Lawless and the House of Electricity E-Book

William Sutton

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The new drawing mistress feels inquisitive eyes upon her as she arrives to take up her post at a country house. Ex-street urchin Molly's quickwitted candour earns her favour with the old Earl and his guests, but the keen-eyed butler sees through her pose of gentility. The House of Roxbury welcomes a cavalcade of poets and magicians, explorers and cyclists, scientists and surgeons. But Molly begins to suspect that darker secrets lurk in the gardens. Who works so late into the night in the menagerie glasshouse laboratories? In London's East End, a body tumbles from a ship. Sergeant Lawless unearths connections between a newly arrived aristocrat, an unfortunate fire, and a mysterious vanishment. The shadow of European machinations looms over the capital, threatening royals and politicians, but evidence from an accidental blast sends him into the English shires.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also Available from William Sutton and Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Book I: Bodies Impolitic

Book II: Reports and Repercussions

Book III: Mollification

Book IV: North and South

Book V: Into the Secret Chapel

Book VI: Shining Hours

Book VII: A Lady’s Diary

Book VIII: To Bring Her Back

Book IX: The Cost

Dramatis Personae

Acknowledgments

Note on Sources

About the Author

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM WILLIAM SUTTON AND TITAN BOOKS

Lawless and the Devil of Euston Square

Lawless and the Flowers of Sin

Lawless and the House of Electricity Print edition ISBN: 9781785650130 E-book ISBN: 9781785650147

Published by Titan Books A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd 144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First Titan edition: August 2017 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

William Sutton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

© 2017 by William Sutton

Map illustrations by William Sutton. Map design by Rebecca Lea Williams.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

BOOK I

BODIES IMPOLITIC

EAST END PROLOGUE: BODIES & SECRETS, PART THE FIRST [SERGEANT CAMPBELL LAWLESS]

Knife in the heart, knife in the throat. Each holding the weapon that did for the other. On the table, money, in two piles.

I shook my head. “Gambling men, were they?”

“Some folk can’t resist a bet,” said Molly, “even if it kills ’em.”

“What happened?”

“Ain’t it plain enough?”

“I’m asking you.”

“You’re the sleuthhound. Earn your crust, why don’t you?”

I sighed. I checked the men were both dead.

Molly was huddled on the bed in the corner. Nowhere near the two bodies. At first, she’d said not a word, which was unlike her, though she gave me a look to make my soul shiver. Both men were dead, and she was glad. They may not have recognised her, but she knew them. And so did I.

They had killed a friend of ours, a little star of Molly’s Oddbody Theatricals theatre troupe. They had done it maliciously and cruelly. They were under orders, true, employed by a distant paymaster who remained unpunished; yet they were culpable. I would find it hard to mourn them.

Blood soaked into my trousers as I knelt beside them. Credible enough that they had killed each other. Still, I would need Dr Simpson to examine the wounds, so he could corroborate whatever tale Moll was about to tell me. Whatever our history, I could not let her go free if she had any part in their death. It is a dictum of police work—and my personal belief—that every man deserves equal treatment in the eyes of the law, and every woman too. Even these blackguards deserved justice, in life and in death.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m alive. They’re dead. Preferable to the other way around.” She was curled up against the bedpost. Her bottom lip jutted out from a face like brooding thunder. Was this what Molly looked like, afraid? Her clothes were ruffled, but not torn; there was a spatter of blood on her face, but it was their blood, not hers.

I’d been afraid for her since the final days of my previous case, during which Molly made inspired contributions—and formidable enemies. I had worried enough to seek out an escape from London for her. I’d persuaded Molly to accept lessons in polite manners from our friend Ruth Villiers. Over recent weeks, they’d worked on everything from her accent to her underwear in order to transform her from East End urchin into a well-mannered young woman. Maybe not transform: her natural style was irrepressible. Miss Villiers was at least equipping Molly to pass as a decent citizen. I’d been seeking a position for her as a drawing mistress in the further reaches of the kingdom, far from recriminations such as this. I’d finally found one that would serve well, and had all but sealed her employment; but—foolish girl!—too late.

Or was it?

* * *

Her hands were behind her back. Only now, as I drew nearer, did I see that she was trussed to the bedstead.

“Well, I never.” I clapped in wonderment; inappropriate, I know, but I was so relieved. “All this is nothing to do with you, eh, Moll?”

“I was talking to the gentlemen, I admit.” She sniffed. “The gentlemen as is now deceased. I invited them back for a drink. I suggested a wager or two. Is that a crime?”

“You didn’t kill anyone?”

She looked at me, lips pressed together in indignation, and tugged at the ropes.

“Yes, Moll, but I’m asking what you did.”

“You police.” She rolled her eyes. “Always the woman’s fault, ain’t it?”

“Did you incite them to violence?”

“No incitements needed, with these two. As you yourself can testify from their previous crimes.”

“And I shall have to testify,” I said, “when the coroner is puzzling over these deaths.”

I looked at her. If she had done no wrong, nothing legally culpable, I might still spirit her away to safety. Her sniffs were eloquent of distress, rather than prevarication. Molly was a liar, but she wasn’t lying now. At least, she’d better not be. Nor was her clothing of her usual fashion. She had the look of an apprentice tart. Not the style Miss Villiers had counselled, it was apt enough for this threadbare backroom in Madam Jo Black’s tuppenny brothel off the Ratcliffe Highway, but far from her yobbish garb as impresario of the theatrical urchins.

I gestured for her to lean forward and let me at the ropes. “I see why you haven’t scarpered.”

“Sent for Lilly Law because I preferred you see for yourself, Watchman.”

Her friend Numpty had roused me from my bed in Scotland Yard in the dead of night. It was not the first time Molly had requested help; but I owed her, and I had come at once.

“Lest you drew unfortunate conclusions.” She coughed. “Lest you heard reports that I’d been consorting with these gents, now deceased.”

“Consorting? Ha!” I looked back at the men. Now that I thought about it, she must have sent Numpty to fetch me before the fatal blows were dealt.

“Besides, Numpty ain’t so good with knots. Summon the old crocus, will you?” She gave me a look, tugging at the ropes. “I’d like to see ’em certified dead, then be on my way.”

“Keep your drawers on, young lady.” I puzzled at the knots on her wrists. “By the time we remove these bodies, you’ll be far from this hovel and on a train from King’s Cross, bound for the shires, where Miss Villiers and I have secured you a position.”

“Exile?” She sniffed. “To the frozen north?”

“You wee southern jessie.” I laughed. Coming from Edinburgh, as I do, Roxbury House hardly seemed the north. “Questions will be asked at the inquest. If you are telling the truth, these two oafs have slain each other. If their injuries are consistent with that narrative, according to the doctors, I shall state that they were quarrelling over a bet in a brothel. Over whom they quarrelled will be inconsequential.”

One whore is as faithless as another, to the coroner. But Molly was no harlot: her guileful answers were as like to incriminate as exonerate her.

I had no doubt that her wit unsheathed the weapons. She wished them dead, but so did I, and wishes are not forbidden.

“No harm in quitting London a while, I suppose.” She wriggled against her bonds. “Lean pickings in the countryside, though.”

“Where I’m sending you, young Molly, you’ll survive.” My recent induction into the Home Office had set me a challenge. Molly was a liar, it’s true, but I trusted her. I needed an ally for a mission of surveillance. Could I trust her with such a task, and kill two birds with one jagged rock? I screwed up my eyes. This was not the send-off I had imagined. I tapped on her wrists, to give her the all clear. “Besides, this is work.”

“Ta kindly, Watchman.” She shrugged off the ropes, all melodrama and sniffles, as she rubbed at her wrists. “But no thanks. I’ll find my own hidey-hole, and my own employ.”

“It’s not a request, Moll. I have a task for you. You’d be wise to accept.”

“Or else what?” She raised an eyebrow, and her laughter faltered as I held up the ropes, which had slipped off her wrists with suspicious ease.

“Or the coroner may find it odd that I didn’t need to undo these knots.”

PILLS FOR THE PALE AND PARALYSED

Dr Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People. They cure:

paralysis

weakness

locomotor ataxy

scrofula

anaemia

sundry ailments.

2s/3d per box. Beware of imitations.

BODIES & SECRETS, PART THE SECOND [LAWLESS]

Bodies are found at the London docks all the time. Jeffcoat thought this one different, but then we rarely agreed on anything.

I handed Molly over to Miss Villiers, by good fortune in town early. Ruth would pack Molly on to the train to the north, give her a talking to, and send her out of danger. I wired Roxbury House, to request we bring forward Molly’s employment somewhat abruptly. I received forthwith a short but friendly reply in the affirmative. I was barely arrived back at Scotland Yard, when Numpty appeared again. He delivered the note into my hands before I had time to worry further over Molly’s departure. A summons back to the East End. It was terse, typical of my friend, Sergeant Solomon Jeffcoat. Solly and I had worked closely through the spring on the Brodie case, so closely I often felt he knew what I was thinking before I thought it, and I wasted no time in setting off.

He had something he wanted me to see: a corpse secreted in a lifeboat.

* * *

Secrets will out, my father told me daily. “All your filthy secrets, laddie, are seen by God and, in the end, by man.” Five years at Scotland Yard has taught me otherwise—at least as far as man is concerned—but my father meant that I must tell him everything. Punishment would be swifter and juster if I confessed, before I was found out. For example, when I botched the mainspring of the procurator fiscal, grandmaster of father’s guild of watchmakers. (I was apprenticed to my father, hence Molly’s moniker for me of Watchman.)

“All your secrets are visible to Him, you wee devil, and shall be to me.”

As every honest parent knows, chastising a child for lying will not teach him to tell the truth, but to lie brilliantly. The best liars I’ve known share one thing, beyond their differences social and temperamental. All had a childhood where discovery meant punishment. I therefore thank my father for my talent in dissembling, useful in my profession, essential to this case in particular. Yet I wonder if it was not just in reaction to my old man that I learned to lie, but in imitation of him. When he died, I stowed his papers away; now that I have the courage to leaf through them, I have found hints of father’s own lies and inclinations that make my wrongdoings look angelic.

* * *

Lies lay striated through the House of Roxbury—or must I style it the House of Electricity, as the newspapers did? The house was built on a lodestone of lies, though none could discern them. Nor could I have guessed what lay in its deeper foundations: love. Reckless love, ready to sacrifice anything. Money. Integrity. Souls. Oh, it was on a bloodstained altar this love was sanctified; and there was no ghost, holy or otherwise, to offer a sacrificial reprieve.

Am I harsh? Judge for yourself. Or, rather, judge from the reports and correspondence of that articulate guide, my friend Molly, the urchin, or rather erstwhile urchin, whom I sent into this lions’ den, from the frying pan into a furnace where souls were smelted in the service of… well, in whose service such harms were done, you must judge for yourself.

* * *

Molly won our hearts long ago. She fell ill, when just a little tyke among her urchin brothers. I was reassessing my naive notions of London, of the rich, the poor, and the malevolent. When Molly took ill, the Hospital for Sick Children had saved her; but it was Ruth nursed her back to health. Since then, I daresay, we have looked out for each other. Her clandestine networks saved my bacon more than once: solving the insoluble, finding the unfindable. She and her brother even saved my life once or twice. Thus bound to them, I could overlook certain illicit activities.

These murders were different, though. I took the decision gravely: I would pack her off to safety. She was doubly beholden to me, and she knew it.

I was charged to find out what was wrong in the House of Roxbury. I was just starting my investigations in the south. I could not waste time in unproductive visits, when they might easily hide any irregularities. Better to place a spy in the north, and an unimpeachable one at that.

To learn what she discovered, let us turn to her own accounts, both the brief reports she encoded for me and the hyperbolic letters to Miss Villiers which betray a richer story of her fears and hopes and successes.

TO FORGET [MOLLY]

MY DEAR BLUE-BELLIED CAPTAIN CLOCKY, SERGEANT LAWLESS, THAT IS, WATCHMAN, OLD FRIEND,

SAFELY ARRIVED.

NOTHING TO REPORT.

MOLLY

Dear Miss Villiers,

Sometimes a girl wants to forget. And we all know the best way to forget. I am the kind of person who seeks love in all the wrong places. Blame my upbringing if you will, or lack of it, among the Euston Square Worms; though I rather think I benefited from such a particular education.

“Miss Molly, is it?” hollered the lad, a bronzed Adonis.

I’ve never been met by a private carriage at a railway station before. The statuesque farm hand stood tall at the end of the platform. He gestured to our sturdy carriage. “You’ll be the new drawing mistress, if I han’t bin much mistook.”

Quite a trip. Speedily packed off, after my East End contretemps. Final confab with your good self, Miss Villiers. Changed into suitable attire. The luxurious train. The branch line. Out I stepped to find the air chilled, despite the sunshine. It may have been the second-best phaeton, and driven by the stable boy, but I took no snub from that; besides, Jem was not hard on the eye. Belgravia drawing mistresses may expect better; but this wilderness is not Belgravia, and I am no drawing mistress, if truth be told.

I should be more disciplined: I shall not write such incriminating things.

I stood on the platform, gawping at the thickets and copses as far as the eye could see. As if Hampstead Heath had grown monstrously overnight, obscuring all civilisation, but for stone walls and flocks across the hillsides, the horizon altogether unfamiliar, what with no St Paul’s dome, no fog, no stink, nothing to make one feel at home.

“Kindly step up, ma’am.”

I recalled your stern injunctions that a lady drawing mistress must not heft her own luggage. Up I stepped into his chariot of the sun.

Jem Stables loaded on my bags and my new drawing case, with its stencil declaring it FRAGILE. He stroked the mare’s mane, leapt up, checked I was ready, with a guttural utterance, and set out into the wilds. Of his bare arms directing the reins, I took little note: the loose shirt, the waistcoat a nod to propriety, flaxen locks strewn beneath his cap, smile on his lips. I am no stranger to stares, yet something in the glance of this rustic unnerved me. It was these fine clothes you coaxed me into: his glance bore through my crinoline to these lacy unmentionables. I blushed. Could he see through me? Could he see me for the street Arab I am? I was angry with myself, though you always say blushes flatter my Boadicean skin. Yet it was the first time I’ve felt a man was looking at me not lest I swindle him, but because I was beautiful.

Damnable nonsense. Start again.

Roxbury’s towers loomed over the valley. Cobbled streets gave way to dirt tracks. An avenue of trees. Fervid stream, placid lake. Surmounting the bend we saw it. Jem chuckled to hear me gasp. Nothing like the forbidding manors engraved in those gothic phantasies you lend me. This was a mansion of the gods, where I was unworthy to set foot. As safe as the Tower of London, as buttressed as Westminster Abbey. Bumpy, lumpy and broad-shouldered, stretching its elbows up the hillside, and gazing down at the glasshouses shimmering by the Burnfoot Stream, where a melancholic orange monkey sat nibbling the nettles in company with its friend, a strange- looking hare.

Roxbury House.

Dash it all. I promised I wouldn’t write such overblown nonsense.

Start again, and keep it simple.

REPORTS AND CORRESPONDENCE [LAWLESS]

Such was Molly’s first impression. Yet of the above lines, all that Molly sent to me was the abrupt message at the beginning. This she inscribed on a card, then re-used the paper of her melodramatic letter (so as not to be wasteful) for the letter to Miss Villiers that follows. The overblown drama of the scenes above remained, lightly scored out, on the reverse of the pages. Whether Ruth was meant to read them or not, who can tell?

Molly’s reports to me were always businesslike and brief. But the generous letters to Ruth in which she wrapped them were uneven, discursive as her speech, pocked with exclamations, derailed by tangents, and sparkling with injudicious revelations (often encoded, which I reproduce here deciphered).

The excitement of her first arrival we noted with relief. Despite the brevity of Molly’s encoded reports to me, Ruth deemed her letters suitable for my perusal, mostly. We chuckled over her hotchpotch of self-doubt, showing off and scandalmongering. As you may judge for yourself, Molly is a compulsively honest narrator, mostly, if overenthusiastic. Of this gallimaufry, however, how was I to know what was relevant, what was distraction? For instance, in the revised letter that follows, Molly recounts a series of faux pas on her part. This put the wind up me: if my spy in the north was dismissed as a fraud, it would be a personal embarrassment and a professional disaster.

“Don’t be an oaf,” Miss Villiers reassured me. “She’s establishing herself.”

I looked at her doubtfully.

“I’ll drop Roxbury a line, if you wish.” Ruth brandished the letter at me in scorn. The earl had been a friend of her father, and he’d listen to her. “She’s just trying to amuse me, as usual, by belittling her considerable abilities.”

ROXBURY HOUSE, REVISED [MOLLY]

I saw movement at the window in the east wing. As the carriage swept around the meander of Burnfoot Gorge and up past the main steps, I saw it and I thought nothing of it.

A heavy floral curtain, pulled tentatively aside, to look down at the Walled Garden, and beyond, toward the botanical greenhouses, where scientists bustled over the advances that underpinned Roxbury Industries.

* * *

I found myself stood alone at a middling sort of door set in the corner tower. Jem vanished round the back. I fought back the urge to run after my bags. (In London, I wouldn’t let them out of my grasp.)

I studied the door. I decided it wasn’t the door for me. Jem, hastening back to work, must have overlooked my station. I took myself down the steps and strode across the gravel— tricky terrain in these boots you’ve foisted on me in place of my trusty old muckers.

Up the main steps, I lost no time in ringing the bell. I gazed up at the doorway, feeling like a sprite in a cathedral. Etiquette, I told myself, etiquette. I know the way of such places: follow the etiquette.

I heard a cough behind me.

I kept my eyes intent on the door. Nothing so important as first impressions, you said. I smoothed down my skirt. I checked my bonnet on my noggin. I reached for the bell again.

I hesitated. In a great house, as we discussed, the butler may have a distance to cover before reaching the door, and there’s no insult in that.

Again, the cough, and a face peering round the corner, stage right, from the door where Jem had dropped me. I extemporised a little ditty to myself.

Lo, upon the steps I spy

A lordly figure standing spry.

His pigging cough suggests: “Clear off!”

His stare would make you cry.

“If you please, miss?” One of them questions that ain’t a question. I made a point of holding my tongue.

Again, the cough. My resolve wavered. Could this be the lord of the manor? The fellow descended in chagrin. A tall, solid type, his jacket cuffs as weary as his frown, he approached, with the deliberate plod of the manservant. The butler, for sure.

“Miss, if you will please to step this way, I may show Miss…?” He waited for me to fill in the gap in his sentence, eager to shoo me off his front steps before I sullied them.

“You may show Miss what?” Which sounds pert but wasn’t meant thus. Seeing as you’d cabled ahead, I wouldn’t brook disrespect for my station.

“I am asking your name.”

“None of your sentences has ended with a question mark, rightly.”

His lips whitened. “What, pray, is your name, miss?”

“That’s a question, I grant you. My name is Molly.”

“Miss Molly…?”

“That’s right.” I revised my posture to a more ladylike stance. “Miss Molly.”

“Begging your pardon.” He gritted his teeth. “That, I do believe, is your Christian name.”

“Not much Christian about it, so help me God.” From his look of horror, I judged I’d better create some further nomenclature; we never discussed names in our lessons. “That is, the children are to call me Miss Molly.”

Again the cough. “But your family name, for the servants’ purposes?”

“Oddbody,” I burst out.

His face struggled between disbelief and disdain.

“Terrible name. Miss Oddbody will just not do. Not for children, not for servants. I insist on being Miss Molly.” I restrained myself from cursing the pigging door, and smiled, recalling your guidelines on how to treat servants. “Open the door, won’t you?”

“If ‘Miss Molly’ would kindly come around the mid entrance.”

“I amn’t a servant, you know.” Not to make a scene, mind, but I was anxious to get off on the right footing.

He stared. “I know. I employ the servants, and I should never employ you.”

I stared back. “Why invite me round the servants’ entrance, then?”

“The low entrance is at the rear arch, miss, facing the Pump House. This mid entrance welcomes artisans and unexpected callers. The grand door is only opened for functions, for aristocracy and for royalty. The housekeeper will show you your quarters, where you shall, I’m sure, be wanting to recover from your journey.” He gave me a look up and down, as if to suggest my clothes were flecked with rainwater and my hair soaked in mud.

That was me told.

TRAINING THE URCHIN [RUTH VILLIERS]

Could Molly inspire in her countryside retreat the same devotion Sergeant Lawless and I felt for her?

She is a quick learner. But to make this street Arab into a young lady—a young woman, at least—seemed as tall an order as converting a jack-in-the-box into a person. Molly’s bulletins to Campbell suggested I’d succeeded; her letters to me, however, described gaffes and improprieties to make me cringe. Which were true? We could not be sure until I paid her a visit.

That she believed she was continually bungling was a measure of the high standards I had set her. When finally I did visit, it was clear she had made a decent impression after all; she was already part of the fabric of the house.

To reassure Campbell, I described the stringent lessons I had given Molly to prepare her for country house life.

* * *

I chose, for Molly’s mnemonic acronym, the word CHAOS.

“C for Clothes.”

“Nothing wrong with my clothes,” Molly had said.

I jabbed at her blotchy waistcoat. “If you’re going to protest every step of the way—”

“Gravy, that’ll be.” Molly rubbed at it with her thumb, then licked the thumb clean. “Meat pie. Spitalfields.”

“It’s not the foodstuffs in your clothing that worry me, Molly. It’s the style.”

“Latest styles, Miss V. I picks ’em up for a song off a chap down Covent Garden.”

“A chap?” I sighed. “There’s the rub. There comes an age when every tomboy’s innate charms can no longer be repressed. Her youthful vigour irradiates through her frumpish disguise. Her head may be turned. Or she may notice nothing, and encourage admirers and suitors, willy-nilly. Try these.”

Her disgust redoubled. “What’s these when they’re at home?”

“Drawers.”

She rolled her eyes.

“They’re the fashion. Else, servants will think you common and maltreat you.”

* * *

Our lessons proceeded.

“H is for Holding,” said I. “How one comports oneself.”

“Do you mean not putting my feet on an armchair?”

“Never decorous.” I laughed. “Especially with those boots.”

* * *

A was for Accent. Knowing thespians aplenty, Molly responded to this challenge. She squeezed her lowly London tones towards more refined elocution, though her diction will always be injudicious.

O for Obeisance. Women are obedient. Women are faithful, moral, and passive. If they should hazard any show of defiance, faithlessness, or aggression (palpably masculine traits), they are shunned, ruined, or incarcerated.

Finally, S for Servants.

“Everyone,” I said, “must develop their own style with servants. Overfamiliarity is never wise. Lack of acknowledgement is equally risky. Be kind, but be entitled. And, Molly, never carry your own bags.”

BODY OVERBOARD [LAWLESS]

“Who’s been and moved this body?” I growled.

The harbour master stood in his office, staring at a length of tarpaulin, rolled up and crumpled at one end. Bodies at the docks are no surprise, as I said. There is a world of difference, however, between a sailor drowned after a dust-up with his wife’s other husband, sad as that may be, and a passenger on a luxury liner despatched en route between Indonesia and the Isle of Dogs.

“I said, who brought this body in?”

The harbour master did not bother to muster an excuse. A short, sweaty man in a jacket of indeterminate colour, he walked past me to survey his domain, the East India Docks. Scotland Yard had jurisdiction only over Her Majesty’s Naval Dockyards, not over the merchant fleet arriving at the Thames. He knew it. I knew it. To these commercial monsters, questions of evidence mattered nothing. Get the ships out to sea, get the profits rolling in. Engravings of the Eastern Steam Navigation Company’s vessels lined the wall. Beneath lay this bizarre exhibit, like equipment to be rolled out for a marquee.

“Ugh.” Raising the tarpaulin, I flinched away. The aroma was not so strong, but vile, the remnants of putridity mixed with rancid brine. I forced myself to peer beneath. Only the head had been unwound; the rest was still wrapped. I glimpsed the face, or should I say the skull? A gossamer residue of skin clung across one cheek, like a blister soaked in soda: no fresh corpse. “Where’s Sergeant Jeffcoat?”

The harbour master gestured to the lifeboat, raised on blocks by the warehouse wall, not far from the water. If he gave me an adieu, it was drowned out by the strident machinery.

The lifeboat sat askew against the warehouses. Behind it loomed the vast bulk of the SS Great Eastern, being refitted to rescue the transatlantic cable. Wonderful venture: we’d soon catch up on the latest news of Lincoln’s cats over our morning coffee.

Jeffcoat popped his head out, in response to my halloa. There was always something sublime in the diabolical machinations of the dockside: he seemed etched in miniature against the leviathan, like a bible story illustrating man’s puny stature before the godhead.

“Trouble boiling your porridge, Watchman, you good-for- nothing haggis-muncher?”

“I’ve been at it since cockcrow, Sergeant Lazybones.” I would leave it till later to explain Molly’s evacuation, our plans having come to a sudden head—indeed, two heads. “While you were clutching your hot water bottle.”

Jeffcoat ignored my jibes. He was examining the boat up and down, gunwales to rowlocks, or whatever. I watched intently: why pay such attention to the boat, while the corpse lay still wrapped? If it were a simple drowning, he would not have called me, nor if the fellow had perished from cold or drink. That he had, abruptly, meant a mystery.

Jeffcoat pressed his knifeblade nose to the flaking paint of the aft seat. “Dints,” he muttered.

“Why have you called me?” I frowned. “Just another unfortunate stowaway.”

“What, on this lifeboat?” He ducked under the seats, checking every recess. “Never afloat.”

“So he snuck on to the liner. Came in on its coat-tails. Didn’t survive the trip.”

“He was only found when the ship was being refitted. Not even then. They said the old lifeboats stank. Swapped them for newer models, and sailed off.”

“Sailed off?” I blinked up at the Great Eastern. “The ship’s right behind you, dunderhead.”

“Our body is two months old, at least. Dunderpate.” Emerging from his searches, he tapped on the lifeboat’s prow, the liner’s name emblazoned in white on the red edging: SS GREAT BRITAIN. “The Great Britain came in from Australia, via the Cape, two months back. In and out in a fortnight. Other lifeboats were sold off. Nobody wanted this one. It’s sat here ever since, with him in it.” Jeffcoat jumped down. “They thought it was oars wrapped in the tarpaulin.”

“Two months? He’s been dead longer, I’d say. Haven’t you looked?”

We headed back to the office, past towering cranes and clanging repair shops. Jeffcoat brushed off his hands on his police trousers. “How did nobody smell him?”

I hadn’t smelt him until I moved the tarpaulin. “He was wrapped so tightly, I suppose.”

“Wrapped? So he didn’t climb in himself.”

“I’d say the body was put there, already dead.”

Jeffcoat narrowed his eyes. “Or did it fall in?”

“Fall?” I glanced back at the Great Eastern. The lifeboats were visible, lined up, midway atop the great upper deck. “Slap bang in the middle of the first-class deck?”

We strolled into the office, ignoring the harbour master’s glare. The smell was permeating the room now, like the recollection of decay. Jeffcoat turned away from the body to study the engravings.

“I can think of smarter places,” I said, “to hide a body.”

Jeffcoat tapped at a picture: a liner at sea. “Look.” The lifeboats were slung from the sides of the upper deck. He glanced at the tarpaulin and took a pencil stub from his pocket. Grinning, he rolled it over the engraving, as if it were rolling off the deck, and made a whistling sound to signify it tumbling into the lifeboat hanging there. “Where are the lifeboats kept, when they’re at sea?”

The harbour master gave us a dirty look. For Board of Trade inspections, he grumbled, they must be brought on deck; but at sea, they hung down port and starboard sides. He mopped his brow, warming to his theme, and began boasting of their promenade decks as broad as Piccadilly, incalculably strong, and buoyant as a life-preserver—

“Didn’t preserve this fellow’s life.” I batted away a fly, as I gently stripped back the tarpaulin. I was pleased to see Jeffcoat grimace as much as I had.

Remnant of a face, withered down to bone, sinews, vestiges of hair. Impossible to tell age, lineage, or even gender. These traces had been weathered to a skeletal pallor by his ensconcement under the flaking gunwales, as the lifeboat dangled in the rains of Cape Finisterre. Prominent teeth: put me in mind of a rabbit.

The skeleton seemed restful. Clothes long disintegrated. Around the wrist, strips of leather: a kind of amulet. Broad leather belt, still in place, though the trousers were long gone. Leather sandals, of uncouth style. At his feet, a basket, woven of bark strips with a type of bamboo, and filled with stones.

Of what he had died, I could not tell, but I would make damn sure Simpson told us.

“You know what Wardle would say?” Jeffcoat elbowed me. He emulated our erstwhile inspector’s Yorkshire accents. “Eee, lad, leave well alone.”

“He’s dead,” I continued in the same tones. “He’s unmourned. Why dig up t’past and ruin more lives on top of his?”

I’d idolised old Wardle, in my first tender days at the Yard. Now I was grown cynical, his maxims sounded hollow. Jeffcoat had looked up to the old scoundrel too. His ignominious departure had left us both rudderless, until we overcame our differences: a touch of envy here, prejudice there. As a team, we were as good as any detectives in Scotland Yard; in the country, God damn it.

“Aye,” he went on, unable to acknowledge the superiority of my impersonation. “Schoolchildren study history, and so they should, but not the finest minds on the force. Out on them streets. Catch me some lowlifes and ne’er-do-wells. Leave bygone crimes to lesser minds.”

We looked at each other and laughed.

“Inspector,” I addressed our absent inspector, “we think differently. History has come alive, and no more evidence of that is needed than our late orders from—”

Jeffcoat touched my shoulder. His glance toward the harbour master shut me up. He was right: I should know better than to spout in public of our briefing at the War Office.

We knelt to examine the corpse, disturbing as little as possible.

“Fair hair.” At my touch, the strand disintegrated. “Germanic, or Nordic.”

“Maybe.” Jeffcoat never agreed with me. “Or bleached by time.”

“The chin,” I mused. “That certain weakness common among the upper classes.”

Jeffcoat shook his head, unconvinced. The strip of skin drawn against the skull was waxy and emaciated.

“Prominent forehead speaks of ill health,” I hazarded. “Curvature of the neck. Bony shoulders. Looks ill nourished.”

“Skeletons will look out of sorts.” He clicked his teeth. “Odd shoes, though.”

I nodded. “From the colonies? Queensland? The Transvaal?”

“I don’t know.”

“But someone may. Casual-looking. But the stitching is rough. Not a working man’s shoes.”

“Cultural differences, though.” Jeffcoat was a terrific one for his cultural differences, which can make mock of such surmises. Our continual disagreements he wrote off to our disparate heritage: my Caledonian artisan stock (father a watchmaker, mother from island weavers); he from rough Kentish Men mixed with unspeakable Men of Kent (a mongrel breed if ever there was one).

As I touched the strange basket, its reeds friable, the waft of decay caught in my throat. Nothing inured you to that. Yet this was not the stench of fresh death, with its oozing juices and bloating flesh.

“No obvious injury.” Jeffcoat was still examining the bones.

I frowned. “Simpson is never going to give a date of death.”

“Nor cause.” He cocked his head and pointed, squinting. True enough, one shoulder was out of kilter, as if from an impact. The left hip, beneath it, bore an indentation. Jeffcoat drew back, that look of connection in his eye. He drew his palm sideways, then sharply down to bang the floor. “Kadonk. He fell from the deck.”

“Pushed.”

“Pushed, then, wrapped up tight. Fell—what?—fifteen feet. Got jammed under the boat’s aftmost seat. Invisible from deck.”

“Just a tarpaulin. Why would you notice it?” I pushed at the basket, heavy with stones. “And the weight intended to drag him to the bottom of the sea—”

“Simply dinted the boat.” He stuck out his lip. “Strange that nobody looked for him. Nobody noticed him gone.”

“Maybe they did. We’ll check the records.” I thought a moment. “Who knows how long he’d been there?”

“Simpson, though?”

I laughed. “Simpson will say—”

“You fearful gendarmes.” Dr Simpson stood in the door of the harbour master’s office, obscuring the daylight. “What inarticulate tripe are you attributing to my tender lips?”

THE UNIVERSITY DOCTOR [LAWLESS]

Our medic, for all his corpulent frame and bombastic style, had sneaked up on us, absorbed in our deductions. Neither of us held out a hand of welcome.

Jeffcoat’s lip twisted into a smile. “You’re about to tell us, I’ve no doubt.”

We stepped back to make way for his Falstaffian bulk. To my surprise, Simpson lost no time getting down on his knees to peer at the skeleton.

“Oh, dear,” he murmured. “No, no, no. Look, you’ve gone and let the flies in. This would have been a lovely set of remains for my students. Hermetically sealed. How long dead?”

“We were rather hoping,” I said, “you might tell us that.”

Jeffcoat and I looked at each other. “You’re doubtless about to say that inside that tarpaulin, damp, salty, shielded from the sea, this fellow may have been dead a week, may have been dead a year. Which will stymie our ever identifying him.”

Simpson smiled smugly. “My, my, Jeffcoat. What a lot you have picked up under my tutelage.” He lost no time prodding the nasal cavities, poking at the teeth. He frowned at the strips of emaciated skin, picking at them, as if disappointed with his dinner. He felt the ribs, frowned again at the basket, sniffed, blinked, and called for a lamp. “Long dead, all right. Soft tissue almost totally decomposed, bar the odd sinew. In the absence of the usual carrion insects, the body has eaten itself, as it were. Yet the absence of putrefaction is surprising. Six to eight months, at least. Possibly years.”

“Doctor,” I groaned. “Don’t be messing us about.”

He touched the skin, sniffed at his fingers, and looked puzzled. “I couldn’t be sure without taking it for further analysis.”

I stared at him.

“Lawless,” Simpson snapped, “you whisky-addled Celt, I’m not obfuscating, merely refusing to rule out possibilities you may subsequently discover to be true.”

“Take it for analysis, then,” said Jeffcoat.

“You’re the detectives.” He began to get up. “Plenty more you can dig up about him, I’m sure.”

Jeffcoat placed a hand on his shoulder, preventing him from rising. “You can do better than that, Doc.”

“Come along, boys.” A desperate look came into his eyes. “Does it matter? Johnny Foreigner lays down his knife and fork out on the high—”

“How do you know he’s foreign?” Jeffcoat let go his grip. He hauled the doctor up on his feet.

“His bloody shoes, man. And this Hottentot pot, whatever it is.” Simpson took his chance to step away from us, looking for his exit. “Look, the fellow was tubercular. Angular kyphosis in the thoracic and lumbar region. See? Touch of ankylosis below the neck—”

I blocked his way. “Did it kill him?”

Jeffcoat stood shoulder to shoulder with me. “You don’t see signs of foul play? The shoulder here—”

“Could be. Could be any old injury. Pointless worrying over it.” He saw that we were not going to yield so easily. He rolled his eyes. “Maybe he died of consumption. Let’s say, the ship’s doctor was reluctant to keep him in the sanatorium. I’d be the same. Some halfwit porter found a place to stow the bugger, and they clean forgot.”

Jeffcoat puffed. “A likely story.”

“Are you sure,” I said, “he died of consumption?”

“For heaven’s sake,” Simpson groaned. “I can’t tell.”

“You can,” Jeffcoat said.

“Not by looking.”

Jeffcoat smiled. “You’d need tests?”

“So you can tell.” I smiled too. “And you will.”

“We wouldn’t want to turn nasty.”

“Speak with our friends in the medical council.”

Jeffcoat gripped Simpson by the arm. “Or your friends at the newspapers.”

Simpson rocked unsteadily. “Ho, there, must you—!” He noticed the harbour master observing our contretemps. That quieted his complaints. There were scandals aplenty about doctors, and a secret sold to the papers might garner a nice fee.

“Are you sure,” said I, “he was dead before he was wrapped up?”

“Are you sure,” said Jeffcoat, “he wasn’t poisoned?”

“He may have been.” Simpson lowered his voice to a rapid rattle. “He may have died of Drugs. Poison. Might account for the inconsistent preservation of the soft tissue.”

“But you’d know,” said I, “once you’d taken in the body for analysis?”

Simpson looked at me.

“Come off it, you fearful crocus.” I wasn’t going to let him wriggle out of it; he could roll his eyes all he liked.

He turned, teeth clenched, and barked at the harbour master. “Have the body brought out, will you? I’ll drive it up to University College Hospital myself, before you let every fly in the dockyard lay in him.”

“Him, eh?” Jeffcoat nodded satisfied.

Simpson replied testily. “Almost certainly.”

“Still discernible, poisons and the like, after such a time?”

“Most likely. If any diagnostic tools can discern them, ours can.” He huffed to the doorway. “I’ll bring up my carriage. The shoes you may send for, if you wish, but take the blasted pot yourselves.”

* * *

The harbour master welcomed our further queries as a mother-in-law welcomes her son’s wife.

How could we check on passengers gone missing? We must have the SS Great Britain’s itinerary, stoppages, moorings, passenger lists; how strictly the passengers’ comings and goings were enumerated; likewise, traders en route. Unlikely this was a Bombay spice merchant, yet one might have done away with him.

The harbour master demurred. Such a load of copying work would take weeks.

I shook my head. My librarian friend Miss Villiers would do the job at triple speed; she did not enjoy the Yard’s measly copyist rates, but she loved a mystery. He should send the papers to the Yard. The glimpse of a ten-bob note sweetened his look; I toyed with it a moment, running through any last doubts. Might the body have been secreted there after the lifeboat was deposited ashore?

Unlikely. The docks were busy day and night. A corpse couldn’t be lumbered around without drawing notice.

We would not delay Simpson’s analysis. I left the tip squarely in front of him.

“Jeffcoat, any point in getting a drawing—”

“To see if anyone recognises the skull?” Jeffcoat laughed. “Why not?”

“Of the basket. See if any museum johnny can tell us where it’s from?”

Jeffcoat reconsidered. “Send for your friend Molly. She’s our best artist. True to life, and discreet, mostly.”

“Ah, yes. Molly. Jeffcoat, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

POST MORTEM [LAWLESS]

The Erith explosion took us by surprise. That it happened the next day was pure coincidence, I was sure, but it was a coincidence that cost us dear: it was months before I connected our tubercular skeleton and the terrors which loomed over London that summer.

We heard the boom as we were driving up to the University College mortuary. All London heard it. We should have done something about it straightaway, but Londoners ignore anything that doesn’t stop the traffic around them.

We’d gleaned all we could from the harbour master the previous day. We harassed Simpson, to make sure he attended to the post mortem. We sent for Molly’s minion, Numpty, to sketch the basket. I sent word to Miss Villiers about the copying job; what might be turgid to others would to her be delightful prying.

Simpson tried to shoo us off. We would have none of it. He was an evasive wretch at the best of times; but this was not the best of times. To identify this lone corpse, with his rabbit-like face, was a long shot, no doubt, but we must know if it was foul play or not. Customs were alerted to suspicious imports around the country docks. An isolated death might point to a larger warren of plots.

Simpson worked in silence, ignoring our brooding presence. He took samples of the remnants of skin and hair. He annotated the dental patterns. He examined the skin minutely. Since arsenic poisoning hit the headlines, doctors were anxious not to be caught out; if their certified as natural deaths later proved accidental, or criminal, they could lose their licence.

Simpson found that the disjointed shoulder and damaged hip bone Jeffcoat had spotted were not the only signs of a fall. Checking the ribs, he declared two fractured. Consonant with falling from a height—or being rolled off deck. His skeletal frame made a pitiful corpse. There were no glands left to analyse for consumption, but, along with the tubercular joints, the brittle bones showed signs of starvation. “He is long enough dead to make diagnosis difficult. There remains some skin for the Marsh test, to check for arsenic. I warn you, though, foreigners have strange ways. No Register of Poisons. Many consider arsenic an aphrodisiac. Any murderer you accuse may claim the Styrian defence, saying the fellow took arsenic of his own free will. I will seek the usual things.” Alcohol, poisons, narcotics, opiates. “Given his quaint shoes, I shall cast the net wider. There could be peculiar herbs at work. The analysis will take time. You’re fortunate to have access to my laboratory.” Taking hold of the skull, he stared into the eye sockets. “I’d adjudge him what we now call Caucasian.”

“Is that a kind of Russian?” said Jeffcoat.

“No, Sergeant.” Simpson laughed, and he never laughed kindly. He leant his corpulent bulk towards us and whispered, “That means, he’s one of us.”

I ignored his leer. “How did he die? That’s the thing. Where in the world is he from? Where did he live? The clothes surely give some clue.”

Simpson gestured to a pile on the next workbench and carried on with his work. We examined the material closely. The leather was good quality, though worn; the stitching was rough, without the pinpoint work we expect today, finished by dextrous children indentured at low wages (a scandal, to be sure, but clothes must be stitched).

Jeffcoat found the secret pocket, inside the belt loop, for travellers fearful of robbery. Rolled in that little tuck, Jeffcoat found, secured by a twist of paper, a ten-shilling note. He frowned. “My father always said: ten bob in your pocket and you ain’t destitute, my son.”

It was as if the dead man was refunding my tip to the harbour master. “Pay your way across the river of death, at least.” I spotted pale ink on the twist of paper Jeffcoat handed me, one word faded by time: ROXBURY.

I dropped it in astonishment.

“Something wrong, Watchman?”

I looked at Jeffcoat. Molly would be on her way right now, despatched as far as possible from the double murder. Before I could explain, in burst Molly’s little chap, Numpty, his urgency beyond the appropriate.

Simpson grunted in reproach, as the boy tugged at my arm.

“Calm yourself, Numpty. As you’re here, you can sketch the basket. But it’s not rushing anywhere, nor are we.”

“I ain’t, Sergeant, but you two ’ave to.” He drew breath and declared with all the gravity he could muster, “There ’as been a hexplosion.”

CONTRAPTIONS & RENOVATIONS [MOLLY]

Dear Miss Villiers,

The butler, Birtle, loomed in the doorway. He stepped aside to usher me in with all the hospitality of a vampyre considering his dinner.

My first steps inside Roxbury House. Before I’d gone two paces, Birtle coughed his pigging cough again. I hadn’t realised: I was still clutching my drawing case. Ladies never carry their own bags; contrary to life on the London streets, you impressed upon me that a country manor rarely threatens a body with theft.

Birtle bade me leave it on the step. “It will be brought up forthwith.”

A fearful blunder.

I strolled into the back hall, nonchalantly gazing about, polite and inquisitive like.

“Miss? Follow me.” He gave me a dirty look.

He has me down as a thief.

I did gawp, I suppose. I ain’t never seen a place so beautifully situated as Roxbury House, stowed up a valley amid the crags, streams caressing the rockery, forests tickling the ramparts.

I expected to find the interior dilapidated. I’ve seen inside many a house more lavisher and grandiose in London, Bucks Palace by no means the grandiosest. Imagine my flabbergastery to find it jammed to the rafters with contraptions and contrivances I’ve never seen before. As I followed Birtle down the back corridor, he rang one of the servants’ bells, only it didn’t ring: it buzzed, like a bumblebee.

Clunk, clank.

Before my very eyes, a sort of cage descended from the ceiling; a porter emerged through the metal grate and went to get my bags. He gave me a friendly tip of the hat, with a sideways look to check Birtle hadn’t seen.

A clock struck the half-hour, only it didn’t just strike: it played a musical quartet.

After the chill northern air, I couldn’t understand how it was so warm. As we crossed the threshold of the central hall, an updraft of heat fluttered my unmentionables, emanating from the floor; no sign of a fireplace.

Whoosh. Thud. A metallic shake, and up through an opening in the marble floor rattled a foursquare trunk, bumping to a stop beside us. Birtle turned to it, with a sigh. He raised a finger, to bid me pause. He pulled at the clasps, his distaste apparent. The lid sprang open, nearly fetching him a nasty blow on the chin.

I leapt back, expecting a leopard to jump out. It was the afternoon post, sent up from the glasshouses by pneumatic railcar, including a package marked FRAGILE: ELECTRIC. How many passageways are secreted in these interstices? I’d better watch what I say, for who knows how room is interlinked to room?

The grand entrance was in a state of upheaval. Scaffolding. Dust sheets. Decorators at three levels. The top fellow painstakingly brushed the wall, as if restoring the Mona Lisa; the mid-level workman was delicately removing plaster; at the bottom, a woman mixed paints, daring the occasional daub.

“Renovations.” Birtle coughed, uncomfortable. “Lady Roxbury had wanted it repainted, but of course…” He took the package, with a glance aloft, then shooed me up the stairs: he couldn’t wait to hand me over to the housekeeper.

* * *

Roxbury House is a topsy-turvy world. We climbed two storeys from the entrance and were still at ground level, the hill behind being so steep. We reached the kitchens, with the housekeeper’s quarters adjacent, atop the butler’s flat. The servants’ quarters fanned out from this hub of power, clambering up the craggy hillside. All this too up the rear of the household, leaving the front for drawing and reception rooms, libraries and bedrooms, with wondrous views.

Birtle’s brows, thunderous black, made it clear he thinks me as tagrag as a Dutch button. But I hadn’t never heard of a mid entrance. I thought you had me well prepared. If I can navigate Catherine Wheel Alley of a late evening, evading flimps, filchers and hedge creepers—

Damnation take it, I meant to steer clear of costermongers’ argot to pass muster, if not as a lady, then at least as a lady’s drawing mistress.

* * *

DEAR WATCHMAN, CONTRAPTIONS APLENTY. FURTHER REPORTS AS I FATHOM THE ELECTRICALITIES. MOLLY

LIES AND EXAGGERATIONS, PART THE FIRST [LAWLESS]

What a correspondent Molly was. To her first arrival she devoted a series of letters. More followed daily. I had asked her to note the goings-on in the house and grounds. No more than that. I alluded vaguely to the nation’s security, but this was just to give her a sense of purpose. She would be too loyal to wander off and let me down. I didn’t expect her to discover much; I gave her first missives little attention.

With the growing national panic, though, her surveillance became important. I needed more from her terse reports, more than the wide-eyed wonderment of her letters to Miss Villiers (which she knew Ruth would give me to read, if I were so inclined). We did not need to know of Skirtle’s bosomy voice, like warmed milk, or Birtle’s, as insistent as a door-knocker. Her wide-eyed wonderment was winning, but distracting, even as she tried to focus on the contraptions, and the machinations animal and mineral. Molly loved subterfuge. From the start, she concealed my reports within these letters to Ruth. There could be nothing suspicious in correspondence with her sponsor, whereas notes to Scotland Yard might attract attention.

* * *

Once I made it clear that her reportage might be vital to the nation (and diabolically useful to our enemies), she encrypted as if her life depended upon it. She wrote in invisible ink, she wrote in abstruse vocabulary, she wrote in forgotten slangs. She did this partly to annoy me, partly to spice up her bourgeois position, but mainly so I’d need help from Ruth. Miss Ruth Villiers, erstwhile British Museum librarian, now freelance scrivener, notary, and researcher. My raven-haired Ruth had shrugged off her dowdy library clothes for dresses, once her Aunt Lexie had rescued her wardrobe from her home—which she refused to visit, due to a tiff with her father. Of Miss Villiers, more anon.

I can scarcely think of anyone with a more realistic grasp of the world than Molly. Yet in her letters to Ruth she did overwrite. Those gaffes upon first arrival she overstated; even if Birtle did think her indecorous, they had orders from Roxbury to overlook teething problems. Molly had to make everything wilder. Consider this, in which Jem took her to view the greenhouses:

Through trees tall as Nelson’s Column, my flaxen-haired Jem named the buildings we pass: Pump House, by the gorge; Shepherd’s Refuge on the crags above; Walled Garden; glasshouses, encompassing the scientific quarter. Below, the menagerie, where his favourite orang-utan gave us a wave; behind, tropical trees rose through a steamy haze; two storeys up, gardeners on the balcony, busy as bees, collected botanicals in the pale northern sun.

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: