The Coven Read online

  George came around his desk, looking serious. ‘I regret to say that I have some painful news for you, Beatrice. Oh, by the way, this is Mr Veal, my accountant. Edward, allow me to introduce Widow Scarlet.’

  The bald-headed man said, ‘Charmed, madam! Charmed! George has told me much about the good work that you have been doing at the home for refractory young women.’

  ‘George, tell me, what’s happened?’ said Beatrice. ‘Please don’t tell me that some of the girls have already died!’

  ‘It’s worse than that, in a way,’ said George. ‘But please sit down. This will come as a great shock to you, I’m sure.’

  Beatrice remained standing. ‘What could be worse than death? Please – tell me!’

  ‘I regret to confess that I’ve been deceiving you, Beatrice. I’ve been doing it for the sake of the girls themselves, but above all to protect your feelings. You’ve had to bear quite enough distress and disturbance in your life recently without a calamity like this.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Beatrice. She was beginning to feel impatient now, as well as anxious.

  ‘When you came here on Saturday I told you only half the truth. The girls had indeed been stricken by a fever. But it was not a common contagion. It was a fever that they had conjured up themselves.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

  ‘On their very first night here in Hackney, at the very stroke of midnight, they started chanting and wailing and uttering the most extraordinary screams. When our housekeeper Margaret Lidiard went to their dormitory to investigate, she found all the girls naked and dancing around their beds. Not only that, they had daubed a huge symbol on the wall, a pentagram, in what appears to be blood.’

  ‘What?’ said Beatrice. She couldn’t believe what George had just said, but his expression was so grave that she found it hard to imagine that he was lying to her.

  ‘Margaret remonstrated with them, of course, and told them all to dress and take to their beds, but she had not stepped more than a few feet into the dormitory before she was flung bodily backwards by some invisible force. She said that it was like being blown over in a storm, except that it smelled foetid – akin to the breath of some foul beast. She was thrown so forcibly against the door frame behind her that several ribs were broken and she was knocked almost unconscious.

  ‘She managed somehow to crawl out of the dormitory, but as soon as she had done so, the door slammed shut, even though none of the girls was anywhere near it. Once she had reported what had happened, I went up there myself with several of my staff. We tried again and again to open it, but we were unsuccessful, and so we tried to break it down by force. I had some of my strongest men attack it with post mauls, but to no avail. The mauls shattered as if they had been made of glass.’

  Beatrice slowly sat down. ‘You must forgive me, George, but I am finding this very difficult to accept.’

  ‘You don’t need my forgiveness, Beatrice. It’s more than difficult to accept – it’s well-nigh impossible. All of us here have scarcely been able to credit what we’ve been seeing and hearing. After we first failed to open the door, my men erected ladders outside the dormitory windows so that we might see what was happening inside, but all the curtains were drawn together tight, and remained drawn.’

  ‘And the girls have stayed in there ever since they first arrived? With no food or drink or sanitation?’

  ‘We knocked at the door repeatedly and pleaded with them to come out, or at least to let us in to talk to them, but there was no response whatsoever. They were as silent as the dead during the day, but as soon as midnight chimed again, they started singing and screaming once more, and we could also hear some strange, discordant music like flutes playing. This went on every night for at least an hour, although afterwards they fell silent.’

  ‘I heard it for myself, and it was enough to curdle my very blood,’ said Edward Veal. ‘If what remains of my hair had not already been grey, it surely would have turned that way overnight.’

  ‘Perhaps I should try to talk to the girls myself,’ said Beatrice. ‘I had some encounters with people performing satanic rituals when I was in America. It was all fakery, but there was a motive for what they were doing, and in the end I discovered what it was.’

  ‘I can’t think of any reason at all why these girls should have been pretending that they were summoning Satan,’ said George. ‘But – you’re a day too late, I’m afraid. Early this morning I noticed as soon as I came here into my office that our goat had gone.’

  ‘Your goat?’ Beatrice looked out of the window and she could see that the goat’s tether was still hanging from the post to which it was fastened, but it had been cut, and there was no sign of the goat itself.

  ‘I went immediately upstairs to the dormitory and I saw at once that the door was wide open,’ George continued. ‘There was no sign of the girls, any of them, but when I went inside and drew back the curtains – well, I hesitate to tell you what I found.’

  ‘Please, George, I’m not at all squeamish.’

  ‘Our goat was nailed to the wall, its legs widespread, and its belly cut wide open so that its bowels had fallen to the floor. Candles had been planted on the floor all around it, so I can only assume that the girls had been carrying out some kind of ritual sacrifice.’

  ‘How did they manage to cut the goat free and carry it upstairs to their dormitory without anybody seeing them or hearing them?’ asked Beatrice. ‘Surely it must have bleated or its hoofs made a clatter on the stairs?’

  George shook his head. ‘I have absolutely no idea, Beatrice. But there were seven of them, weren’t there? Perhaps they managed to knock the poor beast senseless and carry it upstairs between them. Or perhaps they had some other way – some supernatural means of lifting it into the air. After all, they had managed to fling Margaret across the room without touching her, and slam the door behind her when none of them were near it. I’m quite prepared to think that they could have levitated the goat by some black magic.’

  ‘But the girls have gone now? Do you have any idea where they went?’

  ‘None. I asked the postboy who came this morning if he had passed them on his way here, but he said that he hadn’t. I sent one of my lads to stand at the Bethnal Hamlet crossroads to inquire of coach drivers and any other travellers if they have seen them, and another lad to Jeremy’s Ferry past Dalston. So far all seven of them seem to have melted away into nothingness.’

  ‘Spirited away!’ put in Edward Veal, clapping his hands. ‘Piff! As if they never existed!’

  ‘I’m totally confounded,’ said Beatrice. ‘And I must admit that I feel wounded, too. I talked to one of those girls, Jane, and it seemed to me that she was right on the brink of conversion. I don’t mean religious conversion. I mean she seemed to have a genuine desire to give up prostitution and change her life for the better. It’s really hard to imagine her calling up Satan.’

  George puffed at his cigar, and picked a shred of tobacco from his lower lip. ‘Beatrice, my dear – I doubt if she had even the slightest intention of giving up being a blower. She was only telling you what she thought you wanted to hear. You know what these girls are like. She probably believes that Satan will give her everything she wants. Fortune and fame and with any luck some rum cull to take good care of her when she loses her looks. All the things that God wouldn’t give her, but maybe his satanic majesty will.’

  ‘You don’t believe in witchcraft, do you?’ asked Beatrice.

  ‘I don’t disbelieve in it, let’s put it that way. I have a cousin in Bedford who argued with the old woman next door because her dog broke into his yard and killed five of his chickens. When it broke in a second time he caught it and beat it to death with his cane. The next night he heard the sound of breaking glass from somewhere upstairs. When he ran up to see what it was, he saw the old woman outside, hovering in the air, ten feet clear of the ground, unsupported, smashing his bedroom windows with a brass poker.’

  ‘There!’ said E
dward Veal, as if this were incontrovertible proof of witchery. ‘Had she been apprehended for such mischief not twenty-five years before, she could have been hung for it!’

  Beatrice raised her eyebrows but said nothing. She believed that there could well be supernatural influences in the world. After all, she believed in God. But she had come across too many fake mediums and too many charlatans not to be sceptical about Satanism. Her father had always taught her to test any evidence first with science; and even if science couldn’t yet explain what had happened, he had cautioned her to keep an open mind. ‘Our knowledge of chemistry advances by the hour,’ he used to say. ‘That which seemed to be magic this morning might well be completely mundane by the same afternoon.’

  ‘If those seven girls are in the thrall of the Devil, then I very much doubt that we will ever hear from them again,’ said George. ‘It’s a tragedy – a great, great tragedy – and you have no idea how wracked with remorse I am that this happened while they were under my care. But – they are all disappeared off the face of the Earth, and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Piff!’ Edward Veal repeated. And then, ‘Piff!’ yet again.

  ‘I presume that you haven’t yet told the Reverend Parsons of this? Or Mrs Smollett? She seemed to have no inkling of it this morning.’

  George shook his head. ‘I’ve informed neither of them yet, although now of course I will be obliged to. I didn’t want to say anything to Ida because it will break her heart. She devotes so much of her soul and her spirit into converting those girls to a Christian way of life. She is certain to feel that she has failed them somehow.’

  ‘Would you like me to tell her?’

  ‘No, Beatrice, no. I have known Ida for many years and it will be better coming from me. Let me tell her in my own way. I shall be down to the City tomorrow and I will call at St Mary Magdalene’s and the Foundery before I go to my lodge meeting.’

  Beatrice stood up. ‘If you’ll allow it, George, I would like to see the girls’ dormitory for myself.’

  ‘Are you sure? It has not yet been cleaned since this morning, and neither has the goat been disposed of. I was considering that I might ask a watchman to come to inspect it, in the event of the girls later committing some felony, and being arrested for it. The condition of their room would be proof, would it not, that they had forged a pact with Satan? Quite apart from their theft of our unfortunate goat, and its wanton slaughter.’

  ‘Yes... please show me,’ said Beatrice. ‘They might have left behind them some evidence as to where they are now.’

  ‘Come with me, then,’ said George. ‘I have to tell you that I’m taking you to see the carnage they’ve caused with the greatest of reluctance – but, since you insist.’

  ‘As I said, George, I am not at all squeamish. In America I boiled live lobsters and I slaughtered and butchered my own pigs.’

  *

  At the rear of the factory stood a two-storey brick annexe with rustling ivy growing up its south-facing wall. The ground floor was taken up with storerooms for tobacco and wooden boxes, and with a large kitchen where meals were prepared for the factory hands. A wide staircase led upstairs to the dormitories for both men and women.

  Beatrice went up the stairs first, with George behind her still puffing at his cigar. By the time they reached the landing he sounded out of breath, and he stopped for a moment to cough and punch himself on the chest with his fist.

  They walked down to the girls’ dormitory at the far end of the corridor. The door was closed, and George took out a key to unlock it.

  ‘You’re quite certain about this?’ he asked her.

  Beatrice said, ‘Yes, George. I accepted the responsibility for saving those girls from sin, and even though I knew them for such a short time, I still hope that I might be able to rescue them now.’

  ‘As you wish,’ said George, and pushed the door open.

  The dormitory had whitewashed walls, and was lined with eight plain iron bedsteads, four on either side. The sheets and blankets on seven of the beds were in wild disarray, and some of them were speckled with what looked like dried blood. Dark brown loops and spots were spattered all the way across the oak floor, and they looked like dried blood, too. The air was swarming with hundreds of flies.

  On the end wall a huge pentagram had been smeared, reaching almost from floor to ceiling, and around it had been drawn the mystical symbols for earth, fire, air and water. The white goat had been nailed up against the pentagram with its back to the wall, its legs stretched out so that they were aligned with the pentagram’s diagonal lines. Its eyes were yellow slits, its teeth were bared in a snarl and its dry pink tongue was lolling out sideways. Its shaggy beard and its knobbly curved horns made it look even more satanic.

  ‘Now if that isn’t proof of a ritual to call up the Devil, then I don’t know what it is,’ said George, and coughed again. He was about to say something else, but he went into another coughing fit and all he could do was wave his hand.

  Beatrice stepped into the room and made her way slowly down between the beds. Even though she wasn’t squeamish, the ripe, sweet stench made her feel as if she could easily be sick. The goat had been sliced open from its beard down to its testicles, so that all its intestines had slid out onto the floor. They were lying in a glistening, putrid heap, surrounded by a semi-circle of at least a dozen half-burned candles. Flies were crawling all over them, and in and out of the goat’s red body cavity, like looters ransacking an abandoned building.

  Beatrice took her handkerchief out of her pocket and held it against her nose and mouth as she walked right up to the dead goat. George stayed outside the door, smoking.

  There is something amiss here, thought Beatrice. In fact, there are several things amiss. George had clearly told her that the dormitory had remained untouched since they had discovered that the girls had disappeared. Yet where were all their clothes? Where was all of their luggage, their drawstring bags and their leather cases? They had needed a wagon to bring them here to Hackney – surely they hadn’t been able to conjure up sufficient black magic to spirit them all away. She could also see chamber pots under two of the beds, and both were empty. If the girls had been shut in here since the first night of their arrival, how had they relieved themselves?

  She was tempted for a moment to mention these discrepancies to George, but one of his factory foremen had come upstairs to see him, and between coughs he was engaged in conversation, so she decided to say nothing. She had already questioned his belief that the girls had summoned up Satan, and raised her eyebrows at his cousin’s story of a flying witch, and she didn’t want to antagonise him. After all, he was the principal benefactor of St Mary Magdalene’s, and Ida would be less than delighted with her if she aroused his displeasure.

  Something else caught her attention. Scores of flies were crawling all over the disembowelled goat, but not a single one of them seemed to be attracted to the blood on the sheets or the floor or the blood with which the pentagram had been painted.

  She glanced over her shoulder. George was still talking to his foreman, his head hidden in a cloud of blue cigar smoke, so while he wasn’t looking she folded her pocket handkerchief and wiped it against one arm of the pentagram. The blood was stiff and sticky, and she wiped it again, harder, just to make sure that she had a reasonable sample. That’s if it actually was blood. If it had been painted on the first night that the girls had arrived here, surely it would have dried out completely by now.

  She tucked her handkerchief back into her pocket and walked back to join George on the landing.

  ‘Did you ever see a sight so grisly in the whole of your life?’ asked George.

  Beatrice said, ‘Never, George, never. It’s perfectly hellish.’

  She didn’t like lying, because she had seen sights far more stomach-churning when she was in America, the worst of which had been her own husband’s solidified body, but again she decided that it would be wiser to humour George than to upset him. If he believ
ed in Satan and witchcraft there was no real harm in it, after all. She knew plenty of other people who were just as superstitious as he was, and she had her own superstitious rituals. If ever she spilled some salt, she always threw two pinches over her left shoulder, in case the Devil was standing close behind her.

  ‘Once I have called for a watchman as a witness, I will have the dormitory thoroughly scoured,’ said George, as they went back downstairs. ‘I have a good mind, too, to bring in the vicar from St Augustine’s to bless it.’

  ‘You might also ask him to say some prayers for our missing girls,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose I could,’ George told her. ‘In my opinion, though, they are all far beyond salvation.’

  17

  Beatrice returned first to Maidenhead Court, mostly to reassure Florence that she hadn’t disappeared forever.

  She was hanging up her rain-spotted cape in the hallway when Ida came out of the drawing room.

  ‘Well?’ she asked. ‘How are they? Did you give them your physic?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I didn’t see them,’ said Beatrice. ‘Mr Hazzard told me that they were up and about, and I thought that if that was the case, there was no need for me take the risk of exposing myself to their contagion.’

  Ida stared at her but said nothing for almost ten seconds, as if she were trying to decide if what she had said had some hidden meaning. Then she momentarily closed her eyes in acknowledgement, and said, ‘Very well. That was wise of you.’

  Beatrice went to find Florence and took her into the kitchen to give her a bowl of cheese soup with fried sippets. Grace came too. Florence obviously adored Grace, and Grace was already treating her as if she were her younger sister. The two of them giggled together all the way through their supper, and Florence laughed so much she almost spat out her soup.