Savage Magic (23 page)

So it was agreed. Henry would take poor, desperate Maria to Brooke House in Hackney. Maggie would not accompany them, and she added a condition: that her name not be linked to Maria’s. As far as Brooke House was concerned, Maria was the ward of the man of means. He asked her why this should be, and all she said was this: ‘She cannot be associated with what is to come next. She will recommence her life with no stain. No one can know she is my daughter, Henry. It must be as if I were never here.’

She looked at him, and his head felt squeezed once more, and he agreed, adding that he would visit London every week during the stay of her incarceration. As July finally gave way to August, the three of them left the hop garden for London, leaving the relieved overseer to make arrangements for the coming picking season, with the blight of the mad girl lifted from the place like poison lifted from a well.

PART THREE

Do What You Will

CHARCOT: Let us press again on the hysterogenic point. Here we go again. Occasionally subjects even bite their tongue, but this would be rare. Look at the arched back, which is so well described in the textbooks.

PATIENT: Mother, I am frightened.

Jean-Martin Charcot,
Charcot the Clinician:

The Tuesday Lessons

THORPE

The Pipehouse is at the south-eastern corner of the Tempest estate, at a fork in the road. It is a relatively nondescript place, and is quiet tonight as Horton approaches it in the September twilight. The sun is setting behind him, silhouetting the copses of trees and the partly hidden buildings of the fine houses which dot the swampy land. An owl lifts itself from a tree by the side of the road and flies off across a field, its long wings twitching gently in the evening breeze. There is a warm sympathy to the evening air.

The warmth dissipates when he steps into the Pipehouse, and he wonders for a moment if he has made a terrible mistake. The interior is cramped, by the standards of London’s larger inns – the place is barely as big as the Town of Ramsgate in Wapping. It houses perhaps a half-dozen old tables and a dozen stools on its uneven wooden floor. A middle-aged woman is scrubbing down one of these tables, her bulky figure partially obscuring two men sitting behind her. There are five other men seated at different tables, none of them speaking to each other, most of them looking at their jugs of beer with the same mournful intensity they might adopt when watching a pet die. Several of them smoke pipes, and the air is thick and grey with tobacco odours. The fat woman stands straight as Horton steps inside, and he sees the two men sat behind her. He recognises them from the road the previous day, the friends of Peter Gowing. The labourer who had reproached him, and his embarrassed friend.

‘Good evening to you,’ he says, to the woman. She nods and walks to the little wooden bar. He follows her, ignoring the stares of the men around him. No one says anything. He asks for a tankard of ale, and she pours him one from a big brown cracked jug. From somewhere inside the place he hears a distant crash and a shouted profanity, and the woman stares at him coldly, as if daring him to mention it. He thanks her, turns, and sits down at the same table as Peter Gowing’s friends. He doesn’t look at them at first, staring carefully one by one at the other men in the bar, but it only takes a few moments for a hand to put itself on his shoulder and suggest, impertinently, that he turn his head.

He does so, sipping from his tankard as he goes, and faces the angry red-faced labourer from the road.

‘You make very free with your hands, sir,’ he says, softly. ‘Do you need reminding of my station?’

Hob smiles, and leaves his hand on Horton’s shoulder. There is an intensity to the colour in his cheeks. He is drunk.

‘I would like,’ he begins, then stops, frowning slightly. He belches hugely, then starts again. ‘I would like to know what you think you are doing.’

Horton smiles, mildly.

‘I am drinking ale, sir. And if you do not remove your hand, I shall shortly be arresting you.’

The other man at the table reaches over and pulls the redfaced man away. There is no complaint. Hob looks at his friend as if he were some species of elephant, belches again, and looks back at Horton, happily. More than drunk. Incapacitated.

Horton turns to the man’s friend, who looks as miserable as he did on the road yesterday. He is narrow, red-haired, his hands small but roughened, his face as pocked as the wall of Newgate. Horton nods at him, and the man nods carefully back.

No one in the place has anything to say, so Horton fills the silence himself.

‘My name’s Charles Horton. These two men have already met me, but you others have not, though you may have heard tell of my visit. I am looking into the recent events at Thorpe Lee House.’

‘The witchery, you mean,’ says the fat woman at the bar.

‘I mean no such thing,’ says Horton. ‘There have been episodes of trespass, damage to property and even attempted murder at Thorpe Lee House which I am seeking to uncover the cause of.’

‘’Tis done,’ says one of the men at the tables.

‘’Twas the witch, Elizabeth Hook,’ says another.

‘Witchery,’ says the fat woman, again, emphatically.

‘And yet – why?’ says Horton. No one answers that. ‘Why should anyone wish mischief on Thorpe Lee House?’

‘Witches need no reason,’ mutters another man.

‘Do they not? I have heard it differently. Those accused of witchcraft in the past did not do so out of pure malice. It was always in response to a slight, a refusal of help, a dismissal from a kitchen door. Is this not true?’

No reply comes to that.

‘So why should it be that Elizabeth Hook wanted mischief done to Thorpe Lee House? To Miss Tempest Graham?’

‘It’s a rotten, wicked place,’ said the woman.

‘How so, madam?’

She scowls at being addressed directly.

‘They live as man and wife up there. Him and her and that poor girl. ’Tis a bad place.’

A few of the men nod. Horton thinks that the villagers probably all agree on this.

‘But a witch is evil too, is she not? Why would something evil visit mischief on another evil? What is the motivation?’

Hob belches again and giggles slightly. Horton looks at his short friend, who is staring into his tankard as if it held cosmic truths.

‘But he seen ’er!’ says one of the men. ‘Bill seen ’er!’

‘Bill?’

There is a shrinking of the small man’s shoulders, almost involuntary, that gives him away. Bill is the man sitting beside him, it would seem.

‘What did you see, Bill?’

No reply.

‘Bill, if you saw something, you are bound to . . .’

‘I didn’t see nothin’. Not a bloody thing.’

His voice is unexpectedly deep in one so lithe and sinewy. His slight hands are clenched into rough-red balls.

‘Well, let us start with where you were when you didn’t see anything.’

‘In the vicar’s field, just down the lane.’

‘So you did see something?’

Bill’s uneducated face is angry and weak and confused.

‘I saw ’er bloody fly, didn’t I!’

Bill spits it out, straight into Horton’s face, as if he were reacting to a taunt from a child.

‘She flew along the top of the ’edge, all the way back into the village. She’s a bloody witch! Elizabeth ’ook is a bloody witch!’

A little the worse for ale, Horton walks down the lane a way, towards the village, leaving Thorpe Lee House behind him. Bill had calmed somewhat once his revelation had been extracted, enough anyway to describe the spot he’d sat in when Elizabeth Hook had flown through the air above his head. He finds it shortly – an open section of hedgerow, giving onto a fallow field. It is full dark now, with no moon, but the sky is astonishingly clear, such that the stars cast their own light, enough almost to make a shadow. He remembers standing outside a Ratcliffe Highway house, reading the markings on a coin in the moonlight.

He almost falls as he steps into the field, which is somewhat below the level of the road. It is as if a ditch has been dug all the way around the place at some point in the preceding centuries, and has been slowly filled in, leaving only a declivity in the ground as an echo of former works. He steadies himself. He has drunk a good deal of ale, and has become something of a friend to those men in the Pipehouse. Only Bill remained sullen, embarrassed by his outburst, determined to prove his own sanity but equally determined not to be drawn into Horton’s dealings. His fat friend Hob had slept with his head on the table, snoring out clouds of beer fumes into the crowded saloon.

He walks a way into the field, and kicks around with his boots for a moment or two before hearing the sound of glass knocking against stone. He squats down and picks up an empty wine bottle. So, the first part of Bill’s story is confirmed, at least potentially. Someone has at some point sat here drinking wine and looking at the stars. Horton sits down himself and looks back at the hedgerow, as Bill claimed to have done.

It is true – the dip in the ground here does give the impression that the hedgerow has great height. Not even trees are visible on the other side, only stars. He can imagine, rather more vividly than he would care to, the silhouette of a witch skittering across the sky along the top of that hedge, her dark skirts fluttering behind her. He can almost hear a malicious chuckle floating down from the night sky as she watches him, sitting there in the field, beer in his brain and a sudden, inexplicable, inescapable belief in the possibility of
maleficium
.

He shakes his head to restore himself, but is then shaken once again as a shape does, in fact, fly across his vision, scudding across the top of the hedge. For a moment he has a view of outstretched arms, of a gleeful gliding, and then he recognises another owl, perhaps even the same one as before, entertaining itself on the warm night’s updraughts.

Mistaken identity, then? Had Bill just seen a bird?

But no. Bill had
spoken
to the witch. Or at least, she had spoken to him. She had stopped her flight and turned back, and hovered on top of the hedge with impossible intent, and had mocked his cowardice.

Look at you, little fool. Look at you. Pity the man sitting in the field drinking cheap wine and spying on witches. Elizabeth sees you, little fool. She
sees
you. And she remembers.

She had laughed, then, and turned back on her course, flying off into the night, leaving Bill chattering with fear, full of his story, desperate to unleash it upon his fellow villagers. He’d run back to the Pipehouse, and had burst in with the news that there was indeed a witch at Thorpe Lee House, he had seen her and she had spoken to him, and her name was Elizabeth.

Horton stands up, somewhat shakily, and makes his way back to the road, clambering up the steep little bank at the edge of the field. He turns down the road towards Thorpe village and walks a little way in the starlight, glancing back towards the Pipehouse once or twice, unable to shake the overwhelming feeling that he is being watched.

After perhaps fifty yards, he stops, and turns back. It is impossible to see anything, even with the starlight. He will return in the daylight on the morrow; besides, the night-time has lost all its congeniality. He feels more than ever the watchfulness of unseen entities, and walks back to Thorpe Lee House, considerably faster than he left it.

It is impossible to sleep, even with a great quantity of ale in his belly. Horton feels himself prey to an itching discomfort which reminds him of childhood fears. The horror of what might wait behind his closed eyelids. He leaves his candle burning for an hour or more, listening to the sounds of the house and those within it: a light step-step-step somewhere nearby (Ellen?); a giggle followed by a shush (Peter and Daisy?); a muttered prayer. The previous two nights these sounds were intriguing; tonight, for no reason he can account for other than the Pipehouse’s ale, they carry malicious intent.

The old house has thin walls, or its cavities carry sound peculiarly clearly. Or perhaps the house itself has things it wishes to say.

He steps to the window half-a-dozen times, looking out onto the lawn before the house, the swoop of the driveway, the shadowed fingers of the trees. The noises of the house recede, and a great and, to Horton, shocking silence wells up. Never such a silence in London, where the river breathes in creaking masts and illicit splashes. The silence is strange beyond words, stretching out over the lawns to the flat fields behind, as if waiting for something to happen.

And then, something does.

A figure appears from the house, walking out onto the lawn. A woman, dressed for sleep and not for garden walking. Sarah Graham. She walks out towards the middle of the lawn and then stands, perfectly still, watching the trees that ring the lawn.

Nothing happens. The moment stretches out. Horton breathes quietly, as if he were standing behind Mrs Graham, looking over her shoulder into the unresponsive trees.