“I bring words I do not understand to a world I do not know. I come to a woman who is a stranger to me. She is the mistress of two lovers, one dead and one still living. The blood of the dead lies upon the hands of the living.”
“From whom does the message come?”
“He who is the master of the message was once a servant. He was called among you the Fifth Stone.”
I caught my breath at this, recalling Spencer-Smith’s account of Miles Mordaunt. I followed every word as she spoke again.
“He was a servant to her other lover who still lives, who with his mistress shed the blood of this rival. The hidden murder of her first lover calls out for vengeance. The violation of an inheritance calls for retribution. Through me the secret of the guilty one shall be known.”
“Give us your message.”
“The blood of a lover and the soul of a dead child call for blood in return. An inheritance is betrayed. This very night is the time of reckoning. Their enemies are close upon the killers. The only safety lies in flight. Within the hour their lives are forfeit unless she to whom I speak can bear a warning to her lover who lives unaware. Let her warn him before the sands of the hour run out. The blood of the dead lies on the hands of the living. The avengers have their scent.”
But how was he doing it—a live head in a hatbox, answering back!
“How shall she know that your message is for her?”
“Her lover who lies dead was that Fifth Stone. His death was also her crime. Her life, like that of her paramour, stands forfeit to the executioner.”
That was more like it, I thought—eight o’clock on a Monday morning, side by side in the execution shed of Newgate!
“Whom does the Fifth Stone signify?” Holmes asked.
“His name is not my language but a Roman title.”
The Fifth Stone! The Roman title, in dog Latin, was Petrus Quintus. Plain English made it Peter Quint! Any school-miss could put the two halves together! But now the face was fading—or rather disintegrating—as the flame-light died. Petrus Quintus! An absurd but effective mangling of tongues. The image flickered, thin as a ghost, and breathed its farewell.
“Let her carry the warning before it is too late.… Let her remember it is not sweet with nimble feet to dance upon the air.…”
Here and there I caught a gasp from the onlookers. This very month I had bought a copy of a book which had been reprinted five times since Christmas. It was talked of and quoted everywhere, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Dancing on the air with nimble feet was its description of a hanging in a common English prison-shed. To judge from the look on Miss Shelley’s face, she recognised the lines too well.
By the time the image fell silent, it was as if I had been told a story that ten minutes earlier I could not even guess at. Around me the others were clapping vigorously, as if at the Palace of Varieties or the Egyptian Hall. A few sat motionless, not knowing what to think. The gasolier above us was brightening, illuminating the depths of the hatbox. Where the head had appeared lay nothing but a pile of ashes. The trick had carried such conviction that I caught myself almost believing its unearthly mystery. I forgot for an instant that all this had come from the fertile genius of Sherlock Holmes.
I stood up, looking over the heads of others to see the gaunt figure of Holmes slipping through the curtains before they closed again with a rattle of rings. Perhaps the audience thought this was a pause in his demonstration. To me, his movements indicated that speed was of the essence. I shouldered my way after him. What I saw behind the curtain explained a good deal.
He was deftly but calmly fastening the hatbox, which showed no trace of dust, head or flame-light. A girl of fifteen or so was wiping greasepaint from her face with a towel. Under the paint, she was surely the cabman’s child! Behind a projecting wall that hid one side of the conservatory from the séance parlour of the music room, the black metal cube of a compact but powerful magic lantern, fitted with a red lens, stood on a kitchen trolley. It was capable of focusing a concentrated beam of light upon its subject. In front of its lens, a bowl of cooling water still gave off steam. I saw at once how the beam had been angled to illuminate a plain kitchen chair from which the cabman’s daughter had risen. An inspection of the hatbox would no doubt reveal a sheet of glass fitted to fill its opening and capable of being tilted at an angle. I thought at once of Dr Pepper and knew the answer to this splendid illusion!
Let me explain. Twenty years earlier, I had been despatched from medical school to Aldershot for my Army training. There I saw an evening performance of The Haunted Murderer at the Hippodrome, which serves as a garrison theatre. In this theatrical novelty, the source of light was hidden from the audience. I learnt that it was a powerful lamp backstage shining on an actor in the wings. This bright image was then reflected by a sheet of plate glass, fastened at an angle on the darkened stage.
The principle of the illusion was the reflected “ghost” of himself which, for example, a traveller sees when staring out into the darkness from a railway train at night. What appeared at the Aldershot Hippodrome, through the invisible slant of plate glass on the darkened stage, was a much stronger and lifelike “ghost” of the subject. As in the railway carriage illusion, the figure seemed to float in air at some distance beyond the glass. By careful stage lighting—or the lack of it—the spectre at Aldershot moved and talked like any other actor but was insubstantial as a cloud. The play on that evening was produced by the great John Henry Pepper himself. At the climax of the drama, the villain was confronted by this apparition of his better self.
The Kensington spiritualists had just seen a refinement of Pepper’s trick, perfected by Holmes for the occasion. This soon became known as Colonel Stodare’s “severed head” illusion and held theatre audiences in awe over the years! Unfortunately, it could not explain events at Bly because it would never work in daylight.
I glanced at the operator of the magic-lantern and saw the same wiry build and sardonic features as those of our cabdriver. Before I could say so, Holmes turned to me as he finished buckling the hatbox.
“Look sharp, Watson! We have flushed her from cover. You may depend upon it, she has dreaded this moment for the past year and more. I trust you enjoyed my little deception, my mastery of occult claptrap.”
“She? But who is she?”
He ignored this and strode to the door.
“Gregson and two plain-clothes men are watching the street. A constable has the rear of the house in view. Our driver this evening, by the way, is only an amateur cabman but a professional wizard: ‘Professor Hermann’ of the Adelphi Theatre’s Phantasmagoria.”
“Otherwise known as Tom Rathbone and pleased to meet you, sir,” said this new acquaintance, shaking my hand.
“And this,” Holmes added, with a graceful gesture towards the young woman “is the soi-disant ‘severed head,’ his assistant and daughter, Miss Clarissa. An accomplished little actress. Now, let us be on our way.”
We went out through the kitchen door and up the steps to the street, leaving Rathbone to follow with the hatbox and basket. Holmes led the way to our cab, now drawn up in a darker stretch between the lamp-posts. From the interior, a tall fair-haired man in a dark suit craned forward. By the light of the carriage-lamp on his flaxen hair and on his clean-shaven but unnaturally pale face, I recognised Inspector Tobias Gregson.
“Good evening, Mr Holmes. I’d be obliged to you for some explanation of what is going on. What am I to tell the commissioner when he asks where all his fine brave policemen have got to?”
Holmes stepped into the cab and took his seat opposite the inspector. Rathbone was back on his perch but the vehicle did not move. Holmes glanced in the mirror at the view of the street behind him.
“To begin with, my dear Gregson, this is about murder. We seldom deal in smaller currency. And then it’s about a brutal robbery by one of the most ruthless footpads that our underworld can boast. And if that won’t do, it’s a matter of the walking dead.”
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br /> “Indeed!” said Gregson quietly. “And where’s the Belgravia division in all this? My instructions are that any message given to an officer by an infant calling itself a Baker Street Irregular goes straight to Mr Holmes. Chief Inspector Lestrade’s orders, sir, but I don’t like what I can’t understand!”
“One moment,” said Holmes quietly. “Sit and watch quietly for two more minutes. Keep your eyes skinned for a young lady who has just had the shock of her life. A poor young creature whose every thought is shadowed by the coarse touch of a rope round her neck, a strap round her wrists and a trap-door under her pinioned feet. I trust that will do for the moment.”
“More than enough, sir!”
“Six pairs of eyes have been watching Eaton Place for the past week,” Holmes added, talking to Gregson but never taking his eyes from the mirror. “As a rule, my young friends are more concerned to avoid the police then to approach them. With my blessing, they have come to an understanding with the constables who patrol that beat—and with their sergeant. Let us leave it there. The lady in the case is our first concern.”
I took my turn.
“She won’t fall for your stage magic, Holmes! Only a complete fool would be taken in by that.”
“Watson, you are, as so often, entirely correct. I count upon her disbelieving it. Have you not grasped it? That is the whole point. What she is therefore obliged to believe is that her closest and most dreadful secret, supposed to be known only to her lover and herself, is running loose all over London. I added the lines from Ozymandias for her benefit. They happen to be the work of the man she claims to be her natural great-grandfather and whose name she bears.”
“Shelley!”
He did not reply. Instead, he tapped sharply on the roof with his stick. The cab jerked forward.
From my seat in the far corner of the darkened vehicle, I could see two figures who had emerged from the house of the séance. One was the manservant who had taken in Holmes’s hatbox and hamper on our arrival. The other, fluttering to and fro in urgent expectation of a cab, was my pretty witch, Madame Rosa’s handmaid.
The servant raised his hand. Tom Rathbone reined in the horse. We came alongside the pavement, behind another cab, apparently called for Miss Shelley. Holmes opened our door and got down. He walked across to hold open the door of the cab in front, and courteously doffed his hat to the young woman.
“Professor Scott Holmes!” Her voice was startled and not pleased.
“We are at your disposal, Miss Shelley—or should I say Miss Jessel?”
She stood pierced by shock, unable for a moment to reply. My friend continued in the same quiet voice.
“I must confess that I am more often known as Sherlock Holmes. You may have heard of me.”
The breath had been knocked from her but she now managed a whisper.
“You are mistaken, sir! I am Miss Shelley!”
“Indeed you are,” said Holmes sympathetically. “More precisely, however, you are Maria Shelley Jessel. Are you not?”
Miss Jessel—the ghost of Bly if anyone was—looked about her. The cab whose door Holmes held open was plain and black. Its driver wore a dark high-collared tunic. On the off-side, two women in black uniform clothes stepped down and walked to where Holmes and his new acquaintance stood. This pair could only be police matrons, accompanied by a duty constable.
Holmes left our quarry with them. He returned and slid across the buttoned leather of the seat to the corner where he had been sitting.
“Scotland Yard, I think, Gregson,” he said thoughtfully.
9
Several floors above the river and the Victoria Embankment there is a plain green-walled office at Scotland Yard. When it is in use, a uniformed constable stands outside its door to prevent interruptions. Few sounds are overheard from within, except occasional rage or weeping. The walls are lined by plain wooden cupboards. A hat-rack stands by the door. At the centre is a wooden office table, with three upright chairs on each side and one at either end. At the quarters of every hour, the boom of Big Ben echoes like a funeral drum from the nearby Houses of Parliament.
Tobias Gregson sat at one end of this table. To his right, Holmes and I were side by side. Opposite us was Miss Shelley. A police matron accompanied her, sworn to silence by the Official Secrets Act of 1889.
The chair that Miss Shelley occupied had accommodated Dr Neill Cream the Lambeth Poisoner, Oscar Wilde at the time of his downfall and more recently Ada Chard the baby farmer. Even Montague Drewitt had sat there, the man whom the late Commissioner, Sir Melville Macnaughton, swore to Holmes and me was “Jack the Ripper” but could never quite prove it. To me, this plain official room had a far more sinister ambience than all the haunted landscapes of Bly.
Miss Shelley had not yet asked for an attorney to represent her. Gregson had not charged her and so perhaps she hoped that she did not need one. Perhaps she did not even know that she was entitled to one. She must have hoped that, once the matter of her name was cleared up, she would be free to go. Too soon she realised her mistake but, all the same, the inspector got nowhere with his questions. Our suspect no longer denied that she was Maria Jessel but she did not admit to anything else.
During a pause, Holmes broke in upon the interrogation.
“I fear you are not cut out to be a criminal, Miss Jessel, let alone an accessory to murder,” he said sympathetically.
“I have no idea what you mean, sir.”
“Have you not? You face arrest and detention, perhaps much worse. What will become of your child in that case? Please do not shake your head at me, madam. We know you have a child.”
I knew no such thing—nor, to judge from his expression, did Gregson.
“I do not understand you, sir,” she insisted, “I have nothing to do with you. I do not know why I am here. I certainly do not know why you are!”
Holmes became her friend.
“Come, now! While you were governess at Bly you became the mistress of Major James Mordaunt, did you not? It is not an uncommon thing between a young governess and an unmarried employer. There may even be a prospect of marriage. After some months, however, it became inconveniently evident that you were carrying a child. The prospect faded.”
She lowered her eyes but still shook her head.
“The truth is best,” Holmes said coaxingly, “What better solution was there than to tell Mrs Grose you were going home for a long holiday—and then let it be known, through your employer himself, that you had died during this absence? Believe me, it is a common enough subterfuge resorted to by young women in such a predicament.”
He had taken a terrible gamble in jumping to this conclusion. Yet the expression on her face convinced me he had hit the answer at his first shot. She shook her head again, but he went on in the same quiet voice.
“The story of your death would satisfy Mrs Grose—and she in turn was bound by a promise that the other servants were not to be told for fear it would upset them. She would not question the truth of the report, if her master did not. So now that the two children are dead and Mrs Grose has gone to live with her son in Wales you might even return with Major Mordaunt to Bly—unless he has other plans for you. If there were a few people who had heard a mere rumour of your death, and if they chanced to see you now, they would simply know that such tittle-tattle could not have been true.”
She kept her face lowered, pressing her handkerchief to her mouth. Holmes sighed.
“You would be perfectly safe to the end of your life, unless questions were asked. Unfortunately, even a novice criminal investigator would go first to Somerset House to find your death certificate. There is none, is there?”
She stared at him, visibly paler, eyes reddened. My friend continued.
“What there is, however, is a birth certificate. It registers a male child, Charles Alfred Jessel, born several months after your departure from Bly. He is Jessel on the certificate and his mother’s name is Maria Shelley Jessel. His father’s name and occupation a
re blank. James Mordaunt did not think enough of you to give your child his name. Is that it?”
How I pitied her! Her teeth were clenched on the hem of the handkerchief, as if she might tear it! But then she looked up fiercely—and her silence broke.
“I do not want his name!”
“Do not? Or did not?” Holmes asked gently, “Think carefully, I beg you. The difference may be the thickness of a hangman’s rope.”
“Did not!” she burst out, “James Mordaunt had gained power over me. He had got my child, not I. It was put away where neither he nor I might see it. Those were his terms.”
“Because it was not his child, was it?” Holmes suggested coaxingly, and once again my heart missed a beat at this dangerous leap in the dark. But I saw from her expression that he had hit the bull’s-eye twice in a row. His voice softened. “Mordaunt would not take you from Bly to live with him in Eaton Place, so long as there was this reminder of another man under his roof.”
It was so simple! The secret love of James Mordaunt for Maria Jessel was as dead as the two children of Bly. Yet some other man’s child remained the means by which he still commanded Miss Jessel’s obedience.
In the next half-hour we heard how Charles Alfred had been sent to a nursery school in Yorkshire, if baby farms for unwanted children can be called nurseries. Paid for by money drawn from the Bly estate, James Mordaunt kept it out of sight and mind at this private institution It was an establishment founded at Greta Bridge by William Shaw, twice sued by parents after children had gone blind from infection and gross neglect. Little Charles Alfred remained there, in pawn for his mother’s obedient behaviour.
I took my chance.
“Do you tell us, Miss Jessel, that Mordaunt had such a hold over your affections that you would consent to this dreadful thing for your child?”
“I think not, Watson,” Holmes interrupted gently, as our suspect began to weep. “Neither affection nor passion holds them now. Fear of discovery is the bond.”
He turned to her again.
Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly Page 18