Savage Magic (27 page)

He sees Ellen Graham’s – no, Ellen
Tempest
Graham’s – sad, disturbed eyes, hears her surrender to the strange rhythms of her own head.

He sees the cook. The male cook. Stephen Moore. Watching him as he eats his dinner.

He sees Abigail, and she is in terrible danger. She has her arm around a serpent.

A shape flies by the window. Then another. Then another. Dark flying shapes circling Thorpe Lee House, their skirts trailing behind them, and each of them looking in at his window as she passes. Women in the air, watching him.

And thus, Charles Horton’s strange night comes to an end.

He sits up in his bed, still light-headed with exhaustion. He drinks from the cup beside his bed, the lukewarm well-water sluicing his parched mouth but bringing no satisfaction at all. There are so many questions in his head that they have overlapped themselves, a chattering flock of mysteries and unseen narratives. He has written to Robert Brown to try and unlock the mystery of the material in the exposed well. He has, it seems, been forbidden to speak with either Miss Ellen or Mrs Graham.

Very well, then. He will follow another trail. Today, he will try to learn more about Thorpe Lee House’s unusual new cook.

The servants’ quarters are in the top of the house, squashed within the roof, the stuffy enclosed air reminding Horton strongly of a Navy frigate. A narrow passageway follows the line of the house. There are six doors off it, all of them shrunken copies of the majestic doors of the main house. Horton has to stoop slightly to walk across the landing.

Breakfast is being served downstairs, and all the servants are about their business. The attic passageway is silent – much quieter and stiller than it had been during the night, when the giggles and murmurs of the staff had echoed down these corridors, down the stairs and into Horton’s half-sleeping fancy.

He knocks at each door, and when no answer comes he opens it and peeks within. There are no locks on any of the doors – no privacy is allowed the servants of Thorpe Lee House. There are male rooms, and female rooms. The male rooms are austere, almost empty – beds, drawers full of clothes (no wardrobes in any of the rooms, the ceilings are too narrow), candles, chamber pots and washstands. The female rooms are frillier and warmer, edged with lace and drapery, the claustrophobic edge taken off them by decoration.

There are two of the male rooms. One must be for Crowley, the butler and senior male servant. The other, assumes Horton, must be shared by Stephen Moore and the footman, Peter Gowing. There is little, on the face of it, to distinguish this room from the butler’s, save the additional bed and the crowding. Horton carefully opens the drawers, finding nothing but clothes, and looks underneath the beds. There are so few places for a servant to tend any private materials. Moore, if he has a secret to hide, must be hiding it elsewhere. There is only one other room over which he has dominance.

So Horton heads down for his breakfast – as ever, it is served in the kitchen, though this is now where he wishes to be. Moore is down there, and he turns his calm eyes to Horton as the constable steps into his domain.

‘Good morning, constable,’ he says, once again with that easy lack of deference.

‘And to you, Moore,’ says Horton, careful to keep some social distance. ‘Did you rest well this past night?’

Moore does not answer at once. He looks at Horton while he weighs up the question and his answer. He is, Horton can see, as careful in such matters as himself.

‘I think the house does not sleep as well as it might,’ he says. ‘Nor those within it.’

‘You think us haunted? By witches, perhaps?’

Moore smiles at that.

‘Well, by the fear of them, perhaps.’

He turns back to his task – washing dishes, quite fine ones, presumably used by Sir Henry and Mrs Graham for their own breakfast, in that part of the house to which Horton is only granted invited admission. It has been three days now since he spoke to Mrs Graham; since then she has been perceived within night-time rooms and even outside on the lawn. She is like a tired haunting spirit, one to whom Horton can have no access. When he asks to speak with her, the servants say only that she is keeping to her room, and that Sir Henry has ordered she is not to be disturbed.

A prisoner, perhaps, rather than a spirit.

Horton sits himself down at the kitchen table, on which is laid out bread and cheese and preserves and butter. He begins putting together a plate of food, and without warning Moore walks over with a jug of freshly made coffee.

‘My thanks to you,’ says Horton. Moore smiles that non-deferential smile, and walks back to the sink. Horton eats, and looks.

The kitchen is a large room, rectangular, with a long table down the middle, at which he now sits. It is well lit by external windows, high in the walls yet substantial in size. Horton tries to picture the topography of the house, eventually estimating that the kitchen must run front-to-back almost at the middle of the house, beneath the main hall. So there must be considerable vacancies on either side – storage rooms, a cellar, but what else? Doors on either side of the kitchen lead to these rooms. Otherwise the kitchen contains nothing that could be thought out of the ordinary – a large fireplace, a brick hearth from which dozens of pots and pans are hung, a sturdy stone sink, some shelves fixed into the bare brick walls.

‘I would think this kitchen very similar to the one at Stoke d’Abernon,’ says Horton, thinking nothing of the kind, as he has no view of what that other kitchen would be like. Moore does not look at him, keeping his eyes on his task, but he does answer.

‘It is larger at Stoke d’Abernon, but also more crowded. There are half-a-dozen kitchen servants there. The head cook is a terrible tyrant of a woman named Mrs Thomas. She is Welsh, as wide as she is tall, and I have seen her bring grown men to tears. It is a relief to have my own kitchen, and to not be subject to such a woman.’

A full answer, thinks Horton. A rounded, detailed, evocative answer, as if from the script of a play.

‘Who taught you to cook, Moore?’

‘My mother, Constable Horton. A remarkable woman, if I may say so. I grew up in a village near Northampton, where she was a cook to a great house. I helped her in the kitchen. It was my education.’

‘You did not go to school?’

‘I did, yes. There was a charity school in Northampton. I went there every day. All the children of the servants did. The master of the house demanded it.’

‘Where was this?’

‘Lamport, constable. The estate of Sir Justinian Isham.’

Horton files that memorable name away, though it had not been requested.

‘Did your mother go with you to Stoke d’Abernon?’

‘Yes, constable. She went to work in the kitchens there, and I followed her. And then I came here. Now, is this interrogation over?’

Moore does not look at him when he says this, and Horton does not reply, munching contemplatively on a thick hunk of bread.

‘Then, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and check if all the kitchen items have been returned from the dining room. Gowing and Mr Crowley are not always as thorough as one would like in such matters.’

Moore leaves, and still Horton says nothing. When the cook has gone, he stands and tries the doors leading off the kitchen. Both are locked. He returns to the table to finish his breakfast.

He goes in search of Mrs Chesterton, the housekeeper. There are noises from the dining room, where he presumes Sir Henry and Mrs Graham have finished their breakfast and retired elsewhere. Or perhaps only Sir Henry ate here, leaving Mrs Graham to the prison of her bedchamber. He steps into the room to see Moore, again, and Mrs Chesterton. She is telling the young man off.

‘I’ve told you, now, haven’t I? You don’t need to be in here. Peter’ll collect all the bits an’ pieces. You need to stick to the kitchen, and not be poking around the house all the time, as I’ve told—’

She stops when she sees Horton. Moore, he notices, has not even been listening to her, and simply carries on scooping up the remaining detritus of the breakfast, oblivious to Horton.

‘Mrs Chesterton, might I have a word with you?’

‘Now? I’m particularly busy just now, constable.’

‘If you please. It will only take a few minutes.’

She frowns and makes a harrumphing sound, and with a final glare at Stephen Moore she walks out with Horton into the corridor.

‘Shall we step outside?’ Horton suggests. She nods, curtly and almost rudely, as if she finds the whole thing an impertinent imposition. They walk through the front door and down the steps, onto the lawn. Mrs Chesterton looks suddenly lost and fragile, extracted from her domestic empire within.

‘Will I be able to talk with Sir Henry today? It is on a matter of some urgency.’

‘You’ll have to speak to Crowley about that.’

‘And might Mrs Graham be available?’

‘She might, she might not. Jane says she’s no better, and is keeping to her room.’

‘Indeed? I imagined I saw her walking on the lawn last night.’

‘Well, the imagination’s a funny thing, ain’t it?’

Her face is defiant, but there is something else beneath her words, a little wobble. Perhaps Mrs Chesterton’s imagination has been capering as much as Horton’s.

‘Then I would like to talk to you about Stephen Moore, Mrs Chesterton.’

She perks up a bit at that, suddenly interested.

‘Why? What’s ’e done?’

‘As far as I know, nothing. But I wondered if you could tell me the circumstances of his hiring.’

‘Well, he just showed up, didn’t he? The old cook was sacked, her as we all think is behind all this nastiness, and Mr Moore was here two days later. Said he’d heard there was a vacancy for a cook, and he had excellent references, and could we give him a chance?’

‘Had you advertised the position?’

‘Lor’, no, no. Had barely the time to think about it. Saved me a job, didn’t he?’

‘I suppose he did. Did you check his references?’

Her face scowls a little at that, and Horton thinks he gets a flavour of the woman in that scowl. An essentially lazy person, one comfortable in her position, loathe to generate fuss where there is calm. He can see she did not check Stephen Moore’s reference, because to do so would have been additional work, but also would have exposed her to the task she thought she’d avoided: that of advertising for a new cook. Moore was a short cut, and she’d taken the short cut, and had thought nothing of it. Horton thinks he sees why Thorpe Lee House has an air of untended shabbiness about it. Its housekeeper does not do her job.

She does not answer his question, turns that scowling countenance away to the garden, and Horton can see – if he had not done so before – he has made an enemy. He ponders asking to see the letter from Stoke d’Abernon, but she would take that as a direct attack, and might make things difficult. In any case, he does not need to see it. Moore is a careful and assiduous person. If the reference has been faked, it will have been faked well.

‘No matter, Mrs Chesterton. I’m sure it was in order. My thanks to you.’

‘Will that be all, then, constable? I am
particularly
busy.’

Such people are always busy, reflects Horton. He thanks her again and says no, that will be all. She walks back into the house.

The day stretches out before him. He thinks of Abigail, and her own day, and what may be in it for her. But that thought is, his guilt tells him, subsumed in the familiar itching belief that something is here to be discovered.

He walks back to the house. He will write to Dame Mary Vincent at Stoke d’Abernon. There is little other option available to him, unless he can get into those rooms off the kitchen.

He hears the sound of hooves, and turns to see a rider coming up the drive, the horse breathing heavily as if after a fierce gallop.

The horse arrives at the front of the house ahead of Horton. Its young rider climbs down and removes his hat to expose a shock of bright-red hair. Steam rises up from the horse’s back and sides, and it puffs and shakes its cheeks with recent exertion. Mrs Chesterton and Crowley scuttle out of the house and talk to the rider, and as Horton comes close they are followed, at speed, by Sir Henry, accompanied by Peter Gowing. O’Reilly the gardener stands to one side, looking at the horse as if it were an elephant.

Sir Henry strides past his servants, brushing Horton’s arm out of the way as he does so, and the servants around the rider give way to his approach.

‘Well, then,’ he says to the young rider. ‘You have something for me?’

‘Sir Henry?’ asks the rider.

‘Of course I am Sir Henry. Who else would I be?’

‘Well, sir, I bring an urgent letter for you from Mr Graham, the . . .’

‘I know who he is, dammit. Give me the letter.’

As the rider does so, Horton watches the other servants. At the mention of Aaron Graham’s name, Crowley raises an eyebrow towards Mrs Chesterton, thinking himself unwatched. She smiles back at the butler. To Horton’s left, Peter Gowing is himself looking at the ground with the kind of smile on his face which suggests he and the ground have just shared an amusing story. They look like a crowd of smirking children who have just heard an adult say something rude.

Sir Henry rips open the letter and throws the envelope onto the ground behind him. Gowing picks it up while Sir Henry reads. Horton watches him closely, as do all the servants. The urgency in Sir Henry’s frame tightens unbearably, and when he looks up he appears a man ready to strike out.

‘You came straight here?’ he says to the rider.

‘Yes, Sir Henry. As ordered by Mr Graham.’

Sir Henry says nothing else. He turns and glares at Horton, who looks back mystified. Then Sir Henry clatters back into the house.

‘I’ve also been asked to speak to Constable Horton,’ says the rider, and Horton turns back to look at him as Sir Henry walks away.

‘By the magistrate?’

‘Yes. Are you Horton?’

‘I am.’

Horton looks at the servants, one by one.

‘If you please. I wish to speak to this man on a policing matter.’

Gowing looks annoyed, Mrs Chesterton outraged and for a moment Crowley looks like he might pull out a stiletto and plunge it into Horton’s side, there and then. Horton waits, and eventually they do move away. Only O’Reilly remains, his mouth agape, and soon he too walks back to whatever gardening mystery he had been engaged upon before the rider’s sudden arrival.