Savage Magic (40 page)

Lodge’s throat is quite dry – both from the storytelling, and from his own memories. He sips from his ale again. He wonders why this story should be coming out in such detail, and then he sees the constable’s eyes again. Searching, asking, examining. Those eyes, and this ale.

‘Now, I saw all this, because the fact of it was Maggie had done me a great kindness. I’d presented myself to her when I got my ticket of leave, and she remembered me from the
Lady Juliana
, and she gave me work. And I worked hard, and well. She trusted me, I think, in a way she didn’t trust any others. After a time she gave me a plot of land, part of her own grant, and lent me seeds and seedlings and tools. She advised me on planting, and cultivation, and harvesting. Though she did not seem old enough to be more than a sister to me, she did mother me. And while the stories surged and ebbed in the shacks and houses and dormitories of the colony, we became almost friends.’

‘What of the husband?’

‘A sad tale. Threw himself off the rocks at the entrance to the cove.’

‘Killed himself, you mean. Like Longman.’

The words
like Longman
, in the constable’s mouth, become dire.

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘And then you left the colony.’

‘I did, constable. I always had that in mind. I wished to make enough of myself to get away from that place, awful as it was. It took me four years, but I earned enough to pay for my passage home and for a small plot in Kent, where I grow hops. I took what Maggie Broad had taught me, and I applied it here in England. And here I am today. A man of means. A pickpocket become a gentleman-farmer. Is it not a miraculous transformation? Sometimes I think that witchcraft must, after all, be at the root of it.’

‘Perhaps it is.’

The constable doesn’t smile, and Henry Lodge doesn’t reply.

‘Did you expect Maggie Broad to return, one day, as you did?’

‘She said she would come back when she had served her time, and she had made herself.’

‘Why are you here, Mr Lodge?’

Henry Lodge may grow hops but, he tells himself, he cannot take his ale. His tongue is too loose. Somehow another ale has appeared in front of him; when did the constable order that? He takes a slug of a quarter of it, and it is comfortable, delicious, English. It tastes of home. But he must be careful. The daughter must be protected.

The constable’s eyes are fixed on him, and for a moment it is like sitting opposite Maggie Broad. The power of her expression, the way she is able to pour herself into his thoughts, that strange sense of the front of his head swinging open and his mind being revealed, though for the constable this is for revelation, not manipulation.

‘Your story has been a fine one, Mr Lodge. Still, I fail to see its relevance to your attendance here in Wapping. You have seen her. Have you not?’

He asks himself an odd question:
Am I allowed to answer this?
No answer comes.

‘Aye, I have. She came to me, during the summer. She had found my hop garden, and she visited to wish me well.’

‘She had no other reason?’

‘None that I can fathom, constable.’

‘And where did she go then?’

‘I know not. Perhaps to Suffolk? She said once that she hailed from there.’

The constable’s eyes are, if anything, colder and harder than ever. A little shiver of anxiety in Henry’s stomach, soon drowned in another slug of ale. The constable takes a little black notebook from his pocket, and turns to the back pages.

‘Does the name Rose Dawkins mean anything to you?’

‘No, I do not believe. I do not quite recall . . .’

‘Elizabeth Carrington?’

‘It does not strike me as familiar.’

‘Maria Cranfield?’

Oh God
.

He imagines Maggie standing at the bar behind the constable, turning her face to his, and remembers that pinching sensation in his head. He has felt that sensation before. His ale-drenched head begins to ache, suddenly. He feels afraid.

‘No, constable. None of these names mean anything to me at all.’

‘Why are you here, Mr Lodge?’

The repeated question.

‘I . . . have business here.’

‘I think not.’

The constable leans forward, and makes a strange dipping action with his head, as if he were trying to look under Henry Lodge’s face to see what might have been buried there.

‘No, I think you’re here because you were told to be here. I think Maggie Broad has been telling you to do things for years. I wonder whether she even sent you back to England and told you to wait for her, to watch out for her. I think perhaps you are merely an instrument, Mr Lodge. An instrument for a woman’s plan. A woman with a very particular ability. To get inside men’s minds.’

Then the constable tells him of Thorpe Lee House and the murders of the Sybarites, and Henry Lodge wonders if it would not have been better to have drowned beneath those ice mountains, and not feel full of Wapping ale and secrets.

And still he does not mention Maria Cranfield, even though he devoutly wants to.

Maggie Broad will not let him.

WAPPING

It is time, Horton supposes, to go back to Covent Garden and report what he has learned back to Aaron Graham. Though how he should do this – what precisely he should say – is as obscure to him as the far side of the Moon is to the Royal Society’s starry gazers.

Between here and Covent Garden, though, sits Lower Gun Alley, and the home he shares with Abigail.

But is that any longer true? Is Abigail still Abigail? Or has he destroyed her? Is that part of his life coming to a close? And if it does, what comes afterwards?

Unbearable thoughts.

He needs a change of clothes, but more than that, he needs to re-establish himself. There has been too much wandering and wondering. He feels unidentified and uprooted. The case shouts to him for attention and clarity. Patterns are beginning to emerge and, with them, his old sense of himself. Damaged, deliberate, despairing Charles Horton, yes. But Charles Horton, nonetheless.

The sharp tang of the ale reminds him of that strangely terrible night in Thorpe, when witches flew along hedgerows and bonfires sprouted in fields. But his first sip had been as cleansing as taking the waters in Bath. He wonders if the pitchery is still in his system, a malignant manipulator of dreams.

The story has begun to emerge, but an incomplete and odd one. Once again he is in that dark room of his imagination, holding a candle and trying to perceive the full outline of the enormous thing in the middle of the room, assembling its structures from the fragments which the candle illuminates.

A woman, returning from Australia, for reasons unknown but with some deliberate purpose. A woman who, it is said, has the capacity to project her will onto men.

All the Sybarites but two: dead, impossibly so, the only possible killers within the men’s own houses, their faithful servants. The only survivors are Tempest and, Horton assumes, Cameron, the one who took Graham’s advice to leave London.

The man who procured young women for these men: dead by his own hand, a sword in his stomach.

One of the other women in Sir Henry’s dirty little book: also dead, apparently by her own hand.

The
Indefatigable
, returning to Deal in April. Watched for by Henry Lodge, a man who does not seem to comprehend why he is acting as he does. But there was something of Thorpe Lee House about Lodge’s haunted and half-absent eyes. Something hidden there, placed deliberately by a woman with an unspeakable capacity.

Did Maggie Broad bring pitchery with her, perhaps? Grown somewhere on her very successful New South Wales farm? Perhaps with advice from those strange natives, with their spears and the bones in their noses, so very different to the natives of Otaheite which the sailors of the
Solander
spoke of, so dark and afraid and resistant to the queries of the North? Did they not eat people? Or is that somewhere else entirely?

Sir Henry, bleeding on his chaise longue. Speared by his own daughter, the daughter who danced in the woods, who seemed half-witch herself. Who told him to leave the woods without speaking the words, and who then removed the memory of it.

The gypsy’s wagon, pulling away from the forest.

The story unfolding within his head, impervious to his own desires. The implacability of it, the certainty of it, the clarity of it.

But something is still missing, the essential question. Why is Maggie Broad here? What is her motivation? Simple malevolence would be a bleak answer, and Horton does not believe it.

He leaves the tavern, and walks home. It is dark and there is rain and perhaps thunder in the air. The streets are alive with meaning. He sees two young boys he knows well, part of that little network of boys whose eyes watch the houses and the people on his behalf. They wave as they disappear down some mischievous dark sideway, full of intrigue and curiosity, the world an adventure of thousands of levels to be clambered up. He misses Wapping. He has been away too long.

He misses Abigail.

Lower Gun Alley is almost silent. His windows have the same neglected, purposeless air he noticed earlier today. He goes into the building and up the stairs, and unlocks the door to the apartment with his key. Instantly, he notices a letter which has been shoved beneath the door. He picks it up, recognising immediately the well-formed handwriting on the front, picturing despite himself the small careful hand. The letter is from Abigail.

Charles

I pray this letter reaches you for I dare not leave this place. Know this, first of all – I am well, and though the visions which pursued me here and chased me away from thyself are still much in my mind, they have been greatly displaced by other concerns
.

There is something very strange taking place here within the madhouse. There is a girl here, named Maria, who seems to be possessed of abilities which I cannot describe nor quite believe. She seems to have the power to possess men’s minds – to force them to do things against their will. More than this, there is an effulgence from this capacity which seems to have spread through the whole house, causing men to scream and shriek and fear. This has happened on at least three occasions
.

I do not believe I am imagining this. Also, I fear that the physician in attendance herein – a weak man named Bryson – has no conception of Maria’s abilities, and does not know how to deal with her. I have concluded that the only brake on her power – and on her misuse of it – is my attendance with her. She grows calmer when I am with her. I read to her, and I talk to her, and she seems to hear or understand me. But I fear her. Oh, Charles, I fear her terribly
.

I shall give this letter to an attendant here who is kind to us but is sadly feeble-minded. I fear it may never reach you. I will not know if it has until you appear, and I pray you do, my husband. We have seen things, you and I, these past three years, and you have told me of other things which pass all my understanding, for all of my books and lectures. I do not understand what is happening in this place, Charles. And I beg you to come and help me
.

With all my love

Abigail

WESTMINSTER

William Jealous isn’t supposed to be looking for Rose Dawkins. He is supposed to be looking for Charles Horton.

He has tried. Earlier that afternoon Graham had called him into the office at Bow Street and charged him with finding Horton ‘immediately’. The magistrate had looked angry and, Jealous nervously noted, he had looked anxious. Anyone with a nose to smell can sense the panic in the air, can see the emissaries from Whitehall carrying notes and warnings, can hear the raised voices and anxious questions of the scribblers in the parlour. But Aaron Graham is normally the calmest of the Bow Street magistrates. It is disturbing to see that calm fractured.

He had travelled to the Wapping River Police Office directly, and had learned that Horton had been there some hours before, but it is now early evening, and no one knows where he is. Jealous waits for a little while outside Horton’s lodgings, which look shut up and abandoned to his practised London eyes, but he cannot settle. There is an itch he has to scratch. The itch is called Rose Dawkins.