Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  Lydia Brooke walked into the dark, wet Cambridge night that lay behind the fireworks and the party in the house of the daughter of the famous poet, behind the bright lights, the candles, and the mulled wine. She walked with her back to Midsummer Common, where thousands of people in jeans and Wellington boots stood watching the fireworks make patterns across the sky just as hundreds of Cambridge townspeople and students had watched the comets in December 1664 and April 1665, gazing skyward while standing on the very land where in the following summer and the one after it, hundreds of them would be buried as plague victims.

  Lydia Brooke walked down Jesus Lane from east to west, imagining the few men, women, and children who also walked this way in the plague years, this way, not the other, back into the city, towards life, not death. They walked at dead of midsummer night, released from the pesthouses, back from the dead—frail, tired, wide-eyed, incredulous. The resurrected returning to houses where they must burn fires with unslaked lime until dawn, when they would open their shutters to the day, purged and still alive, to the wonder of their neighbours.

  Where the streets were then pockmarked and cratered, and elsewhere sticky with mud or heaped with human and animal refuse, excrement, oyster shells, discarded meat bones and rotted vegetables, as well as ash and burnt wood, now they were paved and littered with burger packs and Coke cans. Where then the shop fronts were boarded up, their owners fled to the country, now glassed shop fronts illuminated the newest leather bags or shoes or winter coats on mannequins, which looked to Lydia that night as if they were theatrical dolls, menacing and grotesque, watching her, smiles too wide, too eager, their lipsticked cupid mouths too perfect.

  She was not herself. Something was wrong. Her head ached, her skin crawled and sweated, glands throbbed beneath her arms and in her neck. She was nauseous, her stomach turned to liquid. She was afraid that she would have to throw up somewhere in a back alley, or stumble and fall, cornered like a wounded, hunted animal. Sickness had muddled her head and intensified her vision. She could see pinpricks of light across the night, flashing on and off in time with the pulse she could feel in the base of her neck and in her temples, even across her stomach. Sometimes everything seemed to contract as if it was running down a hole in her head, running to a still point. From time to time, fascinated, she would stop to watch the pulsing stars on the black night, and then time would slip away like a sand glass, to the sound of the fireworks somewhere behind her, which lit up the buildings in red and green in time with the pulse in her head. How long did she stand there, staring at the wall?

  He must have been there all that time as she stood at the corner of Trinity Lane opposite Hobbs, but it was only when she turned to follow the arrow someone had painted on the corner wall over the words TO THE RIVER that she first heard the footsteps. Why did she turn there? Simply because the sign said TO THE RIVER and that seemed reason enough, an instruction even. She was very thirsty and she thought there might be water there in a river.

  So she didn’t enter Trinity through the great gateway under the carved unicorn and the lion into the courtyard beyond, for that would have meant talking to the night porter, explaining who she was. Instead she turned right off an empty Trinity Street lined with glittering shop fronts, into the dark of Trinity Lane. At the corner, she slipped under the CCTV camera lashed to the wall watching the shops, and into the lane that for centuries has snaked between the walls of Trinity to the right and Gonville and Caius to the left. She’d enter Trinity from the back, near the river.

  That’s when she first heard the footsteps, in step with her own. Turning to see who was behind her, she glimpsed, only for a moment, a shape, a human form, silhouetted against the lights from the shops on Trinity Street. But here there was not enough light to see by. The streetlights weren’t on that night. She has no doubts about that part of what she remembers. It wasn’t that the streetlights for some unaccountable reason had not been turned on, nor that there had been a power cut, but that there were no streetlights at all. They had disappeared. And there were footsteps.

  Don’t let him see you. Don’t let him know you are afraid. Keep walking. Don’t speed your pace. Don’t look back. Remember Lot’s wife: transformed into a pillar of salt. Yes, she is thirsty. Perhaps she is already a pillar of salt. Candles flicker in college windows. The man in the doorway is a pool of red in the night.

  Wellington boots chafed against the back of her calf muscles, boots that felt as heavy as lead that night, and loud against the cobblestones. But how could they have been loud? Rubber soles make no noise against stone.

  “What was it you saw that night, Dr. Brooke? In your own words.”

  “I’m not sure what they were.” The earth has bubbles, as the water hath, / And these were of them.

  “‘They’? You saw more than one figure?”

  “Yes, sir, I saw more than one figure, but I am sure it was only one person I saw.”

  “Would you say the figure you saw—the one that followed you—was male or female?”

  “I couldn’t say. I never saw it clearly enough.”

  Actually, Lydia Brooke saw much more than she could say. Something broke for her that night. When she turned and could no longer see the figure at the top of Trinity Lane, she went to find it. When she thought, He’s gone, something happened: a bolt shot somewhere, a tide turned.

  Tears shall drown the wind. Did the alchemist think he was invincible? Was he? Did he think he was some kind of god, now that he had split light into colours, discovered the laws of motion and of gravity, scratched out the outlines of the calculus? Did he think he had divine protection? Do you? Is that it? Are you immortal already, Isaac Newton, or do you just think you are? Did you make a pact?

  Tell me. I’ll keep your secret.

  And the man in red does what she does, turns, feeling her tide turn against him. He heads for the river down Garret Hostel Lane. How far will Lydia Brooke go? Her pulse, sickeningly fast, drums in her ears and eyes and in her temples. A cat, in the shadows, rummaging among piles of rotten food and rubbish, hisses, seeing what she sees: the figure in the red gown, the man with the white hair, the man who shouldn’t be there.

  She wants to know, to see. He wants to stop the seeing. She must know. She must not know. “I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as to go o’er…” Tell me.

  Lydia shadows the figure in red, moving swiftly now, his gown made of crimson wool, drapery forming and re-forming heavily in the wind, like the folds of the statues they would make of him everywhere, in churches and chapels and outside libraries. She penetrates the dusk of distances and the gloom of shadows, watches him through the shifting effects of perspective brought on by sickness. Was she bringing him out, or he her? A game of hide-and-seek, inside outside, stalker and stalked. He’s behind you. But then he has gone again, into an interstice in the stone, an opening she cannot see, leaving only a trembling of red upon the wind, the only colour in that Cambridge night now except for the fireworks still breaking over her head like red and green chrysanthemums and corals, over the crenelated and towered edges of college roofs.

  But he has not gone. She can feel him bristling somewhere close by, a hunted thing, or a hunting thing, filling out every corner of Garret Hostel Lane. She knows she has to draw him out. He has to run again so that she can follow. She hears steps ringing on stone. She can see him on the other side of the river now, a red figure bleeding into the rain-circled river, a figure reflected in water walking upside down, his leather boots echoing on stone. Over Garret Hostel Bridge into—what?

  She has crossed the river. She is standing now where she had stood only three days before, looking across the Backs to Queen’s Road, Trinity College behind her, Garret Hostel Bridge behind her. But now where there should have been a paved road in front of her leading from Trinity across a scrublike stretch of meadow, once marsh, to meet Queen’s Road, the Backs, a road receding through linden trees to a vanishing point in th
e night, now there was no road, no linden trees, no vanishing point. Instead she stood on a perfect oval of grass, an island in the river; she was looking from Garret Hostel Greene across water into marsh and darkness. Except that Garret Hostel Greene had been dug up some 330 years ago to make way for the Wren Library.

  Lydia knew the patch of oval ground in the middle of the river from the photocopy of George Braun’s map of sixteenth-century Cambridge pasted into the pages of The Alchemist, and from the second copy, which Elizabeth had taped to the wall of the bathroom in The Studio, above the jar of toothbrushes. George Braun had drawn the oval of Garret Hostel Greene as an enormous pupil in that map of the city, which itself looked in some lights like a cross-section of an eye, one of those seventeenth-century anatomical drawings. On the map there were swine and strange dragonlike creatures, perhaps even a kind of unicorn over on the land beyond the river on the outskirts of the city of stone, glass, and reason.

  How could she feel the spongy marshy ground of the green under her feet unless she was already mad?

  Something falls into the water. Or lifts out from it. He, the figure in red, is now standing behind her on the bridge, apparently waiting for her. She closes her eyes for a long minute. When she opens them the night seems lighter, but stained with red, the water, the bridge. A phantasm. Newton’s sun-stain.

  It takes her several moments to work out how the view from the river, from this bridge over which she now follows him, differs from what she knows should be there, because the stain sits there between her and the world, tearing her retina. How can you look at an absence so immense and not see it? No library. A hole where it should be and in its place, where that great library designed by Sir Christopher Wren should be, its gracious arches reflected in the river, only a tennis court and a cluster of half-timbered single-story buildings.

  She follows him into Trinity through courtyards and corridors thick with wood smoke, where shutters are closed, where cracks of candlelight through shuttered windows spill out and radiate. He stops and waits on the stone flagging; she follows him to the bottom of a wooden staircase, then climbs after the flash of red, through the smell of camphor, slaked lime, and balsam. Odours of the apothecary’s shop. He is there, at the top of the staircase, waiting, holding his ground. She turns, still looking up, and stumbling to protect herself from something falling towards her, a glint of glass; she falls in an unlit corridor to the bottom of a flight of stairs in a building which has been demolished to make a great library some 330 years ago.

  That was something of the reason why Lydia Brooke kept certain things to herself in the courtroom. There had been moon shadows and red stains on the night of the 5th of November that she could not have begun to describe. Her silence was, she knew, at least technically, a kind of perjury. She had sworn that she would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but she had long understood that there were whole truths and half-truths and truths that simply could not be put into words and would not be heard even if they were.

  Twenty-seven

  It took me some time to open my eyes. Perhaps I didn’t want to. Somewhere in my head, somewhere in a mass of swollen flesh, my eyes were hot. The painkillers had worn off. I could hear someone else moving around in the room—that was Will, I guessed; she had promised to stay for a few days. Once upon a time. What was Will doing here? Was I now a kind of hostage? Would Lily Ridler use me to reel you in? Kit would come; Kit would know where to look for me.

  I struggled to piece together the fragments of the night before as if it were as simple as waking hungover after a long party. I was lying on the sofa in the big room, covered with musty patchwork quilts that Will had dragged out from some cupboard somewhere. I opened my eyes a crack. I could still see; that was something. Will was between me and the window, her body flattened by the thin morning light. She was pulling off her nightgown over her head, unaware of my presence. A Rembrandt painting—a Saskia. Your Saskia. Arms stretched high over her head, disrobing, long limbs, white skin, blue-white in this light. Will Burroughs. Lily Ridler. Your lover in my house. No, your lover in Elizabeth’s house. No, Elizabeth’s friend in Elizabeth’s house. Will Burroughs.

  I understood something of Lily’s spell on you as I watched her limbs moving against the morning, the enigma you had fallen for and been so enmeshed in. The Lily Ridler who, you said, took you into her bed in that room in Mawson Road. The eyes that were always somehow absent. She’d changed since I had seen her last. She seemed bigger, or maybe that was because, black and blue as I was, I felt smaller. Or perhaps it was because there were two facts now that I couldn’t reconcile: she had been your lover and I knew I was in her debt.

  The air in the big room was thick with the smell of wood smoke, the sleep smells of two women and dried blood. My clothes were still piled on the floor near the desk—a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, a scarf, and a cream cord jacket. That jacket would have to be dry cleaned, I thought. What do you say to a dry cleaner about caked blood? An accident. What kind of accident would produce that much blood?

  “You awake?” she said, turning towards me, smiling, still half naked and unself-conscious, pulling on olive-coloured combat trousers over black knickers. I saw the tattoo of a butterfly on the base of her back. I imagined your fingers following the outlines of that butterfly, and then I looked away when I couldn’t say for sure whose fingers were where. The room was suddenly thick with your lovers and mine: Sarah, Antoine, Lily, Will, and then Cameron and Lydia somewhere—which edge, which fingers, whose tongue was that, whose curve of hip?

  Under the pillow where I had left it, my mobile phone buzzed. You had texted me these words: “A kiss for your morning from the night of America.” I typed out a reply: “I need you to come home. I’ve been hurt. I don’t know what to do.” Then I erased each of those letters, backwards, one by one, till there was nothing left on the white screen. No, no drama. Ill-advised. I needed time, not flurries of questions and anxiety. I wrote to you as I would have done if it was just an ordinary 6th of November morning and I was playing the usual game of cat and mouse, predator and preyed upon, seducer and seduced, that game we played in which we got to change places as often as there were texts.

  “I will not kiss you today,” I wrote. “Not today. You will have to find other lips to kiss.” Mine are cut and bleeding. Like releasing a white dove into the sky to seek you out in Florida. Message sent. It’s all just the same here. I am fine. Nothing to worry about.

  “You won’t want to look at yourself for a bit,” Will said. “It’s not pretty. You might want to stay away from mirrors. Who was the text from?”

  “Kit,” I said. “I’ve texted back that I’m full of cold and I’ll call later.”

  I tried to feel the size of my face with my fingers, running my fingertips round the lids of my eyes. Those first tears hurt, so I bit the end of my tongue, hard. I could taste blood in my mouth, see it in the darkness of my sight. I could smell blood in the air.

  The phone buzzed again. You were keying in words to send to me across the sea from your hotel room.

  “I have just written you a fine long letter,” you replied. “So I will kiss you as often as I like. Try to stop me.”

  “Will?” It was her voice I needed to stop the tears.

  “Yes?”

  “I can’t see very well. Do you think I should call a doctor?”

  “No, not unless you want the police here. It’s just swelling. It’ll go down in a day or so. You’ll need to lie low for a bit. You have broken ribs, I think, but I’ve strapped them up as well as I can. A doctor wouldn’t do any more than that. There’s nothing else broken but your nose as far as I can tell. That will heal by itself. It’ll be OK. I’ll stay with you, I promise, as long as I can. You still sure you don’t want me to call the police?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I want to get whoever did this, but I don’t want the police involved. If they come here there will be questions abou
t me being here and the book, and Cameron will have to get involved. And he’s in deep enough already.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. Listen. I’ve been sitting here thinking about it since six o’clock. I reckon you have to know now. It can’t make things any worse for you because you’re kind of at the eye of the storm. Trouble is, the storm’s moving all the time.”

  “Know what?” Behind Will’s head a fine rain had begun to sweep across the garden.

  “There are things you don’t know about Cameron Brown.”

  So that’s how Lily Ridler began. Not by telling me that you had been her lover. In the scale of things that fact scarcely mattered. Lily’s Cameron Brown fitted into your skin but was not the man I knew. Beware the man who is hairy on the inside, someone said once. The rat man. The wolf man. What does a wolf skin look like from the inside?

  You were right. She is—was—an animal activist. In 1998 she’d been chosen to set up a splinter group of an international animal-rights organization. Their aim was to sabotage the activities of Histon BioSciences because it had doubled its use of laboratory animals that year. She was passionate and driven. As I watched her talk, I could see how she might have made a powerful infiltrator, might have been persuaded to wrench secrets from you, allow her body to become a tool with which to blackmail you.

  Lily’s entanglement began in the spring of 2001. Back then venture capital sponsors, defeated by the spiralling cost of security against animal-activist campaigns, had withdrawn money allocated to build a new, internationally coordinated pharmaceutical laboratory in Cambridge. The animal liberationists hadn’t dared to celebrate, she said, knowing that there had to be a major backlash, knowing that a war had started with that victory.