Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly (18 page)

Sherlock Holmes left our driver and strode to a wrought-iron gate leading to the territory of the apparitions: the gardens, lakes and terraces at the rear of the house. Here the dead had “materialised” in full daylight.

The grounds were a pleasant contrast to the dreary front. Their wide lawns were particularly fine. The first was set with oval vase-shaped yew trees, regular as pieces on a chess-board. Beyond it, over the drop of a ha-ha, a broad meadow lay picturesquely detailed beside a willow vale of river trees. Cattle grazed or rested in the shade of ancient oaks.

All that remained of Miss Temple's drama was a child's swing, hanging disused from the canopy of a great cedar tree. A rusted garden roller stood under the boughs of a beech, as if pushed to that point and abandoned for ever. Poignant symbols of two young lives brought to an untimely end! Thankfully, they were not evidence that the cursed spirits of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel now held the children's souls in pawn.

According to Miss Temple's journal, that evil pair manifested themselves on the top of the tower and across the lake. Here they had beckoned the children to destruction, through the gates of hell. Even to catch oneself thinking like this showed the effect of the place on a rational mind.

The lawns and the alleys behind the house ran down to a long ornamental lake, the chief feature of the grounds. A small river fed its waters, controlled by a bank and an iron sluice at the far end. The banks were shaded by ash and sycamore, beech and oak. Level with the rippling surface, stretches of tall rhododendrons in purple bloom trailed their tendrils and scattered their petals among the shallows. Through gaps in the trees, the hills of summer shimmered in a sunlit distance.

This placid lake was large enough to have an island with a dilapidated garden pavilion among its trees. Much of the shimmering surface of the water was covered by clusters of cream water-lilies, some in masses twenty feet across. They looked treacherously like a planting that might support an unwary footfall. Silence and stillness were broken only by a dance of yellow hover-flies in the warmth of the May afternoon.

Despite my scepticism, I recognised our governess's account of the quietness which accompanied her visions. Clouds hung motionless as a stage-set against blue sky. Hardly a falling leaf or a breath of air marked the passing of that calm afternoon.

What a perfect place to fabricate a haunting! What effect must these surroundings have had on a young woman's morbidly nervous temperament! Suppose Maria Jessel or Peter Quint now stepped out before us from the trees on the far bank, a hundred yards away. We were too far off to interrogate them or even to describe them in detail. They would have time to fade—or more probably tiptoe off-stage—before we could reach them.

Holmes paused. From where we now stood Miss Temple had twice seen a handsome young woman, waiting motionless in shabby mourning. My companion interrupted my thoughts.

“I believe, Watson, we may allow ourselves a circuit of the lake. It cannot be more than a mile.”

I drew my watch from my waistcoat pocket.

“And what of our engagement to take tea with Mrs Grose?”

He waved this away

“As I intended, we have almost an hour in hand. It will be easier to absent ourselves now than later. I should prefer to examine the shore of the lake by full daylight.”

It proved impossible to follow the water's edge at all points. Where rampant overgrowths of tall rhododendrons in luscious bloom prevented this, the footpath took an inland detour for a hundred yards or so. To a photographer or an artist, the view across the water to the far bank might be charming. To me it still remained a place strangely without sound or movement.

Within the hour we came full circle. Our walk ended at a small overgrown area of the bank, boarded over in part as a makeshift landing-stage and otherwise surrendered to weeds. A wooden cradle several feet long supported a delicately-built rowing-boat. It had lost much of its white paint, though its interior looked sound and dry. I doubted whether it had been launched for some months, perhaps not since Miles Mordaunt took Miss Temple “spooning.” A stake driven into the shallows at an angle trailed a filament of thin rope, but nothing had been moored there recently.

Holmes broke the silence.

“If Miss Temple is correct in her supposition, Flora rowed alone to the point from which Miss Jessel was seen. When the governess and housekeeper walked back with the child, the boat had gone. The ghostly Miss Jessel cannot have taken it, for she was on the other side of the water. Who then?”

“Miles Mordaunt,” I said caustically. “No doubt the young master had wearied of practising Beethoven's minuet! The whole thing is nonsense.”

And yet the gardens of Bly House still affected me. Why? I caught myself wondering whether children may not after all be the victims or agents of evil spirits—living rather than dead. Ghosts do not impress me, but I am readily convinced of the existence of human depravity, pitiless and all-devouring in its malice. If you were to argue that such evil influences may somehow survive the death of the body, I would listen with an open mind.

But if Miss Temple truly experienced a vision, reason suggested that she alone was the target. Why else did these alleged apparitions confront her when the children were not present—from the garden tower on a summer evening, at the dining-room window by November lamplight, perhaps even indoors? I looked at my watch again and was cross with my thoughts. Even to think in this way was a sign of reason yielding to tomfoolery.

At one side of the alleys and borders, stretching from the rear of the house to the lake, dusty brick walls divided smaller gardens into a series of enclosures, almost like large open-air rooms. Each enclave of trim grass, pink tea-roses and trailing plants concealed a gardener's store, or a tool-room, or a potting-shed. The structures themselves were abandoned. The potting-shed contained only a scattering of brown leaves and a few pieces of parched earthenware. The spades and jars had gone from the hooks and shelves of the gardener's store, leaving only two fruit-boxes of broken wood.

Holmes examined each forlorn outbuilding until he stood finally at the door of the tool-room with its brick lintel, walls of stone and flint and slate roof. I waited, turning my back and ostentatiously admiring a rough-stone pillar with a figured rustic vase of the seventeenth century on its summit.

Holmes said, “Keep watch for a moment, there's a good fellow.”

There was no one to be seen in any direction. How should there be? He took the handle of the tool-room door and turned it. This time it was locked fast. Had it opened, I believe he would have lost all interest. The need to lock this shed when all of the others were open naturally stimulated his curiosity. He opened his pocketknife and inserted the point of the smallest blade into the keyhole. I tactfully studied the tiger-lilies and agapanthus, enjoying the warmth of the spring sun on my back. Presently I heard a snick of metal and the door of the stone shed creaked open.

“How intriguing, Watson! Tell me what you make of this.”

I walked across. The shed had a square small-paned window at its far end. The shelves on either side were bare. On one wall a pair of brackets held two light oars or sculls. It was impossible to be certain but, from the webs strung about them, I should not have thought they had been used for some time.

“Locking one shed which is empty, while leaving the others open,” he said to himself, “Not a profound mystery but inviting a question. Why?”

“Hardly a mystery at all!”

“Then let us call it merely the charm of the inconsistent,” he said with a smile.

He began to inspect the dusty and cobwebbed interior surfaces. The roof-space had been tightly boarded to provide a ceiling below the slates. He stretched up, doubled his fist and thumped the planking. I heard nothing but a faint reverberation of the wood. The stained and dusty glass of the little panes looked out directly at the lake. He took his reading-lens from his pocket and examined closely the corners and edges of the small glass squares with their mad erratic dance of little flies bred by the sun.

There was nothing here for us. He opened his knife again and turned round.

“And now, Watson, we must be on our way or we shall find our hostess waiting.”

We stepped outside and he used the knife blade once again to lock the door behind us.

As we crossed the lawns in silence I thought that the gardens had allowed my friend very little opportunity of putting on one of his erudite performances. He rather liked to begin a visit with something of the kind, like a tenor exercising his larynx before the rise of the curtain. As it was, we left the territory of the apparitions behind us and turned to the homely prospect of afternoon tea.

5

O
ur cab still waited in the gravelled courtyard. A woman of sixty or so was talking to the driver. Holmes had dressed formally for this visit and he now doffed his black silk hat.

“Good afternoon, madam. You are Mrs Grose, I believe? I am Sherlock Holmes and this is my colleague Dr John Watson. We arrived a little early and have been admiring the glories of your garden. The penstemon, the tea-roses, the agapanthus, the sedum and sweet peas are charming. Your tiger lilies are splendid and your cedar trees are a glory.”

Blushing with pleasure, she dropped a half-curtsey. Mrs Grose was a comfortable figure in dark grey dress and white cap. Her face had filled out with age, but the grey wide-set eyes and handsome features suggested that she had been a “stunner” in her youth. A comfortably furnished room was set apart for her on the first floor. Presently we stood in its window, looking down on the geometry of the garden.

“What is on the island at the end of the lake, Mrs Grose?” I inquired

She chuckled.

“Not much, sir! Mostly covered in trees and bushes now. So overgrown you'd very likely hitch a foot and break an ankle. There was a summer house, so called. Hard to see it for the overgrowth now. What the man Quint called the temple of Pros-er pine. Whatever that may be!”

“Pro-ser-pine,” said Holmes pedantically. “The goddess of hell.”

She pursed her lips.

“Well he should know, Mr Holmes, because that's where he is now. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say.”

Our hostess shivered but continued her explanation.

“Master Mordaunt, father to Mr Charles and Mr James, built it as a pleasure pavilion, when he came home from Asia. Fitted it up with chairs and cushions, even a piano of sorts that went out in sections on a cattle raft. In those days, they had music and lanterns on summer evenings. But they tired of it all even before the father died. With Mr Charles in India it was left to rot. Then Mr James did nothing to it but wouldn't have it touched, though it had gone so shabby and the raft might have cleared it. I daresay he had some plan of his own.”

Mrs Grose put a certain emphasis on this last remark. I guessed the housekeeper and I were thinking of the same plan. Two lovers naked together in perfect safety, as they could never quite be in the house itself. Once the major had taken the only boat to the island, there would be no spies and no interruptions.

“Tell me, Mrs Grose,” said Holmes quietly, “are the stone sheds in use at this end of the lake? They appear abandoned, which seems a waste.”

“They want taking down and clearing away likewise,” she said with a knowing smile. “All the tools were moved last winter when they built the new kitchen garden to the other side of the house. Major Mordaunt was spoken to about it but he had no more interest than his brother used to have. They'll fall down before they're took down. You can't run a house like Bly with an absentee master, sir. And that's what both brothers have been.”

With that, it seemed she had been as indiscreet as she was prepared to be. As we sat down, a silver tray was brought in by a maid. She studied Holmes and me as eagerly as if we were exhibits in a zoo.

Mrs Grose poured tea and said, “Master James being in France, as is usual with him in spring, I took on myself to receive you gentlemen here. He hates being bothered and I know as much about the place as he does. Anything that attracted sightseers would be disagreeable to him. If Miss Temple's visions became gossip, we might have folk coming to stand and stare, when summer's here.”

“And Major Mordaunt would not care for that,” Holmes said firmly.

“I should think not!” She looked at him as if they were sharing a joke. Then she became solemn. “To be fair, though, when Miss Temple was in trouble, he did everything for her. He was away in Paris at the time but he never begrudged a penny of what it cost to save her from prison—or worse. Still, he'd rather those ghosts should be delusions of her poor frightened mind than horrors for the world and its wife to come tripping after.”

“And Miss Temple?” I inquired.

Her pause told me that she disliked this question more than the ghosts.

“Of course, sir, we all hope she'll be well again and they'll set her free.”

Holmes listened, his left thumb under his chin and two fingers curled across his mouth. Then he lowered his hand and took the tea-cup. “What about you, Mrs Grose? You are not a believer in apparitions?”

She put down the pot and spoke carefully.

“Not exactly, sir. But I was by the lake with Miss Temple and Miss Flora, the second time Miss Jessel was supposed to appear. The little girl had gone ahead of us. Perhaps she unhitched the boat and rowed to where we found her. She was alone. The boat was almost out of sight, tied to the fence where it comes down to the water.”

Holmes nodded, saying, “Miss Temple described seeing Miss Jessel on the far bank, beyond the Middle Deep. On the island. Flora, I believe, was positive she saw no one. You neither saw nor noticed anything?”

“Saw? No, sir. Noticed? It felt for that moment as if the world had stopped. As if you might look at your watch five minutes later and find the time just the same as when it all began. Everything motionless. Just like the figure of Miss Jessel herself was said to be.”