Lawless and the House of Electricity

by William Sutton

  WEAK BACK

  BILIOUSNESS

  INDIGESTION

  FEMALE IRREGULARITIES

  ALL NERVOUS, MUSCULAR, FUNCTIONAL AND ORGANIC COMPLAINTS.

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  Also available:

  Harness’s Xylonite Truss, Gentleman’s Belt.

  TERROR IN CAMDEN [LAWLESS]

  The Camden Road train blast, two weeks later, has also been well documented. Jeffcoat and I were quicker to the scene, but not quick enough to save lives.

  It could have been worse. The Fuse Wire Bomber, as the press dubbed him, surely imagined that his “mule” would set the thing off at peak hours. Instead, the costermonger slept in. His donkey was just pulling the cart into its habitual position, at the end of Platform One, when it set off the explosion. Fortunately, the coster escaped with minor injuries; that was a miracle, and not proof of complicity, as the press intimated. Unfortunately, the costermonger’s donkey and cart were what protected him.

  Over his poor animal, he was inconsolable. He spoke barely a word of sense. Jeffcoat and I could testify to that. But this senselessness predated the explosion. As a candidate for subversion by whatever radical organisation planned the shebang, he was unlikely.

  Who did plan it? On behalf of the Home Office’s investigations, we pieced together the sequence of events.

  A porter was coupling two sets of carriages together. The guard stood, whistle in hand, waiting for the signal. The engine driver awaited the guard’s whistle. As he opened his regulator, the report resounded across North London.

  The station was enveloped in steam. The engine was no longer on the viaduct.

  It had fallen twenty feet, into the road below. They would carry out a formal rail investigation, but this was no accident, we were confident of that, nor even a defective boiler. It was intended to be worse. Half an hour before would have been carnage.

  The Fuse Wire Bomber, indeed. We found copper wires, dislodged by the coster cart from its nook by the waiting room. What explosives were used was a mystery. A wooden crate lay smashed across the platform. Its glass sides were blown out, more wires were strewn around, and the platform beneath tinged yellow. The coster swore he had never seen it before. To what purpose the wires, none could tell us.

  This was not Chartist style. Too advanced for the Fenians, unless they had made swift developments with explosives.

  After the casualties were cleared, Jeffcoat made me comb the area with him. We found, where the blasted cart had been, the remains of a mechanism: bits of iron; a strange ball, pocked and scorched, neither wooden nor rubber. Whatever it was had fallen to the platform, knocked by the cart, and ignited upon impact.

  A FENIAN DENIAL [LAWLESS]

  I brought in O’Leary, purely for questioning, without charge. When I showed to him what was left of this contraption, his eyes bulged.

  “What’s that, now, when it’s at home?” he said.

  “We hoped,” said Jeffcoat, “London’s top-ranking Fenian might be able to tell us.”

  “And so he might. But I can’t. Interested to know, though, if you catch ’em.” His envy was such, I felt sure he had no part in it. “On a scientific basis, you understand. It’s not fulminate of mercury, is it now?”

  “No.” I examined him. “And yet your Fenians claim they did this.”

  “Do they now, Watchman?” He lathered on the scepticism. “Would you be meaning the Irish Republican Brotherhood? Or could you be referring to the Phoenix National and Literary Society?”

  Jeffcoat groaned. “And they’re not Fenians?”

  “Not necessarily. These laudable sodalities remain at loggerheads with your government over Irish independence.” He leaned forward. “But we don’t exterminate donkeys.”

  I stared at the card in the file in front of me, received by The Times just hours after the explosion: OURSELVES ALONE. “Ourselves Alone” being the translation of Sinn Fein, of course, the Fenians’ slogan.

  O’Leary tapped the table. “Show us it, then.”

  I looked to Jeffcoat, but he shook his head. He was right: it might complicate a prosecution, if he’d seen the evidence.

  “Read us it then, ye daft Gardai.” He shook his head when I read it aloud. Now he could not keep the indignation from his voice. “Pah! Now, that’s interesting, I’ll grant you. The International Brotherhood is based in Manchester, I needn’t remind you. They managed to hear the news, write the card and deliver it within hours of the explosion. Wouldn’t you grant that’s interesting?”

  “Easy enough, if it was planned.” I gave a sardonic nod. Besides, the Brotherhood had circles in every city in England, with cloak-twitchers aplenty to deliver such notes.

  “It wasn’t.”

  “It couldn’t be the work of some renegade?” said Jeffcoat.

  “Like Dolan the Red?” He shook his head, thoughtful. “Never.”

  Jeffcoat rounded on him. “Why not?”

  “The thing is,” O’Leary scratched his ear with maddening lugubriousness, “Dolan and such are fools, but they’re not likely to forget the Gaeilge now.”

  I looked at him.

  “The Gaelic, Sergeant. Their own Irish tongue as they were brought up with.”

  Jeffcoat snatched up the card. “This supposed mistake being?”

  “Can you not see it?” He tutted, impudent. “And you, Lawless, a Gael, of a sort.”

  I made no answer.

  “‘Ourselves alone’, indeed! Sure, isn’t that the common mistranslation? There’s no ‘alone’ in the Irish. ‘Sinn Féin’ means ‘ourselves’. At a push ‘we ourselves’.”

  “You’re pushing your luck,” said Jeffcoat.

  “False witness.” O’Leary fixed him right in the eye. “If an Irishman’s identifying himself to the world as the author of such an event, which the IRB deplores, by the way, this is exactly how he would not do it.” He thrust his chair aside. “Bloody libellous. If you catch him, add that to his crimes, and I’ll back you up in court.”

  Out he walked. Jeffcoat and I looked at each other.

  We reported it to Ripon. Who else could it be? He said it had to be the French.

  AGE OF WONDERS [LAWLESS]

  The rail disaster caused vast disturbance in Camden, yet from it we only recovered the fuse wire, the iron, and the broken crate—which told us nothing. We had the pocked remnant of a ball analysed. It took them a while: nitrocellulose, some new wonder material. A sharp-eyed constable, packing up the remains of the broken crate, examined the metal attached to the crate panels more closely: three shards of it. Thank goodness he did, for we should have spotted them, and they might prove telltale in the end.

  O’Leary’s eyes had bulged at the sight of these remnants, and I believed him when he claimed he knew nothing. These were times of swift change in armaments. Britain remained at peace (bar a few brawling New Zealanders). Other nations warmongered merrily, hungry for fresh methods of annihilation. The French spatted with the Austrians, the Austrians with Prussians and patriotic Italians. Russia crushed the Circassians; the samurai troubled the Japs. Paraguay wrestled its neighbours. Revolutions, wherever you cared to look, joyfully stoked the north of England’s furnaces. When the Americans fell out over slavery, it was to England they turned for weaponry.

  Roxbury had armed the British since the Crimea—aside from that public disgrace in the fifties which Skirtle alluded to. For that spell, Joseph Whitworth of Manchester snuck into favour.

  Today Roxbury armed the United States of America and the Confederate States of America. Both sides. Why not? Their dollars were as green. Yes, slavery was frowned upon in enlightened England (conveniently forgetting h
ow it built the Empire); but the Confederate States struggled not for slavery, but the sovereign freedom to decide their own laws.

  Arms meant money. No wonder Roxbury Industries and Whitworth Enterprises competed over the latest scientific developments. Newfangled fuels: paraffin or kerosene, whale oil, guano from Pacific atolls, peat from Irish bogs. Ironclad ships. Roxbury’s breech-loading guns saved our army, Bessemer’s steel our navy. This was the age of wonders.

  Three shards of iron, fuse wire, and a ball: all that we had to work from. On two shards, no distinguishing feature. On the third, sliced crosswise, the remnants of words:

  JO

  TWO

  CHE

  DIVERGENCES [LAWLESS]

  Molly told me of her discoveries, as yet limited.

  To Ruth she explained her struggles in the role of drawing mistress with equanimity. If she suffered from the children’s maltreatment, she did not say it outright; at least Skirtle had given her to understand the little devils’ history of rank behaviour.

  “She is exaggerating,” Ruth said, “I’m sure.”

  “Sure?”

  “More or less sure.”

  “Let us hope you are right,” I said. “If she is doing as badly as she presents it, Roxbury will throw her out, I will have learnt nothing, and Ripon will extract my guts to restring his violin.”

  * * *

  The trajectory of Molly’s lessons we learned later.

  The initial lessons proceeded similarly. The Roxbury children had not so much freedom that they could refuse to attend; besides, they enjoyed the challenge of leaving Molly to draw alone while they struggled with their blasted puzzle picture. So, little by little, one by one, Molly took on the challenge, reporting each stage to Ruth. She won them, as she wins everyone, sooner or later.

  AN ART MISTRESS [MOLLY]

  WATCHMAN, YOU OLD CHARPERING FEINTER,

  LESSONS SATIS.

  EARL REMAINS ELUSIVE.

  MOLLY

  Dear Miss V,

  Kitty has succumbed. You may but guess at my sense of triumph.

  I left my caricatures out for the taking. If the older two thought of destroying them, they did not wish to be seen to care.

  Kitty secreted them away.

  Over recent days, I secretly furnished her with paper and chalks. She studied the rudiments of copying with me. First, we copied my versions of her siblings, simplistic and remorseless, which was motivation enough. She has been sketching and re-sketching these wheresoever she goes, at all times of day, all over the house. Her school notebooks are adorned with gargoyle versions of her whole family— mother excluded—and the older two, I am sure, have remarked and are inwardly digesting…

  * * *

  Peggy I won over with my air of knowingness.

  The thought of London is thrilling to her. Our acquaintance with the famous intoxicates her youthful brain. In their heyday, of course, the Earl and Lady Roxbury entertained the most celebrated in the land, but the children were small. Peggy was only ever presented and packed off to bed; she was never allowed to present a play, being a dilatory student; never allowed to converse. This has built up such individuals to an unattainable glory in her mind. I know Watchman’s scribbler friends, of course, Mayhew and Dickens and Wilkie Collins; I’ve supped with the editor of Punch, worked for Bazalgette, entertained the prince and his wife. I’ve witnessed crimes and assisted investigations. Such accomplishments tally awkwardly with being a drawing mistress, I know. I’ve merely hinted. Enough to hook young Peggy.

  Peggy is dying to know life, which I do. Peggy is making plans to escape this pale northern prison; and escape’s my forte. Thus, after initial hostilities, Peggy has decided to sue for an alliance.

  Peggy began by drawing. Badly.

  I told her straight, it would impress me more if she tried to be civil. What at last won me over was her knowledge of life at Roxbury House. Current duties aside—you know what I mean—I am an inveterate snoop.

  * * *

  Two pupils conquered and willing to participate. One to go. Nico has fallen last. Nico has fallen hardest.

  Nicodemus is an arrogant child. He first had a letter published in The Times at the age of fourteen. Don’t ask him, or you’ll get a lecture on it: a complaint about the nation’s rotten bread, demanding government reform and imprisonment for bakers adulterating our foodstuff. This gained him notoriety at school, amused his parents’ friends, and gave him a puffed-up notion of his own importance.

  Nico liked to sit, insolently tapping the puzzle pieces into place, ignoring my lessons. He makes an affectation of reading The Times every afternoon—so late is it delivered in those remote parts—in order to express outrageous opinions. These opinions he first tries on his sisters, at mealtimes. When I began dining with the Norphans, he tried them on me too.

  “These striking factory workers.” He wiped the fat from his chops in satisfaction. “They should be marched down to the sea and shot. Don’t you think, Miss Molly, my dear?”

  Kitty stayed silent.

  Peggy didn’t dare challenge Nico’s politics.

  “I’m not your dear,” I said. “And I’m afraid your views seem somewhat foolish.”

  Nico huffed. “The strikers are the fools.”

  I continued with my lunch. “Girls, what do you imagine the strikers want? No, first: what do their bosses want?”

  “Money.” Peggy was keen to earn my favour. “Profit. That’s what Fa wants. Production increased, profit doubled.”

  “And shooting the workers.” I caught Nico scowling at us. “What will that achieve?”

  Kitty was round-eyed. “Who would work Fa’s machines?”

  “Production stymied,” Peggy declared, like a newspaper hawker. “Profit slashed.”

  “Perhaps the bosses,” I teased, “will work the machines themselves.”

  Nico could not resist. “There are workers all over the Continent who’d gladly take the jobs these strikers complain of, for half the wage.”

  “Oh, yes.” I nodded, raising an eyebrow to Peggy.

  She couldn’t resist. “You mean those immigrant workers you were complaining of last week.”

  “Telling us to deport them,” Kitty agreed.

  “Because they keep blowing up factories.”

  Nico’s face was turning scarlet. “Yielding to ridiculous demands only encourages more strikes.”

  “You’re welcome to your opinion,” I replied.

  “But?”

  I grinned. “You think activists naive, but your thoughts lead to bad decisions in the long term.”

  “How so?”

  “Grant an extra shilling, they go back to work. Safe workplace, you boost their confidence. Fewer accidents. Fewer illnesses. A sense of purpose. Collaboration. Willingness to meet deadlines. All for an extra shilling.”

  “Cheap, I’d say,” chimed in Kitty obligingly.

  Nico regarded me with loathing. “You’re utterly village.”

  “Meaning what?” I laughed.

  He drew himself up to his full height. “Not of the House.”

  “Oxford slang,” Peggy translated, with a snort. “He got it from Wilfred.”

  “Christchurch College is the House.” Nico was pleased with his knowledge. “Anything else is village. That is: of the lower echelons, pitiful.”

  “I see.” I poured myself a glass of wine, particularly enjoyable as Nico is not allowed it.

  Peggy tutted. “A rather snobbish expression.”

  “For a snobbish boy,” Kitty crowed.

  I couldn’t help smiling. “This debate is more robust than you are used to in school.”

  “I’m head of the debating society, I’ll have you know.”

  I blinked. “Oh dear.”

  “You’re not head,” said Peggy, “you’re treasurer. But you’ll probably steal Miss Molly’s logic to become head.”

  OF THE OLD EARL, PART THE THIRD [MOLLY]

  WATCHMAN, YOU SHRINKING LILLY LAW,


  NEARER TO MEETING EARL.

  MOLLY

  Dear Miss V,

  I will confess, I had expected to be introduced formally, before I started teaching. I said as much to Birtle this morning.

  “When will the earl himself interview me?”

  “Interview?” Birtle stared. “You? The earl employs you to occupy his children’s time, not his own.”

  “He keeps his distance, doesn’t he?”

  “He doesn’t suffer fools gladly.” Birtle enjoyed his insult. “And why ever should he?”

  I could not answer. If I suggested he ought to check I’m a suitable tutor for his brood, that might prompt suspicions that I ain’t, suspicions Birtle clearly harbours already. “Only that is how I have previously been employed. In the south.”

  “In the south?” Birtle made no attempt to conceal his mirth, as any London butler with a semblance of manners might. He turned and walked away, muttering. “In the south, she says.”

  MYSTERIES [LAWLESS]

  JO TWO CHE. We racked our brains in search of the solution to the mystery. We studied the metal shard. We made notes, compared copious ideas.

  “We might find,” I suggested, “a blacksmith called John Twomey in Cheshire.”

  Jeffcoat shook his head. “More likely, a Josiah living at a Number Two Cheyne Walk.”

  “Or in Chester-le-Street.”

  * * *

  We ransacked the Yard’s list of criminals. Nothing.

  It could refer to the second job done by a specific chemist.

  Or the Book of Job, Chapter II, the verse where God shows off to Satan about his servant Job who escheweth evil.

  The transpositions, permutations, peregrinations were endless.

  Solutions? Solutions we could not find.

  * * *

  I noted another coincidence that week: a fire at the East India docks, where we had found that forgotten body. Jeffcoat went along to investigate, but arson was frequent enough. When goods from the Indies proved unpopular, they redeemed the expense by burning them and claiming the sum insured.

  The harbour master’s office was burnt down, he told me, along with a building for shipping records. It was unnerving. “Still, what does it matter? We’ve taken copies of everything. Besides, the chances of finding out who it was were astronomical.”