The day after their aborted theatre trip, Abigail walked to St Luke’s hospital at Moorfields. For three months now she had been working at the place, unpaid, as a nurse. The job was part of a careful effort to place her feet back down on the normal earth and begin her life anew.
The previous year, she had taken herself to a madhouse, Brooke House in Hackney. She had been plagued at that time by terrible dreams, and these dreams had begun to bleed into her waking hours, such that she could barely leave the rooms she shared with Charles in Lower Gun Alley in Wapping. Her mind had become an unreliable and tearaway thing, and she had been forced to mislead her husband in order to get it seen to.
She had come out of Brooke House cured, or at least it had appeared so to her. The dreams had ceased. They had been replaced, though, by a lingering discomfort with her memories of the madhouse, which were murky at best and in some instances, it appeared to her, full of queasy blanks. She went in disturbed (she avoided the word ‘mad’, even when thinking to herself) and she came out relatively calm. Of what happened in between she had little idea.
It was this as much as anything that had taken her to St Luke’s, the great asylum formed the previous century by William Battie and intended to be a progressive and humane place for the treatment of madness. Its great rival in all matters relating to mad-doctoring was Bethlem, which had just moved to an enormous new building in Lambeth, such that these gargantuan temples to the infirmities of the mind seemed to bracket the metropolis, to pinch it between their stone fingers.
Abigail had worked as a nurse at St Thomas’s before she ever met her husband, so her skills were in some demand at St Luke’s, but she never asked for any money, nor was it ever offered to her. St Luke’s provided her with something more valuable – an education in madness, and access to its investigators.
She watched the inmates while she cared for them, and tried to understand their lunacies: their manias, their melancholies, their hysteria. She spoke to the nurses and, when she could, she spoke to the senior doctor at the place, whose name was Drysdale, and who had taken a particular interest in this intelligent woman who worked for nothing and asked such penetrating questions about mental disorder.
He had become particularly interested when she mentioned Brooke House during one of her early visits. He knew something of the place, of its own Dr Monro and its former consulting physician, Dr Bryson.
‘I have heard strange stories about the place,’ Dr Drysdale had said to her.
Abigail had not heard stories, but she had imagined them.
‘They say Bryson was involved in some odd investigations there. Involving mesmerism.’
‘Mesmerism?’ Abigail asked.
‘Yes, though I cannot think why a qualified doctor would indulge in such quackery. It is said Bryson had come to believe that one might be able to guide another’s thoughts using a species of mesmerism. He called it moral projection. Did he speak to you of it?’
‘I . . . I do not recall.’
‘You do not recall his theories? Or you do not recall the doctor?’
This seemed an oddly penetrating question, and Abigail found herself wondering if Drysdale might help her understand things from the previous year somewhat better.
‘I do not recall the theories. The doctor . . . Well, I recall a doctor, of course. But none of his details. His face, his voice, how he treated me. None of it.’
‘That is most odd. Mrs Horton, I wonder if you would indulge me.’
‘In what way, doctor?’
‘I would like to examine you, in the mental sense. When you are here, perhaps we could spend some time talking about Brooke House and your memories of it. I am fascinated by the odd wisps of rumour I have heard. Bryson’s theories, while fantastic, do in some way overlap with some of my own ideas. You are an intelligent woman who may have experienced something unique. Might I make use of your brain, as it were?’
Drysdale had smiled when he said this, and while Abigail found his request odd, she also discovered she wanted to know more of what had happened to her. Wasn’t that why she had come to St Luke’s in the first place? She would learn by talking to the inmates, and Drysdale would learn by talking to her, and who could say? Perhaps they would both learn things of interest.
So she fell into a pattern of working at the hospital and being spoken to, once or twice a week, by Drysdale in his consulting rooms. They spoke of many things – of her past, of her husband, of her terrible dreams and of her oddly fractured memories of Brooke House. Some things that had happened there began to reveal themselves; other things stayed hidden. But she found her intellect reviving and her mind calming under the regular activity, like a weakened leg recovering from injury. Charles knew of her working days at St Luke’s, of course, but she did not share with him those sessions with Drysdale, because she knew his concern would be painful to her.
Abigail Horton had returned from St Luke’s and was reading inside the apartment, which she had freshly cleaned, when her husband returned from his work. He was still wearing the clothes he had put on the previous day for their trip to the theatre. Indeed, she smelled him first rather than saw him.
‘Good afternoon, husband,’ she said, looking back down to her book. ‘How was the magistrate?’
He kissed her, and sniffed her hair as he often did, holding the curve of her skull in his hand, such that she wondered if he thought he could cradle the mind inside, protect it from its old disturbances. Abigail lifted one hand from her book and placed it on his forearm, with an affectionate squeeze.
‘What is your book?’ he asked.
She smiled.
‘Ah, so you will give no answer on the magistrate. Keep it to yourself, then. It is a recent novel. By a woman named Austen.’
‘Do you enjoy it?’
‘I do. I like to read of clever people living in circumstances different to ours. Her world is full of wealthy soldiers and summer rain. She writes beautifully. I would like to meet her.’
‘You sound besotted.’
‘Besotted? No. Intrigued by another woman’s voice.’
‘And does Mrs Austen make dinner for her husband?’
‘I would be surprised if she were married. She seems to find men oddly amusing creatures. I cannot think why. Wash yourself. You smell disgusting. I will prepare you some food instead of writing my own novel.’
She stood and went into the little kitchen and looked out of the window into the street outside while she worked. Some boys were playing an elaborate game down there, watched by a fellow puffing on a pipe. He shouted something to them and they laughed and scattered.
She went back into the parlour with a pot which she placed on the fire. She set a tray down beside his chair – a plate with bread and jam and a bowl of apples she had bought that morning. Charles sat down to eat. Abigail returned to her book, and for a few minutes there was peace and a comfortable silence.
Abigail looked up from her book, and noted that her husband was in his turn looking at her. She examined him. Abigail was widely read in matters relating to chemistry, botany and anatomy. She could, she believed, cut open his chest and take out his heart. She would hold it in her hand and watch it beating, but she would still have little idea of what it contained.
‘My husband has the stench of consideration about him,’ she said. ‘Which means my husband is working. Even while he sits with me.’
‘You are a more skilled investigator than I, wife.’
‘I think not. You are a dedicated sniffer of secrets. How goes this new case?’
‘It is a sad one. I do not wish to labour your peace with discussion of it.’
‘You do not? Do I have no say in the matter?’
She smiled as she said it, but there was a deliberate edge to her words. She wished to talk of the case, whatever her husband thought.
‘Well then. The case has some unique aspects, but the most remarkable of them is its similarity to the Marr and Williamson killings. There is a good deal of panic in the neighbourhood that the same killer has returned.’
Abigail was no longer smiling, and the mention of the Ratcliffe Highway slaughter chilled the air in the room, but she was listening closely. He continued.
‘The whole family was slaughtered: father, wife, daughter. The man was in the kitchen, laid out on his front. The mother was face down in the grate. The daughter was tied to a chair, her throat cut. All the family members seem to have been attacked with a maul.’
She was distracted by the awful details. She had asked him, almost a year ago, that he share such details of his work when she requested it: ‘However grim, I wish to hear it.’ When he had asked why, she had said she needed to test her own mind, to ensure its hardiness. It was a fragment of the same experimental regime which had been taking her to St Luke’s. It involved frequent prods at her sensibility and understanding, probing for weak spots. She knew it made Charles uncomfortable.
‘Benjamin Johnson was the name of the husband and father,’ Charles continued. ‘He was a clerk with the East India Company. I spoke to the maidservant this morning, at her father’s lodgings in Spitalfields. The maid told me Mrs Johnson and her daughter had been taking the air down in Brighton in the fortnight before their deaths. Mr Johnson had joined them there shortly after they left, saying his daughter had been taken ill.’
‘His employer let him go?’
‘I imagine so. I have not yet spoken to anyone at the Company.’
‘John Company, they call it. Or the HEIC. H as in Honourable. And as I hear it, taking time off in such a way could be grounds for dismissal. The Company is not renowned for its treatment of its clerks.’
‘You hear a lot, wife.’
‘Well, it is books that I hear it from. They speak, in their own manner. So, Johnson took some time off work, and in that time somebody killed him, his wife, and his daughter. The maidservant saw nothing?’
‘No. She was told to visit the house every third day. She did so, and on one of these visits she discovered the bodies. And then, there is this.’
He took the gold chain out of his pocket, and handed it to Abigail. She held it in her cupped hands as if it were liquid that might run through her fingers.
‘The wife’s?’
‘Yes. It locked a drawer in her dressing table. The drawer was itself empty.’
‘My God, Charles, is that her hair on it?’
‘Yes.’
Abigail gazed upon the gold chain and the hair wound within it.
‘The clasp is broken. Like it was torn from her neck.’
‘Such was my reckoning also.’
‘A woman with a key around her neck. A key to an open drawer. A woman with secrets, Charles.’
‘Indeed. Secrets which someone else now possesses.’
‘Was she killed for these secrets?’
‘That is my task to uncover.’
‘Shall we keep this here?’
‘Yes – I imagine you have some secret place of your own in which it will be safe.’
The remark was in somewhat bad taste, and Abigail did not respond to it. She placed the necklace in a pocket of her dress.
‘Well, husband. You have been busy since leaving me at the Hermitage stairs. What next, do you think?’
‘I must visit the offices of the Company. I have no experience of dealing with such institutions. I know not how it will develop.’
‘Your magistrate will accompany you, surely.’
‘Doubtless. He is a former Company man, after all.’
‘Indeed. The Indian service.’
‘You have read his memoirs.’
‘As I say, husband: books tell me many things.’
‘Well, then – what of these?’
He reached down to his satchel, and pulled out the three books he had taken from the house on the Highway. He passed them to her, and she looked over them.
‘Hmm. I know this one’ – she held up the Environs of London – ‘but the other two are a mystery to me. This one I cannot make head nor tail of, as I have no Latin, but I know someone who perhaps can. And this one – “Dr John Dee”. The name is familiar to me. At least the book is in English.’
‘There are pages missing from the first book – the Environs of London.’
‘Ah, interesting. I wonder who tore them out. I assume you wish me to consult these books? To see if they might speak to me of something or other?’
‘It would be of great benefit to me.’
‘Really?’ She put her head on one side, like a dog weighing up its owner. ‘Are you humouring me, husband?’
‘By no means. These books were left in Johnson’s desk.’
She looked at him, her head still on one side. Her measuring was not quite finished.
‘Poor husband. It must have been an awful scene. All those slit throats. The blood must have been on everything.’
‘As a matter of fact, no. There was little blood. None at all, in fact.’
Abigail frowned.
‘But how can that be? A slit throat will send blood in arcs all over the place. The heart pumps it into the air through the open wound. It is a basic matter of circulation.’
‘Indeed? Well, how would you explain the lack of blood?’
‘Perhaps the place was cleaned after the murders.’
‘Yes. But I do not know why anyone should have done that. And there would still have been marks, surely.’
‘Or they were dead when their throats were cut. A stopped heart will pump no blood.’
She frowned.
‘What state were the bodies in, husband? If the maidservant visited every third day, they may have been there for almost three days.’
‘There was little sign of decomposition last night. More this morning; there were flies in the house then. But none last night.’
‘So, the bodies were fresh. There was no blood. An obvious explanation presents itself.’
‘Yes. That they were killed somewhere else, and brought back to their home to be discovered, after the blood had drained from them.’
‘And brought there immediately after their deaths.’
Horton nodded at the book in Abigail’s lap.
‘What would Miss Austen have to say on this?’
It was a poor quip, and in the universal way of wives Abigail did not even acknowledge it.