Savage Magic (37 page)

Jealous walks over the road with Horton. The lad is quiet, almost reverential in his tone, but Horton scarcely notices. Since stepping away from the madhouse at Thorpe, and presumably from its surreptitiously intoxicating well-water, his head has been clearing but also churning.

He checks the details of Elizabeth Carrington’s death with Jealous as they walk. The constable seems in no doubt that the woman killed herself. He seems abashed by the scene he’d found in Carrington’s lodging, and it is this which causes Horton to notice him properly. The lad has a tough London exterior and looks like he could handle himself in a brawl, but there is an obvious sympathy and natural intelligence there as well. For the first time Horton sees some of what Graham has already seen in the boy. Jealous’s father has a colossal reputation as a taker of thieves, but Horton knows nothing of his character. Perhaps at least the father’s ability has rubbed off on the son.

Jealous opens Rose Dawkins’s cell and lets Horton in. He hesitates at the door, but then Horton asks him to give him the keys, and to go and speak to the servants of the murdered men. He steps inside.

Rose Dawkins is a short woman, a fact emphasised by the enormity of her red hair. Everything about her is red: her dress, her hair, and her angry face, which is particularly ugly. She stands when Horton comes in, but then sits back in the corner of the cell like a malignant dwarf. The smell of shit and piss rises from an un-emptied chamber pot in the opposite corner.

‘Who the fuck are you, then?’ she says, her troll’s face sneering.

‘My name is Horton. I am investigating these terrible events.’

‘Done away with them, have they?’

‘Done away with who?’

‘Those so-called Sibarits. Wondered when things’d catch up with those scandalous bastards.’

Horton passes her the book, open to the page containing her description. She doesn’t take it from him.

‘This isn’t a fuckin’ school, is it? I don’t read, constable.’

He takes it back, and reads her entry back to her. She grins wider and wider as he reads, the gaps between her teeth showing black in the red ruin of her face.

‘Well, someone fancied themselves as an artist, didn’t they? Proper little portrait, that is.’

‘I believe it was written by one of the Sybarites. A gentleman named Sir Henry Tempest.’

‘Oh, it would be him. He was a rum cove, he was. Arrived all screaming and shouting, but once I got to work on ’im he was as gentle as a lamb.’

‘What is the
bizarrerie
?’

‘Fuck, you’re a little innocent abroad, aren’t you? The whip. The slap. The scratch. Even a bit of the blade at times. Sir Henry liked me to go to town on him, he did. Not as bad as that other one – Sir John. Oh gods, he was as soft as an old washrag until we started knocking ’im about.’

She cackles, but it’s a practised sound, not a genuine one. She is putting on a show, he realises, and he wonders where the genuine Rose Dawkins might be found, if indeed she is still alive inside this cauldron of inflamed amorality.

‘And the Duet?’

She frowns at that, and looks away, and Horton sees he has unexpectedly broken through the gutter-theatrical mask.

‘Fuck off.’

‘But it was something you performed with Eliz—’

‘Performed!’ She stands and takes a step towards him, so furious that he actually steps away before remembering himself. ‘Like a pair of fucking Barbary apes, a-kissin’ and a-touchin’ and . . . and . . .’ She takes in a great sobbing gulp of air, and then goes quiet, standing in the middle of the cell, looking at the floor.

‘Elizabeth Carrington. The woman who took her life. You knew her well.’

‘Yes.’

‘She attended these parties with you.’

‘Fucking says so in there, don’t it?’

‘And Maria Cranfield? What of her?’

‘She’s in there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Read me what it says, then.’

He does so, and still she stands, facing the floor. She does not even look up until she finishes. But she does speak. ‘

Awful, horrible, vicious bastards. The fucking lot of you.’

She turns back to the corner, and sits down. She lifts her head and rests it back against the wall behind her. Her eyes are closed.

‘Maria . . . well, Maria was not like the rest of us. She wasn’t even a whore.’

‘Then what—’

‘Oh, she
said
she was a whore. I don’t know where she came from, or anything about her. So don’t ask me, right? She showed up at that party, and she was like a boy sent off to march with Wellesley. She didn’t know one end of a gun from another. If you take my drift.’

‘Then why was she there?’

‘Who am I to say? Go outside now and ask them women on the pavement why they’re there! You’ll get a dozen different answers from a dozen different women. Some of them was gulled into it. Some of them ran out of money, or lost their job, or got thrown out by their father, their brother, their husband. Even their mother, some of the poor cows. I don’t know why she started. But starting with the Sybarites was a mistake.’ ‘

Why?’

‘Because – if you hadn’t cottoned on to this by now – they’re a bunch of vicious, nasty thugs. That book might be full of pretty words, but it doesn’t describe what happened at their little evenings. Not even half of it.’

‘Describe them for me, then.’

‘Drink, food, and whores. In that order of importance. They spent more time choosing the wine and the meat than they did the girls. Even though we were little more than meat to them. But when they saw Maria, they could smell it on her. She was like the choicest cut of veal you could imagine. You could see them sniffin’ round her, like dogs round a ham.’

‘What could they smell?’

‘Her rose.’ She frowns, and for a moment he wonders why, but then remembers her name. ‘She’d never been with a man before. Her first time. Her first fucking time. She must have been older than I am, and she’d managed to keep it under lock and key. When Talty found out, he must have thought every fucking ship in the world had come in.’

‘Who’s Talty?’

‘A panderer. Works out of the Bedford Head on Maiden Lane. Thought you lot had spoken to him.’

‘Perhaps. Not I.’

‘Well, there’s nothing worth more to a panderer than a girl with everything intact. But they’re usually young ’uns – twelve or thirteen. And they usually get sold a dozen or more times as being intact. But Maria – well, there was something exotic about a girl like that still being intact. And it was genuine. You could see the filthy swine knew that. They were clambering over each other to be her first. She was terrified.’

Horton doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t know how to ask what needs to be asked. But Rose Dawkins is now lost in the memory of that night.

‘They drew lots. There was eight or nine of them, and they couldn’t decide. So they drew lots. An order was agreed upon. Your Sir Henry. He drew the first one. He was her first. And then they took her. One by one, they took her.

‘She screamed at first. But that only ever inflamed them. Lizzie was particularly good at that – pretending to be scared, to be in pain. Brought them off in a minute, that did. But Maria wasn’t pretending. She screamed and cried and struggled, and they held her down, and they took their turn.

‘She went quiet for a while, and then she started laughing. Now, laughing’s not appreciated by the men. They don’t like it at all. It disturbs them. So the last two or three who had her, they didn’t like it one bit. But they went ahead. Knocked her about a bit to try and shut her up. Part of the game, wasn’t it? Couldn’t be seen to be weak or letting the good name of their society down.

‘She had beautiful clear eyes, did Maria. I saw that in her straightaway. I asked her, what you doing here, love? And she turned those beautiful clear green eyes on me and she smiled a bit. It was a lovely smile. Dark hair in ringlets down her neck. Smooth skin. She looked like a lady. A real fucking lady. What was she doing there?

‘I looked in her eyes after, when they threw her out. Her mouth was bleeding, but she was still laughing. That’s why they threw her out, see. She was laughing fit to burst. And I saw her eyes when they threw her out. They weren’t shining any more. They were as dead as my old man.’

He turns to leave.

‘Constable?’

‘Yes?’

‘What will happen to Lizzie? Will she be buried?’

‘That’s up to the parish authorities.’

‘I can pay.’

‘You have money?’

‘Oh, I’ve got
money
, constable. It’s Lizzie I ain’t got no more.’

Horton looks at her. She can be no use to her dead friend in here.

‘I will arrange for your release, immediately,’ he says as he goes.

He walks back over the road to the office to arrange for Rose’s release. It is by no means straightforward. The pressing crowd inside the office has not thinned one jot; indeed, a few additional bystanders may have been levered into what little space there is. Horton recalls the crowds outside the River Police Office in Wapping in the aftermath of the Ratcliffe Highway killings; how they had clamoured and shouted, but how they had been kept outside. John Harriott, his magistrate in Wapping, is rather more forthright when it comes to dealing with crowds.

And scribblers, also. A man from the
Chronicle
recognises Horton from that earlier investigation and shouts his name, drawing the attention of a half-dozen others, like a wolf spotting a lone kid. They immediately surround Horton, barking questions and demanding answers, their dirty clothes reeking of desperation. But he ignores them, and forces his way through to Aaron Graham’s office.

Graham is readying to venture outside, saying he has been called to speak to Viscount Sidmouth and pointing Horton towards the Bow Street register clerk, who is sitting in the same room and keeping his head firmly down while whatever storm is lapping at his shores subsides. Graham leaves, and Horton arranges with the clerk for Rose’s release. He also asks the clerk to check Bow Street’s famed register of thieves, receivers and pimps for the address of one Talty.

Minutes later, he is shooing away a cat, but the cat keeps coming back, silently and deliberately, to lick at the thick pool of blood which lies half-under the chair. It’s entirely black and almost invisible in the half-light, and Horton only notices it when the cat’s tongue starts to lap and lick again, breaking the silence of the Bow Street room.

The address had surprised him. Talty, the panderer of Maiden Lane, has lodgings only five doors down from the Bow Street office. He had not paused in coming here. His blood is up.

Unlike Talty, whose blood is down and defiantly outside his body, a body which sits, strangely upright, in an old armchair. Talty’s head is down on his chest, and his two hands grip a sword which has been shoved deliberately into his stomach. The position of the body, the hands, the head, leave Horton in no doubt that Talty inflicted this terrible wound upon himself.

The room is a comfortable one, decorated sparsely but with some taste. Horton walks through into a bedroom, which has a similar feel of mild opulence and unaffected sensibility. Talty has made a good living from pimping and procuring. Horton has heard tales of girls being lured from small towns in the North of England by procurers such as Talty with promises of marriage. Once in the metropolis, a sham ceremony will be arranged between the pimp and the girl, who will then be brought back to a room such as this. What happens next depends on the pimp and the circumstance. Sometimes, he will take her himself, before revealing the truth and sending her out – bereft of all her hopes – as a streetwalker. Other times, he may turn out the lights and welcome in a customer, who will pretend to be the supposed ‘husband’ and will consume the girl’s precious maidenhead for good money. Rarely, the girl will have been procured on the demand of a rich man – he may have seen her at a ball and become determined to have her, or he may just bark ‘get me a girl from Leeds’. It will be he who then takes the place of the pimp when the light is turned out.

All the scenarios lead to the same place: a girl dishonoured, shamed and cut off from her family. A girl who can be sent out onto the street as the only choice for one so besmirched, humiliated and alone.

A good life
, Talty’s body seems to say to him, its hand gripping the helm, the blade pinning him to the chair.

Someone disagreed
, he says back to it.

Talty and Elizabeth Carrington: two actors in this worrying drama, both dead by their own hands.

He wonders if that poor Maria Cranfield’s life ended like this: alone, maddened, suicidal. All she is to him is a name and a story, and her role in these melancholy transactions is still unclear. Her role may already have ended. He hopes it has not, and that he may yet find her alive.

His only remaining clue is the plant which Brown identified – the
pitchery
from the well at Thorpe Lee House. The substance must have been brought to England from New South Wales, and in significant amounts – he doesn’t know how many times it was put into the well, but the stuff he pulled out was somewhat fresh.

He goes back to the office, and once again – the third time in less than an hour – fights his way through the throng. He walks into Graham’s office without knocking, and gives the register clerk a fright. He asks to see the office’s copy of Lloyd’s List of shipping, and his question is met by a blank look of incomprehension. No such copy exists. Why on earth would a Covent Garden police office need to know about shipping?

And, of course, why would it? There will undoubtedly be other places he could view the List, but he only knows of one place where it will for certain be available to him. He needs to go back to Wapping.

WAPPING