The Curse of the House of Foskett

by Kasasian, M. R. C.

  Sidney Grice put on his gloves. ‘Lady Foskett is a woman of the highest breeding and intelligence,’ he replied, ‘but when all is said and done, that is all she is – a woman.’

  ‘There he is again.’

  The boy in the yellow jacket was hurrying towards us.

  ‘Fought you’d come back this way.’ He looked up at me with his big child’s world-exhausted eyes. ‘Can’t keep it.’ He reached inside his shirt. ‘Not after the kindness what you did me.’

  He held out my purse and I took it.

  ‘I will wager it is empty,’ Sidney Grice said as the boy raced away.

  ‘Every penny is still here.’

  ‘The dirty blighter,’ my guardian said. ‘He has stolen my handkerchief.’

  ‘Where there are crowds there are pickpockets,’ I reminded him.

  *

  We had only just returned when a black carriage stopped outside with curtained windows and a darker shape on the paintwork where a crest must have been removed.

  The groom jumped down and lowered the steps for a tall man to disembark. He reminded me of a frog with his bulbous eyes, thin tight lips and slack throat, but his movements were stately, deliberate and precise as he glided erect across the pavement.

  Sidney Grice groaned. ‘What the deuce is he up to now?’

  ‘Who?’

  I did not have to wait long for an answer, for Molly was dusting the hallway and answered his ring almost immediately.

  ‘It’s that Honourable Sir Whatsisname again, sir.’ She presented his card on a tray but her employer waved it away.

  ‘Send him in.’ He climbed reluctantly to his feet, ran his hand through his hair and checked his cravat and eye patch.

  ‘Mr Grice, how good of you to see me at such short notice.’

  My guardian grunted and indicated a chair, but both men remained standing.

  ‘What is it this time?’ he demanded and our visitor glanced meaningfully at me. ‘You can rely on Miss Middleton’s discretion.’

  The man’s face stretched politely. ‘Miss Middleton. My master expressed a wish to meet her, after the newspaper accounts of your last case.’

  ‘It was not my last case,’ Sidney Grice told him, ‘and no such meeting shall take place whilst she is in my care.’

  Our caller scrutinized me and turned up his lordly nose. ‘Probably just as well to avoid disappointment.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I hate being disappointed.’

  His lip quivered with unspoken retorts. ‘If you are quite sure…’

  ‘You have my word,’ my guardian said and the visitor narrowed his eyes.

  ‘My master finds himself in an embarrassing situation.’

  ‘When does he not?’

  The man flushed. ‘My master had what I might describe as an indiscreet correspondence with a well-known lady of the theatre. When their… friendship ended the lady exacted a large sum of money upon receipt of which she returned all of my master’s letters to her and a photograph which he had signed with expressions of an indelicate nature. The letters were burnt but the photograph seems to have disappeared. Were it to fall into the wrong hands…’

  Sidney Grice threw his arms into the air. ‘When will he ever learn and start behaving like a grown man?’

  Our visitor bridled. ‘I really cannot allow you to speak of his… my master in such terms.’

  Sidney Grice tossed his head. ‘I do not have time for all this twaddle. Tell your client to look under the false bottom of his escritoire drawer.’

  The man looked flustered. ‘Is that the message you wish me to convey?’

  ‘Convey whatever message you choose,’ my guardian said. ‘Just tell him to be more careful and to stop wasting my time.’

  Our visitor tightened his tight lips. ‘Very well, Mr Grice. Please ring for me to be seen out.’

  ‘Not your favourite client?’ I asked when he had gone.

  ‘I am sick of playing nursemaid to middle-aged children.’ Sidney Grice fell back into his chair.

  I rang for tea but did not ask him about the Prince of Wales’s feathers on the visitor’s cravat pin.

  15

  The Doctor and the Berries

  Bryanston Street looked quite similar to Gower Street with its white stone-faced ground floors and the red-brick uppers, alongside the railings and the basement moats of the long Georgian terraces. After fifty yards or so we turned right down a mews, a narrower street with rows of stables to the left and tall, ramshackle houses to the right. My guardian rapped on the roof of our hansom and we came to a halt. He paid the cabby with a large tip.

  ‘I will give you the same again if you wait.’

  The cabby showed no sign of hearing him, but lowered his head and allowed his horse to do the same.

  Dr Berry’s consulting rooms were on the ground floor and a dowdy middle-aged maid with gappy, crooked teeth showed us straight in. A sombrely dressed woman about ten years older than me sat behind a desk, writing notes. She stood and held out her hand, which Sidney Grice took suspiciously.

  ‘You are the doctor’s wife?’

  ‘I have no husband,’ she said.

  ‘But you are wearing a ring.’

  ‘It wards off unwelcome advances from male patients.’ The lady smiled. ‘I shall not toy with you, Mr Grice, as I am all too used to the confusion I cause by my choice of profession. I am Dr Berry.’

  ‘A woman.’ My guardian put his hand to his mouth. ‘How revolting.’

  Dr Berry smiled again. ‘If you have come to see me about your revulsion for women I can do nothing for you.’

  ‘It is not an illness.’

  ‘That is debatable.’

  Sidney Grice recovered with great effort. ‘I have come to see you about a Mr Edwin Slab who, I believe, was a patient’ – he was unable to disguise his incredulity – ‘of yours.’

  ‘Mr Horatio Green told me to expect you,’ Dr Berry said. ‘I have heard all about their ridiculous club.’

  ‘You certified the cause of death as a seizure,’ my guardian said.

  ‘Provisionally,’ she agreed. She had short black hair, clipped severely back, but it could not disguise the gentleness of her nature. ‘I was not present at Mr Slab’s death and his family opposed my request for a full post-mortem examination. Unfortunately, the coroner held the same misguided opinion of women as you, Mr Grice, and respected their opinions more than mine.’

  Sidney Grice bristled. ‘My opinions are never misguided.’

  ‘Another misguided opinion,’ the doctor countered and I laughed. She had a faint accent that I could not place.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask where you are from?’ I enquired.

  ‘Everywhere and nowhere,’ she told me. ‘I have never stayed anywhere long enough to say that I belong there. My parents were travelling performers.’

  ‘Gypsies,’ Sidney Grice said.

  ‘Yet another misguided opinion,’ Dr Berry responded and Sidney Grice looked at her. I expected him to be indignant at her presumption but he looked, if anything, mildly amused.

  ‘Gut gesagt,’ he said quietly.

  ‘They ran and acted in a small theatre company,’ she continued. ‘I was educated in whichever country we toured for a season. You pick up a lot of languages quickly when you have to. So when I found that no British university was willing to award a degree to a member of the superior sex, I studied medicine in Paris and surgery in Bern.’

  ‘Two of the ugliest cities in the ugliest countries in Europe,’ my guardian pronounced and Dr Berry laughed.

  ‘Casting your prejudices aside for one moment…’

  ‘The mind of a man without prejudices is a train with no coal,’ he asserted. ‘It may be on the right track but it goes nowhere. I think you will find that all my prejudices are based on logical processes.’

  ‘Then perhaps the premise on which you found each conclusion is flawed,’ she suggested. ‘But, to move on, how can I help you?’

  Sidney Grice picked up he
r pen to examine it.

  ‘How long had Edwin Slab been a patient of yours?’ I asked.

  ‘Only a few weeks,’ she told me. ‘I visited him twice because he had a bout of laryngitis which he was convinced was scarlet fever. I gave him a bottle of laudanum, more to calm him down than anything else, and told him to send for me again in a week if he was no better. Five days later I was called in by his housekeeper and told that he had had an episode. By the time I got there he was dead.’

  ‘In bed?’

  ‘No. In his workshop. Mr Slab was something of an amateur taxidermist and he appeared to have suffered a fit and fallen into a tank of formalin. His housekeeper and maid were unable to lift him out without help from the gardener and his boy.’

  ‘Was he a big man?’ Sidney Grice asked.

  ‘Quite. But the task was made more difficult by the unusual degree of rigor.’

  Sidney Grice put the pen back on a brass tray. ‘Go on.’

  Dr Berry began to pace the room. ‘His housekeeper described to me how Mr Slab suffered from occasional epileptic fits, following a head injury in a carriage accident many years ago. He would go into violent convulsions and froth at the mouth, and it was obvious, when I saw his body, that he had had some kind of seizure. There was a great deal of vomit on the floor; he was cyanotic and his eyes were extruded with dilated pupils, but…’ Dr Berry stopped by a large rubber plant and peered out of the window.

  My guardian clicked his fingers and said, ‘You fear the fit may have been induced?’

  She spun to face us. ‘Two things concern me particularly. The stiff­­­ness of his body was extraordinary, especially so soon after death, and I have never seen such a dramatic case of opisthotonus—’

  ‘Which is?’ Sidney Grice enquired shortly.

  ‘When a body goes into such violent contractions that it lies arched with only the top of the head and the heels touching the floor,’ I said. ‘I have seen it in a fatal case of tetanus.’

  Dr Berry looked at me. ‘And where did you get your medical experience?’

  ‘In India mainly, but also Afghanistan. My father was an army surgeon and he did not trust army nurses to assist him.’

  Dr Berry smiled briefly. ‘I can sympathize with that.’ And her face fell again. ‘All of which led me to at least consider the possibility of poisoning with—’

  ‘Of course,’ Sidney Grice interjected, ‘strychnine.’

  Dr Berry raised a crooked finger. ‘I have also heard of it occurring with other alkaloids and chemical dyes, but I have never come across it myself.’

  My guardian took two halfpennies from his waistcoat pocket. ‘And your other concern was?’

  She sucked her upper lip. ‘When I tapped Mr Slab’s chest it did not sound congested.’

  ‘That was thorough of you.’ Sidney Grice rattled the coins in his left hand. ‘Which would suggest…?’ He turned to me.

  ‘That he was dead before he was submerged,’ I said.

  He tossed the coins and caught them. ‘Or that the fluid drained from his lungs as he was hauled out.’

  Dr Berry nodded. ‘I did point this out to the coroner, but he told me I was letting my imagination run away with me.’

  ‘Perhaps you were overwrought.’ My guardian ignored her indignation. ‘But I am acquainted with Vernon Harcourt, the Home Secretary, and he owes me nine favours. I shall get the body exhumed.’

  ‘Perhaps you should wait a day before you take that step,’ Dr Berry said. ‘My concerns were so strong that I took a sample of Mr Slab’s vomit and sent it to the pathology department of University College for analysis. The results are due back tomorrow.’

  Sidney Grice went down on his haunches to look at her black leather medical bag on the floor by her desk. ‘That is an unusual design.’ He lifted it and I saw four inch-long legs on the base.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I had that made by a man off Charing Cross Road. I have been in houses where raw sewage flows over the floor and my last bag was ruined.’

  ‘Why are there three balls on each foot?’ I asked and she laughed.

  ‘Oh yes. They are meant to be berries – just a bit of fun.’

  ‘Fun?’ Sidney Grice echoed.

  ‘You are unfamiliar with the word?’

  ‘No. Just the experience,’ I said.

  *

  ‘What a resourceful person,’ my guardian commented as we left the house, ‘and such a good clear analytical mind. But what a pity it is wasted on a woman. And what did you mean by implying that I never have any fun? Why, only the other day I got you to calculate some Gaussian eliminations. That was fun.’

  ‘Highly comical,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Especially when you confused co-primes with prime numbers. I… Blast that man!’ Our cabby had gone. ‘We shall have to walk to Oxford Circus if we are to have any hope of getting a ride.’

  ‘What shall we do tomorrow?’ I asked as we made our way back up the mews.

  My guardian buttoned his Ulster coat. ‘You are going to do nothing. You have been looking decidedly unattractive in a hearty sort of way recently, so I hope a morning’s inactivity might drain the colour from your cheeks. I’ – he primped up his cravat and ran a hand through his hair – ‘shall return in the morning.’

  ‘To see Dr Berry?’

  ‘To see if the laboratory report is back yet.’

  ‘And see Dr Berry.’

  Sidney Grice twiddled with his cane. ‘Well, I shall need to discuss a few aspects of the case with her, yes.’

  And it seemed to me that I was not the only one with colour in their cheeks.

  Colour was the first thing I noticed about India before I was overwhelmed. From the deck of the ship I saw the coolies, their black bodies stripped to the waist, clad only in baggy pyjama trousers. But it was the women who really caught my eye. They were dressed in sarees, yards of cloth in one strip wrapped closely around each body and dyed in so many colours – bright saffrons, glowing golds, dazzling crimsons, vivid greens of every hue, some bordered with rich tapestries, some ornamented with silver or glittering with tiny mirrors.

  Once we had docked, everything was confusion, a jumble of shouting and jostling all around us, the pleas of beggars and the cries of children, the rattle of rickshaws, the stench of the mob and animal dung and open sewers, the merciless heat of the midday sun, the heaviness of the air saturating my clothes and hair and dragging me down.

  Colour was what first attracted you to me, you said, the way I flushed when I was angry – and there was so much to be angry about in India – the living conditions, the corruption, the arrogance, the bureaucracy and you. You were always so optimistic, so nice. It used to drive me to distraction, but… Oh, how I wish I could be angry with you now. I should like to shake you until your buttons flew off, and bury my face in your tunic when you begged for pardon. We always made up but we can never forgive each other anything now.

  I carried my gloves. I have always hated wearing gloves but my guardian insisted I brought them. The sun was shining now through the fumes and the rooftops glistened with the remnants of a drizzle, but the people were pallid and their clothes were black and brown and grey as ashes.

  16

  Quicklime and Velvet

  There were several dozen mounds in the field, mostly overgrown and very few with headstones.

  The air was still cold and thick with a misty drizzle. My umbrella could not hold it off and the hood of my cape did not stop my hair from clinging damp to my face as I stood and waited for the hearse to arrive.

  It came with more speed than was usually considered decent, a low black carriage with one black horse tossing its blinkered head restlessly. The hearse stopped and four undertaker’s men climbed out. Close behind came a covered carriage from which emerged a tall, broad woman in full mourning.

  ‘Is this the funeral of Mr Horatio Green?’ I asked one of the men as he dusted himself down.

  ‘What there is of it.’

  They hauled the coffi
n out and walked with it, not on their shoulders but holding it low by the handles. It was a fine oak casket with brass fittings and a nameplate on the lid. The woman followed, her head defiantly high and her face fixed, though her dark-ringed eyes belied her lack of expression. She bore little resemblance to her short, plump brother. The ground was boggy and sucked at my sinking boots with every step.

  A tarpaulin lay over a long pile of soil beside the straight-cut hole just inside the gate and the pallbearers rested the coffin briefly upon it as they took cords from their velvet coats and looped them through the handles and, with only a brief pause to adjust their grips, they stepped either side of the grave, swinging the coffin over it and lowering it quickly. The cords were pulled away and the oldest bearer clapped his gloved hands twice. From behind a yew hedge two men appeared with shovels, and without further ado began to toss the soil back in.

  A small cry escaped from the woman and she clutched her mouth as if to keep another in.

  ‘What, no words?’ I asked, and she looked across the filling hole and answered, ‘No words, no vicar and no holy ground for the suicide.’

  ‘May God receive his servant Horatio Green and have mercy on his soul,’ I said, and the woman stared down and said bitterly, ‘There is no mercy for those who quit this world in an act of mortal sin.’ A robin landed on a clod of turf, picking through it. ‘He loved birds.’ She choked back a sob and walked away. I went after her and she stopped suddenly. ‘Who are you and what were you to my brother? Must I bear another scandal at his graveside?’

  ‘My name is March Middleton. I—’ I began, but she interrupted me urgently. ‘You were there. Did you see him kill himself?’ She clutched my cloak. ‘Did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then perhaps that weaselly detective of yours did it or maybe you.’ She pulled her shawl tight around her.

  ‘No, I—’

  Her black-laced hand shot out and snatched my wrist. ‘Why have you come here?’ She started to pull me back through the gates and I tried to break away, but she was a strong woman and I did not want to fight her at her brother’s funeral.