Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  “Like what?”

  “Pieces of Elizabeth’s notes, important keys to the last chapters, keep disappearing and reappearing as if someone wants them to disappear. Files have gone missing. There are coincidences. There are weird light effects all over the house that I can’t find sources for.”

  “What kind of lights?”

  “Light that looks like water—as if it’s been reflected off a bowl of water. Rainbows that appear in little stubs and stretch out till they disappear, really slowly. I’ve tried photographing them, but my camera doesn’t seem to be good enough to catch them.”

  “The river?”

  “It’s too far away.”

  “Mirrors?”

  “No, I’ve checked.”

  I didn’t tell her how one morning I had collected every piece of glass in The Studio, lifted down the decanters and the glasses from every shelf, unhooked all the mirrors and pictures still hanging on the walls, even removed the light bulbs from their sockets and put them in dark places—in cupboards or under Elizabeth’s bed. Then I had sat and waited, clutching my camera. The light came just the same, spreading around the wall, pooling, slanting, stretching out, even with nothing there to catch and throw it. Light thrown, hurled, pitched. Light caught. Illumination. But the brighter the house became, the more I was thrown into darkness. I couldn’t see anything. And the camera showed nothing, caught nothing.

  “Don’t you think that maybe you just need to get out more?” I’d lost Kit. She stood up from the bench to walk again, so we followed the path along the river’s edge, towards the boardwalk that meanders round past the punts moored at Quayside. She was impatient. I could hear it in her voice. She would come with me so far and would go no further into these speculations. She was laughing at me. “Look, Lydia. I’m going to a party next week. Want to come? We might find someone to share your bed. Then I bet you won’t be watching light move across walls.”

  “And there’s another thing…” I was getting desperate now. Don’t leave me alone with this, Kit. Don’t look at me like that.

  “What?”

  “The one bit of the list of sins that nobody has been able to decode is a line that Newton wrote at the top of the list, on the flyleaf, like a heading. Every Newton scholar who knows anything about codes has had a go but has failed to decode it. Cameron told me that Elizabeth had been trying to decode it for months. She even asked him to try.”

  “And?” She was checking her watch. Thought I didn’t see.

  “Well, it’s another coincidence. Look.” I passed her my notebook with the transcription of the undeciphered heading:

  Nabed Efyhik, Wfnzo Cpmkfe.

  “What am I supposed to be seeing?” she asked. “It’s gobbledygook.” Behind her a street juggler had started to throw coloured balls into the air. But it was too windy, and he kept dropping them.

  “Same bloody word,” I said. Was she being deliberately slow? “Nabed. Newton used it as a code word in his notebooks in 1662. A code so obscure that no one in four hundred years has been able to break it. Because it’s so obscure, it may have been some code he had been passed by someone else—a pledge, a spell, or a mantra passed to him along the alchemical networks, something so powerful it would work as a kind of protection there on the flyleaf of his notebook where he kept the list of his sins.”

  “So…and?”

  “Well, now, three hundred and forty years later, the same word turns up in the same town as a secret code word used by an animal-liberation group. OK, so it’s just a coincidence. I can see that. But what kind of coincidence is that? Just random—like monkeys on typewriters?”

  “Yes, just that,” she said. “You are making as much sense as a monkey with a typewriter.”

  I was about to tell her about the bloodstain that disappeared and reappeared, but I stopped and changed the subject. Why didn’t I tell her? Because then I would have had to explain that the blood was yours. To do that I would have had to explain how your blood came to be on the pillowcase I had washed. Yes, Kit, Cameron stayed the night at The Studio. Yes, I did go to his bed. No, nothing is happening between us. It’s finished. History.

  No, I wouldn’t have said all of that. I could hear how hollow it all would have sounded. There were so many things that I had started to not say. Lydia Brooke, previously the soul of indiscretion, had become rather quiet about many things. That was part of the trouble.

  Kit and I had followed the boardwalk round the edge of the river on to Quayside, where on that late afternoon in October a few last punt touters in white shirts and straw hats tried, with a tired charm, to persuade too-cold tourists to take river tours. One of them, with a blond ponytail and a goatee, approached us and then, recognising Kit, smiled and changed his mind. She’d had run-ins with him before, she explained triumphantly. Now she had plans to cast him in her next play. “He’d make a great Bosola,” she said, “if I can flatter him enough to agree. He has the right kind of swagger. Looks like an eighteenth-century pirate.”

  As Kit prepared to leave me to walk down Magdalene Street to the market, where she would relieve her assistant and check on the sales of her crimson cotton shirts, she said, “You have too active an imagination. And you’re working too hard. Come and stay at Sturton Street for a few nights. Have a break.”

  “What? So that I can exchange my strange lights for the sound of Titus’s wheel?” I said. “I think not. And, hey, thanks for all the sympathy.”

  “Let me know if you want me to find you an exorcist,” she called deliberately loudly from the corner of Nadia’s Bakery. “I’ll look in the Yellow Pages.” She grinned and disappeared into the crowd. I watched her patch of purpled clothes move up the street.

  But I knew where to find an exorcist—Will had told me. In the Texaco garage on the A10.

  Twelve

  I was heading for the library and would need to turn left onto the bridge but, determined to catch the last of the afternoon sun, I took a table outside one of the cafés on Quayside and ordered a coffee. This was, after all, part of what I was supposed to be doing—taking in Cambridge, finding the seventeenth century. This was research.

  The mottled green of the scrubland along the wild riverbank from Chesterton had given way to lush green grass, hedges, flower borders where Magdalene College began the great sweep of colleges lining the river as it curved its way down to Queens’ College, past Silver Street, and on to Peterhouse. From here the river belonged to the colleges. For hundreds of years men and women labourers employed by the colleges had kept this water’s edge spruce, mended its bridges, trimmed its hedges, tended its flower beds, painted its windowsills, polished its glass. Beyond this point on the river Cambridge became a kind of miniature Venice, its river water lapping up against the ancient stone of college walls, here mottled and reddened brick, there white stone. Stained, lichened, softened by water light. Here the river became a great north-south tunnel, a gothic castle from the river, flanked by locked iron gates, steps leading nowhere, labyrinths, trapdoors, landing stages where barges had unloaded their freight: crates of fine wines, flour, oats, candles, fine meats carried into the damp darkness of college cellars.

  Great Bridge, carrying the great north road into Cambridge and on to London in a diagonal stroke from northwest to southeast, had been the single most important entry point to the city, where all northern traffic moving by water or by road made its way south. Now Bridge Street was lined with bag and hat shops, little boutiques selling jewellery.

  I had Elizabeth at my side again, the Elizabeth who’d conjured Stourbridge Fair from February winds for me, Elizabeth the shaman of the seventeenth century. “Find Elizabeth, find the seventeenth century, we always say,” said Dilys Kite. What could Dilys have wanted with the seventeenth century? Or it with her? Find Elizabeth, find the seventeenth century. “Find it for me,” I said, under my breath. “Find me the seventeenth century.”

  Somewhere close by council workers were emptying glass-recycling containers into a refuse lorry
. I heard the pouring torrent of breaking and splintering and crushed glass bottles stop and start, echo and subside. I wondered whether glass bottles sounded different, in their breaking, once they had been sorted by colour.

  I watched the men and women come and go across the bridge, negotiating their way past the punt touters with their placards, stopping to lean over the edge of the bridge to look at the river traffic or take pictures. But instead of finding the seventeenth century, I began to wonder where you were at that moment, whether you might be walking this way, how you would meet my eye. Yes, it was when I was thinking about you that I first saw him. Not out of the corner of my eye or on the edges of my vision but there on the bridge, directly in front of me. How far away? About fifty feet. What did he look like? He had white hair and a red gown.

  I saw the white hair first. A thin young man, about the same age as the punt touters, but looking old before his time, his hair worn to his shoulders, so that it blew slightly in the wind as he leaned against the metal of the bridge, flanked on either side by Japanese tourists taking photographs. He wore no hat and his university gown was scarlet, not the usual black. It was the shock of recognition that made me gasp. He met my eyes. Mutual recognition, a raised eyebrow, the slightest upturning of the edges of his mouth. Or did I imagine that? What was I doing hallucinating Newton on a bridge in Cambridge?

  He was as definite as a picture in a frame, yet around him everything fell away. There was a smudge around him. As if what I was seeing was something underneath the surface of my reality, as if someone had rubbed away the surface of my Cambridge, its boutiques, cars, bicycles, and hat shops, so that now, for this moment, there were shades instead—even smears—of men and women from his world walking behind him through the optical smudge he occupied, or had made. Perhaps he had done the rubbing through from his side. How, then, was it that I could see him, see through into that?

  As we stood there confronting each other—he on the Great Bridge, me on Quayside—there was a falling away such as even Elizabeth could not have conjured. Yet nothing much changed. Neither of the Japanese tourists on either side of him seemed to show any surprise at his presence. I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush into which the sounds of the afternoon fell away. Quayside lost for a moment its clamour. I might even have said that for a moment it lost its colour; they faded into a kind of black and white. That would happen again, later, much more sharply, that draining out of colour, but then you wouldn’t know that. I didn’t tell you.

  How long did it last? You ask that now? You, who understand about the contractions and spasms of time, about that world and this. It lasted longer than I could breathe my way through it. He seemed to fix me from the bridge with a question, a scrutiny through the fading light. He had both hands on the ledge, and as he turned away from me, his hand grazed along the length of it. I can still see, as if I am seeing it now, the passing of his long fingers along the stone. He turned away; that was all I knew, and was gone.

  Thirteen

  If it was the smudge on the bridge that made me find Dilys Kite’s telephone number, it was Pepys’s death that made me pick up the phone and call her. When I got home that afternoon, the cat’s body was lying on the doorstep. From a distance, even before I saw that his legs had been tied with wires, I knew something was wrong. Even asleep or sunning himself on the front step, he didn’t lie like that.

  The blood was still wet, darkening as it dried from crimson to brown. It had fanned out from the first incision with coagulating skirted folds of red velvet. His eyes were open, head thrust forward. What did he see and hear in his final moments? How many hooded figures in black had gathered round him? They had bound his feet with wire, sending a message to Cameron Brown, to you, through me, Elizabeth’s ghostwriter, marking out their territory. Using Pepys as a surface to write on, to save the others, to change the world. I didn’t understand till later how much more complicated that message was. I couldn’t have understood then, though you would have. You would have known what that dead cat meant. Things might have turned out differently if I had told you, if you had received the warning, meant for you, that Pepys carried.

  But I couldn’t tell you. It was a postponement of telling, not a conscious evasion. All I knew then was that you couldn’t see Pepys’s body mutilated like that. Not so soon after Elizabeth’s death. There had been too many deaths at The Studio. I buried him in the garden near the riverbank where the soil was already turned over, so you wouldn’t notice. I could keep all of this from you, I thought. Stand between you and it. I tried to unbind Pepys’s feet before I slipped him into the ground—it seemed right—but when his front paws twitched for a second as I untwisted the wire, as the blood rushed back into his feet, I thought he might be still alive and I dropped him from my lap back onto the step. I had blood on my clothes and hands. There were ants already working around his wounds. I couldn’t do any more for him. It was beyond me. So Pepys went into the ground with his back legs still tied. I don’t like to think about that.

  Burying Pepys there in that peaty ground beside the river made me think of the bodies they pulled from the bogs of Ireland, humans slaughtered to appease the gods: young women with their hands bound, buried alive, or drowned in bogs, their skulls smashed in. I imagined someone digging there at the riverbank some hundred years from now, raising Pepys’s bones on his spade and finding the wire binding his back legs together, contacting the archaeology unit at the university.

  If you were the archaeologist driving out to Chesterton to see the cat bones laid out for you in the rain on the riverbank, you’d be thinking of witchcraft, wouldn’t you? A cat with cut marks on its bones, feet bound, and buried beside a river just outside the city’s boundaries. You’d be excited. Date? Oh, seventeenth century at the latest—part of the witch trials of the seventeenth century, you’d say. A cat, a witch’s familiar, tortured and buried. You might have started to imagine a project, research assistants, a dig. If the cat was buried as part of a witchcraft trial, you’d say to yourself, you would need to look for the remains of an old woman’s body too, close by, and that would take time. Once you’d found her bones and determined whether she’d been burned or drowned, you’d almost certainly be able to tell when she was executed with carbon dating. You’d be expecting to find the burned remains of a house too, and perhaps the shadow of an herb garden.

  But on your arrival at the riverbank the wire would be an instant disappointment. Naturally, in your excitement you wouldn’t have thought to ask the caller how the cat’s feet were bound. Garden wire. Dated in the lab to the early twenty-first century. No witch’s cat. No witch. No burned house or shadow of a garden. No article in the future equivalent of New Scientist or television interviews. So what do you do with your nameless cat? He has to be placed, an explanation found, if only for curiosity’s sake. A search in the online local history database tells you that in the first years of the twenty-first century there was a spate of animal killings in and around Cambridge that were part of a new and more violent animal-liberation campaign that would get uglier yet. And once you had found those articles and found the descriptions of the type of killings—the seven slashlike cuts, the bound legs—that would be your answer. You would have looked no further. This would be evidence enough to provide the explanation, fill out the quota of footnotes for a short scholarly article that would swell your number of publications for that year.

  And would anyone have blamed you for not asking any more questions? For returning in a moment of speculation to your first instinct, that there was something decidedly seventeenth-century about this dead cat, buried by a river with its feet bound. What was that, exactly? Revenge, blood rites, and scapegoats. The children of the Duchess of Malfi strangled. Macduff’s children murdered. The fierce violence of the act of vengeance, its appalling motivelessness; the villain, who, even with the blood of murdered children still warm on his hands, cannot say why he acts. Ferdinand in the Duchess of Malfi knows that his villainy is beyond explanation
as well as redemption, that he is as unfathomable as quicksand (or a fen): “He that can compass me, and know my drifts, / May say he hath put a girdle ’bout the world, / And sounded all her quick-sands.”

  Did you think you knew me? Had you fathomed me, Mr. Brown? You haven’t yet. Though you watch my every move. I’ve not told you everything yet.

  They asked me in the court why I hadn’t reported the cat’s death. There was a lot of criticism about that in the papers. Knowing about the cat’s mutilation might, they said, have given the police a chance to stop the NABED campaign before it had escalated to murder. But how was I to know that, then? I told the prosecutor that I picked up the phone to call the police but at that point I realised that they would almost certainly need a statement from you. And I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t report the death because I was protecting you, I told them.

  “Why did you need to protect Mr. Brown, Dr. Brooke?”

  “Because he was still grieving for his mother. Pepys was his mother’s cat.”

  “And that was a strong enough reason to decide not to report a crime?”

  “Yes, sir. It was. I didn’t want Cameron to see his mother’s cat cut about like that. And, frankly, I didn’t know whether killing a cat was a crime.”

  “Did anyone else know about the cat?”

  Though Will had never known about Pepys’s death, I said: “Will knew about the cat. She was with me when I found him. We had been walking all day, up to Fen Ditton.” There was a good deal of noise from the gallery at that point, where the journalists were sitting. Will picked at the skin around her fingernails.

  “And how did she react?”

  “She was upset. She told me to phone the police. She was angry when I didn’t.”

  Will stopped picking her fingers and sat very still. She looked confused. The prosecutor repeated my statement in that way that prosecutors do, with clear implications, slowly, stressing certain words, glancing at the jury to check that they understood the import of my words, repeated, headlined.