Savage Magic (10 page)

Horton sees there is little point continuing. She is rampant in her determined belief that a witch has been defeated. She is almost exultant. He dismisses them.

The gardener, O’Reilly, limps in next, wincing as he walks, supported by a wooden crutch under his arm. He smells of dung and has a thick rural accent which might be Somerset or Suffolk, but Horton understands enough to confirm the main points about the shed and the dogs. It is he who has dug up the lawn.

‘Hag track,’ he said. ‘Witches on bloody lawn.’

‘You’ve seen such things before?’

‘Oh, aye. They dance, don’t they? Dance on my bloody lawn. Ruined, it was. Bloody ruined.’

‘So, there’s more than one witch?’

‘Oh, aye.
Always
more ’n one, in’t there? That Hook was a bad ’un, she was. Took me in. Liked her, I did. But didn’t know her
true nature
, did I? Bitch.’

Finally, the cook, who to Horton’s surprise is a man, quite a young man, named Stephen Moore. There is something rather clerical about him. He is precise and quiet.

‘Where did you work before here?’

‘I worked for Sir Francis Vincent, constable.’

‘Is that far from here?’

‘It is in Surrey. Stoke d’Abernon.’

‘And how did you come to this role so soon after the departure of the previous cook?’

‘I understood there had been some dissatisfaction with the woman’s performance for some time. One hears these things, even from far away. I wrote to Mrs Graham to offer my services.’

‘Is that the normal way of these matters?’

‘I couldn’t say, constable. It is my way. I have always approached my employers directly.’

‘Is it not unusual for a cook in a house such as this to be a man?’

‘Perhaps. Though not unprecedented.’

‘Sir Francis was happy for you to leave?’

‘I doubt he even noticed. He is not yet ten years old. The estate is run by his mother, Dame Mary.’

Horton, no student of the peerage, nonetheless feels Moore’s smooth condescension, and it irritates him. And yet this young man is the most intriguing person he has met so far. He is soft-spoken but articulate and, it would seem, well educated. He dresses like a City clerk rather than a provincial cook, and carries with him a ledger – ‘I was working on the accounts when summoned to see you, and I don’t like to leave them lying around.’

Moore confirms the stories already told, and speaks with unusual warmth – unusual among the other servants – about Mrs Graham.

‘It is a pleasure to work for such an intelligent woman,’ he says. ‘It is not always the case that a woman in her position is so clear and so understanding.’

‘What do you mean, “in her position”?’

‘Well, I think perhaps it is obvious. She is a wife living under the roof of a man other than her husband. In those circumstances she runs a formidably well-disciplined household.’

‘And yet in recent weeks things have become shakier.’

‘Well, perhaps. Though as I have said to her, sorrows such as these do always seem to accompany each other.’

‘You speak to Mrs Graham often?’

‘Moderately often, yes. She likes to come down to the kitchen and discuss matters with me on occasion.’

‘And what of Sir Henry? Is he as approachable an employer?’

‘Oh, Sir Henry is cut from unique cloth. I am told he is fierce and quick to anger, but he is also full of life. But I have not met the gentleman yet. He has not been here since my arrival. I am sure his company will be a pleasure.’

He speaks like a politician. Which, for Charles Horton, is just another word for liar.

A Treatise on Moral Projection

I had experienced nothing like that awful night in my then-short career as a physician. The great asylum of Bethlem, where I had begun my training, was constantly full of the moans and cries of the mad. It echoed with their misery and their complaints, but such was its common state. If it had become suddenly silent the effect might have been as shocking as those awful screams at Brooke House. But I cannot recall such an event ever taking place.

We could find no explanation for the disturbances. On my rounds the following morning, a strange mystery presented itself. I asked each and every male inmate of the hospital what had caused them to shriek so the previous eve, but not a single one of them could remember having made such noises. And there was no guile in their denials; each and every one of them was sorely perplexed by my question. It was as if they had been dreaming, and had (as I have noted often) forgotten the detail of what they had dreamed.

I recall an air of mystery settling itself upon the place. I remember Dr Monro visited us that day, as was his wont once or twice a week, and I told him of what had occurred. He could provide no explanation.

It was while all this was taking place that Mrs Horton came to see me. Her presence was by no means unwelcome. She had, as I have said, been one of the more interesting inmates of Brooke House, what with her obvious natural intelligence and her more traditional womanly charms. Her dreams plagued her sorely, despite the separation from her husband and her diurnal life, but she did not come to see me for that reason. She told me she had become interested in Maria Cranfield.

I had some suspicion of her motives, of course; had she not already claimed that she’d heard another woman’s voice from Maria’s cell? She admitted that this must have been only another manifestation of her unquiet mind, and accepted my diagnosis of it as such. But she felt that spending time with Maria would help both her and that poor girl, who was still secured in a strait waistcoat.

With my permission, a chair was placed in Maria’s cell, and she sat with her that whole day following the disturbances. She read to her, especially from that volume of Wollstonecraft she had secured from the Brooke House library. I was astonished that such a volume was made available to residents, and while I applauded Mrs Horton’s intent in reading to Maria I was somewhat dismayed at her choice of material. After our meeting I quietly made arrangements for the removal of that particular volume from the house’s library, at such a time when Mrs Horton was finished with it.

I confess, as I write these words, that my blessing for this new arrangement may be seen as a mistake. The events to come may have been very different – indeed, may not have occurred at all – if I had not permitted these two women to spend time together. Yet I trusted and admired Mrs Horton – and she used this trust against me. I will say only this. As the storm gathered and the terrible events unfolded, I learned a hard lesson: one must never trust a patient. Particularly if the patient is a woman.

WESTMINSTER

It is dangerous, Aaron Graham sees, this feeling of being pulled into a mystery. He has seen it happen to other men, notably John Harriott, his great friend and the magistrate in Wapping, who when he is well is unable to let go of a mystery lest it escape and turn into something else, something that hides itself and festers. That is the feeling he has now: of something awful and half-seen that must be identified.

But then, this is why he joined Bow Street. Old Sir John Fielding, the progenitor of much of what Bow Street now undertakes, had been as bulldog-determined as John Harriott, his blindness by no means disrupting his ability to perceive. But Fielding’s
métier
had been the felony of the highwayman and the footpad. He had taken Property as his ward, and had protected her against all villains, be they pickpockets or coiners.

Murder, though, is something else entirely. It is not common for London gentlemen to be murdered in their beds. It is not common for London gentlemen to be eviscerated with no apparent motivation. It is not common for dead bodies to be left in their beds wearing masks. It is not common for all this to have been done with no noise being made, or in any case not enough noise to wake a single household servant.

Those four things are what constitute this mystery, and it is of a very different flavour to that with which Sir John Fielding would have involved himself. Graham throws himself into the heart of it with the full knowledge that this will lead to questions being asked, both by his fellow Bow Street magistrates and perhaps even by the Home Secretary. He is an old man now, semi-retired and only an occasional presence at Bow Street. He no longer sits in the court to hear of the previous night’s arrests and charges from the constables and watchmen of the surrounding parishes, and to question those accused. It is by no means unusual for an individual justice of a certain vintage to interest himself in a case, and indeed Graham has been asked more than once by previous Home Secretaries to involve himself in particularly sticky cases, most notably the Ratcliffe Highway killings of 1811. But this case is different. Wodehouse was a gentleman, and the newspapers will no doubt interest themselves in his death, not least because of its melodramatic nature. The Home Secretary may feel that a younger man is needed.

But what indeed would Sir John Fielding have done, in this case? A gentleman has been viciously killed. There is no suspect. There has been, as far as can be ascertained, no theft of property. Wodehouse’s chattels will remain within Wodehouse’s family. Only his soul has been taken, and what price is a man’s soul? If the friends and family do not take it upon themselves to prosecute the case, it is left to the magistrates and their officers. Thus, is he not doing his duty?

And is it not damnably
interesting?

He decides to proceed and see what transpires. He spends the day learning what he can of Edmund Wodehouse. He is – or rather he was – the third son of Baron Wodehouse of Kimberley in Norfolk. He was born in 1776, making him almost forty at the time of his despatch. No wife, no children, the usual distinguished-yet-disgusting troop of friends and associates. A member, indeed, of one of Graham’s own clubs, White’s – though Graham is one of those rare London men to hold membership of both White’s and Brooks’s, disguising his own mildly Tory views in the name of maintaining irreproachable relations with as wide a circle as possible. And it is to that circle he now turns – he would learn more of Edmund Wodehouse, Esq.

Thus, he takes residence for most of the day at White’s, talking to as many of the men there as he can politely manage. The news of Wodehouse’s death has circulated within the place like blood around the body, and its source is Graham himself. He plants little ingots of fact with various gentlemen, and these are passed around the building like letters between ambassadors. Despite the discombobulating horror of the morning, by the afternoon he finds himself to have learned a good deal more than he might have expected. Unsurprisingly, given the nature of that disgusting painting in the drawing room of Wodehouse’s lodging, there is a good whiff of Scandal in the air.

Brummell himself sums it up, waving airily from his table in the bow-window of the club, reserved for years for the most influential and well-connected members. ‘Wodehouse? Terrible fellow, terrible friends. But of course,
you
know, Graham.’

This with an elegant wink and the suggestion of a leer. He does know. Of course he knows. For it becomes clear very early in the day that one of Wodehouse’s closest friends was Sir Henry Tempest. This one relationship infects every simpering conversation Graham has for the rest of the day, curdling any enjoyment he might have taken in the afternoon. Everyone knows of Sir Henry Tempest’s domestic arrangements and how they have impinged on Aaron Graham’s. He of course knows how general this knowledge is, and is inured to it. It has been almost three years now, after all. But for this lamentable history to now overlap with the blood-drenched sheets of Edmund Wodehouse is both intolerable and, he must admit, enticing.

The satyr’s mask is identified early on in his investigations.

‘Ah, the Sybarites,’ an elderly baron tells him. ‘They wear such masks to their parties, as I understand it.’

He has never heard the name, but a dozen different men allude to the existence of the society. All of them wrinkle their noses in distaste. Some of the more ancient members of White’s are old enough to remember Sir Francis Dashwood’s Medmenham friars, and many are strangely enthusiastic about gorging themselves once again on stories of devilish parties by firelight in abandoned churches, of despoiled virgins and rumoured sacrifice. Some of the younger members who mention the Sybarites talk of the Medmenhamites as if they were Homeric heroes or even gods, Olympian beings from an older, better time. Byron, it is rumoured, had held devil-worshipping parties in Newstead Abbey, in deliberate homage to Dashwood. There is still talk of Sybaritic meetings taking place in caves beneath the hills of West Wycombe.

The ones old enough to have known Medmenhamites personally (some of them, it occurs to Graham, old enough to have been Medmenhamites themselves) adopt a disappointed air when talking of Dashwood and his circle. ‘Selfish men with too much appetite and too little discipline,’ says one, and Graham is not sure if he is speaking of Sybarites or Medmenhamites or the members of White’s.