Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  The story kept on changing. When the court issued a press statement and the newspapers distilled it back down to the size they wanted, with all the appropriately dramatic, suspenseful moments, it fitted neatly into columns of small type. One journalist even made a time line of events in which the two murders were simply a notch in the straight passing of time through Lily’s life, like a single-track train with stations that began with her birth and ended with her arrest. She was charged with three murders and sixteen acts of unlawful animal killing and mutilation, but because they couldn’t pin Elizabeth’s death on her, she was convicted of only two murders. Once they’d added those killings to the time line and filled in the details about her grandfather and her parents, Lily Ridler had become a psychopath, a monster. Now, nearly two years later, Lily is dead.

  So if we thought it was finished, we know it isn’t now. The ghosts have not been laid to rest after all, you see, not yours and not hers. If they were to question me again I think I would have to say that I see it differently now—the connections, I mean. Time does that. There were missing parts then, a historical dimension that no one asked any questions about and which, then, I could only half see.

  What was missing? The seventeenth century. But how do you say that to a policeman who has just switched on his tape recorder to record the words “Parkside Police Station, 16 January, 2003, interview with Dr. Lydia Brooke”? How do you say, “There’s a missing witness account and a missing suspect…Sergeant Cuff, the seventeenth century is missing. And you need to talk to a man called Mr. F.”

  How do you tell him that you think there’s a link between a female scholar found drowned in a river in Cambridge and a man who fell down a staircase nearby three hundred years earlier? Not a simple causal relationship but something as delicate as a web, one of those fine white skeins you see around the tips of grass stems in the spring when the dew is heavy.

  A crow has just flown off my study roof, launched itself into the air to my left down over the garden, just as the right-hand corner of my map of Cambridge has curled itself noisily away from the wall. The syncopated sounds of the scurrying of crows’ feet on roof tiles and the curling of old paper is enough to make one think that there might be something else in the room beside me as I write. Which of you restless people is it? What do you want with my story?

  No. If Elizabeth were here she would say that history is less like a skein of silk and more like a palimpsest—time layered upon time so that one buried layer leaks into the one above. Or like a stain in an old stone wall that seeps through the plaster.

  What would Cuff have said or done if I had told him that he needed to know about the man who fell down the stairs of Trinity College on the 5th of January 1665, the fall that stained the floor, the stain that leaked through Elizabeth’s life and Lily’s, that held us all together, in thrall? Cuff would not have known the significance of the date—1665—or at least I don’t think he would have done. Perhaps 1666 would have rung some bells: the year the Great Plague abated in England and the Fire of London ravaged the capital in its wake. He might have remembered that from his secondary school history classes.

  If I had told Cuff about Greswold and about Isaac Newton’s complicated friendship with a Mr. F., he wouldn’t have written any of it down. He wouldn’t have considered it relevant. A man falling through air and shadows in Trinity College, 1665. A secret friendship between two young men, forged in alchemical and mathematical calculations. How could that have any bearing on a series of murders in Cambridge that took place in 2002 and 2003? If I had suggested that, Cuff would have raised one of his thick black eyebrows and his pen would have paused in midair. Elizabeth Vogelsang would have understood. Cuff wouldn’t.

  Lily went to prison because the seventeenth century was missing from her court records, from her story. Her time line needed to be longer, much longer, and there were many sidelines and tracks, twistings and turnings and yes, it was a labyrinth, a skein of silk that began to weave itself in 1665, 339 years ago.

  I’ve been thinking about labyrinths this summer. Ariadne giving Theseus the thread so that he could find his way back out of the labyrinth, away from the black void of the flesh-eating Minotaur. Unravellings have to start somewhere. Now that I see, for the first time, how connected everything is, I know that the threads between Isaac Newton and us were all attached, like the ground elder under Kit’s soil.

  That summer in which I wrote my story and yours for Patricia Dibb, Kit and I declared war on the ground elder that had taken over her flower beds at Sturton Street. As we began to dig, we could see how each of those separate plants, uncurling above ground, was joined to a great network of root systems underground. There was no point in digging up part of it; you had to pull up the whole thing, and if you didn’t, it would start reaching out again in the wet darkness of the soil, another green leaf curling up a week or so later. Grace, Kit’s elderly neighbour, leaning over the chicken wire fence, uttered her warnings about the impossibility of ever killing it off. She had spent fifty years trying, she said. Break those roots just once, she said, and the wound on the root will make scores of new shoots.

  From my study in the attic of Kit’s house, I looked down on the long stretch of her garden, with its rose beds and gravel path twisting through tall shrubs and Mexican orange blossom, and imagined the ground elder stretching itself luxuriously under the lawn, under the iris bed, unseen in the dark. We had pulled out most of it by the end of June, but a root or tendril here and there would have clung to the root systems of other plants—the iris bulbs, the tubers of the gladioluses—so I knew we would see it again.

  As I write, Grace’s grandchildren play in raincoats on the trampoline under the apple tree. Before the rose garden and the shrubs and the trampoline and the shed, before any of that, the elder had made its way up through the orchards that stood here for centuries, before Kit’s house and before all the others in this terrace were built. Kit has a sepia photograph in her kitchen of the building works for her street, a skeleton row of houses being built on the orchards. Before the orchards, there were marshes here to the south of the city, southeast of Newton’s Trinity College, and the ground elder would have rioted then in the wet earth, unrestrained. Before the orchards and marshes, Roman farmers and the gardeners of Roman villas built on this land would have kept it at bay or used it in herb gardens to make soups and broths or to cure their gout. Builders found the remains of a pretty villa under the road only a stone’s throw from here—three rooms with painted plaster walls, bright red, yellow, green, grey, and deep blue, some patterned to imitate panels of marble, a tiled roof, mortar floors, glass windows, under-floor heating built on blocks of imported chalk. It was probably the last house on the edge of the settlement, marking the boundary between civilisation and the marshlands.

  Every cut in the ground elder root is a failure; every cut will make a redoubling of effort necessary. That’s how I came to understand Isaac Newton’s fear of sin, I think, and how embroiled Mr. F. became in Newton’s name, and how neither of them could stop what they had started, and, finally, how I have come to see the way the consequences of their seventeenth-century acts twisted and turned their way to us, underground and overground, splitting and redoubling. Organic and botanical.

  My story, both of my stories, the police tapes in the Parkside station and the typed account I wrote for Patricia Dibb, began with Elizabeth Vogelsang’s funeral.

  Now, Cameron Brown, I am starting to tell it again so that I can make you a thread for your labyrinth. Yes, I am putting the seventeenth century back into the picture. I hope you can hear me.

  Two

  On the day of Elizabeth’s funeral I’d been in a hurry, as usual, and once I reached the motorway I couldn’t quite remember if I had pulled the flat door closed. It was too late to go back. Could I call my neighbour and get her to check? Gripping the wheel with one hand, I pulled out my phonebook with the other to see if I still had Greta’s number listed there, but then swerved too closel
y towards the central reservation. Stop rushing. One thing at a time. Just pay attention. And don’t lose your way. Head directly north with the sea behind you up the M23, over the massy chalk of the south downs to the open eye of the M25; trace a line around its rim anticlockwise, crossing under the Thames through the Dartford Tunnel and then north to the top of the circle, then north again up the M11 and into the flatlands of East Anglia. Drop into Cambridge from the north, then find the Leper Chapel from the ring road on the east side.

  To compensate for my lack of a mental compass, Kit had taught me to turn directions into a painting or a drawing, a charcoal line stretching across white paper. Lack of direction? Now, don’t put that down to me being a woman. If being male and female can be reduced to a set of stereotypes, you know I have more male instincts than female ones. Perhaps it’s the writing. Writers, apparently, often have a diminished sense of direction: too many maps—time maps, road maps, character maps—all laid one on top of another, like the stories of a building. It gets to be difficult to separate them out.

  I shouldn’t have been late. It wasn’t as if I went to funerals very often. That morning I’d taken ages to get out of the flat, unable to decide whether to wear black or not, so I’d pulled on black clothes and then dark blue ones and pulled them all off again until they had piled up on the bedroom floor. Christmas, Easter, weddings, and funerals. I hated all those sentimental empty rituals made stiff and unyielding by rules and protocols. Elizabeth wouldn’t have cared what any of us wore. She refused to go to funerals.

  Elizabeth Vogelsang—what kinds of things had she cared about? Misused semi-colons; mistakes in dates; poor logic; “dodgy reasoning”; mixed metaphors; the Leper Chapel on the Newmarket Road. Oh, and smells. Elizabeth always noticed smells. She could smell if you were getting sick. She’d said something to me once two years or so ago when we’d met in the University Library tearooms. That day I watched the shadow of your remembered mouth pass over hers as she talked. Her mouth. Your mouth. Mother and son. “Lydia, are you feeling quite well?” she’d asked, stirring her tea and refusing to meet my eye. “It’s just you are giving off a particular kind of smell…not an unpleasant smell exactly…”

  “What kind of smell? Sweat?” I blush easily. No one had ever talked to me like that before. Not even my closest friends. Not even Kit. I’d felt affronted, angry, and fascinated. You are giving off a particular kind of smell. Giving off—it made me think of exhalations, steam rising from the backs of saddled horses, dragon’s breath on frosted mornings. For one bad moment I wondered if your strange mother could smell you on my skin, but then you’d not been near my skin for three years. Could you have left your smell on my skin after all that time? You were certainly still under it then, especially as I was sitting there with that mouth, her mouth, just on the other side of the table.

  “Oh, wet newspapers. Newspapers that have been wet for several weeks. Ink, the edge of mould, wet leaves…It’s just your glands. You’re probably coming down with something.”

  It was only then that Elizabeth had looked up. Thankfully, by then my scorched cheeks had returned to their natural colour. I raised my hand to my glands and found swellings there like invisible bruises. Three days later I had a temperature.

  She wasn’t finished with me. “It became something of common knowledge in Cambridge, you know. You and my son.”

  “I know,” I said, trying to match her directness with my own. It was perhaps more of a relief than anything to have broached the subject. “Did someone tell you?”

  “No. I saw you with him in here once. You didn’t see me. You were walking together from the South Wing to the North Wing. There was something about the way you were walking, the way you didn’t smile, like friends do. So I asked some questions. But don’t worry. I’m not one to judge—how could I? Life is complicated. Mine has been…complicated.”

  “That’s why I left Cambridge,” I said, realising I was lying a little.

  “I wondered.” She laughed and gathered her papers together. “Well, that’s a relief. I thought if we were going to be working together again, it might be better to avoid tiptoeing around all of that. We don’t need to talk about it again.”

  Now, years later, here I was driving from Brighton to Cambridge, from the sea to a Leper Chapel that looked like a ship on the marshy common outside Cambridge, for my last appointment with Elizabeth Vogelsang. And I was late.

  The Newmarket Road was traffic-bound enough for me to risk checking my phone and to reach for my bag of makeup. I had covered only one cheek and part of my nose with foundation before the traffic began to move again, and in trying to manoeuvre the makeup and the steering wheel, I spilled a single drop of foundation onto my black skirt, which wouldn’t rub off. I needed makeup that morning—I’d had almost no sleep the night before so that I could finish the manuscript and e-mail it to my agent before leaving for Cambridge. Miranda would have opened my e-mail by now, I knew, saved the attachment, printed it out in her office onto the thick cream-coloured paper she used: Refraction: A Screenplay, by Lydia Brooke. Then she would have set it aside. Judgements later. I decided I wouldn’t think about the script today. Only Elizabeth. Wonderful, clever, obsessive Elizabeth.

  The Newmarket Road, as it passed out of Cambridge through Barnwell, always made me think of prostitutes: seventeenth-century prostitutes and brothels. Barnwell was where the undergraduates came to pay for sex: a seventeenth-century traveller to Cambridge once wrote that for 18 pence (that’s just £8 now), a scholar and his mistress could have a brothel all to themselves, and, he added with a crow of male triumphalism, there hadn’t been a maidenhead to be found among the sixteen-year-olds of Barnwell since the time of Henry I. The undergraduates, they said, would take off their gowns and roll them up outside Christ’s College at the Barnwell Gate, so as not to be seen leaving the city eastwards, because no undergraduates were allowed there—officially, at least. There weren’t many who stuck to the college rules. Newton was probably one of the rare rule keepers, at least as far as brothels were concerned. As far as anyone knows.

  I found a parking space on Oyster Row, finished my makeup in the car mirror—coral-pink lipstick, dark mascara, cappuccino brown brushed onto pallid cheeks—climbed out, and locked the car. That’s when I realised that in my half-asleep state I had found my way to exactly the same place where I had parked on the winter afternoon when Elizabeth showed me Stourbridge Fair. It was part of the research for the screenplay I’d been writing then, just after I had come back from France. The sign on the old scrap-metal yard brought that memory back, the memory of the two of us walking this street six years before. I leaned back against the car and closed my eyes hard. I was tired. I was sure to cry.

  “If you want to write about the seventeenth century you’ll have to know how it smells,” Elizabeth had said. I could hear her voice as if she were standing there beside me. “Find me an afternoon and we’ll conjure some smells. Then you’ll know where to start, I promise.” One snowy afternoon in February, Elizabeth had driven me up and down the warren of streets off the Newmarket Road called Oyster Row, Mercers Row, Garlic Row, and Swanns Walk. I took scores of pictures through the open car window with the digital camera that I used as a kind of visual notebook—graffiti, overturned bins, scrap-metal yards, bungalows, warehouses, and corrugated iron. Modern streets built on the site of the old Stourbridge Common, where the mayor and aldermen of Cambridge had hosted a fair since the twelfth century. At the foot of Garlic Row, Elizabeth had parked, climbed out of the car, and then, standing in the forecourt of the scrap-metal yard, she’d turned into some kind of historical shaman, her voice raised against the clamour of the industrial machinery behind us. I gave myself up to her. You had to do that with Elizabeth.

  “Use your imagination and get your bearings. It’s September in—let’s say—1664. You are standing at the bottom of Garlic Row, which is the main thoroughfare of the fair, a wide dirt track that runs north in front of you. It’s muddy; sticky underfoot. O
ver that way, northwest, is the River Grant, down which most of the traders have arrived, many from the north, from King’s Lynn, weaving their way across the waterways of the Fens. Their boats are moored on the river now. Between us and the river are arable fields. The harvest has just finished, so the fields are cropped close; there’s stubble as far as you can see and a few wildflowers. But there’s not much room for anything to grow now because already everything has been trampled by hundreds of traders and merchants, who have set up their coloured booths in row after row. Over near the river is the Coal Fair and the Tallow Fair and a little mound called Fish Hill. Right in the centre near the mayor’s temporary house there’s the Oyster Fair, stalls selling thousands of oysters brought down from King’s Lynn and kept fresh in barrels of ice and straw.

  “Between the Oyster Fair and us is Soper’s Row. Over to your right are the bookstalls and beyond them the White Leather Fair and further north the Horse Fair. Now add the others in their stalls. Think of the trades, the guilds who have come here: goldsmiths, toymakers, braziers, turners, milliners, haberdashers, hatters, wigmakers, drapers, pewterers, china warehouses, puppeteers, and prostitutes, and among them all coffee shops, eating houses, brandy shops. There are jugglers, acrobats, and clowns. You are standing among all the tents and booths. What can you smell? Close your eyes.”