The Cunning House

by Richard Marggraf Turley

  She was silent again for a moment. “Mr Wardle spoke of the prophetess. What possible interest could that awful sect have in Robert?”

  Wyre thought he could answer that. He’d heard William discourse on Southcott’s deluded philosophies often enough. “Joanna foresaw the war with France, or so her followers claim. They see the Tyrant as Antichrist intent on crushing all religion – though as far as I can tell, it’s just lots of guff about thrones of clouds. If Wardle’s role at the trial was to send the Vere Street gang to the scaffold, his sect must have thought its members in league with the French.” To be fair, Joanna’s lot weren’t the only ones who believed that.

  Miss Crawford appeared to consider for a moment. “Poor Mr Wardle. I’m sure he was decent, underneath. Do you think those ruffians hurt him?”

  Wyre stared beyond the window. He seemed to be witnessing the destruction of the world: a bricolage of barbarous burning, the clattering of lipless jaws, cities plunged in darkness. Mercifully, his fantasy gave way to more habitual scenes: of crowds milling before shop façades, a sea of bobbing hats. But it was a city of utter strangers, empty and suspect. He picked a man out at random – out buying a gift for his wife, or his Cheapside mistress? Or (it seemed equally likely) for some broad-shouldered regimentalist in the Scots guards? A convert to the prophetess, or an agent of France, plotting a tremendous explosion. As the sun struck the tip of St Paul’s, Wyre had an abrupt idea of a great carriage thundering down the nave.

  Miss Crawford took her hand back. “Mr Wardle said Robert was meant to hang.” Those large eyes, searching Wyre’s own. He looked away. “Was the trial fair?”

  “Wardle was cracked.”

  They turned into Panton Street, where a food riot was in full swing. Bread or blood agitators had halted a wagon, and were seizing sacks of wheat and potatoes.

  ––––– hanged than starve!

  Wyre turned away in disgust. He imagined one of Mr Shoreditch’s new reaping machines trundling towards the rioters on cast-iron wheels, whitethorn cogs a spinning blur, cutting a swathe through the protestors.

  48. The Phoenix of Sodom

  Only a few patches of red paint clung to the cobbles at the St James’s Square rank on the Mall. The war was bankrupting the nation. Wyre offered Miss Crawford his arm down from the hackney. For the hundredth time, he wondered what could possibly induce a woman of her calibre to devote herself to a misfire like Aspinall.

  Across the pavement, a spidery figure in a tight hat was hawking pamphlets.

  “Phoenix of Sodom! Know your enemy! Tuppence apiece.”

  Wyre looked disbelievingly: the hawker was a Courthouse colleague, Holloway, a sucking barrister a couple of years older than himself. His vinegary performances in court were effective, but for some reason he’d never enjoyed Best’s favour.

  Seeing Wyre, Holloway’s fervent expression turned to one of discomfort, then defiance. “It’s what people are thinking . . .”

  Wyre took a copy of the pamphlet from a tottering pile, and opened a page at random:

  . . . mockeries of bridesmaids found wallowing on beds with wretches of the lowest description, scores of unnatural monsters giving justice the slip. The fashionable part of the coterie is thought to be deep in secrets.

  Rabble-rousing guff. There was even a passage fulminating against Mr Best, who was accused of personally presiding over the release of mollies.

  Wyre gazed at Holloway in astonishment. “Hiding behind anonymous won’t help you.” He tapped the pamphlet. “Best will know it’s you.”

  “It’s what people are thinking.” The barrister glanced sourly at Miss Crawford. “Those bawds in britches won’t be put off by a stand in the stocks. They’re like eels – dry them out, they resurrect in the next shower.”

  Wyre shook his head. “You shouldn’t have dragged Best into your fantasies.”

  “Fantasies, you say? There’s a secret society at work, if only you knew. Yea, even in the halls of power . . .” He began striking his pamphlet against the back of his hand in time to the rhythm of his speech. “A hidden web – poke it in one place, and it shakes somewhere else.” His eyes shrank to tiny furnaces. “It’s time to put an end to their cannibal philosophy! Time to rinse them out!”

  “You’ve gone too far,” Wyre said simply, tossing the pamphlet at Holloway’s feet.

  The barrister’s only riposte was his cat cry, “Phoenix of Sodom! Phoe–nix o’ Sodom!”

  At the end of the Mall, the crowd that had been there since the beginning of the inquest into Sellis’s death flexed and tensed. Wyre turned to Miss Crawford, suggesting they meet the following day. Aspinall was the key – he was more convinced of that than ever. Besides, Read didn’t value his contribution, so what difference did it make?

  “There’s an intermission scheduled for three o’clock,” he said. “We can meet at the east gate to the park.”

  “I’m sorry you were hurt, Mr Wyre.”

  He nodded, even mustering a half-smile Leighton wouldn’t have disowned, before leaving her, setting off back to the Palace.

  An elderly man leant against the green palings opposite Marlborough House reading something, one leg lifted to form a raised triangle, right foot pressed against the crook of the left knee. The dexterity was at curious odds with the few carefully combed back wisps of hair that still clung to the man’s head.

  “A prophet of plagues and torrents, our Mr Holloway,” the old man said, lifting a copy of The Phoenix of Sodom as Wyre drew alongside.

  Wyre regarded him cautiously.

  The elderly gentleman touched his forehead, the vestiges of a military salute, perhaps, discernible beneath the casual gesture. “Glad to see that knock on the head hasn’t put you off.”

  Wyre stared in astonishment, but before he could demand an explanation the old man was away, slipping like mercury between pedestrians. The lawyer watched him go, abashed. Should he just accept his private business was a matter of transparency to the outside world?

  A mackerel sky hung above the brick towers. The sentinels at the barricade lifted their ceremonial weapons, this time without issuing a challenge.

  49. Waiting Room

  The message had arrived early that morning, and simply informed her James would be handed over at midday. From the look on the gaoler’s face when she arrived at the Courthouse, she assumed she’d been summoned to collect a corpse. At her own costs. Her husband certainly smelled like a cadaver, but he wasn’t dead; though not entirely alive, either. She’d stared at the gash in his forehead, at the thick amber fluid pulsing at the bony brim, building up in little pushes till there was enough to drip over and run down the bridge of his nose.

  During those first hours, James had switched between intervals of thundering defiance, when he boasted he’d put the State to flight, and periods of uncontrollable raving, when he accused her of having lain with his gaoler before his eyes. Then he’d sunk into a sullen torpor, cursing his fortune for having taken up with molly bitches.

  The door to the operating room creaked open, and the surgeon put his head into the waiting hall. He was tall and grey-haired, and kept his eye glasses fastened around his head with a brightly coloured ribbon. Sarah rose to her feet.

  “All done, Mrs Cooke,” he said, motioning for her to join him in his theatre.

  A man with a severely deformed frame, waiting with the other patients, struggled to his feet, throwing an invisible hook towards the operating room: “Mr Cline! Mr Cline!”

  Sarah stepped inside to find the surgeon leaning over a basin of water in the corner, laving a little blood from his hands. Her husband sat quietly on a bloodied wooden chair.

  “No dirty fingers for a few days,” the surgeon instructed. “Give it a chance to heal.”

  She peered down at the shiny coin sewn into the neatly trimmed bone. Was that tent stitch? It looked like French Knot.

  “The sixpence is on me,” the surgeon said with a smile, adjusting the ribbon around his ears. He looked down at
her. “How will you be paying for the rest?”

  Sarah helped her husband up – he stank of deadening brandy – and led him by the hand into the waiting hall, setting him down on one of the short wooden benches. The other patients dotted about the bare atrium stared at the gleaming disc in his skull, the skin puckered around its edges.

  “You wait here, James,” she said, in a reassuring voice. “I won’t be long.”

  She returned to the consulting room, put her back against the wall, bustled up her skirts.

  50. Countrymen

  Wyre gazed at the intersecting corridors, each a dizzying turn inward. The smart figure of Paulet appeared.

  “The one you want’s back there – ” The valet pointed, his finger oddly curved. “It’s easily missed, Mr Wyre, easily missed.”

  “I’m not going to ask where you got that,” Read said, pointing at the welt, and scowling. “And you’re not going tell me.”

  The Duke’s under-butler, Joseph Strickland, was impeccably attired in a dark uniform, his frame canting slightly to the left.

  “Sellis was civil enough,” he began in a professionally remote voice. “I believe I saw him in his Highness’s dressing room on the night of the attack. I was a little surprised to meet him.” Strickland’s smooth face bore a tiny fishhook-shaped scar that hung like a question mark beneath his lips.

  “Why’s that?” Read said bluntly.

  “It wasn’t his turn, sir.”

  Wyre had heard that phrase once too often. “What time would you say this was?”

  “Oh, some time around eleven. Sellis looked at me oddly. I believe he may have laughed in what the maids would call a ghastly manner.”

  “What was he doing in the dressing room, if it wasn’t his turn?” Read flapped at his ear with two fingers.

  “His Highness often calls us on a whim. I believe there was talk of a visit to Windsor.”

  Wyre cleared his throat. “Tell me, Mr Strickland, what does a valet do?”

  “It’s a caring role, sir. He assists his master in dressing and undressing, keeps his clothes in good order, sees the housemaid lights the fires and fills the ewer, prepares hot shaving-water, airs his master’s dressing gown, warms his slippers, combs his hair.”

  “Anything else?” Wyre made a play of studying him.

  Strickland’s lips twitched. “Nothing I’d be aware of.”

  The under-butler’s place was taken by the broad-faced housekeeper, Sarah Varley. She laid a declaratory hand on her ample bosom.

  “The problem’s all them foreign types.” She wrinkled her nose. “Thousands of ’em in London, all h’aspiring to be servants. Barely speak the language. Assassins in waiting, sir. That’s what they say.”

  “Oh?” Read frowned. “What else do they say?”

  She gave him a crafty look. “That someone paid Sellis to murder his Royal Highness.”

  “And do they also say you helped him? Don’t look so surprised,” Read added when the woman paled visibly. “Mr Wyre seems to think someone must have deliberately forgotten to lock the doors between the Valet’s Room and the householders’ private quarters. I’m beginning to wonder if he’s right. How else could Sellis have made his way back?”

  “Weren’t me, sir.” She stared at the polished floor like a recalcitrant child. “Perhaps you should ask Mr Neale.”

  Read frowned. “Explain what you mean by that comment.”

  “Well,” she began hesitantly, “you know what they say about Sellis and Neale.”

  “I don’t, but you’ll tell us.”

  Wyre remembered Paulet’s nugget about Mrs Sellis’s suspicions.

  “That the pair were always sneaking about the Valet’s Room, sir.” She squirmed beneath the Chief Magistrate’s gaze.

  “Mrs Varley – ” Read’s tone had acquired a dangerous edge. “Mr Neale and Sellis shared the Valet’s Room. Mr Paulet, too, for that matter. There was no sneaking. Forget your petty gossiping. You’re to give an account of your own movements two nights ago.”

  “But Sellis’s preedy-lections were well known to the householders,” she protested, an air of stubbornness coming through. “It’s a wonder he didn’t try to lead his Royal Highness astray.” The housekeeper scrunched up her nose again. “Swooning over drummer-boys when the Duke went riding, thinking things no right-minded person would ever think. Not that the Duke would do anything like that,” she added quickly. “To be honest, I felt sorry for Mrs Sellis.”

  Wyre doubted that. The very suspicions that had driven Mrs Sellis to distraction had been grist to this housekeeper’s mill. What a place. “Did you ever see something of this kind with your own eyes?” he asked.

  “I didn’t, sir, but the servants used to laugh about it. Sellis and Neale once came to blows over a boy in the Guards. That’s common knowledge,” she said, glancing at Read, her face set. “It’s a sin, sir. I won’t have my beliefs squeezed.”

  “And what if we were to raise these allegations with Neale? Or better still, with Mrs Neale?”

  Her face sank. “She wouldn’t like it, sir.”

  “That’s enough slum talk,” Read said, a warning in his voice. “Tell us about that night. What did you see? Actually see?”

  “I was with Margaret Jones,” Mrs Varley said, more subdued now. “The lights were out in the passageway. Neither of us like the dark. We passed Mr Sellis going upstairs, and wished each other good night.”

  “How did you know it was Sellis?” Wyre said. “You just told us it was dark.”

  “He carried a dark lantern. Mr Sellis has one of those.”

  “Did you actually see his face?”

  “Well, Mrs Varley?” Read prompted.

  She gave a little curtsey. “No, sir, not his face.”

  Shaking his head, Read concluded the deposition. The housekeeper signed her name in spidery characters, each one detached and determinedly independent.

  “That rum bitch deserves a ducking,” Read said as the door closed behind her. “There’s not an incorruptible bone in her body. What’s the matter?” he said, frowning. “Lost in the intellectual world?”

  Wyre bit his tongue. There were hidden depths in the witness statements, things more vitally interfused, which Read didn’t seem prepared to grasp. Why did the Bow Street man always wish to drag him back to the surface and hold him there?

  “We’re being fed a story. It’s been rehearsed, but everyone’s getting it slightly wrong.”

  Read simply regarded him. “You mean well, Wyre, I’ll concede that. But don’t you think the Duke’s been through enough? A patriot wouldn’t prolong this nonsense. The depositions agree in ninety-five per cent of the details, and that’s sufficient for me. The other five per cent can be put down to petty vindictiveness or plain muddle. This whole thing’s a waste of everyone’s time and effort.” He pushed his chair back roughly, and got to his feet. “Join us tomorrow, if you must. The inquest will be over by lunch. And Wyre, we’ll be taking Cumberland’s testimony. The Duke won’t welcome schoolboyish theories. He’s a man who wishes to be looked at, not into.”

  Read strode from the Cupola Office, followed by his secretary. Wyre watched them go, waiting a little while before making his own way out. Something important was eluding them; he hadn’t changed his mind about that. The deponents’ stories were too concordant, not enough of those little variations and telling discrepancies Courthouse prosecutors were trained to spot and jemmy apart. What did they really know? There’d been an attack on the Duke; someone had been heard shuffling about in the servants’ passage; Mrs Neale had been sent to fetch Jackson and Sellis; Neale himself had . . . The edges of the narrative were already beginning to fray.

  Wyre pulled up sharp. He’d missed the piazza door. Paulet’s word: befuddled. Hell’s teeth, he’d gone practically all the way to the Valet’s Room. Back to where he began. Perhaps that was just as well. It wouldn’t hurt to look again. This time without Read.

  A dark red ribbon marked the room as off-limits. Wyre
slipped beneath it and gave the door a little push. Inside, leaning at the mantlepiece, both hands flat against the tiles, was Neale. The valet turned.

  51. Conversations

  Wyre decided to brazen it out. If he shouldn’t be here, neither should Neale. Read had made it too easy for this man. He pulled the door to.

  “The Valet’s Room is out of bounds during the inquest, Mr Neale.”

  “Then you’ll have to explain it to his Highness,” replied the valet coolly. “He asked me to change the sheeting.”

  As outflanking gambits went, it was a good one. Wyre was determined to keep his composure. “I trust the Duke’s wounds are healing. I’d been meaning to ask you about them.”

  Neale smirked. “I’d have said that was Mr Jackson’s speciality.”

  “Why don’t you give me the layman’s version. That’s what you are, isn’t it? A layman.”

  For an electrifying instant, Wyre thought the valet was about to rush at him, but his fierce look vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared.

  “I can tell you what I saw,” he said with a shrug. “The back of the Duke’s right hand was cut across. There were gashes on his left arm; one of them looked deep. There was something on the back of his right thigh. He was also cut on his head.”

  “You saw all this in the dark?”

  “I’d lit a lamp by then.”

  “While we’re at it, tell me about Sellis’s corpse. I know you were in his room that night.”

  “It’s no secret,” came the reply. “I told Read that.”

  “Alone with the body, I mean. Do you deny it?”

  Neale laughed. “What a strange question.” He appeared to consider. “People were coming and going. It’s possible. Why do you ask?”

  “I think Sellis had a co-conspirator, a slinker who goes by the name of Mr Parlez-Vous.”

  “Can’t say I ever met him.” The valet’s lips buckled into a sneer.

  “Down at the stables today, by any chance?”

  “Mucking out isn’t part of my duties, Mr Wyre.”

  “You knew Sellis better than most. Tell me, why would he attempt to slay his master?”