One

The Lost Stones Of Victoria Foxton

ON A LATE NOVEMBER EVENING IN 1877, Victoria Foxton left her family home for the last time, an elegant house on Great Portland Street with a navy blue front door that had swollen badly in all the recent rain. Victoria, however, parted by the servants’ entrance, creeping down the narrow back stairs, wary of alerting her father who kept late hours with his papers and a brandy glass. She hurried along the street, quiet but for the passing of an odd hansom cab dashing back from Drury Lane (snatches of recall’d songs carrying above the horse’s clatter), the hem of her petticoat dragging in puddles she made no effort to avoid. Over this she wore a dark wool frock coat with cape, a heavy garment that nevertheless witnesses later described hanging in a curiously strained fashion about her shoulders, or making a peculiar sound not usually heard issuing from the roll of such a fabric. She darted through the London streets like a ghost, attracting neither much attention nor dismay, for the good people of that decade - at least those who still dared venture out at such an hour - were quite used to spirits, and let then go about their business unflustered. Victoria made for the river and eventually found it flowing strong under Blackfriars Bridge, after many a wrong turn, ashen-faced but with her sense of purpose undimmed. She began to climb onto the low parapet.

Victoria had always been a delicate and rather sickly child. She succumbed without an ounce of fight to every infection floating, and was thus kept away from other children (infants in whom her physician father saw not smiles and heard not laughter, but instead a rose bloom on the neck that might tomorrow be pox, or a dissonant orchestra of coughs and fiery sneezes). It was no great surprise that she grew isolated and inward, shy and uncomfortable in the company of others, though in truth this disposition was there from the very start, and only exacerbated by such protection. Victoria spent her days with sable brush in hand, painting flowers whose frail petals never quite came right no matter how hard she tried; sometimes she wrote magical stories with painstakingly decorated letters, tales that her mother would read to her before sleep came beckoning, her room plunged into a darkness that she found peaceful and soothing, not scary like other little girls.

With the approach of adolescence, however, there was a rapid worsening of Victoria’s condition. She began crying without quite knowing why on the eve of her thirteenth birthday, and from that moment onwards – from the first sweet salty drop that balled down her cheek and moistened her lips – tears were never far from her eyes. She became withdrawn and coiled away from her mother’s embrace, stopped running an ivory comb through her hair and grew steadily more fearful of the outside world. Her appetite dwindled, and her face lost its last vestige of infant plumpness and glow (a vanishing that Victoria’s mother mourned in a facile, quite disproportionate manner above all other concerns, recalling the full cheeks she used to playfully tickle, or the cute nose she would daub with strawberry preserve).

In despair, Mr Foxton sought the opinion of some medical colleagues, though the subject was most uncomfortable to him; any discussion of it engendered a curious pain that he endured many a lonely night contending with, desperately trying to convince himself that the sensation was not one of embarrassment, or any of its equally nefarious relations. Alas, none of his contacts had particular expertise in the dark realm of psychological illness, and none could offer an explanation as to why Victoria had apparently tired of life at such a startlingly young age, much less offer anything approaching a solution.

Then in May of 1876, after years of further bleakness and decline, Isaac Foxton decided to administer a jolt to Victoria’s system and force a change of scene. Loading their daughter tearfully onto a carriage, the Foxtons (together with an equally worried maid) headed nervously to Victoria Station, a coincidence of names that did nothing to quell the girl’s watery trepidation. From here they caught an engine to Brighton, and then a further carriage ride to a small hotel with views across the channel and rotting sash windows. By the end of their stay, the fresh sea air seemed to have worked some magic on Victoria. She was visibly stronger, her skin began to regain some colour and there was less fear in her eyes. Most surprisingly of all, Victoria developed a fascination with the stones she found along the shoreline during her afternoon walks. On returning to London, Victoria’s travel case contained some sixty of the most beautiful finds, wrapped together in a napkin.

That same August, seeking to build on this improvement, they returned to Brighton, this time taking a weeklong residence at the opulent Grand Hotel. Martha Foxton was captivated by such luxury, and whilst secretly fearing that her husband was showing a tendency towards extravagance, recognised such lavishness for what it really was - an unvoiced expression of love for his daughter. The couple took genteel promenades on the West Pier, and watched Victoria searching the stony beach far below. That week she found amber, quartz, jasper, jet and glorious striped agate. She danced away from the incoming tide, and Isaac was sure he saw a smile briefly light her face. Sometimes Victoria would simply gaze out across the water, though there didn’t seem to be anything particular to have drawn her focus. Isaac merely believed her captivated, and sought not to examine these incidents further, as was sometimes his way.

There was great pleasure in the household at seeing Victoria so enlivened once again; her kitten returned to the room to warm himself by the coal fire, and even old Mrs Redfearn, the spinster governess, was soon knocking at the front door with books in hand, for Victoria had expressed a desire to resume all lessons. What she wished above all else, though, was for a method of polishing the hundreds of stone she had collected from the Sussex shores. Whilst beautiful just as they were - arranged in glorious arcs over the floorboards, or held to the firelight to expose a maze of previously hidden veins and mineral tributaries, rivers she could quite lose herself in – they were never quite as enchanting as when wettened, glistening when last washed by the waves and stolen from the beach. Her father knew of no written technique for accomplishing such a finish to stones but, joy-filled that his daughter had regained enough in the way of spirit to be contemplating a past-time, promised that he would trace down a solution.

Isaac Foxton pondered the problem during house-calls, when he should instead have been concentrating on pulse rates and clammy foreheads, and then pondered some more in his study during evenings when his eyes tired of the book page; he even took his contemplations to bed where he lay oblivious to his wife’s breath upon his ear lobe, then embraced them afresh in the morning as rich yellow yolk shone down the shell of his breakfast egg. Beginning to fear that maybe a flash of inspiration had lit dull recesses when he was looking the other way, Mr Foxton suddenly recalled an old spinning-wheel going wormy in the attic. This he had a servant recover and dust down, then manhandle to a stick-maker’s shop on Charing Cross Road. The stick-maker was known to Isaac through a mutual friend, and had a reputation for craft and inventiveness that stretched far beyond the simple shaping of hawthorn shanks. Thus for a small fee (which was spun to ever more alarming lengths as the weeks passed), he commenced work on the machine, meticulously, as was his design.

The wheel was removed, and with it most of the woodworm, cremated in their bore-holes as the spokes were fed one by one onto the workshop stove; then the table was stripped back, oiled and left in the back yard to dry under a watery sun. A new iron wheel was sourced (with bearings, for the stick-maker imagined there would be many, many rotations) and connected to a sturdier iron treadle mechanism. In place of the bobbin was fitted a miniature metal lined barrel with a removable lid, with axle stubs top and bottom; a clever gearing system was then attached to the drive pulley, causing the barrel to spin a hundred times more energetically than the iron fly wheel, although the exact ratio was to remain a mystery. Such a renovation took considerable time. Once completed, the stick-maker took a handful of glass marbles, placed them into the barrel and pumped his shoe on the treadle for some minutes. The results of his workmanship proved most satisfying; he poured the marbles back onto a saucer, for they were now nothing but a coarse white powder.

Mr Foxton then tracked down a suitable abrasive mixture from a chemist contact in Holborn, and a supply of polishing compound from a jewellers in Covent Garden. He presented Victoria with her contraption in October 1876, breathless and sweat-soaked about the collar, for no servant could be found to tease it up the stairs. His daughter beamed and threw her slender arms around him in a way she hadn’t done since an infant girl, and Isaac felt his heart flutter, and wondered if she had felt it too.

Nobody in the household resented the faint rumbling noise that soon came from behind Victoria’s closed door; they found it soothing, for that sound meant she was safe and absorbed, lost in herself but spinning ever further from those demons which sought to pursue and torment. It was only when the room fell silent that worry would begin to percolate through Mr and Mrs Foxton, and then to the servants, until one brave soul would make a crack in the door and report back nervous and smiling that Victoria was just asleep, that was all, asleep at the wheel of all things, kitten curled on the treadle.

As soon as her lessons were through and Mrs Redfearn departed – draped in a musky fur stole that left a lingering scent as sure as footprints – Victoria would load the barrel with stones (richly dark garnet to begin the tumbling), add a suitable proportion of grit and start spinning. She spun the stones through to Christmas and beyond, spun whilst the January snow lay virginal under moonlight in the street below, was still spinning when horse hooves churned the crystals to grey sludge the following morning. She spun with the first buds of spring and the first warm day of summer, spun alongside sparrow song and chimney sweep’s whistle (resonating down a sooty flue, notes pushed ever higher by a worn-down bristle brush), spun on into autumn and the first falling leaf. She spun through the lining of three miniature barrels, four wheel bearings, a drive pulley and twelve ounces of polishing compound, but by the onset of November her work was completed. The hundreds of stones were placed into pleasing groups and displayed in the drawing room for a week. Everybody believed them to be perhaps the most beautiful objects they had ever the fortune to gaze upon. Isaac Foxton felt blissful that his daughter had found such an invigorating and educational past-time.

And then Victoria collected the stones together in some muslin (a quite frightful weight when all combined) and hoped they would never see daylight again.

Over the last few weeks, she’d spent the long evenings shut away in her room as was usual, but busy preparing with a needle and thread, sewing secret pockets into the lining of her dress coat, changing the particular stitch as and when the mood took her. Victoria had no grand design in mind. Sometimes the pockets she created were palm sized, sometimes barely a little finger width and height; half were diligently measured and geometric, half free flowing (fabric left to the pin-sharp imagination of the shears); one evening she’d group the creations tightly together, the next let them roam free and lonesome. Into each little pocket Victoria would empty some of the polished stones, push them down into the corners, then seal the opening with a dense cross-stitch (for she feared the stones escaping more than the end itself). Once lodgings had been secured for all the examples in her collection, Victoria hid the bulging garment away and waited for the perfect night.

Balancing now on the parapet, her leather high-tops together and glistening in the rain, Victoria gave herself to the wind and fell backwards into the river. Perhaps she imagined a plunge down a fairy-story well, brilliantly coloured fish blowing bubbles in the warm water, a seahorse playing in her long, wavy hair. Alas, there was nothing but an icy murk, darker with every passing fathom, the lamps on the bridge above dying one by one. On a calmer night, maybe the body would have lain weighted down in the silt, but the currents were strong and the stones’ counterforce weak. She drifted east to Limehouse and washed ashore by morning, where a couple of street urchins stood prodding at her bloated, pale blue body with pieces of driftwood. Luckily for Victoria - and for the fate of the semi-precious stones, still safely stowed in their hidden compartments - a Police Constable was soon on the scene, a florid gentleman who respectfully removed his helmet and blew into a silver whistle that seemed to achieve nothing but attract passing gulls. Within the week, Victoria’s lungs were pure of Thames water once again, and her body covered in earth; the stones were returned to the family home and decanted into three large glass jars. These were carefully placed on the drawing room mantelpiece and twinkled in the firelight until spring, when the last embers were finally allowed to die, and a new servant girl tentatively took to the glassware with a duster, the disturbed motes burning orange in the first strong rays of April’s sun.

Basil Foxton never really got to know his younger sister. A full three years her senior, his childhood had been spent boxed away in a succession of distant preparatory and boarding schools, the pain of homesickness soon b’calmed by the presence of books which embraced him in ever greater numbers as he grew. On his brief returns to London during periods of sojourn (always a carriage ride that tried the endurance, most especially during Yuletide when the lanes were rutted and horseshoes often struggled for grip, when whichever poor soul you happened to be sharing your carriage with was invariably in possession of a fever and would not rest until they’d shared every diseased, lung-borne molecule) Victoria mostly kept to her rooms, only to emerge pale and shy of voice for an evening repast during which she’d artfully rearrange the contents of her plate, but consume not one morsel.

He was attending his final year at Jesus College at the time of Victoria’s passing, and received the news in a letter from his mother, the penny lilac stamp of which had been applied at a most troubling angle and inverted position. The Maltese Cross franking took aim at the expected corner, but only succeeded in catching the upper perforations the merest of glancing blows. Such carelessness from Martha Foxton, usually so fastidious in the particulars of her written correspondence, was enough to give young Basil an uneasy feeling as he placed a cold finger under the paper flap and opened the letter. He paused halfway across the frosty quadrangle - for he was on his way to the chapel and morning worship, the odd snowflake starfishing his gown – and read the following by threadbare light:

2nd December 1877

Dearest Child,

Though the pain within me is of a depth without measure, I must grasp the inky nettle and write, for it is beyond me to do more, yet unthinkable less. It is your darling sister, your beautiful Victoria, of which never a crossed work has pass’d betwixt you. She is no longer of this World, and has ascended to the Heavens where she will be at Bless’d peace for all Eternity, let us pray...

She went on to describe an horrific incident involving a wild-eyed dray horse and a crumbling bridge parapet; a tumble into cold, murky depths; a pain-free slippage of Victoria’s mortal coil.

Her clasp on life was never the strongest; she would have given in to calling of the Light without struggle, without recourse to scream or terror. Victoria would never have wanted you to suffer. Please be strong.

There were droplets of truth. He felt he should be making an attempt to read between the lines, but the words were swimming and it wasn’t at all easy to imagine where these lines might be.

The ink had run in places, though Basil was unable to tell whether this was from falling tears at the letter’s conception, snowflakes that were suddenly dotting the page with increasingly regularity, or something as prosaic as a worn nib. Perhaps it may have been an unfathomable combination of all three. He paused, wondering if tears of his own were about to flood forth, when a hefty snowball exploded in the vicinity of his left ear, the proud work of one ‘Thudder’ Atkins who’d taken aim from a grand distance (and was briefly thunderstruck by his own precision). Basil fell to the ground, and the letter slid from his hands. It caught a skittish breeze and cart wheeled across the quadrangle, danced with a verve and joie de vivre entirely inappropriate to the words unfurled within.

It was several years before Basil would learn the truth behind his sister’s death, the darker pigments that had been allowed to rest and settle free from agitation (for scent of scandal was a terror that outshone all others), but by this point both his parents had departed themselves, within weeks of each other, a mere eye-blink on the grander scale. Broken hearts were the cause, of course, though the inky curlicues on the death certificates pronounced differently. Basil studied the documents by candlelight at the oak table of the family kitchen, a semi-circle of empty wine bottles gathered about his person like ghostly green sentinels. Seated such, or thereabouts (frequent voyages into the cavernous, spider-silked cellar, for example), before a coke range steadily cooling for lack of attention, he spent a week attempting to get the family affairs in order. An orphan at twenty-four, brotherless and sisterless, indeed free from any close entanglements worthy of mention, it struck Basil (though with no great fanfare, for the equation did involve grief) that he should soon be wealthy beyond compare. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that his father had been a rather more assiduous collector of debts than capital. A couple of bottles of exceedingly fine Claret helped sweeten this dawning realisation, but no grape on God’s earth could dam the tide of foreboding that was soon headed Basil’s way.

The house was sold, and with it most of the possessions, excepting a handful of items he could not bear to be parted from, or see wrenched from the spot where they had always been (there was a small mirror, for example, into which his mother had spent so long dreamily gazing that he was sure something of her soul was captured in the silvered glass, and that he could detect her face in the surface, late at night, the spirit of Bacchus taking firm hold). He wrote glowing letters of recommendation for the few remaining staff, settled their wages and assured them they would be an asset to any house in Great Portland Street or beyond. He left one of the glass jars on the drawing room mantelpiece, for part of Victoria’s soul would always belong to these walls, and hoped the new residents would feel sensations similar. One he gave to Florence the maid (together with a sovereign he’d just that minute discovered in a waistcoat pocket he didn’t know he had), on a whim, after he’d spied her transfixed by the assortment of pretty colours, as if stippl’d by a dazzling brush, encased within. The final jar he took back with him to his dingy lodgings in Spitalfields, under a sky that threatened rain and glowered ever more with each approaching step, as if entering the abyss.

The young man’s inheritance, after settlement of debts and associated costs, was just short of four hundred pounds, a dangerous sum since whilst not sufficient to assure a lifetime of idleness, it drained Basil of the motivation to persist with immediate, gainful employment. After finishing his studies at Jesus, he had stayed on at lodgings in Cambridge, much against his father’s wishes, with vague notions of becoming a poet or an Impressionist painter. When a whole year passed with not so much a rhyming couplet or square inch of coloured canvas to show – though with a hugely grown appreciation of sherry wine and gin – Isaac Foxton stopped Basil’s allowance and ordered him back to London. Here he pulled strings and secured Basil a traineeship at a blossoming Chancery Lane law firm; no son of his was going to lounge idle under the family roof, glossy-eyed with artistic visions. Basil responded by moving out. His mother mourned the loss of her now only child with such fervour that infrequent visitors to the house quaked and feared tragedy afresh.

Well, with capital bulging his bank account, the traineeship position was quick to perish; lacking the motivation even to compose a letter of resignation, Foxton became studiously tardy in punctuality and grubby in appearance, then simply ceased attending altogether. He took to rising at midday, and spent the afternoons pacing about his murky rooms, pen in one hand and glass in the other, waiting for inspiration to call. He would write a great work, yes, perhaps the finest of the decade; there were plenty of years remaining before such a deadline might hove into view, though, and a sense of urgency deserted him. Foxton’s output was thus measured in rare sentences, less pages, chapters & volumes, not that this stopped him bragging in ale-houses aplenty of grand future narrative thrusts and turns. When in the presence of young Ladies, however, Foxton was often startled to learn that he had, in fact, written far more than he’d hitherto believed or dreamed possible, was on occasions even approaching the very final page, the degree of exaggeration being curiously proportionate to the beauty of the Lady in question, or the plunge of her décolletage.

It is far beyond the scope of this narrative to chart the specifics of Foxton’s decline across the following years. He succumbed to the ravages of drink and feverish pursuit of women, took to gambling and stumbled wild-eyed about the lonely dawn-lit streets (where even passing horses snorted in derision). He drifted through a meaningless life, like so many young gentlemen of that age with temporary means, caught in an emotional vacuum between the hold of their parents and the soothing love of an (as yet) undiscovered soul mate.

No, it would be unreasonable to settle long over these times, the teary drunken nights spent shaking on his counterpane (returned from a Mile End cock-fight, traces of bloody sawdust still lodged in his boot soles), gazing by candlelight into his mother’s beloved hand mirror, yet finding only dead eyes and his own pallid complexion; or maybe the cold white light mornings waking from yet another evening lost before the gas lamps were lit, naked on a foul mattress with wiry horse hair coiling from each and every rip, a girl pulling on her stockings and pinning back her hair. Annie or Nell or whatever name she was going by that particular morning. Perhaps dear Pru, he’d have known if she’d simply turn her face, but the girl would be gone before his bare feet brushed the cold floorboards, weary of that exposed nail he had always meant to hammer down... No, it would be most unedifying to loiter.

Saviour came in the form of an uncle Foxton didn’t know he had, or more likely had once been aware but long since forgotten in the wash of sherry wine. This kind hearted soul (we shall not examine him with any greater precision) took the gamble that his nephew had probably purged himself of amoral activities for the present; he propped him up financially (convinced there was dormant potential lurking somewhere beneath the grime, eager to make a return on his investment) and found Foxton a position in his small insurance company. From simple copy-work and filing, graduating to book-keeping and then even field work of an ‘investigative’ nature, he found himself sailing on more placid waters. But the narrative mustn’t be allowed to dwell and linger.

As the years moved by Foxton managed to accrue enough funds to secure slightly more salubrious quarters, some third floor rooms above a cobblers off the Gray’s Inn Road. Here he sweltered in the summer and froze during winter months when frost bloomed on the inside of his window panes; Foxton’s own breath (most often expelled in coughs, sneezes, long troubled sighs) hung in cumulous formations near his stained ceiling, and even five blankets were never quite enough. The fittings and fixtures were of a very ephemeral nature – his rooms looking most threadbare prior to rent collection day – but Victoria’s stones remained throughout, a point of permanence (and an excellent door-stop on those rare days when the breeze was palatable enough to invite in). Presently he came of the opinion that it was rather selfish to keep the stones so confined; Foxton got to carrying around some of the more fetching examples in his pockets, where they’d tumble a little more and raise his spirits in a way he seldom sought to examine. It never crossed his mind to try selling the stones, even during the harshest of winters when a few more nuggets of coke wouldn’t have gone amiss, when his financial straits were at their most treacherous.

Yet this was an even more selfish appropriation. By and by he decided to return them to the Thames (though he inclined towards keeping one back as a tiny paper-weight), for surely that was what his sister would have desired. He’d toss the stones from the parapet where her spirit departed, let them fall at the mercy of currents, barge wakes and hungry eels to resting places unknown. Foxton was, however, in no great hurry to return them to the Thames bed; he figured a single stone at a time would be perfectly respectful, and set no rigid timetable for the operation. The process went on for years, during which period the towers of Bazalgette’s new-fangled bridge inched ever skywards on the river’s eastern horizon, and the threads on Foxton’s overcoat lost grip on many a vital seam. Sometimes months would pass without him adding a single stone. Then there might be occasions when he would leave his hearthside for a special trip, often at a peculiar hour, for it was at such times that he felt most maudlin and Victoria flooded his thoughts. He favoured stormy nights most of all, and the angry drum of rain against glass was usually sufficient to stir his emotions in this direction, (and also responsible for many an appalling cold).

It was on just such an evening in late September 1889 that Foxton found himself crossing Blackfriars Bridge in a persistent drizzle, wind whipping in a most ungentlemanly fashion about his hat. Indeed, a carriage may have seemed rather a necessity under such a foul sky, but Foxton’s purse was in its usual state of grave depletion, causing the classification of what deemed ‘necessity’ and what fell under the auspices of ‘luxury’ to invariably favour the latter. Thus he walked, but paused now to search in his overcoat pocket. He pulled out a small stone – maybe Agate or Mook, translucent held to gaslight – warmed it briefly in his palm before leaning over the parapet and dropping the gift into the river.

Foxton was making a path to Southwark and a séance, though not as might first be suspected to attempt contact with the late Victoria, or indeed any other members of his extended, largely deceased family. His work in more recent years had led him into the realm of ‘private investigation’, an arena in which he displayed no great natural aptitude, but had achieved a minor repute notwithstanding. Although initially concerned with the detection of financial irregularities – embezzlement, insurance fraud, annuity misappropriation – the cases inexorably became more sinister, reaching a culmination in the summer of that year with the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the demise of one Charlotte Miller. There were those convinced that the fingers bruising Charlotte’s young neck belonged to none other than her betrothed, a young market trader who’d been keeping up a decent display of grief ever since, and remained chaste insofar as Foxton could ascertain. This, in fact, was about all Foxton was able to conclude, but he continued to pocket a meagre monthly fee from her distraught parents (maybe even thinking of his own and their loss), and promised developments that he’d long since given up believing himself. Perhaps it was a nagging distaste as to his own indolence concerning the matter, or a bubbling sense of conscience about to break from the depths (like damp will lift the Indian Rosewood veneer on a jewellery box), but Foxton had vowed earlier that week to make some sort of amends. He decided the best plan would be to attempt contact with the victim herself, see if she might posthumously shed any light on the matter in hand. Failing an appearance by Miss Miller, there were bound to be other spiritual malcontents floating about the Ether, gasping for an audience. Foxton thought grandly that he might offer them a voice, retrospectively redress an assortment of wrongs... and there was always possible remuneration. For sure, this was one of his better ideas; the lot of the sore spirit and private detective deserved to be thrown together, it made business sense (even if he couldn’t quite lay claim to a loftier moral aspect, with the sweet & selfless views this entailed). Foxton knew nothing of spiritualism, but thought the presence of a treasured object may tempt shy phantoms out of the celestial woodwork. To this end, he had succeeded in the loan of the late Charlotte’s beloved silver pocket watch, a most fortunate acquisition since Foxton’s own time-piece was broken (or rather lurking at Davidsons Watch & Clock Repair, in perfect mechanical health, awaiting some form of non-negotiable settlement).