Steam and Shadows

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. The brass gears clicked in perfect rhythm as Evangeline Hartwell adjusted the delicate escapement mechanism, her fingers moving with the practiced precision of someone who had spent countless hours among the intricate workings of timepieces. The gaslight flickered against the workshop's grimy windows, casting dancing shadows across the cluttered workbench where springs, screws, and half-assembled clockwork lay scattered like the remnants of mechanical dreams. At nineteen, Evangeline possessed an unusual gift for understanding the language of gears and springs that her father, Master Clockmaker Theodore Hartwell, had reluctantly acknowledged but never quite approved of. In the year 1887, young ladies of even modest means were expected to concern themselves with embroidery and piano lessons, not the masculine pursuits of engineering and mechanical innovation. Yet here she sat in the workshop behind their modest Bloomsbury residence, her dark hair pinned back severely and her practical brown dress protected by a leather apron stained with oil and metal polish. The bell above the shop door chimed, its clear tone cutting through the mechanical symphony of ticking timepieces that filled their establishment. Evangeline glanced up from her work, expecting to see her father returning from his weekly visit to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, where he maintained the precision chronometers that governed London's temporal heartbeat. Instead, a tall figure in an elegant charcoal coat stood silhouetted against the grey October afternoon, his presence somehow commanding attention despite his apparent effort to remain inconspicuous.