by John Farris
"Old duffer, scribbling on his walls. Not like him, Thomas. He was always the tidiest one of the lot. Picked up after himself. Never careless about where he moved his bowels."
"Have they decided it was a bomb did him in?"
"What else could have done it? There's just no place that's safe anymore, Georgie. Next thing you know we'll be having one through the roof."
Lord Luxton watched the workmen up the oak staircase, then on impulse followed them to a second-floor chamber with a small brick hearth. The room had been fitted out with bookshelves, a comfortable Morris chair and reading lamp, a prie-dieu at the foot of the iron bedstead. Chessmen stood in rows on an octagonal game table. The private library consisted of classics in at least three languages. There were bland Currier and Ives prints on three walls. The unpolished parquetry was overlaid with rag rugs of the type displayed at rural fairs. It seemed almost a typical institutional common room, lacking keepsakes, the flavor or reflections of one man's personality.
Except for one odd thing: An invocation (perhaps) had been starkly scrawled on the wall at the head of the bed, apparently with a piece of wood char from the hearth.
LADY
IN THY SERPENT
PRISON-HOUSE
SOME PITY SHOW
Luxton noticed iron brackets in the wall, where something had hung for a long time. A large cross? The yellowed calcimine within the brackets confirmed this.
"Who has this room?" Luxton asked.
The workmen turned in surprise. "Shouldn't be up here, guv'nor," Georgie said.
"May I know whose room?" his lordship repeated pleasantly.
"The one that was blowed to smithereens in the park this morning." Thomas said. "Holley. Dr. Holley."
"When did he write that on the wall?"
"Begging your pardon, guv'nor, we're not allowed to natter about the residents. Regulations is strict here."
"Quite all right. Actually I was looking for the loo."
"Right, sir. Just down the hall to your left."
He was washing up when he glanced through the partly opened loo window and saw below a keg of a woman with a black bag trudging across green lawns to her car. His lordship opened the window wider and leaned out.
"Doctor, may I have a word with you? I'll just be a moment."
The doctor's name was Mary Burgess. She maintained her surgery in Nuncheap, and for more than twenty years she'd looked after the health of the residents of Hawkspurn House. She had a rather grizzled, mole-infested face and black eyes like moles that moved. She held her head erect and thrust slightly forward as if she dared anyone to find her homely. Plenty of pepper in her manner, too, but her mouth couldn't hold a firm line for long, and her hands trembled when Lord Luxton respectfully begged a few moments with the late Dr. Holley.
"He's in pitiable condition."
"I'm afraid I must insist," he said.
"Might I ask why, my lord?"
"The condition of the body could be informative. We have virtually nothing else to go on."
"What do you suspect?" the woman said, with the slowest-curdling smile his lordship had ever seen. Still, her hands would not stop trembling. "Some sort of secret weapon? I understand there've been bombs seen entering the ground and burrowing along beneath roadways, humping and bumping the surface as they move toward their targets."
"Of course you don't subscribe to such public fantasies."
"I never fantasize. And my common sense tells me you've nothing to gain by poking about Hawkspurn estate. What exploded in the park this morning was a single, stray bomb—"
"Which happened to kill a gentleman of whom you were very fond."
"He suffered enough in his life. The least I can do is spare him the indignity of strangers—"
"This is official business, madam," Lord Luxton said, summoning the nerve to speak with more authority. But his unconscious cuddling of the pink queer hands against his solar plexus somewhat mitigated the effect.
Her eyes were contemptuous, then sad. "If you must put it on that basis—"
"Well, yes."
"Come with me, then."
The woman led him back into the house and down to a cellar. In a rat-tight and dry storage room lit by a bare globe hung from the ceiling, the shrouded body of Dr. Eustace Holley lay on a trestle table awaiting removal by morticians. Mary Burgess hesitated only a moment before stripping the sheet from the body. She stepped back, mechanically folding the sheet, her eyes fixed on a blank wall, while his lordship examined the remains.
Eustace Holley had been a gaunt man of sixty-five or so, with a hairless torso and one deformed foot, perhaps the result of a monstrous abscess; the scars of surgical correction were still evident. The face was intact, the eyes closed. Judging from the size of those lidded orbs, like parboiled pigeon's eggs, he'd had large, perhaps soulful eyes under a compelling overhang of brow. The furrows of the forehead were straight—an honest, diligent man—the full mustache neatly cared for. Someone, Mary Burgess most likely, had carefully recombed his hair. The, upper torso was, as Kellow had mentioned, severely flayed. There was also a gaping wound in the groin area, now crusted over. The genitals were entirely missing.
His lordship swallowed hard and caught the eye of Mary Burgess.
"Would you turn him for me, doctor?"
That made her angry, but she moved the knobby long body in accordance with Lord Luxton's wishes. Except for a couple of faint, old tropical ulcer scars, the skin of his back and legs was clear. His thin buttocks, however, were stippled with minor but distinct lacerations, almost like puncture marks. Four in a row on each cheek, and recently made.
"Thank you," Luxton mumbled, and he got out of there, ungraciously leaving the corpse for Mary Burgess to reshroud.
By the time she reappeared in the open air his color had returned and there was a cold pipe clenched between his teeth, upside down after the fashion of Ronald Colman in some movie or other where it had rained interminably. His lordship greatly admired Ronald Colman.
"I trust you know more now than you knew before," the doctor said coldly, intending to pass him right by.
Lord Luxton smiled disarmingly. "I'm totally baffled." He fell in step beside Mary Burgess, to her great annoyance. 'What do you make of his condition? I'm referring specifically to the absence of—"
"Shrapnel wound, of course."
"Doctor, believe me, of one thing I'm entirely certain. There was no bomb in the park. Something else did him in."
"Hah," she said, dispiritedly.
"It rather looked to me as if his genitals had been pulled out by the roots."
Mary Burgess faltered as if kicked, then put her head down resolutely and continued on to her open car, a small vintage De Dion Bouton with a high transom windscreen and solid tires. Not what he'd pictured her driving; was she something of a Francophile?
"Good day, your lordship."
"I was wondering—about that time, isn't it?—perhaps tea."
"I'm much too busy for tea today. I've patients waiting and—"
Lord Luxton put a hand on the opening car door, then snatched it away before she could be further offended. But he succeeded in claiming the woman's full attention for several moments.
"Dr. Burgess, something quite odd occurred here this morning. Bizarre, I should say. If I'm not satisfied with my investigation, then there is every possibility that a more comprehensive investigation will be made, perhaps by Military Intelligence. You stand to lose a great deal of your valuable time to those gentlemen. Although I seem to be a considerable nuisance at the moment, if you'll only give me an hour or two perhaps I can spare you further inconvenience."
"What is it you'd like to know?"
"Everything about Dr. Eustace Holley. I especially want to know what possessed him to scrawl those words on the wall of his chamber, above the bed. I want to know what he meant."
"So you saw that," she said, distressed that he would go snooping around. But she couldn't sustain her indignation; her eyes c
louded, and a certain elemental force seemed to leave her body.
"Yes."
"Then I'll tell you what I can," Mary Burgess said, her manner for once subdued.
"May I ride with you to Nuncheap? My chauffeur will follow."
"Very well."
Neither of them spoke the first mile and a half as Mary Burgess gave most of her attention to the laboring automobile, which pulled to the left and wheezed disastrously on the most minor grades. The doctor glanced several times at Lord Luxton as he fiddled with his pipe and absently patted his jacket pockets for matches, and finally she grumbled, "Smoke if you must, it doesn't bother me."
"Oh—no. I've given up tobacco. A nasty catarrh this past winter decided me. But I can't seem to wean myself from the battered old briar."
"Purely as a physician I couldn't help speculating about the condition of your fingers. Would it be hereditary?"
"It's the Massengill family affliction. Crops up every third generation, sparing neither male nor female. All that money going on and on forever, must pay for it in some wise, I reckon."
"Another man would wear gloves day and night."
"I'm long since past feeling any sense of shame about my lack of nails. Quite trivial, really, although my fingers can be easily damaged. Of course it was hell growing up, the hazing, the gratuitous cruelties, but school's out now."
After a few moments Mary Burgess completed the exchange of confidences by saying, "I was thought somewhat odd myself. Cutting open frogs to see what made them tick was not a ladylike thing to do. But I was never on an equal footing with girls my age. I couldn't interest myself in their airs and silly conceits. I began my medical training in 1904—after five years and many attempts to be enrolled."
"A singularly lonely enterprise, I should imagine."
"Yes. But I was determined to have a useful life. Whether or not anyone wanted me."
She made a turn into a crooked lane just off the High Street of Nuncheap and stopped at the second of an unjoined row of two- and three-story houses with overstepping gables that looked down on a cattailed mere. Steam was issuing from under the bonnet of the little roadster.
"Damn! It's the radiator again."
"Why don't you see to your patients, then? My chauffeur and I will have a look. Medwick is marvelous tinkering with engines."
"Thank you—my lord."
A pat of solder from the commodious repair kit which Medwick carried everywhere in the Rolls sealed the trickly radiator of Mary Burgess's car. Twenty minutes later his lordship was admitted to the parlor of the doctor's quarters on the second floor of the house by an ancient Scots housemaid who carried on an incomprehensible dialogue with herself while largely ignoring him.
The parlor had sunny windows and betrayed Mary Burgess's passion for needlepoint and illuminated manuscripts. Lord Luxton whiled away the remaining time by trying to identify vague medicinal vapors rising from the surgery: camphor, iodine, sulfur depuratum. The rose garden just below the half-opened windows was doing famously. Swans coasted on the mere. In this pleasant backwater he felt part of another century; the war that visited England almost on a daily basis was far from his mind. Then the appearance of a flock of Hampden twin-engine bombers in ragged formation on the horizon, heading inland to Driffield, brought him back to the complexities of his chosen service. Luxton, uneasy, rattled the stem of his pipe between his teeth and thought about Dr. Eustace Holley,
Mary Burgess appeared, followed by the muttering housemaid, who was pushing a cart. The doctor said, with a geniality that seemed foreign to her, "I'm afraid I have nothing more savory to offer than tinned biscuit. The shortages, you know."
"You needn't apologize."
She bustled about getting him settled. They faced each other from matching settees that bracketed the hearth. The sun was on the ceiling, turning a deep orange. Mary Burgess had scrubbed her face. It glistened like parchment despite the irritable punctuation of many moles, blobs of ink from a nib pen. Why did she tolerate them, he wondered, or were they inoperable? She'd changed her dress, from dark gray to a medium shade of blue, possibly the gayest article of clothing she owned. Her eyes had a noticeably high, nimbused shine, as if she'd resorted to something powerful as morphia to settle her nerves.
Lord Luxton wondered if her evening tonic might not be habitual, then felt bad about the inference. After all, a close friend had died today, and despite her professional detachment she must have suffered to see him so disfigured.
She had asked if he would mind the wireless, which was now distantly playing "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree [with anyone else but me]." Luxton smiled as he sipped his tea and jiggled one foot in time to the swing rhythm of the popular song.
"You've recently received the George Cross," Mary Burgess said.
"Well, yes, as a matter of fact."
She nodded. "It was in the Pictorial, which a patient of mine happened to have with him today. So I couldn't help noticing, you see—there was rather a large photograph."
"Yes, yes, haven't seen the article myself."
"How long have you been at it? Poking at these unexploded bombs?"
"Two—well, should say a little longer than two years now."
She said with her granite-jawed candor, "You've overstayed then. You'll be killed."
His lordship smiled broadly. "Oh, no. I've no intention of being killed."
"Hmm. Let me make it clear how greatly I admire your courage. You've matched yourself against incalculable odds, and you'll continue, no doubt, until you're no longer needed. It's the only sort of courage that matters. Eustace was a man not unlike yourself. One of a handful of physicians pitted against the immense, hostile, soul-rotting hulk of Africa."
Luxton was grateful that the subject had changed so abruptly. "How long were you acquainted with Dr. Holley?"
"Nearly twenty-two years."
Now there was a surprise. "That's how long he was in residence at Hawkspurn House?"
"Yes."
"Then he was still rather a young man when he—"
"Went mad? He was just shy of his forty-fourth year, and in his prime."
"So Dr. Holley was a lunatic," Lord Luxton said, with a doleful shaking of his head.
Unexpectedly she smiled. "I said he went mad, but he came around with proper rest and treatment. He was perfectly lucid for most of the years I knew him. He had his sinking spells and peculiarities—don't we all? But a more charming, knowledgeable, sensitive man I shall never meet." Her cup rattled on the rim of her saucer; an emotion had caught her by surprise. But her voice continued without a tremor.
"It took time and patience on my part to win his confidence. There were things he could not, would not, talk about, including the practice of medicine. It was my misfortune at the time to suffer from shingles. One day while I was making a routine visit to Hawkspurn House he observed that I was in torment and insisted on making a diagnosis. I humored him. He suggested an infusion principally of chaulmoogra oil, a great rarity obtainable only from India, and gave me the name of a supplier in Switzerland. The treatment worked a miracle. From time to time thereafter when I had a patient with a condition difficult to clear up I'd mention the case to Eustace. But," she concluded, smug and pining at the same time, "he made no more recommendations."
"Obviously, though he'd recovered his faculties, he no longer cared to practice medicine."
"Eustace was lame, as you undoubtedly observed, and never very strong again physically, certainly not strong enough to withstand months in the forests of the K'buru. Nor could he support any unusual demands on his emotions."
"No family?"
"He had a son," said Mary Burgess. "When I last saw him he was still very thin from the effects of a serious head injury, complicated by malaria. That was in autumn, 1921."
"Living now?"
"Yes. Jackson writes to me twice a year to inquire after the health of his father."
"Writes? Doesn't visit?"
"That would be much too painful f
or him," she said, staring at Lord Luxton.
"Painful? how d'you mean?"
"All because of one of Eustace's—peculiarities. He believed his son was dead, and that he was responsible. An attempt was made to reunite them in 1921, after Jackson returned from his long sojourn en dispensaire in Kisantu. He was nearly eighteen years of age. But Eustace refused to see him. He kept repeating, 'My son is dead. I killed him. I did it to save us all.' Quite naturally the boy was shattered. In just over a year's time he'd lost his mother and younger sister! Now he was being obsessively rejected by his father, whom he deeply loved."
"Incredible."
"At last we arranged for Eustace to meet Jackson face-to-face—'accidentally,' as it were. We hoped the shock would restore his memory. It had no such effect: not a flicker of recognition. The matter was hopeless. Even Jackson soon realized his father was lost to him as well."
"What was the meaning of Dr. Holley's obsession?"
"'It's difficult to say. Not much is known about the tragedy of Tuleborné. Jackson's own memory has always been drastically incomplete. If Eustace knew precisely what happened there, he never said a word to anyone."
"Not even to you."
"That is correct."
"And what was this—tragedy of Tuleborné? I gather it's somewhere in Africa—"
"Tuleborné, I'm told, no longer exists. And no Negro of the forest will venture within a mile of its former location. In 1909, when Eustace was posted to Africa by the Fullerites, Tuleborné was a thriving village on the upper reaches of the K'buru River system of French Equatorial Africa, just north of the equator and some two hundred miles from the sea. In addition to sawmills and timber enterprises, there were a mission station, school and hospital already in existence at Tulebom. Dr. Holley added greatly to the hospital facilities during his stay of more than a decade in the forest. He had with him his wife and son, who was six years old at the time. Several months later Mrs. Holley went back to England to await the birth of a daughter. When this child was almost a year old, Eustace took his first and only leave of absence, and the family was reunited.
"They all returned to Tuleborné in the spring of 1912, where they remained. They seem to have been reasonably happy despite the hardships and confinement. The children were educated at the mission school. At an early age Jackson demonstrated a talent for medicine, and was of considerable value to his father as he grew older. There was nothing they wanted except to be of service. But, despite the best of motives, they were defeated in the end."