The sharp tang of the ale reminds him of that strangely terrible night in Thorpe, when witches flew along hedgerows and bonfires sprouted in fields. But his first sip had been as cleansing as taking the waters in Bath. He wonders if the pitchery is still in his system, a malignant manipulator of dreams.
The story has begun to emerge, but an incomplete and odd one. Once again he is in that dark room of his imagination, holding a candle and trying to perceive the full outline of the enormous thing in the middle of the room, assembling its structures from the fragments which the candle illuminates.
A woman, returning from Australia, for reasons unknown but with some deliberate purpose. A woman who, it is said, has the capacity to project her will onto men.
All the Sybarites but two: dead, impossibly so, the only possible killers within the men’s own houses, their faithful servants. The only survivors are Tempest and, Horton assumes, Cameron, the one who took Graham’s advice to leave London.
The man who procured young women for these men: dead by his own hand, a sword in his stomach.
One of the other women in Sir Henry’s dirty little book: also dead, apparently by her own hand.
The Indefatigable, returning to Deal in April. Watched for by Henry Lodge, a man who does not seem to comprehend why he is acting as he does. But there was something of Thorpe Lee House about Lodge’s haunted and half-absent eyes. Something hidden there, placed deliberately by a woman with an unspeakable capacity.
Did Maggie Broad bring pitchery with her, perhaps? Grown somewhere on her very successful New South Wales farm? Perhaps with advice from those strange natives, with their spears and the bones in their noses, so very different to the natives of Otaheite which the sailors of the Solander spoke of, so dark and afraid and resistant to the queries of the North? Did they not eat people? Or is that somewhere else entirely?
Sir Henry, bleeding on his chaise longue. Speared by his own daughter, the daughter who danced in the woods, who seemed half-witch herself. Who told him to leave the woods without speaking the words, and who then removed the memory of it.
The gypsy’s wagon, pulling away from the forest.
The story unfolding within his head, impervious to his own desires. The implacability of it, the certainty of it, the clarity of it.
But something is still missing, the essential question. Why is Maggie Broad here? What is her motivation? Simple malevolence would be a bleak answer, and Horton does not believe it.
He leaves the tavern, and walks home. It is dark and there is rain and perhaps thunder in the air. The streets are alive with meaning. He sees two young boys he knows well, part of that little network of boys whose eyes watch the houses and the people on his behalf. They wave as they disappear down some mischievous dark sideway, full of intrigue and curiosity, the world an adventure of thousands of levels to be clambered up. He misses Wapping. He has been away too long.
He misses Abigail.
Lower Gun Alley is almost silent. His windows have the same neglected, purposeless air he noticed earlier today. He goes into the building and up the stairs, and unlocks the door to the apartment with his key. Instantly, he notices a letter which has been shoved beneath the door. He picks it up, recognising immediately the well-formed handwriting on the front, picturing despite himself the small careful hand. The letter is from Abigail.
Charles
I pray this letter reaches you for I dare not leave this place. Know this, first of all – I am well, and though the visions which pursued me here and chased me away from thyself are still much in my mind, they have been greatly displaced by other concerns.
There is something very strange taking place here within the madhouse. There is a girl here, named Maria, who seems to be possessed of abilities which I cannot describe nor quite believe. She seems to have the power to possess men’s minds – to force them to do things against their will. More than this, there is an effulgence from this capacity which seems to have spread through the whole house, causing men to scream and shriek and fear. This has happened on at least three occasions.
I do not believe I am imagining this. Also, I fear that the physician in attendance herein – a weak man named Bryson – has no conception of Maria’s abilities, and does not know how to deal with her. I have concluded that the only brake on her power – and on her misuse of it – is my attendance with her. She grows calmer when I am with her. I read to her, and I talk to her, and she seems to hear or understand me. But I fear her. Oh, Charles, I fear her terribly.
I shall give this letter to an attendant here who is kind to us but is sadly feeble-minded. I fear it may never reach you. I will not know if it has until you appear, and I pray you do, my husband. We have seen things, you and I, these past three years, and you have told me of other things which pass all my understanding, for all of my books and lectures. I do not understand what is happening in this place, Charles. And I beg you to come and help me.
With all my love
Abigail
WESTMINSTER
William Jealous isn’t supposed to be looking for Rose Dawkins. He is supposed to be looking for Charles Horton.
He has tried. Earlier that afternoon Graham had called him into the office at Bow Street and charged him with finding Horton ‘immediately’. The magistrate had looked angry and, Jealous nervously noted, he had looked anxious. Anyone with a nose to smell can sense the panic in the air, can see the emissaries from Whitehall carrying notes and warnings, can hear the raised voices and anxious questions of the scribblers in the parlour. But Aaron Graham is normally the calmest of the Bow Street magistrates. It is disturbing to see that calm fractured.
He had travelled to the Wapping River Police Office directly, and had learned that Horton had been there some hours before, but it is now early evening, and no one knows where he is. Jealous waits for a little while outside Horton’s lodgings, which look shut up and abandoned to his practised London eyes, but he cannot settle. There is an itch he has to scratch. The itch is called Rose Dawkins.
Rose has, to all intents and purposes, disappeared from view following her release. Ugly, violent, foul-mouthed Rose. Why is he worried about such a one as her? A vicious street-whore. And yet he is hopping from one foot to another on a dirty side-street in Wapping, and for the first time in his young life contemplating insubordination. Horton can look after himself. When he has something to report to Graham he will do so. Standing around is a waste of time.
The dead bodies of the Sybarites are still in their locked-up houses. Surgeons have investigated them and will report to separate coroner’s inquests on the morrow; but none of these inquests will unpick the central mysteries of the case. How do five men meet their deaths in their own homes, under lock and key, and under the eyes and noses and ears of constables and watchmen?
The key was the servants, Horton had said. But they have been spoken to, and they remember nothing. Glassy-eyed confusion greets every enquiry. Graham has no answer to this, and nor do any of his fellow magistrates, or anyone working for him, Jealous least of all. But Rose Dawkins has been forgotten since her release, and Jealous is unable to fathom this. He is, after all, a young man, and he finds himself remembering the shape of Rose’s hand as he dragged her through St Giles. If he cared to think about it more deeply, he might recognise how much Rose’s air of desperate rage is redolent of his sister Joan, who shares the streetwalker’s sense of aggrieved amusement at her lot.
His hand remembers the sting of Rose’s slapped face, a rebuke and a reminiscence. Why is it only he that can see the woman might be in danger? Is not her friend Elizabeth dead already?
When arrested, Rose had given her address as the building in which they had found Elizabeth Carrington: 27 Brownlow Street. He’d raised her eyebrows at that and she’d glared at him defiantly, daring him to question it or even slap him again, so she could ‘kick his prick off’. He’d said nothing. It hadn’t seemed to matter and, in any case, it might be true.
He comes to a decision: to
leave Wapping. He takes a carriage to Covent Garden, where he arrives as the streets begin to fill up for the evening to come. Doors are opening all along Brownlow Street, and women of various ages and sizes are stepping out into the street, some individually, others in little chattering groups. When they spot him, they either go quiet or shout obscenities – he is already well recognised by the streetwalkers. He goes to Number 27, and lets himself in.
With a start, he realises the body of Elizabeth Carrington is almost certainly still upstairs. All available men are either guarding the houses of the dead Sybarites, or running errands for Graham, or out on the pavements seeking something, anything, on which to hang a prosecution. A dead whore warrants no protection, and no intervention. He wonders if Elizabeth will always be up there, her hand hanging down, the blood beneath her staining the boards a permanent scarlet …
There is a whore in Elizabeth’s room, but it is not a dead one. Rose Dawkins is on her knees, scrubbing the floorboards. The body has gone.
He hasn’t knocked, and this does not impress Rose.
‘Who the fuck do you think you are, comin’ in ’ere?’ She remains kneeling on the floor, but the force of her character is undiminished by that. ‘Get out of it, now. You’re no bloody use to me or to anyone.’
The force of her will is like a hand on his chest, and he remembers that feeling of being tugged on the collar as he held her down in St Giles. He feels something like it now – reluctance to do anything other than step out of the room and walk away. Rose’s forceful will is almost physical.
‘I came to check on Elizabeth,’ he lies. ‘Who took her body?’
She looks at him, head slightly cocked on one side, like a smart dog checking on the friendliness of a human.
‘The parish. I told them what had happened. They were ’ere just now. You lot weren’t going to do nothin’ about it, were you?’
‘The coroner might object to that.’
‘Do me a favour. The coroner don’t give a toss. He’s too busy looking at the bodies of toffs, ain’t he? Couldn’t care less about a poor bitch like Lizzie.’
She stands, now. That feeling of wanting to leave subsides, leaving only a spark of sensation in the back of the neck, like the footsteps of an insect crawling across his skin.
‘What do you want?’
‘I was concerned for … your safety.’
‘My safety?’
‘Yes. If there is a killer stalking whores and their gulls …’
She frowns, puzzled.
‘Free ride round the houses, is it?’ she says, her voice sneering but her face open and confused for the first time since he has met her. ‘Hopeful that the poor scared little bitch will spread her legs for the brave Bow Street Runner?’
‘No!’ He steps further into the room, and is now only three or four steps away from her. They look at each other. She is still holding the wet rag with which she had been mopping up Lizzie Carrington’s emptied life. ‘And besides. I’m not a Runner.’
She smiles a little at that, and then Jealous hears a soft step from behind him, and he turns to see an older woman with dark hair and a terrible scar down one cheek. These things are only the impressions of an instant, though, because she is looking into his eyes and he is looking into hers and he falls into those green circles and hears the sound of his sister laughing, a child’s laugh from somewhere down the years, a garden and rain and the feel of wet grass on his warm bare legs, a summer feeling, and he is turning within the garden, turning towards a figure he dimly recognises, a Rose, a Rose in the garden, and he is putting his hands around the Rose’s throat, around its flowers and its thorns, and he is squeezing hard, but his sister is calling to him, down the years, and he looks down at her and she is shouting at him, telling him to stop, and Joan has always been the only one who can tell him to do anything, and he squeezes and squeezes and Joan shouts and shouts, though her shouts are getting dimmer and weaker, but then she shouts one last thing, hard and sharp and completely unexpected …
I’ll kick you in the fucking prick!
… and he stops and lets go and the garden disappears and Rose falls to her knees as he drops her, coughing and crying, heaving air back into her body through rattling great sobs of breath.
He is about to turn to look at the woman who has come into the room, to ask what her business might be, but then Rose grabs his hand and, without looking at him while she struggles with her air, manages to whisper: ‘Don’t … look at her …’
He looks at her hand in his, and some vestigial childhood ripple comes back to him – snap it, snap it like a twig in the garden – but it is a whispered thing, emptied of its power.
Eventually, Rose looks up at him again, and struggles to stand. He feels sick when he sees the marks of his thumbs on the front of her neck, as livid as petals. Once she’s on her feet, she puts a hand on his shoulder, holding him in place, positioning him faced away from the stranger in the room.
‘You killed Lizzie. You bitch. You killed Lizzie.’
Jealous hears nothing at first, only the steady breathing of the older woman behind him. This sound, and the sight of Rose’s fierce stare, and something else – that disconcerting static prickle – fill the room. He wishes, more than anything, to turn and face down those eyes, but Rose’s hand is strong on his arm, holding him in place.
‘Have you always been able to do that?’ says the woman. The accent is strong; East Anglian, Suffolk or Norfolk, as rural as wheat and hops. The voice is harsh and powerful, almost male in its bearing.
‘Do what?’ asks Rose, and her fingers tense on his shoulder.
‘You know what I am talking of, girl.’
‘I’m no girl, bitch. Did you kill Lizzie?’
‘Lizzie killed herself.’
‘Fuck off. You know what you did.’
‘As do you, girl.’
‘You made Lizzie kill herself.’
‘She was a witness.’
‘Witness to what?’
‘To the defilement of my daughter. She did nothing to help her. Neither did you.’
‘Help her? How could we have helped her?’
‘You have some power. You don’t have to whore yourself around. You’re more than that. You’re more than this useless bag of bones that calls itself a patrolman.’
Rose looks at him then, and he sees in her eyes her suspicious hatred, her angry shame, her deliberate viciousness. No one would write poems about those mud-brown eyes – they’re warlike and bitter. She turns them back on the stranger behind him.
‘He resisted you.’
A laugh, then. A nasty, bullying laugh. The laugh of an overseer with a whip standing over an exhausted negro.
‘It was not he who resisted, Rose Dawkins. Now, leave him be and come with me. My work is done. We can leave together, and change your life.’
‘I will not leave with you.’
‘I am a bad enemy to have, Rose Dawkins.’
‘You are an old woman who has no power over me.’
Rose’s eyes widen then – he sees them pop into open circles. Her arm stiffens, her fingers bite into his shoulders. The cords in her neck become visible, her brow creases into a dozen folds. She is in pain. Every part of her is in pain. He is about to turn, to throw himself at her attacker, but then Rose goes limp and falls to the floor and behind him he hears the stranger turn and walk briskly out and down the stairs; he even catches a glimpse of her shoulder as she goes, before turning back to the girl on the floor.
She is in a faint. A dribble of blood comes out of one nostril. He raises her head and, sitting down, puts it in his lap. The tough patrolman finds an unexpected tenderness within him. He takes one of her hands and holds it, and with the other strokes her red hair. It is as soft and brittle as new straw. His father would laugh at him if he could see.
After a minute or two she opens her eyes, and breathes in hugely through her nose. She smiles, a fierce little expression which contrives to make her hard ugly face something b
eautiful.
‘What happened?’ he asks.
‘She gave me a warning,’ Rose replies. ‘To keep out of whatever comes next.’
A Treatise on Moral Projection
That final day was calm, and Brooke House was quiet. The shocks and shrieks of the previous night had, God knows, been among the worst things I had heard – particularly that terrible chanting towards the end, as if all the men in the place were shouting from a script written by a lunatic playwright. How could that have been, I asked myself? What consciousness operated upon them, to make them speak with one voice?
A terrible conception had come upon me. My theory of moral projection was then barely formed; it has taken these past three decades for me to refine my thoughts upon it. I read my notes from that day and they seem to me to be fractured and somewhat desperate, and I believe I know why – I had become terrified lest Maria Cranfield step into my head once again and extract more memories. I resolved to write every single thing down.
It was a wise course. For soon another would come, who would make Maria’s abilities look impoverished indeed. Only my perspicacity and foresight protected my ideas so that I might share them with you, the reader, today.
But I am running ahead of myself. My notes from that day tell a particular story: how I visited Maria Cranfield’s cell. How I found her sleeping, watched over by Abigail Horton. How Mrs Horton begged for someone to be sent to clean Maria’s bedding and to accompany the two women so they could clean themselves. I agreed, and went to find John Burroway.
John went up to the women and was gone for perhaps an hour, during which time I wrote more notes and consulted with a few additional inmates. But my heart was not in it. I could not focus on the prattling concerns of these lunatics when, upstairs, almost above my head, there was a female whose abilities, I had already begun to tell myself, would make my name and my reputation.
I consulted my notes again. As I have said, I was becoming concerned that Maria might try to remove memories from me once again, and that these memories might include my own observations of her. Suddenly these observations seemed to me to be of enormous value; to be the means to my own professional rise.
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