Eight Ghosts Read online

  The car stopped some distance away, and laughing she went on running: how like him, to tease and play – at any moment he’d step out, and run towards her with outstretched arms. But he did not. The sun obscured the windscreen: she could not see his face. Impossible, now, not to forget Nicholas and his tales – the hanging men, the iron-pierced eye – it was all, perhaps, some elaborate unkind joke. She reached the car and rapped against the window, half fond and half impatient. The window did not move. All her cheerful disposition rinsed away, and in its place she felt a kind of panicked dread. She said her husband’s name three times; three times he did not reply. At last she knelt, supplicating, beside the car, resting her hands against the door, her face level with the glass: ‘Darling?’ she said. ‘My love?’

  He was turned away from her, looking up to the white folly on its low hill. There was the familiar pale brown hair growing over the familiar collar; but something, she knew, had altered. ‘Darling?’ she said; and slowly – very slowly, as if with the greatest reluctance – he turned. His face, when she saw it, was utterly changed. Gone was the intelligent shy smile, the sudden beam of kindness; in its place was a fixed mask of implacable loathing – very hard, very fixed, as if cut from an unyielding substance. Then it moved, and there was one final flare of hope – that it was all a game; that he would smile, as he’d always smiled. But what came then was a grimace, as if he were looking at some transgression against which every natural human instinct violently rebelled. His hand moved on the wheel – the idling engine stirred – and very quickly, and without looking back, he was gone.

  ‘As I say,’ said Salma, lightly stroking her sleeping baby’s downy cheek, ‘she’s dead now. Opened her veins in a warm bath, only not lengthways, as you’re supposed to, and it didn’t work. In the end she had to break her own head open on the sink. It was a long time before they found her.’ The child opened its dusk-blue eyes. He gazed at his mother; she gazed back. It ought to have been delightful to see, but it struck me that Salma was not as lovely looking as I’d always thought: that her eyes were small, and their shine like that of wet stones. ‘A very long time,’ she said, and I caught a cool, hard note in her voice, which I disliked. ‘Nobody looked for her, you see. Nobody wanted her. She wasn’t missed.’

  I’for one, am thankful of the unwritten statute of decency that compels us not to speak ill of the dead. But perhaps such compassion is driven by a stronger desire to see a man’s afflictions and troubles die with him. That way, our own, we hope, might do the same when the time comes.

  And so, there was no mention in James Lanyard’s obituary this morning of the true circumstances that had led to his withdrawal from public and professional life these past ten years, simply a brief sentence regretting the nervous illness that had overcome him at the Jacobite trials and brought to an end what had been a long and formidable career at the Bar. Some might recall the rumours about what had happened at Carlisle Castle, but only those of us who had been there would know how to separate those rumours from the truth. There was talk of ghosts and spirits (and that Mr Lanyard had in fact been haunted until the day he died in his house on the edge of the Heath) but those are words for a fireside story and inadequate for the real world.

  Like most clerks of the Inns, I had heard of James Lanyard well before I met him, and when I began my employment at his chambers his reputation was made flesh exactly. He was commanding in court, with a knowledge of the law that often put his opponent to shame and a noose around the defendant’s neck. When there was even the slimmest chance of securing a conviction, he would pursue it with a hound’s nose and a terrier’s teeth. And even when there wasn’t, he forced the gentleman for the defence to work hard for the acquittal.

  After the victory at Culloden, it came as no surprise to me that he was selected to represent the Crown when the rebels were tried. He sent nine men to be hanged, drawn and quartered on Kennington Common, and a few weeks later the Earl of Kilmarnock and Lord Balmerino were beheaded at Tower Hill.

  There was a desire, that unsettled summer of 1746, for justice to be served quickly in order to stamp down any remaining shoots of rebellion and so, when his duty had been done in London, Mr Lanyard was sent north to prepare for the hearings in Carlisle.

  Word had reached us in Lincoln’s Inn some weeks earlier that there were already very few lodgings to be had in the city and so I had made arrangements in advance for us to room with Doctor McEwan, an acquaintance of Mr Lanyard’s brother, who was a surgeon with the Thirty-Fourth Regiment of Foot. But I had not expected the place to be quite so overrun.

  In addition to the rebels captured when the castle fell to the Duke of Cumberland, more prisoners were being sent here from towns on both sides of the border where there was no means of holding them in great numbers or keeping them safe from retribution. And with all these prisoners would come a long procession of lawyers, clerks, underwriters, physicians, men called to the Grand Jury and the Petty Jury, witnesses, families of the accused, bailiffs and a great many other servants and necessaries further down the chain.

  The overcrowding was made worse still by the fact that the castle buildings were generally so unfit for use that the soldiers had been garrisoned in the town, together with the French, who, being prisoners of war rather than traitors, were only confined to the city walls. Now and then we’d catch sight of them standing on street corners, bandaged and begging. Some of them looked barely alive.

  Even so, said Doctor McEwan that evening at supper, they could count themselves lucky that they were not locked in the dungeons of the keep.

  Remembering childhood tales of knights and castles, Perrin, one of Mr Lanyard’s junior clerks, imagined that there were chains on the walls and bones in the corners. To which Mr Lanyard bristled and McEwan smiled and cut up bacon rind for his capuchin monkey; payment, he had told us, for once curing a sailor of pox. It was a wrinkled, emaciated creature and clattered about in a small cage with its withered right hand dangling like a bracelet. As soon as we had come into the dining chamber it had started to shriek, and McEwan tried to appease it with scraps off his plate.

  The poor animal had been unsettled for months, he said, ever since he had been coming and going from the castle to attend to the prisoners.

  ‘It’s the smell of the place, he doesn’t like, perhaps,’ McEwan suggested. ‘I must bring something of the dungeon home with me, I think.’

  Then there was the constant noise on the street outside, and it didn’t like it when folk came to the door to plead for food. Nor did it tolerate being stared at by strange faces. Or familiar ones, it seemed. For whenever a servant came in, it jumped about as if the cage were being heated from below, and the other junior clerk, Willis, spent the meal looking over his shoulder, half expecting it to break free and leap at him.

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ said McEwan, running his thumb over the monkey’s forehead as it chewed the nugget of fat in its paw, ‘if there were soon no men left in the gaol to try at all.’

  ‘Is it so bad as that?’ I said.

  ‘Three hundred men in a room you could pace out in less than two dozen steps, Mr Gregory,’ he said, ‘I would call it worse than bad.’

  ‘You think traitors deserve better accommodation, doctor?’ said Mr Lanyard. ‘You think they should be free to wander the streets like the French?’

  ‘Not every man in there will be guilty, Mr Lanyard,’ said McEwan. ‘You must know that.’

  ‘Not every man in there will be found guilty, I grant you,’ Mr Lanyard replied. ‘But that’s not to say that those who walk free in the end will be innocent.’

  ‘True enough,’ said McEwan, ‘but all the same, innocent or guilty, I wouldn’t have a man die from filth.’

  ‘The brigadier tells me that it has been no more than a dozen,’ said Mr Lanyard, nodding when the servant offered him more wine. ‘And all of them from injuries sustained in the siege. They are casualties of battle, doctor, not uncleanliness.’

  ‘The brigadi
er is referring to the dozen that I’ve been shown,’ said McEwan.

  ‘I don’t follow your meaning, sir,’ said Willis.

  ‘They only want to have the deaths of officers confirmed for their records,’ said McEwan. ‘The names of the others aren’t worth a thing, politically speaking, at least. I don’t suppose there’s much profit to be made from spreading word that auld Jimmy from the bothy in the glen has expired, is there, Mr Lanyard?’

  The capuchin screamed and put its good hand through the bars of the cage, wanting more to eat.

  ‘I am not a politician,’ Mr Lanyard replied. ‘What use is made of men’s names is not my concern. Nor is the condition of the cell from which a man comes to the courtroom. My only responsibility is to try to send him back there.’

  ‘Well, I hope that you never have cause to see the place,’ said McEwan, dicing another piece of meat. ‘We don’t do so well when we’re locked up in the dark. Men, I mean. We stumble backwards.’

  ‘They were savages long before they were shut away in the castle,’ said Mr Lanyard, and Perrin agreed.

  ‘Savages,’ he said.

  ‘Still, I’m sure that they will be glad you’ve finally come to try them, Mr Lanyard,’ said McEwan. ‘Then at least, one way or the other, they will be set free.’

  He fed some more offcuts through the bars of the cage, but even though the monkey had a handful of food, it chittered and screeched, and Willis knocked his wine across the table.

  Doctor McEwan’s house was of a modest size and not used to receiving four guests at once. And so while Mr Lanyard had a room of his own, myself, Perrin and Willis were installed in the parlour next to the dining chamber on palliasses. It was cold and cramped and not so tucked away that we couldn’t hear the endless clamour from the street outside. But there were plenty of people coming into Carlisle without accommodation at all, and Willis, at least, was simply glad to have a solid door between himself and the doctor’s pet, especially when it began to make its noise again in the early hours. It cried and clucked and set the ring grating against the hook of the stand as it flung itself about the cage. It had been disturbed, I assumed, by servants either retiring for the night or starting their morning duties. But if the creature was so prone to making a fuss about being woken, then I thought McEwan would surely have forbidden any of his staff from taking short cuts through the dining chamber after hours. Only, it screamed for much longer than it would have taken someone merely to pass by. It seemed to me that someone was standing there and watching it and having fun stoking its temper.

  The days that followed were all spent at the castle, sifting through the many volumes of evidence for the Grand Jury to decide which of the three hundred or so prisoners would be put before the judges. Some were too sick to be tried, some died before a decision was made about them and others were clearly simpletons with little understanding of what they had been fighting for in the first place. Mr Lanyard was reluctant to agree to the scheme, but to reduce the numbers further the judges ordered that prisoners from the common ranks draw lots in order to determine which of them would be put on trial and which would be transported.

  Now and then, I saw men being brought out of the keep in chains to be loaded onto wagons. Men of a kind at least. Hair and bones. As decrepit as the buildings of the courtyard.

  During the siege the previous winter, Cumberland had called the castle an old hen coop, and even though it might have been a means of making the task in hand seem less daunting to his men, it wasn’t so far off the mark. His artillery had ruptured walls that had been falling apart for a long time.

  The dreariness of the place was made worse by the weather too. It was only the beginning of August, but the autumn had come early to this part of the country and the drizzle that swept over the castle seemed to loosen all colour from the walls. The sandstone dripped in various reds and browns, like a paint palette up-ended and left to ooze itself clean.

  In the old palace where we, the prosecution, had been given a room to work, the windows ran with condensation even though the fires were lit, and I expected Mr Lanyard’s health to suffer. In the courtroom he always presented himself as a man with a physical strength to match that of his intellect, but privately – his robes on the peg and his wig on the stand – he complained of a number of ailments. Cold, damp weather exacerbated his lumbago and for years he had smarted from an ulcerated stomach.

  Which may be the reason – I console myself – that I did not think too much of his hunched appearance during those weeks he spent at the table poring over the masses of paper. It simply wasn’t uncommon to see him in discomfort and, despite McEwan’s offers of salts and liniments, he relieved the aches in his usual way, with a half bottle of claret at supper. He did not speak very much either, but then, like myself, Perrin and Willis, he was tasked with reading reports and witness statements and letters and petitions that were so numerous and complex that it was several weeks before their contents had been examined to any kind of satisfaction.

  No, it wasn’t until the trials began in the second week of September that I noticed anything odd about his behaviour at all.

  The first two days of hearings were successful and he managed to suppress his pains well enough to secure a good number of convictions. He was eloquent and shrewd in his questioning, and the judges commended him on his preparations. But during adjournments he was on edge and developed the habit of brushing the back of his hand, as though a spider had crawled across it. He was nauseous too and frequently called the servants to bring more water. It was the smell of the courtroom, perhaps, that affected him.

  The prisoners were given a cursory sousing in the yard outside before they were presented to the judges, but this only served to make them seem more wretched in a way. Their beards dripped like the matted tails of hill-sheep, they bled from sores that would not heal, and despite the bucket of water that the soldiers had thrown at each of them, they were still soiled to the knees as if they had emerged from a sewer. The odour became so strong in the afternoons that one of the judges, Mr Clark, ordered that after every third hearing the floor be swept. With fresh straw laid down and the benches strewn with rosemary, the air was improved considerably, and yet it seemed to make no difference to Mr Lanyard. He sweated and swallowed and could hardly get through his questions without his voice deteriorating into a coughing fit.

  Twice Mr Clark asked if he wished to adjourn, but Mr Lanyard insisted on continuing until the end of the session, by which time half of the twenty-two men on trial that day had been convicted. Though, I have to say that it was due to the overwhelming evidence against them more than any skill of examination or discovery on Mr Lanyard’s part. All afternoon, he had struggled to speak and when he was seated to hear the defence he settled and resettled his bulk on the chair and pressed his handkerchief to his nose so often that it began to seem like some tactic of distraction.

  Even when we returned to Doctor McEwan’s house in the evening he was no better and would not eat for fear that he would see his supper on his shoes. McEwan advised him to take some mint leaves from the garden but the mere thought of letting anything past his lips made Mr Lanyard pale and he complained again about the smell of the men in the courtroom. How it lingered on his clothes.

  ‘The capuchin smells it too,’ he said as the animal rattled its cage.

  Perhaps it could. It seemed to have taken a particular dislike to Mr Lanyard and bared its pin teeth and hissed in its throat until McEwan finally ordered it to be taken out of the dining chamber.

  The next two days passed in much the same way and Mr Lanyard slept poorly and barely ate. In court, when he was waiting for the defence to finish, I saw him inspecting his reflection in the water jug, peering at his left shoulder and then as discreetly as possible turning to look behind him as if there were someone there.

  The sixth day of the trials proved to be Mr Lanyard’s last. After that he could do no more and did not set foot in a courtroom again.

  His final case wa
s that of a man called Fraser, captured when the castle fell. Like many of the Scottish prisoners, he spoke little English, and so the procedure was doubled in length while questions and answers were passed back and forth through the translator.

  His case was like so many others that we’d heard day after day. Being a clansman, his chief had ordered him to fight and because he had been ordered to fight he could not refuse. If he had, then his cattle would have been taken from him and his house torn down. It was a claim corroborated by the witness for the Defence, who had seen Mr Fraser pressed into service in the most brutal manner, but refuted by two other men captured after the siege and turned King’s evidence.

  The first, from the Cameron clan, said that he knew Fraser well and that he had seen the man leading troops at the Battle of Falkirk. The second, of the clan Gordon, matched the statement and added that he had been garrisoned with Fraser at Carlisle to hold up Cumberland as he pursued the Young Pretender’s army north. He swore on the life of King George that what he said was true and when Mr Lanyard, dabbing his brow with a handkerchief, put this to him, the prisoner answered, ‘Tha e coma mu Rìgh Deòrsa.’

  ‘He says that the witness cares nothing for King George,’ the translator said.

  ‘No?’ said Mr Lanyard, coughing into his fist. ‘Then why does he give evidence against you?’

  The translator asked Fraser the question, who replied, ‘B’ fhearr leis gu robh mi marbh.’

  ‘He says that Mr Gordon wants him dead, sir,’ the translator explained.

  ‘Then Mr Gordon must be assured of your guilt,’ said Mr Lanyard.

  ‘Pardon me, sir,’ the translator said, ‘the defendant says that Mr Gordon wants him dead, but not for treason.’

  ‘You have committed some other crime?’ said Mr Lanyard.

  Fraser said that he had not, but that Mr Gordon thought so.