Authors: Lloyd Shepherd
John Burroway has had the most extraordinary day. He sits near the doorway of Brooke House as evening falls, and ponders on all that has taken place. It is a long, slow pondering, with many distractions and diversions, but John is careful in his thinking. Far more careful than many give him credit for. He knows his conception is a damaged instrument, and so he takes care when using it, like a man who must climb stairs with a lame leg.
But however careful his thinking, and however rambling, it curls and snakes around one awful concern:
Am I in trouble?
John is a large man, but also a perpetually anxious one. He had told his sister just this morning that he was going to get into trouble again today, but this was something he said most mornings and his sister had paid it no mind. He seemed to be getting into trouble a lot, recently. The house had once been a charmed place, and John had liked nothing better than looking after it. He thought of it as a grand old aunt with her own peculiar ways. He swept her corridors and cleaned her windows and spoke to all the people who lived in her. These people had one thing or another wrong with them in much the same way he had something wrong with him. Some of them were very sad. Some of them couldn’t calm down properly. Some of them said things which couldn’t be true, like the man who thought there were flying machines hanging over Brooke House which were forcing him to do bad things to himself and to other people. That man had badly scared John Burroway, but he was the exception. Most of the people in the house were either kind to John or did not notice him.
It has been a sunny day, but it is becoming a stormy night. Rain has begun to pour down outside the little room in which he sits, next to the front door of Brooke House, watching the gate. It’s his duty, tonight, to let people in and out. It’s not one of his favourite tasks, because people arriving can do unexpected things. They don’t stay in one place like a floor that needs sweeping. They ask him to do things, and they act unexpectedly. It is people, more than anything, that make John anxious. And this is why today has been so worryingly peculiar.
First had come the two women. Dr Bryson had told him to go up there and clean the room of the silent woman in the strait waistcoat, the one who had done that thing inside his head, the thing that Dr Bryson kept wanting to talk to him about. John was scared of that woman, but the other who was with her, the sad-eyed one with the beautiful blonde hair that John wanted to stroke but never, ever would, she was nice, and her presence eased him. At least, it did until she told him she wanted him to do something for her.
‘I need paper and ink and a quill, John. Will you get them for me? And will you deliver something for me when I’ve finished? Can you do that?’
He knew what she meant by
can you do that
. She didn’t mean
would you do that for me.
She meant
is your poor feeble brain up to doing what I need you to do.
And because she asked it kindly and because John could do things better than most people thought, he agreed he would.
It took a long time though. And Mrs Horton made him lie, which made him think perhaps she wasn’t as nice as he’d thought. But she
was
nice. She
was
. John felt it in his bones, and his bones were often better judges of situations than his mind. She made him lie to a nurse about the quill and ink and paper; he told her he wanted to practise his writing, and she’d been so pleased she hadn’t asked anything else. And Abigail made him lie to the man who watched the gate during the day, saying he was on an errand for Dr Bryson. And Abigail said he couldn’t tell anyone what she was doing, including Dr Bryson and including his sister. John agreed, but added his own silent lie – he would tell his sister, of course. He told his sister everything.
He found a carriage as she said, he told the driver to take him to the address on the first envelope as she said, and when they got to the house he knocked on the door like she said, but there was no answer, so he left the letter like she said and went to another address on another piece of paper with the second letter, the one he was to use only if there was no one at the first house, and a kindly lady opened the door at this second address and read the letter he gave her, and went back inside and came out with money to pay the carriage driver and made a special point of telling John how extremely clever he’d been to pull off this complicated mission so successfully. And the carriage drove him back to Brooke House.
He was tired when he came back, tired but happy (though a little anxious) at having done something which most people would have thought him incapable of. But then Dr Bryson called him into his office, and started giving him
another
task, which while not as complicated as that of Mrs Horton’s was nonetheless very
peculiar
. Dr Bryson said he wanted John to hide some notes he had taken, to put them somewhere only John knew about, and then not to tell the doctor about them. Not unless the doctor forgot something that had happened. John had wanted to ask how this could be, but the doctor rushed him out, and said they would talk of this later. John took the notes, and hid them somewhere only he knew about; a certain cavity in the wall in the dark depths of Brooke House, a place in which John sometimes goes to hide, where the bricks seem to remember prayers and songs and where the exposed painting of a priest in full raiment pokes down through the ceiling from the floor above, only the priest’s feet and calves visible. It’s a big cavity, big enough for a person to hide in for a long time. John hides the notes in there.
A flash of lightning pierces the deepening dark and John cowers like a terrified animal, all thoughts of his peculiar day banished. He is terrified of the gap between the lightning and the thunder, terrified of the coming crash which always feels like the sky is falling down.
But his fear, this day, is deepened by the figure silhouetted by the lightning flash. There is a woman standing at the gate to Brooke House, and behind her John can see the shape of a tall wagon.
When the crash of thunder finally comes it sounds to John like a giant speaking.
‘I need to pray,’ Maria says. ‘I need somewhere to pray. Is there somewhere I can do so?’
Abigail leaves Maria’s cell and goes to find Miss Delilah. The woman is reluctant to go anywhere near Maria’s cell, but Abigail begs her, and she finally agrees.
Abigail tries to persuade Delilah that Maria should be released from the strait waistcoat, for she wishes to pray, to pray as a human being, not a caged animal. She has had no chance for religious observance in nigh on a month, says Abigail, and the time has come to allow her to speak to God. She tries and she tries, but Delilah just stands in the door staring at Maria, her face stony and her mouth disgusted, saying she can do nothing without Dr Bryson’s say-so, and that he is
exceedingly unlikely
to countenance Maria being released.
And then Maria turns her face to Delilah’s and moments later Delilah has gone to fetch the keys which unlock the chain. Abigail sees what has happened, and though it makes her feel unsettled and afraid she says nothing, lest those blue eyes turn upon her.
So Maria is released, and Abigail asks the glassy-eyed Miss Delilah if there is a chapel anywhere in Brooke House. She has not seen such a place on her own wanderings, and Delilah shakes her head, but then says:
‘The old chapel’s just down the corridor. I’ll show you.’
She walks out of the cell, and Abigail follows, holding Maria by the hand.
At this corner of Brooke House there is a confusion of staircases and doors between the older parts of the building, where Abigail and Maria are locked, and the newer part at the front. It is as if the eighteenth-century developers scratched their heads at the strange geometries of their fifteenth-century predecessors, and surrendered any effort to integrate the two places. A floor has been thrown across what must have once been a deep room, a staircase navigates this space vertically, and on one wall Abigail sees the exposed image of a priest. It is an old image, painted directly upon the wall, but the priest’s rich robes still hold some of their former magnificence. The priest’s legs are cut off at the calves by the new floor, and must stretch down into the space below the floor. Despite the clumsy adaptations, the space still has a vaguely sepulchral air. It must indeed once have been a chapel, though it has lost its purpose. There is the picture on the wall, and a pair of low benches which have been placed to one side of it, and there is the memory of religious ritual. Other than these things, the room has been stripped of function.
Delilah unlocks a door and shows them inside, and Maria tells her to leave.
Abigail does not care for the room within. It seems to her to have something poisonous about it, as if it were a malignant historical tumour inside the modern fabric of Brooke House. It is a place where the house remembers its old self, its walls echoing back Tudor plots and Stuart schemes, the air clustered with Catholic ghosts, and old Thomas Cromwell hunched down in front of that priestly picture, seeking expiation for his manifest sins.
But Maria has kneeled, and as she does so a flash of lightning illuminates the secret corners of the chapel, followed seconds later by a boom of thunder, as if God were complaining that an abomination was trying to converse with Him.
John can hear it is raining very hard now, and the lightning is frequent and fierce. Five or six bolts of light repeat that original silhouette: the woman at the gate, the tall wagon behind her. Her face is invisible, which makes it even odder that she has appeared in his head, just like Maria had been, in his head and telling him to do things.
The first thing she tells him to do – silently, across the space between his little sheltered room and the iron gate – is to walk out to her. So out John goes, out into the rain which drenches him immediately, walking closer and closer to her, until he is only feet away, her on one side of the gate, he on the other, and another lightning strike shows him the woman’s face for the first time. He has seen her before.
Dr Bryson had once asked John about his dreams, and John had said he didn’t dream, at all. The doctor said perhaps he dreamed, but couldn’t remember them in the morning, and John said this was possible. He had thought about it a lot after their conversation. It scared him a good deal, this idea that you might think things at night, think them in such a strong way that you dreamed them, but couldn’t remember them in the morning.
However, in the years after that terrible thunderstruck night, John will always be able to remember one dream. In that dream, there is a woman standing at a gate, and her face is in darkness, until a lightning strike comes and shows the woman’s face to him. Her scar wriggles blackly in the shadows along her cheek. Her teeth are bared, like an angry dog. And her eyes look into him as if his poor empty head were filled with images of her mad daughter.
Let me in. Let me in. Let me in
.
John whimpers a little. But he lets her in.
By the time Horton reaches Brooke House the weather has turned the calm warm day into something snarling and soaking. The hackney carriage he has taken from Wapping stops outside the gate. He tell himself to calm down, suppressing the still-desperate panic in his chest which had sent him hurtling out of the apartment in Lower Gun Alley and down into the bustling twilight of Wapping.
The sharp corners of Abigail’s letter dig into his chest from the inner pocket of his coat. A slap of rain hits his cheek as he steps down from the carriage and turns to watch it pull away. The wind is howling. A terrible storm has come to Hackney.
The madhouse –
Abigail’s
madhouse – squats behind a wall, its silhouette a disturbing combination of order and irregularity. He has been here so many times these past weeks, but always during the day; he has sat under the trees on the opposite side of the road, gazing up into the windows of the place in the hope of seeing her walking down a corridor or glancing outside.
The dark gives the place a new personality, as the dark always does. In the daylight, Brooke House is eccentric and impervious, its bricks occupied with the history of England. In the night-time, it is bleak and desolate, its silhouette resonant with the fearful disturbances that occupy those within.
Somewhere within the raging terror and guilt which has ridden with him from Wapping there has been a space for consideration. The picture which had been forming in his mind over an ale in the Prospect of Whitby is now gaining shape, definition, shadow and colour.
She seems to have the power to possess men’s minds – to force them to do things against their will
.
This has been the void at the centre of the thing. The deaths of the men in London, and the weird events at Thorpe Lee House, had this in common: that the only
opportunity
to commit them seemed to come from within the house. He realised (as the carriage rattled through Whitechapel and headed north) that opportunity is as important as motive in the hierarchy of explanation for unseen, unexplained events. Without opportunity, motive is meaningless; and without motive, opportunity is doubly so. But in this case, the motive has been separated from the opportunity. This woman – this Mrs Broad, if such be her real name – has had no seeming opportunity.
So where has she found it? That has been the dark question, the imponderable. He thinks back to a conversation with his magistrate, John Harriott, in the old man’s office above the river, soon after the
Solander
affair had reached its conclusion. Abigail’s dreams had worsened recently, and he had said something to Harriott about it, about his concerns and his inability to understand how these dreams could remain after such a time.
Harriott had looked out at the river from his chair, as he did whenever he wished to remain calm. And he had said this:
‘Horton, you are a man of exceptional capability. Your approach to investigation has changed my views on the matter entirely, and Mr Graham’s too. You are, it is my belief, a template for the way in which these matters will be treated in the future. But know this: your approach cannot explain everything. I have learned, these past two years, that there are secrets within this world. Some men see these secrets as holding power; we have witnessed, it is my belief, the covering-up of some of these secrets, as those men seek to manipulate unseen capacities for purposes we cannot perceive. But I have been told things, and you have witnessed things, that bear no rational explanation. There are still white spaces on our maps, Horton, and some of those white spaces are metaphorical.’