Curiosity

Dial Books for Young Readers

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Copyright © 2014 by Gary Blackwood

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Blackwood, Gary L.

Curiosity / by Gary Blackwood.

pages cm • Summary: In 1835, when his father is put in a Philadelphia debtor's prison, twelve-year-old chess prodigy Rufus Goodspeed is relieved to be recruited to secretly operate a chess-playing automaton named The Turk, but soon questions the fate of his predecessors and his own safety. • ISBN 978-1-101-59341-7 [1. Chess—Fiction. 2. Apprentices—Fiction. 3. Poverty—Fiction. 4. Robots—Fiction. 5. Mälzel, Johann Nepomuk, 1772–1838—Fiction. 6. Philadelphia (Pa.)—History— 19th century—Fiction.] I. Title. • PZ7.B5338Cur 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2013013438

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For Michael,
my Book Buddy

O
UT OF ALL THE BOOKS IN THE WORLD,
I wonder what made you choose this one. Perhaps you're a chess fanatic and you saw that the game figures prominently in the plot.

Or perhaps not. It may be that you know nothing at all about chess, and care less. You may just be hoping to read a rousing story.

In either case, I feel confident that what follows will satisfy you. If that sounds as though I'm boasting, I assure you I'm not. I make no pretense of being a clever or accomplished writer. I'll simply recount the events as they happened to me and trust that they're compelling enough to keep your attention.

I suppose I should mention before I begin that there's a certain amount of unpleasantness involved. Every person's life has its dark corners, of course, but I suspect that mine has had more than most. I'm not crying “Oh, poor me,” mind you; I'm only warning you, in case you're easily upset.

Actually, some parts are more than just unpleasant. There's a good deal of cruelty, as well as poverty, illness, and imprisonment. Not to mention murder, madness, deceit, obsession, resurrection, and unrequited love. In fact, at times it resembles a tale penned by Mr. Dickens or Mr. Poe—though I wouldn't presume to compare my storytelling skills to theirs.

The passages concerning chess may mean more if you know a little about how it's played—the names of the pieces, for example, and how they move—but even if you're completely ignorant of the game, it shouldn't matter much. I'll keep those bits as simple and straightforward as possible.

However little you may know about chess, you've no doubt heard of the celebrated chess-playing automaton known as the Turk—unless you've been living in Siberia or Darkest Africa for the past several decades. (Actually, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the Turk's reputation has reached Siberia; after all, they say that the Russian empress Catherine the Great played against him—and lost.)

Certainly I was familiar with the Turk long before I encountered him in the flesh—or in the wax, I should say, since that was what his fierce, exotic countenance was made of.

Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself. I know you're curious, perhaps even eager, to learn more about that marvelous and mysterious machine. But if you don't mind, I'd like to begin by telling you something about my life before the Turk entered it. Well, perhaps “like” is not the proper word. Some of my early experiences are quite painful to recall. Still, I believe they're essential to the story.

If you're not a chess fancier, I hope you'll forgive me for starting right off with a scene that revolves around the game. I will keep it simple and straightforward, as promised.

I remember clearly the moment when I first saw a chessboard. It must have been sometime around 1826; I know I was not more than four years old. At the time, my father, the Reverend Tobias Goodspeed, was in charge of a small but prosperous parish in Philadelphia. Since his duties weren't very demanding, he had plenty of leisure time to indulge his two main passions—natural science and chess.

On this particular day, he was playing a game with Father Barry, in the library of the Parsonage. This was before Philadelphia was swamped by the great wave of Irish immigrants, you know, and people saw no great harm in a Methodist minister keeping company with a Catholic priest.

The two made every round of chess into a sort of cheerful crusade. When my father won, he claimed it was because God was on his side, and when Father Barry won—which was rarely—he grew ridiculously righteous. “There, you see, Tobias?” he would say. “You can never keep us Catholics down; we will always triumph eventually!”

The library was normally forbidden territory for tots with grasping, grimy hands. But I begged my father so piteously and gave such sincere promises of good behavior that at last he allowed me to enter the
sanctum sanctorum—
under the eye of my nanny, of course. Like Father Barry's Catholics, I always triumphed eventually.

I'll be the first to admit that I was a pampered, coddled child. In point of fact, I was spoiled quite rotten, both by my father and by Fiona, my Irish nanny. Mainly, I think, it was because I was such a sickly little fellow. According to my father, my birth was a hard one, and the doctors didn't expect me to live an hour, let alone several years. I suspect that, in his heart, my father resented the fact that I had survived and that his beloved Lily had not. But he also seemed to see something of my mother in me, and I think that made me precious to him.

In some ways, I must have been a difficult child to love; in addition to being sick more often than not, I had a slight deformity of the spine—no doubt a result of being wrenched into the world by a doctor's forceps. I was not a pint-sized Quasimodo, by any means, but I had a bit of a stoop. I think I must have looked rather like an old codger in need of a cane.

I've been told, though, that my disposition made up for my many
in
dispositions. Despite all that spoiling, I wasn't a demanding child, or given to tantrums. By all accounts, I had a sweet temper and a ready laugh, and didn't complain much, no matter how ill I was or how much my back pained me. Though of course I enjoyed being pampered, I wish now that I hadn't been. It did nothing to prepare me for the hard times that were to come.

There I go again, getting ahead of myself.

As I said, I was only four when I saw my first chess match, but somehow I grasped the essence of the game almost instantly, instinctively. The bumptious Father Barry didn't have the patience to play slowly or methodically, so he insisted on a limit of half an hour per game. I sat utterly motionless through the first game, like a cat watching at a window.

This seemed to worry Fiona, who sat nearby with her needlework. “Are you feeling poorly, Master Rufus? Shall I take you up to your room, then?” She was a good, earnest girl, and as solicitous of my welfare as any mother, but she was not blessed with brains. She could never have understood what I was feeling, even if I could have explained it. I was like a person under the influence of mesmerism—hypnosis, as it's now called.

The men began a second game; still I didn't stir. As my father was about to take his opponent's bishop, I spoke up at last. “No, Father, you mustn't. If you do, he'll attack your king with his horse.”

My father stared at me in astonishment, then at the board. “By thunder, the boy is right.”

Father Barry was clearly peeved at having his clever strategy foiled. “How long has your father been teaching you chess, my lad?”

“Is that what it's called?” I said.

“Oh, so you're teaching him to lie, too, Tobias? He pretends to know nothing about the game, when clearly he knows a good deal.”

My father put a hand to his heart. “Upon my honor, Barry, we've never even discussed the subject.”

“Then how can he begin to grasp such a complex game? I'm still struggling with it, and I've been playing for twenty years.”

My father shrugged. “Well, my friend, if you'll pardon the expression, I'd say that God only knows.”

My understanding of the game didn't seem odd to me, of course. I thought it perfectly natural, like the ability to walk or talk, and I couldn't see why it would take anyone twenty years to become good at it—or, in Father Barry's case, to become mediocre at it. Now, of course, I realize that it was a rare gift, one that I can't begin to explain.

I've had only one other experience I can compare it to. Years later, when I was traveling through Europe, I stopped overnight in a picturesque town in Austria. Its narrow, winding streets were like a maze; when I went out for a stroll, it took me an hour to find my way back to the inn. But the next morning, I climbed to the top of a tall church tower. With the town spread out beneath me, suddenly I could see clearly where each street led and exactly how to get from one place to another.

That's the way it was with the chessboard. Up close, it appeared to be just a grid of identical light and dark squares. But I seemed able to look at it from another vantage point; I could see patterns, the best way of getting from one place to another. I'm sorry, I promised to keep this simple and straightforward, and here I am getting mystical and metaphysical on you.

My father was delighted to find that he had a
bona fide
curiosity on his hands. The 1820s and 30s were, above all else, a time of curiosity-seekers. Everyone and his brother—and often his sister—fancied himself a budding naturalist. My father was one of the most avid of these amateurs. He was convinced that, if he searched long and hard enough, he would discover some previously unknown species or fossil or set of bones and earn for himself a sort of immortality.

I think he saw me as a kind of glorified science experiment. I don't mean that he treated me like a laboratory animal. He was always very kind and patient with me, and careful not to overtax my frail body. But from that day on, we spent at least two hours each afternoon at the chessboard, testing the limits of my newfound skill.

There seemed to be no limits. By the time I was six, I was winning more games than I lost. When I was nine, he took me to the Philadelphia Chess Club and pitted me against some of the city's best players. I created something of a sensation by defeating most of them. I even showed off a bit, playing three or four men simultaneously, sometimes with a blindfold over my eyes. I considered this more of a parlor trick than a serious challenge, but it impressed everyone.

I loved these outings; they gave me a rare chance to see people and places outside the walls of the Parsonage. My father didn't think it wise for me to attend school. He wouldn't say why, exactly, but I know now that he was trying to spare me from the jokes and pranks and torments that are always suffered by children who are different.

Though he hired tutors from time to time, most of my education came from his extensive collection of books. I had inherited his avid curiosity, and there probably wasn't a single volume that I didn't delve into. My father fed my hunger for knowledge, borrowing or buying books on whatever subject interested me at the time. Many of them were about chess, of course. The best was a manual written by the great French chess master, François-André Philidor. It was in the original language, so in order to understand it, I spent a year learning French.

When I was twelve, my sheltered, privileged life came to an abrupt end. At least it seemed abrupt to me at the time. I realize now that my father had been sowing the seeds of his downfall for a long while. Somewhere along the way, his harmless dreams of being a respected naturalist had gotten out of hand. He was paying less and less attention to his duties as a minister and more and more to his scientific pursuits, which also ate up a growing amount of his modest income.

For years he'd been working on a book that explained—to his mind anyway—how all the different species of animals and plants came to be. He even financed an expedition to South America to gather evidence for his theory. I don't think it ever occurred to him that he was treading on dangerous ground. The church taught that all forms of life had been created exactly as they were; to suggest that they could change, all by themselves, was akin to heresy.

He paid for the cost of printing
The Development of Species
out of his own pocket, which by now was all but empty. The sales were, of course, dismal. Even worse, the church dismissed him, and we had to move out of the Parsonage—the only home I had ever known. Of course we also had to let poor Fiona go, who was the nearest thing I had to a mother.

We were reduced to a single room at a boardinghouse in Southwark, a neighborhood that was even less appealing then than it is today. The streets were strewn with garbage, sewage, and dead animals. But it was the live ones you had to look out for: the ill-tempered pigs, some of them as big as I was, that feasted on the heaps of foul waste and would just as soon feast on you; the drunken sailors with their smelly tarred clothing and their exotic tattoos; the young toughs who hung around the firehouse, hoping for a blaze or a battle with a rival gang to add excitement to their day.