Savage Magic

by Lloyd Shepherd

  ‘No, Sir Henry. It was not at all like that. She seemed genuinely distressed by something …’

  ‘Of course she is distressed! Her mother has been chattering about witches and demons and all sorts of Godawful nonsense, and she has brought a strange man – an impertinent man – into her household, as if he were some gypsy cunning-man from Norwood with a book of spells and curses. For God’s sake, man. This must cease!’

  ‘Very well, sir. I will pack my possessions and have a carriage ordered …’

  ‘No. Wait. Wait.’

  Sir Henry puts his hand to his forehead and closes his eyes. The other hand he holds up to arrest Horton. He sits down on an elegant chaise longue, his fat breeched legs splayed wide, his belly hanging down. His blotchy face has gone grey, as if the richness of the previous night’s food has come back to him.

  There is silence for a moment. From somewhere within the house a woman shouts. Horton looks at the window and sees O’Reilly passing with a shovel over his shoulder. He thinks of the leaves drying in his window, the open letter waiting to be sent. He thinks he will go to the inn to eat and drink tonight.

  ‘It’s a bloody stupidity.’ Sir Henry mutters this while his eyes remain closed, and then he sighs and opens them to look at Horton.

  ‘Is there anything to be discovered, Horton? Is there something peculiar happening here?’

  ‘There is something happening, Sir Henry. As to its peculiarity, I will not say.’

  And he finds he doesn’t want to leave this place, after all. Not while something remains unresolved. And certainly not while Abigail isn’t there to welcome him home.

  A Treatise on Moral Projection

  And so we come to it: the heart of the matter, and the rationale for this paper you see before you. The events I am about to describe have been the object of decades of my personal consideration; barely a day has gone by these last thirty years when I have not given them some thought, as if by turning them over in my mind I can accommodate some explanation for them. I do believe, now, that there is indeed a scientific rationale for them; but when I first experienced the episodes I am about to describe, the theoretical tools for understanding them were either absent, or severely misguided. These are matters I shall return to.

  So here is the substance of it: having spent a month trying to establish some connection or rapport with Maria Cranfield, and having failed utterly in this matter, I was visited that September morning by Miss Delilah Underwood, the matron of the female part of the Asylum. There had been more disturbances during the night; for the second eve in a row, the men of Brooke House had made a fearful commotion, raised to it by we knew not what. I assumed she had come to speak with me of this, or perhaps of Mrs Horton, whom I had had occasion to lock in her cell the previous evening when she had become frenzied during a consultation with me.

  Like Maria Cranfield, I did not see Mrs Horton making any progress whatsoever. She continued to have the same visions as when she first entered Brooke House, and I had tried out a whole barrage of remedies on her. At that time, my preferred regime of moral therapy, while highly effective on the male inmates, was proving less so on the females, and for this reason we also maintained a more traditional regimen of quiet solitude, mixed with vomiting, blood-letting and even the occasional opium dose when it was required. We had installed a new circulating swing chair on the ground floor, and this had proven very effective with certain male patients, but I believed the female frame to be too weak for this kind of physical intervention.

  By this time I had become disheartened, but both the women remained subjects for study. When Miss Delilah came in to my consulting room, I was glad to see her; I asked how Mrs Horton was that morning after a night spent in isolation. This had followed an episode the previous evening in my consulting room when Mrs Horton had temporarily lost her wits, as if to demonstrate the lack of progress she had made in Brooke House. I was told that she was quiet, although there had been a good deal of weeping during the night. This saddened me, but I hardened myself in the knowledge that what I did was for the benefit of her own mental state. There had been too much wandering around the place for the woman’s own good; too much stimulation of the fancy was, no doubt, in some way preventing my effecting a cure.

  However, this was not why Miss Delilah had come to visit me. She wished to speak of Maria Cranfield, she said, and I detected a certain tension in her manner when she spoke of that creature. I asked what she wanted to say of Miss Cranfield, and she responded by requesting that the patient be moved out of Brooke House forthwith.

  I was shocked by this suggestion. It was of course wholly inappropriate for a mere matron to be recommending any course of treatment to a physician, but to insist on a patient’s removal! This was so unprecedented as to be scandalous. I responded with a good deal of anger, and demanded to know what in Maria Cranfield could have sparked such an outrageous demand.

  I well remember, even today, what Miss Delilah said at that point.

  ‘She gets in your head, sir,’ she whispered, and to my great astonishment she began to weep as she spoke. Miss Delilah, who had calmed lunatics and sewn up wounds and faced down violent men in the extremities of a fit, was crying!

  ‘She gets in your head, and once she gets in there, you can’t get her out.’

  I was thunderstruck. For a moment I could think of nothing at all to say. My head was, I recall, a little sore from wine I had drunk the previous evening, and I had been suffering from that torpid sense one suffers under the day after liquor has been consumed. I may also have been tired, my sleep having been disturbed by the disturbances among the male patients.

  But I was firm with Miss Delilah, saying she was overwrought and suggesting she might need to go home and rest. She refused, saying her day’s work had barely begun. There was something of the old, familiar and solid Miss Delilah in this reply, forthright and slightly irritated. She could plainly see that I was giving no countenance to what she said, despite that shivery sense of familiarity I had felt. I agreed to go and visit with Maria Cranfield, and Abigail Horton, immediately.

  ‘Take an attendant with you, sir,’ she said, and a pleading tone had re-entered her voice. I asked why I should do such a thing. ‘T’would ease my mind if you did, sir.’

  ‘Well, we are in the business of easing minds, are we not, Miss Delilah?’ And I smiled. I may even have laughed. How innocent of the truth I was.

  I called for an attendant to come with me to Maria Cranfield’s cell. His name is one I shall be repeating often, for despite his mental incapacity (he was an idiot, with the conception of perhaps a ten-year-old boy) he was to play a central part in the horrors to come.

  He was called John Burroway. He came from somewhere on the south coast. He was a young man, big and strong, one of several of that type we kept in our employ in order to be able to deal with some of the more excitable males in Brooke House. John was, as I have said, simple, unable to write much more than his own name, but capable of basic menial tasks and instruction. He lived with a sister in Hackney, who also worked in the house. He did not speak unless spoken to, but with my head as sore as it was, the last thing I wanted was conversation.

  I had no particular reason for choosing John Burroway to attend with me that day. Indeed, I was a good deal irritated by Miss Delilah’s insistence that I take a companion. John was simply the first attendant I came across. But oh how things would have been different if I had not taken him with me!

  We walked past the chapel and up the stairs to the women’s floor, to those two rooms together: Mrs Horton’s cell, and the strong-room which held Maria Cranfield. Both doors were shut. I decided to look in on Mrs Horton first, and required Burroway to open the cell.

  Mrs Horton was lying on the bed, and raised her head when I entered the cell. Seeing me, she sat up. She looked pale, and tired, and, to my great consternation, she looked afraid. I asked her how she was, and she said she felt unwell that morning and that she had slept little. I asked her what h
ad disturbed her, feeling I knew what she would answer. She told me Maria had been disturbed in the night, that she had been shrieking in her sleep, and that she believed Maria had been visited once again by an unseen female. And that, of course, the male inmates had made such an infernal noise.

  My response to this was complicated. I pitied her, but I also found myself becoming angry at this woman’s seeming unwillingness to cooperate with me or with my methods. I had shown her nothing but kindness and consideration, and could not comprehend her persistent refusal to accept that the voices from Maria’s room were in her head, and in her head only. I spoke to her for some time, expressing my sentiments with some force, and as I spoke she shrank back against the wall behind her bed. We left her there after a time, locking the door closed behind us, and went on to visit Maria Cranfield.

  Maria was not sitting on the bed, as Mrs Horton had been. She was standing and, to my surprise, staring intently at the door as we entered. The chain which held her to the wall was stretched tight as she stood in the middle of the room. She looked alert and aware, by no means lost in herself as she had wont to be throughout her stay. When I spoke to her, she looked at me, though she made no sign that she understood what I was saying.

  I sat down in the chair in the room – that same one we had provided for Mrs Horton to sit in. I felt quite sharply unwell. My headache became suddenly acute, and it was accompanied both by a tightness of the chest and a sudden nausea. The room seemed to swell around me, and I felt as if I would lose consciousness if I did not secure a seat. John stayed by the door.

  Maria’s eyes followed me as I sat down and tried to recover myself. She ignored my entreaties to sit down upon her bed. She remained standing above me. As I spoke, she said nothing. I don’t remember, today, what I said. No doubt nothing of great import. But what I do remember is how terrible I felt under her gaze, how unwell. I had always been a hearty fellow, and while the occasional headache inevitably accompanied me in my work, what I felt that morning was like nothing I’d experienced before or since. I felt as if a knife was being turned slowly inside my skull. But that was not the worst of it.

  The worst of it was that when Maria turned her eyes away from me, and to Burroway, my headache ceased. It went away instantly, like a candle being snuffed out. My eyes widened with the shock of it. I stopped speaking, and for a moment there was silence in Maria Cranfield’s cell.

  What happened next chilled me, and chills me still.

  Without warning, John stepped backwards out of the cell. I had given him no instruction, yet he strode away. I called after him, demanding he come back, but he made no reply. It was an act of staggering disobedience, but I was only angered by it for a moment, for Maria now turned her eyes back to mine, and that terrible pain swooped over me once more. It was as if Maria’s eyes were causing that pulsating, queasy agony.

  Then it switched off again, because Maria had looked away. Someone had come to the open door of the cell. It was Abigail Horton. Burroway stood behind her, the key to her cell in his hand. He had opened her door!

  I began to shout at this egregious insubordination, but my yell was stifled as Maria’s eyes locked back onto mine, and the pain returned, stronger and more deliberate than anything that had gone before. I felt at that moment as if the pain might overcome me, might drag me down into a state of dreadful oblivion, but then Mrs Horton stepped into the room and walked up to Maria. Not once looking at me, she began to speak in Maria’s ear, putting her arm around the young woman’s shoulders. My head hurt so much that I was unable to listen to what she said, but I thought I could feel the pain lessening, bit by bit, and as it did so Maria’s fierce frozen stance seemed to soften under the emollient effects of Abigail’s words. Slowly, the two women sat down upon the bed, and then Maria looked down at the floor, and I was released.

  I stood at once, and began to remonstrate with Burroway and with Abigail, conscious of the terrible breach of behaviour I had just witnessed. But my words were stopped in my throat, when Abigail looked up at me and said, with great anger in her voice: ‘Leave us.’

  The impertinence of this was shocking to me, but I had little time to consider it, for then Maria too looked up at me, and again that great pain returned to my head, accompanied by a fierce entreaty to leave the room.

  It is impossible to describe how I felt this. It was rather as if my own mind was issuing instructions to itself, forcing its will upon its will. Is that not a flavour of lunacy itself? How recursive might such a concept become? A mind talking to a mind talking to a mind, onwards and downwards to the unplumbed depths of the imagination. Few if any other physicians of the Mind can have experienced what I did in that room. I felt as if my sanity was snapping itself in two.

  And more than this: I felt myself leaving the room. Burroway waited outside, and as I stepped into the corridor beyond the cell, he reached past me and closed the door, as if following the stage direction of an invisible playwright. We walked down the corridor, down the stairs, and into my rooms. I came to myself again therein, sat in my old leather chair, John Burroway before me, with no conception at all as to how I had arrived there.

  For the attention of ROBERT BROWN

  % Sir Jos. Banks

  Soho Square

  London

  Sir

  I have a most unusual request to make of you, but following our meeting last year during my investigation into the Solander affair, I trust that oddities might at least pique your interest.

  I am currently in attendance at a fine house in Surrey which is plagued by a number of odd incidents. Following what I take to be one of these occurrences a shed has been burned down to the ground. The shed is next to a well, which supplies the house with drinking water. From my examination of the house, it would appear that something was dragged from the well to the shed. This thing, whatever it may have been, burned in the fire which consumed the shed.

  It is perhaps little more than speculative fancy, but I have imagined a circumstance wherein the shed was burned to conceal the burning of something else; in this case, the wooden lid which protected the water in the well from leaf-fall and other elements. Having pondered this, I looked into the well and saw a good deal of green matter floating on the surface of the water, in a huge clump. It looked nothing like the leaves or twigs on the trees which surrounded the well. And so, following my thoughts, I conjectured that someone had removed the lid to the well, and had then added something to the water.

  I have taken a sample of this material and dried it, as I believe is the way. This is enclosed with this letter. I wonder if this little tale might have piqued your interest, and if so whether you might feel compelled to investigate the dried matter I am sending you. You might, perhaps, even be able to tell me what the substance is.

  I would be obliged by any help you could provide on the understanding, of course, that you are not yourself obligated to assist me in any way. But, as you can see, there is perhaps an interesting story here, and it may be one you would consider helping me compose.

  Please send any response to my name at Thorpe Lee House, Thorpe, Surrey.

  I remain

  Yours

  Horton, C.

  Waterman-constable, River Police Office, Wapping

  THORPE

  Horton takes the dried leaves and twigs and places them carefully inside the envelope, and is sealing it when there is a knock at his bedroom door.

  ‘Yes?’ he shouts. Nothing happens for a moment. ‘Oh, come in, then.’ He is not used to being waited on so.

  Peter Gowing puts his head around the door.

  ‘Pardon me, constable, but there’s a horseman just arrived for you.’

  Horton thanks him and heads downstairs; Gowing disappears into whatever part of the house the servants scurry away to. Outside on the drive he finds Roberts, his baleful driver from the day before last.

  ‘Letter for you,’ Roberts says, and half-hands, half-throws the letter down to Horton. He is about to turn the horse and
leave, in his customarily charming way, when Horton stops him.

  ‘Wait a moment, please. I may need to answer.’

  Roberts snorts, and his horse snorts, and the two of them wait for him to read.

  Horton says nothing for a moment, then:

  ‘A moment, please. I shall return immediately.’

  He runs up to his room, and fetches the letter to Brown. This he hands to Roberts.

  ‘This letter is to be delivered to the man on the envelope, or his manservant, at the Soho Square address written. To no one else. Do you understand?’

  Roberts looks at him as if weighing up how sharp a knife would need to be to run him through.

  ‘I ain’t no bleedin’ ticket porter, son. I’m an officer at Bow Street.’

  ‘And this is Bow Street business. If the letter is not delivered, the magistrate will hear of it. Do we understand each other, Roberts?’

  Roberts snatches the letter from him, and turns away. His horse snaps its tail in contempt.

  Horton goes inside, and tries to speak to Sir Henry again about the contents of the letter. But the master of the house is locked in his room, and has left explicit instructions not to be disturbed. Horton is left to wonder how the murky events at Thorpe Lee House might overlap with the horrors taking place in London, as described by Aaron Graham. The itch he’d felt at the well now feels like a fever.

  WESTMINSTER

  Aaron Graham has made his home on the fringes of Covent Garden, so its stenches both physical and moral are as familiar to him as the pain in his calves and the growing tightness in his chest. Like all gentlemen that choose to live in this extraordinary place, Graham steps out of his home on a daily basis and is near-overwhelmed by the stench from the open drains, the mud and shit which cake the cobblestones, the torrent of shouting noise: the calls to trade of the fruit and vegetable sellers, the curses of the carters, the caterwauling of the ballad singers, the knife grinders and the milkmaids.