Because it was a dream, she could allow herself to laugh. “Oh dear. The two of you, attempting to converse… that cannot have ended well.”
“It went splendidly,” Wrain said, “for all of thirty seconds. But we have begun to pursue the notion on our own, you know; it’s too great a challenge to forego.”
Of course he was building it; these were her dreams, after all, and she would dearly love to see the Analytical Engine in operation. That Wrain was not presenting it to her right now could only mean that her mind had not yet fully encompassed Babbage’s intricate and brilliant design. Such insufficiency, however, did not stop her imagination from leaping ahead. “At this point the challenges are quite mundane, simple matters of obtaining funding and suitable engineers. I have already begun to look beyond.”
“I think you underestimate the difficulty of the engineering,” Wrain said dryly, but he was half-drowned out by Nick’s expression of sudden, sharp interest: “Vat do you mean by ‘looking beyond’?”
Happiness lifted her spirit, like a pair of bright wings. These two would not mock her, or warn that she had best confine herself to what was mathematically and scientifically possible. She could tell them whatever she dreamt of, however outrageous. “If we—by which I mean my dear Babbage, of course—can design an Analytical Engine to calculate the answers to equations, can we not design other sorts of engines for other sorts of tasks?”
Frowning, Wrain said, “You mean, other devices that can be instructed by cards?”
“Precisely! Engines which can perform complex tasks, more rapidly and accurately than any human operator could achieve. Composing music, for example: provide the machine with cards that instruct it as to the form of a song—a hymn, perhaps, or a chorale, or even a symphony—and then, by execution of the operations, the engine returns a new composition.” Her love for music was an abiding thing, close kin to her love of mathematics, though she suspected her mother—for all the woman’s knowledge of the latter subject—never quite understood the similarities between the two. “It wants only some means of presenting notes and their relationships in suitably abstract form. Well, that and the design of the engine itself, which of course is no simple matter; I expect it would require tens of thousands of gears, more even than the Analytical Engine.”
Wrain’s mouth fell open by progressive stages during this speech; Nick had gone still as a stone. After a dumbfounded pause, the spritely gentleman said, “With sufficiently abstract representation—”
“Anything,” Nick breathed, staring off into the distance like he had seen a vision of Heaven itself. “Music. Pictures. It could write books. It could—”
His voice cut off. She felt as if she were flying, lifted above the clay of this earth by the power of her own ingenuity. Only gradually did she realize that while her companions, too, were flying, the path they followed was a very specific one. Wrain and Nick were staring at one another, communicating in half-spoken words and abrupt gestures, too excited to get their thoughts out of their heads before leaping on to the next. “Like a loom,” Wrain said; Nick answered him, “But our notation,” and the gentleman nodded as if his dwarfish companion had made a very good point.
It produced a strange feeling in the depths of her mind. If these were her dreams, then why did it feel as if they had abruptly become about something she didn’t understand? A touch of fear stirred. Perhaps Mother is right, and this is the beginnings of madness.
Wrain leapt to his feet and seized her hand, shaking it up and down as if she were a man. His grip felt very hard, and very real. “Ada, dearest Ada, thank you. Oh, I have no idea how to build this thing—we lack even the notation by which to instruct it; I mean, the system of notation we have is dreadfully inadequate, it would not suffice for a Difference Engine, let alone more—but until you spoke I never even conceived of such a device. Not for our own purposes. Will you help us?”
Baffled, increasingly unsure of everything, Ada said, “Help you with what?”
Nick laughed, a rolling guffaw that made her certain he, at least, was deranged. “Building an engine of magic calculation. Something of gears and levers and wheels, that can tell us how to create things, faerie enchantments, too complex for us to imagine on our own. And perhaps, in time, to make them for us.”
No, there was no doubt at all. Ada had taken the first step—or perhaps more than one—down the path of madness her father had followed. Faeries and enchantment, exactly the sorts of things of which her mother disapproved. If she did not turn back now, gambling, poetry, and sexual immorality were sure to follow.
But she did not want to abandon her friends, even if they were phantasms of her diseased mind. Could she not allow herself a little madness, and trust to prayer and the rigorous strictures of science to keep the rest at bay?
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of the infamous poet Lord Byron and his mathematical wife Annabella Milbanke, suspected she knew the answer to that—and it wasn’t in her favor.
“Please, Ada,” Wrain entreated her. “I have seen the disaster that is Babbage’s notes; I daresay you understand them better than he does himself. Or at least can explain them to others, which he patently cannot. We will not be able to do this without help.”
It would have taken a harder soul than Ada Lovelace’s to say no to that desperately hopeful expression. With a feeling of both doom and delight, she said, “Charles Babbage is too rude and too sane to ever help you in this matter. Poor though my own intellect may be, I will bend it to your cause.”
Islington, London: March 14, 1884
Eliza had spent the days leading up to the meeting of the London Fairy Society imagining how things might go. The people might prove to be nothing more than a cluster of bored wives, reading collections of stories from the folk of rural England, clucking their tongues and sighing over the loss of a peasant society none of them had ever seen in person. They might be a group of scholars, documenting that loss and forming theories about what defect of education or brain made peasants believe such ridiculous things. They might be the kind of people Eliza had seen at Charing Cross last fall—working hand-in-glove with the faeries to sow chaos among decent folk.
She imagined telling the story of how Owen was stolen away, to the shock and sympathy of her listeners. She imagined haranguing the society’s leader until he told her where to find a faerie. She imagined finding a faerie there in person and shaking the truth out of him.
She never got around to imagining how she would get into No. 9 White Lion Street.
Eliza had never been to Islington before. When evening began to draw close on the afternoon of the second Friday, she took her nearly empty barrow and began walking up Aldersgate Street through Clerkenwell. She asked directions as she went, and eventually was directed to a lane behind a coaching inn, in a busy part of town.
The building at No. 9 proved to be a house, and a respectable one at that. Eliza stared at it in dismay. The setting of her various fancies had always been vague—a room; chairs; faceless people—she had presumed it would be some kind of public building, like the ones where workers’ combinations sometimes met to plan protests against their masters. Not someone’s house, where it would be impossible to fade into the background.