And after all, the truth is this: the women might not even be in the area any longer. They might have wandered a mile or two, into the City or over to Lambeth, and be in an entirely different jurisdiction, one with no interest in Sybarites or their whores.
He thinks of Horton, out there in the Surrey darkness. Has he spoken to Sir Henry yet? Is Sarah safe? And what of little Ellen, that dark half-daughter, barely seen but, in a twisted, sardonic paradox, deeply loved? She is not even his daughter. And yet, she is.
A whore walks past, screaming at an unseen fellow. Somebody’s daughter. Perhaps, God help her, somebody’s wife.
The night-walking women of London, screaming from the streets, owned by no man but subject to all men.
Aaron Graham sips, and waits for something to happen.
THORPE
Charles Horton finds himself lying in a field in the dark. The earth is wet against his cheek and edges his mouth, which drools into the soil. He is as one with the field, as damp as an old leaf, as tired as a winter tree, as confused as a lunatic.
First things first. Who am I?
I am Charles Horton.
Well, then. And where am I?
I am in a field.
And where is the field?
Thorpe. It must be in Thorpe. I was in Thorpe.
And how might I have arrived in this field?
He turns his cheek, and a stab of pain as bright as lightning supplies part of the answer. Still lying in the soil, he brings one hand to his face and presses his cheek, releasing another crackle of pain, as vivid as the spark from a Leyden jar.
I have been assaulted. I have been left here.
But by whom?
He remembers.
After leaving the two cooks in the church – the woman, and her cunning nephew – he’d gone looking for the village constable to make arrangements for their arrest. He’d begun with the Rev. Leigh-Bennett, who as rector of the church must know of his parish’s constable. Leigh-Bennett had not been at home, but his manservant had willingly given Horton the name of the constable: Benjamin Ridley. Where might Ridley be found? Either at home, or in the Pipehouse. The manservant’s grimace suggested to Horton that Ridley would most likely be in the latter, presumably already drunk, in keeping with the tradition of many rural constables.
It had been late afternoon, getting on towards evening, when he’d made his way to the Pipehouse. He’d planned to arrange things with Ridley (the constable’s state permitting) and then head straight for Thorpe Lee House. He would begin clearing Stephen Moore’s secret chamber of cunning potions, and would demand an immediate audience with Miss Ellen Tempest Graham.
Ridley had indeed been in the Pipehouse, and was indeed drinking, though he was still largely sober. He was sitting with four or five other men, none of whom welcomed Horton’s attempt to extricate their friend from the inn. His old fat friend Hob, the labourer from the road who’d seen him with Elizabeth Hook days before, had also been in the place, and was drunk, though not as incapacitated as on Horton’s first visit. No, Hob was this time more than capable of expressing violent disapproval of Horton’s return to that place, and made physical threats as soon as he saw him.
‘Oi, here he is!’ Hob had shouted as Horton stepped in. ‘The London Bloody Wizard! Have you arrested her then? That witch? Is she going to bloody burn for all this?’
Horton had tried to ignore him, and had asked whether Benjamin Ridley was in the place. A few fingers pointed at the surprisingly old, shrinking figure sat drinking with half-a-dozen others, and Horton went to speak to him directly. But Hob got in his way.
‘I’m a-talking to thee, Constable Bloody London!’ he said, stepping in front of Horton and pushing him in the chest with a pewter tankard. ‘Is that fucking witch under lock and key? Or am I to go out and drag the bitch out to a tree now?’
Horton, in full knowledge that he was here to arrange exactly what the fat labourer was demanding, nevertheless pushed him out of the way. He was not about to discuss his plans with one such as he.
‘Ridley,’ he began, ‘I am Charles—’
He was grabbed from behind and whirled around, and a fat but solid fist collided with the side of his face. He felt something crack, and the pain brought back hard memories of naval splinters and naval bones cracking under enemy attack, and barber-surgeons below-decks snapping damaged limbs in twain. But he did not go down. No, he swung his own punch, and felt the labourer’s own face give way beneath it, and then the fat man was lying silently on the floor, and every face in the Pipehouse was on him.
He spoke, and every word brought agonies in his face, but he spoke still.
‘Ridley, I am Charles Horton of the Thames River Police Office. I am sent here by Aaron Graham, magistrate of Bow Street and a justice of the peace in Surrey as well as in Westminster, to investigate certain events at Thorpe Lee House. I need you to arrest Elizabeth Hook and her nephew Stephen Moore immediately; I believe they can be found at Thorpe church, if you be quick.’
No one said anything for a moment, then two of the men with Ridley laughed. Neither sound was pleasant. Ridley himself looked miserable, and sunk his old, bearded face into his beer, and refused to look at Horton directly.
‘It’s no use arresting Elizabeth Hook,’ a voice said, but Horton could not identify from where it came. His head was beginning to feel light and airy, and he felt the floor shift slightly beneath his feet.
‘She’s a witch,’ said another voice.
‘That she is. No sense in arresting a witch.’
‘She wants drowning.’
‘Nah. That’s for testing what she be, drowning. We know she’s a witch. She needs burning.’
‘That’s it. Burning.’
‘My Janey always said we’d have to do this, one day soon.’
‘She’s a witch. No doubting she’s a witch.’
One by one, the men in the room stood up from their chairs, said their piece, and waited for their comrades. Horton watched them as they did so, saw the manifestation of a brave battalion, a regiment made fearless by drink and fellowship and made drunk by fear and ale.
‘No, no, no, you cannot.’
His voice seemed to him to come from one of the other men, not from him, so separate from himself did he now begin to feel. He lurched to the only man in the room left sitting. Benjamin Ridley, the constable. He fell onto the solid table before him, unsettling the drinks on it, casting two jugs to the floor, and leaning across it grabbed Ridley’s ancient labourer’s jacket, the smell of fields and shit threaded through its ancient stitching.
‘Ridley, stop them! They must not!’
Ridley looked like he might cry, shaking his head, helpless. He never spoke a word, as one by one the men walked out, in silent determination.
Horton followed them out into the road. The stars danced in the sky, whirling and collapsing to their own silent music. Horton half-ran, half-stumbled through the crowd of men, grabbing shoulders, twisting arms, cajoling and pleading and shouting and threatening. But before long they became tired of him, and two of them grabbed his arms and span him through a gap in the hedgerow, such that he fell down a small inclination in the ground and collapsed, face down, into Thorpe’s newly enclosed earth.
And now he finds himself again, here in the fallow earth.
How long has he lain here? Have they already found Elizabeth Hook? He manages to lift himself onto all-fours, his face hanging down like a cowed dog, and then, the pain from his cheek now infecting every part of him above the waist, he turns to sit and face the hedgerow.
He recognises it immediately. The same place as he sat in, the place where the man from the inn – Bill, had it been? Yes, Bill – had seen the ‘witch’ flying through the air.
Can he smell burning on the wind? Can he hear men shouting?
No. But he can hear a horse approaching down the road. And then, to his surprise, he sees a witch flying along the top of the hedge. She appears from his right – from the direction of T
horpe Lee House – and she is going fast. The sound of horse hooves fills his ears. Her black hair is streaming behind her, and her face is set towards the village. The high wagon she sits on looks like the one he’d seen her on earlier today, behind the woods at Thorpe Lee House, during his encounter with Miss Ellen. The wagon is so high that only its driver can be seen along the row of the hedge, such that she might look to one with too much alcohol in his blood to be flying.
She flashes before his eyes, along the line of the hedge, powered by the sound of hooves. The unknown witch from the woods rushes away from him and into the darkness, towards Thorpe.
She is, thinks Horton, riding away from Thorpe Lee House.
WESTMINSTER
The woman is running, running hard, but her skirts and her shoes make things difficult for her. Even through the noise of Covent Garden’s streets, William Jealous can hear the noise of her frantic breathing, an urgent three-four waltz of halfswallowed shrieks and desperate swallows, so much more weary than the hearty two-four march of his own powerful lungs. As she runs, she calls out helplessly to others on the street, begging their help.
‘He’s upon me! He’s upon me! Help me! Help me!’
But they are going too fast. Even when a bystander tries to help – when a streetwalker sticks out a boot, or a pimp emerges from the shadows with a cudgel, or a gentleman out for the theatre or for whoring raises a gloved fist – it is a mere matter of swerving and avoiding before continuing the pursuit.
He is ten yards away. Nine yards away. Eight yards …
Whoomph.
He sprawls onto the cobblestones, horse-shit and worse squelching up his hands and arms. He just avoids putting his face down into the mire, when an unknown number of feet start kicking his legs and sides.
‘What’s it about, eh?’
‘’What you up to?’
‘Fucking bastard.’
‘Leave ’er alone.’
He springs up in half a second. The voices are all female, the faces angry but now afraid, because he is standing before them, young and strong and unaffected by their pathetic violence. A pimp begins to appear behind them, so he casually slaps one of the whores, hard, around the face. They turn to their screaming companion, and he turns as well, back to the pursuit.
Twenty yards now. Not much ground lost. Nineteen. Eighteen.
She stumbles momentarily, her side caught against the arm of a costermonger’s barrow. He is almost upon her. She screams, but almost silently – there is no air left in her lungs. She runs again, but within twenty steps he has her. Now things could become difficult. They have stopped running, so it is easier for bystanders to intervene, to knock him about the head and try to release her. So he must think quickly.
A door opens onto the street. Light floods out of it. He wraps his arms round the whore’s shoulders and lets their momentum carry them into and through the door, knocking down the old man who had been on his way out, sending him back into the house.
She struggles, but he holds her and with a foot slams the door closed. Jealous hears people knocking at the door, he hears the old man start to shout, and he hopes what he says next will calm the situation.
‘Bow Street officer! I am a patrolman! I have a warrant to arrest this woman!’
He shouts it at the old man, and hopes it is loud enough for the women in the street outside to hear.
‘Rose Dawkins,’ he says to the woman lying on the floor. ‘I’ve a warrant to arrest you.’
She bites and scratches and screams, but eventually Rose Dawkins relents, after a fashion. It takes ten minutes to extricate themselves from the old man’s home. When they finally emerge onto the street, Jealous notes that his pursuit of the prostitute has taken them deep into St Giles.
This brings its own troubles – St Giles is notoriously poor, and vicious – but also a respite from the more crowded streets around Covent Garden. No one comes to St Giles for entertainment. The only people here are the ones who live here, a dozen to a room, crowded into buildings which were built for the rich but which the rich slowly abandoned as they moved west, allowing landlords to steal in and partition rooms and seal off hallways, squeezing every rentable bit of value out of every nook and cranny.
William Jealous grew up in St Giles. His father, the Bow Street Runner, had been a hard man. St Giles had held no fears for him, and it holds none for his son, either. And a whore is a whore.
She has stopped struggling, at least physically. But St Giles holds as little fear for her as it does for Jealous – and her words are spiked with defiance.
‘Fucking constable. Fucking nonsense. You’re no fucking constable. What are you, fifteen? You ever fucked a woman, you ginger shit? Have you? Want to fuck me now, I can see it in your piggy little ginger eyes, you dirty fucking pig. Come on then. Do me here. Do me. I’ll cut your fucking prick off, you dirty—’
He slaps her, hard, with his free hand, never letting go with his other. He is panting and, yes, astonishingly aroused. He could fuck her. He could take her, here, down this alley, up against the wall, a quick one while no one’s about, and then get on with business.
She starts speaking, and he slaps her again. He feels something in his head – a definite force, pushing him away, as if someone had grabbed the back of his collar and was yanking him backwards. She is staring at him, her green eyes full of hatred and intense concentration, and he replies with violence. He shoves her against a wall, and, spitting into her face with the passion of it, tells her the story of the Sybarites, of the men being guarded in their houses this very night, and of his search for her companion in whoring, Elizabeth Carrington. And at the end of it, he slaps her again. That feeling of being pulled away switches off like a candle in an open window.
When he lets go of her, she slides down the wall to sit on the turd-encrusted cobbles. Her old tart’s skirts ripple around her knees like uneaten vegetables thrown on the ground. She puts her head on her arms and knees and stays like that for a while, not crying. She has never cried, not once, during this whole performance.
She sniffs, loudly, and then she looks up at him.
‘Come on, then,’ she says. ‘I know where she is.’
She stands.
‘But if you hit me again, I’ll kick your prick off.’
The lodging house where Elizabeth Carrington lives is on the borders of St Giles and Covent Garden, in that area which still retains some gentility, where whores can take a room for relatively little money and bring back gentlemen without having to climb over dirty children and begging adults on the stairs. Beds can be paid for by the hour, 18d. to 2s., in this part of town.
Rose hasn’t seen Elizabeth since the Sybarites party. She refuses to speak of the party other than to confirm her attendance, and Lizzie’s. She’s been down in Kent the last two days, had been planning to pick hops, needed to earn some money, but they’re not ready for pickers yet. How long is this stupid jaunt going to take, anyway?
The house is on Brownlow Street, just around the corner from Drury Lane. It’s not an enormous place, probably no more than fifty years old, and may at one time have housed a lawyer or a doctor. Now, its half-dozen rooms house four whores and a pimp while the sixth, according to Rose, is let by a peer of the realm who brings whores back here, three or four at a time, undresses them, and paints on their skin.
The door to the street is open, and they go inside. The vestibule is scruffy and noxious, the shit of the street trodden through onto the stone floor. Vestiges of the house’s former status remain: the line of the dado rail, the unbroken panelling at the back by the stairs, a painting, hung askew, of a fat man and a horse. Rose leads them upstairs.
She waits while he knocks at Elizabeth’s door. There is no answer, so he knocks again. Still no answer. He tries the door. It is unlocked. Rose tries to stop him (out of fear or propriety, he cannot tell), but he opens the door and steps inside.
The room has been emptied by persons unknown. All that remains is a bed, its linen stol
en, a chest of drawers, opened and ransacked, a chair and, in the chair, the stiff, lifeless body of Elizabeth Carrington. Rose, as she turns to walk into the room, stifles a cry and backs away from the open door. He grabs her arm and pulls her into the room.
‘What? No, not here!’
But he shakes his head, pushes her against the wall by the door, and closes the door. He pulls a bolt across.
‘Stay there.’
He turns back to the room, and approaches Elizabeth. He walks carefully, as if trying not to wake her. Her hands are drooped over the side of the chair, and something white reflects what little light there is. A cut-throat, dropped on the floor beneath her right hand. Which means …
Yes. The left wrist and hand are darkly smeared, as if she’d sunk her hand in oil up to the wrist. A puddle of this dark stuff swells on the floor beneath this hand.
Self-destruction. And not too long ago. But long enough for the locals to have heard of it, and to have let themselves in, and helped themselves to whatever goods poor Elizabeth Carrington had managed to secure. And then let themselves out again.
From the next-door room, a slap, a gasp, and a deep, male chuckle.
THORPE
The witch is not on a broom, of course. She never was. He realises this as he half-walks, half-runs to the house, his cheek seemingly full of knives and needles. She is riding a wagon. Sitting on top, riding along, she appeared from where he was lying to be flying along the top of the hedge. Such must have been Bill’s view, and his mistake. Appearances can deceive. The mind can play tricks on the understanding.
It seems to represent something important, this thought. But he has no time to interrogate it, for a glow appears at the side of the lane where the house is, and shouts are growing in volume, and then he stumbles into the gardens of Thorpe Lee House and upon a scene from another century.
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