Savage Magic (8 page)

She falls asleep with the words on her lips – the same words she’d heard the voice speaking to Maria this previous night – but then something pulls her quickly from slumber. The scream is shocking enough. The fact that it comes from a man is even worse. And worst of all is the nature of it.

It is a low, animal sound, full of terror and anger, and it is quickly followed after a few moments by more screams and shouts, which together form a great chorus of despair and fear. It sounds to Abigail, in her confused just-woken state, as if every man is experiencing the same horror at the same time, like apes hurling noise at an unwanted intruder. She stands up from her bed and opens the door of her cell, stepping out into the corridor beyond. The noise is even louder, and she stands for a moment in shock. The noise is as if the building itself has gone mad.

And for a few seconds which seem impossible, as if they must be happening to somebody else entirely, she
feels
the building go mad. A pressure seems to press against her, an unseen force. She thinks of a diagram for a steam engine she’d once seen at some public lecture or another, the Royal Institution no doubt, and the explanation of steam power: the transition from heat to
pressure
, the way water and air could with the addition of heat be turned into a directional force, shoving machines which weighed more than houses into impossible dances. That’s what this feels like: as if Brooke House were a gigantic piston, being pushed slowly and deliberately by an emerging compression.

And then, as quickly as it began, that sense of impending explosion falls away and the terrible noise begins to subside. One by one, the men fall quiet. It is only then that Abigail notices that there has not been a single shout or moan from the women on the first floor. The women’s rooms are silent, as if they were all empty. All the noise is male, all of it angry and guttural and terrifyingly desolate, as if each and every man were having a limb amputated on some European battlefield.

The silence grows, as stealthy and gradual as the original shouting had been sudden and shocking. Eventually the last man lets out the last shriek, and Brooke House lapses back into the quiet of midnight. That old sense she’d had – of the house breathing in and out – returns, and a calm lays itself out over the place like a warm blanket.

She goes back to lie down on her bed, leaving the book on the floor. She turns onto her side, her customary sleeping position, facing the wall between her cell and Maria’s. She hears a small, scratching, half-buried sound, and moves a little closer to the cold wall, turning her head so her ear is pressed against the stonework.

She can hear Maria whispering, sharply and urgently. Over and over again she whispers the same thing, with a sharply hateful bite, as if she were invoking some terrible spirit with the fury of her near-silent 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!’

WESTMINSTER

The room into which Aaron Graham is shown by the astonished servant cannot be described merely as opulent. If a man were to dress in the way this room has been dressed, he would only be doing so to mock what other men were wearing. Even Graham, dressed today magnificently but not flamboyantly, finds the room beyond satire.

But this room, being shut away, has no satirical intent; its splendour is deliberate and intended only for the one who paid for it, the one who is now sprawled dead on the purple-and-black four-poster, his torn silk breeches used to tie his hands and feet to each of those four posts, an ugly satyr’s mask covering his face, his entrails pouring out from him as if trying to escape the terrible scene, flies buzzing and from one corner of the room the unmistakable smell of human vomit.

Graham takes one look before turning to the door through which he has just entered and stepping back onto the landing, where the astonished servant waits along with William Jealous, a patrolman from Bow Street. Graham has to fight an urge to slam the door behind him, as if there were stupid demons prancing around within who could be banished merely by looking away. He knows the vision of the body on the bed will be one more terrible thing living inside his head, another entry in a catalogue of memories he would sooner be rid of. He also knows he must go back in for a second look if he is going to pursue this matter.

The astonished servant – astonished not by the extremities within the bedchamber, but by his perplexing inability to account for those extremities – steps towards Graham and almost touches his arm, showing such sympathy with the magistrate’s plight that Graham thinks he can establish whose vomit it is that now blights the infected air of the bedchamber.

‘A glass of water, sir?’

‘If you please, yes,’ says Graham, and uses the time it takes for the water to be fetched to gather himself for a return into the room. He looks at Jealous. The lad is barely twenty years old; Graham only swore him in last month. And yet he looks completely calm.

‘Are you quite all right, sir?’

The lad’s London vowels are smoothed down, nothing like as harsh as his father’s. Graham nods. He realises something: he is more comfortable with the idea of going back into the bedchamber without the manservant here. There is no need of a glass of water; it was a mere diversion operated by some unthinking part of his brain which wanted to be rid of the presence of the servant.

‘I shall go back in for another look.’

‘Shall I come in with you, sir?’

‘If you please, Jealous, yes.’

With a deep breath, he opens the door to the bedchamber, and they go back within. After a few minutes, the manservant returns with the glass of water on a silver tray. The servant is disconcerted by the disappearance of the magistrate and his officer from the landing, and by the closed door which now confronts him. He knocks discreetly on the door, as if his master were alive and capable of answering. There is no answer, and after a few moments the astonished servant, whose life has been taken into strange new regions by the events of the previous evening and of this morning, places the tray with the water upon it on the floor next to the door, and wanders back downstairs.

After several minutes, Graham re-emerges from the room, and Jealous follows. Graham’s face is almost as green as his silk waistcoat. He spies the water and the tray on the floor but does not move to pick up the glass. He pulls the door closed behind him, and goes downstairs, ignoring Jealous entirely for the time being.

Graham seats himself on an especially glorious chair upholstered in the finest chiffon at one side of the vestibule below. The astonished servant reappears, and asks if he can fetch the gentlemen anything. He has not yet allowed himself to be overthrown by any of the men who have burst into the superlative Mayfair residence of which he has been the overseer for a decade now. His world may be in the same wrecked state as the innards of his employer, now putrefying upstairs, but his standards will be maintained.

‘You discovered the body of your master?’ asks Graham.

‘Yes, sir.’ The manservant stands with his hands behind his back. He is, Graham estimates, in his middle thirties. He is thin, austere, his shocked face pinched by a rehearsed rectitude.

‘At what time?’

‘Just after eight, sir.’

‘You secured the room?’

‘Secured, sir?’

‘You made the room safe from disturbance by anyone else?’

‘I locked the door, sir. Then I came immediately to Bow Street. Finding no one there, I went to the Brown Bear opposite, as I believe is the custom. It was there I found your officer here.’

He speaks as if he were describing parliamentary procedure, rather than an early morning visit to a Covent Garden inn.

‘What time did your master return here last night?’

‘It was late, sir. I would say two or perhaps three o’clock.’

‘He had been out? Do you know where?’

‘No, sir.’

‘And you locked up the house and windows?’

‘I did, sir. The master was always most particular about that. He said there were any number of footpads and rogues roaming the streets, and a gentleman had to look to his own safety.’ Something like a blush washes across the servant’s face; he has, after all, just indirectly criticised the magistracy and constabulary, in the presence of two of its representatives. Graham starts to find the man’s presence irritating.

‘Was anyone loitering when you locked up?’

‘No, sir. A few whores. That is all.’

‘Whores?’

‘Yes, sir. We seem to have had an infestation of them in these parts this past year.’

‘Any you recognised?’

‘Sir?’

The servant looks as if Graham had suddenly started speaking in German.

‘Did you notice if any of the whores were familiar?’

‘Familiar to
me
, sir?’

‘Then no, I take it is the answer. You may go.’

The servant starts to leave, but Jealous speaks up.

‘If you please, Mr Graham?’

Graham nods.

‘The mask your master was wearing,’ asks Jealous. ‘Had he worn it before?’

‘I confess to never having seen it before.’

‘And you have no concept as to what it might imply?’

‘None whatsoever.’

Jealous turns to Graham.

‘That’s it, sir.’

The servant is sent away by Graham, and resolves to stay out of his way for the remainder of the visit.

Aaron Graham does not say anything straightaway. He stands and walks into the drawing room, where a fire has been set though no master lives to have requested it. He gazes into the flames as if dancing in there he might see the writhing, destroyed body of the poor soul upstairs, and it would speak to him. He feels unaccountably lonely, unable to organise his thoughts.
John Harriott should be here. He would bark at the servants and make a nuisance of himself, but his bluster would hide his thinking. Horton too; the two of them would have a complete picture by now
.

He begins to regret sending Horton to Surrey. He sets himself by the fire, and looks up at William Jealous, whom he’d almost forgotten.

‘Any orders, sir?’

Graham considers the question. All he can see for now is blood and red satin. And that awful mask, about which he’d entirely forgotten to ask. Thank God the young patrolman had been here to ask it.

‘Yes, Jealous. I want you to gather the servants and ask them some questions.’

‘Yes, sir?’

The boy is keen, interested. Graham remembers his father, Charles Jealous. One of the original Bow Street Runners, and one of the most effective, almost a fixed feature at the Old Bailey. He was in Windsor now, one of several ex-Runners who protected the safety of the Royal Family. Now here was his son, working in the same line, still only a patrolman but already an obvious candidate to be a Principal Officer. Graham thinks of his own son, just made post-captain. This boy looks bright and alert. Perhaps he should introduce him to Horton.

‘You know what to ask, Jealous. You just asked yourself. What time Wodehouse returned last night, whether he was wearing that mask when he did, what it might signify.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Also, this matter of whores in the street. Is that a pattern the other servants recognise? I confess, I had not heard that whores were a particular problem on this street.’

‘Yes, sir. Anything else?’

The drawing room is longer than any drawing room has a right to be, with six tall arched windows looking out onto Bruton Street. The house, Graham knows, takes up three times as much room as any other of the wealthy properties on the street, but even so its stupendous dimensions amaze him. He finds the self-indulgence rather disgusting; Graham is a self-made man, one who has survived on his own wits and intelligence, and seeing the sumptuousness with which this house garlands itself makes him irritated and rather unwell.

He forces himself to take in the room. His attention is drawn to a scene in a painting on the far wall, facing the door through which he entered. At first he is unable to make out what the scene is, but then with disgust he recognises
Leda and the Swan
, although in this particularly gaudy representation the swan has been given a human face, as well as a crazily engorged phallus, and the face is that of the owner of the house, and the former occupant of the eviscerated vessel upstairs, Edmund Wodehouse, Esq. He turns away from the painting with the same disgust as he might reject an unfashionable cravat from his tailor.

Aaron Graham is known across town for his bonhomie, his charm and his facility with all matters social and sartorial. He is a charming dining companion, a learned travelling companion and a discreetly solid drinking companion. But misery now informs Graham’s posture, his expression, even the gaiety of his clothes. His cream tailcoat seems to have no sheen and no joy, and the hat he spins around between his immaculately maintained fingers looks more like a lump of Welsh rock than the latest wonder from his Jermyn Street milliner.

Graham can’t even recall the servant’s name. How does Horton keep his composure at such times? How can he be so careful in collecting evidence? Graham has seen a good many dead bodies in his time, but the devilish horror of that figure upstairs has, for the moment, temporarily unmoored him.