“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.”

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