Rosie Thomas - The Illusionists

‘Oh,’ Eliza said in astonishment.

The room was little more than a barn, but it was not a barn that either she or Devil could have imagined. It seemed as much a charnel house as a laboratory. On a bench lay the lower portion of a leg, the limp flaps of its rubber skin partially peeled back to expose bright metal rods within. On a clean square of cloth a row of silvery instruments, small tweezers, pliers and screw clamps was neatly laid out. A brass microscope occupied the end of the bench, and next to that stood a metalworker’s lathe with coils like tiny locks of metal hair littering the floor beside its clawed iron feet. A foot and a hand, each with a piston shaft protruding from the severed joint, rested on a smaller table. This much the light of the single candle revealed as Devil and Eliza silently stared around them. The recesses of the room were hidden in shadow but there was an impression of other implements, tall cupboards, and more strange work in progress.

The centre of the room, where the candle glow was brightest, was occupied by two chairs. In one sat a female doll, wide-eyed, her hands resting in her lap. Her flaxen hair was tied back from her slender neck. Her lower body was clothed in petticoats but she was naked from the waist up. Her breasts were unmodelled protrusions of pallid rubber. Next to her sat a manikin on a square pedestal, an expressionless Chinaman with a round black hat and long, drooping moustaches. With his triangular yellow face he looked like an illustration in a child’s picture book.

‘Excuse me, Miss Dunlop. My work …’ Heinrich murmured. He wrapped a shroud of cloth around the torso of the female doll.

‘I believe Miss Dunlop did mention that she is employed as an artists’ model,’ Devil put in.

Heinrich frowned, evidently distracted. The candle flame flickered.

‘We need more light,’ he said. He pressed a bell push and Eliza thought she heard a distant peal. Heinrich busied himself with Lucie’s trunk and a moment later a knock announced the arrival of a servant, in this strange room a surprisingly conventional figure in a dark dress and white apron. She brought in a lamp and placed it on the bench.

‘Good evening, Herr Bayer. Shall I light a fire? Will you be wanting some dinner?’

Eliza’s eyes met Devil’s. His eyebrows rose in black circumflexes but she could see that he was intrigued rather than repelled by this macabre place. The shadows of the room were barely dispelled by the lamp, and dread seemed to linger just out of her sight. A tremor of fear ran down her spine.

Heinrich laid Lucie on a cushioned surface that appeared to Eliza something between a bed and a catafalque. She shivered at the spectacle.

‘Yes. Some dinner,’ Heinrich said vaguely. He shook out a fine paisley shawl and let the folds drift over Lucie’s face and body. The resemblance to a catafalque was heightened.

‘Shall I lay up a table over in the house, sir?’

‘Perhaps we could stay here.’ Devil put in. ‘I think this is where our business will lie.’ He sounded quite at ease, with a purposeful note under his light tone, and Eliza wondered how he achieved this in so bizarre a setting.

Heinrich waved his hand. Whenever his attention returned to them he seemed startled to discover that he still had company.

When the servant had withdrawn Devil strolled to the bench. He picked up a watchmaker’s glass and screwed it into his eye, then examined the dismembered leg. Next he inquisitively turned the bezels of the microscope.

‘Whose place is this, Heinrich? Do you work here?’

Heinrich sat down on a stool, then jumped up again and offered the seat to Eliza.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and sat. She was beginning to feel weary.

‘I work here, yes.’

‘For whom?’ Devil persisted.

‘What? For myself, of course. My interests are not so usual. I am a maker of automata.’ He gestured towards the flaxen doll and the Chinese manikin. ‘But you know that much, Mr Wix. You are acquainted with my beautiful Lucie.’

There was a small silence.

‘I thought you were a poor man, Heinrich, like me. If you are rich, as it seems you are, why have you and Lucie danced every night for Jacko Grady and his audience of barbarians?’

Heinrich was still wearing his ruined coat, with his frayed shirt collar protruding. His boot heels were worn to wafers and he looked as if he had not eaten a meal in the last week. Eliza longed to ask the same question, but she would not have had Devil’s boldness in coming straight out with it.

Surprisingly the Swiss smiled. The deep lines in his face vanished and for a moment he looked a younger man. ‘I am not rich. My family have been watchmakers at Le Locle in Neuchatel for three generations. I am the last son. My care is not for watches, but in what I do there is the same precision. The same love for a device that is intricate, ingenious, unique. I am a craftsman, Mr Wix, not a banker. What is money?’

‘I could tell you,’ Devil said bitterly. The note in his voice made Eliza look at him with attention.

Bayer said, ‘I dance with Lucie at the Palmyra because I want the world to see her. There has to be a debut. A London debut, in your popular music hall. I hoped – expected – this would quickly lead to better things. But, sadly, it seems not. We are disappointed of course.’ He shrugged his thin shoulders. It was clear that his brilliance as an inventor was not matched by his knowledge of the world. ‘The worst of it all is the insult to Lucie. This evening, I am afraid, I was unable to hide the pain it caused me.’

Eliza was filled with sudden pity for him which only intensified her discomfort.

The servant came back with a young boy to assist her, and together they unfolded a card table and set three chairs around it. On the bench they laid out a china tureen and some covered dishes with a tray of cutlery and glassware.

‘Will there be anything else, Herr Bayer?’

‘I don’t think so, Mrs McKay. Or, wait a moment. Perhaps some wine?’

‘Thank you. Yes,’ said Devil with distinct emphasis.

A bottle was brought and uncorked. Devil and Eliza helped themselves to soup from the tureen and thick slices of ham with potatoes. The food was plain, but plentiful and good. Devil drank a glass of wine straight off. Heinrich took a few spoonfuls of soup but he soon left the table and went to the Chinaman sitting on its plinth next to the yellow-haired doll. He reached behind it, and its head suddenly flopped sideways with a gasp of exhaled air that sounded like a human sigh. Eliza jumped and her spoon clinked in the bowl. The creature’s hands rose from its lap and its head jerked upright with another hiss. The fingers flexed and its mouth opened and closed to reveal two rows of porcelain teeth.

‘You see?’ Heinrich said.

‘I do,’ Devil replied. He put down his spoon and fork in order to concentrate on the inventor.

‘He is operated by a system of compressed air cylinders, controlled from here.’ Heinrich indicated a notched drum with a handle, a simple enough mechanism that reminded Eliza of a barrel organ.

Devil remarked, ‘He’s of a size with Carlo Boldoni. But this fellow is more biddable, I’m sure. Tell me, Heinrich, what is your creature for ?’

The inventor frowned. ‘I made him. His existence is sufficient reason in itself. But I thought I might have him tell ladies’ fortunes? One shilling a time. “Mr Wu knows the secrets of a woman’s heart, and will answer the questions you cannot ask.” Look at this.’ He turned a handle and one of the Chinaman’s hands drew a spool of paper from the opposite sleeve. ‘What is a fortune? You or I could invent a fine one.’ Heinrich laughed then, a creaking sound of rare usage. Eliza found that the palms of her hands were damp.