Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  “Isaac Newton dyed things?”

  “Yep. He had a book full of recipes for colours that he started about the time he came to Cambridge. He was an experimenter. Always trying things out, you know: poisoning birds, putting mirrors on the top of church steeples to test how long the light took to move from mirror to mirror, dropping things from towers, sticking things in his eyes, boiling things, mixing things, writing down the results.”

  “OK. How did he make red?” Was she laughing at me?

  “Can’t quite remember. Yes, I can.” Blurred words came into focus. “Sheep’s blood drained into a bladder, hung out to dry in the sun to make a powder, then mixed with alum water when needed. There was another one in which you boil brasill, whatever that is, and then he writes that if you would have it a ‘sad red,’ mingle it with potash water; if a light red, temper it with white lead. Christ, I’ve only read the transcription of that notebook once and I remember it all. What do you think a ‘sad red’ is?”

  “What’s Elizabeth’s book like? You’ve finished it?”

  “Brilliant—full of the most wonderful detail about Cambridge. I’m completely lost in it.”

  “I can tell.”

  “Sorry. I’ve been sleeping badly. It’s as if Elizabeth is there—in the seventeenth century. Not reconstructing it but actually there.”

  “Sounds like that’s where you are too. So what’s the problem?”

  “Problem?”

  “You’ve had a frown on your forehead since you moved to The Studio. You’ll have to be careful—the wind’ll change and that face will stick.” Another boat cut its way through the water, a small blond coxswain driving the rhythms of the oars with a voice too big for her small frame.

  Kit was wearing a long purple coat over grey linen trousers and a T-shirt. With her stained hands and the jewellery around her neck, her hair piled on top of her head, she made people turn their heads. She knew she did that. She walked tall and the coat, made of some thick cotton which she had probably dyed, billowed around her in the wind. I imagined her being swept up like a character in a García Márquez novel, in her own billowing clothes, swept off like an angel or Madonna in some kind of purpled apotheosis. Seventeenth-century Cambridge would have been filled with such billowings, I thought, when the winds were high and all the undergraduates wore their gowns—billowings of purple and black in winds that blew into that labyrinth of streets straight from the Ural mountains in Russia.

  Today, it blew through my hair, tugged at my skirt, stung my eyes. In France the wind was aromatic, full of the smell of soil and ripe crops. Here it just smelled of mould. That was the marshland.

  “When does coincidence stretch to improbability, do you think?” I asked her. “I mean, at what point do you say to yourself that something completely beyond the bounds of probability is happening to you?”

  “That’s a hard one. Explain.”

  “There’s a whole series of things…none of them sounds very significant in itself. OK, there was this piece of paper.”

  “A piece of paper?” I’d forgotten how sceptical Kit had become. It was reassuring. She’d have an explanation, if anyone did.

  “Just listen, won’t you? I spotted the corner of a piece of paper in the garden under a lavender bush. I must have dropped it when I’d been working out there the day before because it was from one of Elizabeth’s notebooks—I recognised her handwriting, or what was left of it. There were snails crawling all over it.”

  “Snails?”

  “Yes, snails. Just ordinary mindless garden snails…They’d eaten sections of the paper and the rain had washed out the ink, but I could still just read what was there. I traced out the words with my pen—they were still visible, and I worked out that it was Elizabeth’s transcription of a notebook Newton kept when he was around twenty and had just arrived in Cambridge. It’s an important notebook because Newton wrote it in code and it wasn’t decoded until 1963 by Newton’s biographer, Richard Westfall. Elizabeth had transcribed a section from the decoded notebook.”

  We stopped now under a rowan tree, its berries scarlet against the dark green leaves. The wind was blowing the river water in arced shapes, like bows stretched from one bank to the other. Kit was out of breath.

  “Sorry, I’m not following. What’s weird about any of this?”

  I passed her the piece of paper, folded into four. It looked more like a paper doily after the snails had finished with it. She began to unfold it.

  “Just don’t let go of it,” I said. “It’s blown away four times now. OK, I said it didn’t amount to much in itself. It’s what’s in the notebooks that’s interesting. Westfall spent months decoding that early notebook in the 1960s. He must have thought he’d find something of scientific importance, judging by the amount of time he spent on it, that he’d uncover—I don’t know—mathematical notes or reflections on optics perhaps. You know what he found? Not mathematics or formulas, but sins—two lists of Newton’s sins. The first set of forty-eight was headed ‘Before Whitsunday 1662,’ and a further nine were listed as ‘After Whitsunday 1662,’ arranged as if they were an account book. Imagine the intimacy of that—seeing that list for the first time since Newton actually recorded them secretly, guiltily, three hundred years earlier.”

  “What kind of sins? Fornication, buggery, bestiality? Consorting with a witch?” Kit unfolded the piece of paper as if it were a page from a pornographic magazine.

  “No, nothing so dramatic. Mostly little things. Stealing cherries, sticking pins into people’s backs in church, getting irritable, making things on Sundays.”

  “Newton stole cherries? Was the gravity apple stolen? That would make a good story…”

  “Be serious. It’s awful.”

  It wasn’t until I checked Elizabeth’s page against Westfall’s typed transcription that I felt how awful it was—the young man writing out his sins in code. It moved me. There was something bald and relentless about it, a man’s conscience flayed like a rabbit, all glistening sinews and blood. I imagined him wrestling with his conscience, trying to live according to his understanding of the Bible, failing, punishing himself, and starting again, over and over. He had no sense of humour; I could feel how tired he was with his constant relapses, struggling with a God who was watching him all the time.

  “Poor bloke,” I said. “‘Idle discourse on Thy day and at other times; Not turning nearer to Thee for my affections; Not living according to my belief; Not loving Thee for Thy self; Not loving Thee for Thy goodness to us; Not desiring Thy ordinances…’”

  “You’ve memorised them?” Kit checked the accuracy of my recitation against what she could read on the paper.

  “No, but that’s the point. I can practically recite them and I’ve only read them once. It’s the same with the recipes for colour. You know what my memory’s like—I can’t even remember my nine-times table. Don’t you think that’s weird?”

  “So? Your memory’s improved since your undergraduate days. That’s no big deal. Nothing to get alarmed about. Why did Newton have to count them like this, number them, make a list like an account book?”

  “Because they stopped him from being pure. They were the obstacle. And every now and again, on feast days, on Whitsuntide, they would all be cancelled out. He’d be given a clean slate. At those points he would be pure and powerful and his magic would be at its strongest.”

  “What magic?”

  “His alchemy. He was starting to practise alchemy.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “I don’t know anything. But when you ask me questions like that I can just answer them without thinking.”

  Kit lit a cigarette and passed me back the piece of paper. I went on.

  “Kit, do you remember Cameron taking us to that Methodist chapel in Wales when he and I drove out to visit you at that holiday cottage you and Maria took for the summer? There was a service on and we sat at the back?”

  “Christ, yes—the sermon about sin.” She exhale
d cigarette smoke into the autumn air. “The sweaty minister.”

  “He started out by asking us all to think about the very last sin we’d committed; then, he said, think of all the sins committed by all the people in your house since breakfast, and…”

  Kit fell into the rhythms of the minister’s sermon—she remembered it more clearly than I did: “‘Think of all the people in your street,’” she chanted in a mock Welsh accent, “‘think of all the people in your city, in your country, in the world. Now multiply that by three hundred and sixty-five—all the days in a year. Now think of all the years since Christ died—two thousand long, long years…’ The pile of sins just got bigger and bigger…I couldn’t keep up with the math. Three hundred and sixty-five times two thousand. What’s that?”

  A passing runner in shorts and a T-shirt, catching a fragment of a Welsh sermon where he had never heard one before—on a riverbank no less—turned for an explanation, jogged a few steps backwards, then gave up listening and was gone.

  “I know,” I said. “Those rhythms. Suddenly, after building up and building up, numbers getting bigger and bigger so your head swam, he stopped. Must have stopped for about half a minute before he said just three words: ‘Then Jesus came.’ Cameron laughed out loud at that. Outrageous. I thought we were going to be asked to leave. Then the minister said it again. ‘Then Jesus came and took away all the sins of the world.’ He told us to imagine the scale of all of that sin and then to imagine it all gone. Just like that. It was a brilliant sermon. I’ve never forgotten it because it made me think about sin differently—like a kind of infestation, sins multiplying, breeding, like germs.”

  “Or rats…And what about Newton?”

  “Newton was an alchemist, but he thought he wasn’t pure enough. The first thing you had to be as an alchemist was pure. He knew he wasn’t. He could be pure for a few hours; then some bad thought would creep into his head and spoil everything, take his strength and his magic away. Every morning he’d wake with a new set of resolutions and self-punishments, and by breakfast it would have all started again, the spiteful thoughts, the desire for vengeance, like an infestation.”

  “That’s why he was angry?”

  There were swans now, six of them, swimming upstream, battling against the wind and the current. Three small children were playing with a silver kitten outside the Fort St. George pub, trailing a piece of string along the ground for it to chase. Great tubs of geraniums and late nasturtiums exploded with colour. Passing under Victoria Bridge we sat on a bench next to the lock to watch children throwing lumps of bread to the uninterested, overfed swans. The day had brightened and the colours of the painted barges opposite glowed surreally in the sun. A pretty couple, both with thickly dreadlocked hair, roped their bicycles onto the flat asphalted roof of a barge called The Unmissable and disappeared below, behind rainbow-striped curtains.

  Yes, he was angry, I thought. Newton’s anger had penetrated my dreams now—it happens sometimes with writing, when it matters, when there’s something at stake. Yes, I was dreaming the dreams of the boy who was angry with his sister, his mother, and his stepfather, who dreamed about killing them all when he went back to Woolsthorpe, who hated himself—and it all went round and round and he couldn’t stop it, and it was getting in the way of his work, his experiments. Too much noise in his head. He couldn’t get out of that. There was no way out.

  I said to Kit, “He was desperate. When he was at school in Grantham, when he was twelve, for Christ’s sake, he wrote in a notebook: ‘I will make an end. I cannot but weep. I know not what to do.’”

  Kit was persistent despite my absences, wanderings. “So he started writing his sins down in a notebook to cheer himself up?”

  “Yes, and to try to keep track of them. And he started doing alchemical experiments. Making potions with chemicals. He boarded with an apothecary in Grantham when he was at school, so in those days he had access to lots of chemicals.”

  “Apothecaries are often the poisoners in Renaissance drama. Romeo and Juliet—the poison that goes wrong.”

  “He collected recipes for mixing colours: purple, crimson, green, russet, charcoal black, colours for painting nakedness and colours for painting corpses.”

  “A colour for painting corpses? Did he paint them? How do you mix a colour for painting dead bodies?”

  “The colour for corpses? Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes. Go on. Tell me.” She put out her cigarette and watched me closely, as though she was looking to find the hidden trick in this strange new memory of mine, as if I was some tin-pot street magician. “Go on,” she said. “Surprise me. Let’s see how good your memory really is.”

  I did surprise her; I surprised both of us. That recipe was in a drawer in my head somewhere. All I had to do was read it through: “‘A colour for dead corpses: Change white lead with water of yellow berries and wash the picture all over and change it with blue Indie and shadow it in single hatches, and in the leanest places then take soot, yellow berries, and white lead, and with it shadow the darkest places.’”

  Shadow the darkest places. If my beginning was Elizabeth’s funeral, and yours was finding her body in red in the river, Elizabeth’s entanglement started much earlier—I’d guess around the time she found that notebook full of sins. Yes, that was Elizabeth’s beginning—in the dark corpse-washed corners of a seventeenth-century notebook written by a boy who turned his sins into coded accounts and who wanted to paint dead bodies. I walked that way much later. As Elizabeth’s ghostwriter I had to walk the road she walked, trace its meanderings and speculations back to their origins, start where she started. She’d been working on alchemy and had found Newton’s sins while looking for something else. A moment’s curiosity had set her thinking about how far he would go to find the answers to the questions that stopped him from sleeping. How violent could he be? Would he kill? Could he? What happened to him to give him so much power—real or imagined—in 1665 and 1666?

  Kit was sceptical. “So what’s the series of coincidences that’s spooking you? Apart from the fact that you can remember Newton’s sins and his recipes for red and for corpses?”

  I passed her back the piece of hole-riddled paper. “Look again at Elizabeth’s transcriptions—she’s marked out some of the sins. You can just see the remains of red highlighter pen on sins thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and then if you turn it over, she’s also marked out number forty.” Kit read them out: “‘Thirteen: Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them. Fourteen: Wishing death and hoping it to some. Fifteen: Striking many. Forty: Using unlawful means to bring us out of distresses.’ Why those ones in particular?”

  “That’s what I’ve got to work out,” I said. “They’re all about Newton’s violent feelings. I think it’s a clue to what the last chapters are supposed to say. The key one is ‘Using unlawful means to bring us out of distresses.’ Elizabeth has underlined it twice as well as highlighted it.”

  “Unlawful means? What did he mean by that?”

  “You tell me. You’re the one who knows about crime in the Renaissance and Restoration. What would ‘unlawful means’ be a euphemism for?”

  “Could be anything. Murder. Conspiracy. Almost certainly violence of some kind. So you’ve got to fill in the last two chapters.”

  “Yes, using her annotated notes and the rest of the book as the only source materials. Extrapolate the rest.”

  “And what have you done so far?”

  “Well, read it through several times. Started to read the notebooks.”

  “Sounds to me like Elizabeth was turning him into a character from a revenge tragedy. You know: the boy wound up like a spring by parents who neglect him or favour other siblings over him, the boy who buries himself in secrecy and makes plans for revenge. Smoulders and smoulders. In the end the whole world has to be punished, burned, and tortured. Like Edmund in King Lear—the ambitious, vengeful bastard son. Too easy. Almost a cliché.”

  �
�In her book, Elizabeth makes claims that have no sources. I simply don’t know where she got them from.”

  “What sort of claims?”

  “In the footnotes she often references what she has called the Vogelsang Papers—Vogelsang—she gave the archive her own surname.”

  “Which means what?”

  “That it’s a collection of primary sources that she discovered and that only she had access to. Eyewitness accounts, I guess, and historical documents that almost certainly won’t have been copied or microfilmed. I’ve looked everywhere in The Studio, but there’s nothing. Without the Vogelsang Papers these claims just won’t stand up.”

  “Do they need to?”

  “Well, I’m safe from being sued because as a ghostwriter, I am technically invisible. And Elizabeth can’t be sued, because she’s dead. The author is dead either way, beyond challenge. Absent from the court. But that doesn’t solve the problem. If I am going to get the publishers to take this book as it stands, I have to provide some kind of proof of the allegations I think she’s making. She knew these things to be true, but how did she know? Without the Vogelsang Papers there’s nothing absolute. That’s the problem—she’s missing, the evidence is missing, the last chapters are missing, and I’m invisible.”

  Kit laughed. “There are some advantages to being invisible. If you’re right—that there are certain things that she just knew—maybe you just have to take those things for granted, even though she’s not proved them to you—yet. Maybe she found another way to know—beyond looking in archives. Maybe she got to the end of the archives and still wanted to know so badly that she went places where academics don’t usually go.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Where would you go if you really wanted to find out something about the past and yet you got to the end of what was known?”

  “I have absolutely no idea. I’m just standing there at the edge looking out and I can’t see anything. I’m becoming less and less certain that I know anything at all. I mean, there is so much I just can’t explain—everyday things, not just Elizabeth’s book.”