Clockwork Canada Read online

  Sure, Henry thought. She says that now. But who’s in charge of construction, and who’ll still be in charge when the factory is complete? Alice, that’s who. He couldn’t object, though. Alice was a great boss.

  Her eyes went to his right hand, and her voice softened. “Did you get that in a factory?”

  He glanced at his twisted fingers and thought of French Murphy pushing his hand into the spinning gears of a cotton gin. “Yeah.”

  “We’ll have proper safety equipment here,” she said. “And no children, and no bloody fourteen-hour days.”

  He nodded. Gastown was filled with workers hurt or crippled by the ravenous machinery of the Industrial Revolution, and most people assumed he was just one more victim. Mostly, he let them.

  “What were you?” she said.

  He knew she meant, what position did he have in a factory. He wasn’t about to say “wrecker,” so he pretended to misunderstand. “I was a hunter and a trapper,” he said. “Lived in the forest alone for years. Then I decided to try out life in the city.” He held up his hand. “Now I can’t use a bow any more, and I never did like guns. So I’m a city man now. There’s no going back.”

  Alice nodded solemnly. Her spirit was too lively, though, to hold a sombre mood for long. She grinned. “Well, we’ll find a place for you here. Build a place, if that’s what it takes. That’s what this is all about!” And she left his side, wading into a crowd of men and women, bawling commands and drawing order out of chaos.

  Henry left her to it and walked over to lean against the boiler. They’d lugged the vast iron tank in first, and were putting the walls up around it. After that would come the machinery.

  The crowd of people before him, unlikely partners in an unprecedented business venture, were about as motley a group as Henry ever expected to see side by side. Molly had organized one union after another until there wasn’t a factory left in the city that would take her. Some of the others were former spinners and weavers, made redundant by automation. Likely they’d protested factories just like this one, or tried to burn one or two. Gotten themselves blacklisted, so they couldn’t even change sides.

  Now they’d bowed to the inevitable. As it was too late to go crawling to Joseph Cottonwood or Mike Tremblay for a job in an existing factory, they were stuck building their own.

  He’d cursed people just like them, and fired a musket not too far over their heads, in his job as a factory night watchman. He’d stood shoulder to shoulder with people just like them, and egged them on to greater acts of violence, when French Murphy had hired him to get the Cordova Street factory shut down. He’d been ignored by people just like them after he betrayed French Murphy and found himself begging in the street, his hand a mangled mess.

  Now he worked beside them. He swung a hammer until his fingers ached, then held boards steady while others did the nailing. They framed all four walls by sundown and left them splayed around the rectangular shape of the floor.

  He hit the Blue Barnacle after sunset, hoping to find an old acquaintance and cadge a drink. It was a rough bar, the kind of place he intended to avoid once his new respectability took hold. In the meantime, it was just the sort of rat’s nest he needed.

  “Hank! As I live and breathe. I haven’t seen you in ages.”

  Henry turned, hiding gritted teeth behind an affable smile. Archie Wigman was a petty crook and a two-penny con man, an irritating, whining little rat and good for nearly nothing, but he drank to excess and might not notice one pint more on his tab.

  They clapped each other on the shoulder, and Archie glanced at Henry’s hand with a grimace. “Heard about the paw, mate. Bad bit of luck, that.”

  Henry nodded. “That’s life in Gastown.”

  “Too right.” Archie gestured at a greasy table near the side wall. “You’ll join me, of course? Us being old pals and all.” They weren’t old pals. Clearly, Archie wanted something. Henry smiled wider and sat down.

  Leaning in close, Archie said, “You don’t mind treating an old pal to a pint, do you? For old times?”

  “Sorry, Archie. I’m skint.”

  “Ah, well, no matter. We’ll stay a while and see who turns up. Maybe Frenchy’ll come by. He’s always good for a glass of something.” His eyes went to Henry’s twisted fingers. “Oh, sorry, mate. I forgot.”

  Henry waved the apology away. “Maybe his conscience will tweak him, and he’ll buy us each a pint to ease his remorse.”

  That sent Archie into paroxysms of laughter, and Henry grinned in spite of himself. The idea of French Murphy feeling remorse was pretty funny.

  When Archie had himself under control he leaned close and murmured, “Speaking of Frenchy, there might be a bit of coin in the wind, if you think he’s not still sore.” He looked at Henry’s hand. “You’re still alive, so he can’t have been too put out.”

  Henry shrugged. “I disobeyed him. There was this girl trying to get shut of him. He sent me to the airship station to bring her back.” He sighed, remembering the fear in her eyes when she saw him. “I gave her a fiver instead, and wished her good luck.” He rubbed the scars on his hand. “Frenchy didn’t really care. He just had to make an example of me.”

  “Cor!” Archie shook his head. “What’d you do a stupid thing like that for?”

  There was no good answer for that question, not one that Archie would understand. Henry chuckled instead. “It was pretty stupid.” He looked at his hand and felt the familiar wave of regret. It rose and then quickly faded, as it always did. His hand had hurt – it still hurt – but the look on that girl’s face when she saw him? That had hurt more.

  Archie shrugged, losing interest. He glanced left and right. “We’ve got a bit of a job on tonight. A torch job, and there’s always room for another fella who’s been around a bit.”

  Henry felt his stomach tighten. In the dark days when he couldn’t find work he’d been both angry and desperate. He’d done ugly things for French Murphy, things that still haunted his sleep. A torch job meant burning some factory to the ground. It would look like the work of Luddites, but French Murphy probably had a client footing the bill. Another factory owner, most likely, getting rid of a competitor and stirring up resentment against the hated Luddites, all in one blow.

  “It’s a sweet little job,” Archie continued. “The place is all wood. No brick. And the walls aren’t even up yet. We’re supposed to burn whatever will burn, and bash a hole in the boiler.” He cackled. “Place will never open.”

  Henry’s skin went cold. How many half-built wooden factories could there be in Gastown? He was willing to bet there was just the one.

  “We’re meeting behind Smith and Sons,” Archie said. “Around midnight. Frenchy prob’ly won’t be there. He’s getting to be the fancy man these days. Likes to keep his hands clean.” Archie made a rude gesture with his own filthy hands. “So they’ll likely take you on.” His grin was mostly a leer. “I’ll vouch for you. And you can buy me a pint, after, in exchange.”

  Before Henry could figure out how to reply, a barmaid stopped at their table. Archie ordered a couple of beers, she demanded cash up front, and a moment later the two men were in the street.

  “Behind Smith’s,” Archie reminded him as they parted ways. “Around midnight.”

  “I’ll remember,” Henry said, and slouched into the darkness. His head was spinning, but he already knew there was nothing he could do. The communal factory would burn this night. The boards he’d laboured over would go up in flames, and the expensive boiler, brought in with such effort, would have to be hauled away and junked.

  He thought about the police, but Gastown’s solitary constable would be no match for one of French Murphy’s mobs. He thought about rousing Alice and her people. They would fight to defend their new venture, he knew. But they’d be up against experienced skull-thumpers. The only person they had with experience at street violence was Henry.

  “I can’t do it,” he muttered at the dark cobbles under his feet. Half the mob would k
now him by sight. If he fought alongside Alice they’d come after him later. They’d come to the little blue house on Wickham Street, and if they didn’t find him at home, they’d vent their rage on Widow Cready and her daughter. That would be her reward for believing in Henry McClane and letting him stay when he didn’t have the week’s rent in advance. He imagined Widow Cready watching her house burn and knew that he couldn’t get involved.

  For a bad couple of minutes he even thought about going to the clandestine meeting behind Smith and Sons. If the factory was going to burn anyway, he might as well get paid, right?

  He ran his fingertips over the scars that covered his right hand like a lace glove, and spat. “Be damned if I’ll work for that bastard,” he muttered. “Be damned.”

  He called on the town constable. He went with his collar up and his hat pulled low, slinking like a thief into the little storefront that doubled as an office for Gastown’s one-man police force. As recently as nine months earlier, a lone constable had been perfectly adequate. The town was growing at an explosive rate, though, and the luckless man was now overwhelmed.

  He was not in. A young woman dispensing patent medicines sighed and produced a notebook from under her cash register when Henry asked for the police.

  “Name?”

  “Er, John Smith.”

  “Right.” She rolled her eyes. “What’s it about?”

  Henry gave her the details of the impending raid, including the meeting at the warehouse, and added, “Tell him not to go alone. This is a rough bunch.”

  He expected another eye roll, but the look she gave him was thoughtful, and it made him wish that less of his face was showing. As he walked out he heard a strange clicking noise. He glanced back, and saw the woman with one hand concealed under the front counter. The clicks continued, sounding remarkably like a telegraph set.

  Bemused, he shrugged and headed out into the street.

  Now that the ball was rolling he realized he couldn’t stop. The constable might actually show up in time for the burning, and whatever happened to the man was on Henry’s head. So he jogged to a boarding house near the construction site and banged on the door until a suspicious-looking woman let him in. Tenants were gathering at the top of the stairs by this time, and Alice came down to speak to him. He poured out the story, making it sound like something he’d overheard, and she marched off to get her bonnet.

  By midnight eight people had gathered at the construction site, including Henry. There was no sign of the constable. Alice unlocked the tool shed and passed around hammers and crowbars. He took a framing hammer, the leather-wrapped handle slick against the scars on his hand.

  The nearest streetlight was well down the block, and Henry moved to the far side of the group, keeping himself in their shadow. The minutes crawled past, and then a mutter of voices rose in the distance. Henry could make out a flicker of torchlight on the walls of the row houses several blocks away.

  The mob was coming.

  There were a dozen men in the group, half of them carrying torches. They wore bandanas over their faces. Henry knew Archie by his greasy coat and slinking, furtive movements. The others were just anonymous shapes.

  “Good idea,” Henry muttered, and took out his handkerchief. It wasn’t quite large enough, and by the time he got it tied his nose was mashed to the side. Some of the closer workers gave him curious looks, and he shrugged.

  “Clear out!” shouted a man at the head of the mob. “Move on and no one gets hurt.”

  “Oh, someone’s getting hurt, all right,” said Alice, shouldering a board almost four feet long. “Someone’s getting hurt very badly indeed.”

  The approaching mob didn’t slow down, but the torches wobbled as men pulled weapons out from under their coats. Henry saw chunks of pipe and lengths of chain, blackjacks and brass knuckles.

  This was going to be ugly.

  A fearful muttering rose from the little knot of workers, but they were drowned out by Alice’s rising voice. “You think you can take a livelihood away from honest working people!” Her voice echoed from the buildings around them. “Well, not tonight. Tonight we protect what’s ours!”

  The muttering fell silent, men and women squaring their shoulders, exchanging nervous glances but standing firm. Henry groaned. She was going to get someone killed.

  He looked past his friends to the approaching men and tried to gauge how much damage he could do before he went down. Archie was of no consequence. He’d slink away as soon as the fighting grew hot. The big-bellied man who had told them to clear out – he would be Henry’s first target. If someone struck down the leader, and did it with enough brutality, the rest might break and run.

  “We don’t have nothing to worry about,” Alice said, her voice reflecting an unshakable confidence. “When they see we won’t be frightened, they’ll scatter like rabbits.”

  Henry didn’t know if she believed it. He only knew that her implacable will was keeping the group together, and that blood would flow in the street tonight.

  The two groups were a dozen paces apart, the masked men looking confident and unstoppable and utterly ruthless, when the blast of a steam whistle froze them in their tracks. They turned, gaping in confusion, and Henry heard the rumble of wheels on cobblestones. There was no corresponding clatter of hooves or jingle of harness, so he wasn’t surprised when a steam-powered wagon rounded the corner. It was a blocky machine with a glass window in front, a shadowy figure just visible at the controls. The back of the wagon was a big enclosed box. The machine rolled forward, moving at the pace of a sprinting man, and clattered to a halt beside the gap between Alice’s crew and the mob.

  “It’s the Justice Wagon.”

  Henry wasn’t sure who had spoken, but people stiffened in both groups. He’d dismissed tales of the Justice Wagon as the worst sort of sensational journalism, entertainment for the gullible masses. Could it be real?

  A moment later he had his answer. A slim figure in a long black coat and a leather mask slid from the front of the wagon, and a door at the back of the wagon crashed open, tipping down to form a ramp. The wagon rocked from side to side, and a huge mechanical shape came lumbering down the ramp.

  “Get ’em before they’re ready,” cried the thick-bellied man, and took a single step forward. The slim figure in the dark coat moved with impossible speed, a foot lashed out, and the leader of the mob staggered back into the arms of his followers. He hung in their grasp, red-faced, his mouth opening and closing as he fought to breathe.

  “It’s Typhoon,” someone said, and Henry remembered the stories. Typhoon was worth ten men in a fight. They said he could dodge bullets and put a fist through a brick wall. That was absurd, of course, but the truth was still pretty amazing.

  Henry felt the ground tremble as the mechanical shape came trudging around to stand beside Typhoon. That would be Crusher, the man in the steam-powered suit that could lift a thousand pounds. The suit was a gleaming marvel of brass and steel, with articulated arms and legs and pincher-like hands. A perforated grill covered the face of the man inside.

  “Disperse,” rumbled a bass voice from inside the suit. “Go home or face the consequences.”

  The thick-bellied man regained his feet, one hand pressed to his stomach. He wore a look of murderous rage, and he wormed himself backward, putting several of his men between him and Typhoon.

  Then he drew a nickel-plated revolver from under his coat.

  Henry bellowed and charged, pushing his way past his friends, and hurled himself at the man with the gun. Men clutched at him, he drove a fist into a masked face, and a swinging chain curled around his left forearm. He used his right hand to throw the hammer he was carrying, and it caught the gunman on the side of the head.

  Men shouted, a woman screamed, and metal clashed against metal. Henry didn’t see the blow that hit him, he just felt an explosion of pain above his ear. The world lurched around him, and when he became fully aware again he was lying on his back with a cluster of worr
ied faces peering down at him.

  Half a dozen torches lay sputtering in the street. The Justice Wagon was gone, and the mob had scattered. The battle was over.

  For now.

  The others applauded when Henry climbed to his feet. He was the most serious casualty. Alice had a black eye, and a young man had a bleeding nose and a line of welts across his face where a chain had struck him. He wore his bruises like a badge of honour. All of them were chattering excitedly, flushed with the thrill of victory.

  It’s not over, Henry thought. But he kept the thought to himself as he slipped out of the group and headed home. His handkerchief was gone, and there was no discreet way to ask if any of the gang had seen his face. It was a relief to find the little blue house standing quiet and intact, and he breathed a prayer of thanks as he let himself inside. French Murphy might still take a terrible revenge, but for now Widow Cready and her daughter were safe.

  He was exhausted, but he lay awake reliving the battle. It should’ve gone much worse. Only the intervention of two masked fools had saved them all from disaster. Henry was intensely curious about Crusher and Typhoon. They were remarkably effective together, like a hammer and an anvil, but they were vulnerable to gunfire. Oh, Typhoon could dodge the shots, and Crusher could deflect them, but the innocent people they were trying to protect could be gunned down before the two heroes could react.

  What they needed, Henry reflected, was a ranged weapon. He fell asleep dreaming of joining them, wearing a mask and using a bow to round out their defences.

  * * *

  The next morning, he dropped a knife while spreading jam on a slice of toast. It was a bitter reminder that his twisted fingers would never hold a bowstring again. He was good for stacking lumber and busting heads, and that was about it. He left the house in a sour mood and headed for the factory site to see if it had burned yet.

  He found most of the crew already there, getting ready to raise the walls. Alice’s shiner had blackened and spread into a magnificent blossom that covered a quarter of her face. If it bothered her, he couldn’t tell by looking at her. She was as indomitable as always.