The English Monster

by Lloyd Shepherd

  After some moments of contemplation, Anderson stands, his chest heaving, his stomach determined to vest itself of the ale he so recently took from this tavern. The butcher, Crestle, has followed him down into the cellar but now stands stock still, whimpering. The man with the poker is frozen on his way down the ladder, looking down onto Williamson’s body as it lies illuminated by the glow from the street. John Lee, also already in the cellar, has been sick against one of the empty barrels Williamson keeps—kept—down here. Anderson steps over the publican’s dead body, taking care not to slide in the pooling blood, and climbs the stairs up to the kitchen. He sees the shape of Williamson’s old brown leather armchair heaving into view as he ascends.

  There are still lights burning in the kitchen and he finds Liz straightaway. Another crushed skull. Another throat sliced down to the gleaming bone. She lies against the stove, half-sitting, and he clearly sees a series of perfect parallel lacerations in her perfect upper arms, deliberate and artisan in their application. Her dress has fallen away from one breast, and swearing and half-whimpering under his breath, he pulls the dress back over her shoulder to cover her up, feeling Williamson’s ale rising up his throat once again. He steps backward into the bar and sees old Bridget on the floor in there, her skull smashed again and her throat, again, torn apart by a blade.

  Anderson hears a sound at the door at the back of the saloon, which leads to a staircase up to the first-floor apartments. He glares at the door fiercely and starts toward it. The door begins to open, and as he is preparing to launch himself at it a girl of about twelve peeps sleepily into the saloon. Kitty Stillwell, Williamson’s granddaughter. Anderson doesn’t stop moving, but instead of raising his fists he opens his arms to embrace the girl, whose eyes widen and shimmer as she sees the body of Bridget.

  “Bridget? Bridget! Where’s my gran’pa! Nan? Nan!”

  MARCH 1603

  The shadows were falling. They fell both on the little house in Stanton St. John and on the great palace of Richmond, 40 miles downstream. As Archbishop Whitgift and the great counsellor Robert Cecil fussed around the bed of the ancient Queen, swapping interpretations of signs and sending letters north to Scotland, upstream in the quiet village a slow parade of men and women went in and out of the silent house. The women were weeping, the men grim-faced. Some children came as well, and halted their chatter and games at the threshold of the house, quietened by its calm dignity and the mourning of the adults.

  All these people stepped directly into the front room of the house, and there on an oak table was a coffin containing the body of a woman. Her eyes were closed, her long gray hair fell onto the silk cushion at her head, her long and slender fingers (still so young!) were crossed on her chest. Even as plans were being made to sail the dead Queen’s body down from Richmond to Whitehall, Oxfordshire women touched their fingers to their lips and then to the forehead of the dead woman in Stanton St. John. These women still held memories of the time spent by the young Queen in their own village decades before, when this dead woman was in the flush of youth, newly married and with her own hopes for the future.

  Some of the women whispered of that marriage, even now, years and years after Kate Ablass was abandoned by that strange, beautiful giant who had adventured on the high seas all those decades before. He had come back rich, had young Billy. He had built this house, bought pigs, and had made something of himself. For some years, the village’s respect for the hardworking son of the Polish sailor had waxed along with his fortune. He kept his looks, said the women. He remained the beautiful young adventurer even as the other villagers aged, their bodies and their faces racing toward the inescapable decrepitude that was forged by their hard lives.

  No one could tell when and how the happy domestic picture of the Ablasses had changed. But there came a time when the handsome young pig-farmer was no longer the pride of the village. Maybe this decline was triggered by the legendary fight outside the village’s alehouse, when Billy had nearly killed his fellow pig-farmer and friend Nathan Whitwell in an argument over land access. Those who were there (and a great many claimed to have been there) said Billy had pulled a knife on Nathan, and had to be restrained by a dozen men from slicing the other man’s head from his shoulders. “He was strong as a bull,” said old George White, cousin of the tenant-farmer John White of Manor Farm and thus a relative of the beautiful woman in the little house, sitting by the fire some ten years later, recounting the story as he had dozens of times before, the vowels stretching in his mouth. “We could barely ’old him. And he ’issed at old Nathan, he did, like an angry snake. And there was a terrible sound in the air, like bees humming, it was. I’ll never forget it. Nathan made himself scarce after that, sold up and headed over to Forest Hill, and I reckon that wasn’t far enough for him, neither.”

  Or perhaps the villagers remembered the time that Kate, now almost forty and childless, had emerged from the little house one morning with a vivid, creeping bruise across her eye, the color of a crow. She didn’t hide it, but nor would she talk about it. The women looked, the women talked, and the women drew their own conclusions. A black eye on a woman was by no means an uncommon sight in the village. The men barely noticed it, and those that did probably approved. But Kate’s face had always been as unblemished as her character, and whatever people had started to whisper about Billy Ablass (and the whispers had become dark things themselves by then, full of witchcraft and magic), the one thing they acknowledged was his devotion to his wife. And now, that wife had a black eye.

  Then, suddenly, Billy Ablass was gone. Kate acknowledged his departure but discussed it with no one, not even her close friends Mildred Weathers and Jane Robinson. But if the villagers believed Billy’s departure would be a relief to Kate after the changes in him in the preceding months, they were quite wrong. She entered a period of mourning just as she would have done if he’d died. She adopted black clothes and walked through the village with her head down out of respect for the departed. She talked about him in the past tense, and embellished his now complicated legend with tales of the past as if enjoying the memory of a cherished but deceased relative. No one questioned her behavior, though privately, inside their own houses, the villagers wondered why there had been no funeral for Billy Ablass. Those whisperings continued.

  They were comfortable years for Kate Ablass, after Billy left. She became a cherished matriarch to the village, advising young women approaching marriage, teaching them how to run a household for a working husband, looking after children whenever she was asked, attending church devotedly even as the new traditions of the Church of England pushed their roots down into the people’s souls. She had money and she still had pigs, and she paid for one of the local men to husband her livestock, and lived comfortably enough on the proceeds. She was not free with her money (her husband had taught her that) but she was not miserly either. When the illness came and took her, it did so mercifully quickly, and she died at peace and alone in her sleep. She took God into her heart, said the villagers, and he had taken her to his.

  So they came and paid their final respects to this beautiful gray old lady, every single family for two miles around making their way to the little house. They kissed her brow with their fingers, looked a final time around the inside of the house, so well known to most of them, and walked out into the dark with that steady sense of good-fellowship which comes from the acknowledgment of a life well lived.

  Eventually, the last of them left—the family of Nathan Whitwell himself, who had traveled the four miles from Forest Hill. There were tears in Nathan’s eyes when he came out of the house, though for what he did not or could not say.

  Silence descended on the little house, and Stanton St. John slept. In the churchyard near the house, the two dozen or so headstones stood guard on the now proudly Anglican building. The moon had come out, its light the only thing keeping out the complete blackness up here in the hills outside Oxford. Two white owls circled the ground of the meadow up the lane from the church,
and paid no heed to the tall, black figure who emerged down the lane. It paused outside the church and looked up at its squat little tower, a silhouette in the moonlight. Then it tramped on. It stopped outside the house of Kate Ablass.

  It stood for a while, its head moving up and down, left and right as it took in the front of the little house. After several minutes, the figure stepped through the unlocked door and went inside.

  A mouse scurried away into a corner as it heard the presence come in, and hid in a hole in the still-fresh brickwork. The figure ran one hand along the wall of the front room as it walked. Although the house was dark, it navigated its way to the coffin without difficulty, seemingly aware of where the furniture was without any light to guide it. It approached the coffin.

  From within its long coat, it took a tiny sphere and held it up to the moonlight, which shimmered across the object’s milky surface and, for one magical moment, seemed to light up the room. A pearl. With infinite care, the figure put one hand beneath Kate’s head, lifted it up, and placed the pearl beneath the coffin’s pillow. It placed her head back down on the pillow, and then it placed its hands on the coffin’s lip and leaned against it, its head down and gazing. The shoulders began to gently spasm and then the tall legs seemed to give way, the figure now kneeling on the floor with its hands still grasping the edge of the coffin, its forehead pressed down on the wooden rim. It was sobbing in great oceanic heaves, and for some time it hung there, as if it were gripping onto a great chunk of driftwood on a dark, cold, lonely sea.

  20 DECEMBER 1811

  The Chief Magistrate of the Thames River Police Office presents his compliments to the Magistrates of Shadwell and requests their Attendance at a Meeting to be held at the River Police Office this day at 2 o’clock—to consult together on the most effectual Measures for discovering the atrocious Murderers that infest the Neighbourhoods of their respective Offices, which from the murder of three people in a house in New Gravel Lane last night, gives an appearance of a Gang acting upon a System.

  The Thames River Police Office rises almost primly between the warehouses which line the Wapping riverfront. It has the appearance of a well-established gentleman standing self-consciously among traders and rogues, having found itself in the wrong part of town after a night at its club. The office is built in the same style as the new villa of a city banker. It does not look like a fortress of law and order for the maintenance of trade and commerce on the river.

  A decade before, soon after its opening, this office had been the scene of a terrible riot. Its founder and magistrate John Harriott had already been working for three years to bring some order to business matters on the river, and this had gradually throttled the life out of a centuries-old riverside culture of lawlessness which had involved hundreds of petty thieves and rascals. The riot was the last desperate attempt by these men who’d inherited this way of life to regain their blessed pre-office freedoms. A tattered flurry of Irishmen, Portuguese, and Englishmen had flowed down Wapping Street, determined to preserve their God-given rights to extort money from the river’s trade.

  John Harriott had faced them down, his Essex whiskers quivering with outrage. These were men who under other circumstances he might have been proud to command, but they were now committing the cardinal rule (in Harriott’s eyes) of misrepresenting their class. He believed that workingmen should know their place; if they worked hard and remained loyal and steadfast, they would receive their reward, both here and in Heaven.

  As a proud Englishman he saw only Irish coal heavers and Portuguese seamen within the mob (the truth being, of course, that the bulk of them were Englishmen and, what was more, Londoners). In the drama of Harriott’s long and extraordinary life this was simply another occasion when, as an unshaken officer of the nation of Great Britain, he’d had to stare down uncivilized savages as they sought to assert their privileges over those of the established order. Be they Sepoys, Indians, or even the damned French, he’d always stood his ground and this time he did so again, losing one of his watermen-constables in the process and gaining something which was worth rather more: the steady preservation of the arteries of trade which pumped the world’s commodities into London’s heart, day after day after day.

  Today there is a smaller mob gathering outside the windows of the Police Office. Magistrate Harriott’s eyes are directed elsewhere, so it is left to Waterman-Constable Charles Horton to keep a close watch on the growing crowd outside.

  Somehow the word has got out that there is a meeting taking place at the office on the subject of the recent murders. As is the way of these things, a few have decided that their presence at the office is required by the emerging situation. These few have been followed by dozens more, and now a single body of angry and frightened men and women (and not a few children, Horton notes) has formed itself in Wapping Street, unanimously demanding that something be done.

  The fresh murders at the King’s Arms—their violence, and their echo of the terrible events at 29 Ratcliffe Highway—have reignited and multiplied the panic. Wapping’s residents had become used to the idea of the Ratcliffe Highway killings. The murders had begun to acquire the flavor of local myth, as common in the telling as the great fire of 1794 or the riot of 1798. But the new murders at the King’s Arms, as fresh in the imagination as a vivid fireside tale, have brought those first killings back into sharp relief, and the slaughter is no longer a unique moment of horror, depraved but singular. Now people do believe that something evil is stalking the nether regions of the dock, and that they might be the next to feel the cold swipe of steel through their neck.

  The cocktail of dread and anger has been fed by the gentlemen of the press, and now the stomachs of the people are chock-full of rumor as well as fear. In one thing, though, the mob is at least coherent. It has chosen to gather outside the office of John Harriott, and not at the Shadwell Police Office. Those people outside have seen the progress of Shadwell’s investigation, and have voted with their feet. It is Harriott to whom they are protesting, for they believe it is Harriott who will resolve these awful events.

  Watching the crowd from the upper-floor window, Constable Horton finds himself remembering other events in other places. He recalls the crowd on the shore at Sheerness, desperate for a view of the destruction of the mutineers on the Nore. He sees Richard Parker leaping into the air, the rope around his neck, the gasps of the people watching seeming to lift him for a moment before the rope stiffens and that awful snap echoes over the still waters. He feels, once again, the terrible weight of his own guilt, the memory of how he purchased his freedom and a second chance. Are any of his fellow mutineers out there right now in the crowd? Would any of them recognize their old shipmate? Would they know of the names he’d given to the investigating authorities?

  For a moment, Horton’s reflection in the window is a mask of despair. Deliberately recomposing his expression into a more customary one of watchfulness, he turns away from the window.

  If the rage of the people is growing in the street, inside the room anger of a more specifically restless kind is building up pressure. John Harriott’s temper has been steadily simmering as, one by one, his colleagues from the Shadwell office have justified their actions: Mr. Capper has asserted the unblemished reputation of the Shadwell office; Mr. Markland has bemoaned the lack of support and resources from other offices and from the Home Office; and Mr. Story has once again invoked the Bible and the End of Days as the explanation for the recent slaughters.

  Harriott had summoned the Shadwell office magistrates that morning, after Constable Horton had taken the news of the Williamson murders to Harriott’s home at Pier Head; Horton himself had been woken in Lower Gun Alley by another of his dirty-faced little boys, who’d rattled on his door using a prearranged signal.

  John Harriott had at first seemed emptied by the news, like one of the hot-air balloons which had been all the rage two decades before, but soon his natural energy and impatience reasserted themselves and he set about organizin
g this conference. It seemed to him that the second killings changed everything.

  Despite themselves, the Shadwell magistrates have appeared as requested, perhaps in an attempt to extend the circle of their non-achievement, to shift the pointing finger of Whitehall blame from them to another office. How else to explain the way they are behaving? Two of the magistrates are busy covering their backs. Story is sliding into a state of personal transcendence.

  “We have been diligent in our undertakings, sir, diligent I say,” asserts the spiky, terrified-looking Robert Capper. “We have interrogated countless ne’er-do-wells and vagrants, pursued untold lines of inquiry, I have barely seen my poor wife and children this past week. Your assumption that we have been found wanting in application is most disconcerting and ill-conceived.” The little Hertfordshire man twitters in a high-pitched voice, his hands in his lap and his pinched, pale white face spotted by two dots of red in his cheeks.

  “Sir, no one is asserting an absence of application,” says Harriott, his rage under control but, to Horton at least, as apparent as the presence of a cold wind before a storm. “There has been a great amount of application. But thus far there has been an unaccountable lack of any progress. Those who have been interviewed can, in my view, almost certainly now be discounted, for what kind of impudent devil would be questioned and then go on to commit more murders? And as for motive . . .”

  “Motive?” exclaims Story, his ancient jowls quivering. “The Devil needs no motive, Harriott. These are the works of the Devil, I say, the undertakings of fierce demons with only one thought—our extermination and our eternal damnation.”