Toward the Golden Age

by Ashley, Mike;

  THE NINESCORE MYSTERY

  MARY NICHOLL’S BABY DYING

  Then, below that, a short paragraph:—

  We regret to learn that the little baby daughter of the unfortunate girl who was murdered recently at Ash Court, Ninescore, Kent, under such terrible and mysterious circumstances, is very seriously ill at the cottage of Mrs. Williams, in whose charge she is. The local doctor who visited her to-day declares that she cannot last more than a few hours. At the time of going to press the nature of the child’s complaint was not known to our special representative at Ninescore.

  “What does this mean?” I gasped.

  But before she could reply there was a knock at the door.

  “A telegram for Miss Granard,” said the voice of the hall-porter.

  “Quick, Mary,” said Lady Molly eagerly. “I told the chief and also Meisures to wire here and to you.”

  The telegram turned out to have come from Ninescore, and was signed “Meisures.” Lady Molly read it aloud:

  “Mary Nicholls arrived here this morning. Detained her at station. Come at once.”

  “Mary Nicholls! I don’t understand,” was all I could contrive to say.

  But she only replied:

  “I knew it! I knew it! Oh, Mary, what a wonderful thing is human nature, and how I thank Heaven that gave me a knowledge of it!”

  She made me get dressed all in a hurry, and then we swallowed some breakfast hastily whilst a fly was being got for us. I had, perforce, to satisfy my curiosity from my own inner consciousness. Lady Molly was too absorbed to take any notice of me. Evidently the chief knew what she had done and approved of it: the telegram from Meisures pointed to that.

  My lady had suddenly become a personality. Dressed very quietly, and in a smart close-fitting hat, she looked years older than her age, owing also to the seriousness of her mien.

  The fly took us to Ninescore fairly quickly. At the little police-station we found Meisures awaiting us. He had Elliot and Pegram from the Yard with him. They had obviously got their orders, for all three of them were mighty deferential.

  “The woman is Mary Nicholls, right enough,” said Meisures, as Lady Molly brushed quickly past him, “the woman who was supposed to have been murdered. It’s that silly bogus paragraph about the infant brought her out of her hiding-place. I wonder how it got in,” he added blandly; “the child is well enough.”

  “I wonder,” said Lady Molly, whilst a smile—the first I had seen that morning—lit up her pretty face.

  “I suppose the other sister will turn up too, presently,” rejoined Elliot. “Pretty lot of trouble we shall have now. If Mary Nicholls is alive and kickin’, who was murdered at Ash Court, say I?”

  “I wonder,” said Lady Molly, with the same charming smile.

  Then she went in to see Mary Nicholls.

  The Reverend Octavius Ludlow was sitting beside the girl, who seemed in great distress, for she was crying bitterly.

  Lady Molly asked Elliot and the others to remain in the passage whilst she herself went into the room, I following behind her.

  When the door was shut, she went up to Mary Nicholls, and assuming a hard and severe manner, she said:

  “Well, you have at last made up your mind, have you, Nicholls? I suppose you know that we have applied for a warrant for your arrest?”

  The woman gave a shriek which unmistakably was one of fear.

  “My arrest?” she gasped. “What for?”

  “The murder of your sister Susan.”

  “’Twasn’t me!” she said quickly.

  “Then Susan is dead?” retorted Lady Molly, quietly.

  Mary saw that she had betrayed herself. She gave Lady Molly a look of agonised horror, then turned as white as a sheet and would have fallen had not the Reverend Octavius Ludlow gently led her to a chair.

  “It wasn’t me,” she repeated, with a heartbroken sob.

  “That will be for you to prove,” said Lady Molly dryly. “The child cannot now, of course, remain with Mrs. Williams; she will be removed to the workhouse, and—”

  “No, that shan’t be,” said the mother excitedly. “She shan’t be, I tell you. The workhouse, indeed,” she added in a paroxysm of hysterical tears, “and her father a lord!”

  The reverend gentleman and I gasped in astonishment; but Lady Molly had worked up to this climax so ingeniously that it was obvious she had guessed it all along, and had merely led Mary Nicholls on in order to get this admission from her.

  How well she had known human nature in pitting the child against the sweetheart! Mary Nicholls was ready enough to hide herself, to part from her child even for a while, in order to save the man she had once loved from the consequences of his crime; but when she heard that her child was dying, she no longer could bear to leave it among strangers, and when Lady Molly taunted her with the workhouse, she exclaimed in her maternal pride:

  “The workhouse! And her father a lord!”

  Driven into a corner, she confessed the whole truth.

  Lord Edbrooke, then Mr. Lydgate, was the father of her child. Knowing this, her sister Susan had, for over a year now, systematically blackmailed the unfortunate man—not altogether, it seems, without Mary’s connivance. In January last she got him to come down to Ninescore under the distinct promise that Mary would meet him and hand over to him the letters she had received from him, as well as the ring he had given her, in exchange for the sum of £5,000.

  The meeting-place was arranged, but at the last moment Mary was afraid to go in the dark. Susan, nothing daunted, but anxious about her own reputation in case she should be seen talking to a man so late at night, put on Mary’s dress, took the ring and the letters, also her sister’s purse, and went to meet Lord Edbrooke.

  What happened at that interview no one will ever know. It ended with the murder of the blackmailer. I suppose the fact that Susan had, in measure, begun by impersonating her sister, gave the murderer the first thought of confusing the identity of his victim by the horrible device of burying the body in the slimy mud. Anyway, he almost did succeed in hoodwinking the police, and would have done so entirely but for Lady Molly’s strange intuition in the matter.

  After his crime he ran instinctively to Mary’s cottage. He had to make a clean breast of it to her, as, without her help, he was a doomed man.

  So he persuaded her to go away from home and to leave no clue or trace of herself or her sister in Ninescore. With the help of money which he would give her, she could begin life anew somewhere else, and no doubt he deluded the unfortunate girl with promises that her child would be restored to her very soon.

  Thus he enticed Mary Nicholls away, who would have been the great and all-important witness against him the moment his crime was discovered. A girl of Mary’s type and class instinctively obeys the man she has once loved, the man who is the father of her child. She consented to disappear and to allow all the world to believe that she had been murdered by some unknown miscreant.

  Then the murderer quietly returned to his luxurious home at Edbrooke Castle, unsuspected. No one had thought of mentioning his name in connection with that of Mary Nicholls. In the days when he used to come down to Ash Court he was Mr. Lydgate, and, when he became a peer, sleepy, out-of-the-way Ninescore ceased to think of him.

  Perhaps Mr. Lionel Lydgate knew all about his brother’s association with the village girl. From his attitude at the inquest I should say he did, but of course he would not betray his own brother unless forced to do so.

  Now, of course, the whole aspect of the case was changed: the veil of mystery had been torn asunder owing to the insight, the marvelous intuition, of a woman who, in my opinion, is the most wonderful psychologist of her time.

  You know the sequel. Our fellows at the Yard, aided by the local police, took their lead from Lady Molly, and began their investigations of Lord Edbrooke’s movements on or about the 23rd of January.

  Even their preliminary inquiries revealed the fact that his lordship had left Edbrooke Castle on
the 21st. He went up to town, saying to his wife and household that he was called away on business, and not even taking his valet with him. He put up at the Langham Hotel.

  But here police investigations came to an abrupt ending. Lord Edbrooke evidently got wind of them. Anyway, the day after Lady Molly so cleverly enticed Mary Nicholls out of her hiding-place, and surprised her into an admission of the truth, the unfortunate man threw himself in front of the express train at Grantham railway station, and was instantly killed. Human justice cannot reach him now!

  But don’t tell me that a man would have thought of that bogus paragraph, or of the taunt which stung the motherly pride of the village girl to the quick, and thus wrung from her an admission which no amount of male ingenuity would ever have obtained.

  The Three Knocks

  Edith Macvane

  Edith Macvane (1874–?) is not as well known as she should be. She was a prolific writer in the first two decades of the twentieth century, mostly of light romances and society novels, such as The Adventures of Joujou (1906) and The Duchess of Dreams (1908), but she also turned her hand to a series of detective stories featuring Miss Fanny Gordon. Fanny is a society girl who finds herself alone in Paris with no money but who throws herself into an adventure arising from an exchange of coats. This brings her into contact with an undercover agent, the Vicomte de Chatellerault, who, in subsequent stories, asks for her help in his investigations.

  As if it was truth following fiction, at the time that Edith was writing the stories for McClure’s Magazine in 1913, her sister, Dorothy, a noted opera singer then touring southern Italy, found herself under surveillance on suspicion of being a spy. Edith hurried to the American ambassador in Rome for him to intervene. Dorothy was fully exonerated—it turned out she was the victim of revenge—although she continued to be booed at performances by an Italian public convinced of her guilt.

  Edith, Dorothy, and a third sister, Emily, who had married a French cavalry officer and become the Baroness de Placy, were daughters of the Harvard Professor Emeritus of Ancient and Modern History, Silas Macvane, who was seriously ill and died in Rome in January 1914. All three sisters were talented—Edith a writer, Emily an artist and Dorothy an opera singer. Edith was also a yachtswoman and fluent in French and Italian.

  I

  “Hello! Mademoiselle Gordon?”

  “Here!”

  “This is de Chatellerault who speaks. Tell me, mademoiselle, do you turn sick at the sight of blood?”

  “What!”

  “Blood—in quantities, I mean. Does it make you faint?”

  “No!”

  “Good! Then meet me at half past twelve at the restaurant of the Quai d’Orsay. I’ll give you luncheon, if you’ll accept it, and an explanation.”

  Three quarters of an hour later, Fanny Gordon, chic and charming in her new summer suit of corbeau satin, entered the smoky dining-room of the great station—as unobserved a place for a rendezvous, perhaps, as exists in Paris. Raoul de Chatellerault hurried to meet her.

  “Mademoiselle! I thank you. Here—this corner table. Give me your parasol. Here—let me help you to caviar. And now—mademoiselle, we want your help!”

  “We?”

  “The Secret Service. In the affair of the Queen of Swabia’s pearl, my chief was immensely impressed with your wit and courage. Your name was mentioned in his official report. And now, mademoiselle, the Chief of Police sends me to ask your services in this mysterious affair of the Vaucaire murder.”

  Fanny started as he named this celebrated case which had since yesterday morning rung through Paris. The Vicomte went on quickly:

  “A fine old boy, the Duc de Vaucaire, who at sixty-three preserved the life and spirit of twenty! Nevertheless, like many others of the ancient nobility of France, his traditions were all of the past. Mon roi was his religion. From his beautiful old palace in the Faubourg Saint-Germain all modern life was excluded—newspapers, books, even electric light, because electricity is supplied by the republican city government. It is even said that in the year ’70, when the Republic was proclaimed, he imitated the example of a certain famous ancestor of his in the Hundred Years’ War—sold all the family domains and securities, and stored away the cold, lifeless millions in gold coin in some secret corner, rather than permit the government that he detested to profit by any of his investments. As he wished his line to die out, he never married. And when, this past month, the mysterious knockings began in his house, he refused to call in the police of the detested Republic—but, instead, he invited all his friends to a great fancy-dress ball to help him defy the ghostly death sign of his race. I myself, mademoiselle, was present at that ball, only night before last; and I heard them with my own ears, those three mysterious knocks!”

  He paused a moment; then, leaning across the little table: “Mademoiselle,” he asked abruptly, “are you one of those who believe the boundaries of another world sometimes overlie and overlap those of ours—so that we see what mortal eyes are not meant to see and hear what mortal ears are not meant to hear?”

  His voice had sunk very low. The restaurant, lit only by what light came through the huge glass roof of the station, was half in shadow, and the acrid smoke of the arriving and departing trains filled the air. Fanny shivered.

  “It all depends on whether you ask me that question at noonday, in a crowded place like this, or if you come to me at midnight, in the silence—”

  “It was at midnight that I heard them, mademoiselle—those three knocks which since a thousand years have been accepted in the Vaucaire family as the hand of the Great Intruder himself, knocking for admittance to their house—and which they say have invariably been followed by catastrophe. Twelve years ago, before the Duke’s sister died—again in the year ’69, before the sudden death of his father—those three mysterious knocks heralded the event. So in this past month, when again they began to sound through the partly closed up palace night after night, sometimes loud, sometimes soft, but recurring often more than a dozen times in a night—”

  “And you heard it, Vicomte?”

  “The night of the ball, when we had all gone downstairs to supper. The picture gallery, where we had danced, was empty. I had gone back to fetch my partner’s fan, so I can vouch for that fact! We sat at supper. The atmosphere was tense—we all knew why we had been invited. We talked and laughed and ate—and listened! Suddenly we heard it. From the deserted ball-room above us, the sound of a strong hand knocking, imperatively and slow—once! twice! thrice! Mademoiselle, laugh at me if you will; but I hear them still—those three knocks!”

  Angrily Fanny Gordon flung off the influence that his words produced upon her.

  “Yes,” she cried; “and you were all so taken up with your own wonderful sensations of artistic horror that I suppose no one had the time to go and hunt in the picture gallery!”

  “You wrong us, mademoiselle! As a matter of fact, the echo of the last knock had hardly died away before some of us were already in the deserted picture gallery—the English nephew of the host, Sir Ffyles, I myself, one or two others that were young and ran upstairs fleetly. We found nothing! The endless rooms of the palace were empty. The gardens—empty. The concierge at the gate had opened to no one.

  “Mon Dieu! How I hated to leave him, dear old Vaucaire! But he held his head high. He even insisted on sending his nephew to the Ritz to sleep that night, because he said the poor boy was worn out with lack of sleep, from the recurrence of the mysterious sign for the past few weeks. So we left him alone—alone with the servants and his other nephew, the Abbé Fornarini. And the next morning the Duc de Vaucaire was found dead in his bed, behind doors that were bolted from the inside and windows that were barred, with not a chink or a cranny by which the assassin could have entered or escaped—alone there in his bed, hacked to death with a knife!”

  II

  The taxicab stopped before an immense pile of gray stone, square-roofed in the Renaissance style, and surrounded by a ten-foot wall garnished wit
h iron spikes. A silent concierge admitted them through a great stone gate surmounted with armorial bearings in faded gold. In a vast library where the daylight filtered through stained glass, the visitors were received by Sir Geoffrey Ffyles, the young English nephew of the dead Duke. Though his handsome face still bore traces of a recent horror, he greeted them with cordiality.

  “Upon my word, de Chatellerault, this is good of you!” he exclaimed earnestly. “And Miss Gordon, too! Miss Gordon, I’ve heard from de Chatellerault, here, you’re the keenest in Paris; so I wouldn’t rest till he called you in. These Parisian police Johnnies—you know what they are! Take an idea into their heads, pull facts this way and that to suit their theory till they have the crime ‘reconstructed’—-then cop their man, with their dashed reconstruction as proof! And I say, Vicomte, who do you suppose the beggars are after now?”

  “This morning, when I saw the Chief,” returned Raoul, “he told me they had not yet—”

  “Oh, but now they have! And who do you suppose? The Abbé Fornarini! You know him, of course—he’s lived here with my poor uncle for the past ten years. A sort of nephew on the other side of the house. The most decent sort of chap, Miss Gordon! But just because he’s a Jesuit, these dashed republicans are after him as keen as mustard. You see, he was missionary to the Assawabis, on the West Coast, for years after he left Rome; and he’s got rather a jolly collection of native weapons and that sort of thing. And now, by Jove, these dashed beggars are claiming it came from the Abbé Fornarini’s collection, the knife with which my poor Uncle Vaucaire was—was—”

  He broke off, and, crossing to a side table, poured himself a stiff drink of whisky.

  “Have some, Vicomte? No? Excuse me, Miss Gordon, but I’m a bit on the ragged edge, with all these horrors piling up one on top of the other. And I was frightfully fond of my Uncle Vaucaire— by George, I was fond of him—”

  “Pardon me, Sir Geoffrey. But you yourself—have you any information, any theories?”

  The other shook his head in dreamy bewilderment. “Me? What theories could I have? I only know the padre didn’t do it, poor old scout! And, by Jove, I’ll tell you one thing—I’m glad now, for the first time in my life, that I’m not my uncle’s heir. You know, he has willed everything to the King of Spain? And certainly they can’t say Alfonso did it! I say, I’m dashed glad, too, I didn’t sleep here that night myself, or it’s a sportin’ chance these beggars’d be spinnin’ their dashed ‘reconstruction’ about me!”