Conan Doyle blushed at the comment and quickly mumbled, “Actually, I was wondering if you could possibly mend this.” He pried the windup drummer from his deep coat pocket. “It is my son’s favorite toy and he is quite upset that it is broken.”
“How unfortunate. Let me see what I can do.” Jedidiah wiped his hands on his apron and took the toy. His tinkerer’s hands, stained with oil that marked every crease, poked and probed and gave the key an exploratory twist. After a ruminating pause he frowned and shook his head. “I am familiar with this make of toys. Inexpensive, but rather shabbily made. They soon break — an unfortunate situation guaranteed to break a child’s heart. He indicated the wares of his shop with a careless wave. “Everything in my shop is handmade by myself on the premises. Should a toy ever break, a customer may simply return it for free repair or replacement.”
“Ah,” Conan Doyle said. “So you cannot fix the toy? I had hoped… it is Kingsley’s favorite.”
Jedidiah raised a placating hand. “Do not give up hope so soon. Let me have a look inside.”
The toy maker produced a small screwdriver from an apron pocket and prized loose the tabs holding together the tin body. A black ribbon of coil spring unspooled and dangled. “As you can see,” Jedidiah noted, pointing to a gearwheel missing several teeth, “inferior gears. It has been overwound, stripping several teeth.”
“I see. Beyond repair. Dash it. Perhaps I can find something to replace it.”
“I cannot repair it,” Jedidiah said, looking craftily over his glasses, “but I can rebuild it. Properly. I’ll just take it to my workshop for a better look. Perhaps you and your pretty wife would care to browse while you wait?”
Both Conan Doyle and Jean Leckie squirmed a moment, embarrassed by the false presumption, but neither said anything to correct the mistake.
“Yes,” Conan Doyle agreed. “That would be splendid.”
The shopkeeper nodded. He left the counter and tromped down the steps into the glowing cave of his cellar workshop.
“Isn’t it a dreamland?” Jean Leckie said, wandering the store, fondling toys hanging from the ceiling on cords and crowding the busy shelves. She touched a tinplate monkey in a red fez and it came to life, its arms winding forward and then snapping back as the monkey backflipped. The arms wound up again and the monkey backflipped a second time. “How funny!” she laughed.
Conan Doyle looked around, dazzled by the assortment. The shop displayed a few simple toys, such as stuffed bears, a maniacally smiling rocking horse, a few wooden swords and shields, but most everything was mechanicaclass="underline" windup, clockwork mechanisms of great ingenuity painted in colors to dazzle a child’s eye. “I could never bring Kingsley in here,” he remarked. “I should have to prise his hands off the counter to get him out!”
As Conan Doyle perused the shop, he found that it was much more than a simple toy store. It was also part museum and displayed a variety of wondrous mechanical contrivances. Then he glimpsed something hanging on the back wall that made his heart leap into his throat.
A steam motorcycle.
And a beautiful one at that. He had never seen such an advanced design. The motor was a compact unit streamlined into the fuel tank. Everything was beautifully wrought of painted steel and machined brass, all held together by shiny bolts. The motorcycle was fitted with a giant brass headlamp and two sculpted metal bucket seats, one for the rider and one for a pillion passenger. For a moment Conan Doyle was possessed by visions of swooping along a winding country lane on such a machine, gauntleted hands gripping the handlebars, cap on backward, eyes goggled against the rushing wind. And, of course, Miss Leckie would be seated pillion behind him, arms hugging about his waist, her long tresses tucked beneath a handsome bonnet, a silk scarf fluttering around her neck.
In all his life, he had never lusted so strongly after a material possession. He was at heart a Scotsman, cursed with the Caledonian habit of thrift. But, gripped by a mad impulse, he resolved on the spot to buy it — no matter what the expense. But then he noticed to his crushing disappointment a printed card affixed to the wall beside it: DISPLAY ONLY. NOT FOR SALE.
“Blast!” he muttered as the bubble of his fantasy burst.
Meanwhile, Jean had wandered deeper in the shop, and now her musical voice carried from the far back reaches. “Oh, Arthur, you must come and see this!”
Conan Doyle followed her voice to the back of the shop. When he finally found her, she was staring at something that dropped his jaw with surprise.
Sitting behind a low cabinet was a coffee-skinned man in a costume of the exotic east: a plumed turban and a crimson robe trimmed with white rabbit. An inlaid chessboard took pride of place atop the cabinet before him, which had its all of its doors left wide open to display its many brassy cogwheels, pulleys, and mechanisms of diabolical complexity. Atop the chessboard were ivory chess pieces set out, ready for a game. The turbaned man, who on closer inspection, proved to be a simple wooden dummy, held a long-stemmed pipe in one hand. Conan Doyle recognized instantly what he was confronted with.
“Extraordinary! It is a replica of—”
“The Automaton Chess Player,” Jean Leckie interjected before he could finish.
He looked at her, mouth agape. “You know of it?”
“Yes, Arthur. Although I am a mere woman I have a keen mind and am an active member of three lending libraries.” She gave him a cutting look that softened into a playful smirk. “As I told you in the park, I have made a study of all things occult since I was a young girl. It is a replica of Wolfgang von Kempelen’s mechanical chess player, one of the most famous automatons of all time. The original was built in 1789 to impress the Austrian court. Although many declared it a fake, no one could prove it so. The automaton defeated some of the greatest chess players of the day. It even defeated Napoleon. The original wound up in America where it was destroyed in a fire.”
Conan Doyle bowed, hand on heart. “I apologize and happily stand corrected. Miss Leckie, your knowledge of the arcane is positively encyclopedic.”
“Go on, Arthur,” she said, nudging him with an encouraging look. “Try it. Let’s see if the mind behind Sherlock Holmes can defeat a mere mechanical apparatus.”
Conan Doyle vacillated, suddenly reluctant. “But I don’t even know if it functions. Or how to turn it on. I don’t see a switch anywhere.”
“Try moving a piece and see what happens.”
Conan Doyle cleared his throat, feeling slightly ridiculous, and also a little nervous should the device actually work and he be defeated in front of the lady. But he stepped forward gamely, studied the chessboard for a moment and then began with his usual opening, pushing his queen’s pawn to queen 4. He drew his hand away and waited. Nothing happened. He turned to Miss Leckie. “I don’t think it’s work—”
He was interrupted by the ascending whine of mechanical gears. The figure of the Turk drew itself erect, the turbaned head lifted, and the eyes sprang open, glowing with an eerie inner light. The Turk’s arm lifted the long pipe to his carved wooden lips, as if to take a puff, and then blew out a slender jet of steam. The left arm jerked, swept across the chessboard, hooked the black queen’s pawn with its wooden fingers and pushed it forward, exactly matching Conan Doyle’s opening gambit.
“Amazing!” Conan Doyle laughed. “It’s powered by steam. I must have Oscar take a crack at this.” He smiled and looked around for Miss Leckie, but she had vanished. Conan Doyle returned his attention to the automaton. He reasoned it must be a simple mechanical device — a series of gears mathematically determined to play one or possibly two game variations. Conan Doyle had been a bit of a chess prodigy while at Stonyhurst College. He had little doubt he could make short work of a clockwork cabinet full of gears and pulleys, a mechanism little more than an elaborate cuckoo clock. He stooped forward, placed his large index finger atop his rook’s pawn, and pushed it forward to rook four. Jean would have a few minutes to explore the shop on her own.