NIGHTINGALE NO. 48 had stopped singing.

Its brass head should have been raised, not hanging low, and its jewelled wings were meant to whir. Instead, it stood atop its marble pillar (not real marble, of course, any more than the paste jewels were real, but wood painted well enough to fool the eye by gaslight) in the most secluded glade of the Vauxhall Flying Gardens. None of the thousands of visitors who flocked to the pleasure gardens every night had yet stumbled across it. Give it an hour, Shem thought dourly, once the ladies of the ton went home and the strumpets came out to play, and this would be a far more popular spot.

Better do something before then. This was the third time this month Shem had needed to repair this nightingale. Time for it to be taken apart for a proper look at its clockwork innards.

“What should we do, Mr. Holloway?” the boy asked.

“Put a cage over the top until morning,” Shem said. “Stop the guests from interfering with it. Young gentlemen don’t have much respect for property.”

“The gentlemen, Mr. Holloway?” the boy protested, his eyes going wide. “But they’re brought up proper.”

“Properly,” Shem corrected sharply. No apprentice under his charge was going to wander around the Gardens with a gutter accent. “Higher they’re born, further they fall with a drink in them. You steer clear of gentlemen, boy.”

“Yes, Mr. Holloway,” the boy said, but he still looked puzzled.

Shem sighed. He liked to take new apprentices with him on the late shift until he was convinced they’d learned some common sense (at which point it was safe to assume they were staying, and he would deign to learn their names). This one had him worried. He was hardworking, no doubt, and the masters at the training orphanage had been right when they said he was bright. Unfortunately, he was too eager to please, and pretty besides, all coltish limbs, pink lips, and slim hips.

It wasn’t just the mechanical devices the young gentlemen liked to interfere with. Some of them had a taste for mechanics. Shem kept a fatherly eye on his apprentices, for all they were only ten years younger than him. It was going to be a job to keep this one safe from wandering hands.

Shem unlocked the gate that connected the concealed path to the grove. It took an army of mechanics, gardeners, and servants to keep the Gardens running efficiently, and keeping everyone hidden maintained the illusion of magic.

“Always lock these gates behind you,” Shem instructed the boy, who nodded earnestly. It was bad enough the whores of London plied their trade in the quiet groves and dark walks. Give them access to the secret paths, and the place would be a brothel within a week and shut down within two, putting all the staff out of work. Shem had grown up poor; he had no desire to be jobless.

The cage clicked into place over the silent nightingale, and Shem showed the boy how to lock it shut. He’d come back for it once the Gardens closed, but for now the nightingale was safe.

He and the boy continued on their rounds as the Gardens grew rowdier around them. Dining was over, and the supper boxes in the central grove were overspilling, lewd and drunken chatter drowning out the wheezy music of the steam orchestra. Some young blood, likely straight down from one of the better universities, had managed to get a foothold on Atlas’s brass globe, and was being hoisted toward the smoggy heavens as his friends cheered. Neptune’s water fountain had got clogged and was spewing bubbles sideways, an urgent repair that made Shem glad to have an apprentice to send wading into the foam to clear the pump.

He paused at the end of the Grand Walk as the horns mounted in the trees suddenly blew in perfect synchrony. Nudging the boy round, Shem watched his amazed face as the fireworks began. Vauxhall was unique, and he loved knowing the whole of London looked up at them every night, watching the lights blazing in the garden in the sky.

Only once did they encounter trouble, when a ruddy-cheeked gentleman came stumbling toward them, winking at the boy. Luckily, all Shem needed to do was tap his wrench meaningfully against his thigh, and the hopeful lecher hurriedly found business elsewhere. Even when he’d been a piston boy, running coal through the tunnels below the Gardens to feed the great burners that kept them afloat, Shem had never been waifish. These days his shoulders were too wide for the tunnels, and he carried the muscle to match them. Being a senior mechanic was no light duty. Only a brave man would risk his ire.

When the trumpets sounded for closing, long after midnight, he sent the yawning boy back through the hidden paths to wait in the staff canteen until the Gardens returned to earth. Shem himself retraced his steps toward Nightingale No. 48, the Gardens going quiet around him. He could now hear the distant clang of the last airship undocking from the quay, the wind sighing softly through the treetops, and the night birds, ones that weren’t formed of gears and metal.

The ground surged beneath his feet as the first heated air was released from the floats, and the Gardens began to slide steadily back toward the earth, guided into place by chains and pulleys. A waft of steam floated across the stars, scenting the night with ash and hot metal.

As he stepped into the grove, a real nightingale began to sing, its voice rising in loose, breathy notes. And inside its cage, for the first time that night, the brass nightingale lifted its head with a soft whir and began to sing in reply, its mechanical melody just as yearning.

 

 

That afternoon, Shem took apart the nightingale, unscrewing its chest panel to expose the mechanisms. He’d replaced its spring twice already, so he could discount that. He checked for worn, strained parts and joints in need of oiling. There was nothing obvious wrong.

The bird had sung, just not at the appointed hour. Perhaps there was a problem with its circuitry. Shem was a cog and piston man, not a circuit expert, but he knew how to replace a faulty chip. Ignoring the dull sheen of the nightingale’s glass eyes, he opened up its head. He checked that the circuits were secure, and no wires burned out, and then looked more closely.

He’d had No. 24 open last week, to replace a scratchy music roll, and this one didn’t look the same. It had the usual miniature pianola rolls to dictate its melody, but this one seemed to have an extra circuitry chip: one to control movements, one that switched between tunes, and a third, unfamiliar chip, connected to all the rest with thin filaments.

Time to consult the manual.

The nightingales were not very complex mechanisms, and their book was little used. Shem had to blow off cobwebs (he’d have to talk to the matron about whichever of the orphanage girls was supposed to be cleaning in here, because a well-ordered workshop should be clean even in the corners). To his surprise, each of the fifty nightingales had a separate listing in the book. Nine of them, including No. 48, had a symbol inked across the top of the page: a simple figure of an angel standing on a wrench. Some later hand, in red ink, had added small horns and a forked tail to the figure.

Shem wasn’t going to guess at what that meant. Instead, he tossed a dust cloth over the nightingale and took the manual to the man who might know.

 

 

Nathaniel Dawkins had been a senior mechanic back when the Flying Gardens were merely the Mechanical Gardens. These days, Dawkins was one of two Chief Mechanics. His office, unlike Shem’s workshop, had a view of the swaying treetops of the daytime Gardens, currently resting against the ground while gardeners and day-shift mechanics rushed to prepare them to rise again once the sun set.

Dawkins took one look at the picture in the manual and groaned. “Oh, not today.”

“What does it mean?”

“Only the angel bloody Gabriel coming down from heaven. Or, in his case, from Mayfair.”

Shem must have looked baffled, because Dawkins sighed. “Oh, you’ve not the pleasure yet, have you, Holloway? This is the inventor’s mark. Your broken nightingale is one of Lord Marchmont’s specials.”

That made more sense. Even Shem, who had no interest in aristocratic nonsense, had heard of Gabriel Marchmont, the Earl of Godalming. He was the darling of the Royal Society, the genius inventor whose rank protected him from accusations of madness, and the man who had, whilst punting up the Cam one May Week, casually devised a way to make a garden (and, more to his government’s interest, an ironclad) hover above the ground for twelve hours at a stretch. Shem, who worked with his inventions every day, had always rather wanted to meet the man.

“So?” he asked, thinking about the extra circuit.

“So, he’ll want to repair it himself,” Dawkins said glumly and then raised his voice to roar, “Ruth! Telegraph Lord Marchmont. We broke one of his toys.”

There was chorus of groans from the outer office.

“God help us all,” Dawkins muttered.

 

 

After all that, Shem was alive with curiosity and half expecting an old curmudgeon, although he knew Lord Marchmont had started inventing as a Cambridge undergraduate twelve years ago.

The Marchmont steam carriage drew to a halt outside the Mechanics’ Hall, behind an unusually sleek engine. Steps unfolded from the carriage with a neat click, each one locking smoothly into place. Only then did Lord Marchmont emerge.

He was beautiful. His hair was golden, pulled into a queue at his nape. His face was narrow and high-boned, almost ascetic until you saw the fullness of his mouth. He was tall, looking down on Shem and Dawkins with ease, and slim as a snake. He was dressed for dinner, in sombre colours, save the bright white fall of his cravat.

“Dawkins,” he drawled, “what have your oafs broken this time?”

“A problem with one of the nightingales, my lord,” Dawkins said politely, as Shem blinked and began to seethe. Typical gentleman, then, despite his genius.

“Break the key off as they were winding, did they?”

“No, my lord.”

“What, then?”

Dawkins waved Shem forward. “One of my senior engineers, my lord. Mr. Holloway is in charge of repairs.”

“I wish you wouldn’t palm me off on your lackeys, Dawkins. I don’t have time to run a remedial school for your rude mechanicals.”

“Mr. Holloway will take you to his workroom, my lord,” Dawkins said. “He’ll explain the problem to you, sir.” Then he abandoned Shem to face the earl’s disdain.

Shem never quite knew what to do in these situations. He didn’t have gentry manners; he’d never had them ingrained into him as a child, and he fumbled whenever he was faced with a social situation. He didn’t know how to address the man, or whether he should bow (though he knew he didn’t want to). Gruffly, he said, “This way, your earlship.”

“Dear Christ,” the earl remarked, but as he seemed to be addressing the air, or possibly the heavens, Shem ignored him. He strode back toward the workshops, assuming the earl would follow.

Strolling along beside Shem with his nose wrinkled, Lord Marchmont remarked, “This place feels more like a factory every time I visit.”

“We like to be efficient, sir,” Shem said, bristling. If Marchmont was going to sneer at his attempts to be polite, a simple "sir" was all he'd be getting.

“Napoleon was not wrong to call England a nation of factory workers.”

“I’m sure, sir.”

“They don’t waste any time teaching you people the art of conversation, do they?”

“No, sir.” Then, prompted by some inner devil, he couldn’t help adding, “They taught us that old Boney lost, though, so forgive me if I don’t care much for his opinion of working men. Sir.”

That was met with silence. Shem wondered if he had pushed his luck too far. Then Lord Marchmont laughed. It was a surprisingly nice laugh, full and merry, and Shem was startled to see genuine amusement crinkling the corners of the man’s eyes.

“A hit, a very palpable hit,” the earl said and doffed his top hat mockingly. Then he grimaced and tucked it under his arm. “These things are absurdly uncomfortable. What fool invented them?”

“Someone who never had to crawl into a beam engine,” Shem said and was relieved when the earl laughed again. He could tolerate arrogance better in a man with a sense of humour.

Once they arrived in the workshop, however, things took a turn for the worse again. The earl took one look at the nightingale dismembered on the bench and drew in his breath with a distinct disapproving hiss.

“I’m supposed to be called in before maintenance is done on any of the special automatons,” he said, pursing his lips.

“First place it mentions that is in the manual, my lord.”

“And you touch my mechanisms without consulting the manual?” the earl demanded incredulously.

Shem couldn’t hold back a snort of derision. “Wouldn’t be much of a mechanic if I needed the manual every time I replaced a spring.”

The earl stared at him for a moment before he turned back to the table. “True. Perhaps I should have marked their casing instead, to prevent well-meaning meddling.”

Shem didn’t particularly appreciate that description of his job, but he bit his annoyance back. “So far, I’ve checked—”

“I have no interest in your opinion,” the earl interrupted. As Shem glowered at him, he added, “I prefer a fresh perspective.”

“Shall I leave you to your work?” Shem asked hopefully. He had other repairs to make and an apprentice whose work needed assessing.

“No, stay and tell me your observations, without conjecture. When did it first go quiet?” Even as he spoke, his hands were moving with swift competence, performing all the checks Shem had already done, at twice Shem's speed. Shem found himself fascinated, watching those long fingers move with such dexterity. He’d always assumed aristocrats had plump, soft hands, but Lord Marchmont’s were long and narrow, with callused fingertips. Ink and oil were smudged across the base of his thumb, and Shem indulged himself for a moment. He had a weakness for men’s hands that he rarely acted upon. There was no danger he’d be tempted to flirt with Lord Marchmont, so it was safe enough to look, as long as the earl didn’t notice.

“Is that all, Holloway?”

“Yes,” Shem said, realizing he had gone quiet. “That’s when I brought it in for a better look.”

“Quite right. Nothing obvious is wrong, so it must be the special circuit. A shame. It was an interesting experiment. I was hoping it would work.” He snapped his fingers. “Clippers, please. I’ll remove the empathy circuit, and we’ll see if that fixes your problems.”

Shem passed him the tool, asking, “The empathy circuit?”

“Oh, it was an idea I had.” Marchmont paused, his hand hovering over the nightingale’s innards, and looked slightly indignant. “Some people found the early prototypes unnerving—unnatural, they said!”

“Some people are idiots,” Shem said and was startled when Marchmont smiled at him. It was broad and bright and chased any hint of arrogance out of his face. Again, the realization of just how beautiful this man was hit Shem, stealing his breath and making his cheeks heat.

“Quite,” Marchmont said. “So, the empathy circuit should cause the bird to simulate simple emotional reactions: fear, surprise, joy. If it’s interfering with its primary function, however, I’ll pull it out.” He reached forward with the clippers.

Without thinking, Shem grabbed his wrist to stop him. Marchmont swung to stare at him, his face affronted, and Shem remembered that working men did not lay their hands on lords of the realm. What Marchmont had just said changed the way Shem thought about the automaton, though. He wouldn’t let drunks abuse his apprentices, and he wasn’t going to let Marchmont cripple the nightingale without a little more explanation.

“You gave it a heart,” he said, not releasing Marchmont. He could feel the pulse in the man’s wrist beating beneath his thumb, steady as a clock.

“Strictly speaking,” Marchmont said slowly, “the mainspring is its heart. That’s what powers it, you see.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” Shem said. Marchmont didn’t have blue eyes. Shem had thought he would, with all that cold blond hauteur, but his eyes were brown, as rich and warm as liquorice.

“I see you’re speaking metaphorically. It doesn’t have real feelings, you must understand. They are simply produced by the circuitry.”

“And what produces our emotions?” Shem asked. He’d never been taught to be good with words, and he was struggling to find the ones to express the little clutch of panic and wonder in his throat. “The bird doesn’t know they’re not real, does it? You gave it a heart. Don’t you want to know why it’s breaking?”

Marchmont just stared at him, his brows furrowed a little. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Oh.” Shem wasn’t sure what that meant, not until that bright smile dawned across Marchmont’s face again, and he breathed, “Oh, let’s find out!”

 

 

That night, Shem found it hard to concentrate on his rounds. He was distracted by the thought of a brass nightingale that refused to sing and, more and more as the evening underwent its daily transformation from charming to wild, of its creator, his unguarded smile, the arrogance Shem wanted to slap off that pretty face, and his fine hands.

“Should we check the fountain, Mr. Holloway?” the boy asked, breaking him out of his daydream.

Shem glanced at Neptune’s fountain, currently occupied by three very drunk young men: one sitting in the water up to his waist and the others, shirtless, copying the pose of the great statue for the benefit of a squealing crowd of women who were clearly no better than they ought to be.

“Have some sense, boy.”

The boy’s eyes were wistful, and he wet his lips a little before venturing, “But they might need our help, Mr. Holloway.”

Like that, was it? Shem could see they were pretty, for drunken louts, the water slicking across their bare, muscled chests, and the coloured lights which hung in the surrounding trees washing them with a gold-and-purple glow. Still, anyone who stripped off in a fountain on a June night in England deserved to get pneumonia, and he wasn’t going to let his apprentice lust after buffoons. “The constables will be along in a moment to help them all the way to the dock.”

“But, Mr. Holloway….”

“Come along, boy.” Shem firmly steered the boy away.

He wasn’t expecting a firm clap on his shoulder and an all-too-familiar posh voice to say, “There you are, Holloway. Must say the entertainment’s changed in tone a little since I was last here.”

“I can assure you that the management does not….” Shem started and protested as Marchmont plucked the key from his hand and unlocked the gate in the hedge. “My lord, the paths are for employees—”

“I’m on a retainer,” Marchmont said cheerily, pushing them through the gate. He was still in evening dress, but there was a lot more ink smudged across his cuffs.

A loud splash and a roar of jeering laughter sounded behind them, and both Marchmont and the boy craned in that direction, as if they could see through three inches of dense laurel hedge. Irritated, Shem said, “We weren’t expecting you quite yet, my lord.”

“Oh, I couldn’t stop thinking on it. I’ve revisited all my notes, and the standard reference texts, and now I must see the bird in situ. You’ve restored it to its post?”

“Some hours ago, sir.”

The boy was quivering with curiosity, so Shem said to him, “Nightingale No. 48. Show me that you can find the way.”

The boy darted ahead a little, and Marchmont commented, “It’s a veritable maze behind the scenes. You could make a fortune opening this up to the public. Mazes are all the thing, you know. I designed revolving hedgerows for the one at Blenheim.”

“We do try to keep undesirables out of the staff areas, sir,” Shem remarked. Marchmont seemed to have relaxed considerably since the afternoon, and Shem eyed him suspiciously. Was he drunk?

“Luckily, I am considered quite the catch,” Marchmont said as a money capsule went rattling through the pneumatic tube attached to the side rail of the path. “I say, what do you do about rust?”

“The exteriors are specially treated,” Shem said, relaxing a little. Mechanics he could talk about comfortably. “We also replace sections during the quiet season.”

The boy came rushing back. “There’s guests there, Mr. Holloway.”

“We’ll wait for them to be done,” Shem said.

“The devil we will,” Marchmont snapped and marched straight out into the glade. Shem just had time to glimpse a corpulent gentleman with his hands busy on the bare bubbies of the girl on his lap, before Marchmont swept by with a comment of, “Evening, Shackleton. How’s your wife?”

Within moments, they had the grove to themselves.

“Was that necessary?” Shem asked. They did need to keep the customers happy, after all.

“Absolutely,” Marchmont said. “Can’t stand the man. Tried to court one of my sisters, but Rosalind has far too much sense to be taken in by that type.”

The boy piped up to ask, “Do you have many sisters, my lord?”

Shem clipped him on the ear. “Don’t ask personal questions, boy. It’s impertinent.”

“But—”

“And I’ve told you not to talk to gentlemen.”

The boy looked rebellious, and Marchmont was smirking at them over the nightingale, so Shem pointed to the gate in the hedge and said, “Mr. Ferrars needs another pair of hands at the dock. Off you go.”

The boy trailed off, and Shem turned back to Marchmont, who said, with a note of amusement, “Five, for the record.”

“Sir?”

“Five sisters, all my elders, from Rosalind down to Miranda.”

“That’s nice, sir,” Shem said, ignoring the little twist of bitterness. He had no family.

“You’re supposed to make a remark about my family’s evident fondness for Shakespeare,” Marchmont informed him, sprawling comfortably on the bench. “No? Ah, no small talk from the working man? I hope you’re not going to be dull, Holloway.”

“I shall endeavour to entertain you, my lord,” Shem said drily.

He was rewarded with laughter, and Marchmont delved into his pocket to produce a slim notebook. “To work, then. What time did you wind the bird?”

After a while, Marchmont patted the seat beside him with an irritated look. “Sit, will you? You’re giving me a crick in my neck.”

It felt strange, sitting down in the middle of the garden with a handsome man. He’d never come here as a guest, and it felt oddly sinful to just sit and talk, even if they were exchanging technical details. Marchmont was jittery, obviously desperate to take the nightingale apart again, and so he talked freely, ideas and explanations bubbling out of him. He wasn’t drunk at all, Shem realized gradually, just so caught up in the problem the nightingale posed that he couldn’t be calm. He seemed to want Shem’s reactions now, leaning forward to gesture at him as he described literal castles in the air. It was fascinating, principles Shem worked with every day sliding up against each other in unthinkable ways to make the impossible possible, and it made him a little breathless at times. As Marchmont’s face lit up in response to his careful questions, he wondered if the man had anyone at home who understood his ideas.

A few guests stumbled into the grove, but the sight of the two of them sitting comfortably sent them away again, several sniggering into their gloves.

“What’s wrong with them?” Marchmont demanded.

“They’re probably assuming the worst,” Shem said, shrugging uncomfortably. Dawkins knew Marchmont was here and why, so his reputation was safe at work, but he didn’t like the idea that strangers were judging his morals. “There’s some gentlemen have a taste for engineers.”

“For engineers?” Marchmont echoed, as if he had never heard such an absurdity. “Really?”

“It’s to do with the tool belt, sir, or so I’m told.”

“Oh,” Marchmont said and then added thoughtfully, “Hence Viola breaking Lord Rochester’s nose in the workshop all those years ago. I always wondered why she hit him so hard.”

Shem really didn’t want to know any more than that, but had to ask, “How old were you?”

“Fourteen,” Marchmont said absently. “I should really make her something to say thank you. Do you think her children would like a mechanical pug?”

“I think children like anything mechanical,” Shem ventured, keeping his voice steady.

“I could adapt a design,” Marchmont started and then was off into flights of fancy again, even as Shem swallowed back fury. If it had been one of his apprentices….

He reminded himself that Marchmont was not a defenceless boy and had clearly had his own protectors.

By the time the sky began to lighten and the crowds thin, Marchmont was yawning. His gaze remained fixed on the nightingale, but he was beginning to slump sideways, tilting closer toward Shem’s shoulder with every yawn. Shem did his best to prop him back up with a discreet nudge, but Marchmont merely smiled vaguely and slid back down.

“When,” he asked as the closing trumpets sounded, “do we call it a night?”

“Not yet,” Shem said, watching the small brass shape atop the pillar. It looked very sad, with its head slumped and its wings still, and he wondered how much of his sympathy for it was simply because he now knew it had feelings.

As the garden began to sink to earth, and Marchmont made a little notation of the time in his book, the bird stirred. Its head lifted, and its wings whirred, and a strange music burst out of it: a string of notes from one of its melodies jarring into another in a patchwork, inelegant song.

Marchmont froze, his fingers tightening on his pencil.

A shadow flitted out of the trees on the edge of the grove, landing softly on top of the abandoned cage. As the brass nightingale fell quiet, the real nightingale sang in reply, its song arching up into the dim dawn, throbbing with yearning.

And the brass nightingale began to sing again, clumsily matching its song to the little brown bird’s until the two threads of music merged into a hopeless, lonely whole.

 

 

Marchmont was still spluttering incomplete and incoherent sentences when the Gardens finally landed, so Shem marched him back through the hedge paths to the staff canteen. They were greeted by the scent of bacon frying. The tea urns were hot, so Shem deposited the earl at a table, got them each a sturdy mug of the strong milky stuff, and went to join the queue of yawning night-shift men waiting for their breakfast.

Dolly, behind the counter, winked at him when he asked for two plates and replied in a hoarse whisper, “Who’s your fancy man, Shem?”

“That’s Lord Marchmont, come to examine his inventions,” Shem said, and there was a rumble of interest around him.

“Never knew a lordship to eat his breakfast with us before,” Dolly said. “I hear he’s not married, girls.”

“Think he’d fancy you, d’ya, Doll?” someone shouted from farther back, and there was a wide roar of laughter.

Shem, embarrassed, said, “Enough. I doubt he fancies more than a fry-up right now.”

Dolly nodded vigorously. “Looks like he needs a good feed. Reckon them lords and ladies don’t know how to eat proper.”

“Pay a fortune for Vauxhall fare every night, don’t they?”

“Maybe they think that is good food.”

“Can we just feed the man, Dolly?” Shem asked quietly as the conversation rolled on.

She slipped an extra bit of bacon onto the plate and winked at him. “That’s for him, and don’t you growl and scare him off, Shem, my boy.”

No one else had heard, but Shem narrowed his eyes at her anyway, even as she turned to the next in line. She’d known him too long, had Dolly, ever since they sat in the orphanage schoolroom together.

Back at the table, Marchmont had started sipping his tea. He put it down as Shem approached and said, his voice bewildered, “It’s in love.”

“Looks that way,” Shem said and passed him a plate. “Eat your breakfast.”

“That wasn’t in my design.”

He looked so genuinely taken aback that Shem had to hide a smile behind his mug. “That’s what happens when you play god, sir. I’m fairly certain God was surprised when we started building steam engines.”

“Not a believer in providence?” Marchmont asked.

“Not a believer in arguing religion over breakfast,” Shem said quellingly, and had taken a good mouthful of bread and bacon before he remembered that Marchmont wasn’t one of his apprentices.

“I won’t take out the empathy chip,” Marchmont said fiercely.

“I didn’t think you would,” Shem said. “Your bacon’s getting cold.”

“Oh,” Marchmont said and began to dip the edge of his bread into his egg in a distracted way, until he said suddenly, “I’ll replace it! I’ll take it home with me, and it can sing in my garden, and I’ll give Vauxhall a new one, free of charge.”

It was a generous offer, because a mechanism like the nightingale didn’t come cheap, but something still troubled Shem. It was the end of a long shift, so he took his time to tease it out as he ate. It wasn’t until his plate was clean that he said, “What about the other nightingale?”

“The real one?”

“Are you going to take it to your garden too? Put it in a cage there?”

Marchmont blinked at him. “Oh.” He frowned, putting his knife down.

“Don’t waste food,” Shem said automatically.

Marchmont started eating again, the frown still knotting his brow. At last he said, “One of them has to be in a cage, either way. The brass nightingale—its wings don’t work.”

“Why not?” Shem asked.

“It wasn’t necessary for its original function, and so the weight…. Unless I apply…. I could extend its wings…. Membranes and some gliding function…. It’s not…. I need a pencil. Paper!”

“In your pocket,” Shem reminded him, and Marchmont blinked at him. Amused, Shem said, “No, not now. Go home and sleep on it.”

“But the nightingale!”

“Will still be here when you wake up.”

“I need it in my workshop.”

“I’ll bring it by,” Shem said. He’d had a few apprentices like this, boys who got so entranced by mechanical problems they couldn’t bear to eat or sleep, and knew quite well that Marchmont would just keep going until exhaustion overwhelmed him if he took the nightingale now. The poor bird deserved better.

“When?”

“When I’ve slept,” Shem said. It was his half day, but the nightingale had caught his heart, and he didn’t mind giving up a few hours of his afternoon to help save it. “That will have to do.” And, belatedly again, he remembered to add, “My lord.”

 

 

By the time he made it across the river, Shem was already beginning to regret his offer. He had lived out his entire life in the confines of Vauxhall, moving from the orphanage to the boarding house across the road. He rarely ventured far from the comfortable green shade of the Gardens. This side of the Thames felt like a foreign country, for all it was shrouded in the same heavy pall of smog. He tensed at every steam carriage that came looming and huffing out of the fog, chimneys chugging dark smoke into the mist. How did the rest of London stand it, when they didn’t have the freedom to soar above the murky streets every night?

When the great bell in the new Westminster tower boomed out two o’clock, he jumped. He hadn’t realized he had walked so far, so he pulled his muffler up, braced himself against the wind, and turned away from the river. The Gardens’ advertising claimed only at Vauxhall could Londoners experience a true English summer, and Shem wondered what these streets had been like before the invention of the steam engine. Had Westminster ever been green?

On his arrival in Albemarle Street, his heart sank. The Marchmont town house was huge, with tiers of windows. The black door was framed by pillars, with gleaming brass numbers. It wasn’t the sort of door Shem could ever imagine approaching. Looking at it, he was ready to turn tail and scurry back to Vauxhall. He could send a courier with the nightingale.

He was no coward, though, so he pushed open the gate to the basement stairs and walked down to the tradesman’s entrance. He knocked, but there was no reply.

Then he noticed a small sign tacked to the side of the door frame. A neatly drawn arrow pointed to an ornate brass daffodil, and the sign read, in scrawling handwriting, This is a BELL!!

Dubiously, Shem poked it.

Like a fan, the door folded up into the corners of its frame, revealing a sheet of metal studded with dials, sliding panels, and cogwheels. Another shutter rose to reveal a round-keyed typewriter. At just above his eye level, there was a clack of rotating flaps which revealed the command PLEASE ENTER YOUR DE—Another whir and it now read LIVERY NUMBER OR THE—It whirred again.—PURPOSE OF YOUR VISIT.

Shem reached for the typewriter warily and tapped in shem holloway bringing the nightin—

The panel slid down before he was done, almost catching his fingers, and Shem stepped back indignantly as a bell began to ring and the flaps whirled again to reveal red letters reading ERROR!

“Obviously,” Shem told it.

He shifted uneasily from foot to foot as the bell kept shrilling. He really hadn’t anticipated such a palaver. He was ready to shove the nightingale at the first servant he saw and leave.

Then the entire door—panels, typewriter and all—slid silently sideward into the wall to reveal Lord Marchmont.

“Why are you at this door?” he demanded. “I told the footman to expect you.”

Shem decided not to try explaining. There wasn’t much point arguing about class with folks who were rich enough to disregard it at a whim. Instead, he proffered his package. “The nightingale, my lord.”

“Well, of course,” Marchmont said, backing away into the basement. He didn’t look as immaculately tidy as he had the day before: his hair was standing on end in places, and he had clearly been chewing his fountain pen, because his lips were stained blue. He hadn’t shaved, and although he had abandoned his dinner jacket, he still wore last night’s shirt, its sleeves now grease-streaked. He grinned at Shem as if it were Christmas morning. “Come on, now. My workshop is this way, and I’ve been experimenting with wing components, but all the aerodynamic principles in the world are no use without experimental data, and….” He stopped and stared at Shem, who was still standing on the doorstep, feeling too bulky and grubby to set foot in a place that was too pricey for him to spit at.

The thing was that it never lasted. Shem had kissed a few gentlemen in the shadows of the Gardens, before he learned better, and none of them had looked for him again. One or two had even walked past without a glimmer of recognition. A gentleman could indulge himself by befriending a working man, for an hour or a day, but it was his whim that governed when and how the friendship ended. God help the ordinary man who misjudged that friendship or overstepped his mark. Shem was used to the ground moving under his feet, but everything else in his life needed to be steady to compensate. He didn’t want to be charmed by Marchmont, or risk responding to his excitement, only to be frozen out when the technical challenge was solved.

“Afraid to enter my lair?” Marchmont asked sharply, his smile dimming. “I assure you that, contrary to rumours, I am not building an army of mad automatons to conquer London, nor am I attempting any unholy rites or sacrificing virgins.”

“Of course not, sir,” Shem said, giving up. He didn’t like the note of defensiveness in the earl’s voice. “Blood would make a terrible mess of the gears.”

Perhaps the most worrying thing was that Marchmont found that funny. It was hard to maintain proper detachment from someone who laughed at your darkest jokes. Biting back a sigh, Shem stepped into the inventor’s basement.

The first thing that struck him was the heat and racket: the air rang with the wheeze and clang of pistons. It wasn’t until his second cautious step that he realized he wasn’t in an engine room.

This was a kitchen. The hobs on the polished black stove were glowing, and spits of steam escaped the chimneys that sprouted from its side. Pots and pans were suspended from a pulley that swung them from the hob, lowering them under taps and onto conveyor belts to be filled with chopped ingredients. At the table, the cook, a sturdy woman in a wide black dress, was chopping carrots with a relentless efficiency Shem only understood when he took a second look and realized that she was made of metal, her arms ending in an array of swivelling tools: carving knives, mixing spoons, whisks, even a gleaming potato masher.

Marchmont paused for a moment, sucking his breath in. “Damnation, not again. I swear, no matter how I adjust the programming, Cook always makes enough to feed a family. You’ll have supper, I hope.”

“That’s very kind, sir,” Shem said, eyeing the cook with interest.

“Excellent. Now, downstairs. These are the old cellars. Medieval in parts, I’ve been told. My sisters insisted I put my workshop here to save the house from any accidents. Demmed inconvenient, when I haven’t started any serious fires in years, but not worth the family row, so here we are.”

He swung open the door and waved Shem in. There was a note of nervousness in his voice, and Shem wondered again if the inventor’s friends ever visited his workshop. Surely there were other inventors in the great city of London who shared Marchmont’s passion for his work. Or was it just that Marchmont didn’t trust them in his lair? To Shem, accustomed to collaboration when there was a problem to solve, it seemed a sad way to work.

Unbending enough to smile at Marchmont with some warmth, he stepped inside.

The ceiling was vaulted, crisscrossed with beams and lines of wire threaded with cogs and gears, nuts, latches, clips, bolts, and clasps, the brass gleaming dimly in the gaslight. Racks were bolted onto the ancient walls, but most lay empty, their tools scattered across the cluttered workbenches: wrenches balanced precariously on tins of tacks; pliers and pencils jumbled together in mugs with broken handles; a drill marking the place in a battered book; saws half-hidden below sheaves of blueprints that drifted onto the floor as Marchmont rushed past. There were half-built devices everywhere, many clicking and ticking. A small tin drummer marched along the edge of one bench as the key turned in its back, and a whole tray of fist-sized glass eyeballs rolled around to stare at Shem.

A slight sucking sound made him jump, and he looked up to see a brass turtle crawling across the ceiling, lifting one sucker-tipped foot at a time. A small spider dangled off the edge of its shell, spinning busily. The whole ceiling was lightly coated in cobwebs, and Shem wondered if Marchmont would notice before the turtle lost its grip and fell on his head.

Every tool he had ever wished for was scrambled into this mess somewhere, but he would fire any apprentice who left one of his workrooms in this state.

Then he recalled Marchmont’s anxious look and bit back his criticism to say, “Magnificent.”

“Naturally,” Marchmont replied, the arrogance back in his voice. He pushed aside books and papers to make a space in the midst of one of the benches and put the nightingale down carefully. “Let’s get her wings off.” He looked up, blinking. “If I can find the right screwdriver.”

Shem looked over the chaos and spotted one the right size in amongst a tottering heap of camshafts. He extracted it carefully and offered it to Marchmont without comment, although he suspected his expression said too much.

Marchmont took it eagerly, his fingers brushing against Shem’s. The touch made Shem jump, as if he’d been caught by static, a warm shudder arching up his arm to make him catch his breath. He wanted to touch Marchmont again, for longer, to see what it led to, but that was a bad idea, a very bad idea.

“Holloway?” Marchmont was staring at him, his eyes narrowed so he looked both quizzical and intent. He was breathing fast, and Shem realized they were both still holding the screwdriver, their fingers separated by a mere length of polished steel. A step would bring them up against each other, and he’d be able to find out if Marchmont kissed with haughty arrogance or wild enthusiasm.

Summoning his willpower, Shem stepped back. “Shall I be getting out of your way now, sir?”

“No!” Marchmont seemed have surprised himself, as he blushed a little and added, “Stay, do. You understand the designs, and some of the work will go faster with some help. I shall probably talk, of course, but you’re not obliged to listen. I shall just be thinking aloud.”

Shem knew he should not allow himself to become any more fascinated with Marchmont, but it was so hard to resist, especially when he wanted to know what the man had planned for their nightingale. It couldn’t hurt to stay a little longer, and he would almost certainly learn a great deal, skills to help him in his own trade. “May I make suggestions?”

Marchmont looked a little puzzled. “If you like. People don’t usually…. If you’re interested, of course.”

“I’m interested,” Shem said, and it came out with slightly the wrong emphasis, making Marchmont’s eyes go dark and intent again. Hastily, Shem sidestepped and picked up the nearest drill bit. “I’ll just tidy this up, then.”

“Tidy?” Marchmont echoed, as if it was a foreign word. “Whatever for?” As Shem eyed the nearest bench meaningfully, he added, “I suppose it is a little messy. There’s just so much to do.”

“And think how much more you’d get done if you weren’t constantly searching for your tools,” Shem said tartly and then picked up a fretsaw that caught his eye. “Or replacing them because you haven’t cleaned off—what is this? It’s corroded the blade.”

“I honestly don’t know,” Marchmont said, taking it off him with interest. “Shame. I need a good corrosive sometimes.” He put the fretsaw down on the nearest stool and returned to the nightingale. “Do what you like. I’m going to start by replacing some of the heavy parts with lighter prototypes. Wingspan and body weight ratios are the key, I think….”

Shem moved around as he listened, slowly imposing some order. It was easy to fall into the usual back-and-forth of problem solving, and he soon found himself matching his comments to Marchmont’s rambling. Shem couldn’t spin ideas as fast, but he could pull Marchmont’s wilder flights of fancy back, and he was starting to learn how to ask questions that would make Marchmont’s eyes narrow with interest. It was a shock when he realized the clocks scattered around the room were striking seven.

“My shift starts in an hour,” he said, stepping back from where they were both leaning over the nightingale. “I should go.”

“Fine, fine,” Marchmont said without looking up, which disappointed Shem (which, in turn, made him want to slap himself in the face for pure stupidity). “Come back tomorrow.”

“I start work at four tomorrow,” Shem told him, not even surprised that Marchmont intended to commandeer his free time without apology.

“Must you?”

“Must I work for a living?” Shem asked pointedly. “Yes, my lord.”

“Fine,” Marchmont said with a note of irritation. “Be here by two, and come in the front door.” He pressed a lever above the desk, and a bell tinkled somewhere in the house above. “The footman will show you the way.”

The footman was another automaton, balanced on a pair of ratcheted gears that allowed it to climb the stair rails. Upstairs, it took a photograph of Shem and slotted the resulting slide into a rack behind the front door, and then Shem escaped from the dull and featureless hallway with relief.

All evening, making his rounds and teaching his apprentice, he turned over what he had learned until it fit into place against what he already knew. The engineering knowledge was easy, but the man was a puzzle. Marchmont was rude to strangers, oblivious to anything outside his own social realm, arrogant and demanding; he was sharply defensive of his work, overflowing with words once he realized Shem was willing to listen, living in a house full of automatons, and flustered by a small touch.

Perhaps, Shem thought, it was as simple as loneliness.

It was a quiet night, the fog lapping as high as the edges of the Gardens. The steady mechanical progression of symphonies was underlaid by the distant boom and cry of foghorns on the river. The dirigibles came nosing slowly out of the mist to nudge alongside the wharf, their sides lined with red-and-green lights and their horns sounding steadily. Despite that, there was a quiet to the Gardens tonight, especially in the less frequented corners, where the trees bent deeply over the alcoves and gazebos, their leaves slick and heavy with the damp. He wasn’t surprised when he found Marchmont sitting in their nightingale’s grove after closing, his fingers laced beneath his chin as he contemplated the bird, which had been restored to its perch. It looked different, its wings wider and less adorned.

“Were you successful, my lord?” Shem asked.

Marchmont startled, as if he hadn’t noticed they were there. Sighing, he said, “Not yet.”

He’d shaved since Shem had left him, and found a clean shirt, but there were shadows under his eyes. He clearly hadn’t slept, and Shem’s heart went out to him. Didn’t rich people have faithful old servants to look after them? What about those sisters he had mentioned with such affection? Why wasn’t someone looking after him?

“Go on, boy,” he said to the apprentice. “Shift’s over.”

Left alone with Marchmont, he went to sit beside him on the damp bench, grimacing at the cool press of the stone. He didn’t say anything, but after a few moments, Marchmont said abruptly, “I thought there was little point if I didn’t bring it back in time for dawn.”

“I understand,” Shem said.

The dim sky lightened so slowly it was barely noticeable. The birds were quieter than usual, but the little brown nightingale sang brightly. It didn’t seem to care that the brass nightingale had new wings, but Shem had to catch a breath when he saw them unfold into the gleaming span of brass rods and thin leather, more like a bat’s than a bird’s.

It wasn’t until the brown nightingale flitted away that he realized Marchmont had fallen asleep on his shoulder.

“My lord? Marchmont?” All that got him was a small snore, and shaking Marchmont just made him grumble and slump closer, his hand catching on Shem’s collar.

“Gabriel,” Shem said softly, swallowing the shiver of nerves and the fear of going too far, of falling over the edge of his secure, orderly life. “Wake up.”

Marchmont opened his eyes, hunching up his shoulders in protest. Shem offered him a hand up and again felt Marchmont’s touch shiver right through him. As Marchmont paced, yawning, Shem packaged up the nightingale and walked back through the Gardens with Marchmont plodding slowly beside him. They were sinking through the sky now, the slow hiss and ease of the floats sounding through the ground beneath their feet, and the fog was closing over their heads again, hiding all but the dim shadows of the hedges from their sight.

If they were to step aside now, into one of the hidden alcoves, no one would see them. Shem would be able to slide his hands up into Marchmont’s hair and tip his tired face down to meet his own lips, and there would be no one to witness it or condemn them.

Reckless men couldn’t keep secrets, though, and society would not forgive Marchmont such a sin, let alone Shem. What was silently tolerated in drunks and foolish boys would be roundly condemned by daylight. He would not take not that risk, not even here in the illusory safety of the Gardens.

They had to wait for the gates to be unlocked. Marchmont leaned more precariously to the left the longer they stood, and Shem decided that was a good enough excuse to slide his shoulder under the earl’s hand and prop him up. It had nothing to do with wanting to test how long he would keep reacting to Marchmont’s touch, not at all.

The shivers were almost wearing off when Marchmont moved his hand slightly, his bare fingertips brushing Shem’s throat, and Shem’s whole body tightened in response. When he managed to catch his breath and look round, Marchmont was staring at him. His eyes were still heavy and sleepy, but there was a heat in them that hadn’t been there before. Holding Shem’s gaze, he shifted his fingers again, an almost imperceptible stroke.

Shem barely bit back a gasp.

The gates rattled up, signalling the Gardens were safely lodged into their daytime spot, and Marchmont leaned forward to say, straight into his ear, “See me home.”

Shem wanted to, so much he couldn’t speak for a moment.

But he knew better, so he took a slow breath and stepped back. “I’ll see you this afternoon, my lord. You should sleep.”

He carried the memory of Marchmont’s puzzled disappointment away with him as he trudged through the breakfast hall and then on to his narrow and lonely bed.

 

 

He was expecting it to be awkward when he arrived back at Marchmont’s workshop, but Marchmont merely greeted him with, “Weatherproofing?”

“Could we add caulking and a protective coating without changing the weight distribution?” Shem asked, coming over to the bench. The workshop already looked messier than it had when he left the day before.

They fell back into yesterday’s rhythm easily enough, though there were a few moments when Shem looked up to find Marchmont staring at him with a faint frown, as if trying to work out a puzzle. Neither of them mentioned the previous evening, and Shem knew he should have been relieved that Marchmont dropped it easily. He just felt sad, though, and a little more conscious of how easy it was to be alone in this world. It didn’t help when their hands bumped over their work and sent another pang through him.

An hour didn’t seem like very long, and Marchmont was clearly irritated when he left. It was no surprise when Marchmont appeared in the Gardens again, bringing the nightingale home to sing out its heart. He wasn’t as tired tonight, or maybe just more guarded, but Shem walked him back to the gate anyway, neither of them saying much.

There was no easy solution to the challenge posed by the nightingale: it had never been designed to fly. Marchmont continued to work on it with an intensity Shem didn’t quite understand. He knew there were other projects waiting for the inventor’s attention, but this one seemed to have become an obsession.

By the end of the week, they had a routine, and something that, if it wasn’t for the class divide, Shem might have termed a friendship. He learned his way around Marchmont’s workshop and ventured the odd comment about his own life in response to Marchmont’s babble. He managed to make Marchmont fall quiet and think a few times too, by challenging the little sneering comments Marchmont made about people less brilliant or educated than him. Shem was fairly certain there was no real unkindness in the man; he had simply never bothered to think about society in the same way he did about his designs. It must be nice to have that freedom.

The summer turned sweltering. At least the air above the permanent veil of smog was cooler, and Shem was always awed by the nights when lightning crackled across the skies and caught at the tips of the firework towers, even though it was bad for profits. His work settled back into its usual pattern, and he gradually entrusted the boy with more independent work.

Marchmont appeared in the nightingale’s grove before every dawn. Sometimes he stalked straight off home again, but often he stayed for breakfast, addressing most of his conversation at Shem, but learning the names and skills of some of the other mechanics too. They all regarded him with a wary interest that slowly changed to a careful tolerance. The rich were odd, everyone knew, and geniuses even more so, and if his lordship wanted to eat with them, that was just another eccentricity.

Shem was beginning to feel comfortable, when it suddenly became obvious he had been neglecting at least one of his duties. He hadn’t been watching the boy well enough.

His mood was black when he reached the grove that dawn, and Marchmont immediately asked, “What’s wrong?”

Shem choked on it, his fury and disappointment tangling with what could and could not be said aloud. Closing his eyes didn’t help, because all he could see was the boy’s face, head thrown back and mouth hanging open with delight as he was fucked over the side of a fountain by a man old enough and, by the few items of clothing he was still wearing, rich enough to know better.

Some semblance of what he’d seen must have stumbled out of his mouth, because Marchmont went still and calm. “Was he willing?”

“He’s a child,” Shem said. “It doesn’t matter if he was enjoying it.”

“He’s well past the age of consent,” Marchmont said, giving Shem that puzzled frown again. “You keep teaching me not to judge on first appearances. Shouldn’t you ask—”

“He’s been told,” Shem said flatly. “Time and time over. Stay away from gentlemen.”

“He resents that,” Marchmont remarked. “Everyone’s stupid at that age. There’s little harm in it.”

“That shows how little you know,” Shem snapped and stomped across the grove to scowl at the nightingale, yet again restored to its pillar, rebuilt but still essentially whole. He’d waited until the boy and his fancy man were done and then sent the boy running back through the hedge paths with tears on his cheeks. It hadn’t made him feel any better.

Marchmont’s hands landed softly on his shoulders, not clutching but simply there. “Shem.”

He’d never used anything other than Shem’s surname before, and it meant something, but Shem was too tense and furious to care what. He lifted his shoulders, ready to shrug the man off, but Marchmont’s thumb brushed the back of his neck lightly, and some of the tightness eased out of his spine.

“You can’t expect me to solve a problem if I don’t have all the information,” Marchmont said. “What aren’t you saying?”

“It’s not your job to fix things,” Shem reminded him. “You make things. Beautiful things. I keep them running.”

“Too simple,” Marchmont complained. He was close to Shem, not quite pressed against him, but his presence was tangible just behind Shem’s back. His thumb kept circling on Shem’s neck, soothing and steady. “Occam’s razor is a terrible obstacle to creative thought, you know.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Shem said, but his mood was beginning to lighten, and he took a slow breath, closing his eyes.

Marchmont was quiet for a long while, and Shem could almost hear him thinking. He imagined gears clicking rapidly together in Marchmont’s mind and smiled.

“Did you never indulge?” Marchmont murmured. “Did you never get tempted?”

“A few times,” Shem admitted, lulled by the way Marchmont’s other hand was rubbing around the curve of his shoulder, warm and kind. “A few kisses.” Marchmont wouldn’t understand without more than that, though, and Shem didn’t want to make him ask. “I had a friend….” Marchmont’s fingers tightened, digging into Shem’s shoulders, so he amended that quickly. “No, an actual friend. This isn’t a story about me. I never….”

“Never what?” Marchmont prompted. His fingers had moved into the ends of Shem’s hair now, distracting him. It had been so long since poor Giles was attacked, and the details had lost their immediacy. He could barely remember the clean lines of Giles’s young face and the freshness of his laughter.

“Never had a weakness for rogues,” he said. When he had indulged, it had been with shy, earnest boys, whose kisses were as sweet and clumsy as his own.

“But your friend did?”

“One of them came back for seconds,” Shem said, his throat closing around the words. “And brought his friends, to which Giles said no. They forced him, and then they beat him, for presumption, they said. By the time we found him….”

“How bad?”

“He lived,” Shem said, but that didn’t say it all. “He works in the tunnels now. Doesn’t leave them much. His face is….” He swallowed. “They put worse scars on his heart. He doesn’t speak much, and never to anyone who knew him before. The boys who work for him tell me he screams sometimes while he lies sleeping.”

“I’m sorry,” Marchmont said. He was close enough now that his breath stirred the hairs on the back of Shem’s neck.

“And then there are the girls,” Shem continued. “A lot of the girls I grew up with, they found respectable work or they married, but not all of them. Some of them got tempted into something foolish and ended up on the street. Others… there’s men out there who think if a girl is poor she’s theirs for the taking, whether she wants it or not. A lot of those girls, the ones who lost the fight to be respectable, are dead, whether it was violence or the pox. Most of the rest are sick or gone to drink. So don’t you tell me it’s just harmless fun.”

“I won’t, not again.” Marchmont slid his arms around Shem’s waist, holding him lightly. “I never did anything like that. I swear.”

He should have been concerned with how inappropriate it was and castigating himself for hypocrisy. Instead the warm clasp of Marchmont’s arms, hugging him close, threatened to tear him apart. Half of him wanted to take the offered comfort, but it made him twitchy, aware of every point where their skin brushed, desperate for something different, either to be held tighter or to fight free. He couldn’t remember anyone ever holding him like this.

Marchmont hummed a little in his ear, one of his thinking noises, and Shem relaxed a little at the familiar sound.

“So,” Marchmont said at last. “You don’t take risks, and you don’t indulge. Would you marry?”

Shem considered it. There were times when his little room in the boarding house felt very lonely, especially as his contemporaries married and moved out. Much as he respected the women around him, though, he could never imagine touching one of them, not in the way he dreamed of men, dreamed of Marchmont.

His life was already organized, everything regimented. He wasn’t happy, as such, but he was safe and content in his work. There was no place for a wife, let alone….

“No Mrs. Holloway on the horizon, then?” Marchmont asked, sounding amused.

“No.”

“No Mr. Holloway, either?” Marchmont kept his voice quiet, right into Shem’s ear.

He had half been expecting the question. He hadn’t been vigilant with Marchmont as he would have been with anyone else, and the man could not have missed the way Shem was slowly melting under his hands. Keeping his voice quiet, he said, “That brings other dangers.”

“If it was someone you could trust?” Marchmont asked. His lips caught the edge of Shem’s ear, and Shem shuddered against him. He wanted to take what Marchmont was offering: wanted to turn in his arms and meet his mouth, wanted it so much.

But the world wasn’t made for happy endings, so he simply said, “If.”

Marchmont groaned heavily behind him, dropping his face against the back of Shem’s neck. “Why is it never easy with you?”

“I couldn’t say, my lord.”

“Gabriel,” Marchmont corrected him, a little crossly, and then froze. “Look!”

They had been too busy to notice that the nightingales were singing, their voices twining together.

“Persistence,” Marchmont remarked vaguely. “It’s rather…. Hmm.”

He’d vanished into thought again, so Shem indulged himself for a moment, leaning back against his shoulder to watch the nightingales’ devoted, hopeless courtship.

He was a little surprised when Marchmont released him without further demur. They walked back through the Gardens together, not quite touching, with Marchmont mumbling to himself. Shem recognized the look by now: inspiration had struck. He wondered what they would be trying with the poor nightingale tomorrow.

But the work continued as it had done. What changed was Marchmont’s behaviour. He didn’t press his case in words, but little things changed. He touched Shem more, a squeeze of his shoulder to get his attention or a bump of hips as they leaned over the bird together. Midway through their hour, the footman came rumbling down the stairs with a plate of chocolate éclairs, which of course spurted cream across Shem’s cheek as he bit into one, giving Marchmont an excuse to wipe it off and then suck his fingers clean.

It wasn’t the least bit subtle, and Shem was torn between laughter and constant arousal. By the way Marchmont grinned at him, as if it was some shared joke, he was in exactly the same state, which didn’t help at all.

When Shem left that afternoon, he got a warm, chaste kiss pressed to his cheek, and a murmur of “I’ll see you at dawn. Goodbye, Shem.”

“My lord.”

“No,” Marchmont chided, pressing his finger to Shem’s lips. “You’re supposed to say ‘Goodbye, Gabriel’ now.”

“Goodbye, Gabriel,” Shem said drily, amused and secretly liking having the name to use.

He got another kiss for that, and a chuckle.

In the Gardens that night, though, Gabriel’s behaviour was beyond reproach, and the same pattern continued all month. Gabriel flirted shamelessly in private and showed perfect respect in public. He came to breakfast with Shem, and every afternoon he fed him cake and kissed him good-bye.

Over orange sorbet, a delight in the heat of August, Gabriel remarked, “You shall have to be careful when you meet my sister Rosalind. They’re her favourite, and she’s vicious with a cake fork.”

“When?” Shem repeated sceptically.

“When.”

“I know what you’re doing,” Shem informed him. “You can’t seduce a man with domesticity.”

“Can’t I?” Gabriel sucked on his spoon, clearly pondering it. “Besides, it’s a courtship, not a seduction.”

There was nothing Shem could say to that, so he muttered a little, aware he was blushing.

Kissing him good-bye later, Gabriel murmured, “Come back here with me tonight. You can sleep in the spare room if you like. No one will know. My servants don’t have voices. I want more of you.”

“Gabriel.”

“Stay,” Gabriel sighed, pressing second and third kisses against his jaw.

“I have to work.” But Shem regretted every step out of there.

To his surprise, the tension didn’t stop Gabriel from working on the nightingale. If anything, the flirtation seemed to make him think faster and work more smoothly. He flitted from tool to tool, fitting pieces together with growing confidence, his explanations compressed into cryptic comments and incomplete sentences. Shem gave up trying to follow his train of thought and just leaned on the bench to watch him. Once you stripped away the arrogance, he was lovely. It would be good to have all that intelligence focused on him, Shem thought vaguely. It would be good to strip away Gabriel’s clothes as well.

He wasn’t thinking about the nightingale when Gabriel stepped back decisively, dropping his screwdriver on the floor.

“Respect your tools,” Shem chided him lightly. “That has a place.”

Gabriel scooped it up with a grin and stalked toward him. Shem realized, too late, that it hung on the wall behind him. He couldn’t move, but just watched Gabriel approach. He pushed off the side of the bench a little as Gabriel stepped close and reached over him to hook the screwdriver up. They pressed together from thigh to chest, and Shem went from pleasantly aroused to hard as iron, his cock pressed against Gabriel’s lean thigh.

“Does that have a place?” Gabriel inquired, his breath coming a little fast. “Because I certainly respect it.”

Shem looked up at the sly curl of his lip and the bright laughter in his eyes and gave up. Pressing up a little farther made Gabriel actually gasp, and Shem wasn’t the only one who was desperately hard here. Wrapping his arm around Gabriel’s neck, he tugged him down into a kiss.

For a moment, Gabriel’s mouth was soft and shocked beneath his. Then he breathed out in a great fierce sigh of relief and kissed Shem back fervently. It was so easy, in the end, and Shem lost himself in it, happiness sparking through him as his worries faded.

When the music began to play overhead, he thought it was an illusion. It wasn’t until Gabriel slowly pulled back to catch his breath that either of them looked up.

The brass nightingale was perched on the beam above them, singing joyfully.

“How did it get up there?” Shem asked.

Gabriel just grinned at him, beyond words. As they watched, it spread its gleaming wings and took off again, swooping along the length of the workroom, music tumbling from its polished beak.

“You did it,” Shem breathed, and then kissed Gabriel again, just to celebrate. Within moments, they were both distracted, their hands wandering across each other to the sound of the nightingale’s song.

They didn’t break apart until it went quiet. It took them a moment to spot it. When Shem saw it perched completely still on one of the benches in the back corner, he pulled his hand out of Gabriel’s shirt to point. “What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t….” Gabriel started, and then chagrin swept across his face. He spat out a couple of words Shem didn’t think gentlemen knew and went striding across the room. “It needs rewinding, and it will keep needing it, and so we’re not done at all!”

“It can be solved,” Shem said, because there was no need to despair, not when his skin was still warm from Gabriel’s hands. “Can you harness the bird’s own movement with a winding rotor?”

“I could,” Gabriel murmured, but he still looked distressed. “But then what? It’s a machine, not a living creature. There are so many parts that could fail or break. How can I be sure it will last?”

“How long does a real nightingale live?” Shem asked.

Gabriel turned to frown at him.

Of course he wouldn’t understand. He was too much a perfectionist, too good at creating and with no instinct for when something could no longer be repaired. Trying to find the right words, Shem said, “You can’t make it immortal. You shouldn’t. Give it the chance to live as long as its mate, and then let it be free. It’s the opportunity that matters. Just let it have the chance to live and love.”

Gabriel stared at him with his fiercest problem-solving glare, his hands curling into fists. At last, he said, his voice a little plaintive, “You believe that? That happiness is the freedom to take a chance on love?”

It wasn’t quite what Shem had been trying to say, but it was close, so he nodded. “What the bird does with the chance is out of your power.”

“I’m not talking about the bird!” Gabriel snapped, taking a step closer. “Why won’t you take that chance? Why can’t you forget about making everything in your life safe and perfect and orderly? Why won’t you just take the risk and love me?”

The last words rang out like a slap, and Shem felt like he’d been hit, all the breath rushing out of his lungs.

Love Lord Marchmont, the hoity-toity Earl of Godalming?

Love the inventor who was determined to save one brass nightingale from a broken heart?

Love Gabriel?

As he caught his breath, he began to feel like the nightingale, free to fly for the very first time. His hand was shaking as he raised it to cup Gabriel’s cheek. Swallowing, he said, “I will.” It came out choked and quiet, so he tried again, watching Gabriel’s eyes widen with hope. “I’ll try that. It’s not something I’ve got much skill at, taking risks, but I will try. Loving you, I mean, not doing foolish things for the sake of—”

Gabriel cut him off, not kissing him this time, but grabbing him tight. This time Shem didn’t want to twitch his way out of his lover’s hold. Instead, he wrapped his own arms around Gabriel and let him murmur wild, disorderly words into the crook of Shem’s neck, until Shem just had to kiss him quiet again.

 

 

A few weeks later, they stood in the misty dawn. The first hints of autumn were touching the leaves here in the Gardens, and Shem was glad of the warmth of Gabriel’s hand in his. They watched as, yet again, the little brown nightingale came flitting out of the trees to sing to its metal lover. And this time, when it flew away, the brass nightingale followed it, vanishing into the dawn on shining wings.