Authors: Lloyd Shepherd
It is a mysterious plant, and I wish I might have done more to investigate it. All I know is this: the aboriginals use the plant for purposes of intoxication, of themselves and of animals. It is said that the plant plays some part in their strange religious practice, called the Dreaming, of which we know very little. It is also used for hunting, or so I am told – it can be added in quantities to a waterhole and will stupefy the animals, particularly the Emu, such that the creatures become easier to catch.
I took several sketches of the dried plant when I came across it in New South Wales, and have consulted these. Your leaves certainly appear to be remarkably similar. I admit I am as much struck by the situation in which you found it as by the morphology of the leaves themselves. Dropped in quantity in a well, or so you said – which appears to be similar behaviour to an Aboriginal adding it to a waterhole. If the quantities were such as you described in your letter, and if this well was the primary water source for the house, I can say only that the effects on the house’s residents might be odd indeed. As I say, the aboriginal usage of the plant in religious practice suggests that it must have some kind of hallucinatory property.
The question presents itself, does it not? If someone did add this strange plant to the well at this house you are investigating, why did they do so? And whom were they hunting?
It is a question as strange as any we confronted together during the
Solander
matter, and I admit to still being disturbed by the events of that time. I trust your current situation is less serious, and I hope I have been of some help.
I leave for Paris tonight. I would hear more of this matter on my return, if you are willing and able.
Regards
BROWN, R.
He reads the letter three times, each time as slowly and carefully as the last. Then he stands and pours the water in his glass away, and heads upstairs.
Horton has only seen tenderness in the frame of Sir Henry Tempest twice: once at the mention of his daughter Ellen during their first interrogation; and now. The man sits at the girl’s bedside, his arm in a sling fashioned by the physician who came the previous night, and who was told only a fraction of what had occurred. Sir Henry had fallen upon a decorative suit of armour, it was said, the sword piercing his upper left chest just below the shoulder. Ellen had swooned at the sight of the blood and fallen into a faint which had endured the whole night.
The house is quiet – quieter than it has been throughout Horton’s strange visit. After the terrible commotions of last night, it is as if a convulsive maniac has been subjected to a suite of cures – bleeding, electrical shock, emetics, restraint – and has finally surrendered to exhaustion in the face of the onslaught.
Sir Henry looks up at him as he enters the bedchamber.
‘My God, man,’ he says. ‘Your face looks as if you had swallowed a cannonball.’
It is meant, Horton notes, sympathetically. Sir Henry is a calmed man, indeed.
‘How does the girl?’ he asks.
‘It is impossible to know,’ says Sir Henry, looking down at her. ‘She sleeps peacefully, and that is a blessing, for God knows she has not done so for weeks.’
‘It is certainly for the best.’
‘No doubt. But neither of us is a physician, constable. Nor a mad-doctor.’
This last is whispered, fearfully, lest it awaken demons in the sleeping girl’s head. So different, that face, from the snarling fury upon it last night when Horton had come upon them in the drawing room, Sir Henry pale and nearly gone on that elegant chaise longue, bleeding from his wound; his daughter restrained by Crowley and Gowing, the sword with which she had speared her father on the floor between them.
‘Sir Henry, I have received a letter that casts some light on what has been taking place here. I also have intelligence on your cook, Stephen Moore, and his relationship with your former cook, Elizabeth Hook. May I share these things with you? And then, I believe I should repair to London again, for these facts may have a wider bearing on Mr Graham’s investigation into the deaths of your . . .’
He stops. Your what? Fellow debauchees? Fellow Medmenhamites? Fellow fornicators? Sir Henry does not notice the pause, or if he does he takes no note of it.
‘Can you answer me why my daughter attempted to kill me?’
‘I believe I can, yes.’
‘Then continue.’
Horton constructs his tale as well as he can, although parts of it are dark and obscure, and the whole is inflected with such lunacy that it can scarcely be credited. How the house has been, since the burning down of the shed almost a month before, under the influence of a drug in the form of Brown’s New Holland leaf, left to soak in the water supply and replenished, as far as Horton can see, at least once. How this must account for the visions of the people within the house, and the suspicions of witchcraft. How Elizabeth Hook brought Stephen Moore, a self-professed cunning-man, into the household in the belief that Ellen was herself the source of the bewitchment, and that he has been steadily poisoning her in an attempt to treat this bewitchment. How Ellen herself has come to believe herself bewitched – to
be
a witch, almost.
He does not say it all, for he does not quite believe it all. He does not mention that strange pinch in his head when Ellen had encountered him in the woods, nor does he describe that odd temporary loss of memory, nor does he speak of his own visions of the previous evening – the burning, the mob, the witch flying along the hedge. And he does not mention his darkest thought: that the sour events which have blighted Thorpe Lee House have been perpetrated by the residents themselves, under the influence of the drug in the well and, perhaps, something else even more wicked.
Did the one who killed the dogs know what they were about? Was it Ellen herself, or someone under her influence? And what is the nature of that influence?
These are lunatic questions for which he can yet supply no sane answer.
Sir Henry says nothing during this recital. Nor does he look at Horton. His eyes remain fixed on the still, pale face of his strange daughter, as if he could reach into her mind through the force of his own will and untie whatever knots bind her serenity. When Horton finishes, he says two words only.
‘Why? How?’
They are indeed the only two words that matter. Why this lunatic plot? And how can the plot explain the manic occurrences? The dead rat, the poisoned milk, the destroyed shirts, the profane message, the fairy ring, the dead dogs. Horton cannot explain this mechanism. The why, though, may be clearer, and it is from motivation that explanations will spring.
‘The Sybarites, Sir Henry.’
At this, whatever his newfound calm, the old Sir Henry reasserts himself. His head snaps up, and his eyes when they look at Horton are as cold and as angry as a judge sentencing the murderer of his own children.
‘Ridiculous. You are being ridiculous.’
‘Sir Henry, there is no other explanation. Thorpe Lee House has been visited by what appears to be a campaign of sustained malevolence and mischief, which has ended in an attempt on your life. Two other Sybarites have been killed, sir. The coincidence is beyond possibility.’
‘My daughter tried to kill me because I am a member of a dining society? It is preposterous.’
‘I cannot yet explain the mechanism, Sir Henry. But I believe the motive is clear. This is why I must return to London. I believe what is happening there can only be connected to what is happening here. Your household will be safe – I will request that men be sent here to watch over you. But I must return.’
‘Graham has sent for you?’
‘No, Sir Henry, he has not. But still, I must go.’
‘You are mad. And you are arrogant, to think one such as Graham deserves or needs your assistance.’
Horton says nothing to that. It may, indeed, be very true. ‘
Then go. Leave us. And take your insane ideas along with you.’
‘Yes, Sir Henry. But I must ask you – is there no event in the history of the Sybarites which might draw the anger of someone in this way?’
‘Impertinence! Leave now, sir, before I raise the sword that almost killed me last night and inflict its edge upon you.’
Horton leaves. He packs his bag in his bedroom, and makes his way downstairs. Crowley, the old butler, stands in the vestibule like an exhausted stork. He is holding a small notebook, which he hands to Horton.
‘Sir Henry has asked me to give you this.’
Horton, astonished, puts down his bag and begins to open the book.
‘Not here!’ And Crowley’s hand snatches the book back. His other hand grabs Horton’s arm, and he leans in, his breath smelling of dry cabbage. There is nothing to drink in the house yet, following Horton’s instruction that no one drink the water from the well.
‘Read the book in private, and then destroy it,’ says Crowley, barely in a whisper. ‘Promise me this, Mr Constable. Or I won’t give it to you, whatever Sir Henry’s command.’
Horton nods, and the book is pushed back into his hands.
‘Then on your way, Mr Constable. We shan’t be seeing each other again, I expect.’
He turns to walk away, but Horton speaks to him, and he turns.
‘Make sure the well is drained, Crowley,’ he says, lifting up his bag again. ‘And keep a close eye out for a gypsy woman on a tall wagon.’
And with that, Constable Horton exits the madhouse.
The quickest way to get back to London is via Staines, on the far side of the river to Thorpe. He walks the half-mile from Thorpe Lee House to the river. A stone bridge crosses the water here, and he walks over the calm, broad stream into the pleasant market town to enquire after a coach.
Coaches come on the hour heading out west and eastwards into London. He has some time to think over matters on a stone bench in the pretty market square, which looks to have been the subject of considerable improvement in recent years, and notes that he feels, for the first time in days, a considerable sense of calm. His senses are clearing, as if he had been intoxicated this past week – he rather supposes this is exactly what has happened. Those strange nights and eerie visions are the result of poisoned water.
And nothing else? He is clear that the material in the water might explain dizziness, loss of perception, oddities of vision. But it doesn’t explain dead dogs and hag tracks. Something else is at play here. He climbs into a coach twenty minutes after arriving in Staines, and begins the seventeen-mile journey back into town. The further he travels from Thorpe Lee House, the clearer his analysis of what that something might indeed be.
He knows there are untied knots still in Thorpe. Elizabeth Hook and Stephen Moore will need to be found and arrested. But such matters can be arranged with Aaron Graham, and they represent, for Horton, answered questions. Ellen’s illness is the result of Moore’s quackish interventions. Elizabeth Hook is not a witch. There are no such things as witches.
But there are still hag tracks, and dead dogs, and rats on dining-room tables. There is still
maleficium
. But what is the wellspring of it?
He opens the notebook given to him by Crowley, but reading the first page he closes it again, his face hot. He will not read the contents in the confines of a coach; not with two women in it who already seem terrified by the prospect of a shared journey to London with a man of pale skin, intense eyes and a cheek swollen beyond the size of a fist and as black as pitch.
But the book now feels hot in his hands, its contents as fierce as a forge. Part of the answer lies within its pages, he sees immediately; he would be disappointed, indeed, if this were not so, so melodramatic was Crowley’s behaviour when handing it over. He can no longer think clearly about the case, not with this material on his person.
And so the miles stretch out, and the three-hour journey feels as long and unending as a Pacific crossing. When the coach finally pulls up at Whitehall, Horton steps out and into an alehouse – his mouth is parched, and he needs a clean, unsullied drink of something. He orders an ale, takes it to a secluded corner and, to prepare himself for his arrival in Covent Garden, looks into Sir Henry’s little book.
The book has perhaps forty pages, all written in a neat but purposeful hand, presumably that of Sir Henry himself. On the first page a kind of frontispiece has been constructed by the same hand.
The Testimony of the Sybarites
An Account of the adventures in pleasure of the Sybarites
The Heirs of Dashwood and of Harris, whose famous LIST this book replaces
A Guide to the Cargoes of Covent Garden’s Pleasure Ships
‘Square stern’d, Dutch built, with new sails and rigging’
Horton does not recognise the quotation. On the next page is the first of the material that makes up the book: a sequence of descriptions of whores, written in a deliberately arch and inflated style. The first entry is thus:
CHERRY COOPER, Covent Garden, March 1808
We did make our acquaintance of the celebrated Cherry Cooper on the occasion of our first Meeting. Her first name is one to be reckoned with, and its origins are both mysterious and (as the Swiss doctor would have it) mesmerising. ’Tis most likely that the name is a most fitting response to her red cheeks, her red lips and her red something else. She is a most agreeable girl, one for whom we were to a man grateful for her attentions, but she was so frolicksome and so noisy during our attentions that a neighbour of our host was heard to shout, What a blasted house is here!
All the entries have dates, and all are written in this style, suggesting a single author. So, have the Sybarites been holding their parties since March 1808? It would seem so. Horton turns to the end of the book, reading the last few entries in reverse order.
Elizabeth Carrington (July 1813)