Jeffcoat and I looked at each other. “On Camden Road platform,” said I.
“Blown up,” said he.
“Damn clever bugger to blow anything up with this. This was on a lathe. My mark on the first lathes I ever made, after Babbage’s engine. Early thirties, I’d reckon: 1833? So, whoever it is you’re after, whoever’s used my work to ill ends, was either intoxicated by the quality of my workmanship, or wanted to incriminate me.” He shook the piece at us. “Envious bastards. This’d be the cheapest old scrap they could find with any old name on it.”
* * *
JACQUES THE SECOND [LAWLESS]
We went back to Liverpool. We’d grown used to ignoring informant letters: a sorry state of affairs, but you’d be amazed how quick people are to shop in their dear neighbours as international activists.
Seth Salzman’s offer to present us with the Mersey bomber was less than convincing, but I persuaded Jeffcoat that we must attend. At the worst, we’d have a drink, stay the night and claim the expense back from Ripon’s department.
We found the man in the beret, as promised, at the bar of the White Horse. His look of terror when we laid a hand on each shoulder was enough to tell us we’d been hasty in our judgement. Once we introduced ourselves and got him into a private room, he couldn’t stop talking. As soon as he told us his name, the thing was sure. He called himself Jacques the Painter.
* * *
Jacques the Second—let us call him Mersey Jacques—was a babbler. He told us everything, before we’d asked.
Down on his luck. A fellow told him of the ship sailing. Gave him the cash. Gave him the bag. Showed him how to set it. The fellow said it was a jape: he was a friend of the captain, and this was a birthday surprise.
Up it went. Eleven tons of gunpowder.
He was beside himself at admitting it. He denied nothing. He came with us, compliant, protesting he was a fool, not an activist. He had the money still, or most of it. He described, poorly, what had been in the bag: three balls of medium weight, the size of an egg, but round. All he had to do was balance them on the captain’s table. That was all.
What material?
Not wood, not metal, not rubber: something in between.
Could he tell us who had told him to do it?
He described him as best he could. “Bizarre bloke.”
Jeffcoat huffed. “Bizarre like what?”
“He speak funny. Foreign like.”
“French?”
“Couldn’t say, like. French foreign? Might’ve been. Tak, tak, tak. Yes, maybe, yes. Dunno. Might not’ve. Couldn’t say, like.”
“Hold on.” Jeffcoat looked at me. He laid his hand on the fellow’s shoulder. “I don’t understand. Aren’t you French?”
“No, no,” said Mersey Jacques. “I’m Polish.”
“But your name?”
He told us his real name, but we couldn’t even pronounce it, and he, an illiterate sailor, couldn’t write it. “The man say, he say, if anything go wrong, I give name ‘Jacques the Painter’. Tak, tak, tak. He call hisself Diderot.” Jacques wrung his hands, suppressing a sob. “I never imagine it so.”
We took him to London. It wasn’t necessary to handcuff him, but we did it anyway.
THE ORIGINAL JACK [LAWLESS]
Could all the explosions, fires, and disasters be orchestrated by the French? What did that mean? Was it a directive concocted in a secret Parisian military department, sending agents? Or rogue enclaves of émigrés, dedicated to subvert our proud nation?
It was in Liverpool Jeffcoat and I began to understand the results of our labours: French families held at customs, refused entry to Britain, and ready to be deported. Some protested they were not immigrants, but lived here; others intended travelling on to America.
The officials pooh-poohed this. “Trying to get in the back door,” they called it. Jack the Painter, according to Ruth’s researches, was an unbalanced misfit. Incensed by some slight, he offered to spy for the French. His information underpinned the Portsmouth Plan of 1779, which nearly came to fruition.
Such informing wasn’t enough for Jack. Sympathising with the American Revolution, Jack took direct action to hurt the tyrannical British. He laid gunpowder though the immense new rope house, soaked hemp in turpentine, and lit it. The fire was quickly doused, and the police caught Jack before he fled, on a French passport. In court, he confessed to laying fires in Plymouth and Bristol as well. He was hanged on the mizzen mast of HMS Arethusa, shouting to the crowd of 20,000 that no vigilance would save them.
TREASURE HOUSE [MOLLY]
WATCHMAN,
THANKS FOR INTERVENTION ON MY BEHALF.
KEPT ME FROM CADGING MY WAY TO THE PUDDING HOUSE.
I OWE YOU FAVOURS OF A FAIR FOOTING.
ROXY LIKEWISE CHEERED BY YOUR CHUMMERY.
MOLLY
Dear Miss V,
How can I describe the treasure palace of Roxbury? (The house, more than the man, though I am puzzling out the man too.) How little I showed you on your visit, too occupied with my woes. A balamy bluff, I know, (by which I mean abject apology); but there it is.
I begin to explore as much as I dare, without risking Birtle’s opprobrium. Whenever I’ve chanced upon a servant heading down a corridor, I chat with them. It costs me nothing to be civil and they’re a warm bunch.
Only the east wing remains dourly shut. More than once, I’ve plucked up the courage to ask Birtle: “Who is in the east wing, Birtle? Is there something there? Someone?”
Each and every time, the question has died on my lips at the sight of his dour visage, always watching me, always suspecting me. The east wing remains dourly shut, as it had been, Skirtle informed me, “since her ladyship.” I will yet dare to find a way in.
* * *
The house itself has a labyrinthine complexity. Even to treat of the basement floor is impossible, for the basement at the back is the first floor at the front (that is the basement at the front is two floors below it). Therein:
Butler’s pantry, butler’s rooms, butler’s library.
Servants’ quarters, buzzers ranged above the great flagstones.
Cabinets for crockery and crystal for functions.
Distressed wallpaper, statuettes, umbrella stand, hat stand carved with mythological beasts; stand for dibber, strake and divers garden implements for the rambling gent, for stoning, fruiting, husking, trimming edges, weeding, &c. All this in the back porch, not at the back but at the front, hidden by the east turret’s steps; here the upper gardener may leave his lawn mower, rather than heave it uphill from the glasshouses.
Medicine cabinets, gaming tables. Gun room, sun room. Turkish bath, massage room, male changing, female changing, cold bath, tepid bath, hot bath, sudatorium, showers, and water closets. In the walls, stupendous boilers. The pipes curl upward like sinews disappearing into the walls. Roxy hid these within the walls, I thought; I begin to believe he has secreted a whole chapel.
The grounds at least you have seen for yourself. Here I lose myself amid this wild nature which only months ago gave me the scarpering spooks. More of the grounds another time, as I shall explore them further, chaperoned or alone.
MAN OVERBOARD [LAWLESS]
On the train back from Roxbury House, alone, searching the SS Great Britain’s records for 1858-59, Ruth found Lodestar’s name.
So many fruitless hours she had spent looking through these lists. Hours I thought wasted, and I was paying her. I was paying her as a translator, via the Yard, and for code-cracking through Ripon. Corpse-hunting sounded too romantic for the accounts men.
Besides, the body on the SS Great Britain was not unusual, now that I was working for Ripon. These were times when everyone wanted to come to London. Fugitives were caught daily, arriving at our ports, stowed on ferries, ships, yachts, hidden in carts and cases and coffins, would you believe it; fugitives from more Polish rebellions, more Irish famines, Italian vendettas, and war-torn America.
Yet there it was.
7 December 1858
Mr Nathaniel C. Lodestar
(accompanied by his man, Zephaniah)
She wrote to meet her at the Rising Sun.
I was rushed and in a mood after my northern interrogations with Jeffcoat. We were under pressure to deliver convictions. Catching the two Jacques was something. But our investigations were about as clear as Thames water. I was sure the threat was real: real enough to justify the forts. Jeffcoat was less convinced: his hours interviewing Jacques the First persuaded him it could easily be one madman after another, each inspiring the next, with no coherent plan, barely able to write their own name.
Ruth abruptly presented me with papers from Antony Gibbs Shipping, calling for tea as I stared at them.
“And what of it? We knew Lodestar came from Africa.” I mashed the tea, brusquely, and poured, too soon. “What’s the surprise?”
She looked down at the tea, as if I had slapped her.
I breathed in. “I’m sorry.”
“Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“I suppose. What has it to do with our investigation?”
“A missing man.” Ruth stared. “The ship’s passenger lists have accounted for births, deaths, fugitives and stowaways. This is the first missing person.”
“Missing?” I sipped the half-drawn tea, cursing my impatience. “How is he missing?”
“What attention to detail our detective force exhibits.” She tapped further down the passenger list. I had not got to the second sheet.
DISEMBARKED LONDON
31 January 1859
Mr Nathaniel C. Lodestar
“Only eight weeks? Let’s consider it for our honeymoon.”
She rolled her eyes and waited.
I looked back and forth between the two entries. Picked up at the Cape; eight weeks later he arrives, but now it’s just him. “What happened to the valet? Are you thinking…”
She smiled her sweet detecting smile. “Worth asking, wouldn’t you say?”
I breathed in, my eyes wide. “Excuse me, Mr Lodestar, did your man die, by any chance, and you wrapped him up and chucked him overboard?”
“Yes. You have Numpty’s sketch of the basket.”
“I’m asking him to admit to a crime.”
“Are you? I’m not so sure.” She gave me a look that told me she was quite sure. “If the man died of consumption, he died. It’s accepted colonial practice to wrap the deceased in sail cloth and weigh it down with cannonballs.”
“Colonial practice is all very well, but here we report deaths to the captain and the ship’s doctor.”
“But it wasn’t here. It was at sea somewhere.”
“It was a British ship.”
“He may be appalled, or ashamed, or he may not care a jot. The fact that he botched it doesn’t make the crime any worse.”
“And the basket may clinch it.” The tea tasted better. “I’d love to rule out foul play against our mystery immigrant. At least we’d have one mystery solved.”
FRUITFUL DAYS [LAWLESS]
Over those weeks, before the exeat weekend party was fixed, Molly bided her time. She sowed seeds, cultivated the soil, and waited for her labours to bear fruit. Her friendship with Roxbury blossomed quickly under her natural warmth. Her picture of how the earl and his family came to this strange pass gradually came into sharp colour. I shall tell it through her account, and her reports of the earl’s tales, allowing myself occasional interpolations: a story that could have lasted a thousand and one nights.
* * *
The September sun baked the hillsides. With the children gone, it became clear why Skirtle and Birtle took such care to avoid each other. No longer inhibited, they argued like cat and dog. Molly overheard them, time and again, in the hall, in the corridor, in his pantry, in her scullery; over what remained obscure to her.
Molly took to exploring, from reservoirs down to arboretum, painting all the while. She painted so often, her paints ran low. The earl had said to order whatever she needed, via Birtle. Reluctant to ask that old curmudgeon for anything, she had an idea. She set up her easel above the rockery of a morning, early enough to stop the earl as he headed out.
He glanced over her shoulder and admired her initial sketch.
“I’d like to mix my own colours, Roxy, as I’m running low on supplies. I wonder if I might collect a few things from round the estate.”
“What will you need, young Molly?” he said, charmed.
“For the whites, I’ll want bones. Bones of hens and fish. Whitened in the fire, I grind them to powder and thicken with lime. For the colours, figs and plums; hazels, blackcurrants, willow twigs and sunflowers. Cobalt and charcoal. Sulphur. Eggs to brighten the colours; beeswax to dull them. For the brushes, pig bristles and horse hair.” Molly knew how to make a few colours, more or less, from perusing old Lear’s travel diaries; the rest she was bluffing. She thought it would pique his interest. “Can I acquire those items, do you think?”
“You can.” He frowned. “Certainly you can.”
“I sense a ‘but’ approaching.”
“You can get them. All of them,” he said. “But you’ll be needing your own studio.”
* * *
They went down to the arboretum. They found Jem checking the fruit trees in the glasshouse. Aside from the raised beds, citrus and exotic fruits and summer berries stood in great planters, rotating ever so slowly. As the Burnfoot Stream passed by, water driven through a side channel turned the planters slowly back and forth, by a system of rails and cogs, to maximise the sunlight.
The glasshouse was so hot, Jem had stripped off his waistcoat. He was sweating right through his shirt; to his charms, Molly was still not immune. Seeing them, Jem rearranged his clothing, but the earl reassured him.
“At ease, young man, when working.” He frowned. “Is that a rat?”
Jem broke off his proud stance, alarmed. He scooped up the misbegotten little hare. “Patagonian mara, sir. Little one. Been poorly. Feeding it up.”
“Eating our fruit, no doubt.”
“No, no, sir. Nibbling off the insects. Does a grand job.”
The earl led on through the foliage, shading his eyes. “What power there is in that sun. The day will come, Molly, when this country renounces fuels and relies instead on these two great benisons of nature, water and sun.”
Molly laughed. “The great engineer wishes away the power that supplies his own trade. How will your ships sail? How will you smelt your steel? And your household comforts, the heating, the lamplight?”
“You’ll see.” He smiled. On, through the botanicals. “Coal will run out. A few decades in this country. We’ll doubtless find more, and other fuels to exhaust, as we’ve dug up guano islands and peat bogs.” He led her beneath the mighty spruces around which the glasshouses were constructed, wiping his brow. Noticing Molly’s perspiration, he offered her a handkerchief. “As a youth, I stood by the Burnfoot Gorge and calculated the energy that passes through it. Harness this power, and it would outdo 10,000 tons of coal a day.”
Across the glasshouse quadrangle, they entered the scientists’ cloister. He showed her to a well-lit room. A broad desk, littered with drawing materials, filing cabinets, and an architect’s easel, which he adjusted to her height. “Let’s call this your studio.”
Molly looked around in wonder. At last, she thought. The inner sanctum.
“Our very own telegram station next door. Lodestar next but one. Comes and goes. Doubt he’ll bother you.”
“I’m quite sure he won’t.” She studied the awards that covered the wall. “Is this… This is your office.”
He dismissed her concern. “I don’t use it these days. I do all my thinking up in the tower of power.” He pointed up to the house: his central tower was visible above the trees. “Come. I’ve one of your ingredients we can fetch straight away.”
Out the rear door of the cloister, past the Frog Stone, and they soon came to t
he Pump House, above the Burnfoot weir. The old waterwheel turned slowly, powered by a channel of the Burnfoot. On the platform, the turbine, its industrial piston pumping back and forth. Inside were contraptions. She barely noticed the musty smell, the dirty flagstones, the ropes, broken chairs, and odour of chemicals that stuck in the throat. What she noticed was levers by the door, affixed on the walls; the bureau, with regulating and fuse boxes and telegraphic box; the stack of great wooden boxes panelled with glass sides.
“Nice tanks,” said Molly. “The fish died, did they?”
“Fish? Oh ho. Tremendous.” Roxbury found this hilarious. “Rather painful for your fish, though.”
“All right, clever clogs. What animals are they intended for?”
Roxbury struggled to stop laughing. “They are batteries. The liquid isn’t water, but chemicals. Sulphuric acid, for example. I happen to have powdered sulphur for you here. You must promise to let me mix it up, lest it corrode your paintings—and your fingers.”
He explained how the batteries stored power from the movement, back and forth, back and forth, of the turbine piston. At the end of the row of batteries, a pipe, rubber wound around copper wire, led away to house and glasshouses, powering telegram, servants’ buzzers and scientists’ equipment. His explanation of the various batteries was bewitching, with copper coils and Leyden jars and Siemens batteries and faradisation, and his infinite electrostatic influence machine. As the village church tolled, he led me out by the turbine to survey his domain.
“If my friend Swan is to be believed, he will illuminate our lamps within a year or two, without need for filthy candles, or whale oil or gas or this newfangled paraffin. You cannot imagine the hours of cleaning it will save Skirtle, besides the wasteful consumption of oil. My trusty old influence machine creates a healthy voltage, but this turbine can generate upwards of a thousand watts.” He turned to her kindly, his face golden in the sunlight. “You must come up to my study in the house. I’ll show you more of this new power and what it promises.”
Lawless and the House of Electricity Page 17