The Anatomy Of Ghosts

31

On Thursday morning, Whichcote had Augustus shave him – the lad was surprisingly deft – and dressed with particular care. Appearances were important when they were all one had. With the footboy, now in his ill-fitting livery, behind him, he strolled across Cambridge, acknowledging the greetings of friends and acquaintances but avoiding conversation. By the time he reached the house in Trumpington Street, the clocks around them were striking eleven.

Dorcas showed him into the parlour.

‘He’s in Whitebeach,’ he said without preamble after the door closed. ‘It’s but four or five miles away from Cambridge.’

Mrs Phear said nothing. She sat down in her chair, an oddly graceful movement despite her small and dumpy figure. She motioned to him to sit and did not speak until he had done so.

‘How do you know?’

‘My footboy traced them. They’re putting up at a watermill the college owns. He’s with Holdsworth, and Mulgrave is in attendance. No sign of anyone else. Mrs Carbury visited them yesterday.’

‘No doubt Lady Anne wishes to know how her son does. And how is he? Was your boy able to form an opinion?’

‘He saw nothing of Mrs Carbury apart from her arrival and her departure. Afterwards he watched the garden, where Holdsworth and Mr Frank spent most of their time. But he was not close enough to hear what they were saying.’

‘So we know nothing except where they are, and who is with them.’ Mrs Phear nodded. ‘Well, that is something.’

‘We know a little more than that, ma’am.’ He hesitated. ‘Not know, exactly. It is merely the impression of a foolish boy. Yet he seems to have sharp eyes, and he is perhaps not entirely foolish. He said that Holdsworth and Mr Frank talked and talked into the evening and, as far as he could tell, the tenor of their conversation was entirely rational. There were no hysterical fits, no sudden movements, no shouting or weeping – in short, nothing to indicate that both parties were not as sane as you or I.’

‘You infer that Mr Frank is cured?’

‘It’s possible. Or, at the very least, on the road to recovery. And if Mrs Carbury reports as much to her ladyship -’

He broke off. They sat in silence for a moment. Whichcote caught the sound of movement somewhere in the house and a laugh, hastily smothered. Augustus and Dorcas were entertaining each other.

‘All this over a ghost,’ Mrs Phear said slowly. ‘Was there ever anything so ridiculous?’

‘It is not the ghost that is our difficulty, ma’am. It is what happened at the club.’

She frowned at him. ‘That is not entirely correct. We contrived something to deal with that, did we not? The difficulty came afterwards, and we know who was responsible for that.’

‘Sylvia,’ Whichcote said. ‘Will she never let me be? Did she not injure me enough when she was alive?’

As the days slipped by, Elinor allowed herself to hope that the worst was over. As soon as she reached Jerusalem after her visit to Whitebeach Mill, she had written to Lady Anne and sent the letter by express on Thursday morning. Lady Anne had written back the next day. She was overjoyed by the progress that Frank had made. She was graciously disposed to be appreciative of the efforts that the Carburys had made on his behalf. She enclosed a draft for fifty pounds on her Cambridge bankers to cover the new expenses that the Carburys had disbursed on her behalf.

Best of all, she had written as a postscript: ‘I am sensible of your labours on my behalf. You will find that I do not forget those who have served me, my dear.’

‘Very civil,’ Dr Carbury commented as he read the letter. ‘And the money is convenient, too.’ He looked at Elinor and smiled. ‘And now you must make yourself easy about the annuity her ladyship has promised you in her will. I do not think there can be any doubt about it now.’

Soresby called twice at the Master’s Lodge, by invitation, setting the seal on his defection from the Richardson party. He drank tea with Elinor, who found him gauche and silent at first. He was not used to the society of ladies and treated her with a respect so profound it was almost embarrassing. She tried to set him at his ease, however, and by the end of the second visit he had become almost sociable, displaying a quick, nervous intelligence which seemed all of a piece with his fluttering movements and cracking finger joints.

‘He will do,’ Carbury said afterwards. ‘His scholarship is not in doubt and he is no more of a scrub than Dirty Dick himself when he was a sizar.’

‘Mr Soresby told me he has been reading with Mr Archdale,’ Elinor said.

Carbury rubbed his hands together. ‘All the better. It will vex Mr Richardson. And Mr Archdale’s uncle will be pleased, while Soresby cultivates an acquaintance he may find useful in later life. If he can contrive to lay Mr Archdale under an obligation, so much the better.’

‘I had not set Mr Archdale down as a reading man, sir.’

‘Nor I – but a taste for learning can take root in most unexpected soil.’

For once they were almost cheerful in the Master’s Lodge, or at least tried to give each other the impression that they were. But Jermyn’s prognosis hung over them both like a shadow.

After breakfast on Monday, 12 June, Holdsworth walked into Cambridge with a satchel over his shoulder. He had decided to leave Frank to his own devices for a few hours. The boy was better, and one sign of this was that he chafed at Holdsworth’s constant presence. The answer was to give Frank a taste of independence – and, in doing so, to show that Holdsworth believed he was better.

Nevertheless, it was a risk. He did not know what he would find when he returned to the mill.

He had now been in Cambridge and its environs for two and a half weeks. The town was becoming familiar. In Bridge Street, he called at one or two shops to execute commissions that Mulgrave had given him. It was nearly half-past two before he turned in at the main gate of Jerusalem. As he entered Chapel Court he saw Mr Richardson walking under the arcade with Harry Archdale.

‘The forty-seventh proposition is generally held to be the most difficult in the first book,’ the tutor was saying. ‘But you will conquer it with application. It would be worth your while to -’ Seeing Holdsworth, he turned from Archdale. ‘My dear sir, how do you do? You have been sadly missed. Pray, will you take a turn in the garden with me? I have something most particular I wish to discuss with you. Mr Archdale and I have almost finished, and I shall be with you in a trice.’

After a flurry of bows, Richardson turned back to his pupil. ‘Yes, our own Mr Dow has written most illuminatingly on the trickier propositions of Euclid. You will find his little book in the library, and I should advise you to look over it before attempting the problem. And while we are about it, you cannot do better than consult Maclaurin for your algebra.’ He glanced at the chapel clock. ‘But I will not detain you any longer, Mr Archdale – I see it is nearly time for dinner.’

The undergraduate looked towards Holdsworth as if he wished to say something. But Richardson gave him no opportunity. He took Holdsworth by the arm and guided him down to the chapel arcade and out into the gardens beyond. As they were walking down the path towards the gate of the Fellows’ Garden, it began to rain. They sought shelter under the umbrella of the oriental plane. The rain was falling heavily now, but no drops of water penetrated the thick green canopy above their heads.

‘Have you heard the news?’ Richardson’s face had lost its customary urbanity; anger twisted his features. He rushed on without giving Holdsworth a chance to reply. ‘I had not thought it possible, even of Dr Carbury.’

‘Why? What’s he done?’

‘He has suborned one of my pupils. I can use no other word, sir. The Rosington Fellowship will soon become vacant, and he has offered it to Soresby of all people. But I have smoked him. It is clearly designed to buy Soresby’s loyalty. And the pity of it is, such a mean stratagem as that appears to have succeeded. One can hardly blame the poor fellow for accepting, I suppose. What is mere gratitude worth, after all, when it is weighed in the balance against so substantial a temptation as the Rosington?’

The shower lasted no more than three or four minutes and, as it exhausted its course, so did Mr Richardson exhaust his rage.

‘You must pardon the force with which I express myself,’ he said, touching Holdsworth’s sleeve. ‘It is foolish of me to let the matter rankle. But when we live cheek by jowl as we do here, it is not easy to keep a sense of proportion. But to have it reserved for a man who, however able, has not yet graduated as bachelor of arts is most irregular. I shudder to think what the other colleges are saying of us. But let us leave that aside – I wished to ask you about something of far more importance. It has been rumoured that you have been with Mr Frank Oldershaw. Is it true? How is the dear boy?’

‘I am afraid I cannot break a confidence,’ Holdsworth said, smiling.

‘Ah, so that’s the way the wind blows, eh? Well, wherever he is, I hope his health improves. You must let me know if I may be of service either to you or to him. And if you should chance to see him, pray give my compliments.’

The rain had stopped. The two men strolled slowly under the green shade of the tree in the direction of Chapel Court and New Building. Neither of them spoke. Over to the left there was a metallic rattling that continued for a few seconds and then stopped. It was the sound of iron-rimmed wheels rolling over flagstones. Tom Turdman was doing his rounds. The chapel bell began to toll.

‘Ah – dinner time. Do you dine with us, sir? You would be very welcome.’

‘Thank you, no,’ Holdsworth said. ‘By the by, and under quite a different head altogether, I wanted to ask you about Mrs Whichcote’s wound.’

‘Her wound?’ Richardson stopped, his eyebrows rising. ‘You have the advantage of me.’

‘When I talked to the night-soil man, he mentioned that there was a wound of some sort on her head. On the left temple.’

Richardson laughed. ‘What Tom referred to as a wound was no more than a slight discoloration. An old bruise, no doubt – perhaps the poor lady knocked her head on a beam a day or two before her death. How typical of the uneducated mind to make a melodrama from the most mundane circumstance.’

The Jericho was a brick outhouse that backed against the college boundary wall on the south side of the gardens. The door was at one end, raised about a yard above the ground, and with five stone steps leading up to it. There were no windows, only a line of long rectangular vents just below the eaves. Beyond the door and the steps was another lower door, as wide as the first but no more than four feet high. Both doors were open. Tom Turdman’s barrow stood near by.

Holdsworth went up the steps and stopped in the upper doorway. The chamber was empty. From below, however, came the sound of scraping, shuffling and spitting.

Along the right-hand wall ran a four-seater bench, each hole separated from its neighbour by a low partition that afforded the notion of privacy rather than its reality. Generations of undergraduates had scratched their initials and a selection of insults and obscenities into the wood.

The bell over the chapel continued to toll, calling members of the college to their dinner in hall.

As Holdsworth came out of the boghouse, Tom Turdman emerged from the lower door, hunching forward to duck under the low lintel. A heavy apron, soiled with excrement and urine, protected his clothes. He carried a bucket overflowing with ordure and scraps of newspaper, which he emptied into the barrow. In his other hand was a stained handkerchief, trimmed with lace. Whistling tunelessly, he pushed the handkerchief into the mouth of a little sack hanging from the handle of the barrow. He straightened and blew his nose between finger and thumb. He saw Holdsworth standing over him.

‘Are you later than usual?’ Holdsworth said.

‘I come when I can, sir.’ Tom knuckled his forehead in salute and turned back to the door of the cesspool chamber.

‘Wait. I wish to speak to you.’

‘Me?’ Tom repeated, sounding like a parrot and contriving to give the impression that he understood the word as much as a parrot would have done.

‘I want to ask you something.’

‘Best be getting on, sir. Always a rush on the Jericho after dinner.’ He gave another of his toothless grins. ‘You wouldn’t like to be down there when the young gentlemen is up above you, sir, upon my honour you wouldn’t.’

Holdsworth jingled a handful of change in his pocket. ‘About your discovery in the Long Pond.’

‘The ghost that murdered herself, sir?’

‘Damn it, man, she did not murder herself and she was not a ghost and nor is she now. She was a woman of flesh and blood who had the misfortune to fall in the water and drown.’

‘If you say so, sir.’

‘I do say so. Now listen to me: when we talked in the Angel, you told me that when you found the body your first thought was that it was Mrs Carbury because she was the only woman who slept in college.’

‘There’s two of them.’

‘What?’

‘Her maid sleeps in too.’ Tom Turdman chuckled. ‘Ain’t natural, sir, is it? Two women, all these men.’

‘Listen: you said it wasn’t her outside, not this time. So you mean to tell me that Mrs Carbury sometimes walks out in the garden very early in the morning? At night, even?’

Tom shuffled nearer the low doorway, his bucket clanking. He did not look at Holdsworth.

‘Well? Is that the case or is it not?’

The night-soil man glanced at Holdsworth and then away. ‘Sometimes, maybe.’

‘Does she know you see her?’

The man shrugged.

‘Surely she must hear your wheels?’

‘I ain’t always moving around, sir. Sometimes I just stand somewhere and rest a bit.’

‘So you smoke a pipe or have a nip of something to warm you or fall into a doze? Very likely. And where do you do this?’

Tom Turdman waved vaguely, his hand describing an irregular arc that took in most of the college. ‘Ain’t particular, sir. All I ask is a bit of shelter from the weather, a bit of quiet.’

‘Under that big tree by the pond, perhaps?’

Tom nodded.

‘And where have you seen Mrs Carbury?’

‘In the Master’s Garden, sir, walking up and down. Or sometimes she used to come out here. Through that gate on t’other side of bridge.’ He nodded towards the gate with the iron grille through which Holdsworth’s fingers touched Elinor Carbury’s. ‘Lady can’t sleep, I reckon.’

Holdsworth took a handful of coppers from his pocket. ‘Used to? Does she no longer walk abroad at night?’

‘Don’t know, do I, sir? All I know is what I see with my eyes. And hear with my ears. And I ain’t heard her or seen her for weeks. Not that I’ve been looking out for her, though. Got my work to do, haven’t I? So for all I know she might be walking here still. Or maybe the lady sleeps more soundly now.’

Holdsworth held out his hand. Tom Turdman stared at the coins.

‘I saw them both, one time,’ he said.

‘What? Who?’

The night-soil man wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘The Master’s lady, sir. She was with the one that died, the ghost.’

‘When was this?’ Holdsworth snapped.

Tom Turdman stared up at him with frightened eyes. ‘Months ago, sir. Before Christmas, before the pretty one died. They were walking in the garden under the moon.’