The House of Hidden Wonders

by Sharon Gosling

  “It was you…” MacDuff whispered. “You sent the ears.”

  The man grinned, though it soon faded into an expression of such coldness that even Zinnie shivered. “Nice touch, eh? What did you think, that they’d come from beyond the grave?”

  “You’ve no proof,” MacDuff declared. “You’re just another homeless drunk wandering the streets. Who would believe your word beside mine?”

  “I might,” spoke up Lady Sarah, her strong voice echoing in the cavernous dark. “After all, there’s a body, isn’t there? And we know where it is. The spirit has told us.”

  “The spirit!” MacDuff scoffed. “There’s no spirit, only children playing games.”

  “But we have both of them here,” Lady Sarah pointed out. “So, if that ghost is a trick, who is playing it?”

  “Look,” said Madame Khartoubian. “The spectre – it’s gone.”

  Zinnie looked up. Sure enough, the flickering spirit had vanished. All was silent apart from the guttering of the candle stubs, gasping their last in the damp air of the ruined room.

  “She delivered her message,” said the medium in a hushed tone. “She will have no need to return unless you choose not to heed it.”

  “Trick or not,” said Hobart, “MacDuff has escaped a lifetime of crimes and must not go free again.”

  “From what I understand, Hobart,” Conan Doyle said gravely, “you have just confessed to murder yourself. Four times over, man.”

  Hobart dipped his chin. “Aye, sir, you are right. I was a good lawman once. But the Queensland Kings changed that when they attacked that train. I’d do it all over again to see them served right. I’d do it for my Elsie, who had her life ripped away by thugs not fit to clean her boots.”

  “Elsie?” Zinnie said. “Isn’t that your wife’s name? She was with you on the train, wasn’t she? I remember that from the news report Mr Conan Doyle read to me.”

  A shadow passed across Hobart’s frowning face. “She was. We’d only been married two days. That was our honeymoon trip. My wages didn’t amount to much, but the tramway company said they’d gift me the trip into the mountains where a friend of ours had a little cabin if I kept an eye on what they were carrying during the journey.” He looked away. “She never recovered from her injuries. Died a week later.”

  There was silence as those gathered took in the tragedy of Hobart’s words.

  “I’m sorry,” Zinnie said. “That’s a terrible thing.”

  “It was. And it made me a terrible person in turn. But now, once Fowler is behind bars, I’m done. I’ll sign my name to a full confession. I just want him –” at this Hobart jabbed a finger in MacDuff’s direction – “to pay. No court will convict him over crimes for which I have no proof from so long ago. But if there’s a body that can prove he’s guilty anew, we must find it.”

  “We will,” said Conan Doyle, his voice solemn. “Come, all. Let us see what we shall find beneath the arches of Dean Bridge.”

  There was a screech and then the sound of running feet. Talbot had dropped Ruby and made a run for it.

  Aelfine didn’t want to go to Dean Bridge with everyone else. She and Ruby retreated into the darkness, taking with them Zinnie’s promise to return soon. Zinnie knew that Sadie would be waiting for them in the hidden room beyond the void.

  “Zinnie,” said Doctor Jex-Blake, as Lady Sarah’s carriage followed Conan Doyle’s along Queensferry Street. “Did you know what was going to happen?”

  Zinnie turned to her with a frown. “How could I have known?”

  “The first ghost. You knew that one wasn’t real, at least.”

  Zinnie studied her hands. “Yes,” she confessed. “We did it to expose MacDuff. Because we needed to find a way to save Aelfine before he found her.”

  “But why all the subterfuge?” Lady Sarah asked. “Why not just tell the police?”

  Zinnie looked up. “With my face all over those wanted posters? How could I? And as if they’d believe the likes of us anyway.”

  Lady Sarah frowned. “Then … the second ghost…”

  Zinnie shared a look with Constance. “We’d never had a real medium there before,” she said softly. “Aelfine’s poor ma must have been out there, wanting to get through, but she couldn’t until Madame Khartoubian here gave her a … what’s it called?”

  Constance’s eyes narrowed very slightly. “A conduit. From the spirit world to this one.”

  Zinnie nodded. “That’s right. One of them.”

  “My goodness,” muttered Lady Sarah, and for a moment Zinnie felt a pang of guilt at her deceit, but she shook it off. It was worth a little dishonesty, she told herself, to catch MacDuff. She was so proud of Sadie. Her performance had been just as good as Aelfine’s.

  As if she’d heard her thoughts, the doctor spoke again. “Zinnie. Your friend Aelfine…”

  “She’s our sister,” Zinnie said, turning to look out of the window at the darkened houses as they passed. It was touching 1 a.m. Witching hour was almost over.

  There was a moment of silence. Zinnie felt a great chasm open up in her heart, because even if they had beaten MacDuff she had failed Aelfine. Everyone knew about her and everyone had seen her, and Zinnie did not know how she would now keep her safe.

  “She’s not an idiot,” Zinnie said, in answer to a question she had not been asked. “She’s clever at a lot of things. She sees everything and she’s quick. She’s just a little different, that’s all.”

  “I think there is a word for what Aelfine has,” said the doctor quietly. “I recently read a paper by a John Langdon Down, in which he describes a set of characteristics that a certain type of person has. He calls it ‘Down’s syndrome’. The sketches that he included of his subjects lead me to think that maybe that’s what Aelfine has.”

  “What does it matter what it’s called?” Zinnie asked, as the carriage neared Dean Village. “She’s Aelfine and she’s my sister. No one should need to call her anything beyond that.”

  “I think I agree with you, Zinnie,” said Doctor Jex-Blake. “But I also think that Aelfine needs help. That’s something you can agree with, isn’t it?”

  The carriages were slowing, rattling to a halt. Zinnie waited for theirs to stop before she looked at the doctor again. “It depends what you mean by help,” she said. “The sort where she’s fed and watered but put in a cage to perform for the rest of her life? Or the sort where she’s fed and watered and put in a room with a locked door and nothing to do?”

  She opened the carriage door and jumped to the ground before Doctor Jex-Blake could reply. The men were already at the edge of the bridge, holding up oil lamps taken from the carriages. Below, the Water of Leith was crashing heavily along its route, swollen by the recent rain.

  “The ladies should stay here,” Conan Doyle was saying. “The ground is too steep and treacherous for them to go any further.”

  “Curses,” said Lady Sarah. “I should have worn my Hawaiian riding habit.”

  “Hobart,” said Conan Doyle. “Keep hold of MacDuff.”

  “Oh aye,” said the one-eared man. “I’ll not let him get away this time, believe me.”

  MacDuff – or Fowler, as he truly was – looked defiant. “This is ridiculous,” he spluttered. “This place is known for suicides. Even if you find a body, the law will know that’s all it is. You have no proof.”

  Zinnie ignored him. “I’m not staying behind,” she told Conan Doyle. “I’m coming too.”

  The land beside the bridge dropped steeply away from the sandstone arches, and even with the lights it was hard for any of them to see where to set foot. The undergrowth grabbed at them, tangled round their legs and arms, conspired to drop branches before their feet.

  “We should have waited until morning,” muttered Arbuthnot.

  “And let an innocent victim lie out here another night?” said Conan Doyle. “She’s been left too long already. For shame, man.”

  Down and down the column went, Zinnie bringing up the rear. She won
dered how they would find any landmarks at all in the darkness, let alone a single broken tree and a dropped stone amid the mess around them. The sound of the river grew louder, tripping over itself, splashing and crashing through the mired darkness. Zinnie looked behind her, back up the slope to the road, and saw the silhouetted figures of Lady Sarah, Doctor Jex-Blake and Constance McQuirter standing by the roadside next to Hobart and MacDuff.

  In the gloom ahead, a shout went up, a cry of, “The tree is here, an oak with branches down to the east!”, and then the search was on properly, until Danvers found the stone by falling over it and landing in the mud.

  There was a moment of commotion as he was helped to his feet and then a sliver of silence as the light from the lamps merged together to give a great, yellow glow.

  It was Conan Doyle who said quietly, “Here she is.”

  A scattering of leaves and twigs had blown across the body, which was almost entirely hidden from sight by the trees and bushes around it. Zinnie stared at the sorry bundle. The woman’s dress was striped, like the one worn by the ghost who had led them to this unhallowed place. Her dark hair was covered by a scarf.

  “You should turn aside, Miss Zinnie,” Conan Doyle said gently. “This is no sight for a young lady.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes clear, and said, “I am not afraid and I’m no lady. I want to see.”

  The men lifted the body gently and, between them, they carried her back up the slope to the road where the ladies were waiting.

  “Heaven preserve us,” whispered Lady Sarah, clapping one hand over her mouth as they reappeared. “It was all true.”

  The men laid the body on the road and held their lamps over it as Conan Doyle kneeled at the woman’s head. Her white face was smeared with mud. Arthur took the kerchief from his top pocket and wiped away the worst of the dirt from her eyes, lips and cheeks. The visage that emerged was lined around the eyes, gentle.

  “We should have brought the girl, her daughter,” said one of the other gentlemen. “She could have acted as witness.”

  “And submit the poor child to seeing her mother thus?” Doctor Jex-Blake said. “That would have been a terrible cruelty.”

  “It’s a suicide,” MacDuff scoffed. “Even if it is the woman you say it is. She’ll have run away and thrown herself off the bridge because she couldn’t bear the truth of her progeny. Any judge will agree and you will find no proof to say otherwise.”

  Zinnie was watching Conan Doyle. He had continued to wipe away debris, moving from the dead woman’s face to her neck. Even in the greasy light of the oil lamps, it was possible to see that her neck was tilted at an unnatural angle and, moreover, that there were marks on her pale skin.

  “Doctor Jex-Blake,” he called softly. “Please, a second opinion. What do these look like to you?”

  The doctor’s skirts rustled as she moved closer to the corpse, crouching to get a better look. “I’d say they look like fingermarks,” she said.

  “As from someone gripping the victim’s neck in the act of strangulation?”

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “I would say exactly that.”

  “This is still none of it any proof!” MacDuff insisted. “They could be anyone’s fingermarks – her idiot daughter’s even! Perhaps she flew into a rage, as those with a mental imbalance are apt to do, and slew her mother herself! You cannot blame this on me!”

  “There’s something in her hand,” Zinnie said.

  Conan Doyle examined both of Eliza Dumas’s hands and found one clenched tightly closed. He prised open the fingers and pulled out what had been clutched inside them. It was a square of white fabric, wrapped round something and dirtied by its sojourn amid the mud of the Water of Leith. He opened it out to reveal a small crystal sphere.

  Constance McQuirter gasped. “The fortune-teller’s crystal ball! It must be her!”

  “And this rag is a handkerchief,” said Conan Doyle. “There is embroidery here, a name… Wait, I think I can read what it says…”

  Phineas MacDuff gasped. His hand went to his top pocket, looking for something that wasn’t there. Then he looked straight at Zinnie, who glared back at him with a steady and unwavering gaze.

  “Thief,” he whispered hoarsely.

  “Murderer,” she hissed back.

  He tried to escape, wrenching himself out of Hobart’s grasp and lurching in the direction of the church at the west end of Dean Bridge, but Zinnie stopped him before he could get far. She launched herself at his legs, wrapping her arms round his knees and bringing him down in a struggling heap against the loose shingle of the road, her knees crashing painfully into the ground. Hobart and Danvers dragged him to his feet as Conan Doyle smoothed flat the kerchief and read the name embroidered at its corner.

  Phineas MacDuff.

  7th July 1879

  THE SCOTSMAN

  MURDERER BROUGHT TO JUSTICE

  REVELATIONS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE LEAD TO DRAMATIC SCENES AT DEAN BRIDGE

  Dean Village, Edinburgh. The respectable classes of the city are today rocked by the revelation that an unrepentant thief and murderer has attempted to infiltrate their midst. Phineas MacDuff, owner of new George Street attraction MacDuff’s House of Wonders, which had been set to open imminently amid great anticipation, has been unmasked as a thief, a fugitive and a cold-blooded murderer.

  Amid scenes of confusion at a seance organized by Lady Sarah Montague and held in the derelict recesses of Mary King’s Close, MacDuff was unmasked as being, in truth, James Fowler, former member of a notorious gang of thieves calling themselves the Queensland Kings. In 1867, the gang derailed a train below the Little Liverpool mountain range in Queensland. They then attacked and made off with £20,000. Four of the five assailants were later caught and jailed, but the fifth – Fowler, later to rename himself MacDuff – escaped, taking the money with him.

  For the next twelve years, the newly renamed Phineas MacDuff roamed the globe, using his ill-gotten gains to build up the collection that would eventually become the House of Wonders. However, he did not bank on the fact that his former gang-mates, thirsty for revenge, would break out of jail and come looking for him. Neither did he spare a thought for the determination of Mr Carlson Hobart, a police constable aboard the train robbed by the Queensland Kings, who had perhaps even more of a reason to track Fowler down – his young wife had been fatally injured during the train derailment and he himself had suffered the brutal removal of his left ear.

  Hobart’s quest took on its own form of justice. He murdered the first four of the Queensland Kings, sending their ears to his final intended victim – James Fowler himself. In the meantime, however, Fowler’s criminal nature had reasserted himself and he had killed again. A woman called Eliza Dumas, a fortune-teller by trade, had refused to allow her daughter to perform in the House of Wonders. Fowler killed her in a fit of rage, but had not banked on the persistence of the dead. It was the ghost of Dumas herself, raised by the skilled medium Madame Khartoubian, who damned Fowler by pointing the way to her own body.

  Fowler and Hobart are now in custody and awaiting their turn before the magistrates. Whereas it may in some respects be possible to experience pity for Hobart, however, there is surely none to spare for James Fowler.

  The news was too late for the morning papers, but the evening ones were full of the apprehension of the robber and murderer Phineas MacDuff – or, as he should be rightly known, James Fowler. Zinnie couldn’t read the words but she stared at the sketch that the Scotsman’s artist had put together for the front page. It showed Dean Bridge, the water rushing beneath it, the crescent moon shining above it and their little band of searchers making their way through the undergrowth, looking for Eliza Dumas’ body. It was the talk of the town that the House of Wonders had, in fact, been the very opposite of wonderful, and that its owner was himself a particular kind of curiosity – the sort that polite society thrill to talk about, but would rather not admit had ever been part of their own circle.

  It was
in the foyer of one such circle that Zinnie observed the artist’s work, because Lady Sarah had sent a messenger with a note to say she wanted to talk to her. Zinnie did not really want to see Lady Sarah. She had a feeling there were many awkward questions to come and she would prefer not to have to face any of them. But still she had answered the gentle summons, and now found herself waiting in that huge, gilded foyer.

  “My dear Zinnie,” came the lady’s voice from above. Zinnie looked up to see her descending the great stairs, looking as striking as ever in a dress as scarlet as the wings of her macaw. “I am so glad you’re here: if you had not visited me, I would have come looking for you. Let’s go into the sitting room. The fire is lit in there so it’ll be warmer. We have much to discuss.”

  To Zinnie’s surprise, it wasn’t the events of the previous night that Lady Sarah wanted to talk about, but the future of Zinnie and her sisters.

  “Now that hideous man has been caught,” said Lady Sarah, settling herself by the fire, “we must get to the bottom of why you are so resistant to my help.”

  Zinnie shifted uncomfortably. “It’s not that I’m not grateful, my lady,” she said. “But—”

  “It is Aelfine that worries you the most, isn’t it?” Lady Sarah interrupted. “That poor little girl who had no one to defend her once her own mother had been murdered.”

  “She has me,” Zinnie said. “She has Sadie, and she’ll have Nell too, when they meet.”

  Lady Sarah smiled and took a sip of tea as she looked at Zinnie over the fine china rim of the cup.

  “You say that she is quite clever, in some ways.”

  “Yes,” said Zinnie. “In most ways. She’s just … different, that’s all.”

  “She is not violent or prone to rages?”

  “No. She’s gentle. You’ve seen how she is with Ruby.”