The Cunning House

by Richard Marggraf Turley

  Wyre tried to resist the spreading cloud of unreality. “Who murdered Joseph Sellis? Was that also Mr Parlez-Vous?”

  “Who would you like it to be?”

  “I’ll have officers brought here. You’ll tell them.”

  Ellesmere frowned. “Forgive the lack of courtroom decorum in my summing up,” he said, taking a small step back, “but you must know it was only ever about a few puckered arseholes.”

  Miss Crawford gasped. Wyre levelled the pistol over his left forearm as he’d seen Read do in the Valet’s Room, crouching slightly, spreading his weight. “Last chance, you devil! Where’s Robert Aspinall?”

  The doctor gave him a curious look. “When you get up after defecating, Mr Wyre, do you feel there’s always more to come out?”

  Ellesmere reached behind him, and snatched up the glass-handled rod – blue sparks flared at its prongs – thrusting the instrument straight at the lawyer’s chest. The pain drove out language; Wyre became a single crooking muscle, the doctor’s grotesque rictus hovering above him, filling his contracting vision. A blank crack, somehow related to Ellesmere dropping his shocking points, his head expanding in a great red slop, the glass jar coming shatteringly down, its clear contents hissing over the brick floor. Wyre heard the emptied pistol clatter at his side.

  Then Miss Crawford was kneeling next to him, her hand beneath his jacket, sliding into the pouch, taking a lead ball, tipping the powder sack. Even in his quiverish state, he noted the proficiency. She held out the pistol, straining at the hammer with two thumbs, forcing it back with a final click. Looked up, past him, her face flickering with strange blue lights.

  Wyre twisted his neck painfully, stared over the body of the mad-doctor in the direction shown by the pistol’s muzzle. That side door was open now. An oddly familiar, advancing shape. Mrs Neale’s features had undergone a terrible transformation since he’d seen her last. She cradled a second throbbing jar beneath her arm, and with a high whooping noise rushed towards them, outstretched pole fizzing.

  Miss Crawford rose, one strap of her dress falling to the side, her fingers tightening around the butt of the weapon. That line, from her bare shoulder to the rod.

  There followed a flash that seemed to gather all the room’s dancing lights to it and the valet’s wife fell backwards as if attached to an unseen wire that someone had tugged violently. When the pall of smoke finally lifted, she was sprawled backwards over a gurney. Slowly, she slipped to the stone floor.

  Again, Miss Crawford was crouching over Wyre, hauling him to his feet. His whole body numb. Squinting down, he discovered two round sear-marks in his blue legal jacket. Heart height.

  Somehow the pair of them were crossing to the side door. They passed Mrs Neale, whose jaw moved feebly from side to side as if she were trying to finish an anecdote.

  He was in another room now, watching Miss Crawford stand beside a body on a raised stretcher. She didn’t appear to look at the sutured line, but Wyre knew she’d seen it; recognized it.

  She bent over her fiancé, her face that of a pretty boy (was he the only one who hadn’t seen it?), stroking Aspinall’s forehead with gentle motions Wyre felt suddenly as fire in his chest. A curious expression, like the turn of a sonnet towards a resolution of some kind.

  Robert Aspinall’s eyes opened, stared at the lawyer. Not the slightest flicker of recognition. Then the head lolled to the side, its pained features creasing into a wide grin.

  Mad as the winds.

  Wyre watched him for a moment, then turned away.

  All gone. Rose, Leighton . . . and now Miss Crawford. But he’d be damned if he was leaving without the truth, even if it meant trying to thresh facts from fables in Ellesmere’s story. Didn’t it always come down to that? Wasn’t that what William tried to tell him all along? The cup within the cup. Let him have a stab, then.

  Mr Parlez-Vous was Mrs Neale, on whose extraordinary medical case Aspinall’s fugitive, then Ellesmere’s filched, treatise depended. Even in his final moments, Ellesmere had sought to hide her from the world until he was ready.

  White had felt her pinch. Tranter, too, in all likelihood. Neale swore it was the Duke’s finger curled around the trigger. But Wyre only had his word for that.

  Treatment at Wood’s Close. That was how the Duke had made his peace with Bow Street. Cure rather than punishment. A novel idea. It was in the air. Mrs Neale was the perfect testing ground. But the asylum had merely been an echo chamber for her sickness. She’d been a pretty bird in a bell jar. Wyre pictured the torn-out page of Aspinall’s notebook, mentally reading its obscenities. Had Ellesmere egged her on, nurturing her hatred of mollies, recording her excesses in his study of one mind made two, the double character? Those regular visits to the Retreat, each time returning to the Palace a little madder, her jealousy more murderous.

  His thoughts returned to the Duke’s bedchamber. There was little doubt Mrs Neale had wielded the sabre. It explained why the strokes hadn’t told. All those nights of knowing her husband slept with just a paper wall between him and Cumberland. Or not between them. Hadn’t Paulet said as much (though he’d meant Mrs Sellis)? Wyre could almost sympathize with her.

  As for Joseph Sellis, he’d been sacrificed for no other reason than to explain the Duke’s injuries. He’d been as expendable as a lowly swad in the Peninsula game.

  Who’d slit Sellis’s throat, and how had they got into his room? There was only one explanation now. The missing key was thieved from the Porter’s office by Cumberland and Neale as they planned their cover. He’d always thought it strange they’d gone there first, rather than to Jackson the surgeon. Wyre swept the mental drapery aside, pictured the sequence as it must have occurred – the injured Duke leaning on Neale as they made their way through the corridors looking for Mrs Neale, the unbalanced plaything of both men (Wyre had no doubt of that) – finding her, bringing her to the Duke’s sleeping quarters. Leighton had arrived then in the guise of Mr Gew to witness Neale tending to the cuts on his master’s skull – his own wife’s handiwork – seen Neale set off on his murderous commission. How could Neale refuse? It was either that or leave his wife to the Palace fixers. Perhaps he’d pleaded with Cumberland as she cowered in the corner.

  But there was more to it. Cumberland wasn’t sentimental: he’d have sacrificed all his tin men and women, if he felt he could. No, Mrs Neale had insured herself. Margaret Jones, her ear at the wall, her eye at the keyhole . . . The Welsh maid had documented Cumberland’s comings and goings for her mistress: all those outings to Vere Street as the Country Gentleman, all those visits to the Valet’s Room, all those rides with footmen in the royal barouche (the dickey-box, indeed!). She’d transcribed all she’d heard. It was all neatly recorded somewhere.

  And Read knew. Knew, and decided to protect the Duke from scandal. To serve England the only way he could. The story of Sellis’s suicide worked for all parties. Read had warned him he wouldn’t get anywhere with insinuations about Greek vices, and he’d been right. Puckered arseholes. The lawyer shook his head. Dirty places, and they’d cost at least three men their lives.

  But what about that contretemps on Birdcage Walk? Perhaps Margaret’s head had been turned by Neale, the man she’d seen in so many intimate situations. Had she tried to save him with her gospel graces? Perhaps her mistress’s sharp blue eyes intercepted a glance too warm, inferring from it an understanding. The foolish girl had been playing a dangerous game. Margaret running that time, cheeks streaked with tears, from the games room . . . True to his type, Neale had spurned her in the end. But her God was a vengeful God. Margaret’s swift retribution had been to tell Wyre what she’d seen in the Valet’s Room. She’d been telling the truth.

  He fought an urge to retch. How could these people bear to breathe each other’s air?

  And Leighton . . . Had the Runner’s Bow Street superior stood back as the Palace set Shadworth on him? More likely, Read had done his best to protect him with that unlikely story about stolen gems in Mayfair. At least
, Wyre preferred to think so. At any rate, Leighton was safely harboured in the Belgian Court. There was nowhere in England he’d ever be safe again. But it didn’t make him a turncoat, just a man whose struggle with life was more complex than he’d known, or could have imagined.

  None of this explained Thomas’s letter offering hope to Sellis. William’s words again – the cup within the cup. But now Wyre knew better what Sellis had been. Many things. Tormented victim of the Duke’s violent desires, Neale’s lover, dutiful father of four (the youngest of whom was imprisoned within the prison of the Duke’s own name). What else? French spy, assassin manqué? Whatever Sellis was, was now succumbing to time’s ultimate victory over the light embalming fluid that Surgeon Cline had used to clothe the dead man’s worse than nakedness for all those student eyes.

  Only the slippers left now, and they were easy. Mrs Neale’s part in the charade was to fetch a dead man. She waited till the Porter and the other joskin left Sellis’s bedroom before grabbing the first items that came to hand, concealing them under her skirts. Then she’d placed them where they needed to be, in the Duke’s closet.

  Read had known. Known and hadn’t liked it. But he was a patriot. He believed in the war with France. Though not enough to see Wyre suffer. He’d come back.

  As for Miss Crawford, and her truth. Those river-harlot cat-cries rang in his ears. She would always remain with Aspinall, their pact sealed in the cruellest terms. But he also knew, in that same instant, that despite it all, despite what he was, what she was, if she were only to ask, he would give up everything.

  It was a story of sorts. A pattern even. But as his thoughts rested on an image of a Cumberland still most safe, most sound, he realized his was one chronicle among many.

  Wyre crossed to a door that led outside into a little sunken courtyard. Alone now, he climbed its steps, Miss Crawford’s voice gradually enfolded in another’s. He emerged into a world barely recognizable from the one he’d left. Memory returned with a company of swifts, screaming their parabola over the gardens. One broke off, fixed on its own, solitary trajectory, its shrillness seeming to bend the air. Wyre imagined the wooded lands round the city already turning in the little creature’s ancient brain into the ribbed, then level, sands of its endless summer.

  Author’s Note

  I began this novel in July 2010, two hundred years – pretty much to the day – after the raid on The White Swan tavern in Vere Street. The idea for the book emerged from discussions of the Swan mollies’ persecution with students who had opted to take my Romantic Eroticism course at Aberystwyth University. Buoyed by their enthusiasm, I launched into the project, estimating a year’s work, at most, lay ahead. In the four years it actually took to close Wyre’s case, close-bosom friend and fellow Romanticist, Damian Walford Davies, read every word, many of them more than once. His advice, encouragement and infallible ear were a unfailing spur whenever the complexity of the story threatened to get the better of me. Damian is one of the few who understands Blake “to the lees”, and I profited from his wisdom in that respect, too. I owe another substantial debt to Susan Stokes-Chapman, who also read the entire manuscript, and insisted the plot make sense.

  Like all good Romantics, I subscribe to the doctrine of “being there” – of footstepping, absorbing, and when necessary inhaling. First-hand familiarity of conducting surgical procedures, however, lay beyond my experiential horizon. For insights into how bodies are put together, and come apart – particularly into the wet work of chirurgy – I’m grateful to my good friend Wolfgang Spaeth. I have also been helped by my doctoral students, nineteenth-century specialist Ian Middlebrook, and the novelist Eliza Granville, whose expertise in the areas of cab history and memory, respectively, has been invaluable. Further thanks are due to Jayne Archer for her advice on folk remedies; and to Elaine Treharne, for early exchanges on the mythical Donestre, whose grisly devotions provided me with an entrée into The White Swan’s taproom, and on up into the attics. Finally, thank you to Robert Davidson and Moira Forsyth at Sandstone Press; to Planet Magazine (who published parts of Chapter 19 as a podcast); to my literary agent Dominique Baxter at David Higham Associates; and to Veronica Foetz-Camm for liking Mr Shadworth.

  I acknowledge the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University for generously granting me study leave to complete the first draft of this novel.