Ghostwalk (29 page)

Then, when he thought he might forget, a tide turned horribly against him. Francis Barton returned to Trinity in 1668. Richard Herring, grown especially superstitious since the Great Plague and burdened with guilt, terrified by the sight of Barton strolling across Trinity Great Court, told Foxcroft that he was going to confess his sins to the fellow who had come back from the dead. Foxcroft, convinced that the whole sequence of deaths would become visible once the boy-poisoner started to talk, slipped belladonna into Herring’s ale as he played dice in the Red Hart in Petticury on the evening of 10 November 1668, then followed him as he wandered, disoriented, along the riverbank towards his death in the river at dawn. There seemed to be no end.

In 1668–69, Newton, with the help of his friend Wickins, installed an elaborate experimental apparatus in his rooms and constructed the very first functioning reflecting telescope.

Foxcroft’s embroilments changed him. He received no thanks from the immortal Newton, no preferments. The blood that stained him in Newton’s name went unacknowledged. From the moment Newton had received the Trinity fellowship, he had shunned his old friend, though he had not refused to drink with others and had even played bowls. Foxcroft could see the look of cold contempt the younger man had for him now. He watched Newton rise, saw him appointed to the Lucasian chair, the chair that Foxcroft had been promised; saw More’s and Barrow’s adoration; watched the Royal Society lionise the reclusive, ungracious, arrogant young man.

In 1669 Isaac Newton was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.

Once Newton had assumed the red robes of the Lucasian professor, Foxcroft changed his direction. He determined that his acts would no longer be in Newton’s name. Now he had only one desire left: to soil the younger man’s reputation and restore his own. He had accounts to settle.

In 1669, Newton wrote up “De Analysi,” another milestone in the road towards the calculus.

But still there was no end. After returning to Cambridge in 1668, Francis Barton lived an apparently quiet life in Trinity, but after a strange encounter with a young man on a staircase who confessed that he had poisoned Barton with belladonna, a young man who was found drowned in the river a few days later, Barton began to make enquiries into who had keys to the Trinity physic garden and access to the poisonous plants that grew there.

In 1671, dressed in his red robes, Newton unveiled his telescope to the men of the Royal Society in London. It caused a sensation.

By 1674, Barton’s enquiries about poison had brought him closer and closer to a mathematician at King’s. Then, according to Alderman Newton’s diary, Francis Barton died a violent death from falling:

25th April, 1674:
Saturday morning.
St Markes Day. Mr Francis Barton, one of the senior Fellowes of Trinity Colledge in Cambridge was found dead at the bottome of his Stayres in the house in St Edward’s Parish where he dwelt, it being conceived that he fell downe, and had soe laine dead a day or two before it was found out.

Barton, the fifth Trinity man, died by falling down a staircase, only a few months before Ezekiel himself died in suspicious circumstances in a brawl in a London tavern. That series of seventeenth-century deaths in Cambridge, deaths in which Trinity fellows—apparently drunk, but almost certainly drugged—fell down staircases, came to an end only with the death of Ezekiel Foxcroft.

Foxcroft was the brilliant usurped son cheated of his birthright, the Lucasian professorship, by an ex-subsizar boy for whom he had repeatedly killed. Those deaths in Trinity, perhaps always unknown to Newton, though they had provided the bridge to his glittering future, embroiled Foxcroft for the rest of his life, to the day of his death. Constantly threatening to become visible, they dragged the poisoner further and further into blood, more deaths, greater damnation. With so much blood on his hands the alchemical formulas would no longer work for Ezekiel Foxcroft, and sooner or later Henry More lost interest in his once promising protégé. Meanwhile, Newton took the Lucasian professorship and drew the scarlet folds of the gown and his glory around him.

Here, with all the ambiguities stripped away, was a different truth from the one I had expected. Reading Elizabeth’s terrible assured revelations on paper, in an empty house, I had come to recognise my ghostwalker—here in the folds of “The Crimson Room.” I sat absolutely still for a long time, wondering about mistaken identities and masks, and the man who had followed me down Garret Hostel Lane and over the bridge, who had passed in and out of mirrors, in red. I remembered that Dilys had said something once about how she saw Mr. F. in red—a dark, wine-red gown.

“But that doesn’t make sense,” I’d protested. “Foxcroft was a fellow at King’s. King’s gowns are black.” Perhaps her eyes were playing tricks on her.

“I’m just telling you what I see, my dear. You’re the historian.”

“Why does Foxcroft wear red?” I framed the question now for the first time directly to Elizabeth. Not Newton but Foxcroft in red,
in the red Lucasian gown.

“Perhaps he wants to be taken for someone else,” Elizabeth answered.

“Yes,” I said, “Foxcroft wants to be taken for Newton.”

I felt for Ezekiel; I could step into his hatred then as if it were my own. I could follow him beyond Elizabeth’s ending. I had come to know him
in red,
my angry masquerading ghostwalker. I sat at Elizabeth’s desk in the late-afternoon light, thinking through with Elizabeth, talking directly to her about the stages of Ezekiel’s brilliant plan, the plan that had gone wrong, following him beyond the end of Elizabeth’s chapter, into Elizabeth’s life and then into my own.

Angry and vengeful, Foxcroft’s spirit had walked through and beyond his own shadowy death. For three centuries, habituated to guarding the few records that remained, he’d watched the myth of Newton’s superhuman genius grow in the hands of scholars and historians. Hidden in the historical records, he, Ezekiel Foxcroft, had survived only as an occasional footnote in Isaac Newton’s numerous and extensive biographies, footnotes used to explain briefly only the identity of the man referred to as “Mr. F.” in Newton’s notebooks, or the man who’d translated a famous Rosicrucian text,
Chymical Wedding.
Yet Ezekiel knew that without the blood on his hands, without all those deaths undertaken in his name, Isaac Newton would almost certainly have returned to Woolsthorpe and obscurity.

Then, while he was stalking Elizabeth Vogelsang, Foxcroft had come to see what might now become possible: revenge. After centuries of invisibility, and years of keeping scholars away from the few records of the Trinity deaths, Foxcroft realised with a strange sense of relief that, despite the obstacles he had put in her way, Elizabeth had already mapped Newton’s contacts with the alchemists in Grantham, and that it would be only a matter of time before she would see how the deaths might be connected to Newton’s fellowship. He saw that by
reversing the habits of centuries,
by guiding your mother not away from the records of the Cambridge deaths but towards them, he could and would frame Newton. He would make Newton carry the burden and the responsibility for those deaths. He would use Elizabeth to do his work, and then, once Elizabeth’s book was published, he could let go. So he began to put papers in places where she would find them; leave books open at key passages, then make them disappear; tantalise her, lay a trail she had no choice but to follow. Red herrings. Scents dragged through the undergrowth to distract the hounds from the fox’s path. He put on the red gown so that his identity would be beyond question, so that his ghostly presence would be taken to be Newton’s, the spectre of the Lucasian professor.

But he underestimated Elizabeth. Shortly before her death she found the reference to Francis Barton in Alderman Newton’s diary and saw it all, sniffed out the fox’s trail, noted how the sequence ended with Foxcroft’s death, and, brilliantly, guessed the rest. Then she started to pursue the man in red with her relentless curiosity. She had no fear. In Dilys’s house she challenged Mr. F. directly, accused him of the murders, tracked him to his den. Foxcroft must have confessed. Perhaps the old alchemist surfaced in him then; perhaps he thought Elizabeth might expiate his sins, take off his burden. Whatever happened at Dilys’s house, Elizabeth alone came away with what she wanted, for Dilys was still in the dark about Foxcroft. Then Elizabeth set about rewriting the final chapters of her book. She declared Foxcroft to be the man who had murdered in Newton’s name.

Checkmate. The most dangerous game of chess Elizabeth had ever played and a game of truth-telling that led inexorably to her death.

Newton
was
lucky. Very lucky. Not just because he benefited from the deaths of the Trinity fellows but because their murders might, in another time and space, have been attributed to him. They had, after all, been carried out in his name.

Thirty

W
hen Dilys Kite rang on the morning of the 7th of November to say, “Lydia, my dear, you are in very deep,” I replied, with a degree of brittleness, “Mrs. Kite, I know. I’ve never been deeper.”

“Are you being looked after?”

“Do you
know
?” I turned the mirror in the alcove near the door so that it faced the wall.

“Of course we know.”

“How?” Had my face turned up in one of her crystal balls, its swellings and bruises further distorted by the curves of the glass? Did she think she had summoned a monster? Or did she just “know”?

“There’s no time. I am being…hounded. And frankly, my dear, I am getting quite tired of it all. I have had to cancel all my engagements this week. I’ve never had to deal with anything like this before. It’s bedlam. This is Elizabeth’s unfinished business. And she can’t finish it, so
you
have to.” Dilys had a way sometimes of talking about the spirits she worked with as if they were a bunch of unruly schoolboys making anonymous calls from a village phone box.

“What’s bedlam?”

“My house. Bedlam. He’s broken all manner of things. The light switches keep fusing. Pictures fall off the walls.”

“Mrs. Kite,” I said, “do you have time to come to The Studio? And would you pick up some biscuits on the way? I’m out of biscuits. And I can’t get to the shops.”

“Of course, my dear, biscuits it will be. And some aloe vera for your face.”

“You look just like a woman in my village who’s had a face-lift,” she said, making the tea. “That’s what people will think. That’s what you’ll have to tell them. Now…we need to talk about Mr. F.” She had taken the chair next to the fire, which she had stoked up. She had brought a whole host of remedies and pills in a black plastic bag, most of which I’d politely refused.

“Mr. F.? He’s in your house?” I repeated, casually.

She passed me a custard cream from the packet. “Yes, Mr. F. That’s what he calls himself.” Ezekiel Foxcroft. Elizabeth’s hit man. But I wasn’t going to tell Dilys that. First I wanted to see how much she knew.

“What do
you
know about him?”

“Well, we’ve heard from him before, of course. But not for some time. I checked my files.”

“You keep records of the spirits who contact you?”

“Of course. How else would we know who’s been where and when? I keep them in a card file over there…”

“Were there transcripts of the visits?”

“Yes. Elizabeth kept them in a file she called—”

“The Vogelsang Papers?”

“Yes, that was her little joke. It used to make her laugh that the Vogelsang Papers was a collection of transcripts from a series of spirit visitations from the seventeenth century. A new form of historiography, she said. Yes, it used to make her laugh.”

So the footnotes in
The Alchemist,
her evidence, were to transcripts of interviews with spirits called up at Prickwillow: Cowley, Foxcroft, Herring, Greswold, and the rest. She must have made a transcript of Foxcroft’s confession, too. That would have been in the Vogelsang Papers.

“What happened to them?”

“The Vogelsang Papers? They should be here,…” Dilys looked alarmed. “Missing?”

“Afraid so. I think they may have ended up on the bonfire. Someone decided they were nonsense. Did you ever raise Newton?”

“We tried once. I told Elizabeth I’d never do it again.”

“And Elizabeth had to steal the prism from the Whipple Library to do that?”

“The prism didn’t work. I told her it wouldn’t. Glass objects hardly ever work. They are too opaque for spirit transfer. It just burned a mark high up on the wall.”

“So what did you use instead?”

“A lock of Newton’s hair. Elizabeth took it from the display cabinet in the Wren Library. The librarians knew Elizabeth, so when they gave her the locket for examination and left her alone with it, she managed to open the spring mechanism and replace it with a lock of her own hair. It was almost exactly the same colour. A good match.”

“Christ. Is it still there?”

“Yes—not much we can do about it now. I can’t get in there to switch them around again. But the tourists won’t mind. No one will ever know.”

“Did the lock of hair work?”

“No. It was a great disappointment to both of us. Oh, to have had one of Elizabeth’s index cards for the great man…what a triumph that would have been. No. Mr. F. turned up instead, talking nonsense.”

And how exactly, Mrs. Kite, do you distinguish between shades of nonsense?

“I’m getting confused here,” I said. “You called me this morning because—”

“Because Mr. F. won’t leave my house; he’s breaking things and he’s monopolising the letterboard. He has a message for ‘L.B.,’ he says. I don’t know anyone else with those initials, except you. I do wish they would use full names and not initials. It would be so much easier.”

“And the message?”
A message for me from Ezekiel Foxcroft, who died over three hundred years ago?

“I wrote it down on the back of an index card.”

I took the card and turned it over. The message said simply:
No testimony.

“He was,” Dilys added, “very insistent on that phrase: ‘No testimony.’ He was so insistent, he left deep scratches on my inlay. I’ll never get those out.”

“I think I understand,” I said. “There must be no record. It must end here.”

“It makes sense to you?” she said.

“I have one or two things to check,” I said, “but yes, I know what he wants from me.” I needed time to think.

She didn’t ask me any further questions. I always wondered why. A code of hers, I suspect. Something about leaving her clients to work things out for themselves.