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.”

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paralysis	weakness
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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:

“How have you let it come to this?”

“Slipped through the net, did they? I’m appalled, 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.

I thought nothing of it at the time. Molly had never thought of venturing north of Finsbury Park. Now that I recalled that invitation, it felt right to send her as our agent. Molly was in danger anyway. When she engineered her revenge on those men, I seized my chance.

Molly was not grateful. She was sixteen, or fifteen, or thereabouts—nobody knew rightly—and ripe for trouble. Removing her to —shire was a wise precaution. She took some persuading, not to say blackmailing, but she soon began to make her observations: the brief version to me, the elaborate to Ruth.

OF THE OLD EARL, PART THE SECOND [MOLLY]

WATCHMAN, MY OLD CHUCKABOO,
YET TO BE PRESENTED TO THE EARL.
HIS EXPERIMENTS KEEP HIM OCCUPIED.
YOUR NORTHERN EARWIG

Dear Miss Villiers,

Of the old earl, I yet know little.

Disappointed to report little progress. My first researches involved nosing around, getting under Skirtle’s feet as she was overseeing the house cleaning.

“Oh, the earl used to busy himself in town,” said Skirtle proudly. “Made his name in hydraulics. Toured his manufacticaries all round the kingdom. There in’t a theatre in London dun’t use hydraulic safety curtains, nor a self-respecting hotel without Roxbury lifts. The docks use ’em. The locks use ’em. From this acorn grew the oak of Roxbury Industries, crowned by all this.”

She gestured to the grandeur all about us: the oak panels of the lower drawing room, the wild rockery outside, and the shimmering greenhouses. In Skirtle’s halcyon tales, the earl was as likely to be up north, overseeing ironclads, out west with army artillery, or down south at the brick quarries. The brickworks come from his wife’s family, taken over when her father died. Once I’d got Skirtle going, she recounted the potted history warmly.

“The queen made him an earl. Respected both sides of the House. No wonder they turned to Roxbury Industries to fortify our island.” She hesitated. “There was a hiccough, though, back in the late fifties.”

“What?” My ears pricked up. “What happened?”

“Some funny business over a bomb in Paris.” She turned her attention to the floor, adjusting the grates through which heat arises so magically. “That’s all forgotten now. Now the navy wants their wooden wall plated in steel. Who does England turn to but Roxbury?”

“Nothing wrong, is there?” I refrained from asking if the country could still count on Roxbury Industries. Mustn’t blow my cover. “The earl no longer busies himself in town?”

“No.” Skirtle bustled around the lamps. She couldn’t keep the tone of regret from her voice. “Nor with his industries neither.”

“I’ve barely seen him. I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?”

She ignored me, holding each lamp up to check the wick and content herself the glass was clean. “Well, he’s distracted, you might say.” She mustered a kind look for me. “Don’t worry your pretty head over it.”

I rather thought I’d have the lowdown for you by now. I imagined I’d be presented to him forthwith, prior to embarking on the children’s drawing lessons on Monday.

I caught Birtle tidying the lower drawing room. “Will I be meeting with the earl soon?”

He snorted. “No, no. His Lordship is occupied.”

“Occupied how?”

He glared, as if this were the rudest question he’d ever heard.

“How?” I repeated. “How is he occupied, then?”

“Well, he has business,” he blustered. “Down the scientific quarter.”

“The glasshouses, you mean?” I gestured down the hill with my thumb. “What’s going on there that’s so important?”

“The earl’s business is not my concern.” Birtle harrumphed. “Nor is it yours. He has his plants. His animals. His machines. His electrical experiments.”

“You consider his work important, Birtle?”

“Of course I do, you pipsqueak.” His black eyebrows worked in astonishment, like a caterpillar quadrille. “But it’s none of my business whether it is important or trivial. I am here to facilitate his work, without interruption from the world, the estate, or upstart employees such as you.”

“Experiments?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You mentioned experiments.” I stepped nearer, to unsettle him. “What experiments?”

“I don’t know, blast you.” His eyes blazed. He blinked in horror, as he realised what he had said. “You have made me do something that never happens: I have lost my temper.” His eyebrows arched for the skies, and he muttered reluctantly, “For that I am sorry.”

“I haven’t made you do anything. Nor have you answered my question.” I smiled. “If the earl is neglecting his wider affairs, tied up with these experiments, where are his sons? Why don’t they step in?”

“The eldest, Wilfred, Marquis of Burnfoot, is soon to return from his tour of India and China, training for the Dragoon Guards. The second son, Nicodemus, only yesterday took five wickets for Harrow in the match. He returns tonight. In the morning you shall be teaching him along with his sisters, as he takes a special interest in drawing.”

“Not much use in industry, then?”

“The earl has Mr Lodestar for that.”

I nodded, for I’ve heard this name Lodestar bandied about, but Birtle offered no further account. “And the earl’s wife?”

“His wife?” He looked at me. “His wife is…” And Birtle turned away, his voice constricted. “She is departed from us.”

I regretted my question, which had apparently unmanned him.

“Miss Molly, it’s advisable that you restrain your inquisitive nature, at least until you have understood the ways of such a house as this. You are keeping me from my duties. I bid you good day.”

With that, off he went. I watched him pretending to busy himself, checking the buff on the servants’ buzzers in the hallway.

Next I meet the children, and then the larks begin.

Roxbury’s experiments keep him busy. That is all I can say for now.

CORRESPONDING WITH ROXBURY [LAWLESS]

Why should the name Roxbury be in the secret pocket of a dead man’s trousers arrived from the other side of the world? The body at the docks dropped swiftly down my list of priorities after Erith; further after Camden; and after Guernsey, I disappeared down a governmental rabbit hole, as we began not just to solve crime but to anticipate it.

We’d done all the checks we could think of. The few passengers who’d died on board were all accounted for. They listed the victuals supplied at every dock, the menu for top table, the staff and passengers and their coming and goings. Nothing stood out. Crew came and went at every stop, of course, but never was a passenger noted as missing. We scoured the records for inconsistencies and incidents. If such a man vanished without vestige, he was unlikely to be a passenger. We gave up hope of identifying him. We informed Simpson the body could be buried in the police graveyard in Moorfields. But not before I’d written a courteous note to Roxbury himself, enquiring if he might have known any passenger arriving on the Great Britain over the last few years.

Nor did I forget the men who had ostensibly tied Molly up and then killed each other. Too easy to write them off as the kind of men nobody would mourn.

I tracked down their next of kin. I informed them plainly that these men had been killed in the line of duty. No need to mention their dishonourable duties, or brand them as criminals. Soldiers of fortune, they died as they lived, by the knife, in the slums. Seeing as there were no culprits to be arraigned, the coroner reported death by misadventure, for simplicity: the paperwork for murders is tremendous.

One wife wrote to request a pauper’s burial. The other sent no reply. To think how the men’s shadowy labours had been rewarded gave me a pang. Whatever Brodie had gifted to them, they had paid for it with their immortal souls.

* * *

Roxbury’s answer came not from the earl himself, but from this elusive Lodestar whom Molly had mentioned. He replied by telegram, verbosely, from the wire station in the greenhouse scientific quarter. An expensive communication, this paid excessive respect to an enquiry from Scotland Yard, while demonstrating that Lodestar considered his own time too important to waste on detailed correspondence. He wrote as follows:

WE ARE CURRENCY. ANY NUMBER OF REASONS FOR NAME IN POCKET. WE SELL ENGINES AROUND WORLD, ARMS, AND SHIPS. THERE IS STATION IN BRAZIL WHERE EVERY NUT AND BOLT IS ROXBURY MANUFACTURED. EXCUSE EARL IF CANNOT FATHOM WHY IMMIGRANT SHOULD HAVE HIS NAME IN POCKET. NO LESS USUAL TO FIND COIN WITH QUEEN’S NAME ON IT.

“We are currency.” Well, well.

I replied, by letter, trying to diffuse any ill-feeling, as I felt Lodestar’s message brusque, if not rude. But businessmen will be busy, and telegrams terse. I thought no more upon it, until I started working in earnest with Miss Villiers.

THE NORPHANS PRACTICKLY [MOLLY]

WATCHMAN,
LESSONS DULY COMMENCED.
MOLLY

“Miss Molly, oh—how—delightful.” Peggy, the middle child, curtseyed carelessly and sat down at the puzzle. “Welcome to our pale and insignificant world, to which we beg you to bring colour, else, lost in the phantasmagoria of our woe-begotten dreams, we shall kill ourselves.”

I’d been forewarned that she, the plainest of the three, was the pertest, and a deceitful traitress; but I’ve encountered many supposedly evil folk in my days and found them personable enough.

“Yes, we shall kill ourselves. With promptitude.” She scratched her eyebrow, eyeing me sidelong. “We are the Norphans Practickly. I am Margaret, known as Peggy. This is Mary Catherine, known as Kitty. The fool dressed as a London dandy there is Nicodemus, El Nico, the diablo of Burnfoot Gorge.”

The other two, without looking up from their puzzle, gave an apathetic bow. All three sported discreet items from Jay’s Mourning Warehouse on Regent Street: the girls wore jet rings, and Nico a cravat in the mauve of half-mourning.

I have met many youngsters full of bluff and flam in my time, but never a one from the higher echelons of society so full of it; fuller than I was at her age. (You’ll object that I’m scarcely older than Peggy, but I seem older, with my city savvy; let us hope the Roxbury children never twig they’ve been palmed off on an apprentice.) I bit back a smile to think how rude they were aiming to be, and how pale were their efforts against my Oddbody dunces.

I blinked. “Norphans, did you say?”

Young Kitty prodded her brother’s arm. “Ah-ha-ha! Nico said it wrong,” she chanted, “Nico said it wrong.”

Nico looked up from the puzzle. They tell me there’s always a puzzle on the go in the art room; this was a view of London. Nico’s brows angled as steeply as the Palace of Westminster, where one day he may scorn the opposition as he scorned his sister. “If I may explain the history,” he said drolly. “As a child, with Fa always working and mother obsessed with good deeds, I once complained to Skirtle, saying, in my childish voice, ‘Skirtle, I am a norphan, practically.’ Skirtle found this so hilarious she had me repeat it to my mother, then to Fa; they reeled me out at parties, when the quality visited, as they did in their droves—no more, alas— to repeat my plaint: ‘I am a norphan, practically.’ My diction caused such hilarity that our parents took to calling me the Norphan Practickly, an appellation my fool sisters, lacking in invention, have greedily adopted.”

Giggles from the girls. They turned back to their puzzle, rather insolently, as if to deem my reaction insufficiently entertaining.

“Is this,” said I, “where our drawing lessons are to be held?”

Peggy frowned, as if at a plate of boiled cabbage. “Drawing?”

Nico picked up a piece of the puzzle, huffed confidently, and forced it in, on the lower right of the map, tapping it insolently down.

I squinted at it. “I don’t think so.”

He rounded on me with as much disrespect as his undeveloped vocal style could muster. “What do you know about it?”

“I know the statue of Nelson.” I removed it to the correct spot, mid picture. “I know it stands not on London Bridge but atop of Nelson’s Column. As any good Englander knows.”

Kitty, obligingly, laughed at him.

“Perhaps not.” I did not smirk; disdain was enough. “Not here in the countryside.”

My insult hit the mark. Nico tugged at his dandified collar, gnashing his teeth. To a would-be swell, nothing hurts more than being revealed as a rustic.

“Sadly,” said Peggy, allying herself to him, “drawing must wait till the completion of this mighty puzzle. There is no other table.”

I looked at her. This was a lie. A spiteful lie. I considered laying down the puzzle cloth that Skirtle had provided for this very scenario.

I did nothing. I did not dole out the pencils and paper. I would not force upon them the lesson I had planned so brilliantly with your help, and the advice of old Mr Lear, the filthy landscape painter.

I picked up my drawing case and walked to the window. On the side table stood a daguerreotype of the family, five years old perhaps. To one side, the earl and his wife, a fine-looking woman, bright-eyed and kindly; to the other, the children; beyond my three terrors stood a fourth, staring out with a haughty bearing. Between the four children and their parents, a gap.

I sat myself down, at the end of the table, where the light was good. I glanced up at the three children, endeavouring to ignore me, though little Kitty was poorly rehearsed and kept peeking.

I took out my sketchbook. I laid it on my lap, not the table, so they would not see what I was drawing. I took out my favourite charcoal stick, and chalks. I pursed my lips. I drew.

My sketch of Nico was outlined within minutes. Chalk marks captured the sneer, charcoal shadowed the haughty eyes. I blew off the excess, and laid the drawing on the table, at an angle, so they might see I had drawn something but not exactly what.

For Peggy, my caricature centred on her mouth, fussily pronouncing so many lies. It was not my kindest drawing. This I laid to the other side. Not only Kitty but Nico too gave in to the urge to peek at it sideways.

Kitty’s portrait was less unkind, but lively, with her hilarious mop of hair falling over catlike cheeks and sleepy eyes.

With the three of them skewered, I nodded in satisfaction. “If you wish to take up the drawing lesson offered you,” I said, “kindly come down this end of the table, where the light is better, and try drawing this bowl of apples.”

None moved. After a polite interval, I shrugged.

I turned my back on them. I gazed upon the ravishing view which fell dramatically from the window, flung across the hillside with an abandon that belittles all the Royal Academy landscapes I’ve seen. I am not fanatical for formal gardens: Hampton Court’s cold, Regent’s Park is straight; Hyde Park retains a bit of wildness. But this was another realm.

Rocky peaks rose to both sides, heathers and gorses struggling to hold on. Vast trees—don’t ask me the variety, Miss V, but big ones, straight and true, and bushy ones, gnarled and ancient—lined the Burnfoot Gorge. Below, an iron pedestrian bridge arched over the river churning through the valley. I felt electrified by the energies of nature, so gloriously untamed across Roxbury’s lands. Would my abilities as an artist be up to a landscape so fine?

I laid out paints, mixing jar, cleansing jar. I stared and stared, measuring the scene in my mind. The contours and outlines I sketched in haste. Pencil lines always in haste: it gives a vivacity to the line. The children kept puzzling in this interval. Kitty was only restrained from looking at my caricatures by her siblings’ stringent stares. I heard Nico’s huffings as he tapped pieces into place, doubtless setting St Paul’s dome upon the British Museum Library. Peggy resisted; she was the ringleader of their japes.

Lucky I had befriended Skirtle, else I would not have been forewarned of the Roxbury children’s form.

I began to paint. When I paint, time flows by. It is the only time an enemy might sneak up and do for me.

After an hour of lacing cotton ball clouds over the brooding distance, fading the crags to floating backdrops, dabbing the trees greener, and deepening the nearer boughs, I sat back to survey my efforts. Art brings renewal, and my frustration was forgotten. As my senses returned, I felt eyes over my shoulder and smelt Kitty’s perfume.

“Ho, now,” called Nico, “you blundering zounderkite.”

I turned to see him clutch Kitty’s wrist and tug her back to her place. Peggy tutted, planning repercussions for this disloyalty. But I saw the little one’s eyes dancing with mirth, for she had viewed my caricatures. She could see that my ability to sketch them so damningly gave me power over them. Careless of her siblings’ wrath, she desired that power.

The clock trilled and warbled.

Skirtle popped her head in. “How lovely.” She looked astonished to find a pacific scene, as if she was expecting to find my head on a platter. “Lunch, my little ducks.”

The children rose as one. They bolted past her without a word in my direction. How completely children fail to conceive their elders as humans, with feelings of our own. On the bell of lunch, I was relegated from drawing mistress and foe to employee and invisible.

“Must I eat with the ingrates?”

“Oh, love.” Skirtle could see behind my forced jollity. “You’ve lasted till lunch.”

“Oh, I’ll last.”

“Come and take a bite with me, won’t you, pet?” She linked arms with me, and I noted the scratch of the crepe trimming on her sleeve, over the dull fabric of her dress; subtler than the children’s, these were her signs of mourning.

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TERROR IN CAMDEN [LAWLESS]

The Camden Road train blast, two weeks later, has also been well documented. Jeffcoat and I were quicker to the scene, but not quick enough to save lives.

It could have been worse. The Fuse Wire Bomber, as the press dubbed him, surely imagined that his “mule” would set the thing off at peak hours. Instead, the costermonger slept in. His donkey was just pulling the cart into its habitual position, at the end of Platform One, when it set off the explosion. Fortunately, the coster escaped with minor injuries; that was a miracle, and not proof of complicity, as the press intimated. Unfortunately, the costermonger’s donkey and cart were what protected him.

Over his poor animal, he was inconsolable. He spoke barely a word of sense. Jeffcoat and I could testify to that. But this senselessness predated the explosion. As a candidate for subversion by whatever radical organisation planned the shebang, he was unlikely.

Who did plan it? On behalf of the Home Office’s investigations, we pieced together the sequence of events.

A porter was coupling two sets of carriages together. The guard stood, whistle in hand, waiting for the signal. The engine driver awaited the guard’s whistle. As he opened his regulator, the report resounded across North London.

The station was enveloped in steam. The engine was no longer on the viaduct.

It had fallen twenty feet, into the road below. They would carry out a formal rail investigation, but this was no accident, we were confident of that, nor even a defective boiler. It was intended to be worse. Half an hour before would have been carnage.

The Fuse Wire Bomber, indeed. We found copper wires, dislodged by the coster cart from its nook by the waiting room. What explosives were used was a mystery. A wooden crate lay smashed across the platform. Its glass sides were blown out, more wires were strewn around, and the platform beneath tinged yellow. The coster swore he had never seen it before. To what purpose the wires, none could tell us.

This was not Chartist style. Too advanced for the Fenians, unless they had made swift developments with explosives.

After the casualties were cleared, Jeffcoat made me comb the area with him. We found, where the blasted cart had been, the remains of a mechanism: bits of iron; a strange ball, pocked and scorched, neither wooden nor rubber. Whatever it was had fallen to the platform, knocked by the cart, and ignited upon impact.

A FENIAN DENIAL [LAWLESS]

I brought in O’Leary, purely for questioning, without charge. When I showed to him what was left of this contraption, his eyes bulged.

“What’s that, now, when it’s at home?” he said.

“We hoped,” said Jeffcoat, “London’s top-ranking Fenian might be able to tell us.”

“And so he might. But I can’t. Interested to know, though, if you catch ’em.” His envy was such, I felt sure he had no part in it. “On a scientific basis, you understand. It’s not fulminate of mercury, is it now?”

“No.” I examined him. “And yet your Fenians claim they did this.”

“Do they now, Watchman?” He lathered on the scepticism. “Would you be meaning the Irish Republican Brotherhood? Or could you be referring to the Phoenix National and Literary Society?”

Jeffcoat groaned. “And they’re not Fenians?”

“Not necessarily. These laudable sodalities remain at loggerheads with your government over Irish independence.” He leaned forward. “But we don’t exterminate donkeys.”

I stared at the card in the file in front of me, received by The Times just hours after the explosion: OURSELVES ALONE. “Ourselves Alone” being the translation of Sinn Fein, of course, the Fenians’ slogan.

O’Leary tapped the table. “Show us it, then.”

I looked to Jeffcoat, but he shook his head. He was right: it might complicate a prosecution, if he’d seen the evidence.

“Read us it then, ye daft Gardai.” He shook his head when I read it aloud. Now he could not keep the indignation from his voice. “Pah! Now, that’s interesting, I’ll grant you. The International Brotherhood is based in Manchester, I needn’t remind you. They managed to hear the news, write the card and deliver it within hours of the explosion. Wouldn’t you grant that’s interesting?”

“Easy enough, if it was planned.” I gave a sardonic nod. Besides, the Brotherhood had circles in every city in England, with cloak-twitchers aplenty to deliver such notes.

“It wasn’t.”

“It couldn’t be the work of some renegade?” said Jeffcoat.

“Like Dolan the Red?” He shook his head, thoughtful. “Never.”

Jeffcoat rounded on him. “Why not?”

“The thing is,” O’Leary scratched his ear with maddening lugubriousness, “Dolan and such are fools, but they’re not likely to forget the Gaeilge now.”

I looked at him.

“The Gaelic, Sergeant. Their own Irish tongue as they were brought up with.”

Jeffcoat snatched up the card. “This supposed mistake being?”

“Can you not see it?” He tutted, impudent. “And you, Lawless, a Gael, of a sort.”

I made no answer.

“‘Ourselves alone’, indeed! Sure, isn’t that the common mistranslation? There’s no ‘alone’ in the Irish. ‘Sinn Féin’ means ‘ourselves’. At a push ‘we ourselves’.”

“You’re pushing your luck,” said Jeffcoat.

“False witness.” O’Leary fixed him right in the eye. “If an Irishman’s identifying himself to the world as the author of such an event, which the IRB deplores, by the way, this is exactly how he would not do it.” He thrust his chair aside. “Bloody libellous. If you catch him, add that to his crimes, and I’ll back you up in court.”

Out he walked. Jeffcoat and I looked at each other.

We reported it to Ripon. Who else could it be? He said it had to be the French.

AGE OF WONDERS [LAWLESS]

The rail disaster caused vast disturbance in Camden, yet from it we only recovered the fuse wire, the iron, and the broken crate—which told us nothing. We had the pocked remnant of a ball analysed. It took them a while: nitrocellulose, some new wonder material. A sharp-eyed constable, packing up the remains of the broken crate, examined the metal attached to the crate panels more closely: three shards of it. Thank goodness he did, for we should have spotted them, and they might prove telltale in the end.

O’Leary’s eyes had bulged at the sight of these remnants, and I believed him when he claimed he knew nothing. These were times of swift change in armaments. Britain remained at peace (bar a few brawling New Zealanders). Other nations warmongered merrily, hungry for fresh methods of annihilation. The French spatted with the Austrians, the Austrians with Prussians and patriotic Italians. Russia crushed the Circassians; the samurai troubled the Japs. Paraguay wrestled its neighbours. Revolutions, wherever you cared to look, joyfully stoked the north of England’s furnaces. When the Americans fell out over slavery, it was to England they turned for weaponry.

Roxbury had armed the British since the Crimea—aside from that public disgrace in the fifties which Skirtle alluded to. For that spell, Joseph Whitworth of Manchester snuck into favour.

Today Roxbury armed the United States of America and the Confederate States of America. Both sides. Why not? Their dollars were as green. Yes, slavery was frowned upon in enlightened England (conveniently forgetting how it built the Empire); but the Confederate States struggled not for slavery, but the sovereign freedom to decide their own laws.

Arms meant money. No wonder Roxbury Industries and Whitworth Enterprises competed over the latest scientific developments. Newfangled fuels: paraffin or kerosene, whale oil, guano from Pacific atolls, peat from Irish bogs. Ironclad ships. Roxbury’s breech-loading guns saved our army, Bessemer’s steel our navy. This was the age of wonders.

Three shards of iron, fuse wire, and a ball: all that we had to work from. On two shards, no distinguishing feature. On the third, sliced crosswise, the remnants of words:

JO
TWO
CHE

DIVERGENCES [LAWLESS]

Molly told me of her discoveries, as yet limited.

To Ruth she explained her struggles in the role of drawing mistress with equanimity. If she suffered from the children’s maltreatment, she did not say it outright; at least Skirtle had given her to understand the little devils’ history of rank behaviour.

“She is exaggerating,” Ruth said, “I’m sure.”

“Sure?”

“More or less sure.”

“Let us hope you are right,” I said. “If she is doing as badly as she presents it, Roxbury will throw her out, I will have learnt nothing, and Ripon will extract my guts to restring his violin.”

* * *

The trajectory of Molly’s lessons we learned later.

The initial lessons proceeded similarly. The Roxbury children had not so much freedom that they could refuse to attend; besides, they enjoyed the challenge of leaving Molly to draw alone while they struggled with their blasted puzzle picture. So, little by little, one by one, Molly took on the challenge, reporting each stage to Ruth. She won them, as she wins everyone, sooner or later.

AN ART MISTRESS [MOLLY]

WATCHMAN, YOU OLD CHARPERING FEINTER,
LESSONS SATIS.
EARL REMAINS ELUSIVE.
MOLLY

Dear Miss V,

Kitty has succumbed. You may but guess at my sense of triumph.

I left my caricatures out for the taking. If the older two thought of destroying them, they did not wish to be seen to care.

Kitty secreted them away.

Over recent days, I secretly furnished her with paper and chalks. She studied the rudiments of copying with me. First, we copied my versions of her siblings, simplistic and remorseless, which was motivation enough. She has been sketching and re-sketching these wheresoever she goes, at all times of day, all over the house. Her school notebooks are adorned with gargoyle versions of her whole family— mother excluded—and the older two, I am sure, have remarked and are inwardly digesting…

* * *

Peggy I won over with my air of knowingness.

The thought of London is thrilling to her. Our acquaintance with the famous intoxicates her youthful brain. In their heyday, of course, the Earl and Lady Roxbury entertained the most celebrated in the land, but the children were small. Peggy was only ever presented and packed off to bed; she was never allowed to present a play, being a dilatory student; never allowed to converse. This has built up such individuals to an unattainable glory in her mind. I know Watchman’s scribbler friends, of course, Mayhew and Dickens and Wilkie Collins; I’ve supped with the editor of Punch, worked for Bazalgette, entertained the prince and his wife. I’ve witnessed crimes and assisted investigations. Such accomplishments tally awkwardly with being a drawing mistress, I know. I’ve merely hinted. Enough to hook young Peggy.

Peggy is dying to know life, which I do. Peggy is making plans to escape this pale northern prison; and escape’s my forte. Thus, after initial hostilities, Peggy has decided to sue for an alliance.

Peggy began by drawing. Badly.

I told her straight, it would impress me more if she tried to be civil. What at last won me over was her knowledge of life at Roxbury House. Current duties aside—you know what I mean—I am an inveterate snoop.

* * *

Two pupils conquered and willing to participate. One to go. Nico has fallen last. Nico has fallen hardest.

Nicodemus is an arrogant child. He first had a letter published in The Times at the age of fourteen. Don’t ask him, or you’ll get a lecture on it: a complaint about the nation’s rotten bread, demanding government reform and imprisonment for bakers adulterating our foodstuff. This gained him notoriety at school, amused his parents’ friends, and gave him a puffed-up notion of his own importance.

Nico liked to sit, insolently tapping the puzzle pieces into place, ignoring my lessons. He makes an affectation of reading The Times every afternoon—so late is it delivered in those remote parts—in order to express outrageous opinions. These opinions he first tries on his sisters, at mealtimes. When I began dining with the Norphans, he tried them on me too.

“These striking factory workers.” He wiped the fat from his chops in satisfaction. “They should be marched down to the sea and shot. Don’t you think, Miss Molly, my dear?”

Kitty stayed silent.

Peggy didn’t dare challenge Nico’s politics.

“I’m not your dear,” I said. “And I’m afraid your views seem somewhat foolish.”

Nico huffed. “The strikers are the fools.”

I continued with my lunch. “Girls, what do you imagine the strikers want? No, first: what do their bosses want?”

“Money.” Peggy was keen to earn my favour. “Profit. That’s what Fa wants. Production increased, profit doubled.”

“And shooting the workers.” I caught Nico scowling at us. “What will that achieve?”

Kitty was round-eyed. “Who would work Fa’s machines?”

“Production stymied,” Peggy declared, like a newspaper hawker. “Profit slashed.”

“Perhaps the bosses,” I teased, “will work the machines themselves.”

Nico could not resist. “There are workers all over the Continent who’d gladly take the jobs these strikers complain of, for half the wage.”

“Oh, yes.” I nodded, raising an eyebrow to Peggy.

She couldn’t resist. “You mean those immigrant workers you were complaining of last week.”

“Telling us to deport them,” Kitty agreed.

“Because they keep blowing up factories.”

Nico’s face was turning scarlet. “Yielding to ridiculous demands only encourages more strikes.”

“You’re welcome to your opinion,” I replied.

“But?”

I grinned. “You think activists naive, but your thoughts lead to bad decisions in the long term.”

“How so?”

“Grant an extra shilling, they go back to work. Safe workplace, you boost their confidence. Fewer accidents. Fewer illnesses. A sense of purpose. Collaboration. Willingness to meet deadlines. All for an extra shilling.”

“Cheap, I’d say,” chimed in Kitty obligingly.

Nico regarded me with loathing. “You’re utterly village.”

“Meaning what?” I laughed.

He drew himself up to his full height. “Not of the House.”

“Oxford slang,” Peggy translated, with a snort. “He got it from Wilfred.”

“Christchurch College is the House.” Nico was pleased with his knowledge. “Anything else is village. That is: of the lower echelons, pitiful.”

“I see.” I poured myself a glass of wine, particularly enjoyable as Nico is not allowed it.

Peggy tutted. “A rather snobbish expression.”

“For a snobbish boy,” Kitty crowed.

I couldn’t help smiling. “This debate is more robust than you are used to in school.”

“I’m head of the debating society, I’ll have you know.”

I blinked. “Oh dear.”

“You’re not head,” said Peggy, “you’re treasurer. But you’ll probably steal Miss Molly’s logic to become head.”

OF THE OLD EARL, PART THE THIRD [MOLLY]

WATCHMAN, YOU SHRINKING LILLY LAW,
NEARER TO MEETING EARL.
MOLLY

Dear Miss V,

I will confess, I had expected to be introduced formally, before I started teaching. I said as much to Birtle this morning.

“When will the earl himself interview me?”

“Interview?” Birtle stared. “You? The earl employs you to occupy his children’s time, not his own.”

“He keeps his distance, doesn’t he?”

“He doesn’t suffer fools gladly.” Birtle enjoyed his insult. “And why ever should he?”

I could not answer. If I suggested he ought to check I’m a suitable tutor for his brood, that might prompt suspicions that I ain’t, suspicions Birtle clearly harbours already. “Only that is how I have previously been employed. In the south.”

“In the south?” Birtle made no attempt to conceal his mirth, as any London butler with a semblance of manners might. He turned and walked away, muttering. “In the south, she says.”

MYSTERIES [LAWLESS]

JO TWO CHE. We racked our brains in search of the solution to the mystery. We studied the metal shard. We made notes, compared copious ideas.

“We might find,” I suggested, “a blacksmith called John Twomey in Cheshire.”

Jeffcoat shook his head. “More likely, a Josiah living at a Number Two Cheyne Walk.”

“Or in Chester-le-Street.”

* * *

We ransacked the Yard’s list of criminals. Nothing.

It could refer to the second job done by a specific chemist.

Or the Book of Job, Chapter II, the verse where God shows off to Satan about his servant Job who escheweth evil.

The transpositions, permutations, peregrinations were endless.

Solutions? Solutions we could not find.

* * *

I noted another coincidence that week: a fire at the East India docks, where we had found that forgotten body. Jeffcoat went along to investigate, but arson was frequent enough. When goods from the Indies proved unpopular, they redeemed the expense by burning them and claiming the sum insured.

The harbour master’s office was burnt down, he told me, along with a building for shipping records. It was unnerving. “Still, what does it matter? We’ve taken copies of everything. Besides, the chances of finding out who it was were astronomical.”

I nodded. “You’ve given up hope?”

He laughed. “Haven’t you?”

“Well, I may have.” I opened my palms. “But Miss Villiers is very persistent.”

* * *

Simpson’s final report on the body was equally unsatisfactory. Sent, after typical delay, it featured his typical bombast. Still, noting our threats, he was more conclusive than usual.

He could not rule out foul play, but the tubercular decay suggested the most likely cause of death. Advanced consumption often causes paroxysms; the disjointed shoulder might be evidence of this, or of an impact. Equally there was malnutrition, likely as not due to tuberculosis.

Amid the indiscriminate matter within the tarpaulin, Simpson was surprised to find minimal signs of discharge from the orifices. There were, however, soap traces soaked into the tarpaulin. This might suggest the body was deceased some time before being wrapped, and carefully cleaned at the last, as if for burial. Traces of arsenic lingered on the skin fragments, but no more than arsenical soap would leave. Close examination of these fragments suggested skin fair and freckled, the type that often uses the damnable stuff. Simpson hazarded that death took place in the winter, at sea: in sweaty port towns there are so many species to prey on a cadaver. If insects had got to it, there would be no trace of soft tissue left; but the tarpaulin was wrapped tight, and the body showed only signs of self-destruction (that is, a kind of fermentation, or digestion by its own bacteria).

Yet he had come up with a suggestion as to how long ago the man died. The basket was made of corn husks and armature of cane: an African doctor of his acquaintance recognised the materials. How lucky we were that he was a university man! By examining the growth of mould inside the basket, he declared the man dead at least four years, and more likely five.

Five years. We had searched through the Great Britain’s records only three. Wasted effort. How far back should we have gone? How can you excavate the past? Too late now. The fire at the docks saved us that trouble.

* * *

I showed Simpson’s report to Miss Villiers. “Consumption, most like. He died on board, was cleaned and wrapped for burial at sea.”

“But they were in haste.” She frowned. “Acting furtively. At night, perhaps. They wouldn’t know the lifeboat was hanging there.”

I could picture it. In the darkness, they roll the body over the edge and duck away, not knowing they have tumbled him into the lifeboat. “Simpson’s revised the date of the death.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m to read more records, am I?”

I sighed. “How many immigrants have died trying to get here, to the promised land? Some poor soul died far from home. Does his name matter?”

“But this isn’t some lonely stowaway.” She wrinkled her nose in thought. “Somebody was with him. Cared for him. And then—”

“And then dumped him overboard, unreported. Anyway, no further researches possible.” I told her about the fire at the docks.

“Oh, but Antony Gibbs Shipping has everything copied in their office on Oxford Street.”

I smiled. “Nothing to be gained, I think. It’ll remain a mystery.”

Ruth didn’t like that at all. “Let me know if you change your mind. I can’t bear a mystery unsolved.”

DR FOULD’S ARSENICAL SOAP [ENGLISHWOMAN’S DOMESTIC MAGAZINE]

Dear Dr Fould,
I adore Fould’s Arsenical Soap, and shall be devoted to it till the day I die.

Respectable citizens must shine with morality from every pore. In my youth, I suffered diabolical disfigurements: blotches, blemishes, freckles, pimples and pustulance. To overcome these handicaps, I determined to eradicate dirt.

Oh, the trials I endured, with endless carbolics and caustics, each slogan more lurid than the next. My skin became as tough as the dragon’s hide, as leporous as Job’s. Until, at length, I discovered your patent soap. Ah, the aromatic joy. I pronounce Fould’s Arsenical Soap the only efficacious remedy.

Yours, forever indebted,
Mrs AH Brown and family,
New Malden

Warranted to give satisfaction or money refunded. Also available: Fould’s Arsenic Complexion Wafers, and Fould’s Medicated Complexion Soap.

Beware of imitators. 2s 6d per cake.

Not to be used with prussic acid.

LODESTAR COMETH [MOLLY]

WATCHMAN,
ROXY’S NO. 2, LODESTAR,
AN AFTERNOONIFIED COVE
WORTH WATCHING.
MOLLY

Dear Miss V,

Cometh the hour, cometh Mr Lodestar, of whom I have heard so much.

I was teaching above—the Norphans practising their caricatures—when I heard a fashionable fleet-wheeled phaeton rumbling up the driveway. In its wake rode Jem.

Through the broad art room windows, I viewed the vehicle sweep wildly round the rockery. With careless ease, the driver called the horses to stop square in front of the grand entrance, below my nose. Removing his hat, he wiped his brow languidly, and descended as if he owned the whole kingdom. He snapped his fingers. There was no arrogance in it, just efficiency: time of the essence; work to be done. Jem, appealingly disarrayed, leapt down to tend the horses, but the new arrival took all our interest.

“Who is this,” I said, “in the courtyard?”

The girls set their scrawls aside and crowded round, for they loved a distraction.

“Oh, that,” said Kitty. “That’ll be Lodestar.”

“Fa’s devilish right-hand man, you know.” Nico declined to look up from his composition. “Who steals all his blasted time from us.”

“And his interest and his affections,” said Peggy. “A deadly important fellow.”

I glanced at Peggy’s page and gave some spurious advice on delineation, so as not to appear too interested. “Lodestar,” I mused. “Strange name.”

“Strange chap,” said Nico. “African. Odd manners. Big opinion of himself.”

“And so he should have,” Peggy said. “He runs the company now.”

“Gadsbudlikins, Peg,” said Nico. “He does not. Fa runs the company.”

“And relies upon Nathan Lodestar to redeem all his gaffes.” Peggy’s eyes flashed. To rile Nico, she said to me, “He’ll doubtless run the whole show, soon enough. A job that should have been Wilfred’s, if he had a modicum of aptitude, or Nico’s.”

“I like that.” Nico held up his sketch: Peggy, in the form of a monkey.

Peggy beat her fists against his shoulder. “You vinomadified lickspittle.”

He took no notice, swiftly adding a setting to the image: the pneumatic railway connecting the house with the scientific glasshouses, down which, giving chase to the monkey, was Lodestar.

Peggy wailed. Ah, the joys of siblinghood.

* * *

“Birtle,” said Lodestar. “Good day.”

The children dragged me from our lessons to the landing on the stairs, where we cowered to witness the hurricane that was Lodestar’s arrival.

Birtle just opened the grand entrance in time. Lodestar tossed him his coat. He stretched, catlike, to shake off the journey. His dark brow lightened, flashing with mirth, to see Skirtle descend all aflutter from her housekeeper’s domain.

“O-ho, there, Skirtle, what fine health your complexion speaks of, as the spring days grow warmer.”

She looked flustered. “Sir.”

“Now, I am only passing through, like the camel through the eye of the needle. This evening I must away, as soon as I have talked to his Lordship. There is business to be done seeing off our wily competitors in the west, the vile Whitworths—” Upon pronouncing the name, he pretended to spit: the feigned impoliteness drew howls from Skirtle and a wry smile even from Birtle. “During these meagre hours, I propose that you twice feed me, as I tire of London fodder, that my shirts be sent down to me starched, for the Hounds Club laundress is a sluggard, and that Jem clean my phaeton and refresh the horses. They brought me swift from town, skipping that botheration with the branch line, and I would hence with the same pair.”

“Very well, sir.” Skirtle attempted a curtsey, quite unlike herself, as if the Great Eastern were to trying to dock in a canal lock. “Will you be visiting—” she lowered her voice, “—the glasshouses, sir?”

“Why, yes.” He smiled darkly. “Send lunch to me there, will you? I’ll be in my office, experimenting with this new material. Then to the slate quarry. We should be blasting by two. I know you hate the noise, Skirtle, but the stables must have roofs. What else?”

Birtle stepped forward. I’d rarely seen him and Skirtle in the same room; they go to lengths not to tread on each other’s domains. But the whirl of Lodestar’s arrival in his phaeton had set the household spinning.

“Sir?” said Birtle, as broad an offer as he could make.

Lodestar sized him up. The children bristled with excitement, and Kitty nudged me to watch closely. Lodestar pursed his lips, full and red. His waistcoat fell trim from broad shoulders. His dark locks are too long for a gentleman, but somehow fit this wild uncompromising chap, as if to suggest he plays fast with the rules of business, and his brooding gaze brooks no opposition to the march of progress. He leaned toward Birtle, thinking, and placed a finger on the butler’s midriff. It was a gesture outside decorum, somehow typical of Lodestar’s style. Yes, that’s it. Lodestar is outside decorum. A visitor from another realm, with alien manners and alien demands. Some might thus be criticised, but he is cherished for it. A natural zest oozes from him, lighting up our visages, as we scurry to do his bidding. “Have you the best paper? And the Indian ink? Good man.” The tiny tap that Lodestar gave Birtle’s midriff many would not have noticed; but I am a devotee of close-up magic, and I saw him palm the coin into his fingers and thence into Birtle’s waistcoat pocket. A considerable tip—though the tippee knew nothing about it. He would discover it later, and bless Lodestar’s liberality.

Lodestar is plainly pleased with Birtle, whom he has bewitched exactly as I have failed to. Birtle renders him special service, which he affords to no other household members, nor any of the visitors to Roxbury House. Nobody treats Birtle with such freedom; even Roxbury is reverential to the gloomy butler. Yet Lodestar’s mysterious magic needed no gasp from its audience; it just worked.

I decided I ought to be presented to this fellow, such an important cog in the Roxbury machine. I shooed the children away. (They looked on, egging me on through the banisters.) I descended, as if by happenstance, to the great hall. Birtle did not present me; Skirtle did not notice me. I was on the point of coughing for attention, when Lodestar sensed me behind.

He bestowed that dazzling smile upon me. “Why, look ahoy!”

I felt a peculiar quiver run through me.

“You are no chambermaid, nor housemaid, I warrant. But maid you are, and made to feel welcome, I hope.” He extended his hand, which I took, uncertainly, having never been introduced in my new station in life. This chicanery of etiquette I find harder than circumnavigating Hyde Park Corner on a highly strung pony dragging a dozen milk churns. With the barest effort, he raised my hand to his lips. “Enchanted, mademoiselle.”

Birtle, as if sprung from a spell, came to his senses. “Mademoiselle Molly, sir. I mean, Miss Molly, the children’s latest drawing mistress,” he said, as if I would not last the month. “May I present Mr Nathaniel Lodestar?”

Lodestar wafted him aside. “Nathan. Please call me Nathan. If we be members of the same household, I hate to stand on ceremony. Don’t you?”

I opened my mouth, thinking this one of those questions not requiring an answer, bit my lip, looked up at him—he was a foot and half taller than me, a dazzling animal, his shoulders twice as broad—and heard myself blurt out the following balderdash:

“Ceremonials, sir, whether funerals or matrimonials, are a frippery of society I’d rather see tossed in the sea, from Battersea to the Southern Sea. Mercy me.” I put my hand to my mouth. “My apology, I prithee, for my parlyaree spree.”

I blushed so bad it gave me cheekache.

Skirtle giggled.

Birtle looked away.

On the stairs, the Norphans Practickly held their breath. Nico stared thunderously, Peggy was amused, and Kitty mortified on my behalf.

Lodestar’s eyebrows rose, arching over his brown, brown eyes. He smiled. “I feel exactly the same, Miss Molly. Au revoir.” And he swept from the room, scattering Skirtle and Birtle in his wake.

Mid-afternoon, I heard the explosions in the slate quarry; beyond that, we heard and saw no more of him.

* * *

Lodestar flew in like a comet blazing its trail across an empty sky.

Lodestar’s appearance has lit a fuse. The busy world is ignited by forces far afield. The explosives that shape dockyards and shake mines must be prepared somewhere. Where better than England’s forgotten backwaters? We hear of Parliament placating the rest of the country: oh, we’re raising capital for the shires; ah, we’re powering the north, sending the fruits of Empire for the yokels to lavish their dreary hours upon, spinning, weaving, looming, those things that northern folk still know, while we southern swells are too modern for drudgery, so they do the work, which we invest with fashionable value.

Before Lodestar, I thought Roxbury House a haven of tranquillity, nestled in these wastelands of the north, far from the city’s bustle (which I considered real life). Henceforth I shall seek interconnections north and south, rich and poor, straight and circuitous.