“Wait?”
“Yes. From what I know of Lionel, he’s not mad. Quite the opposite, I would have said. Whatever’s bothering him, he probably just needs time to work it out on his own. He’ll come back when he’s ready.”
“You’re probably right.” She sighed, then took a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. “Thank you for listening, anyway. You’ve been a great help.” She gulped her tea. “You know the craziest thing? He took that woodlouse with him when he went.”
She laughed. We both did. I asked Marian if she still had the map she found in Lionel’s office.
“I’d be interested to see it,” I said. “I like old maps.”
“It’s still on his desk. I’ll go and fetch it.”
She disappeared upstairs, into the main part of the house above the shop. A couple of minutes later she returned.
“Take it, if you like,” she said, handing me the map. “I can easily get another.” She hesitated. “There’s this too, if you’re interested. Lionel left it behind. He kept on at me to read it, said it would explain things. It’s some sort of history of the house, of this Greystone Lodge, or of something that happened there. It’s fascinating in its way. But I can’t honestly see any connection with what’s going on with Lionel. All houses have their ugly secrets, don’t they?”
She passed me what was in her hand, a small book. “You can keep this, too. I doubt I’d read it again. It’s rather unpleasant.”
“You don’t think Lionel would mind?”
“Lionel’s not here, is he?” She shrugged, and compressed her lips. “He shouldn’t leave things lying about, if he wants to hang on to them.”
IT WAS AN attractive little book, cloth-bound, with gilt-edged pages and patterned endpapers, the kind you might pick up at a church jumble sale because you like the look of it, and then put down again because the contents seem so obscure you know you’ll never read it: My Sister Clarissa – An Account of her Illness and Metamorphosis, by Edward Fawcett. A sepia-tint photograph formed the frontispiece, a pale-faced, dark-haired woman in a long dark dress.
The book was written in the form of a diary with academic footnotes, and told the story of a country doctor as he watches his sister’s transformation into some kind of demon. I assumed it was a demon, anyway – Fawcett’s narrator never describes any physical changes in Clarissa, just records her behaviour and the conversations he has with her in meticulous detail, which in a way was more frightening.
The book was published in 1911. I looked for information on Fawcett online, and in the Oxford Companion to English Literature, but there was nothing.
Fawcett’s narrator is never named. In fact, the way the text had been put together – the footnotes, the intimate diary entries – was clearly meant to suggest that the book was a true first person account by Fawcett himself.
Rather clever, I thought. Fake diaries and memoirs are commonplace now, much less so then. For this reason alone I was surprised that Fawcett’s book was not better known.
And when she looked at me, it was with contempt, wrote Fawcett’s stand-in. As if I were an ugly speck of dust on the mirror of her life, a mote to be brushed aside, obliterated. And the mirror: bright as a knife, sharp as a thorn.
I decided to email Professor Rubery, who taught the nineteenth century novel module when I was at uni. I had always enjoyed his lectures – if anyone was able to help me, it would be him. I described Fawcett’s book to him, attached PDF scans of the title page and opening chapter. I bought this because it looked interesting, I wrote. I was hoping you might be able to tell me something about the author? I can’t find a thing online.
Professor Rubery emailed me back in less than a day.
I don’t have a clue, he wrote. But leave it with me.
I heard from him again about a fortnight later, just as I was starting to assume he’d given up.
You were right about it being interesting, he wrote. Edward Fawcett actually was a doctor, not a writer. He was struck off for malpractice – he had his sister committed to a mental asylum and then took money from a colleague in return for permission to conduct experiments on her. The sister died in the asylum. Fawcett and this other doctor tried to hush it up, apparently.
So Fawcett’s book was autobiographical, after all, or at least partly. When I mentioned this to Rubery he seemed less convinced.
I’d say he wrote it to cash in on the scandal. He probably needed the money by then, let’s face it. And horror stories were popular at the time because of Dracula. There are bits and pieces of truth here – Fawcett’s sister really was called Clarissa, for example – but they’re stretched pretty thin.
Professor Rubery added that Fawcett’s sister had been married to an ex-merchant seaman named Douglas Worthen. Worthen had set off for India on some kind of business venture and never returned. Fawcett always claimed his sister first showed signs of mental disturbance not long after her husband’s disappearance, Rubery wrote. The two were very much in love, apparently.
Edward Fawcett’s writing style was overblown and verbose, the voice of someone used to having their opinions listened to, someone who was more than a little in love with his supposed mastery over the English language. The details of his ‘account’ were so festooned in purple prose it was frequently difficult to make out what was going on. His book would certainly have benefited from a decent edit but even so, I found it electrifying.
Make no mistake about it, Ransom. The womanly visage is merely a mask for what lies beneath. Refer me, if you must, to the forces of what you choose, in your wilful cowardice, to cling to as Law and Order. Discrediting me will not alter the fact that the thing you dote upon as my helpless, poor, mad sister is a foot-soldier of the coming apocalypse.
Foot soldier? I couldn’t place the reference at first, or understand why the words had sent such a shiver through me, not so much a shiver of fear as of recognition. Then it came to me: Lionel Rose had used exactly the same phrase about Blythe Maccabe.
THE BOOK DESCRIBED how Fawcett’s sister was effectively tortured to death over a period of months, hidden away in a private asylum close to Belsize Park. The name of the house as it appears in Fawcett’s book is Greystone Lodge. The asylum’s proprietor, Cedric Blane, agrees with Fawcett that Clarissa Worthen is a moral degenerate of the worst kind, corrupted in both mind and body by what he repeatedly refers to as ‘deviant entities’. Blane maintains that the only way of salvaging Clarissa’s humanity lies in forcing these entities from her body by ‘rigorous purging’. Blane’s assistant, Charles Ransom, becomes increasingly convinced that there is nothing wrong with Clarissa Worthen that could not be rectified by removing her from the domineering influence of her brother. He eventually resigns his position at the asylum, stating that Blane’s methods ‘bore the taint of the Dark Ages’ and that he wanted no further part in anything that went on there.
Less than three months later, Clarissa was dead.
Edward Fawcett uses the term ‘alien’ one hundred and forty-eight times during the course of his narrative. In spite of being a doctor – a man of science dedicated to the accurate observation of material facts – he is never able to describe precisely how his sister Clarissa has become alien to him. Everything is tangled in metaphor, layer upon layer of elaborate similes and double-entendres.
Of course I knew how he felt. How can you describe something that conceals itself so perfectly within the familiar?
Both Fawcett and Blane were struck off, according to Rubery. Cedric Blane – his real name was Blyton – carried on practising illegally. Fawcett, believe it or not, entered the priesthood.
I wasn’t surprised, to be honest. Something about the grandiosity of the language he used.
Blyton, Blythe, I thought. Of course, the doctor in Fawcett’s memoir and the man Lionel Rose had named as Blythe Maccabe could not be the same man – the events Fawcett described had happened a century ago – but even so. A relative, perhaps, a descendant? Even that idea seemed faintly ridic
ulous when you said it out loud. I decided to abandon that train of thought, at least for the moment, and concentrate on the house itself. One question at least was solved: Lionel’s map, I saw with a frisson of triumph, had pinpointed its location for me exactly.
THE HOUSE WAS built in 1750, designed and paid for by a Shropshire iron manufacturer named Jacob Arkwright. Arkwright named the house Irongrove Lodge, in honour of the industry that had made him his fortune, although it was known in the local vicinity simply as Arkwrights. Whatever the name of the house, Jacob Arkwright must not have liked living there much: legal correspondence reveals that he and his family – wife Esme, son Tobias, daughters Millicent and Maisie – lived there less than three years before letting the place out to tenants and returning to Shropshire.
Jacob Arkwright died at the age of eighty, outliving his wife and his son Tobias and leaving his considerable estate to be divided equally between his daughters. The younger daughter Maisie had settled abroad with her husband, a shipping line executive with the Eastern Spice Company. Millicent, who had been widowed two years previously, decided she would move south to take up residence in the London house as soon as the current tenants’ term of leasehold expired.
It was Millicent Arkwright who rechristened the house Greystone Lodge, although her reasons for doing so remain obscure. She was also responsible for taking the place up in the world, socially – she wasn’t shy about spending her father’s money, that’s for sure – and by the time Greystone Lodge passed out of the Arkwright family in 1857 the house, with its attractive, creeper-covered facade and ornate wrought iron railings, had featured in the work of at least two notable London artists. A later canvas, entitled simply ‘Sunset’ and reminiscent of Atkinson Grimshaw, was acquired by Stanley Hewitt, a department store owner who purchased the house in 1862 and lived there until his death in 1880.
The painting shows the house – predictably – at sunset, with the colours of the sky echoed in the flaming orange of the Virginia creeper. The effect is slightly unnerving, as if the house has caught fire. There are odd shadows at the windows, too, although the street outside appears completely deserted.
I first noticed the painting hanging over the fireplace in the main living room of Blythe Mccabe’s first-floor apartment when we eventually met. I asked him how he came to have it and he said he’d bought it at auction. The painting had been the property of Denise Cracknell, who had inherited Greystone Lodge from her Aunt Betsy, the granddaughter of that same Stanley Hewitt who had commissioned ‘Sunset’ as a wedding present to his wife Eleanor.
“It was Cracknell who had the house converted into flats. For financial reasons, I imagine,” Mccabe told me, although my own researches had revealed that information to me already. “She lived in the garden flat. Furnished it with what remained of her aunt’s antiques.”
Between Stanley Hewitt’s death in 1880 and Denise Cracknell inheriting the house from her aunt in 1953, it had been managed as a commercial enterprise by Hewitt’s son and later his grandson, first as a convalescent home for wounded soldiers, then as a private asylum, then as a convalescent home again.
“I imagine it was in a bit of a state when Cracknell inherited,” Mccabe said. “The bones of a good house stay true though. There’s nothing a dose of time and vision can’t put right.”
And money, I thought but did not say. When I asked Mccabe how long he’d owned his flat he hesitated, then shrugged. “About twenty years, give or take,” he said. He seemed uncertain, as well he might, because his claim was untrue. According to the Land Registry, the first floor flat hadn’t changed hands since 1972, when it had been purchased from Denise Cracknell’s daughter Clarice by a Dr Malcolm Bliss.
The records insisted that Dr Bliss still owned the flat. Which meant either that Blythe Mccabe was the tenant, not the owner, or that Blythe Mccabe was in fact Malcolm Bliss.
Blane, Blyton, Bliss, Blythe – it was all insane. Still more insane when you considered that even supposing ‘Dr Malcolm Bliss’ had been a boyish eighteen when he first took possession of the flat, he would now be in his sixties. Logic dictated he would be much older.
Blythe Mccabe looked to be fifty years old at the most. The dates didn’t add up.
GREYSTONE LODGE STOOD at the junction of Marsden Road and Queen’s Crescent in the no-man’s-land between leafy Belsize Park and the more mundane Chalk Farm. The area would have been resolutely downmarket in the 1970s, when the mysterious Malcolm Bliss had acquired his flat there, but was now secure in its upward mobility, the shabby newsagents and corner stores inevitably giving way to ethnic delicatessens, wooden-floored coffee bars, and branches of Tesco Metro.
The house, like its surroundings, seemed quietly respectable, the largest and most prominent among a number of Georgian properties in the vicinity, flanked on one side by a ruddy-faced Victorian terrace, on the other by a 1930s mansion block built from the familiar yellow-grey London stock.
Greystone Lodge blended in, I thought, almost as if it was trying to camouflage itself.
Of course the street hadn’t looked like that when the house was first built. Lionel Rose’s map revealed a green suburb of singular properties and stately gardens. Irongrove Lodge, as it was called then, had been one sturdy, gracious home among a select company of similarly desirable dwellings and not an importunate Victorian in sight.
Marsden Road had been a leafy hill, while further to the north you could still catch enticing glimpses of open fields.
Yet still I could not rid myself of the idea that the house had, in some peculiar way, itself created the ramshackle and disparate landscape that now surrounded it, drawn the cloak of modern London securely about itself, to conceal its true purpose.
I studied Lionel Rose’s map for a long time, comparing it endlessly with the same pages in the current A-Z until I could see them in my sleep, those interlocking streets, until I could recite their names to myself by heart, the way another, more reasonable person might ease the racing of their overtired brain by counting sheep.
I still had no real idea of what I was looking for.
MY FIRST SIGHT of the house, appropriately enough, came at sunset. I headed over there straight from work, telling myself I was acting on impulse, that I hadn’t really planned the trip from the moment I woke that morning, my sleep-numbed mind insisting that today would be the day, that if I was serious about this madness I was bound to act now.
I got out of the tube at Chalk Farm, then cut across Haverstock Hill and into Queen’s Crescent. I passed and circled two or three times, pretending to browse the shops on Malden Road before doubling back again. I wasn’t worried about appearing conspicuous as it was still the rush hour.
The house was square, blockish. There was no sign any more of the Virginia creeper, although the whitewashed facade was striped with gaudy orange by the setting sun. Traffic whirled past, commuters disgorged themselves from buses, a woman in silver stilettos tapped past me up the road. It was a commonplace scene, an evening scene, just London preparing herself for the oncoming night. I tried to find something bothersome in it, any single discomfiting element, but failed to do so.
The house was looking down on me, the tall windows with their glassy stares, like disapproving eyes. The curtains on the first floor appeared to be open, but the sunset had turned them to mirrors, effectively blinding me.
There is nothing here to see, just a house, the stones whispered to me inside my head. A voice worn thin by the ages, yet still retaining its vigour, as the day’s warmth is held in a house’s walls as the sun goes down.
Are you speaking to me? I thought but did not say aloud, not quite. I thought of Lionel Rose, and then looked down the street, glancing both ways, almost as if I expected to see him approaching along the opposite pavement, a living flashback.
Unsurprisingly, he was not. I walked back towards the tube, wondering how I thought I meant to get inside the place. I could hardly just ring the bell and ask for Mccabe. Not without a believable cover sto
ry, anyway.
It wasn’t until later that evening that I realised Lionel Rose – Lionel Rose and his hangman’s watch – had already provided me with one.
Lionel Rose had come to the house by invitation, to buy something. It was simply a matter of finding out what other items Blythe Mccabe might be offering for sale.
I LOOKED BACK over Lionel’s entries on the Memento Mori forum, searching for the name of the magazine where he’d first seen the advertisement for Rawlin’s watch. I was lucky it was Lionel and not one of the other posters, some of whom were obsessively secretive about their sources. Lionel traded information freely and with enthusiasm. He was one of those collectors who seemed to enjoy the paraphernalia of their hobby – the specialist language, the camaraderie – as much as he enjoyed acquiring the objects themselves.
Which was what made the change in him so noticeable, afterwards. For the moment though I was simply grateful for Lionel’s openness. Tracking down my quarry might have taken me forever otherwise. Even with my specialist resources, disentangling Mccabe’s identity from a spider’s web of PO Box numbers and fake business addresses wasn’t a project I would have relished wasting time on. As it was, I found Mccabe’s advert – Not Exactly Philately – in the same place Lionel had found it: amongst the small ads at the back of Criminal Collectibles magazine. No mention of a Blythe Mccabe, or of Greystone Lodge, but why would there be? Few of the dealers gave out their personal information until they closed a sale.
Not Exactly Philately were certainly offering some bizarre merchandise. Authentic Victorian poison bottles, facsimile post mortem reports on the Ripper’s victims, a contemporary replica of the nightdress worn by Constance Kent on the night she killed her baby stepbrother, books that had supposedly come from the library of Dr Crippen. Why anyone would want Crippen’s copy of Tennyson’s Poems I had no idea, especially as the advertisement was careful to note that the volume wasn’t inscribed. Obviously for some collectors, the thought that Crippen had at some point flicked through the contents, laid his hands upon the faded cloth covers – that their hands would be occupying the same space as Crippen’s hands – was sufficient.
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