Savage Magic (5 page)

The simple fact of the matter was this: Mr Lodge’s offer to pay the fees for the first three months of care for Miss Cranfield would make a substantial contribution to Brooke House’s running costs. I was under some pressure to turn a profit within each month. The equation was impossible to be ignored. Such was how things were in private madhouses at the start of the present century.

So Maria Cranfield was admitted and locked into one of the strong-rooms on the first floor, secured with a strait waistcoat. This last was with some reluctance, for it was one of my beliefs that securing patients in this way was primitive and not productive, but such was Miss Cranfield’s manic state that I had no other option at that time. In the next-door cell to Miss Cranfield, in the southern end of Brooke House, close to my own rooms, Abigail Horton had already been placed.

Miss Cranfield’s arrival was unorthodox, and so was Mrs Horton’s. She had appeared at the gate of Brooke House on her own, carrying a letter from a Bow Street magistrate, Aaron Graham. The letter stated that Mrs Horton should be admitted to the madhouse forthwith, and that all financial matters relating to her care would be met by Mr Graham. I had not made the acquaintance of this gentleman at that time, though I was soon to do so, in the most trying of circumstances.

Mrs Horton was in a state of extreme agitation on her arrival, though she was by no means as hysterical as Miss Cranfield. On first coming into the building she was frantic, saying she had been pursued to Hackney by a savage woman ‘from a Pacific island’ (these were her words), and that this same woman had been haunting her dreams for a year or more. Mrs Horton’s fancy had, it was clear, become corrupted by some means, and the exoticism of her story recommended it to me. Mr Graham’s credentials were impeccable, and Mrs Horton’s case undoubtedly interesting. I arranged for her admittance at once.

Mrs Horton had stood at the door of her own cell as we placed Miss Cranfield in the strong-room; it was my custom to leave the doors to the cells open as often as possible, when the condition of the patient did not militate against such an approach. Miss Cranfield screamed terrible obscenities at the matron and the attendants. She scratched and she tried to bite, and drew her own nails down her own scarred arms, as if trying to tear herself into pieces. She uttered one name, over and over again: that of
Joshua
.

I well remember working with the nurses and attendants to secure Miss Cranfield against the wall, dosing her with opium, and then turning to leave. Still standing in the open doorway of her own cell was Mrs Horton, her eyes wide at what she was hearing. I gently took her arm and led her back to her bed, assuring her that Miss Cranfield would soon be calm and that her treatment was to begin immediately. She asked for paper and ink to write to her husband and I was forced, gently, to remind her that any contact with loved ones was forbidden, according to the principles of the house.

‘You must try and put your husband out of your mind,’ I said to her. ‘It may be his presence which is causing you to suffer so.’

It was a hard thing to say, and I would have said nothing like this had my attention not been so distracted by the histrionics of Miss Cranfield. But it had an effect. I remember Mrs Horton looking at me as she sat on her bed.

‘If that is so, then I am lost,’ she said.

The weeks which followed the arrival of these two women were by no means unusual. One might even have described the time as peaceful, if one had knowledge of what was to follow. Certainly, looking back on that period from the distance of thirty years, those late summer months take on the glow of warm memory, like a holiday taken with a good friend with fine weather and fine food.

There were perhaps thirty inmates in Brooke House at that time, split equally between men and women. Most of them were allowed to walk freely throughout the building, in the cloistered quadrangle, and in the well-tended gardens – though it was our policy, where practicable, to separate males and females. Only a few patients – of whom Maria Cranfield was one – were confined to their cells, and only some of these were secured by strait waistcoats. Again, Maria was one of these, at my instruction.

For Maria was not a settled patient. During her first week in the place, I had ordered a quickened programme of treatments; she was bled three times, and purged twice, and I kept her on a steady dose of opium for her mania. At the end of this week, I ordered that her strait waistcoat be removed. I would not make the same mistake again. She soon scratched into her arms and face with such severity that deep wounds were gouged into them; indeed, such were the wounds on her cheeks that I doubted they would ever fully heal. These wounds ended just before the eyes, and I wondered if that were deliberate or just happenstance. Had she indeed come close to clawing out her own eyes?

I was not going to take the chance that such awful self-mutilation would be acted out. I ordered that she be placed back into a strait waistcoat, and in it she stayed throughout the month of August.

My routine in the asylum was a set one. I would make my rounds in the morning and afternoon, and have individual consultations in the ground-floor room fitted out for the purpose throughout the day. I ate either in my chambers or in the refectory with the nurses and attendants. I encouraged visits from inmates – always assuming they were arranged via a nurse or matron, and that I was available and not engaged in study or correspondence.

It was on one such evening that Abigail Horton visited me in my rooms for the first time. I had made some inquiries into Mrs Horton’s circumstances, and had discovered the possible reason behind the munificence of her Bow Street benefactor, Mr Aaron Graham. Mrs Horton’s husband, it appeared, was a waterman-constable with the Thames River Police in Wapping, and thus moved in the grimy circles of crime and punishment frequented by Mr Graham. Despite this knowledge I found – and still find – the particulars of Mrs Horton’s arrangement with Mr Graham peculiar, but I kept my professional demeanour at all times, despite the very obvious charms of Mrs Horton. Her husband I knew little of at that time, but a man who had attracted and, it would seem, kept the regard of one such as Mrs Horton must have been an extraordinary man indeed.

Mrs Horton was a particularly handsome and intelligent woman, widely read and possessing degrees of understanding of modern knowledge which I found unaccountable in a female. She had attended seminars at the Royal Institution, had read the latest books on botany, natural philosophy and literature, and was as rounded a woman intellectually as ever I have encountered.

As I have said, Mrs Horton’s condition was an unusual one. She had been plagued by dreams of a woman, though not an English woman. It seemed that this woman was a Pacific Islander, and when I questioned Mrs Horton as to why this should be she often became guarded, as if she knew of a reason but did not wish to share it. All she would say is that she thought the dream might relate to a previous investigation of her husband’s.

I wrote to Mr Graham regularly with information on the progress of Mrs Horton, and allowed her full freedom to roam the parts of Brooke House and its gardens which were open to patients. We often walked together, and it was during these walks that I discovered Mrs Horton’s extraordinarily varied knowledge. Any female of any class would have done well to be as educated as she, but for one of such poor means – her husband a constable, not even a craftsman or a merchant – to have attained such an understanding of the works of mankind and the world around us is, in my opinion, a minor educational miracle. She conversed attentively and carefully, and the time I spent with her was charmed.

On that night, it was Maria Cranfield that was the cause of Mrs Horton’s visit. She had, I knew from my own observation and from the report of the nurses, taken a good deal of interest in the condition of her Brooke House neighbour. I had even pondered allowing Mrs Horton to spend time with Maria, in the hope that two women left to their own devices might find ways of communicating with one another. The nurses and physicians, even myself, would be met with either catatonia or a raging terror, which descended on Miss Cranfield with almost visible speed, as if a dark cloud were coming down on her head.

But Mrs Horton had not yet become Miss Cranfield’s amanuensis. That would come later. Mrs Horton at that time was still plagued by the visions which accompanied her into Brooke House, and on that August night’s visit she told me something that convinced me her condition might be worsening, not improving.

She told me she was convinced that Miss Cranfield had been visited the previous night. She claimed to have heard a woman speaking to Maria and even, at one stage, singing a song to her. I well remember the song Mrs Horton claimed she had heard, as I made some effort to try and discover its origin soon after the events which were about to break over the head of Brooke House. The first verse went as follows:

Ye London maids attend to me

While I relate my misery

Through London streets I oft have strayed

But now I am a Convict Maid
.

The song continued in the same melodramatic vein.

My initial assumption was, of course, that Mrs Horton had imagined the whole thing; that this was another species of the visions which already plagued her tired mind. She became quite upset by this opinion, and I well knew why; those whose minds have run away with themselves become terrified lest we, the sane, imagine all their thoughts to be sprites or fantasies. She assured me she felt these things to be true.

‘But how can it be?’ I said, attempting to reassure her. ‘The house is locked up each night. Anyone visiting is noted in the logbook, and no visits with patients are allowed. Maria’s room is locked shut at all times. How could there be someone in the room with her?’

She admitted that all this was true, but then turned the question round on me.

‘If what I have heard is true, and if what you have said about Brooke House’s night-time arrangements is true, is the question of how someone could get into Maria’s room not an important one?’

You see the brilliance of the woman.
Assume I am mad, and treat me. Or pretend I am not, and investigate
. Her logic was irreproachable. I promised I would look into the matter. She thanked me, and left.

THORPE

There is a flat, swampy feeling to the land around Thorpe village that gives it something of the flavour of Wapping. Or at least, thinks Horton, Wapping must once have looked a little like this, before the coming of docks and wharves and boarding houses, when there were still meadows instead of walls and warehouses.

Thorpe is set perhaps a half-mile south of the Thames, in a riverine green landscape punctuated by copses which stand as a reminder of ancient forests. There is a sullen order to the topography, which to the interested nose of Charles Horton rather reeks of enclosure. He wonders when these fields were laid out, and what that has done to the local labouring community, and who has benefited.

The Bow Street Police Office carriage rattles down the lane from Weybridge, the river to the right, ever present, sometimes hidden by reeds and willows, sometimes barely a suggestion of open space on the far side of a meadow, but always there, like the soft scent of a rich woman in a Mayfair boutique.

The carriage is driven by an officer from Bow Street, an older man who introduced himself only as ‘Roberts, Bow Street’ when he’d knocked on Horton’s door in Wapping. He’d waited by the horses, feeding them scraps from his hands. Horton caught him muttering ‘fucking animals’ in the general direction of a group of dirty, aimless boys who were watching the horses and the carriage. The air had been acrid – it smelled like there had been a fire, somewhere over towards Red Lion Street. Horton had beckoned one of the boys over – he knew them all – and asked him to go and investigate, and to send word to the Police Office if no one had yet done so.

Now, that smoke-stained air and those shit-stained cobbles smack of another world entirely. They turn left off the riverside road and onto a well-maintained track through fields. A house rises up from behind the trees and hedges, an oddly naked structure on the flat meadows surrounding, framed but also exposed by the grey sky and the dense copse immediately behind. The day has autumn in its breath, and though the trees are hanging on to their leaves the coming surrender is palpable.