Lloyd Shepherd is a former journalist and digital producer who has worked for the Guardian, Channel 4, the BBC and Yahoo. He lives in South London with his family. He is the author of The English Monster and The Poisoned Island.
Also by Lloyd Shepherd
The English Monster
The Poisoned Island
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Lloyd Shepherd 2014
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Lloyd Shepherd to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-47113-606-1
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-47113-607-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-47113-609-2
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
For Mum, with love and thanks
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
William Blake, London
CONTENTS
DEAL
PART ONE
WAPPING
WAPPING
THORPE
BROOKE HOUSE
WESTMINSTER
THORPE
WESTMINSTER
THORPE
BROOKE HOUSE
WESTMINSTER
THORPE
BROOKE HOUSE
CANTERBURY
PART TWO
WESTMINSTER
THORPE
WESTMINSTER
THORPE
WESTMINSTER
THORPE
THORPE
WESTMINSTER
CANTERBURY
PART THREE
THORPE
BROOKE HOUSE
NORWOOD
THORPE
WESTMINSTER
THORPE
BROOKE HOUSE
THORPE
WESTMINSTER
THORPE
WESTMINSTER
THORPE
PART FOUR
WESTMINSTER
BROOKE HOUSE
THORPE
WESTMINSTER
WAPPING
RATCLIFFE
THE PROSPECT OF WHITBY
WAPPING
WESTMINSTER
BROOKE HOUSE
PART FIVE
WAPPING
CROSS BONES BURIAL GROUND, SOUTHWARK
DEAL
The ship is resting at anchor out on the Downs. She is easy to spot, having none of the splendour of the dozen naval vessels that surround her. She is fat and ungainly, her plain lines evidence of her ugly purpose. A convict ship, just returned from the southern seas, her cargo of abandoned humanity swapped for sacks of tea and a handful of passengers.
In his room at the top of the tallest hotel in Deal, Henry Lodge watches her through an eyeglass stolen from an inebriated officer of the Rum Corps more than a decade ago. There is no doubt. She is the Indefatigable. But is she carrying the cargo he has been watching for these past years?
The April air is clean, just washed by spring rain, and there is no sea mist. The vessels clustered between the Goodwin Sands and Deal beach look calm and settled. Local boatmen row from beach to ship to beach again, busy water ants with oars and strong arms.
Henry supposes he will have to go out into one of those boats, and as always the thought fills him with fearful memories. He hates these boats, for they remind him of the worst weeks of his life, shivering inside the sinking wreck of a listing frigate, icebergs hidden in the mist, ice spurs slicing through the cold depths, including the one which had torn into the hull of the ship and removed its rudder with apparently diabolic intent. He was not yet twenty, a convict-gardener, sent to New South Wales to try and scratch a harvest from the thin, rocky soil. Between him and Cape Town, unknown hundreds or thousands of miles of empty, ice-cold sea.
Since his own return from New South Wales, Henry Lodge has performed his little pilgrimage to Deal a dozen times. He pays a man a retaining fee to watch the ships coming and going to the Downs, and to alert him when one of those new arrivals is a returning convict transport. The money required for this undertaking is not insubstantial, but it is also affordable. He is, after all, by now a man of some means, grown rich on hops and natural cunning. But when it comes to boats, he is still a scared convict-gardener clutching on to life in a little pinnace suspended above freezing canyons.
He had survived that disaster, the rescue coming from, of all things, a whaler. With war billowing out from Paris and Europe shivering, it had seemed another petty miracle, as ordinary and as wonderful as an ice mountain trying to snatch away a rudder.
The operation runs like this: his fellow in Deal learns of a new arrival. He then despatches a messenger, post-haste, to the hop gardens owned by Henry Lodge around Canterbury. The system has become so efficient that Henry can be in Deal within a day-and-a-half of a new transport arriving. This is fast enough; the vessels out on the water are still moving to oceanic rhythms at this point, where a day is an hour and a hurried tack into the wind would look to the landlocked observer like a massive animal changing direction.
On this occasion, however, the system has not run quite so smoothly. His man in Deal was away on business in Ramsgate when the Indefatigable arrived, such that Henry did not learn of the ship’s arrival until three days after she dropped anchor. He is not particularly worried by this. For these vessels, three days is still barely a heartbeat after so many months at sea.
All the transports he has seen at Deal have looked like the Indefatigable looks now. An exhausted woman, is what she is. A silent, disregarded female approaching the end of her disappointed road.
He closes his eyeglass and takes it with him downstairs and onto the beach, where a boatman is waiting to take him over to the convict ship. The man is unpleasant and crude, and shouts at Henry as he struggles to get into the boat, reluctance biting into his bones like the gout which has, in recent months, slowly been making its jagged presence felt.
How many more times will I do this? he asks himself as they make their way across the glassy water of the Downs. How much longer will I care to watch for this woman? It is an old question; one to which he has no answer.
He keeps an eye on the Indefatigabl
e as they row towards her. Slowly the other vessels move away from his perspective, as the transport rises from the water, becoming bigger and altogether more impressive the closer they get to her. He imagines the three decks within, the bulwarks between male, female and sailor quarters, the tiny cots in which the convicts are chained. He imagines furtive wanderings beneath tropical skies, as female prisoners are called to the hammocks of sailors and marines, pressed into service as journeying whores, each sailor given individual permission by God and the King to take his pick of the women on board.
These are childish pictures. The decks of the Indefatigable will have been cleared of bulwarks and chains while she was in New South Wales. The instruments of imprisonment take up valuable space which will have been cleared for cargo on the return voyage; tea instead of desperate girls. He pictures the piles of unwanted ironware on the quays of Sydney Cove growing higher with the visit of every transport that discards its chains just as it discards its human freight.
He asks himself, as he has done times beyond counting, how a man with such a runaway fancy can possibly have become rich. He remembers why he makes these pilgrimages. To see the woman again, to speak to her. This nonsensical compulsion which he cannot deny.
Now they are alongside the Indefatigable. The boatman calls up to the deck, and a head pops over the gunwale.
‘Visitor from town!’ the boatman calls in his oaky Kentish accent.
‘What kind of visitor?’ replies the seaman, in a West Country voice.
‘One who visits all the transports.’
‘What’s his business?’
The boatman looks at him. It is a well-worn routine, this. Henry shouts up to the gunwale himself.
‘I am a representative of James Atty and Company, the firm which built this vessel. I am to come aboard to ascertain her seaworthiness, and the expected period before she will be ready to voyage once more.’
It is a practised lie, and one day it will fail. One day, another seaman’s face will stare down at him and inform him that the owner’s agent has already been aboard.
Not today, though. The sailor disappears for a moment, and reappears with instructions that they may climb aboard. With goutish difficulty and no small amount of self-disgust, the man of means makes his way up onto the deck.
He is introduced to the master, who has as much common humanity as a bleached piece of driftwood on Deal beach, but he listens to Henry’s second story, which he produces only once he is on board and only in the hearing of the master. He is a representative of the Home Department in London, charged with keeping an eye out for ex-convicts returning from the penal colonies of New South Wales, tracking their arrival back in England for purposes related to the maintenance of the peace. The master half-believes it, and agrees to provide some additional information (for a small fee, as always with such men) about his passengers. Five men returned to England, two of whom were former convicts. The master gives the names, and Henry pretends to note them down.
‘Any women?’
The master frowns. Why would he be interested in women? But yes, there were three women among the passengers. Two were wives, and one is abroad.
‘Their names?’
‘Simpson, Gardener, Broad.’
The Gardener woman is still on the ship, with her sick husband and her three children. But Henry barely hears this. The name Broad clatters like an anchor dropped on a quayside.
‘The Broad woman. She is no longer on the ship?’
‘It’s Broad who is abroad,’ smirks the master. ‘She was in a great hurry to leave.’
‘Did she converse with any of the other passengers?’
The master frowns. Something about the Broad woman has discomfited him, and seeing this only excites Henry Lodge further. She’d been a quiet passenger, says the master, though she’d spent as much time on deck as she could. She’d had little to do with the crew or with the other passengers. The crew avoided her. She’d taken a bit of a shine to two children travelling with their parents.
‘Did she bring anything with her?’
She’d had some goods shipped with her from New South Wales, at considerable expense. The goods had already been unloaded, onto a vessel bound for the Thames.
‘What was the nature of these goods?’
The master has no idea. They were boxed. He suspected something botanical or herbal.
‘You did not investigate further?’
Again, that uncomfortable frown. No, the master had not investigated the goods. The woman had made it quite clear that they were not to be touched, and she had a way of making sure people obeyed her wishes.
‘What do you mean by that?’
The master did not mean anything by that. Mrs Broad was just very forceful, is all. Henry asks if he can speak to the children who’d conversed with this mysterious passenger. The master, who appears relieved at the focus of the interrogation turning away from him, shows him below-decks.
The small number of passengers who have returned from New South Wales are accommodated alongside the officers’ quarters below the quarterdeck, but the family to which he is directed have moved away from these rooms and taken up their own space between the cargo and the cabins. Henry sees why, instantly. There are two boys and a girl, watched over by a haunted-looking mother. The father lies in a hammock, the stench of illness coming off him. A doomed family, shunned by the crew lest the father’s disease carry beyond his own body.
Seeing the family accommodated like this, in a space which a year before would have been filled with chained convicts, men or women or perhaps both, revolts him. It is as if the ship will not let them go.
He asks them about the woman, and the mother says yes, such a woman was on board, her name had been Maggie Broad, and the boys said something of her: how she worried the crew, who thought her a witch. And so the master’s discomfort is explained.
And now Henry Lodge must sit down, for his heart is racing. He collapses onto a sack of Canton tea. The children look at him, curious but patient. The mother looks at her sick husband. Henry tries to imagine the woman he seeks waiting here below-decks, gazing at her cargo, cursing anyone who came near it, alarming the crew with her hostile presence.
His waiting is over. Maggie Broad has returned to England. After all these years, his watching is done, and yet he has missed her. That damned three-day delay.
He has failed in his task, and feels suddenly afraid. She was here, and now she is gone.
PART ONE
Madhouses
For you shall understand, that the force which melancholie hath, and the effects that it worketh in the bodie of a man, or rather of a woman, are almost incredible. For as some of these melancholike persons imagine, they are witches and by witchcraft can worke wonders, and do what they list: so do others, troubled with this disease, imagine manie strange, incredible and impossible things.
Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft
WAPPING
She feels a prodigious and fearful sorrow when she closes the door on the little apartment in Lower Gun Alley, though Abigail Horton has of late become so suspicious of her own feelings that she is wary of this clenching sadness. For much of this past year she has been aware of two Abigails in attendance behind her eyes: one acting, the other watching and judging. She feels, and another part of her observes her feeling, and draws its conclusions, as if a mad-doctor were in residence between her temples. Increasingly, the conclusions of this watching Abigail are ominous.
She barely sleeps, and when she does her dreams are so terrible that most nights she wakes with a cry of fear which startles her husband Charles awake, and she must once again face that morbid expression of guilt which descends on him. The one she has come to loathe.
She walks down the stairs and out into the street, peeking round the corner of the door like some cowardly lurking footpad. Her husband must not see her leave, for he will stop her and she will not be able to resist the weight of his crushing obligation. She knows tha
t he has a veritable invisible army of small boys watching the streets of Wapping, reporting back anything interesting or odd. He is a constable, after all – one with responsibilities for the peace. Perhaps the peace of this street has been bought with the peace of her own marriage bed. She wonders if Charles pays the boys for watching the comings-and-goings so assiduously, or if they feel they are taking part in some kind of game.
The street is clear, at least of any faces she recognises. She closes the outside door and locks it, little remembered activities for the hands as her mind scurries through its two-headed dance of dismay and observation. With her heavy canvas bag she walks down Lower Gun Alley, for all the world like some seaman headed down to the London Dock to catch a ship to Leghorn or Guinea or Arabia.
Lower Gun Alley gives out onto Wapping Street, and if she were to turn right here she would find herself at the River Police Office, her husband’s place of work. The street is crowded with people this morning, and the thick early morning fog has lifted. She looks left and right again, but the gesture is futile. She would not notice Charles, or one of his small boys or even the other constables of the Police Office, out here on this crowded street. She must hope that she blends into the crowd as easily as they would. She turns left and walks away from the Police Office, away from Lower Gun Alley. Away from Charles Horton.
There is a good deal of panic in her head as she goes. She has barely left their rooms for six weeks now, ever since her anxiety had suddenly deepened, like dark-blue seawater off a reef. Charles has taken to buying the food and drink necessary for their meals. When necessity has forced her out into the street she has found the crowds oppressive. The brick walls which lace their way through Wapping, holding in the spaces of the London Dock, have become to her like the walls of a prison, holding her and all those on the streets in a state of isolation from the metropolis, squeezed in against the river, unable to flee. A madhouse on the water, with its own streets, its own watching eyes, its own stenches and mysteries.
This feeling of imprisonment has been acute, because it is flight she dreams of. Not flight from Wapping, or even from Charles, but from the woman in the forest, the one who pursues her and fills her head with unclean thoughts as she comes. A savage woman promising violence and revenge and despair for those who oppose her.
Savage Magic Page 1
