“I apologize,” she finally said through gritted teeth.
He grabbed the stool, yanked it upright, and checked the leather for scuff marks. “What are you after, Eleanor? Would I have arrived tomorrow to a warehouse of broken machines?”
She flinched at his use of her name. “No, of course not.” Hopefully, her earlier thoughts weren’t printed across her forehead. “I just wanted to know how they worked.” She hated how her voice wavered and adjusted her bearing to try to recover her indignation.
His eyes traveled to the sentence she’d typed.
THERE IS NOTHING TO FEAR.
His face softened and her ears burned with the humiliation of having exposed herself. He worked his jaw, as though words were difficult. “Please, sit,” he managed. “Let me answer what questions you have.”
She hadn’t anticipated that kindness. She didn’t want it. She wanted him to stay a careless, soulless monster. Faced with his generosity, she wrestled with warring needs—to understand, to escape.
Understanding won.
Not comfortable enough to sit, she snubbed the stool and faced the Linotype squarely. He stood next to her and she tried to ignore the frisson of energy that sparked in the gap between them. They were flares of loathing. Or fear. Or anger. That was all.
The duke pointed to the large brass magazine that dominated the machine. “The letters are here. When you play the keyboard, they travel down this chute onto the row. This here”—he pointed to a lever that would be in reaching distance for anyone sitting—“sends the line to where the spaces areadded. They are wedge-shaped, see? That allows the text to be perfectly justified.”
Eleanor gritted her teeth. The one thing that had niggled her for all the time she’d been working was how challenging it was to justify text. She was forced to create giant gaps between some letters and not others that ruined the flow of the sentence and looked decidedly ugly. The wedge-shaped space bars solved that problem.
“That is an advantage,” she said. The words were bitter on her tongue, but she was a big enough person to admit the truth.
Encouraged by her concession, the duke continued. “A motor drives the belt that takes the line of matrices to where they’ll be cast in liquid metal. The alloy of lead sulfate, tin, and antimony is heated here using gas.”
“You don’t worry that those who work the machine—what do you call them?”
“Compositors.”
The muscles in her neck stiffened. They weren’t compositors. She bent her head from side to side, trying to release some of the mounting tension. “You don’t worry that the people who work these machines might be burned by the molten metal? If it got infected, that kind of injury could be fatal.”
The duke shook his head. “It is mostly enclosed. Only the smallest amount is released for casting. A compositor would have to fall onto the machine to knock it loose enough to spill.”
“Compositors faint. It is not uncommon.”
“When you’re standing at a table for hours upon hours, I assume that’s true. Our compositors will sit.”
Dash. That was an improvement again. She’d trained herself to handle long days standing, but still her feet ached at nightand more than once a week she’d soak them in hot water and Epsom salts while she read.
Unwilling to concede yet another point—she was notthatbig a person—she countered. “The lead sulfate will reek to high heavens when melted. That in itself could cause swooning.”
The duke pointed to the long pipe that ran several feet into the air. “There is a flue that transports the gas out of the room. We’ve noticed no smell, even with multiple machines running.”
She swallowed again, her mouth far, far too dry. “What if the matrices fall into place in the wrong order?” By hand, she could control which letters came first. This would require reliance on a machine.
The duke shrugged, and she felt the barely controllable urge to elbow him. Maybe a bruised rib would give him something to concern himself over. “It has been expertly timed—each of those channels is at a different angle because the inventor calculated the velocity at which each matrix dropped and compensated accordingly.”
He had an answer for everything, and it terrified her. She bit the inside of her lip. “Your machine might be perfectly designed and calibrated,” she said finally, “but you’re still relying on the accuracy of humans. In your contraption, I can’t see how one would fix a mistakenly placed matrix.” Her voice had changed octave. Had he realized? Could he tell the impact his words were having? Could he see how each one fell like the guillotine that severed pages and marked the end of a print?
The duke sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You are right in that regard.”
She sighed. A reprieve, at last. A moment of clean air.
“The simplest solution would be to run two fingers across aset of keys.” As he leaned over to demonstrate, hair fell across his eyes, and he was no longer the perfectly put-together duke. For a second, he was Peter. Then there was a clatter as a dozen matrices fell into place, filling the rest of the line with gibberish. He stood. “You start the line again. They will just have to remember to remove the faulty text before the piece goes to print.”
His hair was still askew. Under gas lamps instead of chandeliers, the grays looked like worry rather than distinction. It took all her willpower not to brush them aside so that he would turn back into the enemy. “Human memory is fallible.”
He rubbed a too-human hand across the back of his neck. “We are all fallible in many regards, Miss Wright. But with the right processes, the publishers will overcome the issue.”
