And every Tuesday, at the hour of her strange arrival, Miss Marjorie Finch would stand beneath the clock tower, wind a small key embedded in her left wrist, and listen to the gears inside her sing.
The citizens of Batherton-on-Mere agreed on three things about Miss Marjorie Finch: first, that she was excessively tall for a woman; second, that her laughter sounded like a startled goose being stepped on by a cab horse; and third, that she had arrived in their respectable town under circumstances that were, to put it charitably, irregular .
She was a monster of curiosity. She devoured books on anatomy, steam engineering, and French philosophy. She conducted experiments in her room involving magnets, frog legs, and a small, terrified ferret she had acquired and named Socrates. Socrates survived, though he developed a nervous twitch.
The children of Batherton-on-Mere were fascinated. They followed her on her daily walks—stiff, mechanical strides that covered ground with unsettling efficiency. She would stop, kneel to their level, and explain the tensile strength of spider silk or the mating habits of the common slug, her copper hair catching the light like a heliograph. Pobres Criaturas
Sir Reginald Hoax opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. No sound came out.
She opened the book to a random page. “Page ninety-one: ‘Subject M has escaped again. Found her in the garden, attempting to teach the tortoise to dance. She said the tortoise lacked ambition. I am considering a larger cage.’”
“You are correct, Sir Reginald,” she said. “I am unnatural. I was created in a laboratory in Bucharest by a man named Dr. Alistair Finch, who was my father, my god, and my jailer. He built me from the remains of his deceased daughter—the first Marjorie, who drowned in a boating accident—and supplemented my missing parts with clockwork, galvanic rubber, and the brain of a woman he purchased from a medical college.” And every Tuesday, at the hour of her
“Like its exhibitor,” whispered Mrs. Pettle, loudly.
She appeared on a Tuesday, during a rainstorm so fierce that the gutters ran with brown foam. She was not carrying a bag, nor a parasol, nor a letter of introduction. She simply stood at the base of the town’s absurdly ornamental clock tower, looking up at its face with the expression of a mathematician solving a particularly satisfying equation.
The Clockwork Heart of Miss Marjorie Finch She devoured books on anatomy, steam engineering, and
Miss Finch, who was wearing a dress she had sewn from a dismantled hot-air balloon, stepped into the center of the pavilion. She was not angry. She was, by all appearances, intensely curious.
The judge, a prune-faced man named Sir Reginald Hoax, declared it “unnatural.”
