Savage Magic (36 page)

Ah, fair Lizzie: a woman of the strictest honour and secrecy! Upright and reserved in public, agreeable and convivial behind the locked-up doors of pleasurable society! She was educated in the rudiments of erotic knowledge by a certain well-established Bird of Paradise, is about twenty-eight, is slim and tall; has a fair complexion; brown hair; good teeth; and is upon the whole a very pretty woman. She does not give her company widely now, but agreed to return to the stage on which her talents are most valued for our particular party. We shall long remember the pretty little show Miss Carrington performed for us with her talented friend Rose Dawkins. We hope she may be persuaded to return!

Rose Dawkins (July 1813)

Miss Dawkins is one of those rare friends of the Sybarites whose company is so cherished, and whose character is so prettily debauched, that a return visit was agreed by all members to be desirable. Miss Dawkins is a mistress of the bizarrerie, and is a patient and attentive practitioner of such; one amongst our number is a connoisseur of such matters, and notes to us that Miss Dawkins’s hand is as firm and as sordid as any he has before encountered. She is also a noted performer of the Duet, and introduced us to her friend Miss Carrington in the most delightfully vivid way imaginable.

Maria Cranfield (July 1813)

What are we to say of Miss Cranfield? She is an odd fish indeed, yet an enticing one. She has joined with us but once, and presented a strange conundrum indeed: a fresh-faced novice, her sanctity still intact, and not in that way which so many young girls of the Plaza claim, passing for a maidenhead two dozen times to the gullible culls who appear there. We did much enjoy her introduction to the Sybaritic arts, and her natural fresh bloom did darken exquisitely with each additional transaction she did enjoy with the members of our members. She has eyes clear and as fine-coloured as the azure blue, and her dark hair curls in a thousand artless ringlets down her snowy neck. She is tall and has a beautiful complexion; her meretricious performances were transporting and extraordinary.

Finishing his ale, Horton leaves the place, and walks up to Bow Street.

Covent Garden has a different air with the book in his pocket. Horton, like any Londoner, knows of the illicit trade that suppurates through the streets around the Piazza and the theatres, the dark counterpoint to the licit business of fruit and veg. But he has never taken a whore – in England, anyway. So the Covent Garden whoring has been of the nature of a story told to him over a pint of ale.

He recalls an incident with Abigail, some years ago. They had been to a play at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. They had only been married a short while, and Horton was still navigating an understanding of this strange woman who had nursed him back to health in St Thomas’s hospital and who, she said, had come to love him. This single extraordinary fact had made it preposterously difficult to understand her, for how could any woman – especially one as clever and enchanting as Abigail – have come to love one such as he? And yet she said she did, and he had begun on his project of unpicking her, of gazing at her from infinite angles, holding her up to the light of his intense view as he tried to make sense of this development.

They had exited the play – it had been one of Sheridan’s, he remembers, though he cannot recall which – and the whores had been there on the pavement, dozens of them, grabbing the arms of men, and some of the women, offering all sorts of bizarre and oddly worded services, a screeching bazaar of the profane.

Horton’s own arm had been grabbed, as it was bound to be, and Abigail – calm, clever Abigail – had lashed out a hand and slapped the whore who’d grabbed Horton. So powerful had been Abigail’s blow that the whore had stepped back three or four paces, her hand to her cheek, a look of shock on her face which took a second or two to transform into a pavement rage.

The whore threw herself at Abigail, who snarled back at her with astonishing anger, and if Horton had not succeeded in getting between the two of them the picture may have become grim indeed. As it was, he’d shoved the whore away and pulled his wife through the angry crowd of debauched women, desperate to haul her away before their anger grew and focused itself in a way that might become truly dangerous.

They walked back to Southwark, where Abigail still worked in the hospital and Horton did bits and pieces around the shipyards. Horton had tried to discover what lay behind his wife’s sudden violence, it being so uncharacteristic. But Abigail’s face had set into a stubborn, sullen refusal, and it was never spoken of again.

Pondering Abigail and whores and his own personal history, Horton finally reaches Bow Street. And finds uproar.

WESTMINSTER

When Westminster society – its politicians, its peers, its scribblers and its gossips – turns its attention onto a single event, it is wise not to be the one fellow on whom responsibility for that event can be said to rest. It is a terrible word,
responsibility
, and though it is not one from which Aaron Graham has previously flinched, its dreadful weight is upon him today.

His polite but firm interview with his Lordship, Viscount Sidmouth, now seems to have come from an earlier, calmer time. Today, Sidmouth came to him – a sign of the terrible urgency of the morning, but also a sign of Addington’s common sense. Graham needs to be at the heart of whatever investigation is now emerging into the previous night’s deaths. He has no time for perambulatory visits to government ministers.

Tomorrow’s papers will be full of it; there may even be stirrings in whatever printed matter Grub Street and its environs shits out today. And it will not be the number of deaths that the story emphasises; instead, it will be that an Earl has been taken from this earth, accompanied by the sons of a Duke and two Baronets and the brother of a Viscount. Debretts will be thinner come the next volume, while London’s reputation as a pus-filled sewer of terrible violence has been encrusted still further. And all beneath the supposedly watchful eyes of the famous Bow Street magistrates.

Graham has not even been able to visit the murder scenes; were he to walk away from Bow Street, he feels the office might be invaded by a screaming horde of rumourmongers and muckrakers, his fellow magistrates collapsing under the attention. He now knows how the magistrates of Shadwell must have felt as the shockwaves of the Ratcliffe Highway murders rattled against their windows. He’d despised them before. He thinks he understands them rather better now.

You will have whatever you need
, Sidmouth had said, and his uninteresting face had been set into a mask of such fearful determination that Graham had felt not comforted but positively afraid. A killer must be found.

More than one killer, almost certainly. But how many? The great mystery at the heart of this horror rises up again: five men killed, in their beds, locked up in their houses. Outside those houses had stood Bow Street officers and patrolmen, not to mention parish constables and watchmen. It is almost satirical in its devilishness.

The morning passes in a blur of coroners and constables. He despatches riders from the horse patrol to all five addresses, charging them with guarding the front of the houses and keeping crowds away. The other Bow Street magistrates make comforting noises but, he notes, keep out of his way. They sense a terrible fall and reckoning. He believes they may be right.

In the secure room over at the Brown Bear waits Rose Dawkins, brought in last night by William Jealous, who has himself been despatched to the scene of the most important crime, at least in the eyes of society, and these are the only eyes that Graham currently cares about. Jealous is at the home of the Earl of Maidstone, and Graham awaits his return to the office. The only other man who could be of any use is, maddeningly, away and cut off from the stream in Surrey.

But then, in that mysterious way he has, Charles Horton appears, shown in by William Jealous, who has himself just returned from the residence of the Earl of Maidstone. Despite everything Graham finds enough of his old self to be both annoyed and bemused by the maddening way Horton has of appearing when he is least expected – with the least-expected news.

The stories tumble over themselves in the Bow Street parlour which doubles as a kind of office for the magistrates. Graham is put in mind both of a basket of puppies and a nest of snakes. There is a playful oddness to what he is being told by the two officers. But there is confused danger, also.

He hears from Horton first, his attention firm despite the growing clamour in the vestibule outside his office. If Sidmouth were himself sitting here, he’d be asking calmly but dangerously why strange tales of visions and poisonings from a debauched house in Surrey could possibly be relevant? Horton can say little about this, beyond his belief that there is deliberate foul play involved, and that it is aimed at the Sybarites.

‘But, Horton. A mysterious substance in the well? Visions of witch-burnings?’

‘All I know is this, Mr Graham. Ellen tried to kill Sir Henry on the same night that the other five remaining Sybarites were despatched. Does this not strike you as redolent?’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘I know not. Not yet. But then there is this.’

Horton shows Graham the book he had been given by Crowley the butler. Graham opens it and immediately raises an eyebrow.

‘Sir Henry wrote this?’

‘So it would seem, sir.’

Horton watches the magistrate flick through the pages, sees him work out that the entries are dated and turn to the closing pages of the book, which he reads closely. It is a close facsimile of what Horton himself had done. When he looks up, his face has lightened a little of its previous cares. He hands the book to Jealous, open at the back pages, and speaks to Horton.

‘We know of the last two women. Carrington is dead, apparently by her own hand. Dawkins is locked up over at the Brown Bear.’

A look passes between the three men, and Horton knows what meaning it carries. The connection between Sir Henry, the Sybarites and the woman downstairs draws tight. But how does it connect with the previous night’s deaths?

Next, Jealous describes the scene at the Earl of Maidstone’s residence, just off Piccadilly. He confirms the house was locked, from the inside, during the night. The Earl was found in the morning in his bed, his throat slashed and his hands cut off and left by his side. The aspect of ritual is clear. Graham updates Horton on the other deaths, watching him as he does so. Horton’s head is turned slightly, his eyes are pointing into a corner of the room, but they are not seeing whatever rodent or insect may be there. He seems to be staring into a middle distance, an unspecified realm of revelation. Graham waits for a moment.

‘Horton, do you have a suggestion as to how we proceed?’ he says eventually. The constable looks at him.

‘I would like to talk with this Dawkins woman, firstly,’ he says.

‘Of course. You may do so immediately our current conversation is finished.’

‘And there are some questions I would have asked of every servant in every residence where there has been a killing.’

‘Jealous may deal with that. What are the questions?’

‘Have they been visited by a gypsy in recent weeks? Have they experienced any strange visions? Has there ever been a suspicion of bewitchment on their houses?’

It occurs to Graham that in any other public office in Westminster or Middlesex – or in the chambers of aldermen in the City – such a set of questions would be met with angry amusement. But not here. Here, oddness is neither here nor there; it is fitness which matters.

‘And the houses should be searched for bloody clothes, and for the implements of the killings. The beds of all the servants should be checked for bloodstains. Their means for washing themselves should be investigated.’

Jealous is staring at Horton.

‘You suspect the
servants
?’

Horton looks at him.

‘No one went in. No one went out. Who else can it be?’

After the clamour of the Public Office, the Brown Bear is relatively calm. Horton and Jealous had shoved their way out of the office, forcing a way through a clamour of newsmen, patrolmen, constables and watchmen and Covent Garden street-folk, all merrily getting in the way and taking part in the disarray in the manner of gawkers throughout the ages.

The Brown Bear has for decades been the traditional meeting point of the Bow Street Runners, and the place has kept its reputation as a semi-official adjunct of the office. People may come here to seek a Runner or a patrolman – indeed, those who know of such matters tend to come here before they try the Police Office. The office is the province of magistrates; the Brown Bear the kingdom of their officers.

Such is the tavern’s status that a number of secure rooms have been fashioned within it, to be used by Bow Street officers as temporary cells. This is where Rose Dawkins is being held.