Savage Magic (29 page)

After Jealous has left, promising to return when he has an answer from Stoke d’Abernon, Horton tries to speak to Sir Henry right away, but there is little immediate chance of that. The baronet has locked himself in his library and has left instructions with Crowley that he is not to be disturbed.
By that bloody officer in particular
is the unspoken additional command which Horton sees in the old butler’s eyes.

Stephen Moore has retired to his kitchen, so there is little to be done with regard to that line of inquiry, either. A growing sense of frustration comes over Horton. More hours are to be wasted inside this odd house and this odder investigation. The master and mistress of the house are locked in their respective rooms, like sulking children. He feels himself to be waiting for something to happen – a letter to be answered, or an opportunity to let himself through a locked door. And suddenly, his mind is full of Abigail and London, of Covent Garden constables and Hackney mad-doctors.

It is another sunny day, so he resolves on a walk around Sir Henry’s estate. He heads for the trees at the edge of the lawn – the direction, he’s been told, the rough music came from that August night weeks before. The phrase had been unfamiliar to him at first, but then he’d recalled it: rough music was the sound made by people shouting and banging anything that came to hand to try and drive out a maddened witch. The people of the village had been standing here, in these woods, with their pots and pans and their fear, shrieking in hate at the poor old cook.

Yet it was out of these woods that Elizabeth Hook stepped last night. Perhaps this is really why he gravitates towards them. He has no means of finding her, and he would very much like to speak to her again. Perhaps the woods will offer a clue.

The ground is dry and soft beneath his feet. It has been a hot summer of little rain, and within the trees the air feels dry and exhausted. Abigail had spoken to him of air once, of how it was not a single thing, but compounded of multiple gases laid within and on top of each other (he forgets the precise mechanism). What was the word for the most vital of them? He forgets that, as well. He tries to imagine this vacant air containing matter, or something like matter, but fails. Why can he see through it if it consists of something else? It is like the inverse of the events of Thorpe Lee House, which obfuscate and cloud and interrupt and through which nothing can be perceived.

A white shape, dancing through the trees. He stands still, as if he were hunting a stag.

No, not a stag. A white hart, dressed in night-clothes. Miss Ellen, running through the woods. Singing. She seems to be running in a circle, around where he stands. A step in any direction would take him towards her. So a step is what he takes. And another, and another. She does not heed him, and then she does, when he is only a half-dozen yards away.

She is dressed in the same white cotton shift as the night he met her in the kitchen, and this time the sunlight pierces it obscenely, picking out the angular shapes of her childish body, even displaying the small malnourished circles of her unformed breasts. She might as well be naked.

O’Reilly’s voice in his head.
She warn’t doing nothing. She was just standin’ there, lookin’ at me
.

She says nothing, and her glare is surprising. She looks angry.

‘Miss Tempest Graham. We met in the . . .’

‘I know who you are, constable.’

‘Well, then. Are you well enough to be running so through the woods? Dressed in . . . so little?’

She looks down at herself, and her face changes. Anger rushes out and embarrassment courses in. She sits down on a log, tucking her cotton shift beneath her backside, covering her chest with her arms as she leans forward, closing herself in tightly against his male gaze. It is the action of an older girl, almost a woman, who is beginning to understand the attentions of men.

He hears a sound – that of a carriage pulling away, somewhere at the outer edge of the copse, where a wooden fence cuts through the trees, separating one piece of land – Sir Henry’s estate – from another. He can spy the edge of a field through the trees, its wheat recently harvested, and along a track between the two estates an old wagon is making its way. A woman sits atop it, higher up than normal, dressed in gypsy rags.

‘What are you doing in the woods, constable?’

She asks the question quickly and almost too loudly, as if to distract his attention. And for a moment he is distracted, turning his gaze back to hers, and feeling an odd sensation in his head – a squeeze, a tension – before pulling his eyes back towards the gypsy on top of her wagon, as it rolls away beyond his line of sight, too fast to follow.

When he looks back at Ellen, there is such a look of anger and hatred in her face that he feels momentarily afraid, as if she might lunge into the trees towards him, tearing at his face with her long fingernails, her white shift flowing behind her like wings.

‘I was out walking, and thinking,’ he says.

‘Ah, walking and thinking. Yes. Men do a lot of walking and thinking.’

He is terribly confused. It is like talking to a different girl. The sad, gnomic skeleton of the kitchen two nights before has become an irritated, sarcastic shrew.

‘You seem quite the Forest Sprite, constable. A Manly Apparition!’

He feels a sudden quickening pressure in his temples, the beginnings of a headache. He is tired, bothered by the terrible visions of the previous night, by his complete inability to rest in that strange chattering household. He feels compelled to end this conversation, and yet Ellen’s appearance in the woods is at the same time extraordinary and in keeping with what has passed before.

‘This is not the first time you have run through the woods, I think, Miss Ellen.’

His head feels suddenly released, the pain scudding away. What on earth is wrong with him?

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘The gardener saw you. O’ Reilly. He saw you running in the woods.’

‘He is a
liar!
’ She spits like a cat with its feet in hot water. ‘I have seen the way he looks at me. He is a disgusting
liar
and my father will have him
dismissed
.’

‘Which
father
, Miss Ellen?’

Pleasure, anger, embarrassment, rage and now confusion. Miss Ellen’s emotions dance around her face like a hart she must herself chase down. The intermixture is too much for her. She begins to cry.

He does not know what to do or what to say. He feels he should comfort her, but to approach her when she is dressed – or, rather, undressed – like this would be a step too far. Yet she is distraught.

‘I was so angry! I was so scared!’

‘Miss Ellen, please. You must not . . .’

‘I didn’t know! How could I have known
?’

‘Known what, Ellen?’

‘I dreamed he killed the dogs. I dreamed I made him. Like
this
. . . ’

She is glaring at him, and suddenly his head hurts tremendously, and that sense of his temples being pinched between the thumb and forefinger of a giant returns, but multiplied a dozen times. He winces with the feel of it, and closes his eyes against the pain, and then it is gone as quickly as it came, like a candle being snuffed out.

Leave me alone
. The words appear in his head, unbidden and clear, and he feels a great urge to do so, but at that moment, and as if they had emerged from a tunnel beneath the ground, Sir Henry’s dogs surge out of the forest, frantically barking and banging into each other in their frenzy. Behind them comes Sir Henry, riding a chocolate-coloured horse in a similar frenzy to that of his dogs. Horton leaps out of the way of the surge, but this only puts him in the line of Sir Henry and his horse.

‘Out of the bloody way, you idiot!’ the baronet shouts, and Horton scrambles to get behind a tree. As it is, the horse passes less than two feet from him, its eyes white with terror and excitement, long red lines down its flanks from the slashing of Sir Henry’s stick.

Then the baronet and his dogs are in the field behind the wood, where he had seen the gypsy wagon. They rush across it in a seething, demented rush.

Horton looks after them, and then looks around him. He is in the woods. He cannot remember at all how he came to be there.

His head hurts a little, but it is a different pain to any he has felt before, that of a tired limb recovering after hard work. He walks back to the house, eyes to the ground as if he could trace the memory of the past few minutes there. The headache starts to clear as soon as he steps out of the woods. He wonders how tired he must be, to be so confused. He remembers leaving the house, and then there are only shadows. Had he spoken to someone? He vaguely recalls seeing a carriage.

At the house, he goes looking for Crowley the butler or Mrs Chesterton the housekeeper. He finds neither, because to his very great surprise he comes across Mrs Graham dusting plates in the dining room, singing a song of wandering soldiers and lovelorn lovers. She stops when she hears him step into the room.

‘Constable Horton. Good day to you.’

Her face is tired and pale, and her good cheer somewhat enforced. He wonders if she has been waiting to speak to him.

‘And to you, Mrs Graham. It is a fine day.’

‘It is, constable, it is. And how goes your
investigation
?’

She says this with a small smile, as if they are sharing a huge joke at someone else’s expense; he cannot imagine whose.

‘Mr Horton, I fear I may have been wasting your time, summoning you here.’

‘Really, Mrs Graham?’

She winces slightly at the name. Her own name.

‘Yes, I fear so. You see, I have not been well. I am concerned that these fancies of mine may have been the fruit of a fevered imagination.’

‘And yet you sacked your cook.’

‘Yes, I did indeed do that. I wonder if I was perhaps not a little hasty. You have met Elizabeth?’

‘I have.’

‘And she denies any mischief?’

‘She does.’

‘Well, then. I shall reinstate her. This nonsense must come to an end.’

‘Do I take it that Sir Henry wishes me to leave?’

‘These are my wishes, not Sir Henry’s.’

She disguises the lie beneath a particularly vigorous bout of dusting. She polishes with some skill, Horton notes, and he wonders if this is something she has to do a good deal, and whether the servants resent it and despise her for it.

‘Well, I cannot stay if you do not wish me here, Mrs Graham.’

She looks at him directly, and with some puzzlement. She had been expecting an argument, of course.

‘You agree with me, constable? That these matters are fanciful?’

‘By no means, Mrs Graham. Something is happening in this house, and some people within it have secrets they do not wish me to discover. Miss Tempest Graham continues to be ill, inexplicably so. And I doubt your new cook is all he says he is.’

She puts down her cloth, the ruse of cleaning forgotten.

‘You surely cannot ascribe all these events to Stephen. Why, most of them took place before he even arrived.’

Mrs Graham, he notes, still thinks of
these events
as needing explanation. He is being removed for other reasons – presumably, the wishes of the master of the house. He thinks he can see why she has not appeared these past two days. They have been arguing about his presence. She has refused to dismiss Horton, while Sir Henry has insisted she does not speak to him. This new fabrication is her surrender.

‘I do not believe Stephen Moore to be responsible for the events which preceded his arrival.’

‘Then what do you accuse him of, constable?’

‘I accuse him of nothing at all. I merely state that he is not all he seems to be, and I would recommend you take references for him, unless you plan to reinstate Elizabeth Hook. I will plan to make my leave, but may not be able to do so until the morning. Will that be quite acceptable, Mrs Graham?’

She looks back to her crockery.

‘Quite acceptable, constable.’

One more night, then
.

‘Then I will leave you with one final question, if I may.’

‘Always asking questions, are you not, constable?’

‘It is a habit I find impossible to break.’

‘Well, then. Ask your question.’

‘Would it be yourself who holds keys to all the rooms in the house?’

Her smile, which had been barely there and which was ill-meant in any case, vanishes at that. The question is serious and perhaps has an intent she cannot unpick.

‘Why, yes. It is normal for the mistress of the house to keep keys.’

‘So you have the only full set of keys?’

‘Yes.’

‘But surely those who need to get into certain rooms must hold their own keys. Does Jane, for instance, have keys to your bedchamber?’

‘She does.’

‘And O’Reilly, he must keep the keys to the outbuildings – the destroyed shed, for instance? The dogs’ kennels?’

‘Without keys, they’d not be able to do their jobs, would they?’

‘Of course not. And what about the rooms in the basement? Does anyone else have keys to those?’

‘Why, the cook, of course, in addition to me. She . . . or rather,
he
. . . uses those rooms to store things. Is this relevant to anything, constable?’

He uses her own tactics. He obfuscates.

‘It is merely a matter of personal interest. If I may, Mrs Graham, I will return to my room and prepare my things. I would like to visit the village a final time, to speak to the rector. He is a man of some distinction, and I have enjoyed his conversation.’

‘Why . . . yes. Yes, of course.’

Mrs Graham is now the picture of confusion, and Horton, having done what he came to do, leaves her to recover. But as he goes, he asks another question.

‘Your looking-glasses, Mrs Graham. Was it you that broke them?’

She looks shocked and then angry.

‘How impertinent! Why on earth would I break my own property?’

‘Perhaps you saw something in them you did not care for.’

She gazes at him open-mouthed, her face white apart from an angry blaze on each cheek. Then she turns away, and Horton does not speak to her again.