Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion by Jonathan L. Howard, Deborah Walker, Cheryl Morgan, Andy Bigwood, Christine Morgan, Myfanwy Rodman

shuttling backwards and forwards, carrying sugar and slaves and rum to and from the port, blowing steam from their funnels, paddle-wheels churning. They were steel and brass, riveted, like her. Only strong, and free.
     
    “Tell him I don’t want to see him.”
     
    “He’s very insistent.” But the nurse bobbed her head and withdrew. She could never look Angela right in the eye.
     
    Howard would come up anyway, whether Angela wanted to see him or not. She sighed, smoothing her crinoline with her right claw, snagging the fabric and snipping a hole. The right claw was smaller than the left; they had done that last, when their technique was improving, but it was still clumsy, creaking and hissing when she opened and closed it, and it was hard to know how much pressure to apply to cups and glasses before they shattered.
     
    In the two months since she left the hospital at Frenchay she had learned to do many things she thought would be impossible. Walking, swinging out her heavy jointed legs at the hips in a slow, straddling stride that left footprints three inches deep in the soft mud of the garden. Eating solid food, although she tried not to eat much because the disposal of waste through a series of tubes and bags was embarrassing and messy, and she had to have someone help her because her clawed hands tore through the sanitary linen like tissue paper. This morning she had managed to brush what was left of her hair, trying to conceal the metal plate that Doctor Charles told her was the only thing keeping her brains inside her skull.
     
    Actually, yes, let Howard see her like this. He had brought her to this low, and the scandal if he left her would blacken his name from here to Bath. She sat, carefully, in the reinforced chair by the window that groaned under the extra weight, making sure the sun was behind her so that he would have to squint, and waited for his footsteps on the stairs.
     
    The door swung open. He had lost weight, and hair, in the last six months, his tan skin drawn back over his cheekbones. He still wore his moustache in two pencil thin lines, one side, infuriatingly as ever, a trifle higher than the other. He twisted his top hat in his fingers, and cleared his throat. “Angela?”
     
    “Howard.” Her voice was metallic. Under the fresh scar on her throat was an artificial voicebox. She had lost hers six weeks ago, to infection, but it was remarkable what the doctors could do. They were pioneers, and she was their new frontier. That was what Doctor Charles kept telling her, anyway. When she spoke, puffs of steam issued from the sides of her mouth, the way they did from her joints when she moved. Charles assured her it was just compressed air, shifting the pistons in her limbs, but she always thought of it as steam.
     
    “My god! What have they done to you?” He swept into the room and dropped to his knees in front of her, reaching for a hand that wasn’t there. Behind him, in the doorway, Angela could see the nurse lurking with her hand pressed to her mouth. She glared, and the little woman vanished, closing the door behind her.
     
    “She’s gone. You don’t have to pretend to be solicitous any more, Howard.”
     
    He straightened at once, the false smile falling away to leave his habitual sneer. “You stupid woman! What did you jump off a bridge for?”
     
    “You gave me a sickness, from your… from your Rhodesian whore!”
     
    He stepped back, a wary look in his eyes. She never defied him. Always quiet, always willing. Even after she had fallen down the stairs carrying Charlotte and he had flung a bandage at her as he stepped over her on his way to the Seven Stars. Even after Charlotte had died four months later in St Michaels, of scarlet fever. Even after the Frenchman’s Condition condemned her to slow death. But she was different now. A changed woman.
     
    “Can you walk?”
     
    “I can. I’m not going to win any races, but I can get about.”
     
    Howard came closer, his