Lawless and the House of Electricity

by William Sutton

  “Molly?” I pleaded, my throat dry. She ignored me, and when I tried again, my throat constricted in a sob. She would side with him and send me to my death.

  “Glad to see you’ve your boots on, darling,” Molly said to him, as if they were an old married couple. “Fetching. Now tell me what you’re after. I’ll do the necessary and be off.”

  “You don’t want to see the finale?” He was petulant. “After all you’ve been through together.”

  “Not really.” She shook her head, with a tolerant air. “Main drama’s over in the house. They’re going to bring Lady Elodie back from the dead.”

  “Is this not more compelling?”

  “Kill a lilly law, raise from the dead.” She weighed it up. “I’ll take the main house.”

  Her indifference to his performance stung him. The whole reason he had dragged me here was for her to admire this ridiculous melodrama, when he could so easily have shoved me from the train or dropped me in the river. “Why did you bother coming?”

  “Don’t be so shrewish: it’s unattractive.” Molly manipulated him more adeptly than I ever could. She knew him, knew his weaknesses. “You told me to come. And I’m checking the sluice.”

  “The sluice. That’s right.” Lodestar gave me a look. He had confided in me that he was ready to drop her in the soup, if he had to. That could be a wedge between them, if she learned of it. He pulled his gloves back on and looked at me, as if to carve me up. “Open the sluice, Molly. Let’s fry some breakfast for the animals.”

  “Midnight.” She put her hands on her hips. “They’re doing it at midnight, you shallow-pated noddle, with the full moon.”

  “Open it now.”

  “The sluice can’t be worked from here, Nathan. I’ve told you.” She tutted. She was at ease with him, intimate enough to insult him. “You never listen. For such an achiever, you’re dense. If the sluice were worked from here, any animal could flip it—any French vagabonds. Where’s your watch?”

  Lodestar indicated with his glove.

  Molly reached into his waistcoat pocket—such a heedless intimacy—gave me an inscrutable glance, and set the watch on the bureau. “Fifteen minutes. I’ll wire the house.” She sat at the telegraphic box to buzz a rapid message: she needed no chart to help her, with her mastery of codes. “Remind Miss Ruth about the sluice at midnight. Want me to buzz the scientific quarter?”

  “No! Not yet.” Lodestar rubbed his hands together, like a child waiting for the circus to begin. “Why don’t you give our friend a little shock? To warm him up, while we wait for the extra power.”

  Molly looked at him, glanced at me, as if I were no more than a science experiment. She attended to the switches by the bureau, adjusted a dial, then turned toward me. She was holding the gutta-percha wires circumspectly, clear of the exposed ends. No gloves for her. “Any last words, Captain Clocky? Thought not.” She was close up, where he could not see. As I stared at her, overwhelmed with nausea and regret, she winked. “Never eloquent at the best of times, were you?”

  She touched a wire to my right temple.

  I sat upright, awaiting the jolts. She held the other wire close: I could sense it by my head. I could hear the electricity that foretold the fatal shake.

  Nothing.

  “What the blazes is wrong?” Lodestar stomped in, peevish.

  She batted away his hand. “Don’t meddle, Nathan.”

  “You useless baggage—” He grabbed for the wires. Somehow they caught on his clothing, one under his shirtsleeve, the other at his open collar. He gave out such an ugly wail. Back he staggered, beating away the wires. He was lit up against the night—this was the little shock he’d planned for me. It hurt him, but not badly enough. He turned upon her, blinking, intent in his eyes.

  “Your own fault, you blunderbuss.” Molly dropped the wires, unembarrassed, and adjusted the dial at the bureau. “Such a fuss. A little shock. He didn’t moan at all—”

  “You sly snake.” He stared, enraged, unsure whether she had contrived to do it.

  Molly looked at him impassively. “That’s the thanks I get?”

  “Give me those.” He flailed with his gloves to pick up the wires. “I can’t trust you. You told him about the Frenchman, did you?”

  “I told him nothing.”

  Lodestar was talking himself into a fury. “Villiers knows, doubtless. And that fool Jeffcoat. But the Frenchman will do for him. And the others are ignorant, I suspect.”

  “They are,” said Molly, “but you can’t be sure. Better despatch them all.”

  He looked up at her with some respect. “I plan to.”

  “Blow up the house. That’s what I’d do.” She sniffed. “Clear the evidence. Start afresh.”

  Calm overtook him, as sudden as his rage, and as alarming. He shook off the gloves and set the wires, carefully, back in their place. He smiled at Molly’s vehemence, for it made her a kindred spirit. “The package you sent up by pneumatic railway is my latest development in bombs. The detonator is not disturbed until the compartment is opened and the Parkesine balls disturbed. They roll apart. They fall. They combust. I’ve had the Frenchman lay black powder in the hall. That whole house is a fuel in waiting. A conflagration will destroy any evidence against me, you’re right. Shall we buzz the house now? Birtle will open the pneumatic packet thing, and then we shall see some fireworks.”

  “No, we won’t,” Molly muttered.

  Lodestar couldn’t judge whether she were teasing or not. He narrowed his eyes and sat to work the telegraph.

  “He won’t get far with that.” Molly spoke to me, to annoy him. “Can’t make head nor tail of ‘action at a distance’. Rather important for scientists.”

  “What the devil did you say?”

  “You heard.” Molly bobbed in front of him, pleased with his reaction: she knew how to belittle him, and to enrage him. “The thing is, Nathan, Roxy’s made advances recently: voltage regulation and discharge. Whereas you’ve swanned around showing off that whole time.”

  Sure enough, though he tried to remain cool, his eyes blazed up. He snatched up the wires and thrust them against her.

  I cried out. That Molly should come so far, through so much grime and misery, to meet her end here, despatched by this egotistical madman. And my fault.

  Nothing. The wires did nothing to her.

  She didn’t even flinch: she must have adjusted the power without him realising. She was playing with his spirit, teasing, tormenting him into making mistakes.

  “What the hell?” Lodestar dropped the wires. His anger evaporated, he backed away from her. “You are a witch.”

  “If that’s what you like, Nathan.” She fluttered her eyelashes. “I always do whatever you like. Don’t I, Nathan?”

  This provocation overcame his fear of her uncanny power. He snatched her up by her jacket, like a child about to throw its doll out of the pram. Upending her in one movement, he held her upside down by the ankles. He snatched up a rope; he had her tethered within moments. “Like a rabbit.” He laughed to see her helpless. “A caged rabbit.”

  “That didn’t go so well, did it?” she said. “I was only teasing, you empty-headed jobber knot.”

  He growled at her. “You were siding with him.”

  “If this is her siding with me,” I said, “I’d hate to see her hostile.”

  She twisted around toward me, trussed up but grinning. “Told you Lodestar wasn’t the sharpest spanner in the toolkit.”

  He could not abide her insults. To shut them out, he swung her over his shoulder and carried her out into the night.

  “Blast you to hell, you ultracrepidarian bedswerver,” she said, white-faced; though he had knocked the breath out of her, her vocabulary remained unerring.

  He raised her high, to throw her into the river, as he had tumbled his own brother to oblivion five long years ago. I could still see her face, as she dangled over his shoulder, on the point of being hoiked over the weir down the Burnfoot Gorge to be crushed o
n the rocks. She saw me, desperately trying to rise and come to her aid. She winked again, this time a little sadly.

  I had never known, until that moment, how much I loved her. I loved her, like a daughter; I loved her like a sister; and I felt her sorrow at botching the job so desperately.

  Out of the night reared a beast. It flew headlong at Lodestar’s midriff, felling him to the platform.

  Molly was flung aside.

  Lodestar was hefted against the side of the turbine. Only a few inches further, and the piston, pounding with implacable regularity, would be striking him. Lodestar was winded, maybe hurt, but most of all he was shaken by this ambush.

  For a moment, I thought it must be a beast: the orang-utan, avenging his friend. It was Jem. He picked himself up from the platform’s edge, and advanced on Lodestar. He rounded on him, grim-faced, unappeasable as a wild animal, leaving him no escape, staring as if he were the devil.

  “Jem! Well, well.” Lodestar puffed. “What can it be?”

  “You beetle-browed traitor,” Jem said, his voice a lament. The pain in his soft young features was terrible. He was ready to tear Lodestar apart, and I hoped to God he would. “Why did you?”

  Lodestar straightened up, feeling his back for damage. The piston rapped his fingers, and he flinched: how desperately close he’d come to his ruin. He laughed, in relief and disdain. “Don’t you think Molly is out of your reach?”

  “Jem,” Molly called, “what’s happened?”

  “Yes, what did I do, little Jemmy?”

  Jem’s face crumpled. “Dotty, down the village.”

  “Dotty.” Lodestar’s eyes ranged around.

  “The dairymaid. My girl.” He sniffed. “We were to be married.”

  “Oh, Dotty, with the…” He described two circles in the air. “You’d think they’d be unforgettable; her vulgarity quite blotted her name from my memory.”

  Jem swung: no wild swipe, but a measured punch. Lodestar was waiting for it—he had riled him purposely—and he ducked away. Not quick enough. The stable boy was nimble as well as strong. Lodestar’s nose crunched, and he cried out.

  As Jem stepped in to finish the job, Lodestar grabbed at him. He snatched hold of Jem’s waistcoat, maddened. Stepping deftly back, he tugged, swinging the boy’s weight around. He thrust him against the turbine and into the piston which he had so narrowly evaded.

  It struck against Jem’s back, pounding over and over, driven by the waterwheel’s spin. Jem’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth, but no cry emerged.

  Lodestar held the poor boy there, the piston juddering into his back, once, twice, again and again. With a cackle, Lodestar pulled Jem away from the torture, and threw him down on to the jutting ledge.

  Blood darkened the boy’s lower back. He dragged himself, half crawling, away from his torturer toward the edge, but he had no strength. He had saved Molly only for a moment; she lay, still bundled, at the platform’s edge, where it overhung the waterwheel. So much for Jem’s revenge. His strength had failed him; his nimbleness had failed him. Lodestar had bedded his girl, and carelessly. Now Lodestar stepped across, feeling at his neck, and aimed a kick at Jem’s kidneys.

  Jem grabbed at Lodestar’s trouser legs, as if to beg for pardon.

  Another kick, to the groin. Jem jack-knifed, the pain too hard to bear. Like a bottle set too near the table’s edge, where all see it totter but none is quick enough to stop it falling, Jem rolled, toppling over the edge and out of sight: down, down into the gorge.

  There was a cry, but we saw no more. I knew where the water ran, ever swift, over the mossy stones and down, down, down the white water of the Burnfoot Gorge to the rocks below.

  * * *

  Molly craned her neck. Jem had died for us, and Jem had died for us uselessly. Even she struggled to remain nonchalant. She looked over the edge, her voice cracked. “Messed that up, didn’t I?”

  “Molly, Molly.” Lodestar stood above her, breathing heavily, but apparently unconcerned. He wiped his hands on his trousers, and tutted, as one would at a puppy. “It is a shame to kill you too. We could have struck a deal. We could have made a partnership.”

  “We did,” she said. She couldn’t bear to look at him. Any power he had had over her, he had lost: she would side with him no more. The rain redoubled.

  He grinned, too cocksure to hear the loathing in her voice. “We are alike, you and I. You remind me of home.”

  “How nice for you,” she said. “Is that why you let me live when you’ve killed so many?”

  I groaned. Molly’s diplomacy was ever unorthodox. And yet he was still talking. While he was talking, all was not lost. Indeed Lodestar was regarding her with petulant affection. “My plan was that you would live, and I would enjoy you. Why did you spoil it? Why couldn’t you be sensible?”

  “Just be done with it, Nathan.” Molly sighed. She held out her hands, trussed in the ropes, and nodded toward the bureau and the wires. “Charge up the batteries, won’t you? We don’t want to be sizzling like sausages.”

  He hesitated. “With the influence machine?”

  “You remember how.” She tutted. She was coaching him on how to kill us.

  He blinked. “Of course I do.”

  “Your circuitry was never great, was it? Check the time. The surge from the sluice’ll come soon. Roxbury’ll open it at midnight. Ten minutes. Why don’t I show you how to harness it? Do for our friend Watchman here. Then decide whether you keep me or toast my block off.”

  The tower glowed, across the Burnfoot Gorge, beneath a sky brooding with destruction.

  Lodestar nodded, won for a moment. But the exhilaration of his victory over Jem was ebbing. He recoiled from her, deflated, suspecting treachery. He turned back into the Pump House. “You shouldn’t have betrayed me.”

  “A misunderstanding—” she began.

  “I could have saved you, and the ones in the house. But now…” He sat at the telegraph station. His teeth clenched, as he punched out two pointed messages. He pushed the apparatus away, and turned to us triumphant. “Detonated the glasshouses. Detonated the main house.”

  “Molly?” I stirred from my stupefaction. My stomach was ablaze, wrists numb, arms frozen against the chair. I listened for the detonations, but heard nothing. I could already picture the house on fire, the flames licking up the walls, leaping up curtains and through windows, towards my love. “He’s setting off the bombs, Molly. Molly?”

  “Hush your noise,” she called. She was wriggling back toward him, like a caterpillar, across the platform towards the wires. She was sodden and pathetic, trapped as surely as the hare, yet she spoke again with her habitual calm. “It’s just pneumatic packets. He put detonators in my artist’s case, the yellow-bellied skulker. They won’t open it.”

  He snorted. “They will.”

  “I’ll tell them not to open it.”

  “Too late. I’ve buzzed for Birtle to fetch it. The blast will do for him. The house will be on fire in minutes.”

  “Kill Birtle? That’s low.” Molly gave me a look, the tiniest shake of the head. She was up to something; she had some way of diverting Lodestar’s messages. “You’re a blustering bully, ain’t you?”

  A detonation sounded, and I winced. But it had come from high up on the hillside, not the house.

  Lodestar rubbed his hands. “Jacques,” he said in satisfaction. “The Frenchman’s traps are sprung. I told him to expect a visit from Jeffcoat. Good: that’s him dealt with. Now to finish the two of you.”

  Molly had wriggled all the way to his feet. He grabbed at her coat and pulled her upright. He would drag her out and throw her over. She would not escape him again.

  “You’d kill a woman, I know.” Moll shrank away in self-defence. “But you wouldn’t kill your own child.”

  His stare softened.

  “Kill your own son, would you?” She looked at him, placing her trussed hands upon her belly. “I reckon it’s a son.”

  “Molly—!” I yelled, as if I we
re her father, but I broke off.

  Lodestar was dumbstruck. I had never seen him at a loss before. He took hold of her shoulders and stared at her. Should he strike her or kiss her? He shook his head in wonder.

  I marvelled at her tactic. It had better be a tactic.

  He pulled her into an embrace. She resisted, then yielded. She smiled so winningly that he did not notice that her arms were untied. She pulled back gently from him. Holding his gaze, she reached behind her, stretching as if to entice him. Then, with sudden fervour, she clasped her hands upon either side of his neck.

  He juddered, uncomprehending. He could not see the wires in her hands; he could not understand how her hands were free; his swift knots were no match for Molly.

  The wires.

  She held the wires firm, jolting power through him, until his legs buckled. She leaned back as she assailed him, gripping the gutta-percha to avoid shocks herself. The moment he fell to the ground, she threw down the wires. She slipped the ropes around his legs, quick as anything. She yanked, tightening the knot, and yanked again, then hurried to bind his wrists.

  Coming to his senses, he struggled, but the more he struggled the more the rope tightened. “I’ve set up cells,” he stammered, weakened. “Enough activists to keep the English afraid for a hundred years. You won’t be free from terror, unless you let me go—”

  “A shame,” she said, snatching up the wires again, “to despatch your handsome fizzog to prison.”

  He writhed back. “I can testify about you. Traitress to your country. Double murderess of the Ratcliffe Highway.”

  How he knew of that, I could not guess, but it riled her. She brandished the wires in his face.

  “Don’t. Don’t hurt me.” He froze. “We can—”

  “Captured beauty’s never as attractive,” she said, “as beauty on the loose. Wasn’t that what you told me?”

  He lashed out in sudden fury, only to strike the wires again.

  “Watch yourself.” She held them firm against him, as he endured the shock, worse than the first.

  How he writhed to free himself from the torture. He kept wriggling, twisting, and ducking back, convinced he could grab hold of her, but she was dextrous and determined.