The Cunning House

by Richard Marggraf Turley

  He sensed more than saw the Runner’s wraith-like figure moving ahead of him. Behind, the entrance’s circle of light was a fast-receding stamp on the brain.

  Wyre started as a hand was placed against his chest.

  “This is where we found him.” Leighton’s voice was compressed, strangely unechoing. The outline of an arm moved as if laying a bed sheet. “The fly knelt forward here, where he received a single blow to the back of the skull. Pushed the bone two inches into his brain. Must have hurt like fuck ever so briefly, whatever the surgeons say. According to the attending officers there were no signs of altercation. No scuffed ground. No cuts or scratches about the body, either. And incidentally no signs of intimacy. This was no dick-and-arse.”

  “Could your constables have missed something?”

  “Our lads are well trained.”

  “I’m surprised a gany-boy had the strength to inflict that kind of damage.” Wyre hesitated. “Did you know the fly?”

  A pause. “By sight. Not top calibre; came to us from a regiment of foot. But he was handy enough. Should have smelled trouble, even if he couldn’t see it.” Leighton was on his knees now, patting the brick floor. “They found a mason’s hammer beside the body. Killer must have picked it up on site, cocky sod.”

  “One of the bridge builders?” Wyre suggested, the laughter outside still burning in his ears. “Working late, saw the fly creep into the arch, made the not unreasonable assumption the victim was a backgammon man, followed him in. Then . . .” He mimed the blow.

  Leighton’s shadow shrugged. “This is still a book of beginnings. There’s a lot more we need to – ” He held up a finger, then bellowed up the tunnel. “Stand where you are! Do NOT fucking move!”

  Leighton darted forward, vanishing completely, leaving just the sound of heels sliding on slimy brick, before that sound, too, was lost in air that seemed bent on recomposing itself as if nothing were happening.

  Then, alone.

  10. Stare Case

  Brockton looked up at the high, barred window that opened at street level, the only source of light in the subterranean office he shared with Wyre. Dainty ankles flickered in front of it. Bare, dirty feet too.

  No sign of any let-up in the heat. Under his legal robes, he was sweating horribly, and his shirt stuck to his chest. It had been another bread-and-butter morning. Tedious hours spent on boundary disputes, petty thefts, drunken assaults and a so-called rape. Nothing that presented the least opportunity for a man who wished to get on.

  An enormous explosion somewhere or other outside had been the only mildly interesting event that morning. He’d thought ‘earthquake’, at first. The religious zealots spoke of little else; God’s punishment for the city’s depravities. But it was more probable the army had let off a mortar. A large one.

  No, it had been an earthquake, he decided. It wasn’t all that uncommon for them to strike in northern cities.

  He glared over at the empty desk. Wyre’s felt presence made his teeth hurt.

  The clerk appeared in the doorway, an insolent fellow with a stump where one arm had hung before some salvo or other in the Peninsula game came his way.

  “Mr Best’s asking. Yer’d better run, lad.”

  Brockton’s face clouded over at the clerk’s too-familiar cant. He’d better run. Lad.

  “Did Mr Best mention why he wished to see me?” Brockton heaved his bulk to its feet, squeezing through the gap between desks. He glanced down at the files spread haphazardly on Wyre’s table. Molly briefs . . . Brockton wrinkled his nose. There were worse things than boundary disputes.

  The clerk watched him with an amused expression. “Not so much as a syllable.”

  “Nothing at all?” Forewarned was forearmed.

  The clerk winked.

  Brockton made his way along the corridor to the staircase. Stare case, more like. Fleeing girls, ingeniously carved in the decorated marble panels, seemed to pant up the acclivity with him, tunics flapping. He hauled himself up, leaving brief, intimate palm prints on the chilly handrail.

  The swirling walnut veneer of the Chief Magistrate’s door gave him his reflection; in his court garb he looked like an absurd blue mushroom. Brockton tugged at his powdered wig, which sat badly today, and knocked in what he hoped was a stylish manner. How curiously hollow his knuckles sounded on such a heavy door.

  Best’s lacquered den continued the classical theme. Statues of Venus lifting her pudic veil, a boy riding a goat. The old barrister himself was peering down at a book of law, a heavy-bottomed glass at his elbow. Fine Cognac brandy, judging by the tawny dregs.

  Brockton instantly recognized the book as a volume of a much longer work. Coke’s Institutes.

  “Buggery, Brockton,” Best said in a silky baritone, “from the Italian buggeroni.” He looked up and nodded. “You’ll find that it is. Tell me, what do you know about molly houses?”

  Brockton strained to anticipate the cast of his master’s thoughts. “Nauseating places, sir, where men gather in pursuit of abominable fruits.”

  “Euphoniously put. Worthy of old Coke himself.”

  “The mark of the moral life,” Brockton added, pleased with himself, “is to choose to conceal the private parts, to have sexual interunion privately. Buggery is the vortex that engulfs the moral life.”

  The old barrister winced as if something had frayed in his lower back. “Let me share something with you. I was once present at the anatomization of a young woman. The surgeon was a handy fellow.” Best’s eyes were oily, unreadable puddles. “Now, there’s a cracked engraver in South Molton Street who claims a lady’s nakedness is God’s glory. Can’t say I saw any of that, just transparent walls. She was a conjuror’s trick, Brockton, an inside-out-woman.”

  Best gave him a look of such intensity, Brockton wondered if his superior were trying to peer all the way into his own internal cavities; then, with a sniff, the barrister passed across the mottled book on his desk. The spine had cracked at Chapter 10. Most black, most white.

  “Edward Coke,” Best said. “I seem to have lived with his ideas, or in them, for half my existence. You’d think I’d be tired of them.”

  Brockton cradled the tome. “Sir, the Institutes are the cornerstone of modern law. The history of morality itself.”

  Best nodded. “A history filled with terrible things, each one intended to protect the present of today from any futures that may injure it.”

  Brockton stared, uncertain.

  “To put it another way, the law is behovely. Have you ever been in love?” A pause. “I take it you have not,” Best said with a hint of the cross-examining style. “Love – ” he smoothed his blue robe at the shoulders “ – may be compared to a ship sailing a perilous tract between two shores, Ruin and Destruction.”

  “A striking conceit, sir.” Had the flat chains of that great legal brain jumped their cogs?

  “The law is founded on conceits, of which the conceit of custom is uppermost.” Best brought his hands together as if about to recite a prayer, or catch a fly. “But tell me, why does the law seek to intervene in our choice of mate? Why does it balk at citizens acting according to their unbiased wills? If two men consent to love each other, why must the state empty a vial of wrath on their union?”

  Brockton was quick to perceive a test. “I believe you are alluding to sodomy, sir, which is counted as one of the clamantia peccata, the crying sins, not to be named among Christians.” (Was he expected to go on? It seemed he was.) “As a crime, sodomy outranks rape and kidnapping. It is contra natura because the anus lies on the other side than the vulva.”

  “A crime without benefit of clergy. Meaning?”

  “That sodomites can be hanged, sir.”

  “Thank you, Brockton.” Best looked pleased. “The business of the Courthouse is to drag into clear light the worst human actions that can be imagined. The very worst. Thankfully, extraordinary vices, like extraordinary virtues, are very rare, but where they exist, the public demands they be punishe
d to the limits.” He closed one eye as though taking aim. “To prosecute sodomites to the very end of the law, how many witnesses are required?”

  Wasn’t this Wyre’s sordid domain?

  “Two, sir?”

  Best nodded. “Two. Both of whom must be prepared to swear to seed. Naturally, in capital cases where the state seeks to take a life, the highest standards of jurisprudence must be upheld.” The old bar-gown’s smile did not reach his lips.

  A molly brief? Surely not . . . And yet, it didn’t feel as though he were being demoted. Quite the opposite. Brockton’s eyes narrowed. Coke was growing heavy in his arms.

  “Some two or three prosecutions a year, taken to the limit.” Best tilted his head at an angle that implied the gallows. He held out his hands for the volume, clapping it together before replacing it carefully on his desk. “Between you and me, in a short while we’ll be seeing a good deal more molly men than that, several of them citizens of means.” His eyes locked with the younger man’s. “What you decide to do with the others is entirely your business.”

  The junior prosecutor looked at him.

  “The law is hungry for sodomites, Brockton. Shall we feed it some?”

  11. Descent

  The blame was as much hers as theirs. Her father had only consented to the meeting in the first place because he’d mistaken Robert’s sudden interest in engineering for signs of commercial ambition, a fairy tale she’d been happy to promote. In her defence, her father regarded mental surgeons as worse quacks than bone setters, and she’d merely jumped at what appeared to be an opportunity to win acceptance for her fiancé, and thus speed the date of what Robert liked, jokingly, to call their nuptials.

  For the tenth time, she replayed the fiasco in her imagination, the tears still hot on her cheeks. When she’d delivered her fiancé to the drawing room earlier that morning, Mr Bolton had been crescendoing over a set of plans for an improved steam engine. The industrialist’s forefinger moved up and down as if it were itself powered by steam.

  “And here, figure c,” he’d boomed, “the descent in the cylinder, and figure e, the improved reservoir. Double cooling of the condensate, Crawford, yields ten more horses.” (Her father had nodded appreciatively.) “The smoke,” Bolton descanted in his rich northern brogue, “is also in great measure ameliorated by being mixed with unburnt air.” Bolton had paused then, noticing Robert’s silhouette in the doorway.

  “I see your valves move by gears very similar to Smeaton’s . . .” (Her father). “If you were able to guarantee delivery before the year is out, I’d be pleased to be counted among your investors. Any later . . .” Her father sniffed. “Agitators, Mr Bolton. I’m thinking of stock, you understand.” Her father frowned, also registering Robert’s presence. “Aspinall,” he said stiffly. “Well, sit down, man.” He pointed at Bolton’s plans. “Ten per cent more efficiency. What do you think?”

  Miss Crawford had known only too well what Robert thought. Only of his Society’s fulminations against plantations. That, and his infernal case notes.

  “Perhaps,” her father continued, “Mr Bolton can persuade you to invest in sugar. A sweet tooth will always be the mark of a true lady, eh?”

  Her fiancé hesitated. A fraction too long.

  “What’s the matter?” Mr Crawford frowned. “Sugar beneath you?”

  “Not at all, sir!”

  “Then perhaps you’d care to express yourself clearly.”

  Her poor fool, always digging a hole for himself.

  “It’s just that sugar cane agriculture has been proven responsible for – ” Through the crack in the door, she’d seen her fiancé’s hand move to his jacket pocket, coming to rest on that hateful black volume. Sometimes she thought it was the only thing he truly cared about, the only thing he’d save from the flames.

  “Mr Bolton and I are perfectly familiar with that system of husbandry.” She recognized the dangerous edge to her father’s voice. All too well.

  Robert’s eyes shone. “And the system’s a bad one, sir, since it depends on the enslavement of – ”

  “What the devil – ” her father slapped both palms on the table “ – do you mean by using that word here?”

  Robert appealed to the engineer. “Mr Bolton, as an abolitionist yourself, you must – ”

  “You presume, sir,” thundered her father. “By God, you presume!”

  It was Bolton’s turn to colour. “Aye, an abolitionist, like my brethren in the Lunar Society.” He tugged at the buttons of his sleeve. “But I trust you’ll allow a difference of opinion as to how that noble end may best be brought about.”

  “If stringent legislation were – ”

  “Legislation?” her father exploded. “The mortal enemy of free trade and profit!”

  Sell at the dearest market, buy at the cheapest. Her father would wish all little children to repeat that credo at every rising of the sun. He’d introduced her to Ricardo’s economic theories the same summer he taught her how to load and discharge a pistol at speed. They kept a weapon in every room of the house. That was the year of the Maroon Rebellion. She’d been eight.

  “Sir, no one could wish the plantations’ steam engines unbuilt, but – ”

  “But?” Bolton had leaned back in his chair, his eyes two blazing furnaces. A man of sun and planet gearing, wax and resinous bodies. “But? But?” He shook his head slowly. “Well, Crawford, I was sure at least one country was still grateful to its benefactors.” Turning back to her fiancé, he’d said, “My business, sir, is to calculate the economy of heat. These drawings offer steam in lieu of horses, the work of a month, done in a day.” (Her father murmured approval like a Welsh deacon feeding on the Word.) “A negro who does his duty – ” the light cast by the copper table lamp made dark folds of Bolton’s face – “who obeys his master’s orders to his satisfaction, need fear no mistreatment.”

  “I didn’t meant to suggest – ”

  “The present system of governance in the Caribbean will continue, or it will cease, whether I lend it my patents or not.”

  “But I – ”

  “All I’ve done is make the work in those dark places as efficient as possible, requiring the least number of bodies.”

  Her father laid one hand solemnly on top of the other. “I must apologize, sir. The iron has plainly entered Mr Aspinall’s soul.”

  Robert began to protest again. Bolton spoke over him. “It is poverty that cuts the sinews of moral energy. If a state of squalor is allowed to persist, it doesn’t matter whose reforming philosophies are introduced into the islands. You will simply find the chains no longer on a man’s limbs, but wrapped within. The moral darkness will be unbroken.” The industrialist’s face seemed to gather itself into one tight point. “By improving the lot of the planters, you improve conditions for all. Even those of your sable-skinned brethren.”

  “If regulation were fully endorsed by parliament – ” Robert said weakly.

  “Would you strike off their fetters?” Bolton gave him an incredulous look. “What then? Wait for the ploughshare to pass over the dust of Jerusalem? The brutes would settle old scores, beginning with the slaughter of their masters. Their mistresses, too – ” His eye came to rest meaningfully on Robert. “Would you see maroons living in the governor’s house, boko sorcerers burning entrails in churches, white babies impaled? Is that an acceptable price for enlightened thinking, a whole hemisphere of naked, wandering savages? Not to mention the spread of other violent passions. Men familiarized with each other in the heat.” He sat back, wet with passion. “I’ve done God’s work. Can’t you see that?”

  Miss Crawford knew precisely what Robert Aspinall could see: whatever had appeared in that month’s muddled articles in the liberal journals. Engravings of bodies chained like beasts, or hanging to scaffolds by the ribs; accounts of women pressing shrivelled infants to their breasts; fathers swallowing poison.

  Robert had jumped to his feet, eyes gleaming, and dashed from the room. Pushed past her in t
he doorway.

  12. Uppish

  Wyre entered that state of soul in which all motion seemed suspended. The sensation was that of standing on a stone barely wide enough for his feet in the middle of a vast pool of water. A sudden sound, like a single ripple propagating across the pool; light breath over his nape. He swallowed, and swallowed again, waiting for the blow that would send him tumbling from his stone into the frigid depths.

  Have a care, Mr Wyre.

  The voice seemed to come from everywhere. His eyes darted uselessly, the shadows shifting so he was always peering into the darkest place. What did a blade slid between the ribs feel like? Perhaps it had already happened. His conjectures gave way to icy panic, but an attempt to run for it produced only unconnected twitches in his legs.

  “Leighton!”

  The Bow Street officer’s shadow skidded to a halt along the damp crumbling bricks. “Did you see his face? What did the smutball say?”

  Wyre’s chest had set like stone. His shoulders heaved, but no air came.

  “What did he say?” A whip of anger in his friend’s voice.

  “Nothing – ” Wyre managed to gasp, hands on his knees. “He told me to have a care. He must have followed us in!”

  Leighton shook his head. “He was already inside.”

  Wyre stared blankly. “Why risk it?”

  “Some murderers like to haunt the scene of their crime. Either that, or he was tipped off.”

  “He called me by my name. Have a care, Mr Wyre. Those were his precise words. If Michaels thinks he can intimidate me . . .”

  “It wasn’t Michaels.” Leighton stepped past him, heading for the tunnel entrance.

  Wyre hurried after him. “Who, then?”

  “Someone who isn’t afraid of the dark. Come on.”

  The flat light was as welcome to the lawyer as air must be to a man just pulled from under the sea. They plotted a slant return up the slimy banks – Wyre trying to control the tiny tremors travelling up and down his limbs – and onto the Strand, where the midday sun had made a fiery sea of the cobbles. He was a sorry mess: shoes soiled by river mud, his good jacket slimy at the shoulders and sleeves. He couldn’t return to the Courthouse in that state. And there would be awkward questions from Brockton to field.