The following morning, Horton took his drink-addled head and the things he had learned to the River Police Office. Despite Markland’s dire warnings, it was still to Harriott that he owed his loyalty. He reported in full to the magistrate on his meeting with Charles Lamb, rehearsing the clerk’s stories of Johnson’s hidden discoveries within the East India Company’s ledgered innards.
‘What do you know of St Helena, Horton?’ asked Harriott.
‘I confess very little, sir.’
‘The extent of my knowledge, also. I stopped there myself, on my return from India, but saw precious little of the island. I could barely walk at the time. An extraordinary prospect, though. Like a rocky fortress alone on the ocean.’
A look familiar to Horton passed over his magistrate’s face, like the shadow of a cloud on blue waters. An old seaman’s look, salty with memories.
‘I also spoke to Mr Markland last eve,’ Horton said, carefully. ‘He was much exercised with our visit to East India House. It appears that he is a Proprietor in the Company.’
The wistful expression disappeared from Harriott’s face, which immediately went an old and worrying shade of red.
‘A Proprietor? Markland?’
‘Yes, sir. He has only one vote, which suggests he may only be in possession of a small holding . . .’
‘Why, this is a disgrace! Wait a minute. You met him in the Prospect?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘He found you in there?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘He went to look for you! He warned you off, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, sir. In a manner of speaking. Or rather, he intimated that I would find things difficult if I did not immediately report any developments to him.’
‘Scandalous! The Home Secretary will be informed of this.’
Horton wondered if he should add what Markland had told him about Harriott’s personal circumstances: how he was ill, how he was poor. But would an outbreak of hostilities between the magistrates make his investigation easier or more difficult? Harriott had always been something of a loose cannon and this had on occasion made things more difficult than they might have been. For now, Markland was more use as an ally than an enemy.
‘Sir, I wonder if we should not perhaps leave Mr Markland’s revelation alone.’
‘What? How so? It is a clear and flagrant breach of the essential integrity of his office.’
Horton didn’t know if that were true or not; he had certainly encountered a number of magistrates for whom integrity was no watch-word.
‘Sir, Markland knows the Company, or at least aspects of the Company which are unfamiliar to you. He may provide us access we would not otherwise achieve. And it is his case, not ours. He may simply decide to keep it to himself.’
‘Not if the Home Secretary tells him not to.’
And what if the Home Secretary is himself a Proprietor? thought Horton.
‘Can we perhaps wait until after the coroner’s inquest, sir?’ he said. ‘Then we shall see what we shall see.’
‘No, Horton. We cannot. This is a terrible lapse. I will not stand for it.’
Harriott turned his chair to face the window. It was his customary way of dismissing his constable.
‘Salter was looking for you earlier,’ the magistrate said, to the window and the river. ‘He wishes to show you something.’
‘He is downstairs?’
‘Yes. With the bodies. In the basement.’
Horton noted how the Johnson family had lost their names. They were now ‘the bodies’. Subjects for inspection, not a family of warm-blooded beings. He left Harriott to his anger, and went downstairs.
The basement was used to store bodies, inspect bodies, argue over bodies. No one had decreed it so, but it had become the unofficial morgue. Once a body has been stored in a room, it never quite leaves. Horton wondered after the first body to have been stored in there; a dead waterman, perhaps, pitched over the side of his wherry, his head knocked on the starlings of London Bridge. He had set the template, and now this little room was a laboratory of decease.
Salter was waiting for him, standing over the three bodies laid out on tables. When he saw Horton enter the room he folded the newspaper he was reading.
‘Bonaparte! The man is a devil,’ he said.
‘Indeed,’ said Horton.
Salter looked down at the bodies on the tables.
‘Perhaps it is for the best, that this family departed so soon. If Bonaparte makes it to the Channel . . .’
The surgeon sighed. The last time Horton had seen him, the man had been angered by the constable’s impertinence. Now, his dry old face was warmer.
‘You were right, constable,’ Salter said. ‘I should have checked the bodies unclothed.’
Horton looked down at the table. He sniffed the air as he did so. There was something oddly reminiscent about the odour.
‘Come to this side,’ Salter said. He pointed to the body of Benjamin Johnson. ‘The bodies are decaying rapidly. Another day, and the skin might have disintegrated entirely.’ Johnson’s shirt was unbuttoned to his waist. Salter peeled back the two sides of the shirt, revealing the grey expanse of the man’s chest and stomach. There was a sense of movement beneath the skin, as if the dead organs were beginning to slide around each other in their decay. It sickened Horton.
‘Now, constable. Can you see that?’
Salter pointed to the left-hand side of the chest, above Johnson’s still heart. There was the outline of a shape there, about four inches high, and faint. Horton leaned in, smelling the horrible miasma around the body as it enveloped him, but smelling something else, that same strange smell he had detected when he came in. He peered at the shadowy image on Johnson’s flesh. It depicted an odd geometric shape: a circle atop a cross, which itself sat on top of a figure three laid on its side. The circle itself was intertwined with a crescent, giving it the impression of horns. In the middle of the circle was a single dot. Horton found himself oddly repelled by it, as if it were the sigil of some kind of demon.
‘A tattoo?’ asked Horton.
‘No. It is ink, but only on the surface of the skin.’
‘Have you seen the shape before?’
‘No. I had never seen anything like it. But I have since seen it twice more.’
Salter pointed to the dead woman and her daughter.
‘In the same place? Above the heart?’
‘Would you like to see?’
‘God, by no means. Your word is sufficient for me.’
Horton reached out and touched the point on Johnson’s skin where the pattern had been inked. The skin felt like death. He pulled his finger away.
‘Is it possible to say when it was put there?’
‘No. It is not a tattoo, as I said, so it must be fairly recent. The mark on Johnson’s chest is much fainter than those on the two females.’
‘So it was perhaps older?’
‘Yes. Perhaps.’
‘Or someone tried to wash it off, and failed. So they did not make the attempt on the other two.’
Salter looked at him as if he had performed some kind of magic trick.
‘Yes. Exactly like that.’
Horton stood up, and closed Johnson’s shirt himself.
‘Do you smell something odd on these bodies?’ he asked Salter.
‘Yes, I noticed that as well. A slight odour of bitter almonds.’
That was where he remembered the smell from. It was the same smell he had detected in Johnson’s kitchen. He thought it had been a cooking smell, but it seemed to emanate from the bodies themselves.
‘What does all this signify, Horton?’ asked the surgeon.
‘At the moment, only that it signifies something,’ said Horton, not looking at him. ‘But that is better than nothing.’
Upstairs, he found a piece of paper and some ink and a quill, and drew the shape on Johnson’s body from memory. Then, next to it, he drew the constituent parts of the shape: the upturned crescent and number three, the circle with a dot within it, the cross. He looked at it for some time, finding it strangely profane. Was it the mark of some secret society?
He folded up the piece of paper, and went to the street door of the office. He would walk home and show the picture to Abigail. Perhaps she would recognise it.
At the door, the porter handed him a letter which had been left for him. He paused on the street outside to open and read it. The letter was from Lamb, who had paid to have it delivered by hand, presumably from East India House. Horton read the message as he made his way back over the road to his home.
My dear Horton
My apologies for leaving so precipitously last night. I’m afraid that without realising it you perfectly stuck your hand into the hornets’ nest that is my Mind. You cannot have known what you said, or how it would be taken, and I can only blame myself for reacting so badly to your words.
My family has suffered for many years with misapprehensions of the fancy; it is our defining curse. I am afraid I rather took to heart your suggestion that I might in some way be imagining that there was something sinister about poor Johnson’s discoveries. On reflection (and now that the gin which I drank copiously and on an empty stomach has left my system) I understand that you are only doing your job. A healthy scepticism is to be applauded in one with such duties as yours. I apologise for so taking it to heart.
I have remembered something else, which may perhaps lend some credence to the strange story I told you last night. It is this: Ben came into some money last year. He said he had inherited it from his wife’s family. But his wife had no family other than a sister, a woman to whom neither he nor his wife had spoken in a good number of years. There seemed to be substantial bad blood between them. Ben often talked of it.
Some time after the news of this bequest, I happened to run into Ben and his wife at a lecture being delivered by my good friend Coleridge (the poet of whom you have not heard). We spoke of this and that, and our conversation turned to walks in the countryside. Mrs Johnson had grown up by the river, she said, and she added ‘at Putney, where my sister lives’.
Is Mrs Johnson’s use of the present tense to describe her sister meaningful? The woman is clearly still alive. So what was the real source of the Johnsons’ money? And why did poor Ben lie about it?
Forgive me if these are idle conjectures. But it would be a source of unutterable pleasure to me, and to my acquaintances, if we were able to help you in your investigations. I can be found at the address below if you would like to talk further.
I remain
Yours sincerely
Lamb, C
Horton pondered the note as he climbed the stairs to the apartment. Lamb had shared an office with Benjamin Johnson, but it seemed he also shared something with Horton’s own wife, Abigail – a disorder of the understanding which could not be shaken.
It depressed him. He had imagined Abigail to be recovered, but meeting Lamb and then reading his letter forced Horton to acknowledge that the mind, once bruised by terror, could never quite be healed.
There was some breakfast waiting for him. Abigail was reading when he came in, and gave him little attention while he sat himself down and began to slowly break his fast at the little table beneath the window.
‘What do you know of Charles Lamb?’ he asked. Abigail put down her book.
‘Husband, you are full of surprises. Why do you ask about Charles Lamb?’
‘Because I met him – yesterday, and last night. He was one of the contributors to my late night return, and to my dull head today.’
Abigail seemed amused.
‘Charles Lamb? The essayist and poet? He was the man you went to meet with last night?’
‘So he says. I have never heard of the fellow.’
‘Husband, your ignorance in such matters astonishes me.’
‘You read enough for us both.’
‘There is no such idea as reading enough, husband.’
‘So, this Lamb is a talent?’
‘He is a mighty talent, in my opinion. His poems are fine enough, but his prose is wonderful: clear and filled with a great heart. How on earth did you come to meet him?’
‘He is a clerk at East India House. He worked with Benjamin Johnson.’
‘How extraordinary.’
‘He claimed, last night, that Benjamin Johnson had discovered a conspiracy at the Company, and that this might explain his death. He became upset when I said he may have imagined it.’
‘Oh, Charles, what did you say?’
‘Only that we can see shadows where none exist, sometimes.’
‘If you had known more of him, you would not have said such a thing.’
There was great unhappiness in these words.
‘He wrote to me this morning, intimating past afflictions. Do you know of them?’
‘The Lambs have suffered terribly with mental disorders. Lamb himself has experienced them, but his sister has had it the worse. During one attack, she . . . well, the story is a well-known one. You must remember.’
And now he did remember. Mary Lamb had killed her own mother during a rage brought on, it was said, by emotional disturbance. That had been almost twenty years ago, and the newspapers then had been full of the sad tale. Charles Lamb was Mary’s brother? It had taken his wife – his dear wife, who had herself spent time in a madhouse only last year – to explain the hurt in Lamb’s letter.
The indelicate conclusion was that Charles Lamb was as unreliable a witness as Horton had thought him. And yet this new story of Johnson’s inheritance, and of the sister of Mrs Johnson, seemed plausible. It did not ring of paranoid fantasy. He thought it worthy of some investigation.
Abigail was looking at the book on her lap, though her eyes looked elsewhere. Were they remembering Brooke House at Hackney, the place she had gone to escape the world, the world he had allowed in to poison her brain?
‘Stop it,’ she whispered, the harsh words breaking the silence. ‘Gods, I can almost hear your thoughts, Charles. Your infernal self-blaming. I will not have it, husband. I will not have my condition laid at your door. You are not responsible, for you do not operate me. It is an insult, to me, to have you blame yourself so.’
They had had other conversations like this. There was always poison in them, but there was fresh bitterness in Abigail’s tone. It seemed to stem from this history of Lamb’s. For a moment he faced the possibility that his wife hated him. But he was aware enough to slam that door shut, as if behind it were a cellar filled with waiting demons, their eyes green and bitter in the darkness.
‘Abigail, I cannot help my desire to protect you.’
‘No, you cannot. But you can avoid inflicting your bloody guilt upon me.’
He waited for her to come back to him. She always did, and she did now. A breath of air through the nose, a shake of the head: right, enough of that, back to it! He watched her back away from her own despair, and thought her heroic.
‘Do you want to know the result of my own investigations, husband?’ she said.
‘If you please.’
She took a bag from the floor by her chair, and brought it over to the table at which he sat. The bag contained the books he had brought back from number 37. She laid them on the table, one by one.
‘It turns out that all three books have a common denominator – this man called Dr John Dee. And this is his most famous book.’ She held up the book. ‘It is called Mathematicall Preface. It’s the preface to an Elizabethan book on Euclid.’
‘On what?’ Horton asked.
‘Euclid was a Greek mathematician,’ his wife explained. ‘He laid down the principles of geometry.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as the fact that two parallel lines will never intersect.’
‘Is that not obvious enough to make its statement unnecessary?’
She scowled at him.
‘I shall not try to elucidate Dr Dee’s essay to you, husband. It suffices to say that he had some very odd ideas indeed, combined with a trained mathematical mind. I understand barely a tenth of what this book says – and so, it would seem, did Benjamin Johnson. He has written copious notes and underlinings in the book. There seems no pattern to them. And that may be because John Dee himself had the most extraordinary set of beliefs. Which brings me to the second book.’
He opened the book she handed to him. It was the Environs of London, Volume 1: The County of Surrey. It was written by Daniel Lyson, and published at the end of the last century.
‘Some twenty pages were missing from Johnson’s copy,’ said Abigail. ‘This is another copy, from my lending library.’
‘What pages were missing?’
‘Part of the section on Mortlake.’
‘Mortlake? The village on the Thames?’
‘Yes. I know of no other village with the name, in Surrey or indeed anywhere else.’
‘Hmm. Johnson was interested in Mortlake? His wife’s sister lives in Putney – or lived. It is still unclear. I wonder what he was looking at.’
‘He was looking for John Dee.’
Horton looked up from the book and at his wife. There was a sparkle in her eye. She’d enjoyed her academic investigation.
‘The removed pages run on from a list of notable personages who lived and died in Mortlake,’ she said. ‘The missing pages contain the longest entry of all of these. The entry is for John Dee.’
‘Ah.’
‘Yes. And according to the account in this volume, John Dee was something of an odd collection of parts – part-sage, part-wizard. Perhaps even a spy. Certainly an astrologer and an alchemist.’
‘An alchemist?’
‘Men such as Dee believed that everything on earth – including men and women – were composed of four essential elements in different compounds. Alchemists explored those combinations. They sought out the perfectibility of man, believing that through study and contemplation man could become like God.’
‘Do we no longer have such men?’
‘No, husband, we do not. Now, we have chemists. And we understand that there are a great many more than four essential elements.’
‘And this Dee was an alchemist?’
‘Among other things. He does not strike one as a particularly reliable witness, and this account of Dee’s life seems to be based entirely on the Doctor’s own telling. He was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and his patrons included Edward VI . . .’
Horton had to struggle with his memory to even recall this monarch.
‘. . . who gave him a pension and two rectories. Dee was suspected of treason by Bloody Mary . . . ’
Had she been the sister of Edward? Horton thought she was.
‘. . . but returned to favour under Elizabeth.’
Who was Mary’s sister, Horton was sure. Or her cousin?
‘To this point, this could be the account of any scholar under the Tudors. In 1575, the Queen visited Dee’s house in Mortlake to see his library, which was a wonder of the age, the biggest private library in England. Imagine, husband! A Queen visiting a supposed Magician!’
‘It seems unlikely.’
‘And it is only his account. But then Dee’s life took a very odd turn. Dee claimed to be able to speak to spirits via a stone – a “scrying stone” he called it – which an angel had given him. He performed what he called “incantations” with a young man named Edward Kelly. They left England in 1583 for several years, and ended up at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, but then Dee and Kelly fell out with each other. Dee returned to England, to find his library destroyed by a mob, and his reputation in tatters.’
‘Did people really imagine him to be a magician?’
‘Yes,’ said Abigail. ‘Well, a necromancer, meaning one who communes with demons, though Dee claimed they were angels he was talking to.’
A mob and a necromancer. For a moment, Horton was taken back to Thorpe village, a village overtaken by rumours of maleficium in which he had spent time the previous year.
Abigail continued: ‘Dee claimed that Elizabeth herself called him back to England, and he tried to claim money from her to restore his library. He said four thousand books had been taken. Four thousand books! At a time when there were scarcely a dozen printers in the land!’
‘Did the Queen listen to his claim?’
‘The account doesn’t say. But he must have spent more than ten years living in England again before Elizabeth died. Then James took the throne, and he did not look kindly on Dee’s supposed dabblings in magic. Didn’t like witches, either. Dee was accused of calling up evil spirits, and died a few years later, penniless.’
‘Is there any truth to all this?’
‘Well, the account goes on to speculate that Dee was actually some kind of spy, and that all his talk of magic and spirits was in fact secret codes containing political intelligence. But there seems to be no evidence for that. I can’t even imagine why people would have believed it. Dee claimed to have served the Queen, but it isn’t at all clear how – and all these instances of Elizabeth’s attention to him come from his own account. I wouldn’t be surprised to find he made the whole lot of it up.’
‘The story is intriguing, certainly. But I do not see its relevance.’
‘Well, there is something else here. The final paragraph lists Dee’s writings, or at least those things which Dee claimed to have written, and they are astonishingly varied. He wrote about the reformation of the Gregorian calendar, geography, natural philosophy, optics, metaphysics, astronomy, astrology and what the writer of this book calls “the occult sciences”. The account says Dee was asked to use the stars to predict the most propitious time for Elizabeth’s coronation.’
The calendar and the secrets of the stars, all mixed together. How on earth did Dee ever tell the difference between the real and the imagined?
‘But here it is, husband. I read it this morning: “He wrote an account also of his voyage to St Helena, and a treatise on the Queen’s right to certain foreign countries.”’
She looked up from the book.
‘Didn’t you tell me yesterday that the subject of Benjamin Johnson’s work was the island of St Helena?’
‘I did,’ he said. ‘The connection is interesting. And the third volume?’
‘That I can make no sense of. The title seems to be in Greek, not Latin – and I have no Greek or Latin. It seems to consist of a set of 120 short statements or . . . Husband, are you quite well?’
Horton had opened the third volume, the tattiest and oldest of the three, at the frontispiece while Abigail spoke to him, and there it was: the strange symbol that had been left on the Johnsons’ chests. It was at the centre of an arch with two columns etched on the old page. Above it he saw the words Ioannis Dee Londoninensis, which he thought he might now be able to translate.
And on either side of the odd symbol, the initials I and D.
Ioannis Dee. John Dee.