Merlin's Furlong

by Gladys Mitchell

  “For an identical purpose, do you mean, madam? In order to escape detection?”

  “Yes, indeed, George. This place is remote enough, in a sense, but it is only a mile or two away from a main road, and I don’t think the police would take a broadminded view of what has been going on up there this last couple of hours. I wonder…but, yes, it must be, unless I have cast the runes wrongly. I have to find someone up there who knew Professor Havers and knew something to his discredit, and if I can catch such a person taking part, or (more likely), having taken part, in the kind of revels which I fancy have been held tonight in Merlin’s terrifying fort, I shall be well on the way to solving such mysteries as trouble us.”

  “Yourself and the police, madam? You refer to the deaths of Mr. Aumbry and Professor Havers?”

  “I do, George. And now, I must become the questing fairy.”

  George, accustomed to the ways of his employer, waited respectfully for orders, being certain that these would embrace an original note. Mrs. Bradley produced a hunting horn and held it in the glow of a headlamp.

  “Behold, George,” she said. “When you hear this (or if, as the case may be) have your engine running, for I shall be like the poor man in the Metamorphoses, in the monstrous power of witches. It may be that they ‘can call down the sky, hang earth in heaven, freeze fountains, melt mountains, raise the spirits of the dead, send gods to hell, put out the stars,’ but, on the other hand, they may more simply (but probably not more purely) be ladies and gentlemen in evening dress who are incapable of concocting even an Irish stew or the dubious alibi of the rissole. Wait, and we shall see.”

  “Very good, madam; and if…?”

  “If you do not hear the horns of Elfland faintly blowing, I shall be dead, I shall be sped, and my soul (I hope and trust) will be in the sky.” She sounded cheerful, but George possessed, to his sorrow, the bump of caution.

  “How long am I to allow, madam, before taking appropriate action?”

  “If, by appropriate action, you mean climbing into the fort and up to the revels with your heaviest spanner in your hand, you must wait until dawn. In other words, I do not see how to set a time limit while darkness is still upon us. But dawn will shortly be at hand, and, in any case, I confidently expect to remain at large and undetected unless they’ve put guards in that sunk road which leads to the citadel.”

  She put the hunting horn back into her pocket, switched on her torch, which she pointed towards the ground, and glided away. Left alone, George got out the spanner and also a small, illegal cosh which his employer did not know he possessed. Then he sat on the step of the car with his face towards the mass of Merlin’s Fort, and strained his ears.

  There was nothing at all to be heard except the chanting, which was growing throatier, and nothing at all to be seen except the now wildly smoking torches as they wove the patterns of Erebus against the remote night sky.

  Mrs. Bradley, whose eyes very soon became accustomed to the thin summer darkness, switched off her torch as soon as she had identified the entrance between the great bastions of turf and stone, and made progress, so that in a comparatively short time she had threaded the maze-like lines of baulks and sunken roads and was on the edge of the plateau.

  Here a strange sight met her eyes. Except for three tall figures, the torchbearers (who apparently were wearying of their task), were tossing down their impedimenta and had begun to dance out the flares. Sparks, mingled with squeaks of pain as some rash worshipper submitted bare ankles to the fire, stabbed the night through with hideous but humourous recurrence. Mrs. Bradley watched closely. Triple Hecate’s team, holding fresh torches high, sufficiently lighted the scene, and Mrs. Bradley was soon to realise that her prophecy to George had been inspired. The face of every dancer was as black as the entrance to the Shades. There was something else. Although to most of the participants to blacken their faces had been a form either of ritual or disguise, two, at least, were black by nature.

  Well satisfied with what she had seen, Mrs. Bradley waited until the three tall torchbearers had plunged their torches out, then she joined the throng, her face, after applications from a little bag of the soot which she had procured from her dining-room chimney before setting out, making her one with the company she had elected to follow down the hill.

  When they reached the ruins of the Roman temple she was interested to notice that instead of using the main entrance by which she herself had come in, these people had chosen that on the northwest side where the ramparts, she remembered, were steeper but the defences, otherwise, not as cunningly planned.

  When they were outside the fort and were stumbling down a ramp which brought them to the opposite side of the fort from where Mrs. Bradley had parked her car, she perceived the reason for this choice of an exit, for on the turf were drawn up a couple of motor coaches, each with a somnolent driver at the wheel. As the worshippers crowded in, sat down, and began to clean the black off their faces, Mrs. Bradley crept near to the second coach and memorised its registered number. She also took very careful stock of the driver. Then she sauntered round the base of the fort and came in sight of the headlights of her car.

  “All satisfactory, madam?” asked George. “I assume so, as I did not hear the horn.”

  “Except that I’ve had to blacken my face in order to escape detection, all is perfectly satisfactory, George, so far as I am concerned. It is so satisfactory, indeed, that I am in a position to threaten Bluna and her young man with the police, and to trace the motor coaches which carried these celebrants to dance round the grave of Mr. Catfield, whose coffin, you remember, you and Mr. Harrison discovered and reinterred. I am also ready for another short conversation with Mr. Richmond Aumbry, and possibly another with the blithe and energetic Mr. Waite, who was driving one of the coaches. And now the hour grows late. Home, George, but spare the horses. I wish to indulge in philosophical speculation and the higher thought. Thirty miles an hour should meet the case, I fancy.”

  “Meaning you now know all, madam?”

  “Meaning I now know half and can guess the rest. But guessing won’t do for a jury.”

  George was sufficiently friendly with his employer to venture a further question.

  “Were there orgies, madam, as you supposed there might be?”

  “On this occasion I think not. Neither, so far as I could determine, was anybody drunk, but I wonder how many doctors will be called upon to minister to blistered feet tomorrow…or, rather, later today…and what reasons will be produced to account for the blisters!”

  “I thought one should never explain, madam.”

  “A golden rule, and one which, like all the rest of the golden rules which could make this place an Eden, humanity finds it quite impossible to respect. Mr. Waite must have climbed from his bedroom window and driven fast to get here before us!”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Merlin’s Emissaries

  “I shall attend your leisure, but make haste;

  The vaporous night approaches.”

  —Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

  Although Mrs. Bradley went to bed at the rising of the lark, by ten o’clock in the morning she was dealing with correspondence. Her guests had been in the millpond for a swim, had breakfasted, and, at the direct invitation, not to say command, of Henri, Mrs. Bradley’s cook (who hinted darkly of a Lucullan repast disguised under the modern appellation of luncheon), had gone off to walk up an appetite. They had asked, with charm and politeness, whether Mrs. Bradley required them to remain on hand, but for reply she had handed them three ash-plants, a botanist’s specimen-case, a pair of field-glasses, a camera, and a bull-terrier pup. They took these hints gracefully, and were instructed by Henri to be back by half-past one.

  Mrs. Bradley and her secretary dealt briskly with correspondence, and by eleven o’clock Mrs. Bradley had dictated the last letter, tossed the last empty envelope into the waste-paper basket, poured herself and her Laura some sherry, and was retailing with consid
erable liveliness her experiences of the previous night.

  “You might have taken me along,” said Laura. “Why should you hog all the fun?”

  “You get your fun today. I want you to go to this address and bring back the Negro maid Bluna. I don’t care how you do it, but I want her here tomorrow or the next day…there is no particular hurry. I’ve told you who her employers are, but I want you to keep my name out of it. You may experience difficulty in persuading her to come.”

  “Grand!” said Laura, flexing her considerable biceps. “Any idea whether she bites?”

  “I have no information on the subject. You will drive yourself, I suppose?”

  “You suppose correctly, ma’am. Well, I must say I didn’t anticipate the chance of a toot like this! I’ll be off, then, shall I? I can get lunch somewhere on the road. It will be much more peaceful than pigging it here with those three assorted half-bakes you brought along yestreen. Nice lads, but much too young, except Polly Waite, whom somehow I can’t abide.”

  She finished her sherry, declined any more, and ten minutes later a small car shot through the gates and headed for the Winchester Road.

  “ ‘Two of both kinds make up four,’” said Mrs. Bradley pensively to her maid Célestine, who came to take away the sherry glasses and the biscuit barrel.

  “Indeed, yes, madame,” the Frenchwoman earnestly responded. “Mademoiselle Laura, who is affianced, does she still decline…?”

  “To dwindle into a wife? She does,” replied Mrs. Bradley, solemnly shaking her head. “But that is not one of the couples to which I was referring. Leaving the resolute Artemis out of the picture, who, in your opinion, is the odd person out?”

  “Ah!” A broad, understanding smile transfigured the Frenchwoman’s face. “Feminine, says madame? And in the house, young men!”

  “No, madame did not say feminine.”

  “Perfectly I understand, madame. She has three of four. She must make two couples, but not of love or of marriage.”

  “I note you think they can be separated.”

  “For Henri,” said Henri’s wife, “I have the greatest regard. That he is a villain and also ugly, uncouth, ungracious, and a glutton, I do not deny. Why should I? En avance, then, madame! And do not despair. I bring all your little chickens home to roost.”

  “I am not certain that Henri would appreciate that.”

  “Madame amuses herself,” said Celestine coldly.

  “No, no. There is something I want you to do; something which only you, in this house, can do.”

  “Vraiment?” enquired Célestine, suspiciously regarding this compliment.

  “I’m not joking. Some time or other…tonight, I hope, but it may be tomorrow or the next day…Miss Menzies will be bringing here a Negro girl. Now it is reasonable to suppose that this girl, as soon as she discovers that you are a Frenchwoman, will trust you. All Negroes are apt to feel that the English do not entirely lack racial prejudice, a feeling which, in far too many instances, is, unhappily, disgracefully true.”

  “It is true that the French are the only civilised nation,” said Célestine. “Bien, madame. What secrets do you wish that I should learn?”

  “I want you to find out whether the girl’s fiancé is at Merlin’s Castle, where Professor Havers was murdered…and, if he is, why he tends a monkey there. If you can’t find this out, well, nobody can. Be your usual tactful self, of course. Don’t frighten her.”

  Having deployed the two intelligent members of her household in tasks suitable to their respective temperaments, Mrs. Bradley telephoned the police and directed them to Catfield’s burial ground. Then she settled herself down with the shapeless and repulsive piece of knitting which (so far as her relatives could perceive) was the permanent obsession of her leisure and was known by the irreverent members of the family as Aunt Adela’s familiar spirit, and in her mind arranged logically a series of events which might have led to the murders of Catfield, Havers, and Aumbry. That young Catfield had been murdered she was certain. It might have been ritual murder, which could connect it with Havers the magician; it might have been murder for gain, which could connect it with Aumbry the thief. There was a slight chance that the uncle had had a hand in it if any motive could be established, but so far there was no reason to suspect him. Nevertheless, if murder had been committed, there remained the fact that old Mr. Catfield had been, so far as was known (this she had just ascertained from the police), the only surviving relative.

  She lunched with the three undergraduates, invited them to amuse themselves as they pleased during the afternoon, and drove to old Mr. Catfield’s forbidding, uncomfortable house and asked to see its forbidding, uncommunicative owner.

  “Again?” he asked angrily when she was shown in.

  “I am afraid so. You see, Mr. Catfield, our last interview was, to say the least of it, inconclusive. Since I saw you I have been again to Merlin’s Fort.”

  “What for?” He looked both menacing and suspicious.

  “To watch the vampires dance round your grandnephew’s grave.”

  “You jest.”

  “Indeed I do not. Tell me all that you know, for you do know something, I feel certain.”

  But the old man shook his head. He put out his tongue and drew it in again, protruded his head and retracted it, shook it again, and said:

  “No. No. I know nothing about it. I did not care for my grandnephew. He disgraced me in every way; first, as a child…no courage; second, as a youth…no brains; third, as a young man…no character. He consorted with worthless persons. He wasted my substance…”

  “Ah, yes, I was coming to that. It has been suggested that your grandnephew had his own fortune, but got into debt.”

  “Oh, yes, he did,” said the tortoise, blinking intelligently. “The first sensible thing you’ve said. Why do you suppose he had so many friends?”

  “Professor Havers and his band of devotees, do you mean?”

  “I know nothing of any Professor Havers. I am thinking of a man named Parrot.”

  “Parrot?”

  “Parrot, madam. I could scarcely be expected to forget a name like that, especially as the fellow in question was anything but a parrot. No vain repetitions for him! An original mind, I imagine, with a powerful influence over the minds of others.”

  “An undergraduate, do you suppose?”

  “I have no information. My grandnephew always made a crony of him. So much I know, and no more. The fellow only once came here.”

  “Are you sure he was your grandnephew’s friend?”

  “I only know, of course, what Dexter told me.”

  “Dexter?”

  “Dexter Catfield, my grandnephew; now, of course, Sinister Catfield, the spy, the toady, the suicide.”

  “I think you mean Vengeful Catfield, the foolish, the murdered, the betrayed. How was his fortune left?”

  “To a dolls’ hospital, madam.”

  Even Mrs. Bradley was taken aback by this, although she did not betray the fact.

  “Interesting,” she remarked. “Was your grandnephew interested in dolls?”

  “In certain dolls, madam.”

  “As you had brought him up to be?”

  “I? Certainly not. My hobby is anthropology.”

  “Did you contest your grandnephew’s will?”

  “No, no! There was so little left.”

  “Did any other relative?”

  “Dexter had no other relatives, otherwise I should scarcely have burdened myself with the task of his upbringing.”

  “Will you give me the address of this dolls’ hospital?”

  “Certainly. It is in Witchborough.” He thrust out and pulled in his head again. A malignant gleam lit up twin emeralds in his heavily-lidded old eyes. “And I hope the dolls eat your heart out and make a monkey out of you, and fill your brains with sawdust, you cursed interfering old zombie!” he concluded. Mrs. Bradley quietly withdrew.

  “I don’t think I’m popular with old Uncle Catfie
ld, George,” she said. “How long will it take us to get to Witchborough?”

  “We should scarcely make it today, madam, unless you are prepared to spend a night away from home.”

  “No, I don’t think I’m prepared for that. What do you think, George?”

  “I think perhaps a night’s rest at home, madam…”

  “Agreed. Then, tomorrow, perhaps, we can hie us to fresh woods and pastures new.”

  They returned forthwith to the Stone House at Wandles Parva and were in time to receive the polite reproaches of Harrison.

  “I thought you’d gone for good,” he proclaimed. “Why didn’t you take me with you?”

  “For good and sufficient reasons, Mr. Harrison,” Mrs. Bradley replied. “Would you care to accompany me to a dolls’ hospital?”

  “A dolls’ hospital?” Harrison regarded her askance. Mrs. Bradley cackled.

  “Surely your subconscious mind will make the connection,” she suggested. Harrison looked thoroughly alarmed.

  “I hope not,” he said nervously. “Dolls…well, they’ve had too much to do with this business. But a dolls’ hospital! Isn’t there something a bit odd about that? I thought hospitals dealt with the living…”

  “Sometimes the dead.”

  “Yes, but…dolls?”

  “Neither living nor dead. And that’s where the project becomes interesting.”

  “Not to me. I’ve had enough.”

  “Yes, but why, Mr. Harrison?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How much do you really know about Mr. Waite and Mr. Piper?” asked Mrs. Bradley, sensing that his defenses were breached at last.

  “Peter’s all right.”

  “And Mr. Waite?”

  “He’s a headache,” said Mr. Harrison peevishly. “Always wanting to do things.”

  “I’ll do, and I’ll do, and I’ll do,” quoted Mrs. Bradley in sonorous tones. Harrison looked startled.

  “You don’t really think that?” he demanded. Mrs. Bradley shook her head in solemn acquiescence with the view thus naively expressed. Harrison looked gloomy. “I know what you mean,” he agreed.