CHAPTER 48

THE MECHANICAL MOOR AND THE READER OF MINDS

When she had emptied her basket of peppermint rock, Lucy stuck her head into the tent where Mr Pyefinch was leading an enthralled crowd of rustic ladies and gentlemen through the heroic intricacies of the Battle of Waterloo while Charlie used a pointing stick and a cunningly rigged lantern to highlight the important points on the battlefield as he spoke.

It was Lucy’s way not to look at what people wanted her to see, so she watched the audience instead, noting how Mr Pyefinch’s words held their attention and how they all moved their heads in time with the insistent pointing of Charlie’s stick, as if they were all on a string. They were deeply enthralled by the spectacle, and she decided to leave them to it and see what else the fair held by way of attractions. She’d kept a piece of pepper-mint rock in her pocket, and slipped it inside her cheek as she ducked out of the tent into what was now twilight.

She wandered between the attractions and the tents as if she didn’t know where she was going, but her feet took themselves to Na-Barno’s pitch as surely as if Georgiana Eagle had given her an invitation and then dragged her there. She saw a bright naphtha lamp throwing stark shadows across the façade, a cleverly painted canvas screen that was part pyramid, part Grecian temple and had a big eye in the centre from which radiated beams of light picked out in silver paint which sparkled in the lamplight. “THE TEMPLE OF MAGIC” was written across the foot of the pyramid, cleverly painted to look like it was incised in stone. At the doorway, which was closed by a crimson curtain, stood Na-Barno. He was wearing his suit of black velvet and a cape lined in scarlet satin which he twitched and swirled as he encouraged the fair-goers into his entrance.

“Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen! Do not tarry at the door, for while you make up your minds, others may step ahead of you and gain your valuable place in the Temple of Magic! Come and see the wondrous feats of your most humble servant and present interlocutor, Na-Barno Eagle, the Great Wizard of the South! Not to be confused with my pale imitator, the imposter Anderson, who calls himself the Great Wizard of the North, wretched fellow…”

The idea of his rival seemed to drain Na-Barno of some energy, but Lucy saw someone poke him in the back through the canvas walls of the tent, and he shook himself and rekindled the fire in his voice, launching into a practised avalanche of words as he addressed the passing crowd in a deep ringing baritone.

“Roll up and enter the Temple of Magic! Leave your preconceptions at the door, for once within you will see untold wonders and marvels, things you will be proud to tell your grandchildren about in the years to come: you will see a prodigious panoply of persiflage and prestidigitation! A chimerical conquering cornucopia of conjuration! An immense inchoate itinerary of illusion and impossibility! And you will be made mute, marvelling at the magnificent mind-reading mentalism masterfully manifested by my magically Mechanical Moor who will answer questions about the other world, the realm beyond the veil of life, questions only you and he know the answers to!”

The tent poked Eagle again, and he coughed and looked a little lost until he remembered something in his pocket which he reached for and then flung into the air.

There was a bang and a flash and a cloud of blue and red smoke, which jolted the crowd and allowed him to start declaiming again at the top of his voice.

“No matter how far you have travelled in the realms of gold, my good friends, or how many goodly states and kingdoms have you seen, never will you feel a wonderment so serene as when you see the Great Wizard of the South conjure silver to gold! Then you, pretty madam, And you, tall sir, will feel like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into your ken, or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes…”

“Who’s stout Cortez?” shouted a man standing by Lucy. “Who’s stout Cortez when he’s at home then?”

“He’s a fat dago, don’t be ignorant,” said his wife, pulling him away into the entrance. “It’s a poem.”

Lucy walked beside them, going fast-but-slow as she did so, so that she entered the passage into the tent without really being seen and certainly not noticed enough to have to pay an entrance fee at the small window. She could hear Na-Barno, muffled now as he picked up the thread and carried on outside.

“Like fat—I mean like stout Cortez,” he roared. “You will be like stout Cortez when he stared at the Pacific with a wild surmise, silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

“What’s a wild surmise?” mumbled the man beside Lucy as his wife rattled coins onto the narrow wooden ledge of the window.

“It’s like a tame one, only not house-trained,” said a man in front of him in the queue, and for a moment Na-Barno’s pitch was drowned by the rumble of laughter in the narrow canvas corridor.

“Can’t we go in?” said a voice. “I feel like a sheep in a fold, just before shearing.”

“Been shorn already,” said another. “Ha’pence to stand in a dark passage? I can do that at home!”

“Oooh, fancy!” said another voice. “Hark at her! She’s got a passage. Must live in a palace!”

More happy rumblings, and as the crowd shifted in the dark, Lucy saw the shutter come down at the payment window. From its position, she realised that whoever had been sitting there taking the money was also the person who had been poking Na-Barno in the back and keeping him going. She assumed it had been Georgiana.

That assumption was quickly confirmed as she heard the sound of small bells being shaken close by. The crowd quieted itself to listen as the noise passed up and down the passage on the other side of the canvas.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said a deep woman’s voice, somehow Georgiana’s but lower. “Thank you for your patience in waiting here for one more minute. No one may enter the inner room of the Temple of Magic without the Great Wizard being in attendance to control the powerful forces penned within it. This is for your protection.”

The crowd rumbled agreeably, rather liking the frisson of danger the voice was alluding to.

“As you wait, anyone wishing to ask a question of the Mechanical Moor should think of who they wish to contact and attempt to get a seat close to the stage. We would not like you to miss your chance of having your question answered, and a good seat will assure you of the Great Wizard’s attention. We will open the doors to the inner sanctum in one minute exactly.”

The crowd began to whisper to itself: Lucy heard people discussing with their friends or spouses in quiet voices whether they should dare to try and contact someone in the spirit realm. “Ow about Grandmother?… what about our Jessie?… Ask Jethro who he lent the good scythe to?… don’t get Grandpa Watkins; he hated magic shows…” the various voices said, some laughing nervously in the gloom.

The passage was ill-lit but not entirely dark, and as she stood there, unnoticed, Lucy saw a brief shiny reflection of one of the boxed candles on the other wall, and realised she was looking at an eyeball peering at the crowd through a small hole in the canvas.

She smiled at it, thinking it must be Georgiana, but at that moment the doors at the end of the passage flung open to reveal the brightly lit inner sanctum. The people flowed happily from the dim tunnel into the auditorium, which was little more than a small stage hung with black velvet curtains looking out over ranks of thin benches arranged in front of it.

By the time Lucy got into the place, the seats had all been taken and she had to find a space against one of the walls, squashed between a fat boy who smelled of cabbage and a fatter woman who breathed entirely through her nose in a series of excited nasal wheezes, close-set eyes bright with anticipation.

“I hope he cuts someone in half,” she said to the fat boy. “I do so like it when they cuts a pretty lady in bits, though they always have to go and put her together again…”

The lights dimmed suddenly, and the flares in front of the stage brightened. Georgiana pirouetted on and swept her hand towards the wings. She looked glorious, thought Lucy, her heartbreakingly pale face and perfect eyes offset by a deep green silk costume which showed off both her colouring and her body to great effect.

“Whoar!” said the fat boy. “Whoar! If she ain’t a pippin!”

The fatter woman reached behind Lucy and smacked his head sharply.

“Shush now!” she hissed. “He’s coming…”

“My lords, my ladies and my most welcome gentlemen,” said Georgiana in a voice clear and sharp as cut crystal. “I give you Na-Barno Eagle, not just the Great Wizard of the South, but the greatest wizard in Great Britain itself!”

The crowd roared in good-natured approval, entering into the spirit of the thing, and began stamping their feet and clapping their hands in a rhythm that got slowly faster and faster and louder and louder until–at the very moment Lucy knew the rhythm would break–there was a bright magnesium flash and an explosion of white smoke revealing Na-Barno where a moment before Georgiana had been. It was quite as if she had instantly changed into him, for she was nowhere to be seen.

The crowd roared even louder and the show began.

Querulous and odd though he might have been at the Showman’s Drumhead, Lucy had to admit he was very different on-stage as he ran effortlessly through a series of tricks and turns. He made coins appear and disappear. He filled cups with water and then showed that they were empty. Then he made them rise into the air unaided. Then he poured water from an empty cup and filled a jug. Then he upended the jug and showed it was still empty. Then he made the jug turn into a pink sugar mouse which he gave to a little girl on the front row. He did not cut anyone in half, but he did lie Georgiana on a plank between two sawhorses, and then remove sawhorses and plank, leaving her floating in the air, so wholly that he was able to demonstrate the fact she was not supported by anything other than his “power” by passing one of his juggling rings round her from feet to head and back.

In fact it all went superbly until he reached behind himself and whipped the cover off the magical Moor and commanded him to “wake and hold open the veil between this world and the next!”

For a moment nothing happened, and the crowd stared at the torso and head which Eagle had revealed. The Moor wore a sky blue turban with a large spangled brooch on it and a crimson jacket, brocaded in gold and sewn with brilliants which sparkled in the glow of the footlights. He bent forward as if looking at his hands resting on a board in front of him.

The board was angled so that the crowd could see it, and inscribed with the letters of the alphabet, in gold against a black background. Additionally the words “YES”, “NO” and “IT IS HIDDEN” and “I MUST REST” were written around the edge of the alphabet. The Moor’s hand pointed at “I MUST REST”.

“AWAKE, MIGHTY ONE!” shouted Eagle, putting his hand on the Moor’s shoulder.

There was a slight metallic click, and then, as he removed his hand, the Moor’s wooden head slowly began to tilt backwards so that it was looking at the audience, or would have been if its eyes weren’t still shut. It was a black face, cunningly sculpted to give a sense of haughty power, totally unrelieved by colour except for the lips which were a startling crimson.

“AWAKE!” bellowed Eagle.

The room was silent, everyone holding their breath. The Moor’s head came to a stuttering halt, seemingly stuck as it kept ticking back and then meeting some resistance and dropping a fraction forward again.

“He’s resting,” whispered a voice in the crowd. “Just like my broken mangle’s resting.”

And just as a suppressed titter began to spread out in the darkness, Eagle touched the shoulder of the Moor once again, and the head jerked and the eyes flew open revealing a flash of white as the jaw flopped, revealing lifelike teeth, made from bone, and the shiny red cavern of the mouth beyond.

The audience gasped.

The Moor’s finger moved jerkily and rested on the “NO”.

“No!” cried Eagle with what Lucy thought was an overly naked show of relief. “He is not resting! See, he has said so, and his eyes are open! Who has a question to tax the ancient wisdom and unparalleled perception of my friend?”

Before anyone could answer, the Moor started to judder, his eye blinking faster and faster in counterpoint to his mouth, which began to open and close with increasingly loud snapping noises.

Someone sniggered, and Eagle waved his hands and gamely made as if this was an expected part of the show.

“He senses a presence!”

The head now began to rock backward and forward, and the whole effect would have been tragically like someone having a fit had it not been for the growingly humorous spectacle of the large turban slowly slipping drunkenly over the Moor’s face. Eagle’s hand darted out and caught it before it fell to the ground.

“A… er, an oppressive presence,” he cried. “The Moor is reacting to the presence of an ill-wisher who is upsetting the mystic balance in the room! Who is it? We must ask you to leave…”

At that, there was a snapping noise and the head of the Moor swivelled sideways, the eyes stuck wide open and the mouth snapped shut.

To Lucy’s horror, the Moor’s finger rose off the table and pointed inexorably at her.

A cold shudder went down her back as the wooden face stared in unblinking, silent accusation.

Lucy was a survivor, and what she did next she did on instinct, without conscious thought: as heads turned and eyes started trying to pierce the gloom and see what or who the automaton was pointing at in the shadows at the edge of the tent, she went slow-but-fast and slipped behind the backs of the crowd and moved a good ten feet away before stopping.

And so it was that the crowd focused its displeasure on the fat boy who had been standing next to her.

“Oi, fatty!” shouted a cheery voice from the darkness. “What’s your game?”

“It’s not me,” he squawked. “I done nothing!”

“He looks like an ill-wisher!” shouted another. “Wishes ill to every pie he meets!”

The crowd laughed and hooted as the boy’s face reddened into a pretty exact impression of a beetroot. Lucy, with her habit of looking in the direction other people weren’t, saw Eagle take advantage of the distraction to throw the cover back over the Moor and look beseechingly off to the side of the stage.

In a moment, it was clear that he had been looking for Georgiana to rescue him, for she appeared from the wings, walking solemnly, as if in church, with her eyes shut. The crowd hushed itself, drawn by her blind silence as she moved inexorably to the edge of the stage.

“She’s gonna fall off!” whispered a woman beside Lucy. But she didn’t. She stopped with her foot hovering over the drop, and then, without opening her eyes, stepped back and stood quite still.

“Quiet please, ladies and gentlemen,” said Eagle in an urgent voice. “The spirit of the Moor has taken refuge in this, the frail vessel of my only daughter. It has done so to protect itself against ill-wishers as it has done before… but my friends, if you will ask your questions, perhaps the Moor will speak through her!”

Georgiana’s eyes began to agitate behind her closed lids and her head began to wobble slightly. Eagle leapt forward and placed his hand on her head.

“Oh great mage!” he cried. “Will you speak through this fair girl?”

The fair girl’s eyes opened and stared at Eagle. Her mouth opened and out of it came a deep, guttural man’s voice wholly at odds with her delicate looks.

“Vaig a parlar amb vostè, fort mag,” she rumbled, the voice seeming to come from the bowels of the earth, “a través d’aquest bonic vaixell!”

“I will speak for you, mighty wizard,” translated Eagle, his eyes wide with excitement as he looked out at the crowd. “Through this beautiful vessel!”

The crowd oohed appreciatively. Eagle turned back to Georgiana.

“And will you let her speak in her own voice?” he asked. “So the ladies and gentlemen here assembled can partake of your great wisdom?”

Georgiana’s eyes raked the crowd haughtily, and then she gave one decisive nod.

“Si!” she boomed. “Deixi que és així! Let it be so.”

The contrast between the rough man’s voice and her gentle tones could not have been greater, or delighted the audience more. Lucy saw them nodding and leaning forward in their seats.

“Who has a question?” said Eagle.

No one wanted to be the first to raise their hand, though there was a good deal of muttering and nudging. Eagle pointed at a man in the audience.

“You, sir–do you have a question?”

It was the man who had been encouraged to enquire about the whereabouts of a scythe. His wife giggled and nudged him.

“You have lost something perhaps?” said Georgiana, her blindfolded head casting about, as if trying to catch a scent.

“Er, well,” mumbled the man, clearly unhappy at being the centre of attention.

“Don’t say anything!” commanded Eagle. “The Moor will tell you what you have lost, and where it is!”

Eagle turned to Georgiana and gently pointed her towards the man.

“Great Moor, can you tell him exactly what he has lost?”

The tent was quiet as Georgiana reached an open hand out towards the man, as if feeling for him in the air.

“It is a tool,” she said.

The man nodded.

The crowd saw this and murmured appreciatively.

“It is a sharp tool. I see a blade which has been honed many times,” said Georgiana.

The crowd looked at the man who nodded again. The crowd murmured more loudly and looked back to Georgiana.

“It is a not a knife,” she said.

The man shook his head. The crowd held its breath.

“It is not an axe,” she said.

Again he shook his head. The crowd held on.

“It is…” she said. “It is…”

Her hand kneaded the air once again.

“It is a scythe,” she said.

“Yes!” said the man, and the crowd roared with appreciation. Hands slapped him on the back as if it was he who had got something right, and others applauded Georgiana.

Lucy could not work out how Georgiana had done it. Even if she had overheard the man’s wife in the passage before the show began, how had she identified him in the dark both then and now, when she was blindfolded? It didn’t make sense.

“Your scythe was not lent. Your scythe was stolen by a tinker who came past your house while you were away seeing someone called Jed. No. Jethro. You were seeing someone called Jethro and the tinker saw your scythe and took it,” said Georgiana. “Am I right?”

The man looked at his wife, mouth open in shock.

“How’d she know about Jethro?” he said wonderingly.

“Bloody tinkers,” said his wife.

“Am I right?” repeated Georgiana more insistently.

“Yes,” said the man, “I lost my scythe and thought it was Jethro who had lent it to someone, but he died afore I could ask. But I got no blessed idea how you know that!”

The crowd burst into a round of spontaneous applause. Lucy agreed with the man: she had no idea how Georgiana had known all that either unless she really could read minds.

Which was impossible.

But only impossible in the way that her glinting was impossible. So perhaps Georgiana had a similar ability which she used to help her father pull off these mind-reading tricks, the trick of course being that it wasn’t a trick. Only impossibility. Or rather, only an impossibility for a natural person. For someone with what Sara Falk had called supranatural powers, perhaps not so very hard at all…

And this, she thought, might be the reason she had such a strange feeling when she was around Georgiana. Perhaps the frisson she had felt, the strange mixture of excitement and caution was simply the result of like calling to like, blood to blood, a conversation taking place beneath the level of actual thought.

And if she could read minds, Lucy wondered, would she perhaps be able to read hers? Because if she could and would, and if Lucy could trust her enough to let her in–another big question–then could she perhaps help her fill in the worrying blank spots in her memory? With that in mind, Lucy settled back into the shadows and watched closely as Georgiana proceeded to read more minds and bring more messages from the other side.