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“You stupid fat pig!” the young apprentice called, beginning to lose his temper. “Come out of there this instant!”
A bass grunt of protest came wheezing from the sty’s low brick entrance and the boy scrunched up his face in irritation.
“Adam!” a voice yelled suddenly from the stables. “Stop idling out there and fetch it in at once!”
Throwing a quick, anxious glance back across the yard, Adam o’the Cogs, or Cog Adam as he was generally known, decided there was only one thing for it. He glowered at the pigsty; that evening there was no time to indulge the old sow’s stubborn nature.
“Obstinate old sulker,” he grumbled, vaulting over the piggery fence. “You’ve done it now. If you won’t come out, I’m coming in.”
Crouching, he barged into the straw-scented darkness and immediately there came an outraged bellowing.
Old Temperance, the great sow of Wutton Old Place, sent up a snorting uproar as the boy tried to catch her. The two piglets, Suet and Flitch, scudded around her, squealing shrilly.
“Keep still!” Adam cried as she thundered to and fro in the sty, knocking him off balance. “Stay put, you moody old porker.”
Tumbling to the ground, he gave the sow a hefty kick and the ensuing baritone bellow almost deafened him in that confined place.
“Adam!” the impatient command came calling from the stables once more.
The boy scrambled to his feet. “I told you there weren’t no time for mucking about,” he warned. “If you’re going to be so block-headed about it, then there’s only one thing I can do.”
A frantic scuffle broke out as, within the sty, Adam changed tack and tried to catch one of the piglets instead. Their high, piping squeaks lasted several minutes until finally one of them was seized.
“Stop that wriggling!” the apprentice said sharply, tucking the piglet under his arm and crawling from the low entrance. Jiggling and squirming, Suet squealed again but Adam gripped it firmly and hurried back to the piggery fence.
Clambering over, he paused to look up at the darkening sky. At the highest point of the leaded firmament the panes had become completely clear and the first gleaming stars were pricking through.
Adam o’the Cogs spared a moment to consider them. He was a slight youth and the untidy crop of hair that sprouted from his head was almost the same colour as the pieces of straw that now clung to it.
“All them little lights,” he declared. “One day I’m going to learn what each is called, even name a few maybe.”
A jab in the ribs from one of Suet’s trotters returned his thoughts to more immediate matters and he went running on his scrawny legs, over the yard and into the stables.
When she was certain the boy had gone, the ample bulk of Old Temperance came trundling from the pigsty, followed closely by her remaining piglet. Out into the gathering dusk they shuffled. The great sow pushed her snout between the fence’s wooden bars to grunt her objections.
Yet the eyes which peered across the yard were lenses of polished glass, set into a roughly carved wooden head, for Old Temperance was not a living creature. In these uplifted lands there were no beasts of flesh and blood except for man himself; every other animal was mechanical. The horses of which Wutton Old Place had once been so renowned were finely tuned automata. Even the ducks which swam in the village pond were engineered with springs and gears that flapped rusting tin feathers.
Old Temperance’s concertina-like snout moved rapidly in and out as the set of bellows fixed inside her large, barrelled frame squeezed together, and she gave a long, protracted and miserable snort.
The stables which had once housed the finest mechanical horses of the realm were now reduced to common workshops. Shelves and benches crowded the once grand stalls and from every beam there dripped a hundred gleaming tools.
To bolster his floundering fortunes, Lord Richard Wutton had been compelled to take in the broken and defective animals of neighbouring estates. Here, under the guidance of Master Edwin Dritchly, a man most learned in the study of motive science, Adam and two other apprentices executed repairs. Many of the county’s best animals had at some point been inside the stable workshops and even in the great isle of London there were mechanicals which bore the discreetly pasted label ‘A Wutton Restoration’.
An endless ark of faulty creatures passed through those stable doors so there was always enough to keep Master Edwin and his lads busy, but today had been the most frantic and trying that he had known in a long while.
Edwin Dritchly had been with Lord Richard for many years and had adapted to this new, uplifted world with greater ease than most. He was a short, round man with a chubby pink, clean-shaven face which broke out in red blotches whenever he became flustered or agitated. Since that morning, when his Lord had sprung the surprise announcement that they were to expect an illustrious visitor from the court, Master Edwin had resembled a very large and overripe raspberry.
Huffing and sweating, he foraged through boxes of odds and ends, muttering to himself.
“Fourteen year it’s been,” he grumbled under his breath. “Fourteen year without so much as a hafternoon revel on the green, and now all of the sudden I’m hexpected to put those old gleemen back together and make them fit to be heard. Well, I haren’t no conjuror and what I doesn’t have can’t be grabbed out of the hempty hair.”
Thrusting the box to one side, he pushed past the other two apprentices and began searching beneath one of the benches.
The last of Lord Richard Wutton’s finest mechanicals, the only ones which had never been sold for revenue, were two life-size mannequins: a lutanist and a recorder player. These musicians had not been used for many years, and when Master Edwin was commanded to fetch them out and prepare them for a performance that evening, his plump face had fallen and immediately blotched up.
From their dusty corner in the stable loft the mannequins were brought down and Master Edwin groaned loudly. For too long these marvellous mechanicals had been used as the repositories of excellent spares and so when they were laid upon the workbenches he saw that they were in a truly dreadful, ransacked condition. Most of the internal works were either corroded or missing, pipes had perished and brass joints had been stripped away.
“May the celestial orbs fall upon me!” he warbled. “I fear Lord Richard will look like an impoverished fool this night.”
The apprentices, however, were not so easily dismayed and were certain they could manage to lash something together. They were rarely allowed to work on any automata as intricate as the musicians and were eager to show off their skills. For the whole of the afternoon they toiled unceasingly to replace plundered cogs and levers. Gears were removed from several sheep, and the legs of chickens and geese were robbed of their springs. Master Dritchly’s wife took time away from the kitchen, where a feast was being prepared, to whisk the faded velvet costumes from the mannequins. She then set to work beating the dust out of them and sewing up the holes.
Eventually, as the day wore on, their confidence that the task would be completed on time increased.
Inspecting the labour, Master Edwin had congratulated his apprentices. But when he opened the head of the recorder player to check that the breath pipe was still in place, he made an awful discovery and buried his face in his hands. “The cordials are gone!” he had wailed.
Inside every mechanical, from the most crudely fashioned tin fighting cockerel, to the Queen’s own Ladies of the Privy Chamber, were glass phials containing a fluid named ichor. The sophisticated models possessed four vessels of these different coloured ‘humours’, each one governing separate aspects of function.
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