The Transference Engine

by Julia Verne St. John

  Maybe I’d keep him close and teach him the fine art of brewing coffee. He was brighter than most of my boys, and I liked him.

  Decision made, I set about filling crumpets and scones with fresh strawberry preserves. Some of my customers liked brandied raisins. Others liked caramelized walnuts. In companionable silence, we worked side by side, filling the building with the fragrance of baking treats.

  At half seven I fed Mickey a cheese roll and showed him how to grind roasted coffee beans into a coarse powder. He sniffed the grounds appreciatively.

  “We’ll need more before we open, and then several times during the day,” I said around a grin. “Try it on your own while I brew the first pot.”

  He climbed up on a stool to reach the counter that had been designed for my height. Tongue peeking between his lips and eyes narrowed in deep concentration, he followed my instructions slowly and carefully until the beans reached a good imitation of the perfect texture. While he worked, I forced steam through the earlier batch and then whipped milk into a lovely froth to top the brew. The first cup went to Mickey as a reward. He took one tentative sip, mindful of the heat. His eyes grew wide and a smile nearly split his face in two. “’Cor that’s loverly,” he said on a long exhale. “Better’n tea any day.”

  I’d make a domesticated cat of him yet. Maybe a baker as well. Though he’d have to accept a full soaking bath to scrub away all the ingrained dirt on his hands and neck before I’d let him near fine white flour and sugar.

  Inspector Witherspoon rapped upon the front door. I checked the clock over the coffee bar. Still five minutes to opening. Normally, I held fast to the posted times of opening and closing, not making exceptions for even a belted earl. Well, maybe for William King, Earl Lovelace and husband of my Lady Ada. I couldn’t remember ever having a duke in the place—just the illegitimate son of one at my salon.

  I unlatched the door and then relocked it the moment the policeman stepped through. No sense giving anyone else ideas about me loosening my rules. The inspector thrust the two tomes on exotic beliefs in India into my hands.

  “Did you find anything useful?” I asked, placing them carefully into the bin that would reshelve the books.

  “Partly. I know how to set my men to watch for the illusive shadows. But I have dismissed the possibility that Thuggees from the subcontinent have reason to assassinate Her Majesty at the coronation. No. We must look closer to home for the disaffected.”

  “May I be of assistance?” I led him to a small table at the center of the open café, then hurried to fetch him coffee without waiting for him to order. I knew how he liked it, two lumps of sugar, thick cream fresh from the dairy. No steam whipping or expressing for him. “Fetch two of the cream cheese and puff pastries and two savory scones with cheddar,” I whispered to Mickey.

  “I ain’t no serving wench.” He scrunched his face in his offended rebellion expression.

  “And you will not be a serving lad until you learn to speak properly. If you do as I say, you may have one sugar bun.” I flipped my hand to shoo him down the stairs to the kitchen.

  He slumped off, trying to tell me how insulted he felt, but there was just enough lightness in his step that I knew he considered the sugar bun an almost adequate bribe.

  “What brought you to the conclusion that any danger will not come from India?” I asked, placing the pastries and coffee in front of the Inspector.

  He jerked his chin toward the chair across the table from him, and I sat there, leaning forward to catch every nuance of his voice and posture.

  “These Thuggees are extremely loyal to their cult. Will only take orders from one they know, respect, and revere. William Sleeman is doing a good job of rooting out this pervasive cult. It is everywhere in India, hidden among respectable merchants and professionals, even the nobility. There are religious prohibitions against spilling blood, so they strangle with a ritual yellow kerchief, or poison if they have no other means. But he says they have strict rules against attacking women, fakirs, musicians, lepers, and Europeans. No telling what they may think next week.”

  “They will not spill blood, so they will not shoot or use explosives,” I mused. “Would a cannon that shoots light spill blood?” My own veins felt icy at the thought. “It might burn through flesh, cauterizing as it goes and kill the heart.” The black balloon hovered over the West End for a reason.

  “No such weapon exits. No. I believe we can dismiss the Thuggees for now.” Inspector Witherspoon settled back in his chair to sip his coffee and chew his pastry.

  “Her Majesty is young.” My thoughts took a different turn. “She hasn’t been out in public enough to offend anyone. And there are precious few legitimate heirs left. Remove Victoria, and quite likely England would dissolve into chaos and civil war. Only a dedicated anarchist would want . . .”

  “Got most of those rounded up and held in Newgate,” Witherspoon said around a mouth full of cream cheese. “As well as a few foreign spies who’d like to weaken our resolve to resist invasion. If a plot still exists, and rumors say it does, I have to look farther afield.”

  “Perhaps the whispers of danger at the coronation targets someone else,” I thought aloud, remembering the black dragon of a balloon and its shafts of searing light.

  “Who else is important enough?”

  “Nearly all our nobility and lords of the Church, Members of Parliament, ambassadors, and foreign dignitaries will all be gathered in one building.”

  “A single explosion could eliminate our entire government and . . . and likely bring down the Church as well,” he gasped. He finished his coffee in one gulp, scooped up the remaining pastry, and tossed three crowns on the table on his way out the door. “Gunpowder. Damme, everyone has stores of gunpowder for hunting and discouraging outlaws and miscreants.” The door slammed behind him, but three customers slipped in for their morning coffee.

  “’Cor, are all them coins just for treats and coffee?” Mickey asked, sticking his head out from around the coffee bar.

  I nodded without really thinking about the words.

  “If you make that much money, how come you only pay me a penny to sweep?” He came closer, fingers inching toward the table, making little grasping movements. He had yet to learn all the fine nuances of becoming an adept pickpocket. Others of my tribe of urchins did it better when I asked them to steal letters and notes. Another reason to keep him close and let him be tamed.

  I slapped my hand flat atop the coins. “Sweeping is only worth a penny. Serving, brewing, baking, and keeping the library require better manners, cleaner hands, and an education. Therefore, those tasks are worth more.”

  “Oh.” His mouth made a near perfect O and he retreated toward the kitchen. I hoped I’d given him something to think about.

  I opened the front door and welcomed the rest of my customers, wishing Drew were here to discuss Inspector Witherspoon’s ideas.

  Lacking Drew, I had access to someone else with knowledge of machines that performed near impossible tasks.

  “Mickey, I need you to take a note to Lovelace House! After you’ve scrubbed your hands and face.”

  “What do you think of this, Elise?” Lady Ada asked the moment my foot crossed the threshold of her workroom. She didn’t bother looking up from a mass of gears and gyroscopes. She’d appropriated the big family parlor adjacent to the servant stair on the first floor above ground. Normally this room would make an admirable morning room, with good light from the east and south.

  I watched as she pressed a spring and a thin metal sheet slid down over an opening and then slid back up into place. Upon more careful examination, I determined there were two such openings in the area that approximated the head of her machine.

  “Are you trying to make the automaton blink?” I shuffled my feet so that I could see the length of the machine well enough to know what most of the parts represented, without co
ming close enough to actually touch, or be touched, by the artificial person. I had read too much, seen too much, to ever be truly comfortable around these machines.

  When my lady was but a tiny babe, her father, the infamous Lord Byron and his physician Dr. Polidari, had invented a machine to transfer a man’s soul from a damaged but living body into an undamaged but dead body. He was still out there waiting for . . . the perfect body, mechanical or real, to accept his soul, personality, and poetic genius, as well as his perfidy.

  Tapping his daughter’s mathematical genius to accomplish his nefarious schemes had always been a worrisome probability. Possessing her body while she still lived, so that he could share her genius bothered me more. He’d tried that once and failed. Would he try again next time she fell ill and vulnerable?

  “Oh, come closer, Elise. It won’t hurt you. It doesn’t have its thinking cards installed,” Ada said, dismissing my misgivings. “I’ve been studying Henri Maillardet’s theories of automation for his puppets—parlor tricks and games only; he never went beyond to something useful. Still, his work is amazing and set me to thinking what else I can do with his methods.”

  “Might it be taught to harm?” I asked, still not coming closer.

  A mischievous smile creased her too thin face. I hadn’t seen much of that smile of late. She touched another spring, and a skeletal arm made of metal and leather, gears and hinges, jerked outward, fingers grasping toward me.

  “Eeeek!” I jumped back, hand to chest, trying to still my heart that suddenly beat so hard and fast I thought it might burst through my ribs.

  “You!” Ada laughed, long and loud, the delightful sound rippling up from her toes and making her eyes dance with mirth. “You are so funny.”

  “Enough of your pranks, my lady,” I admonished, returning to my governess voice and tone.

  “Why is 25.807 banned from usage?” she asked, her face a mask of false innocence.

  “I don’t know. Why?” I knew better, truly I did. But how can one resist harmless if incomprehensible jokes from the child one has raised?

  “It is the root of all evil!” she chortled.

  “Huh?”

  “The square root! 25.807^2 equals 666.”

  “The root of all evil.” I kept my face bland, not truly understanding why she nearly doubled over with laughter. Her mirth warmed my heart. That was enough.

  She’d long outgrown fear of me. Her lingering respect for our former closeness made her gulp air.

  Useless. She burst out with more peals of laughter. Her hand brushed another control and the machine leg, just as skeletal, jerked and kicked from the knee.

  I restrained my instinct to jump farther away from that bobbing leg.

  Ada turned her back and drew in several long breaths. Jaw still working to contain her mirth, she faced me once more. “So what do you think? Does the blinking eye make it appear more friendly?”

  “Too much so.” I shuddered with atavistic revulsion. “I do not like the idea of machines indistinguishable from humans.” My gaze kept returning to the skull-like head in fascinated horror.

  “Oh, dear. Mr. Babbage and I had hoped that making it more like a pet and less of a machine would allow people to identify with them and accept them into their households and factories.” Ada frowned at her creation. One hand hovered too close to the spring controlling the arm.

  I looked elsewhere, not willing to become a victim of her pranks again. Various gears and wires, sheets of metal, and other arcane paraphernalia littered another long table to Ada’s left.

  A brighter patch of wallpaper in the center indicated the place her father’s portrait used to hang. She’d removed it, thank heavens. One less place for him to invade.

  To her right, a smaller table contained stacks of gold sheets, uniform rectangles, three inches by four, and less than one sixteenth of an inch thick—the all-important codex cards that determined mechanical actions. A punch press with thirty-two calibration dials sat in pride of place at the center of the table. It was a more complicated variation on the key cutter of my book catalog search engine. There were large sheets of paper, covered in mathematical equations that Ada, and no one else, could translate into the codes she punched into those gold cards.

  “What are these?” I asked, holding up the top sheet of paper.

  “Oh, factorials,” she said on a delighted exhale.

  “Oh, ducklings,” I replied in the same tone.

  She looked at me quizzically.

  “You said that with the same delight as someone who has just come across a parade of ducklings in Regent’s Park.”

  “Well, they are certainly cute.” She studied the page with a cocked head and carefully returned the sheet of paper to its proper place. Then she took up the pen from the stand and made a hasty note on one of the clumps of arcane symbols.

  The gold cards were still blank and the mathematics unfinished. Ada had not yet completed the internal working of the automaton on the table. The mechanical man remained inert, incapable of independent movements. Technically.

  No. I would not think about the possibility that some poor soul, having lost its body, and not yet moved on to whatever fate God determined, might take up lodgings in the machine.

  No. No. No.

  Although, wasn’t that one of the purposes of necromancy? To achieve with magic what Lord Byron had tried with machines and bodies, moving a soul from one to another. And Lord Archbishop Howley of Canterbury would not need to outlaw necromancy if someone, multiple someones, weren’t already practicing it.

  “Enough of your games, Lady Ada. I need information. Like how someone would contrive a cannon that shoots deadly light and mounts the weapon inside the basket of a hot air balloon?” I looked her straight in the eye, avoiding the creepy imitation person on the table.

  Her gaze kept drifting downward to the place where the machine should have eyes. She’d contrived devices to make it blink. But what kind of machine would make the automaton “see?” Her face took on the slack-jawed expression common to her when in deep thought.

  “Light as a weapon?” she murmured. “Electricity can set glass and copper to glowing. Light can blind. Light can illuminate. Light . . . I know of no property of light or any method to turn it into a weapon.” She shook her head to jerk herself out of her trance, just as she had at the age of twelve when she’d solved or failed to solve an advanced equation.

  “Do you know of someone who perhaps has studied light more extensively than you have?”

  She tapped her fingers on the table edge, one of her tricks to sort the massive amounts of information stored in her brain. She never forgot anything because she organized her thoughts as well as she did her work.

  “Perhaps. There is an Oxford scholar who has tried repeatedly to work out the equation for the speed of light. He’s from India originally. A convoluted name, I never bothered to learn how to pronounce it. Let me write his address for you.” She wiped her hands on her dark leather apron. The color masked any new stains she might affix there. She tore a corner off one page only partially filled with numbers and symbols, then hastily wrote the name I half expected her to—Ishwardas Chaturvedi, Ish the Hindu scholar who had taught me special deep breathing and relaxing exercises between lectures at Oxford—he’d been lecturing on the physical properties of solids, liquids, and gas. Could the right light agitate gas into a weapon?

  Only one way to find out.

  Chapter Nine

  THE ADDRESS ADA HAD given me was not the same as I remembered. Should I write to Dr. Chaturvedi directly at the new address? Where he had lodged three years ago? Or should I apply to someone else for information? Oxford scholars were notorious for changing rooms frequently unless they had quarters within one college where they taught. As far as I knew, Dr. Chaturvedi lectured at several colleges and kept rooms separate from all.

  I had t
o think about my plans, so I spent the next happy half hour playing with Lady Ada’s children. Tiny mites as they were, simple things delighted them, like dust motes in a sunbeam, and tickles from my bonnet feathers.

  “We play numbers games in the nursery,” Lady Byron said sternly, from the doorway. Heaven forbid she step any closer to her grandchildren except at a formal two-minute greeting at a designated time in the comfort of her own parlor. The children would, of course, be fresh from their bath, fed, and sleepy enough to not interfere with the lady’s schedule.

  “I want to thank you, my lady, for your contribution to Bedlam Hospital. They can now hire three charwomen to keep the place, and the patients, clean. A small step toward helping them, but a necessary one.”

  “Next you’ll be asking for better food for the poor souls, too.” She tried to sound indignant, but I knew her well enough to know that her anonymous donations gave her a source of pride.

  “Better food would help. But at least they have food now. There are a number of war widows who have nothing . . .”

  “Ah, yes. Always the war widows, and orphans. A never-ending supply of them. Leave a note with Little Miss Doyle. She’ll see that we send something. Perhaps we should organize a jumble sale at the church . . .” Her eyes glazed over as she thought of things to donate. “Now about your being here; why must I always remind you of what games we allow in the nursery?”

  “Number games. Of course,” I replied. Then I grabbed the baby’s bare foot and began counting toes, complete with tickles and giggles.

  And an inspection of the skin on those toes for any abrasion or puncture that could indicate tampering by someone in search of a way in.

  When this little one was but a few days old, I had visited her mother. Ada did not fare well after the difficult birth. I’d told the midwife and the physician which herbs to pack into the bandages to stop the bleeding. They ignored my advice. Home remedies—especially those that originated with the Rom—were not considered clean or approved by the Church.