The burning of a witch.
The fire has been set in the middle of the lawn in front of the house; at the centre of this lawn, incongruously, stands a lonely beech tree. Its straight, thickish trunk has been dressed all around with wood from other trees. Its branches have lost a few early leaves, with gaps showing against the moonlit sky; a giant scarecrow which is losing its hair.
At the bottom of the tree, tied to the trunk and with wood gathered up to her waist, is Elizabeth Hook.
Do they mean to burn the tree, and her?
The glow he’d seen from the road does not, yet, come from the pyre. A dozen or more men are standing around the tree, shouting, and each of them carries a torch which blazes with medieval intensity. They wave these torches at Elizabeth, and then, one by one, they hold their torches to the wood. The flames from the torches dance across the front of the house, as if the building itself were goading them on.
He shouts at them, and the effort seems to rip his cheek bone in two. He begins to run, thinking as he does about the woman on the wagon riding away.
She was here, she started this.
Elizabeth Hook screams, and he thinks of the gun deck in a naval battle, of wood chips flying through the air and into skin, eyes and mouths, of enemy cannon balls connecting with the blood and bone of his shipmates, of the screams of pain, the agonies of heat, and he can feel that heat on his face as he draws near to the pyre. His stomach, empty of food, turns over and he vomits up bile and bitterness into the earth, and falls to his knees, shouting at the men to stop, desist, or face the consequence.
He pukes again, and again, and again, as if he could expel the sight of that burning, the smell of the old cook’s flesh blistering in the flame, until his belly is only emptiness, and he pukes up even that, pushing the hollowness out of himself as if he could turn himself inside-out and show his corruption to the world.
And then there is nothing left, and he looks up again.
The beech tree stands solitary and untouched in the centre of the lawn. The air is cold, and damp, and resolutely unburned. He is alone.
For a moment, his brain is as empty as his stomach: a void, in which understanding can gain no purchase.
A vision. A phantasy. A view of the unreal.
Am I then indeed mad?
A shout from Thorpe Lee House, or more of a scream. But not the scream of a frightened woman; this is the angry, pained shout of a man.
Given how filled the air was with screams and angry shouts just minutes before, the countryside is now silent, and the shout from the house is thus shockingly loud.
Did his brain really invent all that has just transpired? The fire, the smells, the shape on the carriage? Did he see the woman from the woods (the witch) riding along the road, or did he not?
The empty darkness of the lawn gives no answer. It seems to contain more fear, even, than those blood-drenched visions. There is a thick possibility to the shadows within the woods behind the lawn, drawn deeper by the sudden uncertainty of his own perception. Is he still dreaming? Is he still asleep? Where might he be?
He walks up to the front door of the house and finds it open. Servants are milling about the vestibule in night-attire and he hears a woman – he thinks it must be Sarah Graham – wailing and shouting from the drawing room. Horton thinks what lies before him must be of the same species as the witch-burning. A phantom of perception, painted beneath the flickering eyelids of a man who is even now asleep in his own bed. Perhaps not even here. Perhaps in Lower Gun Alley, Wapping, his pretty, clever wife asleep beside him, and not in a madhouse, far beyond his reach, the warmth of her body as familiar and comfortable as the shape of his own face.
But his own face is misshapen. His cheek is swollen and full of agonies. He did not imagine that. His mouth is full of the sour taste of choked-up bile. As he steps into Thorpe Lee House, his knuckles smack into the doorframe (he is by no means steady upon his feet), and the pain – low, sharp, definitive – is as real as real can ever claim to be.
He wishes to go to bed.
Jane Ackroyd rushes past him, fetching something from the kitchen for her wailing mistress in the drawing room. He grabs her by the upper arm, and she shrieks. He notes that no one, until now, has realised he has returned.
‘What is this commotion, girl?’
She stares at him, her eyes wide and red and exhausted of the tears she must already have shed.
‘The constable!’ she shouts. ‘The constable!’
From somewhere in the house, a roar. Sir Henry is still here.
‘It’s Miss Ellen, sir,’ says Jane, and he drops her arm immediately. ‘She’s tried to do away with the master!’
PART FOUR
The Woman of Means
We may without exaggeration assert that a common Prostitute is, in a Community, an Evil, not dissimilar to a Person infected with the Plague; who, miserable himself, is daily communicating the Contagion to those, that will propagate still wider the fatal Malady.
An Account of the Institution of the Lock Asylum for the Reception of Penitent Female Patients when Discharged Cured from the Lock Hospital,
ANON, 1792
WESTMINSTER
The regularity of Westminster’s finest houses, it occurs to Graham, is worthy of a book.
What else can explain the fact that five astonished servants have appeared at Bow Street, accompanied by officers, within the space of an hour? Between 7 am, when he is woken in Great Queen Street by one of the officers, and 8 am they show up, one by one, their pale astonished faces disbelieving of the stories they bring.
The butler to Algernon Lincoln, son of the Duke of Handforth, was the first to arrive, accompanied by a patrolman, Daniel Bishop.
Something has happened to my master. Something terrible. He is dead in his bedchamber.
Was he wearing a satyr’s mask? He was.
Within ten minutes, a footman appears from the house of Sir Thomas Mackworth, Bt, despatched to Bow Street with a Runner, John Nelson Lavender. Sir Thomas, he who had angrily refused any protection from Bow Street, is currently lying face down in his room, his head staved in by a small marble statue from Tuscany of two entwined naked women.
Is he wearing a satyr’s mask? He is.
Representatives from the houses of Samuel Lake (second brother of Viscount Lake, and a claimed descendant of Sir Lancelot) and Henry Harcourt Palmer bring their shocked faces to Bow Street at the same time, both accompanied by patrolmen. Lake is currently pinned to the wall of his bedchamber by a spear from Guinea, secured for him by a slave-trader relative, and now securing him through the throat. Harcourt Palmer is unmarked but dead, apparently smothered, on his bed.
Satyr’s masks? Yes, in both cases.
The final arrival is the valet to James, Earl of Maidstone, the only son and heir of the Marquess of Tonbridge and the only one of the Sybarites to be married (to Miss Fabbiano; they have two daughters, who are currently residing in Sissinghurst in Kent). The Earl is a late riser, hence the tardy discovery of his body, its throat slashed, sitting on a commode in the corner of his bedchamber. His hands have been cut off and left by his side.
He was wearing a satyr’s mask.
Outside the Bow Street office, Graham can hear the metropolis waking up. It will be a loud, bursting, vicious sort of day.
BROOKE HOUSE
It has been another bad night in the madhouse. Abigail thinks of her bed in the adjacent cell. It is amazing how attractive something so ordinarily awful can be after hours spent in an uncomfortable chair in a different room.
Maria is sleeping, lying on her side, the strait waistcoat forcing her into an odd position. How can she sleep with that awful thing holding her? It has been a month now since the two of them arrived at Brooke House. Maria has been enchained like this for the whole of that time.
She had been reading to Maria when the night turned bad. Reading aloud is the best way of calming the irregular motion of her own thoughts, never mind those of Maria. Food was
brought to them by John Burroway. No other nurses appeared, nor did Bryson. They had been placed in a weird isolation. Abigail half-suspected they were being watched and listened to, though how this can be she could not imagine.
She read, dozed, ate, drank. Maria remained calm. Abigail herself became agitated as darkness began to fall, because for a terrible few minutes she saw the Pacific princess, removed from her own skull and sitting on the bed beside Maria, watching them both, and then whispering into Maria’s ear.
‘What does she say?’ Abigail had asked, her voice stretched, her blood cold. Maria had tipped her head onto one side, and had spoken one of the very few sentences Abigail heard from her that day; the first sentence she had spoken directly to her, unmediated by some lunatic raving.
‘You see things too, I think.’
She sounded like a milkmaid: a beautiful, slender Suffolk milkmaid with rough hands, exquisite hair, and eyes as old as driftwood.
‘But the things are not real. Not like the things I see.’
Night deepened, and then the bad things started again, in the exact same way as they had three nights before. Abigail had fallen asleep in the chair. She was awoken by a single, sharp scream, and again it was the horrific, unexpected yell of a male patient, from the ground floor.
That single scream had been followed by Pandaemonium. She ran to the open door of Maria’s cell, and poked her head out. The corridor was empty, but it sounded like an agonised shriek was rising from the cell of every male patient, a shriek which wrenched sympathetic horror from the breast – for what kind of terrible fear could be sparking these cries? And how could it be seen from within the four solid walls of an asylum cell?
She turned back into the room, and a vision of a man in a mask being run through with a spear slashed before her eyes and was gone. Maria sat on her bed, upright as a piano, her eyes wide and unseeing, her breath pumping in and out like a bellows. She was chanting something, something quiet and repetitive and hurried, and it was so hard to hear that Abigail took some time to make it out. It was a familiar chant.
‘Tie his wrists and tie his feet, Spill his guts out on the sheet. Tie his wrists and tie his feet, Spill his guts out on the sheet. Tie his wrists and tie his feet, Spill his guts out on the sheet.’
‘Maria? Maria, my dear? What is this?’
She might as well have been speaking to a machine. Maria’s voice and her breath were as regular as a steam engine, and as remorseless; there was no change in emphasis to her words. She remembered what Maria herself had said about the demon that dwelled inside her.
And she heard it from outside, as well. Standing there in the open door of the cell, she heard the shrieks and cries of the men begin to fall back into one another, until a single rhythmic chant thrummed through the stone floors of that rambling old building, every male patient’s scream turned into the same marching tune.
Tie his wrists and tie his feet, Spill his guts out on the sheet. Tie his wrists and tie his feet, Spill his guts out on the sheet. Tie his wrists and tie his feet, Spill his guts out on the sheet.
Like slaves on a galley, she thought.
It went on for some time, this incessant chanting. And then, suddenly, Maria stopped. One by one, the male voices accompanying her fell away, until silence once again made its residence in Brooke House. Abigail remained standing, not daring to approach Maria.
‘Maria. My dear. Was that you?’
The girl had looked at her. She had started to cry.
‘Oh, my dear Lord. Oh my God. What has she done?’ Maria asked. ‘And why can I see it so clearly?’ And she fell into exhausted, whispering prayer.
Dr Bryson appears at the door of Maria’s cell. He looks exhausted, as exhausted as Abigail feels. He also, notes Abigail with some grim satisfaction, looks afraid.
When he sees Maria is sleeping, his pointed little face eases slightly, but not entirely. He does not step into the cell. Abigail notes all these things, and remembers them. She has much business with Dr Bryson, and one day soon she may be able to transact it.
‘She slept throughout the night?’ he asks, not once looking at Abigail, his face set towards Maria, watching for any flicker of the eye, any sign of approaching wakefulness. ‘Throughout that terrible disturbance?’
He does not know what she did. He did not hear her.
Like any practised natural philosopher, Abigail feels a mild contempt for Bryson’s failures of observation and imagination. She realises, fully, why he wants her to keep watch over Maria. He knows that Maria was able to force him to do things against his will – John Burroway, also. But he has not made the connection between the three disturbed nights at the madhouse and the sleeping girl who rests, held in place by that dreadful prison canvas.
‘She slept,’ Abigail lies. She is not his experimental assistant.
‘You heard the disturbance?’
‘It was terribly loud.’
‘And yet she slept.’
It is a question, but Abigail does not answer it. She will not be interrogated.
She is about to ask if she might write to Charles, but she knows what the answer will be. Bryson is losing his grip on whatever is taking place inside these walls. He has little conception of Maria or of her capacities. And the events of the last night had badly scared her, not least those muttered questions that followed the cessation of that awful chant.
What has she done? And why can I see it?
Who was she speaking of?
‘Dr Bryson, Maria’s sheets need changing, and she needs to be washed. As do I. It begins to smell in here, and that will not make either of us comfortable.’
He looks away from Maria for the first time, and back at her. That flat lustful sheen comes back into his eyes. She throttles an urge to spit at him.
‘I will send John Burroway up shortly.’
He turns away, and she smiles for the first time in days. A stupid man will always be vulnerable to a clever lie.
THORPE
The sunlight falls across his bed, a blade of white light enclosed by two dark parallelograms. He nearly wakes, but then subsides again, sliding down that blade of light and off into the darkness at the side.
He is climbing a rope ladder lashed to the side of a black ship, but the gunwale never gets any closer. Somebody up on deck is letting the rope ladder out, hand-over-hand, and he climbs and climbs and climbs but never gets any higher, suspended against the hull of the black ship. Inside, he can hear men and women moaning.
He is in a corridor in an old house. Doors run off the corridor on one side, and windows off the other. The windows look out onto tidy gardens. There are women in the rooms, and one of them is Abigail. He runs up and down the corridor, opening doors, and in every one of them he sees an older woman with long black hair and green eyes and a snake-like scar running down her jaw.
He wonders if he is, at last, going mad.
He cannot wake up.
But then he does, and remembers.
He remembers it all.
He emerges from his bedroom into the swirling, half-real morning, his cheek feeling like it has been cut with a hot poker, and immediately encounters Crowley, the butler.
‘A letter has been delivered for you.’
The butler, like the house itself, has a sheepish air.
‘May I have it?’
‘I left it for you in the kitchen. You may help yourself to some food. The servants are occupied, and we no longer have a cook.’
‘My thanks to you.’
Crowley walks on down the landing, slowly and carefully, as if he were on hot coals. Horton follows him down. He stops at the front door of the house, and steps outside for a moment, giving no immediate thought to the diversion. He sees the lonely tree, the one that had been aflame last night, though only in his addled mind. He sees a darker patch, to the right of the so-called hag track which O’Reilly had dug up, how many days before? An extraordinary dream, from last night’s black, bubbles up to his sense. Crowley and Moo
re chopping up a deer on the lawn. They were both naked, and laughing.
In the kitchen, the letter sits on the big central table, but his stomach demands feeding. His breakfast consists of bread, cheese and milk. It looks like it has been standing there for a good deal of time. He imagines something asleep inside the milk jug, the top of one claw visible above the surface.
Mrs Chesterton bustles through the kitchen, saying nothing to him, shaking keys as she goes. Another memory from last night: Mrs Chesterton singing something in Latin on the landing, and banging the walls as she did so.
He pours himself a glass of water from a jug and opens the letter. It is from Robert Brown.
32 Soho Square, Westminster
Sept. 7
Horton
I acknowledge receipt of your note, and the materials contained within it. It was fortunate that it reached me – I am shortly to travel to Paris with Sir J—, to investigate the current state of France’s botanical facilities following the cessation of hostilities with that nation.
Given the imminence of that trip, I have had little time to inspect the material you sent to me, though I suspected instantly what it might be. If the plant is what I believe it to be, it is passing strange, the coincidence of it – for I believe the plant to be of a kind the aboriginal people of New South Wales call bedgery or pitchery. I have only seen it on two previous occasions, both while travelling in New Holland and New South Wales on the voyage of the Investigator. On both these occasions I did not see the plant in the wild, only in the state in which it is consumed by the natives. It may well be the same plant as I identified in my 1810 Prodromus as Duboisia myoporoides, though I suspect not. I believe the plants may be related, but are not the same species.
It is a mysterious plant, and I wish I might have done more to investigate it. All I know is this: the aboriginals use the plant for purposes of intoxication, of themselves and of animals. It is said that the plant plays some part in their strange religious practice, called the Dreaming, of which we know very little. It is also used for hunting, or so I am told – it can be added in quantities to a waterhole and will stupefy the animals, particularly the Emu, such that the creatures become easier to catch.
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