I do not think I fainted. I know I was conscious of my arm doubled under me, a pain and darkness. I could hear myself moaning, but almost as if it were someone else. There were other sounds, but they did not concern me much. I was not even curious about my location. I seemed to be a very small consciousness surrounded by a great deal of pain.
Several centuries later a light came and leaned over me from somewhere above. Then the light said, “Here she is!”
“Alive?” I knew that voice, but I could not think whose it was.
“I’m not— Yes, she’s moaning.”
They got me out somewhere and I believe I still clung to the tongs. I had fallen on them and had a cut on my chin. I could stand, I found, although I swayed. There was plenty of light now in the back hallway, and a man I had never seen was investigating the staircase.
“Four steps off,” he said. “Risers and treads gone and the supports sawed away. It’s a trap of some sort.”
Mr. Patton was examining my broken arm and paid no attention. The man let himself down into the pit under the staircase. When he straightened, only his head rose above the steps. Although I was white with pain to the very lips I laughed hysterically.
“The head!” I cried. Mr. Patton swore under his breath.
* * *
—
They half led, half carried me into the library. Mr. Reed was there, with a detective on guard over him. He was sitting in his old position, bent forward, chin in palms. In the blaze of light he was a pitiable figure, smeared with dust, disheveled from what had evidently been a struggle. Mr. Patton put me in a chair and dispatched one of the two men for the nearest doctor.
“This young lady,” he said curtly to Mr. Reed, “fell into that damnable trap you made in the rear staircase.”
“I locked off the staircase—but I am sorry she is hurt. My—my wife will be shocked. Only I wish you’d tell me what all this is about. You can’t arrest me for going into a friend’s house.”
“If I send for some member of the Smythe family will they acquit you?”
“Certainly they will,” he said. “I—I’ve been raised with the Smythes. You can send for anyone you like.” But his tone lacked conviction.
Mr. Patton made me as comfortable as possible, and then, sending the remaining detective out into the hall, he turned to his prisoner.
“Now, Mr. Reed,” he said. “I want you to be sensible. For some days a figure has been seen in the basements of the various Beauregard houses. Your friends, the Smythes, reported it. Tonight we are on watch, and we see you breaking into the basement of the Smythe house. We already know some curious things about you, such as dismissing all the servants on half an hour’s notice and the disappearance of the French governess.”
“Mademoiselle! Why, she—” He checked himself.
“When we bring you here tonight, and you ask to be allowed to go upstairs and prepare your wife, she is locked in. The nurse is missing. We find her at last, also locked away and badly hurt, lying in a staircase trap, where someone, probably yourself, has removed the steps. I do not want to arrest you, but, now I’ve started, I’m going to get to the bottom of all this.”
Mr. Reed was ghastly, but he straightened in his chair.
“The Smythes reported this thing, did they?” he asked. “Well, tell me one thing. What killed the old gentleman—old Smythe?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, go a little further.” His cunning was boyish, pitiful. “How did he die? Or don’t you know that either?”
Up to this point I had been rather a detached part of the scene, but now my eyes fell on the tongs beside me.
“Mr. Reed,” I said, “isn’t this thing too big for you to handle by yourself?”
“What thing?”
“You know what I mean. You’ve protected yourself well enough, but even if the—the thing you know of did not kill old Mr. Smythe you cannot tell what will happen next.”
“I’ve got almost all of them,” he muttered sullenly. “Another night or two and I’d have had the lot.”
“But even then the mischief may go on. It means a crusade; it means rousing the city. Isn’t it the square thing now to spread the alarm?”
Mr. Patton could stand the suspense no longer.
“Perhaps, Miss Adams,” he said, “you will be good enough to let me know what you are talking about.”
Mr. Reed looked up at him with heavy eyes.
“Rats,” he said. “They got away, twenty of them, loaded with bubonic plague.”
* * *
—
I went to the hospital the next morning. Mr. Patton thought it best. There was no one in my little flat to look after me, and although the pain in my arm subsided after the fracture was set I was still shaken.
He came the next afternoon to see me. I was propped up in bed, with my hair braided down in two pigtails and great hollows under my eyes.
“I’m comfortable enough,” I said, in response to his inquiry; “but I’m feeling all of my years. This is my birthday. I am thirty today.”
“I wonder,” he said reflectively, “if I ever reach the mature age of one hundred, if I will carry in my head as many odds and ends of information as you have at thirty!”
“I?”
“You. How in the world did you know, for instance, about those tongs?”
“It was quite simple. I’d seen something like them in the laboratory here. Of course I didn’t know what animals he’d used, but the grayish brown hair looked like rats. The laboratory must be the cellar room. I knew it had been fumigated—it was sealed with paper, even over the keyhole.”
So, sitting there beside me, Mr. Patton told me the story as he had got it from Mr. Reed—a tale of the offer in an English scientific journal of a large reward from some plague-ridden country of the East for an anti-plague serum. Mr. Reed had been working along bacteriological lines in his basement laboratory, mostly with guinea pigs and tuberculosis. He was in debt; the offer loomed large.
“He seems to think he was on the right track,” Mr. Patton said. “He had twenty of the creatures in deep zinc cans with perforated lids. He says the disease is spread by fleas that infest the rats. So he had muslin as well over the lids. One can had infected rats, six of them. Then one day the Frenchwoman tried to give the dog a bath in a laundry tub and the dog bolted. The laboratory door was open in some way and he ran between the cans, upsetting them. Every rat was out in an instant. The Frenchwoman was frantic. She shut the door and tried to drive the things back. One bit her on the foot. The dog was not bitten, but there was the question of fleas.
“Well, the rats got away, and Mademoiselle retired to her room to die of plague. She was a loyal old soul; she wouldn’t let them call a doctor. It would mean exposure, and after all what could the doctors do? Reed used his serum and she’s alive.
“Reed was frantic. His wife would not leave. There was the Frenchwoman to look after, and I think she was afraid he would do something desperate. They did the best they could, under the circumstances, for the children. They burned most of the carpets for fear of fleas, and put poison everywhere. Of course he had traps too.
“He had brass tags on the necks of the rats, and he got back a few—the uninfected ones. The other ones were probably dead. But he couldn’t stop at that. He had to be sure that the trouble had not spread. And to add to their horror the sewer along the street was being relaid, and they had an influx of rats into the house. They found them everywhere in the lower floor. They even climbed the stairs. He says that the night you came he caught a big fellow on the front staircase. There was always the danger that the fleas that carry the trouble had deserted the dead creatures for new fields. They took up all the rest of the carpets and burned them. To add to the general misery the dog Chang developed unmistakable symptoms and h
ad to be killed.”
“But the broken staircase?” I asked. “And what was it that Mademoiselle said was coming up?”
“The steps were up for two reasons: The rats could not climb up, and beneath the steps Reed says he caught in a trap two of the tagged ones. As for Mademoiselle the thing that was coming up was her temperature—pure fright. The head you saw was poor Reed himself, wrapped in gauze against trouble and baiting his traps. He caught a lot in the neighbors’ cellars and some in the garden.”
“But why,” I demanded, “why didn’t he make it all known?”
Mr. Patton laughed while he shrugged his shoulders.
“A man hardly cares to announce that he has menaced the health of a city.”
“But that night when I fell—was it only last night?—someone was pounding above. I thought there was a fire.”
“The Frenchwoman had seen us waylay Reed from her window. She was crazy.”
“And the trouble is over now?”
“Not at all,” he replied cheerfully. “The trouble may be only beginning. We’re keeping Reed’s name out, but the Board of Health has issued a general warning. Personally I think his six pets died without passing anything along.”
“But there was a big box with a lid—”
“Ferrets,” he assured me. “Nice white ferrets with pink eyes and a taste for rats.” He held out a thumb, carefully bandaged. “Reed had a couple under his coat when we took him in the garden. Probably one ran over your foot that night when you surprised him on the back staircase.”
I went pale. “But if they are infected!” I cried; “and you are bitten—”
“The first thing a nurse should learn,” he bent forward smiling, “is not to alarm her patient.”
“But you don’t understand the danger,” I said despairingly. “Oh, if only men had a little bit of sense!”
“I must do something desperate then? Have the thumb cut off, perhaps?”
I did not answer. I lay back on my pillows with my eyes shut. I had given him the plague, had seen him die and be buried, before he spoke again.
“The chin,” he said, “is not so firm as I had thought. The outlines are savage, but the dimple— You poor little thing; are you really frightened?”
“I don’t like you,” I said furiously. “But I’d hate to see anyone with—with that trouble.”
“Then I’ll confess. I was trying to take your mind off your troubles. The bite is there, but harmless. Those were new ferrets; had never been out.”
I did not speak to him again. I was seething with indignation. He stood for a time looking down at me; then, unexpectedly, he bent over and touched his lips to my bandaged arm.
“Poor arm!” he said. “Poor, brave little arm!” Then he tiptoed out of the room. His very back was sheepish.
DETECTIVE: RUTH KELSTERN
THE TEA-LEAF
Edgar Jepson & Robert Eustace
BORN IN ENGLAND, Edgar Alfred Jepson (1863–1938) graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, then spent five years in Barbados before returning to take a job as an editor at Vanity Fair, where he worked with Richard Middleton and the libidinous Frank Harris. He became involved, albeit tangentially, with such members of the Decadent Movement as Ernest Dowson, John Gawsworth (with whom he collaborated on several short stories), and Arthur Machen.
The first novel Jepson wrote under his own name, Sibyl Falcon (1895), features a female adventurer; he followed with such fantasy novels and thrillers as The Mystery of the Myrtles (1909), which involves human sacrifice, and The Moon Gods (1930), a lost-race novel. He may be more widely read as a translator than as a novelist, however, having brought many works by Maurice Leblanc to English-language readers. His son, Selwyn Jepson, was a prolific mystery writer, and his granddaughter is the noted British novelist Fay Weldon.
Dr. Eustace Robert Barton (1868–1943), using the pseudonym Robert Eustace, is known mainly for his collaborations with other writers, including several additional stories with Edgar Jepson; a novel, The Stolen Pearl: A Romance of London (1903), with the once-popular mystery writer Gertrude Warden; several books with L.T. Meade; and, most famously, a novel, The Documents in the Case (1930), with Dorothy L. Sayers.
Much like Craig Kennedy and Dr. Thorndyke, Ruth Kelstern, although an amateur detective in this story, brought scientific methods to her work, undoubtedly a skill learned in her father’s laboratory, where she assisted him in a high-paying job.
“The Tea-Leaf” was originally published in the October 1925 issue of The Strand Magazine; it was first published in book form in Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, edited by Dorothy L. Sayers (London, Gollancz, 1928).
The Tea-Leaf
EDGAR JEPSON & ROBERT EUSTACE
ARTHUR KELSTERN and Hugh Willoughton met in the Turkish bath in Duke Street, St. James’s, and rather more than a year later in that Turkish bath they parted. Both of them were bad-tempered men, Kelstern cantankerous and Willoughton violent. It was indeed difficult to decide which was the worse-tempered; and when I found that they had suddenly become friends, I gave that friendship three months. It lasted nearly a year.
When they did quarrel they quarrelled about Kelstern’s daughter Ruth. Willoughton fell in love with her and she with him and they became engaged to be married. Six months later, in spite of the fact that they were plainly very much in love with one another, the engagement was broken off. Neither of them gave any reason for breaking it off. My belief was that Willoughton had given Ruth a taste of his infernal temper and got as good as he gave.
Not that Ruth was at all a Kelstern to look at. Like the members of most of the old Lincolnshire families, descendants of the Vikings and the followers of Canute, one Kelstern is very like another Kelstern, fair-haired, clear-skinned, with light-blue eyes and a good bridge to the nose. But Ruth had taken after her mother: she was dark with a straight nose, dark-brown eyes of the kind often described as liquid, dark-brown hair, and as kissable lips as ever I saw. She was a proud, rather self-sufficing, high-spirited girl, with a temper of her own. She needed it to live with that cantankerous old brute Kelstern. Oddly enough in spite of the fact that he always would try to bully her, she was fond of him; and I will say for him that he was very fond of her. Probably she was the only creature in the world of whom he was really fond. He was an expert in the application of scientific discoveries to industry; and she worked with him in his laboratory. He paid her five hundred a year, so that she must have been uncommonly good.
He took the breaking off of the engagement very hard indeed. He would have it that Willoughton had jilted her. Ruth took it hard too: her warm colouring lost some of its warmth; her lips grew less kissable and set in a thinner line. Willoughton’s temper grew worse than ever; he was like a bear with a perpetually sore head. I tried to feel my way with both him and Ruth with a view to help to bring about a reconciliation. To put it mildly, I was rebuffed. Willoughton swore at me; Ruth flared up and told me not to meddle in matters that didn’t concern me. Nevertheless my strong impression was that they were missing one another badly and would have been glad enough to come together again if their stupid vanity could have let them.
Kelstern did his best to keep Ruth furious with Willoughton. One night I told him—it was no business of mine; but I never did give a tinker’s curse for his temper—that he was a fool to meddle and had much better leave them alone. It made him furious, of course; he would have it that Willoughton was a dirty hound and a low blackguard—at least those were about the mildest things he said of him. It struck me of a sudden that there must be something much more serious in the breaking off of the engagement than I had guessed.
That suspicion was strengthened by the immense trouble Kelstern took to injure Willoughton. At his clubs, the Athenæum, the Devonshire, and the Savile, he would display an astonishing ingenuity in bringing the conversation round t
o Willoughton; then he would declare that he was a scoundrel and a blackguard of the meanest type. Of course it did Willoughton harm, though not nearly as much harm as Kelstern desired, for Willoughton knew his job as few engineers knew it; and it is very hard indeed to do much harm to a man who really knows his job. People have to have him. But of course it did him some harm; and Willoughton knew that Kelstern was doing it. I came across two men who told me that they had given him a friendly hint. That did not improve Willoughton’s temper.
An expert in the construction of those ferro-concrete buildings which are rising up all over London, he was as distinguished in his sphere as Kelstern in his. They were alike not only in the matters of brains and bad temper but I think that their minds worked in very much the same way. At any rate both of them seemed determined not to change their ordinary course of life because of the breaking off of that engagement.
It had been the habit of both of them to have a Turkish bath, at the baths in Duke Street, at four in the afternoon on the second and last Tuesday in every month. To that habit they stuck. The fact that they must meet on those Tuesdays did not cause either of them to change his hour of taking his Turkish bath by the twenty minutes which would have given them no more than a passing glimpse of one another. They continued to take them, as they always had, simultaneously. Thick-skinned? They were thick-skinned. Neither of them pretended that he did not see the other; he scowled at him; and he scowled at him most of the time. I know this, for sometimes I had a Turkish bath myself at that hour.
It was about three months after the breaking off of the engagement that they met for the last time at that Turkish bath, and there parted for good.
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 91