Savage Magic (16 page)

She has had enough. She stands and demands to speak of Maria Cranfield. He turns his eyes on her as if he were surprised to find her standing there in that imaginary lecture theatre, long after all the distinguished men who had been hanging on his words have left.

‘Maria Cranfield? Why do you care, Mrs Horton? What is Maria Cranfield to you?’

‘I have tried to tell you, Dr Bryson, that Maria has been visited by another. Someone who has got into her cell and spent time with her. Why will you not believe this?’

‘Because you are
mad
, Mrs Horton!’

Her cheeks blush red as if he had stepped across the room and slapped her. He continues.

‘You are
mad!
You see visions of . . . what? Of some savage Pacific princess? Someone who is not there? And yet you expect me to believe your tale of mysterious night-time visitors. What kind of mad-doctor would I be, if every madwoman with a frightening tale were able to gain my credence!’

‘Then I shall return to my cell. I wish to contact Mr Graham, my benefactor . . .’

‘No! Oh, bless me, no.’

He walks towards her unsteadily.

‘Mrs Horton, my apologies. I have consumed more wine than was good for me. Your company is charming, and I have lost hold of myself.’

And then he darts towards her, as lithely and unexpectedly as a leopard leaping on the back of a zebra. His fingers are at her wrist. Claret fumes rise from his mouth which, with no more warning, he presses against her.

She shoves him away, and with as much force as she can find she slaps him in the face. He falls to the ground, but rises immediately, hand held to his face.

‘You will hear more of this,’ she says. ‘A good deal more. You are a disgrace, Bryson.’

‘Burroway!’ His call is surprisingly loud and strong and clear, as if her blow had knocked the wine from his veins. The idiot appears.

‘Take Mrs Horton to her cell, Burroway. She is to be locked in tonight.’

Abigail turns away from him, and leaves.

CANTERBURY

The hops are fat and green on the poles, and the hoppers’ huts are going up alongside the fields. The hop garden at this time of year is like a heavily pregnant woman, blooming with life but also terribly tired, ready to relieve herself of her burden. Soon the huts will fill with poor folk from London and Kent, ready to work through the deep golden days of September and on into October, pulling the hops down from up high and carrying them over to the oast house for drying.

Henry Lodge sees this coming birth but cannot settle upon it. Indeed, he has not been able to settle since returning from Deal in April. His skittishness has not yet quite affected the business of his hop plantation – his diligent manager, though alarmed by his master’s sudden lack of application on horticultural matters, is by no means obstructed by it. The hop garden can run itself. Such is the achievement of this man of means.

If he had a wife, she might have gently suggested some time ago, perhaps over dinner one fine evening as the sun set over the oast house and the hops quivered on their poles, that the pattern of his interests has become obsessive, that it is one thing to pore over the Lloyd’s Register of Shipping with the same avidity as his fellow gentlemen farmers pore over livestock prices, it is quite another to take his rickety old carriage to Deal just to take a look at a ship. And to return with nothing on his mind but transport ships and unfulfilled promises.

Ah, but my dear
, he would say,
I am what I am and I can be nothing else. I am the man who grew from the little thief. I am the man who was taken from a Portsmouth hulk onto a naval frigate, a convict-gardener for Parts Beyond The Seas. I am the man who hit an iceberg and was taken to New South Wales on a convict transport full of women
.

But he has no wife, nor children, nor family of any kind. He has no one to hear his story, or at least no one to understand it. He has pondered writing a book:
My Shipwreck on HMS
Guardian
and My Years in Sydney Cove
. It would sell, he thinks. But he has no patience to write such a book, and he has no facility for words. He was a poor thief and then a poor convict-gardener. What words he has are functional and suited only to the running of his business.

And the hops continue to grow, two hundredweight to the acre, to be despatched to London, there to be transmuted into the staff of a working man’s life.

Maggie Broad has returned to Britain. This thought is the root of all his restlessness. Her presence on the old island fills his imagination and, if he cares to dwell on it, fuels his discomfort. She is back, at long last she is back. Her return has been the continuing obsession of his life ever since he returned to England. It has been a species of madness, this inability to leave Deal unwatched, this humming mania to be there when she returns.

And after all those years of waiting, he missed her arrival. The thing he has anticipated has happened, but the mania endures, along with a nagging anxiety that the woman may be angry with him.

‘Did she say where she was going to, after she left the ship?’

He’d asked the young boys on the
Indefatigable
this, and they had said nothing, but the little girl, so careful to hide behind them for protection but also so determined to help, had spoken up.

‘She said she was going to London.’

She might as well have said ‘she is going to the Moon’. He had, nonetheless, given serious consideration to travelling to London, speaking to his contacts among the merchants and agents of Wapping and Limehouse. But any questions he would ask would only fizz into further questions, like yeast being added to wort. They would grow beyond his capacity to control them.

Why are you looking for this woman? What concern is she of yours? Is it true what I hear – that you regularly go to Deal and pretend to be a ship-owner’s agent? What are you about, man? What are you about?

And what is he to say to that?

Everything he is, everything he now possesses, results from a small founding kindness of Maggie Broad. It was she who gave him work as a farmer in New South Wales and she who had given him his first tiny parcel of land, out of her own grant. She became wealthy, in ways which should have been impossible for a woman with a drunk for a husband in a penal colony. Henry Lodge became self-sufficient, his hard work building on Maggie’s kindnesses, until one day he had enough to pay for his passage home. When he returned, he acquired some land for himself, and over the last decade he has built what he has built. But he owes it all to her. And so he looks for her.

He has told this story to some, and he can see the dissatisfaction in their eyes. It does not explain his mania, the care he takes to visit every returning transport. It is such a small part of the explanation, indeed, that the story might as well be a lie. He does not understand the full explanation himself; his obsession with convict transport ships runs, he well knows, outside the bounds of any wish to repay a favour.

Perhaps, he thinks, all he seeks are answers. He had asked her two questions on his final night in the colony, two questions that a great many others were asking.

How did you come by that hundred acres?

And how did you – a woman with a drunk for a husband – keep it?

He had asked her the questions, and she had looked at him, and of all the expressions and glances and glares of others staring into his eyes, it is that look he remembers. It was as if she had opened up the front of his head and stamped an instruction on his mind.

I will answer your questions when I return to England. And you, Henry, will watch for my return, for I will need your help when I come.

It had been an instruction, and that is why his life consists of only two things: hops, and the watching of transport ships. One he does for himself. One he does because he has been told to. That is the truth of it. He can tell himself that he only wants those questions answered. But it is that glance on that long-ago evening on the far side of the world, the way her eyes burned into his understanding: that is what has driven him down to Deal three or four times a year this past decade.

How can he explain such madness to anyone sane?
I do it because a woman told me to
.

So he is mad still. She was not on the
Indefatigable
. His instruction has not been obeyed. He waits as he has always waited, in his Canterbury hop plantation, somewhat afraid, watched by his half-amused servants and his exasperated manager. And somewhere out there in England, the woman he has waited for might be found. He wonders what she might be doing.

Until, one day in the middle of July, with the Kent sun high in the sky, she appears at his door. Older than he remembers her, but otherwise the same. Deliberate and determined, and unashamed in asking for the help she once promised him she would need.

And with her, deranged and raving, her damaged daughter.

PART TWO

A Guiding Consciousness

Johnson. ‘Sir, I am not defending their credibility. I am only saying, that your arguments are not good, and will not overturn the belief of witchcraft. And then, sir, you have all mankind, rude and civilised, agreeing in the belief of the agency of preternatural powers. You must take evidence: you must consider, that wise and great men have condemned witches to die.’

Crosbie. ‘But an act of parliament put an end to witchcraft.’

Johnson. ‘No, sir! witchcraft had ceased; and therefore an act of parliament was passed to prevent persecution for what was not witchcraft. Why it ceased, we cannot tell, as we cannot tell the reason of many things.’

James Boswell,
Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides,

entry under Monday, August 16

WESTMINSTER

Graham dreams of Sarah, as he often does. As always, the mood of his dream is elegiac, purged of anything lustful, suffused with sadness. There is never any narrative to these dreams of his departed spouse. There is a lake, around which she walks and walks, and Graham walks behind her. From the lake comes the sound not of water, but of Purcell. Always the same strange sad music. He never speaks to her, and she never turns. They just walk round and round and round.

He is disturbed from his slumber by his manservant, who has long been under instruction to wake Graham if any urgent word comes from Bow Street. There is a young officer outside in Great Queen Street, demanding Graham’s attendance. There has been a murder. He hears the word ‘Cope’ and rises to dress himself. He takes his time. Aaron Graham will not be seen out and about in untidy garments, even at six in the morning.

William Jealous, the young patrolman who had attended with him at Wodehouse’s residence, waits for him outside.

‘One of the St Paul’s constables just come to the office, sir,’ he says, his breath clearly visible in the cold early morning air. ‘Says someone’s done away with Sir John.’

‘What were you doing at the office at six in the morning, Jealous?’

‘Raids last night, sir. Warrant from Sir Nathaniel, sir.’

Graham scowls at the mention of his fellow magistrate. Why organise a raid at a time such as this? Or is he jockeying for some kind of advantage? Graham’s finely tuned political instincts twitch, even as they turn to walk down to the Strand.

The metropolis is quiet at this time, though he can hear the costermongers and barrowboys manoeuvring themselves into the Piazza for the early trade. Some whores can still be seen on the pavements, looking worn-out and disconsolate, their only customers at this time of day either gentlemen too inebriated to do much more than molest and insult them, or early morning husbands looking for escape before another day of work.

The sun is creeping into the sky above the City and beyond as they walk down the hill towards the Strand. Graham speaks to the young patrolman, learns that he is in fact a member of Bow Street’s mounted patrol, though he hopes to follow his father ‘into a more
investigative
line, if you get my meaning, sir’. Graham looks at him with some surprise, and thinks of the lad’s father. Charles Jealous, it is said, could scry the difference between city dirt and country dirt on a highwayman’s boots. Perhaps such facility runs in the blood.