Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  Here, with all the ambiguities stripped away, was a different truth from the one I had expected. Reading Elizabeth’s terrible assured revelations on paper, in an empty house, I had come to recognise my ghostwalker—here in the folds of “The Crimson Room.” I sat absolutely still for a long time, wondering about mistaken identities and masks, and the man who had followed me down Garret Hostel Lane and over the bridge, who had passed in and out of mirrors, in red. I remembered that Dilys had said something once about how she saw Mr. F. in red—a dark, wine-red gown.

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” I’d protested. “Foxcroft was a fellow at King’s. King’s gowns are black.” Perhaps her eyes were playing tricks on her.

  “I’m just telling you what I see, my dear. You’re the historian.”

  “Why does Foxcroft wear red?” I framed the question now for the first time directly to Elizabeth. Not Newton but Foxcroft in red, in the red Lucasian gown.

  “Perhaps he wants to be taken for someone else,” Elizabeth answered.

  “Yes,” I said, “Foxcroft wants to be taken for Newton.”

  I felt for Ezekiel; I could step into his hatred then as if it were my own. I could follow him beyond Elizabeth’s ending. I had come to know him in red, my angry masquerading ghostwalker. I sat at Elizabeth’s desk in the late-afternoon light, thinking through with Elizabeth, talking directly to her about the stages of Ezekiel’s brilliant plan, the plan that had gone wrong, following him beyond the end of Elizabeth’s chapter, into Elizabeth’s life and then into my own.

  Angry and vengeful, Foxcroft’s spirit had walked through and beyond his own shadowy death. For three centuries, habituated to guarding the few records that remained, he’d watched the myth of Newton’s superhuman genius grow in the hands of scholars and historians. Hidden in the historical records, he, Ezekiel Foxcroft, had survived only as an occasional footnote in Isaac Newton’s numerous and extensive biographies, footnotes used to explain briefly only the identity of the man referred to as “Mr. F.” in Newton’s notebooks, or the man who’d translated a famous Rosicrucian text, Chymical Wedding. Yet Ezekiel knew that without the blood on his hands, without all those deaths undertaken in his name, Isaac Newton would almost certainly have returned to Woolsthorpe and obscurity.

  Then, while he was stalking Elizabeth Vogelsang, Foxcroft had come to see what might now become possible: revenge. After centuries of invisibility, and years of keeping scholars away from the few records of the Trinity deaths, Foxcroft realised with a strange sense of relief that, despite the obstacles he had put in her way, Elizabeth had already mapped Newton’s contacts with the alchemists in Grantham, and that it would be only a matter of time before she would see how the deaths might be connected to Newton’s fellowship. He saw that by reversing the habits of centuries, by guiding your mother not away from the records of the Cambridge deaths but towards them, he could and would frame Newton. He would make Newton carry the burden and the responsibility for those deaths. He would use Elizabeth to do his work, and then, once Elizabeth’s book was published, he could let go. So he began to put papers in places where she would find them; leave books open at key passages, then make them disappear; tantalise her, lay a trail she had no choice but to follow. Red herrings. Scents dragged through the undergrowth to distract the hounds from the fox’s path. He put on the red gown so that his identity would be beyond question, so that his ghostly presence would be taken to be Newton’s, the spectre of the Lucasian professor.

  But he underestimated Elizabeth. Shortly before her death she found the reference to Francis Barton in Alderman Newton’s diary and saw it all, sniffed out the fox’s trail, noted how the sequence ended with Foxcroft’s death, and, brilliantly, guessed the rest. Then she started to pursue the man in red with her relentless curiosity. She had no fear. In Dilys’s house she challenged Mr. F. directly, accused him of the murders, tracked him to his den. Foxcroft must have confessed. Perhaps the old alchemist surfaced in him then; perhaps he thought Elizabeth might expiate his sins, take off his burden. Whatever happened at Dilys’s house, Elizabeth alone came away with what she wanted, for Dilys was still in the dark about Foxcroft. Then Elizabeth set about rewriting the final chapters of her book. She declared Foxcroft to be the man who had murdered in Newton’s name.

  Checkmate. The most dangerous game of chess Elizabeth had ever played and a game of truth-telling that led inexorably to her death.

  Newton was lucky. Very lucky. Not just because he benefited from the deaths of the Trinity fellows but because their murders might, in another time and space, have been attributed to him. They had, after all, been carried out in his name.

  Thirty

  When Dilys Kite rang on the morning of the 7th of November to say, “Lydia, my dear, you are in very deep,” I replied, with a degree of brittleness, “Mrs. Kite, I know. I’ve never been deeper.”

  “Are you being looked after?”

  “Do you know?” I turned the mirror in the alcove near the door so that it faced the wall.

  “Of course we know.”

  “How?” Had my face turned up in one of her crystal balls, its swellings and bruises further distorted by the curves of the glass? Did she think she had summoned a monster? Or did she just “know”?

  “There’s no time. I am being…hounded. And frankly, my dear, I am getting quite tired of it all. I have had to cancel all my engagements this week. I’ve never had to deal with anything like this before. It’s bedlam. This is Elizabeth’s unfinished business. And she can’t finish it, so you have to.” Dilys had a way sometimes of talking about the spirits she worked with as if they were a bunch of unruly schoolboys making anonymous calls from a village phone box.

  “What’s bedlam?”

  “My house. Bedlam. He’s broken all manner of things. The light switches keep fusing. Pictures fall off the walls.”

  “Mrs. Kite,” I said, “do you have time to come to The Studio? And would you pick up some biscuits on the way? I’m out of biscuits. And I can’t get to the shops.”

  “Of course, my dear, biscuits it will be. And some aloe vera for your face.”

  “You look just like a woman in my village who’s had a face-lift,” she said, making the tea. “That’s what people will think. That’s what you’ll have to tell them. Now…we need to talk about Mr. F.” She had taken the chair next to the fire, which she had stoked up. She had brought a whole host of remedies and pills in a black plastic bag, most of which I’d politely refused.

  “Mr. F.? He’s in your house?” I repeated, casually.

  She passed me a custard cream from the packet. “Yes, Mr. F. That’s what he calls himself.” Ezekiel Foxcroft. Elizabeth’s hit man. But I wasn’t going to tell Dilys that. First I wanted to see how much she knew.

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Well, we’ve heard from him before, of course. But not for some time. I checked my files.”

  “You keep records of the spirits who contact you?”

  “Of course. How else would we know who’s been where and when? I keep them in a card file over there…”

  “Were there transcripts of the visits?”

  “Yes. Elizabeth kept them in a file she called—”

  “The Vogelsang Papers?”

  “Yes, that was her little joke. It used to make her laugh that the Vogelsang Papers was a collection of transcripts from a series of spirit visitations from the seventeenth century. A new form of historiography, she said. Yes, it used to make her laugh.”

  So the footnotes in The Alchemist, her evidence, were to transcripts of interviews with spirits called up at Prickwillow: Cowley, Foxcroft, Herring, Greswold, and the rest. She must have made a transcript of Foxcroft’s confession, too. That would have been in the Vogelsang Papers.

  “What happened to them?”

  “The Vogelsang Papers? They should be here,…” Dilys looked alarmed. “Missing?”

  “Afraid so. I think they may have ended up on the bonfire. Someone decided t
hey were nonsense. Did you ever raise Newton?”

  “We tried once. I told Elizabeth I’d never do it again.”

  “And Elizabeth had to steal the prism from the Whipple Library to do that?”

  “The prism didn’t work. I told her it wouldn’t. Glass objects hardly ever work. They are too opaque for spirit transfer. It just burned a mark high up on the wall.”

  “So what did you use instead?”

  “A lock of Newton’s hair. Elizabeth took it from the display cabinet in the Wren Library. The librarians knew Elizabeth, so when they gave her the locket for examination and left her alone with it, she managed to open the spring mechanism and replace it with a lock of her own hair. It was almost exactly the same colour. A good match.”

  “Christ. Is it still there?”

  “Yes—not much we can do about it now. I can’t get in there to switch them around again. But the tourists won’t mind. No one will ever know.”

  “Did the lock of hair work?”

  “No. It was a great disappointment to both of us. Oh, to have had one of Elizabeth’s index cards for the great man…what a triumph that would have been. No. Mr. F. turned up instead, talking nonsense.”

  And how exactly, Mrs. Kite, do you distinguish between shades of nonsense?

  “I’m getting confused here,” I said. “You called me this morning because—”

  “Because Mr. F. won’t leave my house; he’s breaking things and he’s monopolising the letterboard. He has a message for ‘L.B.,’ he says. I don’t know anyone else with those initials, except you. I do wish they would use full names and not initials. It would be so much easier.”

  “And the message?” A message for me from Ezekiel Foxcroft, who died over three hundred years ago?

  “I wrote it down on the back of an index card.”

  I took the card and turned it over. The message said simply: No testimony.

  “He was,” Dilys added, “very insistent on that phrase: ‘No testimony.’ He was so insistent, he left deep scratches on my inlay. I’ll never get those out.”

  “I think I understand,” I said. “There must be no record. It must end here.”

  “It makes sense to you?” she said.

  “I have one or two things to check,” I said, “but yes, I know what he wants from me.” I needed time to think.

  She didn’t ask me any further questions. I always wondered why. A code of hers, I suspect. Something about leaving her clients to work things out for themselves.

  Thirty-one

  Will Burroughs did not visit Emmanuel or say good-bye to her friend. She was in hiding. You didn’t visit him again either; you were out of the country—somewhere overseas. Emmanuel Scorsa was attacked on the night of November 2nd and died on November 9th in the intensive care unit of Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Like James Valentine, 336 years earlier, it had taken him exactly seven days to die. Unlike James Valentine, he died under bright halogen lights in a hospital room when his parents, Maria and Marco Scorsa, advised by solicitous doctors, asked for his life-support system to be switched off. He had been murdered, they said, with rat poison—his organs had failed. James Valentine, the professor of Greek, died in his rooms in Trinity, alone in the dark.

  Somewhere in the Parkside Police Station an office had already been set aside for a murder enquiry. Forensic scientists had taken samples from underneath Emmanuel’s nails and collected evidence and blood samples from his coat and trousers and around his wounds. When the forensic officers had finished working on the murder scene in St. Edward’s Passage, police officers took down the white sheeting and the red tape. Bicycles—only a few to start with—began to make their way down the passage and down King’s Parade; students making their way to the library, books piled up in their bike baskets; tourists, admiring the crisp morning light and the frost on the grass, stopping to take photographs. Underneath the bridge the punt chauffeurs cleaned and polished the sides of their boats, ready for winter storage.

  Everything changed almost overnight, as if a switch had been thrown. A gearshift manoeuvred into place and a foot pressed down aggressively upon an accelerator. The police launched a murder enquiry. Somebody rang you in the States; you changed your ticket and took a plane from wherever you were back across the sea. “Emmanuel died this morning,” you texted me. “I’m on my way back.” Members of the Scotland Yard Special Unit investigating animal-liberation groups reserved rooms in Cambridge hotels. Files were pulled from filing cabinets, computer databases searched, suspects identified and prioritised. Their names were written down on a whiteboard: Samuel Phelps, Roma Smith, Sarah Drabble, Peter McEwen, Lily Ridler.

  The police, the papers said, were looking for members of an animal-liberation group called NABED. For weeks everyone with an opinion seemed to be talking about animal rights and animal ethics. The Sun began calling all animal activists “monsters.” Radio 4’s Moral Maze instantly reran an old recording of a discussion programme in which leading animal-rights theorists argued and cross-questioned each other. Cambridge was full of reporters and photographers, and everywhere Emmanuel Scorsa was portrayed, in different ways, as a martyr for scientific truth. No one had yet discovered his membership in the Animal Liberation Army. No one would, not even during Lily’s trial.

  When you came back from America (or wherever you had been), it was impossible for us to see each other. Plenty of time for my face to heal. Plenty of time for the message my face was supposed to carry to you not to be passed on. I saw you photographed at Emmanuel’s funeral, his mother, dressed in black, leaning blank-faced on your arm. I heard your speeches and interviews. I heard you on the morning radio. I saw you once on the national evening news. You were passionate, reasonable, and fair-minded. You spoke about Emmanuel’s brilliance, about his sense of humour and his kindness. You made a direct appeal to anyone who knew anything about the murder, asking them to come forward. You announced a reward. And from committee rooms and enquiry rooms and police stations and recording studios, you continued to send me text messages—tender and beguiling—and I continued to answer. “Lydia, when this has all calmed down, I want us to go away.” “Lydia, I have some questions I want you to answer.” “Lydia, I can’t live like this anymore. We have to face some things.”

  “I know,” I texted back. “I know.” All through November I answered your texts and your e-mails, uneasily, trying not to give away anything of what I now knew, not in my tone or in my silences. I was trying in the midst of all this fragility to keep an open mind. I resolved to wait to see what would unravel. You were in London for most of November; you e-mailed me from your hotel room or from Internet cafés. Sometimes there would be silence for several days. I was afraid for you, of what might be happening in those silences and in those invisible corridors of power you walked down, or in the dark alleyways around your hotel. I imagined you in those labyrinths like Foxcroft, or those alchemists hunted down in alleyways in London or Antwerp or Pisa, carrying all that dangerous knowledge, the wolves closing in. And while I waited, trusting my future and yours to whatever puppet masters held our strings, I rewrote The Alchemist. I neutralised it.

  No testimony, said Mr. Foxcroft. And I understood. You see, Cameron, I made a deal with Mr. Ezekiel Foxcroft, robed in red, my ghostwalker, that I would exchange Elizabeth’s chapter, “The Crimson Room,” the record of his guilt, I would exchange that chapter for the laying of ghosts, for the end of the deus ex machina. It had to stop. He, I thought, agreed.

  On the 11th of November, I watched the local evening news. There was still a good deal of coverage of Emmanuel’s death. But there were no new deaths. Not a single death reported. It had to mean something. Foxcroft’s pledge would hold.

  In the hope and expectation of that disentanglement, I also burned all the written evidence—Elizabeth’s copy of “The Crimson Room,” her notes, Dilys’s notes, the file she had left for me. On Elizabeth’s bonfire I watched the edges of all that paper curl and twist and char in flames that burned blue, green, an
d orange. I began a new final chapter for The Alchemist and rewrote several earlier chapters, so that there would be absolutely no ambiguity or inference, no trace of Elizabeth’s accusation. No innuendo about Newton having benefited from those unexplained deaths, no reference to Foxcroft or the poisonings—just the usual kind of end chapter to a biography of the great man: Newton, the genius. I finished it in a couple of weeks. It was a short final chapter and easy to write.

  The Alchemist, as I ghostwrote it, was a good book, but it was not Elizabeth’s book. It is a good book. Reviewers applauded Elizabeth Vogelsang for her scholarship, for her knowledge of the complex European networks and Newton’s connections to them, but also for her understanding of how little, in the end, Newton depended on alchemy for his science—how once and for all the idea of Newton the sorcerer had been laid to rest. A few months ago the book was nominated for the Whitbread Biography prize. It didn’t win, though the publishers used the nomination for dust-jacket publicity just the same. I didn’t know all of that in November 2002. In November I was just closing things down. I had no choice.

  Thirty-two

  And then in December you sent me the text I had dreaded. “I’m in

  Cambridge,” it said. “Meet me. I have to see you.”

  “I’m in Norfolk. By the sea,” I texted back, once I’d examined my face and decided it wasn’t safe yet. You’d see the scars. I couldn’t cover them up.

  Another text from you followed mine: “You’re at the sea? I don’t believe you. Show me. Send me a picture of the sea on your mobile.”

  There was a picture of an old boathouse on some Norfolk beach on Elizabeth’s noticeboard. I photographed the picture of the boathouse framed against the sea and sent it to you. A few minutes later I heard your voice speaking into the answering machine: “I know where that is,” you said, laughing. “That’s the place my mother used to go to at Heacham. They knocked it down last summer to build a hotel. Nice try. Meet me tomorrow? Lydia—pick up. I know you’re there.”