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“If the tube fills with a brown gas, you must wake me up without delay,” Russell Starr had insisted with the most ferocious look on his craggy face. He was an old man now, surviving on spite, laudanum and the memories of his past glories as one of the pillars of the Royal Society. It was said that even his reflection was terrified of him.
Marianne, his daughter, knew him better, and did not bother to be scared of him. “Only brown? If it is orange, or yellow, or red, do I let you sleep on?”
He glowered at her as if the answer was obvious, and said, “If any other colour should form, then you will not have time to wake me before the explosion does. Good night.”
He retired to his bedchamber which lay next to the laboratory, and she knew that the pills and potions that he would take to help him sleep through his pain would prevent anyone from waking him until at least midday.
Marianne settled, as well as anyone could settle, on a tall stool by the long bench. Her father’s experiment was a simple-looking one, with some lump of yellow stuff resting in a large round flask. A tube came off the top of it and passed through a condenser. She had no idea what it was designed to prove, disprove or reveal. Chemistry had never been her thing.
No, Marianne’s interest lay in electricity. She was writing her letters by the light of a home-made Geisler tube, though the uranium glass gave the darkened laboratory an unhealthy green glow. Far off in other rooms of the house, her cousin Phoebe would be going to bed after a late evening of entertaining wealthy guests. There would have been laughter, wine, and even a little song. Now it was past midnight, and the guests would have rolled home, full of contentment at their secure places in life.
Marianne refilled her pen and stabbed at the letter, causing a splodge of ink to threaten her carefully chosen words. Her place in life was far less secure, and according to Price Claverdon – Phoebe’s doting husband – she was making it less secure by her irritating insistence on trying to change the world.
I don’t want to change the world, she thought as she blotted up the excess ink. I just want to be able to access it. Her letter was one in a series of tirades she had been sending, on a weekly basis, to all the major London newspapers, deploring the backward state of affairs concerning women’s university education. She herself had gained her degree at Newnham, one of the newest Cambridge colleges. But she had not been awarded it there. She could study at Cambridge but sit no final examinations. For that, she had had to return to London and undertake the University of London’s external exams. The system, she scrawled out angrily, was a patchwork quilt of hasty reactions and idle ignorance. She stared at that last sentence. Did it make sense? She was not sure. She slid off her stool and began to pace around, reading her whole letter aloud to get a better feel for it.
“If one were to spend many hours making a hearty meal, and then before serving this repast, one should simply fling it into a bucket and feed it to the pigs; why then, sir, is this not exactly what –”
The door handle clicked.
She stopped speaking, and froze. She stared at the circular handle, but it did not move again. It was as if someone had begun to turn it, heard her voice, and thought better of it.
Mr Barrington was the house steward and butler. He was the last man to be awake at night, as it was his duty to secure the house and check the windows and doors. He even patrolled the garden wing where Phoebe and her father lodged, so it could be him, but she was sure he had already done his rounds.
She put the letter on the bench and glanced at the bubbling experiment. No brown gases. She was wearing her indoor slippers and she could walk silently to the door. She pressed her ear to it but heard nothing.
She gripped the handle, took a deep breath, and dragged the door open towards her, dramatically jumping out into the corridor.
It was lit by one solitary gas lamp at the far end where the corridor joined the main house. Was that the flicker of a shadow on the opposite wall? It disappeared as soon as she looked at it. She could not be sure what she had seen.
Well, she might live here in Woodfurlong on sufferance and at the generous discretion of her cousin’s husband, but while she did live here, it was at least partly her house. She inflated herself with some righteous indignation and set off down the corridor towards the shadow that she might or might not have seen. If it was one of the dozens of staff, they could only be up to no good. Not that Marianne had any spite in her nature – but if there was a problem, she would be the one to sort it out.
She was that kind of woman.
In fact she had more knowledge of the secret liaisons and troubles of the maids and the menservants that Phoebe did. She got to the junction of the garden wing and the main part of the house, and looked to the right. The door that led into the back corridor of Woodfurlong stood partly open.
And it should not be standing open at all.
The servants were bright enough to hide their night time trysts better than this, she knew. She approached the door with caution. The gas lamp was behind her now, and she knew that she was throwing her own shadow ahead of herself as a warning. She pressed to the wall but it wasn’t enough to disguise her approach.
She heard a noise like a shoe knocking against something it did not expect to be there – so Phoebe’s mad attachment to collecting furniture had a purpose, after all. It waylaid the unwary. Marianne reached the door and peeped through the gap but she could see nothing until she took the step to open it fully.
She flung it open. It startled someone who did not cry out, but she heard them hiss. They were halfway up the back staircase but they turned around, and ran back down, vaulting over the bannister a few steps from the bottom so that they did not have to come close to Marianne. It was a man, dressed all in black, with a scarf over his face. He landed on the tiled floor with hardly a sound and she knew, from that, that his soles were covered in felt or some such. He ran away from her, down the service corridor and through the baize door at the end.
She called out – she could not stop herself. “You there! You! Stop!”
She ran the same way, not to pursue him, but to alert Mr Barrington whose room was on the ground floor near to the wine stores and other vital repositories. She banged on his door, and hopped from foot to foot until he appeared in his night clothes, shortly followed by the housekeeper from her room close by. The other servants were variously in the attic or the space over the stables, and it was Price Claverdon who emerged from the upper rooms before the other servants did.
All was now chaos.
The intruder, of course, had fled. It takes time to rouse a house. Mr Barrington threw an overcoat over his long white nightshirt and he looked like a little round snowman in a jacket as he accompanied Mr Claverdon on a tour of the house while the women clustered around Mrs Kenwigs the housekeeper. Phoebe came down, pursued by her maid who insisted that she return to her room and be locked in; they quickly disappeared again, though Phoebe looked backwards at Marianne and tried to mouth something that she did not catch.
Marianne stayed downstairs, but the conversation was irritatingly circular – who was it? Did anyone see them? What happened?
When Mr Barrington and Mr Claverdon reappeared, they were mobbed by the half-hysterical maids. They were all told to go straight to bed and reassured that they were quite safe. Marianne remained in the shadows and pounced on Mr Barrington as Mr Claverdon left the corridor.
“Who was it?” she demanded. “I raised the alarm; I know that Mr Claverdon will tell me in the morning, but you can surely tell me now.”
Mr Barrington, small and round and as precise as a billiard ball, wanted to prevaricate but he also wanted to get back to bed. And Marianne spoke the truth, and they had a good working relationship. Marianne was a handy conduit between the servants and the Claverdons. He said, in a low rush, “There was a man, Miss Starr, who seemed to have gained entry by force, through the scullery. He had not got into any other room, as far as we can tell. He was pursued out to the gates but he has disappeared. I have instructed Wright and Ted to patrol the grounds tonight.”
Marianne made a mental note to tell the cook, in the morning, that the groom and the boy would welcome a special hot breakfast. To Mr Barrington, she said, “I saw him start to go upstairs, and then he came back down.”
“No doubt he realised that he would be trapped upstairs. You must not worry, Miss Starr. I have fixed the door and you will be quite safe.”
“I never worry,” she replied. “But thank you all the same.”
But she did worry a little, though her concerns were about gases – brown or otherwise. She ran rather quickly back to the laboratory, but did not manage to settle to her letter-writing again. Instead, she pulled out her notebooks and perused her accounts.
If she could earn more money, she could provide for her father in a house of their own.
There was a great deal of pleasing possibility if she were to be successful in tomorrow night’s séance.