The night-soil man’s face cracked into a toothless smile. ‘Wouldn’t forget her, sir, once you seen her. Used to come visiting the other one. I knew who she was soon as we laid her out on the bank. Looked stark staring mad, she did, like she seen a ghost. Lot of ghosts at Jerusalem, they say, and they walk at night, like that other one, other ghost -’
‘Nonsense. Ghosts have no existence outside the minds of fools and children. But I shall not argue the point with you.’ Holdsworth fought down his rising anger, aware of its absurdity and disconcerted by its very existence. Something in his mind surfaced briefly and then vanished. He struggled to retrieve it but failed. ‘Go back to the point where you fell in the water, when you discovered the thing was a body. Was it face up?’
‘Don’t know, sir.’
‘What did you do?’
Tom closed his eyes. ‘It was cold, sir, mortal cold. I yelled, and I screamed, and I thought I was drowning. But then I was standing on the bottom and the mud and weeds were clinging to me like they wanted to drag me down.’
‘Stop this nonsense. Even if there were mud and weeds, they did not want to drag you down. They have no feelings in the matter either way.’
‘Yes, sir. Ask your pardon, sir. I was a-hauling myself on to the shore, when Mr Mepal came running up and he dragged me out.’ An expression of pride settled on the man’s face. ‘And I fainted quite away with the horror of it, sir.’
‘You damned fool,’ Holdsworth said.
‘Yes, sir, but I came round in a flash. And Mr Richardson came, and we got the poor lady out of the water and laid her on the bank. That’s when I see who it was. Mr Richardson told Mr Mepal to get some men and bring back a door so we could lay her on it.’ The man hesitated, looking warily at Holdsworth. ‘Queer thing was her face. She did look terrible afraid. God’s truth.’
‘What did you think had happened?’
‘I thought the lady had been staying with Mrs Carbury, like she did sometimes. And she come out for a breath of air, and maybe tripped. Fell and hit her head, sir, that’s it, then she tumbled in the water.’
‘Hit her head? What’s this?’
‘Because of the wound, your honour.’
Holdsworth stared at him, and Tom Turdman looked guilelessly back at him. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
‘The wound?’ Holdsworth said casually. ‘And what wound was that?’
‘On her head, sir.’ Tom touched his own head in front of the left ear.
Despite the warmth of the evening, Holdsworth shivered. ‘A fresh one?’
‘Yes, sir. We was waiting for the door to lay her on, see, and Mr Richardson was looking to see if there was any life left in her. And I was sitting on the bank near him. He saw it too.’
‘But you said it was before dawn,’ Holdworth said. ‘How can you have noticed all this?’
‘It was growing light all the time,’ Tom said with a note of reproach in his voice. ‘Saw that wound plain as I see you.’
‘A bruise or a wound? Was the skin broken?’
‘Both maybe, your honour. The skin was cut, for certain.’
‘Was it bleeding?’
‘No, sir. The blood must have washed away.’
Holdsworth stared at him. He saw with hideous clarity the little parlour in Bankside, where Maria used to pray, and where they had carried her dripping body. No one had commented on the broken window overlooking the river or the broken chair or the spots of blood on the floor. Someone had closed Maria’s eyes, and he had been glad of that. Even dead eyes accuse. The side of her head was grazed. The wound had been on the left temple, half masked by strands of wet hair.
The colour of a damson. The size of a penny piece.
He prayed that the river had given her that wound. Because if it hadn’t happened then, as she was falling into the water or just afterwards, then it must have happened earlier: when he hit her, when he sent her flying across the room.
‘Anyhow it don’t mean nothing,’ Tom said. ‘Mr Richardson said it don’t signify, it was dark, and the poor lady fell in the water and drowned herself.’
‘How big was it?’ Holdsworth demanded.
‘You what, sir?’
‘The wound on her head, damn you.’ Holdsworth seized the lapel of Tom’s coat. ‘For God’s sake, tell me how big?’
Tom held up a trembling hand. He made a circle with thumb and forefinger.
The size of a penny.
17
When Holdsworth had finished with Tom Turdman, he gave the little brown man another of her ladyship’s shillings and strolled up to the marketplace. He did not know what to do. He did not want to drink, for his head was already aching. He did not want to sit in the combination room at Jerusalem. Most of all he did not want to think about a wound the size of a penny on a woman’s temple.
It was as if the weather in the hot, restless streets had transferred itself to the interior of his head. The marketplace was full of drunken people quarrelling, gambling, embracing, singing, vomiting and sleeping. At the corner of the Corn Market and the Garden Market, a vicious little fight was in progress between three townsmen and four undergraduates.
He tried to conjure up Maria’s face but he could not remember what she looked like. She was reduced to an aching absence, like an amputated limb. But, in contrast, it was all too easy to visualize Elinor Carbury. Even thinking about the Master’s wife seemed a form of disloyalty to poor, drowned Maria.
Holdsworth plunged into a dark and narrow street running to the south. Out of necessity he walked slowly. There were fewer people here and fewer lights, but the buildings pressed in on either side and the air seemed no cooler. The alley was cobbled, with a gully running down the middle. The stench was very bad. Heaps of refuse oozed across the footpath. There was a constant pattering and scuffling of rats, and every now and then he glimpsed their scurrying long-tailed shadows.
The trouble was, he told himself, he had been sent to Cambridge to talk reason to Frank Oldershaw, and in the event he had failed to say anything at all to him. He had also been engaged to find a ghost and instead he had found a dead woman with a wound on her head.
A wound like Maria’s?
But the Jerusalem authorities, certainly Richardson and Mepal, had decided not to make public the injury to Mrs Whichcote. The most likely explanation was the merely venal one, that the college had decided for the sake of its own reputation that it would be better to minimize any gossip about Sylvia Whichcote’s death. It did not necessarily follow that her death had been anything other than suicide. The wound might have been caused by her plunging into the pond, and perhaps hitting her head on a stone. Or, in her journey towards the college through these ill-lit and ill-paved streets, she might have slipped and fallen; indeed, it would have been strange if she had not. Nor could the night-soil man be considered a reliable witness. It did not take long for a man to learn that the more sensational a story, the more attention the teller of it earned.
A wound the size of a penny piece: the phrase repeated itself in his mind like a curse.
More by luck than good judgement, Holdsworth discovered that he had navigated his way through the narrow lanes and emerged into an open space shaped like an axe-head. He recognized it from his walk earlier in the day as the Beast Market. Along its southern side ran Bird Bolt Lane. If he turned left, he would be back at Jerusalem within a few minutes.
Dear God, even here the strange, unseasonable heat was terrible. It tampered with the very fibre of his being. It stripped away the defences of his reason. Now, in a sudden and hideous reversal, he could not stop his mind imagining the cool white skin of Elinor Carbury.
The size of a penny piece, he muttered aloud, a penny piece. It was if that damned wound, whether Sylvia’s or Maria’s, was a key. The key unlocked a door inside him that was better left fastened for all eternity. If he let the door open, God alone knew what might come out.