Savage Magic (3 page)

A huge man with a simple face opens the gate and with a final desperate lunge Abigail Horton enters Brooke House, a private madhouse for the deranged.

A Treatise on
Moral Projection
and its Manifestation among Certain Women at Brooke House Asylum, Hackney, in the Year of Our Lord 1814

By Thomas Bryson, Dr, of St Luke’s Hospital,

Old Street, London 1845

PREAMBLE: TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

It is an unavoidable certainty, which must be obvious to any knowledgeable observer, that mankind knows more of his world, and the Prime Causes that guide it, with every year that passes. The past hundred years have seen a galloping chain of discoveries and revelations by which the world – nay, even the Cosmos – has become an open book to the eyes of men.

It is Britain, of all the Great Powers, that has led this march towards knowledge. It is in Britain that science has been yoked to technology and to progress. It is here that engines powered by steam first clattered down iron tracks. It is here that the earliest adventurers in understanding – heroes like Priestley and Davy and Faraday and Brown – first divined the operations of the air, of gases and, perhaps most of all, of Electrical Forces which, I do believe, will affect a bigger change on this Planet than any preceding innovation. And of course all these great Divinations were set down upon the early edifice built by the mightiest genius of us all, Sir Isaac Newton.

But there is a baleful paradox behind all our discoveries. We know what causes the plants to grow and multiply, so to feed the planet and ourselves. We know how to harness the hidden forces of the world to pump water from mines, to send engines down tracks, to speed our massive ships to the far ends of the Earth. We know what fixes the stars in their heavens.

But the engine which powers all these transitions, the mighty organ that is the Mind of man, remains an essential mystery to us. I speak as one who has laboured for decades within institutions which we once called Madhouses, but are now known as Lunatic Asylums. I have lived through a period of great change in the matter of mad-doctoring, and I have been one of its key innovators.

What is the mind, and how does it conceive? It is a question that has haunted our finest doctors and our most brilliant philosophers. We have argued about the mysteries of the understanding, the relationship of the mind and the body, and the matter of consciousness. We have treated the head
somatically
, as a part of the body, and
philosophically
, as the seat of the soul. To hold a brain in your hands, as I have done on dozens of occasions, is to wonder at how something can be at once a slab of meat and the throne of Reason.

I do not seek to answer such questions in this paper. I seek instead to broaden our understanding of the mind’s capacities. For the past four decades I have made the matter of mental disturbance my ground for research. I have investigated melancholy and hysteria, fury and mania, and I have long held that the mind is a stronger instrument than we have ever credited, though I should perhaps say the Brain. I wish to emphasise the, as it were, muscular capacities of this extraordinary organ.

The present paper is not a complete treatise on this matter. I have been forced to commit these thoughts to ink because of the publications of another doctor, who has published his own theories of a concept he calls
hypnotism
. I speak of Dr James Braid of Manchester, in whose book
Neurypnology
this concept is introduced. Dr Braid’s book has been greeted with some derision among my colleagues, but I will not stoop to mockery. Although Braid’s concepts are misguided, and his conclusions wilful and positively dangerous, there can be no doubt that some of the theories which he has published have affinities with thoughts of my own.

I have been at this particular work for thirty years now. My interest began with events I witnessed at Brooke House, the private asylum (or madhouse, as we then called such places) in Hackney, in the year 1814. The things I saw were so extraordinary, and so out of the range of human experience and theory, that I have made it my life’s work to try and place them within a theoretical whole which can at least accommodate them. Now that Dr Braid’s ideas are, as it were, out in the public sphere, it may be that a more receptive audience will be available for my own theories.

I believe the events described herein – and the medical conclusions I have drawn from them – will be seen by future generations as a great leap forward in human understanding. My depiction of those terrible nights at Brooke House may attract derision and disbelief, but I speak as a doctor of forty years standing when I say they are real, they happened precisely as I describe them here, and they point to a theory of the mind which will shake our current notions of human ability to its foundations.

And the most remarkable aspect of this saga is this: the capacities I shall describe within this treatise were all exhibited by females, and exclusively females. Is this not miraculous? For if Women are capable of the feats described herein, how much more incredible might be the feats of Men?

WAPPING

A carriage stands outside the River Police Office in Wapping Street, its two black horses flicking their tails through the damp September air, its driver sitting hunched inside dark oilcloth, unmoving, possibly asleep. The seamen and shopkeepers and street-hawkers who trudge and trot up and down the street have to squeeze their way past the coach, and many of them complain about this to the dark figure of the driver, who has as much to say in reply as would a statue.

A man emerges from the Police Office and shouts up to the driver, telling him to wait a little longer, not noticing or not caring about the disruption his carriage is causing. This man is something of a sight to see on this grey late-summer morning. He is dressed fashionably and brightly, in the high style of a man off to the gaming tables of St James’s: white silk stockings, dark heeled shoes, duck-egg blue breeches, a grey coat edged with gold brocade, an elegant top hat on his head. In coal-dark, shit-brown Wapping, he looks like a parakeet visiting a murder of crows.

He turns to look back at the Police Office, in a measuring way. The building is an elegant suburban villa adopted for other uses, now housing two dozen water constables and related clerical staff under the eye of its chief magistrate, John Harriott. Yet today it seems quiet and at rest. In an odd gesture, the gentleman removes his hat and looks at the ground, his lips moving as if in a prayer. He replaces his hat and turns, walking downstream along Wapping Street and left into Lower Gun Alley.

If it is possible he looks even more out of place down this alley, which is surrounded by poor housing. Dirty-faced boys watch from doorways and the gaps between buildings where they play their games of high adventure and moderate violence. The braver ones may be contemplating approaching this man, tapping him up for some change or perhaps even inserting a questing finger into those no doubt well-stocked pockets. But then the gentleman walks up to a door they all know, and as one they back away into the urban shadows of their play.

The gentleman raises his silver-topped cane and knocks on the door, firmly and without embarrassment. He is of course aware of being watched by the street boys. He is not a naive man, and as ever he is watchful and intelligent. Wapping may be rougher at the edges than the Covent Garden theatres and coffee houses he knows so well as a magistrate at Bow Street, but it is, he is well aware, a good deal less lethal.

There is no reply. He knocks again, and this time he steps back and shouts up to the first-floor windows.

‘Horton! The door, if you please!’

After a moment, one of the windows opens, and a face appears. Even though he had been led to expect it, the gentleman is still surprised by its appearance: gaunt yet bearded, the hair in disarray, the expression dumb and tired.

‘What do you want?’ says the face at the window.

‘I wish to talk to you, Horton. Now, if you would be so kind.’

The gentleman’s voice carries an expectation of obedience. For a moment the bearded face at the window says nothing, perhaps contemplating refusal. Then it looks behind, into the room beyond the window, before turning back to the gentleman below.

‘Wait. I shall be a minute or two.’

The window is slammed shut with some asperity. The gentleman, forgetting himself for a moment, sighs mournfully. He turns to the street, his back to the door, using the time to make an inspection of his surroundings. The street makes its own inspection in return.

After some minutes, the door opens, and the man from the upstairs window appears. The gentleman turns to face him.

‘What do you want?’

‘Horton, I am not about to discuss sensitive matters in the open air, however bracing Wapping’s odour may be. Will you not invite me up to your rooms?’

‘They are . . . not clean.’

‘Neither is the street, particularly. And I would prefer to be warm.’

With a scowl the bearded man relents, and the two of them go inside.

The rooms within are filthy, as advertised. But the gentleman has been in them before, and makes himself comfortable in a chair he recognises. The bearded man says nothing.

The fire is dead in the grate. It has been dead for some time, by the looks of it.

‘I have just visited the Police Office,’ the gentleman says. ‘Harriott is still unwell.’

The bearded man says nothing to this. After a moment, he sits down in the only other chair in the room, his hands on its arms, ready to endure whatever is to come.

‘He is in his office, but he should not be,’ the smart gentleman continues. ‘I have advised him to retire to his bed. We can find others to manage his daily duties. My fellow magistrates at Bow Street could help, if need be.’

The bearded man seems uninterested in any of this. He looks at the dead fire as if it were reading him a tragic story.

‘Horton, I wanted to ask Harriott for your help in a more personal matter.’

The bearded man looks at him. The gentleman sees the change in his expression; sullen acceptance has given way to a brow-quickening irritation.

‘Help? Whenever you ask for my help, Mr Graham, it ends badly for me.’

The Bow Street magistrate twirls his cane for a moment in one hand, and purses his lips. He is carefully choosing his words.

‘Horton, you do not trust me. This much I know. But if you knew how I had shielded you . . .’

‘Shielded me? Are you now my benefactor, Mr Graham?’

‘Yes, Horton. In ways you will never know, I am your benefactor. And your wife’s, too.’

Horton leans forward in his chair, and his yellow teeth show clearly through his beard. His fists are clenched, and for a moment Graham fears he may rise and strike him.

‘Not my wife, Graham. You do not dare . . .’

‘Abigail is a patient at Brooke House in Hackney, is she not?’

‘Graham, I—’

‘Brooke House is a private hospital, used only by the wealthy families of those poor wretches whose sense has flown. Its fees are considerable. And Abigail has been a patient there for a month now, her fees met by the same benefactor who gained her admission to Brooke House. They will continue to be met by him. By me, Horton.’

Graham is met by a stupefied stare. He remembers the last time he was in this room, almost three years before. Then, he’d defeated the man in front of him with revelations of Horton’s own past. Now, he has done the same with information on the present. It brings him no pleasure. He needs Horton’s help.

‘She came to you,’ says Horton. ‘She came to you when she could not come to me.’ He says it more to himself than to Graham.

‘She did, Horton. She knew she needed professional assistance to tame her unquiet mind. She knew that assistance would be expensive. And she knew how I had used you in the past, and how much I owed you, and her. She is an extraordinary woman, fearless and charming and clever. And she knew you would refuse my help.’

Horton looks at him, and Graham sees a sadly familiar look of desperate unhappiness in the man’s eyes.

‘She was wrong about that, Graham. I would have done anything to help her.’

‘Really, Horton? Would you really have turned to the man who blackmailed you?’

‘Anything.
Anything
.’

Horton stands and turns away from him, hiding his face. Graham finds himself believing him, and wonders at the intensity of the constable’s feelings for his wife.

‘How does she do?’ asks Horton, his face still hidden. ‘She is not permitted to write to me, nor I to visit her.’

‘Yes, that is my understanding of Brooke House’s methods. I know no more than you, Horton. But I do know that, under the supervision of Dr Monro and his assistants, she is receiving the best care possible. The great majority of Brooke House’s patients recover their . . .’