I thought nothing of it at the time. Molly had never thought of venturing north of Finsbury Park. Now that I recalled that invitation, it felt right to send her as our agent. Molly was in danger anyway. When she engineered her revenge on those men, I seized my chance.
Molly was not grateful. She was sixteen, or fifteen, or thereabouts—nobody knew rightly—and ripe for trouble. Removing her to —shire was a wise precaution. She took some persuading, not to say blackmailing, but she soon began to make her observations: the brief version to me, the elaborate to Ruth.
OF THE OLD EARL, PART THE SECOND [MOLLY]
WATCHMAN, MY OLD CHUCKABOO,
YET TO BE PRESENTED TO THE EARL.
HIS EXPERIMENTS KEEP HIM OCCUPIED.
YOUR NORTHERN EARWIG
Dear Miss Villiers,
Of the old earl, I yet know little.
Disappointed to report little progress. My first researches involved nosing around, getting under Skirtle’s feet as she was overseeing the house cleaning.
“Oh, the earl used to busy himself in town,” said Skirtle proudly. “Made his name in hydraulics. Toured his manufacticaries all round the kingdom. There in’t a theatre in London dun’t use hydraulic safety curtains, nor a self-respecting hotel without Roxbury lifts. The docks use ’em. The locks use ’em. From this acorn grew the oak of Roxbury Industries, crowned by all this.”
She gestured to the grandeur all about us: the oak panels of the lower drawing room, the wild rockery outside, and the shimmering greenhouses. In Skirtle’s halcyon tales, the earl was as likely to be up north, overseeing ironclads, out west with army artillery, or down south at the brick quarries. The brickworks come from his wife’s family, taken over when her father died. Once I’d got Skirtle going, she recounted the potted history warmly.
“The queen made him an earl. Respected both sides of the House. No wonder they turned to Roxbury Industries to fortify our island.” She hesitated. “There was a hiccough, though, back in the late fifties.”
“What?” My ears pricked up. “What happened?”
“Some funny business over a bomb in Paris.” She turned her attention to the floor, adjusting the grates through which heat arises so magically. “That’s all forgotten now. Now the navy wants their wooden wall plated in steel. Who does England turn to but Roxbury?”
“Nothing wrong, is there?” I refrained from asking if the country could still count on Roxbury Industries. Mustn’t blow my cover. “The earl no longer busies himself in town?”
“No.” Skirtle bustled around the lamps. She couldn’t keep the tone of regret from her voice. “Nor with his industries neither.”
“I’ve barely seen him. I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?”
She ignored me, holding each lamp up to check the wick and content herself the glass was clean. “Well, he’s distracted, you might say.” She mustered a kind look for me. “Don’t worry your pretty head over it.”
I rather thought I’d have the lowdown for you by now. I imagined I’d be presented to him forthwith, prior to embarking on the children’s drawing lessons on Monday.
I caught Birtle tidying the lower drawing room. “Will I be meeting with the earl soon?”
He snorted. “No, no. His Lordship is occupied.”
“Occupied how?”
He glared, as if this were the rudest question he’d ever heard.
“How?” I repeated. “How is he occupied, then?”
“Well, he has business,” he blustered. “Down the scientific quarter.”
“The glasshouses, you mean?” I gestured down the hill with my thumb. “What’s going on there that’s so important?”
“The earl’s business is not my concern.” Birtle harrumphed. “Nor is it yours. He has his plants. His animals. His machines. His electrical experiments.”
“You consider his work important, Birtle?”
“Of course I do, you pipsqueak.” His black eyebrows worked in astonishment, like a caterpillar quadrille. “But it’s none of my business whether it is important or trivial. I am here to facilitate his work, without interruption from the world, the estate, or upstart employees such as you.”
“Experiments?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You mentioned experiments.” I stepped nearer, to unsettle him. “What experiments?”
“I don’t know, blast you.” His eyes blazed. He blinked in horror, as he realised what he had said. “You have made me do something that never happens: I have lost my temper.” His eyebrows arched for the skies, and he muttered reluctantly, “For that I am sorry.”
“I haven’t made you do anything. Nor have you answered my question.” I smiled. “If the earl is neglecting his wider affairs, tied up with these experiments, where are his sons? Why don’t they step in?”
“The eldest, Wilfred, Marquis of Burnfoot, is soon to return from his tour of India and China, training for the Dragoon Guards. The second son, Nicodemus, only yesterday took five wickets for Harrow in the match. He returns tonight. In the morning you shall be teaching him along with his sisters, as he takes a special interest in drawing.”
“Not much use in industry, then?”
“The earl has Mr Lodestar for that.”
I nodded, for I’ve heard this name Lodestar bandied about, but Birtle offered no further account. “And the earl’s wife?”
“His wife?” He looked at me. “His wife is…” And Birtle turned away, his voice constricted. “She is departed from us.”
I regretted my question, which had apparently unmanned him.
“Miss Molly, it’s advisable that you restrain your inquisitive nature, at least until you have understood the ways of such a house as this. You are keeping me from my duties. I bid you good day.”
With that, off he went. I watched him pretending to busy himself, checking the buff on the servants’ buzzers in the hallway.
Next I meet the children, and then the larks begin.
Roxbury’s experiments keep him busy. That is all I can say for now.
CORRESPONDING WITH ROXBURY [LAWLESS]
Why should the name Roxbury be in the secret pocket of a dead man’s trousers arrived from the other side of the world? The body at the docks dropped swiftly down my list of priorities after Erith; further after Camden; and after Guernsey, I disappeared down a governmental rabbit hole, as we began not just to solve crime but to anticipate it.
We’d done all the checks we could think of. The few passengers who’d died on board were all accounted for. They listed the victuals supplied at every dock, the menu for top table, the staff and passengers and their coming and goings. Nothing stood out. Crew came and went at every stop, of course, but never was a passenger noted as missing. We scoured the records for inconsistencies and incidents. If such a man vanished without vestige, he was unlikely to be a passenger. We gave up hope of identifying him. We informed Simpson the body could be buried in the police graveyard in Moorfields. But not before I’d written a courteous note to Roxbury himself, enquiring if he might have known any passenger arriving on the Great Britain over the last few years.
Nor did I forget the men who had ostensibly tied Molly up and then killed each other. Too easy to write them off as the kind of men nobody would mourn.
I tracked down their next of kin. I informed them plainly that these men had been killed in the line of duty. No need to mention their dishonourable duties, or brand them as criminals. Soldiers of fortune, they died as they lived, by the knife, in the slums. Seeing as there were no culprits to be arraigned, the coroner reported death by misadventure, for simplicity: the paperwork for murders is tremendous.
One wife wrote to request a pauper’s burial. The other sent no reply. To think how the men’s shadowy labours had been rewarded gave me a pang. Whatever Brodie had gifted to them, they had paid for it with their immortal souls.
* * *
Roxbury’s answer came not from the earl himself, but from this elusive Lodestar whom Molly had mentioned. He r
eplied by telegram, verbosely, from the wire station in the greenhouse scientific quarter. An expensive communication, this paid excessive respect to an enquiry from Scotland Yard, while demonstrating that Lodestar considered his own time too important to waste on detailed correspondence. He wrote as follows:
WE ARE CURRENCY. ANY NUMBER OF REASONS FOR NAME IN POCKET. WE SELL ENGINES AROUND WORLD, ARMS, AND SHIPS. THERE IS STATION IN BRAZIL WHERE EVERY NUT AND BOLT IS ROXBURY MANUFACTURED. EXCUSE EARL IF CANNOT FATHOM WHY IMMIGRANT SHOULD HAVE HIS NAME IN POCKET. NO LESS USUAL TO FIND COIN WITH QUEEN’S NAME ON IT.
“We are currency.” Well, well.
I replied, by letter, trying to diffuse any ill-feeling, as I felt Lodestar’s message brusque, if not rude. But businessmen will be busy, and telegrams terse. I thought no more upon it, until I started working in earnest with Miss Villiers.
THE NORPHANS PRACTICKLY [MOLLY]
WATCHMAN,
LESSONS DULY COMMENCED.
MOLLY
“Miss Molly, oh—how—delightful.” Peggy, the middle child, curtseyed carelessly and sat down at the puzzle. “Welcome to our pale and insignificant world, to which we beg you to bring colour, else, lost in the phantasmagoria of our woe-begotten dreams, we shall kill ourselves.”
I’d been forewarned that she, the plainest of the three, was the pertest, and a deceitful traitress; but I’ve encountered many supposedly evil folk in my days and found them personable enough.
“Yes, we shall kill ourselves. With promptitude.” She scratched her eyebrow, eyeing me sidelong. “We are the Norphans Practickly. I am Margaret, known as Peggy. This is Mary Catherine, known as Kitty. The fool dressed as a London dandy there is Nicodemus, El Nico, the diablo of Burnfoot Gorge.”
The other two, without looking up from their puzzle, gave an apathetic bow. All three sported discreet items from Jay’s Mourning Warehouse on Regent Street: the girls wore jet rings, and Nico a cravat in the mauve of half-mourning.
I have met many youngsters full of bluff and flam in my time, but never a one from the higher echelons of society so full of it; fuller than I was at her age. (You’ll object that I’m scarcely older than Peggy, but I seem older, with my city savvy; let us hope the Roxbury children never twig they’ve been palmed off on an apprentice.) I bit back a smile to think how rude they were aiming to be, and how pale were their efforts against my Oddbody dunces.
I blinked. “Norphans, did you say?”
Young Kitty prodded her brother’s arm. “Ah-ha-ha! Nico said it wrong,” she chanted, “Nico said it wrong.”
Nico looked up from the puzzle. They tell me there’s always a puzzle on the go in the art room; this was a view of London. Nico’s brows angled as steeply as the Palace of Westminster, where one day he may scorn the opposition as he scorned his sister. “If I may explain the history,” he said drolly. “As a child, with Fa always working and mother obsessed with good deeds, I once complained to Skirtle, saying, in my childish voice, ‘Skirtle, I am a norphan, practically.’ Skirtle found this so hilarious she had me repeat it to my mother, then to Fa; they reeled me out at parties, when the quality visited, as they did in their droves—no more, alas— to repeat my plaint: ‘I am a norphan, practically.’ My diction caused such hilarity that our parents took to calling me the Norphan Practickly, an appellation my fool sisters, lacking in invention, have greedily adopted.”
Giggles from the girls. They turned back to their puzzle, rather insolently, as if to deem my reaction insufficiently entertaining.
“Is this,” said I, “where our drawing lessons are to be held?”
Peggy frowned, as if at a plate of boiled cabbage. “Drawing?”
Nico picked up a piece of the puzzle, huffed confidently, and forced it in, on the lower right of the map, tapping it insolently down.
I squinted at it. “I don’t think so.”
He rounded on me with as much disrespect as his undeveloped vocal style could muster. “What do you know about it?”
“I know the statue of Nelson.” I removed it to the correct spot, mid picture. “I know it stands not on London Bridge but atop of Nelson’s Column. As any good Englander knows.”
Kitty, obligingly, laughed at him.
“Perhaps not.” I did not smirk; disdain was enough. “Not here in the countryside.”
My insult hit the mark. Nico tugged at his dandified collar, gnashing his teeth. To a would-be swell, nothing hurts more than being revealed as a rustic.
“Sadly,” said Peggy, allying herself to him, “drawing must wait till the completion of this mighty puzzle. There is no other table.”
I looked at her. This was a lie. A spiteful lie. I considered laying down the puzzle cloth that Skirtle had provided for this very scenario.
I did nothing. I did not dole out the pencils and paper. I would not force upon them the lesson I had planned so brilliantly with your help, and the advice of old Mr Lear, the filthy landscape painter.
I picked up my drawing case and walked to the window. On the side table stood a daguerreotype of the family, five years old perhaps. To one side, the earl and his wife, a fine-looking woman, bright-eyed and kindly; to the other, the children; beyond my three terrors stood a fourth, staring out with a haughty bearing. Between the four children and their parents, a gap.
I sat myself down, at the end of the table, where the light was good. I glanced up at the three children, endeavouring to ignore me, though little Kitty was poorly rehearsed and kept peeking.
I took out my sketchbook. I laid it on my lap, not the table, so they would not see what I was drawing. I took out my favourite charcoal stick, and chalks. I pursed my lips. I drew.
My sketch of Nico was outlined within minutes. Chalk marks captured the sneer, charcoal shadowed the haughty eyes. I blew off the excess, and laid the drawing on the table, at an angle, so they might see I had drawn something but not exactly what.
For Peggy, my caricature centred on her mouth, fussily pronouncing so many lies. It was not my kindest drawing. This I laid to the other side. Not only Kitty but Nico too gave in to the urge to peek at it sideways.
Kitty’s portrait was less unkind, but lively, with her hilarious mop of hair falling over catlike cheeks and sleepy eyes.
With the three of them skewered, I nodded in satisfaction. “If you wish to take up the drawing lesson offered you,” I said, “kindly come down this end of the table, where the light is better, and try drawing this bowl of apples.”
None moved. After a polite interval, I shrugged.
I turned my back on them. I gazed upon the ravishing view which fell dramatically from the window, flung across the hillside with an abandon that belittles all the Royal Academy landscapes I’ve seen. I am not fanatical for formal gardens: Hampton Court’s cold, Regent’s Park is straight; Hyde Park retains a bit of wildness. But this was another realm.
Rocky peaks rose to both sides, heathers and gorses struggling to hold on. Vast trees—don’t ask me the variety, Miss V, but big ones, straight and true, and bushy ones, gnarled and ancient—lined the Burnfoot Gorge. Below, an iron pedestrian bridge arched over the river churning through the valley. I felt electrified by the energies of nature, so gloriously untamed across Roxbury’s lands. Would my abilities as an artist be up to a landscape so fine?
I laid out paints, mixing jar, cleansing jar. I stared and stared, measuring the scene in my mind. The contours and outlines I sketched in haste. Pencil lines always in haste: it gives a vivacity to the line. The children kept puzzling in this interval. Kitty was only restrained from looking at my caricatures by her siblings’ stringent stares. I heard Nico’s huffings as he tapped pieces into place, doubtless setting St Paul’s dome upon the British Museum Library. Peggy resisted; she was the ringleader of their japes.
Lucky I had befriended Skirtle, else I would not have been forewarned of the Roxbury children’s form.
I began to paint. When I paint, time flows by. It is the only time an enemy might sneak up and do for me.
&n
bsp; After an hour of lacing cotton ball clouds over the brooding distance, fading the crags to floating backdrops, dabbing the trees greener, and deepening the nearer boughs, I sat back to survey my efforts. Art brings renewal, and my frustration was forgotten. As my senses returned, I felt eyes over my shoulder and smelt Kitty’s perfume.
“Ho, now,” called Nico, “you blundering zounderkite.”
I turned to see him clutch Kitty’s wrist and tug her back to her place. Peggy tutted, planning repercussions for this disloyalty. But I saw the little one’s eyes dancing with mirth, for she had viewed my caricatures. She could see that my ability to sketch them so damningly gave me power over them. Careless of her siblings’ wrath, she desired that power.
The clock trilled and warbled.
Skirtle popped her head in. “How lovely.” She looked astonished to find a pacific scene, as if she was expecting to find my head on a platter. “Lunch, my little ducks.”
The children rose as one. They bolted past her without a word in my direction. How completely children fail to conceive their elders as humans, with feelings of our own. On the bell of lunch, I was relegated from drawing mistress and foe to employee and invisible.
“Must I eat with the ingrates?”
“Oh, love.” Skirtle could see behind my forced jollity. “You’ve lasted till lunch.”
“Oh, I’ll last.”
“Come and take a bite with me, won’t you, pet?” She linked arms with me, and I noted the scratch of the crepe trimming on her sleeve, over the dull fabric of her dress; subtler than the children’s, these were her signs of mourning.
HARNESS’S ELECTROPATHIC BELT
The first and only effectual application of Electricity to Suffering, by mild and imperceptible currents, instantaneous and lasting. All in search of health should wear Harness’s Electropathic Belt. Thousands of unsolicited testimonials received. Beautifully designed. Scientifically constructed. Comfortable to wear. A boon to sufferers. Never fails.
The “very thing” for Ladies. Try one and you will never wear any other kind. For health, comfort and elegance. Don’t delay, send at once. No woman should be without one. These beautiful designed corsets cure
Lawless and the House of Electricity Page 5