The Anatomy of Ghosts

by Andrew Taylor

  Georgie and Maria had become less substantial like the light. For minutes at a stretch, they seemed removed from him, at once real and unreal like favourite characters in a play rather than the beloved dead.

  Holdsworth rose early, dressed and crossed the little landing on stockinged feet. He looked in on Frank. The boy was lying on his back, one arm outstretched above his head, and appeared to be sleeping soundly. He looked very young, completely vulnerable. Holdsworth had not appreciated before how perfectly formed his features were. In the house at Barnwell, Frank had been considered a madman and he had looked like one too. Asleep in Whitebeach, he looked like an overgrown child.

  Would Georgie have lain like this, with such careless and innocent abandon, if he had lived? Holdsworth had failed to save his son and so he would never know. But could he save this living boy in front of him? Would it be something to set against Georgie’s death?

  He went down the stairs, which were so steep they were almost a ladder. The interior of the cottage was gloomy because of the small windows and overhanging thatched eaves. There was a rattle of fire-irons in the kitchen. Holdsworth went into the garden. Early though it was, the grey dome of the sky was full of light. The unkempt grass was silvered with cobwebs and dew. He followed the flagged path down to the water. He stood on the bank for a while, watching a pair of moorhens who flew off at his appearance, oddly erect, with their legs dangling down. Both the water and the air were noticeably cleaner than in Cambridge. Apart from Mulgrave at work in the kitchen, there were no man-made noises. Holdsworth closed his eyes and heard drumming water, the call of a bird he could not identify, and a faint, shifting rustling of vegetation.

  Thank God, he thought, thank God the boy is still here.

  This had been his greatest fear – that Frank Oldershaw would take advantage of the sudden freedom and either flee or find some way of killing himself. Either of those things might happen in the future but at least that first night was past and the boy was still asleep.

  Holdsworth walked round the house to the cobbled yard and washed his hands and face at the pump. The mill itself stood at right angles to the little cottage, its wheel raised out of the water. Beside it was a line of outbuildings thatched with reeds. Beyond the pump was the lane to the village. A ginger cat slipped under the gate and snaked around Holdsworth’s legs with his tail erect. Holdsworth tried to nudge it away with his foot but the animal easily evaded him and purred as though it had been paid a compliment.

  He was drying himself on his shirt-tails when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned and saw Frank.

  ‘Mr Oldershaw – you are up early.’

  The young man looked surprised to see him there. Frank’s hair was tousled. He wore a shirt and breeches but his feet were bare.

  ‘Would you like to wash?’ Holdsworth asked. ‘I will send Mulgrave out with a bowl and a towel.’

  Frank Oldershaw raised his arms and threw them back as if he were preparing to dive. His face, which had been very serious in expression, suddenly broke into a smile.

  ‘Quack,’ he said. ‘Quack. I am a duck.’

  He bolted out of the yard, taking the path that led round the gable end of the cottage and into the garden. Holdsworth pounded after him. As he passed the kitchen window, he saw Mulgrave’s white face staring open-mouthed.

  In the garden, Frank left the path and plunged into the tangle of long grass and weeds. As he ran, he flailed his arms and kicked out his legs with mad and joyous abandon. His feet kicked up silver sprays of dew. He was like a boy let out of school.

  ‘Quack,’ he cried. ‘Quack, quack!’

  In front of him lay the placid expanse of the millpond. Frank did not break stride. At the water’s edge, he plunged into the air in a clumsy dive. His body hit the water with a crash that sent waves rolling over the pool. The waterfowl fluttered into the air in a panic of flapping wings.

  ‘Mr Oldershaw!’ Holdsworth cried. ‘Mr Oldershaw!’

  Seconds later, the boy broke the surface about ten yards from the bank. He turned on his back, half submerged and splashing his arms and legs. ‘Quack, quack!’

  ‘Pray come out,’ Holdsworth called. ‘There may be weeds or other hazards. I cannot save you – I cannot swim.’

  Frank stopped splashing and quacking. He stared across the water at Holdsworth.

  Maria had not been able to swim either, nor for that matter had Georgie. And so the water had swallowed them whole and spat them up to the surface once it had siphoned the life from them.

  Had Sylvia Whichcote been able to swim? Had she drowned just as Frank was about to drown?

  Holdsworth opened his mouth but no words came out. Instead he sucked in breath. He could not get enough. Pin-like pains stabbed his chest. The great grey sky pressed down on him. Dear God, he was drowning in air.

  Frank turned over on to his front and swam with leisurely strokes to the bank. All of a sudden the world had become sane again. Breathing heavily, Holdsworth stepped forward and held out his hand. Frank took it, and hauled himself out of the water.

  ‘Dear God,’ Frank said, his teeth chattering, ‘it’s so damned cold.’

  *

  For the rest of their first day at the mill, Holdsworth and Frank Oldershaw circled around each other like animals who did not know each other but had been forced to share the same confined space. Until now, Holdsworth had followed where common sense or instinct had led him. He had had no doubt that removing Frank from the care of Dr Jermyn would be in Frank’s best interests and therefore in his own best interests too. Now he was not so sure. Indeed, he was not sure of anything.

  Frank’s behaviour was unpredictable. He gambolled about like a large and energetic puppy, reminding Holdsworth inevitably of Georgie when a fit of excitement was on him. Frank sang discordantly, mingling drinking songs with nursery rhymes, and sometimes applying the words of one to the melody of another. He ate whatever was put before him, shovelling food into his mouth as though he had been half-starved at Barnwell. He resisted, or rather ignored, all attempts to guide him in any direction. Every now and then he fell asleep in the middle of what he was doing – again like Georgie – at table with his head cradled on his arms, on the grass in the garden or the cobbles in the yard, on the kitchen floor in the corner by the stone sink.

  Mulgrave said and did nothing that did not relate to his own duties. He waited for Holdsworth’s orders, and when he received them he obeyed them swiftly and fairly efficiently. He avoided being left alone with Frank, though Frank ignored him as he ignored Holdsworth. Mulgrave was a good servant and a worthless ally.

  The only other living thing in the house was the ginger cat. Unlike the three humans, he appeared entirely unconcerned by the strangeness of the occasion. He approached each of the men with the same impersonal enthusiasm. He demanded to be petted and fed. To Holdsworth’s embarrassment, he found himself stroking the animal when it leaped on to his lap, and he even fed it with a scrap of meat from his plate. When Holdsworth pushed it away, the cat leaped on to Frank’s lap, and Frank absent-mindedly stroked it just as Holdsworth had done.

  On one occasion, when the cat had again been on Frank’s lap, it grew weary of him and jumped down. It sauntered into the kitchen where it plagued Mulgrave. Mulgrave did not want its attentions and kicked it. The cat squawked with pain and surprise. It was this that unexpectedly affected Frank, who had been watching events through the open door.

  He stood up suddenly, and his chair fell over behind him. The cat ran round the kitchen in momentary panic.

  ‘Let him be,’ Frank said, his voice sounding thick and rusty from disuse. ‘Let him go freely wherever he wishes, do you hear me?’

  Mulgrave bowed. He came forward and righted the chair. Frank frowned. He looked puzzled, as if wondering what had happened. He sat down on the chair without looking behind him to see if it was there. The cat jumped on to his lap again and purred loudly.

  24

  You never knew with Mr Whichcote.

&nb
sp; In the early hours of Thursday morning, Augustus slept fitfully for nearly two hours in a chair drawn up to the dying glow of the kitchen fire. Even in his dreams he heard the jangling of the bell over the kitchen door. He was not summoned, however, and he dozed until the scullery maid came down at five o’clock.

  The girl, who was the next best thing to a halfwit, coaxed the fire into life and made an almighty clattering as she set pans of water to warm. One by one, in order of seniority, the other servants appeared – the wall-eyed maid, the old man who had tended the garden with gradually decreasing efficiency since the time of Mr Whichcote’s great-uncle, and finally the cook, a majestic but sour-faced woman who was at present working out her notice. None of the servants liked the day after a club dinner. The day itself was hard work, but it was a break in routine, undeniably exciting, full of strange faces, and with the tantalizing possibility of discarded trifles or unexpected tips. Afterwards, though, came the unpleasant task of clearing up.

  A little after eight o’clock, Mr Whichcote’s bell rang. Augustus took his jug of warm water upstairs. When he returned, thirty minutes later with tea and rolls on a tray, he found the jug had not been touched. Mr Whichcote was still in his dressing gown, sitting up in bed and making notes in his pocketbook. He gestured towards Augustus to leave the tray on the night table. As he did so, the footboy glanced down and saw that the master was adding up a column of figures, against which he had made a number of entries.

  An hour later, there was a knocking at the front door. Augustus opened the door to Mrs Phear. Her maid Dorcas was two paces behind her.

  Mrs Phear advanced into the hall, as implacable as a small black cloud in a clear blue sky. She addressed the air in front of her. ‘Where’s your master?’

  Augustus hastened to open the study door. Mr Whichcote was already rising to his feet. Mrs Phear said that she had brought her maid with her: the girl was so idle at home that a little work would be good for her.

  Whichcote turned to Augustus and held out a key for him to take. ‘You and the girl will make the pavilion neat again. I wish to see it clean and swept and garnished, with everything restored to how it was.’

  Augustus bowed and turned, believing he had been dismissed.

  ‘Stay. Come here.’ Whichcote towered over the footboy. ‘Only you and the maid are to work down there. I hold you responsible for that, as well as the rest. Now go.’

  Mr Whichcote kept the pavilion locked. According to Cook, this was because the building was reserved for the master’s obscene and blasphemous activities, especially those that occurred on the nights of club dinners, so the master’s caution was entirely understandable. Cook said that she herself would not go in there alone for all the tea in China. Mr Whichcote, she said, was a gentleman who made your blood run cold, which was one reason why she had handed in her notice; the other reasons being the death of her late mistress (God rest her soul), the impious activities of the master and his friends, and (worst of all) his inability to pay his servants on time. Cook also said that if Mr Whichcote made your blood run cold, then Mrs Phear made it freeze in your veins and turn your very heart to a block of ice; and Cook was right.

  Augustus took Dorcas through to the service side of the house, where they collected the brushes, mops, cloths and buckets. He carried the key of the pavilion in his pocket and was conscious of its weight and the responsibility it signified. Dorcas, who was half a head taller than he was, stared straight ahead. She had a white and bony face with freckles like flecks of mud on her skin.

  ‘We’ll do the big room upstairs,’ he said as he unlocked the pavilion door. ‘Then the little room they used downstairs and the staircase.’

  ‘You please yourself,’ the maid said, still without looking at him. ‘I want to see the bedchamber first.’

  Augustus stared at her. ‘How do you know there’s a bedchamber?’

  ‘Because the girl told me. The one who had to lie in there last night all trussed up like a bird for the oven.’

  ‘You’re making it up,’ Augustus said uncertainly. ‘I was here last night.’

  ‘But you weren’t in that bedchamber, were you?’

  ‘No more was you.’

  ‘That girl was, though. She had to pretend to be a virgin. But she’s no more a virgin than my grandmother. She had this fat young gent come to her. He was too drunk to do it but he gave her three guineas.’

  ‘Where’s she now?’

  ‘Gone back to London.’

  Augustus opened the door, thinking that Dorcas must be telling the truth because she knew it had been the fat young gent, Mr Archdale. She pushed past him into the lobby and looked about her.

  ‘Where is it?’

  Without waiting for an answer, she opened the nearest door, which led to the passage running the length of the pavilion’s ground floor. With Augustus at her heels, she walked briskly along it, trying the doors until she found the bedchamber.

  With a bucket in one hand and a mop in the other, Augustus stood in the doorway and watched Dorcas inspecting the room for all the world as though she were the mistress of the house looking for evidence of her maid’s shortcomings. She tutted over the puddle of wax at the foot of one of the candlesticks on the table. She sighed loudly as she replaced the cork in a bottle of cordial. She raised her eyebrows at the heap of bedclothes on the floor and touched with her forefinger one of the silken white cords that were still attached to the bedposts. She studied the red stains in the middle of the sheet on the bed and wrinkled her nose.

  ‘Up to all the tricks, that one.’

  ‘What?’

  She stared at him not unkindly. She was three inches taller and nine months older yet her expression hinted that in her superiority to him she might just as well have been as tall as King’s College Chapel and roughly as old too. ‘She lay with me last night and she wouldn’t stop talking. That’s how I knew all about the young gent being unmanned. Happens a lot, she says, and they have to pretend. It’s worth their while, mind you.’

  Augustus felt hot and uncomfortable. He turned away, wanting to assert his control over the situation; after all, he was in some sense the host and besides he was a man and Dorcas was nothing but a girl. ‘Come upstairs,’ he said. ‘That’s where the worst of it is.’

  He went out of the room without looking at her. He led her back down the passage and up to the long room on the first floor.

  ‘Pho,’ Dorcas said as she passed through the doorway. ‘Worse than a midden on a hot day.’

  She walked round the room, with Augustus once again at her heels. The air stank of stale alcohol and tobacco and the smoke from the candles. Underlying that were other and less agreeable odours. Two of the chairs had been overturned. There were pools of wax and wine on the table and the floor. At least half a dozen glasses had been smashed, some intentionally, and the fragments of glass lay around the empty fireplace. There was a pool of vomit on a bowl of fruit at one end of the table. They found far worse behind the screen, the source of the worst smells, where one of the commodes had fallen on to its side and a chamber pot had smashed. The floorboards here were slippery with urine, more vomit and even a pile of excrement.

  ‘Take days to set this to rights,’ Dorcas said, and for the first time she sounded awed and even a little scared.

  Together they examined the debris on the table. Dorcas picked up a strawberry and ate it. Augustus found a half-eaten chicken leg. They foraged for a few minutes, cramming scraps of food into their mouths.

  She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Do you think they enjoy it?’

  A door banged below them. There were footsteps on the stairs. Dorcas seized a brush and began to sweep vigorously. Augustus righted one of the fallen chairs. The door of the room opened and Mr Whichcote appeared on the threshold.

  ‘I don’t pay you to be idle,’ he said to Augustus.

  He might have replied that Mr Whichcote did not pay him at all. Instead, he hung his head and blushed.

  Dorca
s curtsied low and said nothing, fixing her eyes on the ground.

  ‘Begin by airing the place,’ Mr Whichcote said. ‘What are you waiting for? Open the windows.’

  They sprang to obey him. Whichcote made a leisurely circuit of the room with a handkerchief raised to his nose.

  ‘Remember,’ he said. ‘I do not choose to have what passes here to be talked about abroad. If there is foolish gossip in the town about it, I shall know that one or both of you have been talking out of turn. And if that happens, Mrs Phear and I will know what to do.’ He looked from Augustus to Dorcas and then went on in the same low, unhurried voice: ‘It is a singular coincidence that neither of you has friends in the world, is it not? It follows that Mrs Phear and I must stand in place of them. And you shall find that, just as we know how to punish wrongdoing, we know how to reward fidelity.’

  Without another word, he sauntered out of the room and down the stairs. Neither Dorcas nor Augustus moved until they heard the closing of the big door in the lobby.

  ‘He’ll kill us if we talk,’ Augustus blurted out.

  He glanced sideways at Dorcas. He was alarmed to see that her eyes were full of tears.

  ‘You remember the other girl, the one that died?’ she muttered.

  ‘The one who came in February? Tabitha? They said she choked.’

  ‘Who knows? Maybe they killed her. I tell you this, though – the mistress locked me in with Tabby’s body that night. And now she never goes away.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Every night she’s there,’ Dorcas hissed. ‘I see her shape in the bed next to mine. She talks and talks and I can’t hear what she’s saying.’