The Detective and the Devil

by Lloyd Shepherd

  It depressed him. He had imagined Abigail to be recovered, but meeting Lamb and then reading his letter forced Horton to acknowledge that the mind, once bruised by terror, could never quite be healed.

  There was some breakfast waiting for him. Abigail was reading when he came in, and gave him little attention while he sat himself down and began to slowly break his fast at the little table beneath the window.

  ‘What do you know of Charles Lamb?’ he asked. Abigail put down her book.

  ‘Husband, you are full of surprises. Why do you ask about Charles Lamb?’

  ‘Because I met him – yesterday, and last night. He was one of the contributors to my late night return, and to my dull head today.’

  Abigail seemed amused.

  ‘Charles Lamb? The essayist and poet? He was the man you went to meet with last night?’

  ‘So he says. I have never heard of the fellow.’

  ‘Husband, your ignorance in such matters astonishes me.’

  ‘You read enough for us both.’

  ‘There is no such idea as reading enough, husband.’

  ‘So, this Lamb is a talent?’

  ‘He is a mighty talent, in my opinion. His poems are fine enough, but his prose is wonderful: clear and filled with a great heart. How on earth did you come to meet him?’

  ‘He is a clerk at East India House. He worked with Benjamin Johnson.’

  ‘How extraordinary.’

  ‘He claimed, last night, that Benjamin Johnson had discovered a conspiracy at the Company, and that this might explain his death. He became upset when I said he may have imagined it.’

  ‘Oh, Charles, what did you say?’

  ‘Only that we can see shadows where none exist, sometimes.’

  ‘If you had known more of him, you would not have said such a thing.’

  There was great unhappiness in these words.

  ‘He wrote to me this morning, intimating past afflictions. Do you know of them?’

  ‘The Lambs have suffered terribly with mental disorders. Lamb himself has experienced them, but his sister has had it the worse. During one attack, she . . . well, the story is a well-known one. You must remember.’

  And now he did remember. Mary Lamb had killed her own mother during a rage brought on, it was said, by emotional disturbance. That had been almost twenty years ago, and the newspapers then had been full of the sad tale. Charles Lamb was Mary’s brother? It had taken his wife – his dear wife, who had herself spent time in a madhouse only last year – to explain the hurt in Lamb’s letter.

  The indelicate conclusion was that Charles Lamb was as unreliable a witness as Horton had thought him. And yet this new story of Johnson’s inheritance, and of the sister of Mrs Johnson, seemed plausible. It did not ring of paranoid fantasy. He thought it worthy of some investigation.

  Abigail was looking at the book on her lap, though her eyes looked elsewhere. Were they remembering Brooke House at Hackney, the place she had gone to escape the world, the world he had allowed in to poison her brain?

  ‘Stop it,’ she whispered, the harsh words breaking the silence. ‘Gods, I can almost hear your thoughts, Charles. Your infernal self-blaming. I will not have it, husband. I will not have my condition laid at your door. You are not responsible, for you do not operate me. It is an insult, to me, to have you blame yourself so.’

  They had had other conversations like this. There was always poison in them, but there was fresh bitterness in Abigail’s tone. It seemed to stem from this history of Lamb’s. For a moment he faced the possibility that his wife hated him. But he was aware enough to slam that door shut, as if behind it were a cellar filled with waiting demons, their eyes green and bitter in the darkness.

  ‘Abigail, I cannot help my desire to protect you.’

  ‘No, you cannot. But you can avoid inflicting your bloody guilt upon me.’

  He waited for her to come back to him. She always did, and she did now. A breath of air through the nose, a shake of the head: right, enough of that, back to it! He watched her back away from her own despair, and thought her heroic.

  ‘Do you want to know the result of my own investigations, husband?’ she said.

  ‘If you please.’

  She took a bag from the floor by her chair, and brought it over to the table at which he sat. The bag contained the books he had brought back from number 37. She laid them on the table, one by one.

  ‘It turns out that all three books have a common denominator – this man called Dr John Dee. And this is his most famous book.’ She held up the book. ‘It is called Mathematicall Preface. It’s the preface to an Elizabethan book on Euclid.’

  ‘On what?’ Horton asked.

  ‘Euclid was a Greek mathematician,’ his wife explained. ‘He laid down the principles of geometry.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as the fact that two parallel lines will never intersect.’

  ‘Is that not obvious enough to make its statement unnecessary?’

  She scowled at him.

  ‘I shall not try to elucidate Dr Dee’s essay to you, husband. It suffices to say that he had some very odd ideas indeed, combined with a trained mathematical mind. I understand barely a tenth of what this book says – and so, it would seem, did Benjamin Johnson. He has written copious notes and underlinings in the book. There seems no pattern to them. And that may be because John Dee himself had the most extraordinary set of beliefs. Which brings me to the second book.’

  He opened the book she handed to him. It was the Environs of London, Volume 1: The County of Surrey. It was written by Daniel Lyson, and published at the end of the last century.

  ‘Some twenty pages were missing from Johnson’s copy,’ said Abigail. ‘This is another copy, from my lending library.’

  ‘What pages were missing?’

  ‘Part of the section on Mortlake.’

  ‘Mortlake? The village on the Thames?’

  ‘Yes. I know of no other village with the name, in Surrey or indeed anywhere else.’

  ‘Hmm. Johnson was interested in Mortlake? His wife’s sister lives in Putney – or lived. It is still unclear. I wonder what he was looking at.’

  ‘He was looking for John Dee.’

  Horton looked up from the book and at his wife. There was a sparkle in her eye. She’d enjoyed her academic investigation.

  ‘The removed pages run on from a list of notable personages who lived and died in Mortlake,’ she said. ‘The missing pages contain the longest entry of all of these. The entry is for John Dee.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Yes. And according to the account in this volume, John Dee was something of an odd collection of parts – part-sage, part-wizard. Perhaps even a spy. Certainly an astrologer and an alchemist.’

  ‘An alchemist?’

  ‘Men such as Dee believed that everything on earth – including men and women – were composed of four essential elements in different compounds. Alchemists explored those combinations. They sought out the perfectibility of man, believing that through study and contemplation man could become like God.’

  ‘Do we no longer have such men?’

  ‘No, husband, we do not. Now, we have chemists. And we understand that there are a great many more than four essential elements.’

  ‘And this Dee was an alchemist?’

  ‘Among other things. He does not strike one as a particularly reliable witness, and this account of Dee’s life seems to be based entirely on the Doctor’s own telling. He was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and his patrons included Edward VI . . .’

  Horton had to struggle with his memory to even recall this monarch.

  ‘. . . who gave him a pension and two rectories. Dee was suspected of treason by Bloody Mary . . . ’

  Had she been the sister of Edward? Horton thought she was.

  ‘. . . but returned to favour under Elizabeth.’

  Who was Mary’s sister, Horton was sure. Or her cousin?

  ‘To this point, th
is could be the account of any scholar under the Tudors. In 1575, the Queen visited Dee’s house in Mortlake to see his library, which was a wonder of the age, the biggest private library in England. Imagine, husband! A Queen visiting a supposed Magician!’

  ‘It seems unlikely.’

  ‘And it is only his account. But then Dee’s life took a very odd turn. Dee claimed to be able to speak to spirits via a stone – a “scrying stone” he called it – which an angel had given him. He performed what he called “incantations” with a young man named Edward Kelly. They left England in 1583 for several years, and ended up at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, but then Dee and Kelly fell out with each other. Dee returned to England, to find his library destroyed by a mob, and his reputation in tatters.’

  ‘Did people really imagine him to be a magician?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Abigail. ‘Well, a necromancer, meaning one who communes with demons, though Dee claimed they were angels he was talking to.’

  A mob and a necromancer. For a moment, Horton was taken back to Thorpe village, a village overtaken by rumours of maleficium in which he had spent time the previous year.

  Abigail continued: ‘Dee claimed that Elizabeth herself called him back to England, and he tried to claim money from her to restore his library. He said four thousand books had been taken. Four thousand books! At a time when there were scarcely a dozen printers in the land!’

  ‘Did the Queen listen to his claim?’

  ‘The account doesn’t say. But he must have spent more than ten years living in England again before Elizabeth died. Then James took the throne, and he did not look kindly on Dee’s supposed dabblings in magic. Didn’t like witches, either. Dee was accused of calling up evil spirits, and died a few years later, penniless.’

  ‘Is there any truth to all this?’

  ‘Well, the account goes on to speculate that Dee was actually some kind of spy, and that all his talk of magic and spirits was in fact secret codes containing political intelligence. But there seems to be no evidence for that. I can’t even imagine why people would have believed it. Dee claimed to have served the Queen, but it isn’t at all clear how – and all these instances of Elizabeth’s attention to him come from his own account. I wouldn’t be surprised to find he made the whole lot of it up.’

  ‘The story is intriguing, certainly. But I do not see its relevance.’

  ‘Well, there is something else here. The final paragraph lists Dee’s writings, or at least those things which Dee claimed to have written, and they are astonishingly varied. He wrote about the reformation of the Gregorian calendar, geography, natural philosophy, optics, metaphysics, astronomy, astrology and what the writer of this book calls “the occult sciences”. The account says Dee was asked to use the stars to predict the most propitious time for Elizabeth’s coronation.’

  The calendar and the secrets of the stars, all mixed together. How on earth did Dee ever tell the difference between the real and the imagined?

  ‘But here it is, husband. I read it this morning: “He wrote an account also of his voyage to St Helena, and a treatise on the Queen’s right to certain foreign countries.”’

  She looked up from the book.

  ‘Didn’t you tell me yesterday that the subject of Benjamin Johnson’s work was the island of St Helena?’

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘The connection is interesting. And the third volume?’

  ‘That I can make no sense of. The title seems to be in Greek, not Latin – and I have no Greek or Latin. It seems to consist of a set of 120 short statements or . . . Husband, are you quite well?’

  Horton had opened the third volume, the tattiest and oldest of the three, at the frontispiece while Abigail spoke to him, and there it was: the strange symbol that had been left on the Johnsons’ chests. It was at the centre of an arch with two columns etched on the old page. Above it he saw the words Ioannis Dee Londoninensis, which he thought he might now be able to translate.

  And on either side of the odd symbol, the initials I and D.

  Ioannis Dee. John Dee.

  ABIGAIL AND THE DOCTOR

  She had little time to discuss the revelation of John Dee’s symbol with her husband, though she could tell him that she knew Dee called it a ‘monad’. Charles had to attend the inquest into the awful murders on the Highway, so she left him to his own thoughts, and went off to St Luke’s to confront hers.

  It took the best part of an hour to walk to Moorfields, and she took her time, enjoying the space in which to think. She had not seen Dr Drysdale during her visit of the previous day, and she wondered if she would today. She had not spoken to him for a week. The events of the last two days – the murders on the Ratcliffe Highway, the books Charles had found, her own research into them – had taken her away from herself, and that had partly explained her reaction to Charles’s concern. She had felt offended that her husband thought her mind was not strong enough to cope with these disgusting deaths, but the truth was she had worried about that herself. She had discovered that she was coping well enough, and wanted to share this knowledge with the doctor.

  She went looking for him when she arrived at St Luke’s, the first time she had sought him out; previously, he had come to find her. But she saw on his face as she walked into his consulting rooms that there was a simple reason for their not meeting over the past week. He had not wanted to. He seemed embarrassed and somehow irritated by her arrival.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Horton. I’m afraid I have little time to talk today.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I shall not disturb you.’

  She turned to leave, but he called her back and asked her to sit.

  ‘My apologies, Mrs Horton. I should not simply dismiss you. We have discussed much in these rooms, and I owe you an explanation for my avoidance of you.’

  Avoidance? she thought, as she sat down.

  ‘You have heard me speak of Dr Bryson, of Brooke House?’ he said.

  ‘The physician there? Why, yes.’

  ‘But your memories of him remain sketchy?’

  ‘Yes, doctor. But, as I have said, my mind was much disturbed during my sojourn at Brooke House. My recollections are generally unreliable.’

  ‘Perhaps not as unreliable as you think, Mrs Horton. You see, Dr Bryson is not all he seems to be.’

  ‘He is not?’

  ‘No. In fact, the story he tells is so odd that he is currently incarcerated here, at St Luke’s, for investigation.’

  This disturbed her. A mad-doctor driven mad by thoughts of Brooke House?

  ‘Bryson’s theories are in themselves sound,’ Drysdale continued. ‘I find his concept of moral projection to have some relevance, and his belief that the effect of mesmerism can be ascribed to it will, I am sure, be demonstrated one day. But his recollections of Brooke House have become . . . well, they have turned into something altogether different.’

  I am not sure I wish to hear this, Abigail thought.

  ‘Bryson has talked extensively of a woman who had an extraordinary ability – that of persuading her fellow patients to perform actions which they were reluctant to do, or which they had not themselves desired. This was the area of his work that I was interested in; this was the essence of his moral projection theory of mesmerism. But I must admit that I imagined the woman of whom he spoke was yourself.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Why, yes, Mrs Horton. You do have an extraordinary capacity to put people at their ease, and I have witnessed you calming the patients here at St Luke’s with just a well-chosen word or phrase. I have been working for some months now under the assumption that you were Dr Bryson’s test patient; that he was investigating your ability while he was treating you. I was seeking to talk to him of his theories without revealing that I knew you; that I had, in fact, been investigating your own mental well-being.’

  It was a pure and cold violation. She gripped one hand with the other to stop both shaking. He had been investigating her? Dr Drysdale seemed only depressed by his revelations. He had no
conception of how he was affecting her.

  ‘However,’ he continued, ‘my assumption was entirely incorrect. I had not mentioned your name to Bryson during our discussions, as I wished to maintain our confidential relationship, but I fear that during a recent session with the man I blurted it out. He remembered you, of course, or claimed he did. But he said the woman he spoke of was not you. He said you knew the woman who had the peculiar abilities I wish to investigate. Her name was Maria Cranfield. Do you recall her?’

  Something twitched at the back of her understanding, a sliver of memory, but it was not enough to grasp hold of, and in any case her mind was a kaleidoscope of anger and shame. She had been used under a misapprehension. Drysdale’s dishonesty dismayed her.

  ‘Dr Drysdale, I will not return to St Luke’s,’ she said, standing. ‘I am not your test experiment. I had thought we were jointly discussing your theories, partly as a means of understanding what happened to me at Brooke House. I had thought you wanted me to contribute to your research. I see now I was only a specimen. Goodbye.’

  She turned and left, still holding her hands together, desperately trying to keep her self-possession until she could find somewhere quiet and dark to weep her shame away.

  CHARLES HORTON AT THE INQUEST

  The venue for the coroner’s inquest into the deaths of the Johnsons was the same as it had been for the death of the Marrs – upstairs at the Jolly Sailor. The atmosphere of near-hysteria that infested the streets outside was the same. A good number of the men watching the proceedings were the same – there was John Harriott, there was Edward Markland, there were Markland’s fellow Shadwell magistrates, Story and Capper.

  And there was Charles Horton, sat in the same place as he had been for that other inquest almost four years ago – at the back, his face hooded, unwilling to be seen, watching and listening and trying to make sense of it all, all the time wondering if these echoes of the earlier atrocity were all part of someone’s deliberate plan.

  He felt unhappily led by the nose, manipulated by signs, obscured by clouds of significance. Those strange symbols on the bodies of the Johnsons, tying them to the book of the Elizabethan necromancer John Dee, were the oddest remnant of all. The symbols were not accidental, just as the maul in the little bedroom was not accidental. There was a deliberation at work here, a particular consciousness.