The Alarming Career of Sir Richard Blackstone Read online

  They cleared the outskirts of the city. Henry did not think his parents would look for him in Hampshire. It was true that he had more than once overheard that county mentioned when they argued, but he had never heard them talk of going back to it.

  Now that the danger had passed, Henry began to enjoy the scenery. He stared at the open fields. So much space to move around in! The horses trotted through a wood; tall oaks stretched their heavy branches over a narrow lane. They passed a farmer who tipped his cap to the coach, and then laughed when Henry enthusiastically waved. But what struck Henry the most was the air. It didn’t smell of sulphur and smoke. It smelled clean. That was something he could not have known from his trip to Hyde Park. Until this moment, Henry had thought the air of the whole world was gray and thick; now he knew otherwise.

  They stopped once to change the horses. Hostlers raced to unhitch one team and lead another into place, and the good woman who owned the inn tried her best to tempt them inside for a meal and a glass of ale. But Sir Richard would not even get out of the chaise to stretch his legs. He was engrossed in his books and occasionally muttered, “I see, of course that would be it,” before scribbling furiously on a bit of parchment.

  In the early evening, Sir Richard put his books away. “We’re nearly there,” he said as he joined Henry in watching the countryside roll by. “We are but a quarter mile from the turnoff to Barton Commons.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Blackstone Manor was a towering limestone structure of two stories. A row of stately columns lined a front portico with tall mahogany doors at its center. Glazed windows taller than a man ran the length of the house. A wide cobblestone courtyard was fronted by a well-tended rose garden. Henry thought it was very like a drawing of a castle he had once seen on a playbill.

  Bertram opened the coach door and once more gave Henry as dour a look as he could manage. The coachman seemed determined to express his ardent disapproval of Henry being hired as an assistant, of Henry riding inside the coach, and of Henry in general.

  A wonderfully round woman with pink cheeks and bright blue eyes hurried down the steps. As Sir Richard descended, she peered over his shoulder and into the coach. “Ah, sir, you have found your boy!”

  Sir Richard nodded. Bertram muttered, “Such as he is.”

  Mrs. Splunket turned to Bertram and said, “Mind your business, you miserable old thing.” She held a hand out to Henry and helped him out of the coach. “Don’t you mind Bertram. Yes, I can see why he’s cross—you are filthy and badly dressed. No worries, we shall have that fixed in under an hour. If Sir Richard says you’re all right, then you are all right in my book. Some people,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at Bertram, “would do well to think likewise.”

  “This is Henry Hewitt, Mrs. Splunket,” Sir Richard said. He had carried the two boxes from the coach, one under each arm. “I’ll leave the boy to your capable hands, as I have two other charges who must be cared for.”

  Mrs. Splunket eyed the boxes. “Do I want to ask what’s inside them?” she said.

  “I think not,” Sir Richard said.

  “Will you at least assure me that it’s not more of them evil little fish that bite?” Mrs. Splunket asked.

  Henry had never heard of fish that bite. If he had, he would never have ventured into the Thames to cool off or wash himself.

  “You may be easy on that point, Mrs. Splunket,” Sir Richard said. “It is not more piranhas.”

  “Thank heavens for that. I’ll have the boy sorted out directly,” Mrs. Splunket said.

  Mrs. Splunket led Henry to the kitchen and heated water for a bath. After she filled the tub, she handed Henry strong soap and ordered him to scrub the soot of London off his person. When he was certain he was clean, he was to scrub again.

  “You’ll find new clothes right there, dear,” Mrs. Splunket said. A pile of clothing was folded neatly on the table.

  “I would attempt to wash what you’re wearing,” Mrs. Splunket said, looking at his clothes, “but I think they’d be better off burned. We don’t need fleas in the house.”

  “But not my shoes,” Henry said with alarm. He had to always wear his shoes.

  “If you’re set on keeping them, I don’t see why not. Though you’ll find shoes and stockings ready for you with the rest of it.”

  Henry was relieved. He could not let anyone, ever, see his feet. They were his secret and that was the way it must stay.

  “I’ll just leave you now,” Mrs. Splunket said. “Find me in my little nook around the corner when you’re done.”

  Henry waited until Mrs. Splunket had left before removing his shoes. He lowered himself into the warm water and scrubbed, and then scrubbed again. It seemed as if years of dirt came off his person and the water turned a murky gray. The last time he’d had a bath was weeks ago when he had dared walk into the Thames wearing his clothes in an attempt to clean himself. As a person never knew what might float by on the Thames, including unfortunate individuals who had ended up in it, he had not stayed long. He supposed he could only be grateful that he had not known of piranhas, as that would have added an extra fright to the experience.

  After the bath, Henry put on his new clothes. They were of fine material and included trousers, a cambric shirt, a waistcoat, and a jacket to go over it all. He hurriedly pulled on his socks and boots and felt more relaxed when his feet were covered.

  Henry found Mrs. Splunket in her housekeeper’s nook. It was a small closet fitted out with a desk and chair and she showed him how she filed her recipes and made her lists for shopping and did her inventory of the cupboards. There was more to housekeeping, she said, than most people understood.

  After tea and buttered toast, Mrs. Splunket told him that while he was in the bath, she’d had a conference with Sir Richard on the nature of Henry’s employment. Sir Richard had wondered where Henry should sleep. Mrs. Splunket informed him that bedchambers were the usual place. Sir Richard had wondered where Henry should eat. Mrs. Splunket pointed out that they had a dining room for that very activity. Sir Richard had wondered what he should have Henry do first. Mrs. Splunket delivered her firm opinion that what Henry should do first was sleep. Sir Richard had finally stopped wondering about everything and left it up to Mrs. Splunket to make the arrangements. As far as Henry could tell, he was to live inside the manor almost like he was a gentleman himself, and he was not to do any work until the morrow. And it was all thanks to Mrs. Splunket.

  Before she led him upstairs, Mrs. Splunket showed Henry the first floor. The dining room where he would take his meals was astounding to Henry’s eyes. A long, polished wood table ran the center of it, flanked at each end by a marble fireplace. Even though nobody was in the room, crystal chandeliers winked with dozens of wax candles. Silk wall hangings depicting hunting scenes covered the cold, rough-hewn stone of the manor walls. Henry had never imagined that he would be allowed to enter such a place, much less sit down and eat in it.

  Just at the bottom of the staircase, they passed a mysterious room. Henry supposed it had once been a drawing room, though now it was filled with all manner of scientific equipment and a strange fog hung in the air. Henry could barely see Sir Richard’s tall silhouette pacing through the mist.

  Henry was installed in a large bedchamber on the second floor. Until Mrs. Splunket had taken charge of the arrangements, he had assumed he would sleep under a table in the kitchen, or on a bale of hay in the stables. Now he found that he had an entire room of his own. Everything about it was big. The windows soared toward the ceiling and the sills wide enough to sit upon. The bed might comfortably hold five people, and the mantle over the fireplace was so high he would have to stand on his toes to reach it. It had been his dearest wish to find some small place to sleep indoors, and now he was in a room that a duke wouldn’t turn his nose up at.

  Mrs. Splunket lit the fire while Henry hurriedly climbed in bed. He slid his boots off out of her view and kept his stockings on.

  Mrs. Splunket pulled the
coverlet up under his chin and said, “Come to the kitchen in the morning and I’ll cook you a good old English fry-up.” She blew out the candle and shut the door.

  Henry stayed up for hours, afraid if he closed his eyes he would wake up in a back alley of London. It seemed almost too good to be true. He had done it! He had escaped the city and his grasping parents and a life of misery as a chimney sweep. Sir Richard seemed to be a kind employer and Mrs. Splunket was already one of his favorite people. Bertram didn’t like him, he knew that, but he thought he might win the man over with time. He drifted off wondering what a good old English fry-up might be.

  Henry woke with the sun as it shone through the tall windows that lined the room. He was still here. It had not been a dream. He jumped down from the bed onto the thick Persian rug and glanced at his still-stockinged feet. He would have to make sure nobody saw his toes. They could ruin everything.

  He struggled into his new clothes and ran down to the kitchen. As he ate his way through a rasher of bacon, five sausages, two fried eggs, and three fried kidneys, Mrs. Splunket said, “It’s about time there was somebody ’round here that appreciates a good fry-up. Now let’s see what you can do to a stack of fried bread and a pot of strong tea.”

  Once Mrs. Splunket was thoroughly convinced that Henry could not swallow another fried crumb, she sent him to Sir Richard.

  The door to the mysterious room he had passed the night before was closed. Henry tapped on it.

  “Enter,” Sir Richard called out.

  Henry pushed open the door. Tables were lined against the walls and stacked with beakers, burners, and haphazardly piled parchments. Glass aquariums sat in a line, most of them empty. Henry spotted the Phyllobates terribilis sitting placidly in the corner aquarium and an enormous, hairy spider attempting to climb the walls of another. He supposed the spider was what occupied the other box he had carried the day before. Between them, a burner heating a pot of water sent steam into the air, creating a fog and giving the air a humid feel. The inner wall of the room was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, filled to overflowing with leather-bound books. Pots filled with unusual-looking plants sat near the window.

  “My laboratory,” Sir Richard said. “I’m a man of science and quite determined to make discoveries. That is the only way humankind can progress and prosper.”

  “Yes, sir,” Henry said, glancing at the pot of boiling water. “Shall I take that off the flame, sir? Is it for tea?”

  Sir Richard laughed. “That is certainly not for tea. By boiling the water I attempt to replicate the humidity that would be found in the Amazon jungle. I like my creatures to feel at home.”

  “Yes, sir,” Henry said, casting about for something to do. “Would you like me to straighten up the place for you?”

  “Good grief, don’t move anything or I’ll never find it again. No, in order for you to assist me with my research, you’ll have to learn to read. I’ll advertise for a tutor. In the meantime, you can use my books to look at the pictures. One can often learn quite a bit from drawings.”

  “I can read, sir.”

  “Can you?” Sir Richard said, with a note of surprise. “How comes an orphan to reading?”

  Henry wasn’t sure how he had come to reading. His parents had sent him to school for two years. He had done very well, but then they had suddenly announced they would send him out to work instead. That was when he had run. He knew what happened to children who were sent out to work. The young girl in the apartment above him had phossy jaw from working in a match factory. Henry had often heard her moan through the night and the exposed bone on her face was hard not to stare at. He did not understand why his parents had bothered sending him to school in the first place if they had intended all along to send him out to work.

  “My mother and father sent me to school, sir.”

  “Ah,” Sir Richard said, nodding, “they must have had big plans for you before they were carried off. A pity, but that does make things simpler. See that book lying on the table? It’s about the creatures of the Amazon. Educate yourself, and then you may begin assisting me with my experiments.”

  Though Henry had been taught to read, it had been some time since he had done so. Slowly, he sounded out the words. Megasoma elephas was also called the rhino beetle. The males used their long horns for fighting. Despite their small size, they were able to lift up to eight hundred and fifty times their own weight.

  The Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris, or capybara, was the largest rodent in the world and could weigh as much as a man. It was known to be a good swimmer and used the water to escape predators, like the jaguar.

  The Eunectes murinus, the green anaconda, had a body as wide in diameter as a stovepipe. They were not poisonous, but Henry didn’t think that made things any better, since the snake liked to constrict and drown its prey, which could be as big as a deer.

  Piranhas, or Pygocentrus nattereri, had teeth that looked as if they had been filed to sharp points. They would devour anything that fell into the water and could get so enthusiastic that they ended up accidentally devouring each other. Henry discovered that the Thames was not a natural habitat for these small fish that bite. Sir Richard noticed him looking at the picture of the fish and told him he had a marvelous collection of them in the fountain at the back of the house. “Just don’t wave any of your fingers near the water,” Sir Richard said. “They are perfectly capable of leaping up and relieving you of them.”

  Henry began to get the idea that if one were to be wandering around the Amazon jungle, one had better watch where they stepped and stay out of the water.

  “A hybrid!” Sir Richard cried. “Of course, why didn’t I see it before?”

  Henry dropped his book and ran to Sir Richard. Sir Richard circled a small pot holding a plant growing low to the ground with teardrop-shaped leaves. The leaves appeared to be dotted with dew.

  “What is it, sir?” Henry asked.

  “That is a sundew. Very interesting plant. You see those little drops? An insect will be attracted to them, then the insect will become caught, as it’s sticky. Then what do you suppose the sundew does?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Henry said. It had never occurred to him that a plant did anything about anything.

  “The leaf that holds the trapped insect will fold in on itself and release digestive enzymes to devour the insect.”

  “The plant eats bugs?” Henry asked.

  “Indeed,” Sir Richard answered.

  Henry thought that was a fairly horrifying idea. If the plant could decide to eat something, then the plant must be thinking. He wondered if trees could think.

  “Fascinating as the sundew’s methods are,” Sir Richard said, “that is not what has captured my imagination just now. Remember, Henry, the goal we’re after is to improve the lives of our fellow man. What bothers people in the summer? Flies. What does every English garden grow? Roses. You see? I shall simply cross the sundew with a rose bush and create a hybrid rose that eats flies. Great heavens, amateur botanists are always creating hybrid roses and naming them after themselves, but what do those hybrids actually do?”

  “Probably just look nice, sir?” Henry said.

  “Precisely,” Sir Richard said. “They just sit there looking nice. While our rose, the Blackstone Fly Eliminator, will rid every English garden of annoying pests. I’ll just get a shovel, dig up one of the rose bushes from the front garden, and we will be on our way to making history.”

  Sir Richard spent weeks trying to create the Blackstone Fly Eliminator with no success. He carefully pollinated the rose bush, then when that didn’t work he blamed it on that particular rose bush and dug up another. At the end of it, the front garden had been transformed into a series of holes. He finally concluded that English roses were stubborn and unwillingly to learn a new way of doing things.

  Sir Richard’s mind was distracted from the stubborn roses when a pony arrived for Henry. Sir Richard had written to a friend who bred horses and the gentleman had sent a
long a gray-colored Welsh pony with a note that said, Don’t be put off by the name (Cantankerous). He is a sturdy little beast and will get you wherever you’re going.

  Bertram had been assigned to give Henry riding lessons. This seemed doubly a challenge, as Henry was already frightened of Cantankerous, who had bitten him on arrival, and was leery of Bertram, who seemed always on the verge of biting him.

  Bertram had saddled up the pony and helped Henry mount, all the while muttering, “I’m a coachman. Does this look like a carriage? No, it don’t.”

  Henry gripped the reins tight.

  “Don’t pull on him, now,” Bertram scolded. “He’ll fight against it.”

  Henry loosened the reins, though it seemed like a bad idea. He didn’t have anything else to hold on to.

  “I suppose I better teach you right,” Bertram said, “else I’ll get blamed.”

  Henry figured that was as good a reason as any.

  “You’ll want to control the horse with your legs. That’s how you’ll tell it where you want to go. It ain’t like driving a carriage, mind, as that takes real skill and experience.”

  “All right,” Henry said, “so if I want to go right, I press my right leg?”

  “I don’t know!” Bertram shouted. “It depends on how the horse was schooled. Who rode him before? How did they teach him?”

  Cantankerous began to rear his head at all the shouting. He backed up, as if to get away from Bertram. Henry tightened the reins.

  Cantankerous bucked and Henry found himself lying on the ground.

  Bertram looked down at him and said, “That looks less like ridin’ and more like falling off. You’re gonna have to get right back on him or he won’t never let you ride him again.”

  Henry climbed back on Cantankerous, though his every instinct told him not to. His instincts had been correct, as he was thrown off three more times. As much as Bertram tried to maintain his gruff exterior, he became more amused each time Henry hit the ground. He even began to warm a little as Henry asked him questions about horses.