* * *
The real Nathaniel Chichester Lodestar lay buried in the police cemetery, unmarked and unmourned. Who was this Lodestar? Why, an unholy creation—and yet he really was Lodestar. Zephaniah Lodestar, illegitimate child of the self-styled governor of Nyasaland, filled with princely entitlement by his mother, the beauty of her tribe. He thought he could do no wrong.
The air became rarefied as we rocketed into the dark night. It was as if the pressures of his duplicity were building up. When a man has dissimulated so much, unseen forces press within him. More drinks. More hours. And he began to talk.
“My father was known,” he told me. “Known and feared in London society. Friend to peers and MPs. Plenty of bankers in the Hounds Club. Roxbury knew him. Lear knew him. They despatched him to darkest Africa to harness its riches. We natives had not known what we were lacking. We thought wealth grew on trees: dates and tamarind. Water fell from heaven. We knew nothing of whisky and money and debt and syphilis, until you forced these upon us, to enslave us into our ways of desire, debenture, drudgery. Bravo, brave colonisers. Alas, craven colonists.”
I refrained from commenting that he had his revenge, though the image of Chichester’s skeleton swam before my eyes.
“Let me tell you what it was like arriving in London.” And he spoke, with candid fervour.
COLONIALS AND INVESTMENTS [LODESTAR]
Any son returning from the colonies would have barriers to surmount. People label you colonial: are you spoilt by servants? Have you fallen into depravity? Has the pipe dazed you? Dark skin entranced you?
Guilty as charged, I warrant. Yet I could sup politely, lose at cards, and stand the boys a drink. I squared the lawyer’s accounts, discharging the debts of my dissolute father’s. Once people stopped regarding me suspiciously, it was time to beg favours.
I was fortunate, on arrival. My finances were stated plainly by West, West, Prosser, West: no inheritance; father bankrupt; the African estate lost. Old Mr Prosser took pity on me. He lent me £10 and coached me to evade my debts, cajole cash from rich shirkers, and carve out a career. An invaluable start. I was able to reach out for helping hands. By God, I reached.
First, to the Hounds Club. I latched on to young Overend, a fool, and a rich one. Father’s old friends let me buy them a drink. Their sons let slip business prospects. They left guineas as tips on dinner tables. They left wallets in their jackets.
I wrote to the earl. He liked me. He took me on. Today I manage his affairs. I am proud to say, I have expanded his business threefold. The hydraulics, the weaponry and the bricks. You cannot challenge these contributions.
As to Overend & Gurney, you seem suspicious. Well, well. You’d think unstable markets cast terror into the hearts of City gents, and they’d steer clear of such treacherous straits. Not a bit. They sniff treasure. Do you see how? I didn’t.
After two hours at the bar in the Hounds Club, I felt like a virgin despoiled. What depths these gents stoop to for money. The cash in which the City bathes may look soothing. Easy pickings, we assume. Au contraire. These boys are constantly waiting for the sky to fall on their heads. So when a sure thing turns up…
* * *
The Hellfire Hounds make their fortune by spreading anxiety. They extract their investments. They tip off the biggest johnny they know, quietly, who runs to his broker and pulls out, whispering to the under-clerk, who whispers to a cabby, who drives the secret all the way to Cockfosters. Hey presto: panic in the market.
Our boys follow the panic from the pub. When they judge it at its low point, they sweep in. With their ready cash, they buy up the property sold in such panic. Like everything in London, it regains its overpriced valuation soon enough. There’s nothing scandalous about the mountains of cash they make, because everyone in the chain benefits: at least everyone they know. Once the panic is over, all the hasty panickers look at what they have sold and wring their hands over how little they got for it.
Our boys make mountains from these non-events. They could listen for news from the colonies: corn fields, coffee plants, or nut harvests. Why bother? Wherever there is a boom, a dip will follow. They even buy the debt of the poor beggars they are robbing, and profit from that too. They even profit from debt.
LIGHTING A FIRE [IN LODESTAR’S NOTEBOOK]
It begins as I touch the wires to complete the circuit. I hear the buzzer. It sets the precarious balls a-rolling.
Boom.
As the first one explodes, just a small bang, I feel a tremendous calm. Stronger than remorse, stronger than vindication. The hand of the gods directs me. Some are exalted in life; some are destroyed. If I am the adjunct of the gods, how can I say no? The Parkesine detonators have lit the paper. The black powder will catch any moment. I have chosen the place carefully: the utmost disturbance, with no chance of discovery.
It is light enough that I can see my way down the lane, back to the busy street. There I lose myself in the emerging crowd. The flames from the theatre turn the clouds orange. I hear the cries of the parents and children, strangers and neighbours, too panicked to help each other, rushing to find a way out, screams across Oxford Street. The street is a battlefield. Whoosh—they flee headlong, trampling each other. It works so smoothly. I shall be able to employ fools to set these traps of mine. Simply set up the detonators, complete the circuit, walk away. If some go wrong, and the dunce police catch them, what matter? However they quiz them, whatever they admit, they will not be believed; for my dissembled plot is too convincing, too widespread to be the invention of one malevolent profiteer.
The dancers’ pain is heard in each scream.
If they cannot fathom the fire’s cause, the people will vent their anger by demanding guns and walls and ships. We feel vulnerable: defend us!
I would feel ashamed, if my cause was not right. Death I inflict here, at the heart of this city of careless souls; I thereby save the heart of the empire.
LODESTAR CONFESSIONS [LAWLESS]
I read his account of the fire.
I would not ask Lodestar about the explosions; I did not ask about the fires. When he excused himself, I simply dug out his diary and turned to August 16, the date of the fire which terrified Ruth.
I read his annotations impassively, and thrust the book away. I could doubt no more.
I stared out at the black night, a queasy darkness enveloping my brain.
Living such a life as he, you must awaken every day knowing you may be unmasked. Any moment may compromise the fiction you have so long maintained. The impersonation you have kept up. Such a slip would ruin your life. Even if you could survive that, it would throw to the devil a hundred plots you are in the midst of contriving. Your friends will not accept you letting them down, your powerful friends, to whom you have promised so much: you have promised diversion, impunity and easy wealth.
* * *
Rain on the carriage roof; rain against the window.
I felt stretched tight with anxiety. He believed he had me charmed. And I must keep him thinking that. He thought I had forgiven him his imposture, because of his efforts, because of his talent, because of his charm. He didn’t know I knew everything.
I was beyond disgust, beyond fear. I simply listened, pretended to drink his brandy, and admired his achievements. I was fascinated and sickened by him in equal measure. I would unmask him, but not here. This was not the place to push for a confession; that would make me unnecessarily endangered while I was alone and exhausted. Nausea threatened my senses, but I must prevail. In my head, I had Ruth’s instruction, and Molly’s promise of aid: I must go to the Pump House, where Molly would come to work the turbine.
I must get him to Roxbury House.
ALDINI’S ELECTRICAL RESURRECTIONS
Giovanni Aldini, prince of scientist showmen, brings his latest Milanese revelation to the London stage. You are invited to bring along any recently deceased pets: rodents, cats, small dogs, amphibians—none, please, more than two days old, we beg you.
&nb
sp; Using the technique of Luigi Galvani, developed in experiments upon frogs’ legs, Aldini will AMAZE and DELIGHT with demonstrations upon the recently executed.
GASP as they twitch end jerk.
GAZE as the eyes of Newgate malefactors open, the jaws quiver and the limbs shake. The mouths of the DEAD shape soundless words.
A spectacle for layman and connoisseur.
LIES AND EXAGGERATIONS, PART THE FIFTH [LAWLESS]
I had also asked myself, why didn’t Molly get to know Lodestar? She reported early enough that this magnetic charmer was at the heart of Roxbury Industries. She gauged that her task was to evaluate threats to Roxbury, pressures and influences injurious to its proper functioning.
And indeed she wanted to know him. She wanted too much. A combination of shyness and pride prevented her from showing too much interest, in those first months. But Lodestar was not an easy nut to crack. He enjoyed the power of his position, where he could come and go at will, ignoring duties or questions and even the everyday courtesies that make us available to our fellow man.
He was also secretive. He was secretive from his upbringing, where he had to be a good young Englishman in his father’s house, and a good young Chewa warrior in his tribe. He was fiercely secretive in business too. This made him trusted by those young investors at the Hounds Club. This secrecy endeared him to Roxbury too. Innovations in engineering can change the world, and it will not do to have any old trainee swan in and inspect the latest design for a tunnelling shield or a drilling rig, only to reproduce it for your rival. Lodestar kept a closed shop at the greenhouses. Any who broke his rules of secrecy were swiftly dismissed.
No wonder it took Molly so long to penetrate the inner sanctums. Once she started painting in the menagerie, she had licence to visit the scientific offices. But not until Lodestar’s last visits was she able to snoop as she would wish. And snoop she did.
She snooped round Lodestar’s office. She found a notable absence of personal information, aside from calling cards of businessmen; she wasn’t to know he kept his accounts at the Hounds. She snooped round his room in the house. No memorabilia—aside from a few notes from females. If his lascivious behaviour in the breakfast room hadn’t been enough, this convinced her that he bedded women in every port.
But in that final stretch, she caught Lodestar’s interest. She already knew how to work the telegraph and the pneumatic rail. When he called into her office, he was amused to find her studio decorated with her caricatures of all the scientists. She went with him to his office, she played billiards, she asked about the new explosives he was developing. She also offered to accompany him to the Shepherd’s Refuge.
Quite how intimately she got to know him, I never knew.
TO BRING HER BACK TO US [MOLLY]
Roxbury was sitting at Lady Elodie’s bedside. The rain redoubled against the turret windows.
She was completely still, head still, pale cheeks, facing heavenward, the pillows plumped beneath her. She might have been dead, but for the way he spoke to her, sotto voce, like confiding in an old friend. He did not know I was there.
* * *
Since Birtle first took me up to see her, I came over and again, amazed to see just how often they visited her, he and Skirtle, how devoted they were. There were flowers in the room. It was always airy and light. It was the most lovely room in the house, the view commanding the whole Roxbury estate, over gorge and rockery, the forest spread out below and the Burnfoot Falls tumbling above.
In those first days, she seemed asleep. “This is the lethargic phase,” Skirtle told me. “It’s not exactly sleep. You’ll see.”
They managed to stretch her limbs, massage, and bathe her. Patience Tarn worked quietly, tirelessly, to keep her from getting bedsores. After the earl had given up on the French doctor who all but killed her, they had taken advice from Hughlings Jackson, the epileptic specialist. He had told them how to care for her in her comatose lethargy, and how they should observe her in case of epileptoid episodes. They managed to get water down her throat. Skirtle added drops from two tiny phials: artemisia and belladonna.
“Poisoning her?” I whispered.
“Wheesht.” She glared at me. “It’s a calmative mix. If we don’t give it her… well, you’ll soon enough see, I’m sure, what happens when we don’t.”
* * *
On the third day, I did see. Patience Tarn, normally so silent, put the bedpan away rather carelessly. It rang against the great vase in the corner, like a mesmerist’s gong.
Lady Elodie opened her eyes, as if awakened from a trance.
“Patience! Quick.” I waved my arms to attract the girl’s attentions. “Is she awake?”
Patience came and stood beside me. She shook her head, smiling sadly. She buzzed for Skirtle.
As we waited, it became quite clear to me that Lady Elodie was just as unresponsive as in her lethargy. I lamented thus to Skirtle when she appeared.
“I often think she is just joshing us, my dear.” She sighed. “And maybe one day she will stop the game. But she’ll not be quite so unresponsive now. You’ll see.”
This was the cataleptic phase. Lady Elodie was not fully awake, but her eyes opened again just before her right side clenched with pain. Patience caught her head as she threw it back, fighting for breath, with ripples going through her upper body. Skirtle checked her heart—racing—and put a wooden spatula upon her tongue—curled up in her mouth—just as she lost consciousness completely. Patience took hold of Lady Elodie’s hands, which were fearfully clenched. Skirtle watched closely, checking her forehead with the back of her hand.
As she had explained, Elodie’s fit began, quivering and jerking in her bed.
Skirtle waited only a few moments. She clenched her jaw, pulled down the covers, felt around her ladyship’s belly, and launched herself forward to press down with the base of her hands. A quiver, a shudder. And the fit was over.
They kept her alive.
* * *
Roxy came up and spoke to her.
I had tiptoed into the bedroom. It still felt to me, entering the east wing, that I was travelling through an impossible realm, a shadow world of the main house, and I could barely believe I was here. Her bedroom was beautifully kept. Warm, soft, spotless, with no trace of careless cobwebs that accrued in the rest of the house.
“Remember, darling,” said Roxy, “when we had brought Wilfred down and packed him off to school.” He spoke plainly, as if she was present; and in speaking thus, he made her present. “And when we got home, the countryside was sparkling. I don’t know if you remember it as I do, darling. And you said, let’s go a-wandering, and off we went, no work for once. And it all seemed radiant; the whole world was shining, and your smile seemed to me to reflect it.”
He went on, reminiscing as any couple might—only she was only there in body, never moving, never responding.
I stared open-mouthed, ashamed of my trespassing. How the house was transformed. That there was a sadness about it I had felt from the first. That the children were motherless was sad, but there are many motherless children.
Yet Lady Elodie was here, alive. Not buried down in the Walled Garden with her boy, her garden nurtured with such attention, more attention than she gave her children, more attention than she had paid to herself through all those busy years. Now that she needed that attention, when everything had fallen apart, she was gone from us. Comatose. Absent. You think you know a place; then all you know turns upside down.
I liked the way he spoke to her every day. This, then, was Roxbury’s absence. Not self-absorption or melancholy, not scientific boffinry (though that took up much of the rest of his time), but devotion to love, love lost, lost and frozen.
* * *
He paused, hearing my approach. He seemed to know it was me. Birtle or Skirtle would have spoken perhaps, and the children were away—
“Do the children know?”
“Yes. They were in on it.” He explained to me how it had all trans
pired, how they have hoped for her to recover, and she had got worse; how they had thought she was at death’s door, and would not be long for this world; and then the fits came again. And the doctors warned him that she might not ever recover her senses fully; she might be a pale shadow of her former ebullient self. They cooked up the scheme by accident. In the first depth of her illness, an insensitive doctor scribbled the brief obituary notice— “Just in case, to save the family’s trouble”—and somehow it was posted to The Times. They could have complained, or retracted it; but they chose to let people believe she had died. There seemed less shame in it, and less awkwardness.
All the servants, but Birtle and Skirtle, were kept from that side of the house anyway. The aunt was brought into the plot; the grave news was spread; the funeral was real, for their boy, Jonathan. Only family in attendance, and the vicar tacitly went along with the deception. Nobody was going to gainsay Roxbury in that village: he employed nine out of ten of them, and the others relied on his lands.
He kept hold of his wife’s hand. Looking over his shoulder at me, he smiled.
I came and perched on the arm of his chair. As a child, I dreamed of having parents like these—of any parents, to be honest. I felt a strange enchantment. We stayed thus a few minutes. He said no more to her.
I had nothing I could say. Did she know we were there? He seemed to feel she knew him. I must not ask. I must not undermine his belief.
“Does she understand what we say?” I said.
He bit his lip. “We don’t know.” He looked back at her. “We just do not know. But Skirtle is convinced that, sometimes, in the night, when none of us are around, she gets up and walks to the window.”
I thought back to my first arrival all those months ago, and the time I saw Patience pull her back from the window; if he did know about these stirrings, they must try to keep it from him, to ease his sorrow.
Lawless and the House of Electricity Page 33