Authors: Rebecca Stott
Twenty-six
W
hat ever happened to Lydia Brooke? Did anyone know? She can’t tell you because she doesn’t know. The people who attacked her didn’t come forward. Never have.
“Where were you going, Dr. Brooke, on the night of the fifth of November 2002?” The courtroom was hushed. Mr. Brydon wore a green wool suit. His white shirt was slightly grubby around the cuffs.
“To Trinity College. I had some research to complete.”
“For your book? At seven-fifteen in the evening?”
“Yes, I needed to go to Trinity College.”
“Despite the fact that you knew that Cambridge was not then a safe place? You knew about the attack on Mr. Scorsa three nights before?”
“Yes, I knew about Mr. Scorsa. But the city was full of people because of the fireworks. It seemed safe. I guess I didn’t think I would be attacked. I didn’t think there would be any reason why they would…I didn’t think.”
I had a key to Cameron’s rooms in Trinity, Mr. Brydon. I was going there. I wanted to look in the drawers in his desk. I wanted to look in his computer. I wanted to know everything. Everything he had kept from me. I wanted to know all his secrets.
“Can you tell us in your own words what you
do
remember of your walk that night?”
“I am afraid, sir, that I don’t remember anything very clearly after I turned into Trinity Lane and before I heard Will’s voice. There was nothing unusual until then. The doctors have told me that the memory failure is due to the blow to the head. I’m sorry. I wish I could remember.”
In my own words, Mr. Brydon? Oh yes, I will tell you in my own words what happened to me, to Lydia Brooke—what she remembers at least, or what she thinks she remembers. She remembers more than she will tell the prosecution at Lily’s trial. Why does she not tell? Not to protect Lily or herself, but because what she remembers will make no sense to anyone there, or at least to anyone but the woman who looks like a boy who sits in the dock and the woman with the tattoo who sits in the gallery. They have already heard it, several times. They have gone through the story piece by piece with her. But otherwise, it is a story that can’t be told. It’s a simple matter of plausibility.
Did you know, Mr. Brydon, that the way you and I use the word
plausibility
—you know, to mean reasonable, fairly argued, believable—that that meaning only came about in the seventeenth century? No, I don’t expect you did. Did you know that Jonathan Swift, the satirist, once described an excuse as having “more plausibility than truth”? More plausibility than truth. Yes, that’s something. Your story, the one you are stitching together right now about Lily Ridler and the murders, has more plausibility than truth, I am afraid. But you would never understand that.
Lydia Brooke walked into the dark, wet Cambridge night that lay behind the fireworks and the party in the house of the daughter of the famous poet, behind the bright lights, the candles, and the mulled wine. She walked with her back to Midsummer Common, where thousands of people in jeans and Wellington boots stood watching the fireworks make patterns across the sky just as hundreds of Cambridge townspeople and students had watched the comets in December 1664 and April 1665, gazing skyward while standing on the very land where in the following summer and the one after it, hundreds of them would be buried as plague victims.
Lydia Brooke walked down Jesus Lane from east to west, imagining the few men, women, and children who also walked this way in the plague years, this way, not the other,
back into
the city, towards life, not death. They walked at dead of midsummer night, released from the pesthouses, back from the dead—frail, tired, wide-eyed, incredulous. The resurrected returning to houses where they must burn fires with unslaked lime until dawn, when they would open their shutters to the day, purged and still alive, to the wonder of their neighbours.
Where the streets were then pockmarked and cratered, and elsewhere sticky with mud or heaped with human and animal refuse, excrement, oyster shells, discarded meat bones and rotted vegetables, as well as ash and burnt wood, now they were paved and littered with burger packs and Coke cans. Where then the shop fronts were boarded up, their owners fled to the country, now glassed shop fronts illuminated the newest leather bags or shoes or winter coats on mannequins, which looked to Lydia that night as if they were theatrical dolls, menacing and grotesque, watching her, smiles too wide, too eager, their lipsticked cupid mouths too perfect.
She was not herself. Something was wrong. Her head ached, her skin crawled and sweated, glands throbbed beneath her arms and in her neck. She was nauseous, her stomach turned to liquid. She was afraid that she would have to throw up somewhere in a back alley, or stumble and fall, cornered like a wounded, hunted animal. Sickness had muddled her head and intensified her vision. She could see pinpricks of light across the night, flashing on and off in time with the pulse she could feel in the base of her neck and in her temples, even across her stomach. Sometimes everything seemed to contract as if it was running down a hole in her head, running to a still point. From time to time, fascinated, she would stop to watch the pulsing stars on the black night, and then time would slip away like a sand glass, to the sound of the fireworks somewhere behind her, which lit up the buildings in red and green in time with the pulse in her head. How long did she stand there, staring at the wall?
He must have been there all that time as she stood at the corner of Trinity Lane opposite Hobbs, but it was only when she turned to follow the arrow someone had painted on the corner wall over the words
TO THE RIVER
that she first heard the footsteps. Why did she turn there? Simply because the sign said
TO THE RIVER
and that seemed reason enough, an instruction even. She was very thirsty and she thought there might be water there in a river.
So she didn’t enter Trinity through the great gateway under the carved unicorn and the lion into the courtyard beyond, for that would have meant talking to the night porter, explaining who she was. Instead she turned right off an empty Trinity Street lined with glittering shop fronts, into the dark of Trinity Lane. At the corner, she slipped under the CCTV camera lashed to the wall watching the shops, and into the lane that for centuries has snaked between the walls of Trinity to the right and Gonville and Caius to the left. She’d enter Trinity from the back, near the river.
That’s when she first heard the footsteps, in step with her own. Turning to see who was behind her, she glimpsed, only for a moment, a shape, a human form, silhouetted against the lights from the shops on Trinity Street. But here there was not enough light to see by. The streetlights weren’t on that night. She has no doubts about that part of what she remembers. It wasn’t that the streetlights for some unaccountable reason had not been turned on, nor that there had been a power cut, but that
there were no streetlights at all.
They had disappeared. And there were footsteps.
Don’t let him see you. Don’t let him know you are afraid. Keep walking. Don’t speed your pace. Don’t look back. Remember Lot’s wife: transformed into a pillar of salt. Yes, she is thirsty. Perhaps she is already a pillar of salt. Candles flicker in college windows. The man in the doorway is a pool of red in the night.
Wellington boots chafed against the back of her calf muscles, boots that felt as heavy as lead that night, and loud against the cobblestones. But how could they have been loud? Rubber soles make no noise against stone.
“What was it you saw that night, Dr. Brooke? In your own words.”
“I’m not sure what they were.”
The earth has bubbles, as the water hath, / And these were of them.
“‘They’? You saw more than one figure?”
“Yes, sir, I saw more than one figure, but I am sure it was only one person I saw.”
“Would you say the figure you saw—the one that followed you—was male or female?”
“I couldn’t say. I never saw it clearly enough.”
Actually, Lydia Brooke saw much more than she could say. Something broke for her that night. When she turned and could no longer see the figure at the top of Trinity Lane, she went to find it. When she thought,
He’s gone,
something happened: a bolt shot somewhere, a tide turned.
Tears shall drown the wind.
Did the alchemist think he was invincible? Was he? Did he think he was some kind of god, now that he had split light into colours, discovered the laws of motion and of gravity, scratched out the outlines of the calculus? Did he think he had divine protection? Do you? Is that it? Are you immortal already, Isaac Newton, or do you just think you are? Did you make a pact?
Tell me. I’ll keep your secret.
And the man in red does what she does, turns, feeling her tide turn against him. He heads for the river down Garret Hostel Lane. How far will Lydia Brooke go? Her pulse, sickeningly fast, drums in her ears and eyes and in her temples. A cat, in the shadows, rummaging among piles of rotten food and rubbish, hisses, seeing what she sees: the figure in the red gown, the man with the white hair, the man who shouldn’t be there.
She wants to know, to see. He wants to stop the seeing. She must know. She must not know.
“I am in blood / Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as to go o’er…” Tell me.
Lydia shadows the figure in red, moving swiftly now, his gown made of crimson wool, drapery forming and re-forming heavily in the wind, like the folds of the statues they would make of him everywhere, in churches and chapels and outside libraries. She penetrates the dusk of distances and the gloom of shadows, watches him through the shifting effects of perspective brought on by sickness. Was she bringing him out, or he her? A game of hide-and-seek, inside outside, stalker and stalked.
He’s behind you.
But then he has gone again, into an interstice in the stone, an opening she cannot see, leaving only a trembling of red upon the wind, the only colour in that Cambridge night now except for the fireworks still breaking over her head like red and green chrysanthemums and corals, over the crenelated and towered edges of college roofs.
But he has not gone. She can feel him bristling somewhere close by, a hunted thing, or a hunting thing, filling out every corner of Garret Hostel Lane. She knows she has to draw him out. He has to run again so that she can follow. She hears steps ringing on stone. She can see him on the other side of the river now, a red figure bleeding into the rain-circled river, a figure reflected in water walking upside down, his leather boots echoing on stone. Over Garret Hostel Bridge into—what?
She has crossed the river. She is standing now where she had stood only three days before, looking across the Backs to Queen’s Road, Trinity College behind her, Garret Hostel Bridge behind her. But now where there should have been a paved road in front of her leading from Trinity across a scrublike stretch of meadow, once marsh, to meet Queen’s Road, the Backs, a road receding through linden trees to a vanishing point in the night, now there was no road, no linden trees, no vanishing point. Instead she stood on a perfect oval of grass, an island in the river; she was looking from Garret Hostel Greene across water into marsh and darkness. Except that Garret Hostel Greene had been dug up some 330 years ago to make way for the Wren Library.
Lydia knew the patch of oval ground in the middle of the river from the photocopy of George Braun’s map of sixteenth-century Cambridge pasted into the pages of
The Alchemist,
and from the second copy, which Elizabeth had taped to the wall of the bathroom in The Studio, above the jar of toothbrushes. George Braun had drawn the oval of Garret Hostel Greene as an enormous pupil in that map of the city, which itself looked in some lights like a cross-section of an eye, one of those seventeenth-century anatomical drawings. On the map there were swine and strange dragonlike creatures, perhaps even a kind of unicorn over on the land beyond the river on the outskirts of the city of stone, glass, and reason.
How could she feel the spongy marshy ground of the green under her feet unless she was already mad?
Something falls into the water. Or lifts out from it. He, the figure in red, is now standing behind her on the bridge, apparently waiting for her. She closes her eyes for a long minute. When she opens them the night seems lighter, but stained with red, the water, the bridge. A phantasm. Newton’s sun-stain.
It takes her several moments to work out how the view from the river, from this bridge over which she now follows him, differs from what she knows should be there, because the stain sits there between her and the world, tearing her retina. How can you look at an absence so immense and not see it?
No library.
A hole where it should be and in its place, where that great library designed by Sir Christopher Wren should be, its gracious arches reflected in the river, only a tennis court and a cluster of half-timbered single-story buildings.
She follows him into Trinity through courtyards and corridors thick with wood smoke, where shutters are closed, where cracks of candlelight through shuttered windows spill out and radiate. He stops and waits on the stone flagging; she follows him to the bottom of a wooden staircase, then climbs after the flash of red, through the smell of camphor, slaked lime, and balsam. Odours of the apothecary’s shop. He is there, at the top of the staircase, waiting, holding his ground. She turns, still looking up, and stumbling to protect herself from something falling towards her, a glint of glass; she falls in an unlit corridor to the bottom of a flight of stairs in a building which has been demolished to make a great library some 330 years ago.
That was something of the reason why Lydia Brooke kept certain things to herself in the courtroom. There had been moon shadows and red stains on the night of the 5th of November that she could not have begun to describe. Her silence was, she knew, at least technically, a kind of perjury. She had sworn that she would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but she had long understood that there were whole truths and half-truths and truths that simply could not be put into words and would not be heard even if they were.