Savage Magic

by Lloyd Shepherd

  ‘You think the women killed these men?’

  ‘By no means. I have no indication of such a thing. But the circumstances of Cope’s killing, in particular, lead me to think there may be some association between what the women were paid to do, and the deaths.’

  Talty allows that grin to reappear.

  ‘You mean, they were killed for fucking whores.’

  ‘Not just killed, Talty. Cope’s cock was severed and pushed into his mouth. Perhaps before he was killed.’

  The sight of this had made him vomit copiously in 13 Royal Terrace. And yet now he can use it to extract information from a pimp. A wondrous recovery.

  That grin has gone again, but will return once more. For now, Talty is professional again.

  ‘I don’t keep records, magistrate.’

  ‘I expect you don’t.’

  ‘But I do happen to remember who the whores were at that last party. Rose Dawkins was one. Elizabeth Carrington was the other.’

  ‘How do I find these women?’

  ‘Not my problem, that, is it?’

  Graham acknowledges this. Talty is a businessman. He can hardly be expected to send his women into the arms of the authorities. He decides to push Talty’s sudden cooperation a little further.

  ‘Any other names, Talty? These men have regular parties.’

  Talty breathes in through his nose, narrows one eye, runs one finger along his chin. Decides.

  ‘Rose has been to the last few. She’ll remember more names. I can only recall two. Jenny Larkin and Maria Cranfield. Jenny’s long gone, left London months ago. Maria’s disappeared. Last I heard she was pleading her belly down in Southwark. Shame. Popular girl, she would have been.’

  Graham, his pockets strategically empty, has nothing on which he can write the names down. The four names are simple and unmemorable in their way, so he forces himself mentally to repeat them a half-dozen times. Then, he stands.

  ‘I’ll issue a warrant for Dawkins, Carrington and Cranfield. You’d best warn them if you see them.’

  ‘Treat them right, magistrate. Word’ll get back to me if you don’t. And we’ve all got our own information to trade, don’t we?’

  The grin reappears for its final performance. Graham, his blood temporarily frozen, stares at the panderer, but avoids the obvious question. He doesn’t wish to know what the information Talty might have would be. Replacing his hat, he turns back into the rank mass of the night-time Garden.

  CANTERBURY

  For two weeks during that hot July, the hop garden was haunted by Maggie Broad’s daughter. Maria wailed and moaned, and the women who worked on the farm would mutter prayers to themselves whenever they walked beneath her window. The men were angered by the sound, and complained to the hop garden’s overseer, who passed their complaints on to Henry Lodge, with no expectation that anything would change.

  And while the girl made these sad noises, her mother sat with her, sleeping when she slept, holding her hand and stroking her brow when she woke, feeding her and showing her to the farm’s water-closet, a recent addition to the property which Maggie Broad had stared at in frank amazement on the women’s first night in the farmhouse.

  ‘Do you remember the heads on the Lady Juliana?’ she asked. ‘Do you remember sitting out there above the waves, shitting into the sea, waiting for some bloody sea serpent to leap up and tear off your arse?’

  She laughed, and the sound was hard and savage, and the man of means felt a terrible discomfort.

  He had not known she had a daughter. There’d been no mention of Maria during their time in the colony. He asked about where she had sprung from. The answer was brusque.

  ‘I had her before I was transported. She was raised by a farmer and his wife in Suffolk.’

  This was where Maggie had disappeared to upon leaving the Indefatigable. She had travelled to Suffolk to find her daughter, but the daughter had gone. The farmer and his wife were dead of some disease or other. There had been no mention of Henry’s failure to meet Maggie, and somehow this made the man of means anxious.

  ‘So how did you find her?’ he asked her.

  ‘I asked people. I’m good at asking things of people.’

  This was not how he’d pictured their reunion. He’d imagined them sipping claret as the sun went down over the hop poles, he telling her of the success he’d made of himself since returning from the colony. He had no ambitions to court her; only to justify himself, to say he’d made the most of the beginning she had gifted him. He wanted to impress her, not woo her.

  But her desperate daughter was all she cared for, and there were no comfortable drinks on the terrace behind the farmhouse. Whenever he alluded to New South Wales, he received a hard and cynical response, as if she despised him for sentimentality.

  This dismissive contempt began immediately. She asked him the name of his farm, and he was reluctant to share it, but that reluctance was obvious and only inflamed her curiosity, such that she insisted.

  ‘I named it Juliana.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘You’re a bloody fool. Let me tell you about the Lady Juliana.’

  She turned away from him. He noticed this a good deal. She rarely looked directly into his face.

  ‘The Lady Juliana was two weeks out from Cape Verde when she crossed the equator,’ she said. ‘I’d been a prisoner on that bloody ship of fools for a year. The whores on board had been allowed to ply their wares at the places we docked; the pox in their loins was traded from Plymouth and Portsmouth and London and beyond, and sold for pennies and pounds to take up residence in the loins of men in Tenerife or on slavers off the coast of Africa. By the time we reached the Line, almost every seaman, including the officers, had selected a woman to share his hammock or his cabin. The captain and the master approved of it, and these women – the ones who did not call themselves whore – were glad of it. A good many of them were pregnant.

  ‘But on the night we crossed the Line, one of those doomed unborn souls died.

  ‘A sailor harpooned a dolphin, and skinned it, and one of the seamen wore the skin as a costume. He was Neptune, and two of his shipmates wore long wigs made of seaweed. They were his attendants. The men were all drunk, and they cheered when Neptune pointed out the sailors who’d never crossed the Line before to be part of their ceremony. The women watched, but then Neptune rushed at them, and they panicked. Many of them fell, and one – I do not remember her name – was by then heavy with child.

  ‘She screamed, and then she wept, and the older women knew what was happening. They took her below, and screamed for the barber-surgeon, but he was drunk and playing Neptune’s games. So the women had to do it, while the men played their games abovedecks, and down at the bottom of the ship the rats hid in the piss and shit of the bilge.

  ‘They talked of bleeding her, as someone had seen a surgeon do this once, but she screamed at that, and then the decision was made for them. The baby was dead. I put my hand on her belly, and there was no life in there. It felt as dead as a cannonball. We gave her China tea with opium drops, and the older women worked away at her stomach and slowly – it took an hour – she pushed out the body. We gave her laudanum, wrapped the baby in sailcloth, and threw it into the sea. The men did not even notice us. The father must have been among them.

  ‘But they were all its father. Every one of them, even Neptune himself.’

  The next day, he took down the sign with the hop garden’s name on it down.

  When he could, he asked her questions. So many questions: about the state of the township at Parramatta, about William Bligh and the Rum Rebellion, about the savage natives he still thought of as ‘Indians’. But she was reluctant to talk of any of these things, saying she’d left New South Wales behind, that she’d come back to England to rebuild a life with her daughter, now she had the means to do so.

  But the daughter was quite mad. He could see it. His overseer could see it. The men and women of the farm could see it. She shrieked and shout
ed, she tore at her hair and dragged at her forearms, her nails leaving long ruby-red tracks.

  This was his life for two weeks. Until at the end of the fortnight she came to him and asked for a favour. She didn’t mention his failure to perform the last task she’d asked of him. She didn’t have to.

  ‘Anything. I’ll do anything.’

  ‘Well, then, sir.’

  She stared at him, and he felt a strangely familiar squeezing touch on his head, a sense that his temples were being pushed together.

  ‘You do not need to demand anything of me,’ he said, with some effort. ‘I am in your debt.’

  ‘Perhaps you are, Henry. But I owe no one, and I would have no one owe me. So do this one thing for me, and we will part as equals.’

  ‘Anything that is in my power, I will do.’

  ‘Maria has lost her wits, Henry. She is quite out of them. She needs treatment, and she needs to be cared for. And more than this, I am not able to watch over her for a time. I must settle a certain matter which will take all my effort for the coming weeks. I need to find an appropriate place for her.’

  ‘You mean a madhouse?’

  She looked away, and that pressure on his head subsided.

  ‘I … I am sorry. I meant …’

  ‘No.’ She looked back at him again. ‘You are right. A madhouse is what she needs. And she needs to be hidden from sight during what comes next.’

  He knew nothing of madhouses. He recognised the name of only one: Bethlem. But was Bethlem not a Gehenna of madness? A palace of lunatics, throwing their excrement from one to the other, undressing themselves for display to a gawping public. How could he possibly send the daughter of this woman to that place?

  But after consulting some of the professional men in the nearby village, he had learned that Bethlem’s chief physician, one Dr Monro, had a private madhouse of his own, in which he treated the well-to-do in a more congenial atmosphere. The madhouse was in Hackney, a long way from Canterbury. But Maggie said she had her own business in Wapping, and that Hackney was by no means too far from there.

  So it was agreed. Henry would take poor, desperate Maria to Brooke House in Hackney. Maggie would not accompany them, and she added a condition: that her name not be linked to Maria’s. As far as Brooke House was concerned, Maria was the ward of the man of means. He asked her why this should be, and all she said was this: ‘She cannot be associated with what is to come next. She will recommence her life with no stain. No one can know she is my daughter, Henry. It must be as if I were never here.’

  She looked at him, and his head felt squeezed once more, and he agreed, adding that he would visit London every week during the stay of her incarceration. As July finally gave way to August, the three of them left the hop garden for London, leaving the relieved overseer to make arrangements for the coming picking season, with the blight of the mad girl lifted from the place like poison lifted from a well.

  PART THREE

  Do What You Will

  CHARCOT: Let us press again on the hysterogenic point. Here we go again. Occasionally subjects even bite their tongue, but this would be rare. Look at the arched back, which is so well described in the textbooks.

  PATIENT: Mother, I am frightened.

  Jean-Martin Charcot, Charcot the Clinician:

  The Tuesday Lessons

  THORPE

  The Pipehouse is at the south-eastern corner of the Tempest estate, at a fork in the road. It is a relatively nondescript place, and is quiet tonight as Horton approaches it in the September twilight. The sun is setting behind him, silhouetting the copses of trees and the partly hidden buildings of the fine houses which dot the swampy land. An owl lifts itself from a tree by the side of the road and flies off across a field, its long wings twitching gently in the evening breeze. There is a warm sympathy to the evening air.

  The warmth dissipates when he steps into the Pipehouse, and he wonders for a moment if he has made a terrible mistake. The interior is cramped, by the standards of London’s larger inns – the place is barely as big as the Town of Ramsgate in Wapping. It houses perhaps a half-dozen old tables and a dozen stools on its uneven wooden floor. A middle-aged woman is scrubbing down one of these tables, her bulky figure partially obscuring two men sitting behind her. There are five other men seated at different tables, none of them speaking to each other, most of them looking at their jugs of beer with the same mournful intensity they might adopt when watching a pet die. Several of them smoke pipes, and the air is thick and grey with tobacco odours. The fat woman stands straight as Horton steps inside, and he sees the two men sat behind her. He recognises them from the road the previous day, the friends of Peter Gowing. The labourer who had reproached him, and his embarrassed friend.

  ‘Good evening to you,’ he says, to the woman. She nods and walks to the little wooden bar. He follows her, ignoring the stares of the men around him. No one says anything. He asks for a tankard of ale, and she pours him one from a big brown cracked jug. From somewhere inside the place he hears a distant crash and a shouted profanity, and the woman stares at him coldly, as if daring him to mention it. He thanks her, turns, and sits down at the same table as Peter Gowing’s friends. He doesn’t look at them at first, staring carefully one by one at the other men in the bar, but it only takes a few moments for a hand to put itself on his shoulder and suggest, impertinently, that he turn his head.

  He does so, sipping from his tankard as he goes, and faces the angry redfaced labourer from the road.

  ‘You make very free with your hands, sir,’ he says, softly. ‘Do you need reminding of my station?’

  Hob smiles, and leaves his hand on Horton’s shoulder. There is an intensity to the colour in his cheeks. He is drunk.

  ‘I would like,’ he begins, then stops, frowning slightly. He belches hugely, then starts again. ‘I would like to know what you think you are doing.’

  Horton smiles, mildly.

  ‘I am drinking ale, sir. And if you do not remove your hand, I shall shortly be arresting you.’

  The other man at the table reaches over and pulls the redfaced man away. There is no complaint. Hob looks at his friend as if he were some species of elephant, belches again, and looks back at Horton, happily. More than drunk. Incapacitated.

  Horton turns to the man’s friend, who looks as miserable as he did on the road yesterday. He is narrow, red-haired, his hands small but roughened, his face as pocked as the wall of Newgate. Horton nods at him, and the man nods carefully back.

  No one in the place has anything to say, so Horton fills the silence himself.

  ‘My name’s Charles Horton. These two men have already met me, but you others have not, though you may have heard tell of my visit. I am looking into the recent events at Thorpe Lee House.’

  ‘The witchery, you mean,’ says the fat woman at the bar.

  ‘I mean no such thing,’ says Horton. ‘There have been episodes of trespass, damage to property and even attempted murder at Thorpe Lee House which I am seeking to uncover the cause of.’

  ‘’Tis done,’ says one of the men at the tables.

  ‘’Twas the witch, Elizabeth Hook,’ says another.

  ‘Witchery,’ says the fat woman, again, emphatically.

  ‘And yet – why?’ says Horton. No one answers that. ‘Why should anyone wish mischief on Thorpe Lee House?’

  ‘Witches need no reason,’ mutters another man.

  ‘Do they not? I have heard it differently. Those accused of witchcraft in the past did not do so out of pure malice. It was always in response to a slight, a refusal of help, a dismissal from a kitchen door. Is this not true?’

  No reply comes to that.

  ‘So why should it be that Elizabeth Hook wanted mischief done to Thorpe Lee House? To Miss Tempest Graham?’

  ‘It’s a rotten, wicked place,’ said the woman.

  ‘How so, madam?’

  She scowls at being addressed directly.

  ‘They live as man and wife up there. Him and
her and that poor girl. ’Tis a bad place.’

  A few of the men nod. Horton thinks that the villagers probably all agree on this.

  ‘But a witch is evil too, is she not? Why would something evil visit mischief on another evil? What is the motivation?’

  Hob belches again and giggles slightly. Horton looks at his short friend, who is staring into his tankard as if it held cosmic truths.

  ‘But he seen ’er!’ says one of the men. ‘Bill seen ’er!’

  ‘Bill?’

  There is a shrinking of the small man’s shoulders, almost involuntary, that gives him away. Bill is the man sitting beside him, it would seem.

  ‘What did you see, Bill?’

  No reply.

  ‘Bill, if you saw something, you are bound to …’

  ‘I didn’t see nothin’. Not a bloody thing.’

  His voice is unexpectedly deep in one so lithe and sinewy. His slight hands are clenched into rough-red balls.

  ‘Well, let us start with where you were when you didn’t see anything.’

  ‘In the vicar’s field, just down the lane.’

  ‘So you did see something?’

  Bill’s uneducated face is angry and weak and confused.

  ‘I saw ’er bloody fly, didn’t I!’

  Bill spits it out, straight into Horton’s face, as if he were reacting to a taunt from a child.

  ‘She flew along the top of the ’edge, all the way back into the village. She’s a bloody witch! Elizabeth ’ook is a bloody witch!’

  A little the worse for ale, Horton walks down the lane a way, towards the village, leaving Thorpe Lee House behind him. Bill had calmed somewhat once his revelation had been extracted, enough anyway to describe the spot he’d sat in when Elizabeth Hook had flown through the air above his head. He finds it shortly – an open section of hedgerow, giving onto a fallow field. It is full dark now, with no moon, but the sky is astonishingly clear, such that the stars cast their own light, enough almost to make a shadow. He remembers standing outside a Ratcliffe Highway house, reading the markings on a coin in the moonlight.