The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris

by Leon Garfield

  Some two minutes after the doctor had gone, his front door opened again and his son emerged, carrying an old piece of blanket. He looked rapidly up and down the street, blessed the teeming rain that was keeping the townsfolk within doors, and hastened away to collect his friend. The change in the weather must mean a change in their luck, thought Harris, and he felt in his bones that all was set for success at last.

  Unhappily no such optimism attended Major Alexander as he and his son set out from the school at approximately the same time as Harris met Bostock at the other end of the town.

  “What about Mother?” asked Adam. “Oughtn’t you—we to say goodbye?”

  “Much she cares,” said the Major bitterly. “Damn her German soul!”

  “And Mister Brett?”

  “We’ll meet him there.”

  Ralph Bunnion, on the other hand, having no cause to be bitter with anyone save Tizzy Alexander, lingered to say goodbye to his father. Mrs. Bunnion, it turned out, was still asleep and the headmaster didn’t want to waken her as he couldn’t bear the thought of her distress at the parting scene. With tears in his eyes he wished Ralph well, and then lapsed into the apathy of despair from which he’d been disturbed. Thus it was a good ten minutes after the Major and Adam had gone that Ralph and Sir Walter Sorley set off confidently for the fatal meeting.

  “What about your seconds, lad? Your friend with the pistols and that fellow Brett?”

  “We’ll meet them there.”

  The rain lashed down on the town with unabated fury and Frederick, walking briskly to the dueling ground with the mahogany pistol case under his arm, prayed that the powder would not get wet. He stopped and took off his cloak and wrapped the case inside it. It would be horrible if one of the weapons failed to discharge and someone was killed by the other. It would make him feel like a murderer. In a few moments he was wet to the skin, but at least the pistols were keeping dry and his friend would have a fair chance. He consulted the little silver and enamel watch that someone had left in one of his father’s coaches. The time was twenty-five minutes to eight, so he quickened his pace.

  The inquiry agent had arrived at Dr. Harris’s house. He had been terribly hampered by his boot, which was full of rainwater and so was twice its ordinary weight. Furiously he banged on the door, and kept banging till a frightened maid appeared.

  “Your master!” shouted Mr. Raven. “Where is he?”

  “Gone out.”

  “Already—already? Fetch your mistress. Quick—quick!”

  Mrs. Harris, hearing the commotion, had already come down. The inquiry agent stared at her savagely. Her name was on the paper in his boot, caught in that frightful web. She was a guilty woman. All women were guilty.

  “Give me the baby,” he snarled. “I know everything, Mrs. Harris. Everything!” She stared at him, at first not taking in what he’d said. Then a look of joyous amazement lit up her face. Adelaide! He had found her!

  “Thank God!” she wept. “Morgan—quick! Fetch the baby!”

  Perhaps had her mind not been so distraught with anguish and she had not loathed the Gypsy child so much, perhaps had her husband been at home, even, Mrs. Harris would not have been so hasty.

  “Wait!” she pleaded. “Wait while I dress, Mister Raven!”

  “No!” he answered harshly. “There is no time. A life is at stake.”

  At twenty minutes to eight, with the Gypsy brat stoutly wrapped and held in his powerful arms, the inquiry agent left the Harrises’ house and stumbled through the rain.

  So, at last, they were all out in the open and going their several ways: the duelists, the inquiry agent, the Gypsy brat—and Bostock and Harris. The self-same rain came down and soaked them all as if in a universal dismay at the prospect before them.

  The baby had begun to cry, but all the world was crying and Mr. Raven told it so. Then it peered up at him through slitted eyes, and the inquiry agent shuddered at the iniquity in them.

  It was possible that at some time during this final journey he had doubts as to the course he’d determined on, but doubts at all stages of an enterprise are part of the human condition. He was right to doubt. He was neither a beast of the field nor a god. He was a man—and men may be wrong. A little higher than the beasts, a little lower than the gods, man is ever a double loser. For a pinch of divine understanding he has sacrificed his instincts; therefore a man should always have his doubts, and etcetera . . .

  Fiercely, Mr. Raven cast his mind back to the affair’s beginning, while struggling to shield his burden from the rain: the bizarre appearance of the strange baby in Adelaide Harris’s cot. Only an explanation as bizarre as the event itself would answer it. And there was no doubt Mr. Raven had provided such an explanation.

  But then never knowing for certain how an event has begun, a man can only guide his understanding along the path of his own experience. Thus some men look up to the great sky and see God; others see but the blind and empty stars. Either way, a man is condemned to build his tower on the shifting sands of doubt. The best he can do is to struggle as high as he can, then make his divine leap. Mr. Selwyn Raven nodded his head, and struggled on to make his divine leap.

  Two other voyagers in the rain, namely Bostock and Harris, had reached the poorhouse. They were very wet and somber. Bostock’s mood was partly due to the distress in his home at the loss of the quilt, while Harris’s was because he felt he had reached the end of a road. All his courage, all his ingenuity—and all his money—had been staked on this last endeavor. If he failed and Mrs. Bonney wasn’t dead drunk, then Adelaide was lost forever. So also would be the esteem of Bostock, and in a strange way, Bostock counted for more than anything. Bostock was his friend and had always looked up to him. Where would Bostock be without him—and where would he be without Bostock?

  Harris scowled. “This is it, Bosty, old friend.”

  Bostock stared at him, and Harris fancied there was a coolness in Bostock’s eyes. “This is it, Harris.”

  The friends shook hands and pushed open the poorhouse door.

  Within, the air was curiously strong. The ordinary smell of fish, gin and babies was overlaid with something sharper and yet richer. It was not in itself the smell of brandy, and yet there was brandy in it. It resembled more than anything a heavy cake that had been burnt. It was very powerful on the stairs and grew more so as the friends mounted. At last they reached the room where the foundlings lay, and the smell was tremendous. Bostock and Harris stopped in the doorway. They trembled.

  There was a chair at the far end of the room, and in the chair, wrapped in Mrs. Bostock’s quilt, sat Mrs. Bonney. Her eyes were partly open but they gave no glimmer of recognition. The smell, now in great waves, was coming from her. As Harris had promised, the last eight shillings had done it. She was as brandied as a butterball and she stank like a vat.

  “Christians,” she mumbled weirdly as Bostock eased off his mother’s quilt. “Darlin’ Christians at it again . . .”

  Mr. Raven had made his divine leap. With a last muttered, “and etcetera,” he had laid the Gypsy brat outside the house of the Hemps. The Hemps? Yes, the Hemps. Where else should the thunderbolt fall?

  He had rapped on the door, then hobbled into concealment to a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder. Then he waited, his reputation at stake. If he was right—and still he was human enough to fear he might be wrong—then this one dramatic stroke would bring everything tumbling out of the cupboards of hell and into the light of day. He fumbled in his boot for one last glimpse of his plan. He drew it out. It was sodden with rainwater. Every last name and line had run into a filthy pool of ink. No human being could ever have made any sense of it. It was lost forever. Mr. Raven cursed. Then he grew still.

  The door had opened. The elder Miss Morgan looked out, looked down. She screamed. Mr. Raven sighed with relief, and smiled.

  The elder Miss Morgan crossed herself. Though she’d never clapped eyes on it before, she recognized the weird infant from her sister’s acc
ount. The worst had happened. The fateful spell she’d given away had come home to roost. She screamed again. Mr. Raven hugged himself. The foul goblins had laid the changeling at her door. If it entered in the house, then all the hellish mystery of Celtic ghosts would be let loose to break the plates and drive everyone storybook mad.

  Careless of the rain, she knelt down, snatched up the wrinkled fiend and rushed away down the street. She would leave it where it could do nobody any harm.

  Mr. Raven watched after her and wondered where she might be going. He would like to have followed, but he dared not. He was waiting for the murder. Very soon now, he had good reason to believe, Ralph tomcat Bunnion would attempt to assassinate Indian, or rather Gypsy Hemp. He hoped to God he would be able to prevent it.

  Harris kissed his infant sister. He was sincerely glad to see her again. There were times when he never thought he would. Bostock looked on, deeply moved. Then the friends, watched by the insensible Mrs. Bonney, crept out of the room with the quilted Adelaide in her brother’s arms.

  “Harris,” whispered Bostock as they were on the stairs. “What about the other one? What do we do about the baby at your house?”

  Harris looked at him. He had entirely overlooked the other baby. He couldn’t think of everything, but he wasn’t going to admit it to his friend. Bostock’s faith in him was in the melting pot. To confess to an oversight now would be to crack the mold and let Bostock’s faith trickle away altogether.

  “First things first, Bosty,” he whispered, and continued down the stairs.

  “Harris!” gasped Bostock as they opened the poorhouse door. “Oh, Harris, you’re a genius!”

  On the step before them lay the alien baby where the terrified elder Miss Morgan had deposited it a moment before.

  “Christians,” sighed Mrs. Bonney, as Bostock and Harris laid the Gypsy child in the empty place. “Bleedin’ Christians comin’ and goin’ like pink mice . . .”

  Twenty

  THE RAIN WAS beginning to let up. A stout sea wind was bundling the clouds toward London and a distant glitter of sunlight had appeared on the gray sea’s horizon. Mrs. Harris, her daughters, and Morgan the nurse, unable to bear the suspense of waiting indoors, had been scouring the nearby streets for some sign of the triumphant inquiry agent with Adelaide in his arms. Caped and hooded, they leaned and turned into every gust of wind with their garments whipping like broken wings. Mrs. Bostock, looking out from her window, saw them and begged them to come inside, at least until the worst of the wind had dropped. At first Mrs. Harris wouldn’t hear of it, but when Mrs. Bostock declared that a physician’s wife should know better than to court a severe chill, she saw the sense of it, and with her soaking family, accepted Mrs. Bostock’s kind invitation.

  It was while she was waiting there, sitting in Mrs. Bostock’s parlor and drinking hot soup, that Bostock and Harris returned Adelaide to her proper place. The emptiness of the house—which had been left in the care of the kitchen maid who would never come out of the kitchen since Morgan had warned her about goblins—and the consequent ease with which the friends accomplished their task, prompted Bostock to declare once again that Harris was a genius.

  “I suppose I must be,” said Harris dreamily. “But Bosty, old friend, it don’t make me feel any different from you.”

  Bostock stared at him disbelievingly. Was it possible that Harris really felt as vague and puzzled by the world as he did?

  “I get the bellyache just like you do, Bosty, and the rain makes me just as wet.”

  Bostock smiled and shook his head. Harris was having him on. “It’s the way you think, Harris. High, like an eagle.”

  “It seems quite ordinary to me, Bosty. Honestly it does.”

  Suddenly there came a knocking on the front door that put a period to all meditation. “It’s the wet nurse! Quick—the window! Help me down, Bosty!”

  At five minutes after eight o’clock, Harris, strolling into his home from nowhere in particular, was greeted with the most astonishing news. Adelaide had been restored! She was back. His little sister had come home!

  He was overjoyed. His real warmth of affection and great delight surprised even his sisters, who were glad enough to answer his many eager questions as to how the miracle had come about. The wet nurse had been admitted by the kitchen maid, he was told, and taken up to the nursery. She had come out almost directly saying the baby had been changed and looked amazingly like a poorhouse brat of her acquaintance. At first the maid had pooh-pooh’d her, thinking her to be in gin and not able to tell one baby from another as she saw so many. Then the wet nurse had lost her temper and flounced off, so the maid had conquered her fear of goblins and gone in to see for herself. “Adelaide!” she’d shrieked, and then tumbled straight out into the street shouting, “She’s back! Miss Adelaide’s come back!”

  Actually it turned out that Mrs. Harris, drinking soup at the Bostocks, had heard the cry some moments before anyone else, but had not dared to say so for fear she should be imagining it. But then Morgan heard it, and then everyone did. They all rushed out in a terrific commotion—the Bostocks included—and sure enough, Adelaide was back!

  All this was told to the open-mouthed Harris at such a rate and with so many interruptions—for the sisters disagreed on details—that the poor boy was quite bewildered and kept staring around the room in helpless amazement.

  “But who—” he managed at length, “but who did it?”

  “Why that inquiry agent, of course. Mister Raven. It was all his doing.”

  Harris nodded. Mr. Raven, of course . . .

  “And Ma says you’re to go down to the Old Ship and ask him to lunch. Go on, hurry up now. Adelaide’ll still be here when you come back!”

  But the inquiry agent was not at the Old Ship. Nor was he still outside the house of the Hemps. Eight o’clock had been and gone and no pistol shot had broken the morning air. The murder had been forestalled, as he’d hoped it would, so Mr. Raven had clumped off to Dr. Bunnion’s school to pick up the traces of his archenemy Brett. But when he got there he found the school in an end-of-term confusion with no one willing or able to help him. Not a soul seemed to know where the devil Brett had gone. Mrs. Bunnion, who had at last woken up, had gone flying out in a hopeless attempt to prevent the unnecessary duel, and the headmaster himself was doing what he could to conceal his agonized fear that Ralph, now two hours gone, was bleeding to death from Major Alexander’s merciless bullet.

  “Of course you know,” said Mr. Raven, irritated by his casual reception, “that Brett was at the bottom of everything?”

  Distractedly Dr. Bunnion nodded. “That is exactly what I keep telling my wife, sir.”

  “You villain, James Brett! You terrible, crafty, shocking villain! If Ma had only known, she’d never have let me fall in love with you!”

  The time was shortly after nine o’clock. The place was the warmly dancing interior of the Southampton coach, now well on its way. The speaker was Tizzy Alexander, and her place was in the arms of her Mr. Brett. The cause of her censure was that Mr. Brett had just confessed to her his unusual part in the duel, and just what he’d done about it.

  She was looking at him with great severity, and frowning with all her might. But the corners of her mouth, do what she would, kept tugging and twitching, and her shoulders were beginning to heave and shake. “James Brett,” she began, but could say no more. Laughter engulfed her, helpless laughter that came bubbling up and exploding in her eyes. She rocked with it, and the coach rocked with her, and then Mr. Brett joined in and the tears ran from their eyes in shining streams while an outside passenger nearly overturned himself in an effort to see what was going on.

  “But what else could I do?” gasped Mr. Brett. “What else could I do?”

  Tizzy only shook her head, and when she was able to speak, all she could say was, “Do you think they’re still there?” and then she was off again.

  At a quarter to ten o’clock, Major Alexander and his son Adam, cold, wet and
ankles awash—for the tide was coming in—retreated from the seashore. “As I suspected,” said the Major with grim satisfaction. “The fellow’s a coward and won’t face me!”

  High on the Downs, near where Adelaide had been found, Ralph Bunnion and his party waited perhaps five minutes longer on account of not wanting to disappoint Sir Walter and to outface a small number of spectators who were beginning to jeer.

  “I knew the swine was craven when I first clapped eyes on him,” grunted the baronet. “All those damned military fellows are the same. Shoot your eyes out with a cannon, but not with a pistol. You have to get too close for that!”

  Then they too left the dueling ground, with Frederick half glad his pistols had not been put to the test.

  “And what the devil happened to that fellow Brett?” said Sir Walter as they walked along.

  “And where was Mister Brett?” said Adam Alexander to his father as they neared the school.

  But it was not until the thwarted duelists met that they discovered Mr. Brett’s duplicity.

  “I told him that it was to be on the beach by the Old Ship,” said Major Alexander furiously.

  “He told me it was to be on the Downs,” said Ralph Bunnion, equally annoyed.

  “The man’s a damned scoundrel!” said Major Alexander. “He has insulted an affair of honor!”

  Mr. Brett had taken the only advantage possible in being second to both parties. He had arranged for them to meet some three miles apart.

  “I warned you!” snarled the Major, glaring at Dr. Bunnion’s knees. “I told you the man was furtive, underhanded and sly!” Then he went off with Ralph and Sir Walter to Ralph’s room where, heedless of gathering parents, the three men of blood and honor drowned their furious disappointment and humiliation in bottomless tankards of claret as red as their unshed blood.