Lawless and the House of Electricity

by William Sutton

  “There’ll be fried breakfast for the python tomorrow, Nathan, if you don’t give over.”

  “Faithless…” His voice was slurred. “Faithless fool.” He tried to strike at her, but had no strength; tried to spit at her, but only drooled. He passed out.

  “Who is the fool now, eh?” she said, standing over him. She dropped the wires. “Who is the faithless one?”

  We stared at him, collapsed upon the platform. Then Molly hurried to untie my ropes, deft but exhausted. I thanked her. I could barely move my limbs.

  “You’re welcome, Watchman. You’d do the same for me, I’m sure.”

  “Tell me.” I rubbed at my wrists. “Why did you let him tie you up?”

  “Best way to put him off guard.” She kept her eyes firmly on Lodestar, prostrate between us and the gorge. The waterwheel clunked: chak-ke-ta chak-ke-ta.

  “He was ready to kill you.”

  “Error of judgement. We all make ’em.” She took from the bureau drawer a discoloured billiard ball. She tossed it in a deliberate arc, up and over Lodestar’s head. BANG: it smashed upon the platform, with a burst of flame.

  “Them’s what started your blasts.” She watched intently. Lodestar did not stir. Satisfied, she made an adjustment to a regulator dial. She glanced from Lodestar back to the wires dropped carelessly beside him. Calmly she put on the gloves.

  “Molly, wait.” I tried to stand, to plead with her. “We can send him to trial. His victims—”

  A gunshot from up the hillside broke into my plea. An almighty splash into the pool above us spattered the platform with cold droplets. A voice echoed down the gorge: a voice I knew. It was Jeffcoat calling down from the Shepherd’s Refuge. “Got him!” he called. “I got Jacques.”

  With that inspiration, I pushed myself to my feet. Molly pointed up at the light, over in the house. The night was blacker than ever, the moon unseen, exerting its mysterious pressure from the tremulous clouds. I put my arm around her, and felt her soften against me.

  She nodded. She threw down the wires, took off the gloves and offered me her arm. “Come along.”

  I gazed up at the tower. A figure was silhouetted in the turret—Ruth, I felt sure. The light in the turret flashed once, twice.

  The village church tolled the hour of midnight. The swoosh of the sluice sounded above us: the sluice gates were opened. Under cover of the noise, he stirred.

  The light in the turret flashed again: once, twice, thrice. Molly was enthralled with the wonder of it: what was going to happen, up there, to her Lady Elodie? All their planning, their researches: the animals, and the experimentation; the batteries and the regulation. All was coming to a finale, and she was missing it. She had missed it, in order to save my life, because I had the fool notion I was going to catch Lodestar red-handed.

  She didn’t see him coming.

  I turned at the last moment. He had the wires in his hand. He lunged at Molly, his feet still trussed together. He was already upon her, when I threw myself in between them. We tumbled, rolling on the platform. Our heads clashed as we writhed above the waterwheel, and he groaned, his nose crushed. He rolled on top of me, with a roar. I gripped on to his waistcoat; he still clutched the wires.

  The falls swelled. The water gathered to gush through the wheel, spinning it ever faster and ever faster—CHAK-ta CHAK-ta CHAK-ta—speeding the piston and setting the circuits a-humming with life.

  We were at the very edge. His jaw clenched, as he urged the bare wires upon me. He was too late. I was weakened, but I had the strength of fury. With the last of my energies, I pushed him off me and over the edge. The wires pulled taut beneath me. Dangling from the platform, he clung to the gutta-percha, his feet tied and useless to help him. He stared up wildly, his eyes bulging. After all the terrors he had inflicted upon me, the fear and the poison and the misery of having failed myself and having failed my dear Molly, in the terror of his eyes I could see myself. I reached out my hand. He registered the wild stupidity of my offer as he tried to pull himself back up. For a few moments, he was succeeding. The stream rushed through the waterwheel. He looked down to see it, so close beneath him, turning ever faster. He let go of one of the wires in order to reach for my hand.

  I looked into his brown, brown eyes.

  But his grip on the wet rubber was not enough to hold firm. He slipped down the last inches of insulated wire, flexing his wrist to gain purchase on the gutta-percha. The bare metal was already touching his clenched hand. In panic, he reached again for my proffered hand, but he could only grab for the other wire.

  The waterwheel accelerated, the piston pounding ever faster. As he clutched on to the metal end of the second wire, his eyes widened with surprise.

  The electricity coursed through him. His mouth opened, but he could not scream. With a fizzling crack, he shook, like a rag doll, writhing, a barely human thing. Energy lit up his body against the dark pool below. The shock must have killed him; it must have been enough. I hope so. For as he fell, he thudded on to the waterwheel, turning with the water’s unforgiving pressure, breaking his body apart.

  I wrenched myself away. Molly had scrambled away to the bureau. She looked back at me, silent, clutching the regulator dials.

  Lodestar was gone.

  * * *

  I put my arm around her. Through the black night, lightning shot from the clouds, illuminating the trees on the hillside, outlining the walls of Roxbury House. The lamps in the tower were all at once extinguished. We gazed up in awe.

  Within the turret, a spark. Another spark. And the final dark transcendent spark.

  BOOK IX

  THE COST

  RETURNED TO LIFE [RUTH]

  “I’m sorry,” said Elodie. “So terribly sorry to have caused you such trouble. Can anyone smell beef dripping?”

  Lady Elodie was back, resurrected from that limbo so long endured by her and all those around her.

  We were standing at the window, looking across at the Pump House. We had given up our efforts, convinced we had failed.

  I whispered a prayer of thanks, as Molly wired that they were safe and that Birtle should on no account open the pneumatic package.

  How long Elodie had been standing by us at the window, none of us knew. Skirtle took such a leap of surprise, she nearly tumbled Birtle out of the window. Elodie’s voice was soft, fuzzy at the edges, persuasive, a delight to all who heard it.

  Roxbury took her in his arms.

  * * *

  How she had been all that time, she could not quite explain.

  “I was awake, aware, some of the time, a lot of the time. I wanted to say so, and ask how everyone was, but you seemed so terribly distant. The notion that you would actually hear me seemed dreadfully unlikely.”

  How could she live up to the promise of her diaries, to the promise of the earl’s love, now that she was back from the dead? Easily. She was more natural and approachable than the headstrong princess, frozen in time, that Molly had painted her as. More magical than I had imagined, simply by being real.

  IN CONCLUSION [LAWLESS]

  That winter, Lady Elodie recovered her strength and learned what she had missed of the world’s woes. The children were called back from the far-flung shires: fearing the worst of this summons, they arrived despondent, but quickly gave way to joy.

  “I said I should like to see you again,” said Kitty, “and now we can.”

  Molly became like another daughter to her; and Elodie a devoted friend to Ruth and me. By the time of our wedding, in July of the summer following, we could not imagine our world without her.

  * * *

  If society made a scandal of her unexpected renascence, they did not notice. Nico wrote to The Times to announce her alive and hale.

  And so they lived; and with them Birtle and Skirtle, who were in fact—as may have been plain from the start—Mr and Mrs Soutar, a couple themselves, equally devoted, married long years ago, soon after entering service and long before they were united in keeping Lady E
lodie alive. Bertie visited after all (with his wife Alix), and the renewed vigour of the household persuaded Peggy to defer her plans for escape.

  The Roxburys lived as happily as any couple can, or any couple I have heard of, outside of stories. She still had seizures, once in a while, but they learned to avert them. Compressing the hysterogenic regions was still effective, but bruising, and an ordeal. If she noticed the onset of the aura that preceded the fit, however, she could go to one of her husband’s electrical devices, around the house and grounds, perpetually charged by the Pump House dynamo; by giving herself regulated shocks, trammelling the unruly nervous system through the musculature of the neck, she somehow rode past the seizure’s approach, sensing it near, but not succumbing.

  * * *

  Ripon accepted Lodestar’s guilt. He never forgave, though, our bamboozlement by the Guernsey papers: two of his special Home Office staff, responsible for bankrupting the military.

  Lodestar’s claim, that he had an understanding with Ripon, the Secretary of State for War, was never admitted. My confidence in him was broken; my confidence in all those Westminster whiddlers and whingers. Jeffcoat too lost his faith. That Ripon had colluded with Lodestar, while doubting each of us, was no sound basis for work like ours. Ripon had sent Jeffcoat to sneak up on Jacques, but told him not to tell me, lest I were a traitor and might warn the Frenchman. Consequently, the Frenchman was waiting for him.

  The detonation we heard was a defence system: Parkesine balls set to go off if anyone approached his refuge. Jeffcoat fell, stunned, in the grass between the Shepherd’s Refuge and the Thimbleton lake. He lay still, knowing his advantage lost; only by luck, patience and skill did he manage to shoot the Frenchman when Jacques came to find out what had tripped the detonation.

  So far did they reach, Lodestar’s efforts to divide us. Yet I had been the most deceived. I was the fuel in waiting, ignited by the sparks of his outrages to inflame the nation into a conflagration of bigotry. I spread the panic for him.

  * * *

  Six members of the Hounds Club were investigated by Scotland Yard: their accounts and investments examined, their whereabouts established for each blast. Prosecutions were brought against four, but dropped before they came to trial, on the grounds of insufficient evidence. In the police, we know what this means: you did it, and we know you did it, but we cannot prove it. Jeffcoat was furious at this cover-up. Thus were Lodestar’s crimes suppressed, his associates exonerated, and our efforts belittled.

  A leading article in the Tory press threw the blame at our feet, styling it a witch-hunt against these gallant investors, who risked their cash in grim localities troubled by immigrant activism. Hogwash and havering. It made me sick.

  London was beyond reform. When Ruth suggested we move to Edinburgh, I leapt at the chance: she to join the Old College Library, and I the Edinburgh City Police Force.

  * * *

  Did Roxbury need to know the depth of Lodestar’s treachery? We told him about the imposture and the inheritance.

  “Suspected as much. Didn’t bother me. His work was outstanding, truly outstanding. Sorry to lose him. He could get anything done, that fellow.”

  Anything—even start a war.

  Birtle and Skirtle never accepted what Lodestar had been up to, still under his spell long after he was gone. Yet Jem’s funeral was a sad affair that none could explain away: the Roxbury staff attended to a man; his girl Dotty wept quietly throughout, for she blamed herself.

  Lodestar’s ambition knew no bounds. Ruth and I debated and debated whether Roxbury truly accepted that Lodestar had been the mastermind of all the explosions, the duping of the nation and the wasting of millions. The company was thus responsible for terrible things. What were we to do? The wrongdoer was gone. Why force the company into disrepute? Whom would that benefit?

  Yet so many lives cried out for redress. In our investigations, everything was blamed on Lodestar: every crime, terror, and depravity ascribed to him. Employees around the country admitted terrible things he’d persuaded them to do. Manipulations he had exacted upon them, forcing them— under pain of losing their livelihoods—to do his bidding.

  He was undoubtedly the villain, though never brought to justice.

  Except, from his point of view, he decidedly was no villain. He was asked to profit a company, and he did, with glowing success. From the company’s point of view, his efforts were undeniably to the benefit of Roxbury Industries—even the crimes.

  We have constructed a world where those we trusted to protect us are empowered to kill without reproach or redress.

  Before I left, I made sure the Home Office had the story clear. I didn’t want the Fenians blamed, after O’Leary’s help. Nor the French. It was only with individual mercenaries that Lodestar had concocted his schemes, never the French government. Bertie was right all along. When Louis Napoleon finally lost the reins of power, it was to Chislehurst he would move, and the house of an Englishwoman.

  * * *

  So many hurt. So many dead.

  Roxbury’s achievements will outlive him. They changed the way we think about power. His dream of dispensing with coal remains laughable, however. Wind and sun may be clean and abundant—and one day even his beloved electricity—but what is the hurry, while we are enjoying the profits of empire?

  I think in the end Roxbury did understand the truth. He stayed aloof from government. He divested himself of the armaments business; if it was not his company, it would be another. He gave talks on the ethics of technology: science without morality was a rabid, improvident animal. He set up libraries, institutions for working men, housing associations, and hospitals, in a sustained frenzy of charity that, to me, suggested he knew what his company had been responsible for.

  He and Elodie left behind Roxbury House in the end, retiring to the coast, where they could watch the village cricket matches from their blustery castle windows—until she died, too young; her ordeal had taken a toll on her slight frame. But the memories remain, good and bad, etched like lightning sparks across our minds, for Roxbury, me, Ruth, and—the heroine of our story in the end—for Molly.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  LONDON & THE SOUTH

  SERGEANT CAMPBELL LAWLESS, also known as Watchman

  MOLLY, street urchin, leader of Oddbody Theatricals, drawing mistress

  MISS RUTH VILLIERS, former librarian

  SERGEANT SOLOMON JEFFCOAT

  BODY aboard SS Great Britain

  HARBOUR MASTER, London docks

  DR MALACHI SIMPSON

  NUMPTY, urchin

  RIPON, Secretary of State for War

  LOUIS NAPOLEON III, emperor of France

  O’LEARY, a prominent Irish republican

  DE NESLE, Guernsey police commissioner

  VICTOR HUGO, popular novelist

  SPRING-HEELED JACK, legendary character from penny dreadfuls

  JULIAN OVEREND, junior partner in Overend and Gurney bank

  JACQUES THE PAINTER (Jacques the First)

  BERTIE, Prince of Wales, son of Queen Victoria

  JOSEPH BAZALGETTE, chief engineer of London Metropolitan Board of Works

  ELLIE, a Portsmouth barmaid

  LEXIE, Miss Villiers’ dreaded aunt

  JOSHUA POSTWOOD, banker

  BRACEBRIDGE HEMYNG (Jack Harkaway), journalist and flâneur

  JACQUES THE PAINTER (London Jacques)

  SKITTLES, or ANONYMA, or CATHERINE WALTERS, courtesan

  JEDEDIAH LONGTHROP, orderly on SS Great Britain

  An engineer for the Solent forts

  WILKIE COLLINS, novelist

  A PILOT, Portsmouth Harbour

  ROXBURY HOUSE & THE NORTH

  MOLLY, drawing mistress (viz street urchin, above, the same)

  JEM STABLES

  BIRTLE, the butler

  SKIRTLE, the housekeeper

  THE NORPHANS PRACTICKLY, viz:

  Nico, Nicodemus L Roxbury

  Peggy, Margaret V Roxbury


  Kitty, Mary Catherine E Roxbury

  NATHAN (NATHANIEL CHICHESTER) LODESTAR, manager of Roxbury Industries

  EDWARD, Earl of Roxbury, also called Roxbury or Roxy

  PATIENCE TARN, maid, deaf and dumb

  WILFRED E ROXBURY, Dragoon Guard, student of Christchurch College, Oxford University

  JOSEPH P WHITWORTH, industrialist

  SETH SALZMAN, sailor

  JACQUES THE PAINTER (Mersey Jacques)

  EDWARD LEAR, poet, filthy landscape painter

  REVEREND CL DODGSON, an Oxford mathematician

  JONATHAN ROXBURY

  A DOCTOR

  ELODIE, Lady Roxbury

  A maid

  ZEPHANIAH, of Nyasaland

  HUGHLINGS JACKSON, neurologist, visiting associate West Riding Asylum

  WIDE-EYED LOU, a patient

  In addition, manifold sundry servants, workmen, labourers, scientists, and Dotty, dairymaid, Jem’s sweetheart in the village

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Caroline and to my Dad, Leslie McL Sutton.

  Thanks to my brother John Sutton for notes on complicity and for dreaming of Nathan Lodestar. Thanks to Nina McIlwain.

  Thanks to trusty readers Tessa Ditner, Mirko Sekulic, Diana Bretherick, SJ Butler, John Lloyd, Noel Le Bon, Philip Jeays, John Waltho, Sarah Salway, Vikki Cookson, and Shomit Dutta. Thanks to Karl Bell, John Sackett, Janet Ayers, VH Leslie, Maggie Sawkins, Matt Wingett, Zella Compton, AJ Noon, Tom Harris, Christine Lawrence, Charlotte Comley; to Dallas Campbell, Lucy Holmes, Tim Lewis, Jeremy Campbell; and to the many readers of Lawless and the Devil of Euston Square and Lawless and the Flowers of Sin who have got in touch to discuss their opinions of Watchman and his errant friends.

  Special thanks to Rebecca Lea Williams, director of maps (rebeccaleawilliams.com), and to Mike and William Richards.

  Thanks to my wonderful agent Phil Patterson and likewise to John Waltho for pointing me towards Cragside. Thanks to Henry Toulson for the secret chapel. Thanks to Lucy Prosser.

  Thanks to Jamie West, Noel Le Bon and Roddy McDevitt, launch collaborators; to Joanna West at Blackwell’s Portsmouth; to Lou and all at Forbidden Planet, Shaftesbury Avenue; to Clare Forsyth and Portsmouth Bookfest. Thanks to Andrew Powney, Greg Klerkx, Roy Leighton, Charlie and Ali Loxton, to George, Lisa, and Fiamma, to Mr Joe Black and his House of Burlesque; to the Boom and Bang Circus; to Tara and Martin Knight @southseacoffee, Farkfk and Lilou @TheTeaTray in the Sky, Kevin and Zirrinia Dean of Southsea Lifestyle, Portsmouth Writers’ Hub, and to the Authors CC XI. Thanks to Kerry Beel and Talking Change.