Savage Magic (31 page)

‘Were there any others there? Other than servants, and whores.’

He says the word with soft emphasis, his own spear pointing towards Sir Henry, who looks at him with contempt.

‘There were no others, constable.’

Horton pulls Graham’s letters from his pocket. Some names have been scribbled in the margins of the original.

‘We have been given names of whores that have been . . .
supplied
to your group, Sir Henry, for previous parties. Can you confirm whether Rose Dawkins, Elizabeth Carrington or Maria Cranfield were at the most recent party?’

A wistful smile now, almost a twinkle on the tired fat face.

‘Ah, Rose, well now. Yes, Rose was there. And Lizzie too. They are quite a pair, those two girls. Sir John kept Lizzie, as I understand it. She certainly was particularly attentive to his needs.’

‘And the third name? Maria Cranfield?’

‘There was a Maria, at a party last year. I don’t recall her surname. She never returned.’

‘Any other names?’

‘Do you mean any other whores, constable?’

Horton says nothing, waits. Eventually, Sir Henry sighs, and looks back out of the window.

‘The Sybarites are not what they were, Horton. Even when we started, we had none of the magnificence of the old clubs. We were no Medmenhamites.’

‘Medmenhamites, Sir Henry?’

‘Sir Francis Dashwood’s crowd in the last century, constable. The Hell-Fire Clubs. Men with money and a certain debauched elegance. I have heard tell that
their
parties would have made the likes of Brummell and these so-called renegade poets run home crying to their mothers.’

Sir Henry sighs, in mourning for a better past.

‘As for the Sybarites? Well. There used to be more of us – two dozen to a party, at least. And a whore to every man. But those days are long past. There were only two whores at the last party, Horton. Lizzie and Rose. No more.’

‘You know where these women can be found?’

‘I have no idea whatsoever. Sir John sorted the women out, and the other essentials. He was very much the master of our ceremonies. Now he has gone, I suspect the Sybarites are no more.’

Sir Henry sounds almost wistful.

‘The other members have been told to take precautions. If someone is targeting the members . . .’

‘Oh, I understand very well, constable.’

‘If you wish, I could remain here to maintain an eye on things, until Mr Graham requires my return.’

Sir Henry turns those fat old eyes on him again.

‘How useful do you believe yourself to be, constable? If whomever is doing this comes to Thorpe, will you be able to stop him?’

Horton says nothing.

‘I thought as much. Do as you will. I will return to London on the morrow.’

Horton, nonplussed, can think of nothing to say to that.

‘If I am to be
hunted
, I will not be hunted here,’ says Sir Henry. ’It may endanger Ellen. And Mrs Graham, of course. And besides . . .’

He frowns at the garden, as if a mystery were walking across its lawn.

‘Thorpe Lee House . . . disturbs me.’

He has no power to keep Sir Henry at Thorpe Lee House, short of arresting him. He writes a note to Graham, but has no means of getting it to him quickly. He has no riders with which to send messages like Graham does.

He ponders going back with Sir Henry – insisting on accompanying him, and thus solving two problems at once: how to preserve Sir Henry, and how to alert Graham to the change in circumstances.

But then there is Stephen Moore.

It is impossible for him to leave the house, he realises, before he has established what Stephen Moore is up to. A dark suspicion unfolds. It is one which he cannot afford to leave uncovered.

He feels temporarily helpless in the face of the problem. London, he realises, presents opportunities to hide and to watch which Thorpe will never supply. He cannot follow Moore safely, cannot observe him without being himself observed. He has seen Moore’s secret kitchen. Is it perhaps time to have him arrested and interrogated, perhaps with the aid of a local magistrate?

The memory – or rather, the non-memory – of that strange episode in the woods comes back to him. Now it seems he can recall speaking to someone. But who? The question scares him. Charles Horton has the same relationship with his mind as a clockmaker has with a mechanism. It is a reliable object, which can suffer occasional discombobulation through anxiety (for Abigail, for his work, for his past) or through alcohol. Such breakdowns can always be recovered. But this strange absence in his recollections feels peaky and different.

He walks up the stairs from the library after his conversation with Sir Henry, and opening the door to his room sees a note left there on the desk.

Meet me at the church at 4 o’clock.

Moore.

The cook, it would seem, has discovered Horton’s entry into his secret room. There is no need to chase after him.

There is a light rain in the air when he walks into Thorpe village for the second time, and it has the chill of autumn in it. Horton turns up the collar on his old sailor’s pea-coat as he walks down the lane.

The red-bricked walls and little thatched houses gather in around him once again, and soon he is at the church. It is quiet, the door closed. There is no one in the churchyard. He opens the door, and almost walks directly into the rector, the Reverend John Leigh-Bennett.

‘Ah, constable!’ he says, with a polite delight at reacquaintance. ‘You are welcome!’

‘My thanks for that,’ says Horton, and is then unsure what to say or do next. He feels vaguely caught out, and wonders why Moore would choose the church as a place to meet, given the danger of observation. Or perhaps he has secreted himself in the churchyard? Should Horton have checked first?

While these worries occupy him, he sees Leigh-Bennett pick up a coat and hat from hooks near the church door. The rector ignores him as he dresses himself for the rain outside, and then smiles again as he makes his leave.

‘I must apologise for leaving you
unattended
.’ The word is given odd emphasis. ‘I am needed elsewhere, and I’m sure you will relish the privacy solitude can afford. And, my dear Horton,’ this with one hand placed carefully but deliberately upon Horton’s arm, ‘do recall our conversation. Superstition and belief, you see. They revolve around one another in a place such as this. Like the Earth and the Moon.’

And with that, Leigh-Bennett leaves.

Horton watches the door close behind him. Its mild Anglican slam echoes around the empty church interior, seeming to pick up volume as it does so, until it sounds like rocks pouring down the roof. His head gives one internal swirl and he sits down heavily. Something flies past the window, then the next, then the next. A figure on a stick.

A woman laughs. He feels his heart beat in his chest, and turns towards the sound of steps. Elizabeth Hook walks out of the gloom.

‘You!’ he gasps, theatrically. He is unable to stand. That headache swells between his temples again, and his body and his mind seem to be in disjunction.

She walks to his side, her height increasing until it fills the hall, her fingers growing into claws, her mouth opening to reveal sharp yellow teeth, her breath as fetid as an ancient cave . . .

And then she is sitting next to him, a concerned middle-aged woman, one hand on his arm, the other on the back of his neck, in the honoured pose of the nurse.

‘It will pass,’ she says, gently. ‘It will pass. Just wait a moment or two.’

The women on sticks fly away. The booming rocks fall into silence. His head makes one final reel and then settles back into place.

‘The enchantment fades,’ she says. ‘It was the same for me, when I first walked away from the house and came here. A powerful, final vision, perhaps brought on by the church. This is the building in which we contemplate such things, after all. But it fades with time.’

He is himself again: a middle-aged guilty man, a mutineer and a constable, abandoned by his wife and deserving nothing better. A great urge to weep comes over him, but he pushes it away, just as he pushes Elizabeth Hook’s hands away, and stands.

‘How did you come to be here, woman?’ he says, feeling anger bubbling. ‘You cannot have sent me the note. Who is your accomplice?’

Another set of footsteps, another figure walks out of the gloom. Stephen Moore.

‘So.’ Horton looks at the two of them, and says nothing more, since nothing more needs to be said.

‘Stephen is my cousin,’ says Elizabeth Hook, after a few moments of churchy silence. ‘I asked him to come here. He is of the cunning-folk. I asked him to work to lift the enchantment that sits on Thorpe Lee House.’

Horton looks at Moore, whose face has remained in that supercilious, comfortable mode in which he first encountered it. A peevish sense of irritation fills his head. He waits again.

‘The house is clearly under a spell of
maleficium
,’ Moore says, finally. ‘When my cousin Elizabeth approached me and told me of the episodes which had occurred, the diagnosis was clear. It is one of the worst cases of bewitchment I have heard of. It is made more horrible by the vehicle through which the bewitchment is carried through the house. The girl. She is at the root of it.’

‘Miss Ellen, Mr Horton,’ Elizabeth Hook whispers from the bench in which she is sitting. ‘The bewitchment sits upon her, and from her visits itself upon the rest of the house.’

‘When I arrived here, the girl was not herself,’ says Moore. ‘During the days, she slept. During the nights, she walked the house and the grounds. She was seen – by the gardener, and by me – running through the woods that surround the house, inappropriately clothed. I do believe it was she that killed Sir Henry’s dogs, though I did not see this myself. When questioned on these matters, she affected not to understand. My cousin tried to discuss this matter with her, and she was greeted with hysterics and accusations. It was Ellen’s testimony that led to her being sacked from her position.’

‘And you are feeding her poison.’ The truth, when Horton realises it, is like a draught of sweet, cool, untainted water.

‘No, constable. I am curing her. It is what we cunning-folk do.’

‘This is madness.’ Horton says it, but he is thinking something else. He is thinking of the things he has witnessed these past two years. He is thinking of Abigail, pursued through her dreams by a woman of the South Pacific. He is thinking of a sea captain, young yet old, howling from the hold of a doomed ship. ‘This is madness,’ he says, again.

‘No, constable. This is witchcraft.’

‘There is no such thing! There is a law!’

Moore laughs at that, an unpleasant laugh, the laugh of a corrupt minister jeering at the indignities of his constituents. Elizabeth Hook flashes a glance of dislike at him, stands, and faces Horton.

‘These things are true, and they are real, constable,’ she says, her face kind but serious. ‘Some of us grew up surrounded by the truth of these things. You did not. But we cannot deny what has happened to us. You yourself have experienced that house. You know something evil poisons men’s minds up there. I can see in your face that I speak truth. What have
you
seen, constable? Why do you deny what your eyes have seen?’

Horton looks at Moore, and then clearly and suddenly he remembers. He was speaking with Ellen in the woods. The gap in his memory fills smoothly and with a sense of cleansing, like water rushing into a well.

‘This will end. This will end today.’ He steps to the door. ‘I will consider what to do. But you, Moore, will tender your resignation immediately. I am going to seize the materials in the basement rooms for investigation by those who understand such matters. I will alert Thorpe’s constable as to what you have told me, and you will present yourselves to him this afternoon, or a warrant will be issued for your arrests. Good day.’

WESTMINSTER

Graham stands at the window of his drawing room, looking out onto Great Queen Street. It is almost midnight. He nurses a glass of Tokay, and waits for something to happen.

Five houses are currently being watched by his patrolmen and officers, one of them secretly, for the second night. Sir Thomas Mackworth, he of the furious threats of a duel, is watched without his knowledge; Graham hopes he can trust the patrolman concerned to stay in the shadows. James Blake-Slater, the Earl of Maidstone, along with Samuel Lake, Algernon Lincoln and Henry Harcourt Palmer are all cooperating. Each of them has a patrolman at his front door, charged with walking around the house every hour. The Earl has insisted on an additional three men to watch his house. The final Sybarite, John Cameron, should be well away from London by now.

Jealous, his promising young patrolman, is out there somewhere looking for the whores Rose Dawkins and Elizabeth Carrington. Indeed, all the Bow Street patrolmen not concerned with watching the houses of the Sybarites, along with the watches of St Giles in the Fields, St Paul’s Covent Garden, St Clement Danes, St Maria le Strand, St Martin in the Fields and even St Anne Soho have been issued with warrants for the two women, an unprecedented show of cooperative determination by the magistrates and the parish watch committees.