The Cunning House

by Richard Marggraf Turley

  Leighton offered to accompany him home. Wyre nodded gratefully, then frowned. Did the Runner fear other covert agents would be waiting?

  “Don’t worry, Kit,” said Leighton, looking amused. “If our slinker had wanted you cold . . .” He left it at that.

  They headed west in silence, cutting through St James’s Park, the Palace’s lofty windows just visible above the high brick wall. The war with France was going through one of its hot periods; perhaps at this very moment the King’s generals were advocating tremendous outflanking geometries to the two soldiering dukes, York and Cumberland.

  Leighton was the first to speak. “Did you tell anyone where you were going, Kit?”

  “Not a soul. And anyway, no one at the Courthouse would . . .”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time one of you lot proved partial to a handy-dandy. Remember the gay Parson?”

  You lot? As for Parson Church, though, Leighton had a point there. It had happened just after Wyre joined Best’s team of lawyers. His novice status had been all that saved him at the subsequent inquiry.

  “Seems some of you got their defence and prosecution mixed up. Bribes have a way of confusing the issue. When I think of the trouble we went to. Made the pinch in the Parson’s own tabernacle, tipped off the news-rats, even brought along the boy who made the accusation – that little stinker, White.”

  “It wasn’t our finest hour,” Wyre conceded. Some good, at least, had emerged from the shambles: the court case had been his introduction to Leighton. Wyre pictured the officer stepping up to the trying bar, explaining in his sardonic way how his men had broken through the Parson’s supporters, how the culprit had turned to his flock and said – Leighton had perfectly mimicked the man’s sanctimonious pulpit tones – The boy has told a simple plain story, and you would do right to believe him. I have been imprudent, but I am not conscious of having done the actual crime. If any thing of that nature has been done, it must have been without my knowledge, when I was asleep, dreaming I was in my own bed with my wife.

  Leighton was the one who’d initiated their acquaintance, coming up in the Courthouse foyer afterwards. “In bed with his own wife?” he’d said, without the formality of an introduction. “As if anyone could confuse arse and quim.”

  The pair turned into Oxford Street, footstepping north to Cumberland Place, and from there entering the smaller avenues fanning up into Crawford Street and the many different flavours of Devonshire. Wyre’s ankles were swelling against his shoe leather in the heat. He began to wish Leighton had brought his hobby horse.

  “Got to hand it to him, though . . .” the Runner showed the pink behind his teeth. “That Parson was a showman. When we took him, he threw back his head and roared, Rejoice not against me. Though I fall, I’ll rise! How in hell did he slip Best’s hook?”

  Wyre shrugged. “No one could have foreseen Hamer.” That was true enough. By first recess, it was clear certain phrases deployed to stinging effect by the defence counsel could only have come from the Courthouse’s own files. Since prisoners were forbidden from seeing evidence ahead of their trial, it meant only one thing – someone from the prosecution’s own ranks had been peddling information. There was no hard evidence implicating Hamer, but Best dismissed him all the same. The man lost his pension. He was still protesting his innocence when two stout clerks threw him from the Courthouse steps, breaking his collarbone. “Once Mitchell had seen our cards, the game was up. Then it was the usual tricks. Resorting to the law’s delay, putting things off till the next assizes. Costs went up, witnesses moved away, the case fell apart.”

  “I expect you would have done the same in the Parson’s position.”

  “That’s a position I hope never to find myself in.”

  “No danger of that.” Leighton grinned. “These molly men like ’em smooth.”

  “To cap it all, Parson Church found an upright widow to marry and vouch for his tastes. Keeps a seminary for young ladies in Hammersmith.”

  “You’d think a jury would see through that one.”

  “They lapped it up. As for the letter of confession, Church claimed he only signed it under duress.”

  “The one who made the original complaint – ” Leighton looked thoughtful “ – that caddling drummer-boy, White. Hard to imagine a more cock-spoiled specimen.”

  Wyre nodded. “In the end it came down to his word against the Parson’s. The jury decided the lad was on the make, and that was that.”

  “Ever hear any more of the drummer-boy?” Leighton looked straight ahead.

  “Kept his nose clean as far as I’m aware. Why do you ask?”

  Leighton didn’t answer. They’d reached the new pavement outside Mrs Mason’s apartments. The Runner whistled through his teeth. “Uppish new lodgings . . . What’s your secret? Stocks or bonds?”

  “No secret, I wish there was.” That was the truth. Short of a miracle – or, what amounted to the same thing, a promotion – he’d be relinquishing his tenancy at the end of the month. He’d only taken these rooms to entice Rose back, gambling on Best giving him more lucrative briefs. That seemed fanciful now.

  “Forget her, Kit,” Leighton said with a bluntness that caught Wyre by surprise.

  With a trademark mock-salute, the Runner left him in the shadow of Mrs Mason’s grand entrance.

  13. Lights

  In the evening’s odd light, everything in the city seemed fabricated. Even the trees lining the alleys appeared to have been cast from great foundry moulds, their branches swaying on unseen pivots connected by invisible rods.

  The city hovered between possibilities. Robert Aspinall could easily trace his steps on a map but no longer knew convincingly where he was. London was a fierce shrill note wedged between the world and nothing, a city of dukes and dustmen, of paced-out plots, where harlots wailed and children plucked at sleeves.

  On Dunstan Avenue, the overhanging branches cast a lattice of shadows. Suddenly, Aspinall was no longer a mad-doctor at Wood’s Close asylum, but a vanquished gladiator netted by a retiarius, awaiting the emperor’s thumb. That, at any rate, was precisely how it had felt in Mr Crawford’s drawing room that morning.

  How many miles had he covered since then?

  So utterly disarmed; so utterly shamed. What choice did he have, other than to dash out? He couldn’t draw a proper breath in that ghastly room.

  There and then, he’d made the decision to seek the tavern out, to witness for himself the source of his patient’s – former patient’s – mental torments, the prompts to lunacy. If Mr Crawford placed no value on his profession, perhaps he’d recognize the worth of celebrity. Because once the public heard of Mr Parlez-Vous, was inducted into the phenomenon of ‘double character’, he’d be the doyen of lecture halls up and down the country. Six shillings a ticket. Let Miss Crawford’s father sneer then!

  Mr Parlez-Vous . . . At first, Aspinall thought the moniker charming. That was before, over the space of four shocking weeks, he’d begun to touch the sides of a most appalling case. That a human being was capable of entertaining such fantasies, let alone acting on them!

  But there were certain risks that accompanied a visit to the tavern. Not moral ones; he was immune to that. No, the risks were more practical, and presented themselves to his liberty. Parlez-Vous had left nothing conducted in that place of unlicensed sale to the imagination. Anyone found within its walls would be tarred with the same brush of sinful trade. No excuses.

  He kept walking.

  Up ahead, half a dozen hellcats were waiting in front of a grille-work gate, caterwauling to passers-by, a shocking motley of petticoat and fringe. The tiny muscles beneath his eyelids began to jump. One of the wagtails, dark hair tied in plaits, stepped forward, blocking his way. She hoiked up her skirt, revealing a dark mess that belonged on the anatomy slab.

  “Chew on that, Mistah!”

  “Nice n’ meaty, is our Elsie’s,” one of the women called in encouragement.

  “Nah, can’t you tell? He’d rathe
r eat a Scotch hedgehog.”

  “Quean!”

  “Percy Bumington!”

  Someone opened the iron gate and slammed it shut again. The noise made him jump. At first he thought another cannon had been fired, like the crack that had sent him half out of his skin that morning as he’d rushed to Miss Crawford’s from his Society meeting. The wagtails laughed.

  Aspinall’s fingers crept to his jacket pocket, closing around his black medical notebook. What a Sisyphean task faced those publicly minded souls who worked to improve the condition of such females. Even if his own time weren’t already occupied twice over with the city’s psychically oppressed, he’d balk at the challenge.

  Besides, the mental vitiations that led women to such behaviour were dreary and predictable, compared to the spectacular phantoms of mind afflicting Parlez-Vous. This evening, if he held his nerve, should see him complete the picture, furnish him with a finished portrait of mind.

  Or . . . should he return to Miss Crawford? Better still, send a cab? There was still time to visit the theatre. Last week, he’d taken her to see Kean act. The play had been a war of lungs; King John pronounced ‘ache’ as if the word possessed two syllables. After the performance, they’d attended a demonstration in the Rotunda, where a chaffinch was suffocated in a glass jar. They’d watched helplessly as the bird broke its wings against the sides. Aspinall remembered trying to live himself into that absence of air.

  If memory served, this evening’s lecture, by a Dr Prydderch of Cardiff, addressed the meaning of bread in Wales. Miss Crawford had always shown an interest in the quaint customs of the Principality. He fished out his timepiece from his yellow waistcoat. Yes, still time to send a cab.

  Five or six fleshless veterans in threadbare military red were loitering at the turn into Little Moorfields. They regarded him with placid eyes. His father used to say: if the whole world were given to a beggar, he’d still beg. Aspinall dug for a coin, dropping it into a skinny palm.

  The crumbling walls of Bethlem Hospital rose before him. Once dubbed the Palace for Lunatics, the institution had long since decayed into that place of cruelty known to the city and the world as Bedlam. It was no longer an asylum in any meaningful sense, rather a house of lurid entertainments.

  At the far end of the street lay a coaching inn with freshly whitewashed walls. Aspinall paused at the arch leading into the stabling yard, where a low-sized boy with shiny auburn hair was crouched over, playing jacks. One of the flints flew out towards Aspinall’s foot.

  “Is your father around?” Wyre said.

  “Father’s dead,” the lad answered in a broad city accent. “Mr Rawlings done ’im in.”

  The physician stared. What a singular child.

  A large black dog with sad eyes came pattering up. The boy threw his arm around the animal’s neck, and buried his face.

  “Well. I am sorry to hear that.” Aspinall threw fivepence among the jacks, and set off again.

  At the entrance to Princes Street, a coalman stamped up from the void, clutching an empty sack in each hand. He hawked phlegm, and spat it out at the physician’s feet.

  Aspinall’s fists clenched.

  One by one, lights were being lit.

  14. Electric Air

  Plunge one hand into a vessel of water as hot as can be borne . . . Let the other be immersed in a vessel containing an equal amount, but nearly freezing. Pour the two fluids together into a third, then thrust both hands in the mixture. Always the same result: hot to the cold hand, cold to the hot. The medical man shook his head wryly. A pretty parlour trick, he conceded, drawing himself up to his full height. But only he who had deceived his own heart – he patted his hands dry on a linen towel – could infer from such basic deceptions the absence of fixed principles. Cold and heat were distinct properties, with actual existences, not fantasies. It was folly to entertain any other hypothesis.

  A faint boom . . . something drifting up from the city. Military manoeuvres. The worst of the present martial epoch was the fact the Continent was closed off. Getting the latest medical books from France and Germany was difficult, impeding progress. But the case he’d stumbled on here, in this modest house of mental relief on the outskirts of the city, would cause reverberations across Europe.

  Stumbled on . . . stolen. Such distinctions were meaningless in the history of science.

  The medical man moved to his wheeled trolley, and slid his instrument case towards him, popping the clasp hinges with two satisfying clunks. From the case, he selected a pair of hollow cork plugs, and pressed them into the nostrils of the monster he’d bound to the gurney earlier that morning. The prisoner, limbs arranged neatly, struggled against the flat, unbreakable leather straps, begging to be released. Quite impossible, he explained patiently, tightening the man’s gag. Anyway, they’d been over it all before. Ignoring the muffled cries, he deftly inserted a bifurcated tube for inflating the lungs. Then he summoned the patient he’d grown used to calling Mr Parlez-Vous from the back room. It was time to begin, and he’d promised not to start without his new assistant.

  Parlez-Vous entered, hair slicked back, face cast into turbulent yellows by the lamplight. The medical man explained in detail how the apparatus worked, in what order its components must be actuated. The first nozzle released gas (he mimed a twisting motion), the second introduced a potent admixture of elements into the electric tube, whose sole function was to assist the gas in uniting with the blood. Next, the gullet was relaxed by means of a laudanum preparation, after which a stiff stilet of whalebone could easily be pushed down into the belly. When, and only when, these operations had been completed to his satisfaction, could the third nozzle be opened.

  The strapped man was also listening attentively. At the mention of the whalebone stilet, the bulbs of his eyes strained, and a fresh round of piteous entreaties began.

  With precise movements, Parlez-Vous began the sequence, slender digits taking the first ivory stopple through an exact quarter revolution. As the azotic air whistled through the tube, the man on the gurney stiffened, his fingers setting like cement around the wooden sides.

  So far, all in order. But, the fact was, the medical man no longer entertained high hopes for electrical air. It seemed all too likely that Dr Hales’s Vegetable Statics, which once promised so much, had been a red herring all along. Months wasted investigating a dead avenue. The idea that particles of air might attract sulphur, that molecules thus compounded could store repulsive force . . . a wild surmise, another scientific chimera.

  He followed the strapped man’s eyes to the large, pot-bellied glass jar that sat on top of his mahogany cabinet. Sheathed metal cables coiled up from the cap, held out of harm’s way by insulator spikes. To a casual observer (not that such a thing could exist down here), the elaborate device must resemble some fantastical loom, a web of humming braids rising above the tumblers. A bluish skyre clung to the apparatus – beautiful in its own, terrifying way. The man on the gurney began to plead again.

  The medical man’s eyes followed the leather-sheathed wire that led away from the electrical jar, terminating in a metal globe a precise foot in circumference. From this instrument a thicker tube ran to a second nozzle. He gestured for Parlez-Vous to open it, handing over the whalebone stilet. His student proved remarkably adept, unperturbed by the strapped man’s spluttering and choking as the stilet was fed into his belly. He’d seen professional doctors put off by a patient’s mewling.

  A spiders’ mesh formed on his face. He stepped briskly onto a glass-footed insulating stool, instructing Parlez-Vous to stand well clear. A jar of these proportions was easily capable of scorching a man. From his new vantage, he looked down on the patient. What was the human body itself, if not a sort of Leyden jar? Movement – Galvani had proved it with the severed limbs of frogs – and perhaps volition itself depended on an excess of electricity in one part of the animal frame, and a deficiency in another.

  Having insured himself against accidental discharge, he made certain t
he stilet was still firmly in place and could not be regurgitated. The third nozzle he opened himself, and watched as the strapped man’s stomach swelled until it resembled a mother’s in the sixth month of utero-gestation. He began to count, his deep voice joined by Mr Parlez-Vous’ higher, softer tones. When their duet reached twenty, he took a lancet from his wooden tray and made a deft nick in a raised vein in the man’s left arm, collecting the blood in a glass bulb. This he held up to the light. Bright red. Perhaps the brightest yet, if a little sizy.

  Electric air . . . A handsome phrase, a modish term; but it had delivered little. Today’s proving would be the last. If the newest monster to have been delivered to his basement, at no small personal risk, showed few signs of relief from his moral sickness, he would indulge Parlez-Vous’ desire to return to older, surer methods. It couldn’t be disputed that the desire to sin vanished with the removal of those parts responsible for its commission.

  The sight of the creature gasping on the gurney, livid lips separating convulsively, caused a momentary twinge. But he reminded himself his work was in service of futurity, carrying light to the otherwise incomprehensible regions, the abyss, of sexual darkness.

  Fortified by this thought, he took a long-barrelled syringe from the top drawer of his desk, and lightly depressed the plunger, producing an opaque bleb at the needle’s end. Refrigerating syrup, he explained to Parlez-Vous, who leaned in, a model of attentiveness.

  15. Water Service

  Could the air really teem with tiny pearly creatures that fell with the rain? Living things so small they resisted microscopes, just as the stars did telescopes? Sarah Cooke’s brow gathered into a tight knot. Mr Shadworth once told her he’d observed an . . . animalcule (she relished the word) in a drop of river water. To the naked eye it resembled a small piece of see-through, but in the lens it went about with a fringe around its mouth that shook. When rubbed by other beasts it drew up its tail.