Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Yet,” the heated youth inwardly murmured, “I would scorn to live here, if the Manor were open to me: for some insults are past forgiving.”

  “Cousin, come! Why are you lingering?” Perdita whispered; and, with girlish solicitude, pulled at his wrist.

  They ascended a broad, curving, majestic staircase (as splendid, Xavier was forced to admit, as any he had ever seen in Winterthurn,—in the homes of the De Forrests and the Peregrines, for instance); and to the carpeted landing, where, overhead, an enormous crimson-and-gold fanlight was ablaze with sun. Here Xavier’s sharp eye lit upon what he perceived to be a clue of some sort,—for was it not peculiar, indeed, that the fine-carved mahogany banister should be so crudely scarred, as if by the strokes of an ax, for a space of several yards? He stopped Perdita, and inquired of her, in a whisper, whether Judge Kilgarvan was responsible for these angry markings: but Perdita, scarcely glancing at the banister, told him that it was but an “historical conversation piece,” going back for generations,—to when the British General Gadwell and his officers had occupied Glen Mawr, in ‘77; and the General had shouted for his men to hurry downstairs; and, losing his temper, had ridden his horse to the landing, raging and hacking at the banister with his sword, when they did not quickly enough obey.

  Chastened by this explanation, Xavier allowed himself to be led the rest of the way upstairs, in silence; and along a dim-lit corridor, hung with numerous portraits in oils of faces too blurred to be recognized, though he did not doubt they were kin of his; and to the very doorway of the Honeymoon Room,—the oaken door itself being partly smashed, and hanging as if drunken upon its hinges. “Here,—it is very much as it was,—excepting of course for what the intruders have done,” Perdita said. Xavier followed slowly in her wake, blinking, and looking from side to side, with the air of a frightened child: for was this the scene of the crime, to be entered so readily?—with so little ceremony? “I wonder you are not terrified to go inside,” Xavier said awkwardly, “or even that you have not mended the door with some sturdy wood, and nailed it shut.” Perdita glanced at him, in genuine surprise; and frowned; and asked, with a wan, droll smile: “But why should we be terrified of a mere room? Unlike Cousin Abigail Whimbrel, we live here by rights: and have lived here all our lives.”

  Xavier entered the room guardedly nonetheless, his eyes rapidly darting from side to side: yet, apart from the opulence of the furnishings and the excessive ornamentation of the walls and ceiling, which he adjudged as comically vulgar, though doubtless costly, he could see nothing immediately remiss, or “suspicious”: save perhaps the wider of the two fireplaces, and its spacious chimney, which looked as if it might accommodate an adult figure (might an assailant have climbed down into the room from the roof?); and the several trompe l’oeil paintings, which fascinated, yet finally repelled, with their deliberate air of the artificially lifelike. As for the place of death,—the carved antique bed with its silken canopy, and its look of inappropriate splendor—Xavier had only to approach it, and to draw his hand along the brocaded cover, to sense that all that had been remarkable about it had fled. Yet here it stood, before him: and here he was, at the scene of the crime at last. “So it has happened that my good luck has prevailed,” Xavier said, as much to himself as to Perdita,—“for I now stand in the very place in which the Whimbrel infant died, and the unhappy Abigail Whimbrel went mad.”

  “Yes, it is a pity: she should not have pressed herself, and her hapless babe, upon us,” Perdita softly said.

  Xavier but half attended to her words, moving about the room, staring, and stooping, and sniffing, and blinking; noting uneasily how his mirrored reflection aped him, from a dozen glassy surfaces, commingled with overelaborate etchings of ivy, roses, grapevines, etc., and designs in bronze and white, painted directly on the mirrors: his image, and that of the pale-browed Perdita who watched him, brought together in a sort of minuet, in utter silence. That an unspeakable incident of an unknown species had transpired in this bed-chamber, not many weeks previous; that it might very well have been an actual, though senseless, murder; that its cause, or its agent, might be sought out one day soon, and exposed, and explained, and “solved”; that what lay in the beclouded realm of the mysterious could be transposed, by the rigorous logic of detection, into the comprehensible,—was this not remarkable? For, after all, Xavier reasoned with mounting excitement, God Himself is a presence underlying, and giving unity to, all ostensibly discrete phenomena: what appears to the untutored eye as Chaos may be read, by the proper intelligence, and by the proper faith, as Order. He had not yet worked it out, to his own satisfaction, nor did his detective-heroes pause to brood over such matters,—being, of necessity, caught up in action; but he was certain, he knew not altogether why, that his Christian faith, and the upbringing which his belovèd parents had provided, would have much to do with his prowess as a detective. “Ah, if only one could remember forward,” the youth inwardly murmured,—as the multifariousness of the room before him, and, indeed, the room diffracted into numberless rooms by mirrors, so threatened to overwhelm him that the pain between his eyebrows, in the hard-boned region of the glabella, grew for a moment more severe,—“and all that is now baffling, vexing, and mysterious, could be read as History!” Yet, though he paused to draw breath, the euphoria of his heartbeat continued.

  With reverent fingers he examined the great canopied bed,—the heavy goose-feather pillows, encased in fine, spotless white linen; the various quilts, comforters, coverlets, linens, etc.; the horsehair mattress, which gave evidence of having been recently and very vigorously cleaned, yet yielded, still, numerous faint stains and discolorations; and then the silken tapestries draped about the bed; and the minutely carved posts. True, there was nothing helpful here: and Perdita’s bemused attention made him self-conscious: but he was confident that, in any case, he was following a correct procedure. How more directly might George B. Jashber have approached the situation; or Sherlock Holmes; or, indeed, the shrewdly bumptious Pudd’nhead Wilson, who had, as it were, pioneered in the science of fingerprinting,—at this time virtually unknown in the States, and sneered at in both Paris and London? And there was the imperturbable C. Auguste Dupin, whose words now echoed, for some reason, in Xavier’s brain, as if the great man were personally directing him: “Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing that puts you at fault.”

  But Xavier, now standing with his hands on his hips, and surveying the room more generally, could not see how so lavishly glittering a surface, replete with so many differing textures, colors, and dimensions,—the very paradigm, it nightmarishly seemed, of the great world itself—might be reduced to any sort of simplicity. Or did he merely lack eyes to see that which stared him in the face—?

  Perdita said, in a lowered voice, that the agents of the baby’s death were evidently rats,—a giant species—a species hitherto unknown at the Manor—that made their way by some undetermined method into the room, on that tragic night, and had not been glimpsed again since: the which should have rendered poor Jupiter blameless, in her Uncle Simon’s judgment, yet did not: and did not Xavier think Uncle most cruel to persist in blaming Jupiter? As Xavier did not know how best to reply to this artless query, he murmured an assent, taking care not to allow his gaze to fix upon his cousin with an inordinate boldness: for the danger was, it seemed, his impassioned blood might too strongly beat, and cause Perdita to become frightened: to “vanish,” as it were, from out his rapt vision—! In a gentle voice he inquired of her whether she did not think it somewhat peculiar that giant rats of an “unknown species” might attack a sleeping baby, and so disappear,—into the walls, or the ceiling, or the very air—as to leave no trace behind: whether some other agent, not, perhaps, an animal at all, might be sought? Perdita bit at her plump lower lip, and appeared to be thinking deeply; then averred that no other agent might be sought, as there was no other agent: for, after all, the bed-chamber had been locked and bolted before Mrs. Whimbrel retired. Xavier asked if no one had
heard the baby’s cries during the night, or any sound from the mother: and again Perdita looked puzzled, and stared half-smiling at the carpet; and said, with a childish want of guile: “Ah, but babies often cry,—do they not?—and wail, and fuss, and soil themselves, and cause a great commotion. It is thought by some to be their attraction, I suppose, that they are so uncalculating in their effects; by others, a disadvantage that, when aroused, they always sound as if they are being killed. So, though I cannot recall having heard the sound of a baby’s crying, on that night, I do not believe I would have supposed it remarkable,—there being, after all, an actual baby under our roof at that time.”

  Xavier was so fascinated by his young cousin’s low, soft, somewhat husky voice; and her lovely eyes; and the sweet simplicity of her manner,—that he found her words rather more logical than otherwise; and decided he must not ask whether the house yet echoed the baby’s cries, and was, in vulgar terms, “haunted,” for so foolish a question, hinting of rank superstition, would surely strike the wrong note. Nor did he wish to ask whether Perdita,—or, indeed, anyone at the Manor—knew how avidly it seemed to be wished, in town, that the old house be haunted.

  Next, he busied himself in examining the fireplaces, and the chimneys,—with no conspicuous results; and the several tall windows, and their faded draperies; and the closets with their showy mirrored doors; and various items of costly furniture,—couches upholstered in silks and satins, chairs of rococo design, bureaus of mahogany deeply carved in plumes, fruits, scrolls, et al., and a massive black walnut armoire in Oriental design, cunningly mirrored, with no less than two dozen drawers, each empty save for tissue paper, and the dried bodies of dead insects. Alas, and he felt the compulsion to examine each drawer thoroughly!—the while the pulse in his forehead dully throbbed, and his starched collar pricked against his throat. Doubtless like Sheriff Shearwater and the rest, he diligently searched for a secret passageway, but found nothing save dustballs, and mouse droppings, and cobwebs, and the husklike corpses of yet more insects. His head throbbed the more when, by accident, he saw in a mirror-maze of countless angles and diffractions the lovely face of his cousin in an expression,—ah, how sweet! how subtly ironic! and, it seemed, how fond!—of patient amusement at his industry.

  He then turned his attention to the heavy gilt-framed mirrors; and the trompe l’oeil paintings, which, all along, had been a source of distraction to him: a pulsatile movement, shading into actual writhing, in the corner of his eye: colors that were too strident, human or cherubic figures that were too insistent,—about, it seemed, to rouse themselves from the wall and lean into the room,—amidst a tangle of grasses, vines, grapes, and rose bushes in which roses luridly bloomed, like damp, pouting, crimson-pink mouths. As a very young boy Xavier had been fascinated by such blatant virtuoso demonstrations of the artist’s skill in “tricking the eye”: he had often stared at a small oil in his Grandmother De Forrest’s drawing room, of a pet monkey with a jeweled collar caught in the act, by his mistress, of making off with a massive bunch of purple grapes,—the “trick” of the painting being its illusion of possessing three dimensions, as the guiltily affrighted monkey leapt (or so it eerily seemed!) toward the viewer. For some years, Xavier had imagined such japery to be synonymous with “art,” and had essayed to imitate it, with disappointing results; then, with the passage of time, he had lost interest, and now gazed upon such things with ill-concealed scorn, no matter how others continued to admire them. This mural of Fairfax Eakins, for instance, ranging across much of a wall, and a goodly portion of the ceiling, was intended, it would seem, to express a holy sentiment, as the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child were nominally at its center: yet, as the most superficial glance suggested, the purpose of the painting was simply to amuse and to titillate, with angels’ heads, shoulders, torsos, elbows, limbs, wings of divers sizes and shapes, leaning, or falling, or plunging out of the wall, upon the viewer’s head. Indeed, the more Xavier stared, the more distaste, shading into actual revulsion, he felt: for were the angels not ungainly, in their overly “realistic” flesh?—and their dazed, or vacuous, or smug, or leering, or contemptuous, expressions not highly offensive? How queer, their wings!—hooked like a bat’s in caricature; or tall and befeathered; or scaled; or possessed of a peacock’s brilliance.

  As he stared, Xavier was gripped by a childish sense that the angelic host was, in turn, observing him, with expressions of withheld mirth: a comely androgynous figure seemed about to wink at him, holding a flute to its lips; a puffy-faced adolescent angel, of about Xavier’s age, seemed to have arched his eyebrow a bit higher, tilting in Xavier’s direction; a more sinister creature, with talons instead of feet, and the drooping black-feathered wings of a bird of prey, was regarding him with scarce-concealed hunger,—and derision. How queerly unsettling, this “religious” subject!—and with what virtuoso flippancy it was executed!—as if, in a sense, the painter had secretly regarded his work as profound, even while he mocked the viewer, and his wealthy patron, with every stroke of his brush.

  Xavier observed to his cousin, who stood a discreet distance away, her hands clasped before her, that he had not, within memory, encountered so bizarre a painting: for one could not interpret it as reverent, nor could one dismiss it as willfully sacrilegious; one could not mock it, as it was a mockery; and one could certainly not ignore it.

  Perdita murmured that she could not follow her cousin’s abstruse logic, and had so little training in aesthetics, she wished to make no judgment on the matter: save to observe that, as she quietly phrased it, “angels may turn demon, with the passage of time,—if starved of the love that is their sustenance.”

  At this moment, a drop of water, or some more viscous liquid substance, which had been forming by degrees in the narrowed eye of an angel overhead, grew suddenly heavy enough to fall: and Xavier instinctively put out his hand to catch it: a teardrop, one might almost fancy, or, judging by its faint crimson stain, a blooddrop,—which the bemazed youth, scarcely thinking what he did, brought to his lips to taste.

  “It’s blood,” he murmured,—and his heart lurched.

  But in the next instant he had sufficiently recovered himself to observe, in a more composed tone, that the ceiling must be leaking; that rainwater must have accumulated in the attic overhead, to make its way through intermittently, under pressure,—for this was one of the countless vexations the Kilgarvans of Wycombe Street had with their house; roofs being evidently very costly to repair. Perdita startled him by taking his hand to examine it: but by now the drop had vanished, and only a faint crimson discoloration remained in the palm—the consequence, no doubt, of rainwater dyed by paint.

  “Blood, you say,—blood?” Perdita said, her eyes darkening, and her voice urgent. “Yet how might it be blood, dripping merely from the ceiling?”

  “No, it was not blood,” Xavier said. “I am certain, Cousin, it was not blood,—only a raindrop.”

  “And yet,—you tasted it: I saw you bring it to your lips.”

  “Yet it was not blood, for how could it be blood, as you say?” Xavier asked, disguising the uneasiness he felt. “As to why I tasted it,—I do not know: an infantile sort of impulse, perhaps, for which I cannot account.”

  As no further drops fell from the ceiling,—the pale angel’s eye being, evidently, now dry—Xavier moved away, to make a final cursory examination of the room: and to tax himself with Monsieur Dupin’s admonition as to the simplicity of the situation. “Yet,” he thought, “is it not invariably, and smugly, the case that any human situation can be defined as simple by those who dwell, as it were, above it; and refined out of temporal existence by one or another authorial stratagem? For if one dwells here below, in the very midst of the puzzle, the navigation of the next hour,—nay, the next minute—is a challenge.”

  Perdita docilely agreed to lead him upstairs, into the attic, that he might examine the space directly above the room; though, as he told himself sternly, he must not expect to find anything so remarkable as
a pool of blood. While the young people were making their cautious way along the corridor, to a back stairs, Xavier was startled to hear a voice or voices nearby: but was assured by Perdita that they were in no danger of being detected,—it was doubtless Uncle Simon reading aloud a passage from his Treatise, in the solitude of his spartan room, that he might, as he said, test the resiliency of his prose to see whether it possessed that steely thinness which all metaphysical pondering required, to save it from muddle. (“It is said in town,” Xavier whispered, “that Uncle has been behaving strangely of late: being, first of all, far more often seen; and several times in the company of an unknown woman, many years his junior.” Blushing prettily, Perdita seemed at first loath to reply; then leaned to Xavier, and murmured in his ear with childish ire: “It is not so. It cannot be. They lie: it is as Georgina says, they always lie. Uncle works on his Treatise upward of twelve hours daily; Father’s death has very much impressed upon him the nature of,—as he says in his words—the ‘intractability of the phenomenal world,’ and the fact of his own impending mortality. So it is, he works near-constantly,—and rarely leaves home.”)

  As Xavier might have foreseen, the cavernous low-ceilinged attic of Glen Mawr, airless, stifling hot, disagreeably abuzz with flies, proved no less “intractable” than the Honeymoon Room: being a veritable graveyard of stored and cast-off things, draped with sheets, and awash in such a profusion of odors (of dust, mildew, rot, moth-crystals; the droppings and decayed corpses of mice, birds, bats, etc.; the desiccated shellac coating the taped surfaces of dressmakers’ dummies; etc.), the luckless youth felt sickened within the first minute of his entry. But Perdita bravely led him forward, through a maze of steamer trunks, upright cartons, paintings, furniture, ladies’ hat-boxes mounting to the ceiling, mirrors in whose grime-coated glasses twin images, scarcely of “boy” and “girl,” eerily floated, and all the melancholy useless paraphernalia of a household: bringing him, by instinct it seemed, to the approximate area he desired, directly above the Honeymoon Room. But, ah!—was he not disappointed to see that, indeed, no pool of blood lay underfoot, but only a coating of dust,—or, rather, numberless coatings of dust, through which the footprints of various years might be dimly discerned, amidst the tinier pawprints of mice.