The Anatomy Of Ghosts

Mr Mepal, and the porter would admit him at the main gate.

Since Augustus could not spend the night in college, Whichcote had settled that he would pass his nights at Mrs Phear’s house in Trumpington Street.

‘You might as well go now,’ he’d said when the chapel clock was striking seven. ‘I shall manage very well without you for the rest of the evening – you are all fingers and thumbs. Mind you give Mrs Phear my best compliments and be sure to say that I wish you to make yourself useful while you are there.’

Augustus walked slowly through Chapel Court, his mind groping for a possible future that did not include his being involved with Mr Whichcote’s ruin. The bailiff had advised him to look for another situation. Could he put his trust in Mr Holdsworth? If not, how could he even start? His present position would be no recommendation to a possible employer. He doubted that Mr Whichcote would give him a character. He was without friends, and in a town that was positively crawling with boys looking for employment, most of whom had an uncle here or brother there willing to extend a helping hand.

Lost in his thoughts, he almost collided with two undergraduates who were talking in the arcade by the porter’s lodge. As he cowered back, begging the gentlemen’s pardon, he recognized Frank Oldershaw and Harry Archdale.

‘You, boy,’ Archdale said. ‘Do you know the town well?’

‘Oh yes, sir. I was born here.’ In the cellar of a rat-infested building in a court off Green Street. ‘Every nook and cranny.’

‘Do you know Audrey Passage?’

‘Yes, sir – off King’s Lane.’ Desperation made him cunning. ‘Not easy to find.’

‘Will you take us there?’

‘Yes, your honour. Now, your honour?’

Frank Oldershaw laid a hand on Archdale’s sleeve. ‘This is Whichcote’s footboy. I knew I’d seen his face somewhere.’

Archdale blinked. ‘So it is.’

‘But I’m looking for another situation, sir,’ Augustus put in quickly.

Archdale murmured to Frank, ‘Can’t harm, can it? This is something quite different.’

‘Please, sir,’ Augustus said.

Frank shrugged. ‘I pity anyone in Whichcote’s service.’

‘You’ll come with me, I hope?’ Archdale went on, still addressing Frank. ‘There’s music at the Black Bull on Wednesday and we might step in there afterwards if it took your fancy.’

The three of them left the college and walked down Bird Bolt Lane. Augustus congratulated himself – Audrey Passage lay on the other side of Trumpington Street between King’s Lane and the Black Bull Inn. He would have taken this direction for Mrs Phear’s house in any case, and she was not expecting him to arrive yet. There was a chance of a handsome tip – young gentlemen tended to be open-handed.

He led them into King’s Lane and then turned off to the left. The two gentlemen already had their handkerchiefs up to their noses. They picked their way through narrow lanes, scarcely more than open corridors between buildings, until they came to Audrey Passage. It was a dark and winding alley, a cul-de-sac with a communal cesspool at the far end. The cobbles were greasy and damp, despite the dry weather. The place was haunted by ragged children and scrawny cats.

‘Ask where Tom Turdman lives,’ Archdale ordered Augustus, his voice indistinct because of the handkerchief.

‘The night-soil man, sir?’

Archdale nodded. Augustus seized one of the larger children by his ear, who pointed them to a doorway halfway down the passage. The door stood open. The child said that Tom and his family lived in a room on the top floor, at the back.

‘You won’t want to go up there, sir,’ Augustus said to Archdale. ‘Shall I tell the girl to bring him down for you?’

Archdale nodded and the child sped off. The three visitors waited outside. Augustus shifted restlessly from foot to foot. Undergraduates were not popular in a place like this and nor were strange boys. There was a danger they might be attacked. On the other hand, the young men were strong, especially Mr Oldershaw, and they carried sticks.

The child reappeared and scuttled between their legs into the safety of the alley. A woman followed, negotiating the steep and narrow stairs with caution. The first thing Augustus saw of her was a cherry-red slipper with a pointed toe. Another joined it on the step. Then came the ragged hem of a dark blue dress to which age and use had lent a green patina. At length the whole woman appeared, though she kept well away from the doorway as though fearing the visitors might bring infection into her house.

‘Who are you?’ Archdale said, lowering his handkerchief.

‘Mrs Floyd, your honour.’

‘Who?’

‘My husband’s the night-soil man, sir. John Floyd, sir, they call him Tom Turdman. Nothing wrong, is there?’

Augustus stared at the cherry-red slippers. On the toe of each was a decoration, finely worked in silk, a geometric pattern that reminded him of the carpet in Mr Whichcote’s study at Lambourne House.

‘No, not in the world,’ Archdale said. ‘I understand he has a – a connection with Mr Soresby of Jerusalem.’

Mrs Floyd curtsied, as though honoured that the gentleman should be aware of anything concerning her husband’s family. ‘Yes, sir – Tobias is Floyd’s poor dead sister’s child.’

‘Have you seen Mr Soresby in the last day or so? I am particularly anxious to talk to him.’

The woman stared at the ground. ‘No, sir. He don’t come here. He’s a scholar, you see, up at the college.’

Augustus frowned at the slippers. They reminded him of something else. He was conscious that all around them were ears and eyes, that the building was invisibly alive.

‘Well, look here, my good woman,’ Archdale said. ‘Tell your husband I want to see his nephew, and – and that I wish him nothing but good. And if either of you sees him, let me know directly. A message addressed to me at Jerusalem will reach me – you may leave it with Mr Mepal, the porter. My name’s Archdale.’

The woman curtsied again and the slippers vanished from view for an instant, masked by the hem of the dress. In that instant, Augustus remembered.

Frank turned and began to move away. Archdale glanced after him, shrugged and followed.

‘Sir,’ Augustus said, with a nightmarish sense that he was about to jump off a very high cliff with his eyes closed. ‘Sir, sir.’

The undergraduates turned back. ‘What is it?’ Archdale said.

‘The slippers, your honour, Mrs Tom’s slippers. I swear they’re the same as madam’s.’

‘Eh? What the devil do you mean? Which madam?’

‘Mrs Whichcote, sir.’

*

On the first evening after his return to Jerusalem, Frank supped in his own rooms. He had only Holdsworth to keep him company. Archdale, whom he invited to join them, cried off, saying he had one of Mr Crowley’s lectures in the morning. They were reading selected passages from Grotius, he explained, and Mr Crowley was not always kind if a man made a blunder while construing. Last week, someone had mistaken merx for meretrix, and half the college were still laughing at him.

‘Why?’ Frank had said. ‘What’s so droll about that? They sound much the same to me.’

‘Merx signifies an item of merchandise,’ Archdale explained. ‘But meretrix is a loose woman.’

Here Archdale blushed. Holdsworth thought of that hot evening when he had seen Mr Archdale vanishing into the darkness of the Leys in pursuit of a whore.

So Frank’s only guest was Holdsworth. Mulgrave served their supper in the keeping room. It was, Frank said drily to Holdsworth, quite like old times at Whitebeach Mill. Their table was by the window and they looked out over the garden, at the oriental plane and the Long Pond.