I paid for lunch, as amends for my outburst, eager to see this satchel. “But why Monsieur Hugo? Have you not French speakers among your trusted comrades?”
“But of course,” he said. His own French was fluent; he was entirely capable of reading it himself. He put his arm around my shoulder, his manner uncomfortably informal. “Certain abbreviations are opaque to me. Slang. Military jargon.” He shrugged. “Besides, who writes as well as Monsieur Hugo?”
* * *
At the station, Hugo was at work in the inner room, sitting at the chief’s own desk. De Nesle’s chest puffed with pride, as if a work of genius were being composed before our eyes. “The translation will be superb. You have read Les Misérables?”
“De Nesle, can we rely on Hugo’s confidentiality? Given that he is, in fact, French.”
De Nesle looked puzzled.
I did not spell it out: if Hugo communicated military secrets to French colleagues on high, any advantage this discovery offered was lost; De Nesle was like an archaeologist, unaware his diggers might sell off the treasures he sought. “Never mind.”
“Bof! You know nothing of Monsieur Hugo’s history.” He spoke of Hugo’s protests upon Louis Napoleon’s grisly transition from elected premier to soi-disant emperor; of Hugo’s exile from France and loyalty to Guernsey.
Ignoring his prattlings, I watched Hugo at work. The great author was absorbed, scanning, sifting, and annotating: getting the measure of his task.
I knocked and went in, shutting De Nesle out. I introduced myself brusquely.
“Thank heaven you have come.” Hugo dragged his attention from the papers, like an opium addict emerging from the swoon. He was ashen-faced, and he spoke beautiful English, gravelly with cigar smoke. “The things I must show you, Sergeant. The historic plots of De Béville and De Guines are reignited: the Portsmouth Plan. You must know of it?”
He unfolded an extraordinary map of the Channel.
“If this only were fiction, one would make of it a beautiful story. Such a beautiful story! It would take London by storm.” He put his hand to his brow, every inch the Shakespearean hero, and fixed me with a piercing eye. “But it is no fiction. This makes the effort of 1779 seem the prank of the schoolboy.”
I tore my eyes from him to study the map: the English Channel was annotated thickly, numbered arrows pointing ashore either side of Portsmouth, then sweeping round, all the way to the naval dockyards, the mainstay of our sea power, the heart of our empire.
Inscribed above, the puzzling phrase: UN GIBRALTAR FRANÇAIS
REPERCUSSIONS [LAWLESS]
“Military intelligence?” Miss Villiers said. We were walking over Waterloo Bridge, and in the dazzling sunlight I could not gauge her expression. “Sounds unlikely.”
I laughed. For six weeks now I had been working on matters of national importance. We would meet at Waterloo Station. I accompanied her into town, where she was attending courses and meetings and job interviews, ever since losing her librarian post at the British Museum. We had a habit of discussing my work. She was ever intrigued by puzzles; our early acquaintance was spent cracking codes in Museum Street tearooms.
On my return from Guernsey, she sensed my anxiety—and my reticence.
“I understand.” She looked askance. “A woman, of course, cannot be trusted.”
Useless to insist that I was forbidden to trust anybody but Jeffcoat. Useless to deny it was anything to do with her being a woman.
* * *
We were already buried in paperwork. Jeffcoat chased round, gleaning facts, figures and names from anyone near the Erith disaster; I the same with Camden, quizzing the train companies and the costermonger’s donkey’s second cousin. While I sifted this mountain of minutiae, the Royal Commission awaited our report. After my days in Guernsey, we were further behind than ever. The satchel dossier was overwhelming, in volume and gravity.
I racked my brains for a solution. I went to Ripon. I confessed that we could not cover all the material; and I needed to check Hugo’s work. Would he accept my employing a translator I had trusted with confidential documents in the past?
Ripon stroked his beard. “Trust him with your life, would you?”
“I’d trust her to the ends of the earth, sir.”
He noted my pronoun with a raised brow. “If I were to vet every single secretary or bookbinder or mapmaker who worked for our department, Lawless, we would still be fighting the Hundred Years’ War. The reason you are working for us—and working well—is that we trust your judgement.”
* * *
The next day, as Miss Villiers and I crossed the river, I briefly feigned further qualms over sharing military intelligence, but I could not wait to hear her thoughts. By the time we reached the Strand, I had offered her the job. I apprised her of the task, its scope and gravity.
She gave a whoop. “I shall put off my return to the country. I must go to an interview just now. But I could join you afterwards, if that’s appropriate?” She bit her lip.
“I’ll be at Scotland Yard. Tell them at the desk I’m expecting you.”
She ended up staying several nights at her aunt’s club, at the expense of the Home Office. We discussed the papers over dinner. My admiration for Miss Villiers’ intellect grew with every day we worked together. She had such a grasp of perspective. One moment she was gauging our whole strategy, the next dealing with the subtleties of translation.
The deadline was impossible; the work was troubling; but I loved these sunlit days, every moment, and so, I think, did she.
ROYAL COMMISSION [LAWLESS]
Miss Villiers pronounced Hugo’s translation accurate. She picked up a dozen details he had missed in his haste. Like him, she grasped at once the intent of this Portsmouth Plan.
Armed with these discoveries, I went to the Royal Commission with a heavy heart, but determined. I had to sway the politicians. We had to resume at once the network of Portsmouth forts. These coastal fortifications, begun in 1860, had been delayed by continual debates and amendments. Typical that the press dubbed them Palmerston’s Follies, when it was the press who bayed for protection against the French; but then newspapers denounce spending in peacetime, only to jeer at government imprudence when war looms.
Huge responsibility fell upon Roxbury Industries. Thrust back into the spotlight, they must arm the Solent forts against attack: they would not only make the artillery, but complete the forts in the middle of the sea, relying on Roxbury hydraulic pumps never used mid-ocean. On my way from Portsmouth to Guernsey, I had passed the incipient works, like Saxon forts rising amid the glistering waves. Now the forts would be completed with bricks from his Loth Brickworks, the papers fell over themselves to lament Roxbury’s ill-treatment during that hiatus in the fifties, and canonise his return to national favour.
As soon as Miss Villiers had gathered the implications, she wrote to Molly. She frequently wrote to Molly, lest the correspondence seem one-sided. She did not encode her letters, lest that attract suspicion as Molly perused them over breakfast, but Ruth orchestrated the beginning of lines with acrostic messages. Using this subterfuge, we refined Molly’s mission.
Focus on Roxbury’s state of mind. Could we rely on him, on his wellbeing and health? Did he retain oversight of his business? Or was his withdrawal from London society the mark of some deeper malaise?
HALCYON DAYS [LAWLESS]
The Norphans Practickly were always at extremes. They laughed, they wept. Nico leapt for the moon because of an obscure judgement in the House of Lords and wrote scathing letters for upwards of a week. Peggy was downcast that anti- French sentiment might frustrate her escape plan crossing into Calais. Kitty won their brilliant game: “How Long Can You Hide Silently in a Box?” Poor girl missed a day’s lessons, and meals. The others admitted they never went near their boxes.
“After such treatment,” Kitty declared, “by those who profess to love me best, I henceforth dedicate myself to evil.”
* * *
The N
orphans expressed everything in superlatives. Their emotions were tumultuous as the crags that overhung the valley.
The earl too, Molly gathered from his visage, was subject to extremes of sentiment. Some days, with new contraptions delivered from distant manufactories, the sun beamed from his brow. More often, the shadow of depression dogged his features, though he spoke not of it.
Molly portrayed these as halcyon days. She taught, or feigned to teach. The Norphans’ creative flair outdid her Oddbody Theatricals, for they could write plays, stage operas, hang exhibits, for which Roxbury House was the perfect venue. Molly loved it all, with a wild abandon—even as she failed to be loved.
Let me expand: from her first letter, we knew she had taken a fancy to Jem. She soon learnt he had a sweetheart in the village. She waited to get the measure of her rival. Did she figure her city charms would win him over in the end?
The royal road to unhappiness lies in urging the world to do one’s bidding, and complaining when it does not. Molly, raised among the disempowered, knew this. She had patience. She knew how to suggest and divert. In this lay her power.
* * *
Lodestar, with his dramatic look and his unfettered energies, passed through again. He inspired devotion from Birtle, commotion from Skirtle, gawping from the Norphans, and clockwork efficacy among the glasshouse scientists.
They would deliver to him any number of items, with proofs, measurements and projections. Elsewise they seemed a disorganised shower, heads in the clouds, devising and imagining and inventing. For Lodestar, however, they met deadlines, completed documents, delivered devices to order, ahead of schedule—or else they were thrown out.
Oh yes, Lodestar dismissed staff with alarming regularity. To work at Roxbury was the peak of the engineering mountain. Lodestar had no time for shirkers and refreshed the staff regularly. Trainees were always arriving, fresh from laboratories, universities and botanical gardens around the kingdom.
New animals kept arriving at the menagerie. Jem would often stay overnight, tending the latest sickly arrival. His special friend, the orang-utan, was often poorly; he attended her on evenings when she couldn’t keep from crying for whatever mysterious sorrow.
Chemicals were concocted, experiments framed, devices tested. Blasting was heard from the slate quarry over the hill. The roof of the old stables was swiftly replaced with fresh slates, converting it to staff quarters; but the blasts continued.
As far as Molly could report, Roxbury Industries was thriving.
* * *
Molly was at that age: her imagination ready for love, bold but uncertain. She yet knew not the havoc her blossoming youth might kindle.
Was she deserving of love? Oh, she was, she surely was, with her wicked tongue and handsome verve. Jem was yet to be swayed; but in her longing for Jem, was she blind to young Nico falling for her?
But we knew nothing of that, until Miss Villiers’ visit.
As she settled, Molly began to describe Roxbury in more detail. The house she explored, under Skirtle’s benign guidance: the earl’s enigmatic laboratory atop Roxbury’s central tower; studies, libraries, morning rooms; the kitchens’ gurgling innards, hydraulic revolving spit and cauldron that washed dishes. The basement furnace, burning wood instead of coal. This not only provided hot water, but heated sauna, Turkish baths, and hydro-therapeutic appliances night and day; without need for fireplaces, it heated the whole house, through pipes that rose through its interstices, giving on to apertures secreted in every doorway.
The wild hillsides she explored herself. The clambering rockery. The glasshouses and menagerie glinting inscrutably down below, like an inverse reflection of the house. Miles of carriage drives, ten thousand trees buffeted by summer rains. Thimbleton Reservoir on the hills above. Burnfoot Gorge. And the Pump House, where she liked to lurk, looking back at the house across the gorge, listening to the village church bell as it tolled the quarter hour.
Molly asked Jem to explain the grounds’ complexities, a canny way to spend some time in his company. He showed her how the reservoirs above were dammed above the Burnfoot Falls. As well as siphoning the waters off into the house, the stream was channelled on to a waterwheel at the Pump House, driving an industrial piston: this automated power was distributed through ingenious gears and cables to drive woodsaws, the kitchen spit, and the dumb waiter. There was no limit to the machines it might run, saving on manpower and steam engines. All through harnessing hydraulic power; no electricity required.
But there was electricity too.
* * *
Molly loved the buzzers that sounded around the house.
“Annunciators.” Birtle was disdainful of innovations. “Not blasted buzzers.”
She studied the wiring in fascination. When someone pressed a button (say, Roxbury, in his laboratory), the electrical circuit, powered by a battery, was completed. A coil on the servants’ board was thus magnetised, pulling a tiny metal arm on to the bell: bing. That movement broke the circuit, releasing the arm, which completed the circuit, and the arm struck again: bing. Released, struck again, fifty times in a second: buzz, buzz.
Jem showed how this electricity was generated: the old millhouse, lower down the Burnfoot Stream, was reinvented as the Pump House, powering the scientific quarter. Before its antique walls stood a shiny new turbine, yet under development; behind it, discarded contraptions. Beside these, stacked wooden crates, plated with glass sides and full of strange chemicals: a poetic history of batteries, from Daniell cells and voltaic piles, through Grove cells, Poggendorff cells, gravity cells, and the mighty Leyden jars, to the latest Siemens prototypes, ready to be tested; all charged by the flow of water, modulated by Roxbury’s system of levers, rails, dams, and outlets. Jem boasted it was a system more powerful than steam engines, more elegant than clocks. And he didn’t understand it.
When Jem showed her round the glasshouses, she shared his company with the orang-utan. Staying clear of the inner quadrangle of laboratories, they saw trees from Brazil and fruits from Bali, geckos from the Galapagos and monkeys from Mauritius. Jem liked Molly to see the animals he was nursing back to health. For example, the strange hare Molly had seen on her first arrival was in fact a Patagonian mara, thriving now in this chilly domain and a favourite of the orang-utan.
Why so many ailing creatures? Lady Roxbury had protested it was wrong to kidnap wild beasts from their native lands. So the earl collected his menagerie from unwanted beasts already in captivity. This had the benefit of making the collection academically unique: zoologists and biologists nationwide signed up to spend a term examining these oddballs. Besides, Jem hadn’t much to do down the stables. The Roxburys weren’t hunting types, and had so few visitors these days. Jem had an inclination toward these sick and lonely creatures. She often saw him petting the mara and keeping the orang-utan company.
Where was the heart of this Arcadia? Jem spoke little of Lodestar; it was to the earl himself that he paid obeisance. Was it Roxbury pushing these levers, flicking switches, and ever enlarging his designs to bend the wildness of nature to his technological will?
ADAPTATIONS [LAWLESS]
After Guernsey, with the Royal Commission’s decision on the forts, Roxbury Industries was paramount. Alongside our labours on the Guernsey dossier, Miss Villiers and I devoted time to Molly every week. I lamented my slipshod approach to Molly’s correspondence. We pored over her missives as they arrived.
Now that Miss Villiers was approved to work beside me in Scotland Yard, her aunt’s club seemed unsuitable for discussing weighty affairs. Yet the Yard was not always conducive to thought, with everyone bleating over the explosions, and what progress we’d made, and where would the next attack come. To avoid this scrutiny, I sometimes took a private room at the Rising Sun, the Yard’s nearest hostelry. It was quiet and cheap, if a little inappropriate, but it brought a lovely intimacy to our work; Miss Villiers seemed determined to bring Revelations of a Lady Detective from the world of fiction into real life.
I did not. As Miss Villiers explained to me what I was failing to read, I had to call for a fresh pot of tea. Ruth did not think Molly was hiding anything, just that her tendency towards novelistic flair disguised her unease. “I should visit Molly, and soon.” She wrote to Roxbury, there and then. She explained that she was travelling to Edinburgh, and asked if she might stop in for a visit.
I read over what she had written. “Edinburgh, eh?”
She shrugged and explained no further, and I knew better than to press her.
OF THE OLD EARL, PART THE FOURTH [MOLLY]
WATCHMAN,
EARL BEFRIENDED.
MOLLY
Dear Miss V,
“I suppose we ought to have a chat,” said the Earl of Roxbury. He stumbled across me one morning as I was standing in the hall, pondering the old murals they’d uncovered during the renovations of the great hall.
“I suppose we ought, Your Lordship.”
The earl’s face was pinched and white. More drawn than I remembered him, back in London, at the Select Committee hearings. Look as I might, I could not see that he wore any mark of mourning, as the children did.
“Stuff and balderdash, young lady. Don’t bother with that Your Lordship nonsense, not here.”
“Right-o.” I hesitated. “Your earl-y-ness.”
He grinned. “I would take it as the most enormous compliment if you treated Roxbury House as your own house. No standing on ceremony. Slouch around. Help yourself and that.”
I liked this familiarity. There was a northern flair to his intonation, making his speech ever so pleasant. I could listen to that voice all day, as pleasant as a stream burbling over rocks. I eyed him closely. “I won’t treat it quite as my own home, sir, for you haven’t seen my stablemates, troughers of the messiest kind, and terrible hoarders too, for they think that a found object may someday be the key to the kingdom of heaven, though it lie unused in a cupboard for a decade.”
Lawless and the House of Electricity Page 8