The Durham Deception

by Philip Gooden

  ‘She must have an independent streak,’ said Tom.

  ‘Mother says I take after her but I am not certain whether it is altogether a compliment. It’s only recently that Aunt Julia and she have started corresponding again.’

  ‘I had the feeling that your mother was not so concerned about your aunt but more about – I don’t know – about family honour, the memory of her father.’

  ‘It is this business of the medium using grandfather Howlett to get what he wants from Julia that is so distasteful. I agree with mother there. But, Tom, I am not looking forward to this one bit.’

  ‘After the trouble in Tullis Street?’

  ‘It does not give me much of an appetite for confronting mediums.’

  Neither Tom nor Helen had talked a great deal about the apparent suicide of Ernest Smight. When they did discuss it, they tried to persuade themselves they had no share in the man’s death, that it was a result of his despair at the police action and imminent prosecution. But even so they felt twinges of guilt. They had been present at the séance; they were witnesses. Like the authorities, they too regarded Smight as a trickster who deserved exposure, for Helen had by now begun to revert to her old suspicion of mediums and Tom had almost forgotten the encounter with his father.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Tom. ‘You will not have to confront this Flask fellow by yourself, if it comes to that. I’ll be there. And maybe you will be able to convince your aunt without any confrontation, maybe she’ll have had a change of heart by the time we arrive and be all for leaving her money to a local orphanage.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Helen. She gave up any pretence of reading her book and gazed out of the window at the countryside rolling by. They had stopped at several great manufacturing conurbations, each announced by a pall of smoke not merely overhanging but spreading out into the surrounding countryside. In between the towns the landscape was largely low and level, stretching away in the summer’s afternoon.

  ‘I feel life must be more serious up here,’ said Helen after a time. ‘More earnest.’

  ‘Is that because the Brontë sisters and Mrs Gaskell tell you so?’

  ‘Why, Tom, I did not know that you read female authors.’

  ‘I may have glanced at them from time to time.’

  Tom had taken an interest in female authors ever since he had met Helen and she revealed to him her ambition to write a novel. He had even read a few of their books to get a sense of the competition. But he did not have much to say about his experience of women authors, except that there seemed to be an awful lot of them. This would not have been a tactful remark to make to Helen under any circumstances. He went back to reading the Cornhill Magazine and Helen returned to her book.

  They were joined by a tall, well-dressed gentleman who got on at York. After putting a small valise in the rack, he settled himself in the opposite corner of the compartment. He stretched out his legs in front of him and flexed his gloved fingers. His glance flicked from Tom to Helen and back again.

  ‘Newly weds?’ he said.

  Helen looked up, a very slight blush on her cheeks. Tom was about to tell the man to mind his own business but his wife said, ‘Not that new. But how do you know? Is it so obvious?’

  ‘When I was putting my bag up there I noticed that the initial, the last initial, on your case had recently been painted over and a different one substituted. You started out as an S but now you are transformed to an A.’

  The man addressed Helen. The familiarity in his words might have been offensive in someone else but he had a curiously insinuating manner of speaking. His voice was warm and low.

  ‘Very observant of you,’ said Tom.

  ‘It is not only a question of letters and paint and luggage. Do not take what I say amiss but there is a kind of bloom on the both of you,’ the man persisted. ‘The bloom of the freshly married when the voyage of life lies all before you.’

  ‘Yes, we have lately cast off into the sea of marital life,’ said Helen, ‘marital life with its many shoals and shallows, its storms and its sunny days.’

  ‘My dear lady,’ said the man, his voice taking on a quality that was positively flowing and syrupy. ‘My dear young lady, you can certainly take a metaphor and stretch it. But to move from metaphor to actuality, are you travelling far today?’

  ‘To Durham,’ said Helen.

  ‘What about you?’ cut in Tom. ‘You cannot be going any distance since you’re travelling light.’

  ‘Durham is also my destination. A city on a hill.’

  ‘Going there on business?’ said Tom, giving the stranger a taste of his own inquisitiveness.

  ‘I reside there for the moment,’ said the man. ‘But I am always about my business. It never ceases.’

  By now they were approaching the outskirts of the city. The green of the countryside was blotched with heaps of slag and skeletal pitheads and pinched lines of housing. Even the sheep in the fields seemed to have been dipped in a sooty dye. Helen looked as eagerly out of the window as she would have at an attractive prospect. Then the train ran across a gently curving viaduct and they had their first sight of the castle and the cathedral. The afternoon sun gave the stone a warm glow but the buildings were still massive and imposing.

  ‘Here we are!’ said the man, waving his hand as if he’d conjured up the scene himself. ‘The city on a hill.’

  The train had scarcely begun to draw up alongside the platform when the tall gentleman leaped from his seat and took his valise from the rack in a single movement. He had the door unfastened before the train was fully stopped. He paused for an instant and made a kind of mock-bow towards Tom and Helen.

  ‘Au revoir, Mr and Mrs A.’

  And with that he stepped out on to the platform. By the time Helen and Tom had gathered their own luggage and got down, there was no sign of him. A few other people got off the train at the station, which was so new that the stonework had only just started to take on a darker, grimy colour. Among the alighting passengers was a tall, shabbily dressed man who stared at the retreating backs of Tom and Helen.

  The Ansells took a battered old hansom from the railway station. Helen gave the driver an address in the old part of town called the South Bailey. As they were being driven downhill past terraces of new housing, Helen said, ‘I wonder if the man on the train is typical of the inhabitants of the city? I thought it would be full of miners.’

  They drove across a bridge that straddled a river so dark in patches that it might have been running with liquid coal. Tom thought it was the River Wear. He had studied a town map before leaving London and recalled how the river looped round and back on itself so that the older part of Durham was isolated like a peninsula. Some loungers in artisan clothes turned from gazing into the black waters to look at the cab go by. To the right, high up on the bluff overlooking the river, were the castle remains and the twin towers at the western end of the cathedral. The carriage ascended slowly into this fortress-like area by a roundabout route, passing through a wide marketplace and then up cobbled streets that were lined with tearooms and confectioners and dress shops.

  The road began to level out and they passed beneath the cathedral on its eastern side. Helen had never seen her aunt’s house before and had only the name to go by: Colt House, named for the mine-owner who had once lived there. Tom stuck his head through the trapdoor in the hansom roof and repeated the name to the driver who shook his head. Tom added that it was the residence of Miss Julia Howlett. The driver’s seamed face registered some kind of recognition at the name. Within a few moments they had drawn up before a broad-fronted house with a handsome pillared portico.

  The Ansells got down. The driver produced their cases. Before Tom had finished paying him and while Helen was still studying the facade of Colt House, the front door flew open. A small woman came out at a run and nearly collided with Helen.

  ‘Helen, is it really you?’

  She held Helen by the elbows and looked up at her face. She was tiny, bird-like. />
  ‘Aunt Julia!’ said Helen. ‘You have not changed.’

  ‘But you have, my dear. Last time I saw you, you were so high – or so low, I should say. And this must be your husband Thomas.’

  Tom shook hands with Miss Howlett. She had a darting eye, and he felt assessed within seconds. He wondered whether Helen felt the same twinge of discomfort. They weren’t exactly innocent visitors. They had come to persuade this woman to do what she probably had no wish to do.

  Colt House

  As they were talking in the hall, a stout and quite elderly man entered. He was carrying a bundle of papers under his right arm. White hair straggled from beneath his hat. He looked at Tom and Helen with curiosity.

  ‘Septimus!’ cried Aunt Julia. ‘You must meet my niece and her husband.’

  The gentleman came forward. He awkwardly shifted the papers to his other arm and shook hands with the Ansells.

  ‘I have heard a deal about you,’ he said. ‘Miss Howlett has been greatly looking forward to your visit.’

  ‘Mr Sheridan – Septimus – is a lodger in Colt House,’ said Julia. ‘He has been here for so long that I may say he is almost part of the furniture!’

  Far from being insulted, Septimus Sheridan smiled gently and bowed his head. He said to Helen, ‘You aunt is very good to me, Mrs Ansell.’

  ‘Now then, you two must be tired after your long journey. You will need to wash and change before dinner. We will be dining early because I have invited a few friends and neighbours for this evening.’

  ‘Not on our account, I hope,’ said Helen.

  ‘My dear, do not be so modest. But no, I had arranged this, ah, event before I knew you were coming. Even so your arrival is very timely. You see, I have asked a good friend of mine to provide us with a manifestation tonight.’

  ‘A manifestation, Miss Howlett?’ said Tom. He had an uneasy feeling he knew what was coming.

  ‘Oh do not call me Miss Howlett, Tom. If I am an aunt to Helen, I shall be one to you also. But, yes, we are having a manifestation. A gentleman by the name of Eustace Flask is to show us his powers. He will communicate with the other side, he will bring us messages from beyond the grave. I am sure your mother has mentioned Mr Flask, Helen? I have been filling my letters with him. He is a remarkable individual.’

  ‘She did mention someone of that name,’ said Helen, glancing at Tom. Her look gave nothing away. Well, thought Tom, this has come sooner than expected. But it was good to have an early opportunity to get the measure of their opponent.

  Aunt Julia talked with enthusiasm on the subject of spiritualism while they ate their early dinner. But her enthusiasm was oddly impersonal. She wasn’t attempting to make contact with the ‘other side’ for herself or to soothe some recent grief. Rather, she was genuinely eager to further the work of those ‘brave and pioneering’ individuals who, in the face of misunderstanding and even persecution, were attempting to ‘pierce the veil between the mortal and the eternal.’

  Tom caught Helen’s eye while she was coming out with all this. Yes, their task was going to be a difficult one. It did not seem to him, either, that Aunt Julia was physically weak or mentally failing and about to give away her worldly wealth, as Helen’s mother had implied. Perhaps that had just been Mrs Scott’s way of getting them to go on their mission to Durham.

  It was difficult to work out Septimus Sheridan’s exact position in the household. From some comments he let slip during the meal, Tom understood that he spent most of his time in the cathedral library engaged on some scholarly work or other, which explained the bundle of papers he brought to the house. Certainly, he had the dry and dusty look of one who most enjoys old libraries. Even his hair was the whitish-yellow tint of old parchment. But every so often he’d glance at Julia Howlett in a way that was half admiring, half timorous. Whenever she was speaking he listened with particular attention and he was quick to agree with her, whatever the subject. She, for her part, treated Septimus with a weary familiarity. He called her ‘Miss Howlett’ while she called him by his first name.

  He’d been introduced as a lodger. A lodger! It was just the kind of description which might have provoked a bit of scandalized gossip, a situation where a single man, however old, was living in the house of a spinster lady, however ancient. If so, Aunt Julia didn’t seem to care. In the brief time since they’d been introduced, Tom had realized that here was a woman who went her own way – something which would make Helen’s task even harder.

  Julia Howlett referred to Eustace Flask several times more. His visit this evening to Colt House was a privilege. Helen and Thomas were truly fortunate that their own visit should coincide with one of Flask’s appearances. Aunt Julia’s face grew even more animated while she was saying all this. Her eyes sparkled.

  ‘What does this Mr Flask actually do during his evening sessions?’ said Helen.

  ‘I think you’ll find he puts on a good show for the audience,’ said Septimus Sheridan.

  ‘A show, Septimus! How can you describe it as a show! He is not some vulgar magician or entertainer. What Mr Flask provides is a manifestation. He is not unlike you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Both of you toil to uncover the truth. You do it among piles of manuscripts, Septimus, while dear Eustace ventures into the trackless world of the spirits.’

  ‘Of course, Miss Howlett, you are quite right. He is no showman but a serious seeker of truth.’

  Tom strained for any touch of irony in Sheridan’s words but could not detect it. Further discussion of the medium wasn’t possible because the advance guard of his party arrived at the house. They were called Ambrose and Kitty. Ambrose was a squat young man who at once started lugging planks and panels of wood out of a handcart which had been wheeled not to the tradesmen’s entrance but to the front door of the house. He carried the wooden sections into the morning room. Since the room was on the ground floor it was the most convenient place for the session. Kitty was introduced as the niece to Eustace Flask. She busied herself with bits of material, little muslin curtains, and an assortment of musical instruments which were also required for the evening.

  The bits of wood were rapidly assembled by Ambrose into the framework for a large cupboard-like structure with double doors, each of which had an oval hole cut into it. The cupboard was on a stand so that the base was about a foot above the floor. Meanwhile, the household maids were bringing extra chairs into the room and being instructed on how to arrange them. Julia Howlett was obviously expecting a good turnout.

  There was a bustle in the hall and a figure suddenly materialized at the door of the morning room. Tom and Helen had been watching the preparations with mild interest but they became very alert when they saw the newcomer. There could be no doubt over his identity. Afterwards Tom wondered why they hadn’t recognized him in the first place, not now but earlier. After all, they had seen his photograph. But the quality of the overexposed picture was poor and his heavily ringed fingers had been hidden by gloves. The new arrival in Colt House was the well-dressed gentleman from the train. It was Eustace Flask.

  He noticed Tom and Helen on the far side of the room. Aunt Julia, however, had not seen the medium arrive since she was examining a tear in the fabric of the cover of a chair just put in place by a maid. She was tutting and shaking her head, as if debating whether to have the chair taken out again.

  Meantime Flask walked briskly towards the Ansells. He came close to them. He said, ‘What did I say, Mr and Mrs A? I knew that we should meet again – and meet shortly.’

  Tom and Helen did not have long to get over their surprise at the fact that Eustace Flask was none other than the insinuating individual who’d boarded the train at York. Now, with rings twinkling on his naked fingers, the dapper spiritualist was directing his two assistants to put the finishing touches to the cabinet or wardrobe which sat at one end of the morning room. Flask would have stood out in a crowd. He favoured colourful clothes, if his bright green frock-coat was anything to go by, and was o
f more than average height and very pale in the face. His hair was a light red and seemed to spring away from his head as if eager to escape. Helen whispered to Tom that he made her think of a walking candle, his flame-like hair wavering as he directed his helpers.

  Ambrose was doing the finishing work of fitting panels into place and tightening screws while Kitty was fussing over the decorative curtains which hung over the oval windows in the upper part of the cabinet, a bit like a Punch & Judy booth. Tom took a more careful look at the assistants. Ambrose was a short fellow with a squashed nose who looked as though he’d be happier sparring in the ring than sitting around a table at a séance. Flask’s niece, Kitty, had an elfin sort of face on a well-padded body. Tom noticed that her uncle frequently touched her arm or shoulder as he was giving instructions. Meantime Aunt Julia was bustling about, welcoming the twenty or so visitors who had come for the show.

  No, it was not a show, Tom reminded himself, but a ‘manifestation’. The visitors, men and women, were a mixture of ages but all of them had the look of solid citizens, not easily taken in. It was much more elaborate and professional than the session in Tullis Street.

  Eventually everything appeared to be ready. The curtains had been drawn on the remains of the summer evening outside and the indoor lights – a mixture of gas and candles – turned down or extinguished. Nevertheless, the illumination was stronger than it had been at the Smights’ house. Eustace Flask stood before his audience, with Ambrose just behind him and Kitty to one side. In a well-practised move Flask slipped off his green frock-coat and handed it to Ambrose.