From off the mere, above the oaks, the hern
Come sailing, and the rook fly cawing home.
The scene in front of me is little changed from that the young James took pleasure in over a century ago. Sure enough, a heron is present this afternoon (‘hern’ is an archaic form of the word), roosting in the alders beside Ampton Water. A striking adult bird, its blue-grey plumage is broken up by its black-feathered shoulder and the thick stripe that extends above its eye.
I walk back towards the church of James’s father. A small deer – a muntjac, I presume – peers at me from through the sedges, sliding beneath the cover of a sallow before I can get a proper look. In the churchyard I wander among the headstones, one ghosted with the faint outline of a cherubic face, another with a lichen-covered skeleton. The commonest surname I find is Mothersole, the name James bestowed upon the witch from his story ‘The Ash Tree’. The horrifying Mrs Mothersole goes on to enact a spidery revenge on the descendants of Sir Matthew Fell, the man responsible for her hanging, delivering a chilling rebuke as she stands on the gallows awaiting her fate: ‘There will be guests at the Hall.’ ‘The Ash Tree’ is set in Suffolk, and a mere features in the grounds of the fictitious Castringham Hall; it’s not unreasonable to suppose that the now-vanished house across the park from James’s childhood home might have been the model for the story’s location.
Alongside the grave of Charles and Ann Mothersole I find the remains of a blackbird, dead a week or so and becoming one with the surrounding soil and oak leaves. Banding its leg is an identification ring from the Natural History Museum. Later, I learn the bird’s melancholy fate: ringed in Great Livermere as a fledgling the previous spring, barely moving from its place of birth.
Towards the back of the churchyard, beyond a dark rectangle of yews (which bring to mind the whispering grove from James’s story ‘The Rose Garden’), stands a spindly cross. This might be the memorial to his mother and father that James had erected. I look for the word ‘PAX’, which is meant to be inscribed on it, but can only make out the letters IHS at its apex: Jesus, saviour of mankind. The stone is crusted with pale-green moss, obscuring the writing on its base. I start to flake off the material with my fingernail in an attempt to expose further clues. There is an inscription, though it’s not easy to read – and something about the act of uncovering it feels wrong, like the sort of foolish feat an inquisitive scholar in one of James’s stories would do and later come to regret.
I decide to leave it a mystery.
Returning to where I parked my car by the front gate of the churchyard, I peer over a wall, through the rhododendrons on the other side, at a cream-coloured building. It’s James’s childhood home – a square, solid-looking place rising to three storeys, with plenty of rooms for the young James to have lost himself in on the occasions he was here and not away at Temple Grove prep school, on the outskirts of London between Mortlake and Richmond Park. This was followed by Eton, where in 1882, and already writing his own ghost stories (as well as indulging in more serious sixth-form study, including a love of the classics, ancient manuscripts and the architecture of churches), he passed his scholarship exam for King’s College, Cambridge.
I contemplate the chances of being allowed to take a closer look at the rectory, restyled as the new Livermere Hall and used as accommodation for expensive game-shooting trips, but decide that rocking up unannounced is unlikely to gain me a warm welcome and an offer of the full guided tour (I tried the same earlier, without success, at the farm neighbouring the derelict church of Little Livermere). Besides, the daylight is waning and the rain now falling more keenly. As I drive from the village, past the dark earth of countless ploughed-open fields, the final words of James’s last published story, ‘A Vignette’, resonate:
Are there here and there sequestered places which some curious creatures still frequent, whom once on a time anybody could see and speak to as they went about on their daily occasions, whereas now only at rare intervals in a series of years does one cross their paths and become aware of them?†
‘Lost Hearts’ was probably the second of James’s published ghost stories to be written (after ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’), finished at some time between summer 1892 and autumn of the following year. It appeared in print in the Pall Mall Magazine in December 1895, then in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, his first collection of supernatural tales, in 1904.
By this point, James had been made a dean (of King’s) and, from 1893, the director of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum. In addition to an expert command of Latin, Greek and French, he also had a familiarity with German and Italian – and even a modicum of Hebrew and Danish. These formidable linguistic skills served him admirably: he was a noted scholar of the medieval, and of esoteric branches of study such as biblical apocrypha – the sorts of subjects the lone middle-aged protagonists of his stories specialise in. Now in his early forties – though always, perhaps, appearing a little older than his years – James was a tall, well-built man with dark hair (parted to the right) and rounded spectacles. His features were soft, apart from a strong, square jaw. He spoke quietly, often chuckling, often drawing on his curved tobacco pipe.
Photo (M. R. James) Hulton Archive/Stringer via Getty Images
I knock and enter the opaque-paned door to the Founder’s Library of the Fitzwilliam. Inside the architecture appears largely unchanged since James’s time, when the room acted as his office. Built in 1848, it houses ten thousand fine volumes in carved oak bookcases that stretch more than twenty feet up to the white, geometrically patterned ceiling. An imposing marble-surrounded fireplace dominates the room. It’s a place of work and study where today the museum’s manuscript department is based – something James would approve of, I’m sure. A young woman at a table is leafing through an oversized illuminated book of musical scores, the only sound apart from the occasional swish of turning pages being the background hum of a dehumidifier. It is a soporific, comforting space that sends me back to another time, another world – and it’s easy on this darkening winter’s afternoon to imagine the director at his desk, squinting through his glasses in the pooled light at one of the antiquated tomes that line the vast shelves.‡
James himself appeared rather indifferent to ‘Lost Hearts’, writing to his friend James McBryde in March 1904 that ‘I don’t much care about it.’ The same was not true of Monty’s feelings for the man who was to become the illustrator of his first collection of ghost stories, his affection rising from the page as he later described McBryde in glowing terms: ‘no one who, even when he supposed himself out of spirits, brought so much enjoyment into an expedition. A smile will never be far off when his friends speak of him …’
Photo by the author, reproduction by permission of the Syndics of The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
James McBryde was a decade younger than MRJ – the three initials were how James usually signed his own name, and how he was referred to by many acquaintances – arriving at King’s College, Cambridge from Shrewsbury in 1893 to study medicine (‘Natural Sciences’ as it was then known). The dashing McBryde came to be a close companion to James, joining him on summer cycling trips, including those to Denmark and Sweden that provided the setting for the