The Burning Court

by John Dickson Carr

  “You’ve answered your own question. Because you still do believe it, don’t you, or you wouldn’t be arguing with me?”

  There was a silence.

  “But that,” Stevens went on, “is aside from the immediate point. You ask me why Mrs. Henderson should swear so positively that a dead woman walked through a brick wall. Let me ask you, why should Mr. Henderson swear so positively that a dead man walked through a granite wall? Why should he be so insistent that not one stone was disturbed in a sealed crypt? We’ve got two flat impossibilities in this case, and only two: first, the disappearance of the woman from this room; second, the disappearance of the body from the coffin. And it’s a curious thing that the only two witnesses to both those happenings are the Hendersons.”

  Brennan was whistling softly through his teeth. He reached into his pocket, produced a package of cigarettes, and passed it round; and each accepted a cigarette, like duelists accepting swords.

  Brennan said, “Go on.”

  “Let’s take the physical circumstances of this murder, if it was a murder. You, Captain,” Stevens went on, “maintain that the murderer must have been an outsider. I deny that. It seems to me almost certain, that the murderer must have been a member of this household. For there’s just one thing which seems to have been generally overlooked: the way in which the poison was administered. It was administered in an egg, milk, and port-wine mixture.”

  “I begin to see—” said Brennan.

  “Yes. To begin with, is it likely that an outsider would come sneaking in here, get the eggs out of your ice-box, beat them up, add milk from the ice-box and port from your cellar, to make up the mixture? Or, conversely, that an outsider would walk across the fields carrying a bowl of the stuff in order to fill a silver cup on your sideboard? But it leads up to the biggest difficulty: how could any outsider expect to make Miles drink the stuff? You know what trouble you had with him about things that were good for him, particularly on that night. If an outsider had wanted to poison him, an outsider would have chosen something he would certainly drink—like champagne or brandy. No; that homely egg-and-port combination is something that would have occurred to a member of the household, who would (1) think of making it, (2) be able to make Miles drink it. Lucy might have done it, Edith might have done it, the nurse might have done it, even the maid might have done it. But Lucy was dancing at St. Davids, Edith was playing bridge, Miss Corbett was rioting at the Y.W.C.A., and Margaret in Fairmount Park. Which brings us to the question of alibis. There are just two people whose alibis you haven’t checked or even questioned. I don’t need to mention them. But kindly note, with regard to the homely mixture, that one of them is the cook. And both, of them, I think you’ve said, inherit substantially in your uncle’s will.”

  Mark shrugged his shoulders.

  “I can’t believe it, and that’s flat,” he returned. “In the first place, they’ve been with us too long. In the second place, if they killed Uncle Miles and are cooking up a story to cover it, why should they make the story supernatural? What good would that do them? It seems a highly unusual and romantic way to go about it, when ordinary murderers can’t get away with plain lies.”

  “Let me ask you something. Last night you told us her story about the mysterious visitor, and about the qualms she had: the ‘funniness’ of the figure, even that pleasant little detail about the possibility that the visitor’s neck might not have been securely fastened on. …”

  “WHAT?” said Brennan.

  “Now think, Mark. Did you put that idea into her head, as we thought last night—or did she put it into yours?”

  “I don’t know,” Mark said, abruptly. “That’s what I’ve been trying to think.”

  “But if she hadn’t suggested it to you, would it have occurred to you at all?”

  “Maybe not. I don’t know.”

  “Here’s something we all know, though. Four of us opened that crypt. Who was the only one of the four who definitely did swear he believed in ghosts? Who tried to throw a supernatural atmosphere over it, even to intimating that there were Powers watching us? Who went to fantastic lengths in swearing that nobody had approached that crypt? Wasn’t it Joe Henderson?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. But there’s where it sticks. Do you mean to tell me that a pair of innocent old family retainers would suddenly turn into a couple of demons——”

  “Not at all. They’re not demons; you’re the one who’s been importing the demons. I admit that they’re very amiable people. But some very amiable people have been known to commit murder. I admit that they’re faithful to you. But they had no reason to be faithful to Miles, who has been so much abroad that (like you) they hardly knew him. And money was to come from Miles to them only on your father’s wish. As for the supernatural story, what was the origin of that?”

  “Origin?”

  Brennan intervened, pointing a cigarette which had burnt crookedly up one side and seemed to express his state of mind.

  “All this,” he said, “is words and words and words. Just the same, I think I see what Mr. Stevens is driving at. Here’s the way I understand it. When the old man died, nobody had any suspicion he’d been poisoned—except you.” He nodded towards Mark. “Because you found the silver cup in that cupboard. And right away Mrs. Henderson comes to you with a story of goblins and women walking out of walls—she didn’t say anything to me about the woman’s head not being fastened on, whatever that is; but all the rest of it’s the same—she comes and tells you that story. Because why? Because you’ll half-believe it. Because it’ll make you hush the thing up all the more. The most you’ll do is to open the crypt. And then, when you discover that the goblins have apparently stolen the old man’s body, you’ll hush it up all the more. Doesn’t that square with everything that pair have told us?”

  Mark contemplated him with sudden amusement.

  “Then,” Mark asked, “the whole parade of lies and body-snatching was got up just to impress me so that I’d keep it all quiet?”

  “It might be.”

  “But in that case,” said Mark, “will you tell me why yesterday, before the crypt was even opened, Mrs. Henderson blurted out exactly the same story to the Commissioner of Police?”

  They looked at each other.

  “That’s true,” Stevens admitted.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that, either. Don’t forget your brother Ogden, Mr. Despard,” said Brennan. “He’s a very smart lad, that one is. He suspected, too. And there’s no knowing how far he suspected, or the Hendersons thought he did. They’d know he wouldn’t keep it quiet. So maybe Mrs. Henderson got hysterical and did what many another woman has done: she knew she had committed herself, and she wanted to try out her story.”

  Again Brennan wandered over to the wardrobe and stared at it, but his air was belligerent now.

  “What I’d like to know is how this wardrobe figures in the case. And, friends, I’ve got a hunch it does—somehow. I don’t mean that there’s anything mechanically wrong with it. But it was on the floor inside this thing that you found the poison-cup, wasn’t it? Now, why did the murderer put it in there? Why were both the harmless glass of milk and the not-so-harmless cup of arsenic stuck right in here? Why did the cat follow ’em in, and, it’d seem, drink from the cup?” He poked among the suits hanging inside. “Your uncle certainly had a lot of clothes, Mr. Despard.”

  “Yes. I was telling the others last night he was supposed to spend a lot of time here changing his clothes for his own edification. But he didn’t like any of us to know he was quite so——”

  “That,” said a new voice, “is not all he did in here.”

  Edith Despard had come in by the hall door, with such quietness that none of them had heard her. But it was not the quietness of stealth. The underlying expression of her face they did not then understand, and were not to understand until somewhat later. Nevertheless, though her eyes still seemed a trifle sanded from lack of sleep, the thin-boned good looks had a quietness of certain
ty. To Stevens she appeared for some reason much younger than last night. Under her arm she had two books, on which the fingers of her other hand were tapping gently. In some subtle way she was Fashion; she was handsome and bedecked, though afterwards Stevens realized that he had no notion of what she had been wearing, except that it was black.

  Mark was startled. He protested: “Edith, you shouldn’t be here! You promised to stay in bed today. Lucy says you didn’t sleep at all last night: except once, and that was a nightmare.”

  “That’s right,” said Edith. She turned to Brennan with a business-like politeness. “Captain Brennan, isn’t it? The others were telling me about you a few minutes ago, when you dismissed them.” Her smile had genuine charm. “But I’m sure you won’t dismiss me.”

  Brennan was affable but noncommittal. “Miss Despard? I’m afraid we’ve been—” he nodded towards the shattered wall, and coughed.

  “Oh, that was to be expected. I have the solution of your difficulties here,” said Edith, and gently touched the books under her arm. “You see, I overheard you saying you believed the wardrobe there had some connection with this case. It has, very much so. I found these books inside it last night. The second volume turned down easily at one chapter; so I gathered that Uncle Miles, though you could hardly call him a man of books, had found something in it to study. I should like to read you some of it—all of you. You may not find it enthralling. It is academic and even rather dull. But I think you ought to listen. Will you close the door, Ted?”

  “Book?” said Mark. “What book?”

  “It is Grimaud’s History of Witchcraft,” replied Edith.

  Sitting down in the basket-chair by the window, she spoke with no more apology or diffidence than if she were dealing with a laundry-list. Yet, just before she began to read aloud, she lifted her eyes towards Stevens; and he was startled at the interest and curiosity with which she regarded him, as though she wondered. Her voice was clear and fluent, if without great expression.

  “The root of the belief in the ‘non-dead’ (pas-morts) appears to have originated in France in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. It is first written of by the Sieur de la Marre in 1737 (Traité sur la Magie, Sortilêge, Possessions, Obsessions, et Maléfices); for some years it was seriously discussed even by men of science; and controversy about it was again aroused by a criminal trial so recently as 1861.

  “Briefly, the non-dead are those persons—commonly women—who have been condemned to death for the crime of poisoning, and whose bodies have been burnt at the stake, whether alive or dead. It is here that the province of criminology touches the province of witchcraft.

  “From the earliest times the use of poison was regarded as a branch of sorcery, nor is the origin of the belief difficult to trace. ‘Love-potions’ or ‘hate-potions,’ admittedly a part of magic, have always been the mask under which the poisoner has worked; and to administer even a harmless love-potion was made punishable under Roman law.1 During the Middle Ages it was identified with heresy. In England, as late as 1615, a trial for murder by poison was, in effect, a trial for sorcery. When Anne Turner was tried before Lord Chief Justice Coke for poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury, there were shown in court her ‘inchantments’—figures in lead, parchments, a piece of human skin—and the spectators could feel the wind of the Black Man’s passing.

  “ ‘At the shewing of these and inchanted papers and other pictures in court,’ writes the recorder, ‘there was heard a crack from the scaffolds, which caused great fear, tumult, and confusion among the spectators, every one fearing hurt, as if the Devil had been present, and grown angry to have his workmanship shewed by such as were not his own scholars.’2

  “But it was in France, during the latter part of the same century, that the practice of murder-cum-diablerie reached its height. It is stated that in Lisbon there were so many hags practising witchcraft that they had a quarter of their own.3 Out of Italy (where the ladies of Toffana’s secret-society poisoned six hundred people) came Glaser and Exili, who searched for the Philosopher’s Stone and sold arsenic. In another chapter we have seen how eagerly the ladies of Louis XIV’s court embraced the cult of Satanism, notably the sacrifice of a child on the body of a woman during the Black Mass.4 Muffled rites took place in-muffled rooms. The witch La Voisin evoked ghosts at Saint-Denis. Those enlisted now for Satanism were not, in Gaule’s phrase, ‘every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furr’d brow, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue’: they were the handsomest women procurable, from seamstress to court lady.5 And husbands and fathers died.

  “Through the confessional, some hint of these underground crafts reached the Grand Penitentiary of Paris. At the Arsenal, near the Bastille, was established the famous ‘Burning Court,’ whose vengeance was the wheel and the fire. The mysterious death of Madame de Montespan, Louis XIV’s favourite, in 1672, gave impetus to the poison-seekers. Between 1672 and 1680 some of the greatest ladies in France were summoned before the Burning Court: among them two nieces of Cardinal Mazarin, the Duchess of Bouillon, and the Countess of Soissons, mother of Prince Eugene. But what opened every secret cabinet to the world was the trial in 1676—a trial lasting three months—of the Marquise de Brinvilliers.

  “The activities of the Marquise de Brinvilliers had been revealed through the accidental death of her lover, Captain Sainte-Croix. Among Sainte-Croix’s effects was a teakwood box to which was attached a paper of instructions that after his death it ‘might be delivered to the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who resides in the rue Neuve St. Paul.’ The box was filled with poisons, including corrosive sublimate, antimony, and opium. Madame de Brinvilliers fled; but was ultimately brought back to trial, on a charge of wholesale poisoning, by the efforts of a detective named Desprez. Though she was ably defended by Maître Nivelle, it was Desprez who secured her conviction. He produced in court a written confession which she had privately entrusted to him. It was a hysterical document, containing—among a terrible list of things she had really done—things which apparently she could not have done. She was sentenced to be beheaded and burnt.6

  “ ‘After the sentence, in order to make her divulge the names of any accomplices, she was put to the “water-torture.” This was a part of the judicial system: the victim was placed on a table, a leather funnel was put into her mouth, and water was poured into it until…’”

  Briefly, Edith Despard raised her eyes from the book. The grey light of the window lay flat on her hair; and Edith’s expression was only one of great curiosity and interest. None of the men moved. Stevens was staring at the pattern in the carpet. He remembered now the address of the house in Paris to which Dr. Welden had told him to go if he were interested in famous crimes. It was Number 16, rue Neuve St. Paul.

  “Madame de Sévigné saw her going to execution afterwards, and laughed and gossiped. A great multitude saw her do penance before Nôtre Dame, in a white shift, barefoot, with a lighted candle in her hand. She was now forty-two years old, and much of her doll’s beauty was gone. But she was a model of penitence and devotion, which satisfied the noble Abbé Pirot. She does not appear, however, to have forgiven Desprez: and, on mounting the scaffold, she uttered some words which were imperfectly understood. Her body was burnt in the Place de Grève.

  “Due to the revelations at the trial, the authorities were ultimately able to penetrate the net of diablerie beneath the court of the Grand Monarque. La Chausée, a servant of Sainte-Croix, had already been broken to death on the wheel. The witch and poisoner La Voisin, taken with all her accomplices, was burnt alive in 1680. The dancers before Satan were gone; their ashes were scattered; and the great devil grinned alone on Nôtre Dame.

  “But all persons do not seem to have accepted this. Although there is no apparent reason of their belief, Maître Nivelle is said to have told the Grand Penitentiary: ‘There is something beyond this. I saw them die. They were not ordinary women. They will be restless.’

  “Now, what is behind this? It is no
ted that even today there are outbreaks of Satanism in Europe, as instanced by the investigation of MM. Marcel Nadaud and Maurice Pelletier so recently as 1925.7 It needs no documentation to show that there have been outbreaks of poisoning, mass-murders—usually by women, and usually without any apparent motive. For instance (argues Perrot), there was Anna Maria Schonleben in Bavaria in 1811, and Marie Jeanneret in Switzerland in 1868;8 there was Frau Van de Leyden, who poisoned twenty-seven people; there are even men, like Palmer and Cream in England.9 What motive actuated them? In the case of the women, there was seldom any gain to be derived from the death of their victims, no hope of profit, no wrong to right. They were not mad: even though they seem puzzled to explain their own motives.

  “It has been argued that theirs was a simple lust, and that they loved the little white powder of arsenic because it gave them the power of queens and the workers of destinies. But this does not explain all. If the women possessed a desire to kill, it cannot be thought that their victims possessed a desire to be killed. The most curious feature in all of these cases is the ease, the sense of fatality, the complete willingness of these victims to undergo it—even when they must have known they were being poisoned. Frau Van de Leyden said openly to a victim: ‘It will be your rum in a month.’ Jedago said: ‘Wherever I go, people die.’ Yet they remained undenounced. It is as though there were some diabolic bond uniting murderer and victim, something not unlike a spell or a hypnosis.

  “This theory was first vaguely stated by the Sieur de la Marre in 1737, due to a case which agitated Paris in that year. A girl of nineteen—Thérèse La Voisin, the same surname as the alleged sorceress who was burnt in 1680—had been arrested for a series of murders. Her parents were charcoal-burners in the Forest of Chantilly. She could not read or write. She had been born in the ordinary way; and until the age of sixteen seemed quite normal. But even the ponderous detective wits of the time were aroused by eight deaths in that neighbourhood. A curious circumstance was that under the pillow or blanket of each person was found a cord—usually of hair, but sometimes of string or plaited hair—tied into nine small knots.