Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  “What is your name?” Dilys’s voice was very still and slow, as if she was talking to a child.

  “Lydia Brooke. My name is Lydia Brooke.”

  “No, what is your name?”

  “Richard.” I didn’t even have to hunt for that. I was Richard, answering Dilys’s questions.

  “Richard?”

  “Richard Herring, son of Alderman Herring, the draper.”

  “Where are you, Richard? Can you tell us what you see?”

  “I can’t see very much. My eyes hurt. It is dark.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Near the river.”

  “Near the river?”

  “By the river. Between Garret Hostel Bridge and the tennis court. I can’t see. I feel sick. I want to go home.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “At the Red Hart in Petticury. Playing dice with the man from London.”

  “What time of year is it?”

  “The eleventh day of November, 1668.”

  “Have you seen anyone else tonight?” Dilys’s voice was gentle and knowing. I had the feeling that she and I had talked like this before. It was a kind of ritual. My part to conceal; hers to open up. A game of cards.

  “Master Newton was there in the Red Hart with his friend. He nodded to me, standing tall, his white hair up above the crowd, and then when I looked again he’d gone. I was using Captain Story’s money to play dice.”

  “Did you win?”

  “No, I lost the money to Master Newton’s friend. And I lost Master Newton’s money too.”

  “Did he have a name—the friend?”

  “I’m not supposed to know his name. He changes it. He gave me money.”

  “For what?”

  “I can’t tell you that. I am not supposed to tell anyone about that.”

  Dilys spoke to me as if she knew me, had known me for a long time.

  “Did you help Master Newton, Richard? Did you buy things for him? For his potions? Help him in his rooms? With the furnace?”

  “Yes. They’re not potions. He’s a magician. He said I had a gift and he told me secrets. He promised me more secrets.”

  “Did he give you money to keep you quiet?”

  “Yes.”

  These were leading questions; they would never stand up in a court of law. Court of law? How did that thought drift across my mind? Once I thought of Richard Herring in the dock, being cross-questioned by Dilys Kite in a black gown, once I saw the carved wood, the gallery of men and women watching, I lost the column of blue light. I lost the river tinged with pink and the two men. I lost the dice, the cards, the smell of the smoky tavern, the dawn light. As if someone had turned off the phone, or the light.

  How long did we sit there, Dilys and I? I watched the shadows lengthen across her garden, a blackening shadow theatre across the vibrant emerald of her lawn. I watched the honeysuckle tendrils blow in the wind, the soft rain, the late flies, a crow. I was nowhere and somewhere. Lost between a river and the Fens, between the seventeenth century and the twenty-first, between scepticism and belief.

  Sixteen

  He’s gone again,” Dilys said somewhere on the other side of the room, but she was not speaking to me. She was with them again, whoever they were, her Bible group, the voices in her head.

  “She’s let him go,” she said. “No, no, she had to. He won’t stay. He never does.”

  “What was that?” I said. My throat wasn’t tight anymore. I wanted to get out of my chair, but I was still cold and my limbs were not yet my own. I clenched my fists, rubbed my hands. Mrs. Kite passed me a glass of water and draped a tartan rug around my shoulders.

  “It takes some people hard,” she said. “It’s not an easy thing—being the road they walk down. You won’t want to be doing that too often. It’s always the same with the boy. He can’t seem to speak for himself. He borrows people.”

  “Who…?” I could hardly speak.

  “That was the boy, Richard Herring, one of the people Elizabeth found. He was the fourth in the series. How did it go? Richard Greswold, James Valentine, Abraham Cowley, and Richard Herring. There’s a fifth man, apparently, but we were never quite sure how he fitted in. Funny, you know, I’m not sure that Elizabeth ever knew his name, or if she did, she never told me. She always referred to him simply as the fifth man. Herring was number four, yes: Greswold—one, Valentine—two, Cowley—three, Herring—four, and then the fifth man.”

  With Dilys’s rounded vowels and clipped consonants, the list sounded like an incantation. I could have sworn that someone sighed somewhere near my right ear as she took out two pieces of paper from a file in front of her, photocopies from a book.

  “Elizabeth called it serendipity,” she said. “I wouldn’t have called it that.”

  “What did she call serendipity?”

  “Wait. It’s important to get this all in the right order. When did it start? When she was writing the Stourbridge Fair chapter—it must have been last fall, November, perhaps. Elizabeth was in the library going over the eyewitness accounts of Stourbridge Fair in the seventeenth century. Defoe and Pepys, I think, and some others. She was very conscientious about her sources. She had her own facsimile edition of a diary written by a Cambridge alderman in the 1660s that she used as a kind of reference book which was especially good on the fair. She’d taken the diary into the library to photocopy some passages so she could mark them up.”

  “The diary of an alderman. As in town councillor?”

  “Precisely. Alderman Newton. Strange coincidence in the names, eh? Alderman Newton was Samuel Newton, no relation as far as I know. Elizabeth put the page she was copying on the photocopier and then pressed the button, but two sheets came out of the machine. Neither of them was the page she had photocopied. She nearly threw them away, but something caught her eye. Each of the two pages, from widely separate parts of the book, parts of the book she’d overlooked, contained a short extract in which Alderman Newton described the death of a Trinity scholar—the death of a Mr. Greswold on the fifth of January, 1665, and of a Mr. Valentine on the ninth of November, 1666. It was the similarity between the two deaths that held Elizabeth’s attention to begin with: they had both fallen down staircases in Trinity during the night, apparently drunk.”

  This account sounded familiar, but I couldn’t think why. Something else I had forgotten or was trying to forget. A staircase.

  “Not that unlikely really, I suppose,” I said. “What with dark staircases and academics drinking too much.”

  “Yes, that’s what I said. But she said there was something in the way Alderman Newton described the deaths that showed that he thought they were suspicious. She knew the diary well enough to know the diarist pretty well. He kept repeating the phrases ‘as was thought’ or ‘as was supposed,’ as if he didn’t believe the explanation the college had put forward. It didn’t mean very much to her—just a coincidence—so she put the two sheets in a file with her other notes. Then she photocopied the section on Stourbridge Fair she wanted—it worked the second time—and she went back and finished writing the Stourbridge Fair section of the book.”

  “I’ve read that chapter. It’s very good.”

  “It should be—she read every surviving description of the fair. But she didn’t just rewrite the sources. She reconstructed it in her head. She had a gift.”

  “So what happened about Greswold and Valentine?”

  “When she went to look for the two pages in her file a few weeks later, the pages had disappeared. So she started again—on a whim. First, she went back to the bookshelf in her study, but the book was gone. So she went to the University Library, but their copy was listed as missing. So she went to the City Library, found the book in the local history section, though it had been shelved in the wrong place, and spent the best part of an hour searching for them. She’d forgotten their names, of course. When she found them, she photocopied the two passages again. She said it seemed as if she wasn’t meant to find them again.
And then, of course, she was determined that she would find them.”

  “And where do you come in?”

  “I bumped into her in the library tearooms a month or so later. She told me the whole story. She wasn’t usually so—how shall I put it?—unguarded, indiscreet. She was an excellent researcher, but she’d drawn a blank on these two and it was getting to her. There was almost nothing to be found in the Cambridge archives about Greswold and Valentine. Venn had entries for them, of course, but nothing else. Absolutely nothing except the Alderman Newton account and Venn.”

  “What’s Venn?”

  “Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses. A list of all the students who have graduated from Cambridge. Goes way back. It gives a short entry for each graduate: date of birth, schools attended, date of graduation, fellowship, father, and family, if known, and date of death, if known—you know the sort of thing. If she hadn’t looked so desperate I wouldn’t have suggested it…”

  “What?”

  “That she try a less conventional way. I asked her out to Prickwillow, suggested that she try my way. She laughed. She wasn’t a believer, you see, though we’d been friends since our university days and she was never rude about what I did. She’d read history, I’d studied English—medieval specialism. Over the years, we’d only ever talked about our research—archives, libraries, and search engines. She was particularly good at checking footnotes. She always checked mine. We avoided talking about what I did. So it was all a bit of a surprise when she said she would.”

  “What do you write?”

  “I’m a biographer. Several articles and short books now. I’m slow. It takes me such a long time to read, with only one good eye. The articles are mostly for the Spiritualist Inquirer. Julian of Norwich. Women mystics. That’s my forte. So I said to Elizabeth, Come with an open mind. I always have an open mind, she said. She didn’t. Very few people do really, though most think they do. Especially academics. It was hard for her to come here.”

  “What did she come out here for?”

  “More information. A lead. I suggested that we contact Greswold and Valentine directly to see if they could tell us anything. Give Elizabeth something more to go on. She’d been through all the death records, the annals of the city, all the town records and college records.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No, nothing. Greswold and Valentine died during the plague years, of course, so it’s not surprising that the death records are a little patchy and incomplete. She said she had nothing to lose. It seems she had a lot to lose. Poor Elizabeth. She was an unusual woman. A bit aloof sometimes, a bit prickly too. But really. All of that shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t. It’s a damn shame.”

  Dilys picked up a bundle of papers, photocopies and other materials, from her table. She pulled out a single sheet, following up on details. “Yes. Greswold,” she said. “Fellow of Trinity. Number one in Elizabeth’s series. Sometimes called Gresould, with a u, sometimes Gressald, with a double s and an a. He died in January 1665 aged only about twenty-eight years old. James Valentine, fellow of Trinity and professor of Greek. He died on the ninth of November 1666, aged about forty. He’s number two in her series.”

  “Series of what?”

  “Suspicious deaths. Five men—Trinity men—died suspiciously within a span of about five years. It starts with Greswold’s death in 1665; then Valentine in 1666; then Cowley in 1667; then Herring in 1668…”

  “How do Herring and Cowley fit in? How did she find them?”

  “Well, we tried to contact Greswold and Valentine and the other two turned up instead.”

  “The other two?”

  “Numbers three and four—except we didn’t know they were in the series at all, so we didn’t know they were numbers three and four. The poet and the boy. Cowley and Herring.”

  “What do you mean, just turned up?” I pictured them, poet and boy, pitching up in Prickwillow by coach from London or Cambridge. Ringing Dilys’s doorbell, waiting under the wind chimes among the gnomes.

  “Here. On the board—the letterboard.” She lifted up the lace-and-brocade tablecloth to reveal the corner of a pretty, antique table beneath. The top was a highly polished rosewood and walnut, I’d guess, inlaid with the letters of the alphabet.

  “My mother’s,” Dilys said, smoothing the tablecloth back into place. “Made in Wales around the middle of the nineteenth century. Lovely, eh? A nice bit of inlay. They turned up here, on the letterboard. We were calling up Greswold and Valentine, but it was Cowley and Herring who answered—the glass kept spelling out their names on the board. Over and over. Serendipity. Elizabeth set a lot of store by serendipity. Finding something when you are looking for something else. I wouldn’t call it serendipity, of course. Much too chaotic a notion. Too dependent on chance. There are guiding hands at work in the world. You have to have an open mind and you have to empty yourself out and let them show you where to look. Do you have an open mind, Lydia?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t know.”

  “Well, that’s a good start,” she said, turning her blind eye on me. I hated the way she did that. She must have known what she was doing.

  “Cowley and Herring—numbers three and four,” I said. “If Greswold and Valentine were the men who fell down the stairs at Trinity, and Herring was the boy in the river, who was Cowley?”

  “Abraham Cowley, poet and fellow of Trinity College, one of the founders of the Royal Society in the early 1660s—but Elizabeth always called it—”

  “The Invisible College?”

  “Precisely. As it was originally called informally. Elizabeth guessed that the Cowley on the board might be Cowley the poet, so she looked him up. Cowley also died in suspicious circumstances in 1667. Aged forty-nine.”

  “In Cambridge?”

  “No, in Chertsey, Surrey. He seems to have been lying low for some reason. He was found asleep in a field near his house—apparently drunk. Died a week or so later on the twenty-eighth of July, 1667. When Elizabeth checked the biography, it seemed he’d had a bad fall two years earlier—in May 1665. He almost died from that fall. If it had killed him in May 1665, he would have been number two in the series.”

  “So that’s how he came to be on Elizabeth’s list. A Trinity man who died in suspicious circumstances, though not in Trinity.”

  “Yes, it seemed Cowley and Herring wanted Elizabeth to know they were part of the sequence too. Or someone did. The apparent drunkenness, the closeness of the dates, the link with Trinity, the fact that Cowley had had a fall that nearly finished him off two years earlier…The files,” she said, apologetically. “I forgot. I was to give them to you when you came. As a kind of contingency plan.”

  She put the four bundles of papers back into a pale green file, marked in Elizabeth’s handwriting with my name.

  “A contingency plan?”

  “You are the contingency plan, dear, Elizabeth’s contingency plan.”

  “I am? She knew I would come here?”

  “Oh yes. Once the seventeenth century had found you, that is. Once they had found you. We had expected it to be a little earlier than this. But you are a braver woman than we thought. Living in The Studio for—what is it now?—weeks. Not an easy thing to do.”

  “What do you mean by brave?”

  “You’ve not seen anything odd?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that. Lots of things have gone missing and there are strange lights that pulse round the house and a number of…coincidences.”

  “Coincidences? You’re still calling them coincidences after all this time? If Cameron Brown had any idea what goes on in that house he would never have suggested that you…It’s most irresponsible.”

  “How would you explain them, Mrs. Kite?”

  “It’s all part of what Elizabeth left unfinished. There were people she raised. Things she stirred up. Stories that have to be finished.”

  “And as her contingency plan, what am I to do? Will finishing the book un-stir ever
ything?”

  “That, my dear, is a very interesting question. We are beginning to wonder whether finishing the book is a good idea at all. It seems to have got worse since you’ve been in The Studio. But we do have to do something to stop the repetitions.”

  “OK. You’ve lost me now. What repetitions?”

  “Elizabeth had a theory and a set of questions about Newton’s fellowship and the company he kept and the alchemists he worked with. The deaths seem to fill in some gaps. She had a theory about how those four—or possibly five—men all died…”

  “Something that involved Newton and the Invisible College?”

  “Yes, in a way. You could put it that way. You see, it didn’t happen all at once. The facts—or what she came to see as facts, though they can never be proven by methods that rationalists would accept—seemed to find her, rather than she them. Once she had put together those two sheets of paper, the one that described Greswold’s death and the other Valentine’s, and once she had seen the similarities between them, there was no undoing anything. She said it was a kind of alchemical reaction that seemed to have its own momentum outside her. She had started it and it seemed to need her to work, but it was making…taking its own way, using her…”

  “Richard Herring—the boy—was the fourth in the series? How did he die? Did he drown? Was he a Trinity fellow too?”

  “No, he wasn’t. He was the son of an alderman called John Herring, a draper, who was very important on the city council and had been mayor of the city until the year before his son’s death. His son, Richard, got tied up with things alchemical, Elizabeth thought. He drowned at dawn in the river in 1668. Yes, at dawn. It’s all in the file. He was the fourth in the series but not the last. But then it’s not really possible to talk about beginnings and endings as far as the dead are concerned.”

  “So Elizabeth came here and you ‘called up’ Greswold and Valentine? Then Cowley and Herring turned up on the letterboard. What did they tell you?”

  “Nothing coherent. That was the trouble. It was all a jumble. We kept a record of everything the spirits told us through the glass on the letterboard. There were references to the Bible, to what we assumed were alchemical texts, initials, and what we assumed were code words, as well as the words Herring and Cowley. It was all just fragments. We failed to make any sense of it. Elizabeth eventually gave up and went back to the archives to see if the names were significant. She found Cowley pretty quickly.”