Curiosity (13 page)

W
E COULDN'T LET MAELZEL KNOW
about the back brace, of course. He would have accused us of neglecting our other tasks. But in truth, there weren't many other tasks; the automata were all performing splendidly and, I gathered, attracting record crowds. Jacques kept a cloth handy and, when Maelzel happened to pay us a visit, he spread it over the curious device.

Though Jacques's personality left a lot to be desired, no one could fault his skill as a craftsman. It took us only a few days to finish the brace, and when he strapped it on me, it fit perfectly. I couldn't help laughing, imagining how I must look—like some bizarre meld of human and machine.

It was more than just a metal frame with straps and padding; Jacques had made it flexible and had attached to it a small metal box full of gears and springs. When turned, one tooth at a time, the mechanism straightened the frame by slow degrees, pulling backward on the clamps that fit over my shoulders. Ever since I arrived here, I'd been little more than a clockwork boy, expected to function smoothly and without complaint. Now I was actually being equipped with gears.

“If this is to do any good,” said Jacques, “you must wear it constantly.”

“Even when I sleep?”

He nodded. “Take it off only when you operate the Turk.”

“What if Maelzel sees it?”

Jacques shrugged. “There is nothing he can do about it now.”

Though I suspected he wouldn't want my thanks, I tried anyway.
“Merci bien.”

He gave a dismissive grunt. “You will not be so grateful when you have worn that for a few days.”

My back had always pained me a certain amount, especially when I sat bent over a book or over the chessboard too long. Now, with the brace pulling at it, my spine ached continually. I could more or less ignore the pain during the day, when I was busy in the workshop, but it was difficult to sleep at night, especially since I could lie with relative comfort in only one position—on my stomach.

The brace had one unexpected benefit, though; I found that I could suddenly breathe more easily. My lungs had always been weak, and I know now that it was partly due to my slumped posture. What's more, my stomach felt less cramped and queasy; my appetite improved so dramatically that, instead of
Bébé
, Jacques began calling me
Porcelet
—piglet.

Every few days, just when the pain began to subside a little, he turned the gears a notch, tightening the frame and testing my endurance. The only respite I got was the time I spent operating the Turk. Ironically, the straighter my back became, the harder it was to fold myself up inside the cabinet.

It was nearly a week before Maelzel visited the workshop and saw me decked out in my corset of leather and metal. He didn't seem to mind that we'd been using his time to work on a project of our own. In fact, he behaved less like a boss than like a fellow craftsman, openly admiring Jacques's handiwork and minutely examining the mechanics of it. He ignored my presence completely; I felt more than ever like one of his automata.

“So,” he said, “you turn the gears and it straightens the frame, eh?”

“
Oui
,” said Jacques. “You use this handle.”

Maelzel took the brass crank from him and inserted it in the side of the little gearbox. “Very neatly done,” he said. And then he abruptly turned the handle—not just one notch, but a half a dozen at least. My spine felt as though it were being shattered. I let out a howl of pain and protest.

“Oh, dear,” said Maelzel, calmly. “I must have overdone it.”

Jacques lurched toward me and pushed the lever that released the gears. I slumped forward, gasping. Though Maelzel made an apology of sorts, I knew very well that it wasn't genuine, that he'd done the deed deliberately. It was his way of reminding me that, though I'd defied him once and won, he could still bend me to his will—quite literally.

As he was leaving, he turned back to say, “I hope you made the boy pay for the materials you used.”

“The device was my idea,” said Jacques, “not his. And I was just doing what I always do—repairing the machinery.”

Though I'd done what I could to help out my father, I still worried about him. He'd said I could return in a couple of weeks, when there was no risk of my catching the cholera. Two weeks had passed, and I still had no one to accompany me to the prison; I'd have to risk it alone.

I waited until the night soil men came to clean out our earth closet, then repeated my trick of jamming the access door and spreading a thick layer of sawdust to crawl on. It was difficult to disentangle myself from the torture rack, but I couldn't ask Jacques for help, and I certainly couldn't squeeze through the toilet hole while wearing it. With a bit of painful squirming, I managed to escape from the brace, and then from the building.

As I made my stealthy way down Market Street, I spied only one night watchman, and he paid no attention to me; he was busy chasing off the vagrants who made beds out of the benches in the public market. When I neared Arch Street Prison, I heard faint footfalls behind me; I slipped into a dark doorway and looked back the way I had come, expecting to see either a watchman or a thief. Instead, I saw the Woman in Black.

She'd stopped walking and was just standing on the street corner, glancing this way and that, as though searching for someone. I had the distinct feeling that the person she was looking for was me. I couldn't imagine why. But neither could I dismiss this as just another coincidence.

I stayed in the shadows until she gave up and disappeared down 13th Street. Whoever she was, she must be either very brave or very foolish to wander about the streets alone at this hour. But in truth she probably had little to fear. Any ruffian who crossed her path would assume she was demented, and wouldn't bother her.

The night keeper at the prison recognized me at once. “You're Reverend Goodspeed's son,” he said. “I reckon you've come for his effects.”

“His effects?”

“There ain't much, I'm afraid. He sold most every-thing at one time or another, even his spectacles and his pocket watch.” The keeper handed me a small parcel wrapped in paper. “That's all I saw that might be worth saving. 'Tis that notebook he was always writing in.”

I couldn't seem to make any sense of the man's words. Why would he be giving me my father's notebook? “Can't I see him?”

“See him?” echoed the keeper, sounding as baffled as I was. Then he put a hand to his head, as though he'd been struck. “Oh, thunderation. Nobody's told you, have they?”

“Told me what?”

“I'm dreadful sorry to have to be the one.” He placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. “The Reverend has been in the ground for nearly a week now, son. The contagion took him.”

I don't know how I made it back to Masonic Hall, or whether I encountered anyone on the way. I must have somehow avoided both the night watch and the night prowlers. A whole gang of thieves might have set upon me, and I would scarcely have known or cared, I was so dazed and distracted.

As bad as my situation had been these past months, I'd always held in my heart the belief that somehow I'd release my father from his debt and from his stone cell and find Fiona, and we'd reclaim that idyllic life we had lost, or something like it—perhaps not at the Parsonage, but somewhere quiet and comfortable and safe.

That hope had abandoned me, now, just as my father had, and my mother and Fiona and even Mulhouse. There was no one in the world I could trust, no one who cared about me or valued me for myself, only people who cared about my freakish skill at chess and the money they could make from it.

I'm not sure why I went back to the workshop at all. I'd only taken the job in order to earn the money to free my father. Well, he was free now—in the words of his favorite poem, “free from every anxious thought, from worldly hope and fear.”

I suppose I returned simply because I had nowhere else to go. Despite all I'd suffered at the hands of Maelzel and Jacques, I was better off there than in the House of Refuge, winding bobbins and being tormented by the big boys.

That thought didn't occur to me at the time, though, at least not consciously. I didn't think about much at all, not even chess. I just lay on my sack of shavings, staring senselessly at the fly-specked ceiling. I didn't bother to strap on the back brace; I just couldn't see the point of it, or of anything else.

When the sun came up and Jacques tried to rouse me, I didn't respond. He shook my arm a few times, then gave up and just let me lie there. As performance time approached, and I'd still made no move or sound, he left the room and returned with Maelzel. After bending over and glaring at me for moment, the German said, “The boy looks well enough to me—at least as well as he ever looks. I expect he is only feigning illness, in order to avoid working.” He prodded me in the ribs with one shiny shoe. “Get up, boy. I am not paying you good money to lie there and daydream.”

I cared no more about money than I did about back braces or food or chess. I didn't even care whether or not he beat me. Since I seemed to feel nothing, I doubted that I'd even notice the blows. But you know, they say that, even in a mesmeric trance, people never lose themselves entirely. There's some essential part of us that won't give up control, that keeps us from, say, murdering someone just because the mesmerist commands us to.

And the truth was, underneath all that apathy, that near-paralysis of my emotions, I
did
feel something. Not sadness; that would come later. And not self-pity or despair; I'd never felt those, not even when things looked their worst. No, it was the same feeling that allowed me to cope with all the troubles that had befallen me so far. What I felt was stubbornness.

Though the thought of a beating didn't bother me, the thought of being
beaten
—in the non-physical sense—did. I could have defied Maelzel just by lying there and refusing to work, of course. But that would have put me in the same league with those infuriating chess players who spend an hour mulling over a single move—reasoning, I suppose, that if they don't play, they can't lose. If I wanted to prove my worth—to Maelzel, to the world, to myself—I couldn't do it lying on my back and staring into space; I needed to get back in the game.

Unlike the church deacons who had condemned my father without ever reading his book, I'd struggled through all four hundred pages of
The Development of Species
. It seemed to me that the basic idea behind all those words was really pretty simple:
In nature, it's the strongest and healthiest members of a species that survive and pass their traits on to the next generation.

I'd always taken that to mean
physically
the strongest. But I've come to realize that there are different sorts of strength. Sometimes it's the Davids who survive, not the Goliaths, the puny humans who flourish and the great mammoths who die out. My father had always regarded me as weak and sickly, like my mother, and fated to die young. But he was only seeing my frail, bent body, and not my spirit.