The Ghost Tree by Barbara Erskine
‘Yes, she does. Urgently.’
Fin stood back. ‘You’d better come in then. She’s in the dining room.’ He gestured behind him.
Malcolm went in without knocking. ‘I’m sorry I was hasty. Harriet made me very angry.’
Ruth had been sitting staring at the screen of her laptop. She looked up at him, her eyes blank, as though for a moment she didn’t recognise him, then her face cleared and she smiled. ‘I thought I’d never see you again.’
‘I didn’t intend that you should. But you need me.’
He pulled a chair out from the end of the dining table and sat down, leaning towards her. ‘Have you had any more trouble?’
‘I watched Thomas dream. It was so odd. I suppose I was dreaming myself.’ She looked at him steadily. ‘I was devastated when Harriet said you’d washed your hands of me.’
‘Is she staying here?’
‘No. She has friends in North Berwick. She came to tell me what she’d done and I told her to get lost. I was very angry. I apologise, for her and for me. I didn’t keep my word. I shouldn’t have told her about you. I thought as she was part of it I could trust her.’ She hesitated. ‘I need you, Mal.’
‘I think you do.’ He held her gaze. Neither of them spoke. In the silence the door opened and Finlay walked in.
‘Sorry, am I interrupting? Does anyone want strong black coffee? If you do, come out to the kitchen.’
As he retreated, Mal stood up. ‘Coffee’s good.’
When they walked in Finlay turned and surveyed them both. ‘Have you forgiven Ruthie? If I lay my hands on Miss Jervase I’ll give her a piece of my mind, I can tell you. We have enough problems going on without her sticking her oar in.’
‘It’s sorted.’ Mal pulled himself onto a stool.
‘I gather she thought you wanted to plagiarise Ruth’s story of her ancestor.’ The kitchen was full of the rich scent of the coffee.
‘Fin!’ Ruth objected.
‘No. She was right to be worried,’ Malcolm put in. ‘Harriet and I belong in our own ways to a cut-throat business. There’s a lot of competition between historians. Colleagues can be deadly rivals. We guard any exciting new facts we dig out carefully. We frequently accuse each other of trying to upstage our new theories. It’s one of the few ways we create enough excitement to engage the interest of the press. And I confess, I am fascinated by Ruth’s ancestor, but alas, in the form in which he talks to Ruth, I can never quote him. I can quote his papers, and his letters and contemporary newspapers and Hansard, but I cannot cite the conversations of a ghost, however well meaning.’
‘And anyway,’ Ruth put in. ‘I’m not writing a book. Please, Fin, that coffee must have sat for long enough.’
Fin obliged and pushed the milk towards her. ‘Are we allowed to know what your quarrel is with Harriet?’ he asked.
‘We were on stage together at a book festival with a chairperson who took great delight in setting Harriet and me quite deliberately at each other’s throats. Unfortunately, she has rather a short fuse, and perhaps didn’t realise that we were being manipulated. It was implied that she wrote for a popular market to make pots of money and therefore wasn’t as intelligent a historian as me, with my more academic approach. She took it as an insult and stormed off the stage. Headlines in the press next day, which pleased both of our publishers immensely and did wonders for our sales, but she was obviously deeply hurt. I did write to her to try to smooth things over but she never replied. We hadn’t seen each other since.’
‘You probably need to speak to Harriet again, Ruthie, before she goes to the press with this,’ Fin said.
Ruth looked at him, horrified. ‘She wouldn’t.’
‘I’d guess she might if she’s still angry. One of your charms, and your failings, is that you are a bit naive.’ Fin glanced at Malcolm. ‘I suspect you would agree with me.’
‘Indeed.’ Malcolm winked at her.
Ruth blushed. ‘OK. We’ve established I’m an idiot. I’ll do it now.’ She fished in her pocket for her mobile. ‘It’s switched off.’ She threw the phone down on the table and reached for her coffee. ‘Oh God! What if it’s too late? Oh, Mal, she could tell everyone about you. I’m so sorry.’
He smiled. ‘Not the end of the world. In fact, an interesting footnote to my career. Don’t worry about it.’
‘I do worry. Your street cred would be in tatters.’
He laughed out loud. ‘And my career as a psychic advisor to the stars would be launched.’ He leant forward and put his hand over hers. ‘Please, don’t give it another thought,’ he repeated.
His hand was warm and firm and reassuring. She noticed Fin looking at their two hands on the table. Malcolm saw the direction of his gaze and gently removed his. ‘I must go. I have a chapter to write while I still have a publisher. In the meantime, I want to remind you that you can call me any time if you need me. I’ll be there for you.’ He drained his cup and stood up. ‘And I would be grateful if you can find a way to defuse Miss Jervase. She’s probably learnt enough by now from studying Dion Fortune to be capable of sending some psychic bullets my way if she saw fit, never mind the columns that might appear in the Daily Mail.’
‘Column inches in the Daily Mail are things we lesser mortals dream of,’ Fin put in. ‘Don’t knock the idea. It would do wonders for your sales figures, my friend.’
47
Ruth had wanted to slap Fin. He had asked Malcolm as he left if he had a wife at home waiting for him, then glanced at her with a huge wink. She sat back in her chair staring at the screen. Was she giving off some kind of signal that she was unaware of herself? Did she fancy Mal? Hattie had seemed to think so.
He was a good-looking man, obviously. Attractive. And she liked him, maybe even fancied him a little, but she didn’t want to get involved. She and Rick had parted amicably; there had been nothing there to put her off men; she liked men; she had several men friends, like Fin. It was more that she had revelled in her new-found freedom and had no wish to give it up. Perhaps that mojo had been switched off as well as her spiritual one. She smiled wistfully.
Outside the window something moved over towards the shrubbery. She stood up and went to look out, her heart thudding. Not Timothy, surely. Not in broad daylight. The rain had blown away and the sky was blue this morning. The garden sparkled with hanging raindrops. The birds pecking at the lawn didn’t appear to have been spooked by anyone. There was no one there. She glanced at her watch. Half an hour to read some more. It was as if Thomas was calling to her, urging his story onward. Fin was cooking and she knew better than to offer to help; they were expecting Max for supper. She turned back to her laptop and within seconds she was once again engrossed.
Winning the English Declamation prize at Trinity was the high point of Thomas’s career to date. Having celebrated long and late with his friends and walked back with them along the bank of the Cam, he fell into bed as dawn was breaking.
He dreamt about Fanny. She had kissed the children goodbye, four of them now, his three adored little girls, Frances, Margaret, and Elizabeth, and his son, two-year-old Davy. She waved a hand to Mrs Moore, and then to Abi, and let herself out of the front door onto Ludgate Hill. She had a shawl about her shoulders and her reticule was hung from her wrist by a cord and he could see the happy smile on her face. She was still beautiful, his wife, and strong and happy in spite of their impecuniousness. In his dream he was gazing at the ceiling of his room, planning to tell her about his prize, how he had stood up in the chapel with its painted ceiling and looked down on the sea of faces listening to his every word, captivated by the power of his oratory.
Fanny paused at the corner of the road, looking for a gap between the carriages so she could cross to the other side and walk down Fleet Street. Why was she alone? His brain was befuddled and he couldn’t understand. ‘Fanny!’ he called out to her sharply. ‘Wait for Abi. Don’t go out by yourself.’
A horse trotted by, pulling a chaise, and she couldn’t hear him for
‘Come on now, Mr Erskine, sir. This won’t do.’ Light flooded into his bedroom as the curtains were drawn back and his bedder was standing looking down at him. ‘Been celebrating, have we, sir?’ The old man stooped and began to pick Thomas’s scattered clothes off the floor. ‘Shouting fit to wake the whole stair you were, sir.’ He hung Thomas’s hat and his neckcloth on the bedpost and began to shake his jacket free of its creases. ‘Shall I fetch you some coffee, sir? That will clear your head.’
‘Dear Lord, Fanny!’ Thomas was tangled in his sheets, struggling to get out of bed. ‘The bastard has her! I have to save her!’
‘I think you’ll find you were dreaming, sir. Coffee will rectify the situation.’ The servant was already halfway out of the door.
Thomas lay back on the pillows. His head was thumping and he tried to comfort himself. It was a nightmare. Fanny was at home, safe. She would never go out alone; the streets of London were too dangerous. Mrs Moore would go with her, or Abi.
But his dreams were often too accurate for comfort. She had called for help and he had to go to her. He dragged himself out of bed and ran to the door shouting for his bedder to come back.
An hour later he was galloping along the road towards London on a borrowed horse. Please God he would be in time to save her.
They all slept late after the supper party. Max had spent the night in the end and it was ten next morning before Fin began to concoct breakfast for the three of them.
‘So, has Mal been able to help you with your ghost problem?’ Max asked as Fin busied himself at the cooker.
Ruth nodded. ‘Thank you for the introduction.’
‘Mal’s a nice man. A bit reclusive. I had no idea for years that he had a spooky side.’
‘He seems very gifted.’
‘He certainly is as a writer.’
‘He’s writing about Pitt, I gather?’ Ruth put the question casually.
‘Indeed. Almost finished.’
She liked Max. He had a kind, lived-in face with a small beard and wire-framed glasses that made him look, she thought, a little like Einstein. ‘I like his house,’ she said.
‘Isn’t it wonderful. It’s been in his family for centuries.’
‘He seemed very pleasant when I met him.’ Fin had produced a pan of scrambled eggs and a huge pot of coffee. ‘Does he live in that great house all alone?’
‘As far as I know. He’s an intensely private person, as I expect you found out. We’ve never discussed his family. I’ve only ever met his dogs. What?’ He had noticed as Ruth reached to give Fin a playful slap across the table.
‘Private joke, old boy,’ Fin replied.
It was getting on for midday before Fin and Max left for the city; Ruth went into the dining room and switched on her laptop. There on the screen was her calculation of how long it would have taken a frantically worried Thomas to reach London from Cambridge on horseback.
She had been trying to remember her own journeys up and down the A10 to Cambridge with Rick before they were married, and she had reckoned on at least fifty miles. Obviously she had consulted the Internet.
Distance to London 54 miles; eighteen hours on foot.
By stagecoach, in 1750, two days.
A fit horse could do it in one day as long as well rested afterwards. Fastest way to travel, probably post horses?
Prince Regent rode London to Brighton (similar distance?) in four and a half hours and back the same day!
Poor Thomas, he had been out of his mind with worry. But he had reached London and all had been well.
She then reached for her copy of Lord Campbell’s book. It mentioned Thomas’s studies at Lincoln’s Inn and his time at Cambridge. His prize oration had been on the subject of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. She looked back at the screen and began to scroll up to the top of her notes. She appeared to have written several pages, describing his life as a Cambridge undergraduate, the celebration after his dissertation in the Chapel of Trinity College, drinking with his friends, staggering happily along the Backs in the early hours, tiptoeing past the porter’s lodge, his finger to his lips, avoiding the wrath of the porter for his late return when he saw the man slumped across his desk, his head in his arms, snoring. And then it was Thomas who was snoring in his bed in his set of rooms on the narrow staircase.
Ruth read her own description of Fanny as she slipped out of the house onto the busy street. She didn’t remember writing any of this. Fanny was wearing a green riding habit, slightly faded and worn, and a neat feathered hat beneath which her hair had escaped into a tangle of ringlets. The street was busy, and the pavements were crowded. She was trying to cross the road and she stepped out behind a loaded handcart almost under the hooves of a trotting horse. The man who caught her arm had been immediately behind her, his hand outstretched; it was almost as if he had pushed her. Then all hell had broken loose. The scream, not from Fanny, but from a bystander who had seen what had happened, the whinny of the horse as it reared up in the shafts and the rattle of wheels, the shouts, and there before Thomas’s eyes and so before her own, the man who had pulled Fanny back had turned for a moment to leer directly up, almost as if he sensed the two people watching him, Thomas and Ruth, some two hundred and thirty years apart and she had seen him clearly. His was the face of the man who had come to her bedroom; the ghostly figure who had tried to ravish her in her bed was Andrew Farquhar.
Thomas’s story stopped on her screen as he threw himself into the saddle and galloped along the turnpike, away from Cambridge. No telephones, no emails, no one to contact for help; no way of knowing if Fanny was safe.
Farquhar! Ruth tried to steady her breathing. She had seen him. He had touched her! Out for some kind of perverted revenge then, was he still out for revenge now? Still, over two hundred years later, obsessed, able to leap off the page, leap out of the past? She shuddered, hugging her arms around herself. Logic told her none of this was real, it couldn’t be, but logic no longer had any part in this.
She reached for her mobile.
‘Mal. The ghost is Farquhar! I recognised him.’
‘Is he there now?’
‘No.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have rung you. It’s just – I was dreaming. At least, I suppose I was—’
‘Do you want me to come back?’
‘No.’ The sound of his voice reassured her and she pulled herself together with an effort. ‘I’ll be OK. You didn’t sound surprised. You knew it was him?’
‘I had a suspicion. Remember, keep yourself strong. Don’t let him intimidate you. If he appears, tell him to F off!’
She gave a shaky laugh. ‘I love your esoteric language.’
‘It will work. And surround yourself with light.’
Putting down the phone, Ruth turned back to the screen. She had to know what happened next. With the benefit of hindsight, she knew Fanny had lived to tell the tale, but she didn’t know what had happened in those moments after Farquhar had caught her arm. Had she recognised him? Had she pulled away and run back towards the house? Or had she gone with him, grateful for his help?
There was nothing about this in Thomas’s letters to his daughter, written some forty years after the event. She needed to talk to him directly. This was no time for scepticism. She looked across at the empty chair. ‘So, tell me what happened next,’ sh
‘I knew you’d seen it happen.’ Fanny nestled into Thomas’s arms as they sat together on the settee by the fire in the Moores’ front parlour. ‘I tried to tell you I was all right. Oh, my darling, I’m so sorry. You galloped all that way to save me.’
‘What happened to him?’ Thomas was holding her so tightly she could barely breathe.
‘I told you. He disappeared almost as soon as I recognised him. So many people crowded round us and there was such a to-do about the horse, which had gone down in the shafts, and I was being jostled on every side and when I looked round he had gone. And then a lady only a few feet from me started shrieking that someone had stolen her purse and people’s attention went to her and then I saw old Abraham who works for my cousins had come out of the house and seen me and he offered to take me back indoors. There was no harm done, my darling.’
‘But Farquhar was waiting for you. It can’t have been chance that he was there in the crowd.’
‘No,’ she sighed.
‘So, what were you doing out on your own? Could you find no one to go with you?’ He knew he sounded more stern than he intended.
‘I didn’t think there was any harm. I wanted ribbons for the girls’ hair. They have so few pretty things.’ She caught her breath. ‘Oh, Tom, I’m sorry. That sounded petty and cross. We’ll have all we need as soon as you’re qualified.’ She reached up to kiss his cheek. ‘I hadn’t given Mr Farquhar a thought in a long time. I assumed he’d gone. But he didn’t hurt me. Tom,’ she hesitated. ‘I did wonder …’ she paused again. ‘I wondered if he had pushed me in front of the horse.’ She looked up at him anxiously. ‘But he couldn’t have. Could he?’
‘Someone would have spoken up if they’d seen him do it. Was the horse injured?’
She smiled. ‘As always you think of the animal rather than your poor wife.’ She punched him affectionately on the arm. ‘No, it was only frightened. And the driver didn’t beat it. He soothed it just as you would have done. And talking of horses, what happened to the animal you rode here on, all lathered and sweaty and exhausted as it was?’