Savage Magic (34 page)

The regularity of Westminster’s finest houses, it occurs to Graham, is worthy of a book.

What else can explain the fact that five astonished servants have appeared at Bow Street, accompanied by officers, within the space of an hour? Between 7 am, when he is woken in Great Queen Street by one of the officers, and 8 am they show up, one by one, their pale astonished faces disbelieving of the stories they bring.

The butler to Algernon Lincoln, son of the Duke of Handforth, was the first to arrive, accompanied by a patrolman, Daniel Bishop.

Something has happened to my master. Something terrible. He is dead in his bedchamber
.

Was he wearing a satyr’s mask? He was.

Within ten minutes, a footman appears from the house of Sir Thomas Mackworth, Bt, despatched to Bow Street with a Runner, John Nelson Lavender. Sir Thomas, he who had angrily refused any protection from Bow Street, is currently lying face down in his room, his head staved in by a small marble statue from Tuscany of two entwined naked women.

Is he wearing a satyr’s mask? He is.

Representatives from the houses of Samuel Lake (second brother of Viscount Lake, and a claimed descendant of Sir Lancelot) and Henry Harcourt Palmer bring their shocked faces to Bow Street at the same time, both accompanied by patrolmen. Lake is currently pinned to the wall of his bedchamber by a spear from Guinea, secured for him by a slave-trader relative, and now securing him through the throat. Harcourt Palmer is unmarked but dead, apparently smothered, on his bed.

Satyr’s masks? Yes, in both cases.

The final arrival is the valet to James, Earl of Maidstone, the only son and heir of the Marquess of Tonbridge and the only one of the Sybarites to be married (to Miss Fabbiano; they have two daughters, who are currently residing in Sissinghurst in Kent). The Earl is a late riser, hence the tardy discovery of his body, its throat slashed, sitting on a commode in the corner of his bedchamber. His hands have been cut off and left by his side.

He was wearing a satyr’s mask.

Outside the Bow Street office, Graham can hear the metropolis waking up. It will be a loud, bursting, vicious sort of day.

BROOKE HOUSE

It has been another bad night in the madhouse. Abigail thinks of her bed in the adjacent cell. It is amazing how attractive something so ordinarily awful can be after hours spent in an uncomfortable chair in a different room.

Maria is sleeping, lying on her side, the strait waistcoat forcing her into an odd position. How can she sleep with that awful thing holding her? It has been a month now since the two of them arrived at Brooke House. Maria has been enchained like this for the whole of that time.

She had been reading to Maria when the night turned bad. Reading aloud is the best way of calming the irregular motion of her own thoughts, never mind those of Maria. Food was brought to them by John Burroway. No other nurses appeared, nor did Bryson. They had been placed in a weird isolation. Abigail half-suspected they were being watched and listened to, though how this can be she could not imagine.

She read, dozed, ate, drank. Maria remained calm. Abigail herself became agitated as darkness began to fall, because for a terrible few minutes she saw the Pacific princess, removed from her own skull and sitting on the bed beside Maria, watching them both, and then whispering into Maria’s ear.

‘What does she say?’ Abigail had asked, her voice stretched, her blood cold. Maria had tipped her head onto one side, and had spoken one of the very few sentences Abigail heard from her that day; the first sentence she had spoken directly to her, unmediated by some lunatic raving.

‘You see things too, I think.’

She sounded like a milkmaid: a beautiful, slender Suffolk milkmaid with rough hands, exquisite hair, and eyes as old as driftwood.

‘But the things are not real. Not like the things I see.’

Night deepened, and then the bad things started again, in the exact same way as they had three nights before. Abigail had fallen asleep in the chair. She was awoken by a single, sharp scream, and again it was the horrific, unexpected yell of a male patient, from the ground floor.

That single scream had been followed by Pandaemonium. She ran to the open door of Maria’s cell, and poked her head out. The corridor was empty, but it sounded like an agonised shriek was rising from the cell of every male patient, a shriek which wrenched sympathetic horror from the breast – for what kind of terrible fear could be sparking these cries? And how could it be seen from within the four solid walls of an asylum cell?

She turned back into the room, and a vision of a man in a mask being run through with a spear slashed before her eyes and was gone. Maria sat on her bed, upright as a piano, her eyes wide and unseeing, her breath pumping in and out like a bellows. She was chanting something, something quiet and repetitive and hurried, and it was so hard to hear that Abigail took some time to make it out. It was a familiar chant.

‘Tie his wrists and tie his feet, Spill his guts out on the sheet. Tie his wrists and tie his feet, Spill his guts out on the sheet. Tie his wrists and tie his feet, Spill his guts out on the sheet.’

‘Maria? Maria, my dear? What is this?’

She might as well have been speaking to a machine. Maria’s voice and her breath were as regular as a steam engine, and as remorseless; there was no change in emphasis to her words. She remembered what Maria herself had said about the demon that dwelled inside her.

And she heard it from outside, as well. Standing there in the open door of the cell, she heard the shrieks and cries of the men begin to fall back into one another, until a single rhythmic chant thrummed through the stone floors of that rambling old building, every male patient’s scream turned into the same marching tune.

Tie his wrists and tie his feet, Spill his guts out on the sheet. Tie his wrists and tie his feet, Spill his guts out on the sheet. Tie his wrists and tie his feet, Spill his guts out on the sheet
.

Like slaves on a galley, she thought.

It went on for some time, this incessant chanting. And then, suddenly, Maria stopped. One by one, the male voices accompanying her fell away, until silence once again made its residence in Brooke House. Abigail remained standing, not daring to approach Maria.

‘Maria. My dear. Was that you?’

The girl had looked at her. She had started to cry.

‘Oh, my dear Lord. Oh my God. What has she done?’ Maria asked. ‘And why can I see it so clearly?’ And she fell into exhausted, whispering prayer.

Dr Bryson appears at the door of Maria’s cell. He looks exhausted, as exhausted as Abigail feels. He also, notes Abigail with some grim satisfaction, looks afraid.

When he sees Maria is sleeping, his pointed little face eases slightly, but not entirely. He does not step into the cell. Abigail notes all these things, and remembers them. She has much business with Dr Bryson, and one day soon she may be able to transact it.

‘She slept throughout the night?’ he asks, not once looking at Abigail, his face set towards Maria, watching for any flicker of the eye, any sign of approaching wakefulness. ‘Throughout that terrible disturbance?’

He does not know what she did. He did not hear her
.

Like any practised natural philosopher, Abigail feels a mild contempt for Bryson’s failures of observation and imagination. She realises, fully, why he wants her to keep watch over Maria. He knows that Maria was able to force him to do things against his will – John Burroway, also. But he has not made the connection between the three disturbed nights at the madhouse and the sleeping girl who rests, held in place by that dreadful prison canvas.

‘She slept,’ Abigail lies. She is not his experimental assistant.

‘You heard the disturbance?’

‘It was terribly loud.’

‘And yet she slept.’

It is a question, but Abigail does not answer it. She will not be interrogated.

She is about to ask if she might write to Charles, but she knows what the answer will be. Bryson is losing his grip on whatever is taking place inside these walls. He has little conception of Maria or of her capacities. And the events of the last night had badly scared her, not least those muttered questions that followed the cessation of that awful chant.

What has she done? And why can I see it?

Who was she speaking of?

‘Dr Bryson, Maria’s sheets need changing, and she needs to be washed. As do I. It begins to smell in here, and that will not make either of us comfortable.’

He looks away from Maria for the first time, and back at her. That flat lustful sheen comes back into his eyes. She throttles an urge to spit at him.

‘I will send John Burroway up shortly.’

He turns away, and she smiles for the first time in days. A stupid man will always be vulnerable to a clever lie.

THORPE

The sunlight falls across his bed, a blade of white light enclosed by two dark parallelograms. He nearly wakes, but then subsides again, sliding down that blade of light and off into the darkness at the side.

He is climbing a rope ladder lashed to the side of a black ship, but the gunwale never gets any closer. Somebody up on deck is letting the rope ladder out, hand-over-hand, and he climbs and climbs and climbs but never gets any higher, suspended against the hull of the black ship. Inside, he can hear men and women moaning.

He is in a corridor in an old house. Doors run off the corridor on one side, and windows off the other. The windows look out onto tidy gardens. There are women in the rooms, and one of them is Abigail. He runs up and down the corridor, opening doors, and in every one of them he sees an older woman with long black hair and green eyes and a snake-like scar running down her jaw.

He wonders if he is, at last, going mad.

He cannot wake up.

But then he does, and remembers.

He remembers it all.

He emerges from his bedroom into the swirling, half-real morning, his cheek feeling like it has been cut with a hot poker, and immediately encounters Crowley, the butler.

‘A letter has been delivered for you.’

The butler, like the house itself, has a sheepish air.

‘May I have it?’

‘I left it for you in the kitchen. You may help yourself to some food. The servants are occupied, and we no longer have a cook.’

‘My thanks to you.’

Crowley walks on down the landing, slowly and carefully, as if he were on hot coals. Horton follows him down. He stops at the front door of the house, and steps outside for a moment, giving no immediate thought to the diversion. He sees the lonely tree, the one that had been aflame last night, though only in his addled mind. He sees a darker patch, to the right of the so-called hag track which O’Reilly had dug up, how many days before? An extraordinary dream, from last night’s black, bubbles up to his sense. Crowley and Moore chopping up a deer on the lawn. They were both naked, and laughing.

In the kitchen, the letter sits on the big central table, but his stomach demands feeding. His breakfast consists of bread, cheese and milk. It looks like it has been standing there for a good deal of time. He imagines something asleep inside the milk jug, the top of one claw visible above the surface.

Mrs Chesterton bustles through the kitchen, saying nothing to him, shaking keys as she goes. Another memory from last night: Mrs Chesterton singing something in Latin on the landing, and banging the walls as she did so.

He pours himself a glass of water from a jug and opens the letter. It is from Robert Brown.

32 Soho Square, Westminster

Sept. 7

Horton

I acknowledge receipt of your note, and the materials contained within it. It was fortunate that it reached me – I am shortly to travel to Paris with Sir J—, to investigate the current state of France’s botanical facilities following the cessation of hostilities with that nation.

Given the imminence of that trip, I have had little time to inspect the material you sent to me, though I suspected instantly what it might be. If the plant is what I believe it to be, it is passing strange, the coincidence of it – for I believe the plant to be of a kind the aboriginal people of New South Wales call
bedgery
or
pitchery.
I have only seen it on two previous occasions, both while travelling in New Holland and New South Wales on the voyage of the
Investigator.
On both these occasions I did not see the plant in the wild, only in the state in which it is consumed by the natives. It may well be the same plant as I identified in my 1810
Prodromus
as
Duboisia myoporoides,
though I suspect not. I believe the plants may be related, but are not the same species.