Savage Magic (22 page)

It is, of course, a shock to see him there. Graham can see it in the panderer’s eyes. Magistrates are not people of the street – engaging with the pavements is the job of watchmen and constables. Justices sit in their offices and have the bad and the depraved brought to them, and from there pronounce judgement. This is the model for most London magistrates. Graham, though, is different; he has been inspired by another approach, that of John Harriott of Wapping.

‘You are Albert Talty?’ says Graham. The panderer, still in a state of mild shock, just nods. He is dark-featured and younger than Graham expected. Graham tries to suppress his instinctive dislike of the man and his profession; it will cloud his judgement.

‘You know who I am? I see from your face that you do.’

‘And what do you want from me, magistrate?’

Graham is aware of two large figures standing up from a table to his right, and feels an intense ripple of fear. He has stepped into a region where he is resented and incapable. Social conventions exist to prevent these icy moments. He should not be here.

Talty sees the fear in his face, and smiles – a yellow-toothed, baleful grin. He hisses at the figures, and they disappear into the crowd. An equation has been set, Graham sees. He on one side, Talty on the other. As of now, the equation does not balance.

‘Will you sit?’ Talty points to the chair opposite him, and Graham takes it, aware of sitting in the same position as hundreds of men before him, all of them seeking release. Perhaps he is no different.

A waiter appears, but Talty waves him away. This will be a short interview, the gesture says. Thinking he should have brought a constable – or a dozen of them – with him, Graham begins.

‘I seek information on whores supplied to a particular group of gentlemen for their use at parties. I have been given your name by a servant to one of these men.’

The pimp says nothing. Yellow teeth are still visible through his lips, but they no longer form a smile. They look like they might bite.

‘The men call themselves the Sybarites.’

The smile comes back. A wolf, sharing a splendid story.

‘I know of the men. I have supplied them with no women. Why would I have done?’

The lie is splendidly relaxed, and Graham ignores it.

‘Women were supplied by you to a party recently at the house of Sir John Cope. Also in attendance was Edmund Wodehouse, another gentleman. Both Cope and Wodehouse are now dead. They have been murdered in such a way that suggests a connection to these parties I have mentioned. I will be speaking to the other gentlemen concerned. I also wish to speak with the women who were there.’

As he speaks, he is aware of Talty’s countenance changing. That theatrical, spiky grin eases, and is replaced by a face of concentrated thought. Graham knows what is happening. The world of society, the world of propertied men, the world which the magistracy was established to protect, has been threatened by the perpetrator of these killings. A justice has ventured out into the streets to investigate, an unprecedented event serving to emphasise the severity of matters. The comfortable balance between magistrate and pimp, between constable and whore, is being endangered. Refusal will make that danger intensify; Talty only has one option.

‘You think the women killed these men?’

‘By no means. I have no indication of such a thing. But the circumstances of Cope’s killing, in particular, lead me to think there may be some association between what the women were paid to do, and the deaths.’

Talty allows that grin to reappear.

‘You mean, they were killed for fucking whores.’

‘Not just killed, Talty. Cope’s cock was severed and pushed into his mouth. Perhaps before he was killed.’

The sight of this had made him vomit copiously in 13 Royal Terrace. And yet now he can use it to extract information from a pimp. A wondrous recovery.

That grin has gone again, but will return once more. For now, Talty is professional again.

‘I don’t keep records, magistrate.’

‘I expect you don’t.’

‘But I do happen to remember who the whores were at that last party. Rose Dawkins was one. Elizabeth Carrington was the other.’

‘How do I find these women?’

‘Not my problem, that, is it?’

Graham acknowledges this. Talty is a businessman. He can hardly be expected to send his women into the arms of the authorities. He decides to push Talty’s sudden cooperation a little further.

‘Any other names, Talty? These men have regular parties.’

Talty breathes in through his nose, narrows one eye, runs one finger along his chin. Decides.

‘Rose has been to the last few. She’ll remember more names. I can only recall two. Jenny Larkin and Maria Cranfield. Jenny’s long gone, left London months ago. Maria’s disappeared. Last I heard she was pleading her belly down in Southwark. Shame. Popular girl, she would have been.’

Graham, his pockets strategically empty, has nothing on which he can write the names down. The four names are simple and unmemorable in their way, so he forces himself mentally to repeat them a half-dozen times. Then, he stands.

‘I’ll issue a warrant for Dawkins, Carrington and Cranfield. You’d best warn them if you see them.’

‘Treat them right, magistrate. Word’ll get back to me if you don’t. And we’ve all got our own information to trade, don’t we?’

The grin reappears for its final performance. Graham, his blood temporarily frozen, stares at the panderer, but avoids the obvious question. He doesn’t wish to know what the information Talty might have would be. Replacing his hat, he turns back into the rank mass of the night-time Garden.

CANTERBURY

For two weeks during that hot July, the hop garden was haunted by Maggie Broad’s daughter. Maria wailed and moaned, and the women who worked on the farm would mutter prayers to themselves whenever they walked beneath her window. The men were angered by the sound, and complained to the hop garden’s overseer, who passed their complaints on to Henry Lodge, with no expectation that anything would change.

And while the girl made these sad noises, her mother sat with her, sleeping when she slept, holding her hand and stroking her brow when she woke, feeding her and showing her to the farm’s water-closet, a recent addition to the property which Maggie Broad had stared at in frank amazement on the women’s first night in the farmhouse.

‘Do you remember the heads on the
Lady Juliana
?’ she asked. ‘Do you remember sitting out there above the waves, shitting into the sea, waiting for some bloody sea serpent to leap up and tear off your arse?’

She laughed, and the sound was hard and savage, and the man of means felt a terrible discomfort.

He had not known she had a daughter. There’d been no mention of Maria during their time in the colony. He asked about where she had sprung from. The answer was brusque.

‘I had her before I was transported. She was raised by a farmer and his wife in Suffolk.’

This was where Maggie had disappeared to upon leaving the
Indefatigable
. She had travelled to Suffolk to find her daughter, but the daughter had gone. The farmer and his wife were dead of some disease or other. There had been no mention of Henry’s failure to meet Maggie, and somehow this made the man of means anxious.

‘So how did you find her?’ he asked her.

‘I asked people. I’m good at asking things of people.’

This was not how he’d pictured their reunion. He’d imagined them sipping claret as the sun went down over the hop poles, he telling her of the success he’d made of himself since returning from the colony. He had no ambitions to court her; only to justify himself, to say he’d made the most of the beginning she had gifted him. He wanted to impress her, not woo her.

But her desperate daughter was all she cared for, and there were no comfortable drinks on the terrace behind the farmhouse. Whenever he alluded to New South Wales, he received a hard and cynical response, as if she despised him for sentimentality.

This dismissive contempt began immediately. She asked him the name of his farm, and he was reluctant to share it, but that reluctance was obvious and only inflamed her curiosity, such that she insisted.

‘I named it
Juliana
.’

She stared at him.

‘You’re a bloody fool. Let me tell you about the
Lady Juliana
.’

She turned away from him. He noticed this a good deal. She rarely looked directly into his face.

‘The
Lady Juliana
was two weeks out from Cape Verde when she crossed the equator,’ she said. ‘I’d been a prisoner on that bloody ship of fools for a year. The whores on board had been allowed to ply their wares at the places we docked; the pox in their loins was traded from Plymouth and Portsmouth and London and beyond, and sold for pennies and pounds to take up residence in the loins of men in Tenerife or on slavers off the coast of Africa. By the time we reached the Line, almost every seaman, including the officers, had selected a woman to share his hammock or his cabin. The captain and the master approved of it, and these women – the ones who did not call themselves whore – were glad of it. A good many of them were pregnant.

‘But on the night we crossed the Line, one of those doomed unborn souls died.

‘A sailor harpooned a dolphin, and skinned it, and one of the seamen wore the skin as a costume. He was Neptune, and two of his shipmates wore long wigs made of seaweed. They were his attendants. The men were all drunk, and they cheered when Neptune pointed out the sailors who’d never crossed the Line before to be part of their ceremony. The women watched, but then Neptune rushed at them, and they panicked. Many of them fell, and one – I do not remember her name – was by then heavy with child.

‘She screamed, and then she wept, and the older women knew what was happening. They took her below, and screamed for the barber-surgeon, but he was drunk and playing Neptune’s games. So the women had to do it, while the men played their games abovedecks, and down at the bottom of the ship the rats hid in the piss and shit of the bilge.

‘They talked of bleeding her, as someone had seen a surgeon do this once, but she screamed at that, and then the decision was made for them. The baby was dead. I put my hand on her belly, and there was no life in there. It felt as dead as a cannonball. We gave her China tea with opium drops, and the older women worked away at her stomach and slowly – it took an hour – she pushed out the body. We gave her laudanum, wrapped the baby in sailcloth, and threw it into the sea. The men did not even notice us. The father must have been among them.

‘But they were all its father. Every one of them, even Neptune himself.’

The next day, he took down the sign with the hop garden’s name on it down.

When he could, he asked her questions. So many questions: about the state of the township at Parramatta, about William Bligh and the Rum Rebellion, about the savage natives he still thought of as ‘Indians’. But she was reluctant to talk of any of these things, saying she’d left New South Wales behind, that she’d come back to England to rebuild a life with her daughter, now she had the means to do so.

But the daughter was quite mad. He could see it. His overseer could see it. The men and women of the farm could see it. She shrieked and shouted, she tore at her hair and dragged at her forearms, her nails leaving long ruby-red tracks.

This was his life for two weeks. Until at the end of the fortnight she came to him and asked for a favour. She didn’t mention his failure to perform the last task she’d asked of him. She didn’t have to.

‘Anything. I’ll do anything.’

‘Well, then, sir.’

She stared at him, and he felt a strangely familiar squeezing touch on his head, a sense that his temples were being pushed together.

‘You do not need to demand anything of me,’ he said, with some effort. ‘I am in your debt.’

‘Perhaps you are, Henry. But I owe no one, and I would have no one owe me. So do this one thing for me, and we will part as equals.’

‘Anything that is in my power, I will do.’

‘Maria has lost her wits, Henry. She is quite out of them. She needs treatment, and she needs to be cared for. And more than this, I am not able to watch over her for a time. I must settle a certain matter which will take all my effort for the coming weeks. I need to find an appropriate place for her.’

‘You mean a madhouse?’

She looked away, and that pressure on his head subsided.

‘I . . . I am sorry. I meant . . .’

‘No.’ She looked back at him again. ‘You are right. A madhouse is what she needs. And she needs to be hidden from sight during what comes next.’

He knew nothing of madhouses. He recognised the name of only one: Bethlem. But was Bethlem not a Gehenna of madness? A palace of lunatics, throwing their excrement from one to the other, undressing themselves for display to a gawping public. How could he possibly send the daughter of this woman to that place?

But after consulting some of the professional men in the nearby village, he had learned that Bethlem’s chief physician, one Dr Monro, had a private madhouse of his own, in which he treated the well-to-do in a more congenial atmosphere. The madhouse was in Hackney, a long way from Canterbury. But Maggie said she had her own business in Wapping, and that Hackney was by no means too far from there.