Escapade

by Walter Satterthwait

  I do not invent. Apparently, whenever the whim took him, the late Earl would don a wig and an artificial beard and go bounding through the rooms of astonished paid companions, giggling obscenities and waving that organ which Mrs Applewhite once characterized as “the progenerative member”. (Member of what? I remember you asking her; you were so heartless, Evy.)

  Today the entire episode strikes me as more pathetic than terrifying. I honestly feel rather sorry for the old man. How very sad to advertise one’s needs, and one’s means, to total strangers. How very sad, really, to feel compelled to do so.

  My aplomb of today, however, may in some way be a result of the Earl’s recent death. He won’t, ever again, be brandishing his endowments (which were considerable, by the way); not for me, and not for anyone else, poor soul.

  But to return to the equally astonishing Mr Beaumont. Last night, at a few minutes before one o’clock, after sealing your letter, I switched off the light and eased open my bedroom door and peeped out. I looked to the left. I saw nothing. I looked to the right. I saw Cecily Fitzwilliam, sheathed in a filmy silk robe, slide into Mr Beaumont’s darkened room as easily and as comfortably as a powdered foot slides into a familiar slipper.

  I’d known about them, of course, about their affair. Still, I was rather shocked (and not a little envious, I confess) at the brazenness of the woman—promenading semi-naked through the hallways, where anyone might see her, even a slinking, spiteful paid companion.

  I waited. I listened for the silence that would signal safety. This I heard, and I opened the door, closed it quietly behind me, and then galloped down the corridor to the post box. I slipped your letter inside and then I cantered down the stairs and through another hallway and up some more stairs and down another corridor to the Earl’s room, where I found the wig and the beard beneath his bed.

  Why the Earl’s room?

  Why must you pester me with questions?

  I was beneath the bed myself at the time, or I shouldn’t have discovered the beard and the wig.

  Oh, it’s an impossibly long story, Evy, and I’ll relate it to you one day, I promise, but just now I want to get to the knife and to

  Mr Beaumont.

  The knife was a silver dagger—an antique, and quite handsome, really—and it was thrusting out of my bed like a wicket when I returned to my room. I’d created a Sylvia—you remember the Sleeping Sylvias we fashioned from pillows and bolsters before we crept out the window of Miss Applewhite’s? I’d constructed a Sylvia before I set off for the Earl s room, and this one had been impaled.

  I became an imbecile for a moment or two, wondering how on earth the knife had got there. And then I realized that of course someone had put it there, deliberately, stabbed it there, having mistaken Sylvia for myself; and I promptly came down with a very bad case of the collywobbles.

  No, I don’t know who did it. And I can’t imagine why.

  After a few moments, in a sort of daze I snatched up the knife and went stumbling off toward Mrs Corneille’s room.

  I knocked on the door. She opened it and I staggered in. And who should be there, lurching up from a small rococo sofa, but Mr Beaumont.

  He was fully dressed. Perhaps he’d clothed himself again, after the earlier rendezvous with Cecily. Or perhaps, back in his room, Cecily had lunged upon him like a panther while he still wore them, and the two had toppled to the floor, and there, without wasting a moment, in the hurried lunge and thrust of passion, they...

  Oh dear.

  It’s the weather, Evy. Another day hot and sultry, and the sweetness of the sunlight sprawling across the green lawn. Everyone else has gone to Sunday services and I'm writing this out of doors, on the patio beside the conservatory. Squirrels are leaping about, and so, I fear, is my fancy.

  Whatever the explanation, there was Mr Beaumont looking dark and rather dashing in his dinner jacket (and trousers, etc.).

  This might have been, you may say, an innocent meeting, his engagement with Mrs Corneille. I might (almost) have believed so myself if I hadn’t, while sitting down, happened (by the purest chance) to glance into the front of the standing Mr Beaumont and discover that he was in a state that your Mrs Stopes describes as “masculine readiness.”

  Perhaps—and this occurs to me only just now—making love while clothed is another of those perplexing American innovations, like the Charleston. Perhaps this is what is actually meant by “get up and go”. Perhaps when I knocked at the door he and Mrs Corneille, both fully dressed, were tumbling wildly across the floor.

  No. I can—and with a vividness that is not at all unpleasant— picture Mr Beaumont so performing; but not the elegant Mrs Corneille. And yet I suspect that had I not knocked at the door, someone s clothing would have been, at the very least, profoundly rearranged.

  Mr Beaumont is indefatigable, it seems.

  In any event, I was flustered when I began the conversation with the two of them; and, throughout the course of it, I could feel my face flushing idiotically whenever I looked at him.

  He isn’t as self-absorbed as I’ve portrayed him in these letters, Evy. He was most charming, really—both last night, when I spoke with him and Mrs Corneille, and today, during my interrogation by the pompous Inspector Marsh of Scotland Yard. He even went so far as to defend me.

  But I get ahead of myself.

  I told them the entire story last night. Mr Beaumont and Mrs Corneille.

  Very nearly the entire story. I didn’t mention the other ghosts, the mother and the young boy I’d seen down by the mill. The more I consider them, the more I begin to believe that they were a product of my imagination. My nerves were stretched taut, the light beneath the willow tree was thin and gray. And, moreover,

  My goodness. I’ve just had quite the most bizarre and disquieting conversation with Mr Houdini. I’m at a loss. If what he seems to be suggesting is true—

  Let me see if I can structure this.

  He came strutting down the walkway, greeted me with a cheery ‘Good day!,’ plopped himself beside me on the bench, and declared that he was planning to resolve everything.

  I closed my notebook—hiding this page, with its tumbling speculations—and I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’

  He waved his hand quickly back and forth as though chasing away flies. ‘All this confusion, Miss Turner. Rifles and pistols and dying Earls. Ghosts. It has gone on for far too long, and I intend to resolve it.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. That was rather an exaggeration.

  He said, ‘I have been speaking with my associate, Phil Beaumont, and that policeman from London. Phil has told me of your encounter with the Earl. I sympathize completely, Miss Turner. I realize that to a demure young woman such as yourself, the Earl’s behaviour must have seemed monstrous.’

  I nodded demurely and looked down at my notebook. And blushed demurely, thinking of the things I’d written there.

  ‘I should tell you,’ he said, ‘that I have discovered the means by which he effected his invasion of your room.’

  ‘The means?’ I said stupidly.

  ‘Yes. By a careful examination of the Earl’s room, I was able to locate a secret passageway behind the wall. This leads down a narrow stairway to a kind of tunnel which encircles all of Maplewhite. From this tunnel, additional stairways lead upward to the various rooms of the house. One of them, no doubt, leads into your room. No doubt the Earl used this on Friday night.’

  ‘A secret passageway?’ I was beginning to feel rather like a parrot.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘But I thought he simply came in through the door.’

  He shook his head like a prim headmistress. ‘He has lived here all his life, and so must have known about the passageway. And why should he take a chance on being seen in the hallways? But, Miss Turner, a moment’s thought will tell you that if the Earl used the passageway, then someone else might have used it, at some other time.’

  ‘Yes?’ I said. I was still rather lost in visions of the Earl gliding in
his long nightgown through dark vaulted passageways, torchlight flickering along stone walls, bats fluttering, rats squeaking.

  ‘Phil has also told me of the knife you found in your bed, last night,’ he said. ‘Whoever put it there may also have used the passageway.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see.’

  ‘You comprehend what this means?’

  And I did, Evy. It meant that if the passageway had been used last night, it had been used by someone familiar with Maplewhite. Someone other than the Earl, who was no longer among us. ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘I have been pondering my preconceptions, Miss Turner,’ he said. ‘Someone attempted to kill you last night. This, I believe, was an attempt to silence you. I believe that you have heard something, or seen something, that will provide me the explanation for the mysterious events that have occurred here.’

  ‘But what?’

  He smiled. ‘It is precisely to determine this that I have tracked you down.’ He pulled a gold watch from his vest pocket, glanced at it, frowned, and looked at me. ‘Now, Miss Turner, I would be very grateful if you will tell me everything that has happened to you since you arrived at Maplewhite.’

  And, Evy, finally, I did so. I told him everything, including the tale of the two ghosts at the mill. I hadn’t told anyone of this, not Mrs Corneille, not Mr Beaumont, and certainly not the imperious Inspector Marsh. I felt that I should be unable to convince them of the first ghost’s identity if I complicated the story by mentioning a second ghost, and then a third. One truth, I felt, would have blemished the other. And, as I said, I had honestly begun to doubt their existence.

  I nearly did mention them to Inspector Marsh. But the man was so accusatory, so vain and self-satisfied, so prissily officious— how he ever managed to become a police officer I cannot imagine. The London underworld and its denizens must be a good deal less robust than the press accounts suggest. Inspector Marsh would survive for perhaps five minutes in Sidmouth.

  Mr Houdini possesses a certain smugness of his own, but he listened carefully to everything, paying especial attention to my chronicle of the mother and the young boy. He asked countless questions, nodding thoughtfully all the while, and then asked to hear the rest of my tale.

  I gave it to him, eliminating only the story of Cecily and Mr Beaumont, which is no one’s business, I think, but theirs. At the end, he began asking me a series of really quite remarkable questions. From the gist of them—no, I can’t tell you even that,

  Evy. I’m not being coy, honestly. I promised him; I swore I would tell no one what he asked me.

  ‘And what shall I tell Inspector Marsh,’ I asked him, ‘if he asks about the ghosts?’

  He raised his head, like a Caesar. ‘Then you must tell him. Houdini always plays fair.’

  And with that, he stood up, thanked me, and set off quickly back into the house.

  I really don’t know what to do, Evy. This is all extremely distressing. If the ghastly things that Mr Houdini suspects are true, then—

  I cannot.

  I shall post this. And then I shall sit down and think everything out.

  All my love, Jane

  Chapter Thirty-four

  MRS. BLANDINGS WAS a tall thin woman with a narrow mouth and a narrow chin and permanently narrowed brown eyes glinting from either side of a curved, narrow nose. She had been a handsome woman once, but time and care had deepened the hollows of her face and hardened the edges. Her hair was white and it was curled so tightly that patches of pink scalp glistened between the coils. She wore a long black cotton dress so heavily starched that it rustled like dead leaves whenever she breathed.

  She kept her hands on the kitchen table, her fingers interlaced. The hands were thin and almost elegant but her knuckles were red, as though she’d been pounding them against bricks.

  “I will not dally,” she told Inspector Marsh grimly. “I am incapable of dallying. Constitutionally.”

  “We won’t take much of your time, Mrs. Blandings,” Marsh assured her. He hadn’t been doing much dallying himself. We’d come down here at nearly a run and he hadn’t quoted Shakespeare once.

  We were sitting down at a table in the comer of the kitchen. It was a huge room, maybe thirty feet high. Fireplaces and ovens were built into the stone walls. There were five or six big wooden cupboards and six or seven long wooden shelves sagging beneath rows of heavy porcelain canisters. Four big sinks were built into the marble counter. Hanging on the walls were pots and pans and saucers and colanders and bowls and caldrons. There was a big metal drain in the floor, so you could hose everything down after you butchered your whale.

  “Lady Purleigh tells me,” said Marsh, “that the two of you were together yesterday when you heard the rifle shot.”

  “Poachers,” she said. “No respect at all these days.”

  “And where were you, exactly, when you heard the shot?”

  “In the conservatory. Discussing dinner with her ladyship.”

  “How long have you been employed here, Mrs. Blandings?”

  “All my life.”

  “So, doubtless, you know the family well.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you say it was a happy family?”

  “Certainly.”

  “No arguments, no dissension?”

  “None.”

  “But even in the best of families, surely—”

  “It isn’t my place to speak of other families. You asked about this one. Was it happy. Yes, I said.”

  Marsh nodded. “So you did. Are you prepared to speak about ghosts, Mrs. Blandings?”

  She eyed him skeptically. “Ghosts?”

  “Were you aware that one of the guests, a Miss Turner, claims to have been visited by a ghost on Friday night?”

  “Nonsense. The woman must be hysterical.”

  “You don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Of course not. But what I believe is hardly your concern, is it?”

  Marsh smiled. “Do you believe, Mrs. Blandings, that the late Earl committed suicide?”

  “I have no opinion on the matter.”

  “None?”

  “None.”

  “The Earl had been infirm for some time,” said Marsh.

  “For three years.”

  “Had you been given any reason to believe that his condition might have been improving?”

  “Improving? He was paralyzed.”

  Marsh nodded.

  Mrs. Blandings glanced impatiently around the room, looked back at Marsh. “Are we finished? I’ve things to do.”

  “Yes. For the moment. But I should like to speak to one of the kitchen maids. A young woman named Darleen.”

  “The O’Brien girl? Why?”

  Marsh smiled. “Forgive me, Mrs. Blandings, but that s hardly your concern, is it?”

  She blinked, and then she pursed her lips and stood. “I’ll send her in,” she said, and left.

  Marsh turned to me and smiled. “Not exactly forthcoming, was she?”

  “Maybe Darleen will be different.”

  DARLEEN WAS DIFFERENT. She wore black patent leather shoes and white cotton stockings and a black button-up cotton dress printed with tiny pink fleurs de lis. It was a conservative outfit, or it was supposed to be, and probably she’d worn it to church this morning. I felt sorry for the minister.

  She was in her early twenties and her body was so lush and ripe beneath the dress that she might as well be naked, and she knew it. She swept into the kitchen flickering like a colt and she tossed back her thick red hair and grinned at us. “And what’ve you done to poor Mrs. Blandings, you two? The poor old dear is givin’ off more steam than an express train.”

  Both Marsh and I had stood. “Miss O’Brien?” he said.

  “That’s me,” she said, and she cocked her head and smiled. Her eyes were green and bright and her cheeks were dusted faintly with freckles, cinnamon on cream. “And you’re the police, I hear. Come all the way from the great city of London.”

  �
��I’m Inspector Marsh. This is Mr. Beaumont. Please, Miss O’Brien, be seated.”

  She plopped down into the same seat Mrs. Blandings had used. She stretched out her long legs and she crossed them at the ankles and slapped her hands into her lap, like a little girl playing at being a grown-up. She smiled at me and then at Marsh.

  Marsh and I sat down. “Miss O’Brien,” he said, “I intend to be straightforward with you.”

  “Sure,” she said, and she sat back and opened her eyes in mock innocence, “and haven’t the police always been straightforward?”

  “You’ve had some experience of the police, have you, Miss O’Brien?”

  “Haven’t all the Irish? Experience of the Garda and the English.” She smiled. “But that’s over now, isn't it? Home Rule has come—finally, but better late than never.”

  “Yes,” said Marsh, “to be sure. Miss O’Brien, we know about your late-night visits to the room of the late Earl. We know that these have been going on for some time.”

  She smiled again. “Briggs. He’ll be the little bird that sang. Nasty pommy poof.”

  “So you don’t deny it.”

  She shrugged. “And what would be the point?”

  “No point whatever.”

  “There you are, then. And now you’ll be runnin’ off to her ladyship with the story. And young Darleen is sacked again. Well, fair enough. It’s back to Ireland for me anyway. We kicked out the ruddy English, and once we kick out the ruddy priests we’ll have a paradise on our hands.”

  “Miss O’Brien, so long as you cooperate, I see no need to apprise Lady Purleigh, or anyone else, of your relationship with the Earl.”

  “Cooperate, is it?” She grinned and put her elbow on the table. “And just what sort of cooperation was it you had in mind?”

  “Merely the answers to a few questions.”

  “Well, get on with them then. Always a treat to answer questions from the police.” She looked at me, looked back at Marsh, jerked her head toward me. “He doesn’t have much to say for himself, this one, does he?”

  “Mr. Beaumont is acting as an observer.”