Once Upon a Forbidden Desire, page 17
“I’m sorry about Mel,” said Alfred abruptly, startling Cyd out of her thoughts. Alfred’s eyes flew to her. He must have felt her flinch through her grip on his arm. “Sorry, didn’t mean to alarm you. I only wanted to apologize for dragging you into this. If I hadn’t fallen into your pond and met with that nixie, you wouldn’t have ended up rescuing me and meeting Mel.”
“I like Mel,” said Cyd carefully. “She’s very … friendly.”
“Oh, she’s wonderful. I didn’t mean she isn’t. And honestly, I don’t know what I’d do without her. She’s got me through …” He swallowed. “Well, let’s just say I wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t barged into my life.” He threw Cyd a wan smile. “I only meant you were probably perfectly happy in your pond before we came along and ripped you away. Mel has a way of embroiling people in madcap schemes. They’re usually fun, but … not everyone has time for them, I suppose.”
Cyd could have told him how thrilled she was to be pulled from her mundane life and given the chance to be something, but she couldn’t deny the all-encompassing fear pulsing through her body and leaving her gasping.
She just nodded.
“So …” He glanced at her questioningly. “Are you all right with this? Or should I beg Mel to let you off the hook? There’ll be a tantrum for certain, but I won’t mind putting up with it if it’s what you’d prefer.”
His lost, boyish expression made Cyd’s throat close. She shook her head emphatically. “No, I want to do this. I’ve always wanted to do something like it; I’ve just never had the opportunity.”
He beamed at her, and Cyd’s knees felt as if they’d give out at any moment. This was a very, very dangerous man. But she’d be strong. For science.
They reached the carriage, and Alfred handed Cyd up into it. She perched on the edge of the brocade-upholstered seat and pulled her skirt down as far as it would go to cover her bare feet.
Alfred climbed inside and sat in the opposite corner to her. He offered a friendly smile, but she could see he was uncomfortable. It struck her that it wasn’t entirely appropriate for a young lady to be alone with a young man in a confined space like this. Not that either of them had any improper intentions.
Alfred brushed a floppy lock out of his eyes.
Cyd rubbed one bare foot with the other, worried he’d see how her toes curled.
No improper intentions at all.
“W-what about you?” she asked, driven to fill the itchy silence. “You weren’t excited about Mel’s idea?”
He frowned. “A machine that writes poetry? It goes against everything I believe about art. Art comes from living things, from deep in your soul. Machines aren’t alive. They don’t breathe. You have to breathe to create art.”
“Most poems I’ve heard weren’t artistic at all,” said Cyd. “They all sound the same. Some man describing how beautiful something is, usually a woman, using as many long words as possible. Mostly, it’s unintelligible nonsense. I mean, what is ‘amber-dropping’ hair, anyway?”
Alfred looked incensed. “‘Amber-dropping hair’ is one of the loveliest word pictures I’ve ever read. Think of the color of amber: translucent gold amber. Now picture a mass of silken strands that color, drops of water sliding down each one, magnifying the color along the way and catching the light as they dangle from the end, clinging to it for life, then losing the battle and falling to the ground.”
Cyd took in a stuttered breath. It was a lovely picture. Or perhaps it was the passion in his light tenor that made the words appealing, or the way his hazel eyes flamed while he spoke.
Still, numbers could be far more beautiful than words, and certainly much more reliable. “Meter is mathematics. And there’s a finite number of words in the world. If you group them by function, the possibilities reduce further. Take a hundred poems and examine them—you’ll find the same words used repeatedly, just in different combinations. Trust me, I’ve heard more poetry in my lifetime than anyone should.”
He leaned forward, eyes flaring. “You’re talking about mediocre poems. Once you’ve read a truly artful poem, you’ll change your mind.”
“Show me one, and I’ll consider it.”
He slumped back in his seat and folded his arms, lips pressed in a determined line. “I will,” he said. “I’ll write it myself.”
The carriage clattered over the cobbled streets, and Cyd looked to the window, but she wasn’t interested in the crowded-together buildings that lined the road or the bustling crowd of all types of species jostling each other on the pavement or the horses and centaurs and carts that passed. She watched Alfred’s reflection in the glass, unable to tear her eyes away.
This really had to stop.
“Why poetry?” she blurted.
Alfred’s eyes bounced up to hers. “Pardon?”
“Why did you choose to be a poet?” She rubbed her bare feet together beneath her skirt.
Alfred’s eyes lit up as he spoke. “Words are the most marvelous things. My mother read her favorite poets to me when I was a child. I’ve always loved how a story can be condensed into a few pages if you choose the right words. How a scene or a feeling can be captured in only a sentence or two.”
“But you haven’t been published yet?”
“No.” He sighed. “My style of poetry is … unusual.”
The carriage bounced over a bump, and Cyd cocked her head. “How so?”
“You’ve heard a lot of poetry, you said? And you’re familiar with meter?”
Cyd nodded sadly. “Poets and composers come to the park all the time. They seem to find the naiads inspirational.”
“Well, when I began writing, I used the standard meters: iambic pentameter, etcetera. But then I thought … what if I didn’t? And then I started writing poems as they came to me, without worrying about rhyme or rhythm.” His face seemed to glow with some internal light. “And it was thrilling.”
Cyd’s toes curled against the velvety carpeted floor of the carriage, and she tried to tuck her feet underneath each other. “But then … are they still poems? Or just prose?”
He shrugged. “That’s the problem. The publishers I’ve submitted to don’t believe what I write is poetry, just nonsensical ramblings. They say their clientele won’t like it. That no one will buy it.”
“But Mel will make sure you get published if we build this machine.”
“That’s what she says.” He shook his head. “I just don’t see how a machine like that is possible.”
“It’s definitely possible,” said Cyd. “I’ve seen machines that can read instructions from cards inserted into them, others that can calculate complex sums. And then there are typewriters.”
“A typewriter needs a person to operate it to produce anything. It has no intelligence.”
“You’re right, but it’s only an example of how the output can be done. What we want is more like a pocket watch. You wind it up, and it ticks away on its own for hours.”
He frowned. “I think it’s too hard for my poet’s brain to understand.”
“I’ll show you,” she said with wide, eager eyes. “It’s simple.”
He grinned. “Perhaps to you. But I think you underestimate how intelligent you are.”
Her breath fled from her lungs. She seemed to be having a lot of trouble breathing around him. Especially when he smiled at her like that.
Eager to shift the focus from herself, she asked, “How did you come to know Mel?”
His smile drooped. “She found me one night. I had been struggling with my new method of writing, was downhearted from all the rejections from publisher after publisher. I called out to the goddesses of inspiration in my frustration. And she appeared.” His eyes crinkled at the corners. “In a flash of glitter, of course. She adopted me as her personal project, although she has many. She collects people, it seems. Then she introduces us to each other and makes us share ideas and help and so on.” He brushed some dried mud from his sleeve. “I think she likes rescuing them from themselves. And of course, she is the goddesse of poetry. I do enjoy talking to other poets. I’m not the only one experimenting with new ideas. It’s comforting to know there are others like me.”
The way he spoke about how Mel had found him and taken him in gave Cyd a taste of a warm feeling, that sense of belonging she wished for. How must it feel to be part of a community of like-minded individuals, to talk to others like you? Cyd didn’t think there was anyone like her. Most naiads she’d met or heard of dedicated themselves to their water sources, keeping them clean and protecting them from polluters. Not that she’d spoken to many other naiads. They tended to have their hands full saving poets from drowning and then being forced to listen to their endless sonnets of gratitude.
“Why do you love mathematics?” asked Alfred, interrupting her thoughts.
Cyd inhaled a stuttery breath. “I don’t know. Numbers have a … a beautiful logic to them. You put them into an equation and they do exactly what you expect.”
Alfred looked pensive. “I never thought of numbers being beautiful. I always found them restrictive.”
“No!” Cyd found herself leaning forward, hands digging into the fabric of the seat. “Numbers make everything possible! Without numbers, you couldn’t write your poetry. If the ratio of wood pulp to water isn’t right, your notepaper wouldn’t form a smooth sheet; it would be lumpy or so thin it broke when you tried to write on it. Without numbers, your ink would be too runny or too thick. Everything is made of numbers, and numbers make everything work.”
Alfred pursed his lips. “Except the poetry I write. It seems as though the numbers want to trap my words and limit me to boring old sonnets or rhymes.”
Cyd didn’t have a response to that. Numbers were the one thing that didn’t make her feel trapped. Her mind could go anywhere with numbers.
Rain pattered down on the carriage, a light morning shower.
“Where are we going?” asked Cyd. “We’ve been traveling for almost forty-five minutes.”
Alfred pulled out his pocket watch, and his eyes widened. “You’re right,” he said. “You have an incredible sense of time.”
Cyd shrunk into the seat cushions. A naiad had to have a good sense of time so that she didn’t stay away from her water home for too long. It meant life or death to her.
Cyd peered out the window, but she didn’t recognize this part of town. She’d never traveled this far from her pond. But she knew the size and shape of the city—she’d seen maps.
The rain obscured some of the scene, but it looked as though they were in some kind of industrial area.
And the carriage trundled on.
“Knowing Mel, she probably just wanted us to spend hours in the carriage together,” said Alfred with a smirk. “She likes to force people to spend time together until they like each other.” He met Cyd’s eyes, his twinkling with mirth and a hint of shyness. “Not that I needed any time at all to like you.”
Cyd had the sudden urge to curl up in a nice dense thicket of reeds. She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but she already liked Alfred too. And that was a very dangerous thing.
“Maybe we should start thinking of a list of word groups,” she blurted.
“You’re all business, aren’t you? But very well.” He searched through his pockets and pulled out a pencil and a damp notepad. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to write anything on this. And my script is barely legible at the best of times. In a carriage, I don’t know what chicken scratch will result.”
“Give it to me.” She held out a hand for the notepad, and he handed it over. She laid her fingers on the cover and hummed. Droplets of water leached from the paper and slid up her fingers, disappearing into her skin.
“How … how did you do that?” asked Alfred, astonished.
“This water is from my pond,” she explained. “It’s part of me. I can call it to myself.”
“Fascinating. What else can you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you can call water to yourself, understand complicated mathematics, fight off nixies … Can you juggle too?”
Flummoxed, Cyd simply blinked.
Alfred’s deadpan face broke into a smile. “I’m teasing you,” he said. “I only meant that you’re a woman of extraordinary talents, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you had even more hidden away.”
“Oh,” said Cyd. “I don’t think I have any other talents. I’m just a naiad.”
“Just a naiad,” he parroted. “You’re magical. And not only because you can manipulate water.”
The way he looked at her made the carriage feel small, and Cyd wished she could open a window. Had all the oxygen inside disappeared?
The carriage pulled up to a neat brick building, and a footman jumped off the back and opened the door. Alfred exited first, then helped Cyd out. He held her hand a little longer than necessary, causing Cyd’s lungs to refuse to do more than make her gasp for air, but she didn’t pull away.
A portly gnome waited at the door up a few steps. “Welcome!” he bellowed with impressive volume for a creature just slightly taller than Cyd’s knee. “Mel told me you’d be coming. Come inside, come inside.”
He patted his rainbow striped waistcoat and led them through a hallway and down a passage. Sawdust speckled his curly black hair, and he had a smear of yellow paint on his right cheek.
“Mel said you’d need a place to work,” he said as they entered a cluttered but tidy workshop, “and that I was to leave you two in peace except to bring you tea and sustenance once in a while. She warned me you had limited time and must be on your way home by seven o’clock sharp.”
That would allow the two of them nearly twenty straight hours to work before Cyd had to start the journey back to her pond. Did Mel really expect them to work that long together? Alone in this workshop?
“I’ll arrange some sandwiches and tea,” said the gnome.
“Pardon me,” said Alfred, “but what is your name?”
“Oh,” said the gnome with a chortle, “I’m Sam, of course. Hasn’t Mel mentioned me? Probably too busy throwing glitter around.” He brushed some metal shavings from a worktop and knocked on it. “You two get to work while I fetch the tea.”
Singing “sandwiches, sandwiches,” in his gruff but jolly voice, Sam left.
Cyd glanced around the workshop and located a chair, which she pulled up to a scuffed wooden table. She found a stack of paper and a pencil, sat down, and started sketching.
Alfred took a seat beside her and watched. After a few minutes of only the sound of her pencil scratching against the paper, he asked, “What am I looking at?”
“Well, this would be where all the words are stored, arranged in groups,” she said, pointing with her pencil. “The user would pull this lever, and the machine would select the words in the order we predefine, then stamp them onto a page, like a typewriter.”
He folded his lips, and Cyd decided he had a very expressive mouth. “How can you predefine the order? Poetry comes in too many forms.”
“Not really. When you break sentences down into their component parts,” she explained matter-of-factly, “you find the same patterns over and over: noun, verb, noun. That is the most basic. Sentences in poetry are usually littered with adjectives and adverbs, so you could have a pattern like this: article, adjective, noun, adverb, verb, article, adjective, noun.”
“It all sounds so clinical.”
“It’s the structure of language. Patterns are everywhere, and they repeat again and again. Of course, we also need to account for meter. We could add a lever here and here”—she added lines to her sketch—“to allow the user to select the poem form. One lever for type of feet—Iambic, Trochaic, Spondaic, Dactylic, and Anapaestic—and one for number of feet.”
Alfred’s lips crooked up. “For someone who hates poetry, you know a lot about it.”
Cyd’s pencil scritch-scratched frantically. “With so many poets frequenting the park, I began analyzing the patterns. Once, a helpful language professor had his lunch under the tree next to my pond, and I asked him about it. He explained all the terms to me. But it only went to confirm what I knew already: it’s all based on numbers. There is a finite number of syllables in each poem, and those syllables follow an order of stressed versus unstressed. All you need is the number and order, and you can write a poem.”
Alfred tugged his earlobe. “It’s a lot more complicated than that.”
“It isn’t, really. People like to think everything is more emotional than it is. But the truth is, everything we do, everything we think, can be broken down into numbers and order and patterns.”
Alfred folded his arms. “I’m going to write you a poem that proves you wrong.”
Cyd shrugged. “If you want to. But we’ll need to analyze a number of existing poems to create our lists of words. We’ll need to further divide the word groups into number of syllables in order for the machine to select the appropriate number for the chosen meter.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with such an analytical mind. It’s truly amazing.” He grinned. “Do you have clockwork in there?”
Cyd frowned.
He held up his hands, looking alarmed. “I don’t mean to offend you. I’m impressed by the way your mind works. You have an incredible sense of logic. I’m not like that at all. My mind feels like a mess of feelings and words and sensations, and I often get lost trying to make sense of it all.”
Cyd’s lungs compressed. It was just as her mother had told her: poets were far too emotional and not to be trusted. A naiad could lose everything if she allowed them to poison her thinking.
“You can start on the word lists,” she instructed. “We’ll need some books of poetry …”
“No need.” He tapped his head. “I have hundreds of poems up here.”
Cyd blinked, mind spinning with calculations. “I need to refine this design so that we know what parts will be needed. I’m not certain how we’ll get them made.”
