The Ill-Fated Fortunes of a Steampunk Madam III: Helpless

For several moments, as Caster cleared the tea, Mrs. Leonard sat still and quiet in her chair. Her hands were folded neatly on the table, and she watched with blank intent as the invisible process of obvious aging continued to reflect in those hands.

Take, for example, her fingers. Once slender and elegant, they had been capable of such tiny stitching and intricate embroidery, able to knit for hours on end, to so deftly braid her daughters' hair. Now, they were knobby with arthritis and looked like crepe-shrouded bones. They ached and they fumbled and they disappointed.

"Aging is the ultimate expression of helplessness." The words poured out of her, as sad and uncontrollable as tears. "I don't see it so much in my face, you know. But it's there in my hands. My weak, helpless hands. It's in how they look, and in the things they can no longer do."

Mrs. Leonard lifted her hands, and observed them across their backs and their palms. She watched them shake softly, watched the light illuminate her skin as though she were no more substantial than the sheer curtains billowing in the reading room's open windows. She traced the inky trails of veins as they rode across her tendons and roamed the topography of her deeply lined palms.

"In many ways it's like becoming a child again," she said, her tone a mangled wreck of anger, accusation, and helpless frustration. "All the things you cannot do, all the things you should not do, all the things you mustn't do. You age, and they slowly strip from you all of the freedoms and liberties that you spent a childhood longing for and a lifetime abusing." Her tone switched, suddenly, to one of sharp mockery. "Nana, you shouldn't be driving at your age. Nana, you can't take flying lessons at your age. Nana, you mustn't be experimenting in the lab at your age! Well, that's all poppycock, I say!" And she sprang to her feet with the energy of her proclamation, as if she meant to demonstrate that her age was nothing to bother her.

Or, rather, she meant to. But her aged knees and aged hips were not up to the task of springing up from a chair. Nor was her equally aged balance as keen as it was in her youth. She bumped her shin against the leg of the table and immediately a lurid purple bruise formed beneath her tissue-fine skin. The tears that had been welling up in her always watery blue eyes spilled over, then, as she saw the look on Madam Fiona's face and felt like the doddering, helpless old woman that she feared she truly was.

"Mrs. Leonard," Mrs. Leonard said, in a soft voice that quivered with embarrassment and shame. "You mustn't get so excited...at your age."

She slumped back in her chair, covered her face with her hands, and wept like a helpless child.