The Anatomy Of Ghosts

and walked away.

But what if she had stayed? If she had allowed her hand to remain beneath his? And what if they met again in the garden, and by night. Tonight. He thought of Elinor’s smooth fingers running up his arm and then -

Real footsteps destroyed the sweet illusion; the dream became instantly insubstantial and tawdry, revealed for what it was, a mere lubricious fancy.

The size of a penny piece. Oh, Maria, forgive me.

Someone was coming down the lane from the direction of Jerusalem. Holdsworth drew back into the shadow of a clump of trees and shrubs on the corner of the market. At this time of night, you never knew who might be abroad. And here, on the fringes of the town, the conditions were well suited to robbery. On the other side of the lane was the Leys, the stretch of unenclosed fields and marshy waste that bordered the town on the south.

Forgive me.

A lamp burned feebly above the doorway of a building on the opposite corner of the market, illuminating a few yards of the paved footpath. As Holdsworth watched, a small, stout man walked slowly into the patch of light and paused. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking towards the darkness on the other side of the road.

Not looking? Showing himself?

There were other, lighter footsteps. A woman crossed the road towards the man. She must have been sheltering in or near the Leys. She stood beside him, their heads close together. They had a short conversation, conducted in whispers. The man took the woman’s chin and tilted her face so he could see it in the light. Holdsworth felt a twinge of envy: it was quite clear what they were discussing. Coins chinked. Then the woman moved away from the lamplight. The man waited. He looked up and down the lane, turning his head, which allowed Holdsworth a glimpse of his profile.

It was young Mr Archdale. Holdsworth’s envy turned to disgust. So that was how you found yourself a whore. You showed yourself under the light in the Beast Market and waited for one to come to you, a moth to your candle. If he stayed here, if he waited under the light, Holdsworth could find himself a whore of his own. Had he come to this, he wondered, that he lusted after such pleasures? A grieving widower at least retained a little dignity. But surely a man who paid to fornicate in the dark had none?

Harry Archdale walked quickly over the road. In hot pursuit of the last favours, he plunged into the Leys, moving deeper and deeper into the darkness that had already swallowed up his whore.

Forgive me.

Few people found it easy to sleep that night. There was a storm coming.

When Mr Richardson left Sir Charles Archdale at the Blue Boar after supper, he could not bear to return immediately to college but walked aimlessly through the streets. The unnatural heat made him itchy, and he scratched himself as he walked, especially under his wig. The air was particularly bad – he sniffed and caught a trace of the foul and familiar stench of tanning hides.

It had not been an agreeable evening – Sir Charles was overbearing by nature, and enjoyed the sound of his own voice. He also disliked what he had heard about a fatality at Jerusalem, and the tutor had been obliged to handle him carefully. But now it was over, Richardson still could not relax. He had much to occupy his mind and he could not see his way clear.

As Richardson passed St Michael’s Church, he thought he heard someone murmur his name. Or rather, not his name but one like it. Richenda. He told himself he had taken too much wine, though now he felt suddenly and unpleasantly sober. He hurried on.

Tobias Soresby was walking through the streets like Mr Richardson, though unlike the tutor he was perfectly sober. His loping progress was erratically punctuated with tiny cracking sounds, as he tugged at his finger joints. The sizar was trying with growing desperation to weigh up the pros and cons of a decision so complex and so momentous that it frightened him. He had heard today that Mr Miskin might soon resign the Rosington Fellowship. That was most unexpected. It might change everything.

In his wanderings Soresby passed the little house in Trumpington Street where Mrs Phear was working by candlelight at her tapestry showing the destruction of Sodom, or possibly Gomorrah. When her eyes grew tired, she summoned Dorcas, checked the bolts and locks on doors and windows, and prepared herself for bed. But after she had blown out the candle, Mrs Phear could not sleep. She too had a great deal on her mind. Above all she was worried about Philip Whichcote. She did not want to worry about him but had long ago resigned herself to the fact that she had no choice in the matter. If she had had a child of her own it might have been different. She blamed Sylvia above all for Philip’s troubles.

Mrs Phear had thought everything would be better with the woman dead, but in the event everything was worse.

On the floor above her mistress’s bedchamber, Dorcas undressed herself and lay down on her bed. She was completely naked. The sweat poured off her. Her room was immediately under the roof, and all the heat of the day seemed to have gathered there.

Dorcas said the Lord’s Prayer in the usual way and then again, backward, just to be on the safe side. In her left hand she held a corm of garlic, which a gypsy in the market had told her was an infallible specific against ghosts.

In February they had laid Tabitha Skinner on the bed next to Dorcas’s and drawn the blanket over her head. Dorcas had spent a wakeful night with a dead girl. Everyone knew that the soul lingered near its earthly habitation until the body was consigned to a Christian burial. And in cases like Tabitha’s, where the circumstances surrounding her death were sinful, the soul might linger much longer in the place where its body had been.

And now when she did sleep, Dorcas sometimes dreamed that the girl pushed aside the blanket, sat up in bed and talked to her. Sometimes Tabitha talked when Dorcas was awake. But Dorcas could never make out what she was saying. Once she had a nightmare in which Tabitha got out of her bed and climbed into Dorcas’s. On that occasion, Dorcas woke up screaming, and Mrs Phear came upstairs and whipped her.

Dorcas prayed, but it did not help. The memory of Tabitha, alive and dead, lingered like a bad smell, and so did the dreadful heat. She lay there with her right hand resting between her legs and wondered exactly what they had done to Tabitha.

‘Tab?’ she whispered into the darkness. ‘Tab? Go away now, please, there’s a good girl.’

Mulgrave, who lived not far away from Lambourne House in a cottage backing on to the castle ditch, dozed in his chair after a late supper. He had spent much of the evening reckoning up his worth – the house he lived in, several hundred pounds in the bank, and nearly as much again in gilts.

He made money from catering to the whims of wealthy puppies, just as Tom Turdman made money from shit. It was tiresome work but lucrative. On the borders of waking and sleeping, he turned over in his mind a scheme to reduce his labour while increasing his profit. After all, bankers and lawyers had their clerks, tradesmen their apprentices and beneficed clergy their curates. Why should a gyp be any different?

In Dr Jermyn’s house in Barnwell, Frank Oldershaw lay on his back in his chamber. He was snoring. After the outbreak in the morning, Jermyn had ordered the attendant to dose him thoroughly with laudanum. Every hour the porter unlocked the door and shone a lantern on his face to make sure he was still there and still breathing.

Harry Archdale was in the Leys. He had taken hardly a drop of wine since dinner. He had finished working through his notes for the Vauden Medal, together with Soresby’s detailed commentary on it. Rather to his own surprise, he was confident that he had sufficiently mastered it to acquit himself respectably under examination by his Uncle Charles, whose erudition was more commonly admired than displayed. He doubted that the results would fool Mr Richardson, but that did not concern him. Ricky would not want to upset Sir Charles any more than Archdale did.

He had discovered that the combination of study and unaccustomed sobriety had invigorated him quite remarkably. The girl said she was called Chloe, a likely story, but she knew her business well enough. He pushed her up against a tree and dealt with her manfully – he fancied that she would not soon forget the vigorous thrusts of his mighty membrum virile. Archdale wore his armour for the encounter, for in his way he was a prudent youth, though there was no denying the protection affected the pleasure of an amorous engagement. But he would not need his armour at the Holy Ghost Club because the girl there would be a virgin.

Only a virgin was suitable for the occasion. It was, after all, the Holy Ghost Club, and the Holy Ghost insisted on a virgin. That was the point of the whole thing.

In the Master’s Lodge at Jerusalem, Ben was dismissed for the night. He left college and went to his room in Vauden Alley, hard by the northern wall of Jerusalem.