Credulous Days
[Penny Satirical, a London gazette]

“Boom. Bang.”

Louis Napoleon III clicks his fingers and lo, there springs forth a dark figure, bounding across the roofs of London: Spring-Heeled Jacques.

“Danger. Beware. Fire!”

Will he spout fire over England’s defences? Eat our navy for breakfast? Neither Spring-Heeled Jacques, nor his master Louis, adhere to a plan. He is conjured up to disturb us, trouble our dreams, and drive us deranged—as he drove certain ladies of Barnes mad back in the credulous thirties.

“Bombs! Explosives! Run!”

Are you laughing? Those days of credulity have returned. We are to believe not that some roof-leaping monster has returned, but that the French are hatching gunpowder plots on every street corner. South London might as well be Lyon or Lourdes, it is so filled with Frenchies, foreigners, and folderol-frothers. Expel all émigrés. Throw them in the Thames, before these Frogs kiss our lovelorn princesses, else trouble will be spawned.

CONSTANT VIGILANCE: GUERNSEY [LAWLESS]

The trouble with the Guernsey explosion was that nobody could say exactly what had happened. Nobody saw it, nobody was hurt. Was it intended to kill passers-by? Was it aimed at Victor Hugo, novelist in exile from Napoleon’s Paris?

We could not discover for sure. Yet the information we gathered from that satchel under the sea wall changed everything.

Early evening, August 8, a boom was heard all over St Peter Port, principal town of the island of Guernsey. Some reported a flash, some a cracking sound. The sea wall was damaged by a strange blast below Hauteville, Hugo’s house. The news was wired direct to Scotland Yard.

I caught the late train to Portsmouth. Awaiting the ferry, I spent the early hours of the morning talking with Ellie, a barmaid at the Fortitude Tap. I asked her what sights were worth seeing in Portsmouth. She poured me a pint of Long’s Stout.

It was a one-sided conversation, though I was glad of the company. She told of her fourteen children. With the navy’s new ironclads being built up north, her husband’s hours at the dockyard were so reduced she had to support them all.

* * *

We docked at St Peter Port at lunchtime. Inspector De Nesle, chief of police, insisted on visiting a restaurant before he took me back to the station. He filled me in over a repast of garlic and shellfish, his report as copious as the French wine, and likewise accented.

“That is the hour when Monsieur Hugo normally takes his promenade. The attack was aimed at him, it is sure.” He crossed himself. “Grâce à Dieu, our literary lion was dining at Sausmarez Manor. How I see it, the traitor sets the explosives. He is disturbed. In his incompetence, he sets off the blast. He escapes with his life, worse luck. He flees.”

Nobody was seen departing the scene. Nobody was injured. But something was found near the rubble. Under a jacket of deplorable condition—how activists cultivate this deadbeat image—lay an old satchel, full of documents.

What an array: letters, telegrams, maps, from the 1780s to a few weeks ago. Beyond belief, beyond our fears: orders, munitions, shipping military and mercantile, diagrams. One document bore dates for the coming year; other annotations ran to the end of the century. And all in French.

Having riffled through the papers, De Nesle had taken a decision. “I have invited Monsieur Hugo to be our police translator. The fee will be nominal, but I have assured him the gratitude of the British nation.”

* * *

Guernsey is a mess of contradictions. Many of the denizens are French, French-descended, and French-speaking. They love French food, French cheese, French wine.

On the other hand, so close to this warlike neighbour, they are xenophobes. They will demand that Westminster invade Normandy at the drop of a pin. This bomb was just such an occasion, and De Nesle hoped their parliament would kick up a stink about it.

“This is military information,” I said, “and you’ll show it to nobody.” I would take the papers back to the mainland. I excoriated him for the liberty of summoning Hugo. “In the current climate, given the papers’ nature, I’m astonished you’ve whispered a word to anyone. The Royal Commission on defence is reconvening this week. I may summon you in front of them, and see how you like that.”

“In our bailiwick, Monsieur Scotland, British bureaucracy feels far distant. Your convoluted cogs turn too slow. History has shown us we must be our own protection. Constant vigilance. This is our only safety.” De Nesle gave a continental snort. “Besides, I am answerable not to your parliament, but to my own, blast you au diable.”

I paid for lunch, as amends for my outburst, eager to see this satchel. “But why Monsieur Hugo? Have you not French speakers among your trusted comrades?”

“But of course,” he said. His own French was fluent; he was entirely capable of reading it himself. He put his arm around my shoulder, his manner uncomfortably informal. “Certain abbreviations are opaque to me. Slang. Military jargon.” He shrugged. “Besides, who writes as well as Monsieur Hugo?”

* * *

At the station, Hugo was at work in the inner room, sitting at the chief’s own desk. De Nesle’s chest puffed with pride, as if a work of genius were being composed before our eyes. “The translation will be superb. You have read Les Misérables?”

“De Nesle, can we rely on Hugo’s confidentiality? Given that he is, in fact, French.”

De Nesle looked puzzled.

I did not spell it out: if Hugo communicated military secrets to French colleagues on high, any advantage this discovery offered was lost; De Nesle was like an archaeologist, unaware his diggers might sell off the treasures he sought. “Never mind.”

“Bof! You know nothing of Monsieur Hugo’s history.” He spoke of Hugo’s protests upon Louis Napoleon’s grisly transition from elected premier to soi-disant emperor; of Hugo’s exile from France and loyalty to Guernsey.

Ignoring his prattlings, I watched Hugo at work. The great author was absorbed, scanning, sifting, and annotating: getting the measure of his task.

I knocked and went in, shutting De Nesle out. I introduced myself brusquely.

“Thank heaven you have come.” Hugo dragged his attention from the papers, like an opium addict emerging from the swoon. He was ashen-faced, and he spoke beautiful English, gravelly with cigar smoke. “The things I must show you, Sergeant. The historic plots of De Béville and De Guines are reignited: the Portsmouth Plan. You must know of it?”

He unfolded an extraordinary map of the Channel.

“If this only were fiction, one would make of it a beautiful story. Such a beautiful story! It would take London by storm.” He put his hand to his brow, every inch the Shakespearean hero, and fixed me with a piercing eye. “But it is no fiction. This makes the effort of 1779 seem the prank of the schoolboy.”

I tore my eyes from him to study the map: the English Channel was annotated thickly, numbered arrows pointing ashore either side of Portsmouth, then sweeping round, all the way to the naval dockyards, the mainstay of our sea power, the heart of our empire.

Inscribed above, the puzzling phrase: UN GIBRALTAR FRANÇAIS

REPERCUSSIONS [LAWLESS]

“Military intelligence?” Miss Villiers said. We were walking over Waterloo Bridge, and in the dazzling sunlight I could not gauge her expression. “Sounds unlikely.”

I laughed. For six weeks now I had been working on matters of national importance. We would meet at Waterloo Station. I accompanied her into town, where she was attending courses and meetings and job interviews, ever since losing her librarian post at the British Museum. We had a habit of discussing my work. She was ever intrigued by puzzles; our early acquaintance was spent cracking codes in Museum Street tearooms.

On my return from Guernsey, she sensed my anxiety—and my reticence.

“I understand.” She looked askance. “A woman, of course, cannot be trusted.”

Useless to insist that I was forbidden to trust anybody but Jeffcoat. Useless to deny it was anything to do with her being a woman.

* * *

We were already buried in paperwork. Jeffcoat chased round, gleaning facts, figures and names from anyone near the Erith disaster; I the same with Camden, quizzing the train companies and the costermonger’s donkey’s second cousin. While I sifted this mountain of minutiae, the Royal Commission awaited our report. After my days in Guernsey, we were further behind than ever. The satchel dossier was overwhelming, in volume and gravity.

I racked my brains for a solution. I went to Ripon. I confessed that we could not cover all the material; and I needed to check Hugo’s work. Would he accept my employing a translator I had trusted with confidential documents in the past?

Ripon stroked his beard. “Trust him with your life, would you?”

“I’d trust her to the ends of the earth, sir.”

He noted my pronoun with a raised brow. “If I were to vet every single secretary or bookbinder or mapmaker who worked for our department, Lawless, we would still be fighting the Hundred Years’ War. The reason you are working for us—and working well—is that we trust your judgement.”

* * *

The next day, as Miss Villiers and I crossed the river, I briefly feigned further qualms over sharing military intelligence, but I could not wait to hear her thoughts. By the time we reached the Strand, I had offered her the job. I apprised her of the task, its scope and gravity.

She gave a whoop. “I shall put off my return to the country. I must go to an interview just now. But I could join you afterwards, if that’s appropriate?” She bit her lip.

“I’ll be at Scotland Yard. Tell them at the desk I’m expecting you.”

She ended up staying several nights at her aunt’s club, at the expense of the Home Office. We discussed the papers over dinner. My admiration for Miss Villiers’ intellect grew with every day we worked together. She had such a grasp of perspective. One moment she was gauging our whole strategy, the next dealing with the subtleties of translation.

The deadline was impossible; the work was troubling; but I loved these sunlit days, every moment, and so, I think, did she.

ROYAL COMMISSION [LAWLESS]

Miss Villiers pronounced Hugo’s translation accurate. She picked up a dozen details he had missed in his haste. Like him, she grasped at once the intent of this Portsmouth Plan.

Armed with these discoveries, I went to the Royal Commission with a heavy heart, but determined. I had to sway the politicians. We had to resume at once the network of Portsmouth forts. These coastal fortifications, begun in 1860, had been delayed by continual debates and amendments. Typical that the press dubbed them Palmerston’s Follies, when it was the press who bayed for protection against the French; but then newspapers denounce spending in peacetime, only to jeer at government imprudence when war looms.

Huge responsibility fell upon Roxbury Industries. Thrust back into the spotlight, they must arm the Solent forts against attack: they would not only make the artillery, but complete the forts in the middle of the sea, relying on Roxbury hydraulic pumps never used mid-ocean. On my way from Portsmouth to Guernsey, I had passed the incipient works, like Saxon forts rising amid the glistering waves. Now the forts would be completed with bricks from his Loth Brickworks, the papers fell over themselves to lament Roxbury’s ill-treatment during that hiatus in the fifties, and canonise his return to national favour.

As soon as Miss Villiers had gathered the implications, she wrote to Molly. She frequently wrote to Molly, lest the correspondence seem one-sided. She did not encode her letters, lest that attract suspicion as Molly perused them over breakfast, but Ruth orchestrated the beginning of lines with acrostic messages. Using this subterfuge, we refined Molly’s mission.

Focus on Roxbury’s state of mind. Could we rely on him, on his wellbeing and health? Did he retain oversight of his business? Or was his withdrawal from London society the mark of some deeper malaise?

HALCYON DAYS [LAWLESS]

The Norphans Practickly were always at extremes. They laughed, they wept. Nico leapt for the moon because of an obscure judgement in the House of Lords and wrote scathing letters for upwards of a week. Peggy was downcast that anti- French sentiment might frustrate her escape plan crossing into Calais. Kitty won their brilliant game: “How Long Can You Hide Silently in a Box?” Poor girl missed a day’s lessons, and meals. The others admitted they never went near their boxes.

“After such treatment,” Kitty declared, “by those who profess to love me best, I henceforth dedicate myself to evil.”

* * *

The Norphans expressed everything in superlatives. Their emotions were tumultuous as the crags that overhung the valley.

The earl too, Molly gathered from his visage, was subject to extremes of sentiment. Some days, with new contraptions delivered from distant manufactories, the sun beamed from his brow. More often, the shadow of depression dogged his features, though he spoke not of it.

Molly portrayed these as halcyon days. She taught, or feigned to teach. The Norphans’ creative flair outdid her Oddbody Theatricals, for they could write plays, stage operas, hang exhibits, for which Roxbury House was the perfect venue. Molly loved it all, with a wild abandon—even as she failed to be loved.

Let me expand: from her first letter, we knew she had taken a fancy to Jem. She soon learnt he had a sweetheart in the village. She waited to get the measure of her rival. Did she figure her city charms would win him over in the end?

The royal road to unhappiness lies in urging the world to do one’s bidding, and complaining when it does not. Molly, raised among the disempowered, knew this. She had patience. She knew how to suggest and divert. In this lay her power.

* * *

Lodestar, with his dramatic look and his unfettered energies, passed through again. He inspired devotion from Birtle, commotion from Skirtle, gawping from the Norphans, and clockwork efficacy among the glasshouse scientists.

They would deliver to him any number of items, with proofs, measurements and projections. Elsewise they seemed a disorganised shower, heads in the clouds, devising and imagining and inventing. For Lodestar, however, they met deadlines, completed documents, delivered devices to order, ahead of schedule—or else they were thrown out.

Oh yes, Lodestar dismissed staff with alarming regularity. To work at Roxbury was the peak of the engineering mountain. Lodestar had no time for shirkers and refreshed the staff regularly. Trainees were always arriving, fresh from laboratories, universities and botanical gardens around the kingdom.

New animals kept arriving at the menagerie. Jem would often stay overnight, tending the latest sickly arrival. His special friend, the orang-utan, was often poorly; he attended her on evenings when she couldn’t keep from crying for whatever mysterious sorrow.

Chemicals were concocted, experiments framed, devices tested. Blasting was heard from the slate quarry over the hill. The roof of the old stables was swiftly replaced with fresh slates, converting it to staff quarters; but the blasts continued.

As far as Molly could report, Roxbury Industries was thriving.

* * *

Molly was at that age: her imagination ready for love, bold but uncertain. She yet knew not the havoc her blossoming youth might kindle.

Was she deserving of love? Oh, she was, she surely was, with her wicked tongue and handsome verve. Jem was yet to be swayed; but in her longing for Jem, was she blind to young Nico falling for her?

But we knew nothing of that, until Miss Villiers’ visit.

As she settled, Molly began to describe Roxbury in more detail. The house she explored, under Skirtle’s benign guidance: the earl’s enigmatic laboratory atop Roxbury’s central tower; studies, libraries, morning rooms; the kitchens’ gurgling innards, hydraulic revolving spit and cauldron that washed dishes. The basement furnace, burning wood instead of coal. This not only provided hot water, but heated sauna, Turkish baths, and hydro-therapeutic appliances night and day; without need for fireplaces, it heated the whole house, through pipes that rose through its interstices, giving on to apertures secreted in every doorway.

The wild hillsides she explored herself. The clambering rockery. The glasshouses and menagerie glinting inscrutably down below, like an inverse reflection of the house. Miles of carriage drives, ten thousand trees buffeted by summer rains. Thimbleton Reservoir on the hills above. Burnfoot Gorge. And the Pump House, where she liked to lurk, looking back at the house across the gorge, listening to the village church bell as it tolled the quarter hour.

Molly asked Jem to explain the grounds’ complexities, a canny way to spend some time in his company. He showed her how the reservoirs above were dammed above the Burnfoot Falls. As well as siphoning the waters off into the house, the stream was channelled on to a waterwheel at the Pump House, driving an industrial piston: this automated power was distributed through ingenious gears and cables to drive woodsaws, the kitchen spit, and the dumb waiter. There was no limit to the machines it might run, saving on manpower and steam engines. All through harnessing hydraulic power; no electricity required.

But there was electricity too.

* * *

Molly loved the buzzers that sounded around the house.

“Annunciators.” Birtle was disdainful of innovations. “Not blasted buzzers.”

She studied the wiring in fascination. When someone pressed a button (say, Roxbury, in his laboratory), the electrical circuit, powered by a battery, was completed. A coil on the servants’ board was thus magnetised, pulling a tiny metal arm on to the bell: bing. That movement broke the circuit, releasing the arm, which completed the circuit, and the arm struck again: bing. Released, struck again, fifty times in a second: buzz, buzz.

Jem showed how this electricity was generated: the old millhouse, lower down the Burnfoot Stream, was reinvented as the Pump House, powering the scientific quarter. Before its antique walls stood a shiny new turbine, yet under development; behind it, discarded contraptions. Beside these, stacked wooden crates, plated with glass sides and full of strange chemicals: a poetic history of batteries, from Daniell cells and voltaic piles, through Grove cells, Poggendorff cells, gravity cells, and the mighty Leyden jars, to the latest Siemens prototypes, ready to be tested; all charged by the flow of water, modulated by Roxbury’s system of levers, rails, dams, and outlets. Jem boasted it was a system more powerful than steam engines, more elegant than clocks. And he didn’t understand it.

When Jem showed her round the glasshouses, she shared his company with the orang-utan. Staying clear of the inner quadrangle of laboratories, they saw trees from Brazil and fruits from Bali, geckos from the Galapagos and monkeys from Mauritius. Jem liked Molly to see the animals he was nursing back to health. For example, the strange hare Molly had seen on her first arrival was in fact a Patagonian mara, thriving now in this chilly domain and a favourite of the orang-utan.

Why so many ailing creatures? Lady Roxbury had protested it was wrong to kidnap wild beasts from their native lands. So the earl collected his menagerie from unwanted beasts already in captivity. This had the benefit of making the collection academically unique: zoologists and biologists nationwide signed up to spend a term examining these oddballs. Besides, Jem hadn’t much to do down the stables. The Roxburys weren’t hunting types, and had so few visitors these days. Jem had an inclination toward these sick and lonely creatures. She often saw him petting the mara and keeping the orang-utan company.

Where was the heart of this Arcadia? Jem spoke little of Lodestar; it was to the earl himself that he paid obeisance. Was it Roxbury pushing these levers, flicking switches, and ever enlarging his designs to bend the wildness of nature to his technological will?

ADAPTATIONS [LAWLESS]

After Guernsey, with the Royal Commission’s decision on the forts, Roxbury Industries was paramount. Alongside our labours on the Guernsey dossier, Miss Villiers and I devoted time to Molly every week. I lamented my slipshod approach to Molly’s correspondence. We pored over her missives as they arrived.

Now that Miss Villiers was approved to work beside me in Scotland Yard, her aunt’s club seemed unsuitable for discussing weighty affairs. Yet the Yard was not always conducive to thought, with everyone bleating over the explosions, and what progress we’d made, and where would the next attack come. To avoid this scrutiny, I sometimes took a private room at the Rising Sun, the Yard’s nearest hostelry. It was quiet and cheap, if a little inappropriate, but it brought a lovely intimacy to our work; Miss Villiers seemed determined to bring Revelations of a Lady Detective from the world of fiction into real life.

She decoded Molly’s bulletin to me: all well and good. But after reading of melancholic explorations, she sighed. “Do you think our poor spy is struggling?”

I did not. As Miss Villiers explained to me what I was failing to read, I had to call for a fresh pot of tea. Ruth did not think Molly was hiding anything, just that her tendency towards novelistic flair disguised her unease. “I should visit Molly, and soon.” She wrote to Roxbury, there and then. She explained that she was travelling to Edinburgh, and asked if she might stop in for a visit.

I read over what she had written. “Edinburgh, eh?”

She shrugged and explained no further, and I knew better than to press her.

OF THE OLD EARL, PART THE FOURTH [MOLLY]

WATCHMAN,

EARL BEFRIENDED.

MOLLY

Dear Miss V,

“I suppose we ought to have a chat,” said the Earl of Roxbury. He stumbled across me one morning as I was standing in the hall, pondering the old murals they’d uncovered during the renovations of the great hall.

“I suppose we ought, Your Lordship.”

The earl’s face was pinched and white. More drawn than I remembered him, back in London, at the Select Committee hearings. Look as I might, I could not see that he wore any mark of mourning, as the children did.

“Stuff and balderdash, young lady. Don’t bother with that Your Lordship nonsense, not here.”

“Right-o.” I hesitated. “Your earl-y-ness.”

He grinned. “I would take it as the most enormous compliment if you treated Roxbury House as your own house. No standing on ceremony. Slouch around. Help yourself and that.”

I liked this familiarity. There was a northern flair to his intonation, making his speech ever so pleasant. I could listen to that voice all day, as pleasant as a stream burbling over rocks. I eyed him closely. “I won’t treat it quite as my own home, sir, for you haven’t seen my stablemates, troughers of the messiest kind, and terrible hoarders too, for they think that a found object may someday be the key to the kingdom of heaven, though it lie unused in a cupboard for a decade.”

He laughed. “I am a terrible hoarder too.”

“I doubt that.” I frowned. “Do you mean those contraptions in the Pump House?”

“Wait till you see the dreadful accumulation of pistons and levers and tubes I have in the scientific quarter. Not to mention the electrical gadgets in my laboratory. Oh, give me a battery and a copper coil, and I shall squirrel it away. But then I should not be here if I did not store away the good things of life up here.” He tapped his head. “Nor should this house.”

He explained. He had visited these same crags as a child. He spent many an hour gazing at the Burnfoot Gorge, where I so loved to ramble. That established his lifelong devotion to energy and power, especially the untold powers of water. When he made his fortune, from hydraulic engines, he considered no other location for his lordly retreat. Today, this was the source of the invention that ever bubbled through the house.

“Anyway, forget Your Lordship. Call me Roxbury, why don’t you, or something along those lines.”

“Very well, Mr Roxy.” I never could resist eliding a syllable. “I must go about my lessons, or your children will stay savage and untaught.”

“Can’t have that.” He smiled. “I’m delighted you’re offering them so much.”

I sensed he did not mean my painting skills.

“I believe you have much to teach all of us, young lady. I’ve seen your skills at work.” By which he meant not just my drawing at the Select Committee, but the sleight of hand with which I demonstrated subterfuges to the court. “I give you permission to instruct my lot in whatsoever subjects you choose!” He touched me lightly on the arm, as if we were old friends. Then he walked off in a direction quite the opposite to where he had been headed.

Only as I turned to go up to my lessons did I sense eyes upon me.

There, in the shadows of the butler’s pantry, lurked Birtle, eyeing me as if I was a traitor.

REINTERPRETING MOLLY [LAWLESS]

Thus did Molly win free rein over the three Roxbury children. The Norphans Practickly were practically begging her to teach them more anyway, beyond their drawing lessons. Accepting that caricatures could not contain their mischief, Molly consented. By early August, they had developed a week-long roster of lessons:

—juggling

—puppetry

—prestidigitation

—ventriloquism

—slang, mainly argot and backslang, for conducting secret dialogues under the noses of straight people (Birtle, Skirtle and their father), requisite to any kind of secret society

—and twenty subjects improvised on the job, covering whatever Molly considered a reasonable addition to a young person’s education.

She entertained them royally. And this led to Molly dining at the earl’s table.

* * *

Miss Villiers and I loved the notion of our street urchin instilling her irrepressible verve into this aristocratic brood. Molly gave them more fun in those eight weeks than throughout the grind of their private (and expensive) education.

They conjugated parlyaree to the penny whistle. They learned the bite of satire, the shiver of gothic horror, the grandeur of tragedy. They imagined themselves Cleopatras, Boadiceas and Joan of Arcs, their kingdoms wrenched away and ruined. Molly was of old a devotee of theatre, museums and lectures, her memory cavernous and unpredictable.

* * *

Even Nico’s respect for Molly blossomed.

Picture Molly, at the window of the art room. The sun steals through the forest to cast dappled light on the wood panels. It gilds the page; it sets Molly’s chestnut hair aglow.

Picture, all the while, Nico sitting obstinately at the other end of the table, filling in puzzle pieces for as long as he could bear it. Then his sisters abandoned him. They asked for lessons; they loved their lessons, which Molly made more hilarious day by day.

No wonder he fell for her. (Molly was not even aware, but Ruth discerned it, between the lines.) A schoolboy crush. He had tired of playing up. He was vociferous as his sisters, but the snobbishness was gone.

* * *

Absorbed in my investigations, I never considered how draining her lessons must be. Molly was used to coming and going. She preferred to rely on her own wit. To have responsive pupils, with wit of their own, was satisfying, once they stopped playing up and became devoted to her, but it was exhausting.

Still, once the children left for school, Molly would be quite bereft. I must warn her about that. Having never been to school, she knew nothing of the approaching school term, which would whisk her charges summarily away.

DINING DOWN [RUTH]

My dear Sergeant, or (if I may?) Campbell,

Molly had not yet been promoted to the earl’s table, when I visited.

As a friend of the family, I am considered a lady; no question but that I would dine down, with the earl. The children were obliged to join us, which inhibited their fun, as Roxbury and I get on well (despite him having been friends with my father) and sit nattering idly. The moment the children finished dessert, they asked to be excused.

Last night, I accepted this as normal. When it happened again tonight, I asked why.

“Oh,” said Kitty, “but Miss Molly is upstairs, with our sketching pads, and puzzle.”

Roxbury smiled. “Why should you hurry to her?”

“Because, Fa,” said Nico, “she is so droll.”

“Enlivening,” said Kitty.

“Whereas you, Fa,” said Peggy, “are dull as Burnfoot ditchwater.”

“Should we summon your friend?” Roxbury looked amused. “Birtwell, bring the puzzle too. We shall have a night of it.”

“Is Molly’s style appropriate?” I hesitated. “For the table?”

Molly was summoned. Placed at the end of the table, Molly ogled our assembled company as if she’d been asked to dance naked in front of the empress of Japan. You know as well as I, Molly has met princes, actors and novelists, uncowed. She has given evidence to your parliamentary select committee; at inquests, indeed.

I attempted a rescue. “What games do you play upstairs?”

Molly searched for an apposite lie.

“Why,” said Peggy, “we extemporise limericks about members of the household.”

Molly winced.

“Molly, Molly, take the floor,” Nico said. “Do one of your ones about Fa.”

Kitty clapped. “No! About Birtwell.”

Molly failed to conceal her horror.

“Gentle, now,” said Roxbury. “You derail our guest’s energies.”

“Come, children,” I said. “Why don’t you begin? Show us how you’ve been taught.”

Before Molly could stop her pupils, Nico plunged in, eyeing his sisters. “When residing at Roxbury House—”

[Kitty] “One must creep round quiet as a mouse—”

[Peggy] “Sneaking tidbits from Skirtle, tiptoeing past Birtwell—”

“Whose stare tramps one down, like a louse.” [Molly, unable to help herself.]

Applause from Roxbury, applause from me, laughter all round. Then I noticed Molly’s pained face. She was looking to the doorway, where the butler—whatever his damnable name is— stood, quietly looking daggers at her.

* * *

My visit was a success. Molly’s friendship with the earl was cemented. I think it will grow, now that she is dining down. I imagine her having walks with him, and quiet evening chats.

I was desperate not to be too inquisitive—mustn’t give the game away—but I asked Roxbury if he would consider opening his house again, as in old times. The aristocratic houses of England endure an unending round of visitors each summer, but I checked the guest book, and Roxbury has curtailed such visits since his wife’s passing.

* * *

I have alerted Molly to oddities of the house she had not noticed. She’s been willing, yet circumspect. There are rooms unfound and corridors unexplored. She doesn’t know the way to the towers, or the furnace, nor has she investigated the scientists’ laboratories and electrical innovations. “What, Moll, have you no curiosity?”

“Curiosity I have aplenty, Miss V,” she said, “but it’s killed molls greater than I.”

Molly has no notions of how a house normally runs, but I have. I consider Birtle’s sullen conduct a dereliction of butlerdom, and Skirtle’s house management little better. Call me demanding, call me pampered and southern, but I cannot believe northern servants must be so obstructive.

These are subtleties beyond Molly’s ken. And all offer insights into the earl’s state of mind.

APPRAISALS [LAWLESS]

Miss Villiers’ report on her visit surprised me. On her return from the north, we shared a meal at the Rising Sun. She filled in the broad brushstrokes of her letter with colourful undertones. So much that I had taken for granted as true in Molly’s reports was, if not false, more complicated.

The earl was by no means idle; he was industrious—but working at what? Molly did not yet know, and Miss Villiers could not work it out.

The enigmatic Lodestar had become de facto manager running Roxbury Industries.

Birtle was not a useless butler, in Ruth’s demanding eyes, but tiresome, and Skirtle an adequate housekeeper, but no more. The children, to her ears, were nightmarish.

And Molly was unhappy.

* * *

Roxbury House, she concurred, was a place of magic. Miss Villiers’ descriptions enriched Molly’s labyrinthine palace.

The earl Miss Villiers found likeable. “Not at all the brusque man of business the press used to portray him as. He has no time for public affairs, for standing on ceremony; no wish to brag of business affairs, like most men. His mind is always soaring like a buzzard, seeking the idea scurrying far below to feed his brood.”

Miss Villiers wanted to know what I knew of this Lodestar.

“Nothing much. Why?”

“Worthy of notice, I’d think. If you’re concerned for Roxbury and his Industries, that’s where I’d start; it’s Lodestar that runs them. I barely saw the man.” She described how the staff deferred to him, and Roxbury signed off his suggestions, happy to leave the day-to-day running of the business in his hands. “Molly seemed taken with him, though.”

“Surely not; she’s devoted to Jem.” We had been enjoying the developing drama of Molly’s admiration of the stable boy. “And you? Did you find him so captivating?”

She strove to mask her aversion. I was relieved to see her distaste. Miss Villiers is younger than I am; I harboured a fear that some nimbler fellow would charm her away. “I wouldn’t wish to prejudice you. I’d prefer that you come to your own conclusion. Can you cook up a reason to meet with him?”

“What, here?” I laughed. “Come to London often, does he?”

“All the time. He’s all over the country. Newcastle, Portsmouth, Liverpool, Erith—”

I gave her an inquisitive look, my hand upon hers.

She shrugged it off. “Anywhere Roxbury Industries has business. Which is everywhere. Nothing untoward about it. He’s one of these empire-building engineers, extending their domain, checking, cajoling, pursuing payments, haranguing slowcoaches. The company lives in fear of him, Molly tells me. But they try to impress, which keeps the whole caboodle at top speed. You can see why the earl would love him.”

There was a reservation in her voice.

I poured fresh tea. I knew not to interrupt her in full flow.

She walked to the window. “The earl seems to love him like a son. More than he loves his own children. Them he barely seems to notice, and their mother gone. They are growing up wild. Skirtle mothered them when they were tots, but she hasn’t the will nor energy to control them now they’re filthy youths. Their schools evidently train them more in savagery than civilisation.”

“England’s public schools. When they say Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton—”

“They’re not talking of fair play and decency, no. Witness the backstabbing that enlivens the Tory party daily.”

I laughed. “Have we dumped Molly well and truly in it?”

“She went as a drawing mistress. She teaches them street arithmetic and bad manners. A street urchin schooling an earl’s brood makes me laugh. And she contrives to do it brilliantly, disguising her lessons. Mathematics she has turned into gambling. (She lets the boy win, else he would strop and stay an ignoramus.) They approach literature through comic poetry, which they compose daily to their amusement, extemporising at the expense of the household. In art, she hooked them through caricatures; they now depict the secrets of country life in Hogarthian triptychs. By this means, she digs out secrets the children know and should keep secret, of the household and neighbouring village: who hates whom, who has affairs, who is rumoured illegitimate, and worse. She is brilliant.”

“But she is unhappy, you say?”

Miss Villiers sighed. “She spends many lonely hours wandering.”

* * *

Molly had taken to exploring the grounds, in search of solitude, perhaps because so many doors of the house were shut to her. Indeed, Miss Villiers reported that the whole east wing was closed up, ever since the demise of Lady Elodie, the earl’s wife, of whom nobody ever spoke. Yet the renovation in the hall was her idea: to brighten guests’ first impression. When they found old paintings beneath the plaster, rather than paint over them, they decided to restore. They dated back to the old lady who lived there long before: Mad Wifey, she was known as. The tumbledown ruin was still known as Mad Wifey’s when Roxbury bought it in the forties and began converting it into Roxbury House. All that remained of Mad Wifey’s was the hall, with surrounding rooms and interstices; the rest of the wild gothic confection was Roxbury’s design.

I had imagined it an ancient manorial pile. So it looked, in the engravings. Yet Roxbury was as new a house as you might find in England, more appealing than Osborne House, more likeable than Blenheim Palace, more breathtaking than St Paul’s.

“Molly’s used to the city. She misses that aloneness. Noise and bustle, schemes and plots. There, she can be anonymous, snooping and watching over all. Here, simply to turn up in one corner of the house where she is not invited—quel faux pas. Birtwell spies on her, she says, waiting for a slip and thinking evil of her.” She sighed. “I’ve arranged that we go up again in a few weeks.”

“We?”

Miss Villiers’ plan was even better than that. She had put into Roxbury’s head the notion of a weekend visit, as of old. It was too soon, perhaps, to invite a sprinkling of artistic fellows, but she might return, with me at her side, if I dared.

LIES AND EXAGGERATIONS, PART THE SECOND [LAWLESS]

Why hadn’t Molly found out more?

Her investigations were full of verve, as I had hoped, and acumen and insight. But they were strangely incomplete. She had barely described the hive of activity that was the glasshouses. Bee house, butterfly house, entemologicon, arachnidarium. Scientists on two levels, outer and inner. Outer houses brightly lit, open to see, full of life and the fruits of activity; inner cloister a place of sequestered study, darkened, papery, and academic.

Why such striking gaps? Molly was our “eyes in the north”. She was surely curious about these secretive realms. I would have expected her to peek and peer, to report and surmise; but if she had, she neither reported on it, nor mentioned it on Ruth’s visit.

Only later, when she befriended Lodestar, did he himself induct her into the botanical and industrial mysteries, the chemicals, the botanicals, the herbs and homeopathics, the electrical experimentation.

DOG DAYS [LAWLESS]

In the heat of August, everybody left town; everybody who could afford to. There were no explosions, for that brief season. Jeffcoat and I sat down to fathom three things.

How immediate was the threat outlined in the Guernsey papers?

What could we learn from the blasts in Erith, Camden and Guernsey?

Could we anticipate future attacks? Could we not prevent them?

* * *

I set about harrying the Royal Commission. I co-opted the upper echelons of the military: they considered the Guernsey papers an urgent awakening.

I checked the progress of the defences recommended to the commission, so we could make their current shortcomings clear before Parliament voted on them again.

We asked ourselves who had the ability to design such bombs. If even O’Leary the Fenian was impressed, these activists must have specialised knowledge. They were not isolated cranks. Industrial workers? Researchers? We drew up a list of institutions and companies to visit.

We sketched out likely sites for attacks. Erith, on the Thames, was the gateway into London, Camden on the mainline train, Guernsey a staging post if the French ever invaded. Where next? Ports? Emblematic London sites? Somewhere to shock the nation.

I would visit learned institutions around London, Jeffcoat construction companies. We kept up our interviews; we harangued local forces to keep an ear out. We sought allies we could trust. We circulated the notion of constant vigilance. Notice anything odd? About a colleague or a project, about the development of materials or the use of equipment? Let us know. We peddled the motto “See, share, secure.”

This call for vigilance reached police forces all over. If they heard rumours, if they noted unruly gatherings, if criminals vanished from view or employed a new modus operandi, they should let us know.

The letters began arriving.

* * *

Miss Villiers hated an unsolved puzzle.

She could not forget the body on the SS Great Britain lifeboat. A fruitless quest, I told her. I was overwhelmed with the Guernsey paperwork; now letters poured in, full of dread warnings, which must be sifted through.

“Your Mr Lodestar is a bit of an optimist, isn’t he, Campbell?” It was a quiet moment at the Yard, and she had dug out the Great Britain file. She was astounded that the name Roxbury had been in the dead man’s pocket. “And Lodestar dismisses it as altogether ordinary?”

“As it is. Everybody’s heard of Roxbury.”

“There’s a darker interpretation.”

I set aside my work and gave her my attention.

“You’re anxious about Roxbury’s capabilities to defend the nation. The papers are crowing about malign French influence. What if this fellow was sent to attack Roxbury? What if he slipped aboard in Cadiz, say, planning some mischief?”

“To the ship?”

“To Roxbury.”

I put my hand to my mouth. “But he didn’t survive stowing away.”

“He fell out with his accomplice, and they did for him. These anarchists are famously argumentative.”

“And ill-nourished. And tubercular.”

She ignored me. “He intended to find a Roxbury crane, and blow it up. Or the new guns for your Portsmouth forts. In order to discredit Roxbury Industries.”

I nodded. “Possible.”

“And his friends are still at work.” She grimaced. “Put that to your Mr Lodestar, and see if he’s so sanguine.”

* * *

Miss Villiers admitted that, since Simpson’s revised estimate of how long the man had been dead—four years, or five—she was paying occasional visits to Antony Gibbs Shipping. Having lost so much in the dockyard fire, they would not let her take records away. So she was spending odd afternoons working, little by little, through their SS Great Britain lists in search of the unfortunate man.

Antony Gibbs’s office on Oxford Street was sandwiched between the Princess’s Theatre and a dingy alley, Adam and Eve Court. Not knowing what she was looking for, she was often distracted by music from the theatre. Through the summer evenings, the theatres struggled to lure audiences; gone was the spring mania for Mazeppa at the Astley with the American actress naked on horseback. They trumpeted moderate prices for Perseus and Andromeda, starring Mrs Ellen Ternan, frequently understudied (so the gossip went) for her visits to the coast at Mr Dickens’s expense.

Then there was the fire.

THE HOUNDS [LAWLESS]

I took up the suggestion to enquire about Lodestar.

I learned that he was liked. Admired. A capital fellow. An old-style member of the club—though no drinker. He paid his dues, bought his rounds, joked with the right people and avoided the wrong sorts, dressed nattily, spoke succinctly, listened much, and judged when the evening was headed downhill in time to escape the debauchery. He was revered for his trick shots at billiards, and a bosom pal of Julian Overend, a young banker currently doing rather well.

* * *

I happened to intercept young Overend as he left work, heading for the Hounds Club, on St Martin’s Lane. A highly strung fellow, he looked terrified when I said I was from Scotland Yard. I reassured him my intention was to protect his friend’s interests. I bought him a drink, and he calmed down. “I’m told you’re friendly with Lodestar.”

“Terrific chappy.” Overend was enthused to the point of devotion. “Such a grasp of finance. Stocks, bonds.” Julian Overend was heir to the fortune of Overend and Gurney, the bank on everyone’s lips due to their fabulous interest rates. “Lodestar’s been a tremendous advocate for us. All over the country. The fellow gets around, don’t you know.”

“So I hear.”

“They think nothing of such distances where he grew up. Four days on a camel through the savannah. That’s just how it is there. Ten thousand acres his father had. Should have come to him, were it not for his father’s dissipation. Inheritance tied up.” Overend gabbled away, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. “And debts. Frightful debts.”

Lodestar, he told me, was the son of Sir Chichester Lodestar, British consul to Mozambique and the Interior. Our Lodestar came to London when his father died, just a few years back, aiming to sort out the inheritance and return home. On discovering his fortune had been frittered away on his father’s vast debauches and dissolute investments, he had no alternative but to stay in London and make his own fortune. His father had friends enough back in the day. People helped him out. Who had sent him to Roxbury, Overend had no idea. He had some notion Lodestar Senior had been at Oxford with Roxbury. The two men went their different ways: Roxbury into engineering, transforming British industry; Lodestar Senior into the Foreign Service, one of their more difficult postings, outwith the Empire, where he established a vast estate in the African interior.

There he imposed his stamp rigorously. As the years passed, he spent less and less time on governmental business. He acquired a reputation as one of the hard men of Africa, quashing tribal disputes with something of the iron fist.

“They say Nathan is the spitting image of the old goat. But a harder worker you won’t find, nor a nicer chap. He’s in town tomorrow. Come and meet him at the club, why don’t you? Set you up with an offshore account while we’re at it, eh? All the smart money’s going there.” He gave me his card.

I confess myself enchanted by his account of Lodestar. The wandering heir, arriving in the great city, surely dazzled by its vastness and variety, deprived of his dues and thrown back upon his own devices. Why not befriend bankers such as Overend? Why not make yourself well liked at gentlemen’s clubs? How else to get an introduction to a job as steady as Roxbury’s right-hand man? How better to make his way in Roxbury Industries? So much so that he was taking an engineering diploma, Roxbury’s endorsement releasing him from turgid requirements of essays and lectures. What better way to thrive than to be brilliant at his job? Perhaps his father had been a libertine—I should be wary of touching upon what must be a tender subject—but young Lodestar was clearly both likeable and industrious.

* * *

MAGNETIC MANAGER [LAWLESS]

Lodestar met me in New Slaughter’s Coffee House, adjacent to the club on St Martin’s Lane. I had suggested a public house. He replied that he preferred a pot of Ethiopian than a jar of ale; the coffee in London was execrable, but New Slaughter’s at least roasted their own beans.

I was early. I like to see my prey before they see me. Lodestar spotted me through the bow window. He swept in, his bright eyes fixing me, that broad brow fringed by his mop of jet-black hair. He had a vitality, unquenchable and winning. As he held out his hand to me, I felt as if I were reuniting with an old friend.

* * *

Lodestar held nothing back. Yes, his travels around the country were unpredictable and incessant. Roxbury Industries had more work than ever these last years. It was all he could do to keep it up. How Roxbury himself had it in the old days he could scarcely imagine.

I was glad I had caught up with him. Lodestar put me at ease, establishing a bond between us, as of men of the world. He talked of how we were both called back and forth to deal with trifles others should have dealt with; and yet we must stay alert, ready for that one serious call, where our attentions were needed to solve a crisis or avert disaster. I was flattered that a man running one of the largest businesses in the country should consider my labours as demanding as his own. We all think our efforts unnoticed, I suppose, and our struggles greater than others’.

I reminded him of our previous correspondence, concerning the body. I explained Miss Villiers’ theory that the dead man may have planned mischief against Roxbury.

Lodestar shrugged. “But you never discovered who he was?”

“No. My colleague was hunting through the shipping lists. But there was a fire at the docks.”

“I heard mention of it.” He gave me a quizzical look. “Strange, how Londoners surround themselves with flammables. I have chemists developing safer materials. I’ll show you the new billiard balls I’ve produced.”

“I’ve been forewarned. Don’t challenge me to a game.”

He laughed. “Wood, gas, coal, paper. Fuels in the waiting.”

“And we live on top of it all.” I shook my head. “As if we’re inviting disasters.”

“In Africa, we have bushfires and accidents, but nowhere this density of population. I have seen violence, even on my father’s cosseted estates, but I have never seen a place as vulnerable for apocalypse as London. Your Great Fires of London fascinated me as a child: in the fire of 1212, thousands died on London Bridge alone. Frightful. And expensive! In business, we try to foresee dangers. Prevention is cheap. You police must be moving that way. What a lot of bother would be saved if you could head off fires and explosions, eh?”

I smiled to think of him as a child in the bushveldt, studying histories of faraway England. “But as I was saying, we’ve found further records at the shipping company offices.”

“You determined fellows. Bravo!” He smiled and called for fresh coffee.

I could not find it in me to decline, though my heart was already thumping and skipping. It was time for business. I asked him about Roxbury munitions works. Were they prepared for the demands of the Palmerston fortifications? And the brick factories? Was it within their capacity?

“Are they going ahead?” His dark brows lifted in amusement. “They have been ceased long enough with legal delays and political whatnot. I had the impression the commission was minded to cancel the whole plan.”

I was permitted to make discreet enquiries, without revealing official secrets; indeed, I was obliged to, on Ripon’s say-so. It would not do for the government to make a grand announcement giving the go-ahead to such vast expenditure, crucial to the nation’s safety, only for the private contractor to admit that they were not up to the job. That would advertise the nation’s lack of defences. “The commission met. The plan isn’t cancelled. You’ll hear officially within the next week. Will that be acceptable to Roxbury Industries?”

“Acceptable?” He grinned, and poured more coffee, despite my protestations. “Oh yes, my friend, I’d say it’s acceptable.” Lodestar’s accent had that clipped African overlay to its upper-class English vowels, and behind it a wild energy that spoke of vast confidence, a confidence that would sweep away objections and make the impossible possible, make the unimaginable within reach, make the future present.

* * *

I was emboldened to ask him how he came to know Roxbury, for I was fascinated that he had so quickly risen in eminence.

“Two sad tales,” he said, “and one happy one.”

His old father in Africa had dwindled away. He was a difficult man, toughened by years of toil, but devoted to his homeland and proud to have established a British protectorate in the interior. As he died, he packed off his son to London to seek his fortune. He had not explained that said fortune would come not as inheritance, but through merit and work.

Lodestar laughed to recall his own rude awakening. What his father had given him, however, was the introduction to Edward, Earl of Roxbury. Yes, they played rugby together at Oxford, when Roxbury was an ambitious engineering student, and Lodestar Senior a dissolute graduate, playing endless sports until his civil service posting came through.

The second sad story: after the early debacles in the Crimea, Roxbury was called upon to help his country. He set aside commercial enterprises, which supplied hydraulics across the world, to consider guns. What advances the French had made since Waterloo. We had ignored them pig-headedly; even the Russian weaponry was better than ours. In two months, Roxbury had designed, developed and tested a breech-loading artillery gun. This reached the Crimea just in time to make a difference. The British forces across the world were poised to adopt them.

In 1858, an unexpected reversal. A bomb at the Paris Opéra nearly killed Louis Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie. Policemen and passers-by died; hundreds were injured. Only by a whisker did the emperor and his wife escape. In the aftermath, the French unravelled the manufacture of the bomb. It had been finished by a Birmingham gun maker, who protested he knew nothing of its radical intention. But it had been tested in the north of England—where exactly was never proven.

Suspicion fell upon both great industrial manufacturing companies of the north: Roxbury Industries, which dominated the east coast, and their rival in the west, Whitworth Enterprises of Manchester. Diplomatic relations between France and Britain became strained (our government toppled promoting the Conspiracy to Murder Bill).

Whitworth pronounced that the technical achievements of the bomb—or its remnants—were beyond his company’s capabilities.

Roxbury declined to investigate, absorbed in improvements in the British Navy’s ordnance. This rebounded badly upon him. The press suggested that Roxbury may have, if not sanctioned, at least winked at the plottings, knowing that mischief done to France could only profit his company, inextricably bound with British armaments. In a spiral of suspicion and adverse publicity, Roxbury was vilified, and so soon after being lionised for his inventions. To his astonishment, the new government saw fit to withdraw their contracts, claiming pressure from the electorate. The government even went back on his technical advances, reverting to Whitworth’s trusty old muzzle-loaders.

Roxbury was left with contracts broken, research wasted, and military sales slashed. He was stung and scolded.

He reacted in two ways. Reluctantly, he offered his commercial services around the globe. He soon found his wares in greater demand than ever, now that he looked beyond parochial Britain. The Brazilian army took him up; the Japanese bought warships; the Italians bought artillery; Union and Confederates armed themselves to the teeth with Roxbury guns—making that fruitless conflict more gruesome.

Personally, he withdrew from public duties. He only appeared in the House of Lords on occasions of the utmost gravity (such as the Fairchild Commission, where Molly had encountered him). He withdrew from his civic commitments up north. He broke off his habitual contact with the managers of subsidiary companies. And, though he never gave up his research, he looked to appoint a manager for Roxbury Industries.

Enter Lodestar.

NORPHANS’ HIGH JINKS [LAWLESS/MOLLY]

Between Miss Villiers’ visit and the sudden evanishment of the children passed several weeks. These proved quietly fruitful. Now Miss Villiers had galvanised her to get the measure of the scientific quarters, and the house’s secrets.

Molly offered us glimpses of teaching the Norphans, the sport and the stramash. They sat in each other’s places; they spat in each other’s faces; they stole each other’s napkin rings; they sowed cress in each other’s bedsprings; they stole dessert; they denied stealing; they endured their punishments stoically.

“Molly?” said Kitty one morning. “After this lesson, remind me to kill myself.”

“I’m sorry?”

“To kill myself. I’ve dedicated myself to anarchy and nihilism. Though, in consorting with the likes of Fa, I betray the cause.”

Meanwhile, Peggy’s escape fund was not flourishing. Peggy was continually selling her worldly goods, to squirrel away funds for running away. Her ambition was to join a gold rush to Australia or South America; failing that, to become arch ruffian of a gang of thieves. She longed for her birthday, and possessions she might sell. She got little from her siblings, but the odd treasure from an aunt in Portland; though opportunities for commerce were limited among staff and residents of Roxbury. She constantly reckoned up her savings to the nearest farthing, converting the total into so many days on the run: a miraculous effort, as she was the worst at sums.

Nico divided his time between correspondence with parliamentarians and posting mischievous signs around the house:

VISITORS ARE REQUESTED TO REFRAIN
FROM HOOTING AND TRUMPETING BETWEEN
THE HOURS OF MIDNIGHT AND 6AM.

When the “hide in a box” game lost its currency, the older two invented more games to torture Kitty:

—Who can make the highest chalk mark on the wall? (Never Kitty.)

—Who can steal Skirtle’s teacakes? (Never Kitty.)

—Who will go nearest the Walled Garden without trepidation? (Kitty never got near. Quite why the Walled Garden was so trepidatious Molly could not get them to say.)

—Who can hit the Frog Stone? (Kitty had at least a chance.)

The Frog Stone was a great boulder mid-river, upstream from the Iron Bridge, at the confluence of the Burnfoot and River Dally. To please the children, in younger days, Roxbury had painted it with a frog face; they loved to throw stones from the bridge, the scoring complex, with premiums for hitting eyes, nose and mouth.

VISITORS ARE POLITELY REQUESTED TO REFRAIN
FROM DRINKING THE TURKISH BATH WATER
DUE TO AN UNIDENTIFIED CORPSE IN THE GORGE.
IF THEY MUST SLAKE THEIR THIRSTS, THEY WILL FIND
THAT FOULD’S ARSENICAL SOAP ADDS FLAVOUR.

They sketched self-portraits on envelopes and sent them to school friends. A few brave souls sent back a daguerreotype, only to have the Norphans caricature their looks cruelly by return post.

In the evenings, they played fearsome parlour games, requiring feats of ingenuity. Molly’s favourite was “When I embark on Auntie Mildred’s ship”, in which each child added yet more poetic items to the list for embarkation on an imaginary voyage. Where Molly chose apples, cake and books, Kitty would demand “a prince to save my heart from woe” and Nico “a bottle of the widow” (which meant, of course, champagne).

Molly shared with the Norphans a sense of unreality about her residency. Too perfect, it could not last. Kitty copied one of Molly’s lovely sketches to her best friend, a view from the house over the valley, with herself and Peggy outlined, like sylvan dryads playing some Arcadian ball game.

“It’s so beautiful,” Kitty wrote. “I wish I was here.”

I did not understand what Miss Villiers already intuited: that Molly was retelling her story in the guise of a romantic novel, precisely because she was not experiencing it so. Molly had lived always by her wits. To be the voice of authority jarred. She was used to bargaining over everything, always looking for the profit, the margin, even in her closest friendships. We are all parasites, she liked to say. To have livelihood and lodgings guaranteed confused her raison d’être.

On Nico’s bedroom door:

No ruminators allowed.