Plutonic Rainbows

Professor Parkins is “scrupulously polite and strictly truthful”, James tells us, and on his second morning at the Globe Inn a chambermaid reports that both his beds were slept in, “all the things was crumpled and throwed about all ways”. He says he “certainly never touched the other”. A few lines on he “may have disordered it” while unpacking, and then he adds that he expects “a friend of mine soon”, a gentleman from Cambridge, “to come and occupy it for a night or two”. The only gentleman on offer is Rogers, who proposed exactly that at dinner and was turned down. Either Parkins has just made up a friend for that bed, or after one night in the room he’s written to the man he refused. Rogers does arrive, the morning after it’s all over, “more welcome than he would have been a day before”, and nobody says who asked him.

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is the seventh story in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, and the second bed is there from the first page. Parkins doesn’t “quite fancy having an empty bed” in what he calls his study, and Rogers offers to take it because “it’ll be company for you” and would “keep the ghosts off”. James had ended Number 13 on a landlord offering two shaken men “a double-bedded one”. Two stories later he opens with that room and gives it to a man on his own.

The whistle comes out of a hole at the end of what may be an altar, in a ruined Templar church Parkins has agreed to look over for a colleague, and he pockets it. On the walk back the figure is already behind him on the sand, while the thing is still a nameless tube, with “an appearance of running about his movements” and no gain on him at all. It’s “stationed on the shore in front of the inn” when he opens the casement to tip out the caked earth, before he’s read a letter of the inscription. So when he works out QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT (“Who is this who is coming?”) and decides “the best way to find out is evidently to whistle for him”, the answer is outside, and the inn is “not more than sixty yards” from the sea. The other inscription is the one he can’t read, being rusty enough not to “even know the word for a whistle”. Stephen Devereux at Thresholds says it’s set out in a diamond (Gutenberg flattens it to FLA FUR BIS FLE), and that read as “fur, flabis, flebis” it means you will steal, you will blow, you will weep. That makes the blowing his second offence, and the first one was over before dinner.

That first night has the best thing in the book. He can’t sleep, he’s counting his heartbeats, and “He found a little vicarious comfort in the idea that someone else was in the same boat. A near neighbour (in the darkness it was not easy to tell his direction) was tossing and rustling in his bed, too.” James never comes back to it. When the bed does finally sit up, on the second night, the narrator lets slip something about himself: “I have in a dream thirty years back seen the same thing happen”. If that narrator is James, born in 1862, he was about twelve.

The title comes from Burns, written in 1787 and expanded in 1793, and it’s a girl telling a lover how to reach her unseen: “Syne up the back-style, and let naebody see, / And come, as ye were na coming to me”. James has hung those instructions on something that runs down a beach for most of a mile without arriving, then climbs out of a spare bed and feels over a bachelor’s pillows “in a way which made Parkins shudder as he had never in his life thought it possible”. Jonathan Miller built his 1968 BBC film on that: “one’s emotions, feelings and impulses, which one denies and represses, lie in wait and can sometimes ambush one”, he said, quoted by Nicholas Ray, and it’s a fine reading of Michael Hordern. The prose has something else going as well.

On the links Colonel Wilson calls Parkins “little better than a Sadducee”. Parkins nearly answers that they’re the most sensible people he’s read of in the Old Testament, then wonders whether they’re in it, and they aren’t. They’re in the New, as the people who “say that there is no resurrection”. In the same round the Colonel is fuming that the Vicar has announced a service for Friday, the Feast of St Thomas the Apostle. A ritualist Vicar could have annoyed him with any saint in the calendar, and James picked the doubter, as a post at Graham Crackers has noticed. St Thomas’s Day is 21 December, which puts all this golf at the shortest day of the year, under a “very bright frosty moon”. James knew that coast in midwinter: Burnstow is Felixstowe, where he often spent New Year at Felix Cobbold’s house, and another guest at those gatherings, J. K. Stephen, had the head injury thought to have worsened his mental illness. There was a suggestion, the actor Robert Lloyd Parry told the BBC, that his horse was frightened “by a whistle or by a gust of wind”.

I’d take the Thomas idea a step further, and I’m not sure I’m right. John 20 is his chapter: “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” The same chapter opens in an empty tomb, where Peter “seeth the linen clothes lie”. Parkins throws himself at the window because he “could not have borne” to touch the thing, then “the linen face was thrust close into his own”, and when the Colonel gets through the door there’s “a tumbled heap of bed-clothes” on the floor, linen where a body was. Patrick Murphy and Fred Porcheddu, as Sam Wiseman reports, think that round Templar church is based on the Holy Sepulchre in Cambridge, which takes its name from the same tomb. James doesn’t wink once.

The Colonel is the comic turn, a man who hears of a weekday service and suspects a Jesuit, and he’s the only person at the Globe who knows what he’s looking at. He says “You know where I am if you want me during the night”, and afterwards he “asked no questions”. Only in the last paragraphs do we learn he “remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India”, and I’d have swapped a couple of the later collections for that story. His verdict is that “if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little”, since there was nothing to it but “the bedclothes of which it had made itself a body”. Parkins had been offered the test Thomas asked for, and he went for the window.

The Colonel also sends the whistle “as far into the sea as a very brawny arm could send it”, and everyone takes that as the end of the matter, though it’s the sea that “has encroached tremendously” on this coast. The Royal Commission on Coast Erosion, as Justin Sausman reports, had 518 acres of Suffolk going between 1879 and 1904. Parkins comes away unable to see “a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved”, which is white linen, and as much Canterbury’s as Rome’s whatever the Colonel thinks. And the second bed does get used in the end. Once Parkins is back in his own, the Colonel, “wrapped in a rug, occupied the other bed, for the rest of the night”. He needed the rug, the bed’s own clothes being in a heap on the floor.

Perfect conditions tonight, with the moon half buried in cloud, a bat for company and a witch over the rooftops while everyone below keeps the lamps lit and doesn’t look up. The Irish artist Power O’Malley made her for the cover of Life on 30 October 1913, and she usually goes by “Beware the Beautiful Witch”, though one dealer’s listing gives just “Beware!”. Happy Halloween to all of you, and if something taps at the window later on, I’d leave the curtains shut.

Thirty years ago next month I bought a 15ml bottle of Yohji parfum in Broadmead, in Bristol, and I still have it. I got through about half in the first three years, left the rest in a cupboard, and sealed it with parafilm in 2014, which may well have been locking the stable a long way too late. When I opened it earlier this year the liquid had darkened and the top of the perfume had gone. There’s a faint powdery impression of the heart and base, and nothing at all of whatever used to happen in the first few minutes on skin.

Losing that from the bottle was always going to happen, but it’s gone from my head as well. I remember buying it and unwrapping the tissue paper, I remember wearing it, and none of that comes with a smell. Ask me to call up the opening and I get nothing I’d trust. In April I wrote here about “galbanum landing sharp and metallic”, but “metallic” is also the word in Raiders of the Lost Scent’s retrospective, which I quoted one paragraph later, so I can’t swear that was memory at all. I may just have been reading.

That’s the state I was in when the sample of Noir Gabardine arrived. Laurent Mazzone Parfums released it in 2011, fifteen years after Yohji, and its name turns up wherever people mourn the original. One Fragrantica commenter calls it “reincarnated juice, under a different name”. The resemblance is genuine, as far as my nose can be trusted on it, though it didn’t show up when I put it on. For a while it was simply a perfume I didn’t know, and then, some time later on my skin, it was noticeably something I did. A Reddit user says it’s “known for being almost identical” and adds, “It’s missing the magic of the original for me, though.” I’d love to be in a position to argue.

The note lists would explain the delay, if note lists explain anything. Lower down the two perfumes nearly overlap: vanilla, musk, amber and sandalwood are in both Fragrantica’s pyramid for Noir Gabardine and Parfumo’s entry for the parfum, and Raiders describes Yohji’s coumarin as “a warm, tonka-like depth” where Noir Gabardine simply lists tonka. Higher up they part. Noir Gabardine opens on galbanum, bergamot and mandarin, and Parfumo gives Yohji those three plus blackcurrant, cardamom, green notes, peach and pineapple, so perhaps Yohji began greener and fruitier while Noir Gabardine goes straight for citrus. But Fragrantica gives Yohji only galbanum, bergamot and green notes on top, with blackberry and raspberry below, and neither berry is on Parfumo at all. That’s one perfume with two sets of paperwork. Earlier this month I said I’d be very pleased to find blackberry in the vial, as though the matter were settled.

The parfum itself has no witness at all. Parfumo shows five ratings and an invitation to “Write the first Review”, so I’m left with what people say about Yohji in general, which probably means the eau de toilette, and they can’t agree on that either. Raiders has galbanum that’s “cold, almost mineral”. Osmoz says it “opens on a forthright, reassuringly warm, amber note”, and I can’t get from one to the other. The Ayala Moriel blog says the opening “can be experienced as harsh”, with “more than a little acetone-like note”, and calls the clear box a “glass coffin”, which I could have done without. Victoria at Bois de Jasmin got a first impression “green and radiant”, and a Parfumo reviewer, in translation, could “especially remember the pineapple in the top note, which was pleasantly sweet-sour and primarily fruity.” I’ve read them all and none of them brings it back.

The research is kinder than the note lists. Herz and Engen’s 1996 review says long-term odour memory seems “unusually resistant to decay”. In Engen and Ross’s 1973 experiment, recognition was only 70% straight after smelling, and a year later it was only 5% lower. Calling a smell up on purpose is another matter. The same review says people rate their ability to “conjure an odor sensation” as poor, and a 2014 paper describes smell as the sense “with the fewest instances of volitional imagery”. So my blank may say very little about what’s stored. I know how much weight I’m putting on this. That one-year follow-up had fifteen people in it, 70% is a shaky start, and they were being asked about the smells they’d actually been given, not lookalikes. Against that, they’d only been shown those smells, and I wore this one for three years. I think that if the real opening reached me again I’d recognise it at once, not because I’d rebuilt it in my head but because some of it had survived.

Noir Gabardine’s opening rang no bell, which is harder to read than I’d like. If recognition really lasts, then either those first few minutes aren’t Yohji’s or whatever I held of Yohji’s has gone after all, and I can’t tell which from here. The later recognition isn’t clean either. I smelled what’s left in my bottle earlier this year, and what’s left is the heart and base, the same stretch where Noir Gabardine stirred something, and there’s too little now to set the two side by side. I may have matched a 2011 perfume to a 2026 residue rather than to 1996. The only qualified judge is the person who stood in Broadmead that November, who isn’t available. And every time I try the sample I’m learning it, so if some trace of the old opening does survive, I may be laying Noir Gabardine over the top of it.

An unopened bottle or miniature from the original run is the next step, and I’ve been somewhere like this before. In 2013, twenty years after binning my first bottle, I bought a replacement Pasha de Cartier from Florida, and it’s still in its sealed box, because it was never the smell I wanted from that one, only the afternoon. Yohji is the same problem turned inside out. I’ve got the actual bottle with the actual thirty years on it, and the smell is all I’d want from anybody else’s.

A sealed miniature won’t be 1996 either. Citrus goes early: limonene, the molecule behind what Premiere Peau’s chemistry explainer calls bergamot’s “electric sparkle”, oxidises into something closer to “turpentine left in a hot car”, and I’d expect a seal to slow that rather than stop it. A well-kept example could still hold more of the opening than mine does, and if several from different sellers opened alike, that would count for something, though they could agree simply because they’ve all aged the same way.

Every one of those bottles would have survived by accident. Jean Kerléo, who composed Yohji, co-founded the Osmothèque at Versailles, an archive built to keep perfumes that have left the world. I said in April that I didn’t know whether Yohji is in it, and I ought to find out, since that’s the one place the opening might have been kept on purpose.

Tomorrow is the first of November. For three years I put this perfume on without giving its first few minutes a thought, since they were only the way in, and there’d be more of them next time. Noir Gabardine has got me closer than I expected, from the middle onward, so the character of the thing hasn’t gone out of reach altogether. I’d dearly like the way in back.

“Pastor of village in Skåne. Usual black coat and soft black hat.” That’s passenger 24 on a Swedish canal boat in the summer of 1863. Passenger 25 is a commercial traveller going to Trollhättan. Passenger 26 is a “man in long black cloak, broad-leafed hat, very old-fashioned”, and Mr Wraxall has crossed that one out and written “Perhaps identical with No. 13. Have not yet seen his face.” No. 13 is a Roman priest in a cassock, and after the last story I did look twice at that number. James gives us “not less than six” of these attempts and the sum never changes: twenty-eight people in the count, twenty-six at meals. The man in the cloak is “perhaps absent”, and the short figure in the hood is “certainly absent”.

“Count Magnus” is the sixth story in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, and I find those lists more frightening than anything that actually touches anyone in the book so far. Look at how they’re kept. A cloak gets crossed out and reconsidered, and a man who can’t see a face still enters the hat. Wraxall had spent the summer gathering material for a travel book, the kind James sums up as hotel details plus “reported conversations with intelligent foreigners, racy innkeepers, and garrulous peasants. In a word, they were chatty.” Everything in the story began as copy for that volume, and by the canal boat the habit is all that’s left of it.

James spends a good part of the opening on how little of Wraxall there is. He’s “very much alone in the world”, “a denizen of hotels and boarding-houses”, and his belongings probably went in the Pantechnicon fire. He published a book about a holiday in Brittany, which the narrator, who has also been through the Calendar of Wraxall’s Oxford college, can’t find after “a diligent search”. Mr Abney chose his children as people who could vanish “without occasioning a sensible gap in society”. Wraxall has private means and letters of introduction, and as far as the story tells us nobody comes looking for him either.

The manor-house he’s heading for “is to be called Råbäck”, the narrator says, “though that is not its name”, which is thin cover. The De la Gardies are real, and Rosemary Pardoe has James at Varnhem in 1901 and, going by Michael Cox’s annotations, writing to his parents that August from a real Råbäck on Kinnekulle. Their famous Count, Magnus Gabriel (1622-86), “could scarcely have been a more different character”, and she makes a tentative case for his father Jacob as the model.

James’s Count built the house soon after 1600 and had late tenants flogged and branded, and the innkeeper says he “had been on the Black Pilgrimage, and had brought something or someone back with him.” Among the family’s account-books Wraxall finds the Count’s own note: anyone who wants “a long life”, “a faithful messenger” and to “see the blood of his enemies” must first go to Chorazin and salute the prince, with one word scratched out that he reads as “of the air”. Across nearly three centuries, this only makes the man “a more picturesque figure”. He tries Chorazin on the deacon, who says old priests hold that Antichrist is to be born there, “and there are tales—”, and then, “Tales, I was going to say, which I have forgotten”, and goes home. The tradition is real. Pardoe and Jane Nicholls trace it to the Revelations of the Pseudo-Methodius, probably written in Syria around 690: “He will be born in Chorazaim, nourished in Bethsaida, and reign in Capharnaum.”

The name has had a stranger afterlife. Jack Parsons, the American scientist and follower of Crowley, left an account of a Black Pilgrimage of his own (“things were done to me of which I may not write”). Pardoe and Nicholls think he “somehow got the idea via ‘Count Magnus’”, while admitting “There is no actual evidence that he ever read the story”. Manon Hedenborg White, going by the parallels between the two accounts, calls it “more-or-less certain”, and I’m with her. That would mean a practising occultist took his pilgrimage from a Cambridge don who’d told him next to nothing about it.

The landlord finally gives up one story, and I’d never worked out its date before. Herr Nielsen puts it “ninety-two years ago”, so 1771, when two men say “The Count is dead; we do not care for him” and go poaching in his wood. Someone who built a house soon after 1600 had been in the ground a long time by 1771. People don’t bother saying that about a man that long dead unless it’s still in question, and nobody keeps the wood, “because no one wished to live there”. One of the men is found pushing with his hands at something “which was not there”, and he’s still doing it when he dies before the winter. The other is Anders Bjornsen, whose face “was not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off the bones. You understand that?”

The next morning Wraxall is looking at a band of engraving round the Count’s coffin. A man runs through trees with his hair flying, chased by a short hooded form with one visible limb, which he compares to “the tentacle of a devil-fish”. He’s less than a day from hearing about that face, and he files the thing as “allegorical”, a “fiend pursuing a hunted soul”, then looks round for the huntsman, expecting “a demon blowing his horn”. He finds a cloaked man on a hillock, leaning on a stick and watching “with an interest which the engraver had tried to express in his attitude”. Somebody worked at getting that interest right, for the man’s own coffin. The hooded thing is the faithful messenger, and the blood is what the man on the hillock has come to see. The long life is presumably why the lid has three padlocks on it.

He’d already asked once. The evening he read the note he stopped at the churchyard gate and told the mausoleum “I should dearly like to see you”, and something clanged, which he put down to “the woman who, I suppose, was cleaning up the church”. Now one of the padlocks is lying on the pavement. That night he comes to himself at the gate again, with no memory of the walk, chanting “Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?” and “something more which I have failed to recollect”, and inside he finds two loose. “I must have been wrong,” he writes, “in saying that one of the padlocks of my Count’s sarcophagus was unfastened”. He tries to close them, can’t, and lays them “carefully on the window-ledge”. On his last evening he goes back to say goodbye, “I should like to see you, or, rather—”, and the third hits his foot. The story never says his asking does it, but he asks three times and three locks come off.

The counting stops in England. Near Belchamp St Paul, on a moonlit August night, Wraxall’s closed fly reaches a cross-road and two figures are standing at the corner in dark cloaks, the taller in a hat and the shorter in a hood. They’ve got off the boat. He takes a furnished lodging and works through who might help: doctors would call him mad, policemen would laugh, and “The parson is away.” Then the narrator’s sentence starts out in his own voice, “People still remembered last year at Belchamp St Paul how a strange gentleman came one evening in August years back”, and by the end it belongs to them: “and there was an inquest; and the jury that viewed the body fainted, seven of ‘em did, and none of ‘em wouldn’t speak to what they see”.

The first line of the story promised that how the narrator got the papers would be “the last point which the reader will learn”, and it is. He inherited the house, which “had stood empty since 1863”, had it pulled down, and they turned up “in a forgotten cupboard under the window in the best bedroom”. He wasn’t looking for them. Since then he’s checked the Brasenose Calendar, gone through the bibliographies after a book on Brittany, collected what they still say in the village and read every last note in order, and he’s the one who told us on the first page that Wraxall’s besetting fault was “over-inquisitiveness”.

King Erik Glipping was murdered near Viborg in 1286, and the narrator of “Number 13” can tell you that fifty-six blows of square-headed iron maces “were traced on Erik’s skull when his tomb was opened in the seventeenth century. But I am not writing a guide-book.” He carries straight on to the hotels: “Preisler’s and the Phœnix are all that can be desired.” His cousin Mr Anderson went to the Golden Lion instead, and “has not been there since”. Helen Grant, writing up her own visit in a Ghosts & Scholars newsletter, says James stayed in the town in 1900, at Preisler’s. So he gave the hotel he’d actually slept in a clean notice and made up another one for the horror.

This is the fifth story in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Anderson, “a methodical, accurate-minded man”, has come to copy papers on the last days of Danish Catholicism, and he turns down Number 17 because its windows “commanded only the blank wall of the next house”. He takes Number 12, with three windows on the street. The guest list on the blackboard has no Number 13, but that night he comes back from fetching a book to the wrong door, and it’s numbered 13. It “entirely refused to open, and he caught the sound of a hasty movement towards it from within.” In bed he works out that the board must be wrong, and he’s sorry he didn’t take the room himself.

James sets out the next part as evidence and leaves the adding up. On the second night the portmanteau, left on a trestle “at the farthest end of the room from his bed”, has gone. Anderson smokes at the window (“the right-hand window it was”), facing the kind of dead wall he turned down Number 17 to avoid, and on it he can see his own shadow and, to the right of it, the occupant of Number 13, “like himself, leaning on his elbows on the window-sill”. He leaves his cigarette-end on the sill and goes to bed. In the morning the portmanteau is back on its trestle and the cigarette-end is on the sill of the middle window. So at night Number 12 is two windows long, the far end of the room has gone, luggage and all, into a room that isn’t there in daylight, and the sill that shadow leaned on is his own right-hand window by day. He’d been sorry not to take Number 13, and he’s been paying for part of it all along.

The landlord, Herr Kristensen, is no help, and I could read a whole book of him. Asked why Danish hotels skip the number, he’s off into his old schoolmaster and “one snowy day”, then his father’s hotel in Aarhuus. Only at the third go does it come out that the trouble is the commercial travellers, with their stories of “men that have slept in a Number 13 and never been the same again, or lost their best customers”. So the gap on the board is hotel management, and the thing has marked its door with the one number the hotel left free.

By day Anderson is in the Rigsarkiv with letters about Bishop Jörgen Friis, who was real: the last Catholic to hold the see, according to Grant. The Bishop owned a house in the town and let it to one Mag Nicolas Francken, who the reforming party say “practised secret and wicked arts, and had sold his soul to the enemy”. The Bishop tells them to bring it before the proper court, meaning his own. Two days after their last reply he writes that Francken “hath been suddenly removed from among us”, so that “the question for this time falls”, and he moves on to the Scarlet Woman, “be it known to you,” etc. That “etc.” is the last anyone hears of it. Francken is James’s invention; when Grant asked at the local archive the name “met with an absolute blank”. The reformers had the real Friis imprisoned in his own dungeon at Hald, which the narrator calls “one of the prettiest things in Denmark”, and on the afternoon Anderson reads that letter he pays it “a short visit” and goes for his tea.

The archivist, Herr Scavenius, mentions that he’s never been able to place the Bishop’s house. Of the 1560 terrier of the Bishop’s property, “just the piece which had the list of the town property is missing. Never mind.” That makes two lists with a hole in them, the blackboard and the terrier. Nothing in the story says the Golden Lion was the Bishop’s house, and James lets you suspect it anyway. Grant went looking in November 2005, walked the streets where most of what survived the fire of 1726 is clustered, and found “no single building which has all these characteristics”. The Golden Lion, she concludes, “is everywhere and nowhere in old Viborg.”

On the third night he looks out at the wall again and sees a thin form crossing the next window, “his arms waved, and a gaunt leg was kicked up with surprising agility”. He assumes it’s the staid lawyer in Number 14, Herr Jensen, and starts composing comic verse: “I dance all night upon the floor. / And even if my neighbours swore, / I’d go on dancing all the more, / For I’m acquainted with the law”. Nobody ever says who’s really dancing, but the rhyme fits Francken better than it fits Jensen: his neighbours did swear and his whole case turned on a point of law, and Anderson has spent two days reading about it. Mark Sinker at Freaky Trigger compares the thing to someone dancing along to “LOUD TECHNO till dawn, selfishly encroaching on the personal space of others”. After Abney’s children and Mrs Mothersole, it reads less like revenge than like somebody who won’t be told.

Then it sings, with the landlord sitting right there, in “a high, thin voice” that’s “dry, as if from long disuse”. Kristensen’s contribution is “I have heard it once before, but I made sure it was a cat.” The lawyer comes in to complain and finds nobody to blame, and he and Anderson go out into the passage with a stick and an umbrella and finally compare notes. “My room has three windows in the daytime,” says Anderson. “By George, so has mine!” says Jensen, turning to look at him, which puts his back to the door. It opens, and an arm comes out and claws at his shoulder, “clad in ragged, yellowish linen, and the bare skin, where it could be seen, had long grey hair upon it.” The servants won’t touch the door until Anderson tells them “It isn’t a German in there, and if it was, we are five to one.” One swings a crowbar at the door and it’s a plaster wall, with a gash in it. A cock crows, and the landlord asks “with hesitation” whether they’d like “another room for tonight—a double-bedded one?”

S. T. Joshi, quoted on Wikipedia, says “the ‘ghost’ is not that of a person, but of a room”. The plaster wall is on his side, but a room doesn’t need linen, and it doesn’t laugh to itself behind a shut door.

Next morning they take up the floor of Number 12. “You will naturally suppose” that they found a skeleton, perhaps Francken’s. “That was not so.” They find a copper box holding “a neatly-folded vellum document”, and the narrator breaks off to talk about the fly-leaves of an astrological book of his own, where after ten years he can’t “determine which way up this writing ought to be read, much less in what language it is.” James, who catalogued many of the manuscripts in Cambridge’s college libraries, gave him that line. After two days Jensen, “the bolder spirit of the two”, “hazarded the conjecture that the language was either Latin or Old Danish.”

The narrator gets all of it a few months later, near Upsala, after a visit to the library where he’d laughed over the contract by which Daniel Salthenius “sold himself to Satan”. Salthenius was real, and the letter is still in the university library there. He was sixteen, and he offered body and soul for a purse that never ran dry. Anderson “was not really amused.” “Young idiot!” he says, “how did he know what company he was courting?” The reformers’ charge against Francken was the same one, and that’s as near as Anderson gets to the subject. He tells the story, and he “refused to draw any inferences from it, and to assent to any that I drew for him.” The narrator clearly drew some, and he doesn’t pass them on.

Sir Matthew Fell’s evidence against Mrs Mothersole is an odd thing to hang anyone on. He told the court he’d watched her three times from his window, at the full of the moon, up in the branches of the ash-tree beside his house, “clad only in her shift” and cutting twigs with “a peculiarly curved knife”. Each time she heard him coming, and each time all he found in the garden was a hare running towards the village. On the third night he went straight to her house and battered at her door for a quarter of an hour, and when she finally came out she was “very cross, and apparently very sleepy, as if just out of bed; and he had no good explanation to offer of his visit.” Anyone who knows the folklore reads the hare as Mrs Mothersole getting home first, and the story bears Sir Matthew out. In a courtroom, though, it’s a hare and a cross, sleepy woman, and the man who’d woken her had no reason to give for being there. That, with “much more of a less striking and unusual kind from other parishioners”, was enough. She was hanged a week after the trial at Bury St Edmunds, “with five or six more unhappy creatures”, a number nobody seems to have thought worth getting exact.

“The Ash-tree” is the fourth story in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, after the mezzotint that cost two guineas, and it starts somewhere unexpected, with the narrator wishing he owned a house. He writes about the small country houses of Eastern England with real affection: the grey paling of split oak, the meres with their reed-beds, a library where you might find “anything from a Psalter of the thirteenth century to a Shakespeare quarto”. He’s especially fond of a pillared portico stuck onto a red-brick Queen Anne house and faced with stucco to suit the Grecian taste. “I wish to have one of these houses, and enough money to keep it together and entertain my friends in it modestly.” Then he catches himself (“But this is a digression”) and introduces Castringham Hall in Suffolk, which he says still has its Italian portico and its square white block, “older inside than out”. The one feature that marked it out from a score of others is gone. Rosemary Pardoe’s notes on the story place Castringham in the same part of Suffolk as Livermere, the village where James spent much of his childhood at the Rectory, and the name Mothersole is on gravestones in the churchyard there.

James’s narrators don’t often editorialise, and this one stops the story to talk about witch-trials. He doubts anyone will soon be able to say how much solid reason, “if there was any”, lay behind the old fear of witches, or whether the confessions “were extorted by the mere cruelty of the witch-finders”. He calls Mrs Mothersole’s hanging an auto-da-fé, which isn’t a neutral word for a lawful execution. Then he swerves: “And the present narrative gives me pause. I cannot altogether sweep it away as mere invention.” I’ve read that a few times now and I’m still not sure which way it cuts. The story goes on to show she was more or less what the court said she was, and the narrator has already told us the courts were cruel. He lets both stand. She differed from “the ordinary run of village witches” only in being better off, several reputable farmers testified to her character, and on the scaffold, on a damp March morning on the hill outside Northgate, all she said was “There will be guests at the Hall,” more than once, in an undertone.

Sir Matthew isn’t a witch-finder, and James is careful to say so. His evidence “had not been very willingly given; he was not specially infected with the witch-finding mania”. He was “a man who liked to be on pleasant terms with those about him; but he saw a duty to be done in this business, and he had done it.” The Vicar, Mr Crome, applauded this, “as any reasonable man must have done”, and that last clause is the narrator’s, not Crome’s. Pardoe points out that Bury held no witch trial in 1690. The likeliest model is the trial of Amy Duny and Rose Cullender in the 1660s, where the judge admitted the most dubious testimony and both women were condemned to hang, and the judge was Sir Matthew Hale. I doubt James gave his witness the same first name by accident. Neither Sir Matthew needed to be a fanatic. Sam Reader at Reactor has the widow’s spirit “only balancing the books” after a system did what it was built to do, though he’s harder on Fell than James is, saying he had her executed “just for acting odd on his property and trespassing”. James’s version is worse. His Fell is reluctant and decent, and she was condemned mainly on his evidence all the same.

A few weeks later, under the May full moon, he and Crome take a turn on the gravel behind the house and Sir Matthew asks, “What is that that runs up and down the stem of the ash? It is never a squirrel?” Crome can’t make out its colour, but he’d swear, “though it sounded foolish”, that it had more than four legs. Next morning Sir Matthew isn’t down at six, as usual, or at seven or eight, and the servants break in to find him “dead and black”, with the window open. According to Crome’s notes, the two women who laid out the body touched his chest and their arms swelled so badly they couldn’t work for weeks. With “a small Magnifying Lens of Crystal” he and the physician from Bury find “a couple of small Punctures or Pricks”, and think of the poison ring of Pope Borgia. Then, as an experiment for posterity, he opens Sir Matthew’s bedside Bible three times at random and gets Cut it down, It shall never be inhabited and Her young ones also suck up blood. The following Sunday he preaches a funeral sermon titled “The Unsearchable Way; or, England’s Danger and the Malicious Dealings of Antichrist”, on the view held by most of the neighbourhood that the Squire was the victim of “a recrudescence of the Popish Plot.”

Nothing happens to the second Sir Matthew, which makes him the most sensible Fell in the story. He never sleeps in his father’s room, and for forty-five years nobody does except the odd visitor. His cattle keep dying, at a rate that rises slightly as time goes on (there’s a statistical account, the narrator says, in a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1772). He deals with it the way a farmer would. Having noticed that “nothing was ever attacked that spent the night indoors”, he shuts all his beasts in sheds at night and keeps no sheep in the park, and after that the “Castringham sickness” confines itself to wild birds and game. He never finds out what it is and doesn’t seem to need to. He dies in 1735 and the narrator can’t find “that anything particular marked his reign”, which in this family is an achievement.

His son Sir Richard is “a pestilent innovator”. He has been to Italy. He builds a great family pew out on the north side of the church, which means disturbing graves on “that unhallowed side”, Mrs Mothersole’s among them. Her coffin is sound and entirely empty, with “no trace whatever inside it of body, bones, or dust”, and he has it burnt. Then he masks the mellow red brick of the Hall with stucco and ashlar, plants some indifferent Roman marbles about, and puts up a copy of the Sibyl’s temple at Tivoli on the far bank of the mere. The narrator finds the result “less engaging”. It’s the house from the first page, though. The white stucco is Sir Richard’s, and the Italian portico almost certainly is too, so the house the narrator would like to own is the one the pestilent innovator made. He disapproves of it and wants it anyway, which is roughly where he stood on the witch-trials.

In 1754, after a bad night with a smoking chimney and something rattling at the window, Sir Richard decides he can’t sleep in his room again. He wants a western look-out, so the sun can’t wake him early, and the housekeeper, Mrs Chiddock, has to tell him the only room like that is Sir Matthew’s, the West Chamber. He flings open the casement and orders his bed moved in. Young William Crome, the old vicar’s grandson, happens to ride through that morning with a packet of his grandfather’s papers, and Sir Richard reads the Sortes and is amused. Cut it down is “one prudent piece of advice”, and he means to take it. He tries the family Bible himself, gets “Thou shalt seek me in the morning, and I shall not be,” and waves it away. “No more prophets for me!”

One of his guests is the Bishop of Kilmore, unusual among Irish bishops of his day for having actually lived in his see, who tells him on the terrace that none of his Irish flock would sleep in that room, since it’s the worst of luck to sleep near an ash. Sir Richard says the tree comes down tomorrow. Told that the nearest branches can’t reach his glass, he asks what, then, “scratched and rustled so” in the night and covered the dust on his sill “with lines and marks”. They settle on rats coming up through the ivy. “That was the Bishop’s idea, and Sir Richard jumped at it.”

Then the story drops into the present tense and puts us in the room. “And now we are in his bedroom, with the light out and the Squire in bed.” The night is warm, so the window is open. Sir Richard seems to be moving his head rapidly to and fro, and then, “so deceptive is the half-darkness”, to have several heads, “round and brownish”, moving “even as low as his chest”. Something drops off the bed “with a soft plump, like a kitten” and is out of the window, then another, then four. “Plump” is a word you’d use for a cushion being set down, and it’s the most frightening sound in the book.

Next morning, while the guests stand under the window trading theories about poisoners, Popish emissaries and infected air, a white tom-cat in the fork of the ash leans too far over the hollow in the trunk and falls in, and the noise it makes sends Lady Mary Hervey into a faint. A gardener goes up a ladder with a lantern, looks down the hole, and falls back in a dead faint, dropping the lantern inside, and the tree catches. It burns all day, and the men stand round it killing what comes out: spiders “the size of a man’s head”, “veinous and seared”, covered in greyish hair. When it’s done they find a hollow under the roots with two or three smothered spiders in it and, crouching against the side, the dried body of a woman with “some remains of black hair”, which the examiners judged “clearly dead for a period of fifty years”. It had been sixty-four since Northgate, and the examiners, like whoever couldn’t say whether five or six went up the hill with her, were content with a round number.

“I think I should buy it if the price was five shillings,” Mr Williams tells his golfing partner, “but for some unearthly reason he wants two guineas for it.” Item 978 in the catalogue of Mr J. W. Britnell, the London dealer every collector of topographical prints relies on, reads “Unknown. Interesting mezzotint: View of a manor-house, early part of the century. 15 by 10 inches; black frame. £2 2s.” Britnell adds a typed note drawing attention to it, and Williams sends for it on approval, without much excitement. What arrives, on a Saturday afternoon and a day late, is “a rather indifferent mezzotint, and an indifferent mezzotint is, perhaps, the worst form of engraving known”: a plain manor house with three rows of sash windows, trees, a lawn, and the initials A. W. F. on the margin. “It’s a wretched engraving, and there aren’t even any figures to give it life.” By Sunday afternoon he’s decided that two guineas “is not a very exorbitant price for it now.”

“The Mezzotint” is the third story in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, and it opens by reaching back to the first. The narrator reminds us he has already told the story of his friend Dennistoun and the scrap-book bought for 250 francs, and says word of it reached Williams, who runs an art museum at another university. Williams finds it agitating and takes some comfort from his job description. He isn’t expected to hunt manuscripts in obscure corners of the Continent; that’s the library’s business. His department, English topographical drawings and engravings, is “homely and familiar”, and he buys from Britnell to fill gaps in “the rank and file” of the collection rather than to find rarities. James calls the university Bridgeford and the museum the Ashleian, which Jeremy Musson at Country Life reads as a nod to the Ashmolean in Oxford.

The picture changes in stages, and for most of that first evening Williams is the one person in the room not looking at it. Professor Binks spots a head at the very edge of the print, “hardly more than a black blot”, its back to the viewer, looking at the house. Later, over whist, a visitor named Garwood calls the figure “rather too grotesque” but “somehow very impressive”, and Williams, busy pouring whisky-and-soda, doesn’t cross the room to look. Past midnight, turning down his lamp, he sees it properly. The figure is in the middle of the lawn, “crawling on all-fours towards the house”, and it’s “muffled in a strange black garment with a white cross on the back.”

What he does next is the funniest thing in the book, and I think James knew it. He carries the picture across the passage to his second set of rooms, locks it in a drawer and sports both outer doors, but before he goes to bed he writes out and signs “an account of the extraordinary change which the picture had undergone since it had come into his possession.” Lying awake, he’s consoled that “the behaviour of the picture did not depend upon his own unsupported testimony.” Next morning his neighbour Nisbet comes to breakfast, describes the print without being told why and signs his description. Garwood is fetched and gives a statement, which is also signed, and Nisbet photographs the thing. That’s three signed documents and a photograph before lunch on a Sunday. It’s a curator’s instinct, the condition report and the chain of custody, and James never once lets Williams notice how odd it is.

Nisbet is the first to say out loud that the house is a place where something is happening to someone. “The question is, has it happened already, or is it going to come off?” The figure has gone from the lawn, and a ground-floor window to the left of the door is open. Williams decides “we’re meant to see the whole thing”, and the three of them go for a walk, keeping together so nobody lets slip a word that would bring “the whole of the Phasmatological Society about their ears.”

They come back at five to find Williams’s skip, Robert Filcher, sitting in his master’s chair and staring at the picture “with undisguised horror”. Filcher is “a servant of considerable standing” who sets the standard of etiquette for his own college and several others (“the name is not my own invention,” the narrator adds), so sitting down is a measure of how badly he’s been shaken, and he apologises for it at once. He’s also the first person to look at the picture and think about the baby in it rather than the phenomenon. “It ain’t the pictur I should ‘ang where my little girl could see it, sir.” She once saw a “Door Bible”, which I take to be one of the Doré editions, and they had to sit up with her for three or four nights; “if she was to ketch a sight of this skelinton here, or whatever it is, carrying off the pore baby, she would be in a taking.” In “Lost Hearts” the servants knew what was wrong with the house and wouldn’t tell the master upstairs. Filcher tells the gentlemen exactly what he thinks, politely, asks whether they’ll want anything that evening, and goes off to the rest of his rounds.

The figure is upright now, walking towards the front of the picture with long strides, the moon behind it, the black drapery hanging over a face of which only “a white dome-like forehead and a few straggling hairs” can be seen. Its arms are clasped over a child, “whether dead or living it was not possible to say.” The legs “were horribly thin.” Then it holds still for two hours while the three men take turns watching, and by the time they come back from Hall it’s gone.

At half past eleven that night Williams finds the house in Murray’s Guide to Essex. It’s Anningley Hall, a solid Queen Anne house belonging to the Francis family, which is now extinct, “the last heir having disappeared mysteriously in infancy in the year 1802.” The father, Arthur Francis, was a talented amateur engraver in mezzotint who lived in complete retirement after his son vanished and was found dead in his studio on the third anniversary, “having just completed an engraving of the house.” So A. W. F. is the father, and the picture Williams sneered at for having no figures to give it life is a portrait of the house a child was taken from, made by the man who lost him. I read the plate as his and the performance as Gawdy’s. Francis engraved an empty lawn in front of the house, and the thing that crosses it is the one figure he would never have put there.

Green, the old bursar, supplies the backstory when he gets back from Brighton. Francis was “very much down on these poaching fellows” and had them turned off the estate one by one, all but a man called Gawdy. “Squires could do a lot of things then that they daren’t think of now.” The keepers caught Gawdy in a wood, he shot one of them, “that was what Francis wanted”, and he was “strung up in double-quick time” and buried on the north side of the church. He had no relations; “he was the last of his line: kind of spes ultima gentis”, and whoever took the boy meant to “put an end to his line, too.” Green thinks Gawdy did it himself. “Booh! I hate to think of it! have some whisky, Williams!”

Gawdy’s family had been lords of the manor once, Green says, and could still show a row of tombs in the church, which is why Williams asks whether he was like the man in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It’s the right comparison: an old name sunk to poverty, with the monuments to prove what it had been. Green dares say so, but “it’s not a book I could ever read myself.” He’s also the only character with any sympathy for the hanged man (“poor chap!”, “poor devil!”), Hardy or no Hardy.

Michael Kellermeyer at Oldstyle Tales reads the story through the old maxim that the sins of the father are visited on the sons, and that’s true as far as it goes, but the revenge here is more exact than a proverb. It’s arithmetic: one last heir for another. Read next to “Lost Hearts” it’s almost a mirror. There a gentleman picked victims nobody with any standing would ask after, and got away with it until they came for him. Here a squire uses the law to dispose of a man whose family has already fallen, and the man answers without needing the law at all. The difference is that Abney’s ghosts came for Abney, while whatever crossed the lawn at Anningley came for an infant. Green shudders and reaches for the whisky, the guidebook records a disappearance, and only Filcher pictures the child.

The reviewer at FictionFan’s Book Reviews found it didn’t tingle the spine much, because “the picture appears to present no threat to Mr Williams.” That’s accurate, and I think it’s the design rather than a flaw. The danger was over a century before Williams opened the parcel. What the picture does is make three comfortable men watch a crime they can’t affect, on a schedule that suits it, while they write things down. The Sadducean Professor of Ophiology, hearing the story later, says only, “Oh, those Bridgeford people will say anything,” a sentiment the narrator says “met with the reception it deserved.” The print is in the Ashleian now. It’s been tested for sympathetic ink without result, Britnell knew nothing about it “save that he was sure it was uncommon”, and “though carefully watched, it has never been known to change again.”

Mr Abney asks Stephen Elliott how old he is twice in the first two minutes of their acquaintance. The boy is an orphan, brought by post-chaise from Warwickshire in September 1811 to live with an elderly cousin at Aswarby Hall in Lincolnshire, and Abney darts out of his study rubbing his hands to greet him. “I’m twelve years old next birthday, sir,” Stephen says, and Abney asks when that is and answers before the boy can, “Eleventh of September, eh?”, as though he’d looked it up already. “I like—ha, ha!—I like to get these things down in my book. Sure it’s twelve? Certain?” On a first reading it’s the fussiness of an old bachelor who has no idea how to talk to children. On a second it’s the worst line in “Lost Hearts”.

It’s the second story in the collection, after Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book, and James read it to the Chit-Chat Club at Cambridge on 28 October 1893, 133 years ago tomorrow. The Pall Mall Magazine printed it in December 1895. James wasn’t fond of it and thought of it as filler, and I think he was wrong. Canon Alberic’s scholar is a tourist who buys trouble; this one is the trouble, and every clue to what he is gets laid down in plain sight long before the explanation arrives: the locked bathroom, the cellar, the equinox, the left side of a boy’s chest.

Mrs Bunch, the housekeeper, is the first person at the Hall who makes Stephen feel at home, and one November evening by her fire he asks whether Mr Abney is a good man and will go to heaven. She answers with two stories meant as proof of his kindness. Seven years back, master took in a foreign boy who came “a-tweaking his ‘urdy-gurdy round and about the drive”; before that, a silent girl with no one belonging to her. Each of them was gone one morning before anyone was up. Abney was “wonderful put about, and had all the ponds dragged.” The boy left his hurdy-gurdy behind, it’s still lying on a shelf, and Stephen spends the rest of the evening trying to get a tune out of it. Nothing with a ghost in it is as hard to read as that: a child playing the instrument of the child whose place he’s been brought in to fill.

The servants know the house is wrong, and neither of them will say so upstairs. In March Mrs Bunch finds long parallel slits in the left breast of Stephen’s nightgown, which match scratches on the outside of his bedroom door, “too high up for any cat or dog”. Her advice is to lock the door and say his prayers, and “I wouldn’t say nothing to master.” The next evening Parkes, the butler, announces that master can fetch his own wine after dark, because he’s heard voices behind the door of the far bin in the cellar. Michael Kellermeyer, at Oldstyle Tales, reads the adults in the story as “either clueless enablers or sinister threats”. These two are enablers, but of a particular kind: frightened, decent, and dependent on the one man they’d have to accuse.

Stephen has already seen one of the children by then, in a dream: a figure in the locked, disused bathroom at the end of his passage, hands pressed over its heart. The narrator steps out from behind the story to describe it. It reminds him, he says, of “what I once beheld myself in the famous vaults of St Michan’s Church in Dublin, which possess the horrid property of preserving corpses from decay for centuries.” It’s the only place where the narrator admits to having seen anything like it himself, and that one dry sentence from a man who has toured a crypt does more for the dream than any adjective could.

Abney, meanwhile, keeps reminding his cousin that the spring equinox is coming, that the ancients thought it “a critical time for the young”, that he should shut his bedroom window at night, and that Censorinus had some valuable remarks on the subject. I’ve gone back and forth on what that warning is. It could be plain malice, a man enjoying a joke only he understands. I think it’s more likely bookkeeping. His papers later dismiss the ghosts’ “feeble efforts”, but feeble against a man of philosophic temperament, he means. The slits in that nightgown show they weren’t feeble against a boy, and that may be exactly what he was guarding against.

On 24 March 1812 Abney asks Stephen to come to his study at eleven that night and to tell nobody. At ten, from his window, Stephen sees the two of them on the gravel terrace: a girl with her hands clasped over her heart, and a ragged boy with nails “fearfully long”, raising his arms “with an appearance of menace and of unappeasable hunger and longing”, with “a black and gaping rent” on the left side of his chest. At eleven the study door won’t give, though the key is on the outside, and Stephen hears his cousin speaking, then trying to cry out.

The explanation is a set of papers on Abney’s table, which Stephen reads years later, “when he was of an age to understand them”. Abney has spent twenty years testing a recipe he credits to Hermes Trismegistus: absorb the hearts of three people under twenty-one, and gain “a complete ascendancy over those orders of spiritual beings which control the elemental forces of our universe.” He chose the subjects of his experiment from “such persons as could conveniently be removed without occasioning a sensible gap in society.” Phoebe Stanley, “a girl of gipsy extraction”, on 24 March 1792. Giovanni Paoli, “a wandering Italian lad”, on 23 March 1805. Stephen was to follow on 24 March 1812. The method is to burn the living heart to ashes and take them in about a pint of red wine, preferably port, and the remains, he advises, are best hidden in “a disused bathroom or wine-cellar”.

The cruelty is in the register. He finds the word “victim” “repugnant in the highest degree to my feelings”. He expects “some annoyance” from “the psychic portion of the subjects, which popular language dignifies with the name of ghosts.” And he was right about the gap. The only search either child got was the one he ordered himself, the servants talked by the fire, and nobody with any standing asked a question about a gipsy girl or an Italian street musician.

They come for him anyway. Abney is found in his chair, his face “stamped with an expression of rage, fright, and mortal pain”, with a lacerated wound in his left side exposing the heart. His knife is clean and there’s no blood on his hands. He gets a coroner, which is more than Phoebe Stanley or Giovanni Paoli ever had, though the coroner sees the open window and settles on a wild creature, and it’s left to Stephen, older and holding the papers, to come to “a very different conclusion.”

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary opens with a sale. In the spring of 1883 an Englishman called Dennistoun spends a day photographing the cathedral at Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, a decayed little town at the foot of the Pyrenees, and by evening he owns a priceless book for 250 francs. M.R. James read “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” to friends at Cambridge in October 1893; it’s his earliest known horror story as well as the first in the collection. The book was on my January reading list in 2018, and I’ve come back to it this autumn.†

The old sacristan won’t leave Dennistoun alone in the building all day. He starts at noises, and at one point he’s found weeping in front of a painting of Saint Bertrand delivering a man from the devil. Dennistoun is too deep in his notebook to care much, though he admits later to hearing “a thin metallic voice laughing high up in the tower.” Back at the sacristan’s house, the old man tells his daughter, “He was laughing in the church.”

The scrap-book holds about 150 leaves that Canon Alberic seems to have cut from the cathedral’s own manuscripts. Near the back is a drawing of Solomon facing a demon, which James likens to “one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South America translated into human form, and endowed with intelligence just less than human.” The sacristan takes 250 francs for the lot and cheers up the moment he’s paid. His daughter presses a silver crucifix on Dennistoun before he goes.

That night, in his hotel room, he takes the crucifix off and lays it on the table, and a black-haired hand appears by his left elbow. The figure from the drawing is rising to its feet behind his chair. The inn’s servants come running at his scream, feel something unseen push past them, and find him unconscious. Selling the book seems to be how the thing changes hands, the old man knows exactly what he’s getting rid of, and the crucifix is the only protection his family can send along with it.

Alberic got what he asked for, too. At the back, on a plan of the cathedral, are questions he put on 12 December 1694 and the answers he got. He’ll find what he’s looking for, he’ll be rich, he’ll be envied. To “Moriarne in lecto meo?” (shall I die in my bed?) the answer is “Ita.” The Gallia Christiana records that he died on 31 December 1701, “in bed, of a sudden seizure.”

Money changes hands once more before the end. On a later visit to the canon’s tomb, Dennistoun admits he’s a Presbyterian but has paid for Masses to be said for Alberic de Mauléon’s rest anyway. “I had no notion they came so dear.”

Amendment, 26 October 2026. I'm still reading the book, and I'll write about each of its stories in turn. ↩