Part Wan: Ghost in the mansion

In Kellynch Hall’s excessively mirrored breakfast room, Anne felt a ghostly shiver. She fetched a warm shawl. While her father was still haranguing her about its unfashionable bulk, Mary ran in screaming.

“Horror! Error! Poooorrrrr!!!”

Anne carefully fetched the smelling salts, at a pace which gave time for Mary to faint into silence and Charles Musgrove to catch up with his wife. He explained.

“Father and I both invested our capital in the same scheme. The bubble burst and we’re ruined.”

“We can’t make room here for 14 people,” said Elizabeth quickly. “My intimate friend Isabella Thorpe is coming for a lengthy stay and cannot be put off.”

Charles rolled his eyes. “We are selling Uppercross Hall and Cottage to complete strangers and departing to live in simplicity in a small cottage. In the Lake District.”

Mary sat up to scream the better. “Farewell,” added Charles.

“Mary, you must stick with your husband,” said Sir Walter quickly. “The footman will see you both out.”

Anne heard her sister bansheeing for a full 10 minutes after the carriage rattled out of sight.

***

Just before dinner, Anne heard a strange tapping behind the mantlepiece mirror—and felt a ghostly shiver. She stepped closer to the fire. While Elizabeth was complaining about having to share the warmth, Lady Russell ran in screaming.

“Fire! Higher! Entire!” she shrieked.

“We can share. We have big fireplaces,” said Anne.

“No, no,” panted Lady Russell, the crow’s feet about her temples increasing even as they watched. “The fire is at Kellynch Lodge! It has burnt to the ground.”

“What shall you do?” asked Sir Walter anxiously. “And how shall I find a tenant for a burned-out hulk?”

“I shall go to Bath,” said Lady Russell haughtily. “And you…”

The footman interrupted with a message. Sir Walter paled as he read. “It is from Shepherd,” he said. “A plague has broken out simultaneously in Bath and London! What about our annual enjoyment?”

Anne fetched some sulfur disinfectant for the fire and made her father stand near it while he ranted. “Stay a minute, Richard,” she said to the footman.

Under the circumstances, Elizabeth could hardly refuse Lady Russell a bed for the night. Long after they had all retired, smelling rather brimstoney, Anne could still hear her sister complaining to her maids.

***

After Elizabeth at last fell silent, a gale began to beat at the windows. Anne gave up on sleep. She headed for the library; she’d just finished The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices , and had her eye on The Method of Finding the Longitude by Timekeepers . But halfway down the grand marble staircase, she felt a ghostly shiver, and a loud creaking started overhead.

Anne ran. KERaaaaashhhh! A wave of mirror shards chased her down the last of the steps, along with the entire roof of Kellynch Hall.

Anne had practiced tree climbing for private reasons of her own. Stopping only to tie on her strongest boots, she made her way through the debris pretty well, rescuing first Lady Russell, Richard and the maids, then her father, and finally Elizabeth. They huddled in the mirror-strewn breakfast room, where Elizabeth commandeered the shawl.

“What shall we do!” wailed everyone who wasn’t Anne.

“The stables appear intact,” said Anne, who had had a good view while climbing. “We can take the carriage to some fashionable coastal resort and engage rooms. We shouldn’t be infectious, thanks to the sulfur.”

They gave in, but then she had to listen to them arguing the merits of Brighton versus Sanditon for the rest of the night.

***

Part Twooooo: Puppets of Fate

Anne felt a ghostly shiver as the carriage creaked past Lyme in the late afternoon – halfway to Sanditon. They had been delayed in setting out while Sir Walter insisted she climb up and rescue his lavender-and-pearl suit, then his green-and-fuchsia, then his third-best hat, then…eventually Lady Russell had put her foot down.

Anne hooked her elbow through the straps, while taking firm hold of her reticule, now packed with smelling salts, sulfur, shawl, boots, a few other useful objects, and of course her bullwhip and spare hat.

The crash was nearly as loud as the roof collapse had been, though Anne thought her family were accounting for most of the noise. As the most injured, Sir Walter (disarranged hair) and Elizabeth (mussed dress) naturally were entitled to the only two free rooms at the inn.

“All the other lodgings in town are let,” announced the innkeeper. “But you might convince someone to share. There is a university student at Mrs. Edwards’ house…”

“A man?” gasped Lady Russell.

“A young gentleman in need of ready money,” said Anne gently, tying a jacquard handkerchief over the worst of Lady Russell’s cuts.

Ten minutes later, young Mr. Babbage had agreed to sleep in Mrs. Edwards’ washing shed until the Kellynch carriage should be repaired, and had even offered to show them the sights of Lyme. “The next thing is unquestionably to walk down to the sea,” he announced.

Ten minutes later still, Anne stood on the Cobb with her fretful godmother, kind new landlady, and excited new acquaintance. She was not shivering, but her mind hummed.

“f(b) = 4b2 – 6b + b – 15,” said Babbage. Anne and Mrs. Edwards shook their heads at once.

“f(b) = 4b2 – 6b + b3 – 15,” said Anne gently.

“Indeed,” added Mrs. Edwards. “But do not distress yourself, young man. The finite differences method works very well, but we must not forget…”.

Lady Russell drew Anne aside. “Do you ever feel like a puppet of fate?” she asked.

“No,” said Anne. “You may have persuaded me all those years ago, but I made my own choice. Everything about my current condition is entirely my own fault.”

“Er,” said Lady Russell. “I meant…do you not feel that we have somehow been steered to this exact spot by very extraordinary machinations?”

“Er,” said Anne, who had not realized anyone else had noticed. “I think–“ she began, when something caught her eye against the sunset. She whipped her spyglass out of her reticule at once.

***

As Anne searched the horizon, her heart began to thump. A ship, with all sail set, steering straight for the port. HMS Popham, 36 guns, her mind told her. Her heart was telling her things that neither language nor mathematics could express.

Then she saw, closer in, a small battered boat with four strange, stiff figures in it. One held a drum. One held a slender pipe, one a lute. “Why, that looks like…” she wondered.

“I know!” said Mrs. Edwards. “My goodness. But how?”

Boom-splash! Boooom-splasssshhh!

“The French are attacking!” screamed Lady Russell.

“No,” said Anne. “The Popham is firing on the rowboat. But doesn’t he know what it is—”

Boooom-splasssshhh-ploppp!

The third shot was closest yet, and a great gout of water slopped up and into the basin held by the endmost figure. As the liquid slowly drained, the other three figures began to move, stiff hands beating up and down on the drum, stiff fingers tapping the pipe and plucking the air where strings had long since rotted away. Ghostly music floated toward the watchers on the Cobb.

“What is it?” shivered Lady Russell.

“A valuable antique,” said Anne, absent-mindedly. She was rooting in her reticule for the signal flags.

“It is a water-powered mechanical orchestra, one of many ingenious devices invented by the polymath Al-Jazari six hundred years ago,” explained Mrs. Edwards kindly, as Anne knotted a blue-with-a-central-white-stripe above a white-with-a-blue-cross and a red-and-white checked. Quickly, she held the string above her head. “Relent,” whispered Anne. “Please Frederick, understand.”

For a moment, she held her breath. The little waves slapped the Cobb, the automata fluted…and no sound came from the Popham.

“Hold these for me,” Anne told Lady Russell. Her hands free, she trained her spyglass on the flags rising up the frigate’s mainmast.

“A-N-repeat-E,” she read. There was more activity at the mizzen. “Query.”

Anne snatched the red-with-a-white-cross from her reticule and danced up and down, waving it. “Affirmative! Affirmative! Affirmative!”

***

“It is an automaton!” shouted Babbage. Forgotten by the ladies, and not owning a spyglass himself, he had rushed to the end of the Cobb to see better. “I am determined! I will—”

KERsplash! In a moment, the young man was in the water and struggling for his life.

Anne stepped out of her dress and Circassian corset. “The horror of the moment!” gasped Lady Russell but Anne was already swimming strongly. From the corner of her eye, she saw another figure pull off a blue coat and dive from the frigate, and suddenly the sea did not feel cold at all.

They met just at Babbage’s struggling figure, and held him above water. “Tell me not that I am too late,” whispered Frederick.

“For you alone I think and plan,” breathed Anne.

“It’s still working!” spluttered Babbage. No longer busy drowning, he paddled their group towards the automaton and seized its gunwale. “Look at those decorative carvings. I wonder how—”

“Those aren’t decoration,” Anne explained. “It’s writing. In Classical Arabic. It says: ‘Spare automatic servant is stored in locker B’.”

“How do you know that?” asked both men, bemused.

“I went to school in Bath. Besides history and mathematics, it was quite good on languages.”

Frederick smiled as he leaned closer. “No one so capable as Anne.”

***

Part Eeeeeee: Reckoning with the Future

Captain Wentworth’s enormous fortune built himself and his bride a mirror-free mansion in a location with excellent sea-bathing, and further funds purchased a house in Bath for Lady Russell and Mrs. Smith to occupy together. A fine library shortly graced Edward Wentworth’s parsonage, and there was even a little left to enlarge the Musgrove cottage in the Lake District.

Mr. Babbage took the musical automata back to Cambridge with him. He offered the spare servant to Mrs. Edwards, but since it proved to be some sort of shaving-water butler, she let Sir Walter have it at his London house once the plague had passed. It was the talk of town for nine days at least. He felt it was worth every ghostly shiver, though Elizabeth did not. Steeling herself to unaccustomed exertion, she snagged a young man called Rushworth on the rebound and lived haughtily ever after.

Meanwhile, Anne took the Wentworth carriage back to Kellynch and rooted gently through the rubble. There was a surprising amount of text carved into the foundations. After reading it all, she sat on the largest remaining stone.

“السلام عليكم” she said politely. “Sir, I have read your messages and understand that you travelled here from Baghdad seeking materials for your metalwork, and built Kellynch Hall to be your resting place when you became too ill to return.”

She felt a ghostly warmth and smiling, pulled her Arabic dictionary from her reticule.

“But I also understand that the kh-l-s word-root –from which, I am quite sure, the name Kellynch has derived—carries connotations of purging and redemption.”

The shiver changed to one of excitement.

“Have we achieved this?” asked Anne. “Your tomb, though destroyed, has been freed from the vanity that sullied it. Your lost automata have been recovered. Your work has inspired one who I think might carry your ideas forward. His last letter spoke of an engine for calculating polynomial functions. This is, I hope, a more powerful legacy than mechanical playthings for kings?”

Peace washed over her, but the presence did not dissipate.

“And if we let you down again,” added Anne, “you can always come back and haunt those who misuse your ideas.”

The last remaining mirror broke with a rather joyous crash.




****

P.S.: You may have noticed some history-of-computing easter eggs

The board does not let me post more than two links, but they were all to Wikipedia so I hope you can find them on your own.

Al-Jazarī : Badīʿ az-Zaman Abu l-ʿIzz ibn Ismāʿīl ibn ar-Razāz al-Jazarī (1136-1206), the real author of The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices , and real inventor of the automata described. (Completely fabricated: a voyage to England and the haunting of Kellynch.)

Mrs. Edwards : Mary Edwards (1750-1815) really worked on mathematical calculations for the Royal Navy. (Complete fiction: letting rooms in Lyme.)

Mr. Babbage : Charles Babbage (1791-1871), real university student (and a member of a Ghost Club) in the 1810s, and really credited with originating the concept of a computer. (Completely made up: acquiring an inspiring haunted al-Jazari artifact.)

Extra credit: ghost in the mansion , jacquard handkerchief