“But she would have gotten her skirts wet in the snow,” I started to object. “Of course! The spilled punch bowl! It drenched her!”
Cork smiled broadly. “Yes, my lad. She entered the kitchen, scooped up the punch bowl, carried it into the ballroom, and then deliberately dropped it.”
“Well,” Tell grumped, “she may be sprung in the mind, but she understands the theory of tactical diversion.”
“Self-preservation is the last instinct to go, Major.”
“Yes, I believe you are right, Cork, but how are we to explain all this and still shield the Dame’s secret?”
Cork looked dead at me. “You, Oaks, have given us the answer.”
“I? Oh, when I said the killer took off his boots to avoid tracks in the den? You rejected that out of hand when I mentioned it.”
“I rejected it as a probability, not a possibility. Anything is possible, but not everything is probable. Is it probable that a killer bent on not leaving tracks would take off his boots inside the entry, where they would leave a puddle? No, I couldn’t accept it, but I’m sure the general public will.”
The major looked disturbed. “I can appreciate your desire to protect the Dame,” he said, “but to suppress evidence—”
“Calm yourself, Major, we are just balancing the books of human nature. I have saved the Crown the time and expense of trying and executing an extortionist. God knows how many victims he has fleeced by his artistic trickery over the years. And we have prevented the Dame from the commission of a homicide that any jury, I think, would have found justifiable. Let it stand as it is, Major; it is a neater package. The Dame has had enough tragedy in her life.”
The last of his words were soft and low-toned, and I watched as he stared into the flames. By jing, could it possibly be that this gallivanting, sunburnt American had fallen in love? But I quickly dismissed the thought. We are fated to our roles, we two—he, the unbroken stallion frolicking from pasture to pasture, and I, the frantic ostler following with an empty halter, hoping some day to put the beast to work. I persist.
THE DAUPHIN’S DOLL
by Ellery Queen
“Ellery Queen” has a split personality. It is the pseudonym of Brooklyn-born cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, whose contrasting personalities gave a keen edge to their many years of mystery collaboration. Together they wrote a long list of novels, novelettes and short stories featuring their namesake detective, Ellery Queen. They edited over seventy anthologies and founded and edited Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Seven Edgars and a Raven attest to Ellery’s popularity.
However, Ellery Queen was more knowledgeable about crime than he was about plangonology, as the following story demonstrates. Attitudes have drastically changed since the 1940s. What contemporary collector wouldn’t give her eyeteeth to find the dolls in this story under her Christmas tree?
There is a law among storytellers, originally passed by Editors at the cries (they say) of their constituents, which states that stories about Christmas shall have Children in them. This Christmas story is no exception; indeed, misopedists will complain that we have overdone it. And we confess in advance that this is also a story about Dolls, and that Santa Claus comes into it, and even a Thief; though as to this last, whoever he was—and that was one of the questions—he was certainly not Barabbas, even parabolically.
Another section of the statute governing Christmas stories provides that they shall incline toward Sweetness and Light. The first arises, of course, from the orphans and the never-souring savor of the annual Miracle; as for Light, it will be provided at the end, as usual, by that luminous prodigy, Ellery Queen. The reader of gloomier temper will also find a large measure of Darkness, in the person and works of one who, at least in Inspector Queen’s harassed view, was surely the winged Prince of that region. His name, by the way, was not Satan, it was Comus; and this is paradox enow, since the original Comus, as everyone knows, was the god of festive joy and mirth, emotions not commonly associated with the Underworld. As Ellery struggled to embrace his phantom foe, he puzzled over this non sequitur in vain; in vain, that is, until Nikki Porter, no scorner of the obvious, suggested that he might seek the answer where any ordinary mortal would go at once. And there, to the great man’s mortification it was indeed to be found: On page 262b of Volume 6, Coleb to Damasci, of the 175th Anniversary edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. A French conjuror of that name, performing in London in the year 1789, caused his wife to vanish from the top of a table—the very first time, it appeared, that this feat, uxorial or otherwise, had been accomplished without the aid of mirrors. To track his dark adversary’s nom de nuit to its historic lair gave Ellery his only glint of satisfaction until that blessed moment when light burst all around him and exorcised the darkness, Prince and all.
But this is chaos.
Our story properly begins not with our invisible character but with our dead one.
Miss Ypson had not always been dead; au contraire. She had lived for seventy-eight years, for most of them breathing hard. As her father used to remark, “She was a very active little verb.” Miss Ypson’s father was a professor of Greek at a small Midwestern university. He had conjugated his daughter with the rather bewildered assistance of one of his brawnier students, an Iowa poultry heiress.
Professor Ypson was a man of distinction. Unlike most professors of Greek, he was a Greek professor of Greek, having been born Gerasymos Aghamos Ypsilonomon in Polykhnitos, on the island of Mytilini, “where,” he was fond of recalling on certain occasions, “burning Sappho loved and sung”—a quotation he found unfailingly useful in his extracurricular activities; and, the Hellenic ideal notwithstanding, Professor Ypson believed wholeheartedly in immoderation in all things. This hereditary and cultural background explains the professor’s interest in fatherhood—to his wife’s chagrin, for Mr. Ypson’s own breeding prowess was confined almost exclusively to the barnyards on which her income was based; he held their daughter to be nothing less than a biological miracle.
The professor’s mental processes also tended to confuse Mrs. Ypson. She never ceased to wonder why, instead of shortening his name to Ypson, her husband had not sensibly changed it to Jones. “My dear,” the professor once replied, “you are an Iowa snob.”
“But nobody,” Mrs. Ypson cried, “can spell it or pronounce it!”
“This is a cross,” murmured Professor Ypson, “which we must bear with ypsilanti.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Ypson.
There was invariably something Sibylline about his conversation. His favorite adjective for his wife was “ypsiliform,” a term, he explained, which referred to the germinal spot at one of the fecundation states in a ripening egg and which was, therefore, exquisitely à propos. Mrs. Ypson continued to look bewildered; she died at an early age.
And the professor ran off with a Kansas City variety girl of considerable talent, leaving his baptized chick to be reared by an eggish relative of her mother, named Jukes.
The only time Miss Ypson heard from her father—except when he wrote charming and erudite little notes requesting, as he termed it, lucrum—was in the fourth decade of his Odyssey, when he sent her a handsome addition to her collection, a terra-cotta play doll of Greek origin over three thousand years old which, unhappily, Miss Ypson felt duty-bound to return to the Brooklyn museum from which it had unaccountably vanished. The note accompanying her father’s gift had said, whimsically: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”
There was poetry behind Miss Ypson’s dolls. At her birth the professor, ever harmonious, signalized his devotion to fecundity by naming her Cytherea. This proved the Olympian irony. For, it turned out, her father’s philoprogenitiveness throbbed frustrate in her mother’s stony womb: even though Miss Ypson interred five husbands of quite adequate vigor, she remained infertile to the end of her days. Hence it is classically tragic to find her, when all passion was spent, a sweet little old lady with a vague if eager smile who, under the name of her father, pattered abou
t a vast and echoing New York apartment, playing enthusiastically with dolls.
In the beginning they were dolls of common clay: a Billiken, a kewpie, a Kathe Kruse, a Patsy, a Foxy Grandpa, and so forth. But then, as her need increased, Miss Ypson began her fierce sack of the past.
Down into the land of Pharaoh she went for two pieces of thin desiccated board, carved and painted and with hair of strung beads, and legless—so that they might not run away—which any connoisseur will tell you are the most superb specimens of ancient Egyptian paddle doll extant, far superior to those in the British Museum, although this fact will be denied in certain quarters.
Miss Ypson unearthed a foremother of “Letitia Penn,” until her discovery held to be the oldest doll in America, having been brought to Philadelphia from England in 1699 by William Penn as a gift for a playmate of his small daughter’s. Miss Ypson’s find was a wooden-hearted “little lady” in brocade and velvet which had been sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to the first English child born in the New World. Since Virginia Dare had been born in 1587, not even the Smithsonian dared impugn Miss Ypson’s triumph.
On the old lady’s racks, in her plate-glass cases, might be seen the wealth of a thousand childhoods, and some riches—for such is the genetics of dolls—possessed by children grown. Here could be found “fashion babies” from fourteenth-century France, sacred dolls of the Orange Free State Fingo tribe, Satsuma paper dolls and court dolls from old Japan, beady-eyed “Kalifa” dolls of the Egyptian Sudan, Swedish birch-bark dolls, “Katcina” dolls of the Hopis, mammoth-tooth dolls of the Eskimos, feather dolls of the Chippewa, tumble dolls of the ancient Chinese, Coptic bone dolls, Roman dolls dedicated to Diana, pantin dolls which had been the street toys of Parisian exquisites before Madame Guillotine swept the boulevards, early Christian dolls in their crèches representing the Holy Family—to specify the merest handful of Miss Ypson’s Briarean collection. She possessed. dolls of pasteboard, dolls of animal skin, spool dolls, crab-claw dolls, eggshell dolls, cornhusk dolls, rag dolls, pine-cone dolls with moss hair, stocking dolls, dolls of bisque, dolls of palm leaf, dolls of papier-mâché, even dolls made of seed pods. There were dolls forty inches tall, and there were dolls so little Miss Ypson could hide them in her gold thimble.
Cytherea Ypson’s collection bestrode the centuries and took tribute of history. There was no greater—not the fabled playthings of Montezuma, or Victoria’s, or Eugene Field’s; not the collection at the Metropolitan, or the South Kensington, or the royal palace in old Bucharest, or anywhere outside the enchantment of little girls’ dreams.
It was made of Iowan eggs and the Attic shore, corn-fed and myrtle-clothed; and it brings us at last to Attorney John Somerset Bondling and his visit to the Queen residence one December twenty-third not so very long ago.
DECEMBER THE TWENTY-THIRD is ordinarily not a good time to seek the Queens. Inspector Richard Queen likes his Christmas old-fashioned; his turkey stuffing, for instance, calls for twenty-two hours of overall preparation, and some of its ingredients are not readily found at the corner grocer’s. And Ellery is a frustrated gift-wrapper. For a month before Christmas he turns his sleuthing genius to tracking down unusual wrapping papers, fine ribbons, and artistic stickers; and he spends the last two days creating beauty.
So it was that when Attorney John S. Bondling called, Inspector Queen was in his kitchen, swathed in a barbecue apron, up to his elbows in fines herbes, while Ellery, behind the locked door of his study, composed a secret symphony in glittering fuchsia metallic paper, forest-green moiré ribbon, and pine cones.
“It’s almost useless,” shrugged Nikki, studying Attorney Bondling’s card, which was as crackly-looking as Attorney Bondling. “You say you know the Inspector, Mr. Bondling?”
“Just tell him Bondling the estate lawyer,” said Bondling neurotically. “Park Row. He’ll know.”
“Don’t blame me,” said Nikki, “if you wind up in his stuffing. Goodness knows he’s used everything else.” And she went for Inspector Queen.
While she was gone, the study door opened noiselessly for one inch. A suspicious eye reconnoitered from the crack.
“Don’t be alarmed,” said the owner of the eyes, slipping through the crack and locking the door hastily behind him. “Can’t trust them, you know. Children, just children.”
“Children!” Attorney Bondling snarled. “You’re Ellery Queen, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Interested in youth? Christmas? Orphans, dolls, that sort of thing?” Mr. Bondling went on in a remarkably nasty way.
“I suppose so.”
“The more fool you. Ah, here’s your father. Inspector Queen—”
“Oh, that Bondling,” said the old gentleman absently, shaking his visitor’s hand. “My office called to say someone was coming up. Here, use my handkerchief; that’s a bit of turkey liver. Know my son? His secretary, Miss Porter? What’s on your mind, Mr. Bondling?”
“Inspector, I’m handling the Cytherea Ypson estate, and—”
“Cytherea Ypson,” frowned the Inspector. “Oh, yes. She died only recently.”
“Leaving me with the headache,” said Mr. Bondling bitterly, “of disposing of her Dollection.”
“Her what?” asked Ellery.
“Dolls—collection. Dollection. She coined the word.”
Ellery strolled over to his armchair.
“Do I take this down?” sighed Nikki.
“Dollection,” said Ellery.
“Spent about thirty years at it. Dolls!”
“Yes, Nikki, take it down.”
“Well, well, Mr. Bondling,” said Inspector Queen. “What’s the problem? Christmas comes but once a year, you know.”
“Will provides the Dollection be sold at auction,” grated the attorney, “and the proceeds used to set up a fund for orphan children. I’m holding the public sale right after New Year’s.”
“Dolls and orphans, eh?” said the Inspector, thinking of Javanese black pepper and Country Gentleman Seasoning Salt.
“That’s nice,” beamed Nikki.
“Oh, is it?” said Mr. Bondling softly. “Apparently, young woman, you’ve never tried to satisfy a Surrogate. I’ve administered estates for nineteen years without a whisper against me, but let an estate involve the interests of just one little fatherless child, and you’d think from the Surrogate’s attitude I was Bill Sykes himself!”
“My stuffing,” began the inspector.
“I’ve had those dolls catalogued. The result is ominous! Did you know there’s no set market for the damnable things? And aside from a few personal possessions, the Dollection constitutes the old lady’s entire estate. Sank every nickel she had in it.”
“But it should be worth a fortune,” remarked Ellery.
“To whom, Mr. Queen? Museums always want such things as free and unencumbered gifts. I tell you, except for one item, those hypothetical orphans won’t realize enough from that sale to keep them in—in bubble gum for two days!”
“Which item would that be, Mr. Bondling?”
“Number Six-seventy-four,” the lawyer snapped. “This one.”
“Number Six-seventy-four,” read Inspector Queen from the fat catalogue Bondling had fished out of a large greatcoat pocket. “The Dauphin’s Doll. Unique. Ivory figure of a boy Prince eight inches tall, clad in court dress, genuine ermine, brocade, velvet. Court sword in gold strapped to waist. Gold circlet crown surmounted by single blue brilliant diamond of finest water, weight approximately 49 carats—”
“How many carats?” exclaimed Nikki.
“Larger than the Hope and the Star of South Africa,” said Ellery, with a certain excitement.
“—appraised,” continued his father, “at one hundred and ten thousand dollars.”
“Expensive dollie.”
“Indecent!” said Nikki.
“This indecent—I mean exquisite, royal doll,” the inspector read on, “was a birthday gift from King Louis XVI of France to Louis Charles, his second
son, who became dauphin at the death of his elder brother, in 1789. The little dauphin was proclaimed Louis XVII by the royalists during the French Revolution while in custody of the sans-culottes. His fate is shrouded in mystery. Romantic, historic item.”
“Le prince perdu. I’ll say,” muttered Ellery, “Mr. Bondling, is this on the level?”
The Twelve Crimes of Christmas Page 17