She retorted by abusing my thinness of face. “Are you determined to marry in a restraining corset? I hear they only asphyxiate a few ladies per year.”
Such candour, regarding undergarments, discomfited the reverend. Had I erred in securing an invite for an Oxford mathematician? He was recommended by the dean of Christchurch as a good egg, a photographer and popular with children. He chaperoned Kitty up, meeting her on her train at High Wycombe. When Birtle brought the papers, Dodgson pounced upon The Times as if it was a life jacket, turning straight to the chess page.
“Mister Wilfred,” announced Birtle, “has cabled.”
Beside me, Molly stiffened.
“He will not be joining us for the weekend, due to unforeseen… engagements.”
Just as well. From that moment, Molly recovered her usual ebullience. Nico and Peggy were too busy to return—school debates, school sports.
The party assembled had no proclivity for hunting or riding or shooting or boozing, so we went about our respective business. Molly took Mr Lear down to the menagerie for instruction in the complex art of illustrating birds. Lear hugely enjoyed seeing his painting case sent down the pneumatical railway.
Kitty and I tagged along. The talk was technical and the parrots impassive. Molly, I realised, was not bluffing: she was an artist; and she was an art teacher. (She did not know that the children had gone to their father to ask him to re-engage her for future holidays.) When I thought of the snub-nosed smudge of a girl I’d met through Campbell’s work underground, I was filled with pride. She was grown up: grown-up enough for Wilfred to take an interest in her.
“Who,” asked Lear pleasantly, “is to hold the bird for us? Yes, indeed. How else to study the intricate colourings and feathers?”
Molly was flabbergasted and delighted. “The earl was all for having it strung up.”
“The old-fashioned way.” Lear opened his case and set out his palette. “Not necessary. Not necessary at all.”
“It is as if,” said I, “you are setting out on one of your painting tours.”
He smiled. “I have painted from Jeddah to Jaipur, you know. Though I’ve made my name and money from oil paintings, I enjoy the sketching tours ten times more. Ah, the pleasures of friendships on those reckless jaunts.”
A thought struck me. “Have you been to Mozambique?” I asked.
“In Africa, no further than the pyramids.”
Molly looked at me quizzically.
“I just wondered if Mr Lear might know Lodestar.”
“Certainly. I knew him before his African days. Last saw him in Alexandria.”
I frowned. “Lodestar Senior, you mean, of course. The diplomat.”
“Diplomat! I like that. Old Chichester Lodestar was about as diplomatic as a rhinoceros. But that is how the Home Office likes ’em in the equatorial regions. Vindictive and intransigent.”
“How highly you think of your friend.”
Lear blanched. “I hope I have not misspoken. He was an old goat. The wife suffered most, I suppose. They had a little boy: Chesty they called him.”
Molly paused in setting up the easels. “That must be our Lodestar.”
“Likely,” said Lear unconcerned. “I’ve been away.”
I nodded. “I believe it is. Head of Roxbury Industries.”
Lear examined his paints. “Golly, I wouldn’t have had him down as the engineering sort. He was a delicate young thing; but it was a long time ago.”
“You must meet him again.” Molly’s enthusiasm for Lodestar was shining. “We shall ask the earl to summon him.”
“You will do no such thing, Molly.” I must dissuade Molly from pursuing this fancy. “He is a busy man.”
“He won’t remember me.” Lear smiled. “He was a little sprout. Though I fancy I drew him an alphabet at a banquet in Alexandria.”
I frowned again. A delicate thing: hard to imagine anyone describing Lodestar thus, at any age. People change, I suppose, and toughen up. I could see in Kitty’s manners how school would iron out the child into a brittle young woman, ready to be presented to society and make a dull marriage. Oh dear! Her mother was such a defender of women’s freedoms.
Kitty and I went back up to the house, just as Jem arrived for parrot-holding duties; Molly, I saw, paid him no regard whatsoever.
* * *
The parrot’s neck had a bare patch on it. Lear was teaching Jem how to hold the bird still without distressing it or distorting its shape, when he spotted the blemishes.
“My goodness. What have you been doing with this bird?”
Feathers had been plucked, tiny plumes removed or burnt. Not a problem for the painting: there were feathers and colour enough. But Lear and Molly were bemused.
“It’s them scientists,” said Jem, in a sheepish mumble.
Molly looked at him.
Lear tugged at his beard and patted Molly’s shoulder.
All at once, it dawned on Molly that the menagerie was no longer an assemblage of wounded beasts, as Lady Elodie had wished it. It had become, whether by Roxbury’s will or Lodestar’s agency, an adjunct to the scientific establishment. The scientists must be allowed—encouraged, even—to experiment upon the living creatures.
Lear was unshocked. He cut his teeth painting birds in the Regent’s Park Zoo, an unapologetically scientific establishment, dedicated to preserving species, but also to understanding animals, their physiologies and maladies. While that was often possible with live animals, there must be experimenting: research, dissections, and vivisection. He talked companionably to Molly of all this, as they painted.
She steeled herself. She refrained from making a scene. She got the most out of her lessons with Lear, persuading him back in the afternoon. He was a jovial fellow, but a hard worker, and a wonderful teacher. How swiftly she improved with two days of lessons from the old eccentric.
* * *
Dodgson was still reading the paper.
I might have thought Kitty would be jealous, after Mr Lear’s breakfast entertainment. But she latched on to Dodgson, demanded he tell her a story. He promptly put down his paper and began an imaginative tale, rather wild, which she illustrated as they went.
I left them to it, and went on a ramble up to the reservoir. I was seeking perspective, in this final year before we are to wed.
I believe that is when Dodgson suggested going up to the schoolroom where Kitty had her dressing-up box. The lighting was good. Dodgson had his photographic equipment sent up in the lift. There they remained till dinner, giggling and chattering.
EXEAT EXTRA [RUTH]
On the Saturday, all was glowing.
Before dinner, the reverend and his little model joined me at the puzzle. They loved maps, adorned with drawings, information and nomenclature. This latest was another world map: the colours suggested the aridity of deserts, tropical fecundity, and sickly pallor in the steppes and plains. The whole picture was redeemed by the rosy glow of pink, outposts of progress from Dublin to Durban. The illustrator had taken the opportunity to add contemporary life: sheep on South Georgia, bright fruits in Queensland; weapons to denote wars.
“I’ve got it,” Kitty piped up. “It’s all the places that Fa sells his smelly guns.”
The reverend and I looked at each other. Ought we to chastise her for an observation that was palpably true, if disloyal?
Kitty sensed our discomfort. “It’s all right. That’s what Mama used to call them.”
“Did she?” I said. In all Molly’s reports, the children had never breathed a word about their departed mother. “I thought you were Norphans.”
“Oh, that.” Kitty studied a gap in Central Africa. “That’s just Nico’s silly moping. That is what happens when you become a solitary old fool.”
Reverend Dodgson smiled at the thought that her brother was old and maudlin.
“Kitty,” I said, “do you miss your mother? You do remember her?”
“Yes.” She hunched over the Atlantic, her brows crossed
with hilarious concentration. “Pass Tegucigalpa, would you?”
I watched her. “I was a great admirer of hers—not that I knew her—her work, I mean, for the furtherance of women’s rights.”
“Yes.” Kitty sighed wearily. “I suppose I was an admirer too.”
“No more?” Dodgson teased.
“We have frantically busy lives,” Kitty remarked, as if she were a cabinet minister and the puzzle an affair of state. “Our paths crossed, and pleasantly. She took a great interest in my schooling. But beyond that…” She drifted off, engrossed in her task.
Dodgson and I glanced at each other, entranced by her maturity in speaking of the dead.
Just for a moment, Kitty stared out of the window and murmured with an intensity quite different to her feigned unconcern. “Of course, I should like to see her again.”
My heart broke for her. I reached out to squeeze her shoulder.
The blasted reverend piped up: “You will, my child. You surely will.”
Do-gooding busybody. I could have kicked him, at the very moment the girl was acknowledging the depth of her loss, that he should force on her a platitude of religiosity.
Kitty ignored him, raising her brows as if to consider his claim, then turning back to the important job in hand.
PARTY PIECES [RUTH]
The earl was elated when he returned from his experiments. Something to do with his new battery cells: glass containers, framed with wood, that hold electrical charge.
By dinnertime, the earl seemed preoccupied again.
I mentioned Lodestar and how Mr Lear fancied he had met him, as a child, years ago.
“Excellent fellow.” Roxbury chomped on his steak. “Great improvement on his father.”
Lear smiled, evidently relieved. “I suspect we are like- minded in that direction.”
Kitty and I conspired to draw the earl out of himself, for that was the impulse behind the weekend. After dinner, we demanded the visitors do party pieces. Lear happily began declaiming, somewhat waffly, through his beard, from Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania. Not at all what we had wanted, and we shouted him down.
“A limerick,” cried Kitty. “You are such a big published writer of nonsense, but I’ll wager you won’t outdo our Molly.”
“There will be no wagering,” said the earl, amused, “unless by the gentlemen.”
“Ha.” I snorted. “You see what we’re up against, ladies?”
Lear nodded. “If I must, I shall take on such a giant of poetry as young Molly; but I do it regretfully.” He nodded sagely. “I believe that poetry is never competitive. And also that she will win.”
The two wags got into their stride, extemporising pithy verses on topics of the weekend.
Lear began with the parrot, beaten by stick and eating a carrot.
Molly described a menagerie with animals most curmudgeonly.
I attempted a reservoir from which to see afar.
Dodgson made a hash of it, not grasping the verse scheme, though rhyming neatly, with photographs of tame giraffes, where sharks and sparks drew belly laughs.
The earl was enthused. So enthused he joined in, though he got stuck after his first line, and we leapt in to help:
[Roxbury] A gent long obsessed with electrics…
[Molly] Drove his creatures amply apoplectic.
[Kitty] His experiments wild
[yours truly] Left them gravid with child.
[Lear] Bless that old Inca god of obstetrics.
We laughed until we were exhausted.
Dodgson offered to read from his latest mathematical treatise. We took it that he was joking (though he wasn’t), but he brought down instead his latest daguerreotype prints: a boys’ cricket team; cheery skeletons of man and monkey; the dean’s children in mythological poses.
“What’s extraordinary,” said Roxbury, “is the movement captured by the still image.”
Dodgson spoke of the process today allowing shorter exposures, so people need no longer pose so rigidly, afraid of blurring their gift to posterity.
“Not what I mean, old fellow,” Roxbury said. “There’s an inexplicable vitality in the concatenation of light and dark chemicals reacted upon paper.”
“Wonderful, yes.” Dodgson saw his moment. “I hope you don’t mind my photographing Kitty?”
Kitty clapped for joy, revelling in the attention.
BOTTLED LIGHTNING [RUTH]
After the singsong, we adjourned, by Roxbury’s invitation, to his laboratory, which he preferred to call the Experimental Room. The servants called it the magician’s lair, and Molly had never yet seen it.
The tower stood at the midpoint of the house between the two turrets, the one Molly’s room, the other where Molly had, perhaps, seen someone at the window, about which she had a theory she was reluctant to share.
He introduced the equipment, bit by bit, as if they were friends; I suppose they were, during these years of his retreat.
While he set up his show, we curious souls dispersed around the room, which seemed equipped for alchemical wizardry. Dodgson gravitated toward the statue of white marble, Undine, representing Paracelsus’s elemental water spirit. Molly circled the room like a cat checking for unsuspected dangers: each corner held stacked glass containers, framed with wood and filled with liquid. Of differing sizes and complex interconnections, these constituted a history of the battery: Leyden jars, Daniell cell and Siemens units. All held electrical charge. The earl warned Molly to be wary of shocks should she touch them in a particular way.
“How exactly?” I asked.
“To complete a circuit.” He frowned. “It’s a rather complex science. Few understand it quickly.”
“Mr Lodestar?”
“Lodestar regards electricity as witchcraft.” He shook his head, smiling. “The very notion of ‘action at a distance’— the basic enquiry of science—remains a mystery to him.”
I glanced at the framed monograph of Roxbury’s speech to the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society. He spoke of the “great conquests of science” that lay before us, the challenge of generating motive power through electricity more cheaply than our current fuels, to fulfil humanity’s ever-increasing demand.
Lear meanwhile was fascinated by a large mechanical contraption. “An influence machine, I do believe. I saw a sideshow with this when I was young. A chap got it cheap off Benjamin Franklin.” Roxbury showed him the foot pedal, and Lear set it rotating until it thrummed. Pleased with the speed, he grabbed hold of the rod: at once, the hair on his balding pate leapt to attention; at once, his beard attempted an escape from his chin.
We applauded, laughing.
“My infinite influence machine I’ve had to move,” said Roxbury, “over to the Pump House, it was so large. But these batteries, charged by the Burnfoot Stream, are enough for the experiment I wish to show you.”
As if by magic, Birtle appeared—summoned, I think, by buzzer—carrying two wine glasses and a phial of water.
Roxbury set the glasses on his table. He held up the phial to the lamp, examining it minutely.
“Distilled, sir, as always.” Birtle revelled in his role: magician’s accomplice.
Roxbury filled the glasses halfway each. He took a thread—an ordinary thread, he assured us—and coiled it into one of the glasses, leaving just enough to reach the short distance, perhaps half an inch, between the rims.
Roxbury had an ease in explaining abstruse science lucidly. I came away convinced I could explain the latest technical advances to any dunce. (When I come to test my theorem, Campbell, you may prove too duncelike.)
“The thread: silk. The distance: four tenths of an inch. The electromotive force?” He smiled, inserting a copper wire into each glass, noticeably more at ease here in his own domain than at dinner. “Let us say, a considerable voltage.”
Birtle dimmed the lamps: a routine once well-practised.
“Observe.” Even as the earl spoke, the thread was coated with water. As
if by a snake charmer’s enchantment, the coil began to unwind, gradually depositing itself, less neatly, into the second glass.
We drew near, like disciples inspecting a miracle. “I’ll be dashed,” said Lear.
Dodgson rubbed at his eyes. “I’ll be double dashed and dod-busted.”
The final end of the thread rose from the first glass and travelled across the tenuous water bridge into the second glass. The water continued to travel, for several seconds, through thin air, unsupported.
I gasped, as a spark of blue leapt through the air. The water fell back.
I blinked, the blue lightning still on my retina. We had witnessed something remarkable. Dodgson wanted explanations. Molly and I wanted more.
In the sequel, with the string fixed at one end, the water emptied from one glass into the other.
In the finale, after the thread had finished its journey, he made water pass through mid-air—for several minutes—with no diminution of the water in either glass.
“It is beautiful, Your Lordship.” I clapped my hands in excitement. “And what use can such magic be put to?”
“My dear lady, thank goodness you are here to ask the apposite question.” Roxbury took my hands in his, gratefully. “I don’t for the life of me know.”
“Could a person be the conduit?” said Lear. “We see so many crackpot remedies in the newspapers. Darwin, you know, is always wrapping himself in galvanic belts.”
“I believe so. I soon hope to make an advance.” Roxbury looked exalted with hope for a moment; then he gave way to exhaustion, as if recalling how such everyday civility cost him. “I must retire. I am unaccustomed to entertaining. Will you excuse me?”
RETURN TO THE WALLED GARDEN [RUTH]
In the night, I dreamt of magical resurrections, of people long dead or lost to me as if they were dead. I dreamt of laboratory experiments: the lights extinguished, blue sparks emanating from the influence machine. Lear and Dodgson extemporising alphabets on either side of the table, on which Molly slept in a gravy boat. The earl meanwhile wrapped himself in chains and asked me to connect him to the electrical current.
Lawless and the House of Electricity Page 24