‘The Holy Ghost Club?’
‘That’s it, sir. He becomes a full member and wears the livery for the first time. He was parading up and down in front of the glass for half the afternoon, pleased as punch. He’ll be the worse for wear tomorrow morning, though, I’ll warrant. And Mr Whichcote will be a little richer, I daresay, not that any of it will come my way.’
‘A little richer?’
‘Lord love you, sir, Mr Whichcote don’t do all this from the kindness of his heart. The young gentlemen have to pay their subscriptions and they ain’t cheap. And there’s always play at these meetings, too, and the stakes are high. I’ve heard hundreds turn on one card, one throw of the dice. Still, it’s not my place to say anything about how gentlemen choose to amuse themselves. As long as they pays their way.’
The motion of the chaise suddenly accelerated. Holdsworth stared out of the window. They would soon be at Jermyn’s house.
‘There was something else I wished to ask you,’ he said. ‘About the supper you served Mr Oldershaw on the night of his – his seizure.’
‘As nice a little supper as I’ve ever served, though I say it myself. Everything neat and handsome.’
‘And how were the gentlemen? In spirits?’
If Mulgrave saw anything strange about the question he made no sign. ‘No, sir – Mr Whichcote was quiet and serious, and Mr Oldershaw was low-spirited. Had been for days. I believe he’d dined with Mr Archdale that day and afterwards they sat a long time over their wine, so his wits was already a little cloudy. And by the end of the evening, he must have been a lot more than half seas over, judging by the empty bottles and the state of the punch bowl.’
They came to a halt outside the gates of Dr Jermyn’s establishment. The carriage lurched as Ben scrambled down from the box and rang the bell.
‘When we leave with Mr Oldershaw,’ Holdsworth said softly, ‘you will ride outside with Ben.’
Mulgrave shot a sly glance from the opposite corner of the chaise. ‘Are you sure, sir? If he has one of his reckless fits –’
‘Quite sure.’
‘You want the young gentleman to have his privacy, sir, I shouldn’t wonder. Very natural, I’m sure, and of course you could have him restrained. Just as a precaution. I am sure Norcross would lend you a straitjacket for a consideration.’
‘I’m obliged to you, but I don’t think I shall want a straitjacket.’
The gates opened and the chaise rolled slowly up the drive. At the house, Ben remained on the box. Mulgrave opened the door, jumped down from the carriage and let down the steps for Holdsworth. Now the gyp was in the public view, he had transformed himself with the swift efficiency of his kind into a perfect upper servant, a mere machine ingeniously designed to gratify the desires of his employer.
When the door opened, Holdsworth found himself face to face with Frank Oldershaw. Norcross was on one side of him and another attendant on the other. The young man was dressed immaculately in black. He looked at Holdsworth and then past him at the chaise waiting on the gravel sweep in front of the door.
‘There’s a couple of portmanteaus here, sir,’ Norcross said. ‘No doubt her ladyship will send for the rest of his things.’
‘Thank you, I’m obliged to you. Where is your master?’
‘Dr Jermyn’s compliments, sir, and he regrets he is not at liberty to receive you.’
‘Very well. We need detain you no longer. Mr Oldershaw, would you be so good as to enter the chaise?’
At these words, Mulgrave brought his heels together like a soldier coming to attention and opened the carriage door. Ignoring Holdsworth, ignoring Norcross and the attendant, Frank walked down the steps, across the gravel and climbed into the carriage. Holdsworth followed. Mulgrave shut the door behind them and folded up the steps. Frank was sitting in the furthest corner, facing forward. Holdsworth sat down diagonally opposite. Mulgrave mounted the box. There was a jolt and the carriage moved away.
‘I have her ladyship’s authority to take you to a cottage north of Cambridge, sir,’ Holdsworth said as they were travelling slowly down the drive. ‘It is a secluded place and we shall see no one. Mulgrave will attend us. There will be no one else.’
Frank said nothing. He was staring at the empty seat directly opposite him.
‘We are obliged to drive back through Barnwell and then Cambridge to reach our destination,’ Holdsworth went on. ‘To avoid inconvenience, I propose we put up the glasses and lower the blinds until we are past the town.’
He put up his own glass and drew down his own blind and then he leaned across and did the same on Frank’s side of the chaise. The young man made no move to stop him.
They drove slowly through Cambridge, often travelling no more than a footpace. The interior of the chaise was gloomy and close. Holdsworth’s limbs ached. It seemed to him that he had spent most of the last three days cooped up in a carriage. It was easy enough to monitor their progress by the speed they were going, by the surface under their wheels and by the noises that reached them from the outside world. First, came cobbles and paved roads. The timbre of the wheels changed as they rolled across the great bridge near Magdalene College. They picked up speed briefly and then slowed for the hill beside the castle. Beyond the castle, they turned right, leaving the main road to Huntingdon and travelled in a northerly direction on a road whose condition grew steadily worse.
‘We may raise the blinds if you wish, sir,’ Holdsworth said.
Frank made no reply.
Holdsworth raised the blind on his own side and light flooded into the carriage. He lowered the glass, too. They were running down a long, straight lane with huge flat fields on either side.
Suddenly there was a flurry of movement on the other side of the carriage. Frank raised his blind and lowered the glass. He poked his head half out of the window. The wind of their passage ruffled his hair and sent the powder flying away in little curls and puffs. Holdsworth watched him but did not move.
In a moment, Frank withdrew his head and sat back. He said as casually as if it were the most natural thing in the world, ‘I – I am obliged to you, sir. It is Mr Holdsworth, is it not?’
‘Yes, sir. You remember that her ladyship has sent me. She hopes that you will soon be restored and able to return to her.’
Frank screwed up his features and turned his head away. ‘As to that, what’s the point of her wishes?’ he muttered. ‘I am the unhappiest wretch alive. I wish I were dead.’
21
Whichcote raised the money for the dinner on the strength of his wife’s furniture. He had a long-standing arrangement with the landlord of the Hoop, who lent Whichcote his French chef and several of his waiters for the occasion. Some of the food was prepared in the inn’s kitchens. After breakfast, three footmen arrived, a father and two sons. They had worked for Whichcote before and, like the landlord of the Hoop, insisted on payment in advance. They needed nearly an hour to curl and powder their hair and dress themselves in the livery that Mr Whichcote provided. The coats were sadly shabby now and they did not fit their new wearers very well.
In the afternoon, Whichcote retired to his study and bolted the door. In a corner of the room out of sight from the window and from anyone standing in the doorway, a tall cupboard had been built into an alcove. There were two keyholes in the panelled door but no handle. He unlocked the two locks and opened the door.
The cupboard held the archives of the Holy Ghost Club, together with a number of items associated with it. On one shelf was a selection of glasses, punchbowls, plates and curiously designed cutlery. On the top shelf was a line of leather-bound volumes recording the membership, activities, accounts and decisions of the Holy Ghost Club over the three decades of its existence. Here too were the wager books and cellar books.
Whichcote took down the current cellar book. The club kept its own stock of wines, a subject of great and abiding interest to its members, and the source of considerable expense for them. He had already selected the wines for the ev
ening and withdrawn them from that part of the Lambourne House cellar reserved for their storage. But, on reflection overnight, he had decided that there would be no harm at all in bringing up another dozen of claret and the same of port. He had overseen the withdrawal directly after breakfast. Now he carried the book to his desk, made a note of what had been removed, and replaced the volume on the shelf.
He ran his index finger along the row of spines. He had read, or at least skimmed the pages, of all of them. The club had been founded by Morton Frostwick in the 1750s. Full membership was restricted to the president, known as Jesus, and twelve Apostles. Its entertainments rapidly became legendary in Cambridge because their nature was both mysterious and lavish.
Both these qualities were due to Frostwick. He had spent many years as a servant of the East India Company in Bengal, where his activities had been immensely profitable. When he returned to England, he visited Cambridge and found the fellows’ combination room at Jerusalem so congenial a place that he had himself admitted to the college as a fellow-commoner. He enjoyed the society of younger men, and his munificence earned him the title of Nabob Frostwick. He presented the college with the little footbridge across the Long Pond, a replica in miniature of Mr Essex’s famous wooden bridge at Queens’ College.
At his own cost, Frostwick had bought wines for the club’s cellar, and also glasses, cutlery and plate, all curiously adorned, which were still used at club dinners today. Among them was a ceremonial glass from which all who desired admission were still obliged to drink: it ingeniously resembled an erect penis, complete with testicles; it had the capacity to hold about half a pint of wine, and each postulant was required to swallow its contents in one go. Frostwick left Cambridge unexpectedly after an episode rumoured to involve one of the sizars at Jerusalem, and went abroad, where it was said he kept a harem of catamites and died of cholera.
Members of the Holy Ghost Club had always had a keen interest in the deflowering of virgins, as the archives amply testified. Frostwick had pointed out that nothing could be more appropriate to the name and aims of the club than to signal the elevation of a disciple to apostolic rank with an outpouring of virginal blood. Was not he himself, in his capacity as Jesus, the son of the Virgin? Was not the very wine they drank at their meetings emblematic of blood? And were they not, by defin-ition, Holy Ghosts, and therefore obliged to lie with virgins whenever possible, in respectful imitation of a similar episode in the Gospels? In Frostwick’s time, this part of the admission ritual had been enacted in front of Jesus and the assembled Apostles. After his departure, however, his successors had decided that it would be more genteel to allow the deflowering to take place in private after the rest of the ritual, as a sort of reward that set the seal on all that had gone before.
Philip Whichcote restored the book to its place in the cupboard. As he was locking the door, Augustus entered the study, his eyes sliding from side to side as though he expected to find monsters lurking in the corners.
‘If you please, sir, it’s Mr Richardson from the college.’
‘Show him in, you booby.’
The tutor advanced into the room and bowed gracefully. His wig was perfectly powdered, his coat was perfectly cut; there was a smile on his freshly shaved face. Only the eyes were unsettling, restless and flecked with amber.
‘Your servant, sir,’ Richardson said. ‘I hoped you would not be engaged. You must have so many calls on your attention.’
‘I hope I shall always have leisure enough to greet my old tutor.’
‘You are too kind. I hear that your club meets this evening and I am sure such occasions require a vast deal of work beforehand.’
Whichcote smiled. ‘Not at all, my dear sir – these things arrange themselves. The servants know what to do.’
‘Indeed.’ Richardson adroitly switched the course of the conversation to the weather, which led by degrees to the recent ill health of the Master, which Mr Richardson prayed would not recur. ‘For I am sure that he is sensible of the difficulties his indisposition causes in the college. Nothing of any importance can be done without him.’ Richardson hesitated. ‘For example, had he been in better health, he might have been in a position to help poor Mr Oldershaw.’
‘The unhappy fellow. Is there any change in his condition?’
‘Not that I am aware of. Of course, he is a member of the HG Club too. In fact, now I come to think of it, I believe his melancholy dated from the last of your dinners.’ Richardson leaned forward, his brow creased with anxiety. ‘But the subject must be inexpressibly painful to you. Pray forgive me.’
‘I’m sure no offence was intended,’ Whichcote said. ‘And certainly none was taken.’ He knew that Richardson was the last person in the world to speak without calculation. ‘As for poor Frank, I believe I perceived signs of his melancholy long before that night. He opened his heart to me on more than one occasion.’
Richardson inclined his head, acknowledging Whichcote’s superior knowledge.
‘I believe you yourself were not a member of the HG Club?’ Whichcote said.
Richardson changed countenance. ‘No. I did not move in those circles when I was an undergraduate.’
‘But you must have known our Founder, I fancy. Was he not a Jerusalem man? Morton Frostwick – a fellow-commoner, if I remember rightly, and past the first flush of youth.’
Richardson turned his head away. ‘Yes, I believe I knew him very slightly.’
Whichcote smiled. ‘Sometimes I while away an idle hour by glancing at the club archives. Mr Frostwick figures largely there, as you may imagine.’
‘I hardly remember him.’
‘Really?’ Whichcote allowed his disbelief to seep into his voice. ‘There are so many diverting stories about him.’
The senior tutor gestured gracefully with his right hand, displaying fine white fingers. ‘It is always agreeable to recall the scenes of one’s youth, but alas I have a more pressing concern on my mind. You are aware, perhaps, that Mr Archdale is one of my pupils?’
Whichcote nodded. ‘He is fortunate indeed.’
‘And I understand that he is to be advanced to full membership of the HG Club today.’
‘I am sure that he will be a popular addition to our little society.’
‘No doubt. However, I had some discussion with his guardian on Saturday, and again on Sunday when Sir Charles dined in college. He is most anxious about his nephew. May I speak in confidence, my dear sir?’
‘By all means,’ Whichcote said.
‘Sir Charles fears that the lad may be following a mode of life that can not only harm his future prospects but also undermine his health. As you are intimate with him, I thought it my duty to have a word with you on the subject. He respects you greatly. A word from you in season may work wonders.’
‘I feel you have too high an opinion of my abilities, sir.’
‘I do not think so.’ Richardson rose to his feet. ‘I must trouble you no further, sir. I know I may rely on your good offices, and I shall be infinitely obliged.’
Whichcote accompanied his visitor into the hall, where Augustus opened the door and bowed very low as Mr Richardson left. Whichcote stood on the step, his hand raised in farewell, as his visitor walked briskly down the short drive towards the main road. He had received a warning. Richardson had no wish for another club scandal touching a member of Jerusalem College.
It was a great pity that before the tutor reached the gates, Mrs Phear turned into the drive, with Archdale’s little whore for the evening walking behind her. Richardson uncovered and bowed to Mrs Phear as he passed. He looked curiously at the girl from the Magdalene Hospital, who passed him with downcast eyes.
The meeting was unfortunate, Whichcote thought. He hoped it was not an evil omen.
The Apostles arrived in ones and twos, some on foot, flaunting the full glory of the club livery in the afternoon sunshine, others preferring to conceal their splendour in sedan chairs or hackneys. The hired footmen ushered them down to the
pavilion at the bottom of the garden, where Whichcote waited to receive them in the great room overlooking the river.
Mrs Phear and the girl from the Magdalene Hospital were in the small white bedchamber below. The girl was called Molly Price. She was not as pretty as Tabitha Skinner, but she knew what she was about. Mrs Phear had looked over the arrangements, visited the kitchen, and made her presence felt among the servants. This was all to the good, for there was no getting away from the fact that the servants were a slovenly, greedy crew who needed careful watching. They would serve the company, wait at dinner, clear away and serve supper. But once supper was on the table, they would go, leaving the club to serve itself, with a little help from Augustus if necessary. Then the real business of the evening would begin.
Harry Archdale was one of those who arrived in a sedan chair. His face had lost its usual high colour, and the pallor of his complexion contrasted curiously with the careful arrangement of his hair, which he had had thickly powdered in a shade of white with a distinctly pink tinge. Whichcote smelled brandy on his breath.
Before dinner, the members of the club strolled in the garden. It was, all in all, not a bad turnout. When dinner was announced, Whichcote led the way upstairs, where they arranged themselves around the table in the order of precedence. He placed Harry on his right hand.
He had spared no expense with the food. The first course consisted of cod, a chine of mutton, some soup, and a chicken pie as well as many puddings and roots. For the second course they had fillet of veal with mushrooms, pigeons and asparagus, roasted sweetbreads, a hot lobster, apricot tart and, in the centre of the table, a great pyramid of syllabubs and jellies. Dinner was more than a meal: it was an investment.
Afterwards, some members, including Archdale, showed a tendency to linger over their wine, but Whichcote weaned them away to the card tables set up at the far end of the room. This was, after all, the lucrative part of the proceedings. He did not encourage club members to engage in such games as piquet, which took too much time and involved only two people. Simpler, shorter games were much better, both cards and dice. With these, the players won and lost with such rapidity that they became infected with a mania for play; and each loss was obliterated by the hope of winning next time.
The Anatomy of Ghosts Page 18