Mrs. Pettle, who had hated Miss Finch with the heat of a thousand suns, found herself stepping forward. “The girl needs a cup of tea,” she said, surprising herself. “And possibly a proper pair of gloves. Those balloon-fabric mittens are a disgrace.”
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.’”
Miss Marjorie Finch paused. She tilted her head, and for a moment, something behind her eyes clicked—an audible, metallic tick .
“Like its exhibitor,” whispered Mrs. Pettle, loudly. Pobres Criaturas
A child laughed. An adult shushed him.
The Clockwork Heart of Miss Marjorie Finch
Sir Reginald Hoax opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. No sound came out. “And possibly a proper pair of gloves
Miss Marjorie Finch looked down at him. Something clicked behind her eyes—not a malfunction, but a shift. A recalibration.
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 crowd gasped. A jar of pickled beetroot toppled and rolled across the floor. Found her in the garden, attempting to teach
They built her a small workshop behind the chapel. She repaired clocks, which she found “deeply stupid but charming,” and continued her experiments. Socrates the ferret lived to a ripe old age, fat and twitch-free. The night-blooming cereus became the pride of Batherton-on-Mere.
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 .
Timothy, the toothless boy, tugged at Miss Finch’s hand. “Can you teach me how to make a flower that glows in the dark?”
It was then that the peculiarities began.
“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.”