by John Harwood
"Yes, Inspector," I said, wondering what Vernon Raphael had said to them.
"May I ask what papers?"
"I meant, papers I thought might interest Mr. Craik," I said desperately. "I did not expect the coach to be more than an hour or two."
"And what did you and Mr. Rhys do in the intervening hours—before the explosion, that is?"
Though his tone was studiously neutral, I blushed scarlet at the implication.
"I—I spent most of the time in the library," I said at last, "trying to keep warm. After I had given up looking for the papers, that is—I think I dozed for quite a while."
"I see." In the same disbelieving tone. He flicked through the pages of his notebook for a small eternity.
"Mr. Rhys says," he resumed, "that he went down to the cellar at around five o'clock to fetch more coal. Will you tell us what happened after that?"
My mouth was so dry, I could scarcely speak.
"I waited and waited—I don't know how long, until it was dark—I was afraid—I was just going to go and look for him when I heard footsteps in the gallery—"
"And where were you in the library when you heard them?"
"I—I was looking for a lantern, near the door that leads in—to where the armour was..."
"And the footsteps—could you tell where they were?"
"On the other side of that door."
"But you did not think they were Mr. Rhys's?"
"No."
"And why not?"
"Because—because they didn't sound like his. He would have come up the stairs and straight into the library."
"And then?"
"Then there was—a flash of light—I saw it under the door—and an explosion, and—and I started to run back through the library—and I must have tripped and hit my head—"
"So you didn't go into the gallery at all?"
I shook my head, not daring to speak.
"Then how, Miss Langton, do you account for this?"
He opened a small leather case and drew out a ragged piece of fabric, charred and blackened along one side, but perfectly recognisable as the one I had torn from my dress.
"Sergeant Brewer remembers seeing a gown of just this pattern beneath your travelling cloak when you and Mr. Rhys called at Woodbridge police station to report the—accident. We found it caught between the armour and Dr. Davenant's body."
"I don't know," I said faintly. "It must have got caught earlier in the day, when Mr. Rhys and I were examining the armour."
"Surely you would have noticed."
"I—I—I do think I remember something catching at my dress, but I did not know it had torn—until after the explosion—and then I assumed it had happened when I went to look for Mr. Rhys..."
"I see. Might we be able to examine this dress, Miss Langton?"
"I told Dora—my maid—to throw it out. She may still have it."
"That would be very helpful to us. Perhaps you could also explain the footprints—they appear to be yours—on the surviving portion of the gallery floor?"
"I—I went in after the explosion—after I had recovered from my faint—to see what had happened."
"After the explosion ... I see." The note of disbelief was stronger than ever. "But there is a scuffed area, as if someone had been lying there when the dust first settled, and then a series of handprints, and then footprints—the same footprints, Miss Langton—but leading only in one direction: out of the gallery."
Two pairs of eyes watched me steadily while the incriminating seconds dragged by.
"I can't explain it," I said at last, "unless—perhaps I was confused about where I woke—from my faint, I mean, after the chimney fell down. I must have run all the way into the gallery without realising it ... I'm afraid I can't remember; it was such a shock; I'm afraid that's all I can tell you."
"I see," said the Inspector heavily. "Are you sure, Miss Langton, there is nothing you would like to add to your statement?"
I took a deep breath, thinking, it must be now, or never.
"Yes, Inspector, there is. I found out this morning that Dr. Davenant was actually Magnus Wraxford. He did not die at the Hall in 1868, as everyone supposed—"
The two men were staring at me with utter incredulity.
"I said in front of him—before I realised who he was—that I had evidence to incriminate him—and then he must have concealed himself—he could not have found his way back through the fog—and shut Mr. Rhys in the cellar. He meant to murder us both and destroy the evidence and blew himself up instead—"
"And what evidence might that be?" asked the Inspector with heavy sarcasm.
"I did not have it then; it was just—intuition—but this morning I went to his house to—and when I found Mr. Montague's painting—"
"Miss Langton," the Inspector broke in, "you are plainly overwrought. I shan't detain you any longer—for the moment. But I shall need to speak to you again, and I must ask you not to leave London without letting us know exactly when and where you are going. Now, if you could ask your maid about that dress...?"
Everything I had ever read about the horrors of incarceration came back to haunt me that night: the slamming of iron doors; the rattle of chains; darkness, cold, filth, unspeakable smells; the shrieks of my fellow prisoners; the roar of the mob as I was dragged, hooded, to the scaffold ... until I woke at last from terrible dreams, and lay waiting, as the dawn brightened into another perfect sunrise, for the police to come hammering on the door. I had promised to meet Edwin at midday, and realised I should write to him by the first post to tell him what I had done, and why I might not be there, but the right words would not come, and after I had torn up half a dozen attempts, there seemed to be nothing left to do but try to will myself to sleep again, until Dora came up to tell me that a lady had called. She had refused to leave her name, but said she would like to speak to me privately and would wait for me by the seat at the top of Primrose Hill.
With my heart beating wildly, I crept downstairs, let myself out by the garden gate, and walked up through the wet grass, the droplets glittering like diamonds in the sunlight, until I reached the brow of the hill and saw a woman in a dark blue dress, with a travelling cloak draped over the seat beside her: the gaunt, strikingly featured woman who had answered the door of Ada Woodward's house. She rose to her feet as I drew near, and I saw that she was very pale.
"Miss Langton—we meet again. My name is—or was, until yesterday evening—Helen Northcote, but I think you might know me better as Eleanor Wraxford."
I gazed at her, unable to speak, drinking in every detail of her appearance. Her eyes, I saw, were a delicate shade of hazel, flecked with green. And there was something different about her voice, which sounded lower and more cultivated than I remembered: the Yorkshire intonation had gone.
"When Ada told me what you had said—especially after we saw the reports in the newspapers—I knew that we could not abandon you, no matter what the cost. We came down to London yesterday, but the police would not allow Ada—she insisted upon going to Scotland Yard alone—to see the body until late in the afternoon, when Inspector Garret returned from his interview with you. And then she was obliged to wait several more hours until they managed to unearth a Mr. Veitch, an ancient gentleman who had once been Magnus's lawyer, to confirm the identification. Enough to say that the Inspector has deduced—or so he told Ada—that Magnus intended to blow up the Hall, and was killed when the charge exploded prematurely."
I could not help smiling at the Inspector's appropriation of a theory he had dismissed as lunacy only a few hours before.
"And by then, Miss Langton," she continued, "it was far too late to call on you. Ada is sorry she could not be here; she was obliged to take the early train home."
"Please, you must call me Constance—do the police now accept that you were entirely innocent?"
"The warrant for Eleanor Wraxford's arrest will be withdrawn, yes. It is a very strange feeling, after twenty years of preparing myself for th
e worst ... but before I say more, will you tell me your own story—since you are already so well acquainted with mine?"
And so, beginning with Alma's death, I relived for her the journey that had brought me here, with the city at our feet, and the shining thread of the river running through it, until I had come full circle: to yesterday's visit to Hertford Street, my engagement to Edwin, and the horrors of the previous night, all now dispelled.
"I do understand," she said at last, "why you thought you might be my daughter; and why you wanted to be. And if I had given Clara away, as you supposed, I would believe it, too; not only because you remind me so much of my younger self, but because of the affinity that led you to me. But, my dear Constance, you are not my daughter. She is alive and well; I think you caught a glimpse of her, just before I shut you out, as I had to do, for her sake. Her name is Laura Woodward, and she believes that Ada is her mother—and that she lost her beloved father, George, ten years ago."
Tears welled in my eyes, though I tried to blink them away. She took my hand in hers, gently caressing my fingers.
"I had no choice, you see. Everything—almost everything—happened as you divined. When Lucy and I left Munster Square for the last time with Clara, Lucy didn't come with me to Shoreditch, as I wrote in that diary; I put her in another cab to Paddington, while I drove with Clara to St. Pancras, where Ada was waiting for me. It was all arranged; she used to write to me poste restante at a dingy little post office in Marylebone, where I was sure Magnus would not go. George wasn't in Whitby then; he had a temporary living in Helmsley, thirty miles away, and that was where Ada took Clara, while I went on to Wraxford Hall.
"I never did go to the gallery, the night Mrs. Bryant died. I meant to, but my courage failed me at the last. All these years I have wondered how she died ... and now I know."
I looked at her questioningly.
"Magnus must have forged both of those notes. And I very nearly did what he assumed I would: conceal myself somewhere nearby. And then ... Mrs. Bryant was infatuated with him, and he was mesmerising her frequently. She need not even have read the note they found in her room; that was simply to incriminate me. He could have proposed an assignation, or implanted the suggestion in a trance. Dr. Rhys, said, I think, that she seemed to be walking in her sleep. And so she came to the gallery at midnight; and if I had been watching, I should certainly not have revealed myself to her, of all people. And then the lid of the tomb began to open, just as you saw that night. The shock of that alone might have been enough to kill her; or perhaps something sprang out—"
"The ghost of the monk," I said, remembering John Montague's story of the stonemason. "That was how Magnus disguised himself ... but I don't understand. Why did he want you there? You would have denounced him—"
"Yes, and who would have believed me? By the time anyone else arrived, Magnus would have closed the tomb and disappeared into the tunnel—remember that he had gone out for a stroll in the moonlight, so he claimed, sometime before midnight—and what would they have found? Mrs. Bryant dead, and me beside her body, raving about the ghost of a monk. I should have been taken away in a strait-jacket, with Magnus playing the grieving husband..."
She paused, breathing deeply.
"Why did you marry him?" I had not meant to ask so baldly, and wished, when she did not immediately reply, that I could call back the question; it had sounded like an accusation.
"I believe," she said at last, "that on the one occasion he succeeded in mesmerising me, he did gain some hold over my mind; whenever I tried to muster the courage to tell him I could not marry him, an answering chorus would spring up in my head: 'but he is so kind, so thoughtful, so intelligent, so charming; how could you not grow to love such a man? And what will become of you if you do not marry him? You will be utterly alone in the world ....' It was not until the honeymoon," she said with a slight shudder, "that the scales fell from my eyes."
She was silent for a little, gazing at the tranquil horizon.
"I tried to persuade myself," she continued, "once it was too late—that he had married me for my gift, as he called it. I thought, you see, that his scepticism was merely another of his masks; I thought he truly believed in—supernatural powers—and sought to harness them for his own ends. Whereas in reality he saw himself as a god.
"No," she said, as if answering an objection, "I am sure that my visitations intrigued him; but I think he was drawn to me principally because I resisted his spell; because he had twice failed to mesmerise me; and, I fear, because he truly desired me. And so he hated me all the more, when he discovered how much I loathed him."
"And—your visitations?" I asked hesitantly. "Was the one in your journal—of you and Clara vanishing—invented for Magnus's benefit?"
"Yes, it was."
"And did they ever return?"
"No," she said wryly, "and neither did the intolerable headaches that used to follow them. That fall on the stairs: I remember thinking that it had opened a crack in my mind, just enough to let in glimpses of a world beyond—a world I never wanted to see. And then the rift closed again; I sometimes think it was the shock of Edward's death. And I will always wonder whether I should have told him about that vision, and whether he would have taken any notice if I had."
"Do you think," I ventured, even more hesitantly, "that Magnus might have had something to do with Edward's death?"
"I don't know. Edward was quite reckless enough to have climbed that cable of his own accord, but Magnus might very well have encouraged him, or even ... I try not to think of it."
"I am sorry," I said. "I should not have asked."
"You need not be," she said. "It is always somewhere in my mind."
"How did you escape from the Hall?" I said, after a pause.
"Very much as you surmised: I left the Hall at dawn the next morning, in a gown and bonnet of Lucy's. I was enough of a mimic to pass as a lady's maid. It would have been too dangerous for me to go straight to Yorkshire, and so I had reserved a room, under the name of Helen Northcote, in a temperance hotel in Lincoln. I was still there when the first reports began to appear in the papers, and I realised that all the time I had been planning my escape from Magnus, he had been fashioning a hangman's noose for me."
"Yes," I said, "but ... why did he kill Mrs. Bryant the night before the séance, when he had made all those preparations, and brought everyone together at the Hall?"
"Because"—she paused, as if searching for words—"because those preparations were meant to mesmerise everyone into expecting him to vanish from the armour. Now that I know he was living a double life as Davenant, it makes sense at last. The Hall was heavily encumbered; he had already converted Mrs. Bryant's ten thousand pounds into diamonds; that cheque was her death warrant. Another man might have gone on trying to extract more money from her, but for Magnus I think money was simply a means to an end; it was power he craved: power and revenge. If I had been dragged away to an asylum that night, I'm sure he would have insisted upon trying the experiment anyway. 'We owe it to Mrs. Bryant's memory,' I can imagine him saying; and Magnus Wraxford would have vanished, leaving nothing behind but ashes. But when his original plan miscarried, he saw that he could use the death of Magnus Wraxford to exact an even more terrible revenge upon me."
"Did you believe, all along, that he was still alive?"
"Yes—alive, and hunting for me. I had a waking nightmare—one of many—of standing on a scaffold, with the rope already round my neck, and seeing Magnus smiling from the shadows. I never thought I would escape him, but I was determined that Clara would be saved. And so Ada and George—at my insistence—became her parents. They let the servants at Helmsley think that Laura—as we named her—was their foster child, but when George was offered a living at Whitby a year later, they began to speak of Laura as their own, and nobody questioned it. Ada gave Helen Northcote a reference, and after three years as a housekeeper in Chester—the longest years of my life—I came to Whitby as Ada's companion."
&nb
sp; "It must have been dreadfully hard for you," I said. "Knowing you might be snatched away at any moment, I mean."
"Yes," she said simply. "Laura knows I love her, but I have always withheld something of myself. To brace yourself for the worst, every time a stranger knocks at the door, leaves its mark, as you see...
"It is strange—or perhaps not—that Laura has grown to be so like Ada: sweet-natured and tranquil, with nothing of my temper, and even a natural gift for music, which I certainly do not possess. No one would ever doubt that they were mother and daughter. And now—thanks entirely to you—the shadow is gone from our lives.
"You risked your life for me," she said, taking my hand once more, "you were willing to go to prison for me; I shall never forget you. I came to London prepared to reveal myself as Eleanor Wraxford, if there was no other way of ensuring your safety. But thank God we have been spared that; the police have agreed that Ada's name will not appear in the matter, and Laura need never know."
"But surely," I said, "you must want the world to know who you really are. How else can you clear your name?"
She was silent for a while, gazing out across the city.
"Magnus worshipped power," she said at last, "the power to deceive whomever he chose, to make them believe, feel, even see as he directed. If they would not succumb, then in his eyes they deserved to die. And yet out of all that terror and cruelty came Laura. There is nothing of Magnus in her; blood does not always out; sometimes it is washed clean, or never tainted from the first...
"But the world, Constance, does not see things thus. Magnus's vision and the world's have more in common than we care to admit. I could shout my innocence from every one of those rooftops, and people would still believe me guilty of something. No; Eleanor Wraxford will always be 'that woman who murdered her husband'—or her child, for what could I say had become of Clara? If Laura were to learn who I really am, she would surely divine the truth."
"But—now that there is no reason to deceive her—might she not prefer to know? Would she not have two loving mothers instead of one?"