Escapade (38 page)

“By tea time.”

“Exactly.”

“You will permit me to harbor a stray doubt or two?

“Harbor as many as you like. Harbor a fleet of these. I shall succeed, nonetheless.”

“Are you a betting man, Mr. Houdini?”

The Great Man drew himself up. “Houdini never wagers.” 

“No,” said Marsh. “I shouldn’t have thought so.”

“But,” said the Great Man, “Houdini has been known, on occasion, to accept a challenge.” He looked at Marsh. “Are you offering a challenge, Inspector Marsh?”

“I prefer to think of it as a wager. A gentleman’s wager, if you like. With no money passing hands. I’ll wager that you will
not
solve this case by the time of afternoon tea.”

“And that
you
will?”

“Oh,” said Marsh, smiling, “I fully expect to solve it long before then.”

“Oh yes?”

“Oh yes.”

The Great Man studied him for a moment. “Very well,” he said. “I accept.” He stepped forward holding out his hand. Marsh rose from the bed and took it.

The Great Man dropped Marsh’s hand, took a look around the room, and then drew himself up. “I must go,” he announced, and then he did, stalking out the door.

Marsh looked over at me. He smiled wryly. “Silly of me. But your employer has rather a way of getting under one’s skin.”

“Yeah.”

Marsh reached into his pants pocket, eased out a watch, glanced at its face. He nodded, slipped it back. He turned to Sergeant Meadows. “Grab that lantern, will you, Meadows, and take a look at the tunnel. Follow all the stairways. Determine into which rooms they lead. Discreetly, of course.”

Beneath his heavy brow Sergeant Meadows glanced at me. He looked back at Marsh. For the first time he spoke. “And you, sir?” 

“Oh, I’ll muddle along on my own for a while.” Marsh turned to me. “Unless you’d care to come along?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I told him.

TALKING TO THE Great Man, Inspector Marsh had seemed very sure of himself. And he seemed sure of himself for the next few hours, but I noticed that we were moving pretty quickly through the house.

First we went to the room of Carson, the Earl’s valet. Carson was in bed, wearing a white nightshirt, but he was willing to talk. He looked worse than he had yesterday. His face was paler and his eyes were more dull. The trembling of his hands was more intense.

Marsh sat in the chair, I stood leaning against the wall. Marsh asked Carson pretty much the same questions I’d asked yesterday and Carson gave pretty much the same answers.

Then Marsh said, “I understand that Lord and Lady Purleigh made a visit to the Earl’s room on Friday night.”

“Yes, sir,” said Carson. “They did, sir.” His shaking hands moved vaguely along his chest.

“Were you present at the time?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you have any idea what the three of them discussed?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“How did you know, Carson, that Lord and Lady Purleigh came to visit the Earl?”

“I saw them, sir. Passing by in the hallway. I was in my room, sir, and generally I keep my door open.”

“Do you indeed. At all times?’

“Until I’m ready to sleep, sir. In case the Earl calls for me. Usually, around twelve, I go in to check on him, sir.” He frowned, took a ragged breath. “
Went
in to check on him, sir. Before I went to sleep.”

Marsh nodded. “You could hear the Earl calling, all the way from his bedroom?”

“Yes, sir. There was nothing wrong with the Earl’s voice, sir.”

He made a feeble smile.

“You could hear him when the doors were shut?
His
doors?”

“No, sir. During the day, sir, we left all the doors open, my door and the Earl’s. Except when he took his nap, sir, before tea. I always shut his bedroom door then. It helped him to sleep.”

“So your door was open yesterday afternoon, before you brought him his tea.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did anyone pass by?”

“No, sir. No one, sir.”

In the same conversational voice he’d been using all along, Marsh asked him, “You know the kitchen maid, Darleen?

Carson blinked. “Yes, sir.”

“Have you ever seen Darleen pass by your room?

“No, sir.” He blinked again. “Why should I, sir?”

“I’ve heard that this Darleen made an occasional visit to the Earl’s room. Late at night.”

Carson shook his head. “Oh no, sir. Why should she, sir? Oh.” Carson opened his eyes wide. “Excuse me, sir. I tell a lie. Once, several months past, sir—I was ill, sir, my stomach, and I couldn’t perform my duties. And I believe it was young Darleen, sir, from the kitchen, who helped the Earl then.”

Marsh nodded. “Tell me, Carson. How long have you known of the secret passageway in the Earl’s room?”

Carson’s hand jumped and he frowned, puzzled. “Secret passageway, sir?”

“Come now, Carson. It’s been there for years. Centuries, I expect. You
must
have known.”

Carson shook his head. “But I didn’t sir, I swear.” He tried to rise up from the bed, gasped out a small cough, and he lay back down. His hands moved along his chest. “A secret passageway, sir? In the Earl’s room? Where, sir?”

Marsh smiled. “Carson, do you know the penalties for perjury?”

Carson’s eyes were frantic. “Sir, I swear to you, I know nothing of a secret passageway. Nothing, sir. I swear it!”

Marsh stared at him for a moment. Then he stood up, reached into his pocket, took out his watch, glanced at it, slid it back into his pocket. He turned to me. “We’re for the kitchen, I think.”

The Morning Post

Maplewhite, Devon

August 19

Dear Evangeline,

More boulders.
Many
more of them.
Large
boulders.

And no genteel rolling down the hillside for this pack; no. All at once they coughed from the clouds and smashed to earth at precisely that piece of it upon which I, wide-eyed and well intentioned, happened to be dawdling. I still lie here, flattened, beneath them.

Mr Beaumont is the largest of these.

An arresting image, don’t you think? Me lying flattened beneath Mr Beaumont?

If such a position ever actually befell me—somewhere outside the chaste confines of metaphor—I should be far from the only woman at Maplewhite who had, shall we say, enjoyed it.

It appears that I’ve been mistaken about Mr Beaumont. In several ways.

Last night, you’ll recall, I was about to go slinking through the dark silent halls of Maplewhite, in the hope of learning something—

Which I did; and, Evy, you won’t believe me—

You recall the first ghost, the one I promised to explain but never did, really? It transpires that that ghost was no ghost at all. He was Lord Purleigh’s father, the Earl of Axminster.

I do not invent. Apparently, whenever the whim took him, the late Earl would don a wig and an artificial beard and go bounding through the rooms of astonished paid companions, giggling obscenities and waving that organ which Mrs Applewhite once characterized as “the progenerative member”. (
Member of what?
I remember you asking her; you were so heartless, Evy.)

Today the entire episode strikes me as more pathetic than terrifying. I honestly feel rather sorry for the old man. How very sad to advertise one’s needs, and one’s means, to total strangers. How very sad, really, to feel compelled to do so.

My aplomb of today, however, may in some way be a result of the Earl’s recent death. He won’t, ever again, be brandishing his endowments (which were considerable, by the way); not for me, and not for anyone else, poor soul.

But to return to the equally astonishing Mr Beaumont. Last night, at a few minutes before one o’clock, after sealing your letter, I switched off the light and eased open my bedroom door and peeped out. I looked to the left. I saw nothing. I looked to the right. I saw Cecily Fitzwilliam, sheathed in a filmy silk robe, slide into Mr Beaumont’s darkened room as easily and as comfortably as a powdered foot slides into a familiar slipper.

I’d known about them, of course, about their affair. Still, I was rather shocked (and not a little envious, I confess) at the brazenness of the woman—promenading semi-naked through the hallways, where anyone might see her, even a slinking, spiteful paid companion.

I waited. I listened for the silence that would signal safety. This I heard, and I opened the door, closed it quietly behind me, and then galloped down the corridor to the post box. I slipped your letter inside and then I cantered down the stairs and through another hallway and up some more stairs and down another corridor to the Earl’s room, where I found the wig and the beard beneath his bed.

Why the Earl’s room?

Why must you pester me with questions?

I was beneath the bed myself at the time, or I shouldn’t have discovered the beard and the wig.

Oh, it’s an impossibly long story, Evy, and I’ll relate it to you one day, I promise, but just now I want to get to the knife and to

Mr Beaumont.

The knife was a silver dagger—an antique, and quite handsome, really—and it was thrusting out of my bed like a wicket when I returned to my room. I’d created a Sylvia—you remember the Sleeping Sylvias we fashioned from pillows and bolsters before we crept out the window of Miss Applewhite’s? I’d constructed a Sylvia before I set off for the Earl s room, and this one had been impaled.

I became an imbecile for a moment or two, wondering how on earth the knife had got there. And then I realized that of course someone had put it there, deliberately, stabbed it there, having mistaken Sylvia for myself; and I promptly came down with a very bad case of the collywobbles.

No, I don’t know who did it. And I can’t imagine why.

After a few moments, in a sort of daze I snatched up the knife and went stumbling off toward Mrs Corneille’s room.

I knocked on the door. She opened it and I staggered in. And who should be there, lurching up from a small rococo sofa, but Mr Beaumont.

He was fully dressed. Perhaps he’d clothed himself again, after the earlier rendezvous with Cecily. Or perhaps, back in his room, Cecily had lunged upon him like a panther while he still wore them, and the two had toppled to the floor, and there, without wasting a moment, in the hurried lunge and thrust of passion, they...

Oh dear.

It’s the weather, Evy. Another day hot and sultry, and the sweetness of the sunlight sprawling across the green lawn. Everyone else has gone to Sunday services and I'm writing this out of doors, on the patio beside the conservatory. Squirrels are leaping about, and so, I fear, is my fancy.

Whatever the explanation, there was Mr Beaumont looking dark and rather dashing in his dinner jacket (and trousers, etc.).

This might have been, you may say, an innocent meeting, his engagement with Mrs Corneille. I might (almost) have believed so myself if I hadn’t, while sitting down, happened (by the purest chance) to glance into the front of the standing Mr Beaumont and discover that he was in a state that your Mrs Stopes describes as “masculine readiness.”

Perhaps—and this occurs to me only just now—making love while clothed is another of those perplexing American innovations, like the Charleston. Perhaps this is what is actually meant by “get up and go”. Perhaps when I knocked at the door he and Mrs Corneille, both fully dressed, were tumbling wildly across the floor.

No. I can—and with a vividness that is not at all unpleasant— picture Mr Beaumont so performing; but not the elegant Mrs Corneille. And yet I suspect that had I not knocked at the door, someone s clothing would have been, at the very least, profoundly rearranged.

Mr Beaumont is indefatigable, it seems.

In any event, I was flustered when I began the conversation with the two of them; and, throughout the course of it, I could feel my face flushing idiotically whenever I looked at him.

He isn’t as self-absorbed as I’ve portrayed him in these letters, Evy. He was most charming, really—both last night, when I spoke with him and Mrs Corneille, and today, during my interrogation by the pompous Inspector Marsh of Scotland Yard. He even went so far as to defend me.

But I get ahead of myself.

I told them the entire story last night. Mr Beaumont and Mrs Corneille.

Very nearly the entire story. I didn’t mention the other ghosts, the mother and the young boy I’d seen down by the mill. The more I consider them, the more I begin to believe that they were a product of my imagination. My nerves were stretched taut, the light beneath the willow tree was thin and gray. And, moreover,

My goodness. I’ve just had quite the most bizarre and disquieting conversation with Mr Houdini. I’m at a loss. If what he seems to be suggesting is true—

Let me see if I can structure this.

He came strutting down the walkway, greeted me with a cheery ‘Good day!,’ plopped himself beside me on the bench, and declared that he was planning to resolve everything.

I closed my notebook—hiding this page, with its tumbling speculations—and I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’

He waved his hand quickly back and forth as though chasing away flies. ‘All this confusion, Miss Turner. Rifles and pistols and dying Earls.
Ghosts.
It has gone on for far too long, and I intend to resolve it.’

‘I see,’ I said. That was rather an exaggeration.

He said, ‘I have been speaking with my associate, Phil Beaumont, and that policeman from London. Phil has told me of your encounter with the Earl. I sympathize completely, Miss Turner. I realize that to a demure young woman such as yourself, the Earl’s behaviour must have seemed monstrous.’

I nodded demurely and looked down at my notebook. And blushed demurely, thinking of the things I’d written there.

‘I should tell you,’ he said, ‘that I have discovered the means by which he effected his invasion of your room.’

‘The means?’ I said stupidly.

‘Yes. By a careful examination of the Earl’s room, I was able to locate a secret passageway behind the wall. This leads down a narrow stairway to a kind of tunnel which encircles all of Maplewhite. From this tunnel, additional stairways lead upward to the various rooms of the house. One of them, no doubt, leads into your room. No doubt the Earl used this on Friday night.’