The Anatomy of Ghosts

by Andrew Taylor

  Somewhere between waking and sleeping, he sensed Maria’s presence. He fancied he saw her outline, just for a moment, a shadow among shadows between the bed and window, but somehow darker than the shadows that surrounded it.

  He was breathing too fast, and he couldn’t suck in enough air. He tried to slow the rhythm but something stronger than his will increased the tempo instead. Soon his nightshirt was drenched with sweat. He shivered, and once he had started he could not make himself stop.

  Slowly the dream, if that was what it was, filled with grey light, a sort of illuminated mist that cloaked as much as it revealed. He was no longer in his bed but standing in the Fellows’ Garden and looking down at the Long Pond, just as he had with Richardson a few hours earlier. The transition did not strike him as in any way strange. He looked down and there was Maria, floating face upwards on the water, her body submerged an inch or two below the surface. Despite this apparent handicap, she was speaking, or rather he heard her voice quite distinctly.

  ‘Georgie,’ she cried. ‘Georgie, I am here now. Come here, my little one.’

  Maria, who had drowned in the Thames, was now drowning in the Long Pond. In the logic of the dream, the water was the same, and perhaps all times and places flowed through the same essential nexus of circumstance, and you saw one or the other – in this case the Long Pond at Jerusalem in May or the Thames at Bankside in March – according to your perspective on the matter. In the dream, this speculation seemed entirely rational and he wondered why he had not thought of it before.

  ‘Come out!’ he shouted. ‘You’ll drown. Take my hand. Quick.’

  But Maria did not hear. She was still calling for Georgie, and telling him that Mama loved her own boy, and that he was Mama’s little sugar plum.

  He shrieked wordlessly at her.

  ‘Georgie, Georgie.’ Her voice was fainter now. ‘Mama’s own little boy.’

  Her body was no longer there. Indeed, now there was nothing left except the thick, black water of the Long Pond, and it was rising higher and higher.

  ‘Georgie?’ The voice was no more than a whisper on the edge of silence. ‘Georgie?’

  Holdsworth groaned. His ears hurt, and he had the curious sensation that his skin had been stripped away from the bleeding flesh beneath. His hands tingled. Underlying everything was still the disgusting, desperate desire to copulate.

  Stiff as a ramrod.

  ‘Maria?’ he muttered. Something puzzled him, but he could not pin it down, a monstrous and unspeakable anomaly of some sort. ‘Maria? Maria?’

  It was only then, as he said her name for the third time, that he realized what the anomaly had been. It was quite inexplicable that he had not noticed at the time. The face he had seen distorted in the water had not been Maria’s face. The voice had been Maria’s. But the face had belonged to Elinor Carbury.

  Pain lanced into his chest. An iron band tightened around his ribs. It tightened, squeezing the breath from his lungs. He opened his mouth to scream but the rising tide of black water now covered his mouth. As his lips parted, the darkness flowed inside him. His body convulsed.

  He wrenched himself from the blankets. He was falling. A jolt ran through him.

  Full consciousness flooded over him, and he knew that he was in the bedchamber at the Master’s Lodge, lying on the bare boards between the bedstead and its surrounding curtains. His left elbow, which had borne the brunt of his fall, was exquisitely painful. He flailed with his arms and succeeded in finding the gap between the curtains. A cooling draught brushed his cheek. And there was a little light, too – a faint vertical line where the shutters failed to meet across the window.

  Dear God – Elinor Carbury? He pushed the thought of her away. He despised himself and his treacherous, sin-ridden body.

  A nearby clock with an unfamiliar set of chimes struck the three-quarters. Holdsworth stood up, steadying himself on the bedpost. He tore off his nightcap and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He shuffled across to the window and opened the shutters. His body ached. To the east there was a pallor in the sky, an easing of the darkness. Thank God, it would soon be day. His erection slowly shrivelled.

  The air was chilly. The window seat had a strip of cushion running along the top. He perched on it, drawing up his legs, wrapping the hem of the nightshirt under his feet and hugging his knees like an overgrown child.

  Outside the window, light crept back into the gardens of Jerusalem. He grew steadily colder. He made an irrational decision, again like a child who invents a purpose because even an invented purpose is better than none: that he would permit himself to return to bed as soon as he saw or heard another human being, an incontrovertible sign of life and sanity returning to the world.

  He had not long to wait. Through the glass of the window came the rattle of iron-rimmed wheels on stone. He craned his head and caught sight of a hunched figure trundling a little barrow along the flagged path at the back of the Master’s Lodge. It was a man in a long dark coat and a slouch hat. He was making his way to a cluster of outbuildings on the left, near the northern boundary of the college.

  The night-soil man. There was no one else it could be. The man who had found Sylvia Whichcote in the Long Pond.

  The night-soil man. There was no one else to see. Not Maria. Not Elinor Carbury.

  10

  After breakfast, Ben, the Master’s manservant, directed Holdsworth to a stationer’s, where he purchased a plan of the town and its environs. Guided by this he set out on the road to Barnwell, which lay to the east of the town in the Newmarket direction. It was not quite a village and not quite a suburb of Cambridge, but something indeterminate between the two. Carbury warned him that parts of the neighbourhood were not agreeable. There were disreputable taverns and houses of ill fame, which attracted low characters from both the town and the University.

  None of this was visible on Saturday morning. The road was busy, mostly with traffic going the other way towards the town’s market and shops. The house Holdsworth was seeking was on the eastern edge of Barnwell, where the houses were fewer and the air of the place was notably more rural.

  The exercise and the morning sunshine made it possible to put the terrors of the night into perspective. A rational man need not chastise himself for his dreams, Holdsworth reminded himself, for they were quite outside his control and by their very nature replete with absurd fancies and sensations. There were difficulties enough in his waking life without wilfully manufacturing more.

  Dr Jermyn’s establishment stood in its own small pleasure ground. The demesne was surrounded by a wall almost as high as Jerusalem’s. The gates were locked. There was a bell pull mounted on the right-hand gatepost, together with a notice advising visitors to ring and wait. Holdsworth pulled the handle. Thirty seconds later, the front door opened and a manservant came unhurriedly down the drive and inquired civilly enough how he might be of assistance.

  ‘My name is Holdsworth. I believe Dr Jermyn is expecting me.’

  The servant bowed and took out a key for the gates.

  ‘You are well guarded against the world,’ Holdsworth said.

  ‘It’s not only to keep people out, sir.’ The servant locked the gate again when Holdsworth was inside, and began to lead the way up the drive. ‘It’s to keep them in.’

  As they walked up the drive, Holdsworth glimpsed three or four men in the grounds. One of them appeared to be pruning a bush; another was hoeing a flower bed. There was nothing curious in that except for the fact they were attired not as gardeners but as gentlemen. Even at a distance, Holdsworth could see the black coats, black silk breeches and white waistcoats; and at least two of them had their hair powdered and arranged, as though at any moment they were due to pay a morning call upon a lady.

  At the door of the house, the servant rang the bell as though he too were a visitor. Another servant admitted them and showed Holdsworth into a small drawing room, saying that Dr Jermyn would be with him directly.

  Holdsworth prowled about th
e apartment. He came to the window and stared out over an expanse of sunlit lawn at the side of the house, with an extensive shrubbery beyond. At this moment the door opened, and Dr Jermyn appeared.

  ‘Mr Holdsworth, your servant, sir,’ he said briskly. ‘Mr Cross wrote me that you would probably honour us with a call this morning.’

  The two men exchanged bows. Jermyn was a young man, little more than thirty, with a pleasant, open face. He dressed soberly and neatly, and wore his own hair.

  ‘I see you were examining our windows, sir,’ he said. ‘Were you expecting bars across them?’

  ‘I did not know what to expect. Were those your – your patients I saw in the garden?’

  ‘Indeed. Honest toil in the open air has much to recommend it. I am glad to say that a number of our gentlemen condescend to assist us.’

  Holdsworth felt in his pocket. ‘I have a letter of introduction from her ladyship.’

  The doctor offered Holdsworth a chair. Murmuring an apology, he broke the seal of the letter and read it slowly. At length he looked up. ‘These matters are always delicate. And I apprehend that Mr Oldershaw’s case is so in more ways than one. Her ladyship writes that you have her complete trust, and instructs me to give you every assistance in my power.’

  ‘And how is Mr Oldershaw?’

  ‘In terms of his eventual progress towards a cure, I have great hopes of him. His constitution is robust, and his temperament naturally sanguine. His family and friends wish him all that is good. There is no lack of resources. In short, I have seen many patients in far worse circumstances. Indeed, I have had some of them under this roof.’

  ‘I do not doubt it,’ Holdsworth said.

  ‘Nor, in some respects, is his case uncommon. There are many young men who come up to the University ill-prepared to meet the temptations and trials that they find here. Some have never been away from home before. Without firm guidance or, in many cases, the support of carefully inculcated moral principles, they unite the follies of youth with the opportunities of independence and, by degrees, slide towards catastrophe.’

  ‘You speak generally, sir,’ Holdsworth said. ‘But what of Mr Oldershaw?’

  For the first time Dr Jermyn hesitated. ‘Pray, sir, what exactly have they told you? I would not have you meet him unprepared.’

  ‘I have seen Mr Cross’s neck.’

  ‘Ah. That was indeed unfortunate.’

  ‘Her ladyship informs me that her son’s temperament from his earliest years has been mild and good-humoured.’

  A noise broke out somewhere above their heads, a distant howling, followed by rapid footsteps and the slamming of a door.

  ‘One must allow for a mother’s partiality,’ Jermyn said. ‘I should perhaps preface my remarks by saying that there are aspects of Mr Oldershaw’s case which may not be easily comprehensible to those who are not physicians. Indeed, sir, I suspect that perhaps even the majority of my professional brethren would be quite at sea. Only a physician who has made a particular study of maniacal disorders is really in a position to appreciate the finer points.’

  ‘Then pray allow me to manage as best I may with the coarser ones, sir. Why was he brought to you and not to some other medical man in the locality?’

  Jermyn stared down at his hands, which were small, white and very clean. Then, perhaps recollecting who was paying the bills, he looked up with a smile.

  ‘Why, as to that, there are not so many of us who specialize in such cases within easy reach of Cambridge. I flatter myself that my name is not unknown in the University. The local physicians, though many of them are admirable men, have not had time or opportunity to study such conditions, let alone the modern science of moral management.’ Jermyn nodded, as if in approval of himself. ‘We have come a long way since the days of our grandfathers.’

  ‘And who recommended you to Lady Anne?’

  ‘Why, the lad’s tutor – Mr Richardson. It seems that Mr Oldershaw had not been himself for several weeks – since February. I wish they had called me in earlier. They waited until his condition had worsened considerably. That was in March.’

  ‘And what precisely was his condition?’

  Jermyn joined his hands together and made a steeple of the fingers. ‘To put it simply, in lay terms, his melancholy had deepened to the point where he found life insupportable. The proximate cause appears to have been a nervous collapse within one portion of the brain, inducing a form of delirium. Now, we physicians distinguish in these cases between melancholia and mania. Some believe that the two conditions are generically separate, but I hold with Professor Cullen that in fact the difference between them is not one of kind but only of degree. If you consult his Nosology of Mania you will find the doctrine explained in great detail.’

  Holdsworth thought of Maria: of the effect on her of Georgie’s loss, and then of the news that she must leave the house where he had lived and where they had brought his battered little corpse: in Jermyn’s terms, when melancholia had slipped into mania. ‘You do not think there was a particular, external cause? A shock of some sort to his system?’

  ‘I do not say that precisely. It is rather that I look to the physiology of the brain to provide my answers, rather than to any events, real or imaginary, that may or may not have taken place outside it.’

  ‘And so what of the ghost?’

  ‘Ah – our ghost.’ Jermyn smiled again. ‘I wondered when we might arrive at this fabled creature. My dear sir, it is a symptom of Mr Oldershaw’s mania, not a cause.’

  ‘I am informed that Mr Oldershaw was walking in the garden at Jerusalem late one night, and that he believed he saw the ghost of a lady who had recently died, a lady with whom he was acquainted as she was the wife of a friend. And it was this that drove him to attempt to take his own life.’

  ‘That is to put the cart before the horse. Consider his unprovoked attack on Mr Cross. Here we have his mother’s steward, an old man he has known since childhood. Mr Cross barely had time to enter the room where Mr Oldershaw was sitting when the young man leaped up and attacked him. Had not an attendant and myself been at hand to restrain him, the consequences for Mr Cross might have been fatal. There is no conceivable external reason why Mr Oldershaw should have attacked him, any more than there is any reason why he should have attempted to destroy himself in the college pond. No, in both cases he was in the grip of the delirium of mania. The technical phrase for it is mania furibunda; that is to say, mania attended by violence.’

  ‘Let us not be technical for a moment, sir,’ Holdsworth said. ‘Had anything happened to make him believe Mr Cross was his enemy?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’ The doctor leaned forward. ‘Sir, I cannot yet fully explain these particular manifestations of mania, but I believe I know the general phenomenon that makes them possible. You are perhaps familiar with Locke’s Essay upon Human Understanding?’

  ‘I have glanced over it, yes.’

  Jermyn permitted himself another smile. ‘Inter alia, it deals with how we discern, and other operations of the mind. And Mr Locke makes acute remarks on the subject of why madmen fail to discern matters correctly. In fine, he argues that madmen are perfectly capable of rational thought. In this, by and by, they differ from idiots, who are constitutionally incapable of reasoning.’ The physician’s voice had imperceptibly acquired the inflections of the pulpit. ‘But for madmen, the difficulty arises from the propositions they reason from, rather than –’

  ‘Forgive me, sir, but I do not understand how a philosophical error could result in Mr Oldershaw’s mania,’ Holdsworth said. ‘And I am also puzzled to understand what his physiology has to do with it.’

  ‘You have strayed into the province of the physician, sir, and I’m afraid some confusion is inevitable. It is usually safe to take Mr Locke as a guide on such matters. Believe me, when you have seen as many of these unfortunate young men as I have, Mr Locke’s theories may not seem so improbable.’

  ‘But you are still unable to attribute a cause
to his mania? That is the long and the short of it.’

  ‘ I’m interested in the fact of Mr Oldershaw’s delusions, not their content. In general, the ravings of a madman signify no more than the wanderings of a will-o’-the-wisp, and tracking the course of their vagaries is equally beside the point. What does signify, however, is the fact that he is raving. Like everything in the universe, from the orbit of the sun to the migration of swallows, melancholia and mania follow immutable laws. Such laws are like the master keys that permit us to unlock the mysteries of nature, including those of the human mind. They are all we need.’

  ‘And all Mr Oldershaw needs is to recover his senses,’ Holdsworth said. ‘What course of treatment do you follow, sir?’

  ‘I practise a system of moral management. I believe it the only effective way. The physician must achieve a benign domination over his patient, both in the psychological and the physical spheres. Once this is done, he can set to work on the defects of understanding that lie at the heart of the patient’s malady. Much depends on the physician’s ability to master his patient. It is not unlike training a child.’

  ‘Moral management,’ Holdsworth repeated. ‘You make your patients obedient to you? Like a dog?’

  ‘In essence, yes. It is a system of re-education. We insist on their following appropriate lines of thought, speech and conduct. I confess that with Mr Oldershaw, I was over-sanguine. I advised Mr Cross to say to Mr Oldershaw that he would soon take him home to her ladyship and that, since he was so much improved, it might be agreeable to have a little dinner party here – for Mr Oldershaw to act as host, and to invite not only Mr Cross and myself but also some of his acquaintances in Cambridge.’

  ‘Who?’ Holdsworth said.

  ‘Oh, only three other men. His tutor, Mr Richardson, of course. And Mr Whichcote, a most reputable gentleman of some substance, who goes much in society here; recently widowed but he still dines out at small private parties. He made something of a pet of Mr Oldershaw. And the other man is called Archdale, a fellow-commoner at Jerusalem – he and Oldershaw were always together. I hoped a small dinner for Mr Oldershaw’s intimates would be the first step to restoring him to society. In the event, all was in vain. He became increasingly agitated and, most unfortunately, my attention was distracted for a moment, and as you know he lost all control and tried to assault Mr Cross. Mania furibunda operates in just such a way – as impossible to predict as summer lightning.’