Lawless and the House of Electricity

by William Sutton

  Yet disappointment had entered the party. Wilfred could not help shooting dark looks down the hill. He was brooding on the usurper Lodestar and his intimacy with the earl, inspecting the glasshouses central to his father’s business. He lit another cheroot; he smoked unconvincingly, as if holding it for someone else. “Smoke, Kitty, Peggy?” He showed off the engraved silver case to his sisters. “Clears the lungs.”

  When Birtle announced that the coaches were imminent to deliver the children to their respective stations, the complaints I was expecting melted away. They retired to put on their travelling clothes; even Kitty went peaceably. Birtle busied himself with the trunks; Skirtle was at the girls’ toilet. On a sudden, I was left with Wilfred.

  Wilfred asked me to pass the mustard. He grasped my hand and pulled me roughly towards him. “Give us a kiss, you saucy bit of chutney,” he said.

  I almost let him, such was my surprise. I scrambled to my feet.

  There were no witnesses.

  Wilfred eyed me insolently. “Nico told me you were a saucepot. How on earth did my old fool of a father engage someone like you, when I had dragon-faced Visigoths to tutor me?” He leaned towards me, mustard smeared on his chops.

  I looked about for assistance. The phaeton, thank goodness, swept back into the courtyard. Lodestar leapt down, and the earl beside him.

  “Ready?” said the earl. “We’ve time. Let’s whisk the girls down to their station. Wilfy, why don’t you drive Nico?”

  Wilfred was ladling mustard onto his beef sandwiches, as if he had said nothing, done nothing. Yet, as Nico came out, Wilfred leapt up and put his arm around his brother, exchanging scurrilous words. Five minutes later they were all gone. As his coach pulled away, I saw Nico gazing back at me, as if ashamed on my behalf.

  PROPOSALS [LAWLESS]

  I met Miss Villiers, as always, at Waterloo, off the Petersfield train. My heart was singing.

  Her smile as she descended, the perfection of her neck, the tilt of her head as she peered over the crowds from the carriage step; the way her skirts fell from her hips; the rasp of her voice as she hailed me, all set me a-thrill; and her hair, her gorgeous black hair, which she swept aside from her eye as she reached out to allow me—unheard of concession—to help her down.

  She had no idea that I planned to go down on one knee. She had not the slightest idea that I’d made the clandestine trip to meet her father (from whom she was estranged). I was determined to ask his permission, an old-fashioned notion which she would disdain. Anyone may fall out with their kin, nothing more natural; I hoped to construct bridges into the divide separating her from her past. I did not care overmuch. Colonel Villiers might say whatever he liked; I was ready to ask, with or without his permission. But I got his permission, and along with it, I received Colonel Villiers’ opinion of the Palmerston fortifications, an opinion I had not sought; but he was a military type, and his forceful views did not surprise. Indeed, I surprised myself by listening to such codswallop without making a retort which might dampen my marital prospects. He liked me. He wished us well. He thought it unlikely he would attend the ceremony—did he really say “unlikely”? No explanation of how Ruth came to leave home and throw herself on the mercy of her famed Aunt Lexie, with whom she still resided.

  * * *

  To survey the south bank of the Thames, with the height of summer upon us, was worth the risk, though the streets around the station were filthy. Hawkers squawked their puppets and jack-in-the-boxes; women eyed up passers-by, as they draped washing across the insalubrious alleyways behind the rails.

  On Waterloo Bridge, we floated in sunlight. The river gleamed, teeming with boats passing under the bridges; to the left, the golden stripes of the clock tower of Westminster, to the right St Paul’s dome radiant in the sunshine. Is there anywhere grander than London?

  After the morning rush, the city seemed void of people. If I had felt weary of my Home Office researches, today I was reinvigorated. If I had found London tiresome, today I was restored to faith. Of course, the water beneath the surface was anything but clear. How many leap from this very spot on foggy nights, despairing of their future? This morass of humanity threatened to drag us all into its mire; but I rose above, soaring into a cloudless sky.

  Ruth was in good humour. She could be impatient with dawdling pedestrians, but not today. I should have suspected a motive for such sweetness.

  “Are you happy?” She tugged me to the side of the bridge. “In London, I mean?”

  “Happy? Why do you ask?” Ridiculous question, today, with her, in this glorious late summer sun. The Guernsey papers were a headache, but the work was worthwhile and intriguing. With Molly’s fair reports from the north, and Jeffcoat a dynamo of a partner, what had I to complain of? “Are you not happy, too?”

  She pulled at my arm. We looked out over this city that had beguiled and bedevilled us. She had enjoyed living in London: theatre and opera, the British Museum Library, attending lectures at Bedford College. But her studies had gone awry. My fault, in part, for Molly had fallen ill, and Ruth had set aside her own obligations to nurse her back to health, all the while assisting my investigations with her talent for codes and ciphers—she could not resist the tickle of mystery. She lost her job at the library, over a request for an unsuitable book, and retreated to her Aunt Lexie’s in the countryside. She spread her hands, as if to disclose a secret. “The Law Faculty of Edinburgh are seeking a librarian. The Advocates Library is in a state of crisis.”

  Edinburgh? Edinburgh was my home. My old home, where my mother died, leaving my father to bring me up, a puritanical watchmaker, from whom I escaped south, from the clock trade for the police force. It was not three years since my father died. The Clockmakers’ Guild tidied up his affairs, letting out the Bruntsfield flat to graduates, which gave me a useful supplement to my police sergeant’s income.

  “Only I sometimes feel you have a yen,” Ruth was saying, “to live there again. And I…” She hesitated, tongue-tied, which was not like her. She was enquiring of my plans for the future, without wishing to seem indelicate. Might our dreams be somehow entwined?

  I reached for her hand, overtaken by a flood of feeling. Now was the moment. The sun, the cloudless sky, the gleaming river, and we two—just we! What place more perfect? (Except for the strange old man lurking, as if to ask money of us.) I felt in my pocket for the ring. There it was. It was only the old man made me hesitate—

  “I don’t intend that—” She flushed. “I wouldn’t wish to presume upon your friendship.” She looked at me beseechingly. She saw in my eyes that I had caught the import of her words, yet I held back. She bit her lip. She tried to turn and walk on.

  I held my fingers interlocked with hers. (The old man—at last!—moved away.)

  She struggled to pull free. “Oh,” she said. “Forget that I— Won’t you let me go?”

  I would not release her. When at last she turned to lambast me, her face lustrous with anger, she saw that I had gone down on one knee.

  PIGGOTT’S GALVANIC BELT [THE TIMES]

  Piggott’s Galvanic Belt, without acids or saturation, for the cure of nervous diseases and irregularities of the system produced by want of electricity.

  Medical galvanic apparatus, without the aid of fluids, always ready for use, with the current in one direction, to be had of the inventor and patentee,

  Mr WP Piggott, medical galvanist,

  523 Oxford Street, Bloomsbury.

  Treatise on the above, with testimonials, gratis.

  LIMBO [MOLLY]

  [NO NOTE FOR WATCHMAN, I’M AFRAID,

  AS I’VE NOTHING TO REPORT,

  AND THIS MAY BE MY LAST.

  MOLLY]

  Dear Miss V,

  I was indulging my melancholic mood after the children’s departure, when I was reminded of my investigations yet incomplete.

  My room, in the western turret, rejoices in dramatic views. I was packing my bags. I had not much to pack. Freed from lessons, I whiled
away the afternoon in folding and refolding my clothes, so carefully chosen by your good self, so carefully laundered under Skirtle’s watchful eye. Every hem brimmed with nostalgia for the summer I had enjoyed, not realising its days were numbered.

  I found myself drawn to the window. I reached for my sketchbook, to strive one last time for that dramatic perspective London never offered. It was the most fabulous view.

  Or perhaps the second most fabulous. The east wing’s turret must give views up to the crags, across to the Pump House and the Burnfoot Falls, and right down the gorge into the valley. I had not known—that first day, when the curtain twitched—that the east wing was shut up, and has been since the passing of Lady Elodie.

  I craned my neck, staring across at the turret. As I stared, a shadow shifted at the curtain. My heart lurched. Or had I imagined it?

  Nobody pulled them aside; nobody looked out, as they had done on my arrival; but then that could have been anyone, a maid or the under-butler. I thought back: who was the figure I had seen then? To pull back the curtains and gaze out seemed now to me so evocative of Roxbury’s elusive magic.

  The curtains hung immobile.

  Who was allowed up there? It must be cleaned, I supposed, even if dormant. Now that my employment was to end, I felt ashamed that I’d barely begun to unravel the place’s secrets. Was I too immersed in those gothic romances and penny dreadfuls? (I’m sure you regret lending me them now.) The heroine of Revelations of a Lady Detective overcomes all odds to tease out mysteries that defeat all London’s detective policemen.

  I stared until my eyes smarted. As I was about to give up, and return to my desultory packing case, the floral curtains were thrown aside. The window glinted, obscuring my view, as it too was thrown open. Breathing in the soft autumn day, Patience Tarn leaned out, the picture of prettiness, oblivious to my prying eyes.

  LIES AND EXAGGERATIONS, PART THE THIRD [LAWLESS]

  Why didn’t Molly investigate the east wing sooner? At the time, I thought nothing of it; since, I have chided her and extracted the following, which are reasons, if not excuses.

  Molly was not architecturally savvy. She was unused to such grand residences and bamboozled by the abundance of rooms—morning rooms, drawing rooms, galleries and boudoirs; brush room, shoe room, saucery, spicery; bakehouse, brewhouse, bamboo room, gun room; fish store, lamp room, game larder, chandry—so she simply did not know there was so much of the house she had never seen. (There was even a room for ironing the newspaper, though it was only ever used when Nico was home.)

  Every house is several houses under one roof, just as every city is many cities superposed. Molly in London had leapt boundaries. She was one of the rare beasts visible to rich and poor, on speaking terms with law lords, landlords and layabouts. But Miss Villiers’ lessons impeded that irrepressible curiosity, forbidding her to hobnob or lurk.

  To fulfil her role was so demanding, no wonder she forgot that twitch of the curtain on her first arrival. Consequently, she never thought that exploring those closed rooms might have led her to the east wing turret. By the time she overcame that reticence, our investigation was drawing to a close.

  PAX INTERRUPTA [MOLLY]

  “Does Miss Molly require assistance?”

  I jumped three feet in the air to find Birtle standing in the doorway of my room. His glowering brow skipped between me and the window.

  He knew I was gazing at the turret.

  I would ask him. He knew what I had been looking at. There was no space for dissembling. “Birtle, that eastern turret—”

  “But, Miss Molly.” He gestured at my half-filled case. “Wherever are you going?”

  “Why, old cove, you know as well as I that with the children gone my employment must be ending.”

  A smile came to his lips, and it was not the smile I expected. Not triumphant, nor exultant, but wry. “No, no, no, I hardly think the earl could do without you.”

  I looked at him. “He has said nothing to me.”

  “Nothing about your leaving, I rather think.”

  “Nothing about continuing.”

  His smile became kinder, almost repentant. “Shall I endeavour to secure you an interview with him, as soon as he is back?”

  “Back?”

  “He is called away to Yorkshire, on private business. Let me take the liberty to issue you interim instructions. Consider yourself at leisure for the weekend.” And with that, he took himself away, as was his wont, silently and without any attempt to answer my query.

  REFUGE [LAWLESS]

  While Wilfred was in residence, Molly went walking daily. Thimbleton Reservoir offered tranquil respite from her anxieties. She found a route up around the calm of the reservoir, into the hills above the house, and back down through the gorge.

  The Norphans had shown her the Shepherd’s Refuge. This was an old railway carriage that Roxbury had deposited as a hut for watching wildlife, amid the wild flowers and brambles above the gorge. From there, she looked across the valley, watching birds wheel over the house. A falcon hovered, ready to pounce; up flapped a disorderly crow to harass him. The larger bird eased away; but the crow flapped after, pecking at the bird of prey. The crow, she understood, was protecting its young; for that day, at least, it won the battle.

  Excellent vantage point for spying. She could watch Roxbury fribbling around the Walled Garden. At the menagerie, Jem would carry his latest invalid rodent on a stroll, in company of the orang-utan; sometimes he rode to the village to show his dairymaid sweetheart. Lodestar headed past the Shepherd’s Refuge, unaware of her, as he crossed over to the slate quarry for the blasting tests that so annoyed Skirtle.

  The shadowed path down into the gorge made her feel secure from prying eyes. Wilfred often went away into town or hunting with friends. She would descend by the Pump House, where the ancient waterwheel jutted out into the Burnfoot Falls, the dam above controlling the water flow that powered the newfangled turbine. The river’s roar was louder than any part of the Thames. The mist thrown from the turbulent rocks gave her a sense of magical repose. From here were channelled the healing streams that provided the house with ambrosial water and worked its contraptions.

  A powerful sanctuary.

  * * *

  Skirtle told Molly of the changes she had seen at Roxbury House. When she arrived, along with the children, coal fires provided cheap, copious warmth; but coal will coat a house with soot. Skirtle only mentioned this once, and the earl switched to wood fires.

  He had a forest of a thousand trees, and was planting a thousand more each year; they would not run short. The problem was to stop the servants clearing away the fireplaces. Servants trained on coal fires liked to clear them every morning, but a wood fire needs that ashen base; Skirtle and Roxbury both would flit around the house of a morning, springing on poor backward servants who disobeyed the new regime.

  Still, wood ash wafted out, and she was constantly marshalling her troops to clean carpets, polish sideboards, and rejuvenate paintings. Consequently, Roxbury replaced the wood fires with his centralised heating core. A great furnace was built into the crags beneath the house. Hot air circulated under the basement’s terracotta tiles and, via a lattice of pipes, up through the house, with smoke filtered through strategic flues. This furnace also heated three boilers, whence water was driven up through the house by hydraulic pressure. The Turkish baths were ready at any hour; from the taps issued hot and cold water. It was the most advanced system in the world, perfect for the frozen wastes of the north, as Molly called them.

  Thus Roxbury, with his house; thus Roxbury, with his servants. It spoke of his obsession with developments, yet was a miraculous gift to all who used the house. His children took it for granted, until they returned to school and found themselves once again shivering at night in their beds.

  The next episodes of Molly’s tale she did commit to paper, but she never posted. Ruth got them from her on our visit, sensing something was awry. To maintain the order of the narrative, I p
lace them here.

  ABOUT LOVE [MOLLY]

  Dear Miss V,

  “I’ll teach you a thing or two about love,” said Wilfred. Can you imagine it? I shall write down as much as I can of my tangle with him, but whether I’ll post it I know not.

  It was two nights before you and Watchman visited. We dined together, the earl, Wilfred and yours truly. The wine flowed. I tried to set aside my aversion to Wilfred Marquis of Burnfoot. He was an arrogant flapdoodle, and a hectoring Tory; but I ought to make allowances. An officer in the Dragoon Guards fresh returned from the sub-continent to resume laying about Oxford must have some sense.

  Then, in my cups, I made a halfwit comment about love. Why, why did I say it? I keep my thoughts to myself. I reflect those around me, bolster their self-esteem with senseless quips: that’s how I duck them arrows of fortune. It’s a good method, but doesn’t always work.

  Port was served after dinner. The earl opened the dining room French windows. Out we stepped on the balcony, where Lady Elodie’s roses are blooming in the wrought-iron trellises.

  With the earl there, I felt safe enough. I was fascinated to see father and son together. Throughout Wilfred’s stay, I’ve barely seen them exchange a word. Peggy had teased that Lodestar was usurping the boys’ birthrights. Why should that be?

  Father and son had little to say to each other. The earl’s curiosity and warmth were in Wilfred transformed to brooding and belligerence.

  I broke the silence. “How far does the Roxbury land extend?”

  Wilfred threw his arms wide. “As far as one can see.”

  Roxy shook his head. “We only tend these slopes, the gorge, and the slate quarry. Those far hills are let to farmers, to be worked as they should be.”