Savage Magic
Page 5
A small writing table has been placed by the window, and Horton sits at it, leaving his bag to fend for itself. He rubs his freshly shaven face, the skin still itching slightly from the barber’s attentions this morning. The view outside is of the lawn to the side of the house, and the dense copse beyond. Another old man, cut from similarly dilapidated cloth as the butler, works away at something in the ground on the edge of the lawn. There is good plate glass in the window, and a small balcony outside.
Horton unties the scroll and folds it flat on the table.
Mrs Graham’s handwriting is tidy and, like the woman herself, has the odd property of making him feel rather lacking. The note consists purely of a list of dates, annotated with the events of the day, with no colour or feeling to it:
Aug. 10 – O’Reilly’s shed burned
Aug. 12 – milk from Thorpe Lee herd curdled. Remains undrinkable for the rest of the week
Aug. 13 – dead rat left on dining room table. Rat’s blood discovered in kitchen
Aug. 14 – ring appears on lawn – about 10 feet across
Aug. 15 – words of profane intent discovered in chalk on inner door of linen cupboard; chalk discovered in kitchen
Aug. 16 – several of Sir H—’s shirts cut to pieces. Scissors with cotton fragments found in kitchen.
Aug. 18 – cook becomes ill
Aug. 19 – dreadful noise from trees to side of house
Aug. 21 – two of Sir H—’s dogs slaughtered overnight
Aug. 22 – I sack the cook
Aug. 27 – Ellen falls ill, terribly so
He wonders, rather, at the self-discipline which this writing-down must have taken, but then ponders whether he is not making the mistake of assuming a personality where there is none. Even before meeting her, Horton had assumed that Mrs Graham would be a wilful individual. Leaving a husband with Aaron Graham’s reputation to take up with a man with Sir Henry Tempest’s must have been an act of deliberate will. Or was it? Was there passion involved? Is this precise, calculated handwriting just the careful strongbox within which ardour is chained?
He feels uncomfortable, miserable even, in this odd house. The primary cause is the same as it has been this past month: Abigail’s absence, or more particularly his ignorance as to her state. What is she doing now? Who is she talking to? Or is she alone, scared and trembling in some cold cell in that strange building north of London, where he has lingered outside a dozen times this past month, hoping for a glimpse or a clue?
Abigail has been the mournful backdrop of his existence for weeks now. He wonders if Graham had intended to displace it with a change of scene: take Horton out of Wapping, despatch him to this oddly disjointed place beside the river, perhaps he will settle down a bit there. But why should he care about Horton’s welfare?
What on earth am I doing here, really?
A knock at the door, and the old butler’s voice, asking him down to dinner. He comes back to himself with a start, and sees the shadows have lengthened across the lawn, like bars across a great pit in the land.
Dinner is served to him, alone, in the kitchen beneath and behind the main staircase. Mrs Graham will have nothing more to do with him today, it seems. Even the cook is absent. Horton wonders how long the lady of the house can keep up this separation between him and the servants, and what purpose she believes it serves. It leaves him feeling slighted and vaguely disconnected from the real world. Where are the sights and smells of Wapping, the scurrying humanity with its incessant chatter? Here there is only absence and unidentified sounds from unseen rooms.
He finishes his lonely supper, and walks back up the stairs. Crowley, or anyone else for that matter, does not come to meet him. It is as if the house had been abandoned. He takes the opportunity of solitude to give himself a better picture of the house’s layout. He looks into the rooms on the ground floor: the reception room, the drawing room, the dining room, the library. All are empty. Behind another door he finds a new water-closet, such as only the newest and finest homes in London have. There is something both daring and strange about it. Is it Mrs Graham’s innovation, or Sir Henry’s?
He hears movement in the house. The place is haunted by its inhabitants. Or perhaps he is the ghost. He goes upstairs to bed. Behind a door on the landing he hears the sound of a woman weeping. He thinks it is Mrs Graham, but cannot be sure. He contemplates knocking on her door and establishing she is well, but decides against it. Reluctantly he goes to bed.
During that first night in Thorpe Lee House he is constantly awoken by the dreams of those hidden inhabitants of the place. From above him come a variety of moans, shrieks and sobs which are so regular that they give the impression that the house itself is having a particularly bad night of it.
At one point he is woken by howling dogs from somewhere in the blind dark. Sir Henry’s pack, presumably, two of whom have been killed. He gets up to look out of the window. A light is shining from a downstairs window – another waker, perhaps? It casts a flickering shadow on the grey surface of the lawn, which is broken only by a ring of freshly dug earth which he had not noticed before.
Wide awake now, he goes out into the hallway. He cannot hear the moans and groans of the servants in the attic rooms above when he is outside the room, and it is as if the house has shushed itself upon hearing Horton’s waking. A burst of coughing ending in a rattling sigh comes from one of the main bedrooms.
He hears a clatter of something metallic from downstairs, and a woman’s curse. He walks to the stairs and sees an old woman scurry across the vestibule into the drawing room. She is carrying something in a tankard, and from within the drawing room Horton hears the sound of a woman weeping.
He goes down to the kitchen. There is no one there. Three pans and their lids lie on the floor, the source of the noise he’d heard from the landing. A big jug sits by the ugly-looking sink, and finding a tankard he pours himself some water from within it. He sips from the tankard, looking around the kitchen. A scurrying sound from behind the cupboards. He feels watched by twitching rodent eyes.
He waits a few minutes, half-expecting one of the servants to come in and demand an explanation. But no one comes. He walks back up the gloomy stairwell and goes over to put his ear to the drawing room door. He hears a woman talking within, soothingly, her words indistinct.
He senses the great quiet which surrounds the house, so different from London. It seems to squeeze in against the great front door, and he glances through the fanlight at the top of the door, to be greeted only by a flat inexpressive purple, a non-suggestive void.
There is no one out there, he thinks to himself, and after so long as a sailor in crowded ships and a resident of London’s scurrying mazes, the thought is a confused and frightening one.
He goes back up to bed.
BROOKE HOUSE
Abigail waits for the night to come once again. Like all her nights in Brooke House, it will be full of sounds and sights which may or may not be true. She no longer has any faith in her perceptions or her understanding.
There is an observing part of her mind that she has started to think of as an anatomist, one such as William Hunter, gazing down at her opened body as she lies on a slab inside some institution or other, the very core of her exposed to men’s inspection. This part of her records all the insanities of the previous months inside a doleful ledger, one which she is free to peruse during the daylight when her mind is most at rest.
The ledger is full of the Pacific woman who had pursued Abigail from Wapping to here and who still, somehow, can climb into the madhouse and infect her dreams. The woman’s presence has faded not one jot, despite the treatments of the weasel-faced Dr Bryson and his self-important employer Dr Monro.
She has been bled twice, once from each arm. Each time Bryson watched from the doorway as Brooke House’s resident surgeon opened his leather-bound case and made great play of selecting the right instrument ‘for such an intelligent and sensitive creature as yourself’. On both occasions he’d
picked up a small, beautifully polished scarificator, the tiny blades of which emerged from its metal surface like the teeth of some artificial beast. Once her vein was opened, Abigail watched as her blood dripped into a pewter bowl with numbers marked up the side, until Bryson barked an order to stop and the surgeon covered her new wound with a bandage.
She has also been purged, immediately before each bleeding, forcing down a herbal concoction of Dr Bryson’s own devising which, within seconds, caused her to vomit up the contents of her stomach into a different bowl. Each time, Bryson would avidly investigate the contents, like an ancient alchemist discerning the combination of humours from the belly of a duke.
On a half-dozen occasions, Bryson has come into her cell and made her sit on the bed, facing him. Then he has stared at her, his bloodshot brown eyes peering at her as if she were a botanical specimen under investigation by a Kew gardener, and while he stares he has asked her provocative questions about her condition and even about her relationship with Charles. She has answered the questions when she can, and grown angry at the more impertinent of them, but something about her anger seemed to excite Bryson, and he had leaned in and furrowed his brow deeply, never taking his gaze from her, never blinking, nostrils flaring as if he could cast a spell upon her through the space between them.
Each of these strange episodes has ended the same way: Bryson has sighed and looked down at the floor, shaking his head as if she had failed some unspoken examination, then patting her hand and standing. Each time, she has immediately been given some form of intervention: a purging, or a bleeding, or a dose of something-or-other. Some days it is oil, some days opium, some days the juice of an orange.
Otherwise, the only other element of the Brooke House regimen has been seclusion. On this point Bryson is adamant. Abigail cannot write to Charles, nor can she receive any of the letters she is certain he must have sent. She imagines him outside the front of the house, standing under a tree, desperate to catch a glimpse of her. She speaks to other patients of this, and they all confirm it: Brooke House allows no intercourse between patients and their families.
But the Pacific woman endures. The kindly idiot who mans the gate, whose name she has learned is John, may have shut it behind her when she first arrived, but he did not shut out the princess. She came in with her, and most nights she whispers to Abigail, whispers of strange plants and unquenchable thirsts.
The princess has been with her since last year, when the sea captain appeared at her door with a gift of tea for her husband. Tea made from the leaves of an Otaheite tree, a substance full of strange potencies. The Otaheite princess had leaped into Abigail’s dreams from the drink she made from that tea, and then she had leaped from her dreams into her waking hours, and now she is a constant dark-haired companion, whispering baleful tales of the crimes of Englishmen and the vengeance of women.
But this is not the only voice Abigail hears. When the old building finally settles into sleep – a fitful sleep, full of creaks and murmurs and audible memories – Abigail listens for the woman in the cell beside hers. And, more often than not, the woman speaks.
Abigail has not seen her since the day she was first brought in, but she has asked Bryson and the attendants about her, and one of them has at least provided her with a name: Maria. For the first few nights, this girl did not so much speak as sob, quite gently compared with the terrible screams she had aimed at the attendants who had tried to calm her on her arrival. The sobs were full of a single name – Joshua – and were possessed of the longing of a hundred sonnets.
But sometimes she spoke to herself – spoke of men who’d done things to her, terrible things, of livid indignities and wretched crimes. And then, after perhaps two weeks, Abigail had heard another voice in the cell with her; a woman’s voice, its tones soft but its accent harsh. Sometimes it sang to Maria, sometimes it read to her, but when Abigail left her cell the next day, as she was permitted to do, the door to Maria’s was firmly shut. No one was getting out, it seemed, and Abigail could not imagine how anybody could have got in.
She’d gone to Dr Bryson with the story of the singing, but had later wondered why she should have done so. He was unlikely to listen to her, she knew. Was she not mad? A female sufferer of terrible visions? What was an overheard voice from a madwoman’s cell when there was only a madwoman there to hear it?
Such is how he’d heard her news, that condescending smile on his face, the one he used to calm people, the one which made her imagine his face being ripped into pieces by the hooks of Pacific fishermen. Specifically, Otaheite fishermen and Otaheite hooks.
Ah, she was always there, the princess. Always there to preach violence in the face of men’s pig ignorance. Always whispering rhymes of revenge.
She lies awake as night falls. She thinks of her husband, and where he might be, and whether he is sleeping or lying awake like her, their souls intertwined in restlessness. The madhouse seems to possess a different, almost watchful aspect. The house is never silent, by any means. It is, Abigail knows, an old, crumbling building which has housed the insane for more than half a century, and such a building is never going to be silent. Nonetheless there is a brooding quiet; even the inmates who contribute to the night-time noise do so with a kind of embarrassment, as if they imagine their quieter comrades turning upon them for their lack of manners. She is aware that she can hear breathing from the house around her, the hollow in-and-out of the desperate and the mad, normally inaudible beneath the groans and chuckles and repetitive incantations. Even in a place as respectable as Brooke House, the mad will moan.
The air is cold, and this is also bizarre; summer is still caressing the trees of the gardens, and Abigail had felt perspiration on her face when out walking in the walled garden behind Brooke House that afternoon. Indeed, it is so cold that her breath rises up above her head as she lies on the bed, such that it creates its own little infernal fog.
After supper she’d walked along the corridor that lined the rear upper floor, which looked over the garden. Even in her extremities of loneliness and anxiety this place can please her. She believes it must have once been a grand open gallery of the original house, for its ceiling is lined with ornate carvings which are abruptly cut off by the doors of cells along the corridor, making it clear that a once-open space has been subdivided. She’d looked at the women around her, most of whom were sat down against the walls, and none of them had looked back at her; they were either turned in on each other, or looking into the distance, or closely at the walls or the floor. The windows which ran the length of the corridor looked out onto a grey mist behind the house, as if the place were floating inside a gloomy cloud. Some of the windows had been replaced by boards, and cracks ran down the walls; the building itself seemed to be coming apart under the weight of its own anxiety. Nothing was visible in the gloom.
She breathes on her bed. In, out, in, out. Her smoky breath embraces the air. She holds the book she’d taken from Brooke House’s surprisingly good library on her belly, her hands crossed above it, and she remembers the passage she’s just read.
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists – I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.
She falls asleep with the words on her lips – the same words she’d heard the voice speaking to Maria this previous night – but then something pulls her quickly from slumber. The scream is shocking enough. The fact that it comes from a man is even worse. And worst of all is the nature of it.
And for a few seconds which seem impossible, as if they must be happening to somebody else entirely, she feels the building go mad. A pressure seems to press against her, an unseen force. She thinks of a diagram for a steam engine she’d once seen at some public lecture or another, the Royal Institution no doubt, and the explanation of steam power: the transition from heat to pressure, the way water and air could with the addition of heat be turned into a directional force, shoving machines which weighed more than houses into impossible dances. That’s what this feels like: as if Brooke House were a gigantic piston, being pushed slowly and deliberately by an emerging compression.
And then, as quickly as it began, that sense of impending explosion falls away and the terrible noise begins to subside. One by one, the men fall quiet. It is only then that Abigail notices that there has not been a single shout or moan from the women on the first floor. The women’s rooms are silent, as if they were all empty. All the noise is male, all of it angry and guttural and terrifyingly desolate, as if each and every man were having a limb amputated on some European battlefield.
The silence grows, as stealthy and gradual as the original shouting had been sudden and shocking. Eventually the last man lets out the last shriek, and Brooke House lapses back into the quiet of midnight. That old sense she’d had – of the house breathing in and out – returns, and a calm lays itself out over the place like a warm blanket.