The Anatomy Of Ghosts

17

When Holdsworth had finished with Tom Turdman, he gave the little brown man another of her ladyship’s shillings and strolled up to the marketplace. He did not know what to do. He did not want to drink, for his head was already aching. He did not want to sit in the combination room at Jerusalem. Most of all he did not want to think about a wound the size of a penny on a woman’s temple.

It was as if the weather in the hot, restless streets had transferred itself to the interior of his head. The marketplace was full of drunken people quarrelling, gambling, embracing, singing, vomiting and sleeping. At the corner of the Corn Market and the Garden Market, a vicious little fight was in progress between three townsmen and four undergraduates.

He tried to conjure up Maria’s face but he could not remember what she looked like. She was reduced to an aching absence, like an amputated limb. But, in contrast, it was all too easy to visualize Elinor Carbury. Even thinking about the Master’s wife seemed a form of disloyalty to poor, drowned Maria.

Holdsworth plunged into a dark and narrow street running to the south. Out of necessity he walked slowly. There were fewer people here and fewer lights, but the buildings pressed in on either side and the air seemed no cooler. The alley was cobbled, with a gully running down the middle. The stench was very bad. Heaps of refuse oozed across the footpath. There was a constant pattering and scuffling of rats, and every now and then he glimpsed their scurrying long-tailed shadows.

The trouble was, he told himself, he had been sent to Cambridge to talk reason to Frank Oldershaw, and in the event he had failed to say anything at all to him. He had also been engaged to find a ghost and instead he had found a dead woman with a wound on her head.

A wound like Maria’s?

But the Jerusalem authorities, certainly Richardson and Mepal, had decided not to make public the injury to Mrs Whichcote. The most likely explanation was the merely venal one, that the college had decided for the sake of its own reputation that it would be better to minimize any gossip about Sylvia Whichcote’s death. It did not necessarily follow that her death had been anything other than suicide. The wound might have been caused by her plunging into the pond, and perhaps hitting her head on a stone. Or, in her journey towards the college through these ill-lit and ill-paved streets, she might have slipped and fallen; indeed, it would have been strange if she had not. Nor could the night-soil man be considered a reliable witness. It did not take long for a man to learn that the more sensational a story, the more attention the teller of it earned.

A wound the size of a penny piece: the phrase repeated itself in his mind like a curse.

More by luck than good judgement, Holdsworth discovered that he had navigated his way through the narrow lanes and emerged into an open space shaped like an axe-head. He recognized it from his walk earlier in the day as the Beast Market. Along its southern side ran Bird Bolt Lane. If he turned left, he would be back at Jerusalem within a few minutes.

Dear God, even here the strange, unseasonable heat was terrible. It tampered with the very fibre of his being. It stripped away the defences of his reason. Now, in a sudden and hideous reversal, he could not stop his mind imagining the cool white skin of Elinor Carbury.

The size of a penny piece, he muttered aloud, a penny piece. It was if that damned wound, whether Sylvia’s or Maria’s, was a key. The key unlocked a door inside him that was better left fastened for all eternity. If he let the door open, God alone knew what might come out.

He wanted a woman now, for the first time in months, almost any woman, but he wanted Elinor most of all. She was no beauty, or not as the world estimated such things, but she had something stronger than beauty, a quality as much of mind as of body. God forgive him, but he did want her, and he could not deny it.

He saw Elinor’s hand on the gate of the Master’s Garden. He remembered how it had trembled slightly under his touch, and also the way she had caught her breath as if he had pricked her with a pin, just before she turned and walked away.

But what if she had stayed? If she had allowed her hand to remain beneath his? And what if they met again in the garden, and by night. Tonight. He thought of Elinor’s smooth fingers running up his arm and then -

Real footsteps destroyed the sweet illusion; the dream became instantly insubstantial and tawdry, revealed for what it was, a mere lubricious fancy.

The size of a penny piece. Oh, Maria, forgive me.

Someone was coming down the lane from the direction of Jerusalem. Holdsworth drew back into the shadow of a clump of trees and shrubs on the corner of the market. At this time of night, you never knew who might be abroad. And here, on the fringes of the town, the conditions were well suited to robbery. On the other side of the lane was the Leys, the stretch of unenclosed fields and marshy waste that bordered the town on the south.

Forgive me.

A lamp burned feebly above the doorway of a building on the opposite corner of the market, illuminating a few yards of the paved footpath. As Holdsworth watched, a small, stout man walked slowly into the patch of light and paused. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking towards the darkness on the other side of the road.

Not looking? Showing himself?

There were other, lighter footsteps. A woman crossed the road towards the man. She must have been sheltering in or near the Leys. She stood beside him, their heads close together. They had a short conversation, conducted in whispers. The man took the woman’s chin and tilted her face so he could see it in the light. Holdsworth felt a twinge of envy: it was quite clear what they were discussing. Coins chinked. Then the woman moved away from the lamplight. The man waited. He looked up and down the lane, turning his head, which allowed Holdsworth a glimpse of his profile.

It was young Mr Archdale. Holdsworth’s envy turned to disgust. So that was how you found yourself a whore. You showed yourself under the light in the Beast Market and waited for one to come to you, a moth to your candle. If he stayed here, if he waited under the light, Holdsworth could find himself a whore of his own. Had he come to this, he wondered, that he lusted after such pleasures? A grieving widower at least retained a little dignity. But surely a man who paid to fornicate in the dark had none?

Harry Archdale walked quickly over the road. In hot pursuit of the last favours, he plunged into the Leys, moving deeper and deeper into the darkness that had already swallowed up his whore.

Forgive me.

Few people found it easy to sleep that night. There was a storm coming.

When Mr Richardson left Sir Charles Archdale at the Blue Boar after supper, he could not bear to return immediately to college but walked aimlessly through the streets. The unnatural heat made him itchy, and he scratched himself as he walked, especially under his wig. The air was particularly bad – he sniffed and caught a trace of the foul and familiar stench of tanning hides.

It had not been an agreeable evening – Sir Charles was overbearing by nature, and enjoyed the sound of his own voice. He also disliked what he had heard about a fatality at Jerusalem, and the tutor had been obliged to handle him carefully. But now it was over, Richardson still could not relax. He had much to occupy his mind and he could not see his way clear.

As Richardson passed St Michael’s Church, he thought he heard someone murmur his name. Or rather, not his name but one like it. Richenda. He told himself he had taken too much wine, though now he felt suddenly and unpleasantly sober. He hurried on.

Tobias Soresby was walking through the streets like Mr Richardson, though unlike the tutor he was perfectly sober. His loping progress was erratically punctuated with tiny cracking sounds, as he tugged at his finger joints. The sizar was trying with growing desperation to weigh up the pros and cons of a decision so complex and so momentous that it frightened him. He had heard today that Mr Miskin might soon resign the Rosington Fellowship. That was most unexpected. It might change everything.

In his wanderings Soresby passed the little house in Trumpington Street where Mrs Phear was working by candlelight at her tapestry showing the destruction of Sodom, or possibly Gomorrah. When her eyes grew tired, she summoned Dorcas, checked the bolts and locks on doors and windows, and prepared herself for bed. But after she had blown out the candle, Mrs Phear could not sleep. She too had a great deal on her mind. Above all she was worried about Philip Whichcote. She did not want to worry about him but had long ago resigned herself to the fact that she had no choice in the matter. If she had had a child of her own it might have been different. She blamed Sylvia above all for Philip’s troubles.

Mrs Phear had thought everything would be better with the woman dead, but in the event everything was worse.

On the floor above her mistress’s bedchamber, Dorcas undressed herself and lay down on her bed. She was completely naked. The sweat poured off her. Her room was immediately under the roof, and all the heat of the day seemed to have gathered there.

Dorcas said the Lord’s Prayer in the usual way and then again, backward, just to be on the safe side. In her left hand she held a corm of garlic, which a gypsy in the market had told her was an infallible specific against ghosts.

In February they had laid Tabitha Skinner on the bed next to Dorcas’s and drawn the blanket over her head. Dorcas had spent a wakeful night with a dead girl. Everyone knew that the soul lingered near its earthly habitation until the body was consigned to a Christian burial. And in cases like Tabitha’s, where the circumstances surrounding her death were sinful, the soul might linger much longer in the place where its body had been.

And now when she did sleep, Dorcas sometimes dreamed that the girl pushed aside the blanket, sat up in bed and talked to her. Sometimes Tabitha talked when Dorcas was awake. But Dorcas could never make out what she was saying. Once she had a nightmare in which Tabitha got out of her bed and climbed into Dorcas’s. On that occasion, Dorcas woke up screaming, and Mrs Phear came upstairs and whipped her.

Dorcas prayed, but it did not help. The memory of Tabitha, alive and dead, lingered like a bad smell, and so did the dreadful heat. She lay there with her right hand resting between her legs and wondered exactly what they had done to Tabitha.

‘Tab?’ she whispered into the darkness. ‘Tab? Go away now, please, there’s a good girl.’

Mulgrave, who lived not far away from Lambourne House in a cottage backing on to the castle ditch, dozed in his chair after a late supper. He had spent much of the evening reckoning up his worth – the house he lived in, several hundred pounds in the bank, and nearly as much again in gilts.

He made money from catering to the whims of wealthy puppies, just as Tom Turdman made money from shit. It was tiresome work but lucrative. On the borders of waking and sleeping, he turned over in his mind a scheme to reduce his labour while increasing his profit. After all, bankers and lawyers had their clerks, tradesmen their apprentices and beneficed clergy their curates. Why should a gyp be any different?

In Dr Jermyn’s house in Barnwell, Frank Oldershaw lay on his back in his chamber. He was snoring. After the outbreak in the morning, Jermyn had ordered the attendant to dose him thoroughly with laudanum. Every hour the porter unlocked the door and shone a lantern on his face to make sure he was still there and still breathing.

Harry Archdale was in the Leys. He had taken hardly a drop of wine since dinner. He had finished working through his notes for the Vauden Medal, together with Soresby’s detailed commentary on it. Rather to his own surprise, he was confident that he had sufficiently mastered it to acquit himself respectably under examination by his Uncle Charles, whose erudition was more commonly admired than displayed. He doubted that the results would fool Mr Richardson, but that did not concern him. Ricky would not want to upset Sir Charles any more than Archdale did.

He had discovered that the combination of study and unaccustomed sobriety had invigorated him quite remarkably. The girl said she was called Chloe, a likely story, but she knew her business well enough. He pushed her up against a tree and dealt with her manfully – he fancied that she would not soon forget the vigorous thrusts of his mighty membrum virile. Archdale wore his armour for the encounter, for in his way he was a prudent youth, though there was no denying the protection affected the pleasure of an amorous engagement. But he would not need his armour at the Holy Ghost Club because the girl there would be a virgin.

Only a virgin was suitable for the occasion. It was, after all, the Holy Ghost Club, and the Holy Ghost insisted on a virgin. That was the point of the whole thing.

In the Master’s Lodge at Jerusalem, Ben was dismissed for the night. He left college and went to his room in Vauden Alley, hard by the northern wall of Jerusalem.

Elinor Carbury’s maid, Susan, the only servant who slept in college, went to her attic bedroom and bolted the door. She opened her box. She took out the special clothes she wore on her days out and laid them one by one on the bed. She kneeled before them, holding up the candle so she could see them better.

At last she made her choice. She chose the velvet cloak that Mrs Carbury had given her. It was her favourite, the most magnificent thing she owned, and looked so neat and fresh it might have been delivered but yesterday from Mr Trotter’s shop in St Mary’s Lane. Despite the warmth of the evening, she draped it around her shoulders. The rich, soft folds fell to the floor, enveloping her. She breathed deeply, sucking in their smell, absorbing the cloak’s essence and making it a part of her.

She closed her eyes, stroked the fabric and thought of Ben.

Elinor Carbury also went to her bedchamber and also did not sleep. She sat in the darkness in her chair and listened to the sounds around her. She heard footsteps on the landing, and she knew which ones were Holdsworth’s. She tried to persuade herself that it was unprofitable to look back at one’s mistakes, in marriage as in all else. One must make the best of things. After all, if one had a roof over one’s head and food on one’s plate, there was no need to despair. The condition she feared above all was poverty.

She wondered what Sylvia Whichcote would have thought of Holdsworth, and he of her. Would she have enchanted him, as she had so many men? Holdsworth was clearly a man of parts and had some elements of cultivation about him. However, there was a ruthlessness about him, a sense that it didn’t much matter whether he walked round an obstacle in life or simply kicked it out of his way. Perhaps the death of his wife and son had made him sour and fanatical. All in all, Elinor was not entirely comfortable with him as her guest, or even with him at Jerusalem. She wondered whether there was something she might say to Lady Anne that would shorten his stay at the Master’s Lodge. On the other hand, she didn’t want him to go.

Time passed. The clocks on colleges and churches rang the quarters. The air grew hotter and stuffier. It was not until well after midnight that the first heavy drops of rain fell on warm lead on old roofs, on dusty, stinking streets, on parched gardens and on those few people still abroad.

Beyond the river, in Lambourne House on Chesterton Lane, Philip Whichcote was still wide awake. He was sitting at his desk in the study. The pile of papers on top seemed to have grown larger and more confused than earlier in the day, as though the bills had been breeding among themselves with feckless enthusiasm during his absence.

The rain pattered against the window. Whichcote shouted for his footboy, who was dozing on a chair in the hall. The child stumbled into the room, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Augustus was such a grand name for such an insignificant boy.

‘Bring more candles. Stay a moment – how old are you?’

‘Thirteen, your honour.’ Augustus dropped his eyes. ‘Well, in September, anyway.’

‘Come here. Stand before me.’

Augustus advanced slowly towards him, coming to a halt when he was four feet away from his master. Whichcote turned his chair around so they were facing one another. He looked up at the scrawny child before him. The boy was trembling slightly. He expected a blow.

‘How long have you been part of my household?’

‘Nearly nine months, sir.’

‘You wish to remain in my employ?’

‘Oh yes, your honour. If you please. There’s eight of us at home, you see, and Ma can’t feed us all.’ There was a note of panic in the boy’s voice. ‘I like my position, truly, sir. I hope I give satisfaction.’

‘That remains to be seen. Fetch the candles now.’

When the boy returned, Whichcote ordered him to light him upstairs. On the landing, he unlocked the door to Sylvia’s apartments. Once he was inside, he told the boy to put down the candles and go away. When he was alone he wandered from room to room with a candle in his hand. He would put Sylvia’s furniture up for auction on Monday. It would send a signal that he was short of money to his creditors but it couldn’t be helped. At least he would have something in hand and he wouldn’t have to look at that damned bedstead any longer.

Sylvia had kept secrets from him. He knew that now. So she might have hidden valuables from him. It was worth making absolutely sure that he had overlooked nothing – a ring, perhaps, a few guineas; anything would help.

He opened the bureau and set the candlestick on the flap. He stretched out his hand towards the back of the recess. In the poor light he misjudged the distance. His fingertips jarred against the mounting that held the little drawers and pigeonholes. He felt it give a little at his touch. He took out one of the drawers and tugged at the mounting. It moved smoothly away from the back of the bureau.

Whichcote lifted it out and set it on the floor. He shone the candlelight into the wide, shallow space behind it and ran his fingers along. To his disappointment, there was nothing but powdery dust. He came to the corner and felt the outline of a small, shallow recess in the side of the desk. There was something inside it.

He almost upset the candle in his urgency. He took out a scrap of yellowing paper, folded into a little parcel. Dear God, he thought, a banknote, please let it be a banknote. But as he turned it over in his shaking hands, something sharp stabbed his finger and he cried out, as much in surprise as in pain. A rusty pin was attached to the paper.

Holding it close to the candle flame, he unfolded the sheet completely. The pin held in place a lock of dark, wiry hair. Sylvia had labelled it My Dearest Philip.

To his consternation, Whichcote felt his eyes filling with tears. It was a strange and uncomfortable thought that this was what Sylvia had hidden in her most secret place, carefully wrapped away for a future that had not come to pass. He remembered now that when he had wooed her, he had begged a lock of her own hair, that he had gone down on bended knee to do so, and that she had blushed and after long argument agreed to his request. And she had asked for one of his in return.

He folded the paper carefully and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket. He said softly, ‘Sylvia?’

The flame of the candle flickered. There was a faint sound from the bedroom. A sigh? A moan of pain, instantly suppressed.

Nonsense. Nothing but wind and rain in the chimney and the rustle of water in the downpipe outside the window.

He sucked his finger where the pin had pricked it. The wound was deeper than he had thought. His blood was salty. What had he done with the lock of hair she had given him? He had no idea.

Still with the finger in his mouth, he carried the candle to the bedroom door. He stood in the doorway and stared at the shadowy outlines of the great bedstead.

A cage of wood, he thought, a prison for shadows and secrets.

‘Sylvia?’ he whispered. ‘Sylvia? Is that you?’