strapped up with a rough, badly cured cradle that must have hurt
like hellfire. He also had a splintery crutch that he used to get
around with, the sort of thing that the sisters of St Aggie’s bought
in huge lots from unscrupulous tradesmen who cared nothing for
the people who’d come to use them.
His name was William Sansousy, a Metis boy who’d come
from the wild woods of Lower Canada seeking work in Muddy
York, who’d found instead an implacable machine that had torn
off his leg and devoured it without a second’s remorse. He spoke
English with a thick French accent, and slipped into Joual when
he was overcome with sorrow.
Two sisters brought him to the door on a Friday afternoon.
We knew they were coming, they’d sent round a messenger boy
with a printed telegram telling Grinder to make room for one
more. Monty wanted to turn his Clockwork Grinder loose to walk
to the door and greet them, but we all told him he’d be mad to
try it: there was so much that could go wrong, and if the sisters
worked out what had happened, we could finish up dangling
from nooses at King Street Gaol.
Monty relented resentfully, and instead we seated Grinder in
his overstuffed chair, with Monty tucked away behind it, ready
to converse with the sisters. I hid with him, ready to send Grinder
to his feet and to extend his cold, leathery artificial hand to the
boy when the sisters turned him over.
And it went smoothly—that day. When the sisters had gone
and their car had built up its head of steam and chuffed and
clanked away, we emerged from our hiding place. Monty broke
into slangy, rapid French, gesticulating and hopping from foot to
peg-leg and back again, and William’s eyes grew as big as
saucers as Monty explained the lay of the land to him. The clang
when he thumped Grinder in his cast-iron chest made William
leap back and he hobbled toward the door.
“Wait, wait!” Monty called, switching to English. “Wait, will
you, you idiot? This is the best day of your life, young William!
But for us, you might have entered a life of miserable bondage.
Instead, you will enjoy all the fruits of liberty, rewarding work,
and comradeship. We take care of our own here at St Aggie’s.
You’ll have top grub, a posh leg and a beautiful crutch that’s as
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smooth as a baby’s arse and soft as a lady’s bosom. You’ll have
the freedom to come and go as you please, and you’ll have a
warm bed to sleep in every night. And best of all, you’ll have us,
your family here at St Aggie’s. We take care of our own, we do.”
The boy looked at us, tears streaming down his face. He made
me remember what it had been like, my first day at St Aggie’s,
the cold fear coiled round your guts like rope caught in a
reciprocating gear. At St Aggie’s we put on brave faces, never
cried where no one could see us, but seeing him weep made me
remember all the times I’d cried, cried for my lost family who’d
sold me into indenture, cried for my mangled body, my ruined
life. But living without Grinder’s constant terrorizing must have
softened my heart. Suddenly it was all I could do to stop myself
from giving the poor little mite a one-armed hug.
I didn’t hug him, but Monty did, stumping over to him, and
the two of them bawled like babbies. Their peg legs knocked
together as they embraced like drunken sailors, seeming to cry
out every tear we’d any of us ever held in. Before long, we were
all crying with them, fat tears streaming down our faces, the
sound like something out of the Pit.
When the sobs had stopped, William looked around at us,
wiped his nose, and said, “Thank you. I think I am home.”
*
But it wasn’t home for him. Poor William. We’d had children
like him, in the bad old days, children who just couldn’t get back
up on their feet (or foot) again. Most of the time, I reckon, they
were kids who couldn’t make it as apprentices, neither, kids
who’d spent their working lives full of such awful misery that
they were bound to fall into a machine. And being sundered from
their limbs didn’t improve their outlook.
He’d worked for a watch-smith, and he had a pretty good hand
at disassembling and cleaning mechanisms. His stump ached him
like fire, even after he’d been fitted with a better apparatus by St
Aggie’s best leg-maker, and it was only when he was working
with his little tweezers and brushes that he lost the grimace that
twisted up his face so. Monty had him strip and clean every
clockwork in the house, even the ones that were working
perfectly—even the delicate works we’d carefully knocked
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together for the clockwork Grinder. But it wasn’t enough.
In the bad old days, Grinder would have beaten the boy and
sent him out to beg in the worst parts of town, hoping that he’d
be run down by a cart or killed by one of the blunderbuss gangs
that marauded there. When the law brought home the boy’s body,
old Grinder would weep crocodile tears and tug his hair at the
bloody evil that men did, and then he’d go back to his rooms and
play some music and drink some brandy and sleep the sleep of
the unjust.
We couldn’t do the same, and so we tried to bring up
William’s spirits instead, and when he’d had enough of it, he lit
out on his own. The first we knew of it was when he didn’t turn
up for breakfast. This wasn’t unheard of—any of the free
children of St Aggie’s was able to rise and wake whenever he
chose, but William had been a regular at breakfast every day. I
made my way upstairs to the dormer room where the boys slept
to look for him and found his bed empty, his coat and his peg-
leg and crutch gone.
“He’s gone,” Monty said, “Long gone.” He sighed and
looked out the window. “Must be trying to get back to the
Gatineaux.” He shook his head.
“Do you think he’ll make it?” I said, knowing the answer, but
hoping that Monty would lie to me.
“Not a chance,” Monty said. “Not him. He’ll either be beaten,
arrested or worse by sundown. That lad hasn’t any self-
preservation instincts.”
At this, the dining room fell silent and all eyes turned on
Monty and I saw in a flash what a terrible burden we all put on
him: saviour, father, chieftain. He twisted his face into a halfway
convincing smile.
“Oh, maybe not. He might just be hiding out down the road.
Tell you what, eat up and we’ll go searching for him.”
I never saw a load of plates cleared faster. It was bare minutes
before we were formed up in the parlor, divided into groups, and
sent out into Muddy York to find William Sansousy. We turned
that bad old city upside-d
own, asking nosy questions and
sticking our heads in where they didn’t belong, but Monty had
been doubly right the first time around.
The police found William Sansousy’s body in a marshy bit
of land off the Leslie Street Spit. His pockets had been slit, his
pathetic paper sack of belongings torn and the clothes scattered
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and his fine hand-turned leg was gone. He had been dead for
hours.
*
The Detective Inspector who presented himself that
afternoon at St Aggie’s was trailed by a team of technicians who
had a wire sound-recorder and a portable logic engine for in-
putting the data of his investigation. He seemed very proud of his
machine, even though it came with three convicts from the King
Street Gaol in shackles and leg-irons who worked tirelessly to
keep the springs wound, toiling in a lather of sweat and heaving
breath, heat boiling off their shaved heads in shimmering waves.
He showed up just as the clock in the parlour chimed eight
times, a bear chasing a bird around on a track as it sang the hour.
We peered out the windows in the upper floors, saw the
inspector, and understood just why Monty had been so morose
all afternoon.
But Monty did us proud. He went to the door with his familiar
swagger, and swung it wide, extending his hand to the Inspector.
“Montague Goldfarb, officer, at your service. Our patron has
stepped away, but please, do come in.”
The Inspector gravely shook the proffered hand, his huge,
gloved mitt swallowing Monty’s boyish hand. It was easy to
forget that he was just a child, but the looming presence of the
giant Inspector reminded us all.
“Master Goldfarb,” the Inspector said, taking his hat off, and
peering through his smoked monocle at the children in the
parlour, all of us sat with hands folded like we were in a
pantomime about the best-behaved, most crippled, most terrified,
least threatening children in all the colonies. “I’m am sorry to
hear that Mr Grindersworth is not at home to the constabulary.
Have you any notion as to what temporal juncture we might
expect him?” If I hadn’t been concentrating on not peeing myself
with terror, the inspector’s pompous speech might have set me
to laughing.
Monty didn’t bat an eye. “Mr Grindersworth was called away
to see his brother in Sault Sainte Marie, and we expect him
tomorrow. I’m his designated lieutenant, though. Perhaps I might
help you?”
The inspector stroked his forked beard and gave us all
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another long look. “Tomorrow, hey? Well, I don’t suppose that
justice should wait that long. Master Goldfarb, I have grim
intelligence for you, as regards one of your young compatriots, a
Master—” He consulted a punched card that was held in a hopper
on his clanking logic engine. “William Sansousy. He lies even
now upon a slab in the city morgue. Someone of authority from
this institution is required to confirm the preliminary
identification. You will do, I suppose. Though your patron will
have to present himself post-haste in order to sign the several
official documents that necessarily accompany an event of such
gravity.”
We’d known as soon as the Inspector turned up on St Aggie’s
door that it meant that William was dead. If he was merely in
trouble, it would have been a constable, dragging him by the ear.
We half-children of St Aggie’s only rated a full inspector when
we were topped by some evil bastard in this evil town. But
hearing the Inspector say the words, puffing them through his
drooping mustache, that made it real. None of us had ever cried
when St Aggie’s children were taken by the streets—at least, not
where the others could see it. But this time round, without
Grinder to shoot us filthy daggers if we made a peep while the
law was about, it opened the floodgates. Boys and girls, young
and old, we cried for poor little William. He’d come to the best
of all possible St Aggie’s, but it hadn’t been good enough for
him. He’d wanted to go back to the parents who’d sold him into
service, wanted a return to his Mam’s lap and bosom. Who
among us didn’t want that, in his secret heart?
Monty’s tears were silent and they rolled down his cheeks as
he shrugged into his coat and hat and let the Inspector—who was
clearly embarrassed by the display—lead him out the door.
*
When Monty came home, he arrived at a house full of
children who were ready to go mad. We’d cried ourselves hoarse,
then sat about the parlour, not knowing what to do. If there had
been any of old Grinder’s booze still in the house, we’d have
drunk it.
“What’s the plan, then?” he said, coming through the door.
“We’ve got one night until that bastard comes back. If he doesn’t
find Grinder, he’ll go to the sisters, and it’ll come down around
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our ears. What’s more, he knows Grinder, personal, from other
dead ones in years gone by, and I don’t think he’ll be fooled by
our machine, no matter how good it goes.”
“What’s the plan?” I said, mouth hanging open. “Monty, the
plan is that we’re all going to gaol and you and I and everyone
else who helped cover up the killing of Grinder will dance at
rope’s end!”
He gave me a considering look. “Sian, that is absolutely the
worst plan I have ever heard.” And then he grinned at us the way
he did, and we all knew that, somehow, it would all be all right.
*
“Constable, come quick, he’s going to kill himself!”
I practiced the line for the fiftieth time, willing my eyes to go
wider, my voice to carry more alarm. Behind me, Monty scowled
at my reflection in the mirror in Grinder’s personal toilet, where
I’d been holed up for hours.
“Verily, the stage lost a great player when that machine
mangled you, Sian. You are perfect. Now, get moving before I
tear your remaining arm off and beat you with it. Go!”
Phase one of the plan was easy enough: we’d smuggle our
Grinder up onto the latticework of steel and scaffold where they
were building the mighty Prince Edward Viaduct, at the end of
Bloor Street. Monty had punched his program already: he’d pace
back and forth, tugging his hair, shaking his head like a
maddened man, and then, abruptly, he’d turn and fling himself
bodily off the platform, plunging 130 feet into the Don River,
where he would simply disintegrate into a million cogs, gears,
springs and struts, which would sink to the riverbed and begin to
rust away. The coppers would recover his clothes, and those,
combined with the eyewitness testimony of the constable I was
responsible f
or bringing to the bridge, would establish in
everyone’s mind exactly what had happened and how: Grinder
was so distraught at one more death from among his charges that
he had popped his own clogs in grief. We were all of us standing
ready to testify as to how poor William was Grinder’s little
favorite, a boy he loved like a son, and so forth. Who would
suspect a bunch of helpless cripples, anyway?
That was the theory, at least. But now I was actually stood by
the bridge, watching six half-children wrestle the automaton into
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place, striving for silence so as not to alert the guards who were
charged with defending the structure they were already calling
“The Suicide’s Magnet,” and I couldn’t believe that it would
possibly work.
Five of the children scampered away, climbing back down
the scaffolds, slipping and sliding and nearly dying more times
than I could count, so that my heart was thundering in my chest
so hard I thought I might die upon the spot. Then they were safely
away, climbing back up the ravine’s walls in the mud and snow,
almost invisible in the dusky dawn light. Monty waved an arm at
me, and I knew it was my cue, and that I should be off to rouse
the constabulary, but I found myself rooted to the spot.
In that moment, every doubt and fear and misery I’d ever
harbored crowded back in on me. The misery of being abandoned
by my family, the sorrow and loneliness I’d felt among the
prentice-lads, the humiliation of Grinder’s savage beatings and
harangues. The shame of my injury and every time I’d grovelled
before a drunk or a pitying lady with my stump on display for
pennies to fetch home to Grinder. What was I doing? There was
no way I could possibly pull this off. I was wasn’t enough of a
man—nor enough of a boy.
But then I thought of all those moments since the coming of
Monty Goldfarb, the millionfold triumphs of ingenuity and hard
work, the computing power I’d stolen out from under the nose of
the calculators who had treated me as a mere work-ox before my
injury. I thought of the cash we’d brought in, the children who’d
smiled and sung and danced on the worn floors of St Aggie’s,
and—
And I ran to the policeman, who was warming himself by