The Coven

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Goodness, Katharine, you have so many uninvited visitors in your hair!’ she said. ‘The itching must drive you to distraction! I shall mix you up another preparation, too, to get rid of them. Meanwhile, I’ll see if I can find you a fine-tooth comb, so that you can rake them all out.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Katharine, hugging her tight. She was so overcome with emotion that she was gasping. ‘You’re like an angel, come to save us.’

  Beatrice closed her eyes for a moment. She could hear the girl in the dining room still singing and she wondered if this was the destiny that God had chosen for her ever since she was very young, sitting next to her father while he told her stories and stirred up vials of pungent chemicals that had made her eyes water.

  *

  That afternoon, she left Florence to play with Judith and walked to the Foundery to talk to Godfrey, the apothecary. This time she went by London Wall, and Finsbury, past the open gardens of Bethlem Hospital, so that she would avoid any of the narrow, stinking alleys between Whitecross Street and Bunhill Row.

  She found Godfrey in his gloomy laboratory, brewing up a large glass flask of liquid the colour of dark urine. It smelled vile.

  ‘A tonic for the Reverend Parsons’s gout,’ he explained. ‘It’s my own formula of wild mint, aniseed, ipecacuanha and opium.’

  Beatrice tugged out her pocket handkerchief to cover her nose. ‘Godfrey – that smells appalling! Thank God I’m not suffering from gout! And what you’ve mixed up, it’s only glorified Dover’s Powders!’

  ‘Oh,’ said Godfrey.

  ‘My father used to make pills of autumn crocus, which were much less pungent, and easy to swallow. And they were really effective, too.’

  Godfrey stirred his mixture one more time, but looked dejected. ‘I wish I’d known that before I started mixing this. It does stink, doesn’t it?’

  Beatrice said, ‘I came to ask if you have any black haw bark. Or if can you find me some.’

  Godfrey frowned up at the bottles and boxes on his shelves, but before he could answer, the door opened again and James Treadgold, the teacher, came in. He was wearing the same red frock coat as before, and his sleeves were smudged with white chalk dust. There was chalk dust in his hair, too.

  ‘Widow Scarlet!’ he said, and bowed. ‘I saw you arrive, and I had to come to ask how you have been faring. I heard that you and Ida and your little daughter were the victims of a very unpleasant assault.’

  He paused, and turned, and wrinkled up his nose. ‘Godfrey, what the devil is that you’re cooking up? It reeks like a whore’s left armpit!’

  Immediately, though, he turned back to Beatrice and said, ‘A simile only, Widow Scarlet. I don’t speak from personal experience.’

  Beatrice gave him the faintest of smiles. ‘I’m sure not, James. But thank you for enquiring about our attack. We were all badly shaken, I must admit, but not hurt. I expect you know that we were rescued by Mr Hazzard. He was very brave indeed, and impaled one of those rascals with his sword.’

  ‘So I heard, and thank merciful heaven that you weren’t robbed, or injured, or worse.’ He paused again, and looked down at the floor, and then he lifted his eyes again and said, more softly, ‘My invitation for you to have supper with me one evening... I was wondering if I might ask you afresh. I mentioned the Three Cranes in the Vintry before, because they have a snug where ladies may enjoy a drink and some supper in private, but if you have another preference, I would be happy to take you there.’

  ‘James, I’m sorry, but I’m desperately engaged at the moment,’ said Beatrice. ‘I’m having to acquaint myself with all of the twenty-nine girls at St Mary Magdalene’s, and their anxieties. On top of that I’m already having to devise several preparations to deal with their physical ailments. Having said that, Godfrey, do you happen to have any stavesacre, and perhaps some ground mistletoe seeds?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Godfrey, knowingly. ‘One of your girls is lousy.’

  James said, ‘I quite understand how overwhelmed you must be, Beatrice, and I must return to my classroom before my children start to strangle each other and throw their slates around. But if and when you find the time, I would consider it both a pleasure and an honour to spend some time with you, and discover more about you.’

  When he had left, Godfrey looked across his workbench at Beatrice and raised his eyebrows. ‘Here’s your stavesacre and your mistletoe seeds,’ he told her, passing over two small wooden boxes. ‘I have no black haw bark on my shelves at present, but I will get you some from Collin’s in Covent Garden. You don’t also require a potion to suppress a young teacher’s rampant desire, by any chance? I do believe he is smitten!’

  *

  The days seemed to pass faster and faster, as if the pages of the calendar were being stripped away by the rising autumn wind. By the end of the week Beatrice could remember every girl’s name, and she spent hours talking to each of them alone so that she could find out how they had come to be prostitutes.

  Their stories were depressingly similar. Some of their parents had been too poor to take care of them, and in some cases had even been reduced to selling their clothes and their bedding, and eventually their virginity. Other parents had died of typhus or strangury or rising of the lights, and left the girls as orphans, to make their own way in the world.

  Most of them were country girls who had believed they could find their fortune in London, one way or another. Some of them had thought that they would be able to survive by singing or dancing or working as milliners or ladies’ maids.

  They had quickly discovered the reality of life for penniless but pretty young women in the City. Some of them had been taken in by bawdy houses, and they had been reasonably well cared for, although a few of them had been obliged to hand their bawds every guinea that they made from their clients, which was slavery in all but name. Others had rented rooms in brothels, or resorted to the streets, where they had offered five-shilling frock-lifting wappings in one of the many courts and back alleys off the Strand.

  As desperate as their lives had seemed to be, Beatrice had guessed from her very first morning here at St Mary Magdalene’s that many of the girls had preferred working as prostitutes to more moral employment. Of course it could be a dangerous life, and there was always a high risk of venereal disease and pregnancy. But mostly they had been complimented and treated well by their gentlemen patrons, and they had been well paid, too, especially the very pretty ones, so that some had saved and done tolerably well for themselves. Others, of course, had wasted all their money and spent their days in a blurry haze of alcohol or opium or ether. But what was the attraction of a life of virtue and sobriety? You might outlive your friends for a few more years, but how dull were those years going to be, and who wanted to live to be old and ugly?

  ‘It’s frightful, Widow Scarlet!’ Annie told her, as they were sitting by the fire on Friday evening. ‘If I live to be twice the age I am now, I’ll be forty!’

  Annie was a voluptuous, creamy-skinned brunette from Devon, quite attractive except for a profuse speckling of moles on her breasts and an alarming cast in her eyes, so that Beatrice was never sure who she was looking at.

  ‘Can you imagine?’ Annie went on. ‘If I ever grow that ancient, I’m going to tie myself to a bag of bricks and kittens and throw myself off the Old Swan Stairs.’

  Beatrice patted her knee and said, ‘Tell me that again when you reach forty. If you still feel the same way then, I will buy the bricks and kittens for you myself.’

  13

  On Saturday morning Beatrice was sitting at her toilet writing letters to her dear friends in Sutton, Goody Rust and Goody Greene, who had both attended her when Florence was born, when Katharine knocked at her door. Before Beatrice could call out to her to come in, she opened it and stuck her head round it.

  ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you, Widow Scarlet.’

  ‘Not at all, Katharine. Come in. How are you? How is the monthly easement working?’

  ‘The
cramp is so much relieved, thanks to you, Widow Scarlet. But I’m still feeling a terrible itching in my hair. I have combed and combed it, and rubbed on that lotion you gave me, but the lice are still giving me such fierce irritation. On my eyelids, too.’

  Beatrice beckoned her to come nearer to the window. ‘Bend your head down,’ she said, and carefully parted Katharine’s hair so that she could see if any lice and nits were still clinging on.

  ‘You’re still bathing your eyelids in warm water?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, twice a day, as you said, and I do think they’re better than they were.’

  ‘Good – but it seems as if the visitors in your hair are still reluctant to pack their bags and go. I think I shall have to prescribe you something stronger than stavesacre. My father used to swear by tobacco leaves and vinegar, so we might try that. The juice from tobacco kills any insects you have ever heard of!’

  ‘Anything, Widow Scarlet. I have been scratching myself to distraction.’

  Beatrice stood up. ‘Well, this will give me the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. I was considering a visit next week to Mr Hazzard’s tobacco factory so that I could see how Jane and the other girls were settling in. I could go this afternoon and bring back some tobacco leaves for your hair.’

  Katharine said, ‘You’re so kind to me. I wish there was something I could do for you. I could bake you some queen’s cakes, couldn’t I? Martha has shown me how, with raisins and mace and orange-flower water.’

  ‘Perhaps when you’re all cured,’ said Beatrice. She wasn’t squeamish. Ever since she was young she had treated people with boils and suppurating pustules and thickly furred tongues that needed scraping. All the same, she preferred not think about eating queen’s cakes into which lice had accidentally dropped.

  *

  After Beatrice and Florence had finished breakfast, about eleven o’clock, Grace went out to hail a hackney coach for them.

  When it drew up outside, Grace opened the door for them and said, ‘Tell Jane that I send her my best wishes. She is beautiful, that poor girl, but she has such troubles.’

  ‘She talked to you too?’

  ‘Not when she first come here. She is rude to me at first and call me a Hottentot. But later on the same day she change, like a different person. She tell me how unhappy she is, and weep.’

  ‘I’ll let her know that you’re thinking of her. You have a kind heart, Grace.’

  ‘I see so many girls in pain, Widow Scarlet. Some have good fortune and find themself a husband, or some gentleman to keep them as their mistress, anyway. But most have nothing in the days to come but growing old. That’s if luck and God is with them, and they don’t die young from the typhus, or the Venus curse.’

  Beatrice and Florence waved goodbye to Grace and then their coach rattled off at a brisk pace north-eastwards up Shoreditch, past the lofty spire of Shoreditch Church, and out to the countryside towards Hackney. A few ramshackle clusters of cottages lined the sides of Kingsland Road, but out here it was mostly farms and open fields, with cows grazing and trees that were beginning to turn brown. After about two miles they turned a bend and arrived at Silvester Row. Half-hidden by a row of mature elms, a large grey-brick factory building with a tall, smoking chimney stood beside a stream.

  When the coach driver opened the door and Beatrice stepped down, she found herself confronted by a sign outside, announcing that this was Geo. Hazzard & Son, Tobacco Blenders, with the same crest that was emblazoned on the chamber pot under her bed, two black men and a large leafy tobacco plant.

  It was a chilly morning, but the air out here in Hackney was bracing and fresh, and after the coach had turned around and trundled off, Beatrice stood for a moment holding Florence’s hand and breathing it in. It reminded her so much of the cool, clean wind that used to blow down from the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Florence looked up at her with a serious expression and Beatrice wondered if she were thinking the same.

  They walked in through an archway that led to a cobbled courtyard, where two wagons were being loaded up with boxes of tobacco and cigars, and several men were standing around smoking.

  Beatrice approached one of the men, who was wearing a long, leathery apron and had a long, leathery face to match, with two tufts of white hair behind his ears, like puffs of smoke. ‘I have come to visit Mr Hazzard, if he is here,’ she told him.

  ‘Of course, ma’am. I’ll take you to him directly,’ said the leathery-faced man. He bent over to Florence and held out his clay pipe to her. ‘How would you fancy a sup of my baccy, young lady? It’s capital for clearing out the lungs, and it will save you from catching the consumption!’

  Florence hid behind Beatrice’s coat. Beatrice smiled and said, ‘Thank you for the offer. She has a bubble-pipe already, and she’s a little young to start drinking smoke.’

  The leathery-faced man led them through a wide pair of black-painted doors and onto the main factory floor. As soon as he opened the doors, the noise and the smell were overwhelming. There must have been more than fifty or sixty women in there, sitting at two long rows of desks, facing each other, stripping the mid-ribs out of heaps of tobacco leaves by hand. At the far end of the factory, tobacco leaves were being soaked in tanks of fresh water to render them more pliant for the strippers, while off to the right, behind a row of brick pillars, machine-men were chopping up tobacco, and stovers were stirring it in steam pans to separate the fibres and then drying it in fire pans to make it fit for smoking.

  The clatter of cutting machinery and the hissing of steam and the shrill shouting between the women was deafening; and the pungency of tobacco was so strong that Beatrice felt as if she had been smoking a pipe herself, or taking snuff.

  Some of the girls looked up and smiled as Beatrice and Florence passed, but Beatrice was puzzled that she couldn’t see Jane among them, nor any of the other girls from St Mary Magdalene’s.

  The leathery-faced man led them through to a smaller room where another ten girls were sitting at tables and rolling and cutting cigars by hand. None of the girls from St Mary Magdalene’s was there, either.

  ‘Where’s Jane?’ asked Florence.

  ‘I don’t know, darling. We’ll have to ask Mr Hazzard.’

  George’s office was at the rear of the building, and its door was wide open, with billows of cigar smoke drifting out. The leathery-faced man knocked and said, ‘You ’ave yourself a wisitor, Mr ’Azzard, sir!’

  George was sitting at a massive mahogany desk which was heaped with letters and bills of lading and empty cigar boxes. He was wearing his usual yellow frock coat and a yellow cravat. The walls behind him were lined with rows of bookshelves, all stacked with hundreds of oddly assorted books, and beside him stood a huge tobacco-brown globe.

  Out of the window Beatrice could see a large, unkempt garden where a white goat was tethered, and in the distance she could make out the rooftops of Hackney village and the square tower of St Augustine’s church.

  George stood up, took his cigar out of his mouth and blew a long column of smoke.

  ‘Beatrice! What a delightful surprise! And your charming daughter too. Come in! Have a seat.’

  He came around his desk and cleared a stack of accounts books off one of the two leather chairs. ‘May I offer you some refreshment? Coffee, perhaps? Or cider? Or a glass of wine?’

  ‘This is only a fleeting visit, George,’ said Beatrice. ‘I came principally to see how Jane and the other girls were settling in.’

  George sucked at his cigar and when he blew out smoke again his face was serious.

  ‘Beatrice – I am grieved to tell you that all seven girls from St Mary Magdalene’s have succumbed to a raging fever.’

  ‘What? All of them?’

  ‘All of them – every one – without exception. I don’t know if the girls remaining in the home have shown any symptoms of it, but it has certainly spread like the plague of Egypt among these seven. For the time being they are all confined to their dormitory upst
airs, in case they communicate it on to any of my other employees. I couldn’t afford to have my entire work force sick in bed. I would be out of business and bankrupt in a week.’

  ‘They showed no signs of it at all before they left St Mary Magdalene’s, and none of our other girls is at all unwell.’

  George shrugged. ‘They all have the purples, and are hot and chilled alternately, and have no appetite whatsoever. They have been visited by our local doctor, who has prescribed them cold baths and clysters. At my own expense I have also employed a nurse to care for them – a woman of some experience in tending to the sick. But we can only wait and pray and hope that they soon recover.’

  ‘Perhaps I can see them for myself,’ said Beatrice. ‘My father trained me as an apothecary, and I’m sure that I can prescribe them something more effective than cold baths and clysters. If they have no appetite, why would they need to purge their bowels?’

  George shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Beatrice. I’m sure you mean well, but I believe that would be unwise in the extreme. The fever appears to be highly contagious and if you were to succumb to it, you can imagine how mortally guilty I would feel. Why – if I were to allow you to expose yourself to an illness like that, I would almost be committing a criminal act. More than that, think of your precious little daughter here. What if you passed it on to her?’

  ‘George, I have tended to the sick all my life, and I have never been seriously ill myself.’

  George shook his head again and continued shaking it. ‘I cannot take the responsibility, Beatrice. If you wish, I will keep you informed daily of their progress, but even though I have only recently made your acquaintance, I think of you already with the greatest affection. I would rather cut off my own arm than be responsible for you coming to any harm.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Beatrice. ‘But – yes – if you could keep me apprised of their condition.’