other home—was something she had often spoken of, though never so definitively or immediately. But with this incident something had changed, something deep and fundamental, and plainly Father was seriously considering the question.
He pursed his lips and furrowed his brow. He stroked his chin and looked to Mother, to Michael, to Arabella—his eyes beneath the gray brows looking very stern—and then out the window, at the sun just beginning to peep above the rows of khoresh-trees.
Finally he sighed deeply and turned back to Mother. “You may have the girls,” he said in a resigned tone. “But Michael will remain here, to help me with the business of the plantation.”
“But Father… ,” Arabella began, until a minute shake of his head stopped her words. The look in his eyes showed clearly that he did not desire this outcome, but it was plain to all that this time Mother would not be appeased.
Arabella looked to Michael for support, but though his eyes brimmed with tears his shoulders slumped and his hands, still stained with Arabella’s blood, hung ineffectually at his sides. “I am sorry,” he whispered.
Khema, too, stood silently in the corner, hands folded and eye-stalks downcast. Bold, swift, and powerful she might be in the desert, but within the manor house she was only a servant and must submit to Mother’s wishes.
“Very well,” said Mother, after a long considering pause. “Michael may remain. But the Ashby women… are going home.” And she smiled.
That smile, to Arabella, was like a judge’s gavel pronouncing sentence of death.
Arabella eased her bedroom door open and crept into the dark hallway. All about her the house lay silent, servants and masters alike tucked safe in their beds. Only the gentle tick of the tall clock in the parlor disturbed the night.
Shielding the candle with one hand, Arabella slipped down the hallway, her bare feet making no sound on the cool boards. She kept close to the walls, where the floor was best supported and the boards did not creak, but now and again she took a long, slow step to avoid a spot she had learned was likely to squeak.
Down the stairs and across the width of the house she crept, until she reached the drawing-room. In the corner farthest from the fireplace stood the harpsichord, and the silent figure that sat at its keyboard.
Brenchley’s Automaton Harpsichord Player.
Nearly life-sized and dressed in the height of fashion from eight years ago, when it had originally been manufactured, the automaton sat with jointed ivory fingers poised over the instrument’s keys. Its face was finely crafted of smooth, polished birch for a lifelike appearance, the eyes with their painted lashes demurely downcast. A little dust had accumulated in its décolletage, but in the shifting light of Arabella’s little candle it almost seemed to be breathing.
Arabella had always been the only person in the family who shared her father’s passion for automata. The many hours they had spent together in the drawing-room of the manor house at Woodthrush Woods, winding and oiling and polishing his collection, were among her most treasured memories. He had even shared with her his knowledge of the machines’ workings, though Mother had heartily disapproved of such an unladylike pursuit.
The harpsichord player had arrived at Marlowe Hall, their residence in England, not long after they had emigrated—or, as Arabella considered it, been exiled—from Mars. It had been accompanied by a note from Father, reminding them that it was one of his most beloved possessions and saying that he hoped it would provide pleasant entertainment. But Arabella, knowing that Father understood as well as she did how little interest the rest of the family had in automata, had taken it as a sort of peace offering, or apology, from him specifically to her—a moving, nearly living representative and reminder that, although unimaginably distant, he still loved her.
But, alas, all his great expense and careful packing had gone for naught, for when it had been uncrated it refused to play a note. Mother, never well-disposed toward her husband’s expensive pastime, had been none too secretly relieved.
That had been nearly eight months ago. Eight months of frilly dresses and stultifying conversation, and unceasing oppressive damp, and more than any thing else the constant inescapable heaviness. Upon first arriving on Earth, to her shame Arabella had found herself so unaccustomed to the planet’s gravity that she had no alternative but to be carried from the ship in a sedan-chair. She had barely been able to stand for weeks, and even now she felt heavy, awkward, and clumsy, distrustful of her body and of her instincts. Plates and pitchers seemed always to crash to the floor in her vicinity, and even the simple act of throwing and catching a ball was beyond her.
Not that she was allowed to perform any sort of bodily activity whatsoever, other than walking and occasionally dancing. Every one on Earth, it seemed, shared Mother’s attitudes concerning the proper behavior of an English lady, and the slightest display of audacity, curiosity, adventure, or initiative was met with severe disapproval. So she had been reduced, even as she had on Mars, to skulking about by night—but here she lacked the companionship of Michael and Khema.
On Mars, Michael, her elder and only brother, had been her constant companion, studying with her by day and racing her across the dunes by night. And Khema, their Martian nanny or itkhalya, had been to the two of them nurse, protector, and tutor in all things Martian. How she missed them both.
Setting her candle down, Arabella seated herself on the floor behind the automaton and lifted its skirts, in a fashion that would have been most improper if it were human. Beneath the suffocating layers of muslin and linen the automaton’s ingenious mechanisms gleamed in the candlelight, brass and ivory and mahogany each adding their own colors to a silent symphony of light and shadow. Here was the mainspring, there the escapement, there the drum. The drum was the key to the whole mechanism; its pins and flanges told the device where to place its fingers, when to nod, when to appear to breathe. From the drum, dozens of brass fingers transmitted instructions to the rest of the device through a series of levers, rods, springs, and wires.