He did not know that he was screaming. By that time, Tom Turdman was beyond thinking, almost beyond feeling. But long before he discovered what he was holding, he knew that there was nothing living in whatever curled around his fingers. He knew that what he touched was dead.
2
Another town, and another stretch of water.
What John Holdsworth remembered most about the house by the Thames was the light. Pale and shimmering, it filled the rooms overlooking the river throughout the day. It was a fifth element poised somewhere between air, water and pale fire.
Georgie used to say it was ghost water, not light at all, and sometimes he believed he saw apparitions swaying and flickering on the walls. Once he roused the household with his screams, crying that a drowned lighterman from nearby Goat Stairs had come to drag him down to the bottom of the river. Later Holdsworth thought the drowned man had been a portent of what was to come, a prelude of sorts, for drowning ran like a watery thread through the whole sad affair.
In November 1785, Georgie slipped on a patch of ice when he was playing by Goat Stairs. As he struggled to right himself, he tripped over a rope attached to a bollard. Maria, his mother, saw the whole thing happen, saw the boy tumbling off the wharf. One moment he was there, a vigorous, shrieking little boy. The next moment he was gone.
The tide was high and he fell into the water, striking his head against the side of a coal barge. It was possible that it was the blow to the head that killed him. But the weather was rough that day. The heavily laden barge was rocking and heaving against the side of the wharf, and it was at least ten minutes before they got him out of the water. So it was not easy to say precisely how he died. His body had been ground between wharf and barge. It had sustained terrible injuries. But just possibly Georgie might have drowned before that. There was no way of knowing for sure.
Holdsworth preferred to think that his son had died at once, that the fall itself had killed him, perhaps with one of the blows to the head. He knew nothing of what had happened until it was over, until they came to fetch him from the shop in Leadenhall Street. He felt a guilty and intolerable gratitude that he had at least been spared the sight of his son falling to his death.
After that, nothing went right. How could it? Maria was unreachable in her grief. She refused to put up a headstone, saying that it would not be right, for Georgie could not be wholly dead. She spent most of her time praying in the house or beside the little mound in the burial ground. She gave what money she had to a woman who claimed to be able to see ghosts. The woman said she saw Georgie, that she talked to him, that he was happy and that he sent his love to his mama. She said that Georgie was now playing with lambs and with other children in a great green sunlit meadow, and the air was filled with the music of the heavenly choir.
Item by item, Maria sold her rings, most of her dresses and the better pieces of furniture. She fed the woman with more money. In return the woman told her over and over again that Georgie thought of his mama all the time, and sent her caresses and fond words, and that soon they would be together and God would never let them be parted again.
Sometimes Holdsworth did not know whether he was grieving for Georgie or angry with Maria. The two emotions were fused. He would have been within his rights to forbid his wife to see the woman, and to beat her if she disobeyed him. He had not the heart for it. He felt guilty enough already, for he had failed to save his son. Maria told him that Georgie had sent his love to Papa and said they would soon be together with the angels in God’s heaven. Holdsworth swore at her, and she did not tell him anything else.
Holdsworth poured his anger into writing a little book that examined stories of ghosts, past and present, drawn from modern and classical authors. It was better than hitting Maria. He began with the story of Georgie’s ghost, anonymously of course, and described how Georgie’s mother believed it because she needed to, and how a wicked woman had taken cruel advantage of her credulity and her grief. His theme was that stories of the dead revisiting the living could not be taken at face value. Some of them, he wrote, were nothing more than childish superstitions that only children and uneducated women were likely to credit. Others were misunderstandings and delusions, perpetrated in good faith, but now increasingly explicable as natural science revealed more and more of the truth about God’s universe. He conceded that some ghost stories had a useful moral or religious effect on the minds of children, savages or the great mass of uneducated common people; and to this extent, they had a limited value as parables. But they could not be considered as evidence of divine or even demonic intervention. He had never come across a ghost story, he concluded, that could be considered as evidence of a scientific phenomenon deserving the serious consideration of men of education.
He called the book The Anatomy of Ghosts and had it printed at the small printing works he owned in Maid Lane on the Surrey side of the river. He advertised it in the newspapers and sold it from the shop in Leadenhall Street. It caused a small stir. An anonymous reviewer in the Gentleman’s Magazine accused him of being the next best thing to an atheist. Two dissenting ministers denounced the work as blasphemous. The vicar of St Ethelburga’s in Bishopsgate preached a violently hostile sermon, excerpts from which were published in the Daily Universal Register, and therefore discussed in thousands of private parlours and public places up and down the country. As a result, sales were respectable, which was just as well because, after Georgie died, little else made a profit.
The shop sold old and new books, pamphlets, materials for writing, and a range of patent medicines. Unfortunately, two months before Georgie’s death, Holdsworth had taken out two substantial loans, one to extend the premises and the other to buy the library of a private collector whose heirs had no use for reading. Holdsworth was rarely at the shop after Georgie’s death. A careless assistant stored the newly acquired collection in the cellar, where a damp winter ruined two-thirds of them. Meanwhile, the manager of the printing works fell ill and left; Holdsworth let his deputy take over the enterprise, but the man proved a rogue and a drunk, who took what he could from the business. One night the deputy’s carelessness proved even more damaging than his criminality: he left an unguarded candle burning when he went home and the entire works, along with its contents, were gutted by the morning. In the fire, Holdsworth also lost the stock he had transferred from Leadenhall Street, including almost all the surviving copies of The Anatomy of Ghosts.
Maria seemed unconcerned by these disasters. Apart from her trips to chapel, she stayed at home in the house on Bankside near Goat Stairs. She spent most of her waking life either on her knees or closeted with the woman who could talk to ghosts, and who brought the consoling messages from Georgie.
In March, Holdsworth managed to penetrate her absorption at last, though not for a reason he would have wished. Their lease was due to run out on Midsummer Day, and he was compelled to tell her that they would not be able to renew it, even for another quarter. He was not bankrupt, he said, but he was perilously close to it. They would have to move away from the house near Goat Stairs.