Savage Magic (47 page)

Like the two books which precede it –
The English Monster
and
The Poisoned Island
– this novel deals primarily with fictional events and invented characters, but in some cases the events are not entirely imagined, and some of the characters are based on real biographies.

Where the events are real, they may have been warped to fit fictional purposes, though I have tried to do justice to them. For example, the
Indefatigable
really was a convict transport and did return to England in 1814, though in September, not April. Aaron Graham really was a magistrate at Bow Street, though by 1814 he was almost certainly semi-retired, and I have no documentary evidence for his impeccable taste in clothes.

Since these kinds of liberties have been taken, the careful reader should note the following.

The madhouse called Brooke House did exist in Hackney at the time of these events, and indeed continued to operate well into the twentieth century. The building itself was finally demolished after the Second World War; its depiction here is based on monographs written by council surveyors at the beginning of the last century. In 1814, it continued to be owned and operated by the Monro family, and the philosophy of treatment ascribed to Dr Thomas Monro in the book is based on the writings of mad-doctors from the period. However, the character of Dr Bryson is invented, as is his theory of
moral projection
, though I know a good many people whose powers of persuasion are sufficiently mysterious to warrant investigation.

The most tangled fictional-factual thicket has grown up around the personal life of Aaron Graham, his wife Sarah and her relationship with her cousin, the baronet Sir Henry Tempest. It is true that Sarah Graham did leave her husband to live with her cousin Sir Henry, though there is no date recorded for when this occurred. The daughter she had with Aaron Graham – Ellen was born in 1799 – was given Tempest’s name in addition to Graham’s; the other children of Aaron and Sarah Graham were not renamed. Both Ellen and Sarah were beneficiaries of Aaron Graham’s will.

It is also true that a good deal of scandal attaches to the name of Sir Henry, though he may not have earned the sobriquet ‘worst man in England’ I have awarded him within. The tale of how he made his fortune by marrying and then abandoning an heiress is recounted in Caroline Alexander’s book
The Bounty
. Sir Henry squandered his own fortune, so set his eyes on another: that of the heiress Ellen Pritchard Lambert, the only daughter of Henry Lambert of Hope End in Herefordshire, whose fortune came down to her from her grandfather. Note the coincidence of her name.

The story goes that Sir Henry disguised himself as a gypsy woman and told the impressionable Ellen that she would meet her future husband at a given hour at Colwall Church. Along she went, and there met Sir Henry, divested of his gypsy disguise. The two were married and as was the legal custom Ellen’s fortune became the property of Sir Henry, as did Ellen herself. Sir Henry then threw both his wife and his father-in-law out of the family home; Ellen was also later disowned by the father. Destitute, she was said to wander up and down the Holloway Road on the edge of London. She died penniless, probably in 1817, and probably in Worcester.

Hers is a bitter story but doubtless not an uncommon one. Such behaviour would not have been particularly outrageous among gentlemen of Sir Henry’s stripe in the Georgian era.

Sir Henry and Mrs Graham did indeed live in a house in the village of Thorpe in Surrey. My particular thanks to Jill Williams of Egham Museum and the staff of the Surrey History Centre for tracking the house down.

The Sybarites – both the group, and its individual members – are all invented, in some cases by inserting fictional sons into actual families, in others by inventing families from scratch.

Maggie Broad and her friend Henry Lodge are invented, but their shared history is at least plausible. The facts around the
Lady Juliana
are real, as are the experiences of those aboard the
Guardian
. Much less likely is any kind of interaction between a convict woman and the natives of what we now call
Australia
. Whether this is more or less likely than any of the other unlikely things that happen in
Savage Magic
will be for the reader to say.

The final unlikely thing is the use of
pitchery
, or
pituri
as it is more commonly known these days, by anyone European in the early nineteenth century. Joseph Banks first recorded Aboriginal Australians chewing plants ‘as a European does tobacco’ in 1770. Seventy years later, the diary of the deceased explorer William Wills was preserved by one of his companions, and made reference to ‘stuff they call
bedgery
or
pedgery
; it has a highly intoxicating effect when chewed even in small quantities. It appears to be the dried stems and leaves of some shrub.’ This sparked a century of searching and inventing, and all sorts of strange effects were ascribed to what came to be known as
pituri
. Europeans confused different plants, with different effects, used by different Aboriginal groups in different ways. They concatenated different stories and different traditions. It’s a classic case of an attempt to
categorise
leading directly to a project to
mythologise
. In effect, pituri is like nicotine – a form of chewing tobacco. The only mass psychosis it has caused was among the explorers and botanists of the nineteenth century.

For wise words, encouragement and skilful editing I would like to thank Jessica Leeke and Mike Jones at Simon and Schuster, and all their amazing colleagues. Thanks as ever to my kind readers, Josie Johns and Dan Dickens. Thanks also to my agent, Sam Copeland. For putting up with sulks and selfishness, I am as always in devoted debt to Louise.