Savage Magic (46 page)

‘You mean to keep all this secret.’

‘I mean nothing of the sort. More powerful men than I believe this matter worthy of investigation, and wish this investigation to remain, yes, secret. Think about it, Horton – the ability to force men to act against their will. To cause servants to slaughter their masters, and then have no memory of it. A drug that can cause hallucinations. These things are potentially significant.’

‘Significant?’

‘Do not be naive, Horton.’

‘Are we talking of a new type of artillery? A cannon of the mind?’

‘Do not be ridiculous.’

‘This is why you are being forced to absorb these attacks from the newspapers. They are hiding this thing behind you.’

‘
They?
Who on earth do you mean, Horton? There is no
they
. There is the Royal Society and there is the government. Both bodies believe these matters to be worthy of investigation and consideration. Why dramatise this so?’

‘Because, if I were to say to you now that I will tell the newspapers what I know, you will in turn tell me that should such a matter arise then certain
secrets
relating to my naval career and my involvement in the Nore mutiny would be made public, and that certain of my previous shipmates would be interested to hear such secrets.’

Graham says nothing to that.

‘Is that not the case, Graham?’

‘Do not be impertinent, Horton. You are still just a constable.’

‘I appear to be a constable whose head is now full of things I am not supposed to know.’

‘Horton, your own magistrate has told you that we have, in recent years, touched upon matters which should have remained hidden. He knows, as do I, and as do you, that our investigations have revealed aspects of the secret world that, were they to be made public, would at best weaken social morality, and would at worst unpick the beliefs on which our stable society is based. That cannot be allowed to happen. Only a fool would disagree.’

‘And only a liar would go along with it.’

‘Horton, we are all liars. Some of us are just better at it than others.’

‘Your daughter, Graham.’

A warning hand from the magistrate, which is ignored by Horton.

‘Your own daughter was subject to whatever capacities Maggie Broad possessed. You would do well to investigate these things further, for her sake if not your own. Did she kill Sir Henry’s dogs, Graham? Did Maggie Broad turn your daughter into something like her own self?’

Graham stands, and places his hat on his head. He suddenly looks old and, to Horton’s eyes, rather unwell.

‘Horton, your wife is well. You are well paid for what you do. You are interested in your work. You are, in this grubby and complicated metropolis, a lucky man. Do not endanger that.’

He walks to the door with the angry threat still reverberating in the room. Horton does not rise to see him off. He instead asks a question.

‘Dr Bryson spoke of another woman in his testimony – a daughter.’

‘He did.’

‘I spoke to the idiot. Burroway. He confirmed Bryson’s story. Others say similar things. Rose Dawkins, for instance.’

Graham sighs.

‘So, what do you suggest, Horton? That we begin a new line of inquiry, based upon the testimony of a madman, an idiot and a whore? We looked into it. We checked the records of Brooke House, and interviewed all the staff. None could recall this “Maria Cranfield”. She only appears in Bryson’s case notes. Which indicate, incidentally, that this so-called patient was befriended by your own wife. Does she remember her?’

‘She does not.’

‘Then accept the truth. There was no Maria Cranfield. Bryson invented her as part of his own delusion, and somehow forced his ideas onto the idiot. Maria is just a figment of his mind.’

And with that, Graham leaves. Horton, with a sigh, falls down into his armchair, and collects himself as his wife cooks his dinner. The fire is warm; October is well on the way outside, but here within all is warmth and health and recovery. He thinks back to those terrible weeks when Abigail was in Brooke House, and they seem to have happened to a different person, one whose mind was full of different things.

While he is thinking, he takes out the little black notebook Sir Henry had given him at Thorpe Lee House. The one that Aaron Graham seems to have forgotten about, or at least to have chosen not to remember. He thinks back to what the hopfarmer had told him, the man who’d identified Mrs Broad’s body at Wapping, and had said those strange words to Horton as he’d departed.

A question for you, constable. If I committed a crime on your behalf but I was unaware of it, how guilty would I be of the crime?

He turns to the last page of the little black book. He reads the name
Maria Cranfield
but does not read the black words used to describe her. And he throws the little book onto the fire.

CROSS BONES BURIAL GROUND, SOUTHWARK

The old gravedigger is not quite blind, but over the years he has learned not to see. His spade has turned over too many tragedies to allow his eyes to record the stories which settle into the mud of the burial ground. From daylight to dusk he digs and turns the soil, a dozen bodies a day or more, their flesh piling up beneath the Southwark earth.

So it would be wrong to say the gravedigger sees the woman with the long body and the young-old face who stands beside him, her back against the Cross Bones wall. He is aware of her, as he is aware of many other things: the cold sharp air; the sounds of the city waking up; the pastel smudge of the buildings in the morning fog. He looks at her just once, takes in an impression of long black hair, loose and dishevelled, and a dress which might have once been pretty and almost fashionable but which is now ragged and indistinct in both colour and cut. She looks somewhat familiar, but – as has been said – the old gravedigger is not quite blind.

She makes no sound, this woman. There have been a great many other women sitting where she now sits. Most of them weep, some of them moan to themselves, and some of them – like this one – stand in silence, never announcing themselves, their exhausted eyes following every slice and turn of the gravedigger’s spade.

Thus, in the absence of the woman’s tears, the only sounds are the flat and heavy movements of the gravedigger’s shovel and the wet thuds as he piles earth onto the tops of five plain wooden coffins, each of them barely two feet long. These coffins are laid out in a row in front of him. To the gravedigger they are just boxes; they contain nothing, not even stories.

The five coffins are the top row in a stack of the dead which reaches down twenty feet into the earth. The gravediggers always put the babies at the top of the burial stacks, closest to the surface. They can squeeze more bodies in, that way. Like all London’s burial grounds, Cross Bones is full to bursting, a pit of the squeezed-in dead, men, women and their babies clustering in the darkness. Perhaps they haunt this place; if so, they are well-practised in it. All of them had been ghosts before they died, invisible to the well-off, a flicker at the edge of what people of means were prepared to see. The fact that their final caskets are so clearly visible beneath the crowded earth is the last irony of their existence.

The woman by the wall begins crying, suddenly. Her sobs are bitter and abandoned, and provide the melody for the percussive clunks of the shovel. The gravedigger looks up from his task as if compelled, seeing her properly now, and every now and again he takes another glance at the crying woman, shaking his head and making a thick
tsk
sound under his breath before turning back to his work. It is a comfortable routine, this. When he shakes his head, he might be expressing impatience, sorrow, amusement or an old unspoken wisdom. It is the privilege of gravediggers that ordinary folk will never know which it is.

It is obvious to
him
why the girl is crying. Five little boxes of death, being packed into the earth. Anyone with eyes to see would recognise this old and mournful tale.

‘
Joshua . . .
’

He looks up again, and sees the girl pointing to the little coffins, now disappeared but still agonisingly close to the surface.

And then he remembers her. Remembers her here. In the spring, wasn’t it? She came with another woman, an older woman, her dress fine but muddy as if she had walked through the Lambeth marshes, her arms bare and lined with flint-cuts, nettle-stings and briar-scratches. He remembers those arms, and the way the older woman had put them round the shoulders of the younger, and the way they had watched the gravedigger inter a different set of small plain wooden boxes. He even remembers a name, whispered in sobs over the April air:
Joshua
.

There were five coffins then, too
.

He is wonderstruck with remembering. How can this be? It is as if he looks through another’s eyes and remembers another’s thoughts.

For herself, Maria looks down into the stack which, earlier this year, was being freshly dug. It is now more than half full. Soon, little Joshua will have company, as the bodies of children are squeezed in at the top, alongside those five coffins she’d watched being interred the previous spring.

No headstone marks the spot where her son is buried; only this half-full hole in the ground can be used to identify exactly where he lies. Maria kneels into the mud of the earth and prays to her Father in Heaven. The gravedigger stops his shovelling. Maria prays for the soul of Joshua, that little brittle thing which was here on earth for so little time. She prays for the soul of her mother, believing it to be endangered beyond all expectation of salvation. She prays for the Suffolk farmer and his wife who raised her and did not mean to die so suddenly, leaving her to fend for herself. She prays for Lizzie Carrington – sweet, kind Lizzie, who’d met her begging in the street and who’d suggested another way to earn her crust. Poor Lizzie.

It was she who had told her mother where Lizzie could be found. She tried shutting the location up in a corner of her memory, but her mother had found it.

A young woman walking down the side of the burial ground feels a sudden swell of sadness and sees a picture of a baby boy in her mind’s eye, an inconsequential but perplexing image, as if plucked from the recollections of another. She walks on.

She does not pray for the men who took her, one after another, hidden behind their leering awful masks, their bodies stinking of wine and tobacco and of something old and disgusting. Joshua’s fathers, united in this poor dead baby who sleeps beneath her knees.

A panderer, standing in a doorway behind the burial ground watching one of his girls negotiating with a gentleman, sees a red image of her lying dead across a bed and rushes out to see off the potential cully. The gentleman is confused and angry. So is the girl.

Maria weeps, and the tears feel oddly wholesome, a sane reaction after so many weeks of empty, frantic grieving. She thinks of Abigail, the kind woman who read to her. She hopes her final kindness towards her – the erasing, from her poor disturbed mind, of those terrible Pacific images – has made her happy. She thinks of poor John Burroway, the idiot, and worries about him.

She thinks of her mother, dead on a chapel floor. She knows what her mother wanted her to do. She knows she could leave this place and continue her mother’s work. Dead men would litter the ground along which she walked. Vengeance would sit on her shoulder. Vindication would be her birthright.

Joshua’s eyes look up at her from her memory, their dark circles full of understanding, the light in them already fading.

She will not stay hidden for long, she thinks, in the forgetfulness of others. Her name must reappear, so she must take on another.

A carriage waits for her out in Red Cross Street, its horses breathing over the dead of Cross Bones. Inside the carriage is a man of means who has pledged to help her for reasons he cannot seem to explain. She can begin a new life.

But there is business to be completed first. In the village of Thorpe.

She stands up and leaves that place behind, to find kinder memories to live within.

AUTHOR’S NOTE