Savage Magic (15 page)

‘What is your sin, child?’

‘Do you know the old story of Rynadine, constable?’

‘I do not.’

‘I read it in a broadside I bought from a gypsy woman in the woods. The song tells of a young girl meeting a stranger in the woods, who seduces her. It ends like this:

When I had kissed her once or twice, she came to herself again, And said, kind Sir be civil and tell to me your name. Go down in yonder forest, my castle there you’ll find, Well wrote in ancient history, my name is Rynadine: Come all you pretty fair maids, a warning take by me, Be sure you quit night walking, and shun bad company, For if you don’t you are sure to rue until the day you die, Beware of meeting Rynadine all on the mountains high.’

The girl’s voice is whispery and as dry as the rats’ feet in the cellar walls.

‘It is a warning, you see. A warning about meeting strangers.’

‘Like the strange woman you bought this broadside from, perhaps?’

‘Yes, like her.’

‘Do you ever go outside at night, Miss Graham?’

‘I dream I do. Perhaps I dream of something I have done in the real world. It is often impossible to tell.’

‘You have been seen. Standing in the woods.’

‘I have? Well, then, I must have been. Or perhaps the one who saw me dreamed. I have dreamed some terrible things.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘I am tired now, constable. You should pay no mind to me. My mind is as broken as . . .’

She holds up a plate, and drops it to the stone floor, where it obliterates itself.

‘. . . that.’

She stands, and walks gingerly to the door, her feet terribly fragile on the stone floor. Before she leaves she stops and turns to him.

‘You asked me if the house was bewitched, constable. It is a blasphemous, heinous question. God has made his judgement on we who live here. For my part, you can see of what that judgement consists.’

She turns, and abandons him to the unseen attentions of the rats.

The second night is as the first, his sleep disturbed both by the moans and cries of the residents of Thorpe Lee House, and by his own wild imaginings, which take the form of terrible dreams and wake him several times. Each time he wakes he goes to the window to look outside, onto the lawn, as if it were a stage on which a drama might be played out.

He wakes from one dream of being pursued through an old, evil ship by a hungry, ageless creature and he gets up and goes to the window to see a tall man in a pea-coat limping across the lawn. The figure is horribly familiar and when he gasps it turns and looks at him, an old-young face he recognises, and then he really wakes up, sitting upright, a bellow caught in his throat, his heart crashing in his chest.

The house’s residents walk up and down the corridor in different combinations or alone: Mrs Graham talking to Jane Ackroyd; Mrs Chesterton coughing; Crowley the butler whistling incongruously; Peter Gowing and Daisy Webster whispering. He listens carefully whenever he can, but can detect no obvious pattern in their movements, beyond the odd restlessness of the house itself.

BROOKE HOUSE

Abigail reads to Maria for three hours. Not once does the girl raise her head again, nor make any sound. Only the regular breathing interrupted by an occasional pause, usually at some particularly perspicacious slice of prose from the book, suggests she is paying attention at all. But the timing of those pauses suggests to Abigail a good deal more than attentiveness; there is intelligence there, and understanding.

The matron, Delilah, comes to fetch her, saying that Maria ‘is to be visited by the doctor’, and suggesting that Abigail take some time to eat and perhaps walk in the garden. Her face suggests that she hopes a tree might fall on her.

She has a surprise in the afternoon, as she sits in her cell reading the Wollstonecraft volume. John Burroway, the happy and kind idiot who serves as a sort of gatekeeper cum manservant cum factotum for Dr Bryson, comes to her cell with a card. He hands it to her and she reads it with him watching. ‘I’m to wait for your answer,’ he says.

The card has the name of Dr Bryson etched in florid type, and beneath it the doctor has written in a crabbed and untidy hand, ‘I would like to discuss the case of Maria Cranfield with you over supper in my rooms this evening. 6 pm. Please confirm to Burroway.’

A great many odd things have happened to Abigail, before she arrived at Brooke House and since, but in some ways this is the oddest. It seems both an impertinence and a curiosity, and yet she feels unable to resist. Dr Bryson had refused to indulge her stories of women speaking to Maria in her cell; perhaps, in a more congenial setting, she may discover whether these are phantoms or facts. The measuring anatomist in her head points out, of course, that this behaviour is unacceptable, both Bryson’s invitation and her acceptance of it. But she disregards those thoughts. Surely social niceties can be suspended within the walls of a madhouse?

She says yes to Burroway, and he looks oddly pleased, like a child being told he can stroke an animal.

So she cleans and dresses herself, taking some care over it. There is no looking-glass in her cell, nor has she seen one anywhere in Brooke House. She does not let this worry her. She wants to look nothing more than presentable. Or, more accurately, sane.

Burroway comes to fetch her at six, walking her down the stairs and unlocking the door at the bottom. Bryson’s rooms are in an annex joined to the main building, and as she enters she realises she may be making a terrible mistake. Something about the set of the candlelight, the care around the table setting, the way Bryson stands, self-consciously, by his hearth, as if he had practised the position which set him off best.

Is this, then, a seduction?

She feels suddenly and sharply angry, and yet this helps. Her mind clears. The doctor’s impertinence does not change what she wishes to do – to help Maria, and to understand her mystery.

‘Mrs Horton, I’m very pleased you agreed to dine with me.’

‘I wish only to discuss Maria, doctor.’

Her tone is sharp, and he blushes.

‘I think, perhaps, you find this setting inappropriate, Mrs Horton.’

‘I do.’

‘It is by no means unprecedented. I have dined privately with inmates before. A great variety of people come through Brooke House, Mrs Horton. A good number of them are both distinguished and, despite their illness, entirely lucid. I feel it is important to have this private time with them, to speak to them freely and generally about matters cultural and scientific. It aids my diagnosis and my treatment, this attempt to understand the person in the round, as it were.’

‘You dine with women as well as men, doctor?’

‘Of course!’

Bright and brittle. A lie.

He asks her to sit down, and she almost does not. She nearly turns round and walks out. But this would be a retreat, and would set her back – she has Dr Bryson’s trust, for now, and would like to keep it.

‘Please, Mrs Horton, I understand that you are an exceptionally honourable woman. I admire you for that. But let me make it clear to you that my only wish is to discuss your treatment.’

‘And that of Maria Cranfield. I would like to discuss her, as well.’

‘Of course. Of course!’

He gestures to the table, his squirrelly face trying hard to be charming. She sits.

The food is by no means distinguished and she refuses wine; Bryson, however, drinks fairly freely of it. He asks her about her education and interests, and seems surprised (as most men are) to hear of her reading, as she discusses the latest texts on natural philosophy and describes some of the lectures she has watched at the Royal Institution.

As his wine bottle empties and his face reddens, though, Dr Bryson turns his attention to a subject he obviously finds particularly fascinating: himself. Or more particularly, his views on mad-doctoring, and on the
problem of women
(his own phrase, which he apologises for and then uses continuously).

‘The mental fragilities of women are a social issue of enormous import. Take, if you will, the rampant problem of prostitution in the metropolis. At this time there are brothels and bagnios and bawdy houses throughout Westminster; on one little street south of St James’s Square, called Kings Place, every single building houses a brothel. In my days working at Bethlem I would often walk into Westminster, but venturing outside on any day would lead to pestering from a half-dozen or more different women, some no more than children. Children, Mrs Horton! Without shame men would pull their emaciated frames into doorways or cellar rooms and enact upon them awful degradations.’

He pours another glass of wine.

‘Most of these women became ill – and, mind you, for these women, falling pregnant was no better than succumbing to disease. And a great number of them went mad. Who would not flirt with madness amid such misery? At Bethlem we helped those whom we could, but that place had long become little more than a prison for the mad. Dr Monro’s
therapeutic philosophy
, such as it is, involved little more than separation from society, rest and, once a year in the spring, a regimented blood-letting of all the inmates which I found awful and pointless.’

‘But Dr Monro owns Brooke House, does he not?’

‘Oh, he
does
, he certainly does. But I am trying to move us on here. Monro’s attitudes are already old-fashioned, scandalously so. Blood-letting, emetics, opium – these have been the tools of mad-doctoring for a century or more. During the Restoration, madmen would be ignored, tolerated or, in the worst cases, beaten. Thankfully that barbarism had given way to more humane attitudes. No, I prefer a new way, a modern way.’

‘And what does this approach consist of?’

‘It
consists
of
moral therapy
, Mrs Horton. I am an admirer of the Reverend Dr Francis Willis, who cured the King of his first bout of madness at the end of the last century. Willis achieved his success by asserting his
will
over the patient – in this case, over His Majesty himself. The physician’s mind becomes locked with the mind of his patient, and within this mysterious relationship a cure might be affected.’

Abigail thinks of those odd occasions when Bryson had sat in front of her and stared, to no perceptible effect.

‘And this is the approach you have adopted here at Brooke House?’

‘It
is
, it is
indeed
.’

‘Yet I have been bled, and purged, and given medicine.’

‘You have, that is true. Dr Monro is still the master of the place, after all.’

‘Are we merely specimens then, doctor? Instruments on which your theories can be tested?’

‘Come now, that is an unfair conclusion.’

‘But Dr Bryson, have you not tried this so-called
moral therapy
on me already? Yet I can recall no such
interplay
as you described between yourself and myself.’

‘That’s because you are a
woman
, Mrs Horton! And, may I say, a very attractive one.’

He giggles, slightly, very drunk now. But she will not leave. This has become interesting.

‘It works on men, Mrs Horton. Oh, I have had great success with the men. I can project my will upon them after only one or two sessions, and I can calm them. Other approaches are needed as well, of course; I am particularly proud of the spinning chair. Have you seen it? No? It is magnificent. It is
moral therapy
that informs
all
my work with the men. But the problem with women is this . . .’

He stands and makes his way to the hearth again, holding the mantelpiece as if it were a piece of wreck-wood above a sinking ship.

‘I can’t make it work! I have tried. The techniques I use on men have no impact on women. The frenzied stay frenzied, the sad stay sad. You have barely even noticed when I have attempted it, and you have certainly not responded. Neither has that poor madwoman Maria Cranfield.’

She tries to speak now the subject has turned to Maria, but he will not be stopped.

‘So I fall back on Monro’s ways with the women. I bleed them, I purge them, I dose them. Their minds are closed to me, so old approaches have to take the place of new ones. Separation from families. Quiet and rest. The occasional emetic, a dose of opium. It’s all so damnably
old-fashioned!’

He smacks his fist into the mantelpiece, and a small dish upon it jumps into the air and falls back down with a sharp crystal crash.

‘Britain has fallen behind, Mrs Horton.’ He is not looking at her; it is as if he is addressing an invisible lecture hall. ‘During the previous century, all of Europe regarded England as the maddest nation on Earth, such that lunacy was known, far and wide, as the
English disease
. And of course, in 1814, we have a figurehead for our insanity: a mad King, of all things!’

He sways slightly before the fire.

‘This is not medicine. It is not treatment. It is no better than the savage hiding in his cave until the rain passes. There is a madness loose in our society, a kind of perversion of moral sense which is visible wherever one looks. Robberies and violence stalk the streets of the metropolis. And worst of all – an epidemic of
whores
, a screaming barrage of
female vice
in the face of every decent man living!’