Savage Magic

by Lloyd Shepherd

  ‘Did Mrs Graham tell you about her mirrors?’

  ‘She did. She did. And let me ask you something, Mr Horton. Is Mrs Graham’s conscience as entirely snow-pure as she might wish? Does she have nothing to exercise herself about with regard to her own behaviour?’

  He sits back at last.

  ‘If maleficium exists, constable, it need not be directed from one to another. Might one not direct it onto oneself?’

  Horton is almost back at Thorpe Lee House when he is stopped by a middle-aged woman who is standing by the side of the road just before the inn on the corner of Sir Henry’s grounds.

  She is, by Horton’s reckoning, over fifty years old. She wears clothes which once must have been respectable but which are now threadbare, although care has obviously been taken to maintain their dignity to the extent that such a thing is possible. Her grey hair is almost bald in places, and two or three ugly warts molest her face. But when she speaks out to him, her voice is warm and kind.

  ‘Constable Horton?’

  He stops in the road, surprised by the intervention. It is late afternoon, and the fog has lifted, leaving behind an oppressively grey day. The September sky is low over the flat fields north of Thorpe village. A solitary crow squawks from a tree which is grimly holding on to its summer leaves as the temperature falls and the moisture adheres in the air.

  ‘Who is it who asks?’ he replies, carefully.

  ‘My name is Hook, sir. Elizabeth Hook. I was formerly the cook at Thorpe Lee House.’

  And so, Charles Horton, you find yourself on a country lane face-to-face with a witch. What does one say in such a situation?

  ‘I have been waiting some time for you to pass. I went up to the house and they told me you was in the village. Tell me, sir. Is Miss Ellen any better?’

  ‘Who told you I was in the village?’

  ‘Why … the cook. My replacement.’

  ‘And are you accustomed to wondering in and out of Thorpe Lee House? I’m surprised they do not run you out.’

  ‘I choose my times carefully. I watch the place.’

  ‘That would, no doubt, be of concern to Mrs Graham. Your watching her house so carefully.

  ‘I am full of concern for the child.’

  ‘Why so?’

  Elizabeth Hook sighs. Her face is as grey as the daylight, and moisture has attached itself to the scruffy ends of her hair. Horton notices her hands – rough, dirty, disfigured.

  ‘Please, sir, do tell me – is she yet unwell?’

  Her hands lift towards him, as if she might pray.

  ‘That is what I have heard.’

  ‘Ah, now. I had hoped she might have recovered somewhat since my departure, but it seems it was not to be.’

  ‘I am pleased to have met you, Mrs Hook.’

  ‘Miss Hook, sir.’

  ‘Miss Hook, then. You know my name, and so I assume you know why I am attending Thorpe Lee House.’

  ‘You’re investigating the events of August, sir.’

  ‘Yes. Events for which you have been blamed.’

  ‘Indeed so, sir. The village takes me for a witch. The accusations started in the house, and now they follow me wherever I go. Look.’

  She pulls up the sleeve of her dress, and Horton feels a queasy rush when he sees the deep scratches on her arms, embedded inside purple-flowered bruises.

  ‘I was mobbed, sir. By villagers. Scratching’s a way of fending off a witch. So’s beating with wood about the arms and the head. They laid off my head, sir. But they might not next time.’

  ‘And how do you fare now?’

  She looks at him, as if surprised by his concern. One dirty rough hand goes to her hair and pulls its moist weight away from her face. She is ugly, Horton sees, as ugly as any woman he has ever seen, but her eyes are sharp. There is a good deal of warmth in them.

  ‘I am getting by. It is hard, but it was already hard. I must try and find work with those who have been successful, but there are so few of them and they are already supplied with cooks. I may have to leave for London, if my fortunes do not change.’

  Horton doesn’t know what to say to that. One such as her would struggle to find a job in service in London, and she is too old and too ugly to take to whoring. He sees that the woman has something to say to him, and waits for it to come out. He is quite comfortable doing so; he has noticed on many previous occasions that saying nothing can unlock confidences as swiftly as posing questions. Something about this woman’s approach, her determination to be heard, makes him trust her.

  Perhaps I am bewitched, already.

  She looks away from him and up towards the house, the roof of which can just be seen down the road. Men’s voices can be heard from the inn. Horton had been intending to stop in there on the way back from the village, to see if anyone has anything much to say about what ails the inhabitants of the estate. He sees three men walking down the road. Elizabeth Hook sees them at the same time, and a new urgency comes into her. She takes a step towards him, as if to create a smaller circle of confidences.

  ‘Whatever you may hear of me, sir, know this: I am a good woman, a good Christian.’

  Horton is not surprised by this assertion.

  ‘What am I likely to hear?’

  ‘Whatever stalks Thorpe Lee House is nothing to do with me, sir.’

  ‘And what stalks the house?’

  ‘Something evil, sir. There is terrible evil in that house.’

  She looks to her right, towards the men who are coming down the road. One of them shouts, suddenly, a harsh ‘oi!’ which sends the watching crow shuddering into the sky.

  ‘Watch Miss Ellen, sir. Watch her close.’

  ‘What is it that you are—’

  ‘Oi! You! Step away from ’im!’

  ‘And watch yourself, sir. Watch yourself carefully. And do not believe what they say of me.’

  She turns to walk back towards the village. The three men come up to Horton. One of them, he sees, is Peter Gowing, the footman at Thorpe Lee House. He is not the one shouting; that is a fat labourer who smells of beer and tobacco and cooked meat, and who approaches Horton as if ready to do violence.

  ‘What’s up, eh? Why you speakin’ to that witch?’ His hard voice reminds Horton of the street accents of Wapping, its sinews tight and full of suppressed violence.

  ‘Witch? Why do you say so?’

  Gowing puts a warning hand on the fat man’s shoulder.

  ‘Easy, Hob, easy. It’s all right. This is Constable Horton, from the docks. Staying at the house, he is. Guest of Mrs Graham’s.’

  ‘Constable, is it?’ Hob does not seem mollified by Gowing’s words. ‘What’s Thorpe need with a London constable, now?’

  Gowing makes a helpless gesture towards him. Horton turns to face Hob directly. The third man, dressed in the same labouring clothes, stands to one side, as if embarrassed like Gowing.

  ‘Witch, you reported,’ Horton says. He draws on the authority his office confers, an authority which he has stood behind on dozens of occasions, and which never fails to make him vigorous but at the same time disturbed, as if it were a power guiltily acquired and sheepishly used. ‘There’s no such thing as witches, lad.’ He remembers what Leigh-Bennett said to him.

  ‘Lad, is it?’ The fat man is close enough to breathe rancid breath on him. ‘This be no lad. Visitors from London should take some care over—’

  Horton steps right into his face, despite the odour. The fat man’s face shows a sudden uncertainty, and Horton pounces on it like a dog.

  ‘No such thing as witches. Declaring someone a witch is an offence, and has been for years, laddie. Want me to put you on a charge? Bring you up before the magistrate? I might come from London, but the magistrate who sent me has a commission for the peace in Surrey as much as he does in London. So shut your mouth, and answer me this: what makes you call Elizabeth Hook a witch?’

  Horton’s use of the woman’s name shakes all three of them, as if it is evidence of local know
ledge he is not supposed to have. The fat man steps backwards, submissively. He looks at Gowing for help, and the footman provides it.

  ‘Hob means nothin’ by it, constable,’ he says, quickly and nervously. ‘He is only voicin’ the view of many in the village, and you’ve heard what the servants say.’

  Horton looks back down the road to the village, expecting to see the retreating figure of Miss Elizabeth Hook. But the old woman is gone.

  BROOKE HOUSE

  The matron, who is named Delilah, unlocks the door and shows Abigail into Maria’s cell. Abigail stops up short against the word: cell. She has not thought of these rooms as such until now, but Maria’s situation makes it clear. These rooms are cells, and this is a prison.

  The smell inside the cell is terrible. Abigail has managed to keep herself clean and fresh during her time at Brooke House, but it has not been particularly easy, and she can tell as soon as the door opens that no such effort has been made by the woman next door. Then she looks into the room and sees why.

  Maria Cranfield sits on the bed, the weight of her body leaning forward over the stone floor, her long black hair drooping down such that it obscures her face completely. She is held to the wall by a chain, itself secured to a thick iron loop in the wall behind her. This chain is affixed to what looks to Abigail like a thick coat made of ticking, only this coat’s arms are tied at the back, securing Maria’s arms in a cross in front of her. Her hands are invisible, somewhere inside the long sleeves.

  So this is what a strait waistcoat looks like. Abigail feels a nauseous anger. It is impossible not to imagine being secured inside that awful thing, strung together like a piece of rancid meat, secured at the back by a single chain, the only way out of it a backwards whip of the head to smash the skull on the metal loop in the wall.

  One might as well be dead, after all.

  Maria does not look up as she enters the room. Carrying the book, Abigail sits down upon the chair.

  ‘What will you read to her?’ asks the matron. Abigail holds the book up to her, but the woman frowns, a big ugly grimace, and looks away, saying nothing. She cannot read, but cannot bring herself to say so. Abigail has seen Delilah’s short-handed way with the Brooke House inmates, so is surprised by feeling suddenly sorry for her. The book may have done her some good, after all.

  Delilah fusses around Maria’s bed for a while, obviously waiting for Abigail to start to read, this being the only way she might be able to identify the book without asking directly, though it will be a great surprise if a woman who cannot read will recognise even this particular volume. But soon another attendant appears at the door and calls for her, and she leaves, glancing back at Abigail once with a sour warning not to fill this poor mad girl’s head with even more delusions.

  Abigail waits for a little while, listening to the nurses disappearing down the corridor, looking at Maria as she does so. The girl is silent, her breathing regular. It occurs to Abigail that she might even be asleep. After some minutes, she opens the book to the title page.

  ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. By Mary Wollstonecraft. Third Edition.’

  Still, Maria says nothing, but Abigail thinks she can detect a shift in her breathing, a new inflection suggesting attentiveness. She skips the dedication to M. Talleyrand-Perigord, late Bishop of Autun, and the Advertisement, and begins reading from the Introduction.

  After considering the historic page, and viewing the living world with anxious solicitude, the most melancholy emotions of sorrowful indignation have depressed my spirits, and I have sighed when obliged to confess, that either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial.

  She pauses after the long sentence, and before continuing asks:

  ‘Did she already read you this, Maria? The woman who comes in the night. Did she already read this?’

  Maria lifts her head. Her face is beautiful yet ghastly, young yet old, mad yet quiet. Her blue eyes suggest both frenzy and a despairing attentiveness. Her nostrils flare; she is breathing heavily now, as if she had just run into this place wearing that awful strait waistcoat.

  Abigail smiles at Maria before her head falls down again.

  After a little while, Abigail continues to read.

  WESTMINSTER

  Graham walks down towards the Strand in the approaching twilight. He turns into Adam Street, pondering on the arrogance of developers as he goes, and then turns onto the Royal Terrace, its thirteen houses presenting their elegant windows to the scurrying river.

  Suspended on the steep slope between the Strand and the Thames, on the river side of the Adam brothers’ great Adelphi development, it strikes Graham as appropriate that the building was finished with funds raised by a lottery. There is something showy and unlikely about the place, an element of the impossible about the design and situation, an impertinence in the way it blocks the old riverside processional of the Strand from its historical view of the Thames.

  He pauses for a look at the river, hearing a buzz of diligent commerce from the arcaded warehouses beneath his feet, despite the late hour. Lighters and wherries fill the river’s surface, reminding him of the view from his friend John Harriott’s window at the River Police Office in Wapping. There, the vessels entering the new dock system and disgorging a world’s harvest are massive and slow-moving, mammoths of wood and cloth and rope. The boats on the Westminster river are smaller and cleaner, as if the Thames itself were refining goods as they head upstream, turning barrels into bottles and boxes into bags.

  He turns and walks along the terrace towards number thirteen, remembering suddenly that Dr Thomas Monro, the owner of Brooke House, resides behind one of these doors. Before he can ponder on which door Monro can be found behind he is accosted, loudly, by an old street woman whom he takes, on closer inspection than he would like, to be a gypsy.

  ‘Fortunes told, noble sir! Fortunes told! I shall consult the Dreaming for you, sir, if you so please! Or perhaps the Tarot? Or a little love magic? Though one so well set-up as thee surely requires no such assistance?’

  She coughs and laughs and wheezes, performing as if on the stage. She is quite the most charismatic street woman Graham has ever come across and, as is his way, he finds himself delighted by her. She is a repulsive thing, of course, her face disfigured by a terrible scar, her black hair tumbling down across her filthy head, her dress torn but still artfully made.

  ‘Are there rich pickings for you hereabouts, woman?’ he asks. She chuckles meaningfully.

  ‘Richer than you’d ever think, fine sir, richer than you’d think. These houses contain clever gentlemen and willing women, as you know – but there’s a good many people within who believe in the power of my people.’

  ‘Indeed so? Servants, I take it?’

  ‘Servants is people, sir.’

  ‘And women, of course. Women are credulous of these things.’

  There is something about this gypsy which makes Graham talk to her as if they were in on a shared joke, one at the expense of the maids and cooks within the houses behind them. She seems intelligent and speaks to him as an equal, not a potential client. This makes him uncomfortable, suddenly.

  ‘Women sees things, sir. Women sees a great many things.’

  ‘Well, now, be away with you. You’ll be telling me this ground is a fairy graveyard before long, and I should return with money to talk to them.’

  ‘No fairies at all, fine sir. None around here. But horrible large numbers of devils.’

  And with that she walks away, chuckling to herself. Graham thinks of his wife and her superstitions, and finds himself considering the gullibility of females. He turns back to the house of Sir John Cope.

  All thirteen houses on the Royal Terrace are identical. Their tall, elegant windows reflect the fading yellow light back on itself, creating an impassive secrecy. The houses remind Graham strongly of Wapping Pi
er Head where Harriott lives and, just now, recuperates. He is somewhat exercised by thoughts of Wapping today.

  Thirteen black doors gleam with identical paint, their maintenance presumably enforced by some complex property regulation. Number thirteen is different to the dozen other houses for only one reason. Its curtains are closed to the world, on every floor.

  Graham knocks on the door, and waits. A moment or two later, the door opens, and he is shown in to a wonderland.

  The exterior of number thirteen may be austere and in keeping, but the interior is an impertinent phantasmagoria of colours and textures. The hall is lined with rugs and hangings such that every sound is swallowed up by densities of wool and cotton and silk. Where most English gentlemen would line their walls with portraits Sir John has opted for pure decoration, a riot of colour, purples peeking out from behind reds, blues muttering at greens, shrieking oranges and yellows which announce themselves so directly that one expects them to detach themselves from the wall and take wing. It is less an English gentleman’s house than a Caliph’s tent.

  From somewhere inside the house, music is playing. A piano, tinkling as if from behind a waterfall in a Chinese valley.

  The place looks, it occurs to Graham, like a magnificent bordello.

  He presents his card and is shown into the drawing room, off the vestibule. The room’s effects are more muted than the hallway, but only by comparison. Patterned rugs festoon the chairs in the room, and the bookshelves glitter with painted spines, like expensive courtesans standing in London clubs. The smell in here is almost overpowering – a thick, potent combination of tobacco smoke, spices and something else, an intoxicating vapour which for a moment makes Graham’s head spin. He thinks about the young men he has seen taking the hookha at the Hindostanee Coffee House.

  He ponders sitting down, but looking at the furniture he worries about doing so, lest he be sucked down into it. As in Wodehouse’s drawing room, he ponders the art on Cope’s ostentatious walls. One painting in particular is deeply familiar: a copy of Hogarth’s famous depiction of wicked old Sir Francis Dashwood, who is turned into a parodied St Francis of Assisi, gazing not upon a bible but on an erotic novel, the Elegantiae Latini sermonis edition of Satyra Sotadica. From his halo peeps the wicked old face of Lord Sandwich. And lying on his palm is the wanton figure of a naked woman.