The Ghost and the Machine

By Benny Lawrence

It's 1838, and Europe is obsessed with mechanical contraptions, and the Rajah is the height of entertainment as the ultimate chess-playing machine. Kit has toured with the Rajah since the age of ten and knows the secret behind the machine all too well . . . just as she knows that people would rather be fooled than have their illusions stripped away.

 

An eccentric Countess summons the Rajah to her manor house in Vienna for a private engagement. There, Kit meets the inquisitive Eleanor, who tests Kit's ability to tell the difference between truth and illusion . . . Or is it all just another game of chess?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bedazzled Ink Publishing
• Release date: Sep 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201920388

Book preview

The Ghost

And the   Machine

Benny Lawrence

Bink Books

Bedazzled Ink Publishing Company • Fairfield, California

© 2012 Benny Lawrence

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced or transmitted in any means,

electronic or mechanical, without permission in

writing from the publisher.

978-1-934452-89-9 paperback

978-1-934452-90-5 ebook

Cover Design

by

TreeHouse Studio

Bink Books

a division of

Bedazzled Ink Publishing Company

Fairfield, California

http://binkbooks.bedazzledink.com

It’s 1838, Europe is obsessed with mechanical contraptions, and a chess-playing machine known as the Rajah is the height of entertainment. Kit has toured with the Rajah since the age of ten and knows the secret behind the machine all too well . . . just as she knows that people would rather be fooled than have their illusions stripped away. An eccentric Countess summons the Rajah to her manor house in Vienna for a private engagement. There, Kit meets the inquisitive Eleanor, who tests Kit’s ability to tell the difference between truth and illusion . . . Or is it all just another game of chess?

For S.F.R.C., who taught me that stories need directions, villains need reasons, and things can always get better.

The Pawns are the soul of the game.

~ François André Danican Philidor

Part I

Pawn

PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK me what it’s like to travel inside a box.

I don’t like to answer with sweeping statements, because I think it depends on the box. Mine was quite nice, as boxes go.

Don’t ask me about measurements. I didn’t have a ruler up my sleeve. But it was long enough for me to lie at full length, and high enough to let me turn over. It was lined with red cloth, like a jewellery case, and there were slits carved in the lid for airholes. On cold days, I was allowed to have a blanket in there.

The box was strapped to the back of the coach, and that was how we travelled. I was packed away with the rest of the luggage, hidden from any curious eyes. Von Hausen was in the coachman’s seat, her face a thundercloud as she whipped along the four black horses. (We went through a lot of black horses over the years, and they never did have names.)

The inside of the coach was reserved for the brains of our little operation, our guiding light and lord protector. That was Diana Rushmore—Rush, we called her. In wintertime, she spent each journey wrapped in furs, with her feet propped up on hot bricks, nursing a flask of the best brandy. In the summer, it was lemonade laced with gin.

Von Hausen’s bull mastiff, Towser, used to trot alongside the coach in his younger days. That was before he aged into a grave and portly dog whose fastest pace was a waddling walk. When he couldn’t run anymore, Von Hausen began to hoist him into the coachman’s seat next to her. She rigged a sort of harness to make sure he wouldn’t tumble off and go splat on the road, and it worked, mostly.

I didn’t spend all my time in the box. I wouldn’t want to give you that impression. When we were into a long leg of a journey—say, if we were driving overland from Brussels to Cologne—we’d rearrange things once we were on a deserted stretch of road, out of sight of any town. The coach would rumble to a halt. Then the carriage-frame would shudder, which meant Von Hausen was swinging down from her seat. I’d hear her heavy tramp as she stomped around the carriage to the luggage rack, and then the scraping sound as she undid the hidden catches. The lid of the box would pop open, and as I rose, blinking, Von Hausen would hold up her heavy black cloak to shield me. The cloak stayed up for the few seconds it took me to scramble down from the luggage rack, around the side of the coach, and in through the opened door.

When I slid onto the bench next to Rush, her hand would come over to rest heavily on my knee. At intervals, while the carriage rattled along, she would give me a pleased, possessive little squeeze.

There were thick wooden shutters nailed across the windows of the coach. Rush kept it dark in there, dark as the bottom of a boot, and that was for my sake.

All of those elaborate precautions were for my sake—the shutters, the box, the cloak. That was the manner of thing that I was: a creature designed to live in dark and secret spaces. For my own safety, I had to be kept tucked away in the black, away from the bustle of the world. What other choice did Rush have, when a breath of open air or a ray of light was enough to wound me? Left alone under the noonday sun, I would have collapsed, broken apart, and blown away.

I know what that must sound like, but it’s not what you think.

YOU’LL HAVE QUESTIONS for me, of course.

People have asked me more questions in the past couple of years than in the rest of my life all put together. When I feel like being difficult—and most of the time, these days, I do—I give clipped, inadequate answers, accompanied by a flippant little shrug. I’m sure it’s annoying. It’s meant to be annoying. I spent far too much of my life being eager to please, and now I’m past it.

Who am I? Well, I’m me. Where was I born? Paris. When was I born? Eighteen sixteen. How old was I when I left Paris? Ten. Why did I leave Paris? Long story. Where have I been since then? Oh, you know, around. What have I been doing since then? This and that.

Why am I so angry?

(I’ve been told that when someone asks this question, my eyes glint in a dangerous sort of way.)

I’m angry because it’s the best way to get people’s attention. Nothing else seems to do the trick. Human beings, those shy, retiring things, will go to absurd lengths to avoid noticing anything that might complicate their lives. They won’t just cross the street to avoid a beaten man, they’ll pretend he’s a bundle of rags or a dead dog. Unless you’re angry—unless you’re making a scene, as Rush would put it—people look straight through you, clear out to the other side.

If I could change one thing, out of everything that happened, it would be this: I wish I’d learned how to make scenes earlier in my life. I wish I’d learned how to force people to notice me. If I could have done that, then maybe . . .

Maybe what? Maybe I could have prevented the murder? I don’t believe that, not really. Looking back, I can see how inevitable the whole thing was. During that last week, events were rushing single-mindedly in one direction, like water running downhill. It was all one unbroken chain of circumstance, from the moment that the carriage pulled up outside the manor, right up to the second the Countess unlocked the door to the red room and beckoned me inside.

I don’t think there’s anything I could have done which would have altered the outcome one iota. And in particular, I doubt I could have done anything which would have kept her alive. But it’s impossible not to think about what could have been different, if only I . . .

I’m getting ahead of myself. I do that sometimes.

How am I doing these days?

Fine, I suppose. Considering.

How did all this happen?

It’s complicated. You might want to start by asking how it all began.

How did it all begin?

It began with a game of chess.

BUT WHEN DID it begin?

In a way, everything started in 1838. That was the year when Rush took me to Vienna, to perform for the Countess.

But in another way, and a more important one, my story begins in 1819. I was three years old then, so I wasn’t paying much attention to world events, but interesting things were going on around me. John Franklin was groping his way along the coast of Canada, hunting for the Northwest Passage. King George IV was on the throne of England, eating everything he could lay his pudgy hands on. The newly united American colonies were facing their first major financial crisis. And a miraculous machine known as the Turk was being exhibited in London.

Have you heard of the Turk? Perhaps not, though the Turk was still touring Europe not so very long ago. People are apt to forget the things that used to puzzle and delight them. The Turk was an amusing contraption, but that’s all it was: a contraption, something in between a wind-up toy and a conjuring trick. Nowadays, people have gone on to new forms of entertainment, like dime novels and opium, leaving the Turk to be remembered mainly by amateur detectives and lovers of chess.

What was the Turk? you ask, and even that’s a complicated question. What the Turk was and what it seemed to be were two different things. It seemed to be a machine that could play chess. This was what it looked like: a life-size mechanical man, carved from wood and dressed in the robes of an Oriental sorcerer, his brown ridged face shiny with varnish. The figure was seated at a wooden cabinet, two-and-a-half feet high, that acted as a table. On top of the cabinet sat an ivory chessboard. The cabinet had two doors in the front. Before each game, a showman would open the doors to reveal two cramped spaces, half full of clockwork.

When challenged to a game, the mechanical man would judder to life. Its head swung from side to side as it studied the board. Each time the Turk’s opponent made a move, the Turk would respond: one wooden hand would swing out, clasp a chessman between wooden fingers, and move it to a new square. All the while, clockwork gears click-clacked and groaned in the cabinet’s belly.

That wasn’t all the Turk could do. It could nod when it was pleased with itself, shake its head in a long-suffering way if its opponent did something stupid, and sweep all the pieces from the board in a fit of pique if somebody tried to cheat. It could even pronounce the word Check, in a grunting, gravelly voice.

And here’s the important thing. The Turk usually won. Not always—it had its off days. It lost to the great immortal Philidor in a match at the Café de la Regence, but Philidor was pretty much a god, so that was only natural. Most of the Turk’s other opponents crawled away from the board after the game, crushed and humiliated.

How was this possible? How could a clockwork machine outthink the best players of the age? How could a wooden automaton scheme and plan and reason? That was the question, and a lot of clever heads grappled with it without getting anywhere particularly. Some people believed that the showman moved the Turk’s hand by pulling invisible strings. Others argued, sort of vaguely, that it must all be done by magnets. Some went to the other extreme and screeched to anyone who would listen that the thing ran on black magic, powered by a ghost, a poltergeist, or maybe just Satan.

The most popular theory was that the Turk was controlled by a human operator hidden inside. Problem was, this theory spawned a dozen unanswerable questions. How could the operator stay concealed when the showman opened up the cabinet to expose the machine’s clockwork innards? How could the operator, shut up in the cabinet, see the chessboard on the cabinet’s top? How could he move the Turk’s arm with any accuracy? And even if those problems were solved, how could a full-grown man fit inside the cabinet, along with the mess of clockwork gears? People got around that last problem by suggesting that the operator was a dwarf . . . or a legless man . . . or maybe a child.

The thousands of people who saw the Turk in London all had their own theories. And all of them were wrong, except for one.

When the Turk played its first opponent at No. 4, Spring Gardens, Diana Rushmore had a front-row seat. She returned to the exhibition every night for a week, her eyes slitted and calculating as she watched the automaton play. The other members of the audience staggered out of the hall after each game, laughing in total bewilderment, guessing, and speculating. Not Rush. Rush never guessed, and she thought it was beneath her to speculate. When Rush wanted a secret, she plucked it out like a pair of tweezers. She took apart the mystery of the Turk as if she was dissecting a corpse. After three performances, she had everything she needed.

So she headed back home, back to the cheap room she had rented on Broad Street. She spent the better part of a day drawing diagrams and jotting down calculations. Then she got busy, building a chess-playing machine of her own.

She named it the Rajah. And that’s where I come in.

IT WAS A stinking hot summer in 1838. The guesthouse where we stopped on the road to Vienna felt like a bread oven, even in the twilight cool.

As usual, I had been carried up to our hotel room, still inside my box. It was Von Hausen who did the carrying—Von Hausen and two hefty footmen, whom Rush tipped generously so they wouldn’t ask any nosy questions.

There were a few tense moments when a maidservant came in to make up the beds (this being a hotel of a slightly luxurious stripe). But we were used to that kind of emergency, and we reacted in time. An instant after the maid’s tentative knock, I was buried beneath a pile of cushions on the settee. I stayed there for the ten minutes until the maid left, breathing shakily through my half-open mouth.

This was rule one: no one was allowed to see me, except for Rush, Von Hausen, and Towser. There were twelve rules in all. Some were more difficult than others to live by, but it was rule one that caused the most problems and required the most planning.

Now the door of our hotel room was safely locked and bolted, with our trunks piled against it for good measure, and we were making our supper off of a pair of roast fowl and a loaf of bread, with some celery and cheese to follow. Rush weighed my portions of chicken and bread before we ate, on a little pair of letter scales, which she kept for that purpose. Then she sat back and snapped open her newspaper.

While she read, I focused on my supper. One didn’t interrupt Rush. That was rule number three.

Before long, she lowered the paper and smiled at me over the pages, all sly delight. Do you want to hear something wonderful, Kit?

I nodded yes. Under the circumstances, it was pretty clear that yes was the only acceptable answer.

She cleared her throat. This was written by one of the newspapermen who came to the last performance. He wore an absolutely absurd red cravat—not that you would have seen that, of course. And his breath was foul. But he must have had a good time. He writes, ‘This week I, with select other gentlemen of Munich, was so fortunate as to be admitted to a private exhibition of the RAJAH, the magnificent chess-playing machine, invention of the ingenious Miss Diana Rushmore.’ Rush paused there, tasting the words, before she adjusted her spectacles and continued. ‘The Rajah played five matches against players admitted to have few rivals in France, and none in Germany. In each match, though the Rajah gave the advantage of a pawn and the move to its enemy, the wooden man was victorious. Indeed, I am informed that the Rajah is all but unconquered. In this respect, Ms. Rushmore’s machine must be held far superior to that other chess-playing automaton, the TURK of Johannes Maelzel, which in recent years has so often been defeated.’

Rush stopped reading there, a frown on her face in spite of the praise. I knew why. She was annoyed that the article mentioned the Turk at all. Rush used to say that it was silly to compare the Rajah and the Turk. The Turk, she claimed, was just a primitive example of the art which, in the Rajah, was perfected. This was tripe, more or less. So far as I could make out, there were only two differences between the Rajah and the Turk. First, the Rajah was smaller. Second, the Rajah had a little red jewel sewn to the front of its turban.

I think that last part was unnecessary, Rush said aloud. Still, the rest of the article is quite good, don’t you think, Kit? Kit? Are you listening?

I was, I was, but I had heard Rush read out this kind of thing at least fifty thousand times before, so it was hard to summon any genuine excitement. Besides, I was preoccupied by something more interesting: the dish which held the remnants of the carved fowl.

I want more chicken, I announced.

Good for you, Rush murmured, flipping pages. It’s important to have goals.

Can I have more chicken?

It’s ‘May I?’ And no, you may not.

But . . .

You know the rule.

She meant rule number six, which was this: Rush had to approve everything I ate. This was one of the more wearisome rules, as Rush could be quite strict about it. She always said she was sorry but in our line of work, just how the hell would we manage if I started to put on weight?

You’ve eaten too much today already, Rush went on. I let you have bread and honey for breakfast, instead of God’s honest porridge. I shouldn’t have allowed it, but you wheedled so hard. I suppose it’s to be expected. Greedy heathen Frenchwomen like you would eat nothing but jam and macaroons, given the opportunity.

She gave me a sweet and tolerant smile, to let me know that she forgave me for my greed and my heathenism, though not necessarily for my Frenchness. Then she turned her attention back to the paper.

Caroline Von Hausen had been silent throughout this exchange, hunched over the card table as she picked at her food. Every so often, she passed a bit of chicken down to Towser, who lay beneath the table with his head resting on her feet. Unlike me, Von Hausen was allowed to eat as much as she wanted—but she didn’t, preferring to live almost entirely on liquid. For days on end, nothing went into her mouth but beer or wine or schnapps or sherry.

It seemed to be taking its toll, too. When I first met Von Hausen, she was the colour of a china doll: white skin, flaxen hair, pink cheeks, eyes blue as a robin’s egg. Now she was yellow all over, her face sallow and ill-looking, with a deep orange flush in both eyes. A smell hung around her that I can only describe as being halfway between varnish and overripe fruit. It was almost as if she was rotting. Though she ate so little, her belly seemed bloated; it hung, soft and bulgy, over the waistband of her trousers.

I say trousers because Von Hausen usually wore men’s clothes when we were travelling. Rush always said that women were perfectly capable of travelling without a male escort, but it was best to at least pretend that we had one, to avoid all those tedious explanations and excuses. Von Hausen was tall and big-shouldered, so, with the proper clothes on and her hair tied back, she looked enough like a man to get by. At least from a distance. Rush said it was economical to use Von Hausen that way, and it wasn’t as if she was good for much else.

Gnawing on a piece of celery I didn’t want, I studied Von Hausen sidelong. She was getting worse, there was no doubt about it. If she went even a day without liquor, she woke up during the night with screaming horrors. And her hands shook almost constantly.

I wondered whether she would die. The prospect didn’t frighten me, exactly. The two of us were not friends. Still—still, it would be very strange if she wasn’t around any longer.

Rush had bought me when I was ten. Or, if you want to get really technical about it, she had won me in a game of cards. Same difference. Von Hausen had been there on that jumbled confusing day, and she’d been there every day of the twelve years since. It was hard to imagine what the world would be like if Von Hausen was out of it, but sometimes I thought it would be much improved.

Rush read the newspaper article three times more, then slipped her spring-loaded knife from her sleeve. Caroline, my scrapbook, she ordered.

Von Hausen pushed her chair back and lumbered away to find the book. I rested my chin on my hands and watched Rush snap out the knife. That thing used to fascinate me when I was younger. There was a button you pressed and it made a spring snap tight and then the blade sprang out of the handle. The handle itself was inlaid with red tortoiseshell. Rush had designed and crafted it herself, and she kept it sharp with a little whetstone that she kept in her other sleeve. The blade snicked cleanly through the newsprint, cutting out the newspaper article in three swift strokes.

Elbows off the table, Kit, Rush warned me, clicking the knife shut.

I dropped my elbows immediately. The twelve rules didn’t say anything about table manners, but annoying Rush was always a bad move, tactically speaking.

Von Hausen stumped back with the scrapbook and dumped it on the table. It was already thick with clippings. Reviews and raves about the Rajah’s performances all over Europe. Theories and speculations about how the chess-playing machine worked. Diagrams that showed how an amputee or a midget might be able to fit inside the cabinet. Words like astonishing, astounding, brilliant, genius, marvel. Rush’s favourite words.

I eyed the scrapbook, idly, as I finished my celery. I could remember when that scrapbook had only a few pages. We had been at this for a long, long time.

Rush snapped her fingers at Von Hausen without looking up. Get some paste, Caroline. And move a little more quickly, if you wouldn’t mind. It’s almost seven o’clock.

(Seven o’clock was my bedtime, except on the nights that the Rajah was performing, or the nights when Rush needed me. Rule number nine.)

Von Hausen shuffled away to make the paste. Rush skimmed the article one more time and gave a little hum of satisfaction. This is a good one. This should help me to line up more bookings in Germany. I’m very pleased, Kit. You were at your best, that night in Munich. Truly, you were superb.

Thank you, I said, but my attention was still mainly fixed on