Savage Magic (41 page)

Rose has, to all intents and purposes, disappeared from view following her release. Ugly, violent, foul-mouthed Rose. Why is he worried about such a one as her? A vicious street-whore. And yet he is hopping from one foot to another on a dirty side-street in Wapping, and for the first time in his young life contemplating insubordination. Horton can look after himself. When he has something to report to Graham he will do so. Standing around is a waste of time.

The dead bodies of the Sybarites are still in their locked-up houses. Surgeons have investigated them and will report to separate coroner’s inquests on the morrow; but none of these inquests will unpick the central mysteries of the case. How do five men meet their deaths in their own homes, under lock and key, and under the eyes and noses and ears of constables and watchmen?

The key was the servants, Horton had said. But they have been spoken to, and they remember nothing. Glassy-eyed confusion greets every enquiry. Graham has no answer to this, and nor do any of his fellow magistrates, or anyone working for him, Jealous least of all. But Rose Dawkins has been forgotten since her release, and Jealous is unable to fathom this. He is, after all, a young man, and he finds himself remembering the shape of Rose’s hand as he dragged her through St Giles. If he cared to think about it more deeply, he might recognise how much Rose’s air of desperate rage is redolent of his sister Joan, who shares the streetwalker’s sense of aggrieved amusement at her lot.

His hand remembers the sting of Rose’s slapped face, a rebuke and a reminiscence. Why is it only he that can see the woman might be in danger? Is not her friend Elizabeth dead already?

When arrested, Rose had given her address as the building in which they had found Elizabeth Carrington: 27 Brownlow Street. He’d raised her eyebrows at that and she’d glared at him defiantly, daring him to question it or even slap him again, so she could ‘kick his prick off’. He’d said nothing. It hadn’t seemed to matter and, in any case, it might be true.

He comes to a decision: to leave Wapping. He takes a carriage to Covent Garden, where he arrives as the streets begin to fill up for the evening to come. Doors are opening all along Brownlow Street, and women of various ages and sizes are stepping out into the street, some individually, others in little chattering groups. When they spot him, they either go quiet or shout obscenities – he is already well recognised by the streetwalkers. He goes to Number 27, and lets himself in.

With a start, he realises the body of Elizabeth Carrington is almost certainly still upstairs. All available men are either guarding the houses of the dead Sybarites, or running errands for Graham, or out on the pavements seeking something, anything, on which to hang a prosecution. A dead whore warrants no protection, and no intervention. He wonders if Elizabeth will always be up there, her hand hanging down, the blood beneath her staining the boards a permanent scarlet . . .

There is a whore in Elizabeth’s room, but it is not a dead one. Rose Dawkins is on her knees, scrubbing the floorboards. The body has gone.

He hasn’t knocked, and this does not impress Rose.

‘Who the fuck do you think you are, comin’ in ’ere?’ She remains kneeling on the floor, but the force of her character is undiminished by that. ‘Get out of it, now. You’re no bloody use to me or to anyone.’

The force of her will is like a hand on his chest, and he remembers that feeling of being tugged on the collar as he held her down in St Giles. He feels something like it now – reluctance to do anything other than step out of the room and walk away. Rose’s forceful will is almost physical.

‘I came to check on Elizabeth,’ he lies. ‘Who took her body?’

She looks at him, head slightly cocked on one side, like a smart dog checking on the friendliness of a human.

‘The parish. I told them what had happened. They were ’ere just now. You lot weren’t going to do nothin’ about it, were you?’

‘The coroner might object to that.’

‘Do me a favour. The coroner don’t give a toss. He’s too busy looking at the bodies of toffs, ain’t he? Couldn’t care less about a poor bitch like Lizzie.’

She stands, now. That feeling of wanting to leave subsides, leaving only a spark of sensation in the back of the neck, like the footsteps of an insect crawling across his skin.

‘What do you want?’

‘I was concerned for . . . your safety.’

‘My safety?’

‘Yes. If there is a killer stalking whores and their gulls . . .’

She frowns, puzzled.

‘Free ride round the houses, is it?’ she says, her voice sneering but her face open and confused for the first time since he has met her. ‘Hopeful that the poor scared little bitch will spread her legs for the brave Bow Street Runner?’

‘No!’ He steps further into the room, and is now only three or four steps away from her. They look at each other. She is still holding the wet rag with which she had been mopping up Lizzie Carrington’s emptied life. ‘And besides. I’m not a Runner.’

She smiles a little at that, and then Jealous hears a soft step from behind him, and he turns to see an older woman with dark hair and a terrible scar down one cheek. These things are only the impressions of an instant, though, because she is looking into his eyes and he is looking into hers and he falls into those green circles and hears the sound of his sister laughing, a child’s laugh from somewhere down the years, a garden and rain and the feel of wet grass on his warm bare legs, a summer feeling, and he is turning within the garden, turning towards a figure he dimly recognises, a Rose, a Rose in the garden, and he is putting his hands around the Rose’s throat, around its flowers and its thorns, and he is squeezing hard, but his sister is calling to him, down the years, and he looks down at her and she is shouting at him, telling him to stop, and Joan has always been the only one who can tell him to do
anything
, and he squeezes and squeezes and Joan shouts and shouts, though her shouts are getting dimmer and weaker, but then she shouts one last thing, hard and sharp and completely unexpected . . .

I’ll kick you in the fucking prick!

. . . and he stops and lets go and the garden disappears and Rose falls to her knees as he drops her, coughing and crying, heaving air back into her body through rattling great sobs of breath.

He is about to turn to look at the woman who has come into the room, to ask what her business might be, but then Rose grabs his hand and, without looking at him while she struggles with her air, manages to whisper: ‘Don’t . . .
look
at her . . .’

He looks at her hand in his, and some vestigial childhood ripple comes back to him –
snap it, snap it like a twig in the garden
– but it is a whispered thing, emptied of its power.

Eventually, Rose looks up at him again, and struggles to stand. He feels sick when he sees the marks of his thumbs on the front of her neck, as livid as petals. Once she’s on her feet, she puts a hand on his shoulder, holding him in place, positioning him faced away from the stranger in the room.

‘You killed Lizzie. You bitch. You killed Lizzie.’

Jealous hears nothing at first, only the steady breathing of the older woman behind him. This sound, and the sight of Rose’s fierce stare, and something else – that disconcerting static prickle – fill the room. He wishes, more than anything, to turn and face down those eyes, but Rose’s hand is strong on his arm, holding him in place.

‘Have you always been able to do that?’ says the woman. The accent is strong; East Anglian, Suffolk or Norfolk, as rural as wheat and hops. The voice is harsh and powerful, almost male in its bearing.

‘Do what?’ asks Rose, and her fingers tense on his shoulder.

‘You know what I am talking of, girl.’

‘I’m no girl, bitch. Did you kill Lizzie?’

‘Lizzie killed herself.’

‘Fuck off. You know what you did.’

‘As do you, girl.’

‘You made Lizzie kill herself.’

‘She was a witness.’

‘Witness to what?’

‘To the defilement of my daughter. She did nothing to help her. Neither did you.’

‘Help her? How could we have helped her?’

‘You have some power. You don’t have to whore yourself around. You’re more than that. You’re more than this useless bag of bones that calls itself a patrolman.’

Rose looks at him then, and he sees in her eyes her suspicious hatred, her angry shame, her deliberate viciousness. No one would write poems about those mud-brown eyes – they’re warlike and bitter. She turns them back on the stranger behind him.

‘He resisted you.’

A laugh, then. A nasty, bullying laugh. The laugh of an overseer with a whip standing over an exhausted negro.

‘It was not he who resisted, Rose Dawkins. Now, leave him be and come with me. My work is done. We can leave together, and change your life.’

‘I will not leave with you.’

‘I am a bad enemy to have, Rose Dawkins.’

‘You are an old woman who has no power over me.’

Rose’s eyes widen then – he sees them pop into open circles. Her arm stiffens, her fingers bite into his shoulders. The cords in her neck become visible, her brow creases into a dozen folds. She is in pain. Every part of her is in pain. He is about to turn, to throw himself at her attacker, but then Rose goes limp and falls to the floor and behind him he hears the stranger turn and walk briskly out and down the stairs; he even catches a glimpse of her shoulder as she goes, before turning back to the girl on the floor.

She is in a faint. A dribble of blood comes out of one nostril. He raises her head and, sitting down, puts it in his lap. The tough patrolman finds an unexpected tenderness within him. He takes one of her hands and holds it, and with the other strokes her red hair. It is as soft and brittle as new straw. His father would laugh at him if he could see.

After a minute or two she opens her eyes, and breathes in hugely through her nose. She smiles, a fierce little expression which contrives to make her hard ugly face something beautiful.

‘What happened?’ he asks.

‘She gave me a warning,’ Rose replies. ‘To keep out of whatever comes next.’

A Treatise on Moral Projection

That final day was calm, and Brooke House was quiet. The shocks and shrieks of the previous night had, God knows, been among the worst things I had heard – particularly that terrible chanting towards the end, as if all the men in the place were shouting from a script written by a lunatic playwright. How could that have been, I asked myself? What consciousness operated upon them, to make them speak with one voice?

A terrible conception had come upon me. My theory of
moral projection
was then barely formed; it has taken these past three decades for me to refine my thoughts upon it. I read my notes from that day and they seem to me to be fractured and somewhat desperate, and I believe I know why – I had become terrified lest Maria Cranfield step into my head once again and extract more memories. I resolved to write every single thing down.

It was a wise course. For soon another would come, who would make Maria’s abilities look impoverished indeed. Only my perspicacity and foresight protected my ideas so that I might share them with you, the reader, today.

But I am running ahead of myself. My notes from that day tell a particular story: how I visited Maria Cranfield’s cell. How I found her sleeping, watched over by Abigail Horton. How Mrs Horton begged for someone to be sent to clean Maria’s bedding and to accompany the two women so they could clean themselves. I agreed, and went to find John Burroway.

John went up to the women and was gone for perhaps an hour, during which time I wrote more notes and consulted with a few additional inmates. But my heart was not in it. I could not focus on the prattling concerns of these lunatics when, upstairs, almost above my head, there was a female whose abilities, I had already begun to tell myself, would make my name and my reputation.

I consulted my notes again. As I have said, I was becoming concerned that Maria might try to remove memories from me once again, and that these memories might include my own observations of her. Suddenly these observations seemed to me to be of enormous value; to be the means to my own professional rise.

Was it possible, that she might wipe away all recall of these events? I thought it probably impossible; I had, after all, remembered most of the events in the cell two days before. However, the crucial fact of this matter was that the remembrance I had come to had depended, had it not, on the reminders provided by John Burroway. He seemed impervious to Maria’s ability to remove memories, perhaps because his own capacities were so damaged.

And so I concocted a plan of self-protection. One which defended me from what was to come, though in ways I could not then imagine. I called for John Burroway, but was told he was not then in the building, having been sent on an errand. I barely thought about what this errand might consist of, so determined was I on thinking about this new path. I ordered that he be sent to my consulting rooms immediately upon his return, and I went back to collect my notes into some order. I was, it now seemed to me, recording matters for Posterity.

BROOKE HOUSE