Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly (24 page)

“Professor Scott Holmes!” Her voice was startled and not pleased.

“We are at your disposal, Miss Shelley—or should I say Miss Jessel?”

She stood pierced by shock, unable for a moment to reply. My friend continued in the same quiet voice.

“I must confess that I am more often known as Sherlock Holmes. You may have heard of me.”

The breath had been knocked from her but she now managed a whisper.

“You are mistaken, sir! I am Miss Shelley!”

“Indeed you are,” said Holmes sympathetically. “More precisely, however, you are Maria Shelley Jessel. Are you not?”

Miss Jessel—the ghost of Bly if anyone was—looked about her. The cab whose door Holmes held open was plain and black. Its driver wore a dark high-collared tunic. On the off-side, two women in black uniform clothes stepped down and walked to where Holmes and his new acquaintance stood. This pair could only be police matrons, accompanied by a duty constable.

Holmes left our quarry with them. He returned and slid across the buttoned leather of the seat to the corner where he had been sitting.

“Scotland Yard, I think, Gregson,” he said thoughtfully.

9

S
everal floors above the river and the Victoria Embankment there is a plain green-walled office at Scotland Yard. When it is in use, a uniformed constable stands outside its door to prevent interruptions. Few sounds are overheard from within, except occasional rage or weeping. The walls are lined by plain wooden cupboards. A hat-rack stands by the door. At the centre is a wooden office table, with three upright chairs on each side and one at either end. At the quarters of every hour, the boom of Big Ben echoes like a funeral drum from the nearby Houses of Parliament.

Tobias Gregson sat at one end of this table. To his right, Holmes and I were side by side. Opposite us was Miss Shelley. A police matron accompanied her, sworn to silence by the Official Secrets Act of 1889.

The chair that Miss Shelley occupied had accommodated Dr Neill Cream the Lambeth Poisoner, Oscar Wilde at the time of his downfall and more recently Ada Chard the baby farmer. Even Montague Drewitt had sat there, the man whom the late Commissioner, Sir Melville Macnaughton, swore to Holmes and me was “Jack the Ripper” but could never quite prove it. To me, this plain official room had a far more sinister ambience than all the haunted landscapes of Bly.

Miss Shelley had not yet asked for an attorney to represent her. Gregson had not charged her and so perhaps she hoped that she did not need one. Perhaps she did not even know that she was entitled to one. She must have hoped that, once the matter of her name was cleared up, she would be free to go. Too soon she realised her mistake but, all the same, the inspector got nowhere with his questions. Our suspect no longer denied that she was Maria Jessel but she did not admit to anything else.

During a pause, Holmes broke in upon the interrogation.

“I fear you are not cut out to be a criminal, Miss Jessel, let alone an accessory to murder,” he said sympathetically.

“I have no idea what you mean, sir.”

“Have you not? You face arrest and detention, perhaps much worse. What will become of your child in that case? Please do not shake your head at me, madam. We know you have a child.”

I knew no such thing—nor, to judge from his expression, did Gregson.

“I do not understand you, sir,” she insisted, “I have nothing to do with you. I do not know why I am here. I certainly do not know why you are!”

Holmes became her friend.

“Come, now! While you were governess at Bly you became the mistress of Major James Mordaunt, did you not? It is not an uncommon thing between a young governess and an unmarried employer. There may even be a prospect of marriage. After some months, however, it became inconveniently evident that you were carrying a child. The prospect faded.”

She lowered her eyes but still shook her head.

“The truth is best,” Holmes said coaxingly, “What better solution was there than to tell Mrs Grose you were going home for a long holiday—and then let it be known, through your employer himself, that you had died during this absence? Believe me, it is a common enough subterfuge resorted to by young women in such a predicament.”

He had taken a terrible gamble in jumping to this conclusion. Yet the expression on her face convinced me he had hit the answer at his first shot. She shook her head again, but he went on in the same quiet voice.

“The story of your death would satisfy Mrs Grose—and she in turn was bound by a promise that the other servants were not to be told for fear it would upset them. She would not question the truth of the report, if her master did not. So now that the two children are dead and Mrs Grose has gone to live with her son in Wales you might even return with Major Mordaunt to Bly—unless he has other plans for you. If there were a few people who had heard a mere rumour of your death, and if they chanced to see you now, they would simply know that such tittle-tattle could not have been true.”

She kept her face lowered, pressing her handkerchief to her mouth. Holmes sighed.

“You would be perfectly safe to the end of your life, unless questions were asked. Unfortunately, even a novice criminal investigator would go first to Somerset House to find your death certificate. There is none, is there?”

She stared at him, visibly paler, eyes reddened. My friend continued.

“What there is, however, is a birth certificate. It registers a male child, Charles Alfred Jessel, born several months after your departure from Bly. He is Jessel on the certificate and his mother's name is Maria Shelley Jessel. His father's name and occupation are blank. James Mordaunt did not think enough of you to give your child his name. Is that it?”

How I pitied her! Her teeth were clenched on the hem of the handkerchief, as if she might tear it! But then she looked up fiercely—and her silence broke.

“I do not want his name!”

“Do not? Or did not?” Holmes asked gently, “Think carefully, I beg you. The difference may be the thickness of a hangman's rope.”

“Did not!” she burst out, “James Mordaunt had gained power over me. He had got my child, not I. It was put away where neither he nor I might see it. Those were his terms.”

“Because it was not his child, was it?” Holmes suggested coaxingly, and once again my heart missed a beat at this dangerous leap in the dark. But I saw from her expression that he had hit the bull's-eye twice in a row. His voice softened. “Mordaunt would not take you from Bly to live with him in Eaton Place, so long as there was this reminder of another man under his roof.”

It was so simple! The secret love of James Mordaunt for Maria Jessel was as dead as the two children of Bly. Yet some other man's child remained the means by which he still commanded Miss Jessel's obedience.

In the next half-hour we heard how Charles Alfred had been sent to a nursery school in Yorkshire, if baby farms for unwanted children can be called nurseries. Paid for by money drawn from the Bly estate, James Mordaunt kept it out of sight and mind at this private institution It was an establishment founded at Greta Bridge by William Shaw, twice sued by parents after children had gone blind from infection and gross neglect. Little Charles Alfred remained there, in pawn for his mother's obedient behaviour.

I took my chance.

“Do you tell us, Miss Jessel, that Mordaunt had such a hold over your affections that you would consent to this dreadful thing for your child?”

“I think not, Watson,” Holmes interrupted gently, as our suspect began to weep. “Neither affection nor passion holds them now. Fear of discovery is the bond.”

He turned to her again.

“You had best tell us, Miss Jessel, what happened on the night that you—or more probably Major Mordaunt—killed Peter Quint at Bly House. That is to say when the father of your child, then still unborn, was killed.”

He could not be certain of so much! He seemed like the gamester who risks one throw too many because his feral instinct senses a winning streak.

She looked up in tears, her hair straggling a little, and Holmes resumed.

“Was it the jealousy of your two lovers—servant and master—that caused the quarrel?” The pitiless voice was hardly more than audible. “Was it Mordaunt's discovery that you were carrying Quint's child—or was it something more? Did Quint strike you, for some reason, and did Mordaunt then deal him a murderous blow in return—across the skull with a blunt instrument? You left Bly for your so-called holiday a day or two later, did you not, wearing a convenient travelling veil to hide a swollen mouth or a bruised cheek?”

There was no reply, only a relentless sobbing.

“Peter Quint was a brute,” Holmes continued quietly. “Did you perhaps strike in your own defence? You are not powerfully built, Miss Jessel, but even you might catch him from behind while he was sitting in a chair. Even you are strong enough to smash a poker down on his head. If one blow did not do it, you dared not let him recover and strike back. Blow must follow blow. Quint was a powerful man. He could kill you and your unborn child with a stroke of his arm or a swing of his boot. You had no alternative but to repeat those blows with force enough to cause that dreadful wound. Such a wound as might be mistaken for a flying impact against a stone parapet! To strike again and again for fear he should live and retaliate!”

At that instant, Holmes illustrated such violence by bringing his fist down on the table with a reverberating impact and Maria Jessel cried out, “No! Oh, no!”

But all sympathy had drained from my friend's voice.

“To carry him to the bridge that winter night offered a desperate escape. But you could not have lifted him. Mordaunt could. I have examined the inquest papers, the photograph of the body where it lay. Your hobble-de-hoy country coroner saw simply what he expected to see. I know rather more of blood and fatal wounds—and I have read the medical evidence. Peter Quint bled too little, even on a winter night, to have died at the bridge. The dead do not bleed as freely as the living—and he had almost stopped before he was placed there. I could prove, if I had to, that he lost too little blood at that place—even in the ice and cold.”

“No!”

What did this denial mean? That Quint's body was not carried to the bridge or that she was not involved in his death?

“Oh yes, madam,” Holmes persisted. “He was killed elsewhere and laid in the freezing darkness to be discovered next day when the medical evidence would be less clear. A man with medical knowledge, well within the competence of Surgeon-Major Mordaunt, could easily assist in misleading the coroner.”

Our poor butterfly was pinned and wriggling.

“Quint walked back to Bly that evening,” Holmes continued quietly. “At Bly he died from a blow—or blows—to the head, dealt by one or both of you. Mordaunt, let us say, carried or drove the body to the bridge. It would be frozen by morning. The correct time of death would be judged from when he left the inn. He was a drunkard who appeared to have died a drunkard's death. Why go further? If he died at the bridge, you and Major Mordaunt were both safely at Bly House when it happened.”

He did not hurry her. At last she looked up.

“James Mordaunt,” she said. “I could not do it! I had not the strength.”

Her tears had stopped with the suddenness of fright, but her face was as wild-eyed as a fury of Greek tragedy.

Holmes was gentle with her again.

“I believe you did not do it, Miss Jessel. I believe I could prove that, if you will help me. But I can do nothing until I know why you assisted Major Mordaunt to drive Miss Temple almost out of her mind.”

In these three sentences her persecutor offered to become her champion and lit the way through her despair. She looked at him uncertainly and then burst out:

“I did not want to harm Miss Temple! Why should I? But Quint had told secrets to little Miles. Secrets that James Mordaunt assured me might destroy us both, if they went further. The little boy betrayed them innocently when he said things at school. We did not know this when Miss Temple first came and Miles was still at King Alfred's. But we could not risk what he might say to her if she remained.”

In similar words, Spencer-Smith recalled how Miles “said things” to the other children.

“Secrets about the evil eye and the selling of souls, perhaps? Crime and criminals? Power over others?”

She nodded without looking up.

“The boy worshipped Quint like a father.”

“Go on, please.”

“Such secrets would destroy us, if ever Miles was questioned about them!”

I saw my friend take a breath before his next question, as if the croupier's wheel was spinning once more.

“Destroy you and Major Mordaunt?”

She answered with her eyes and now I saw the whole truth, even before she told it. Maria Jessel was calmer. She addressed Holmes in a quiet monotone.

“If Miles believed that Quint was dead, James Mordaunt feared the boy might not hesitate to tell the man's secrets. But Miles would do nothing to hurt Quint if the man might be alive in some form. If we could make the boy and his sister believe that Quint and the dead governess could somehow linger at Bly.” She dropped her voice to a whisper, “Even as ghosts. Miles loved tales of terror, as children do. He believed all that Quint had told him.”

Inspector Gregson intervened cautiously.

“Did Major Mordaunt suggest to you that if the secret of Quint's murder was known, he would hang for his crime and you as his accomplice? Is that what it comes to?”

She looked at Holmes, as if for authority to answer. He gave a single nod.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “He suggested that threat to me—only once.”

“So Peter Quint and you, the dead governess, must appear at a convenient distance?” I asked. “Upon a tower or across a lake?”

“Half a moment,” said Gregson, lifting his hand. “The boy would know the difference between Quint and his uncle in disguise, even at a distance.”