Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  I picked up the phone. “I’m afraid,” I said.

  “It’s safe for the moment,” you answered, tenderly. “You just have to trust me. Everything’s gone quiet. I’ve seen to it.”

  “I’ve forgotten what your voice sounds like,” I said. “It’s been five weeks.”

  “They wouldn’t let me phone you. I told you. It’s been killing me, Lydia, not to be able to see you. I’m so tired. I’ve never needed you like this before. Meet me. Just for an hour. Please.” And why will they let you see me now? What does that mean?

  “The Green Dragon,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Meet me tomorrow night at the Green Dragon in Chesterton. I’ll buy you a pint. There’s a mummified cat—”

  “A mummified what?”

  “Cat—a mummified cat—bricked into the fireplace there. To keep off evil spirits.”

  “It’s going to take more than a mummified cat…”

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just a joke. Green Dragon at eight? I can’t wait to see you. It’s been weeks, far too long.”

  You’d taken the leather sofa near the log fire by the time I arrived. I had counted on the light in there being too dim for you to notice the last visible scar, a raised red gash, on my cheekbone. But you did. It was the first thing you saw. You drew close as I sat down, unwinding my scarf and unbuttoning my coat. You ran your fingertips over the wound. Slowly. As if I were a hurt child.

  “Cold hands,” I said.

  “What happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your face—looks like you’ve been in a fight.”

  “Yes,” I said. “A street brawl. You know me. Can’t keep out of trouble. No. Just a bad gash from a branch of one of the trees in The Studio garden. I was walking down to the river after dark and slammed straight into it. It’s not as bad as it looks. What an idiot, eh?”

  “No, you’re no idiot.”

  What did that comment betray? I watched you closely, your face near mine, watched your eyes narrow, reading me. Did you know? Had someone in the Syndicate told you? Sent you a photograph, perhaps? You looked away.

  “Adnams?” you asked.

  “I thought I was buying this round,” I said lightly. “Christ, you said you were tired. You look a hundred years old. And you’ve lost weight. What have you been doing?” This elaborate game of innocence and ignorance, I thought. How long can we sustain it?

  “Thanks. Just working. The usual. Wish I could pack it all in now. But there’s too much at stake.”

  I watched you walk to the bar, surveyed you: the tall, familiar shape, the blue shirt over the worn red T-shirt, the cream trousers, the brown shoes that needed polishing. You were at the end of a very long telescope. I saw that I no longer knew anything. Anything was possible. If someone had told me that you had issued an order for me to be attacked to frighten me into leaving Cambridge so that I would no longer be your Achilles’ heel, if they had said that you wanted me out of the way at any price, I might have believed them. And then if someone had said that you would protect me above all else, sacrifice everything for me, that you loved me above all else, yes, I would have believed that too.

  We were both embroiled in your network, its surveillance, its cameras and phone-tracking devices, its satellites and computer systems. There was no separating from it or cutting ourselves out from what we knew, no escape to some safe future. There would be consequences to the knowing, casualties. A price to be paid. One of us has to find a way out, I thought. There must be a way out.

  Morazapine, the formula you had made and that only you could develop, whatever you had wanted it to be, had, under your dark husbandry, bloomed into a paralysing drug, a chemical weapon. Yes, whatever you had meant it to be, it now had the strength to paralyse armies, prepare them for slaughter. It could take out whole cities: Tehran, Basra, Baghdad. It would. There was a great deal at stake. They couldn’t let you go. You were their Daedalus—you carried the secrets to the labyrinth in your head. They couldn’t let you just walk away.

  “Have you seen the plaque on the wall?” you said, putting two pints down on the table. “To the man who disappeared? Over there, under the shelf in the corner. It’s famous.”

  “I can’t read it from here,” I said. “My eyes are not so good.”

  “Some bloke who was a ferryman here. On the shelf just there over the plaque there’s a single boot, a hat, and a wicker basket with a tea can and a drinking bottle. Underneath it says, ‘1896—All that is left in memory of Alfie Basset, who mysteriously disappeared after leaving the Green Dragon and crossing the river in his own boat.’”

  “Poor Alfie,” I said. “And they never found his body. How was America?” Tell me.

  “Dull. I wasn’t there for very long. I had to come back to deal with the press after Emmanuel died. There’s been a lot of political fallout. Meetings and negotiations and deals. It’s not good.” You’ll never tell me. These evasions between us. Great rifts in the landscape.

  “I saw you on the television.”

  “And the book? How’s The Alchemist?”

  “It’s finished. I’ve finished it.”

  “Are you ready to pull out the stopper?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The hand grenade. You said The Alchemist was going to be controversial. You said you’d be pulling out the stopper.”

  I smiled. “Hand grenades don’t have stoppers; they have pins. I was wrong. It’s a good book, an important book in terms of the history of alchemy, but there’s nothing very controversial about it. No grenades.”

  “Shame. It would have been good to see some ruffled feathers among the historians of science. Lydia, how brave are you?”

  “Not very. I was. I’m not so brave now. Why?”

  “I want to sit by an open window with a view over water. A room with you in it and silence. A marble bath. Away from here. Right away from here. And then there are things I want to tell you. Will you come? Just for a few days? I want you to know some things. And I can make it safe. I have a few favours left to call in.”

  “Yes,” I said slowly, finishing my pint. “I will. But now I have to go. Really. I’m sorry. I’m not feeling very well.” And I have things to tell you. About the end of your mother’s story and a man in red. And I’m not sure I care about safety anymore, not mine at least. Yes, I will come and we will tell each other some things. It’s time.

  “You’ll come?” you said. “Venice? Will you come to Venice?”

  “Yes,” I said. Just that. Just yes.

  I addressed the envelope to you—Dr. Cameron Brown, Trinity College, Cambridge—and slid a copy of Elizabeth’s “The Crimson Room” inside. I had made the photocopy the night before I’d burned Elizabeth’s original copy of the chapter and all the related papers. The stamps on the envelope were Christmas stamps, a seventeenth-century Madonna and child, in bright, oil-paint colours, the child holding a red pomegranate. I mailed it that night, slipping it into a postbox on the corner of Union Lane. A gift. Your mother’s lost words, returned to you. This was what she had been looking for. This was what she had found. Elizabeth Vogelsang’s goddamned seventeenth century—the dark history buried beneath the myth of a great man. A history that would now have to be reburied. But first you had to see it—the end of your mother’s story. Another of the blackbird’s circles.

  Thirty-three

  Cameron’s late,” Kit said as I helped her and Maria carry the plates into the kitchen on New Year’s Eve. The conservatory, where Kit had jewelled her long dining table with ivy, gold, cinnamon-scented candles, pink ginger lilies, and bowls of oranges and figs, looked like a scene from a Caravaggio painting. Opulence and sacrifice. A New Year about to turn. A dinner party.

  “I don’t think he’s going to make it,” I said. “He would have been here by now.” I checked my phone. There was a text. I felt the pleasure again as a chemical rush through my veins. It said, “Got as far as the Plough and Fleece but Leo is with me. The gods ar
e not with us tonight. Will text later.” I turned my phone off.

  When I came back to the table I said, “Cameron sends his apologies.”

  “He’s not got this virus that’s going round?” Tom said.

  “No, he’s at another party and thought he could get away, but it turns out he can’t.”

  “Run out of alibis? Not Cameron, surely,” Anthony said wryly.

  “There’s money in alibis,” Kasia said.

  “Can we change the subject?” Anthony looked in my direction when I spoke, waiting to see how far I might be pushed.

  “Oh no, you misunderstand,” Kasia answered quickly. “I’m not sitting in judgement. I just find it interesting, that’s all. I have several friends who are in your…” She trailed off, suddenly aware that everyone around the table was listening.

  “Situation?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “What situation is that?” Tom leaned forward curiously.

  “Women having affairs with married men.” Anthony knew he was wounding me, but he was too drunk to care. Now Kit was watching me, too. Anthony continued, just as Kit turned up the volume on the CD player so that Madeleine Peyroux’s mournful voice broke across our words singing a Leonard Cohen ballad. “Kasia was just saying that she has several friends who are having affairs with married men…like Lydia.”

  Dance me to the end of love…

  “Cameron’s married?” Tom said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes, it’s something Cameron forgets too, sometimes,” Anthony said.

  Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin…

  “How many affairs do we have between us around this table, I wonder?” I said.

  “Lydia…” Kit was wary, Maria watching closely.

  “Well, if everyone’s going to be sanctimonious about it…” I said, tracing the patterns of down on the purple skin of an abandoned fig on my plate.

  Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in…

  This wasn’t about affairs, wives, and mistresses. None of that mattered. A paralysing drug, an arms industry, espionage, networks that stretched everywhere, infiltrated everything. I peered for a moment into the mechanisms that kept everything going around you, the oiled levers and coils and wheels. And you at the middle of it all, throwing the switches, alone in the labyrinth, working machines you could no longer control.

  Dance me to the end of love…

  “Lydia, cigarette?” Anthony’s eyes gave nothing away. “Yes, take me outside,” I wanted to say, but didn’t. We stepped out into the night. There was a bonfire in a brazier on the patio, which made me remember another fire I had stood next to once.

  “I thought you needed rescuing,” he said, passing me a cigarette. “Don’t stand too close to the fire. Your coat’ll catch on the sparks.”

  “I thought he was your friend,” I whispered, cigarette and wood smoke stinging my eyes.

  “He is my friend. I’ve known him for a long time. I adore him. He’s extraordinary. He’s…”

  “Clever?”

  “Yes, he’s very clever. The cleverest man I’ve ever met. And the most elusive.”

  “How long have you known about us?”

  “Since the beginning.” He sounded apologetic.

  “Ha. The beginning. When was that? You know I can’t remember a beginning anymore…Did he tell you?”

  “He had to tell someone. He was in a bad way. I’ve had to rescue him several times since. He’ll have a breakdown eventually, you know, splitting himself like he does between you and Sarah. Leaving you, coming back to you.” And the rest. And all the rest.

  “He didn’t leave. I did.”

  “Whatever…It doesn’t matter in the end, does it? You always come back. So does he. He was outside, Lydia, a few minutes ago, in the car. He texted me. I was to tell you that he was waiting for you. I didn’t get it in time to tell you.”

  “Why didn’t he text me?”

  “Because you switched your phone off.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He wanted me to tell you that he loves you. That he only had ten minutes and that he had to go. He’s put an envelope through Kit’s door, apparently.”

  “It’s too late,” I said. “It’s much too late.”

  “You’re just tired, Lydia. It’ll all—”

  “I know. Don’t tell me. It’ll all look different in the morning.”

  Everything seemed on fire outside on Kit’s patio. The flames from the brazier made everything look like it was blazing—the shrubs, the wall, the trellis, trees. An immense conflagration.

  Anthony was piling more logs and branches into the brazier.

  “Everything’s burning now,” I said. “Everything.”

  “Yes,” Anthony said. “We’ll burn our way into the New Year. It’s going to be a good year. You’ll see. All will be well.”

  Thirty-four

  I still have the letter you put through Kit’s door on New Year’s Eve. Handwritten in black ink on thick, cream-coloured paper, it has two folds, beautifully symmetrical. The tickets were bought from Bennett’s Travel Agency on King Street at five P.M. on the 29th of December. I put them in the box you bought me with the heron embossed on the lid, with all the things you gave me that autumn and winter: the silk scarf, the bronze statue of Venus, the oyster shells, the copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and of Walter Pater’s The Renaissance with the autumn crocus leaves pressed inside. You wrote:

  Dear Lydia, here’s an air ticket to Venice. I know it’s a crazy idea but it’s been so dark of late. I just had this feeling that we should find some winter light for ourselves. Grasp it before it gets taken away. I’ll meet you at five o’clock at Cambridge Station on the morning of the 5th. Can’t get away before then—things to sort out with Sarah. Bring a warm coat. Venice can be cold in winter. Text me if for any reason you can’t make it. C.B.

  There’s the finest of strands catching the sun at my window, a single spider’s thread. The window here has been scratched, and where the sun catches it, in the cut, the colours bleed like stained glass.

  There was thick fog that morning. It was four forty-five when I reached the taxi rank next to the pub on the High Street in Chesterton, so I was surprised to see another man waiting there.

  “You going to the station?” I asked. “Shall we share the ride?” He nodded in answer and took a step back into the shadows. A few minutes later the two of us occupied the back seat of a taxi threading through Cambridge streets, which were empty except for the red lights of occasional cars ahead of us, streaked and starry. The streetlamps above us across Elizabeth Way Bridge made veils of lit fog. The taxi driver slid the glass panel across between him and us—it was too early to talk.

  In the silence I thought of you on the station platform, how I would reach out to touch your arm, imagined how we would talk, at first, of inconsequential things, as the train pulled south through the dawn towards Stansted Airport. I wouldn’t ask how you had managed to find five days away from work in early January to travel to Venice or how your lab would allow you to do so at this precise moment without additional security measures. Nor would I ask about your Christmas or ask after Sarah and the boys. That was understood. Best not to ask. I always told myself that you would do the same if our situations were reversed. There are some things best not said, at least not yet, not until that room with a view over water, not until Venice. And then, what then? You would have a plan. You would have worked out what to do—some new machinery for flight. We’d find a way out. Everything was possible now.

  I switched on my phone. There was a text from you, marked by a tiny green envelope, sent earlier that morning: dated the 5th of January, three A.M. “I’m at Trinity,” it said. “Just finishing off some paperwork in the office. Loose ends.” “The Crimson Room.” You were reading “The Crimson Room.” Or had been. I saw the desk lamp and the pool of light it made and you in it, reading the white sheets of a photocopied manuscript. Cameron Brown reading in a
pool of light.

  “Shame about the fog,” I said to the man sitting next to me. “Apparently there’s a meteor shower up there somewhere, or so the papers said yesterday. We’d be one of only a handful of Cambridge people awake to see it. If it was visible, that is.”

  “Yes, I know,” the man in the black coat answered, looking out his window and peering up towards the sky. “They are spectacular. Never the same.” He’d seen several? How could that be—was he lucky?

  “What would we see?” I asked, studying the texture of his skin, the curve of his profile in the half-light, struggling to remember something. “What would we see if we were standing out there looking up at the sky and there was no fog?”

  “Sharp points of light all radiating out from one still centre, in jagged lines. A little like an abstract scientific drawing.” His voice had a richness of timbre that reminded me of stringed instruments, sad and slow like a cello.

  “Like fireworks?”

  “No, not like fireworks—much more chaotic and delicate. Not like a shower at all. More like a storm or thousands of dandelion seeds lifted by the wind at once and pulled in different directions.” Still he did not turn towards me.

  “An entanglement,” I said, a nameless sense of dread rising. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

  He turned to look at me then, so that I saw his face fully for the first time. “No, I don’t think so,” he said, his face stiff and unsmiling. I struggled for a moment, searching his face, half remembering.

  “What have I forgotten?” I said in that first moment of recognition, feeling my pulse race, inhaling the thick, smoky aroma of sulphur and balsam as he met my gaze, matching my question with his own, asking, in a voice that was barely audible now, only:

  “Did you forget?”

  As he turned away, I remembered letters that had appeared on a mirror once and heard the biblical verses they marked: “I will prepare thee unto blood, and blood shall pursue thee,” letters that filled the air with the taste of poison.