Deadly Hall

by John Dickson Carr

  “In those days the family had a considerable number of business interests. Not that these much interested Fitzhugh, who hated business and said he couldn’t be bothered with it. Still, he did pretty well. Among the business interests was a big sugar plantation fifteen or sixteen miles upriver. Now you’ve heard, haven’t you, we’re distantly related to the Norman English family of Delys?”

  “Yes, I seem to have heard it somewhere.”

  “Cut the sarcasm, old son! Fitzhugh himself bought that plantation, also on the q.t., before leaving to look for treasure. But he couldn’t be bothered with growing sugar either. At the end of the eighteen-fifties an indigent younger son of the Delys clan had emigrated from England with his wife. Fitzhugh set ’em up as master and mistress of Faracres, the plantation, in a big pillared house that’s now dust. Though my grandsire owned and continued to own the place, he let everybody think the real owner was Arthur Delys.

  “Then came the Great Unpleasantness of ’61–’65.

  “It’s important to mention that at this time Fitzhugh Hobart, who soon became Captain Hobart and then Commodore Hobart, had two great friends. One remained his friend, the other didn’t. The first of these, who remained his friend, was the grandfather for whom you were named: Colonel Jeffrey Caldwell of the 4th Louisiana.” Dave stopped pacing. “Let me think, now, Jeff! Didn’t you yourself see service with the infantry during the late Great War?”

  “‘See service’ is much too strong a term; I never got near the front. I wound up as a shavetail in the 18th Connecticut.”

  Dave straightened up.

  “Got a very slight heart condition,” he declared, “that kept me out of the navy! Never mind; back to old shades. Fitzhugh’s other crony, who didn’t stay a crony very long, was a financial genius named Bernard Dinsmore, seven or eight years his senior.

  “Trouble between ’em flared up even before the outbreak of hostilities. Fitzhugh called him a damn Yankee-lovin’ traitor, and told him to go north with his goddamn friends.

  “Fitzhugh never forgave him. My father, only a baby then, later took steps to investigate the quarrel. My father always said the accused had been badly misjudged, and that right should have been done. Bernard Dinsmore, though a sharp businessman, just wanted the South to forget war. But he got into such hot water that he had to go north. If he didn’t join the Yankees in any active sense, he did make a fortune there. Bernard’s only surviving relative is his grandson, who must be a good deal older than either of us: Horace Dinsmore, a very pious and sour-faced Boston clergyman.”

  Dave had begun pacing again.

  “You’ll soon see, Jeff, how all this affects us today. The war storms rolled, wrecking so many Confederates but leaving the Hobarts untouched. Any bitterness is forgotten now, although one or two still gripe about what they did to Georgia in ’64. In New Orleans we had ’em on our necks from ’62 until the last carpetbagger was chased out in ’77.

  “Once Hobart fate hung in the balance when ‘Spoons’ Butler, the Federal commander, wanted to take over that plantation house upriver. Why they wanted a house so far from town I can’t tell you, but then Spoons wanted anything he could get, including the silverware. If they had known the place belonged to Fitzhugh, who had been playing hell with Union shipping … ! But Arthur Delys swore Faracres was his own, and maybe by that time Arthur believed it.

  “‘I am a British subject,’ he said truthfully. ‘Unless you care to provoke an international incident, sir, you will keep your hands off my property.’ Spoons thought better of it.

  “Then, presently, Commodore Hobart returned. He didn’t return to Faracres, where he’d lived with my grandmother; probably he expected some carpetbagger would grab it. Jeff, why do we think men who had beards couldn’t have had any emotions? He never remarried, cherishing his wife’s memory. His son, whom he’d called Harald in her honor, was brought up by a nurse until the boy grew old enough for boarding school. Fitzhugh took furnished rooms in the Garden District, which he made his home for many years.

  “Arthur Delys and Mrs. Delys died in a fever epidemic at the end of the eighteen-seventies. With the last carpetbagger gone, my grandsire sold Faracres, safely reinvesting his considerable profit. In the spring of 1882, at the mature age of fifty-four, he went abroad; he went to England, where he’d spent his honeymoon. It was partly a sentimental pilgrimage, and partly to call on the head of the Delys family at Delys Hall, Delys, Lincolnshire.

  “There it stood in the fen country: a sixteenth-century Tudor manor house, dark-red brick, many windows, with the date 1560 cut in stone over the front door. But the old boy’s Delys kin, once so wealthy, had fallen on hard times; they wanted to sell. And Fitzhugh conceived another romantic dream.

  “He had already bought that big tract of land outside New Orleans, upriver but quite close to town, meaning to build a home there for his old age. Now he’d do better. He would buy Delys Hall and have it taken apart for transportation, to be set up again beside the Mississippi.

  “And that’s what he did. Apart from gaslight for modern illumination (people were already talking electric light, but hadn’t got to it), and a few other improvements like up-to-date bathrooms, there were no alterations in its history of more than three centuries. There it stands now, windows and tall chimneys and all, as you’ve seen it a thousand times in the past.”

  Jeff, who had been smoking one cigarette after another, crushed out the latest.

  “I don’t like to interrupt you, Dave …”

  “Then why interrupt?”

  “Because I don’t understand!”

  “What don’t you understand, for Pete’s sake?”

  Jeff stood up and faced him.

  “This family history is fascinating; to one with my turn of mind, anyway. But how does it affect the situation today?”

  “Eh?”

  “Dave, you’re as jumpy as a cat; you’ve been acting like a wanted criminal. You say there’s all hell to pay, and that something bad or dangerous will explode very soon. What has the commodore’s story, or your father’s story, got to do with some trouble that threatens you now?”

  “Everything! You don’t see it?”

  “No. And that’s not all.”

  “If you’d just shut up and let me get to the point,” Dave told him pettishly, “maybe you would see. You’ve still got reservations; all right! If I promise to prove I’m not talking through my hat, may I have the liberty of saying what I want to say?”

  “Of course. I didn’t mean—”

  Dave made a magnanimous gesture.

  “Though it’s true my father had little to do with it, I’d better include him. He was in his early twenties when they transplanted the Hall, and looked on as the workmen made those few alterations under the commodore’s direction. My father studied engineering, but never finished at M.I.T. All he did, mostly, was help handle financial affairs before the commodore died, and handled ’em entirely later.

  “Four years after the old boy kicked the bucket, both my father and my mother were afraid they’d have to get repairs done to the fabric of the Hall. That damp climate, remember, can be rough on old brick and wood. But the architect they consulted said it wouldn’t be necessary; any house that could stand the English fen country could stand Louisiana. They made no changes except to install electric light, and the architect watched it done.”

  “Is this relevant too?”

  “Strictly relevant. Don’t forget old Fitzhugh’s hidden treasure.”

  Dave crossed to the door giving on the texas deck. He opened the door, peered out, then closed it softly and returned.

  “That place,” he went on, “never seemed incongruous in its new demesne, as it might have seemed. It looks old; it is old; it was bound to gather legends. Ever since the commodore did his transplanting job, finished in 1883, there’s been a persistent rumor you must have heard because so many have heard. Delys Hall, they’ll whisper, contains a secret room, a hidden room, and that’s where my grandsire put
his Spanish gold. Isn’t there a story like that about some place in Scotland?”

  “Yes, about Glamis Castle. But Glamis Castle is a huge place where almost anything might be hidden. The Hall is large, admittedly, and yet …”

  “You needn’t argue, Jeff; I agree. Another story says there’s no ‘room’ in a technical sense, but that the gold has been stashed away between two of the walls.”

  “Just a minute, now! The commodore found his gold, you tell me, more than two decades before he ever set eyes on Delys Hall. If he insisted on stashing it away in some place or other, where did he stash it during those twenty-two years?”

  “I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. Our subject is the Hall; let’s stick to it. Well, there’s no gold stashed away between any of the walls; I can testify to that.”

  “How so?”

  Dave’s excitement had grown along with his nervousness.

  “The workmen,” he replied, “went into the walls when they put in the electricity and the telephone. And that architect had got interested enough in legends to watch everything. I was only twelve years old then; Serena was younger. Neither my father nor the architect would tell me what they kept muttering about. But little pitchers have big ears and eyes; I’ve since verified what I thought. And you needn’t take my word for it. The architect in question is still very much alive; why not ask him? Nothing between the walls. At the same time,” Dave sighted along his pointing forefinger, “the damn gold has got to be somewhere in the house!”

  “Sure of that?”

  “Dead sure. The commodore left notes in a big ledger he called his log, as I started to remind you. It’s now available for inspection. He also talked to my father, who long afterwards talked to me.”

  “Gold bullion in the form of ingots, was it? How much gold?”

  “The weight is roughly in those notes. I asked a friend of mine at the Planters & Southern Bank, putting it as a hypothetical question about America’s gold supply, what would be the value of that weight in bullion. It works out at just under three hundred thousand dollars.”

  “As much gold as that?”

  “As much gold as that; no kidding! ‘It’s here,’ the old boy once said to my father, meaning in our house. ‘It’s not buried; in one way it’s not even concealed. It’s in plain sight, when you know how to look for it.’”

  “He didn’t say, ‘When you know where to look for it’? He said, ‘When you know how to look for it’? ”

  “His very words. Pretty wild, isn’t it?”

  “It’s more than wild; it’s against nature!” Jeff stared at him. “Dave, do you understand your own grandfather? We might reconcile the hard-boiled with the sentimental; that seems to have characterized his generation. But he left your parents one fortune, didn’t he? If he salted away another fortune in some hiding place that’s not a hiding place, why had he kept it so secret? Why didn’t he just tell ’em?”

  Dave swaggered a little, thumbs hooked at the lapels of his dressing-gown.

  “To my way of thinking, the ingenious old devil enjoyed making it a challenge.”

  “Suppose he’s been stringing everybody for all this time?”

  “No, Jeff; grandpop wouldn’t have lied. By all accounts he never lied, though he did get a kick from making misleading statements inside the truth, like one of those mystery stories that play fair. You used to read a lot of mysteries, didn’t you?”

  “I still do.”

  “Yes, my father liked ’em too. The old commodore would have been a fiend for the stuff, if in his day there’d been anybody to read about besides Sherlock Holmes. He never thought our family would need that gold, you know. We don’t really need it now, of course, but what a triumph if somebody could read the riddle!”

  “That’s not the only riddle in this affair, Dave, or your grandsire’s conduct either. Your own conduct is just as odd as his.”

  “My conduct?”

  “Yes, yours. You say you’ll explain the jitters that so patently affect you, and make everything clear. But not one word of explanation have you uttered so far!”

  “Oh, I don’t know. There must be some reason, mustn’t there, why Delys Hall has been called Deadly Hall?”

  Jeff, who had sat down, jumped up.

  “Now hold it right there! Gabble away as much as you like and welcome, but I won’t have that!”

  “Oh, Lord, what’s on your mind now?”

  “What’s been on my mind for some time. A certain book on the stately homes of England, Dave, devotes one whole chapter to Delys Hall before it was transplanted. As an amateur historian of sorts, I can tell you something about the place and the Delys family too.”

  “Well?” demanded Dave.

  “Your Delys kin, who built their house two years after the accession of Queen Elizabeth, were good old stock. They were also sober, unspectacular stock: sound Protestants of Henry the Eighth’s Anglican Church. They avoided squabbles, religious or political, before then and afterwards. By some miracle they even contrived to stay neutral during the English Civil War. And their private lives were just as unspectacular. No murders, duels, or tragic love affairs leading to suicide.”

  “Suppose you explain now?”

  “Delys Hall had been called Deadly Hall in England. It got that name through a natural habit of our common language; ‘Delys’ would instantly suggest ‘deadly’ to the primitive sense of humor. It didn’t acquire the names from anything that ever happened there, because no such thing ever happened. Has it ever been called haunted, sinister, or of ill repute in any way?”

  “Not in England, maybe. But—”

  “Well,” Jeff pursued, “doesn’t the same apply to its history on this side? The place exudes antiquity, as you’ve pointed out—”

  “It exudes jitters, as I do myself. Damn the business, Jeff … !”

  “Still, can you name one sinister aspect? Did anything violent ever occur there?”

  “Yes, once!” Dave burst out. “Aren’t you forgetting what happened that night in the fall of 1910, when you and I were both away from home for our first term at preparatory school?”

  “If you mean the family friend who tumbled down the stairs in the main hall and broke his neck, it’s not even violence of the sort we’ve been discussing. And it attracted almost no attention. That staircase is solid oak, but the treads are worn and apt to be slippery. A guest who was drunk or even careless …”

  “Wrong in everything, old son!”

  “Wrong in everything?”

  Dave checked off the points on his fingers.

  “You can’t call Thad Peters a family friend; he had some very slight business dealings with my father. He was never careless and he couldn’t have been drunk: he didn’t drink. Thad Peters, in fact, was a noted athlete with a perfect sense of balance. You see, Jeff …”

  Again Dave’s eye had strayed towards the door; suddenly he went rigid. Dave darted at the door and flung it open. Then, taking one long step outside, he paused, turned towards his left, and stood staring forward along the deck.

  “Good God!” he muttered.

  3

  NIGHT MURMURINGS, WATER noises: no more. Jeff, who followed Dave a moment later, also crossed the threshold to stand beside him.

  Any lights in the roof over the deck had been extinguished. And Dave had already closed the little curtains at the deck window. Only a glow from the open door fell across scrubbed boards outside. Glancing forward, Jeff could see, some sixty feet from them, the indistinct shape of a woman who seemed to be leaning her elbows on the rail as she gazed out towards the vague Indiana shore.

  If Dave thought he had heard somebody just outside, he must have been mistaken. The figure was too far away to have covered that distance in a second or two.

  “Kate!” Dave called.

  As the woman turned, still indistinct, he lifted his forefinger and crooked it, beckoning. Evidently unsurprised, but giving a little gasp none the less, she approached at a graceful walk that was no
t quite self-conscious.

  The newcomer emerged from gloom as a tallish, handsome brunette, her figure well developed despite current fashion, in a white dress with the shortest of skirts under her long, fleecy coat, and hair confined by a cloche hat. If her manner could not have been called furtive, it had a touch of the stealthy. Beautiful brown eyes seemed to lurk in ambush. The woman called Kate might have been thirty-odd.

  “Dave Hobart, as I live and breathe!” she said in her throaty voice. She extended her hand, which Dave took briefly. He did not appear over-cordial.

  Kate ignored this. Her gaze, combining the soulful with the sensual, searched Dave’s face. She dropped her hand on his left shoulder, then let it wander down to his chest.

  “When I passed once today, do you know, I thought I saw you hiding in there—positively hiding, poor boy—as though you didn’t want to be seen! Silly of me, wasn’t it, being only poor little me? But …”

  “Hiding? Who’s hiding, for God’s sake? I’m very much in the open, as always. And I do want to present a very old friend of mine, also bound for our destination on the levee. Mr. Caldwell, Mrs. Keith. Jeff, meet Kate.”

  “Such a pleasure, Mr. Caldwell!” carolled Mrs. Keith. “I’ve heard of you, of course. You’re—” Her attention returned to Dave. “Is Mr. Caldwell your roommate for the trip?”

  “No; we’re each travelling alone. Have you got a roommate, Kate?”

  “Davey-boy, I’m alone too! Anyway, what girl would travel with an old widow woman like me? Returning to the city of your fathers, Jeff?”

  “Only for a very short time, I’m afraid,” Dave answered for him. “However, I think I can persuade him to stay with us at the Hall.”

  “How terribly nice! Or at least I expect it is. He won’t fall downstairs and break his neck, I hope? Oh, dearie me,” Kate exploded, “there I go again! Such a blabbermouth, they tell me, with no more tact than an Arkansas farmer. I hadn’t intended to mention that, Dave, and I swear I’ll never mention it again!”

  “Somebody’s going to mention it, Kate, maybe talk about it a lot.”