Chapter Fourteen #2
“Righto,” she whispered as she flicked through it.
“Let’s do this.” Following the instructions, she engaged the drive belt and jumped as the thing roared into life.
She held her breath, but there were no shouts, no footsteps.
She exhaled and turned her attention back to the keys.
She searched until she found the capital T and pressed it, flinching at the resulting clack.
The scratch it made as it slid down the chute sounded like nails on a chalkboard.
Gritting her teeth, she jabbed out the rest of the sentence.
THERE IS NOTHING TO FEAR.
Maybe if she said it often enough, she’d believe it.
She stared at the words in front of her.
Then she typed the phrase out again, this time deliberately interchanging the h and the i and studying the way they came together on the line.
As far as she could tell, there was no quick way to fix the mistake.
There was no access to each letter like there was in her typecase.
Eleanor was so engrossed that she didn’t hear footsteps behind her.
The first inklings she had of the duke’s presence were the goose bumps that prickled across her arms and the clearing of his throat.
She leapt to her feet, knocking over the stool.
The thunk of wood against cement reverberated through the room.
“Your Grace,” she said, hand to her chest. God, was she about to be arrested? Maybe she could convince him that her friends had nothing to do with it, that she had strong-armed them into joining her.
He was angry. A muscle along his jaw ticked, and his hands looked like they had been pried open from fists.
“Miss Wright.” His words were as cold as the machine she’d backed up against. “What a surprise to see you, here, in the middle of the night, in a building that I know that Andrew and I locked as we came in.”
“Your Grace,” she replied, swallowing. When she’d confronted him two nights earlier, it had been with confidence borne from justified outrage and the knowledge that she had been in the right. Here, now, she was very much in the wrong.
She clasped her hands before they could tremble. Her palms were as clammy as her mouth was dry. “I lost my purse this afternoon. It has very important papers inside that I must have tonight.” Thank God for Lillian’s cover story and the way she’d drilled it into them.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked, sarcasm dripping.
He knew. He knew that there was no lost purse, and that she’d come to the warehouse looking for something else. But she’d be damned if she was going to admit that she’d been looking for an answer, an omen, a solution. She grabbed her purse from beside the fallen stool.
“Found,” she said with a false smile.
“How fortunate, then, that you and your colleagues each found a purse. Irresponsible, though, for all three of you to have left one behind.” His smirk made her want to shrink into nothingness. He stood there, arms crossed, waiting.
“I apologize,” she finally said through gritted teeth.
He grabbed the stool, yanked it upright, and checked the leather for scuff marks. “What are you after, Eleanor? Would I have arrived tomorrow to a warehouse of broken machines?”
She flinched at his use of her name. “No, of course not.” Hopefully, her earlier thoughts weren’t printed across her forehead. “I just wanted to know how they worked.” She hated how her voice wavered and adjusted her bearing to try to recover her indignation.
His eyes traveled to the sentence she’d typed.
THERE IS NOTHING TO FEAR.
His face softened and her ears burned with the humiliation of having exposed herself. He worked his jaw, as though words were difficult. “Please, sit,” he managed. “Let me answer what questions you have.”
She hadn’t anticipated that kindness. She didn’t want it. She wanted him to stay a careless, soulless monster. Faced with his generosity, she wrestled with warring needs—to understand, to escape.
Understanding won.
Not comfortable enough to sit, she snubbed the stool and faced the Linotype squarely. He stood next to her and she tried to ignore the frisson of energy that sparked in the gap between them. They were flares of loathing. Or fear. Or anger. That was all.
The duke pointed to the large brass magazine that dominated the machine.
“The letters are here. When you play the keyboard, they travel down this chute onto the row. This here”—he pointed to a lever that would be in reaching distance for anyone sitting—“sends the line to where the spaces are added. They are wedge-shaped, see? That allows the text to be perfectly justified.”
Eleanor gritted her teeth. The one thing that had niggled her for all the time she’d been working was how challenging it was to justify text.
She was forced to create giant gaps between some letters and not others that ruined the flow of the sentence and looked decidedly ugly.
The wedge-shaped space bars solved that problem.
“That is an advantage,” she said. The words were bitter on her tongue, but she was a big enough person to admit the truth.
Encouraged by her concession, the duke continued. “A motor drives the belt that takes the line of matrices to where they’ll be cast in liquid metal. The alloy of lead sulfate, tin, and antimony is heated here using gas.”
“You don’t worry that those who work the machine—what do you call them?”
“Compositors.”
The muscles in her neck stiffened. They weren’t compositors. She bent her head from side to side, trying to release some of the mounting tension. “You don’t worry that the people who work these machines might be burned by the molten metal? If it got infected, that kind of injury could be fatal.”
The duke shook his head. “It is mostly enclosed. Only the smallest amount is released for casting. A compositor would have to fall onto the machine to knock it loose enough to spill.”
“Compositors faint. It is not uncommon.”
“When you’re standing at a table for hours upon hours, I assume that’s true. Our compositors will sit.”
Dash. That was an improvement again. She’d trained herself to handle long days standing, but still her feet ached at night and more than once a week she’d soak them in hot water and Epsom salts while she read.
Unwilling to concede yet another point—she was not that big a person—she countered. “The lead sulfate will reek to high heavens when melted. That in itself could cause swooning.”
The duke pointed to the long pipe that ran several feet into the air. “There is a flue that transports the gas out of the room. We’ve noticed no smell, even with multiple machines running.”
She swallowed again, her mouth far, far too dry. “What if the matrices fall into place in the wrong order?” By hand, she could control which letters came first. This would require reliance on a machine.
The duke shrugged, and she felt the barely controllable urge to elbow him.
Maybe a bruised rib would give him something to concern himself over.
“It has been expertly timed—each of those channels is at a different angle because the inventor calculated the velocity at which each matrix dropped and compensated accordingly.”
He had an answer for everything, and it terrified her.
She bit the inside of her lip. “Your machine might be perfectly designed and calibrated,” she said finally, “but you’re still relying on the accuracy of humans.
In your contraption, I can’t see how one would fix a mistakenly placed matrix.
” Her voice had changed octave. Had he realized?
Could he tell the impact his words were having?
Could he see how each one fell like the guillotine that severed pages and marked the end of a print?
The duke sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You are right in that regard.”
She sighed. A reprieve, at last. A moment of clean air.
“The simplest solution would be to run two fingers across a set of keys.” As he leaned over to demonstrate, hair fell across his eyes, and he was no longer the perfectly put-together duke.
For a second, he was Peter. Then there was a clatter as a dozen matrices fell into place, filling the rest of the line with gibberish.
He stood. “You start the line again. They will just have to remember to remove the faulty text before the piece goes to print.”
His hair was still askew. Under gas lamps instead of chandeliers, the grays looked like worry rather than distinction. It took all her willpower not to brush them aside so that he would turn back into the enemy. “Human memory is fallible.”
He rubbed a too-human hand across the back of his neck. “We are all fallible in many regards, Miss Wright. But with the right processes, the publishers will overcome the issue.”
She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t yield another point.
So she shook her head and hoped that would suffice, because if she opened her mouth, a sob might escape.
Stupid, Eleanor. How can you have memorized entire passages of The Art of War and yet still have underestimated the enemy? Stupid. Careless. Worthless.
“There are holdouts, you know.” His pity cast her self-reproach in antimony and tin. “The newspapers are all on board, but some publishing houses aren’t ready to transition, or they don’t have the capital to do so immediately. The entire industry will not change in an instant.”
You might still have work, is what he was saying. “But it will change in a decade, won’t it?” Her voice cracked and hot, uncompromising shame consumed her.
At least now he had the grace to look uncomfortable instead of proud. Guilty instead of righteous. “You have less time than that, I think,” he said quietly.
Eleanor stared at the machine in front of her.
She’d bested it—for now. But she knew how far practice could take a person.
These keys made no sense to her, but in a year’s time, they would make sense to someone.
That someone would operate faster than Mr. Gray had today, and Eleanor would no longer be the most sought-after compositor in London.
As Peter pulled the warehouse door shut, he saw Eleanor and her friends grasp one another’s hands.
Damn. The Linotype was about to create a lot of collateral damage.
He’d always known that it would, and he’d told himself that it was necessary.
He’d just not expected the collateral damage to have a face, or a soft laugh, or a fascinating mind.
He’d not expected to like the collateral damage.
You are not making her destitute. She is an intelligent woman. She will adapt just fine once she realizes she has to.
Traditional compositors could retrain. Their reading skills and attention to detail would put them in high demand.
If they chose not to forge another career, their circumstances would be their problem.
His problem was the people who depended on him and that was it.
His estates needed the money. His sisters needed financial independence.
They were not Eleanor. They were kind and responsible and intelligent, but they could not fend for themselves the way she did.
They might all be at the mercy of feckless husbands if he didn’t do something.
He had no choice, and even if he did, he wouldn’t take it.
It’s for the greater good, not just mine. I am not a soulless automaton.
The Linotype would improve far more lives than it would ruin. An educated populace would have more opportunities for success. There would be economic benefits, health benefits, social benefits. If today’s deception was the cost, then he would bear it as he’d borne the weight of everything else.
But if he was to do so, he would dull the memory of her shock with a damned drink.
Andrew was waiting by their office, his toe tapping. “I’m going to check the machines. I doubt they’ve destroyed anything, but still…”
Peter sighed and hoped the damned woman had done nothing to force him to report her. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yes, go check.”
He needed distraction from her and his guilty, disgusted conscience.
The chairs needed straightening. The wastepaper basket needed to be nudged to make sure it was in its proper place.
There were papers on the floor that he’d dropped when he’d heard intruders enter.
He snatched them up. Thank the Lord he’d not barged into the main room with the stovepipe Andrew kept by the door.
He’d have had to deal with their tears, though perhaps Eleanor would have swung back and he’d have had to deal with a bleeding nose instead.
He took the bottle of brandy from his desk and poured himself a glass.
Booklover’s latest letter was folded in his breast pocket.
His hand went to it and concern for himself faded.
Her day had been as bad as his. He didn’t know what had caused her to feel so defeated, but he wished he could fix it, could make her feel better.
Dear Booklover,
I’m sorry that your day was so awful. I am furious on your behalf and would take on the Greek gods myself, if it would ease your hurt. Please don’t shy away from telling me how you feel. You couldn’t scare me away. It’s not possible. I fear you are stuck with me as a friend.
I understand what it is to question yourself. I also have an excess of pride, and I understand what panic feels like when everything that you’ve worked for starts slipping away.
Success has been just beyond my grasp for years.
I’ve chased it as hard as I can in order to stave off the consequences of what will happen if I fail.
Now, I finally feel some relief. It seems as though success is imminent and all the people who rely on it will soon have their own “safety and freedom,” to use your terms.
But though I have much confidence, I can’t slow down yet. I must do whatever it takes in this final stretch, even though I’m not proud of some steps that are necessary. One will haunt me for a while.
I still feel the brush of panic. It sits at the corner of my vision, quiet for now but not forever.
Once success is in my grasp, it will no doubt pounce again, this time in a shape that mirrors yours.
It will convince me that the security I’ve finally earned, I will also lose. Is “safe” a feeling that ever lasts?
The only advice I have for you is to fight. Get scrappy. Get skin under your fingernails. Harden yourself, and do the things that others feel are beneath you.
I wish I could help. Instead, trust that I am here, cheering you on.
Do you think we should meet?
—Captain O.T.N.