Savage Magic

by Lloyd Shepherd

  ‘I am a constable of the River Police.’

  ‘There’s no river here, constable.’

  The giant shape doesn’t chuckle or sneer. It’s a simple matter of fact that there is no river here.

  ‘I am investigating a matter which relates to the deaths of several gentlemen in Covent Garden.’

  The silhouette moves forward and its face takes shape in the dim moonlight. It is a large face, with the puzzled expression of a child who has been told something mystifying, its mouth open.

  ‘Why were they killed in the garden?’

  The giant’s confused face waits for an answer. Horton sees the kind of conversation he must have.

  ‘That is what I am trying to find out. Now, you’re a powerful fellow, are you not? I need your help, you see. I think there might be someone in here who can help me understand why they were killed in the garden.’

  ‘Do you mean Dr Bryson?’

  ‘Yes. That’s who I mean. Dr Bryson. He’s an expert in these matters. I need to speak to him quickly.’

  ‘He’s not been himself. Dr Bryson. He’s been worried about the woman upstairs. The one in the strait waistcoat. The one who gets into your head.’

  The rain seems to drop several degrees in temperature. The giant turns his head up to the top of the building, up and away to the left.

  ‘She’s up there now?’ asks Horton, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  The giant turns back to him.

  ‘She can make people do things she wants them to do. She did it to me. I remember. She makes people forget things. But I remember. Why do I remember?’

  ‘I don’t know. But perhaps I could ask Dr Bryson.’

  ‘Yes. Dr Bryson.’

  ‘What’s your name, fellow?’

  ‘It’s Burroway. John Burroway.’

  ‘Well, John Burroway. I think Dr Bryson will want to speak to me. I think I can help him with this woman you speak of.’

  ‘Did she kill the men in the garden? But no! That’s stupid! She’s in here. How could she kill them if she’s in here? Unless,’ and the giant leans in towards the gate, and whispers, ‘unless she got someone else to do it for her.’

  ‘Let me in, John. You must let me in now.’

  And with that, the giant pulls out a key and unlocks the chain around the gate, and lets Horton inside. As they walk to the house, Horton asks him.

  ‘Do you stand at the gate a lot, John?’

  ‘Yes, constable, I do. Most days and most nights, when I’m not doing things inside for Dr Bryson.’

  ‘Have you ever seen a woman with long black hair outside? On a cart? On her own?’

  ‘Oh yes. I see her all the time. She scares me.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘Yes. She’s got an angry face.’

  ‘Have you seen her tonight?’

  A long pause as the giant considers.

  ‘She’s inside. But she doesn’t want me to remember that.’

  Horton has visualised the interior of the madhouse which contains his wife many times over the past month. It has become a Gothic extremity in his lonely imagination, as massive as Bethlem, as dirty as Newgate, filled with the chatter of lunatics and the rattling of chains.

  The reality is quieter and yet more suffocating, as if he were walking into the interior of a doll’s house owned by a stupid yet pedantic child. The layout is confused, as if different houses were contained within the exterior. There is a sense of imprisonment here, but it is a distant one, out of sight. The vestibule and drawing room are tidy but nondescript.

  The place reminds him strongly of the River Police Office. It has the same air of municipal domesticity, the same sense of a dwelling adapted for other purposes. And both have the unavoidable discomfort that comes from random shouts and screams from within.

  He hears them straightaway: the distant clamour of upset minds. They are almost all male, these random howls, and they are emphasised by the worsening storm.

  ‘Who is in charge?’ he asks Burroway, who has followed him inside. In the light, Horton can see the man’s enormous face, which while clearly that of an idiot also betrays its own calm.

  ‘They shout again,’ Burroway says in reply.

  ‘Who shouts, John?’

  ‘The men. They’re shouting like before. Dr Bryson.’

  ‘Dr Bryson is in charge?’

  ‘Yes.’ Burroway frowns.

  ‘Would you take me to him, John?’

  ‘Yes. Follow me.’

  They walk along a corridor that seems to run the full width of the place, which ends in a door that stands ajar. From inside Horton can hear a man muttering and the sound of tearing paper.

  He goes inside.

  Dr Bryson does not look round when Horton enters. He is standing at the fireplace, throwing papers onto the flames, muttering to himself as he does so as if performing some kind of inventory.

  ‘That’s almost all of them, oh the matron’s report, mustn’t forget the matron’s report, and the letter the fellow who brought her in gave me, where is that, oh here it is, is that it all then? Is that it all?’

  ‘Dr Bryson?’

  He speaks sharply to draw the man’s attention away from the fire. He is so impatient by now that he imagines being able to smell Abigail, to detect her somewhere in this building by a sense other than sight or sound.

  Bryson is unshaven, his hair is wildly disordered, and his eyes have a look of such frenzy that Horton thinks the mad-doctor may stand up and rush at him. But then he is distracted, almost as if someone had tapped him on the shoulder, and he looks down at a disarrayed pile of papers on the corner of his desk, which stands next to the fireplace. An ink pot has fallen over and is staining papers and wood indiscriminately. A half-empty bottle of what looks like whisky stands beside the overturned ink pot.

  ‘Yes, yes, nearly there, nearly there.’

  And he takes the pile and, pausing a moment, throws the whole thing onto the flames. The fire is almost extinguished by the weight of the paper, but then it reasserts itself and billows out from the hearth in its hunger to consume whatever Bryson is throwing upon it.

  Horton can hear the sound of men screaming. John Burroway has disappeared from beside him, to who knows where? His only guide to the interior of Brooke House is this deranged man.

  ‘Bryson, I must speak to my wife, immediately.’

  Bryson looks around him, desperately, and grabs something off the desk. It is a small, old letter-knife, and he points it at Horton, and opens his mouth in a grin that displays his yellow teeth.

  ‘You’re in it together. All of you. You’re in it together.’

  ‘Bryson, calm yourself.’

  ‘I am CALM. You will LEAVE. All is WELL here.’

  ‘Bryson, you must listen to me. Look me in the eye. Remain calm.’

  ‘Look you in the eye? Ah, you think to control me, do you, constable? You think to assert the strength of your will over mine? Well, look into my eyes, man. Do what I say!’

  He is not a tall man, the mad-doctor, but he straightens his back and raises his chin now, as if he were holding an épée to his chin in readiness for a duel. His eyebrows beetle down over his eyes, his brow furrows, and he fixes Horton with a ludicrous theatrical stare.

  Horton turns, and leaves the office. Rushing into the corridor, he almost runs into John Burroway, who is standing against the wall with his hands in his ears. His massive face is strung with unhappiness.

  ‘John!’

  The big man just shakes his head and looks at the floor, his hands still covering his ears. Horton grabs one of his thick arms and tries to pull it away from the man’s face.

  ‘John – I need you to take me somewhere. To the women’s quarters.’

  The man can hear, he thinks – he just chooses not to reply.

  ‘John, do you remember what I said to you? When I said I was a constable? Well, you could be in trouble if you don’t help me.’

 
It is the wrong approach. John’s shoulders slump even further, his hands pushing towards each other as if he were trying to lift his head from his shoulders.

  ‘My wife, John. My wife is inside. Her name is Abigail.’

  John lifts his head, and looks at Horton. He takes his hands from his ears.

  ‘Mrs Horton? Your wife is Mrs Horton?’

  ‘Yes! Can you take me to her?’

  John looks down the corridor, both ways, as if an answer, or at least someone carrying an answer, might appear. He looks at the floor again, and shivers as another massive burst of thunder seems to shake the roof.

  Then he turns, and walks around a bend in the corridor, leaving Dr Bryson’s apartment behind. Inside, Horton hears the sound of furniture toppling, as if someone were pulling out drawers.

  Round the corner, they reach a door. John puts out his hand, saying, ‘It’s probably locked,’ but it opens. Security has become soft at Brooke House, it would seem.

  On the other side of the door is a flight of stairs, and John points up them.

  ‘Up there. At the top of the stairs.’

  Horton rushes up. At the top of the stairs are two empty cells, their doors open. On the bed of one of these he spies a book, and goes in to pick it up. It is A Vindication of the Rights of Women, by Mary Wollstonecraft.

  That smell again, clear and present – though not quite a smell, more like a memory floating on the air. This is Abigail’s room.

  But where is she?

  Horton walks out of the empty cell. The noise in Brooke House is rising behind him, a chattering sound of women which has for its bass note the irregular rattling boom of thunder.

  The corridor stretches to his right down the side of the building, but to his left a little staircase runs down to another section. From down there, in the gloom, he hears the sound of women arguing.

  From somewhere within the building, he hears a door slam and a man shout.

  He walks down the staircase, the sound of the women’s voices growing louder and louder. A flash of lightning illuminates the corridor. He enters the little room and, in the candlelight, sees the shape of a gigantic footless priest gazing down at him from the wall. Then he sees his wife sitting on a bench, turning to him, and he shouts her name and runs to her. She stands and he embraces her, and as he does so he sees the two tall blackhaired women standing before the picture of the priest, and they both look at him.

  And then he remembers no more.

  Abigail can do nothing. Maria’s prayers are relentless and incomprehensible, a monotonous chant in a tense whisper like a strangled shout. She kneels in front of the old painting with her back to Abigail, her dark hair flowing down between her shoulders.

  It occurs to Abigail that this is the first day she has seen Maria’s arms and hands, the first time they have been freed from the strait waistcoat.

  Lightning opens up the shadows in the corners of the chapel, and she pretends she cannot see goblins and gargoyles dancing in there. She says her own silent prayer, but not to God. To Charles.

  I am in need of rescue, she thinks.

  She wonders what she would do if Satan himself walked into the room, smiled at her with a nod and a wink, and took Maria’s hand, the two of them to be married with her as a witness. She hears someone step into the chapel, and for a moment she dare not look, lest what she imagined become true.

  She does look, then, and sees a tall woman silhouetted in the door to the corridor outside. A woman as tall as Maria, and with the same long loose hair.

  ‘Maria, it is time for us to leave,’ says the figure, and Abigail recognises the voice instantly. The voice in the wall, the one that had read to Maria during those hot August nights. The figure steps into the chapel, and turns its eyes onto Abigail.

  Her fear buzzes around her head and thunders through Brooke House, with nothing to settle down on or adhere to, and it grows and grows and grows. The woman’s eyes are gleaming obsidian, and a pernicious scar wriggles up her face. Abigail feels naked before her gaze. More than naked: it is as if her skin were suddenly as transparent as glass, her bones and muscles and sinews exposed for this woman’s inspection.

  ‘Mother,’ says Maria. ‘Leave her.’

  The dark-haired woman turns her gaze away, leaving Abigail to gasp as if her head had been held in water and then released, that word mother unavoidably mesmerising. She watches the woman walk up to Maria, with that painting of the priest behind them. The priest is not looking into the room, but at a point somewhere in the middle distance. Perhaps he is praying to the lightning.

  The two women face each other in front of the painting. They look like two queens, discussing an offering from a poor subject.

  ‘What is this, Maria?’ says the woman from outside. ‘What is going on?’

  ‘God has spoken to me,’ says Maria. She looks away from her mother to the picture of the priest. ‘He speaks to me again.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He said I am unclean. That there is a demon within me which can only be got rid of by my own destruction. He said I deserve what has happened to me.’

  ‘God is a man, Maria. And men speak lies.’

  ‘That is blasphemy, Mother. Even though you may say it, it is a wrong thing to say.’

  ‘Where did it come from, this truck with God? Not from me.’

  ‘From those who raised me.’

  ‘Ah, indeed? The good Suffolk farmer and his wife. They did what they promised.’

  ‘Until the illness took them.’

  ‘Indeed. The precious gift of disease from your so-called God. Beware men bearing gifts, Maria. And know this – to take thine own life is a sin, if such a God does exist. And this male God will punish you for that sin.’

  ‘I shall not take my own life.’

  ‘Ah. I begin to understand. You are to make a sacrifice of another’s soul.’

  Maria sinks her head. A noise from the door, and a man comes into the room, and Abigail hears her name from her husband’s throat for the first time in more than a month.

  ‘Abigail!’

  He rushes up to her, and she rises into his embrace, breathing his name and crying into his neck, but then his arms go limp and he sits on the bench beside her, looking up at Maria and her mother with the empty expression of an idiot.

  ‘Maria! No!’ she shouts, but Maria shakes her head.

  ‘’Tis not my doing, Abigail.’

  ‘Your husband?’ says Maria’s mother, and she looks at Abigail with those obsidian eyes, and Abigail silently prays that she never looks at her again. ‘Last time I saw this man he was lying senseless in a country field. He must be a bloodhound, to have followed me here.’

  ‘Leave him be, whoever you are,’ says Abigail, unable to look away from her. ‘He is a good man.’

  ‘There is no such creature as a good man,’ says the woman, and looks back at Maria. ‘Just ask my daughter.’

  ‘My papers,’ says a voice from the door, and all three women turn to see Dr Bryson standing on the threshold of the room, his little letter-knife held in front of him, his face pale and wet. ‘You made me destroy all my papers.’ He is, momentarily, framed by lightning.

  ‘Yes, doctor,’ says Maria’s mother. ‘All records relating to my daughter have been destroyed. She was never in this place. I should never have brought her here, but she seems calm now. You have had more success than I did. Than she permitted.’

  Bryson steps forward.

  ‘Stay out of my head, bitch,’ he says. Another step into the room. ‘Evil, it is. The devil’s work. I must cut out the evil. It is an infection, and I am a doctor.’

  He steps forward, one single shuddering step, and both women turn to face him head-on from the altar. He stops. But then he walks again – directly towards Maria.

  ‘Evil! Evil!’ he shouts. He walks like a man being pulled back and pulled forward at the same time, as if he has a piece of rope tied around him and someone outside the room is pulling him away fr
om the women, but the other force is so much the stronger, the force pulling him towards them.

  ‘Maria, would you condemn his soul?’ says the older woman.

  ‘Evil!’ shouts Bryson again, stepping with stiff legs towards the altar. He has almost reached them.

  ‘I saw those men, Mother,’ says Maria. ‘I saw what happened to them. What you caused to happen to them. Even in these walls, I saw it. It was a great sin, and I am the cause of it.’

  ‘Is it a sin to rid the world of sinners, Maria?’

  ‘It is God’s work, Mother. It is not ours. We are abominations, you and I. It is not right that we should have such capacities.’

  ‘EVIL!’

  Bryson is standing directly in front of the two women. Both of them stare at him as they talk, and Abigail feels the fine hairs on her arms and on her neck tingle and stand.

  ‘If it were a sin to dispose of these men, the sin is mine,’ says Maria’s mother, and Abigail sees a ripple of grey exhaustion pass over her disfigured face, which must have once been as beautiful as Maria’s. ‘I take the sin upon me, and only me. You are free, Maria. Free at last.’

  Then the mother steps forward and grabs Bryson’s face between the fingers of her left hand and holds it before her, staring into his eyes.

  ‘Mother!’

  As Maria says this, the woman from outside looks away from the doctor and around the room, and Abigail feels something terrible pushing at her head. She holds her hands to her ears, but it makes no difference. She feels like her head is being squeezed by gigantic fingers. She can feel worms burrowing away inside her skull, little creatures of intent, searching for something in her poor deranged brain.

  The doctor’s body seems to momentarily loosen, as if the invisible rope around him had been dropped. Then his legs become less wooden and his arm comes round, and with a great cry …

  ‘EVIL!’

  … he plunges the letter-knife into the older woman’s throat. Once, twice, three times. And when he is done, he steps away, and drops the knife to the floor, where it rings a metallic trill on the old stone.

  There is a great confusion then. Maria screams, and this scream is accompanied by an even greater sense of pressure on Abigail’s head. Maria kneels down beside her mother, and Bryson shouts once more, spins and falls to the floor, and lies still.