Richard Marggraf Turley is a British author and literary critic. He is Professor of Engagement with the Public Imagination at Aberystwyth University, and works in the University’s Department of English and Creative Writing. In 2007, he won the Keats-Shelley Prize for poetry.
Also by Richard Marggraf Turley
Poetry
Whiteout (with Damian Walford Davies)
The Fossil-Box
Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair
Non-Fiction
Keats’s Boyish Imagination
THE CUNNING HOUSE
Richard Marggraf Turley
First published in Great Britain
and the United States of America by
Sandstone Press Ltd
Dochcarty Road
Dingwall
Ross-shire
IV15 9UG
Scotland.
www.sandstonepress.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © Richard Marggraf Turley 2015
Commissioning Editor: Robert Davidson
The moral right of Richard Marggraf Turley to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.
The publisher acknowledges support from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.
ISBN: 978-1-910124-10-9
ISBNe: 978-1-910124-11-6
Jacket design by Mark Ecob, London
Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore.
To DWD
Contents
1. Monsters
2. Crying Sins
3. Jackadandies
4. Martyr's Tears
Author's Note
“Is any one here who knows how to play the cups and balls?”
Encyclopedia Britannica (1810)
1.
MONSTERS
1. Self-destroyer
At least he could be sure of the corpse’s name. James Tranter, footman to his Royal Highness the Duke of York. He had two slick chickens to thank for that. Both jack-a-dandies, Neale and . . . he opened his notebook for the foreign-looking one with the odd name . . . Sellis, were valets to York’s younger brother, the Duke of Cumberland.
By their account, Tranter had acted up the previous evening, charging about with a hatful of bullets. Lots of loud talk about putting a slug through his brains. Seemed he’d been good for his word.
He watched as the Royal Surgeon, a short man with bad skin called Jackson, gave the corpse the once over. Every appearance, the St James’s surgeon pronounced, glancing up, of the pistol having been discharged from within the mouth, rather than at the temples, which was the more usual position. The bullet had blown out the palate. The missing area of the orbital bones – he indicated with a finger, as if there could be any doubt – marked an exit.
There was, Jackson added, getting to his feet and rolling his shirt sleeves down, no single location of a gunshot wound that on its own conclusively disambiguated suicidal from homicidal injury. (He obviously enjoyed the words.) But as far as he was concerned, the hole satisfied in every respect. Biathanate in nature. Tranter was a self-destroyer.
The beginning of March, and unseasonably warm. Hadn’t lit a fire in his office for a fortnight. Somewhere nearby, a bird was singing. He couldn’t find it.
“Care for a closer view, Mr Read?”
He’d have to see this travesty through. He was the Chief Magistrate at Bow Street, after all. He turned back to the surgeon and smiled grimly, adjusting the buttons on his waistcoat. One was coming loose. He gave the thread a little tug.
Tranter’s body lay on its back at the cobbled entrance to the palace stables, a discharged pistol held loosely in its manicured fingers. The Chief Magistrate glanced up. A high brick wall rose behind these outbuildings, and just behind that – a world away – lay Pall Mall, one of the city’s busiest pavements.
He turned his gaze down. The footman’s corpse looked lank and worn. There was an intimate whiff about it. Kneeling, Read noted the upper teeth protruding into nothingness, the broken crust of the skull. Lifting his eyes skywards, he allowed himself to imagine for a moment the slug’s flight onwards, beyond the constraints of the footman’s skull, its acute plane over the dovecots, the inevitable parabola, pictured the projectile coming to rest, chinking curiously, next to a flowerpot, where the contrast between its brutal grey and the plant’s living colour briefly detained any servant whose eyes happened to be drawn in that direction by a strange insect, busy at the sticky parts.
A lot easier if that were true.
What the Chief Magistrate also noted, and knew better than to mention, was the lack of sufficient frothy matter on the cobbles and stable walls to account for the contents of the footman’s inner thoughts.
2. Ones & Zeros
“What of space, Mrs Cooke?”
Sarah stopped wiping down tables. She looked quizzically at old Mr Shadworth, the only patron who remained below, half-hidden in a cloud of blue tobacco smoke.
“Has its immensity no end? Are the suns and planets without number? How deep is the void?” He lifted his sparse eyebrows.
She gave him a smile, and a non-committal shrug.
“What is infinity?” he persisted.
The old dog claimed to be a mathematician at the Academy. She sent her cloth back over the tables, the air keen with citrus.
“Indubitably,” Mr Shadworth continued with a touch of piqué, placing his tumbler on the counter, “it is endless repetition, all there is, all there can ever be, divided endlessly.”
“Then you already know.” An odd fish, but a big tipper. His silver guineas had her handsome jacks lining up. Only the Country Gentleman dropped more coin.
Roars from the attics sieved down through the ceiling boards.
“Stargazers,” Mr Shadworth said, crossing to the brass spy glass that perched on a tripod in the corner of the taproom, “speak of the infinity of space as a never-ending progression, a voyage through ideas of emptiness.”
Mr Shadworth had the telescope brought in – at his own expense – and personally supervised its placement at the window. But the only vista it opened was a view along the whole length of Clare Market.
He squinted into the eyepiece, then returned to the ale counter. “They say, since the universe is infinite, other worlds like our own, incalculably remote yet equally adapted for rational life, must roll afar. Perhaps the moral world extends even to such distant realms.” He knocked back his tumbler, licking a dark residue from his lips.
Sarah stretched for the back of a table, wincing where James’s fingers had dug in below her shoulder blade that morning.
Good fer nothing since yer come back. Should never have let yer go, family or not.
“Speaking for myself,” Mr Shadworth said, pulling at his jacket, watching her massage the tender spot, “I can’t think the chances are high.”
“Why’s that, Mr Shadworth?”
“Oh,” he said airily, “the answer is best described mathematically. ‘One’, or ‘1’ – ” he drew the numeral in the air “ – representing our world, is the middle – ” he raised an eyebrow “ – let us call it ‘attribute’, between ‘zero’ and all other values. Between all barren worlds and those that may be supposed to nourish life.”
“I don’t – ”
“Remember, Mrs Cooke, ‘one’ is no closer to ‘zero’ than it is further from infinity.” He smiled, the perilously thin skin at the corners of his eyes becoming a mass of spiculated folds. “Infinity is all other possible numbers. It might be two, it could just as easily be two-trillion-and-t
wo. It would certainly be a fallacy to take the sign of infinity for infinity itself.”
“I – ”
“Indeed, Mrs Cooke.” His face fell a little. “Of course, perhaps there’s no inside or out, space limited only by space.” He leaned forward. “His Holiness has appointed a circle of astronomers to advise him on the latest scientific ideas.”
The cloth stopped. “Surely that’s bla–” She checked herself, afraid of the word.
“Blasphemous?” Mr Shadworth shook his head. “Far from it, my dear. The Pope’s perfectly willing to entertain the possibility of the existence of other planets. He’s even instructed his agents to prepare for missionary work among the stars.”
She looked at him dubiously. “Would the Pope really baptize monsters?”
“I’m quite certain he would.”
The ancient being pushed himself up from the counter with an easy motion that, not for the first time, caught Sarah by surprise.
“Errands to run, Mrs Cooke. Well, bene darkey. Your arm to the door?”
She led him across the taproom, certain he didn’t need any help. His frame was oddly solid, she’d almost say muscular, if that weren’t impossible. All the old men’s bodies she knew were soft and stringy. She thought of old men’s cocks, hairless, buried in fat, tricky to coax out.
Sarah glanced up. The noises from the attics were getting louder.
“Stay away from the Charlies,” she cautioned, picturing coats and rattles.
With a little wave, Mr Shadworth disappeared into the murk of Clare Market.
When the last of her mollies had gone, Sarah slipped into bed beside James, who was snoring drunkenly. Her thoughts turned to those three . . . what had Mr Shadworth called them? Attributes.
One of James’s girls from his other tavern, a regular knocking shop, possessed the private organs of both man and woman. Sarah had discovered it while treating her for blotches. The creature laid back on her bed, lifted her skirts above the waist, and presented two red lips like the wattles beneath a cockerel’s throat. Nestling above these incomplete female parts were the beginnings of a man’s organ, about the thickness of a little finger. That part shared by both sexes was unusually large: a halfpenny might have been dropped into it.
She mulled over her patrons. Ones, nothings, all possible numbers.
3. Tools of the Trade
The rat crept along the wall of the burying ground in Portugal Street, where stinks and other odours of the dead were given off, before doubling back the length of Clare Market. Past the disreputable tavern with its ramshackle bays.
The July air was even more unsustaining than usual, and he was no longer at his best . . . He gazed down at the silky patches showing through his coat. Still nimble enough, though. Filling his shallow lungs, he darted across the street for no other reason than to prove he still could, aware he’d needlessly drawn the eyes of a huddle of men cutting for guineas on the pavement, then slipped into the alleys and dark passages fanning out between Vere Street and Stanhope Street, the shortest way down to the river.
Someone not far away was making a poor imitation of a blackbird’s call.
On the Strand, Rat-man judged it safe to rear on two feet. He stepped into a shadowy doorwell to catch his wind. Above him, Venus and Mars were bright specks; he imagined the chill between planets, that unbearable space. But a body in motion was a body not yet cold – and there was work to do. The latest intelligence from France spoke of a munition so potent, wherever a man stood when it ignited was the centre; of grenades packed with chemicals that rendered soldiers irresistible to each other.
It had always been the Frenchies. He remembered handing General Wolfe his gloves at Quebec after a day of clinging to rocks. Long ago now. France, a nation of barley and buckwheat eaters, moustachioed fawns and stinky women.
He set off again, ducking at the corner of Somerset House into an ill-lit passage strewn with ashes and oyster shells. Above him, chandeliers flamed in a high gallery. Then he was on the river bank, pattering over loose pyramids of burnt clay tiles.
The unfinished bridge towered ahead, its cunning interfrictions of iron and granite reaching out from either side of the river towards a deafeningly dark hole. Rat-man’s sharp eyes found the tiny entrance to the service tunnel. He flipped open his watch. He was early.
He walked to the second shuttered pier, scaling the scaffolding with spry, connected movements. The bridge was unmetalled, and without sides, a set of makeshift railings all that prevented workmen plunging into the oily water. He peered over the edge, feeling the cold air rise. A great hoy shouldered up the watercourse. There had been talk of turning the river into one vast wet dock with sliding vanes and wickets, capable of accommodating the new copper-hulled behemoths. But the plans raised spectres of French ships-of-the-line sailing up the Thames, pontoons of enemy dinghies, landing boats tethered at the foot of Parliament stairs.
Movement below. A shadow was creeping along the bank. Alone, as instructed.
A clatter of debris . . . a muffled curse. Rat-man smiled. This would be easy.
His foot connected with something that glinted blackly against the freshly ashlared stones. Blunt and metallic, short-handled. Just the job. He picked up the hammer, swung it in a scything arc as if intending to dislodge an offending nodule of granite from some otherwise perfectly rectangular block, then slipped it into one of his deep coat pockets.
He scurried down the scaffolding, jumped off at the footings, and trailed the shadow into the service tunnel. A familiar sour smell of urine coiled into his nostrils. A few hops, and the darkness was complete.
Someone coughed up ahead. Whispered his name. One of his names.
Rat-man felt his way along the masonry, which came smooth and humid beneath his palms.
4. Dandy-Charger
Back in the village, helping the mowers in the churchyard. As always, the scythe’s handles were set too far apart for his young arms. The blade’s cradle kept catching on his boot. Every second blow produced a squint stroke.
“Thou ain’t taking it clean,” one of the men said, licking spit from his lips.
“Strike into the grass,” another suggested in broad forest accents. “Thou be standing too far afield, an’ all bumble-footed.”
A third man took the blade from him. The other boys stood off, watching with blunt eyes.
“A good scythe, well ’ung, saves ’arf the labour,” said the mower, deftly cutting a tight swathe. With a smirk, he held up the tool, measuring. “Him be be’err off wi’ a rake.”
“Orra trowel.”
With burning cheeks, he snatched back the handle. This time he compensated for the length with a rounder stroke, and had almost managed to clear a second grave when a slow-worm spasmed from his cuttings, sheering in panic over the dead stones, caught in the open. The other men huddled round, children again as they stared down at the creature’s notched tongue, its human lids.
All of them, beneath those thin slices of sky, caught in the open.
A commotion at the trying bar jolted Junior Prosecutor Christopher Wyre back to the present. The younger of the two sodomites, a handsome jack called Leager, had fainted. An officer was propping him up to hear his punishment recited in full. In the light from the glass mirror that hung in the centre of the chamber, both felons had a washed-out appearance, as if they were already fading from the world.
“I have done wrong, I have done wickedly,” the other public criminal, a thickset coalman named Oakden, was mumbling.
The Judge finished unfolding his black towel, and laid it solemnly on his head. According to custom, flowers had been strewn about his desk. Jacobea lilies.
To cries of Monsters! the mollies were led away. Wyre remained seated till the courtroom had emptied, then pushed himself up from the bench. Leighton would be waiting in the entrance hall. It had been a fortnight since he’d last seen his friend; Leighton had been laid up in a Guy’s Hospital bed, wounded in the thigh, a guard at the door. He’d survi
ved his encounter with the notorious French spy Vallon, unlike his Bow Street partner . . . How had the newsrags put it? The Tyrant’s agent fired into his belly, blowing a hole above the navel. Fancy phrases to sell copies, but Wyre thought of a wife deprived of a bedfellow, two children of their papa.
Public opinion was divided over Bow Street, Wyre mused as he walked. Some officers policed with excessive bravura, while others practised what The Gentleman’s Magazine, in that fancy way it had, termed suborning, and The Post called bribery. As far as Wyre was concerned, anyone willing to take on one of Boney’s best men deserved the city’s gratitude.
A barracking mob pushed and heaved in the Courthouse’s marble foyer – molly trials could still be relied on to draw a crowd. Hearing his name called, he turned, breaking into a smile as he saw Leighton’s athletic form. Noticeably leaner. Thin as the shank of a spoon, his grandmother would say.
“With me, Kit! A success should be celebrated.” The Runner extended an arm.
Wyre followed his friend out onto the wide civic steps, where he was blinded by the blenching sun.
“A double conviction,” Leighton called over his shoulder, jostling through the sensation seekers, making a good job of hiding his limp. “You must be feeling cock-a-hoop.”
“It was high time things went my way. Three duff cases in a row. Those walkers cost me, Leighton. They still do. Reputation’s everything in the courtroom.”
“Think of them as acquitted felons – ” The Runner stopped abruptly and pointed. “Down there . . .”
Wyre followed the police officer’s finger through the pasteboard hats. A little way up from the Courthouse, three well-dressed cits were stepping into a flash phaeton, all vaudy lancewood and whalebone.
The Cunning House Page 1