from The Heretics’ Temple
by Gabriella Håkansson
translated by Fiona Graham
Following on the heels of its predecessor, the well-received Aldermanns arvinge (Aldermann’s Heir), Gabriella Håkansson's Kättarnas tempel (The Heretics’ Temple) takes us on a dizzying tour of Regency London and a society juddering into the modern world. William Aldermann, orphaned heir to enormous (albeit ill-gotten) wealth, finds himself charged with the responsibility of reviving the Society of Dilettanti. This (fictionalised) secret society, formerly led by his father, promotes hedonism in the name of pursuing antiquity’s ideals.
The novel opens with William Aldermann discovering the blueprints for his father’s great ambition: to create a museum to enlighten society, a so-called 'temple to truth'. However, lacking the funds to put such a grandiose plan into action, his tutor, the wily libertine Josias Gebhardt, decides to take matters into his own hands. This excerpt follows Gebhardt as he wanders through London’s slums, seeking financial counsel from the head of the city's illegal cadaver trade. This culminates in an evening at the macabre 'Bishop's Bone House', the secret watering hole of London's criminal underground.
A stylistic tour de force, Håkansson’s captivating prose and flair for memorable details draw the reader along on an immersive journey through London’s streets and society. So meticulously researched are Håkansson's depictions of London that fans of the novels have held walking tours through the capital based solely on her books.
from The Heretics’ Temple
Chapter XI: The Bishop’s Bone House
At the other end of the corridor, William had entered into a conversation with Mrs Clermont. The mere tone of his voice conveyed despair. Gebhardt could bear it no longer. It was vital to staunch the flow of bile before his entire body metamorphosed into a cistern brimming with poison. He sat up in bed. How would he have acted if the financial issue had pertained to his personal assets rather than William’s, what would he have done to lay his hands on lucre?
Two obvious answers came instantly to mind. He would have tackled the financial crisis by seeking out Dr Wolfe, king of the illegal cadaver trade, and he would have sought to halt the life-threatening secretion of bile by setting off to commune with the dead – which, in Gebhardt’s circles, signified drinking oneself into a stupor.
Moving purposefully, Gebhardt finally emerged from his bed and donned his trousers, shirt and greatcoat. Then he pulled out his valise, from which he extracted the old, worn cloth bags. With these tied neatly around his boots and a capacious, dark-green sou’wester on his head, he then made a surreptitious exit from the Temple. A single light was still burning in the white room on the third floor, behind whose lace curtains one could glimpse a slender female figure with her hair down. It was Jenny Cibber. The corner of Gebhardt’s mouth twitched.
Pulling the sou’wester down over his forehead, he slunk with lowered head along Harley Street. The fog was dense and came drifting in chilly swathes from the royal parks south of Oxford Street. Turning off by Judge Atlay’s house at number 36, he followed an old cattle track that cut straight across the neighbourhood, and emerged into Mansfield Street. He looked around. Down on Cavendish Square, a few night-watchmen were patrolling by the light of a row of yellow gas lamps. These men were considerably younger than the ancient topers who stood guard over Portland Place: above all, they were armed with both cudgels and cutlasses. Best be cautious.
He turned off into Duchess Street and passed the crossroads to Charlotte Street. Here, the sudden appearance of a hackney carriage obliged him to nip swiftly into a well-lit Portland Street, until he was able to slink further eastward under cover of darkness along Mortimer Street. Presently the thoroughfare changed its name to Charles Street. Now there were only a few more streets to go to Tottenham Court Road. The end goal of Gebhardt’s nocturnal wanderings was the slum of St Giles in the Fields. That was where he rented his two rooms and kept his few belongings. That was where his acquaintances were to be found. The horribly squalid slums between the parish church of St Giles, Great Russell Street and the Seven Dials junction were sometimes called ‘the Holy Land’. One of the many reasons for the district’s ill-fame was the fact that it accommodated over seven hundred taverns within an area barely larger than a racecourse. Yet the most spectacular hostelry of them all was little known. Very few knew how to find it, and admission was reserved for the very crème de la crème of the criminal classes. Gebhardt had once been a regular, as Dr Wolfe still was.
Gebhardt’s plan was to enter the slums through a subterranean passage of ill repute next to the British Museum, but on approaching Bedford Square after a few more minutes’ walk, he found the square packed with mounted men from the Royal Horse Guard, who were keeping watch over the residence of the Conservative Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon. He recalled that a disorderly rabble had stormed the square some weeks previously and shattered the windows of the Lord Chancellor’s house in protest against the new protectionist Corn Laws. These laws set the price of wheat and other types of grain at such levels that ordinary folk were unable to buy bread, far less slake their thirst with ale or spirits. Not that bread had been affordable before, but now the war was over and people had justifiable expectations of better days.
Eyeing the uniformed guards bitterly, Gebhardt put the tunnel in Great Russell Street out of his mind. It was too risky. Instead, he continued down Tottenham Court Road, following the long thoroughfare southward to a brightly lit Oxford Street. Hawkers and vagabonds pressed together in large clusters under the street lamps, while, along the more shadowy house fronts, tavern-goers and nocturnal wanderers slipped in and out of gin-shops. At every crossroads, there were barrows teeming with smoked sausages and fish, not all of them necessarily very fresh – but what did that matter? In defiance of the night noise abatement laws, some bold vendors were touting their wares loudly in the gloom, while others contented themselves with setting out cardboard signs that became increasingly crooked and illegible in the persistent rain. There were opium sellers and narcotics pedlars too, Chinese men in broad-brimmed hats, with long pigtails, and lone individuals bearing the marks of various institutions’ disciplinary measures. Anxious to avoid being recognised, Gebhardt pulled his sou’wester down even further over his forehead and hurried on to the High Street before slinking into a foul-smelling alley between the three-storey houses at numbers 9 and 10, from which another quick march brought him to the Holy Land’s notorious Church Lane.
The most striking difference between St Giles and other London neighbourhoods was the dark. Although one could find unlit alleys or medieval passageways even down in the City or in the West End, the darkness in such places never lasted for long and was never as absolute as in the slums. There would always be a light at a door or an oil lamp somewhere, but lighting within the Holy Land was confined to the three main streets running from west to east, while the rest of the densely populated area was as dark as a deserted village.
Gebhardt walked eastward along Church Lane. It was a Friday evening and crowds of people were out and about, despite the rain and the late hour. Listless men loitered on the steps up to every single doorway. They were industrial workers back from the factories north of the district, intent on killing their free time and blotting out the painful nullity of their existence with intoxicants of all kinds. Paper cones and brown bottles lay scattered here and there around them. The labels included laudanum, oil of vitriol, wormwood, foxglove extract, nutmeg, indeed, more or less any substance that had a numbing effect on the human constitution or affected it in some other peculiar way. Most of these labels were fictitious, the contents being cheap essence of valerian. Striding past them with his face averted, Gebhardt pondered whether to send a messenger in search of Wolfe. There was probably no need. The man was a drunken sot by nature and he rarely missed his Saturday drinking bout […]
Pulling the curtains aside, she made a sweeping gesture with her gloved arm.
‘Welcome to the Bishop’s Bone House, Mr Gebhardt. May you regale yourself right royally!’
A large, round room with lofty Gothic vaulting was revealed. Flaming torches illuminated the walls, which were covered in soot and faded medieval graffiti. Crowded around small coffee-house tables, some fifty men were absorbed in games of cards or dice. Bellowing guffaws were followed by hissed oaths and sudden concentrated silences each time a new hand of cards was dealt. Hardly anyone raised their eyes when Gebhardt elbowed his way past. It was not done to stare at strangers. The clientele in this vaulted cellar was of the type that had no desire to be recognised. Fisticuffs were frequent; an intrusive stare or an inappropriate expression could be taken as an insult, igniting pitched battles that raged for hours. Bloody skirmishes were nothing out of the ordinary, and although everyone was relieved of their weapons before being allowed inside, disfigured corpses had to be dragged outside at least once a month.
The fact that the tall newcomer was on his way to the inner sanctum also muted people’s curiosity. Clearly his status was higher than theirs, and it was best to mind one’s own business anyway. Another drapery was pulled aside, whereupon Gebhardt found himself in the innermost chamber, known as the Bishop’s Ballroom. The guests here, of whom there were far fewer than in the anteroom, reputedly belonged to the uppermost echelons of the criminal underworld’s elite. The ambience here was reminiscent of the clubs on the Strand. A one-armed pianist, sporting an officer’s redcoat that had survived the Napoleonic Wars, sat tinkling the keys of a pianoforte, while three boys in gilded livery and white gloves took the guests’ orders. The bar was built out of about a hundred crates of spirits, stacked to form a rectangular oblong counter. The bottles, straight out of their packaging, still bore the unbroken seal of the East India Company.
‘Ex fonte’ – straight from the source – was the motto of this underground establishment, which took great pride in offering the most extensive range of distilled beverages in the whole of London.
Yet that was not its principal attraction.
The most remarkable feature of the Bishop’s Bone House was its decor. The entire rear wall of this inner chamber, from floor to ceiling, was made up of parts of human skeletons: to be more precise, of human thighbones, sorted and tightly stacked, with the balls of the hip joints facing outwards. On the floor, oriental arabesques had been fashioned from knucklebones and toe joints set between black granite flagstones. On the ceiling and the pillars that formed the corners of the room, the charnel carnival continued in the form of garlands and ornamentation made up of various parts of the human skeleton, and if you looked up at the ceiling, a truly spectacular sight met your eyes. At first sight, the round white domes that bedecked the ceiling resembled faded terracotta tiling of the kind found in southern Italy. A closer look revealed each roundel to be a human cranium. Hundreds of skulls were packed tightly together like fish scales, forming a cup-like cupola of crania. It was rumoured that the contents of the ossuary had once included mummified cadavers, but of these no trace now remained. There was, however, a large royal throne atop a marble sarcophagus by the back wall. Once used as a prop in a Shakespeare play performed at the Little Theatre, it was known as the Bishop’s Cathedra. This imposing throne was flanked by a pair of candelabra fashioned from bones. When the Bishop was in, the candles were lit; when he was out, they were extinguished. They were currently extinguished, and the man in question was rumoured to be serving a month’s sentence at King’s Bench Prison, Southwark, for the ravishment of a young woman, although no one knew for sure.
Gebhardt looked around him. To his great disappointment, Dr Wolfe was nowhere in sight. He seated himself on a mauve fauteuil that had once adorned Hans Sloane’s Chelsea residence and which, like all the other furnishings, was a premium stolen good. He tilted his head back. The gloomy inscription from the Gothic porch echoed in his head. Were his legs dried out, was his flesh worn out – or was it the bile that was making him feel so weak?
There was no point in cudgelling his brains. The medicine was right there in front of him. Like most men of his generation, Gebhardt believed that the best remedy for melancholia, a surfeit of black bile, was to dilute the pernicious fluid with a thinner liquid, so that it could be pissed out. Many had tried bloodletting, taking the waters, and a variety of medicines – the bolder ones had even tried electricity – but it was his personal conviction that there was only one reliable treatment for melancholy. Alcohol.
He beckoned a serving-lad over and ordered a tot of chocolate-brown Jamaica rum. The first draught burned his throat raw, while his stomach contracted in pain.
‘To blazes with this fire-water!’ he muttered through clenched teeth.
The rest went down like water. He let his gaze wander over the stacked bones. In the Middle Ages, every church in England had had its own charnel house or ossuary. The Catholics, fond of reminding people about the ephemeral nature of life, had attained aesthetic perfection in their worship of death, but with the Reformation, the Church had distanced itself from the cult of cadavers and closed the charnel houses.
Gebhardt downed another glass of rum. The gods only knew he had little enough fondness for the Papists, they were nothing but Protestants in long gowns. All Christians were in reality nothing but Communion-host-eating Jews with a fear of father figures, but the worship of relics and sacred figurines went back to the time of Plato – indeed, to long before him – and it was one of the few remaining genuinely religious aspects of Christianity. That was why he appreciated the stacked skeletons and the morbid atmosphere in the Bishop’s Bone House. They brought him closer to the original source; they made him feel like part of history.
Communing with the dead was not merely an idiomatic expression as far as Gebhardt was concerned. In this underworld, he drew strength from the dead. While they might not be speaking to him directly, he could nonetheless sense their presence.
‘Play!’ he yelled at the pianist. ‘Play!’
‘What would you like to hear, Milord?’ replied the one-armed man in a servile tone.
‘Van Beethoven, who else? Play something by Van Beethoven!’
Wordlessly, the pianist went through his repertoire. Haydn, Schubert, Rossini and Field. At weekends he played at variety theatres and public ballrooms, and he’d learned the popular pieces that were most in demand, but Van Beethoven? That was a very unusual request.
Then it came to him.
‘How about number 17?’
‘Capital!’ Gebhardt exclaimed.
He had no idea what number 17 might be, but that was of no consequence. He might as well enjoy a concert while waiting for Wolfe, so he made a winding motion with his hand to indicate that the pianist should start playing. The one-armed man beckoned over one of the serving-boys, who removed his gloves, sat down and began to belabour the pianoforte’s lower registers with tone-deaf enthusiasm. Together, they performed something purporting to be Van Beethoven’s pianoforte sonata number 17 in D minor.
It wasn’t long before Gebhardt stood up and started waving his arms in dissatisfaction.
‘Schneller, schneller! More tempo, damn your eyes!’
The pianist bent over the pianoforte, pouring the very depths of his soul into the piece. The notes flooded the Bone House. Tranquil, flowing phrases exploded into violent cascades, hammering tremolos rose into monomaniacal eruptions. Gebhardt saw before him vast masses of water rushing down long flights of steps, whereupon they turned into coins. Again and again, the water issued forth as if in perpetual motion. The coins clinked and glittered, and by the beginning of the allegretto passage in the third movement, the music had filled Gebhardt with so much gnosis that he was overwhelmed by the desire to dance. Lifting his arms above his head, he began to clap in time with the music while his legs weaved unsteadily over the floor in a wild gavotte.
‘Hell and damnation, let us dance away all melancholy!’ he yelled at the onlookers, who immediately started to bang their glasses on the table tops.
Soon the whole crypt was like a mighty, thundering organ. The beats became one with his bones, his bones became one with his flesh, and when the inevitable happened and Gebhardt tripped and fell over onto the makeshift bar, knocking over ten or so unopened bottles with his wildly waving arms, no one took him to task. The Bone House was a place where you could drink yourself senseless without incurring a reprimand. The Bone House was a sanatorium for the spiritually tormented.
Kättarnas tempel
Albert Bonniers förlag, 2014, 500 pages.
Foreign rights: the author.
We are grateful to Gabriella Håkansson and Albert Bonniers förlag for permission to publish this translated extract.
Gabriella Håkansson made her literary debut in 1997, with the much-acclaimed Operation B. Aldermanns Arvinge (Aldermann's Heir), her epic novel about Regency London, was reviewed in SBR 2014:1, and a translated excerpt from the same novel was published in the same issue. Kättarnas tempel was reviewed in SBR 2015:1.
Fiona Graham is a translator and editor working from Swedish, Dutch, German and other languages. Her translation of Elin Anna Labba’s August Prize-winning The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow was published in late 2023 at University of Minnesota Press.