Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  “Can you stop? Please let me out here,” I said to the taxi driver, my voice high-pitched, banging my hand on the glass panel to make him hear, barely controlling an urge to open the door and take my chances jumping from the moving car.

  “We’re here, love,” he said. “Cambridge Station. You all right?”

  The fog had given way to soft rain. The man in the black coat headed off down Station Road while the taxi driver lifted my bags from the car.

  “Off somewhere nice?” he asked as I passed him the fare.

  “What?” I said, bewildered, watching the dark figure diminish to a vanishing point, occasionally illuminated as he passed under the streetlights.

  “Never mind. You have a good trip, eh?”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Floating not into darkness but into a darker obscure.

  Checking my watch, I gathered myself back into the morning. A man in a taxi who for a moment in the dark I had thought I recognised. A trick of the brain. Déjà vu. Nothing more. Nearly time. You were expected at five A.M. I bought two single tickets to Stansted, checked on the next train, and stood in the lit-up entrance of the station to watch for your car. I might have been standing at the bottom of the sea and raising my eyes to some faint green twilight.

  I ran over the few words I had exchanged with the stranger, struggling to understand.

  What have I forgotten?

  Did you forget?

  Did I forget? Did I?

  “No. I’ve stuck to the bargain,” I said aloud.

  A few minutes before, I had seen you reading your mother’s chapter in a pool of light in your rooms in Trinity College; now I couldn’t see you at all. You were nowhere. You were gone. In that hole that had been ripped in the night, ripped through past, present, and future, in that hole I could do nothing but remonstrate with Ezekiel, my voice loud and high and desperate, echoing in the empty station entrance.

  “There is no record. I’ve changed the story. You know that. There’s nothing left.” But I was lying now even to ghosts, phantasms, tricks of the fog. Ezekiel knew that as well as I did. I had not erased the last written record, as I had promised. I had sent you a photocopy of “The Crimson Room” with a note that read:

  Cameron. Read this. Your mother’s last chapter. It went missing but I found it again. She worked it out. She worked it all out. When you’ve read it, shred it. That’s important.

  There were no chapel bells to strike the fifth hour as it came and went.

  I had wanted you to see Elizabeth’s version of “The Crimson Room,” wanted you to know where your mother’s story had led, her last brilliant discovery. You would shred it. There would be no record, once you had done that.

  “There’ll be no record,” I said again. “He’ll shred it…Ezekiel? Are you listening to me?” I ran my finger across the scar on my cheek, pinching the skin there to stop my knees from buckling under me. A boy, running for a train with his mother, turned to look at me, a woman talking to the air.

  Hand grenades have pins, not stoppers. And sometimes they take longer than you think to go off.

  At five-fifteen I texted you: “Held up?” I wrote and waited, holding my breath for one of your usual text replies: “Five minutes” or “En route.” When none came, I knew.

  Taxis gathered to wait for the next train in from Stansted. I watched the few early-morning travellers spill out from the station, tanned families returning from Christmas holidays at ski resorts, academics travelling alone, a few lone businessmen in suits, carrying briefcases. I watched them queue for taxis and watched the taxis disappear. It was cold.

  It was five-twenty when I phoned. I left a voice message: “Cameron. I don’t know what to do. Call me. There’s no way we can catch that plane now. Did I perhaps miss you? Did you mean for me to meet you somewhere else?”

  By seven A.M. Sergeant Cuff, standing beside your body at the bottom of Staircase E in Trinity College, behind the cord of striped red plastic marking off the edges of the “incident,” had recorded my words on your phone in his notebook, next to a note that recorded the seven cuts to your face. “Voice message from ‘L.B.’: 5:20 A.M., 5 January.” The words were written out, my words, with that dying fall: “Did you mean for me to meet you somewhere else?”

  Thirty-five

  They put up a plaque to you today, Cameron Brown, on the 19th of November, 2004, in the chapel at Trinity, nearly two years after your death. That’s a kind of triumph, don’t you think? You would have liked that. Another of Trinity’s famous men. Not a bench in a park, or a statue like they gave Newton, but a bronze plaque in the chapel. Just a plaque, but very simple and in good taste: “To the memory of Cameron Brown, neuroscientist, 1954–2003.” Sarah was there and your boys, so I didn’t stay. She looks better than the last time I saw her; it hit her hard—the court case and all those stories that had to come out about you and me. There were speeches when they unveiled the plaque. I slipped away.

  I have Lily’s funeral to go to. She hanged herself in Holloway on the 11th of November, just a week ago, when the wardens turned away for long enough. She said she would, so we knew it was just a question of time. Couldn’t go on, she said. She was of no use, she said, in prison. There was nothing we could do about that. Once she had read that last chapter of Elizabeth’s book, it was just a matter of time, as it is for me. A question of time. “We are only like dead walls, or vaulted graves/That, ruin’d, yield no echo.”

  Dilys will come with me to Lily’s funeral. But none of Lily’s people will be there. They can’t, you see. Your people have smashed theirs. It worked in the end. The laws have been changed, the networks scattered. Their time is over. The police investigation failed, of course, to uncover the link between the Syndicate and NABED and instead established that Lily Ridler had conspired in the deaths of Elizabeth Vogelsang, Emmanuel Scorsa, and Cameron Brown, and in the attack on Lydia Brooke, as part of a campaign of violence orchestrated by a terrorist organisation called NABED. She continued to protest her innocence and refused to reveal the names of any of the other members of the group. None have been found.

  Who was standing behind you on that Trinity staircase at dawn? An embittered alchemist in a red gown trying to erase the last traces of a historical record or a man in a black balaclava, a member of the Syndicate working to protect the secrecy of a chemical formula that paralyses its victims and will, sooner or later, escalate the war on terror? Two particles moving together across time and space, shadowing each other. One turns one way; the other follows.

  Coincidences. How many times does a piece of paper have to fly away in a windless garden for it to stop being a coincidence? I never worked that out.

  I dreamed last night that I was running through an ancient city at night, between canals and old walls, cobbled and stained with lichen and mould. It was a rat run. A maze. I couldn’t get out. There was no one to be seen. Sometimes it was like a film—a Buñuel—where everyone is forever trying to get somewhere in beautiful clothes, high heels, and silk shawls, but they’ve forgotten where they’re going and they’re hungry and disoriented. I ran first my fingertips and then my knuckles along the wall. It felt familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen it before. There were alleyways and arches and doorways and sometimes there was water, like little quays alongside the path. Rats swam up against the edge; one scrambled out of the water and onto stone, its great tail slithering like a wet snake behind it. Then it was gone. I had forgotten something important. Something I was supposed to do. I was following something in red—a child who seemed to be weeping, then a cat that was bleeding. Don’t worry, I said. I’m coming. I’m coming. Then it was me ahead in the red coat, bleeding, wounded, crying. And I was you, following me. It made no sense.

  I woke, falling through moon shadows, sweating; I woke feeling you watching me, lying close.

  Is the light, freighted with water, still shoaling across the walls of The Studio? Can the surface of the present still rub away and let the past thro
ugh? What else might come to be possible? You might know, Cameron. You who have passed to the other side, you who watch me, you whom I see always out of the corner of my eye, whom I catch still on the edges of my vision. You who are always there. Time past and time future, what might have been and what has been, point to one end, which is always present. And you, Cameron Brown, man of fractures and disguises, lie close still, under, between, inside, for we became once, and still are, entangled together, imprisoned, like time, in a skein of silk.

  For a Further Understanding of Newton

  Author’s Note

  Time Line

  Newton’s Sins

  Extracts from Notebook Containing “Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophiae” (Certain Philosophical Questions)

  Newton’s Recipes for Colour and Remedies for Sickness

  Further Reading

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A word about fact and fiction.

  All the seventeenth-century characters in this novel—students, fellows, alchemists, aldermen, chemists, and apothecaries—are real people who left records of themselves, some more substantial than others. I have been faithful to those records.

  The deaths of Greswold, Valentine, Herring, Barton, and Cowley are as they are reported in Alderman Newton’s diary. The alderman clearly thought there was something troublesome about each of those deaths.

  Isaac Newton left copious information about himself but there are still some areas of his life which are not well illuminated and will never be; his years spent in the apothecary’s house in Grantham are frustratingly indistinct. I have been faithful to what is known, but I have also, like Elizabeth, speculated about what might have happened there.

  Ezekiel Foxcroft, mathematician, alchemist, fellow of King’s College, left the most shadowy of records of his life. He is known only as a Mr. F., referred to in Newton’s notebooks; as the translator of an important Rosicrucian text, Chymical Wedding; is named in Venn’s list of Cambridge alumni, Alumni Cantabrigienses; and is mentioned in a letter or two that passed between Henry More and Elizabeth Foxcroft.

  In Ghostwalk, I have woven together the closely researched Trinity deaths, Newton’s alchemy, and Ezekiel Foxcroft to create a narrative about patronage and murder. That narrative is speculative. Whether that speculation is also factual will never be known.

  TIME LINE

  1629 Ezekiel Foxcroft is born in Stoke, Shropshire; his mother, Elizabeth Foxcroft, and his uncle Benjamin Whichcote are both philosophers interested in alchemy.

  1642 Newton is born on Christmas Day (January 4, 1643, New Style) in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England.

  1649 Ezekiel Foxcroft enters King’s College, Cambridge, where his uncle is provost.

  1650s Newton is sent to the King’s School in Grantham. Boards at the apothecary’s house.

  1652 Foxcroft is appointed fellow at King’s College.

  1660 Restoration of the monarchy after the civil war. Charles II is crowned.

  1661 Newton arrives in Cambridge.

  1661 Beginning of the restoration of the English glassmaking industry, monopolised by George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, past student of Trinity College, patron of Abraham Cowley. Venetian glass has dominance over world trade until English law restricts the importation of foreign glass in 1664. Buckingham starts to recruit Italian glassmakers for his glasshouses.

  1662 Chemist and member of the Royal Society Christopher Merrett publishes his translation of Antonio Neri’s The Art of Glass (1612), making Italian techniques available to English glassmakers.

  1662 Newton teaches himself short-writing, or code; writes a list of his sins.

  1662 Samuel Hartlib, alchemist, intelligencer, and centre of an alchemical network, dies in London.

  1662 On 30 November: the altar in Trinity Chapel is destroyed by fire.

  1664 Newton is elected to a Trinity scholarship; competition and Newton’s low performance in the examination indicate powerful patronage.

  1664 In April or May, Newton begins experiments with light.

  1664 On 17 December, a comet moves across the skies; Newton watches it. It is still moving on 23 December.

  1665 On 5 January, Richard Greswold, Trinity fellow, falls down the stairs, apparently drunk, and dies.

  1665 On 3 April, a second comet passes; plague deaths begin in London.

  1665 In May, Abraham Cowley, eminent poet, fellow at Trinity, and cofounder of the Royal Society, sickens and then suffers from a fall in his house in Chertsey, Surrey, in which he is badly injured. Draws up his will two months later.

  1665 Sir Kenelm Digby, alchemist, dies at the age of sixty-two.

  1665 George Starkey (Eirenaeus Philalethes), alchemist, dies at the age of thirty-seven.

  1665 In his rooms in Trinity, Newton proves that white light is made up of colours and takes to his bed, temporarily blinded.

  1665 In August: Newton buys a prism at Stourbridge Fair; he then leaves Cambridge to return to Woolsthorpe.

  1665 After Michaelmas, there’s a fire in Trinity Old Library.

  1666 In March, Newton returns to Cambridge; plague outbreaks in Cambridge rise as the spring temperatures increase. Sometime in 1665–66 Newton carves out the rules of gravitation and the fundamentals of what would come to be called the calculus.

  1666 Working by candlelight late into the night, Newton devises a method of calculating the exact gradient of a curve, a method which would come to be known as differentiation.

  1666 In June, Francis Barton, Trinity fellow, loses his sanity and is expelled from the college.

  1666 On 22 June, Newton leaves Cambridge for Woolsthorpe; plague has returned.

  1666 On 2–5 September, the Fire of London rages. One-sixth of the inhabitants of London are made homeless.

  1666 Thomas Vaughan (Eugenius Philalethes), alchemist, dies at the age of forty-four.

  1666 On 9 November, James Valentine, Trinity fellow, falls down stairs apparently drunk. Dies seven days later.

  1667 On 25 March, Newton returns to Cambridge and buys equipment that suggests that he is about to undertake a series of alchemical experiments. He performs successful experiments on colour and light.

  1667 On 28 July, Abraham Cowley, Trinity fellow, poet, and cofounder of the Royal Society, having fallen ill after being found asleep and apparently drunk in a field near his home in Chertsey, Surrey, dies.

  1666–67 Ezekiel Foxcroft begins his translation of Chymical Wedding by Christian Rosenkreutz, the third manifesto of the Rosicrucian movement. Published posthumously in 1690.

  1667 In October, Newton is elected a fellow of Trinity. He is lucky: three Trinity fellows have died since he came to Cambridge—Greswold, Valentine, and Cowley—and a further fellow, Francis Barton, has been expelled for insanity.

  1667 After his election, Newton paints his rooms red and buys more equipment to set up or further equip an alchemical laboratory; his roommate, John Wickins, leaves the college for a short period.

  1668 Francis Barton returns to Trinity.

  1668 On 11 November, a young man called Richard Herring drowns himself in the river next to Trinity.

  1669 Newton writes up “De Analysi,” another milestone in the road towards the calculus.

  1669 Nicolas Le Fevre, alchemist, dies at the age of fifty-four.

  1669 Newton is appointed the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.

  1674 In April, Francis Barton, Trinity fellow, dies after falling down a staircase in Cambridge.

  1674 Ezekiel Foxcroft dies.

  NEWTON’S SINS

  This list, written by Newton in code in 1662 in the so-called Fitzwilliam Notebook, was decoded only in 1963, by Newton’s biographer Richard Westfall. Newton Project.

  Before Whitsunday 1662.

  1. Vsing the word (God) openly

  2. Eating an apple at Thy house

  3. Making a feather while on Thy day

  4. Denying that I made it.

  5. Making a mousetrap on Thy day

  6. Contriving o
f the chimes on Thy day

  7. Squirting water on Thy day

  8. Making pies on Sunday night

  9. Swimming in a kimnel on Thy day

  10. Putting a pin in Iohn Keys hat on Thy day to pick him.

  11. Carelessly hearing and committing many sermons

  12. Refusing to go to the close at my mothers command

  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

  16. Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese.

  17. Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer

  18. Denying that I did so

  19. Denying a crossbow to my mother and grandmother though I knew of it

  20. Setting my heart on money learning pleasure more than Thee

  21. A relapse

  22. A relapse

  23. A breaking again of my covenant renued in the Lords Supper.

  24. Punching my sister

  25. Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugar

  26. Calling Derothy Rose a jade

  27. Glutiny in my sickness.

  28. Peevishness with my mother.

  29. With my sister.

  30. Falling out with the servants

  31. Divers commissions of alle my duties

  32. Idle discourse on Thy day and at other times

  33. Not turning nearer to Thee for my affections

  34. Not living according to my belief

  35. Not loving Thee for Thy self.

  36. Not loving Thee for Thy goodness to us

  37. Not desiring Thy ordinances

  38. Not long [longing] for Thee in [illegible]

  39. Fearing man above Thee

  40. Vsing unlawful means to bring us out of distresses

  41. Caring for worldly things more than God