Lawless and the House of Electricity

by William Sutton

  I sat at the bureau. I opened a file.

  * * *

  Lists, diagnoses, prescriptions. Handwritten, printed, and torn from magazines. Advertisements. Contraptions. Medicines. Diets. Scientific papers.

  I lost track of time, captivated, leafing through page after page of mysterious notes. By the time I rubbed my eyes and remembered where I was, time had passed. One hour, several hours: I had no idea. It was getting dark. If I could not go on, I must go back through the secret chapel. I looked for the door I had come in by.

  I could not see it.

  There was no handle anywhere. There was no sign of a frame. In the dark, when I entered, I hadn’t noticed where I’d come in.

  I scoured the panels. I felt a fool for getting myself into a situation I could not get out of. I pushed at the borders. I found an edge. That must be it: a minuscule gap between the panel and the floor. I tried to claw it apart. No way to prise it open.

  I was rattled. What could I do? There was nothing else: I went back to leafing through the documents in the gathering gloom.

  THE EAST WING [MOLLY]

  “What in God’s name do you think you are doing?” Skirtle appeared in the middle of the wall adjacent to the panel I’d clawed around.

  I snapped shut the file I’d been peeking at. Our mutual astonishment was such that she didn’t register the way I had passed the time, trapped in this forgotten library.

  “I been worried sick over you. You’re not in your room. You haven’t done your work. I thought you’d fallen down the gorge and drownded yourself.”

  “Drown myself? No fear.” I gestured unconvincingly. “I found my way in. Couldn’t find my way back out.”

  “The house has been up to high doh about you.”

  “Go where you please, you said. Nobody’s stopping you.”

  She grabbed me and pulled me back out into the chapel. “I made some excuse. It was Birtle who thought to look here.”

  “Birtle?” I was alarmed. “Why? Was he afraid I would discover your secret?”

  “Whatever do you mean by that?”

  * * *

  I had spent the lonely hours in a kind of trance. Now I asked myself what this meant about the house. Patience came through these secret doorways. Birtle passed through. He did not pause. He went straight on, as if to business. What business so important should he have in the east wing which I had always been told was shut?

  The curtain twitching on my first arrival. Someone peeking from the turret window. I pictured a wild face, a fixed gaze. But in the dark library, I knew my imagination was coming alive, fired up by such strange lists of medicines, prescriptions and doctors.

  Nonsense, really. I had been reading too many wild romances. Although I hadn’t been dreaming that first day. Here, in the forgotten library behind the chapel I began to wonder: how much of the inner life of Roxbury House has remained hidden from me?

  * * *

  “Skirtle. Wait.” My mind was racing, over and over the things that didn’t make sense. You noticed that Skirtle and Birtle were inattentive to the running of the house. As if they had some other agenda. Other duties. In a part of the house that remained closed to the rest of us. “Tell me. Birtle’s in the east wing, isn’t he? Patience Tarn too.”

  She shooed me out, back through the chapel and out into the drawing room. After my inadvertent incarceration, it seemed a vast acreage.

  I breathed, and breathed again, feeling the oppression of that inner room fading, but also its magic. I began to doubt my convictions. “Come, now, Skirtle, we’re friends. Don’t equivocate.”

  “I’ll excavate you, body and soul, if you don’t get out of it.” She dusted me back into the hallway, towards Birtle’s quarters. “Hush, and move, young miss.”

  At the door of Birtle’s rooms, I stood my ground. “There’s someone in the east wing.”

  “He’ll just be getting it ready.” She hesitated. “For the visitors.”

  “You don’t put visitors there. Not for years. I’ve read the guest book. It was Lady Elodie’s rooms. I’ve seen her books. Don’t—”

  “Hush.” Skirtle clapped her hand over my mouth. She spoke, rapidly, with a gravity I’d never seen in her before. “Are you hushed?” She took her hand away, glancing about to see that none of the servants were about to hear my querulous chatter, but of course none of the servants came here but Patience. “You’d better come and talk to Birtle.”

  PRYING AND SECRETS [LAWLESS]

  We all fear we’ll be found out. It’s inevitable: however able and qualified we are, we await discovery. I certainly do.

  The public expects detectives to have superhuman powers, as they do in the penny dreadfuls. If they guessed how many crimes, dire and murderous, go unpunished in the morass of humanity that is London today, they would stage a revolution.

  Bertie, the Prince of Wales, fears it. His father filled him with a sense of inadequacy. He always feels second-rate, though he charms the whole of Europe, rich and poor, into loving him. Even his dear mama, the queen, felt foolish beside that self-important intellect.

  No doubt even Roxbury feels out of his depth sometimes.

  BIRTLE’S RECOLLECTIONS [MOLLY]

  Once inside Birtle’s pantry, Skirtle thrust me so firmly into the chair that I was stuck like a plum in a pudding. She thought of locking the door, I believe, but her injunction to stay put was enough. I had no wish to be thrown out. With you, Miss Ruth, and the visitors due in a few days, I would kick myself if I put another foot wrong. I was just beginning to unfurl the mystery within the doors of Roxbury House.

  Skirtle tugged a lever, sounding out a faraway buzzer in a peculiar rhythm, to summon Birtle back. Satisfied by an answering buzz, she turned tail and stormed out.

  What kind of a talking to would I get? Skirtle’s reaction to my explorations was strong enough. How great would be Birtle’s wrath? He disliked me enough. Mightn’t this be the pretext he’d been looking for to turn the earl against me?

  I was seized with the strangest fear. They’re going to do away with me, I thought. My heart began pounding. That’s why the servants change so frequently, and the scientists. If anyone gets a sniff of their methodology, they’re done for. They’re a double act. They’re going to do me in. That’s why Skirtle has vacated, because she’s fond of me and can’t bear to watch him do it.

  Opposite the door, behind Birtle’s desk, was a closet. Only now, as it creaked open, did I realise it was not a closet after all. It was the butler’s escape: a passage into the east wing, access to rooms, staircase and towers without all the faffing around at the Walter Scotts. Birtle could go there; doubtless Skirtle, from her rooms, had the same access.

  Birtle ambled in, dishevelled, expecting to see Skirtle, no doubt. He shut the door carefully behind him, with not a trace of his customary ill humour, and turned to me.

  “Christ Jesus on an omnibus.” He leapt like a startled goat. My fears subsided, for he seemed quite afraid of me. “Who brought you in here? Don’t tell me. Skirtle, wasn’t it? Without my say-so.”

  The bell must have told him she was calling. Blimey, how I wanted to flee. But where? I could not stop Skirtle reporting my snooping. Nor could I unsee the books and the files and all her Ladyship’s accoutrements. What he was going to say I could not imagine. As little as he could, surely. I would be dismissed. Reduced ignominiously to my former standing, all these efforts at ladylike tutorship cast into the dustheap. I would be warned against blabbing on pain of incarceration or transportation or worse.

  Birtle collected himself. He sat steadily down opposite me, as he had that first morning, but no trace of disdain. “Oh, Molly.” He had never before said my name so warmly. He looked at me steadily and swept stray locks of hair from his brow. “For such an inquisitive soul, it’s a wonder to us, to Skirtle and to me, that you haven’t stuck your nose into the east wing before.”

  “You told me not to.”

  “We didn’t think you’d obey us.”

&
nbsp; “You told me it was closed up.”

  “It is.” He hesitated. “Mostly.”

  I sat forward. “Closed up, with someone inside?”

  He sighed. “You have heard, from the earl, no doubt, the story of his marriage.”

  I gulped. “Up to a point.”

  Birtle started his story at the point that Roxy and Lady Elodie retreated, stung by the government’s betrayal, after he saved the day in the Crimea. “That showed him what politicians are: creatures of popularity, not sense. Like dogs, they come when their master calls them, panting to do his bidding, however stupid. Like dogs, they hang their heads when told off, for a moment. Any attempt to reason with them will fail, for their desire to please is not intelligence, but loyalty and need. The earl washed his hands of Parliament and retreated to this pleasure dome of Roxbury House. Here we are.”

  He buzzed a familiar pattern, and we waited in silence.

  “That much you already know.” Birtle took a tin from his desk. He tugged it open. It was not a gun; it was not my contract to be ripped up. It was biscuits. A moment later, the tea arrived via the dumb waiter. “Let me venture beyond.”

  Lady Roxbury, on her husband’s withdrawal, was faced with a choice. She could persist in her London adventures, supporting women’s education and charitable foundations and scientific lectures, or she could retreat with him. For many marriages, aristocratic ones most of all, such moments break the pledge of faith; the marriage was but a brief season of warmth now stilled to coldness.

  But Lady Elodie loved the earl; and the earl loved her. Retreating to this frosty paradise, they came to a new understanding. Were there challenges enough to occupy them? Why, certainly, with his experiments and her gardens, with her books and his glasshouses, with visitors from the cultural world and the disposition to enjoy the haven they had created. And they fell deeper in love, all over again.

  They had been a fine couple back in their twenties, well-matched and engaging. Now, either side of forty, they had business and public service behind them. The children were off to boarding school. So began their fresh romance. The earl and his Lady Elodie walked through the woods, by the gorge, around the reservoirs. He told her of his dreams: to harness the water’s inner force; to master electricity.

  On her side, it was no indulgence to share his fascination, for she was one of the first women inducted into the Royal Society. She kept her garden and her roses; she kept reading and studying. The earl put into place his wires and pipes and communication networks: buzzers, telegraph, and pneumatic rail down to the glasshouses, and cables to the Pump House, where the water’s tumult was channelled into power.

  The west wing comprised the usual drawing rooms and galleries, with gaming room, billiard room and children’s quarters to appeal to everyday visitors. Roxbury established his magician’s lair in the central tower. Skirtle, meanwhile, oversaw Lady Roxbury’s development of the east wing into a palatial retreat for artists and like-minded thinkers, to stimulate mind and body with a visit to this palace of the North, walking in arboretum and menagerie, musing by the Burnfoot Gorge and reflecting at Thimbleton Reservoir. Lady Elodie’s idea included these magical portals that connected east with west wing: through the Lady’s Library and through the chapel, for the literary and philosophic of mind; through housekeeper and butler’s quarters; and through Roxy’s magic tower. She thought it hilarious that the ladies’ library be secret, a comment on how women have long been discouraged from reading.

  I’m kicking myself to hear there were other ways in, though it would have been hard to find them. There had been more ways too, each with an illusory door or a secret mirrored entrance, through the servants’ quarters and kitchens and Turkish baths—but the earl had them closed up during the recent renovations, a kind of admission that the dream was over.

  * * *

  Where did it go wrong?

  Lady Elodie had one regret, one forgotten dream, which she voiced to the earl. That she had not brought up her own children. They had handed them to Skirtle and the nannies for their upbringing.

  One might suppose an aristocratic lady has no real idea of the travails of motherhood, but Lady Elodie worked to reform workhouses. She set up charities to help struggling parents keep their children. She read the research: sociomedical scholars pointed to loss of parents as by far the greatest factor in the capital’s deadly cycle of homelessness, alcoholism, violence and criminality. She befriended the reformers, the journalist, Mayhew, and the doctor, Acton. She walked the streets with the Red Lion Society. Even mothers debased by drink and driven mad by opium wailed to see their children taken from them. And yet the aristocracy cannot wait to pack their little ones off and out of their hair; and the middle classes fight for the pennies to afford the same strange separation. Why, she asked herself, why had she given birth four times only to yield the privilege of motherhood to servants? Couldn’t she have done it differently? Could she yet? She was advancing in her thirties, but it was not too late.

  They were not blessed with another child. A year went by. She became concerned. The anxiety began to chip at their idyll. The earl was understanding, but after a while began to feel his patience strained. They had so much; they were so blessed. Could this one lack taint all? Her Ladyship grew fixated on the idea.

  Her eldest Wilfred had suffered from her absence, she saw it now. Wasn’t this the reason he was such a thoroughly disagreeable child? Antagonistic to adults, distrusted by teachers, and unpopular with schoolmates, he derailed his academic studies with perverse behaviours. It took strenuous string-pulling to secure him a university place.

  The next three? She knew them a little better, and they had each other for company, but their joke of being Norphans made her wildly sad, silly though it was. Why not another? Why not a chance to redeem their errors?

  Lady Elodie prevailed upon the earl to have her checked by prominent medics. Thus began the procession of experts through the household: gynaecologists, obstetricians, impregnation experts, antenatal surgeons. These doctors said there was no reason. They must just accept it. She might have reluctant follicles, she might have ovarian cysts, or uterine debility. There was nothing to rectify it; and nothing could be worse for her than worry. She should simply accept it.

  She did not accept it.

  They toured the clinics of London. On and on into the more diverse reaches of the medical world.

  Acupuncturists gave Indian head massages; alienists assessed her psyche blocked by previous births; phrenologists pronounced her occipital lobes incompatible with childbirth (though she had proved them wrong four times over). Homoeopathists prescribed poisons to provoke her uterus; naturalists prescribed rainwater filtered through pumice (4s 6d a flagon); ramblers advised ten-league walks. She visited nutritionists, dietitians, philanthropists, philologists, vegetarians, temperancers, tea-drinkers, druggists, pharmacopoeists and every type of quack upon the earth.

  Scientific Roxbury accepted all this with no more resistance than a pained expression. He wanted her happy; she could not be happy without another child in her arms. All failed. He took advice with a doctor friend. Why not adopt a child?

  Roxbury was persuaded of the good sense of this solution; Lady Elodie accepted it. She travelled the length and breadth of the country, visiting orphanages. She could not bring herself to choose one over all the others: unfair that one should be selected from the thousands to receive not only the privileges, but the love she longed to bestow, while the others stayed behind, unloved.

  She decided to adopt two. That was the only way to lessen her angst. She was agonising whether it was right to keep their names or to change them, when she fell pregnant.

  THE LADY IN THE TURRET [MOLLY]

  “Pregnant?” My breath went short. I stood up, so taken up was I with the romance of the story as Birtle told me it. I stared at him, puzzled how he could fail to share my joy in the news. Except it was not news. Or rather it was old news, and any rejoicing long over. For where was the fi
fth child? Where was Lady Elodie? “It didn’t…” I didn’t like to say it. “The child…”

  “The child died. Yes.” Birtle glanced down. In that glance, I saw that everything I had thought of him was false: I had thought that he was unfeeling, that he cared little for the Roxburys and less for their children. All of that was damnably wrong. I do not believe he could have been more distraught had it been his own child. “And her ladyship. Her ladyship fell ill.”

  A tender tap at his door. Skirtle entered, with familiar ease, before he answered. She gauged with a glance how our conversation had gone. I had been so sure these two couldn’t stand each other. And here they were, in cahoots over these secrets.

  “I was just mentioning,” Birtle looked at Skirtle, “how her ladyship took ill.”

  “Oh, she did. After the bairn? Oh, ill something terrible.”

  “And to explain all our comings and goings?” Birtle wafted his hand towards the hidden door, gesturing to all the secrets tied therein. “Her sister.”

  “Oh. Yes.” Skirtle turned to me, wide-eyed. “Her sister!”

  “Her sister came up.” Birtle elaborated. “From Dorset. To look after her. Seeing as how her ladyship was poorly, in body and mind. And his Lordship…”

  “The state he was in.” Skirtle rescued him. “And decisions about her safety, which only he should be making, but were left to us, so as—”

  “Her sister,” Birtle prompted. “Her sister was the one we called upon to help.”

  “Not with nursing duties, mind. We were fit for that. But there were things we couldn’t decide. It takes an educated person, to deal with the ’pothecaries.”

  “Pharmacological decisions.”

  “Like I said.” Skirtle glared at him. “Them potionaries, all for giving her this, and herbalisationists for that. Then the brain doctor—”

  “Neurologist.”

  “He’s warning of this. The mesmerist is claiming that. The alienist is prescribing the other. Oh!” She threw up her hands, as if to give up mid juggle and let the clubs fall on her head. “Terrible, it was.”