Savage Magic

by Lloyd Shepherd

  ‘She said she was going to London.’

  She might as well have said ‘she is going to the Moon’. He had, nonetheless, given serious consideration to travelling to London, speaking to his contacts among the merchants and agents of Wapping and Limehouse. But any questions he would ask would only fizz into further questions, like yeast being added to wort. They would grow beyond his capacity to control them.

  Why are you looking for this woman? What concern is she of yours? Is it true what I hear – that you regularly go to Deal and pretend to be a ship-owner’s agent? What are you about, man? What are you about?

  And what is he to say to that?

  Everything he is, everything he now possesses, results from a small founding kindness of Maggie Broad. It was she who gave him work as a farmer in New South Wales and she who had given him his first tiny parcel of land, out of her own grant. She became wealthy, in ways which should have been impossible for a woman with a drunk for a husband in a penal colony. Henry Lodge became self-sufficient, his hard work building on Maggie’s kindnesses, until one day he had enough to pay for his passage home. When he returned, he acquired some land for himself, and over the last decade he has built what he has built. But he owes it all to her. And so he looks for her.

  He has told this story to some, and he can see the dissatisfaction in their eyes. It does not explain his mania, the care he takes to visit every returning transport. It is such a small part of the explanation, indeed, that the story might as well be a lie. He does not understand the full explanation himself; his obsession with convict transport ships runs, he well knows, outside the bounds of any wish to repay a favour.

  Perhaps, he thinks, all he seeks are answers. He had asked her two questions on his final night in the colony, two questions that a great many others were asking.

  How did you come by that hundred acres?

  And how did you – a woman with a drunk for a husband – keep it?

  He had asked her the questions, and she had looked at him, and of all the expressions and glances and glares of others staring into his eyes, it is that look he remembers. It was as if she had opened up the front of his head and stamped an instruction on his mind.

  I will answer your questions when I return to England. And you, Henry, will watch for my return, for I will need your help when I come.

  It had been an instruction, and that is why his life consists of only two things: hops, and the watching of transport ships. One he does for himself. One he does because he has been told to. That is the truth of it. He can tell himself that he only wants those questions answered. But it is that glance on that long-ago evening on the far side of the world, the way her eyes burned into his understanding: that is what has driven him down to Deal three or four times a year this past decade.

  How can he explain such madness to anyone sane? I do it because a woman told me to.

  So he is mad still. She was not on the Indefatigable. His instruction has not been obeyed. He waits as he has always waited, in his Canterbury hop plantation, somewhat afraid, watched by his half-amused servants and his exasperated manager. And somewhere out there in England, the woman he has waited for might be found. He wonders what she might be doing.

  Until, one day in the middle of July, with the Kent sun high in the sky, she appears at his door. Older than he remembers her, but otherwise the same. Deliberate and determined, and unashamed in asking for the help she once promised him she would need.

  And with her, deranged and raving, her damaged daughter.

  PART TWO

  A Guiding Consciousness

  Johnson. ‘Sir, I am not defending their credibility. I am only saying, that your arguments are not good, and will not overturn the belief of witchcraft. And then, sir, you have all mankind, rude and civilised, agreeing in the belief of the agency of preternatural powers. You must take evidence: you must consider, that wise and great men have condemned witches to die.’

  Crosbie. ‘But an act of parliament put an end to witchcraft.’

  Johnson. ‘No, sir! witchcraft had ceased; and therefore an act of parliament was passed to prevent persecution for what was not witchcraft. Why it ceased, we cannot tell, as we cannot tell the reason of many things.’

  James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides,

  entry under Monday, August 16

  WESTMINSTER

  Graham dreams of Sarah, as he often does. As always, the mood of his dream is elegiac, purged of anything lustful, suffused with sadness. There is never any narrative to these dreams of his departed spouse. There is a lake, around which she walks and walks, and Graham walks behind her. From the lake comes the sound not of water, but of Purcell. Always the same strange sad music. He never speaks to her, and she never turns. They just walk round and round and round.

  He is disturbed from his slumber by his manservant, who has long been under instruction to wake Graham if any urgent word comes from Bow Street. There is a young officer outside in Great Queen Street, demanding Graham’s attendance. There has been a murder. He hears the word ‘Cope’ and rises to dress himself. He takes his time. Aaron Graham will not be seen out and about in untidy garments, even at six in the morning.

  William Jealous, the young patrolman who had attended with him at Wodehouse’s residence, waits for him outside.

  ‘One of the St Paul’s constables just come to the office, sir,’ he says, his breath clearly visible in the cold early morning air. ‘Says someone’s done away with Sir John.’

  ‘What were you doing at the office at six in the morning, Jealous?’

  ‘Raids last night, sir. Warrant from Sir Nathaniel, sir.’

  Graham scowls at the mention of his fellow magistrate. Why organise a raid at a time such as this? Or is he jockeying for some kind of advantage? Graham’s finely tuned political instincts twitch, even as they turn to walk down to the Strand.

  The metropolis is quiet at this time, though he can hear the costermongers and barrowboys manoeuvring themselves into the Piazza for the early trade. Some whores can still be seen on the pavements, looking worn-out and disconsolate, their only customers at this time of day either gentlemen too inebriated to do much more than molest and insult them, or early morning husbands looking for escape before another day of work.

  The sun is creeping into the sky above the City and beyond as they walk down the hill towards the Strand. Graham speaks to the young patrolman, learns that he is in fact a member of Bow Street’s mounted patrol, though he hopes to follow his father ‘into a more investigative line, if you get my meaning, sir’. Graham looks at him with some surprise, and thinks of the lad’s father. Charles Jealous, it is said, could scry the difference between city dirt and country dirt on a highwayman’s boots. Perhaps such facility runs in the blood.

  They turn left into Adam Street, and the vacancy of air above the river opens out before them, revealing the timber yards and manufactories of the Surrey shore. Like the Piazza, the river is opening for trade, flexing its wherries and stretching its lighters into a new day.

  There is a small group of people outside the door to number thirteen. He recognises two parish constables from St Paul’s; the others seem to be servants of the house, many of them in night attire underneath coats and capes, some of the women weeping, the men staring open-mouthed into the gaping wound of the front door. The house has been disturbed in its sleep, and looks embarrassed and ill-prepared.

  Graham steps through the crowd and into the hallway, greeted again by that splendour of draperies and rugs. The lonely, astonished figure of Cope’s manservant, Burgess, is standing at the bottom of the stairs waiting for him. His face has the same disbelieving pallor as that of the servant of Edmund Wodehouse.

  ‘You discovered him?’ asks Graham, after a nod of greeting.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘It was just past five, sir. I alerted the watch immediately.’

  ‘Why did you attend upon him so damnably early?’

&n
bsp; The question does not sound quite as he intended it, and Burgess is surprised. He blinks, raises his eyes to the ceiling, and frowns, as if someone had just asked him to explain how his Mind perceives of Itself.

  ‘I … I hardly know, sir. Perhaps I heard a noise?’

  ‘Were any of the other servants disturbed?’

  ‘None, so far as I believe. I have not had time to question them minutely.’

  ‘And there was no one else in the house?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘And the door was locked?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Have all the windows been checked?’

  The manservant blinks again, and that same puzzled look. Young Jealous coughs, and says he will himself check all the windows, and see if they are secure. Graham nods.

  ‘Well, then. Please show me up, Burgess.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Sir John Cope’s bedchamber carries the house’s theme of Eastern opulence to new extremes. Draperies cover the walls and windows and bed, and Graham sees depicted upon them various exotic scenes which cause his heart to stop in its chest. He remembers that awful version of Leda and the Swan in Wodehouse’s drawing room, but that was a child’s picture-book offering compared with the devilish depictions of Cope’s drapes. He catches glimpses of tigers and lions astride the naked forms of women, and priapic satyrs binding women together, of whips and branches and desperate chains, and for a moment this half-seen whirl of debauch almost distracts him from the figure on the bed.

  Sir John’s arms are secured behind his back using a strait waistcoat of the kind Graham has seen at London madhouses. He thinks, incongruously, of Abigail in Brooke House. The waistcoat has been tied to the frame of Sir John’s bed. He is on his knees, leaning forward, his weight supported by the waistcoat and the bed frame. His face hangs down, something raw and indescribable hanging from the mouth which Graham cannot quite perceive. Sir John is naked apart from the waistcoat, and the area below his stomach is an unholy red mess which seeps out from beneath the heavy canvas. The bedding is purple and red and black and silken, so the blood and other matter which has fallen down upon it appears only as a darker stain.

  Graham can smell the sweetly acrid odour of human vomit, but does not ask where it comes from. He can probably guess. Even now his own stomach is twisting and forming its own wet release.

  He stares at the body for an unknown stretch of time. ‘What is in his mouth?’ he eventually mutters, to no one in particular. With a small cough, Jealous steps from behind him and into the room – he has finished checking the windows, then. He walks up to the side of the bed, stepping around something on the floor, and then grabs Sir John by the back of the head and lifts up his face to Graham. At which the senior Bow Street magistrate turns and divulges the contents of his stomach to the elegant rug of the dead Sir John Cope.

  THORPE

  Given the odd neglect which rests over Thorpe Lee House like a layer of dust, Horton feels he perhaps should not be surprised by the condition of the shed. Its burned-out remains have not been cleared away and they remain an untidy memorial to the recent unpleasantness. What had once been a shed is now a large black square at the side of the lawn, at the rear of the house and almost within the trees which line one side of the open lawns. Half-burned timbers are piled in the middle where they have fallen in upon themselves. A sturdy-looking well stands nearby. The grass all around is long and wet and almost muddy as it prepares for autumn. A few curled leaves lie on the ground, the harbingers of falls to come.

  Horton looks at the charred ground around the sorry remains of the shed, and feels an old familiar itch. He can smell a narrative here, and the smell is as vivid as the black odour of smoke that still hangs in the air. The previous day’s interrogations and encounters have been swirling around his head all night, louder even than the sleeping moans of the servants which must, he thinks, be a permanent feature at Thorpe Lee House.

  It seems obvious to him – so obvious, indeed, that he wonders that others have not seen it – that Thorpe Lee House has been targeted. He will have no truck with witchcraft, and cannot help but feel that those who do are laughably primitive. Can it really be that here, only a few miles from London, people still scratch the arms of women and bang their pots and pans in the woods to drive away supposed hags and brides of Lucifer?

  No, indeed. The itch tells him there is mischief here, and it is mischief of an everyday nature, grounded in motivations which he has not yet unpicked. Elizabeth Hook may be involved, but she did not smash Mrs Graham’s looking-glasses. Ellen Tempest Graham may be involved, but having spoken to her Horton believes the girl to be authentically unwell and possibly even deranged. Some or all of the servants may have undertaken some or all of the petty mischiefs – the curdled milk, the rat in the dining room. And someone killed Sir Henry’s dogs.

  Indeed, the only member of the household above suspicion is Sir Henry himself. And that only because he does not seem to have been here when any of these things were taking place.

  The questions he must ask himself are not supernatural, after all. They are capable of being answered. They are the same questions as always: how, and why. And they will lead him to who.

  The fire which took the shed must have been rapid indeed, as it has consumed almost all the wood that the structure contained, leaving only the black ground, a few black bits of timber and a half-dozen big pieces of smoothed-down stone, on top of which the old shed had stood. Nature has already begun to make her presence felt; small green shoots can be seen within the sooty surface of the ground, revealed to the sunlight again after who knows how long. And that ugly dead smell of smoke in the air.

  The distance from the remains of the shed and the well is perhaps fifty feet, and with an old familiar calm which encases a galloping excitement Horton notes a long thin channel which has been gouged out between the two, perhaps an inch-and-a-half wide. At one point this channel disappears, and here the grass is disturbed differently, as if something large had been dropped upon it and then dragged back up; the grass has been ripped up in a couple of places.

  He hears a carriage approaching down the road from the river, the same direction from which he travelled. He puts the noise out of his mind, and walks over to the well and looks in. The noise of his own excitement subsides and a crystal concentration takes its place. The water level in the well is higher than he expected; it is perhaps only a few feet beneath the lip of the well. He remembers how swampy the surrounding fields had seemed on his journey here.

  The well is a good fifteen or twenty feet from the tree-line, and there are no leaves on the ground around it. So it is surprising to him to see the vast quantity of fresh-looking leaves and twigs which float on the surface of the well’s water. Big clumps of material swirl only inches below the lip of the well, like leaves in a giant’s teapot.

  And did this well not have a lid?

  He hauls down the bucket on its chain which rests on the winch above the well. He doesn’t have to go very far. The bucket comes back up, full of water and the dark green-and-black stuff which floats on top of it.

  Horton lifts some of this stuff out of the water, allowing the liquid to run through his fingers and back into the well. He is left with a handful of small limp leaves, like old rotten cabbage. He sniffs at them but detects no odour. He squeezes the remaining water out of them, and folds them into a handkerchief and puts them in his pocket.

  He stands up from the well, and looks back towards the burned-out shed. He looks to the trees lining the lawns. He looks towards the house, which is quiet and still and watchful, waiting for the next calamity.

  The sound of a carriage is growing louder and louder. Soon, he can hear it turning into the driveway of the house, and he sees it as it drives around the far side of the house and turns back to face the front portico. One of the two men on top of the carriage jumps down, the door is opened, and a large man in hat-and-greatcoat climbs down.

  ‘Gowing!’ he yells at th
e house.

  Horton walks towards him, pictures of conspiracy sharpening in his head.

  WESTMINSTER

  There is a frenzy of letter-writing. On reaching Bow Street, Graham calls to ask if the note he wrote to Horton the previous eve has yet been despatched. It has not. He amends it hurriedly and is about to give it to Jealous for delivery when he pauses. In the matter of Thorpe, he finds himself infected by a strange frenzy; like a rope slowly turning on a rope-walk, Thorpe Lee House and the events in London are becoming more and more bound together. He is aware of a great and growing anxiety for his estranged wife and the young girl who shares his name with her. Sir Henry Tempest carries a new stench with him; the stench of the targeted.

  But Jealous can be of use to him here in London; indeed, he has a job in mind. Any of the Bow Street horse patrol can safely deliver a letter. In the end it is Roberts, the man who delivered Horton himself to Thorpe two days before, who is despatched to Surrey.

  There are several possible avenues of inquiry, and he sends Jealous off to chase the most nebulous of them. It is perhaps an indulgence to send Jealous to enquire of the gypsies in Norwood. It may turn out to be thus, but the old woman outside Royal Terrace had already seemed possessed of some quality of significance even before he had spoken to Sir John’s butler, Burgess, who said she had been seen around the house on half-a-dozen occasions. So off Jealous goes to Norwood.

  That business concluded, he must write to the Secretary of State at the Home Department. It is his second missive to Sidmouth on sanguinary matters in days; he had already alerted his lordship to the death of Edmund Wodehouse, it being such an unusual event, but no reply to that letter had been received. Perhaps Sidmouth is otherwise engaged. Graham feels this second killing may change matters. A gentleman’s death may not exercise the former prime minister. A second death, with the same ritualistic marks, smacks of something more sinister.

  Extraordinary, how the second identical killing establishes a pattern. He has seen this before – during the Ratcliffe Highway killings of three years earlier, it was the second atrocity which sharpened the national panic, which gave the killings a sense of implied purpose. It changed them from random acts into deliberate ones, from violence into obscenity. A guiding consciousness, however dark and vicious, could be perceived within the blood-splattered scenes.