Free The Blushing Bounder (An Iron Seas Short Novella) by Meljean Brook

1
    T HE NEEDLES IN Miss Lockstitch’s left hand could have sprung from Temperance’s fevered nightmares. Not even her hand, but an embroidering machine shaped like a hand, the steel contraption hadn’t disturbed Temperance at first glance. It had seemed more of a curiosity, and she’d been so desperate for conversation that when Miss Lockstitch had appeared at the door of their small flat, Temperance had actually thanked her horrid husband for arranging a companion to begin sitting with her every day.
    She ought to have known. From the moment Edward Newberry had forced a kiss upon her, Temperance’s life—what little remained of it—had been one dreadful episode after another: deceived by Newberry’s seemingly honorable character, shunned by her family and employer, forced to marry the man who’d instigated her fall, moved across an ocean from Manhattan City to filthy London, and denied the gentle care of a sanatorium, where she might have spent her final years in privacy and comfort.
    And now she had become the horrid one, staring rudely at another’s affliction. Sitting in the chair opposite Temperance’s sofa, Miss Lockstitch had laid her palm over a blue cloth stretched across a round wooden frame, and positioned the frame over her thigh. Temperance simply couldn’t look away from the score of needles rhythmically jabbing through the back of the woman’s steel hand, the twitching fingers that seemed to control the needles’ speed and the pattern of the colored threads. At Miss Lockstitch’s knee, a muffled clicking and slight up-and-down of her toes told Temperance that another apparatus had been grafted onto the woman’s leg—which now explained the pretty bow that had been tied over the knee of her trousers. Beneath the fall of cloth she embroidered, Miss Lockstitch must have quietly exposed the machine in her leg that was working in tandem with her hand. As she worked, Miss Lockstitch spoke of her upcoming marriage to Constable Thomas, as if it were perfectly normal to carry on a conversation with her contraptions half-exposed.
    Perhaps it was. Perhaps, in London, it was. Temperance hadn’t yet met a person who hadn’t had a tool attached to their body in some fashion, or a prosthetic limb to replace it. Miss Lockstitch lived in a boarding house full of other seamstresses, all members of the lockstitch guild—and, Temperance assumed, all fitted with similar contraptions.
    “Mrs. Newberry?”
    Her gaze darted up, met Miss Lockstitch’s enquiring look. Beneath her curling blond fringe, the young woman’s brow had furrowed with concern. Heat climbed into Temperance’s face. Though the seamstress had turned her focus away from her cloth, the clicking of the machine hadn’t ceased; she didn’t know how long Miss Lockstitch had been watching her, waiting for a response.
    Temperance scrambled for an excuse. In the first hour of her visit, Miss Lockstitch’s replies had been marked by shyness and uncertainty. She’d slowly become more comfortable, speaking more quickly, asking more questions. No matter Temperance’s feelings about the terrible machine, she couldn’t bear the thought that her rudeness would make the young woman feel unwelcome.
    And she was young—only eighteen, by Temperance’s estimate. Perhaps that age could serve as the excuse she needed.
    “Forgive me, Miss Lockstitch. I found myself wondering…I had heard that the Horde waited until the children raised in crèches were almost fully grown before altering them for labor. Yet you must have been only nine or ten years of age when the revolution drove the Horde from England. Did I misunderstand?”
    “Not at all.” Miss Lockstitch glanced at her hand, and in her faint smile there seemed a combination of pride and loss. “I had a blacksmith create it for me two years past.”
    She’d deliberately let someone remove her hand and attach that contraption to her body? Temperance struggled to contain her horror. “Why?”
    “How