Savage Magic (20 page)

I had no particular reason for choosing John Burroway to attend with me that day. Indeed, I was a good deal irritated by Miss Delilah’s insistence that I take a companion. John was simply the first attendant I came across. But oh how things would have been different if I had not taken him with me!

We walked past the chapel and up the stairs to the women’s floor, to those two rooms together: Mrs Horton’s cell, and the strong-room which held Maria Cranfield. Both doors were shut. I decided to look in on Mrs Horton first, and required Burroway to open the cell.

Mrs Horton was lying on the bed, and raised her head when I entered the cell. Seeing me, she sat up. She looked pale, and tired, and, to my great consternation, she looked afraid. I asked her how she was, and she said she felt unwell that morning and that she had slept little. I asked her what had disturbed her, feeling I knew what she would answer. She told me Maria had been disturbed in the night, that she had been shrieking in her sleep, and that she believed Maria had been visited once again by an unseen female. And that, of course, the male inmates had made such an infernal noise.

My response to this was complicated. I pitied her, but I also found myself becoming angry at this woman’s seeming unwillingness to cooperate with me or with my methods. I had shown her nothing but kindness and consideration, and could not comprehend her persistent refusal to accept that the voices from Maria’s room were in her head, and in her head only. I spoke to her for some time, expressing my sentiments with some force, and as I spoke she shrank back against the wall behind her bed. We left her there after a time, locking the door closed behind us, and went on to visit Maria Cranfield.

Maria was not sitting on the bed, as Mrs Horton had been. She was standing and, to my surprise, staring intently at the door as we entered. The chain which held her to the wall was stretched tight as she stood in the middle of the room. She looked alert and aware, by no means lost in herself as she had wont to be throughout her stay. When I spoke to her, she looked at me, though she made no sign that she understood what I was saying.

I sat down in the chair in the room – that same one we had provided for Mrs Horton to sit in. I felt quite sharply unwell. My headache became suddenly acute, and it was accompanied both by a tightness of the chest and a sudden nausea. The room seemed to swell around me, and I felt as if I would lose consciousness if I did not secure a seat. John stayed by the door.

Maria’s eyes followed me as I sat down and tried to recover myself. She ignored my entreaties to sit down upon her bed. She remained standing above me. As I spoke, she said nothing. I don’t remember, today, what I said. No doubt nothing of great import. But what I do remember is how terrible I felt under her gaze, how unwell. I had always been a hearty fellow, and while the occasional headache inevitably accompanied me in my work, what I felt that morning was like nothing I’d experienced before or since. I felt as if a knife was being turned slowly inside my skull. But that was not the worst of it.

The worst of it was that when Maria turned her eyes away from me, and to Burroway, my headache ceased. It went away instantly, like a candle being snuffed out. My eyes widened with the shock of it. I stopped speaking, and for a moment there was silence in Maria Cranfield’s cell.

What happened next chilled me, and chills me still.

Without warning, John stepped backwards out of the cell. I had given him no instruction, yet he strode away. I called after him, demanding he come back, but he made no reply. It was an act of staggering disobedience, but I was only angered by it for a moment, for Maria now turned her eyes back to mine, and that terrible pain swooped over me once more. It was as if Maria’s eyes were causing that pulsating, queasy agony.

Then it switched off again, because Maria had looked away. Someone had come to the open door of the cell. It was Abigail Horton. Burroway stood behind her, the key to her cell in his hand. He had opened her door!

I began to shout at this egregious insubordination, but my yell was stifled as Maria’s eyes locked back onto mine, and the pain returned, stronger and more deliberate than anything that had gone before. I felt at that moment as if the pain might overcome me, might drag me down into a state of dreadful oblivion, but then Mrs Horton stepped into the room and walked up to Maria. Not once looking at me, she began to speak in Maria’s ear, putting her arm around the young woman’s shoulders. My head hurt so much that I was unable to listen to what she said, but I thought I could feel the pain lessening, bit by bit, and as it did so Maria’s fierce frozen stance seemed to soften under the emollient effects of Abigail’s words. Slowly, the two women sat down upon the bed, and then Maria looked down at the floor, and I was released.

I stood at once, and began to remonstrate with Burroway and with Abigail, conscious of the terrible breach of behaviour I had just witnessed. But my words were stopped in my throat, when Abigail looked up at me and said, with great anger in her voice: ‘Leave us.’

The impertinence of this was shocking to me, but I had little time to consider it, for then Maria too looked up at me, and again that great pain returned to my head, accompanied by a fierce entreaty to leave the room.

It is impossible to describe how I felt this. It was rather as if my own mind was issuing instructions to itself, forcing its will upon its will. Is that not a flavour of lunacy itself? How recursive might such a concept become? A mind talking to a mind talking to a mind, onwards and downwards to the unplumbed depths of the imagination. Few if any other physicians of the Mind can have experienced what I did in that room. I felt as if my sanity was snapping itself in two.

And more than this: I felt myself leaving the room. Burroway waited outside, and as I stepped into the corridor beyond the cell, he reached past me and closed the door, as if following the stage direction of an invisible playwright. We walked down the corridor, down the stairs, and into my rooms. I came to myself again therein, sat in my old leather chair, John Burroway before me, with no conception at all as to how I had arrived there.

For the attention of ROBERT BROWN

% Sir Jos. Banks

Soho Square

London

Sir

I have a most unusual request to make of you, but following our meeting last year during my investigation into the
Solander
affair, I trust that oddities might at least pique your interest.

I am currently in attendance at a fine house in Surrey which is plagued by a number of odd incidents. Following what I take to be one of these occurrences a shed has been burned down to the ground. The shed is next to a well, which supplies the house with drinking water. From my examination of the house, it would appear that something was dragged from the well to the shed. This thing, whatever it may have been, burned in the fire which consumed the shed.

It is perhaps little more than speculative fancy, but I have imagined a circumstance wherein the shed was burned to conceal the burning of something else; in this case, the wooden lid which protected the water in the well from leaf-fall and other elements. Having pondered this, I looked into the well and saw a good deal of green matter floating on the surface of the water, in a huge clump. It looked nothing like the leaves or twigs on the trees which surrounded the well. And so, following my thoughts, I conjectured that someone had removed the lid to the well, and had then added something to the water.

I have taken a sample of this material and dried it, as I believe is the way. This is enclosed with this letter. I wonder if this little tale might have piqued your interest, and if so whether you might feel compelled to investigate the dried matter I am sending you. You might, perhaps, even be able to tell me what the substance is.

I would be obliged by any help you could provide on the understanding, of course, that you are not yourself obligated to assist me in any way. But, as you can see, there is perhaps an interesting story here, and it may be one you would consider helping me compose.

Please send any response to my name at Thorpe Lee House, Thorpe, Surrey.

I remain

Yours

Horton, C.

Waterman-constable, River Police Office, Wapping

THORPE

Horton takes the dried leaves and twigs and places them carefully inside the envelope, and is sealing it when there is a knock at his bedroom door.

‘Yes?’ he shouts. Nothing happens for a moment. ‘Oh, come in, then.’ He is not used to being waited on so.

Peter Gowing puts his head around the door.

‘Pardon me, constable, but there’s a horseman just arrived for you.’

Horton thanks him and heads downstairs; Gowing disappears into whatever part of the house the servants scurry away to. Outside on the drive he finds Roberts, his baleful driver from the day before last.

‘Letter for you,’ Roberts says, and half-hands, half-throws the letter down to Horton. He is about to turn the horse and leave, in his customarily charming way, when Horton stops him.

‘Wait a moment, please. I may need to answer.’

Roberts snorts, and his horse snorts, and the two of them wait for him to read.

Horton says nothing for a moment, then:

‘A moment, please. I shall return immediately.’

He runs up to his room, and fetches the letter to Brown. This he hands to Roberts.

‘This letter is to be delivered to the man on the envelope, or his manservant, at the Soho Square address written. To no one else. Do you understand?’

Roberts looks at him as if weighing up how sharp a knife would need to be to run him through.

‘I ain’t no bleedin’ ticket porter, son. I’m an officer at Bow Street.’

‘And this is Bow Street business. If the letter is not delivered, the magistrate will hear of it. Do we understand each other, Roberts?’

Roberts snatches the letter from him, and turns away. His horse snaps its tail in contempt.

Horton goes inside, and tries to speak to Sir Henry again about the contents of the letter. But the master of the house is locked in his room, and has left explicit instructions not to be disturbed. Horton is left to wonder how the murky events at Thorpe Lee House might overlap with the horrors taking place in London, as described by Aaron Graham. The itch he’d felt at the well now feels like a fever.

WESTMINSTER

Aaron Graham has made his home on the fringes of Covent Garden, so its stenches both physical and moral are as familiar to him as the pain in his calves and the growing tightness in his chest. Like all gentlemen that choose to live in this extraordinary place, Graham steps out of his home on a daily basis and is near-overwhelmed by the stench from the open drains, the mud and shit which cake the cobblestones, the torrent of shouting noise: the calls to trade of the fruit and vegetable sellers, the curses of the carters, the caterwauling of the ballad singers, the knife grinders and the milkmaids.

The physical stench can be overcome with nosegays, and the better sort do indeed wander the Piazza with various items held to their faces to ward off the odour. The moral stench, though, is of another kind, and deepens at night, when the whores and the constables take over the pavements. They dance in front of the elegant Tuscan portico that Inigo Jones built on the front of St Paul’s, and the classical architecture puts Graham in mind not of God but of Derangement, for when comestibles give way to sex as the main item on sale, Covent Garden does seem to him to become Mad. Its covered walkways are cloisters for the insane, where whores who give their names as ‘Ann Nothing’ or ‘Mary Knowbody’ or ‘Kis my Comekel’ grasp at the sleeves of men and where pox surges through the blood of an unknown number of them, such that it may as well be all of them, an infected Body Erotick, shrieking its appetites to the sky.