Poor Tom's Ghost

by Jane Louise Curry

  No one had seen Tom Garland at the Cardinal’s Hat, where the clock in the front room chimed half-past five as Roger came through the door. Could it be so late? Had he slept under that sycamore tree? How could it be so late and still no Tom?

  The landlord propped the note atop a wine cask and drew Roger’s small-beer himself. “Now away wi’ ye and drink it out of doors,” he growled. “I may be a friend to Tom Garland but I’ll not have ye sickening under my roof.”

  “ ’Tis only th’ heat. I’m not ill.” Only the hellish heat. But there was no point in arguing. He took his pint out and along Bankside to the shade of a tree hanging over the garden wall of one of the Pike Garden houses, where he could catch his breath. “Jack, my lad,” he said thickly, “if he has caught his death ’tis all your doing. He cannot stay in town. Must come away. So stir yourself, you addlepated cuckoo.”

  Somewhere deep in his mind the dim alarm sounded. Not Jack. Roger. You’re Roger.

  Jack pushed himself unsteadily erect, “It doesn’t really matter,” he whispered. “Only Tom matters.”

  Tom came sore-footed home at nightfall to Brande’s Rents to find the door sealed up and the quarantine order nailed upon the doorpost. His knock on the window by the door fetched first a snivelly child and then poor Agnes Barton to say it was her James and the youngest of the children who were ill. There was nothing yet that they needed, so Tom had wished her a peaceful night for James and was almost as far as the playhouse when Agnes suddenly remembered Jack and came back to her window to call down the lane. To Tom’s alarm that Jack should be in town at all, and looking ill at that, all she could say was, “The poor lad said, Tell Tom the Blue Pump.’ Nothing but that, over and over. ‘Tell Tom the Blue Pump’.”

  And Jack was there. Rough-voiced old Alison Yarbie, the hostess, had against all reason taken him in, untrussed his laces, stripped him down to his linen shirt, and put him in a clean bed. “Such a pretty lad to leave to the cut-throats or the ditch,” she said, puffing up the stairs ahead of Tom with the candlestick. “Let ’em seal up my door if they will. I had my touch o’ the sickness in April, and I’ve drink and flour for forty days, with hens and cabbages and cowcumbers in my garden. And a little door out into the fields and away.”

  Hours later pain woke Jack from darkness and a shapeless dream into a guttering circle of light, the chill of a cold cloth on his burning forehead, and a thin runnel of water past his ear and down his neck. On a bench near the bed a single candle burned in a pewter candlestick beside a basin filled with water. Tom sat on a joint-stool drawn close to the bed, round-shouldered with exhaustion, his face streaked with tears and the day’s grime. He wrung out a rag over the basin to fold and smooth across Jack’s forehead.

  “Oh, Jack.” He groaned. “I thought you well away to Brentford with young Somercote. Why must you have followed me back into this pesthole?” Covering his face with his hands, he said brokenly, “ ’Tis hard enough my Kitten should leave me for a tinsel gallant. Now you have caught your death and I must lose you both.”

  to say we end the hart ake

  THRUST OUT OF TIME INTO A WORLD OF shadow, Roger huddled on a bench in a corner of the dark room and watched the boy on the bed. Outside, beyond the open, unshuttered windows, the sun beat cheerfully down on streets and marshy fields, but the room was strangely dark, a room seen in a dark mirror. He had cut himself adrift from Jack … a day ago? Two days? The illness had frightened him at last into letting go his increasingly fragile hold. What was the use of it all anyway? Jack had fought too fiercely against mending what he had broken. He would never say a word of Katherine. Roger knew that now. Jack’s anxiety for Tom’s safety had lasted only so long as he did not understand his own danger. When the telltale swellings betrayed his weary heaviness and raging thirst for what they were, he clung to Tom as he clung to life. No matter that the love keeping Tom by him could mean Tom’s death as well. No matter that the tale of what he had done might be pieced together if Tom lived. But why should Tom live? Roger’s interference had changed nothing else. How could it change that? It had, it seemed, done nothing but trap him in a nightmare. In that bare, low-ceilinged room he was a poor, trapped shadow no one saw but Jack.

  Tom slept when he could, as now, on the truckle-bed pulled over to the open window. Jack slept only fitfully and had bad dreams. Each time he wakened, his feverish eyes wandered anxiously until they fixed on Roger, as if to fix where danger lay.

  Tell him! Haven’t you hurt him enough?

  I’m afraid. He’ll leave me if he knows. I’m afraid…

  He’ll piece it together for himself, you know. In time.

  A queer kind of satisfaction grew in those sick eyes. He’ll never. He’ll go with me. He’s sickening himself and feels in his dreams for swellings.

  No!

  But Tom in his uneasy sleep did lie cramped upon his side, arms crossed, his hands pressed tightly into his armpits.

  There was a quiet tap at the door and Mistress Yarbie bustled in, still puffing from the stairs, to set a pitcher on the bench beside the bed and take away the emptied one. Tom jerked awake when she passed between Jack’s bed and his, and she gave him a pitying look as he sat up on the low truckle-bed, head in his hands. “You’ve a touch of it yourself, my lad, by the look of ye. I’ll be setting the Pump up for a pest-house next. Old Timkins up in the garret’s sickening fast, and I’m a fool as ever was, running up and down. Handsome and young or too old to kick up a dust, I’m a fool for any of ye.” She mopped at her face with a grimy handkerchief.

  Tom’s grin as he stood was wan. “A dear old fool, then. How—how’s Jack, d’you think?”

  The old woman shook her head doubtfully. “It came on him so fast. Else he was sickening before and wouldn’t give in to it. ’Twould make it worse. He’s been thrashin’ in his sleep, by the look of the bed linen. I brought another nice lemon and borage julep to ease the thirst when he wakes. There’s sorrel water in it for the fever.” She hesitated. “If ye’d like a chicken again for your dinner I’ll send out to the cookshop, but I’ll need the silver for’t and for what I’ve laid out already. ’Tis three shillings for the lemons and oranges and eight shillings tuppence for the chickens and mutton and th’ giblet pie.”

  Tom flushed as he opened his purse. “I had forgot. I tipped tavernkeepers and ostlers from Gyl’s to Highgate and Stratford East for news of—of an old acquaintance, so that after the physician yesterday and his pills, I’ve only the eight and tuppence. If you’ve an honest messenger, I can send for more to Mortlake tomorrow.”

  Old Alison shrugged. “If you wish. But the lad has coin enough and to spare.”

  Tom looked wryly up from counting his coins. “Jack? Hardly. Unless it’s farthings enough to make a deceitful pretty jingle.”

  “No indeed,” Mistress Yarbie insisted. “ ’Tis gold, and plenty. In a pouch beneath his shift. I felt how heavy ’twas when I undid his doublet.” At a sound from the bed she gave a sudden start. “Heaven ’fend us, the poor child’s demon-shot for sure!”

  For Jack had wrenched about in terror. No, no gold! he wanted to cry out, but his swollen tongue muffled it to a violent “Oh, oh!”

  “Bless us, what is’t he stares at so?” the old woman whispered, so far forgetting herself as to sketch a rapid on sign of the cross on her ample bosom. “He stares in that corner as if ’twere a bogle come to fetch him.”

  “It’s all right, Jack lad,” Tom soothed. “I’m here. I’m here.” He raised his brother up to ease his retching cough, but as he lowered him again to the pillows he felt a thickness shift between Jack’s shoulder blades, and traced through the damp linen the cord it hung by. Jack struggled weakly, but the pouch came free and Tom gently drew the knotted cord over his head and smoothed the damp hair away from the boy’s flushed face.

  “It feels heavy as gold, right enough,” Tom muttered. “I saw the cord before and thought it only some pretty friendship knot. But gold? When he spends the shillings I give him each week
in a day or three and begs for more?” He spilled the pouch out on the truckle-bed.

  “Lord ha’ mercy!” old Alison whispered. How much is’t?”

  “Four—five pounds and more,” Tom said uneasily. “Jack?”

  Jack made no sign that he had heard, but mumbled violently in his fever, glaring into the corner of the room with such despairing fury that Alison Yarbie, with a fearful glance over her shoulder, moved her stout self to stand between the corner and the boy. Only then did Jack’s eyes stray toward Tom’s back as he unfolded the papers from the pouch and read slowly, uncomprehendingly, the greeting My onely dere swete hart…

  When Tom came to the end of the third sheet he looked up dazedly. “What can it mean? ’Tis my wife’s hand. She looks for me to come quick as I may, yet… How came Jack by these? When was it writ? And she’s not signed it. It seems scarce finished.” He read through it once more in disbelief and wakening alarm.

  “The letter Kitten left at New House… It bore no greeting,” Tom whispered, turning at last. “And this one no farewell. They belong together. They belong together, Jack.” He looked at his brother helplessly. “What have you done to me?”

  Roger heard Tom’s words cleave through the deepening shadows and hang in the room’s heavy heat like the unbelieving cry of some dumb animal struck down by his master’s hand. Even before Mistress Yarbie moved aside, he knew Jack would make no answer. Jack’s eyes were fixed on him in fear and hatred and did not see the old woman take his purse from the peg on the wall where his clothes hung and draw out the note that, but for Jack, would still have leaned against the candlestick in the empty rooms in Brande’s Rents. “What o’ this?” she asked, thrusting it at Tom. “I saw before ’twas for thee and forgot it.”

  Roger could not see Tom’s face, but it hardly mattered. Tom would guess the rest. It was finished. By chance almost, but finished. For Roger, if not for the Garlands.

  I’m afraid. Despair whispered in the shadows. Tom…

  He won’t leave you. Roger tried to pierce that bewildered pain. He loves you. And you don’t even know what that means. You…

  The words died into silence like sparks falling into dark water. There was no Jack, no room, nothing but the streaming darkness.

  what may this meane…?

  ROGER WONDERED IDLY IF HE WERE drowning. He could not move to save himself and could not seem to care. In a darkness where there was no sound, only a faint rise and fall of lulling motion, a sense of floating in emptiness, nothing seemed to matter. Not to care—that was the answer. Why struggle to tie up on this bank or that when it was the way of mooring lines to fray and break and send one adrift over deeper and deeper waters? Easier far to drift…

  But something held him back: a hail from an unseen shore, a hand on a trailing line. For a long time while he swung against that line, until weariness and confusion ebbed and the darkness thinned. The lulling warmth bled away and he felt cold, and wet.

  Roger!

  Roger stirred and felt a tugging at his hand.

  Roger? Oh, Rog, please be all right.

  A second small hand closed around his own. Pippa? How could Pippa have come to the edge of nowhere? With an effort that left him drained of everything but wonder, Roger opened his eyes to stare up at her in bewilderment.

  “Are you O.K.?” Pippa’s voice quavered. “Oh Rog, I was so scared you’d slip clear in. What happened? Is he gone?”

  Pippa, in her dressing gown and pyjamas, barefooted and shivering, crouched above him on the slipway, clinging to his hand for dear life. Fog drifted around them, moon-pale, and dark shapes loomed above.

  “A dream,” Roger said, the words coming thickly and slowly. “I went to help Tom so Pa’d be free of him and almost lost myself.”

  “Roger, please,” Pippa pleaded.

  “It’s all right. I’m all right.”

  But when he rolled onto his side and drew his feet up under him, he found not his camp bed, but a hard, slanted surface and the slap and pull of water. That much had been no dream. Startled into wakefulness at last, he sat up and saw that he really was on the slipway, shirtless and cold, with his legs half in the river. The dark shapes above were parked cars, dimly haloed by the street lamps across the way.

  “One of your sandals floated away,” Pippa said. “I didn’t see the other one. Can you stand up? The fog’s getting thinner. We ought to go before anybody sees us.”

  Roger tried to make out the hands on his watch and could not. He scrambled up, his jeans slapping coldly at his calves. “What time is it?”

  “Almost morning, I think. But Mama and Alan still weren’t back from the hospital when you came out.”

  Pippa took Roger’s hand and drew him after her like an obedient child up to the parking area, across the street, and along the footpath past the church, where the old-fashioned street lamps marked their way like pale candles in the fog.

  Beyond the river the fog thinned quickly and they had almost reached their own lane when Pippa ventured again to ask, “Roger? What did happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Roger said helplessly. “Not for sure. How did you know I was out here?”

  Pippa slowed and peered questioningly upward, but Roger’s face was in shadow, silhouetted against the chill glare of a Park Road arc-lamp. “It wasn’t a dream, you know. I saw him. That Jack. I saw him when you were trying to get the letters out of his hidey-hole.”

  Roger looked down at her wonderingly. She stood at the road’s edge in her bare feet as matter-of-factly as if she made a nightly habit of strange expeditions. “And you followed. Just like that?” He broke off as a car’s headlamps winked into sight far up Park Road and pulled Pippa after him at a run the last few yards to the lane. Once safe in its shadows they picked their way along gingerly.

  “It’s a good thing it’s so grassy,” Pippa said, thinking of her bare feet. “I ran like sixty and couldn’t catch up to him—to you, I mean. And then I was scared somebody’d be awake on Church Street and look out a window, so I went along between the fence and the parked cars or I mightn’t have found you. You weren’t down there at first, before the fog. I don’t know where you were. And when the fog came, it came so sneaky-fast that everything but the slipway just disappeared. One minute you weren’t anywhere, and then you were down there looking like you’d gone to sleep. I couldn’t wake you up or pull you out. I was afraid if I went for help you’d slip on in. Besides, it felt—spooky. So I just hung on.”

  Roger shivered. “I probably wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t. Was it really only as long as that? It seemed like … like three days. And wasted ones, at that.” There was no time to tell it all. It had seemed so simple and was not. At Pippa’s nod he said miserably, “All that about being an actor in the past’? I fancied myself putting everything right for everybody. It sounded so simple. But it didn’t work that way. Oh, I think that what I did warned Katherine and let Tom know the truth about Jack’s trick, so we won’t have our ghost any more, but I have an idea it didn’t change anything that happened. Maybe that’s just from not knowing what happened, but…” The sense of powerlessness dragged at him. He had liked Tom. Loved him, even. And not to know was unbearable.

  “Oh Pips,” he whispered. “He was so much like Pa.”

  “Well,” Pippa said kindly, tucking her hand in his, “we’ll just have to find out what did happen. Like Alan and Jo found out about him in the first place.”

  “Alan—” Roger stopped abruptly where the drive curved to approach the house. “Alan’s car’s still gone,” he said tightly. “They’re not back. What if—oh, Pips, maybe I should have gone with Pa in the first place! Come on. I’m going to put on some shoes and a shirt and walk round to the hospital. You can tell Jemmy if she wakes up.”

  “Wait,” Pippa hissed. She felt in her pocket for the key.

  “It’s locked. Jemmy was asleep and all alone, so I locked it.”

  “It’s not locked now.” Roger eased the door open quietly and moved quickly tow
ards the hall stairs.

  “Roger!” Pippa’s quaver caught him on the landing.

  “What is it?” he whispered. “And keep it down. You’ll wake Jemmy.”

  Pippa did not answer. In the faint light from the window in the lower hall he saw her point at something in the front room and then disappear. Forgetting Jemmy, he took the steps noisily two at a time and, reaching the doorway, groped for the light switch.

  The light did not come on. And the moon-like paper globe was gone from the shadowed ceiling.

  “Pippa? What is it? What’s the matter?”

  Pippa closed the door at the far end of the room and moved into a patch of moonlight. “Jemmy’s not there,” she said wonderingly. “The bed’s gone too. And look!”

  This time Roger saw what she pointed at. The doorway up into the dining room was incredibly, nonsensically, covered up again. Instead of the plain stone arch and patches of dark brick wall there was a heavy, painted moulding topped with a cumbersome lintel crenellated like a castle’s parapet. In the dining room itself, the old poor gas stove huddled in its dark hole in a fireplace wall with ruined panelling. Opposite, beside the door to the kitchen stairway, was a wall of peeling cupboard doors.

  The beautiful Elizabethan fireplace and the wide, handsome staircase were gone, erased, as if they had never been.

  I will finde

  Where truth is hid

  WHEN ROGER WOKE, ALL OF HIS WINDOWS were wide open and through the one looking out over the green garage roof the sun rising above Syon Park glittered through the trees. It was the first morning in Isleworth all over again, an astonishing, unexpected stitching-up of the rent in time: poor Tom’s ghost would never walk. Had no call to.

  Roger could not grasp it at first, it was at once so simple and so beyond explaining. That Tom’s ghost would not appear again he had guessed, but not that his own interference in the past would have changed the present. And, of course, it had to. Once Tom Garland knew that he had not lost Katherine, it made no difference whether he died in the plague or in his happy old age: his ghost would not walk for grief of her. And that meant that these five days past when he had walked would have to be either impossibly full of gaps, or … gone. Undone. To be re-done as he had re-done Jack’s last three days.