Savage Magic (39 page)

‘Mrs Broad was a wealthy woman, constable. She said she had owned a farm in Parramatta, though I had not heard of it.’

‘What was her appearance?’

‘Impressive. She was tall, strong, brown-skinned, well fed. Black hair which she always wore loose; I remember admiring her for that. But her face was ugly. It was disfigured by a terrible scar along her jaw.’

One of the boys falls, and his siblings fall on him like wild dogs.

‘Did she say where she would be staying, in England?’

‘She did not. She said she had come from Suffolk, originally. She did not say where and when.’

‘And why was she returning, if she was successful in New South Wales?’

‘Oh, I asked her that. Over and over again, I asked her. She had done what we had failed to do, and I couldn’t understand her. She said she had served her time. That was her phrase.’

The woman looks sadly on her shrieking children, as if they were a story that had happened to someone else.

‘It is odd. You are the second man who has come to ask me about Mrs Broad.’

The shrieks of the children subside, and Horton, who had been on the point of leaving, feels his heart clench.

‘Who was the other?’

‘He came twice, which is why I remember. He visited the
Indefatigable
in Deal; came on board the ship, spoke to my husband. And then he visited us here, just yesterday.’

‘Did he state why he wanted to find Mrs Broad?’

‘He said he was an old friend of hers. I didn’t think much of it when he came to Deal, but when he came here . . . I mean, it must have taken some effort to find us, must it not? Though you found us. I think he’s a well-to-do man. A man of means. Perhaps he can help us?’

‘Who was this man?’

‘He gave his name as Lodge. Henry Lodge. He said he could be found at the Prospect of Whitby.’

THE PROSPECT OF WHITBY

As a man of means, Henry Lodge can afford better accommodation than that offered by the Prospect of Whitby. But he likes taverns and alehouses and inns. They are his business, after all. The hops which climb up his poles in Canterbury end up here, in the tankards of working men and women. He likes to see the alchemy his trade weaves: the cuttings he plants in the Kent soil becoming the balm for men’s souls here in London.

He should not be here, of course. The hoppers’ huts will soon be filling up, as the picking season approaches. He does not even know what pulled him back into London. He feels the same compulsion that once dragged him to Deal three or four times a year. He has not been sleeping well. The newspapers are suddenly full of blood and murder. Gentlemen are being killed in their beds.

He’d promised Maggie Broad that he’d visit Maria weekly, but even that has proved impossible. The madhouse does not permit such interaction with its inmates; the anxious-faced little doctor who’d accepted Maria had made that clear, and he’d taken the information back to Maggie, and she’d scowled and said she would see her daughter herself, rules or no rules.

And then she had disappeared.

That had been five weeks ago. He has not seen her since. During these anxious weeks he’d felt a growing pressure, like fermenting beer ready to explode from a glass bottle. His mind is confused and unhappy, and he haunts the Prospect of Whitby like a faithful dog unsure of its purpose. He wants to leave and go back to Kent. He finds he cannot.

He sits and he drinks and he thinks, but then he is interrupted by a tall, pale man with exhausted eyes who walks up to his table, and asks if he is Henry Lodge.

‘Why yes, I am. Who is it who asks?’

‘Charles Horton. Sir, I am a waterman-constable from the River Police Office, here in Wapping.’

He cannot help it – his whole body clenches itself, ready to pound and punch and forge an escape. Once a convict . . .

‘I am looking for a woman called Broad.’

The stomach stays tight. The constable’s eyes may be tired and supported by grey-black bags, but they are searching. Does he not blink?

Fly or fight. Fly or fight.

But Henry Lodge has been a man of means for a decade or more. He is a convict no longer. He needs not such violence.

‘Well, sit down, constable. May I buy you an ale? It is quite excellent here.’

‘I am given to understand you have been looking for Mrs Broad,’ the constable says, after the maid at the bar has brought them ale.

‘You are? By whom?’

‘Are you looking for her?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘And have you found her?’

‘May I ask why
you
want to speak to her, constable?’

‘First I would like to know more about your interest.’

Henry sips at his ale. He must choose his words with care.

‘Well, then. It is no great secret, I suppose. I knew her in New South Wales.’

‘You were a farmer there?’

‘I was. Before that, I was a prisoner.’

He can see it in the constable’s eyes:
he thought I was one thing, and I turn out to be another. A more difficult thing
.

‘I see.’

‘You do? Well, I was a convict. I went out on the
Guardian
, and was later transferred to the
Lady Juliana
.’

The constable frowns. Henry can see him trying to remember. Ancient history now, he supposes.

‘HMS
Guardian
was cut open by a spur of ice in the South Seas, constable. You may or may not remember. We made it back, eventually, to Cape Town, and I was taken aboard the
Lady Juliana
. A transport for women convicts.’

‘For what reason were you transported?’

‘Picking pockets. I was fourteen. But that was only part of the reason.’

Lodge sees the constable is a man of some imagination, and is now conjuring with that thought.
A fourteen-year-old boy amid the ice mountains
.

‘The penal colony needed farmers and gardeners, constable, and I was one of them. I was raised on a farm. We volunteered, after a fashion. Go out on a transport in what became known as the Second Fleet, or go out on the
Guardian
. I knew nothing of boats, but I knew about numbers. Twenty-five convicts on a naval vessel, or hundreds on a privately contracted one. It wasn’t a difficult decision, volunteering.’

He is enjoying telling the tale, but an internal voice warns him:
keep the secret you have pledged to keep
. It is Maggie Broad’s voice.

‘We were sent to help the colony grow its own food, but the scheme ended when the ice tore a hole in the
Guardian
and ripped off its rudder. Thanks to the good sense of the captain, and a passing whaler, we made it back to Cape Town. I was shipped off with the
Lady Juliana
. It was on that ship I met Maggie Broad.’

‘Was her husband also transported?’

‘She had no husband then. She found one on the ship. A good many of the women did. He was a marine. They married in Sydney Cove soon after we reached that place. For a woman, it was the only way to avoid being shipped to Norfolk Island.’

Henry Lodge sips some ale. This is his third pint of the stuff today. He is feeling dangerously loquacious.

‘She took her husband’s name?’

‘Aye, she did.’

‘And what was her unmarried name?’

He nearly says it, but when he goes to fetch the name, when he turns his memory around in his mind, there is nothing there. It is like looking for a key he has set down on a table moments before which has now disappeared.

‘I know not,’ is all he says. The constable sniffs. Henry Lodge goes on talking, as much to fill the silence as anything else.

‘The man she married – William Broad, his name was – he served out his own time in the marines and then in the New South Wales Corps, and he was given a fair parcel of land in Parramatta, where the soil was at least decent and didn’t run away whenever it rained, like in Sydney Cove. And before long the Broads’ farm was the richest in Parramatta. The most successful farm in the colony. Even the Governor’s soil didn’t sing the way Maggie’s did. And he took the best bloody land of all.’

‘Maggie’s soil?’

‘Yes. Her soil. Broad was a useless drunk. Maggie did everything. But the women of New South Wales were of a particular stripe, constable. Some of them were vicious, some of them were sly, some of them would open their legs and then shove a knife in your back while you were enjoying them. But the ones that survived the voyage, and then survived the living? They weren’t women like the women in this fine place, constable. They became something else. The men did, too. Hard lives back here, they’d lived. And even harder lives over there. And yet they’d survived.’

Henry finds himself feeling wistful, thinking of the boy becoming a man, the boy who’d survived a shipwreck but the man who’d nearly succumbed to New South Wales.

‘And Maggie Broad was the toughest, cleverest, most powerful of the lot of them. There were a good many tales doing the rounds about her. How she’d killed her husband back in Suffolk, and that was why she got transported. How she’d caused women to miscarry on the voyage out. How she’d sent a man overboard as the
Lady Juliana
crossed the line, for forcing himself upon her. But the strangest story of all was about how she was friends with the savages. She could speak their language, people said, and they taught her things. She had power over the soil, people said, though the savages didn’t grow anything of their own and lived on fish and what grew wild, so how much power did they have? And she had power to make people do things they didn’t want to do. There were tales aplenty about the magic of the savages: how they could point a bone at you and you’d drop dead within a day, how they could pull out your soul on a white cord while you slept. And Maggie Broad, it was said, had learned their tricks. And that was why she could make stuff grow, where others could not.’

Another sip.

‘Toxic brew, it was. Jealousy of a woman. Hatred of the savages. Put them together, and you’ve got a barrel of something that’s bound to explode. And one night, it did. The Broads had about a hundred acres in Parramatta at that time. Not a great amount by the standards of this country, especially now the enclosures have come in, but she made the very best of it. She could grow anything in that cursed bloody soil. Grapes and figs and oranges and pears. Rich stuff. Stuff that made poor convict men and women think they could live like kings and queens, out there where the rock was just beneath the soil and snakes dropped out of trees and bit you on the bloody head.

‘But she’s surrounded by men who can’t make the soil sing in the way she can. So one night one particular group of dullards decided that Maggie Broad was, beyond the bounds of doubt, a witch.’

The constable looks surprised.

‘A witch? They called her a witch?’

‘Oh, yes. And as such she needed to be taught a lesson. So, off they went, carrying torches and unpleasant dispositions. They marched to Maggie Broad’s farm. The ringleader was a thug called Longman. Birmingham man, he was, and he’d just finished a stint in the Corps. He was a brutal, vicious bastard, but so were all those Corps fellows. Longman had his own tract of land near the river, and like all the Corps men he’d been able to choose it himself. Helped themselves, did the Corps, always. But his plot kept flooding, of course, and it brought him to the brink of ruin. It drove Longman into a rage. How could a woman know more about land than an officer?’

‘And for that she was called a witch?’ asks the constable.

‘It’s the way of these things: when a woman bests a man, witchcraft must be at the root of it. So Longman and his band marched on Maggie Broad’s property. She was waiting for them, unaccompanied and unarmed. William Broad was nowhere to be seen; she chained him up, some said, and made him sleep in the yard. And Longman strode up with his knife, and said the quickest way to draw a witch’s power was to scratch it out of her, and he cut her cheek. She made no sound, I was told, but just tore the bottom off her skirts and held it to her cheek, turned her back on Longman and his men and said she would like a private word with him. He refused, saying he wouldn’t be going off anywhere with a witch, but she said they would not be going out of sight of his companions. There were secrets she wished to share with him, she said,
horticultural
secrets which would help him be as successful in his planting as she had been. And Longman, being a greedy and stupid man, said he would like to hear these secrets.

‘So they stepped to one side, out of earshot of the other men, and she spoke to him, it was said, for twenty minutes. When they returned, Longman insisted that the men walk away from Maggie Broad’s little plantation and return to their homes. Enough time had passed for the fires in their bellies to extinguish, and they were willing to do as he said, and to leave Maggie Broad alone.’

‘They left her alone for good?’

‘Yes. All was quiet for a month, during which time Longman neglected his own farm and consumed dangerous quantities of liquor. He got into fights with other men, and one night he was found weeping by the side of the road, unable to explain himself. His decline was precipitous, and I saw it myself, going to visit him on three separate occasions. I wanted to try and discover what ailed the fellow, because I had my own idea that Maggie Broad might help me to understand the soil. Seeing him almost put me off the scheme. His life was as unproductive and barren as the fields he planted, he said. All that was left to him was drink and despair. And then, about two months after the encounter with Maggie Broad, Longman took his own gun and, placing it in his mouth, blew his head off.’