Curiosity (23 page)

“All right. You don't have to answer all those other questions, just this one. Do you . . . do you still have those nightmares?”

An even longer pause.
Oui.

“I'm sorry to hear that. You know, the last time I saw you, I tried to thank you. I don't think you were listening then. But now you have no choice, do you? Thank you for protecting me, and for building the back brace, and I hope you have a good life.
Au revoir
.” I shook the Turk's mechanical hand and walked off without waiting for a reply; I knew there wouldn't be one.

O
H, DEAR. I'M NOT DOING SUCH A
good job of weaving my tale, am I? Though I meant that to be the final chapter, I realize now that I've left a few loose ends. Well, I did warn you that I wasn't an accomplished storyteller.

For one thing, I still haven't gotten around to telling you what became of Virginia Clemm—or Virginia Poe, I should call her, for she did marry her now-famous cousin. There's a good reason why I've been avoiding the topic: her fate is a sad one, and I'd just as soon not dwell on it. But it would be unfair to you, the reader, to ignore it altogether.

For all his faults, Mr. Poe was a devoted husband; by all accounts he and his young bride were quite happy, except for having no money. But after they moved back to Philadelphia in 1837, Virginia became ill with consumption—tuberculosis, to use the more modern term—and, at the tender age of twenty-four, she died.

You may also be curious to know about Fiona—the nanny, I mean, not the automaton—and about Ezra, my friend from the House of Refuge. You recall the Mr. Peach I mentioned, who frequented the Chess Club? Well, he hired Fiona to work in his shop; a year later, to everyone's surprise—perhaps even his—he married her.

As for Ezra, he lived up to his promise and his nickname by escaping yet again—though not by hot-air balloon, as I imagined. He built a sort of ladder out of yarn and kindling wood and climbed over the wall. Mr. Dunn was so impressed with the boy's cleverness and determination that he made Ezra an apprentice clerk.

There's one more character whose fate I suppose I must reveal, though it's nearly as tragic as poor Virginia's.

I may have implied that, when Mr. Dunn moved his Chinese Museum to London, he took all his exhibits with him, including Otto—or the Swami, as he was now known. I wish that were true. But the fact is that, after nearly three-quarters of a century of celebrating and challenging and speculating about the Turk, the public had lost interest in him. So many bona fide mechanical marvels had come upon the scene lately—the telegraph, the sewing machine, the steam locomotive, the electric motor—and they were actually useful and practical. A machine that could play chess or tell fortunes seemed somehow frivolous, little more than an especially clever toy.

Though I didn't know it at the time, Mr. Dunn left the Turk behind, to gather dust and mold in a back room of the museum building. With its Oriental exhibits gone, the building's main hall was hired out for concerts and lectures and political conventions and flower shows and other such mundane events.

I didn't learn Otto's whereabouts until a full decade later. My mother and I spent much of that time in Europe, traveling from one tournament to another; I faced some of the world's best players and, in all modesty, acquitted myself pretty well. By 1854, we were back in Philadelphia, where I was hired by the Chess Club to be their resident chess master.

As luck would have it, our old friend Mr. Peach once again provided me with information about the Turk. He had recently made an inspection tour of the old museum building, with an eye to purchasing it, and had discovered Otto languishing in one of the storage rooms.

“How did he look?” I asked.

“Well,” said Mr. Peach, “it was quite dark in that back room, so I wheeled him out into the main hall, where the light was better. I must say, he looked rather shabby and forlorn. The mice had made a nest in his turban.”

I couldn't bear to think of my clockwork comrade sitting there, useless and abandoned; I knew all too well what that felt like. I made up my mind that I would contact the building's owner as soon as possible and offer to buy the automaton.

I never got the chance. The following day was the Fourth of July—a time when, in the city that calls itself the Birthplace of America, the machinery of business and commerce grinds to a halt, to make way for blaring brass bands and dwindling ranks of weary-looking war veterans and throngs of cheering flag-wavers. But the ones who relish the holiday most are the pyromaniacs—and at that time they numbered in the thousands, all of them equipped with devices that flamed and sparkled and exploded.

By the morning of the Fifth, the city's streets looked like a battleground where two enemy forces had met, armed only with Crowns of Jupiter and Stars of Columbia. You might think that, after an entire day of this, the citizens of Philadelphia would have been fed up with fireworks. And most undoubtedly were, but when evening came there were still scattered booms and bangs in every neighborhood.

The noise put me on edge and made it hard to sleep. In my half-awake state, I kept imagining that I was hearing artillery fire, the sort that must have surrounded Jacques at Trocadero, and at any moment a shell might rip through the roof and blow some part of me away.

Just when things seemed to have settled down, there was another disturbing sound—the tolling of church bells. Not the relaxed, rhythmic peal that summons you to church on Sundays, but the urgent clanging that signals a fire. Through my open window, I heard running feet and panicky voices shouting: “Where is it?”

“The National Theatre, someone said!”

The theatre lay right next door to the museum building where Otto was imprisoned. I sprang out of bed and into my clothing. In the hallway, my mother was emerging from her room, wrapping a robe around her. I rushed past her, ignoring her cry of “What's happening?” and burst out the front door—and was very nearly run down by a fire engine hauled by four burly smoke eaters, eager to be first on the scene and get the glory. Even though they were winded, they let out great guffaws, as though it were all a huge lark and running me over would only have added to the fun. They were followed by four more men pulling the hose cart.

When I reached the site of the conflagration, the firemen, instead of battling the fire, were battling a rival hose company for the right to hook up to the nearest fireplug. Meanwhile, the National Theatre was blazing away, throwing off brands that threatened to ignite the buildings around it. At last, the firemen began manning their seesaw-like pumper. I detoured around them and made for the old museum building, which was separated from the theatre only by a narrow alleyway.

The alley was already filled with burning debris, and the flames had begun to swarm up the wall of the museum. Somewhere on the other side of that wall sat the Turk, unable to do a thing to save himself. I glanced desperately around, looking for some way of breaking into the building. A few yards away, a young smoke eater was leaning on his fire ax, grinning, as though this were just another fireworks display.

I strode over to him. “I need your help, my friend! There's someone inside the museum!”

The fellow scowled, as if my interruption were spoiling the show. “That building there?”

“Yes! Can you break down the door?”

“If you reckon it's necessary. I don't care to be arrested for destroying property.”

“It'll be destroyed in any case, won't it?” I gestured toward the museum's roof, which was now ablaze.

Despite my attempts to hurry him, the fireman hacked at the door in such a leisurely way that, by the time we were inside, a section of the roof had caved in, and the ceiling of the main hall was on fire. In the light from the flames, I could barely make out the Turk at the far end of the smoky room.

“Why's he just sitting there?” demanded the firefighter. “Why don't he make a run for it?”

“He can't walk! We'll have to help him!” I scrambled to the Turk's side and, grabbing hold of the cabinet, started pushing it toward the door. The young smoke eater, meanwhile, just stood there, gaping, obviously wondering what to make of the machine. Before I got halfway to the door, a blazing rafter descended from the ceiling. It crashed into one side of the cabinet and sent me sprawling.

The fireman rushed forward at last and yanked me to my feet. “It's no good!” he shouted, between bouts of coughing. “We got to get out of here!”

“We can't leave the Turk!”

“It ain't a real person! We are!” He seized the back of my shirt and propelled me, stumbling and choking, toward the door.

Once we were outside, I broke away from his grasp. Taking several lungfuls of fresh air, I turned and peered into the interior of the hall. Though the cabinet was aflame and the ermine-trimmed robe had begun to smoulder, the Turk was still sitting upright, his fierce eyes glaring at me accusingly, as if astonished that I would leave him there, at the mercy of the flames. Clearly he didn't share my father's belief that we should accept with good grace whatever befalls us.

And then, slowly, his expression began to change, to one of profound sadness. His mouth went slack, his mustache drooped, great tears streamed down his cheeks—or so it appeared. It took me a moment to realize what was really happening: the wax from which Otto's face was fashioned had started to melt. A patch of it sloughed off, then another, revealing bit by bit what lay beneath the wax—something white and smooth, like bone; in fact, if I hadn't known better, I might have mistaken it for a human skull.

And if I hadn't known better, I might have imagined that the faint sound I was hearing, through the crackle of the flames and the crash of falling rafters, was a human voice. It wasn't, of course; it was only the Turk's mechanical voice box, activated by the hot air that rose from the burning cabinet and up through the chimney of his hollow chest. It was trying to form the words it had been designed to utter:
Échec et mat
. But the heat had warped the delicate mechanism, and instead the Turk, as he perished, seemed to be sighing,
Ah, Jacques, c'est moi. Ah, Jacques, c'est moi.

M
OST OF MY HISTORICAL NOVELS
have featured one or more actual, well-known personages from the past. This book is no exception. Edgar Allan Poe makes an appearance, of course, and P. T. Barnum has a cameo role. What you may not realize is that I've included an even more famous historical figure—the Turk. Though he's more or less unknown today, for nearly two centuries he was a worldwide celebrity.

You've probably never heard of Johann Nepomuk Maelzel before, either, but he was a celebrated character in his own right, not only as the man who displayed the Turk, but as the inventor of a device essential to many generations of musicians—the metronome. Well, actually, he didn't invent it so much as steal the design from another inventor. He also tried to claim credit for Beethoven's composition
Wellington's Victory
.

Though he clearly wasn't the most admirable of men, Maelzel wasn't quite as unpleasant as I've portrayed him. His contemporaries describe him as “polite” and “amiable,” the “prince of entertainers.” But for the purposes of the story, I've given him a darker side.

I've made Mr. Poe a bit more of a scoundrel than he was in real life, for the same reason; though he was moody and eccentric and had a drinking problem, he probably wasn't unscrupulous. He did write an exposé of the Turk, but it wasn't based on “ill-gotten information,” only on deduction—a method that figures prominently in his detective stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter.” (You can read his
Messenger
article about the Turk online at http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/maelzel.htm.)

William Schlumberger, alias Mulhouse, was a real person, too, who operated the Turk from 1826 until his death in 1838. Though the elusive Mademoiselle Bouvier is my own creation, Maelzel did, in fact, use an unnamed young Frenchwoman as his operator for a short time. The character of Jacques is fictional but, again, based on fact—or rather on a story that claims to be fact, involving a Polish officer who lost his legs in a revolt against the Russians; he was supposedly smuggled out of Russia inside the Turk.

Neither Reverend Goodspeed nor his controversial
Development of Species
actually existed, but there were a number of naturalists and other scientists who tackled the topic of evolution—also known as “descent theory,” “continuity theory,” and “transmutation”—well before Darwin.

Though I've taken a few liberties with the characters, the locations in the book and the details of early nineteenth-century life are as accurate as I could make them with the help of dozens of histories, biographies, and contemporary accounts.