Turning the Stones (23 page)

‘By the by,’ he said, displaying the box, which he had been longing to introduce, ‘this particular instrument is an electrometer. It is a device for measuring electricity that exists in the air.’

‘Do you mean thunder and lightning?’ Eliza asked.

‘The operation of lightning is of course a very obvious demonstration of electricity, my dear Eliza, but what interests an experimental philosopher such as myself …’ Mr Paine paused in order to let the buffed weightiness of
experimental philosopher
sink in, ‘is the electricity that is invisible to the eye during fair weather. The purpose of an electrometer is to detect it.’ He flipped open the box and two small balls fell from a channel inside and dangled on a fine thread about six inches long. Mr Paine directed a wary ‘
Voilà!
’ at Johnny with the air of a fellow who expected to be disparaged. Johnny was picking at a loose thread on his cuff. He looked tired and hard-eyed.

Mr Paine pressed on. ‘One may measure the amount of electrical charge in the atmosphere by the divergence of these balls and their degree of separation.’

Eliza raised her shoulders to her ears with a bored sigh. Mrs Waterland scratched the back of her hand and said, ‘But what is the point of this measuring, Cousin?’

‘Electricity is connected to the principle of life, dear madam. It has the power to unbind and encourage flow. Do you know, experiments have shown that vegetables can grow considerably faster if they are electrified.’

Mrs Waterland was sweeping at her forearms with long strokes of her ringed fingers.

Mr Paine cleared his throat. ‘Which has brought me to wonder if electricity might be used, in fact, to render barren land productive. I am devising a series of experiments to prove such an hypothesis.’

Mrs Waterland lifted her head at an angle and narrowed her eyes at a dark patch of midges near one of the windows.

Johnny drawled, ‘We could make a killing with that thunder box of yours at assemblies in London. It’s a novel entertainment.’

Mr Paine said, ‘I made the entertainment at Weever Hall purely as a favour to Lady Broome. My concerns are rather more scholarly as a rule.’ He was about to add something more, but no one was listening to him. The net of midges had fallen on the company and we were forced to abandon the summer house before we were eaten alive.

*

As I readied Eliza for bed, she declared her disappointment at Johnny’s being shut up with their father all night in the library. She had hoped to play cards with him instead of with Arthur, who had turned out to be unappealingly competitive and a poor loser.

‘Is Johnny’s friend coming to stay, do you know?’ I tried to keep my tone light, although I was sickened by the possibility that Barfield would ride on to Sedge Court after leaving Nantwich.

‘How should I know?’ Eliza said. Then she added, ‘Probably not. I am afraid that Johnny intends to go with Papa to Chester. I am furious about it. Why does he always abandon us so quickly?’

Her disappointment was in contrast to my joy, when I found the following morning that Johnny had indeed ridden out with his father. That meant a respite from Barfield. In fact there was an atmosphere of jubilation in general in the house. That the master was well enough to go abroad on his horse to tend to business was greeted with relief in the servants’ hall. There was an optimistic discussion around the kitchen table of canals and coal mines and cash flow, which made us feel secure and lively, since where would we be without the master’s bulging pocketbook? The esprit of the house climbed higher still when Mrs Waterland received word from Chester that Mr Waterland would not return for at least a fortnight. He had determined to accompany Johnny to London on a matter of business. The knowledge that such a journey was not beyond the master’s reach encouraged us, the anxious clan rejoicing at the failing chief’s return to vigour.

With Johnny gone, Mr Paine could find no reason to stretch out his visit at Sedge Court. I could not fathom why he was quite so impressed by Johnny Waterland, especially since Johnny treated him with such scorn. But there it was: another of the enigmas of human relations. The afternoon before his departure, I came down to the apothecary’s at Parkgate to
obtain a phial of vitriolic ether for Mrs Waterland’s headache. She was under some pressure of time, trying to hurry along the paperhangers and painters she had contracted to redecorate the withdrawing room. She was determined to have the work completed before Baron von Boxhagen sent his card, which was an event much anticipated.

As I came out of the apothecary’s shop, I saw Mr Paine apparently arguing with two or three fishwives at an entrance to a weint. They were having the better of the harangue. I thought to hustle Mr Paine away to safety. ‘Best to stay out of the weints, sir,’ I said. ‘They do not care for outsiders there.’

His intention had been to take a reading with his electrometer of the thick air around the fishing hovels to show that electrical action was inhibited there. It seemed not to have occurred to him that he might be interpreted as an invader and repelled accordingly.

‘I work only to benefit mankind,’ he said plaintively as we walked back to Sedge Court.

In his view, plants and animals alike are badly affected by vapours and effluvia. When they are subject to moist atmospheres and cloudy days, the electricity within them is stifled and a withering of life occurs. It was his plan to conduct a series of experiments to demonstrate the connection between Ireland’s want of atmospheric electricity and her blighted crops. To prove that famines stem from a want of natural electricity was to be his great work and his entrée to the Royal Society.

Then he said that he hoped to persuade Johnny to accompany him on his expedition. I could not imagine anything less likely than Johnny Waterland agreeing to be thrown together
with Cousin Arthur in a bog, but then Mr Paine said, ‘He has bought a number of Irish mortgages, you know, and he might be interested to inspect the properties at first hand.’

*

The summer came to a slow boil. By the middle of August the air was so clotted you could throw a barley-spike into it and make it stick, and Lady Broome was drawn to Parkgate to take the sea air. She came on to Sedge Court and was conducted straight away to the drawing room to admire the yellow-and-grey colour scheme and paisley India papers that had supplanted its former glacial blue and white. The new decor gave to the room a moody cast that suggested an impending storm.

The kitchen was heady with the perfume of late-fruiting plums, which Mrs Edmunds was making into pies, and of lush end-of-season roses listing under great velvety heads. Their fallen petals and a general scent of incipient decay hinted at the passing of summer. Downes and I were arranging the roses in vases, when Hester descended into the servants’ hall and stood gravid with news from above.

‘There will be a right curfuffle now,’ she announced, ‘going by what her upstairs has just said. Her ladyship’s been giving the drawing room the once-over.’

‘Has she though?’ Abby said.

‘But that was just a preamble. I could see she was gloating over something, and so could the mistress.’

Mrs Edmunds growled, ‘Mind your glabbering, Mrs Clap-Tongue.’

Hester said, ‘It ain’t glabber if it’s true,’ and stared down the housekeeper.

‘Get on with it then, if you must,’ Mrs Edmunds snapped.

‘Whey, I will then. The mistress and her ladyship banter back and forth until finally the mistress comes out with, “How is the baron, by the way?” And guess what her ladyship says?’

I think we all knew the answer to that, but we leaned suspensefully towards Hester and gave her the moment.

‘Oh, the baron,’ her ladyship says. ‘I imagine he has reached Holland by now. He left England two or three weeks ago. But of course you knew that. What a pity he could not manage a sojourn at Sedge Court.’

Abby let out a long, low whistle and Hester went on, ‘The mistress don’t say quack when she hears that. Just pours the tea as cool as a cucumber. If you ask me, she had too much confidence in that baron.’

‘There has been no clamour for your opinion, Hart,’ Mrs Edmunds said. ‘Now go about your work, and you too, Jenkins. Those pies won’t rear theirselves.’

Hester dropped an ironic curtsy and said, ‘Any road, everybody knows Miss Eliza is not licksome enough to bag a title, so it was always going to come to naught.’ She flounced away into the darkness of the stair.

Mrs Edmunds allowed herself a small sigh and remarked, ‘Strike me down if there is not an afterclap to this business.’

But there was one more shock to come before that season of disappointments came to its end.

The Master’s Storehouse, Parkgate, and the Parlour
Autumn, 1765 and Winter, 1766

In the first week of September, Sedge Court was woken in the middle of a hot, still night by the tolling of the bell at Parkgate. Groggily I heard footsteps banging down the back stairs and realised it must be Abby and Hester descending from the garrets. I joined Eliza in her bedchamber and we rushed to the window and saw our men cantering along the drive on horseback. After some minutes, while we strained to make out what was happening, two small figures came out on to the drive and scurried and half ran towards the gate – Hester and Abby. In a state of excited curiosity, Eliza and I dressed hurriedly in wrapping gowns and, with our shoes in our hands, ran downstairs to the servants’ hall.

There was a great lozenge of moonlight on the flagstones, formed by the open door of the back entry, and a feeling of the hall having been hastily and recently vacated. We could hear Dasher’s alarmed yapping in the courtyard and more distantly the hunting dogs barking in their kennels and nervous calls from the horses in the coach house. Then the sound of coal clattering on to iron. Eliza froze and widened her eyes at me. I crept towards the kitchen opening and saw that Mrs Edmunds, with her back to me, was stoking the stove. I
indicated to Eliza with a rolling eye that we should sneak outdoors. She nodded; we were of the same mind.

We stole around the corner of the house and hurried to the gate. As we came on to the road, we noticed the gleam of lanterns. They were carried by figures streaming dimly across the fields, all of them hurrying in the direction of Parkgate. We soon smelled on the air the acrid stink of charred corn and I knew at once that the master’s granary must be on fire. Eliza knew it, too. She gave a little cry and rushed forward past the drovers’ fields. Horses were squealing and stamping their hoofs in the fields – they must have been brought up from the beer-house pens for safety – then, as we reached the slope above Parkgate, we could hear the crackle of flames feasting on timbers and presently a fiery glow came into view.

Eliza gasped. Her father’s storehouse was crowned by an orange halo and the burned-out door on the upper storey gave it the appearance of a Cyclops. Evidently it was beyond saving.

Eliza and I ran towards the conflagration. There were two fire engines at work pumping water from the Dee to douse the beer-house and its outbuildings. We could hear the effortful grunting of the men who were working the clanking levers and treadles to draw water into the cisterns, and the belching of the hoses. Lines of people stretched from the water’s edge to the beer-house, passing pails of seawater from hand to hand.

All of a sudden there was a report like the crack of a whip – and all eyes turned to the stricken storehouse. With an agonised sound of joints tearing free of their fixtures, the beams fell in. Flames leaped up from the howling interior and people ran about beating out the singeing smuts that rained down.

*

The following afternoon as I brought smoke-saturated clothing to the laundry, Hester stopped me and asked if I had heard about the dreadful discovery that had been made in the storehouse. Croft had seen with his own eyes mutilated remains being brought out of the burned-out cellar. At supper time, Mr Otty came back from Parkgate with the news that the body was that of Theo Sutton. The master had confirmed to the watchmen raking through the ruins that the day before he had asked Sutton to examine a consignment of linen that was in the basement of the storehouse. His grain was kept in the floors above. Mr Otty said, ‘Mayhappen it was an overturned candle or a spark from his pipe that started the blaze.’ Hester remarked with bright, rimless eyes that the thought of burning to death was horrifying. Mr Otty said that Sutton would have suffocated from the smoke and probably expired long before the floor fell in and smothered him with tons of corn. I remember failing to feel, on any level, the least bit sorry for Sutton. I note that in passing – there is a coldness inside me.

*

In November news came that Sir Joseph Felling was dead of the dropsy. You can imagine the rejoicing that swept through Sedge Court even as we pinned on our mourning crêpe and prayed for the repose of the patriarch’s soul. The mistress was quietly gay at the prospect of the inheritance. You could sense her keeping a tight lid on the effervescence within. But there was to be no deliverance for Sedge Court. Mrs Waterland’s expectations were annihilated in December by an apocalyptic communiqué from the Fellings’ lawyer. Sir Joseph had named as his heir his sister’s son, Arthur Paine, whose already considerable pockets were to swell like blown bladders with the
Felling goods, chattels, husbandry and personal estate. To his great-nephew, John Waterland, Sir Joseph bequeathed ten shillings and a feather bed. To his niece, Henrietta Waterland, he left his best bedclothes; only that.

There was not one of us who did not feel the sour hostility of the legacy. I would go so far as to describe the overwhelming feeling at Sedge Court as one of embarrassment. It was as if we had been swanning about in a fine new gown at a public assembly only to be informed after the event that the skirt had been rucked up in the nether regions and the focus of much ribald remark.

‘It is not fair,’ Eliza cried. ‘Arthur already has so much. He came early into his money on the death of his father and he is swimming in it. No one tells him he must marry, for he is married already. He may spend his days fiddling with electricity or blowing up his Leyden jar, or whatever it is he does while he lives on his rents, and everyone is very pleased with him.’