Savage Magic (6 page)

The house takes further shape as the coach nears: a square, elegant but characterless place. Horton’s eyes are untutored in matters architectural, but it seems to him this house has none of the new qualities of the wealthy properties at Wapping Pier Head.

The coach-sweep approach departs from the road and then twists around two sides of the building to the front door, which is set behind four columns holding up a portico. Thorpe Lee House is surrounded by flat grounds which, if need be, could accommodate the entire London Dock. Three or four clumps of trees are set artfully around the place, and although there has been some thought in the past to the design of the gardens, the overall impression is of mild neglect. The woodland Horton saw from the road frames one side of the gardens and from somewhere in the near distance he hears the sound of dogs, a good many of them. Horton recognises how little he knows of country estates, but feels sure they are normally neater than this. The grass is too long, the pathways a little weed-strangled for the artful bucolic polish he has seen along the river at Kew and Richmond.

The driver throws down Horton’s bag with no ceremony, and says no farewell as the bag lands with an alarming sound on the gravel of the driveway. With a
hai!
to the horses the coach leaves. Horton experiences another little wobble of dissonance after the sight of the mildly unkempt gardens: the lady of the house is now appearing, unaccompanied, at the door to Thorpe Lee House. Are there no servants?

Horton picks up his bag and walks to the portico where the tall woman waits. She is dressed fashionably if somewhat more plainly than might be expected for a baronet’s – what, exactly? There is a sudden and pressing confusion. The wife of a baronet such as Sir Henry Tempest would be greeted as ‘Lady’. But Mrs Graham is not Sir Henry’s wife. So what
is
Mrs Graham? Companion?
Inamorata?
Concubine? The extraordinary nature of her domestic status is thrown into sharp relief on their first meeting by the fact that he has been sent here by her own abandoned husband. Horton rather feels like the dupe in a Drury Lane farce. The audience is waiting for him to slip on some hidden particle of etiquette.

‘Constable Horton?’ the woman asks. She has the face of a tired forty-year-old or a well-preserved fifty-year-old. Horton does not know which should apply.

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He picks the word carefully, yet it feels unwieldy and imprecise on his tongue.

‘Welcome to Thorpe Lee House, constable,’ she says, adding (to Horton’s relief), ‘I am Mrs Sarah Graham.’ She takes a good degree of care over each word. The word
constable
had sounded foreign and almost insulting when she spoke it. She had shared her own name with some haughty reluctance.

She is polite to him nonetheless, and expresses words of gratitude as they walk into the house, but this isn’t enough to hide her apparent distaste at his presence. She had asked for someone to come, of course, but Horton can see his arrival has only served to make real whatever is troubling her. And of course, she had not exactly asked for
him
. She’d wanted a justice of the peace, not a river constable.

Despite the unofficial nature of his visit, Horton sees that he cannot help but represent the encroachment of the public realm into Mrs Graham’s confused and confusing household. Mrs Graham is so embarrassed, Horton now recognises, that she has decided to leave the servants out of it for now. She tells him to leave his bags in the vestibule for someone to pick up – she doesn’t say who. She shows him into the reception room, where tea already waits on a tray. She has planned everything such that no servant shall see or speak to him before she has taken the chance to do so herself.

He asks after Sir Henry, and is told that the master of the house is up in London and has been for some weeks. Mrs Graham expresses some satisfaction that this is so as they sit down.

‘I wish to speak to you of the strangest things,’ she says. ‘Sir Henry has a different attitude towards them than I.’

‘He does not hold with the idea of witchcraft?’

A look of discomfort passes over Mrs Graham’s face. Horton’s directness is unwelcome.

‘Mr Graham has told you everything?’

‘Not at all, ma’am. Only the generalities. I carry a letter for you from him.’

He hands it to her and watches her as she reads it. The fire is burning in the cosy grate, above which is a massive painting in oils of the man whom Horton takes to be Sir Henry Tempest. The painting reveals a tall and fashionable figure, standing in a rural scene with several dogs and a gun. His eyes quiver with the zeal of the hunt (the artist’s skill is much in evidence around those eyes), and Horton is left with the impression of a determined, almost fanatical individual, full of life and appetite. The figure blazes from its otherwise rather ordinary depiction, the flat oils unable to hold the man’s personal force within the frame. Horton keeps looking back at the picture, as if worried that the figure within might leap down from the fireplace and throttle him.

After a minute, Mrs Graham puts her husband’s letter to one side. She places her hands in her lap, and looks down at them, as if they might provide a cue for how to proceed. Then she looks up and speaks to him. Her brow is determined, and she speaks with easy authority, inflected by the same clear internal tension which greeted him in the driveway.

‘Before we begin, constable, I wish to make one thing perfectly clear to you. We will not be using the word
witchcraft
when talking of the events which have befallen this house.’

‘You do not believe that to be the cause?’

Mrs Graham narrows her lips and breathes in heavily.

‘I do not know what I believe, constable. But it is of course beyond all rational inquiry that bewitchment has taken place.’

He can see, immediately, that this is not quite the truth, and for the first time Horton warns himself to perhaps take care around this woman. Trusting Aaron Graham at all does not come easily, but Horton had believed him when he’d said his wife believed Thorpe Lee House to be bewitched. She is now lying about that belief to the man charged with investigating its cause. Her dissemblance hangs in the air like the smoke from the fire.

‘So your explanation for these occurrences is that they are mere coincidence? Or perhaps somebody has a grudge against you?’

‘Against me? I should hope not.’

She looks to her left, and Horton’s eyes are drawn back to the picture above the fireplace.

‘Against Sir Henry, then?’

Mrs Graham looks at him directly again, and he feels distinctly uncomfortable beneath her penetrating gaze.

‘What have you been told of Sir Henry, constable?’

That he is the worst man in England
.

‘Very little, Mrs Graham.’ The name stings her, slightly. He files that away.

‘A great many people have a great deal to say about Sir Henry, constable,’ she says. ‘Do not believe any of it. They are envious of him and, I suppose, are envious of me too. Envy breeds all sorts of runaway tongues.’

There is something smoothly unpleasant about this speech. Mrs Graham speaks no more of Sir Henry. She tells Horton of the sequence of disturbing events at the house, which began and reached their peak during August and which she had believed were at an end. But now there is the matter of the sudden illness of her daughter, Ellen.

‘Does Miss Graham fare any better?’

‘Miss Tempest Graham, if you please.’

The correction implies all sorts of questions which Horton does not wish to now pursue.

‘Is she better?’

‘She is the same, constable. She is very ill but not, her doctor says, in any immediate danger. I confess to having panicked at her first illness, when I spoke to Mr Graham. I may have been premature. You see, I thought perhaps I knew who might be at the root of this matter.’

This is new. Graham had made no mention of it.

‘Almost a fortnight ago, I sacked the cook. She is a woman by the name of Elizabeth Hook. The servants, and many in the village, had become convinced that she was the . . . well, she was the
primary cause
of these incidents.’

‘Was there evidence for this belief?’

‘There was some. Items related to some of the events were found in her kitchen.’

‘That is all?’

‘That is all. Also, she became ill during a ceremony performed by two of the servants.’

‘A
ceremony
?’

‘Yes. They told me about it. A witch-bottle, they called it.’

‘Do you know what this ceremony involved?’

‘I do not. They can tell you. But it is intended to make the . . .
perpetrator
unwell. And it seemed to work.’

‘I see. And where is Elizabeth Hook now?’

‘I cannot say. I presume in the village. Though there was a good deal of bad feeling towards her. She may have left the area altogether.’

‘Mrs Graham, you are aware, are you not, of the legal status of accusations of witchcraft?’

‘I am. Aaron . . . Mr Graham . . . explained this to me. I am choosing my words carefully.’

‘I understand. Have the incidents which caused this suspicion been itemised in any way?’

‘They have. I have them here.’

She hands him a scroll of paper tied, almost ritually, by a thick black thread.

‘Every incident, and its date, is listed therein.’

‘My thanks. I would like to read this, and then talk to you again. And the servants as well.’

‘Yes. They will be made available to you. Perhaps tomorrow – the hour is growing late today, and we must still eat dinner.’

‘And Miss Tempest Graham? May I speak to her?’

‘Perhaps, if she recovers a little. Though I confess to being mystified as to why you would wish to.’

‘Mrs Graham, I have no idea why I should speak to anyone. I must try to establish whether there is any motive for these mischiefs on your household.’

And envy is by no means sufficient as a motive, he decides not to add.

‘Motive? I do not understand.’

Horton is quite familiar with this inability.

‘It is my experience, ma’am, that no crime is committed without a motive. Most of the time that motive is personal gain. Sometimes it is petty revenge. It may be fear that forces the hand of the saboteur or poisoner, if such there be in this case. Whatever the matter, establishing the motive always leads to the perpetrator.’

‘Ah? Well, as Mr Graham has said, you are the master in such matters. I just wish these things to stop, constable. If you can effect such an arrest, I will be in your eternal debt.’

She looks at him with an expression that suggests her creditors, financial or emotional, are the luckiest people in the world.

Horton is collected from the reception room by the butler, a thin, rather scruffy man of indeterminate age and unknown regional provenance who gives his name as Crowley, but only when asked, and who smells of alcohol and old tobacco. His clothes bear the same tattered air of mild desuetude as the gardens outside; indeed, it occurs to Horton, of the house itself.

They leave Mrs Graham alone inside the reception room, her eyes following Horton out as if he were under suspicion of a felony. From the vestibule a staircase with pretensions of hauteur climbs up to the first floor, and Horton follows Crowley up. There are five doors off the first-floor landing, all but one of them closed, and Crowley leads Horton through into the bedroom beyond. His bag is already on the floor, and he is about to turn and ask Crowley a question when he hears the door close. The butler, without a word, has made his escape.

A small writing table has been placed by the window, and Horton sits at it, leaving his bag to fend for itself. He rubs his freshly shaven face, the skin still itching slightly from the barber’s attentions this morning. The view outside is of the lawn to the side of the house, and the dense copse beyond. Another old man, cut from similarly dilapidated cloth as the butler, works away at something in the ground on the edge of the lawn. There is good plate glass in the window, and a small balcony outside.

Horton unties the scroll and folds it flat on the table.

Mrs Graham’s handwriting is tidy and, like the woman herself, has the odd property of making him feel rather lacking. The note consists purely of a list of dates, annotated with the events of the day, with no colour or feeling to it:

Aug. 10 – O’Reilly’s shed burned

Aug. 12 – milk from Thorpe Lee herd curdled. Remains undrinkable for the rest of the week

Aug. 13 – dead rat left on dining room table. Rat’s blood discovered in kitchen

Aug. 14 – ring appears on lawn – about 10 feet across

Aug. 15 – words of profane intent discovered in chalk on inner door of linen cupboard; chalk discovered in kitchen

Aug. 16 – several of Sir H—’s shirts cut to pieces. Scissors with cotton fragments found in kitchen
.

Aug. 18 – cook becomes ill

Aug. 19 – dreadful noise from trees to side of house

Aug. 21 – two of Sir H—’s dogs slaughtered overnight

Aug. 22 – I sack the cook

Aug. 27 – Ellen falls ill, terribly so

He wonders, rather, at the self-discipline which this writing-down must have taken, but then ponders whether he is not making the mistake of assuming a personality where there is none. Even before meeting her, Horton had assumed that Mrs Graham would be a wilful individual. Leaving a husband with Aaron Graham’s reputation to take up with a man with Sir Henry Tempest’s must have been an act of deliberate will. Or was it? Was there passion involved? Is this precise, calculated handwriting just the careful strongbox within which ardour is chained?

He feels uncomfortable, miserable even, in this odd house. The primary cause is the same as it has been this past month: Abigail’s absence, or more particularly his ignorance as to her state. What is she doing now? Who is she talking to? Or is she alone, scared and trembling in some cold cell in that strange building north of London, where he has lingered outside a dozen times this past month, hoping for a glimpse or a clue?