NUMBER SIXTEEN WILLOW STREET
Screwdriver in hand, Marion Lane secured the last steel feather into place, restoring the clockwork sunbird from a pile of metal and springs to its glorious former self. She turned it over, wound up the key hidden beneath the left wing and waited. Just as before, however, nothing happened.
She groaned as she placed the bird on her windowsill, packed away her leather roll of tools and peered down at the street below. As ever, there was little to be seen that bitter morning: a lone cat in search of misadventure, detritus collecting on the pavement, the milkman setting fresh bottles on doorsteps. And, of course, the For Sale sign nailed to her front door, as it had been for nearly a year.
It was here, right in the fetid heart of the East End, in a ramshackle two-story flat on Willow Street, that Marion had spent her entire existence. For twenty-three years she’d lived within the boundaries of what she knew, not daring to imagine that another life awaited her—one far removed from the mundane and ordinary. Another world, one to which she truly belonged.
And while Marion had discovered this new world four months ago, on the surface it appeared that her life was just the same as ever. She still lived in Willow Street with her grandmother, in a bedroom filled with objects of an exceedingly unremarkable nature, apart from the gilded metal fowl, of course.
There was an ordinary single bed in the corner, a partially unpacked briefcase lying on top. There was an ordinary dresser just opposite, stacked with piles of unused parchment, books and two framed photographs: one of the father Marion had never known, who’d died in the war the day of her third birthday, and one of Marion and her mother, Alice. This second photo, taken on Marion’s sixteenth birthday, was not particularly flattering for either woman—the lighting dull, the angle awkward and unnatural—and yet for Marion it held the last fond memory she had of her mother, a fleeting moment in which Alice had at least pretended to be happy.
A ray of pale morning sun filtered through her bedroom window, catching just the tip of the bird’s tail feather and bringing Marion back to the present. It had been a mistake to offer Bill her assistance in figuring out what was wrong with the thing, though their plan seemed infallible at the time—Marion, mechanically minded as she was, would take the bird home over the weekend and dismantle it. She would check its interior for loose joints, a maligned anchor, an unsuitable driving weight, making a note of what she found.
Meanwhile, five miles away in a flat nearly as musty and miserable as her own, Bill would bury himself in a hoard of peculiar reference books in the hopes that somewhere, somehow, he’d find a paragraph on what made clockwork birds defective. They’d convene on Monday with all the answers and this, their first project together, would be a successful one. She’d assumed that, for her at least, the task would be simple. The sunbird contraption—with its gleaming exterior, yet complicated and delicate core—was one she’d found herself particularly drawn to and whose inner workings she’d become so familiar with. But again, she was reminded that nothing at her new job was quite as simple as it seemed.
For the past four months, Marion and Bill had worked as apprentices at an obscure bookstore that hardly anyone had heard of that stood at the end of a cul-de-sac with no name, just beyond the borders of Eel Brook Common in Fulham: Miss Brickett’s Secondhand Books and Curiosities. The shop’s only piece of furniture was a butler’s desk that served as a reception table, though this was quite unnecessary as Miss Brickett’s never had any customers. Of course the desk had another more practical role, but this, much like the existence of the metallic sunbird, was a secret Marion and Bill were forbidden to divulge.
The bedroom door swung open now and Marion’s grandmother, Dolores Hacksworth, stepped inside. She eyed the gleaming sunbird suspiciously and looked for a moment as if she might ask what it was. Thankfully, she became distracted by a sight far more alarming.
“Now, darling,” Dolores said with that displeased, twisted frown she wore so frequently, “what have you done to your hair?”
Marion patted down the nest of short and unruly brown locks that she’d never once paid any attention to. Much like the rest of her appearance. “I haven’t done anything to it actually. I’ve just woken up.”
“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it,” Dolores said as she inspected Marion’s hair from above with scrupulous attention. “Dull and lifeless, darling. And you’re far too thin. Whatever do you eat at that bookshop?”
Marion considered pointing out that her hair had been just as dull and lifeless when she’d been on a diet of Dolores’s cooking three meals a day, seven days a week. But she decided against the idea as she still had forty-eight hours of uninterrupted Dolores to endure. She needed to conserve her energy.
“Do run a brush through it at the very least, darling,” Dolores went on, “and...” She turned her eyes to the sealed envelope on Marion’s bedside table. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, you still haven’t answered Mr. Smithers’s letter? It’s probably an invitation to his birthday, which might be your last chance to make an impression.” She looked at Marion with her chin tilted to the floor in a way that doubled over the flaps of her neck skin.
“I’ve had a busy week.”
Dolores’s face flushed with irritation. “Busy?”
“Yes...” Marion hesitated. It wasn’t a lie, her week had been busy, especially after Wednesday when Marion, Bill and Jessica (another apprentice) had been tasked with sorting through boxes of supplies destined for the Miss Brickett’s Workshop, but which resulted in an unfortunate incident as one of the supplies escaped from the box and proved particularly problematic to catch again (and switch off). But Marion couldn’t say any of this and so, as usual, she came up with a rather dull alternative: “One of the bookshelves caved in...it took two days to mend and another day to restack.”
Dolores gave a nasal, supercilious laugh. “Two days to mend?”
Marion inhaled and counted to five before answering, having read somewhere in Dolores’s recent issue of Good Housekeeping that this might stem discomposure, or any such unladylike reactions. “Yes. Two days and a bit.”
Dolores examined her more carefully still. She did not believe the lie, that was clear enough. “Well, be that as it may,” she said at last and with a little reservation, “you needn’t be so coy with the man. Mr. Smithers sent that letter two weeks ago. He was very taken with you, you know?”
“Yes, I can see that. But unfortunately, I wasn’t taken with him.”
“You do know that he is set to take over the family business? Smithers Furniture and Supplies—do you know how well they’ve been doing, financially? You would step into a very comfortable life. Not something everybody gets a chance at and I really think—”
“He only met me once,” Marion interrupted, unwilling to engage in yet another lengthy discussion on Mr. Smithers’s future prospects. “He wasn’t interested in anything I had to say. We talked mostly about the weather. And besides, I’m nearly twenty-four.”
Dolores narrowed her eyes even further so that she was now looking out of mere slits. “Nearly twenty-four? That is quite the point, dear girl! I was seventeen when I married and your mother was—” She paused. A short, difficult silence. “I just wish you would give me a chance.”
“You?”
“Yes, me. I have tried so hard to help you, so very hard, and all you do is make a joke of things.”
Marion’s chest tightened as she rubbed the worn leather watch strap on her wrist, the last gift from her mother. She knew what was coming next—a discussion on how her grandmother had been so kind to move in after Alice had died, how generous she’d been to pay the rent, buy the food and even find Marion the perfect husband. All things she ought to be grateful for. All things Alice would have wanted for her daughter. But it wasn’t true. There was only one thing Alice had wanted for Marion and it wasn’t marriage; it wasn’t a husband or a life governed by societal rules. It was something Alice had never really had herself. Happiness.
Marion got to her feet and turned her attention to the sunbird, the only way she might stall the tears. “I’m not making a joke. I like my life as it is. I just wish you’d accept that.”
Dolores paused. Perhaps she was counting to five? “You’d really like to spend the rest of your life working at a bookshop? That is enough for you?”
Marion wanted to say so many things in response, things that were cutting and intelligent, that would make Dolores feel foolish and insignificant, just as Marion now felt herself. Yet, as always, the words remained lodged in her throat, fully formed and completely unspoken.
“Well, exactly. That’s just what I thought,” Dolores said. Again, she’d won.
It was a brilliant stroke of luck that, just then, right as Dolores looked ready to say something more, the doorbell rang.
Dolores’s eyes darted to the window.
The doorbell rang a second time.
“See who that is!” she snapped.
Marion gathered her reserve and peered down at the street outside their front door. Of all the people she’d expected to see standing there, Frank Stone would have been the very last.
“Well?” Dolores said.
Marion pulled herself back inside. “It’s for me, I think.”
“For you?” Dolores walked over to the window.
Dolores had met Frank a few times before as he’d been an old friend of Marion’s mother. Most recently Frank and Dolores had encountered one another when he’d arrived to offer Marion the job at the bookshop four months ago. Unfortunately, that being the second time Marion had rushed to accept a job of unfavorable standards, Frank’s offer was met with a considerable amount of reluctance from Dolores.
At eighteen, two years after her mother had died and Dolores had moved in, Marion had been desperate to escape the long and meaningless days at Number Sixteen Willow Street. But armed with little education and no talents to speak of, opportunities were scarce. Impossibly so for women.
After many months of trying, however, Marion was offered a clerical position at a dingy auto repair shop. The shop’s owner, Felix, was a kind though impractical man who’d refused to close his once-thriving workshop in the dull years that followed the war. With rising taxes, food shortages and a people carved hollow with grief, there were few who owned motor vehicles, and even fewer who bothered to have them repaired.
Nonetheless, Felix persisted, and although his dreams of bountiful custom never did come true, he found in Marion something more than he’d expected: a skilled and untiring assistant, willing to do whatever work was necessary. Thus, Felix passed on to Marion his passion for all things metal, oil and rubber. For the next five years of her life, she spent her days wrestling with wheel nuts, resurrecting engines, exchanging spark plugs and distributor caps. And amid the chaos and destitution of postwar London, Marion, like Felix before her, found solace in the quiet assurances of gliding gears, rotating screws and coiling springs. The logical assemblage of machinery became her only comfort in an otherwise coarse and bristly existence.
But by the time Marion turned twenty-two, Felix’s health had taken a drastic turn for the worse, and after so many years of toil and disappointment, his heart finally delivered its closing beat. On the eighth of July 1957, the workshop shut down and Marion was left once again unemployed, dejected and alone.
Or so she assumed.
What she didn’t know was that the skills Felix had passed on to her had not gone unnoticed. Miles beneath the streets on the other side of London, an arrangement for Marion’s future had already been made. Much to Dolores’s later despair.
Frank rang the bell a third time, then rapped his knuckles on the door.
“For heaven’s sake!” Dolores said. “What is he doing here?”
“No idea,” Marion said honestly, attempting to keep her voice casual and unsurprised, not at all how she felt. She sped past her grandmother and down the stairs to the front door.
Frank, recruitment officer for the bookshop and head of the apprenticeship program, stood at the threshold. As he had the day they’d met, he wore a bowler hat and Chester coat.
“What are you doing here?” she asked under her breath.
“Morning, Marion,” he said with a hint of impatience as he removed his hat and peered over her shoulder.
Dolores, who’d somehow managed to tiptoe down the stairs very quickly for her age, pushed Marion aside with a firm hand. She eyed Frank with annoyance. “Can I help you?”
Frank smiled and, as always, Marion was encompassed by a profound warmth, a feeling of strength and serenity that entered every cell in her body. A feeling she imagined a father should provide.
Frank extended his hand in greeting. “Good morning, Mrs. Hacksworth.”
Dolores pursed her thin red lips and without preamble lurched into an attack. “Marion was proposed to the day you offered her that job. Mr. Smithers of Smithers Furniture and Supplies. They had just had their best year of sales and he even offered Marion a share. Did you know that?”
Frank continued to smile, though a little less brightly. “I did not. How wonderful!”
Dolores sniffed. “It was.”
“He changed his mind, did he?”
“Of course he changed his mind! What man would be interested in a woman who works twelve hours a day at some ridiculous bookshop? For a pittance, I might add.”
“Oh, yes,” Frank said thoughtfully, “I can see how that might be a little off-putting, but you know I’m quite sure—”
“I don’t care what you know for sure.” She breathed. “Why are you here?”
Frank slipped his hand into the bag he had slung over his shoulder. He pulled forth an envelope. “As it happens, I came to speak to you, Mrs. Hacksworth.”
After a long pause, during which Marion’s heart rate doubled, Frank spoke again. This time he looked only at Marion.
“Just a small matter of paperwork,” he said with an attempt at reassurance. “We need a next of kin to sign a few things.”
“Sign a few things? Such as? If you think I’m going to—” Dolores, whom Marion was certain was about to launch into a lengthy diatribe about how unlikely it was that she would agree to do anything Frank asked her to, stopped. Marion wasn’t sure why, but thought she noticed Dolores’s gaze hover over something written on a piece of paper sticking from the end of Frank’s envelope. Before Marion could see what it was, he slipped the envelope under his coat.
“Should we have some tea, then?” he asked.
In one swift movement, Dolores both nodded and turned around, leading Frank past Marion and into the kitchen.
“Ah, Marion, I forgot,” Frank said as he and Dolores settled at the table. “Would you fetch the spare keys I gave you last week for the bookshop? I seem to have misplaced mine...”
After a moment of horror-induced immobility, Marion made her way up the stairs. Leaving Dolores and Frank alone was terrifying. What if, in the time it took her to fetch the keys and return to the kitchen, Dolores had managed to convince Frank that hiring Marion had been a mistake and that she really would be better off married and unemployed? What if her grandmother was about to destroy the only thing in Marion’s life that had ever been worth having? What if, just four months after she’d finally found a world to which she belonged, it was all about to be taken away?
She hurried over to her bed and opened the briefcase she still hadn’t unpacked from the night before. Underneath a layer of semifolded clothes she found a pair of binoculars with oddly curved lenses, a tennis-ball-size light orb (still glowing a soft white) and a Miss Brickett’s Policies and Regulations Booklet, dog-eared on page thirty-three: first-year apprentice general conduct and procedure.
She paused. There were no spare keys amid the mess and, now that she came to think of it, she didn’t remember Frank ever giving her any. She walked over to her bedroom door, partly to check the bunch of keys hanging in the keyhole, partly to eavesdrop on the conversation downstairs.
“...you could have saved us all the trouble and not come here in the first place,” said Dolores, her foghorn voice easily reaching the landing.
“I knew what I was doing then. And I don’t regret it, but these are...unforeseeable circumstances.”
“Unforeseeable?” Dolores’s voice was tight with skepticism. “In that case, perhaps you should consider employing me instead. I predicted this would—”
“Quite beside the point, I’m afraid,” Frank interrupted. “Just let me know by Friday and everything can be arranged.”
“Very well,” Dolores said.
There was a short silence.
“Thank you. And again, I’m sorry for all this. But I’ve explained my reasoning as best I can.”
There was the sound of scraping chairs as the two got to their feet.
“Wonderful to see you again, Mrs. Hacksworth.”
Marion rushed halfway down the stairs. Frank was already at the front door. “Frank? I couldn’t find the spare. You can have mine, though?”
“Oh, no, not to worry,” he said hurriedly, placing his bowler hat on his head and opening the door. “Perhaps it wasn’t you I gave them to, after all. See you on Monday.” After a curt nod to Dolores, he stepped outside. By the time Marion had reached the threshold, all that could be seen was a flash of Frank’s tawny coat as he disappeared around the last bend on Willow Street.
“What did he say to you?” Marion asked as she wandered into the kitchen.
Dolores was standing over the sink, washing the dishes with hands that Marion could clearly see were trembling.
“Papers,” she mumbled almost incoherently, “papers to sign. Emergency contact, telephone number, that sort of thing.”
“I heard him say something about—”
“What on earth you need an emergency contact for, working at a bookshop, I have no idea...” Dolores continued as if she hadn’t heard.
Marion didn’t answer. There was nothing she could say that wouldn’t give away too much. But Dolores was also concealing a truth. Marion had given Frank Dolores’s details as her emergency contact the day she started at the bookshop. The same day she’d signed a pile of classified documents all guaranteeing she would never be able to reveal what she saw or what she did beyond the doors of Miss Brickett’s Secondhand Books and Curiosities.
She made her way back upstairs, leaving behind the strange disquiet that now lingered in the kitchen. She sat down on the chair by the windowsill and picked up the sunbird once more, only half-aware of what she was doing—her mind caught up in other, darker thoughts. Whatever documents Frank had asked Dolores to sign, it was clear he’d wanted Marion to know nothing of them. But what could Frank possibly tell Dolores that he couldn’t tell her? Had she broken some policy at the bookshop she hadn’t even known about? Overlooked some administrative detail that would necessitate her dismissal?
Perhaps she’d have lost herself in further uncomfortable thoughts had the clockwork sunbird in her grasp not suddenly began to convulse. Somehow, she’d managed to bring the contraption to life—exactly what she’d been trying to do all morning. Its metallic wings extended outward, pushing against Marion’s palms. Sharp edges dug into her flesh as the bird struggled against her and eventually she had no choice but to release it. It fluttered up to the ceiling in a purposeful, mechanical motion, coming to rest on the exposed roof beam above her bed. Where, most frustratingly, it stayed all weekend.