Blood and Ivory-A Tapestry

by P. C. Hodgell

  "No," I snapped. I had run my thigh hard against a table and sworn, as much at Holmes and his ill-timed games as at the pain to my old war injury, already aching with the change of weather.

  My left hand lost contact with the wall. I stood in the doorway of a long dining room, its dimensions briefly defined by a flash of lightning outside tall, broken windows. Holmes was moving about at the room's far end, apparently in search of something, still lecturing like some infernal cicerone:

  "Many structures have risen on this site since then, each built with the bones . . . I mean, the stones of its predecessor, each with its foundation sunk deep into the same thirsty darkness. In the Middle Ages, a convent rose on the villa ruins, but was abandoned because of 'strange noises under-ground.' Later, it was learned that the abbess had ordered thirteen young novices to be walled up alive for 'consorting with the dead of the mound.' During Elizabeth's reign, the house was rebuilt, but again abandoned after tainted water from a new well shaft killed nine children. In 1645, Roundheads burned it to the ground under the impression that the wife and children of a Royalist supporter were hiding inside. Unfortunately, they were. Ah."

  A candle flared. The light flickered across Holmes's sharp-boned face, and then across that of the young woman behind him. I could not suppress a cry, even as I realized what I was seeing. Holmes turned and looked at the portrait over the fireplace. I believe that its sudden, spectral appearance startled him too, though the only sign was a quiver, instantly controlled, in the hand which held the candle.

  "The current structure dates from 1725," he said. "Its last owner, to my mind, was its worst. There, if you please, is the portrait of a true vampire."

  The light called her forth from the shadows, ghostly in her pallor, yet strangely, avidly alive. The pose and style were reminiscent of da Vinci's "Mona Lisa." Her hair, the shade of anemic strawberry, was pulled back from a broad, white brow to tumble luxuriously down below her waist. Her eyes were a pale, almost luminous green. White teeth—the incisors, not the canines—showed between unexpectedly full, red lips. She was smiling. I thought, despite myself, that she looked hungry, and Walter Pater's description of that famous painting came unbidden to my mind:

  She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.

  No. This would not do.

  "Really, Holmes. Next you'll claim to have known this lady."

  "Of course I did," he snapped, turning. "Her name was Blanche Vernet. She was my cousin."

  Then a strange expression flickered across his face. He was staring at something above my head. Hastily, I crossed the threshold and turned to look up. Over the doorway, chained to the lintel, hung a giant, skeletal branch of mistletoe. It moved slightly in the unaccustomed draft rushing in from the hall, its leafless fingers scraping on stone.

  " 'The mistletoe hung in the castle hall.' " Holmes quoted the old ballad in an odd tone, as if surprised to remember it. " 'The holly branch shone on the old oak wall . . . ' "

  His voice faltered. For a moment, he looked . . . "haunted" is the only word—but that moment quickly passed.

  "You have heard me mention my maternal great-grandfather, the French painter Carle Vernet," he resumed briskly. "Besides his son Horace, also an artist, he had another son, Charles, who became a doctor."

  "Your great-uncle," I said, working this out.

  "Yes. For a doctor, he seems to have been singularly unfortunate: his first wife, a French woman, did not survive Blanche's birth. His second wife, the daughter of a minor Wallachian diplomat, died some twelve years later under similar circumstances, leaving behind the twin infant girls Alice and Alyse. That was in 1853, I believe, after the family had moved to London . . . Watson, am I boring you?"

  "What?" I jerked my attention back to him, away from a second face that stared grimly from the end wall opposite Blanche out of the heavy gold of a mock Byzantine icon. "Holmes, who is that?"

  "Irisa," he said curtly, noting the direction of my gaze. "The second wife's sister and the twins' aunt. She descended suddenly from some aerie in the Carpathians and stayed to tend house after her brother-in-law removed his family here in the summer of'62."

  Severe, black clothing, an ornate Greek cross on her breast, black brows drawn together over inimical black eyes . . . she was like the shadow cast by Blanche's hectic light, watching her niece down the length of the dining room with the unfathomable stare of a death's-head.

  Sodden branches lashed the windows. Atop Surrey Hill, the druids' desecrated grove seemed to pull lightning down from the sky.

  Flash. CRACK.

  I blinked in the after-glare, seeing not the room but its image burned into my mind, stark black and white. Instead of portraits, the family themselves stood silent and watchful against the walls: black-browed Irisa, pale Blanche, and two little girls in white, side by side in a corner, regarding us solemnly . . . but then my sight cleared and again they were only paint on canvas with dust-blurred eyes. Of the two girls, however, there was no sign.

  I cleared my throat. "Dr. Vernet painted these?"

  "He did," said Holmes. "Art in the blood will out, one way or another. His last portrait was that which you see over the mantel, but his true masterpiece was its original: his eldest daughter, Blanche."

  " 'The baron beheld with a father's pride,/ His beautiful child, young Lovell's bride,' " I quoted the ballad's next verses sarcastically, still half-convinced that Holmes was pulling my leg, not wanting to prove myself as gullible as he thought or as I had just been given reason to fear.

  "Oh, yes," he said, ignoring my tone. "He doted on Blanche, for whom nothing was good enough. My father, on business in London, wrote home that Blanche's coming-out ball was the hit of the season and she the nonpareil, upstaging even that other 'Pocket Venus,' the notorious Florence Paget. Oh, my lovely cousin had many admirers, but, as women will, she fixed her wild heart on the least suitable and seduced him."

  This was blunt, even for Holmes, surprising bluntness from me in return. "Who?"

  He ignored my question.

  "In the midst of her triumph, she contracted a cough which proved to be consumption. At that time, Dr. Vernet sold his London practice, bought Morthill, and moved his family here in a desperate attempt to find a cure."

  In this, Dr. Vernet had my sympathy. The only "cure" for tuberculosis is fresh air and sunlight, but most victims die anyway, usually from inanition, sometimes from drowning as bodily fluids flood into their destroyed lungs—a far cry from the romantic image of the disease in Dumas's Lady of the Camillias or La Bohème. In the mid-nineteenth-century, the disease which we now call the White Plague killed millions, if not tens of millions, with no end in sight even today.

  "I fear," I said, "that Dr. Vernet's effort was gallant, but doomed."

  "Call it rather his obsession, matched only by his daughter's ferocious will to live. Tiny as Blanche was—hardly taller than a child—she proved remarkably tenacious of life. Summer passed, and then fall. In the last, bleak days of the year, a black-edged envelope finally arrived—sent by Blanche to announce her father's death."

  "Of consumption?"

  "Yes. Remember, this was before Villemin proved tuberculosis to be contagious, although it had already been noted that while the disease dawdled with some victims like a fond lover, it galloped off pell-mell with others. This had been Dr. Vernet's fate. Moreover, Blanche informed us that she had inherited all her father's assets, including a large debt owed by my father to hers. She asked—no, demanded—that Father immediately attend her here at Morthill to discuss terms. And so, perforce, he came, bringing me with him."

  Holmes looked up again at the leafless branch chained and creaking over the lintel.

  "Forty years ago on Christmas Eve, when I was a boy of eight and that bough was fresh . . . "

  * * *

  Viscum album, the boy Sherlock thought, regarding the spiky greenery over the door. The traditional
kissing bough. How seasonal.

  He tried to keep his thoughts on this subject—parasitical, sacred to the Druids . . .—but unease gnawed at him, as it had all that long, dark day on the increasingly silent drive to his cousin's house.

  Looking back, it seemed that none of their household had been easy since Father's return from London the previous spring. That was when the letters had started to arrive. At first, awkwardly joking about some "damned importunate suitor" in a civil case, he had carried them away to read in private.

  Finally, in a stony voice, Mother had said, "Burn them."

  From then on, self-consciously, he had—unopened, in full sight of the family—until they had slowed and stopped at summer's end. Intrigued, the boy had slipped back into the breakfast room to rescue the last one from the grate. All that remained was a piece of red paper, ripped on one side and charred on the other, overlaid with a filigree of light ash.

  Then, that morning, another envelope addressed in that same impetuous hand, edged in black, lay beside Father's plate.

  "Open it," Mother said, and he had.

  As he read, his face had blanched. "My God. So much money. This will ruin us." He had looked at Mother, turning paler still. "I must go."

  Mother had been silent for a moment and then had suddenly said, "Take Mycroft with you."

  Mycroft had looked grim at this. At fifteen, seven years his brother's senior, he took their mother's side in whatever-it-was that had upset her since the previous spring. Father had glanced at him and then quickly away.

  "No. I will take Sherlock. A child may soften her."

  Now here they stood in their cousin's cold, disordered dining room, beside a long table laden with dirty dishes. Their pony and rig were tied at the outer door; no one had come to take charge of them, the servants having all fled.

  "A plague house declares itself," that grim woman in black (Aunt Irisa?) had said as she let them in. Then she had seen Sherlock, and drawn her breath in sharply. "You fool, to bring a child here! Do you know what happens to children in this house?"

  The boy wondered about his two little cousins, Alice and Alyse. As he entered the dining room, he thought he had seen the white hem of a child's dress flick out by the far door. Girls are timid, he reminded himself, clutching for the warmth of superiority. Cold as the room was, Mycroft would laugh at him if he shivered: What are emotions to the superior mind? What is physical weakness?

  Father hid his emotions poorly. He was pacing now, shooting glances at the door.

  Quick footsteps out in the hall, a flurry of white—Blanche stood there, breathless, under the bough, corsaged with holly and crowned with mistletoe. Once she had been as tiny and perfect as a porcelain doll. Now her unbound hair, thinned by illness, floated up about her in the draft from the hall and her eyes glistened. When she looked at Father, the tip of her pale tongue slid as if with a life of its own across the bruised ripeness of her lips. Then she saw the boy, and the smile froze on her face like ice mantling over a corpse.

  "What a dear little chap, Siger!" she cried with feigned delight. "My cousin Sherlock, is it not?"

  She embraced him as if she would gladly have broken him in two. There was strength there yet, though he felt the rack of her bones beneath the white shroud of her gown and smelled the sweet rot of her flesh, mingled obscenely with attar of roses. Then she began to cough and pushed him away. Flecks of her blood speckled his face.

  "How shall we . . . entertain you?" she cried, collapsing into a chair, struggling to catch her breath. "I know . . . a treasure hunt! There is a paper . . . a promise in writing to repay my dear dead father . . . oh, such a great amount of money! Find it, and perhaps you may keep it." She clasped her hands against her wasted breast, gazing at his father. "Look for it . . . under a broken heart."

  The boy left the room by the far door, forcing himself not to run. A stair led upward to the second floor. He climbed.

  The window at the far end of the upper hallway was small and round, silvery with twilight. It seemed a great distance away, and yet Morthill was not large. After all, it only had two central corridors, one on each floor, with rooms opening off to either side. It should be easy to find his cousin's bedroom. Women liked to keep their secrets hidden close. He hesitated a moment, uncertain, and then turned to the first door on the left, which stood half open.

  His boots crunched on broken glass as he stepped inside. The door closed behind him. He edged forward in utter darkness, his feet now rustling as if through fallen leaves. He ran into something, hard. A table edge. More glass fell and broke. Now he could see the vague outline of a window. Advancing on it, he pulled down the black velvet which muffled its long, narrow frame.

  Twilight glimmered into the ruins of Dr. Vernet's laboratory. Here was the squat hulk of an alchemist's athenor; there, rows of shattered retorts like jagged, crystal teeth; everywhere, the pages of books ripped out and strewn in drifts about the floor. Chemical formulae, astrological symbols, and Celtic runes tangled in black charcoal across the whitewashed walls.

  Eon sang nepeut mentir, read one notation. Le sang c'est la vie, proclaimed another—and a third, simpler and more raggedly written: Sangsue. Leech. Bloodsucker.

  Scrawled over it all, in letters almost too large to read, was a single, repeated word: NON, NON, NON . . .

  There were secrets here, but they belonged to the doctor, not the daughter. He must look elsewhere.

  The boy dragged the door open again, grating over shards of glass. Beyond, however, lay not the hall but another, smaller room. He must have lost his bearings in the dark, he thought. Thin light showed him two iron cots, bolted together side by side. One was draped with leather straps. The floor beneath it was dark, and greasy, and there was a smell.

  The boy paused, thinking that he heard the distant voices of children, singing. Alice and Alyse must have come upstairs before him. This was a cold, lonely place. He would find his little cousins and ask for their help.

  But each door only led to another room, never to the hall.

  As night fell, the boy wandered on, deeper and deeper into the house. How cold it was and how silent, except for a chill winter's rain stealthily tapping on the windows. Where were his cousins? Where was he? Maybe he was no longer even in the same house which he had entered—oh, such a long time ago, it seemed. What if tonight all the Morthill manors down through the ages had come back, stone, and oak, and human bone?

  ("Do you know what happens to children in this house?")

  What if, even now, black-robed monks were walling the little novices up alive? In the dark, gagged and bound, they beat their heads against the newly set stones: Ta-thump, ta-thump . . . and from within the mound came the slow, heavy answer: THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

  What if, even now, Roman soldiers were bending the limbs of a child to fit into an oak-lined cavity under the floor? "The earth is still hungry," the centurion in charge would say—in Latin, of course—and they would come tramping through the house, looking for another child to bury alive . . .

  Then, to the boy's relief, he heard the singing again, closer now, almost clear enough to understand the words. They were playing hide and seek with him. He hurried on through door after door, room after room, following the thread of song, until at last he entered a chamber which reeked of roses.

  At the foot of an unmade bed was an oblong chest, the size of a child's coffin. Was this what his little cousins had wanted him to find? He listened for them, but only heard the rain, tapping on the windowpanes. The box was oak, black with age, bound with iron. He traced the crude carving on its lid—a spray of mistletoe, split by a finger-wide crack. Then, gingerly, he opened it.

  Within lay a welter of Blanche's under-garments.

  At first the boy thought that the bosom of the negligee uppermost was soaked with blood, but then he saw that the red was the backing of a lace paper valentine, ripped down the middle. He had found Blanche's broken heart, whose other half his father had burned almost but not quite to ashes
.

  The boy looked on, detached, as his hands shredded the paper. (What are emotions to the superior mind?) Crimson fragments fell into the chest like a sprinkling of blood.

  Then he knelt to burrow beneath the shattered "heart," through layers of not-very-clean linen. The smell made his head swim. Breathing through his mouth, he clambered inside the chest so as to be done searching as quickly as possible. Camisoles, chemises, drawers, petticoats, no, no, no . . . yes! Here was a legal document: his father's promissory note, tucked into the bodice of a peignoir.

  Then the chest's heavy lid crashed down on his head.

  Darkness. Pain. Confusion. Fear.