Alice continued to think. If Aunt Edwina had wanted Alice to have the house, she wouldn’t have created it in such a way that Alice wouldn’t be able take possession of it. There had to be a way to circumvent the traps, or shut them down. On the other hand, clockworkers didn’t think the way normal people did, and what made sense to one of them appeared mad to everyone else. A clockworker might think it perfectly sensible to help someone by killing him.
Machinery parts large and small continued to swing, drop, turn, and clank in the clockwork mansion, but the violin music filtered through the noise. Alice was finally able to pinpoint a direction-the back of the building. Very well, then, that was where she would go.
A pair of automatons rushed past her, creating a slight breeze with the speed of their passing. Three spiders clicked forward, paused, clicked forward, paused. A man-sized gear rolled along its track while pistons popped up and down out of the floor behind it. Alice pursed her lips and studied the system carefully. Even assuming there were no more traps laid-and she wasn’t ready to assume that-the clockwork machinery took up quite a lot of the floor space, and it was always moving. Any bit of it could easily crush her. But the more she studied the place, the more she began to see a regularity, a pattern. A series of deep grooves was cut into the floor, and the automatons moved through the grooves in specific ways. Even the ones that flew followed the floor grooves. And the fact that the automatons moved throughout the room without harm told her she could, too.
When another automaton passed close by, a slower one, Alice leapt over the pressure square and, grateful she had chosen a simple dress for her luncheon with Norbert, landed behind the machine so she could follow it exactly. Her heart beat fast with fear and excitement. Another leap and step brought her behind the trio of spidery automatons skittering in another direction. She paused when they did, ducked beneath a swinging pendulum that would have brained her, twirled on her toes, and made a fast turn to stay behind the spidery trio. A few more steps brought her to the bottom of a staircase that circled the back wall, where she paused to catch her breath. No more traps triggered so far.
After a moment’s thoughtful stare at the staircase, she put the wooden handle of her handbag in her mouth, flung herself astride the banister, and hauled herself hand over hand up its length. The process looked ridiculous and immodest, she was sure, but no one was around to see, so what did it matter? Better that than to risk an unhappy surprise on the stairs.
A certain amount of exertion got her to the top, breathless and panting around the handbag handle. Click was waiting for her on the final stair.
“How did you get up here?” she demanded.
Click didn’t answer. Grumbling to herself, Alice clambered down from the banister. She was standing on a balcony that encircled the great room. A quarter of the way round, a set of double doors stood partly ajar. Below her, the automatons, pendulums, and ticking machinery continued in their strange, intricate dance on the grooved floor. The pattern hovered at the edge of recognition, but the longer Alice stared at it, the more her head began to hurt. Instead, she closed her eyes and listened carefully. The sweet violin music she had heard earlier seemed to be coming from beyond the double doors farther along the balcony.
Alice started carefully across the wood floor. One of the boards shifted beneath her foot, and she leapt back. Nothing further happened. Alice drew her skirts back and tapped at the flooring with a quick foot. Still nothing. She prodded harder. This time an entire section of the floor tilted and flipped over on a pivot. Alice barely had time to yank her foot back and catch a glimpse of the yawning space beneath the boards before they smashed back into place.
“Hm,” she said. “Who were you expecting to break in here, Aunt Edwina?” Then she glanced down at the faraway smear of dried blood on the floor near the front door. “And did they manage it?”
The crack left by the pivot trap was now visible, and there was just enough room at the side, near the wall, for a careful person to edge around it. Thanking heaven her bustle was small, Alice pressed her back and hindquarters close to the wall and scooted around the deadly trap. The automatons below continued to ignore her. Alice cleared the dangerous section of flooring, which lay just before the double doors, and checked carefully for trip wires or anything else that might cause a messy death. She found nothing, so she stepped through and found herself on another balcony, this one overlooking a cobblestoned courtyard large enough to play rugby on. To one side, attached to a wall, rose the tower she had seen outside, from the front of the house. A narrow window toward the top glowed, and Alice heard the violin play. To her astonishment, she recognized the song as the one from Hyde Park. The wistful tune created an intense longing inside her, a desire for something she couldn’t name, a feeling that she was in the wrong place or the wrong time, but that the right place and the right time were just a step around the corner.
A touch on her ankle gave her a start. Click looked up at her quizzically, and she realized she’d been staring at the tower, mesmerized.
“That can’t be the same player I heard in the mist, can it?” she asked him.
Click cocked his head, then put out a steel-wool tongue and washed a paw with little scratching sounds.
Alice sighed and started down a set of stone stairs that led to the courtyard lit by a half-moon. A high wall ran all the way around the yard, and small gargoyles glared from the top. The ground was immaculate-no cracks in the mortar, no weeds or ivy sprouting anywhere.
Gingerly, Alice made her way across the courtyard. Click walked ahead of her, segmented tail straight up, claws clicking on the stones. As she came closer to the tower, she realized that the dozen-odd gargoyles staring down from the top of the wall were made of metal, not stone. Their iron glare made her uneasy, and her mouth went dry. The musician played on, his melancholy music the perfect accompaniment to the eerie night.
Click reached the base of the tower and flopped down on his side with a clank. Alice looked up. A shadow hovered in the window high above her. Her heart beat staccato, and feelings she couldn’t name shifted inside her.
“Hello?” she called.
The music squawked and stopped. The shadow in the window shifted, and out leaned a young man, not yet twenty. Alice couldn’t tell more than that in the moonlight.
“Hi!” the young man called back. “Are you here to rescue me?”
That made Alice blink. “Er… do you need rescuing?”
“Yes, please. I’ve been in this tower for… well, I don’t know how long. At least two weeks, I think. I can’t get out. I’ve been playing like crazy, hoping someone would hear me and come.”
“Are you an American?” Alice asked, and immediately wished she hadn’t. It was such an inane thing to say.
“Boston. Are you English?”
“Of course.” The entire situation made Alice feel oddly sideways. “I don’t normally speak to strange men when I first meet them, you know, however extraordinary the circumstances may be.”
“Sorry! I’m Gavin Ennock. I’d shake your hand, but I can’t quite reach.”
Alice stifled an unladylike snort of a laugh. “I understand, Mr. Ennock. My name is Alice Michaels. This is Click, my cat.”
“He’s very nice. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a clockwork cat before. Can he help get me out?”
“That depends. Er… who put you up there?”