Savage Magic (19 page)

The name squirms into the room like a serpent.

Sir John held parties at Medmenham? He struggles to keep the disbelief – almost the mockery – out of his tone.

Once, says Burgess. This time last year.

‘And what happened?’

‘Very little. Nobody died.’

THORPE

Sir Henry Tempest stands in front of his portrait with, Horton presumes, no satirical intent. But the juxtaposition of the idealised portrayal with the fat, angry and contemptuous reality is too stark to be ignored. Horton, after a mere three minutes with Sir Henry, thinks he can picture a small army of servants stood here where he is now, inwardly smirking at how far the real man falls from the man in oils up there on the wall.

He is not offered a seat, a cup of tea, a walk in the garden. No, none of these would be in keeping with how Sir Henry so obviously sees him: as a kind of manservant to Aaron Graham, the man he has cuckolded. Paid for by the Bow Street magistrate, sent by him, and told what to do by him. Horton does not find this description to be wholly inaccurate.

‘So here’s the
witch hunter
,’ says Sir Henry, thumbs hooked into a stained silk waistcoat, hat thrown onto a nearby chair, one leg bent at the knee, the other ramrod straight. His breeches are tight, far too tight for a man of his girth, and his face is blotchy. The finer things in life have caught up with Sir Henry Tempest.

‘Sir Henry,’ he says, with a slight dip of the head which he tries to invest with as much insubordination as he once used to mock the admirals of His Majesty’s Navy. ‘If I may introduce—’

‘Do not bother yourself,’ Sir Henry barks, reminding Horton of those dogs out at the back of the house. ‘I know who you are. Graham has written to me about the unspeakable witchfinder-generaling you’re wasting my cousin’s time on.’

My cousin
. No anxieties over nomenclature for Sir Henry. Mrs Graham might be his lover, but she is primarily his cousin. Presumably Sir Henry thinks this reflects upon her rather well. Also, Sir Henry must be deliberately trying to avoid ever referring to Sarah Graham by her married name.

An answer is expected, even though no question was asked and only derision was offered. Horton has become used to being shown respect by his betters – John Harriott and Aaron Graham, senior magistrates both, are comfortable deferring to him. It is rather a shock to experience this pressing disgust, this bullying derision, from a man who so obviously considers Horton to be almost semi-human in his inferior position.

‘Sir Henry, if you would rather I left this house and returned to London, I will be on my way immediately.’

‘In defiance of Graham? You should know your place, sir.’

‘And you should know, Sir Henry, that Mr Graham may be my social better but he is not my superior. That position is another man’s. Mr Graham has asked me here as . . .’

He stops. Calling this mission a
personal favour
would be too much. He has already gone too far, and he can see it in Sir Henry’s face.

‘There are, I believe, things to be investigated here,’ he says, as neutrally as he can.

‘How so?’

‘There may have been crimes committed.’

‘Crimes against my property? Or crimes against the Heavenly Host?’

‘Against your property. I trust you have been kept appraised of events?’

‘You may assume I have, yes.’

‘Well, then. I believe your shed may have been burned down deliberately. Your dogs were, clearly, slaughtered by someone who wishes this household malice. These seem to be matters worthy of investigation.’

The mention of his dogs does not improve Sir Henry’s rough mood; though Horton rather thinks nothing much can achieve that.

‘It is my understanding that the cook – what is her name, Hook is it? – has been accused of these things.’

‘Accused by some, indeed. But without any real evidence or motivation that I can find.’

‘Evidence? Motivation?’

‘I mean, why would she do things like this?’

‘Malice. I would have thought that was obvious.’

‘Malice with what foundation? Does she have reason to resent you or Mrs Graham, Sir Henry?’

‘Are you interrogating
me
, now, constable?’

‘I am attempting to explain my approach to this matter.’

‘You are stating, then, that there is nothing to suggest Elizabeth Hook committed these crimes.’

‘Nothing I can as yet discover, no. And then there is the matter of Miss Tempest Graham.’

He says the name carefully, and he can see the charm it weaves. Sir Henry’s face softens, and for a moment his cantankerous carapace is pulled aside, revealing a man with some great anxiety beneath.

‘My daughter’s illness should not be confused with this stupidity of her mother’s.’

And yet she is not your daughter
, thinks Horton, and wonders at this obvious affection.

‘Perhaps not. But Miss Tempest Graham has alluded to matters which . . .’

He stops because Sir Henry has stepped towards him, newly enraged. He swings one arm behind him as if he might strike Horton, and another side of the man’s essence is revealed for a moment. For a country baronet, Sir Henry looks more than capable of playing the part of a street brawler.

‘Alluded! Alluded
when
, constable? You were given
no permission
to speak to my daughter!’

‘She spoke to me in the kitchen, this past night. I sought no interview with her.’

‘You should have sent her away!’

‘She seemed disturbed. Sending her away would have been unkind.’

‘So she comes to you in her night attire, indecently dressed and dizzy with sleep and illness, and you have no compunction in interrogating her with the same impertinent material you have offered me?’

‘No, Sir Henry. It was not at all like that. She seemed genuinely distressed by something . . .’

‘Of
course
she is distressed! Her mother has been chattering about witches and demons and all sorts of Godawful nonsense, and she has brought a strange man – an
impertinent
man – into her household, as if he were some gypsy cunning-man from Norwood with a book of spells and curses. For God’s sake, man. This must cease!’

‘Very well, sir. I will pack my possessions and have a carriage ordered . . .’

‘No. Wait.
Wait
.’

Sir Henry puts his hand to his forehead and closes his eyes. The other hand he holds up to arrest Horton. He sits down on an elegant chaise longue, his fat breeched legs splayed wide, his belly hanging down. His blotchy face has gone grey, as if the richness of the previous night’s food has come back to him.

There is silence for a moment. From somewhere within the house a woman shouts. Horton looks at the window and sees O’Reilly passing with a shovel over his shoulder. He thinks of the leaves drying in his window, the open letter waiting to be sent. He thinks he will go to the inn to eat and drink tonight.

‘It’s a bloody stupidity.’ Sir Henry mutters this while his eyes remain closed, and then he sighs and opens them to look at Horton.

‘Is there anything to be discovered, Horton? Is there something peculiar happening here?’

‘There is something happening, Sir Henry. As to its peculiarity, I will not say.’

And he finds he doesn’t want to leave this place, after all. Not while something remains unresolved. And certainly not while Abigail isn’t there to welcome him home.

A Treatise on Moral Projection

And so we come to it: the heart of the matter, and the rationale for this paper you see before you. The events I am about to describe have been the object of decades of my personal consideration; barely a day has gone by these last thirty years when I have not given them some thought, as if by turning them over in my mind I can accommodate some explanation for them. I do believe, now, that there is indeed a scientific rationale for them; but when I first experienced the episodes I am about to describe, the theoretical tools for understanding them were either absent, or severely misguided. These are matters I shall return to.

So here is the substance of it: having spent a month trying to establish some connection or rapport with Maria Cranfield, and having failed utterly in this matter, I was visited that September morning by Miss Delilah Underwood, the matron of the female part of the Asylum. There had been more disturbances during the night; for the second eve in a row, the men of Brooke House had made a fearful commotion, raised to it by we knew not what. I assumed she had come to speak with me of this, or perhaps of Mrs Horton, whom I had had occasion to lock in her cell the previous evening when she had become frenzied during a consultation with me.

Like Maria Cranfield, I did not see Mrs Horton making any progress whatsoever. She continued to have the same visions as when she first entered Brooke House, and I had tried out a whole barrage of remedies on her. At that time, my preferred regime of
moral therapy
, while highly effective on the male inmates, was proving less so on the females, and for this reason we also maintained a more traditional regimen of quiet solitude, mixed with vomiting, blood-letting and even the occasional opium dose when it was required. We had installed a new circulating swing chair on the ground floor, and this had proven very effective with certain male patients, but I believed the female frame to be too weak for this kind of physical intervention.

By this time I had become disheartened, but both the women remained subjects for study. When Miss Delilah came in to my consulting room, I was glad to see her; I asked how Mrs Horton was that morning after a night spent in isolation. This had followed an episode the previous evening in my consulting room when Mrs Horton had temporarily lost her wits, as if to demonstrate the lack of progress she had made in Brooke House. I was told that she was quiet, although there had been a good deal of weeping during the night. This saddened me, but I hardened myself in the knowledge that what I did was for the benefit of her own mental state. There had been too much wandering around the place for the woman’s own good; too much stimulation of the fancy was, no doubt, in some way preventing my effecting a cure.

However, this was not why Miss Delilah had come to visit me. She wished to speak of Maria Cranfield, she said, and I detected a certain tension in her manner when she spoke of that creature. I asked what she wanted to say of Miss Cranfield, and she responded by requesting that the patient be moved out of Brooke House forthwith.

I was shocked by this suggestion. It was of course wholly inappropriate for a mere matron to be recommending any course of treatment to a physician, but to insist on a patient’s removal! This was so unprecedented as to be scandalous. I responded with a good deal of anger, and demanded to know what in Maria Cranfield could have sparked such an outrageous demand.

I well remember, even today, what Miss Delilah said at that point.

‘She gets in your head, sir,’ she whispered, and to my great astonishment she began to weep as she spoke. Miss Delilah, who had calmed lunatics and sewn up wounds and faced down violent men in the extremities of a fit, was crying!

‘She gets in your head, and once she gets in there, you can’t get her out.’

I was thunderstruck. For a moment I could think of nothing at all to say. My head was, I recall, a little sore from wine I had drunk the previous evening, and I had been suffering from that torpid sense one suffers under the day after liquor has been consumed. I may also have been tired, my sleep having been disturbed by the disturbances among the male patients.

But I was firm with Miss Delilah, saying she was overwrought and suggesting she might need to go home and rest. She refused, saying her day’s work had barely begun. There was something of the old, familiar and solid Miss Delilah in this reply, forthright and slightly irritated. She could plainly see that I was giving no countenance to what she said, despite that shivery sense of familiarity I had felt. I agreed to go and visit with Maria Cranfield, and Abigail Horton, immediately.

‘Take an attendant with you, sir,’ she said, and a pleading tone had re-entered her voice. I asked why I should do such a thing. ‘T’would ease my mind if you did, sir.’

‘Well, we are in the business of easing minds, are we not, Miss Delilah?’ And I smiled. I may even have laughed. How innocent of the truth I was.

I called for an attendant to come with me to Maria Cranfield’s cell. His name is one I shall be repeating often, for despite his mental incapacity (he was an idiot, with the conception of perhaps a ten-year-old boy) he was to play a central part in the horrors to come.

He was called John Burroway. He came from somewhere on the south coast. He was a young man, big and strong, one of several of that type we kept in our employ in order to be able to deal with some of the more excitable males in Brooke House. John was, as I have said, simple, unable to write much more than his own name, but capable of basic menial tasks and instruction. He lived with a sister in Hackney, who also worked in the house. He did not speak unless spoken to, but with my head as sore as it was, the last thing I wanted was conversation.