Lawless and the House of Electricity Read online

  Everything, to Molly, is pale and northern.

  She painted a pastoral idyll, with sublime peaks neath inclement skies. I shall not reproduce her glowing manuscripts in full; and I shall supply missing information, from other contributors and things we learned later through guesswork and guile.

  Ruth knew, though I did not, how Molly edited her cast of characters. I am a lazy reader of fiction: a volume with a family tree I will quickly close; I prefer a map. She met all the servants, the gardeners, the scientists, but mentioned precious few. She told of butler, but no underbutler; she told of Skirtle, but mentioned none of the staff of maids, except Patience Tarn, the deaf-mute girl; she told of Jem’s work in the glasshouses, but not of the researchers who directed him.

  I later accosted her over this. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Narrative economy, Watchman, my friend. Mr Dickens advises reducing the dramatis personae for clarity’s sake.”

  “But, Molly, this is no shilling shocker; these are investigative reports. You needn’t follow the dictates of novelists.”

  Economy and clarity indeed. Still, I took her point. No reader can absorb a panoply of characters all at once; they must be introduced singly, and memorably. She excised Lodestar’s scientists, and gave us Jem the stable boy; and memorable he was.

  Even Skirtle was not actually Skirtle. The irrepressible Northumbrian housekeeper was in fact Mrs Soutar. Her pseudonym derived from the Roxbury children’s efforts at saying Soutar as toddlers, and everyone at Roxbury House still called her so.

  And Birtle, the butler—heaven forfend—was not truly Birtle. The previous butler, long ago, rejoiced in the name of Edward Butler. The earl could not bring himself to call out “Butler!” It sounded too imperious. Nor could he call “Edward,” as that was his own given name, by which Lady Elodie was wont to call him. Thus the original Butler was rechristened Birtwell, after a university friend of Lady Elodie’s. The later butler graciously accepted this title, deciding that sounded better than his own name.

  It was Molly who transmogrified this into Birtle, or simply misheard it, by analogy with Skirtle. I will not correct it, for that was how we learned of him, but it caused us no end of embarrassment when we arrived and got it wrong.

  Thus Skirtle. Thus Birtle.

  Roxbury House presented challenges beyond Molly’s ken. Her reports of the earl evoked a simplistic portrait. I suppose I saw the picture I wanted to: a jovial gentleman, withdrawn from the tussles of business to his rural sanctuary; thence Lodestar emerged, a young man with the hunger to keep Roxbury Industries where the empire needed them, at the forefront of power.

  The exaggerations in her letters were all “in the interest of the narrative” (as she later protested). These I shall unravel as we go; but Molly was no fantasist. After all, her literary models were penny dreadfuls, Spring-heeled Jack and the gothic nonsense lent her by Miss Villiers. Though these led her to exaggerate blunders, such as her quarrel with Birtle, she made little of other things, such as her falling in love.

  * * *

  SKIRTLE [MOLLY]

  “The new drawing mistress?” said Skirtle, the housekeeper, her accent outlandishly northern. She ogled me, judging whether I was a delicate orchid or a dung heap in the doorway. She reproached Birtle. “This wee slip of a thing? But they’ll eat her for breakfast, the feral wee rapscallious unthinking excuses for bairns. Think how they gulled the last tutor, and him an Oxtobrian gradient with a masterly degree of scientography.”

  I looked to Birtle for a reply.

  He had slipped away soundlessly.

  Skirtle buzzed at a button by a hatchway. She tugged me into her lair, hurled me on to a chair and furnished me with cup and saucer. The hatchway buzzed back, and up surged a copious tea tray: it was the dumb waiter. She mashed the pot, eyeing me thoughtfully, and poured my tea: steaming hot, splash of milk, no mention of sugar.

  Skirtle gazed into the broad mirror above the window, distracted. Whatever was she looking at? I craned my neck: a view across the Burnfoot Gorge—that view, with the sun setting golden on the peaks! Yet these rooms were at the rear of the house, the crags rising sheer in front of us. Ingenious mirrors, reflecting via a spyhole above her door the view from the upper drawing room’s bow window.

  Skirtle was a-muttering, half to me, half to herself. “See what you done? What you done is you made an enemy of Birtle. Already! Before you’re halfway in the door, like. Swift work. Grand door’s Birtle’s. Mid door’s mine, dear. You would have to ring the wrong ’un.” On went the monologue, with an invention that would have earned her a living extemporising at Wilton’s Music Hall.

  I took my chance to study her.

  Skirtle wore a tweed jacket, speckled oatmeal brown, barely buttoned around her middle. Forest green taffeta draped her bumpy terrain demurely, but fell short of concealing her ankles. Shoes in need of a stitch. She resembled nothing so much as a lovely fruitcake, in which the mix was poured right to the brim, with no thought how much would spill over in the baking. She was fruity and delicious. I think a slice of Skirtle, whatever my troubles, will make the world a good and kindly place.

  OMISSIONS [LAWLESS]

  Thus Molly on Skirtle. Molly revelled in showing Ruth round through her letters. She illustrated for us the rumbling world of Roxbury House. There was always calm; there was always activity. There were great events; there were quiet evenings. There was Thimbleton Reservoir; there were the Burnfoot cascades. Whether well-born or lowly, tentative or tenacious, you could find a place at Roxbury.

  Her feelings, though, as Miss Villiers pointed out, were discernible more through omissions: that Birtle was a prig, Skirtle a font of energy, Jem kind, and Lodestar—well, we are coming to Lodestar.

  Explosion [Erith Evening Reporter]

  The gunpowder explosion this morning was heard all over London and felt fifty miles away.

  At 7 o’clock, two barges were being loaded with gunpowder from a magazine on the Erith marshes. One barge exploded. The second barge exploded.

  Thereupon the magazine exploded. A column of black smoke rose to the heavens, visible for miles.

  No trace of the barges was found. By the time the area was approachable, bricks and timber from the magazine and nearby houses were scattered over a wide area. Scientific instruments at the Royal Observatory showed sixty undulations in the five seconds the explosions lasted.

  Still more alarming was the destruction of three hundred feet of river wall. Flooding of the marshes was threatened, an irreparable disaster.

  By good fortune, it was low tide. Officers from Scotland Yard called at once for support. In an unusual spirit of cooperation, Woolwich Barracks sent 1,500 soldiers, who plugged the gap with patriotic fervour.

  Nobody saw how the explosion began. The causes are under investigation. The quantity of gunpowder is estimated at 750 barrels in the depot and 200 in the barges, each barrel containing 100lb. The sufferers number seventeen. Of these ten are dead (five reckoned as missing, but surely blown to smithereens). Seven of the sufferers are doing well at Guy’s Hospital, with one exception.

  The effect upon domesticated animals has been remarkable. Thousands of pets succumbed with fright, the mortality to canaries being especially severe.

  TERROR ON THE THAMES [LAWLESS]

  “I thought the end of the world had come,” a gentle old lady kept saying to all who would listen, as we tried to steer her away from the dangers of the rubble, the repairs and the river. “I thought it was the end, and I’d soon be reunited with my Harold.”

  I need not add my description of the Erith explosion to those published at the time, by press, pamphleteers, victims, rescuers and busybodies. Jeffcoat and I arrived in time to be of use. We cleared the area of bystanders. I tackled the self-appointed moral guardians voicing their unwanted opinions on the state of the nation, while people lay in pain:

  “How have you let it come to this?”

  “Slipped through the net, did they? I’m a
ppalled, but not surprised.”

  “Immigrants, ain’t it?”

  “Please,” I said, ready to give them my plain opinion of how it had come to this. But there were more urgent tasks. “Let us get to the injured.”

  We stanched wounds. We tied tourniquets. We sent the wounded to hospital. We removed the dead, or what was left of them. A local fisherman spoke quietly of the danger posed by the river: it could kill a hundred times more than the blasts. We took stock of the damage, and wired Ripon at the Home Office.

  The soldiers arrived before lunchtime. They worked tirelessly. The river wall was redeemed: a temporary job, but sufficient for now. How lucky we were that the tide was out. Floods would have engulfed a huge area. Was that the intention? To cause untold damage and deaths? Was there an intention? Or was it accidental? I found myself wondering: whoever perpetrated this, did they stay around to see the terror? Were they watching me now, among those vociferous bystanders, laughing at our efforts?

  Jeffcoat and I attended the disaster not just as Yard officers responding to the crisis, but as officers deputed by the Home Office to investigate subversion, intimidation and anti-British activity. Could someone have planned this? What kind of organisation would dream up such a scheme?

  We lost no time in contacting perennial culprits. The Chartists denied it. Not that they styled themselves Chartists any more. They were essentially the same folk agitating for the same goals demanded throughout the thirties and forties: reform the Poor Laws, universal education, universal suffrage (at least, broader suffrage; let us not be ridiculous). But these days, they had learned to couch their moral goals in economical arguments, which made Tories and Liberals tangle to pick up their policies in search of the popular vote.

  The Fenians neither claimed it nor denied it.

  There were other groups and sects, but none so organised, nor so polemical.

  Someone circulated the rumour, and the satirical papers picked it up: it was the French.

  NAPOLEONIC MURMURINGS [LAWLESS]

  “Gentlemen, you have saved London’s most powerless and unprotected,” said George Frederick Samuel Robinson, Marquis of Ripon, stroking his beard, “and now you are going to save the nation.”

  Before these explosions, and the fracas in Guernsey which followed, I would have sworn there was no threat from France. Any sane person would. This was when everything changed: not just my opinion, but the approach of the governmental department to which we had been seconded.

  Jeffcoat and I had been summoned to the Home Office just three weeks before, in June. In our late investigations of Brodie’s business empire, we had made enemies. I had expected recriminations: our investigations implicated policemen, press, priesthood, charity workers and businessmen; not to mention politicians, right up to the Prime Minister. I was expecting the worst. At best, we might be reprimanded: we’d be relegated to the bureaucratic hinterland, and spend our careers in menial duties in the back offices of Scotland Yard. At worst, I foresaw us sacked and publicly shamed.

  Jeffcoat told me to stop worrying.

  I was sure they would accuse us of things we knew nothing of, by way of retribution. There had been threats aplenty before the cases came to court. I was exhausted by it all. The late nights, the aftermath, the human complications, with rescued women who had no place to go, and we had to find them lodging wherever we could. I imagined our enemies would accuse us of the very crimes we’d been investigating; they were powerful and without scruple. That was the meeting we steeled ourselves to appear at.

  “Let’s wait,” said Jeffcoat, “and hear what Ripon has to say.”

  * * *

  “Save the nation?” Jeffcoat smiled at Ripon uncomprehendingly. “Delighted to. How?”

  Ripon enlarged upon his hyperbolic declaration until we almost believed him. He was newly appointed Secretary of State for War, to general astonishment. For he was a bluffer. An intellect, no doubt, and of schooling so private nobody knew where. He was prone to inflammatory buffoonery. That is all very well at the Hounds Club; when enacted on the diplomatic stage, it tends to start wars. He allied himself with Gabriel Mauve, MP, in a hawkish anti-French stance (that is, the late Gabriel Mauve, MP). But they fell out over an interpretation of Homer, or a cravat, or something. Ripon was truly one of those floating liberals whose political views shift with the times— or indeed with The Times, to which he contributed scurrilous articles demeaning his opponents’ dress sense.

  “Murmurs have been overheard in Parisian circles,” Ripon began, “about Louis Napoleon III’s ambitions. Cross-Channel ambitions.” He poured drinks. “Five years ago, I grant, these would have scarcely seemed credible. The British Navy without equal. Dominating any port we chose. Hence our nice trade arrangements. The Chinese buying our opium. Garibaldi safeguarding our lovely Marsala.”

  I frowned. Louis Napoleon was our friend, I thought. He’d proven it in the Crimea.

  “He stood by us against the Russian bear.” Ripon nodded. “Stood close enough to notice our antiquated guns. Relics of Waterloo. Cumbersome muskets. Ships powerless when the Tsar barricaded Kronstadt Harbour. When we’ve wrought- iron commercial wonders like the Great Eastern, why are our warships rickety and slow?”

  Jeffcoat gave a quiet whistle. “So he built La Gloire.” He always took an interest in France.

  Together they explained to me the glory of La Gloire: the first ocean-going ironclad naval vessel could not be sunk. Not by seaborne guns, not by emplacements in the Channel. Her hull, twenty inches of armour-plated timber, could resist a 68-pounder over twenty yards. She could sail right up the Thames. If Portsmouth Harbour, home of our great navy, was vulnerable, “Britannia rules the waves” was obsolete nonsense.

  “You follow?” Ripon tugged his beard, as if to make it longer. His mouth slanted downward, but his eyes were broad and kindly. “We are no longer safe in our beds at night. If this concerns you, as much as it does me, I shall pour another drink and bring you on into our inner office. Work out how we counteract this threat.”

  “Are you joshing us, sir?” Jeffcoat said. “I mean, your Lordship?”

  Ripon gave him a glum look.

  * * *

  This induction into the Home Office opened our eyes. Crimes were no longer isolated. The security of the nation was a constant concern. It required attention to patterns of crimes, to unexplained deaths, to suspect disasters, and vulnerable thresholds. Panic over immigration had been the province of bigots and xenophobes. Now it was echoed in the corridors of power.

  Within two hours, we were fully apprised of the Royal Commission on the Defence of the United Kingdom of 1859: depositions from senior navy and army boffins; proposals for barriers and batteries to protect harbours such as Portsmouth (initially rejected); the parliamentary debates which slashed the funds for the extraordinary ring of newfangled forts, latterly caricatured as Palmerston’s Follies.

  Thus the importance of Roxbury. Roxbury Industries were already central to our national defences as weapons innovators. For the completion of these defences, Roxbury was essential: for the guns, the hydraulics, for the brickwork.

  But the earl had changed. This was the concern for Ripon and the Home Office. Roxbury stopped coming to the House of Lords. Only last year, sick of the government’s vacillations, he had ended the government’s exclusive deal with Roxbury Industries and begun pursuing international contracts. Thus our first charge: find out what was wrong in the House of Roxbury. We needed a spy in the north.

  I thought at once of Molly. Whenever I needed help, I liked to offer Molly employment. She would be perfect for elucidating Roxbury’s withdrawal. But there were drawbacks. Molly was not quite an appropriate employee for such a house. Miss Villiers would have made a suitable governess, but I had no wish to send her to the ends of the kingdom. Molly, on the other hand, was young and malleable. She could draw, she needed the work, and she needed to get out of London. Why couldn’t she be a drawing mistress? It was too beautiful a chance to spurn
.

  Jeffcoat and I discussed the urchin’s strengths. He was unsure; I thought her perfect. I swayed the day. We decided to withhold the details from Ripon; we simply referred to her as “our eyes in the north”. Molly was a professional trickster, after all. She could be headstrong, she could be errant, but spies require a complex cocktail of characteristics. Above all, I trusted her. I would need to trust her ever more in the coming months, if the nation was to be safeguarded.

  As of this first meeting, in June 1864, Palmerston’s Follies stood uncompleted.

  After Erith, the groundswell of support began rising, and then more after Camden. After Guernsey, it was beyond contention.

  OF THE OLD EARL, PART THE FIRST [LAWLESS]

  The earl had a favourable notion of Molly before I sent her north. They had even met, briefly, at the Commons Enquiry in the spring, where Jeffcoat and I uncoiled the secrets of the aristocracy in public. Roxbury had attended the enquiry, and Molly had given expert testimony on the subject of misdirection, dear to her heart and her pocket.

  The earl mentioned his admiration to me. “Nice to see such verbal acumen in a youngster.”

  “You should see her drawings,” I said. For Molly was making sketches of the scandalous courtroom proceedings, for which the illustrated press paid well.

  From then on, he observed her closely. She sketched witnesses with unerring accuracy, capturing not their exact likeness, but a fluid essence: she laid bare their soul.

  “I could use such an artist on my estate,” the earl told me in passing. He seemed admirably unconcerned by Molly’s eccentric style.