An Ensuing Evil and Others (25 page)

“As for Tullyfane, the American tried to run the estate, but fell foul of the Land Wars of a few years ago when the Land Leaguers forced radical changes in the way the great estates in Ireland were run. That was when a new word was added to the languageboycott—when the Land Leaguers ostracized Charles Boycott, the estate agent of Lord Erne at Lough Mask. The American pulled out of Tullyfane Abbey, which fell into ruin and became derelict.

“Without being able to find out what happened when James Phillimore stepped back beyond his front door to retrieve his umbrella, I was unable to bring the blame to where, I believed with every fiber in my body, it lay; namely, to James Moriarty. I believe that it was Moriarty who planned the whole dastardly scheme of obtaining the estate which he presumed would set him up for life. He was not in love with poor Agnes. He saw her as the quick means of becoming rich and, not content to wait for her marriage portion, I believe he forged the suicide note and will and then found an ingenious way to dispatch the colonel, having failed to drive him insane by playing on the curse. Once he had secured the estate, poor Agnes became dispensable.

“How he worked the curse, I was not sure until a singular event was reported to me some years later.

“It was in London, only a few years ago, that I happened to encounter Bram Stokers younger brother, George. Like most of the Stoker brothers, with the exception of Bram, George had gone into medicine and was a Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. George had just married a lady from County Kerry, actually the sister of the McGillycuddy of the Reeks, one of the old Gaelic nobility.

“It was George who supplied me with an important piece of the jigsaw. He was actually informed of the occurrence by none other than his brother-in-law, Dennis McGillycuddy, who had been a witness to the event.

“About a year after the occurrences at Tullyfane Abbey, the body of a young boy was found in an old mine working in the Reeks. I should explain that the Reeks are the mountains on the Iveragh Peninsula which are the highest peaks in Ireland and, of course, Tullyfane stands in their shadows. The boys body had not badly decomposed, because it had lain in the icecold temperatures of the small lochs one gets in the area. It so happened that a wellknown Dublin medical man, Dr. John MacDonnell, the first person to perform an operation under anesthetic in Ireland, was staying in Killarney He agreed to perform the autopsy because the local coroner had noticed a peculiar aspect to the body; he observed that in the dark the corpse of the boy was glowing.

“MacDonnell found that the entire body of the boy had been coated in a waxy yellow substance; indeed, it was the cause of death, for it had so clogged the pores of his skin that the unfortunate child had simply been asphyxiated. Upon analysis, it was discerned that the substance was a form of natural phosphorus, found in the caves in the area. I immediately realized the significance of this.

“The child, so I presumed, was one of the hapless and miserable wretches doomed to wander the byways of Ireland, perhaps orphaned during the failure of the potato crops in 1871, which had spread starvation and typhus among the peasants. Moriarty had forced or persuaded him to act the part of the wailing child whom we had observed. This child was our specter, appearing now and then at Moriarty’s command to scream and cry in certain places. The phosphorus would have emitted the ethereal glow.

“Having served his purpose, Moriarty, knowing well the properties of the waxy substance with which he had coated the child’s body, left the child to suffocate and dumped the body in the mountains.”

I waited for some time after Holmes had finished the story, and then I ventured to ask the question to which he had, so far, provided no answer. As I did so, I made the following preamble.

“Accepting that Moriarty had accomplished a fiendish scheme to enrich himself and that it was only in retrospect you realized how he managed to use the child to impersonate a specter—”

Holmes breathed out sharply as he interrupted. “It is a failure of my deductive capabilities that I have no wish to advertise, Watson.”

“Yet there is one thing—just how did Moriarty manage to spirit away the body of James Phillimore after he stepped back inside the door of the house to retrieve his umbrella? By your own statement, Moriarty, Jack Phillimore, and yourself were all together, waiting for the colonel, outside his house. The family retainer, old Malone, swore the colonel did not reenter the house. How was it done? Was Malone in the pay of Moriarty?”

“It was a thought that crossed my mind. The RIC likewise questioned old Malone very closely and came to the conclusion that he was part of no plot. In fact, Malone could not say one way or another if the colonel had returned, as he was in the kitchen with two housemaids as witnesses at the time.”

“And Agnes?…”

“Agnes was in the cellar. She saw nothing. When all is said and done, there is no logical answer. James Phillimore vanished the moment he stepped back over the threshold. I have thought about every conceivable explanation for the last twenty years and have come to no suitable explanation except one….”

“Which is?”

“The powers of darkness were exalted that day, and Moriarty had made a pact with the devil, selling his soul for his ambition.”

I stared at Holmes for a moment. I had never seen him admit to any explanation of events that was not in keeping with scientific logic. Was he correct that the answer lay with the supernatural, or was he merely covering up for the fact of his own lack of knowledge or, even more horrific to my susceptibilities, did the truth lie in some part of my old friend’s mind which he refused to admit even to himself?

Pinned to John H. Watsons manuscript was a small yellowing cutting from the
Kerry Evening News;
alas the date had not been noted.

“During the recent building of an RIC Barracks on the ruins of Tullyfane Abbey, a wellpreserved male skeleton was discovered. SubInspector Dalton told our reporter that it could not be estimated how long the skeleton had lain there. The precise location was in a brickedup area of the former cellars of the abbey.

“Doctor SimmsTaafe said that he adduced, from the condition of the skeleton, that it had belonged to a man in midlife who had met his demise within the last twenty Or thirty years. The back of the skull had been smashed in due to a severe blow, which might account for the death.

“SubInspector Dalton opined that the death might well be linked with the disappearance of Colonel Phillimore, then the owner of Tullyfane Abbey, some thirty years ago. As the next owner, Professor James Moriarty was reported to have met his death in Switzerland, the last owner having been an American who returned to his homeland, and the Phillimores being no longer domiciled in the country, the RIC are placing the matter in their file of unsolved suspicious deaths.”

A few lines were scrawled on the cutting in Dr. Watson s hand, which ran, “I think it was obvious that Colonel Phillimore was murdered as soon as he reentered the house. I have come to believe that the truth did lie in a dark recess of my old friend’s mind which he refused to admit was the grotesque and terrible truth of the affair. Patricide, even at the instigation of a lover with whom one is besotted, is the most hideous crime of all. Could it be that Holmes had come to regard the young woman herself as representing the powers of darkness?” The last sentence was heavily underscored.

THE SIREN OF SENNEN COVE

O
f the many adventures and curious hazards that I have shared with my good friend Sherlock Holmes, the wellknown consulting detective, there is one that still brings an icy chill to my bones and a tingle to the hairs on the nape of my neck. I can still recall the apprehension—nay, the unutterable fear—that gripped me when I saw the pale specter of that naked, dancing woman who had lured so many seamen to their watery deaths—and she no more than ten yards away from where Holmes and I huddled in an open dinghy on the tempestuous seas off the rocky granite coast of Cornwall.

Lest Holmes rebuke me for starting my account at the end rather than at the beginning, let me remind those of my readers who have followed my record of his adventures that, in the spring of 1897, Dr. Moore Agar of Harley Street had prescribed to my friend a complete rest, should he wish to avoid a breakdown in his health. We had taken a small cottage near Poldhu Bay, near Mullion, on the Lizard Peninsula almost, but not quite, on the farthest extremity of Cornwall.

It was here that the ancient Cornish language had arrested Holmes’s attention and he received a consignment of books on philology and set himself to writing a monograph on what he perceived as Chaldean roots in that branch of the Celtic languages.

Our idyll was rudely interrupted when, taking tea at the local vicarage with its incumbent, Mr. Roundhay, we became involved with the strange case of Mortimer Tregennis, which I have recounted as “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot.” It was a stimulating exercise in deduction but, as Holmes remarked at the end of it, he was pleased to get back to the study of the Cornish language.

Only three days elapsed before we had a visitor who would send us helterskelter into a case that made the investigation of the death of Mortimer Tregennis seem a mere diversion in mental entertainment by comparison with the terrifying peril it presented.

It was just before noon. I was taking the sun in a garden chair outside our cottage, sipping a preprandial sherry. Although it was April, it was a warm day and not at all breezy. Holmes was enclosed in the room we had set aside as his study, poring over a newly acquired volume that had arrived by that morning’s mail. It was
Some Observations on the Rev. R. Williams’ Preface to his Lexicon CornuBritannicum
, written by no less a luminary than Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte. That is why I recall it so well; the idea of one of the Bonaparte family becoming a philologist and an authority on the Cornish language was a matter which intrigued me.

Holmes had scooped up the book and disappeared into his study after breakfast, promising faithfully to appear for luncheon because our daily help, Mrs. Chirgwin, was preparing it, and she did not take kindly to her meals being missed.

I was, therefore, sitting, reading the
Falmouth Packet
when I heard the sound of a carriage rattling along the track that led to our cottage. I reluctantly placed my sherry and newspaper aside and stood up, waiting to receive the unexpected visitor with some curiosity. We were so isolated that visitors were an unusual phenomenon.

It took a moment for the carriage to appear from behind a clump of trees and come to a halt before the garden gate. It was a sturdily built carriage, one more often seen in the country than in town. But it was clearly the vehicle of some welltodo personage.

A tall, darkfaced coachman leaped down and opened the door. From the interior, a short, wellbuilt man alighted and glanced about him. He had a shock of white hair, a red face and was well dressed, bearing the hallmarks of a country squire. In fact, he seemed almost a caricature of one.

He saw me and hailed even as he opened the gate and came toward me. “Mr. Sherlock Holmes?”

“I am his colleague, Dr. Watson,” I replied. “Can I be of assistance, sir?”

The man frowned impatiently. “It is Mr. Holmes that I must see.”

“I am afraid that he is busy at the moment. May I take your name, sir, and I will see—?”

“It’s all right, Watson,” came Holmes’s voice from behind me. He was leaning out of his study window, which he had opened. “I heard the carriage arriving. What can I do for you?”

The whitehaired man examined him for a moment with intense blue eyes; a keen examination that seemed to miss nothing.

“A moment of your time is what I require, sir. Perhaps some advice at the end of it. My name is Sir Jelbart Trevossow. It is a name not unknown in these parts.”

Holmes stared at the man in amusement. “That’s as may be, sir, yet, unfortunately, it is a name unknown to me,” he replied amiably. “Nevertheless, I have a moment before luncheon. Watson, old fellow, bring Sir Jelbart into our little parlor, and I will be there directly.”

I smiled a little at the mortification on the country squire’s face. He was apparently unused to people not recognizing him nor having his wishes obeyed instantly. I gestured to the door with a slight bow.

His mouth tightened, but he moved inside to the room we had set aside as our common parlor. I followed him and closed the cottage door behind me.

“Now, sir,” I said, “may I offer you some refreshment? Something to keep out the chill? A whiskey or a sherry, perhaps?”

“I do not agree with strong spirits, Doctor,” Sir Jelbart snapped. “I am of the Wesleyan religion, sir. My views are firm on strong drink and tobacco….” He sniffed suspiciously, for Holmes’s noxious weed could be discerned all over our small cottage.

“Then be seated, sir,” I invited. “Perhaps Mrs. Chirgwin might be prevailed upon to make you some tea?”

“I will have nothing, thank ‘ee,” he replied firmly, sitting down. His attitude was somewhat pugnacious.

Holmes entered at that moment, and I was thankful for it, raising my eyes to the ceiling to indicate to him that our guest was of an awkward nature.

Holmes stretched himself at his ease in an armchair opposite our visitor and, undaunted by the look that would have sent others straight to the fires of hell, he took a pipe from his pocket and lit up.

“I do not agree with tobacco, sir,” snapped our guest.

Holmess goodnatured expression did not change. “Each to their own enjoyment, sir,” he replied indifferently. “Myself, I think best over a pipe or two of shag tobacco. The coarser, the better.”

Sir Jelbart eyed Holmes for a moment, and when he saw that he was dealing with someone of an equal steel will, he suddenly relented. Holmes would doubtless have pointed out that by giving way so easily on the matter, Sir Jelbart s business must have been of considerable importance to him.

“Now, sir”—Holmes smiled—”perhaps we can discuss the reason for this visit, for I presume you have not come merely to pass the time of day with me on our respective likes and prejudices?”