Savage Magic (18 page)

This is the import of his letter to Sidmouth: that the second killing implies a pattern, and that within the pattern the future can be descried. Cope was a member of this party of Sybarites; somebody is killing those same Sybarites. The
why
is still unanswered, but will have to wait now that the
what
presents itself.

The letters are barely on their way when the gentlemen from the
Chronicle
and the
Times
reappear at Bow Street, and are rebuffed. They are accustomed to this game. They will write their story anyway.

Next, Graham summons the Bow Street principal officers and as many parish constables as can be found – a good number of them are already in the Brown Bear with their Bow Street colleagues. He tells them to bring him the senior household servants from Sir John Cope’s residence, Burgess the butler and the housekeeper. If they refuse to come, they are to be arrested. He feels a twinge of guilt at this imposition of authority – he suspects neither of the servants, or at least has no reason to as yet – but he must now base himself at Bow Street and its court. He wishes never to see the inside of Sir John’s house ever again. He informs the other magistrates of the office that, for the time being, his attention must be wholly on this particular matter. They seem strangely willing to remain uninvolved, as if the case is already infected and capable of transmitting that infection to the unwary. Graham has the same sense himself, but an old magistrate on the cusp of retirement is somewhat immune to such contagions.

THORPE

In the time it takes him to reach the house, the freshly arrived carriage in front of Thorpe Lee House has been completely unloaded. The driver is preparing to take the carriage round to the rear of the house, where there is a small stable-block and carriage house. As Horton climbs the steps to go within, he hears the driver crack his whip and the crunch of wheels and hooves on gravel.

Inside, the previous atmosphere of impatient quiet has been shattered. The exhausted servants dart up and down the stairs. Crowley the butler is barking orders, seemingly at random, while Mrs Chesterton scurries around with what looks like a huge ostrich feather, flicking it at random items as she goes. Jane Ackroyd (or
Béatrice
) the lady’s maid shouts something from the upstairs landing and moments later Daisy Webster the scullery maid appears on the stairs, rushing down to the kitchens below. She catches a glimpse of Horton as she goes and nods politely, but her face is red and flustered. The only servants not on view are Peter Gowing, who is presumably performing some task for his master elsewhere in the house, and Stephen Moore, who must be in the kitchen.

A male voice yells ‘CROWLEY!’ from the drawing room, and the butler, caught in mid-flow remonstrating with Jane Ackroyd at the top of the stairs, dashes downstairs and into the room.

‘I take it Sir Henry is returned,’ Horton says to no one in particular, and everyone ignores him in the same way. He leaves the servants to their scurrying, and heads upstairs to his room.

He had been thinking of writing to Abigail, as he has done multiple times since she left for the madhouse. He knows his letters are almost certainly not being read. During the empty days of August, while his beard grew and their apartments congealed under neglect, he had often walked up to Hackney, always demanding to be let in to see her. On one occasion he had managed to speak to the resident doctor, a weasel of a man called Bryson who seemed to have taken an unaccountable dislike to him.

This mad-doctor had explained, superciliously, that Brooke House patients were allowed no contact with family or friends during their rest. He had used the word ‘rest’ as if it had some magical resonance, like an elixir of life hidden in a Florida jungle. Horton had complained – indeed, by the end of the short interview he had been shouting – but his complaints fell on deaf ears. He had insisted that, as Abigail’s husband, he had final legal redress over her, that she was, to all intents and purposes, his property, and she was being held against his will. Such had been the extremity of his dismay that such thoughts came willingly; he would have said anything at all to have Abigail come out of that place.

And when it came to it, Bryson had in any case backed down, agreeing with him that, yes, as the woman’s husband, he had every right to withdraw her from the asylum. He would arrange for the nurses to make her ready. Following which, with bleak acceptance, Horton told him to wait. For the terrible truth which awaited him always presented itself: Abigail had chosen to go to Brooke House. No one had spirited her away.

Abigail had chosen to cut herself off from him.

It is this empty, bleak and unavoidable truth which has haunted him these past five weeks. It is what always prevents him taking her away from that place. He is too much afraid of what would happen if he did.

That fear comes back to him now, but its return makes him realise that he has not thought about Abigail for some hours now. Something about Thorpe Lee House has arrested his self-consuming obsessions. After that investigation of the well – and the discovery of the vegetation within it – perhaps he is beginning to feel haunted by something else.

He settles down to write a letter, much different to the one he might have composed to Abigail. One he had not anticipated writing when he first woke this morning.

It is a new feeling, this writing-down of things. He has never before now been a man of letters, even private letters. He has been on the ground in Wapping, surrounded by his network of small boys, always watching and aware. He is able to attend, in person, any event he desires.

Besides, he has hoarded too many secrets and carried too many disreputable histories to feel entirely safe when writing them down. He knows how important the letters of the Nore mutineers were to their deliberate destruction at the hands of the Establishment, assisted by one Lt. C. Horton. A great deal of agony might have been avoided if some of his fellows had avoided prolix celebrations of success in letters to loved ones which had only been intercepted by the government’s spies in Sheerness, and had later served to incriminate their verbose creators.

Horton had bought his freedom – and a life with Abigail – by turning evidence against his fellow mutineers, and has ever since been rehearsing a kind of running away, though from what exactly and to where precisely is unclear even to him. Better to think of him as hiding in plain sight, operating and breathing and living but never revealing himself more than he has to. And what could be more revealing than an ill-considered letter to an indiscreet recipient?

But Horton is a quick if deliberate thinker, and a highly creative one – he knows this of himself perfectly. Writing things down slows down his mind, gives him the time to delineate his thoughts precisely and with care, and he has found in consequence that light falls on dark matters in a different way. Sometimes a more revealing way.

So, while he waits for the chaos downstairs to cease, and while the thoughts of his sojourn in the garden are fresh in his mind, he begins to scribble. A rather preposterous idea has occurred to him. Soon, the thoughts and the ideas coalesce themselves into a new letter. He looks at it for some moments before folding it and placing it in an envelope. He leaves it open. A knock comes on the door.

‘Come in,’ he says.

The footman, Peter Gowing, looks round the door. There is a sheepish look on his face, as if in acknowledgement of their previous encounter.

‘Constable, the master would like to see you. He’s waiting in the drawing room.’

Horton stands. He leaves the letter on the desk.

‘Certainly. I have left some leaves drying by the window – could you tell the other servants to leave them as they are?’

WESTMINSTER

Sir John Cope’s housekeeper is an Irish woman who is unexpectedly calm in the face of the events in the house under her keeping. She informs Graham, when she is brought to Bow Street, that Sir John was always likely to come to a bad end. She’d only been with him three months, and in that time she’d seen ‘matters such as I never thought to see, and never wish to see again’, her fat face aquiver with indignation and disgust. She tells Graham who the household staff are, and which of them were under Sir John’s roof this last night. She heard nothing, and reports that none of her staff heard anything either.

One by one the other servants of Sir John Cope are interviewed, as in the wings the other arms of officialdom wait to take the stage: the reporters, the coroner, the undertaker. No doubt somewhere, even now, someone is preparing for the sale of the lease to 13 Royal Terrace, and lawyers are dusting off legacies. Sir John Cope was a rich man, by all accounts, though Graham notes how the legacies of the so-called rich like Sir John often melt like river fog upon their death, subsumed into lawyers’ correspondence and the dozens of unpaid tradesmen’s debts accrued over decades of living in a certain fashion.

So, as Westminster begins to swarm over the literal, legal and metaphorical carcass of Sir John Cope, Aaron Graham reads the depositions of the dead man’s servants. All agree on the dates of parties, all tell of the nature of them. Burgess had told him of the procurer for these events – Talty, the pimp of the Bedford Head, the present day’s very own Jack Harris, upon whom a visit will shortly be paid. While there is some suggestion that Cope believed his parties to be operating at a different level – one of spiritual resonances and ghostly recurrences – Graham thinks he knows the kind of parties the Sybarites enjoyed. Parties where men devoured drink and food and then devoured women, made beastly by their own appetites and desires, whatever mysticism Cope believed himself to be practising. It is clear, in the testimony of the servants, that they saw the parties in the same light as Graham.

Burgess is a different matter. That air of shocked stillness is still upon him when he is brought into Graham’s office by one of the constables. He surprises Graham by telling him he had been Sir John’s butler for the best part of two decades, and Graham wonders how a character such as Burgess could last in the company of a man such as Sir John. When he puts this question to him, the butler seems not to understand it. He is like a dog that has been badly treated for so long it has forgotten what kindness is like.

Graham asks for a list of the attendees of Sir John’s last party, and Burgess unfolds a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his coat and hands it across. A list of names presents itself, some of them very recognisable to Graham, either from acquaintance or report. He asks Burgess if these men have attended parties at Sir John’s before. Burgess replies that they are, indeed, regular attendees, there being two of what he calls ‘Sir John’s special parties’ a year.

The name Sir Henry Tempest is in the middle of the list, picked out, as it were, in flashing personal significance.

Did Sir John always host these parties? he asks Burgess. No, comes the reply. Sometimes they were held at far-flung venues, chosen, says Burgess, by Sir John Cope.

Graham asks: chosen for what reason?

Burgess looks unable to answer for a moment, struggling in his shocked state to find the right words. He says, eventually, that Cope believed these venues to have some kind of significance.

Graham asks, what kind of significance?

Burgess looks embarrassed now, for the first time. Even on Graham’s first visit to 13 Royal Terrace, Burgess had feigned distance, not shame, at his master’s behaviour. But now he seems gripped by a deliberate and deep remorse. It is as if his true feelings were resolving themselves back into expression. He says, eventually, that Sir John believed certain places carried resonances from previous things that happened there; that the past could be drawn back into the future by the performance of certain rites and ceremonies in those same places.

There is silence for a moment, as Graham digests that. It smacks of a different flavour of lunacy. He does not care for it. He asks, eventually, for an example.

Well, sir, says Burgess, and now he is squirming like a naughty schoolboy in front of a headmaster. Like Medmenham.