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.
The house takes further shape as the coach nears: a square, elegant but characterless place. Horton’s eyes are untutored in matters architectural, but it seems to him this house has none of the new qualities of the wealthy properties at Wapping Pier Head.
The coach-sweep approach departs from the road and then twists around two sides of the building to the front door, which is set behind four columns holding up a portico. Thorpe Lee House is surrounded by flat grounds which, if need be, could accommodate the entire London Dock. Three or four clumps of trees are set artfully around the place, and although there has been some thought in the past to the design of the gardens, the overall impression is of mild neglect. The woodland Horton saw from the road frames one side of the gardens and from somewhere in the near distance he hears the sound of dogs, a good many of them. Horton recognises how little he knows of country estates, but feels sure they are normally neater than this. The grass is too long, the pathways a little weed-strangled for the artful bucolic polish he has seen along the river at Kew and Richmond.
The driver throws down Horton’s bag with no ceremony, and says no farewell as the bag lands with an alarming sound on the gravel of the driveway. With a hai! to
the horses the coach leaves. Horton experiences another little wobble of dissonance after the sight of the mildly unkempt gardens: the lady of the house is now appearing, unaccompanied, at the door to Thorpe Lee House. Are there no servants?
Horton picks up his bag and walks to the portico where the tall woman waits. She is dressed fashionably if somewhat more plainly than might be expected for a baronet’s – what, exactly? There is a sudden and pressing confusion. The wife of a baronet such as Sir Henry Tempest would be greeted as ‘Lady’. But Mrs Graham is not Sir Henry’s wife. So what is Mrs Graham? Companion? Inamorata? Concubine? The extraordinary nature of her domestic status is thrown into sharp relief on their first meeting by the fact that he has been sent here by her own abandoned husband. Horton rather feels like the dupe in a Drury Lane farce. The audience is waiting for him to slip on some hidden particle of etiquette.
‘Constable Horton?’ the woman asks. She has the face of a tired forty-year-old or a well-preserved fifty-year-old. Horton does not know which should apply.
‘Yes, ma’am.’ He picks the word carefully, yet it feels unwieldy and imprecise on his tongue.
‘Welcome to Thorpe Lee House, constable,’ she says, adding (to Horton’s relief), ‘I am Mrs Sarah Graham.’ She takes a good degree of care over each word. The word constable had sounded foreign and almost insulting when she spoke it. She had shared her own name with some haughty reluctance.
She is polite to him nonetheless, and expresses words of gratitude as they walk into the house, but this isn’t enough to hide her apparent distaste at his presence. She had asked for someone to come, of course, but Horton can see his arrival has only served to make real whatever is troubling her. And of course, she had not exactly asked for him. She’d wanted a justice of the peace, not a river constable.
Despite the unofficial nature of his visit, Horton sees that he cannot help but represent the encroachment of the public realm into Mrs Graham’s confused and confusing household. Mrs Graham is so embarrassed, Horton now recognises, that she has decided to leave the servants out of it for now. She tells him to leave his bags in the vestibule for someone to pick up – she doesn’t say who. She shows him into the reception room, where tea already waits on a tray. She has planned everything such that no servant shall see or speak to him before she has taken the chance to do so herself.
He asks after Sir Henry, and is told that the master of the house is up in London and has been for some weeks. Mrs Graham expresses some satisfaction that this is so as they sit down.
‘I wish to speak to you of the strangest things,’ she says. ‘Sir Henry has a different attitude towards them than I.’
‘He does not hold with the idea of witchcraft?’
A look of discomfort passes over Mrs Graham’s face. Horton’s directness is unwelcome.
‘Mr Graham has told you everything?’
‘Not at all, ma’am. Only the generalities. I carry a letter for you from him.’
He hands it to her and watches her as she reads it. The fire is burning in the cosy grate, above which is a massive painting in oils of the man whom Horton takes to be Sir Henry Tempest. The painting reveals a tall and fashionable figure, standing in a rural scene with several dogs and a gun. His eyes quiver with the zeal of the hunt (the artist’s skill is much in evidence around those eyes), and Horton is left with the impression of a determined, almost fanatical individual, full of life and appetite. The figure blazes from its otherwise rather ordinary depiction, the flat oils unable to hold the man’s personal force within the frame. Horton keeps looking back at the picture, as if worried that the figure within might leap down from the fireplace and throttle him.
After a minute, Mrs Graham puts her husband’s letter to one side. She places her hands in her lap, and looks down at them, as if they might provide a cue for how to proceed. Then she looks up and speaks to him. Her brow is determined, and she speaks with easy authority, inflected by the same clear internal tension which greeted him in the driveway.
‘Before we begin, constable, I wish to make one thing perfectly clear to you. We will not be using the word witchcraft when talking of the events which have befallen this house.’
‘You do not believe that to be the cause?’
Mrs Graham narrows her lips and breathes in heavily.
‘I do not know what I believe, constable. But it is of course beyond all rational inquiry that bewitchment has taken place.’
He can see, immediately, that this is not quite the truth, and for the first time Horton warns himself to perhaps take care around this woman. Trusting Aaron Graham at all does not come easily, but Horton had believed him when he’d said his wife believed Thorpe Lee House to be bewitched. She is now lying about that belief to the man charged with investigating its cause. Her dissemblance hangs in the air like the smoke from the fire.
‘So your explanation for these occurrences is that they are mere coincidence? Or perhaps somebody has a grudge against you?’
‘Against me? I should hope not.’
She looks to her left, and Horton’s eyes are drawn back to the picture above the fireplace.
‘Against Sir Henry, then?’
Mrs Graham looks at him directly again, and he feels distinctly uncomfortable beneath her penetrating gaze.
‘What have you been told of Sir Henry, constable?’
That he is the worst man in England.
‘Very little, Mrs Graham.’ The name stings her, slightly. He files that away.
‘A great many people have a great deal to say about Sir Henry, constable,’ she says. ‘Do not believe any of it. They are envious of him and, I suppose, are envious of me too. Envy breeds all sorts of runaway tongues.’
There is something smoothly unpleasant about this speech. Mrs Graham speaks no more of Sir Henry. She tells Horton of the sequence of disturbing events at the house, which began and reached their peak during August and which she had believed were at an end. But now there is the matter of the sudden illness of her daughter, Ellen.
‘Does Miss Graham fare any better?’
‘Miss Tempest Graham, if you please.’
The correction implies all sorts of questions which Horton does not wish to now pursue.
‘Is she better?’
‘She is the same, constable. She is very ill but not, her doctor says, in any immediate danger. I confess to having panicked at her first illness, when I spoke to Mr Graham. I may have been premature. You see, I thought perhaps I knew who might be at the root of this matter.’
This is new. Graham had made no mention of it.
‘Almost a fortnight ago, I sacked the cook. She is a woman by the name of Elizabeth Hook. The servants, and many in the village, had become convinced that she was the … well, she was the primary cause of these incidents.’
‘Was there evidence for this belief?’
‘There was some. Items related to some of the events were found in her kitchen.’
‘That is all?’
‘That is all. Also, she became ill during a ceremony performed by two of the servants.’
‘A ceremony?’
‘Yes. They told me about it. A witch-bottle, they called it.’
‘Do you know what this ceremony involved?’
‘I do not. They can tell you. But it is intended to make the … perpetrator unwell. And it seemed to work.’
‘I see. And where is Elizabeth Hook now?’
‘I cannot say. I presume in the village. Though there was a good deal of bad feeling towards her. She may have left the area altogether.’
‘Mrs Graham, you are aware, are you not, of the legal status of accusations of witchcraft?’
‘I am. Aaron … Mr Graham … explained this to me. I am choosing my words carefully.’
‘I understand. Have the incidents which caused this suspicion been itemised in any way?’
‘They have. I have them here.’
She hands him a scroll of paper tied, almost ritually, by a thick black thread.
‘Every incident, and its date, is listed therein.’
‘My thanks. I would like to read this, and then talk to you again. And the servants as well.’
‘Yes. They will be made available to you. Perhaps tomorrow – the hour is growing late today, and we must still eat dinner.’
‘And Miss Tempest Graham? May I speak to her?’
‘Perhaps, if she recovers a little. Though I confess to being mystified as to why you would wish to.’
‘Mrs Graham, I have no idea why I should speak to anyone. I must try to establish whether there is any motive for these mischiefs on your household.’
And envy is by no means sufficient as a motive, he decides not to add.
‘Motive? I do not understand.’
Horton is quite familiar with this inability.
‘It is my experience, ma’am, that no crime is committed without a motive. Most of the time that motive is personal gain. Sometimes it is petty revenge. It may be fear that forces the hand of the saboteur or poisoner, if such there be in this case. Whatever the matter, establishing the motive always leads to the perpetrator.’
‘Ah? Well, as Mr Graham has said, you are the master in such matters. I just wish these things to stop, constable. If you can effect such an arrest, I will be in your eternal debt.’
She looks at him with an expression that suggests her creditors, financial or emotional, are the luckiest people in the world.
Horton is collected from the reception room by the butler, a thin, rather scruffy man of indeterminate age and unknown regional provenance who gives his name as Crowley, but only when asked, and who smells of alcohol and old tobacco. His clothes bear the same tattered air of mild desuetude as the gardens outside; indeed, it occurs to Horton, of the house itself.
They leave Mrs Graham alone inside the reception room, her eyes following Horton out as if he were under suspicion of a felony. From the vestibule a staircase with pretensions of hauteur climbs up to the first floor, and Horton follows Crowley up. There are five doors off the first-floor landing, all but one of them closed, and Crowley leads Horton through into the bedroom beyond. His bag is already on the floor, and he is about to turn and ask Crowley a question when he hears the door close. The butler, without a word, has made his escape.
Savage Magic Page 4
