Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

My phone buzzed against my leg.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m just going to get myself a cup of coffee. Would you like one? Anything else?’

‘Would you recommend the coffee?’ asked Lady Helena.

‘Only as a last resort.’

She declined and I popped out into the corridor where Nightingale met me with a cup of coffee. Guleed and Stephanopoulos hurried to join us.

I sipped the coffee – I hadn’t been kidding, it was terrible.

Guleed hadn’t been making much headway with Caroline – she claimed she’d been out shopping and had been minding her own business when Nightingale had physically overpowered her and falsely arrested her. She also denied ever meeting me and Lesley on the premises of County Gard the year before. Her lawyer was asking to see evidence that her client had been involved and if none was forthcoming etc., etc. Since the lawyer was working for the mother it was decided that Guleed would keep plugging away to keep daughter and brief pinned in place while I took a more robust approach with Lady Helena.

‘Meaning what?’ I asked.

‘Meaning, Peter,’ said Stephanopoulos, ‘that we want you to go in there and put your foot in it.’

As Guleed said – it’s always good to be playing to your strengths.

So back I went and sat down across from Lady Helena and said, ‘Okay, tell me – how long have you been practising magic?’

Judging from her long hesitation before answering, Lady Helena hadn’t been expecting that question. Which told me quite a lot. One thing being that she didn’t know who I was. In fact, she might not even know about the Folly – which meant that she wasn’t connected to the demi-monde, who definitely knew who we were.

Or she’d just remembered that she’d left the gas on.

‘When you say magic,’ she asked, ‘you mean what, exactly?’

‘The creation of physical effects through the casting of spells,’ I said.

‘My god, you’re serious,’ she said.

I have a nice low powered werelight that I can conjure in an interview room without blowing all the surveillance – you’d be amazed how often I have to use it. My latest refinement was to add a scindere forma so that I can park it over my shoulder and use it as a reading light.

When I started my apprenticeship it took me the better part of two months to learn how to cast a simple werelight – now I barely have to think about it. If you’re an experienced practitioner you can sense another practitioner in the initial stages of spell casting. The more experienced you are the more sensitive and the quicker your reaction.

Lady Helena reacted before I’d finished the metaphorical first syllable and, by the time my werelight hung over the coffee table between us, she knew that I knew and that she was well and truly busted.

‘So, it’s true then,’ she said. ‘The magical gestapo is alive and well.’

You go ahead and liken Nightingale to the gestapo, I thought, and see what that gets you.

‘I take it you’re a practitioner yourself,’ I said.

‘A practitioner,’ she said. ‘Is that what you’re calling yourself?’

I said it was the official term.

‘My,’ she said. ‘What an ugly term. I suppose I should have expected the establishment to try and suck all the joy out of magic. God knows they try so hard with everything else.’

‘What do you call yourself?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I’m a witch, darling,’ she said. ‘Or a sorceress – depends on my mood.’

‘And who trained you?’

Lady Helena smiled.

‘Who do you think trained me?’ she said. ‘My mother, of course. As her mother trained her and hers before her. It all goes back to Queen Caroline, you know.’

Back to the court of Caroline of Ansbach, who was famously brighter than her husband – the future George II. Caroline, who kept company with Walpole and Leibnitz and did medical experiments on condemned prisoners and orphaned children.

‘Early form of vaccination, darling,’ said Helena. ‘And they all lived happily ever after.’

She also had Phillip Boucherett, former protégé of the great Isaac Newton, as a regular guest at court. There he was happy to impart what Nightingale is pleased to call ‘the forms and wisdoms’ of magic to others in her circle – male and female.

‘Of course,’ said Helena, ‘in those days your lot were hardly what you’d call a reputable bunch.’

According to Lady Helena, the Folly at that time had been reduced to a bunch of quacks, grifters and near charlatans meeting at a floating coffee house moored outside Somerset House. The true intellectual heirs of The Second Principia grew out of Caroline’s salons and later those of Elizabeth Montague and her fellow bluestockings.

They called themselves La Société de la Rose – The Society of the Rose.

‘Why was that?’ I asked.

‘I have no idea,’ said Lady Helena.

But this alliance of posh women and pushy middle class entrepreneurs wasn’t going to last. By the end of the century the need for an organised response to all things magical had become obvious to the state – even one as cheerfully laissez-faire and corrupt as the British.

The Scottish led the way, with many from the famed Edinburgh Club arriving in London. And, by the 1760’s, they were calling themselves practitioners, greasing up their patrons and hoovering up the cash.

‘As soon as they got a whiff of respectability they couldn’t dump the women fast enough,’ said Lady Helena. Being a female practitioner became as disreputable as being a female . . . well, anything not connected with maintaining a household. The men moved into their brand new club house on Russell Square and slammed the door in the face of the women following behind.

Actually, I had noticed that the Folly’s lecture hall had a separate ‘Ladies Gallery’ which you reach via a back passage off the east staircase. Presumably it was there so proud mothers, sisters and wives could watch their menfolk demonstrate particularly clever new formae or spells. There was a discreet brass plaque and everything.

I decided not to mention this.

‘Women carried on “practising”,’ said Lady Helena, ‘just as they carried on composing, painting and all the other professions from which history has erased them. Mother taught daughter, who passed on the skills through the generations – just as women have always had to do. My mother petitioned the War Office to be allowed to serve. Do you know what they said?’

I admitted that I did not.

‘Nothing,’ said Lady Helena. ‘Not even a polite “piss off.” It’s no wonder she buggered off to Kenya, a new country with new possibilities.’

‘Did she practise in Kenya?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Lady Helena, ‘Mum was so good at that point that she didn’t have to practise.’

‘And you?’

‘I was mother’s little helper,’ said Lady Helena. ‘We used to find wounded animals and nurse them back to health.’

‘Using magic,’ I asked, trying to be casual.

‘That would be telling,’ said Lady Helena. ‘Although if you really want to know, I’m sure we can come to some sort of arrangement.’

She’d been working towards this, I realised, dangling her information in front of us in the hope that we’d bite. I was willing to bet cash money that she had known all about the Isaacs and the Folly and probably about Nightingale before she so much as set foot in Belgravia nick. We’d been outplayed. But that’s the beauty of being the police – you get to cheat.

‘First you’re going to tell me what your interest in Reynard Fossman is,’ I said. ‘Then I might go to talk my governor about how we’re going to sort this out.’