Free Savage Magic by Lloyd Shepherd

particular problem on this street.’
    ‘Yes, sir. Anything else?’
    The drawing room is longer than any drawing room has a right to be, with six tall arched windows looking out onto Bruton Street. The house, Graham knows, takes up three times as much room as any other of the wealthy properties on the street, but even so its stupendous dimensions amaze him. He finds the self-indulgence rather disgusting; Graham is a self-made man, one who has survived on his own wits and intelligence, and seeing the sumptuousness with which this house garlands itself makes him irritated and rather unwell.
    He forces himself to take in the room. His attention is drawn to a scene in a painting on the far wall, facing the door through which he entered. At first he is unable to make out what the scene is, but then with disgust he recognises
Leda and the Swan
, although in this particularly gaudy representation the swan has been given a human face, as well as a crazily engorged phallus, and the face is that of the owner of the house, and the former occupant of the eviscerated vessel upstairs, Edmund Wodehouse, Esq. He turns away from the painting with the same disgust as he might reject an unfashionable cravat from his tailor.
    Aaron Graham is known across town for his bonhomie, his charm and his facility with all matters social and sartorial. He is a charming dining companion, a learned travelling companion and a discreetly solid drinking companion. But misery now informs Graham’s posture, his expression, even the gaiety of his clothes. His cream tailcoat seems to have no sheen and no joy, and the hat he spins around between his immaculately maintained fingers looks more like a lump of Welsh rock than the latest wonder from his Jermyn Street milliner.
    Graham can’t even recall the servant’s name. How does Horton keep his composure at such times? How can he be so careful in collecting evidence? Graham has seen a good many dead bodies in his time, but the devilish horror of that figure upstairs has, for the moment, temporarily unmoored him.
    Jealous is still waiting.
    ‘Yes. I want to know who visits this house. I want to know who his friends were. Now get to it, Jealous. I’ll wait for you in here.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    Jealous departs. Helplessly, Graham’s eyes are drawn back to that awful painting.

THORPE
     

     
    The servants, who had hidden from him the previous day, are brazen in their presence when Horton emerges the following morning. Mrs Graham, though, is nowhere to be seen – ‘missus has taken to her bed today, very tired she is,’ says Mrs Chesterton the housekeeper, a short bustling creature with a head and body so spherical she looks like a preliminary sketch for a Hogarth caricature. Horton asks if it was she whom he had heard the previous night talking to Mrs Graham in the drawing room. The housekeeper confirms it was with some reluctance and ill-hidden irritation, as if Horton had been spying on the house in its fitful, noisy slumbers. Which, he supposes, he had been.
    Mrs Chesterton is one of Thorpe Lee House’s seven servants. They have come out into the new day like mice creeping out after the death of a cat. But there is no bustling order to the house as it wakes up; tasks are gone about with indifference. Horton searches the faces of the staff for signs of sleeplessness when he talks to them, but all he sees is a kind of mild defiance in the younger ones, and a puzzled dislike in the older, as if he carries with him a slightly unpleasant smell. And yet last night they had dreamed noisily and restlessly.
    Horton finds himself wondering what the staff’s ramshackle appearance says about the state of Sir Henry’s finances. From his first view of the gardens the previous day, he has been struck by how the appearance of the house itself teeters on the edge of respectability, just as the domestic arrangements of Sir Henry and Mrs Graham teeter beyond the edge of social convention. Abigail would have been as