Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  Alderman Newton recorded James Valentine’s death nearly two years later:

  November 2nd 1666: On Fryday night about 11 of the clock Mr James Valentine goeing out of his chamber downe the Stayres into Trinity Colledge Court, gott such a fall that for a good space he lay as dead and bruised and cutt his head and blead much, and its feared much that he will not recover it. Mr Valentine dyed of this hurt on Wednesday/Thursday morning being the 9th November 1666. (p. 16)

  Elizabeth’s second hypothesis was that there was a connection between these suspicious deaths in the 1660s, Newton, and a group of alchemists working in Cambridge, including a man referred to only as Mr. F., whom she had found reference to in Newton’s notebooks. This was scandalous—Newton implicated in murder—but certainly within the realm of the rationally possible. She hadn’t proved Newton’s involvement: the bundle of papers here—her attempt to gather proof—contained only scraps and snippets that documented Newton’s violent temperament. On one sheet of paper, Elizabeth—speculating—had copied out numbers 13 to 15 and number 40 from Newton’s list of sins, recorded back in 1662:

  13. Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them

  14. Wishing death and hoping it to some

  15. Striking many

  40. Using unlawful means to bring us out of distresses

  This bundle also included descriptions of mysterious fires that had taken place in Trinity in or around Newton’s rooms between 1662 and 1677—Elizabeth clearly saw a connection between Newton’s threat to burn his mother and stepfather and their house and these subsequent fires. The first was a description of a fire in Trinity Chapel on Advent Sunday on the 30th of November 1662, in which the altar was completely burned away; the second an account of a fire in Trinity Old Library between Michaelmas and Christmas in 1665; and the third a report by a student of St. Johns called Abraham de la Prynne of a fire in Newton’s rooms sometime in 1677:

  In a winter morning, leaving [his manuscript of his book on optics] amongst his other papers on his study table, whilst he went to chapel, the candle which he had unfortunately left burning there too cachd hold by some means or other of some other papers, and there fired the aforesaid book, and utterly consumed it and several other valuable writings, and that which is more wonderful did no further mischief. But when Mr Newton came from chapel and had seen what was done, every one thought he would have run mad, he was so troubled thereat that he was not himself for a month after.

  A further sheet of paper described Newton’s famous breakdown in the summer of 1692, when he became paranoid and consumed with violent feelings and during which he may have set fire to his lodgings. On this sheet, Elizabeth had copied out two short extracts from letters Newton had written at that time—to indicate his state of mind, I assumed. In September, 1692, Newton sent a letter to Samuel Pepys in London in which he wrote:

  I am extremely troubled by the embroilment I am in and have neither ate nor slept well this twelve month, nor have my former consistency of mind.

  Three days later he wrote to John Locke:

  Being of the opinion that you endeavoured to embroil me wth woemen & by other means I was so much affected with it as that when one told me you were sickly & would not live I answered ’twere better if you were dead. I desire you to forgive me.

  So Newton had violent fantasies and suffered from attacks of madness and paranoia. Not enough to implicate him in murder, surely?

  The third of Elizabeth’s hypotheses was not rationally plausible, or not in any way that I could formulate. In the last months before she died, Elizabeth came to believe that a series of deaths that had taken place in Cambridge since she’d started investigating were connected in some way with the seventeenth-century murders. This bundle in the file was made up of a series of press cuttings from the Cambridge Evening News, short records about four deaths that had taken place on one of her four dates: January 5th (Greswold), July 28th (Cowley), November 9th (Valentine), and November 11th (Herring). This hypothesis seemed to be significant only in that it revealed the extent of Mrs. Kite’s influence and the paranoid and delusional state of Elizabeth’s mind just before her death. What had she thought? That these deaths were somehow being replayed for her, either to warn her off or to lead her in a particular direction in her investigation?

  The final hypothesis was also a mere speculation. On a photocopy of Alderman Newton’s account of Richard Herring’s drowning Elizabeth had circled the date and had written underneath: “Almost two years to the day since James Valentine died on 9 November 1666.”

  What was the connection between the deaths by falling of two Trinity fellows, Greswold and Valentine, and the death by drowning of the son of the draper and former mayor almost exactly two years later? The boy Richard Herring had drowned in the river only a few hundred feet from the spot where Greswold and Valentine had fallen to their deaths. The answer was there in Elizabeth’s notes. She had written a single word underneath the account of Richard Herring’s death, accompanied by a question mark: “Blackmail?” Of course, I thought, beginning to see the thought that had formed in Elizabeth’s mind. Elizabeth had come to believe that Herring had been involved in the Trinity deaths. As the son of a draper, he had perhaps been employed in the college in some way, as a porter or cook or a delivery boy. Offered enough money by a third party, might the servant boy have acted as a poisoner? At some point Elizabeth had attached the question “Blackmail?” to Richard Herring’s name. Herring had enough power in 1668, two years after Valentine’s death—to attempt blackmail of an unknown “third party,” an act of such consequence as to make his death inevitable.

  A final scrap of paper, torn from one of Elizabeth’s notebooks, I assumed, began with a name and a question mark:

  Mr. F.? Newton refers to Mr. F. in his notebooks as a man who supplied him with alchemical manuscripts. Who was he?

  This page must have been a record of the beginnings of Elizabeth’s speculations about the mysterious Mr. F. She had spent the last few weeks of her life searching for him; she must have found out more than this. He might have been the man in Newton’s company in the Red Hart in Petticury, the night the boy Richard Herring died—but that was speculation too. Elizabeth had also told Dilys that she’d seen Mr. F. in the weeks before her death. She had actually seen him. If she had discovered his identity, she had left no record. Elizabeth’s pursuit of this question had been interrupted by her death.

  Twenty

  At midnight on the 2nd of November I let the file drop to the floor over the edge of the bed and fell into a series of confused dreams in which I and a number of people, all of us dressed in black, burned down your house with you in it. You had to see me do it. I could make out your silhouetted frame behind the flickering window, pressed up against it, you inside, me outside. I woke suddenly, covered in sweat and swollen with rage, the smell of burning still in my nostrils and the word embroilment on my lips.

  Embroilment. Newton had written about embroilment and madness in letters to John Locke and Samuel Pepys, just as he lost his edges. “You endeavoured to embroil me,” he wrote.

  The woman in the mirror is also embroiled. She knows that. She has known that for some time.

  Transitive verb, embroiled, embroiling, embroils. 1. to involve in argument, contention, or hostile actions 2. to throw into confusion or disorder, entangle—from Old French embrouiller, to throw into confusion.

  How to describe one of those dreams that soon becomes so familiar that I struggle to remember how one was distinguished from the next? Only by degrees of force, like volume of sound.

  It did not surprise me, then, that when I woke in the middle of the night from that dream and walked to the window, I saw you on the riverbank. I didn’t recognise you at first, but I was not afraid of the outside; out there the world seemed benign and uninhabited. It was your frame that I recognised, your silhouetted bulk against the faintly illuminated water, looking across the river to the scrubland on the other side, S
tourbridge Fair, where a few cows cast long shadows. Did you feel my eyes on your back?

  Eyes on the back of the neck. I’ve read about that. No, you told me about it. “Given how much research has been done on the brain and how it works,” you said, “it’s amazing how little work has been done on the mind. People don’t even know where it is.” Your theory was that the mind was a kind of force field. It was “out there,” all around us, not inside our heads, like the brain. Our minds reach out to touch what we are looking at, you said. So that’s why people can feel someone’s gaze on the back of their neck as a touch. It’s such common knowledge in the world of surveillance that security guards and intelligence officers are trained not to look directly at a subject’s back when they are in pursuit. One of your security men had told you that, you said. One of the men employed at enormous cost to watch over you, in that house.

  That night, Cameron Brown, I began to feel a new kind of power. I touched the back of your neck with my eyes from your mother’s bedroom window, through the rain, and made you turn towards me. I watched you turn briefly towards the house, glance up at the upper windows, follow the line of the roof there. But you couldn’t see me up in Elizabeth’s bedroom in the dark, so you turned back towards the river.

  I determined not to be stirred by your presence or by the passing through of those who, like you, would embroil me. You are the road they walk down, Mrs. Kite had said. I climbed back into bed and pulled the sheets up over my head. I turned off the phone, then turned it back on again. You might text me, after all. When I went back to the window you were still standing there, your back to me, but the rain was heavier now and your body was hunched and stiff against the cold. You did not move.

  I pulled on a raincoat over my nightgown. In the kitchen, where I checked that Pepys’s bowls were still standing by the back door so that you would not notice his absence, I poured a glass of whisky into a heavy tumbler and walked through the rain to you. We said nothing, but instead we stood together watching the rain making intersecting circles on the moonlit water. I passed you the tumbler of whisky, which you took from me and drank.

  “Come in from the rain,” I said.

  “I’m glad you’ve come back,” you said, looking away, across the river, hiding your face. “You don’t know how it was. Don’t go away again.”

  “There are no happy endings for us,” I said. “Just a scattered present. It’s always been like that. It’s enough, more than enough. But let’s not think about futures or make promises.”

  The moon made a path to Stourbridge Fair across the water.

  “There were prostitutes, puppets, and acrobats,” I said, “across there during the fair. There are plague victims buried across there too, down there, under the scrub. Bones girt about with buttons and oyster shells and all the detritus of the fair.”

  “Are they still down there?” you asked. “Does the earth ever give them up?”

  “Who? What?”

  “A friend of mine has been attacked. He’s in the hospital.”

  “A friend of yours?”

  “Emmanuel Scorsa. He works with me at the lab. A young Italian neuroscientist with a fellowship—from Milan. Someone or some people attacked him in Cambridge this evening, in St. Edward’s Passage. I’ve just come from Addenbrooke’s. He’s in a coma lying on a life-support machine. I hardly recognised him.”

  We stood on the grass in the rain. You wouldn’t come in. It was cold. I was wet. My hair had begun to stick to my face. My feet were bare. I had nettle stings.

  “Shit,” I said. “That’s terrible. Attacked with what? And why?”

  “Why? Because he works on animals. Rats. Because he experiments with the brains of rats. Enough reason to stab someone in the dark in an alleyway in the back, don’t you think? Rats, for Christ’s sake. Just fucking rats.”

  “Have they caught anyone?”

  “No. He was found slumped in a doorway by a couple passing by. They thought he was a drunk at first, until they saw the blood and the cuts to his face; then they called the police. The doctors have operated, but he’s ‘critical,’ they say. He has a punctured lung and a cracked skull. They think he might have been attacked somewhere else and then dumped in St. Edward’s Passage. The police found his card with my name on it—that’s why they called me.”

  St. Edward’s Passage. Too awful to imagine lying there bleeding slowly to death. Listening for the sound of footsteps. Drifting in and out of consciousness. Had he been tortured somewhere to have been beaten up like that? Also too awful to imagine; but Emmanuel Scorsa would have information that the animal activists—if it was animal activists who attacked him—wanted. I couldn’t protect you from this. Animal killings were one thing—guinea pigs and cats slaughtered and mutilated—but this accelerated everything. Pepys was now part of a sequence that tied The Studio and me dangerously into your world. So for a moment then I thought how clever I had been to keep Pepys’s death from you and from the police, because he was an invisible link in the chain between the guinea pig deaths and Emmanuel Scorsa. You didn’t know about Pepys—you never would. If you’d known about Pepys then you would have seen that I was in the firing line now. You being at The Studio at all that night put us both in danger.

  “When I got to his bed in the hospital he was all wired up to drips and monitors. He has wadding and bandages on his face where they’d stitched up the cuts.”

  “Cuts?”

  “Yes, of course, cuts. Seven cuts to his face.”

  “Like the animals?”

  “Yes, just like the sodding animals. A policewoman was sitting next to his bed reading a book; she asked me for identification and took down my name. She wouldn’t leave me alone with him. They want to see me in the morning. They’ll want to interview all of us from the lab in the morning.”

  “You’ll go back to the hospital tomorrow?”

  “Yes, his parents should get here by tomorrow. They were leaving for the Milan airport an hour ago. I had to make the call. If he makes it to the morning they’re going to do some tests. He has stains around his lips too, which they think may mean he’d been drugged or poisoned. He’s in such a bad way. Bastards. Bloody bastards. Such a brilliant beautiful boy.” You kicked a tree. You threw your glass into the water. It floated for a moment, then sank.

  “And Sarah?”

  “She took the boys and went back to her sister’s this afternoon.”

  “They’ll be all right there.”

  “She says that’s it. She liked Emmanuel. We all did. He took the kids tenpin bowling. He used to babysit for us. He made her laugh.”

  “She’s said that’s it before. She’ll come back.”

  “If I were her, that would be bloody it. I wouldn’t come back. I don’t think she will. Not that it matters in the scale of things. None of it bloody matters. Maybe that will be it for me too.”

  Sometime before dawn in the early hours of the morning, when you talked in your sleep, I put my arms around you, tracing the contours of your naked back and hips with a single fingertip. Sometime in that same night I walked—sleeping—from that bed and your body to the front door. How do I know? The way I always know—because I’m awakened by the cold on the threshold, the open door in my hand, looking out into the night. For a moment in that flickering between sleep and wake, on the threshold between that world and this, I remembered, as I always did, what it was I was supposed to be doing. But in that same second, as always, it was gone, like sand through a sieve. I reach for it, but it’s gone. I tried to wake you—I called to you from the bottom of the stairs—but you didn’t hear me. I spoke to you as I climbed back in beside you and slipped my cold hands between your thighs, but you were too deeply asleep to hear my voice or feel the touch of my fingers or the silk of my gown. You stirred and said something I couldn’t make out. I lay still for a few minutes, watching you, wondering how my defences had been so ineffectual against you in the end, after all my resistance. Would I always come back? Then I gave up trying to w
ork it out, and slept with the word embroilment on my lips.

  I was washing my face the following morning when I saw the letters and numbers written on the steamed-up bathroom mirror, almost certainly traced by my fingertip on the mirror’s surface the night before, while I was sleepwalking. EZ35/6. I didn’t recognise them as letters and numbers at first, because the characters curled around each other and mirrored each other, the E and the 3 looking towards each other separated by the Z, and the 5 and the 6 looking towards the right with the slash separating them. They could have meant anything: letters from the license plate of a car; a code from a security lock; a password for a file on Elizabeth’s computer; or something from the dream that had pitched me into walking.

  You were in the shower, your voice raised above the sound of the running water, talking about someone in the lab. I took a bath towel and rubbed it across the surface of the mirror. I couldn’t let you see those letters.

  “Did you walk in your sleep last night?” you said suddenly, turning off the shower and climbing out through the curve of the glass door and pressing your wet body up against my back, your arms around my waist.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “What makes you ask?”

  “A dim memory of your body disappearing for a while. This robe of yours is going to have to come off again, I’m afraid.” Green silk slipped to the floor, its folds curved and undulating like snakeskin.

  “That’s strange,” I said, appalled at how motiveless my lying had become. There was no need to protect you from knowing that I’d been sleepwalking, after all. I took the toothbrush from my mouth. “How long was I gone, do you think?”

  “Oh, best part of an hour, I’d guess. I assumed you’d gone downstairs to read or answer some e-mails.” As you massaged my shoulders and neck, ran the tip of your tongue up the back of my neck, I saw my face and yours framed for a moment and then disappearing into the mirror as it steamed up again. The letters I had erased from the surface of the mirror reappeared where your face had been. EZ35/6. My hands were grasping the side of the sink, taking the weight of you against my naked back: your hands were over mine. I was trapped. I couldn’t erase the letters this time.