The Anatomy of Ghosts Read online

  The path ran close to the pond in the shadow of a great tree. In the greater gloom under the branches, Tom slipped on a patch of ice. He fell, measuring his length on the stones. The barrow toppled on to the frosty grass and discharged at least half of its stinking cargo on the bank. The shovel, which had been balanced on top, slithered into the water.

  Panting with cold, he righted the trolley. He would have to clear as much as he could of the filth, and hope against hope that rain would wash the rest away before anyone noticed it. But the shovel was somewhere in the pond, and he could do nothing without it. Surely the water near the bank could not be very deep? He took off his brown coat and rolled the sleeves of his shirt above his thin, pointed elbows. He was about to plunge his hand into the water when he saw a large, dark object floating among the shards of thin ice a yard or two from the bank.

  At first he thought a sheet or a shirt had fallen into the pond, for the east wind had blown strongly during the last few days, often coming in savage gusts. The following instant he thought of a more interesting idea – namely, that the floating thing was a cloak or gown discarded by a reveller during some drunken prank the previous evening. He had retrieved caps and gowns from cesspits on several occasions and either restored them to their owners or sold them to a dealer in second-hand academic dress.

  Tom Turdman thrust his right arm into the freezing water. He whimpered as the cold hit him. To his relief, his fingers closed around the shaft of the shovel. All this time his mind was partly distracted by the risk of Mepal’s vengeful anger if he discovered what had happened, a risk that grew with every minute’s delay.

  The sky was becoming paler. But the goddamned tree blocked so much of the light. He straightened up and stared at the thing in the water. If it was a cloak or gown, it held the possibility of substantial profit.

  He held the shovel in his other hand and leaned low over the pond. He stretched his arm towards the thing that lay just beneath the swaying surface. Water seeped over the lip of one of the pattens and trickled into the cracked shoe beneath. He tried to hook the shadow with the shovel, but it danced away. He leaned out a little farther. The patten slipped in the mud.

  With a shriek, Tom Turdman fell forward. The cold hit him like an iron bar. He opened his mouth to scream and swallowed pond water. His feet flailed, seeking the bottom. Weeds curled around his ankles. He could not breathe. He flung out his arms. He was now desperate to keep afloat, desperate to find a handhold. As he began to sink again, the fingers of his right hand closed around a bundle of rotting twigs, each of them with something unyielding at its core. At the same moment his feet sank into mud, and the mud seemed to receive him in its embrace and draw him deeper and deeper into it.

  He did not know that he was screaming. By that time, Tom Turdman was beyond thinking, almost beyond feeling. But long before he discovered what he was holding, he knew that there was nothing living in whatever curled around his fingers. He knew that what he touched was dead.

  2

  Another town, and another stretch of water.

  What John Holdsworth remembered most about the house by the Thames was the light. Pale and shimmering, it filled the rooms overlooking the river throughout the day. It was a fifth element poised somewhere between air, water and pale fire.

  Georgie used to say it was ghost water, not light at all, and sometimes he believed he saw apparitions swaying and flickering on the walls. Once he roused the household with his screams, crying that a drowned lighterman from nearby Goat Stairs had come to drag him down to the bottom of the river. Later Holdsworth thought the drowned man had been a portent of what was to come, a prelude of sorts, for drowning ran like a watery thread through the whole sad affair.

  In November 1785, Georgie slipped on a patch of ice when he was playing by Goat Stairs. As he struggled to right himself, he tripped over a rope attached to a bollard. Maria, his mother, saw the whole thing happen, saw the boy tumbling off the wharf. One moment he was there, a vigorous, shrieking little boy. The next moment he was gone.

  The tide was high and he fell into the water, striking his head against the side of a coal barge. It was possible that it was the blow to the head that killed him. But the weather was rough that day. The heavily laden barge was rocking and heaving against the side of the wharf, and it was at least ten minutes before they got him out of the water. So it was not easy to say precisely how he died. His body had been ground between wharf and barge. It had sustained terrible injuries. But just possibly Georgie might have drowned before that. There was no way of knowing for sure.

  Holdsworth preferred to think that his son had died at once, that the fall itself had killed him, perhaps with one of the blows to the head. He knew nothing of what had happened until it was over, until they came to fetch him from the shop in Leadenhall Street. He felt a guilty and intolerable gratitude that he had at least been spared the sight of his son falling to his death.

  After that, nothing went right. How could it? Maria was unreachable in her grief. She refused to put up a headstone, saying that it would not be right, for Georgie could not be wholly dead. She spent most of her time praying in the house or beside the little mound in the burial ground. She gave what money she had to a woman who claimed to be able to see ghosts. The woman said she saw Georgie, that she talked to him, that he was happy and that he sent his love to his mama. She said that Georgie was now playing with lambs and with other children in a great green sunlit meadow, and the air was filled with the music of the heavenly choir.

  Item by item, Maria sold her rings, most of her dresses and the better pieces of furniture. She fed the woman with more money. In return the woman told her over and over again that Georgie thought of his mama all the time, and sent her caresses and fond words, and that soon they would be together and God would never let them be parted again.

  Sometimes Holdsworth did not know whether he was grieving for Georgie or angry with Maria. The two emotions were fused. He would have been within his rights to forbid his wife to see the woman, and to beat her if she disobeyed him. He had not the heart for it. He felt guilty enough already, for he had failed to save his son. Maria told him that Georgie had sent his love to Papa and said they would soon be together with the angels in God’s heaven. Holdsworth swore at her, and she did not tell him anything else.

  Holdsworth poured his anger into writing a little book that examined stories of ghosts, past and present, drawn from modern and classical authors. It was better than hitting Maria. He began with the story of Georgie’s ghost, anonymously of course, and described how Georgie’s mother believed it because she needed to, and how a wicked woman had taken cruel advantage of her credulity and her grief. His theme was that stories of the dead revisiting the living could not be taken at face value. Some of them, he wrote, were nothing more than childish superstitions that only children and uneducated women were likely to credit. Others were misunderstandings and delusions, perpetrated in good faith, but now increasingly explicable as natural science revealed more and more of the truth about God’s universe. He conceded that some ghost stories had a useful moral or religious effect on the minds of children, savages or the great mass of uneducated common people; and to this extent, they had a limited value as parables. But they could not be considered as evidence of divine or even demonic intervention. He had never come across a ghost story, he concluded, that could be considered as evidence of a scientific phenomenon deserving the serious consideration of men of education.

  He called the book The Anatomy of Ghosts and had it printed at the small printing works he owned in Maid Lane on the Surrey side of the river. He advertised it in the newspapers and sold it from the shop in Leadenhall Street. It caused a small stir. An anonymous reviewer in the Gentleman’s Magazine accused him of being the next best thing to an atheist. Two dissenting ministers denounced the work as blasphemous. The vicar of St Ethelburga’s in Bishopsgate preached a violently hostile sermon, excerpts from which were published in the Daily Universal Register, and
therefore discussed in thousands of private parlours and public places up and down the country. As a result, sales were respectable, which was just as well because, after Georgie died, little else made a profit.

  The shop sold old and new books, pamphlets, materials for writing, and a range of patent medicines. Unfortunately, two months before Georgie’s death, Holdsworth had taken out two substantial loans, one to extend the premises and the other to buy the library of a private collector whose heirs had no use for reading. Holdsworth was rarely at the shop after Georgie’s death. A careless assistant stored the newly acquired collection in the cellar, where a damp winter ruined two-thirds of them. Meanwhile, the manager of the printing works fell ill and left; Holdsworth let his deputy take over the enterprise, but the man proved a rogue and a drunk, who took what he could from the business. One night the deputy’s carelessness proved even more damaging than his criminality: he left an unguarded candle burning when he went home and the entire works, along with its contents, were gutted by the morning. In the fire, Holdsworth also lost the stock he had transferred from Leadenhall Street, including almost all the surviving copies of The Anatomy of Ghosts.

  Maria seemed unconcerned by these disasters. Apart from her trips to chapel, she stayed at home in the house on Bankside near Goat Stairs. She spent most of her waking life either on her knees or closeted with the woman who could talk to ghosts, and who brought the consoling messages from Georgie.

  In March, Holdsworth managed to penetrate her absorption at last, though not for a reason he would have wished. Their lease was due to run out on Midsummer Day, and he was compelled to tell her that they would not be able to renew it, even for another quarter. He was not bankrupt, he said, but he was perilously close to it. They would have to move away from the house near Goat Stairs.

  ‘I cannot remove from here,’ Maria told him.

  ‘I regret the necessity, but we have no choice.’

  ‘But, sir, I cannot leave Georgie.’

  ‘My love, he is not in this house any longer.’

  She shook her head violently. ‘But he is. His earthly presence lingers where he was born, where he lived. His soul looks down from heaven on us. If we are not here, he cannot find us.’

  ‘Pray do not upset yourself. We shall carry him with us, in our hearts.’

  ‘No, Mr Holdsworth.’ She folded her hands on her lap. She was a small, calm woman, very neat and self-contained. ‘I must stay with my son.’

  Holdsworth took her hands in his, where they lay cold and unresponsive. She would not look at him. He did not care that the printing works were gone, and what was left of the Leadenhall business would go under the auctioneer’s hammer in a week’s time, and that there might not even be enough to pay their debts. But he did care that his wife had become a beloved stranger to him.

  ‘Maria, we still have some weeks to grow used to this. We shall talk it over, we shall decide when and how we shall come back here, if that is what you wish. Why, we may walk past the house any time we choose, if not come inside it. By and by, we shall become quite accustomed to the idea.’

  ‘Georgie sends his bestest love to Papa,’ said Maria, lisping like a child. ‘He says Mama and Papa mustn’t leave his dearest home.’

  A sound like rushing water filled Holdsworth’s ears. He hit his wife, and his blow sent her cowering into a corner of the parlour. He broke a chair and put his fist through the window that overlooked the river.

  He had never hit Maria before and he never hit her again. Afterwards he stood in the parlour, with the blood running down his hand where her teeth had broken the skin over the knuckles. He wept for the first time since he was a child. Maria stared up at him from the floor, her eyes full of pain and wonder. She touched the side of her head and stared at the blood on her hand. There was blood on her lips too. Blood spotted the bare boards. Who would have thought that one blow could do so much damage?

  He picked his wife up and kissed her and cuddled her and told her that of course all three of them would soon be together again in heaven. But it was too late.

  That night they went to bed early. To his relief, Holdsworth slept deeply. Sleep was the one refuge that remained to him, and when he stumbled on it, he embraced it greedily. In the morning he awoke to the sound of hammering on the door of the house. Maria was no longer by his side in the bed where Georgie had been both conceived and born. She had gone to the water by Goat Stairs.

  *

  It is strange how soon a life can collapse if the foundations are removed. In the moment of that abrupt awakening, it seemed to Holdsworth that he had lost everything of substance about himself. He still moved through a solid world in three dimensions, a world existing in time and populated with flesh-and-blood people; but he was no longer constructed from the same materials as they were. It was as if his body had passed through a chemical process that had altered its composition. He had become as formless as the fog over the river.

  Unlike Georgie’s, Maria’s body was unmarked, apart from a split lip and a wound, little more than a graze, on the left temple. The wound was the colour of a damson and about the size of a penny piece. She was fully dressed.

  At the inquest it was established by Holdsworth and two of his neighbours that Maria often took the air early in the morning, and that she was in the habit of walking to and fro along Bankside, often lingering in the neighbourhood of Goat Stairs where her son had died in the unfortunate accident the previous November. Much was made of the fact it had been very misty. Two watermen who had been about at the time said that you could barely see a few yards in front of you, let alone the dome of St Paul’s across the water. Then there was the condition of the stairs themselves, which were worn and much marked with green slime, and therefore slippery. The coroner, a humane man, had no hesitation in bringing in a verdict of death by misadventure in the absence of evidence to the contrary.

  A few days later, Holdsworth watched his wife being lowered into the earth of the burial ground. They laid her in the same grave as her son. Holdsworth averted his eyes in case he should glimpse Georgie’s little coffin.

  At the funeral, Ned Farmer stood at Holdsworth’s side, and Mrs Farmer was among the little crowd of mourners that clustered behind them. When they were young, Holdsworth and Farmer had been apprentices together. Farmer had been a big, bumbling, good-natured boy, and now he was a big, bumbling, good-natured man. The one astute decision in his life had been to marry the daughter of a wealthy printer in Bristol, though that decision had not been made by him but by the lady in question. Now her father was dead, and she his sole heiress, she thought it time for them to move to London and strike out there, for the capital was where fortunes were to be made in the printing and bookselling trade. She persuaded Ned to make an offer for what was left of the business that Holdsworth had built up over the years. It was not a generous offer but it was at least a certain one, whereas proceeding with the plan of auctioning everything carried a strong element of risk. Moreover, Ned said they would take over the lease on the house on Bankside too.

  ‘Betsy has taken a fancy to it, for the sake of the river and the convenience of it,’ he explained. ‘And she refuses to live over the shop. But I beg your pardon, John, the subject must be painful.’

  ‘It’s not the river pains me,’ Holdsworth said. ‘Or the house.’

  ‘No, of course not. But tell me – do you know where you shall live?’

  ‘I have not considered it yet.’

  ‘Then, if it would not distress you, you must live with us until you find your feet.’

  ‘You are very good. But perhaps Mrs Farmer …?’

  ‘Pooh, Betsy will do as I bid her,’ Farmer said. Optimism was another quality that had survived intact from Ned’s boyhood. ‘Consider it settled.’

  Remaining in the house by the river, staying with the Farmers, was not a desirable arrangement. But it was a convenient one and avoided the need to make yet another decision.

  Holdsworth knew that it would not answ
er for very long. In the old days, Maria used to say that he slept like the dead. But on his first night in the house at Bankside as the Farmers’ guest, he did not sleep like the dead, he dreamed of them instead.

  He dreamed that, when they were burying Maria, he had seen Georgie’s tiny coffin at the bottom of the open grave. The lid was ajar and the wood was splintered, as if someone had tried to get in or out. The clergyman would not stop talking. A black tide rose out of the coffin. It came in waves, ebbing and flowing with the sound of the clergyman’s prayer, sucking back on itself only to surge ahead even farther.

  Holdsworth woke but the tide continued to rise, crawling up his legs like treacle. Higher and higher it climbed, soaking his nightshirt. A hammer pounded his chest. He could not breathe and the pain was so savage he could not even scream.

  Soon the black tide would reach his mouth. Then his nostrils. Then he would drown.

  3

  On the morning of Tuesday, 23 May 1786, John Holdsworth woke before it was light. He listened to the creaking of the timbers, the sighing of the winds in the casement, and the snuffling snores of the servant on the other side of the partition. He watched the first cracks of light appear between the shutters and gradually grow stronger. Shortly after dawn, he dressed, went downstairs in his stockinged feet, and slipped out of the house before even the maid was up. He had heard the Farmers quarrelling about his presence in the house the previous evening. He knew that Mrs Farmer had the stronger will, and it was only a matter of time before her side of the argument prevailed.