“Suppose that there were no ghosts, Mrs Grose. Suppose the two figures were common intruders, as Miss Temple first thought. Could they not stand where she could see them but you could not? Could not trespassers reach the places where she saw them, without being challenged?”
The cautious soul reckoned this up. Then she replied.
“Anyone can come up the drive or over the meadow. They might be seen and asked their business—or not. Keeping to the path through Bly woods, they need not be seen.”
“And indoors?”
“Miss Temple told me she thought she saw Quint and Miss Jessel on the stairs in the dark. But without a candle she’d never see who was below her. And they’d be gone before she could get down there.”
“And the garden tower?”
“The first time she saw Quint he was on the tower. An intruder might get there through the house. The wooden stairs badly want mending, have done for ages. But no one goes up there, so no one bothers. And no one locks the doors by day. Except for Miss Temple and the children, there’d hardly be anyone about when the servants were below stairs. We’d only be upstairs to lay fires, make beds, polish furniture and the like. And serve dinner, of course.”
Holmes intervened courteously.
“On a Sunday morning in November, Miss Temple came home early from church. She thought she was alone in the house and went into the schoolroom. Miss Jessel was standing at the far end by her desk. Miss Temple recalls shouting, ‘You terrible, miserable woman!’ In an instant the figure dissolved to dust in a beam of sunlight. Our friend lost all sense of where she was until she came to herself a moment later. The same loss of consciousness occurred when Miles died in her arms.”
“I think she had what they call ‘drops,’ Mr Holmes. It was spoken about by doctors at her trial. But you know that already, sir. More than that I can’t tell you.”
Time was pressing and I was determined to hunt out the evil genius.
“What of our other ghost, Peter Quint? Why did no one like him?”
She wrinkled her brow.
“He was low, doctor. Low and mean. Too free with the maidservants. Much too free with Miss Jessel—and she with him. Too free with the boy, worst of all. Major Mordaunt was squire while his brother was in India. But the major was seldom here. He gave his valet the run of Bly. I’ve seen Quint, with my own eyes, wearing smart clothes or fancy links and chains that I knew to be his master’s. He went like a gentleman in stolen clothes to be handy with the parlourmaids or village girls. Even a little piece where his hair was gone at the front. Call that a gentleman!”
“And his dealings with the children?”
“He never came near Miss Flora. I saw to that. Master Miles was God’s angel, until Quint came here. That fellow taught him to talk to women.”
She paused as if I had not caught her true meaning.
“To talk to women like a man, not a child” she insisted. “A boy of eight or nine, if you please! Quint taught him things a boy shouldn’t know until he’s a man.”
“And what of Miles’s dismissal from school?” my friend interposed.
“Whatever wickedness the child took to school, sir, he got it from Quint. He was in that man’s company from breakfast to dinner!”
“And Major Mordaunt? Did he not know the boy was dismissed from school?”
“That was a bad business, Mr Holmes. Major Mordaunt should never have acted as he did. The headmaster wrote to him that Miles was dismissed. When the major saw Dr Clarke’s writing on the envelope, he never opened it. He sent it on to Miss Temple with a note saying the headmaster was a bore. She was to deal with it, whatever it was. Probably school fees owing. She could arrange that with the lawyers. He was just off to France, if you please!”
“So he did not know that the boy had been dismissed?”
“Not then, sir. Of course, Miss Temple wrote to tell him. Then to cap it all, as we found out too late, Miles used to open her letters to the master while they were lying on the hall-stand here to be posted. He read this one and destroyed it. I once heard him say outright that he wouldn’t have a servant-girl—that’s what he called her!—sneaking to his uncle. Before the major got wind of all that had happened, the poor child was in his coffin.”
“Thank you,” said Holmes encouragingly. “Now, if I may impose on you for the last time, how did Peter Quint die?”
Her face reflected an aversion to this repetition of the man’s name.
“Miles was still away at school. Miss Jessel was here as governess to Miss Flora. I shan’t forget that night. Quint used to come out of the village inn, always the worse for drink. It was a winter midnight with the roads like glass. He must have come a real cropper on the ice. In the darkness he came down with a proper smash. Went flying into the wall of the little bridge that crosses the stream and cut his head open on the stone-work. That lane leads nowhere but up to Bly House. So he was only found next morning. The blood from his wound had frozen and he was dead.”
“There was an inquest?”
“Of course. What could it say? Accidental death.”
Holmes’s eyes suggested it might have said a good deal more.
“And by then Quint had corrupted the boy?”
Mrs Grose stared at him, straight and hard, as if prepared to reveal something she had kept locked in her heart.
“That man was a fountainhead of corruption, Mr Holmes!” The good woman paused, self-conscious at such a chapel-preacher’s phrase. Then she continued. “I may not have seen the ghosts, Mr Holmes, but as soon as Miss Temple described the figure on the tower, I knew who it was. Dead or alive! His eyes were the worst. He caught yours and never let them go. His were hard as jet and black as hell. You couldn’t wait to look away and give him the satisfaction of staring you out!”
Holmes nodded again.
“And what of Quint’s conduct with Miles Mordaunt?”
“He acted like the boy’s tutor more than a valet. If Master Miles was bad at King Alfred’s, Quint made him bad before the child ever went there. Miss Temple thought the boy an angel, even though he came back in disgrace. Quint was dead by then, of course. She told me both children had an unnatural beauty, an unnatural goodness. Something from another world. But I heard Master Miles tell her once that he was bad. Then he laughed at her, as if he was telling her there was nothing she could do about it. He was the master—her master.”
“Very well,” said Holmes patiently. “How was Miles bad when Quint was still here?”
“I warned the boy that he was a gentleman’s son and not to put himself under a menial. And what do you think? Miles turned round on me and swore Quint was a gentleman. Quint had been a soldier. Quint knew something of the world. I was the ‘menial,’ if you please, the scullery-maid. That was the very word he used to me—this boy of eight or nine, as he was then! After that he lied and was impudent—and Quint protected him. I could do nothing with him. That’s how he came to be sent to King Alfred’s. To make him knuckle under.”
“And when he came back in disgrace?”
“He was worse! He got his way with Miss Temple by smiles and bossing. As Quint would have done. As if Quint was whispering to him, dead or alive. He courted his governess, this child, like a grown man. He had Quint’s way with women. What was it he called her one day, talking to me? Words I don’t just recall, Mr Holmes, but they gave me a shudder.”
“Indeed,” said my friend indulgently.
The sunlight moved from the lawn and cedar tree at the side of the house. Mrs Grose seemed about to tell us something we should not care for.
“I would not harm Miss Temple, sir, but I must speak the truth.”
“The truth will not harm her, Mrs Grose.”
“The foolishness was on both sides, sir. If Master Miles courted her like a grown man, she behaved like his obedient sweetheart. He could do what he liked with her and she would forgive him. She never seemed sure of herself with him. Out of her depth, you might say.”
“You
need not fear that it will damage her case, Mrs Grose,” said Holmes quietly. But he showed no inclination to inquire further.
I recalled Dr Annesley mentioning Miles Mordaunt’s boast of “spooning” with his young governess. I had felt uneasy, though reassured on meeting her. The fragile emotional balance of this young woman had been the sport of predatory children—as well as of her own “ghosts” in her imagination. Why did the little ones taunt her with their mewling of cats behind her back? Why had the boy boasted falsely to his cronies at school of having drowned his governess? Why were kittens to be drowned before they could grow into cats? Thanks to Holmes, I had read a little of the new psychopathology. Professor Krafft-Ebing would surely diagnose psychopathy in the mind of this child. A boy dreamed of murder giving him a power over women, which his lack of manhood still denied him in any other form.
Our time was almost up and I roused myself from contemplating worse horrors than any so-called ghost. There were questions I must ask, as a medical man.
“Mrs Grose, will you tell me about the deaths of the children?”
She nodded calmly. No doubt she had been questioned at the time.
“Flora was taken ill in London?” I prompted her.
“A week or so after the upset by the lake, I took the poor little soul to her mother’s sister, Lady Camerton in London, away from Bly and its ghosts. But at Apsley Square the child grew feverish. Two days later an infection began in her throat and lungs. She was moved to the fever hospital. Then it became full-blown diphtheria. We thought she got it in London or travelling there. Now it seems both children probably caught it from the same source of infected water. The major wanted the best for her. But, most of all, he had wanted Miles kept away from Flora’s illness.”
“You returned alone to Bly from London soon after the little girl died?”
“And Master Miles was gone by then. What a dreadful business that was! But they never thought of diphtheria in his case for there was no time. It was Miss Temple who smothered him in her madness. I grieve for her but it must be she who did it.”
“Can you be sure?” Holmes asked.
“Until the post-mortem they never knew diphtheria was in him—just feverishness. He’d had lung fever at school and thrown it off. He could have thrown off this. What happened that last day, I can only tell you as it was told to me. Master Miles was a little poorly but quite well enough to come downstairs. That counted against Miss Temple at her trial. They even talked of which new school he might go to.”
“And the rest,” Holmes interposed, “is in Miss Temple’s journal.”
“So I understand, sir. They were in the dining-room talking of another school, when she saw Quint at the window. Just as she did before Evensong a few weeks earlier. She tried to stop Miles seeing that evil man. She was strong as a field-girl, governess or not. She held him tight, felt his pulse race with fear. He was white as chalk and cold sweat running from him. So I was told.”
Holmes kept his eyes on his notes as Mrs Grose continued. Then he said, “She says that she seized him and felt his heart flutter, not that he gasped for breath. She tells us his face looked ravaged by those eyes glaring through the glass. She too felt sick and faint. At the window was a spectre of damnation. She fought with that demon for the child’s soul.”
The poor woman lowered her head and there were tears in her reply.
“Perhaps she fought the evil beyond the glass—but more the evil in the child, for evil there was. If the boy died for want of breath, I swear she could not know it. And when she went under, in her faint, she thought she heard Miles cry out, ‘Peter Quint—you devil!’ Who did he mean was the devil—she or Quint? Either way, she held him tighter to protect him. Better he should die in her arms, I suppose she thought, than go to damnation with Quint. But when she came to herself, that devil had gone and the child’s soul with him.”
After a moment’s respite, Holmes spoke again.
“It grieves me, Mrs Grose, that we can bring you so little comfort. But let there be justice for Victoria Temple.”
“I hope so, sir. This has been an unlucky house. Masters and mistresses coming to grief. You’d never think it on a sunny afternoon like this. Sir Guy Mordaunt hanging from the cedar tree after his young wife’s death. Harry Varley the poacher swimming the lake by night. The weed in the Middle Deep got his legs and held him, the poor fellow jumping like a trout for air but always pulled back, until he could jump no more,”
“You may depend on it, Mrs Grose, that I shall do all in my power to set Miss Temple free. When we meet again, I hope she will be with us.”
The poor woman looked a little flustered.
“I don’t think you’ll see me again, sir. The house will be shut up in a day or two. There’s only me, the maid and the agent’s man at the gate-house.”
“Then where will you go?” I asked politely.
She brightened at this.
“To my son. At Cwm Nant Hir, the valley of the long river, a sheep farm, among the mountains of Wales. I won’t miss Bly without the children.”
At seven that evening we joined the London express. In the restaurant car, after dinner, two glasses of brandy stood before us. Holmes sighed.
“What would Professor Sidgwick and the Society for Psychical Research make of all this?”
“What the Court of Criminal Appeal may think is surely more to the point.”
Trailing white smoke and steam across ripening cornfields, we rushed towards a slim gothic spire against a darkening sky.
“Odd that diphtheria was ignored by the defence,” Holmes continued thoughtfully, “with the threat of a wilful murder verdict still possible.”
“Diphtheria could not have gone far enough to cause death on its own. It merely weakened the child and made suffocation that much easier. That is all.”
He brooded on this for a moment, his lean profile reflected in the darkened window of the carriage. Then he brightened up.
“As always, we must bow to the evidence. I shall attend Somerset House tomorrow morning, to view the death certificate of Miles Mordaunt. I believe we must test your presumption that diphtheria could not have gone far enough to kill him on its own.”
It was dark across the marshes. The bright, square illumination of the carriage windows flashed on hedgerows and embankments as we thundered into the night.
6
The powers of memory exhibited by Sherlock Holmes would have been worth a whimsical monograph of the kind that only he could write. How any human being could have so encyclopaedic a recollection of so many divers facts was beyond me, and I no longer sought the answer. Once he had tried to explain it by saying that the only thing necessary was a passion for knowledge which made it impossible to forget. Then he tried to define it as a system, in which knowledge of one thing led by association to two more—and so on by geometrical progression. It seemed far simpler to accept that once his indomitable memory learnt a fact, he never forgot it.
None of this prepared me for the next day’s bombshell.
On the morning after our return from Bly, I was later than usual coming down to breakfast. Holmes was seldom an early riser and I was not surprised to see the Morning Post unopened. But his knife, fork and plate had been cleared away. Therefore he had gone out even before the paper was delivered. Once the game was afoot, as he called it, there were nights when his head hardly touched the pillow before he was up and about again.
I finished breakfast and was reading the county cricket scores in The Times. The rasp of a wheel rim against the kerb indicated that a cab had pulled up. Slow and hollow hoofbeats signalled the driver’s return to the Regent’s Park rank. I waited to hear Holmes’s key in the lock and his footsteps on the stairs, while I followed the report of yesterday’s match at Bath between Middlesex and Somerset. As time ran out—ten to make and the match to win!—Hereward Douglas had hit a stylish half century for the visiting team.
Why was there still no sound on the stairs? I got up and drew bac
k the curtain a little, looking up and down the street for any sign of Holmes. He was a hundred yards away, towards the park, in conversation with half a dozen of the ugliest little ragamuffins I ever saw. Four boys and two of their sisters, no doubt. This unsightly group was a detachment of his “Baker Street Irregulars,” as he called them. They were his spies in enemy territory. While they watched and listened, gathering intelligence or shadowing a quarry on our behalf, our opponents never gave them a second glance. He was either describing the details of their next assignment or arguing over their extortionate demands for payment.
The prestige of working for Mr Holmes, the Baker Street Detective, always carried the day with these little bandits. Several coins now passed from his purse to the tallest boy of the group. The balance would follow upon completion of their task. He turned back and strode towards the freshly polished brass of Mrs Hudson’s doorstep.
Vigorously, as if he had just woken from a good night’s sleep, he came up the stairs two at a-time and into our sitting-room. Action and activity were his great restoratives. His cap went skimming onto the hat-stand. He threw himself down in his fireside chair and greeted me with a broad smile. Then he drew a sheet of paper from his breast pocket.
“We have it, Watson! I shall be surprised if a competent Queen’s Counsel cannot argue Miss Victoria Temple out of Broadmoor by next week.”
He produced a sheet of paper.
“What is that?”
“A transcript from Somerset House. Their doors were open at eight-thirty and I was the first applicant across the step. This is a transcript of the death certificate of poor young Miles Mordaunt—or rather the details which I have copied from it. Still appended to it was a post-mortem report.”
“How does it help Miss Temple? She has already admitted killing him. If she was so deranged that she did not know what she was doing or did not know it to be wrong, she will remain insane but guilty under English criminal law.”
“I shall take the liberty of calling that into question.”
Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly Page 15