Lawless and the House of Electricity

by William Sutton

  “Feed the body,” he said jovially, “feed the mind.”

  * * *

  Molly took time for a Sunday walk with me, before Lear and I were whisked off to catch our connection. She told me of the library, the trunk, the documents; how Skirtle found her, and Birtle was kind, after all his stares. She told me the sad tale of love rekindled and joy destroyed. And in the turret, mad or sleeping, the lady.

  “Lady Elodie?” I could hardly believe it. I stared up at that crenellated tower hanging over us, as we descended the path around the rockery. No visions of wild-haired women were afforded to me.

  As I contemplated the place, I felt the earl revealed to me. The house, calm and reasoned in exterior, but alive to the torrent of unknown forces. No namby-pamby fountains for Roxbury; no ornamental grottos. What need, when nature gives you such a setting? The falls roared down the Burnfoot Gorge. With clouds massing above, how much energy must that torrent generate through his turbines?

  Molly spoke only of her researches, self-contained to the point of evasion.

  “But how are you,” I said, “in yourself?”

  “Fine, fine.”

  I knew her better than that. “Come along. Don’t play Molly mysterious with me. I know you, and I see your lively eye, and I wonder on whom it alights.” It was a new stage of our friendship for me to recognise that she was grown up and full of dreams and passions, and an easy target for the roving eye that so many men have. Down beyond the Iron Bridge, Jem the stable boy was heading for the glasshouses. “Can I see the object of your passion?”

  “Him? He has a sweetheart, Dotty, a dairymaid down the valley.”

  “The earl is fond of you.”

  “Don’t be a daft-pated duckling.” She stopped short. “But his sons—”

  “Both?”

  Molly sighed. “Nico is just a boy, and a dreamer. The elder one, well.” She gave an involuntary shudder.

  I recalled Wilfred’s blackened eye, but we did not speak of it.

  * * *

  Molly’s demeanour changed. “Look. Here is the Walled Garden. It’s the one part of the grounds I avoid.”

  I smiled at her evasion. “And why is that?”

  “Private reasons.” She coughed. “Lady Elodie’s garden. Gone wild now.”

  “I thought you hadn’t ventured?”

  Molly leaned toward me, pointing at the solid wooden gates, paint peeling. “He’s buried there.” Her face darkened. “The child that died.”

  “There’s no shame in paying respects to the dead.”

  Molly was pale. “Spoil our jolly walk.”

  “I love a ramble through a cemetery.”

  “An overgrown garden, with a grave?”

  I had forgotten she was afraid of graveyards. I took her hand. We squeezed through the gap in the gates. Herbs, wildflowers, familiar and exotic, witch hazel, allium, and hogsbane, with its mawkish scent.

  Dark and rough-hewn, the stone slab was free of moss, beginning to weather.

  JONATHAN ROXBURY

  DECEMBER 1861

  IN OUR ARMS SO BRIEF,

  IN OUR HEARTS FOREVER

  * * *

  THE MENAGERIE, PART THE THIRD [RUTH]

  Our visit will be remembered by the staff, of course, for the two screams that ended the weekend’s idyll. One led to Dodgson’s summary departure. The second revealed the goings-on in the scientific quarter.

  This latter scream came from Jem. He was combing the hair of his beloved orang-utan, when he found a neat row of stitches forward of her left ear.

  The first scream was Skirtle’s. She brought tea and biscuits up to the makeshift photography studio, only to find Kitty in what she considered inappropriate attire. Dodgson was taking his photographs without apparent prurience, yet Birtle persuaded him that he should leave ahead of schedule.

  Not exactly sent home in disgrace, Dodgson was undoubtedly an odd fish, too fond of Kitty’s whimsical declarations. The sad thing was that Kitty did look fetching in dirtied face and rags. She reminded me terribly of Molly when we first met her. It was not how an earl’s daughter was usually posed; but perhaps Dodgson was ahead of photographic fashions.

  LEAR AND LODESTAR [RUTH]

  I have had the pleasure of travelling south with Mr Lear. I enjoined him to publish more of his limericks, as they gave us such pleasure. He pshawed and harrumphed: it was such an effort getting subscribers for his paintings, he hardly had the stomach for selling Nonsense; but I assured him that his Nonsense kept us adults sane, and lit our children’s imagination, so thank God for him.

  I also asked if I might send you to speak to him. For someone who had known Lodestar Senior seemed to me an invaluable referee for this young man who had risen so swiftly to such a prominent position.

  I have also decided I should write to the Lodestar estate in Africa.

  ROXBURY’S MAXIMS [FRAMED IN THE MAGICIAN’S LAIR]

  The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse. (Burke)

  Everything is interaction and reciprocal. (Von Humboldt)

  Power should act and not talk. (Goethe)

  Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but in striking true. (Balzac)

  A hair or two will show where a lion is hidden. (Dickens)

  You cannot turn back time, but you may convert it into energy. (Roxbury, Notes on Electricity)

  MARGINALIA [MOLLY]

  Dear Miss V,

  Since your weekend here, I have become more dedicated in my searches. Please pass on what you think useful. My daily letters are noticed. I worry that the coded notes may rouse suspicion: hence no bulletin for Watchman this time. I shall send what I can, when I can.

  First, I spent time with the trunk of lost dreams. I began to find annotations, scribbled by Lady Elodie herself, in the margins of her books, so I knew her hand. Thrilling, to touch the page where she scribbled. Her literary thoughts (“Rochester—rotter”). Reminders to herself (“fish Friday—lamb Saturday?”). Her own name (“Elodie Margaret Loth, Elodie Roxbury, Lady Elodie”).

  I determined to ask Birtle if I might not see her. He would refuse, of course, but at least it would mean I had asked, before I snuck in without permission.

  Then I found Lady Elodie’s diary.

  It was on her bookshelves, betwixt Christina Rossetti and Menella Smedley. The scrap of memoir by the earl had put me on the lookout for it. It looked like a bound volume, but the spine was named by hand in beautiful script:

  ELODIE ROXBURY

  JOURNAL

  I leafed through Lady Elodie’s writings, astonished. At the end, I found notes in a script wilder than hers, and read these first.

  They were by the earl, after her passing.

  SHE IS GONE [ROXBURY]

  Pen to paper. Words words words. Work work work. My heart leaps in my chest, rattling uselessly against its cage. No escape. No release. Our dream of sunlit valleys will never be. Again and again, the realisation: that will never be.

  She is gone.

  She is here.

  She is gone.

  In trying to write usefully, panic takes me. Useful? What use? What use can there be in writing these sufferings? What use to keep living?

  I shall take my pencil, return to my laboratory, and approach my work again, without hope and without despair, as every scientist must do. Observe. Draw. Not for the relief promised by Ruskin and his artists. But an engineer is no pure scientist; he is a bridge between the worlds of science, art and life. Unless he has this equal stake in those three realms, what use is he? What use am I who can girdle the world entire with power, but cannot save her? End it all. Disconnect the cables. But there is no cliff, no reservoir that offers the release I need. I cannot vanish away.

  * * *

  Write again. Work again. Work until this foolishness dissolves. How can we exist and not be together?

  Work. Work. Work. Not just doodles of imaginary nothings. Coherence. Construction. All the projects I daydreamed of. All the pr
ojects I promised her. The rail she wanted for the children’s safety on the Iron Bridge. The rockery. Lay the copper conductor to the turbine at the gorge—the Pump House, I shall call it. Test the reservoirs’ capacities. Calculate motive forces. Experiment with the waterwheel, resistance, momentum, and charging the battery jars.

  Visit that asylum in West Yorkshire. Jackson has dissected brains of epileptics in York to understand the neurological damage. He has seen Fritsch and Hitzig applying shocks to dog brains, mapping the brain areas. Now he wants to try the electrical treatments, like Charcot. But I will bet their batteries are twenty years old. Hospitals.

  Read more. Try again. Go back to the wine glass. Read up on developments since I first published. When the consensus is overwhelming that it is better to try than remain forever in stasis—horrid paralysis—try again. Rely on the uncertain tenets of these new sciences.

  Risk all.

  GATHERING SPEED [LAWLESS]

  As Molly shared these revelations with Ruth, I journeyed around the country. My panic to hold shut the doors of invasion seemed overwrought. I saw at every port Frenchmen and Frenchwomen detained, their papers checked and double- checked; ever more were sent back where they came from. I wondered if Jeffcoat, on his voyage, would recover not just from his wound, but from the shock of his close call.

  The rains began. It rained on the moors, it rained on the dales. In London, floods. In Teddington, floods. At the children’s schools, floods. Intemperate seasons that left us fed up with tempests, and in a temper.

  Molly shortened her drawing sessions with the shortening daylight, to study the secrets of the Lady’s Library. I pelted round, gathering scraps of hints of murmurs about who might have anti-British sentiments or French sympathies or unexpected extra income. Ruth collated this information.

  All this happened simultaneously. It is a frustration to write of it piecemeal. Indeed, I feel foolish when it is all set out thus, because I feel I should have seen it, and sooner, the thread that would wind through the labyrinth to the dark heart of the monster terrorising us.

  * * *

  I went back to Portsmouth to harangue the contractor for the forts on Bazalgette’s behalf; I owed that much to Bertie. This tiresome man listened to my suggestions, as if I were a schoolchild proposing a half-holiday. I thought he would dismiss me without consideration.

  Instead he put this proposal to me. “How many bricks can they make per week? How many does Bazalgette want? Can we get these extra bricks—of lower quality—at lower cost? Get those figures. Meet me here, with Lodestar, to make sure his company is willing to parcel out their bricks thus.”

  “It’s not his company,” I said. But I wired Lodestar, and we fixed the meeting for a fortnight’s time. I sent the queries to Bazalgette, then I set all thought of bricks aside.

  I bought a drink for Ellie at the Fortitude Tap, to cheer her up, and stomped back to the station through the rain.

  * * *

  Before he sailed, Jeffcoat and I had reported our suspicions to Ripon. He wanted more information, always more. About the explosions that had happened, the damage, how executed, what proofs, what connections, what links to the French. We told him of the bank’s obstructiveness and the bonds from a gentlemen’s club. We told how Jacques I had escaped, while the Jacques ready to talk, Jacques III, was killed at Clerkenwell; but then he was not French.

  Ripon looked troubled. “This gentlemen’s club. Have you asked there? I notice how the banks’ stocks have fluctuated in the wake of each attack.” He rubbed his beard. “I’d be interested to know who was throwing money around in the bar on those dates.”

  Difficult to check, I thought. “Why, sir?”

  “Widen our list of suspects.” Ripon pursed his lips. “The Frenchies aren’t the only people who benefit from instability.”

  INVESTIGATING THE ZOOLOGICAL RESEARCH [MOLLY]

  Miss V,

  I have rationed my reading hours. Although Birtle and Skirtle knew that I visited Lady Elodie’s library, I deemed it imprudent to let on that I was delving into the trunk. I judged how long I could risk staying and staring and flicking through these pages. The earl’s endnotes, fragmentary and incoherent, provided a window on to his soul, till now opaque. But I dared not remove the volume: it would have felt like a robbing a tomb—even if my terror of being branded a thief has abated, since Birtle’s softening toward me.

  * * *

  I’m inquisitive, me. (My brother would have chosen a less polite word.)

  After the parrot with Lear, I was looking for a chance to investigate the zoological research. Early morning, waking from slumbers, a scratch at the window made me leap to my feet. That was a distress signal, back in London among the Oddbodies. I leapt up; but it was just a bare branch, drawn across the antique panes by the wind. A carpet of grey whooshed over the bright morning: in these northerly wastes, winter can leap out at any moment. I spotted the earl tiptoeing across the gravel, making his way toward the glasshouses.

  Nothing attracts my nosiness more than secretiveness. It was quick work to dress in dark clothes. The rains had swollen the stream in the night. I could hear the turbine whirring up at the Pump House; it is not usually engaged at this hour.

  I flitted from bush to bush, following Roxy down to the glasshouses. He passed through the double door, greeted by a muzzy-headed scientist. I did not approach the same door, but passed along the great glass walls, checking for prying eyes. I might have been spotted from the house, but the morning was dull and my clothes dark. I snuck round the glasshouses towards the zoological end, with the animals arranged by genus, species and whatnot.

  A cry. I stopped in my tracks. It sounded barely human.

  Or rather nearly human. The old orang-utan, Jem’s friend, is grown lethargic of late. They have treated her with massage, with herbs, with drugs, not knowing whether it is senility or a tumour causing her despondency. Most recently, they have tried galvanic belts, and succeeded in rousing her from slumber. What now?

  I crouched at her window. When I gathered the courage to peek, I saw what made her scream: electrocuting belts, attached around her head; incisions at her temples, where wires emerged from under the skin.

  The scientist gave a signal. Charged by the turbine, the belt shot electric charge through her head. A convulsion, and they had to hold down her arms to stop her removing the blasted thing from her ears.

  She relapsed, blinking, and allowed the earl to squeeze her in a comforting embrace. For all her cries, for all her pain, there was no doubt, she was awake: awake, and more alert than she had been for many weeks.

  Why this furtive experiment, at such an early hour? Because Jem could not bear to see them do it to her.

  FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES [PENNY SATIRICAL]

  These late attacks on structures of national importance are a menace, and the perpetrators must feel the weight of Her Majesty’s justice.

  As violent attacks go, however, with respect to the injured, they are fiascos. Their success has been in the disproportionate scale of the terror they provoke. Consider.

  Erith: ten dead, windows broken, sea wall repaired in the nick of time.

  Camden: train derailed, windows broken, inconvenience, donkey exploded.

  Florence Veigh: inferno, none killed, windows broken.

  Clerkenwell and Scotland Yard: prisoners killed, windows broken, police narked.

  Why, it’s almost as if they are just upsetting people— aside from glaziers, who love them*. Who would stand to gain from that?

  “The Irish, of course,” say our redoubtable organs of misinformation, the newspapers.

  The Detective Police Force murmurs tacit agreement.

  “The French, of course!” mutters public opinion, fuelled by egotist demagogues peddling anti-European sentiments as old as the Domesday Book. Detectives emerge from the War Office demanding that Palmerston’s coastal follies go ahead, the costliest defenceworks on our island since Hadrian’s Wall.

  “Nobody stand
s to gain,” lament the right-minded. With people afraid, nobody trades, nobody dines out, nobody spends. We all lose.

  Or do we?

  (* Has Scotland Yard investigated the possibility of glazier activism?)

  * * *

  Your memorious Penny Satirical recalls an outbreak of supernatural sightings in the thirties. Remember? Ah, those distant days, when the gullible populace was so bereft of trustworthy information they believed in werewolves and vampyres.

  Not at all, we reply, these were intelligent and educated people. And yet they saw Spring-Heeled Jack, that venerable larkster who sometimes robbed, sometimes leapt, sometimes groped, but above all scared the living daylights out of people.

  Or so we were told. That is, trusted news organs reported what they had seen.

  We are also told, by a little birdy, that the Hellfire Club placed bets on Spring-Heeled Jack’s antics, raking in quite a sum over the course of two years, until the bookmakers suspected the newsmen were in cahoots.

  Imagine! Selective reporting of the truth? Journalists paid off for reports with no basis in fact? Never: not in British papers. That is the preserve of despotic regimes, like Russia and France.

  It was rumoured that two prominent Hellfire members, who cannot be named, profited by investing in the troubled areas. What a wheeze. Now, like Jack of old, up leaps Spring-Heeled Jacques. Down go prices. Investors buy up property sold in panic at rock-bottom prices. Nothing immoral about it.

  Apart from the murderous explosions, that is.

  * * *

  Property in Erith, Camden, Clerkenwell and Birkenhead can be found on pp. 9, 12, 13 and 24-28.

  AFRICAN SKIES [LAWLESS]

  Ruth was so troubled by Lear’s offhand comment about Lodestar and his delicate constitution as a child that, with my endorsement, she wrote to the Lodestar estate in Africa, including return postage, begging further details of the father’s death and son’s departure, with any family portraits they might have, which she would return.