Death of a Ghost Read online

  Hmm, thought Jack fastidiously. Those boys have left their footprints in my dew.

  “I WARNED YOU not to enter here! Was my meaning not plain?”

  “But, master, he brought a warrant!” Adam turned from his work in annoyance. Though he had not bolted the workshop door, his instructions had been clear. He was to be left alone with his books and equipment. He could not be disturbed in this most delicate work.

  It had been that way ever since the death of Scrope. The loss of the elixir had shaken him – but there was more to it than the ruin of one experiment. Adam’s work had taken a new and secret turn, perhaps a dangerous one, and Ossian was not invited to his counsels. The room was shuttered, with only a candle’s shady glitter to light it. There Adam kept all the instruments needed for the union of the Red King and White Queen, for alchemy’s great marriage. Ossian had expected to find a maze of glass and liquid, of calcified powders and subtle, sponged chambers, a den of steam and delicate stored fire.

  Instead, he blinked. At first, he did not know what it was he saw.

  The woman on the table was not quite dead. Her left hand, dangling, gripped and released a loop of embroidered stuff, brown with blood. Her fingers too were freaked with brown where the skin creased, but the bleeding was old. Ossian could not see her face, which overhung the table edge so that she must lift her head to breathe freely. Too weak for that, she hardly breathed at all. Adam was turning a tight strip of linen around her other arm, the one Ossian could not see.

  Her one shoe was awry – a rough leather sandal patterned with waves – and Ossian straightened it. Then he handed Adam a sealed note.

  “Who gave you this?”

  “The messenger who brought you to Scrope,” said Ossian, gathering himself. “He’s gathered a harvest of smiles. Says he will wait for your answer.”

  Adam looked down at the paper, frowning. The hand was strange to him. He feared the subtlety of these clerkish men. They knew too well how to express themselves in a double sense. He must be careful, lest one of those fine flourishes or hanging loops slip tight about his own neck.

  “I must have this interpreted. Our fine messenger – where is he?”

  “He waits above, master. Shall I send for him?”

  “No, I’ll go. I need to see his eyes. You stay with this one.” He strode briskly to the door, then turned. “Do not speak to her,” he said.

  As Adam left he wiped his hands clean on his shirt, a quick fussy gesture. After the slam of the door came footsteps, the scrape of metal, the titter of conversation on the floor above. And the woman who was not quite dead said: “Ossian!”

  Ossian started in fear. Adam had surely not mentioned his name in her hearing? But “Ossian!” she was calling again, not so loud but more urgent, and the syllables barbed and caught and drew him to her, to the face he had not yet looked upon, that was turning to him only now.

  The woman was a girl. How pale she looked! Her eyelids were blue as lead. A clean incision ran two inches from her wrist towards her elbow, and was held open with a clamp and leather wedges. All the layers of her flesh were visible, clear as sediments in an earth bank. The wound still bled but, thanks to the linen strip, tied about her upper arm, no longer freely. Ossian doubted she had much blood left to give, judging by the basin at his feet. He had never seen skin so waxen, death-like, perfect. He would hardly have known her.

  But the girl was not quite dead.

  “Ossian, you fool,” she said, “you got here at last.”

  A look of contemptuous affection lit her face faintly.

  “How could you let things come to this…?”

  She seemed to be wrenching the effort to say something more, but could manage no better word than “fool” again. “You fool. Fool.”

  “It was you,” mumbled Ossian. “You’re the girl I saw at the ford.”

  The girl closed her eyes in exhaustion.

  “Are you a witch?” Ossian asked recklessly. “Master Price has said…”

  Her eyes flickered a little. “Master Price? Ask him, up in the room above. Ask what he wanted of me. A spirit to smoke out the elixir, that was his ransom. He took me for the Devil’s hedge-child.”

  “Who brought you to him? Was it the Abbot? What are you charged with?”

  “No one brought me, Ossian,” she sighed. “Adam Price himself. He’s been watching my house and says – don’t ask how – I summoned demons. He’ll swear to the Abbot that he saw me linking arms with Lucifer.”

  She did not seem to care if he believed her. That made Ossian want to know. Her white face could not be read.

  “Is that the truth? Are you a witch? Did you send a spirit to protect me that day?”

  The girl groaned. “You are the kind who hears a raven croak and thinks he has met the Devil. Look at my eyes, Ossian.”

  Ossian looked. Her eyes, green-blue jade, shone from the white face and trapped his own. He was looking at himself.

  “Susannah?” The name tripped and fell from his mouth. He did not know where it had come from.

  “You see? You know my name. Now who is the witch, my brother?”

  “I’m not your brother!”

  “If you doubt that, turn and go. But my mother told me how she wrapped a two-legged bundle once and left it at the door of Adam Price. One of us she could barely raise, not both – it was beyond her. She was not strong.”

  The voices in the room above were louder now. Adam was haggling, pretending not to know his own mind.

  “I didn’t know,” said Ossian, in a whisper.

  “Now, consider. Are you content to see your sister butchered before your eyes? To hold the basin even, to catch her blood like any slave?”

  The witch’s eyes did not blink, but Ossian saw them narrow, then the light that had seemed to lock his own gaze dulled a little. Even now, Ossian did not look away. Her words filled his mind and they were truth. He could not doubt them. Here was his sister, a fragment of himself. Now, he saw clearly, only now, how maimed a soul he had always carried. Adam Price his maker? In his own grim image? That was lies, all deception. Without Susannah, Ossian was just a fragment of a boy.

  It was witchcraft, no doubt. How else could fifteen years of Adam Price’s care and vigilance have been so suddenly overturned? As if Adam had been no more than a chance stranger and not – as Ossian knew him to be – an honest Christian, his own thousand-fold benefactor. Adam had given him everything: meals and shelter, care in sickness, the apprenticeship itself. His own son’s portion, had he had a son. Only sorcery could have made Ossian cast him off so abruptly.

  But now he was with Susannah and she was his poor sister.

  “Where is our mother?” he asked.

  “Dead.”

  “Can I see her grave? Where is she buried?”

  “It’s nothing but a piece of ground. Far away. You tire me,” said the blue lips, “Ossian.”

  “Where is she? If you are my sister – I don’t even know her name.”

  “Fool. She’s sailed far off…”

  Ossian clenched his fist. “Tell! Or I’ll—”

  “She’s buried by the crossroads, torturer’s boy! Murdered by one of your master’s canting priests.” Her eyes spiked him. “You’ll not ask me why? For finding stolen gold with a raven’s feather. A chalice lost from the Lady Chapel. She traced it with a bright black feather and some smoky words and six grains of good wit. She didn’t need to torture any living soul. And when she asked for her reward, they said: ‘You may choose. Will you be hanged as a thief or a witch?’”

  Susannah turned her head aside. Her story had exhausted her and Ossian saw she would not speak again. Perhaps she would never speak, unless he could move her from this place.

  But that was impossible. Her body was clamped and strapped. Besides, she was too weak; even the attempt might kill her. And now Adam’s boots were heavy on the stairway and Adam would know at once that they had spoken. Ossian couldn’t lie to Adam – not with words. Even his eyes might betr
ay him. Adam Price had chiselled out every reflex in his body, had he not? With relentless care and watchfulness. How could he fail to guess his mind?

  The door opened and Adam came in looking pleased. His shadow filled the doorway, but his eyes were bright. “Fetch your dancing shoes, Ossian. Tomorrow we must play before the Sheriff himself.”

  He threw Ossian a coin. Ossian bit and tasted gold.

  “A token of his lordship’s goodwill,” said Adam. “Master Blackthorn would have kept it as the. price of his errand, but I persuaded him to honesty.” He opened his broad palm for the coin’s return and Ossian thought, as he laid it on the dark-stained flesh, how very persuasive Adam Price could be. Even so, he knew he was lucky. Had Adam not been distracted he would certainly have noticed the fear in Ossian’s own face or the tremor of his fingers as their hands touched.

  “Sleep, Ossian,” was all he said. “Tomorrow we must ride to Winchester and teach Lord Hungerford himself to sing in tune.”

  Susannah was groaning low, too far gone to hear them.

  “What about her?” asked Ossian. “What is she?”

  “My business. Sleep now, Ossian. I’ll patch her and Mother Bungay will have the care of her while we’re away. So – to your bed. I’ll make things ready here, lay out our tools and damp the fire down.”

  OSSIAN HAD STALKED the marsh beds much of the morning. Snipe were rare in summer, but he had heard of a pair in the patches of wet heath between the Abbey ruins and the Solent. So he had taken his camera along the devious woodland paths behind the house and waited. He had seen squirrels, magpies, pigeons. A hectoring mallard splashed cumbrously into the peaty water and out again. And always Mr Frazer’s dredgers were wrenching mud from the land’s flank somewhere to the south, their engines’ roar carried on the breeze.

  Meanwhile, the letter to Lizzy lay abandoned on the desk in his room. He had decided now to leave that task until they were out of Lychfont. The place smothered his thoughts whenever he tried to turn his mind Lizzy’s way – like a radio blind spot. It was strange, though there were no prizes for guessing the reason. He’d dreamt of Sue all of last night – hot, clammy dreams mostly, from which he’d woken in a froth of sweat and hair. Except for the last one. In that he’d been walking the banks of a shallow, black lake, its border clogged with yellow sedge. His legs hurt and all the time a high, midge-buzzing whine sounded in his ears, and the more he tried not to listen, the more it sounded like a voice from the lake’s heart.

  “Husband! Come quickly!”

  He shook his head; even by daylight that whining still seemed to be with him. It had blended with the sound of the dredgers and the songbirds’ twitter, the taut hum of the summer light itself.

  Ossian packed up his equipment and wandered. Almost at once he found his path crossed by a serpentine inlet of the Solent. Here was a small landing stage: the Frazers’ old jetty. He smiled, surprised by another memory. Wasn’t this where they had sat and plotted in the old days – him and Colin? It was a secluded place, still rural despite the yachts and ferries nearby. Southampton might as well not exist. Low tide, however, had revealed an urban beach strewn with tyres and plastic bottles. The cracked ribs of a cabin cruiser curved under his feet.

  He did not linger there. He threaded the maze of willow and alder, climbed the tree roots up an earth bank and looked down the ditch on its far side. The ditch-bottom was still muddy, a ferment of leaf litter, just as it had been in the days when Colin had sent him to capture toads there. Colin had worked dry-shod, picking off green twigs from the overhanging trees to make a wreath of willow. From here they had walked to the Corn Stone, where Colin laid down his offering solemnly, while Ossian let the dazed toad hop from his hand.

  “Accept our offering, oh God of the Stone,” Colin had said in a hollow voice. He had brought a heavy, jagged rock with him. They looked down at the yellowy-brown quiver of flesh. It had reminded Ossian of a plant more than an animal, some rare fungus he had tusked out like a rooting pig.

  “Kill it then, Ossian!” said Colin, handing him the rock at the last moment. “Smash its head!”

  Ossian smashed it. He brought the rock down once – twice. The fungus was a splay of innards and split flesh, bone and brain froth. The head was gone. Only one foreleg had survived, by chance, without injury.

  Colin stood there, disapproving. “You did it wrong! You should have killed it with one blow!”

  “But – but it’s dead,” Ossian stammered.

  “No good!” said Colin coldly. “It was spoiled! Now its spirit will be hungry…”

  That was a long time ago. Now Ossian was standing on the same earth bank, facing out towards the Solent. The sun had scattered sequins of angled light across the distant water. Would that make a good shot, he wondered? He experimented with the camera zoom for a while before deciding that it would not. It was all to do with time, that effect – not space. The light would not pose for him and he didn’t know how to fake it. Turning inland, he raised the camera again – and saw a rushing green blur at first, so close he was forced to steady himself. He gasped. The colour broke on him with the force of a wave, setting him adrift in a sea of greenness. Then he realised that he was seeing nothing but the top of the nearby alder tree, enlarged and out of focus. He adjusted the camera and the blur resolved into veined leaves and twigs, and a wood pigeon. The bird was preening itself. It dug its beak in under the feathers of its wing obliviously. Watching, Ossian experienced a strange sensation of power. To be so close and not be known! He trained the camera lower, to the reed-spiked ditch that ran the edge of the field. He tracked slowly along it, then climbed a bank of daisies, up to the field where the Corn Stone sat.

  He stopped. The Stone was different. A tartan blanket was spread out on the grass next to it. He took the camera away, wanting to check what he was seeing with his own eyes.

  Sue Frazer lay beside the Corn Stone. She was sunbathing in a pale green bikini. The music – Ossian realised he had been hearing music for the last few minutes – must be coming from that radio beside her head. He pursed his lips, feeling obscurely cheated. He realised now that this was where he had been meaning to arrive all morning. He had not come to photograph wildlife but to visit the Corn Stone – to compare the reality of it with Sue’s weird theories and prove her wrong. But that he couldn’t do if Sue was here first. He felt annoyed, unreasonably so. It was as if she knew.

  Ossian looked through the zoom again, experimentally. Again he was unprepared for the sudden obliteration of distance. His gaze was buried in Sue’s flesh and the closeness of her body astonished him. Each nail, each nostril and lock of hair imprinted itself on him as if he had been made of wax. The sun was at his back and in the oblique light Sue’s skin seemed made to dazzle – a blazing paper-white.

  There was no birdsong. The only sound was the music from the radio by Sue’s head: a chiming ripple of bells and a ragged chorus that made him half afraid, though the words were bland enough:

  Two-timer, you ran out on me

  But if you come back now

  I’ll show you how

  To make it good

  Sooo good

  I’ll show you how to love me.

  Sue was sitting up now, and the sun was glinting on her face as if on polished glass. Ossian realised with astonishment that she was weeping! Her face was wet with tears! She had turned his way, her long legs stretched out towards him. Ossian panicked. If he moved now, he would surely be seen. But no, she was beyond noticing anything but her own tears and the shallow melancholy of the song she played.

  What could be the matter with her? Sue’s tears seeped through her fingers and down her forearms, down to the white tips of her elbows, dripped and ran over her slim calves.

  You better believe it

  You never should have gone…

  He let the camera drop about his neck and slid to the bottom of the bank, then squinted towards the Corn Stone again. It was blindingly bright, now, and it was some moments before he was a
ble to make out objects clearly. He blinked. There was the tartan rug and the little radio. A streak of white, just in front of the rug, revealed itself as a bunch of daisy heads. And the radio song jangled on:

  …and you’ll be sorry!

  Sooo sorry

  When I show you how to love me.

  But of Sue Frazer herself there was now no sign at all.

  “WHEN THEY CAME to the tree it was aflame with red and yellow fire, you see? And in all that brightness it was a hard thing to spy the raven sitting in the topmost branch, and harder still to throw a spear that would shave its wing and make it fall down to sit on a man’s fist.”

  Ossian paused. The little ones looked up at him, waiting. They wanted to know what happened next – the secret it was his to give or keep. They dared not break the spell by asking.

  He smiled generously. “That raven granted wishes,” he explained. “That is how my father became a wise man. His brothers asked for gold and weapons; he asked for knowledge.”

  They had left the yard and come to sit in a secret patch of reed and sedge that could not be spied from the roundhouse. Ossian had avoided his father since his visit to the island and taken to playing with the younger children. He was ashamed of what his eyes might admit if his father searched there. Luckily, the old man was distracted with the quest for the Red King, the new Cernunnos. Half his days he was not even in the mortal world, but seeking Sulis through the broad meadows of her own country, bringing gifts to lay at her feet. Even so, Ossian needed to be careful and had made the company of children his refuge. He knew they admired him for his age and birth and he was happy there. But the knowledge had made him boastful.

  “My father took me to her island. He will do again, when I’m older; then I’ll be allowed to see the goddess. You know, Beli and Madoc, but these younger ones may not, that only her priest may see her plainly. I had to wait outside the sanctuary. But I could hear them.”