My dearest sister,
It is very late at night, but I cannot sleep.
I wrote you yesterday night, thinking that today I would leave this place in the early morning, to try to find Sylvia and talk to her. But as it happens, I did not leave. Indeed, after having finished breakfast, I informed Mrs Bryce-Fortescue of my intentions, and asked if Peter could bring me to the train station. But instead of acquiescing, she leant towards me, staring at me intently with her eagliest expression, and said penetratingly,
‘Have you come to some conclusion about my son-in-law’s murder?’
‘I certainly have some important information,’ I answered carefully, ‘but before I speak of it at all, I really must talk to Sylvia.’
‘But I am your client,’ she said, ‘and as such, I think you should inform me of exactly what is going on.’
I felt trapped; she was not wrong, yet instinct told me not to reveal anything yet.
‘I believe that Sylvia holds an important piece of information which may identify the murderer,’ I said finally, ‘but it seems possible that she does not realise it herself. That is why I absolutely must talk to her. And in fact, it is extremely urgent,’ and pulling Pat’s telegram from my pocket, I spread it out in front of her. She read it and blanched.
‘I will wire for her to return immediately,’ she said. ‘Whatever is to happen, I would much prefer that it happen here and not at some distant place where I can be of no help to her. I beg of you to remain until she arrives. The trip is a rather complicated one as Severingham is very out of the way, but she will surely arrive by this evening at the latest.’
Thus, Dora, I found myself once again unexpectedly unoccupied for the space of an entire day. Time dragged endlessly, and it was still too early to think of expecting Sylvia; I worried and fidgeted and was unable to reflect tranquilly. It was your letter, which was laid at my place at luncheon (together with one from Arthur exhorting me to put a speedy end to my stay), which finally released me from the terrible tension in which I was trapped. It spurred me to a depth of concentration during which I forgot everything else. And I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering alone through fields and groves, forcing my mind to think over the facts again and again, but alas, feeling it constantly twisting aside as though to avoid the course of reasoning I wished to impose upon it.
In the end, exhausted, I retired to my room not long after dinner. There was still no sign of Sylvia, and Mrs Bryce-Fortescue was visibly unnerved. I myself felt unreasoningly afraid that she had perhaps been arrested during the course of the day, yet it seemed that this could not possibly have happened without our somehow being apprised of the fact. I closed my door and sat down on my bed, then lay down and fell into a strange doze from sheer mental exhaustion, although it was not late. The thoughts that had been writhing unformed in my mind all day turned themselves into strange dreams, shaping into vague images and dissolving away again until I woke up from sheer torment, my forehead damp. I seemed to feel a sense of impending doom, and my body was cramped with tension, so I arose and looked at the time. My dear, I had slept for hours, it was – is – two o’clock in the morning! I lit my candle and sat down at the desk to write this letter; surely, surely, this gentle activity will, as always, soothe my feverish brain and clarify my racing thoughts.
I seem to feel exactly what the mathematicians describe, when they have puzzled for weeks and months over some difficult theory, and suddenly they realise that they are on the very brink of the solution, and that the fog is lifting, and the whole landscape is forming clear and sunlit in front of their wondering eyes.
And my mind has been shying away from what it is beginning to perceive, just as they have often told me happens at the moment of discovery. That precise moment – when one becomes aware that the course of thought will lead inexorably and very soon to total certainty – that is the moment when the mathematician drops his pen and rushes out to take a long walk in the city, or drink a cup of tea which lasts for hours. And so I have done today. Things are coming to a head, and discovery can no longer be avoided; I must do what I can to ensure that the innocent are spared. This means that now, I must apply myself to my task with no more detours. Yes, I shall follow the advice contained in your extraordinary letter, and try to set down on paper, in orderly form, the list of those facts and contradictions that must be resolved. So many things that don’t fit – they must be examined, one by one, and made to fit!
1. It seems certain that Sylvia had a lover while in Paris. Yet, this contradicts all of Ellen’s instincts, though she will not say why. It also contradicts Sylvia’s own inclinations, which she expressed to me in what I believed to be complete spontaneity. Of course, Ellen could be mistaken as she has not seen Sylvia for so many years, and Sylvia could be lying. Yet it does not seem so to me … it must mean something.
2. The following three people are, it appears to me, unquestionably to be identified as a single person: Sylvia’s friend mentioned above, seen with her in Paris and Deauville, then the young man observed on the boat and in the train to Haverhill, and finally Mr Granger’s murderer. What do we know about him? After various mistaken assumptions, the information most likely to be correct is that he is English, although he was certainly in France last winter, and he certainly took the boat over from there on the day of the murder. Yet it is not necessarily in France that he must be sought.
3. No one appears to be able to discover where he came from just before taking the boat. It seems that the only way in which he could have done what he did is by wearing a disguise, a disguise both very effective, consisting of very few and small elements (as nothing seemed to have been left behind) and incredibly quick to put on or off – off probably being much faster as the French inspector pointed out.
4. I heard something this evening – I feel certain that it was something Mr Korneck mentioned – which rang a bell inside me. At the moment he said it, it was as though a little voice said Note that – that reminds me of something important! But I paid no attention, I was so concerned by the sad fate of his proof. And now I cannot figure out what it was – yet it seems as though it were on the very tip of my tongue!
I have just glanced over your letter again, and my eye fell upon your remarkable observations about mathematics. Are you clairvoyant, Dora? Does it really all mean something?
What a strange parallel can be erected between the story of Fermat’s lost theorem, and the problem you are investigating. An equation that is surely true – a murder which really happened! A proof sought by many and not yet understood, and a hopeful optimist who does not give up the search. A young woman who holds the key to a fundamental piece of knowledge, but who is prevented from speaking out frankly by the rigid social constraints of her time. And the margin, the margin which is always too narrow; a margin of paper too narrow to allow the proof to fully unfold – a margin of time too short to allow a change of disguise – a seemingly invisible margin of space through which someone slipped onto a boat – and a margin of error too tight to allow any haphazard explanation to fit the facts.
Dora – OF COURSE! I remember now what it is that Mr Korneck talked about! Your words have just reminded me; but how, how could you possibly have guessed it? He said –
Wait!
It is very strange – I seem to hear some faint sounds coming from next door, from the large vacant room onto which mine gives. Someone is moving around in there, lightly, softly. Oh! what can it be? I feel unreasonably afraid – terrified! What shall I do? I must stop writing – I will take my candle, unshoot the bolt and fling the door open to face whatever is there.
In haste –
V.
Maidstone Hall, early morning, Saturday, July 23rd, 1892
My dearest, dearest and only, unique twin,
I am in a sorry state, as I write this note to you, before I hasten, at the very first crack of dawn, to quit this house forever. Dawn is barely breaking over the sky, and my previous letter, written just a few hours ag
o, lies on the desk before me, barely dry. This one is an addendum to it, and yet it is much more. For during the long hours of this fatal night, I have passed the barrier to the other side.
Oh, I did not realise, when I began this investigation, that the solving of it could perturb me so deeply, could tear such rifts into what I thought, hitherto, was a natural, healthy and straightforward moral sense. Wrong, right, and responsibility – nothing is clear to me any more! Yes, something is clear. The truth has been revealed to me beyond the need for proof – and if proof were needed, it would be easy to come by now.
I left you last night, when I wiped my pen and put it down next to the letter I had just finished writing. I stood by the desk, momentarily paralysed, straining my ears for the soft rustling noises from next door, and running my eyes, at the same time, over the list of points I had taken such pains to write just moments before – I will send you that letter, dear, with this one, although it seems so foolish and blind now! I was reading over the sentences you wrote me, when suddenly, in an instantaneous flash, in infinitely less time than it takes to read this, and even while my heart was knocking in fear at the sly little movements I could still make out next door, something hit me which had not hit me before.
Sophie Germain – the genius mathematician, Mr Korneck’s idol – she had to pretend to be a man! Charles had told us all about her story, and Mr Korneck’s mention of her had lit a sudden spark in my mind, in connection with all our talk about disguises; hasty disguises that must be put on and off in a moment behind a pile of crates.
A woman – disguised as a man! What could be easier? A tall woman with a long stride, and thick dark hair controlled by a net and combed severely back into a heavy knot, a woman who is able to sew the most sophisticated dresses for herself and her friend. If such a woman were to pass quietly along the quay, wearing a long, ample skirt of some modestly coloured stuff and a hat upon her head – if her hair were in fact cut short like a man’s, and her knot of black hair were a false one, attached with pins – if the skirt should in fact be fastened down the front with nothing more difficult than buttons or ribbons, and lined, invisibly, with brightly coloured silk – if it were worn over a pair of men’s trousers and boots – if this woman should, then, slip behind a mountain of waiting luggage, snatch off her lady’s hat and fling it to the ground, to be picked up later by some stray passenger or by a dockworker after the loading was finished, and handed to the office of lost objects – if she were then to remove the net and the knot and thrust them into a pocket, ruffle up her mass of hair into curls, and unbinding her skirt, transform it into a vivid cape with a single swish?
If this same woman amused herself, months earlier, by donning her masculine guise in public, and accompanying her friend about the city in the role of a lover?
Dora – what if this woman planned a murder, and planned it carefully, travelling to Dover and crossing to France in her female clothing, descending from the boat onto the quay, and turning herself into a young man in just a few swift gestures, leaving no trace at all behind her (except, perhaps, a lost hat)? And if she boarded the boat again, her ticket of course purchased beforehand, and travelled back to England as noticeably as possible in her scarlet silk cape, and went about her terrible business there? And then quietly, in a washroom on the return train to London, resumed her woman’s garb, took a different seat, and descended at the terminal, undetected and undetectable (except, perhaps, by a vague, wandering old woman who had seen her, upon occasion, visiting Haverhill Manor)?
Camilla!
These thoughts, or rather, these images flashed through my mind within a single second, together with the startled question – but why? Why? Why would Camilla hate Sylvia’s husband enough to murder him?
And one who murders once can murder again, I thought, gripping my candle and staring at the door of my room with horror. I heard again slight sounds of movement, and even something that sounded, faintly, like the rustling of paper. Stepping silently to the door, with one brusque, sharp gesture, I kicked aside the little dressing table which stood in front of it, pushed the bolt, flung it open, and stretched my arm with its candle into the total darkness that confronted me.
I perceived no one, yet I still felt afraid. My candle shed a little circle of light which did not reach into the farthest corner of the large space, and it was well stocked with old furniture and boxes behind which a person could be hiding. Yet I would not have thought that a person could have had enough warning of my approach to hide, so quick had I been. I stood for a moment, wavering.
Then I saw another movement, like a streak. The large orange cat whom I had already encountered in this same room leapt down suddenly from the top of a high old closet where he had been perched, landing with a soft, heavy plunk, and trotted over to me with a meow. I heaved a tremulous sigh of relief, then jumped as I heard a rustling noise; something, disturbed, slipped from the top of the closet after the cat and fell, bumping, to the ground. It was a little sheaf of papers, which he had probably been investigating, as cats will, if they find anything unusual in their familiar domain. I stepped over to it with care and picked it up, my heart pounding uncontrollably.
This little packet, folded tightly and tied with a string, was undoubtedly what Sylvia had been hiding in her jewel box, that object which had subsequently disappeared.
Dora, I hardly know how to comment on such a document. I do not know what to do with it, where to put it; it burns my fingers. I will send it to you, Dora; keep it for me. I think it contains more explanations, and of a deeper kind, than any other kind of proof ever could, no matter how factual.
Truth
A poem-novel, a novel-poem, a raving novel,
an impossible attempt
I. Madness
This book contains the truth about Camilla: Camilla is mad. Her madness has a source, a wellspring, a catalyst that shoots it forth like jets of flame pouring from the cannon’s mouth, and when the fire dies down, it leaves only white ashes like death.
Camilla’s madness is invisible to all about her. She walks upright, she walks tall and straight, her eyes are calm, her words are plain. Sometimes she sneers, but only slightly.
Camilla’s life, and her madness, are divided into three. When the source is far and the need is small, the madness rolls like a ball, curls like a ball, and remains dense and thick and quiet in a deep place. When the source is near, and the inflamed thirst is constantly slaked, the madness lurks within like a ravening animal just after food: satisfied for the present, yet infinitely wary, infinitely tense. But when ferocious demand wells up uncontrollably and finds no satisfaction, meets only silence, that is when Camilla’s madness swells into a giant and all-consuming roar that drowns out, in her ears, every pleasant sound of the world around her; birdcalls and running water and the echo of distant conversations. All are lost; only the screaming roar remains.
In that swirling darkness all becomes possible, all becomes necessary, all becomes inexorable for all eternity, for the raving monster is stronger than any barrier the world can raise against it. As Mohammed moved the mountain, Camilla feels that she will heave gigantic, unknown weights and tear apart the very fabric of existence, if she lifts her hand to do so.
The wild beast is invisible. Camilla herself cannot see it.
In these moments, she rises slowly and walks, step by step, to the mirror. Carefully, as though she needs an effort to recall the simplest gestures. Step by step, to the mirror, and there, she stops and stares at herself.
Black eyes stare back: tormented. Black hair smoothed back, drawn back, forced back, pulled back. The creature with its slavering fangs is nowhere to be seen, and yet she feels it gnawing and gnashing within.
She stares in the mirror for many long minutes. Without knowing it, she is rocking back and forth, slowly, intently, and her gaze is becoming fixed. She presses her fingers to her temples, hard, strong hard sensitive fingertips pressing against the delicate place, then forces them slowly upwards in
to the hair, into the very roots of the hair where it springs forth, a heavy mass controlled, a wild thing tamed. Deep into the roots the fingers force their path until they are buried entirely, and she grasps the hair, grasps it in a frenzy, wrenches and twists it, pulls it loose from its binding, and as it falls in a tangled web on her shoulders, she is crying, rocking back and forth, crying, twisting the hair as though to tear it out altogether, staring at herself in the mirror, rocking and crying, devoured from within by the monster, destroyed and devoured by the monster, and she stares at the girl in the mirror, no longer a girl, a banshee, keening and wailing, suffering and desire forbidden, and therefore mad. And she whispers again and again to the abandoned creature in the mirror,
‘Is it possible? Can it be? Were I a man, this madness would be love?’
II. Stonehenge
Great rocks embedded in the earth, thrusting toward the sky. Gigantic and immobile and silent; mere stones, yet radiating the still power of pagan gods. The air is thick beneath them, thick with tension, heavy with their eternal past, silent echoes of the formless, hypnotic thoughts of those who built and worshipped them. They move not, they speak not, yet they stand, shrouded in meaning, inaccessible to time and effort, monuments to eternal, expressionless existence.
That same eternal monument is the cornerstone of Sylvia’s soul; silent, inscrutable, invisible, powerful.
‘She’s just a slip of a girl.’ That is what they say of her.
A slip of a girl, a flower perhaps, but merely a small and insignificant one. Yes, that describes her quite well.
She sits at the window, staring outside. Her hands are idle, her body motionless. It is early evening, and the room is filled with people, the air is crossed by a multitude of sounds. Yet the girl at the window is alone. She is at a party, yet she sits, and stares out the window, at the dusk slowly gathering over the stone urns bordering the terrace. She is not absent, not irritated, not disturbed, not bored, not anxious, not hopeful. Her profile, the profile of a very young girl, is sharply outlined in white against the darkening window. Camilla stands watching her. The party swirls around her, and she stands, watching the girl at the window and trying to fathom what she sees, what she feels. The power of the presence of the unknown girl is such that the party fades into mist, and her silent world becomes the only truth. To be so motionless (her hands and feet so totally still) – how is it possible when Camilla’s whole being twitches with restlessness, when interest, annoyance, surprise, pleasure and boredom alternate so rapidly within her that she hardly knows what it is that she feels? Her first season; at times she feels like a queen, at others, hatefully, on display. Sometimes she dances (she has danced a great deal lately), sometimes she watches and her thoughts are tinged with irony and malice. The parties seem like giant games of chess; each piece moving according to preconceived rules, no infractions tolerated. Camilla plays her role, but sometimes the thoughts within her run wild.
Flowers Stained With Moonlight Page 27