Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  “What’s that you’ve written there?” you said, lifting your head for a moment to make out the letters sharpening in the steam, and then biting the skin just beneath my ear.

  “Something in one of Elizabeth’s notebooks. One of the codes I have to work out,” I said without hesitation. “I was afraid I’d forget a minute ago. Couldn’t find a pen.” So quick. So quick. So easy to falsify, even like this, even when so aroused that my head was spinning.

  “There’s a Bible next to the thesaurus on the desk downstairs,” you said. “I’d guess it means Ezekiel, chapter thirty-five, verse six.”

  “Christ, how do you know that?”

  “This towel of mine is going to have to come off now, you know. No choice. Might I just put my hand there for a moment? How do I know about Ezekiel? Boarding-school education. You had to know how to find your way around a Bible. Just as I’ve learned over the long years since how to find my way round this body…” You placed the palms of my hands up against the wet tiles of the bathroom wall and, running your hands down the curve of my back and buttocks, traced the letters—EZ—on the base of my spine with your fingernails.

  Lydia Brooke and Cameron Brown have lost their edges again. Bodies seen from above a bed. Impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. Impossible to see the other bodies there, caught up with them, between them, shadows of their own.

  Lying to you. Lying with you. Lying for you. Can I remember the difference?

  Elizabeth’s Bible, on her desk in the big room, fell open at Ezekiel, chapter thirty-five, because there was a card marking the page. An index card with the name Ezekiel Foxcroft written in capitals along the top. This was the card missing from Elizabeth’s index file of alchemists. Elizabeth had worked out who Mr. F. was, then, before she died. She’d found him and recorded his details here on this index card. Then, for some reason, she’d moved the index card and hidden it in the pages of her Bible. Perhaps she’d thought it would be safer here, that whoever wanted it might not be able to reach it here. Whoever had left the message on the mirror, using my fingertips in the night, had meant me to find this, hoped I would be smart enough to work it out. I wasn’t, but you were. The card read:

  Ezekiel Foxcroft (1629–1674), mathematician, protégé of Henry More. Schooled at Eton, then King’s College, Cambridge. B.A. 1652–53; M.A. 1656; fellow 1652–74. Fellow of King’s College. Nephew of Cambridge Platonist and philosopher Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683), provost of King’s. Son of Elizabeth Foxcroft née Whichcote (1600–1679), a theosophist, alchemist, and the companion of alchemist-philosopher Anne Finch, Viscountess Conway, with whom she lived at Ragley Hall. Elizabeth Foxcroft cotranslated work of the German mystic Jakob Boehme with Henry More at Ragley Hall. Ezekiel Foxcroft translated the seminal alchemical manuscript Chymical Wedding by Christian Rosenkreutz in the 1660s, the third manifesto of the Rosicrucian movement. Moved between Cambridge, Ragley Hall, and London throughout the 1660s. Died in London in a brawl in 1674.

  So Mr. F. was Ezekiel Foxcroft, fellow at King’s, a mathematician, ten years or so older than Newton, son of an alchemist mother, named Ezekiel after the great prophet celebrated by alchemists, translator of Chymical Wedding, nephew of the founder of the Cambridge Platonists, Benjamin Whichcote, protégé of the most powerful Henry More. Ezekiel was an alchemist, all right; he’d practically been born one. It was in his blood. Elizabeth had underlined the words from the Bible she had meant me to read in Ezekiel, chapter thirty-five, verse six: “I will prepare thee unto blood, and blood shall pursue thee.” Elizabeth had sent me that message about him, perhaps even for him: “Ezekiel—blood shall pursue thee.”

  Twenty-one

  It’s only when you’ve pieced together a story in several different ways that you realise where the holes are, discover the knowledge that is still missing, the questions you still need to ask. It’s not like a jigsaw, which can only fit together one way, each piece carved out of the side of another so that it will nudge back, skin to skin, bone to bone. A jigsaw exists in two dimensions. But there were so many of these fragments, layerings of narratives with jagged edges, your story, mine, now, then, seventeenth century, twenty-first century, and all the spirits that seemed to pass—or bleed—between. There were horizontal patternings, vertical and diagonal patternings, and those were just the ones you could see. If each part of this narrative of Elizabeth’s was a playing card, they had to be reshuffled. So many sequences were possible. But when there are so many players in the frame, so many potential motivations in play, almost any consequence becomes possible.

  You had another piece of that jigsaw that I didn’t even know was missing. “Have you seen the light here?” you said, lying in my bed one bright morning at the beginning of November. “I’ve never really noticed it before. It’s as if the house is awash.”

  Have I seen the light? Seen it? I live in it. I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to. You were about to give me something. Something that would fit.

  “Funny that,” you said, turning over the prism in your hand, the prism that I carried with me around the house now, slipped under my pillow at night.

  “Funny what?”

  “People in glass houses…”

  “What glass house?”

  Fragments of your thoughts did that sometimes—surfaced as if they had become detached from the rest of whatever it was you were thinking about. Suddenly you’d say something like “Most people look different in the morning” or “It was probably cowardice,” and I’d say, “Which people?” or “What was?” and you’d come back into focus. But you never did tell me which people or what was probably cowardice.

  “Elizabeth built The Studio on the site of an old boathouse,” you said. “I used to play down here in it with my friends when I was a kid. It was just a shed really, full of old wood.”

  Your eyes, close to mine, were of every colour, like Madame Bovary’s. A base brown but flecked with gold and blue. I often wondered how many people you were and how many possible combinations there were with all the people I am. Enough newness in that for several lifetimes, I guessed. That’s what potentiation means. All those combinations make a kind of potency. But potent for what?

  “No boat?”

  “Yes, there was a boat, an old rowing boat. My mother—ridiculous woman—renamed it. It was called Primrose, I think. She painted that out and renamed it Harmonium—after the Wallace Stevens book of poems. She painted green letters down the side. We used it for a few summers when I was back from school, but no one took care of it, and the wood started to rot. It never got mended.”

  Your body arched as you turned onto your side, facing away from me. I watched the sinews stretch taut across your back. You sighed and arched your back again. Arching against my touch.

  I remembered Mrs. Kite insisting on the impossibility of serendipity or coincidence. There are guiding hands at work in the world, she’d said. You just have to give yourself up to them. And you, Cameron Brown, will you give yourself up, into my hands?

  When you turned back towards me all the colour and light had gone from your eyes. I could see myself, my white face against the pillow, reflected there in the great darkness of your eyes. You said: “Last time I came here, back in July, you know, the last time before she died, we had lunch. She’d banked up the fire; it was incredibly hot. We piled the dishes from the lunch in the kitchen sink, and opened another bottle of wine—Crozes-Hermitage. I can see her sitting in a pool of sunlight downstairs, in jeans and sweater, on the sofa with the broken springs, feet folded beneath her, her white hair twisted into a knot at the back of her head, with a book of maps out on her lap and a magnifying glass. I sat in the armchair and she just carried on working like she’d always done.”

  “As if you weren’t there…”

  “Yes, as if I wasn’t there. I picked up a book of Flaubert short stories, but I couldn’t read. My eyes kept slipping off the page. So I sat and watched her working, the light catching the tendrils of white hair on the nape
of her neck, her breathing slow as she sipped the wine, absentmindedly, from her glass. I had to say something. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. And you know what, when she turned round to look at me and smiled, I felt guilty. And though it was so damned hot in that room, I was suddenly really cold—as if someone had walked over my grave. But it was hers, wasn’t it?”

  “Her what?”

  “It was her grave that was making me cold—her grave and all that cold water she died in. I felt it then—that Sunday afternoon. Her death.”

  “Did she answer your question?”

  “About what she was doing? Yes, she said she was trying to work out what was on the land before they built the Wren Library, in the 1670s. She said the seventeenth-century map records of Cambridge were very difficult to read because they weren’t drawn to scale, but she thought they’d had to fill in the King’s Ditch and dig up an old tennis court. And then she told me there were rats in her garden again and that Pepys had caught three or four of the young ones. And I said, ‘That’s good.’ Just that. ‘That’s good.’”

  The great oval in the river that you can see from Elizabeth’s map. Garret Hostel Greene. The pupil in the eye on the map—that’s what was there before the Wren Library.

  “What was here before, besides the boathouse? On this land?”

  “Under The Studio? Oh, you should have asked Elizabeth that. She was never able to live anywhere without tracing its history, the lay of its land. She had a gift for it. She was tenacious, like those women you see in the local history section of public libraries. But she wasn’t looking for ancestors or mapping out family trees. She was never interested in that. Just land and what had been on it. We lived in the big house, of course, where the Morrisons live now. Grange End. They planted the beech hedge so you can’t see it from the orchard anymore, but there isn’t much to see. It was an ugly house, really. There’s been a house on this land for centuries, right back to the sixteenth century. I liked to think of that when I was a boy, sitting in the apple tree. It was an apothecary’s house once. My parents took down an old wall in the late seventies to build an extension, and the following summer the field next to it was full of poppies—my father said that the seeds had somehow lain dormant in the wall. You could still see the lines of the herb garden from up in the big tree.”

  “Poppies? Why poppies?”

  “An apothecary would have grown poppies for the opium. Along with an herb garden. Christ, I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “Why did she sell the house—Grange End? Money?” I imagined the beautiful Elizabeth in the big house like that woman in E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Walking around a sunlit garden, her skirts trailing the long grass.

  “My father died. The house was too big for her, and she’d never really liked it. She just wanted a place to store her books and papers and to write in, so she sold off the house and most of the land and had The Studio built by an architect friend of hers, where the boathouse was in the orchard. Just enough. It was quieter here, she said.”

  “And did she ever find out what came before the boathouse?”

  “Oh, yes. Even before she had the plans drawn up. She had to be sure it was good land. The boathouse was only built in the early nineteenth century. You’d never guess what was here before—even Elizabeth hadn’t expected that.”

  “Boatyards for boatbuilding?” I guessed as you pulled on your clothes, gathering yourself for the day, for the lab, finding your papers, books, wallet, watch among the pile of objects you had discarded on the floor the previous night.

  I used to think that it was unfair that you were always leaving me. I used to complain that I never got to have a turn at being the one to walk away. But there were all those times when I engineered it so that I could. Slammed the door, left town, left the country. Yes, I guess that’s true. It was pretty even, really—the leaving. We always thought we were in control, didn’t we?

  “A ferry?” I pulled the bedclothes around my skin. Of course: you had come here to fill in some of the missing bits for me. You were drawing in some of the lines on the dot-to-dot, but you had no idea what you were doing. The air was thick with threads and skeins. I couldn’t quite see it yet. But I could sense that it was there somewhere. You passed me the prism.

  “Glass, Lydia. Sometimes you are very slow. That was what was here before. A glasshouse.”

  “A house made of glass?” I pictured a single-story building made entirely of glass so that it was skinless, so that you could watch everything going on inside. It was your house I saw—the one at Over—turned into glass. The one that had CCTV cameras trained on it permanently now. In my picture I was outside looking in. People with second sight like Dilys can tell—apparently—even when they’re being watched through CCTV. The touch of the eyes reaches them even through all that technology, the glass, metal, and wiring. Like the bruises on the sleeping princess.

  “No, a house where they made glass, stupid. Look, I’m going to have to go. Should have left twenty minutes ago. I’ve been late for almost all the lab meetings in the last two weeks. All your fault.”

  “Bollocks,” I said. “You just won’t go. Not my fault. Am I keeping you? Are you restrained in any way? What kind of glasshouse?” There was a health club in Cambridge called the Glass House, I remembered. Very expensive. I think you had a membership once.

  You sat down on the edge of the bed again, resigned to being late. “OK. An ordinary kind of glasshouse—if glasshouses can be ordinary, which I guess they can. I’m not sure about the dates, but I think it was built in the seventeenth century. Part of all that revival of English glassmaking in the 1660s and ’70s. Sarah knows about all that stuff. You want me to ask her? Is it important?”

  “No, I don’t think it’s that important,” I said. “I’m just curious, that’s all.”

  “Only curious? There’s never been only curious with you. Well, I only know bits and pieces. Elizabeth insisted on having the oak worktable built right in the middle of the big room because it’s where the glasshouse furnace would have been. She was very exact about that. The architect didn’t like it at all. Said it spoiled the line of the room.”

  For once I didn’t feel that dropping away when the front door slammed and when, almost exactly two minutes later, I heard the sound of your engine start up. Too full for emptiness, I was framing a question while the sound of your car diminished to nothing: if the walls of a sixteenth-century apothecary’s house can leave poppy seeds behind, can a seventeenth-century glasshouse leave the light of its furnace in its wake? And if a boathouse is built on the same land, bringing together all that fire and water, is that potentiation? Alchemy? Particles of fire and water moving and mirroring through and into each other? No, of course not. Seeds can survive for years in cracks in walls if the conditions are right, if it’s dry enough, but light, even light freighted with water, doesn’t hang about. Light is always long gone. It doesn’t have a history, a past or a future. Like people, it just disappears into nothing. Yet some light—like sunset light—lingers. You’d say that, wouldn’t you? Or a poet might say that. But that lingering is of seconds—surely no light can linger for centuries.

  Coincidence? No such thing. It was no coincidence that you brought me the prism that Elizabeth had tracked across the sea from Murano into the hands of Isaac Newton or that she had built her house on the site of a seventeenth-century glasshouse. It was no coincidence that she drowned with that prism in her hand.

  Everything was turning into new forms on the land around The Studio, or so it seemed to me then. Blooming. It had always been so. Benign. Malign. Who could say? When we were both unaccountably awake at dawn a few days before, you took me out into the garden to show me the fairy ring you’d seen under the beech trees, and instead of the fairy ring we found the fly agaric mushroom in the grey cold, colours washed from trees, soil, leaves, a sepia morning, in which the mushroom’s red cap bled like a pool of blood in the undergrowth, flecked with white.

  “Jesus,” you sa
id. Just that. “Jesus.”

  A pool of red poison in the grey of the morning.

  “If I tell you not to touch it, you’ll touch it,” you said.

  “You think I’m that predictable?” I feigned offence. I’d often tasted the mushrooms you’d not been able to identify, and because you were always so careful about the poisonous ones, yes, it was always an act of defiance. Taste was a way of telling what it was. The books said that certain mushrooms tasted of apricot or cucumber or ashes. You had to taste them sometimes to know.

  “Eat it,” you said. “Go on, eat it. I could tell you that you’d hallucinate, vomit, and feel your head explode, but it wouldn’t be true. You’d need scores of dried ones to do that, but you just can’t be sure how strong they are. Several people have died from eating agarics. Go on, you know you want to—eat it. Then I’ll drive you to Addenbrooke’s to get your stomach pumped.”

  “What do we do with it?”

  “Leave it there…there’ll be several others in a day or so.”

  Which of us was Red Riding Hood and which of us the wolf? It had become difficult to differentiate roles now that the tables had turned.

  “You’ve gone back into his bed?” Kit asked, across the reading room desk. The old man to my right leaned a little more closely in our direction, ears pricked. The boy with the ring through his lower lip who was writing on Marvell was listening too.

  “After everything you said? Just like that? What is it with you? I told you to be careful years ago. And you’ve been reckless ever since. That man is bad news.”