Savage Magic (33 page)

‘Bow Street officer! I am a patrolman! I have a warrant to arrest this woman!’

He shouts it at the old man, and hopes it is loud enough for the women in the street outside to hear.

‘Rose Dawkins,’ he says to the woman lying on the floor. ‘I’ve a warrant to arrest you.’

She bites and scratches and screams, but eventually Rose Dawkins relents, after a fashion. It takes ten minutes to extricate themselves from the old man’s home. When they finally emerge onto the street, Jealous notes that his pursuit of the prostitute has taken them deep into St Giles.

This brings its own troubles – St Giles is notoriously poor, and vicious – but also a respite from the more crowded streets around Covent Garden. No one comes to St Giles for entertainment. The only people here are the ones who live here, a dozen to a room, crowded into buildings which were built for the rich but which the rich slowly abandoned as they moved west, allowing landlords to steal in and partition rooms and seal off hallways, squeezing every rentable bit of value out of every nook and cranny.

William Jealous grew up in St Giles. His father, the Bow Street Runner, had been a hard man. St Giles had held no fears for him, and it holds none for his son, either. And a whore is a whore.

She has stopped struggling, at least physically. But St Giles holds as little fear for her as it does for Jealous – and her words are spiked with defiance.

‘Fucking constable. Fucking nonsense. You’re no fucking constable. What are you, fifteen? You ever fucked a woman, you ginger shit? Have you? Want to fuck me now, I can see it in your piggy little ginger eyes, you dirty fucking pig. Come on then. Do me here. Do me. I’ll cut your fucking prick off, you dirty—’

He slaps her, hard, with his free hand, never letting go with his other. He is panting and, yes, astonishingly aroused. He could fuck her. He could take her, here, down this alley, up against the wall, a quick one while no one’s about, and then get on with business.

She starts speaking, and he slaps her again. He feels something in his head – a definite force, pushing him away, as if someone had grabbed the back of his collar and was yanking him backwards. She is staring at him, her green eyes full of hatred and intense concentration, and he replies with violence. He shoves her against a wall, and, spitting into her face with the passion of it, tells her the story of the Sybarites, of the men being guarded in their houses this very night, and of his search for her companion in whoring, Elizabeth Carrington. And at the end of it, he slaps her again. That feeling of being pulled away switches off like a candle in an open window.

When he lets go of her, she slides down the wall to sit on the turd-encrusted cobbles. Her old tart’s skirts ripple around her knees like uneaten vegetables thrown on the ground. She puts her head on her arms and knees and stays like that for a while, not crying. She has never cried, not once, during this whole performance.

She sniffs, loudly, and then she looks up at him.

‘Come on, then,’ she says. ‘I know where she is.’

She stands.

‘But if you hit me again, I’ll kick your prick off.’

The lodging house where Elizabeth Carrington lives is on the borders of St Giles and Covent Garden, in that area which still retains some gentility, where whores can take a room for relatively little money and bring back gentlemen without having to climb over dirty children and begging adults on the stairs. Beds can be paid for by the hour, 18d. to 2s., in this part of town.

Rose hasn’t seen Elizabeth since the Sybarites party. She refuses to speak of the party other than to confirm her attendance, and Lizzie’s. She’s been down in Kent the last two days, had been planning to pick hops, needed to earn some money, but they’re not ready for pickers yet. How long is this stupid jaunt going to take, anyway?

The house is on Brownlow Street, just around the corner from Drury Lane. It’s not an enormous place, probably no more than fifty years old, and may at one time have housed a lawyer or a doctor. Now, its half-dozen rooms house four whores and a pimp while the sixth, according to Rose, is let by a peer of the realm who brings whores back here, three or four at a time, undresses them, and paints on their skin.

The door to the street is open, and they go inside. The vestibule is scruffy and noxious, the shit of the street trodden through onto the stone floor. Vestiges of the house’s former status remain: the line of the dado rail, the unbroken panelling at the back by the stairs, a painting, hung askew, of a fat man and a horse. Rose leads them upstairs.

She waits while he knocks at Elizabeth’s door. There is no answer, so he knocks again. Still no answer. He tries the door. It is unlocked. Rose tries to stop him (out of fear or propriety, he cannot tell), but he opens the door and steps inside.

The room has been emptied by persons unknown. All that remains is a bed, its linen stolen, a chest of drawers, opened and ransacked, a chair and, in the chair, the stiff, lifeless body of Elizabeth Carrington. Rose, as she turns to walk into the room, stifles a cry and backs away from the open door. He grabs her arm and pulls her into the room.

‘What? No, not here!’

But he shakes his head, pushes her against the wall by the door, and closes the door. He pulls a bolt across.

‘Stay there.’

He turns back to the room, and approaches Elizabeth. He walks carefully, as if trying not to wake her. Her hands are drooped over the side of the chair, and something white reflects what little light there is. A cut-throat, dropped on the floor beneath her right hand. Which means . . .

Yes. The left wrist and hand are darkly smeared, as if she’d sunk her hand in oil up to the wrist. A puddle of this dark stuff swells on the floor beneath this hand.

Self-destruction. And not too long ago. But long enough for the locals to have heard of it, and to have let themselves in, and helped themselves to whatever goods poor Elizabeth Carrington had managed to secure. And then let themselves out again.

From the next-door room, a slap, a gasp, and a deep, male chuckle.

THORPE

The witch is not on a broom, of course. She never was. He realises this as he half-walks, half-runs to the house, his cheek seemingly full of knives and needles. She is riding a wagon. Sitting on top, riding along, she appeared from where he was lying to be flying along the top of the hedge. Such must have been Bill’s view, and his mistake. Appearances can deceive. The mind can play tricks on the understanding.

It seems to represent something important, this thought. But he has no time to interrogate it, for a glow appears at the side of the lane where the house is, and shouts are growing in volume, and then he stumbles into the gardens of Thorpe Lee House and upon a scene from another century.

The burning of a witch.

The fire has been set in the middle of the lawn in front of the house; at the centre of this lawn, incongruously, stands a lonely beech tree. Its straight, thickish trunk has been dressed all around with wood from other trees. Its branches have lost a few early leaves, with gaps showing against the moonlit sky; a giant scarecrow which is losing its hair.

At the bottom of the tree, tied to the trunk and with wood gathered up to her waist, is Elizabeth Hook.

Do they mean to burn the tree, and her?

The glow he’d seen from the road does not, yet, come from the pyre. A dozen or more men are standing around the tree, shouting, and each of them carries a torch which blazes with medieval intensity. They wave these torches at Elizabeth, and then, one by one, they hold their torches to the wood. The flames from the torches dance across the front of the house, as if the building itself were goading them on.

He shouts at them, and the effort seems to rip his cheek bone in two. He begins to run, thinking as he does about the woman on the wagon riding away.

She was here, she started this.

Elizabeth Hook screams, and he thinks of the gun deck in a naval battle, of wood chips flying through the air and into skin, eyes and mouths, of enemy cannon balls connecting with the blood and bone of his shipmates, of the screams of pain, the agonies of heat, and he can feel that heat on his face as he draws near to the pyre. His stomach, empty of food, turns over and he vomits up bile and bitterness into the earth, and falls to his knees, shouting at the men to stop, desist, or face the consequence.

He pukes again, and again, and again, as if he could expel the sight of that burning, the smell of the old cook’s flesh blistering in the flame, until his belly is only emptiness, and he pukes up even that, pushing the hollowness out of himself as if he could turn himself inside-out and show his corruption to the world.

And then there is nothing left, and he looks up again.

The beech tree stands solitary and untouched in the centre of the lawn. The air is cold, and damp, and resolutely unburned. He is alone.

For a moment, his brain is as empty as his stomach: a void, in which understanding can gain no purchase.

A vision. A phantasy. A view of the unreal.

Am I then indeed mad?

A shout from Thorpe Lee House, or more of a scream. But not the scream of a frightened woman; this is the angry, pained shout of a man.

Given how filled the air was with screams and angry shouts just minutes before, the countryside is now silent, and the shout from the house is thus shockingly loud.

Did his brain really invent all that has just transpired? The fire, the smells, the shape on the carriage? Did he see the woman from the woods (the
witch
) riding along the road, or did he not?

The empty darkness of the lawn gives no answer. It seems to contain more fear, even, than those blood-drenched visions. There is a thick possibility to the shadows within the woods behind the lawn, drawn deeper by the sudden uncertainty of his own perception. Is he still dreaming? Is he still asleep? Where might he be?

He walks up to the front door of the house and finds it open. Servants are milling about the vestibule in night-attire and he hears a woman – he thinks it must be Sarah Graham – wailing and shouting from the drawing room. Horton thinks what lies before him must be of the same species as the witch-burning. A phantom of perception, painted beneath the flickering eyelids of a man who is even now asleep in his own bed. Perhaps not even here. Perhaps in Lower Gun Alley, Wapping, his pretty, clever wife asleep beside him, and not in a madhouse, far beyond his reach, the warmth of her body as familiar and comfortable as the shape of his own face.

But his own face is misshapen. His cheek is swollen and full of agonies. He did not imagine that. His mouth is full of the sour taste of choked-up bile. As he steps into Thorpe Lee House, his knuckles smack into the doorframe (he is by no means steady upon his feet), and the pain – low, sharp, definitive – is as real as real can ever claim to be.

He wishes to go to bed.

Jane Ackroyd rushes past him, fetching something from the kitchen for her wailing mistress in the drawing room. He grabs her by the upper arm, and she shrieks. He notes that no one, until now, has realised he has returned.

‘What is this commotion, girl?’

She stares at him, her eyes wide and red and exhausted of the tears she must already have shed.

‘The constable!’ she shouts. ‘The constable!’

From somewhere in the house, a roar. Sir Henry is still here.

‘It’s Miss Ellen, sir,’ says Jane, and he drops her arm immediately. ‘She’s tried to do away with the master!’

PART FOUR

The Woman of Means

We may without exaggeration assert that a common Prostitute is, in a Community, an Evil, not dissimilar to a Person infected with the Plague; who, miserable himself, is daily communicating the Contagion to those, that will propagate still wider the fatal Malady.

An Account of the Institution of the Lock Asylum for the Reception of Penitent Female Patients when Discharged Cured from the Lock Hospital,

ANON, 1792

WESTMINSTER