The Burning Court (13 page)

“Listen, Edith,” urged Lucy, “must you bring all this up? I don’t like the way you’re going on; I didn’t like what you were saying, coming out in the train. Can’t we just forget it, and——”

“Well, we can’t,” said Edith, shortly. “You know as well as I do the rumor is all over the place that there’s something wrong here.”

Mark whistled. “Rumor?”

“And if you ask me who started it,” said Edith, “I should say it was Margaret… oh, unintentionally, I admit. Something just—slipped. She may have heard the nurse talking to me, or the nurse to the doctor. Don’t look so surprised, Mark. Did you know that that nurse was suspicious of us all the time she was here, and that’s why she kept her room locked up whenever she wasn’t in it?”

Mark whistled again. He glanced uneasily at Partington and Stevens. “Deeps,” he said, “within deeps. Or wheels, or—Everybody seems to be keeping back something. Suspicious of us? Why?”

“Because,” answered Edith, “some one stole something out of her room.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep dribbling out bits of information.” Mark spoke rather irritably, after a silence. “You always used to speak out hot and strong. Stole what? When? Why?”

“It was the week-end before Uncle Miles died—the Saturday. I think it was the 8th.” She looked at Stevens. “You remember, Ted? You and Marie were up here to play bridge; only Mark broke up the whole affair, and for some reason it degenerated into telling ghost stories?”

“I remember,” said Lucy. She was trying to disguise her uneasiness with a pleased expression. “Mark had taken one too many highballs, that was the reason. But why do you say ‘degenerated’ into telling ghost stories? It was good fun.”

Edith went on: “The next morning Miss Corbett came to me and said she seemed to have mislaid something. I thought she talked a little snappishly, and asked what it was. She became more definite. She asked me whether anyone had accidentally taken something from her room; something the doctor had ordered for Miles in such-and-such an event (she didn’t specify what). She described it as a small square bottle. Finally, she added that it could be of no use to anybody, that it was a deadly poison if given in quantity, and that if somebody had taken it in mistake for smelling-salts—which she thought wasn’t very likely—it would be a kindness to return it. Just like that. I don’t think she was suspicious, exactly. She thought somebody had been monkeying about.”

Mark almost slipped. Stevens saw that it was on the tip of his tongue to say, “But they wouldn’t keep arsenic for a medicinal purpose”; he opened his mouth, but shut it in time. Mark looked at Partington in a puzzled way, and then back to Lucy. “Did
you
hear anything of this, Lucy?”

“No.” She was troubled. “But that’s not surprising, is it? I mean, they naturally go to Edith rather than me; anybody would. If I were somebody else, I shouldn’t go to me—if you understand.”

Mark stared round.

“But damn it all, somebody must have—” He stopped. “What did you say to Miss Corbett, Edith? What did you do?”

“I said I’d make enquiries.”

“And did you?”

“No.” The weakness, the doubt, the indecision, came back to Edith’s practical face; she would run up to the breach, clanging arms, but she always hesitated there. “I suppose I was… afraid. Oh, I know it sounds silly, but I was. I don’t mean I didn’t say anything; I threw out enquiries, in a casual way, as though I were talking about a bottle of Uncle Miles’s medicine; and nobody connected the two. I didn’t mention poison. I
couldn’t.”

“This is a devil of a mess,” said Mark, “but it couldn’t have been ar… h’m. Here, Part, this is a job for you. What sort of stuff could it have been?”

Partington frowned. “Depends on the doctor’s ideas as to possible developments in the case; I haven’t heard his own complete diagnosis. But it might have been several things. Just a minute! Tell me, Edith, did the nurse report this to the doctor?”

“Doctor Baker? Yes, of course. So, naturally, I didn’t think——”

“And Doctor Baker had no hesitation about saying your uncle died of gastro-enteritis? He had no suspicion, in other words?”

“None at all!”

“Then,” said Partington, curtly, “stop worrying. You can take it from me that it couldn’t have been any medical preparation which could possibly have caused the same symptoms as your uncle died with—like antimony, for instance. Isn’t that obvious? Otherwise both the doctor and the nurse would have been on to it immediately. … No; probably it was a sedative, or else a heart-stimulant like digitalin or strychnine. Those things can be deadly, as you know; but all of them are what are called neurotic poisons; and—again take it from me—not one of them could have caused the symptoms with which your uncle died. Far from it! So what are you worrying about?”

“I know,” murmured Edith, miserably, and scratched her nails up and down the arm of the chair. “I know that, I told myself that all the time, and I knew it couldn’t be. Nobody would do a thing like that!” She smiled, or tried to. “But with Miss Corbett locking her door every time she went out of her room afterwards, and even locking it on the night Miles died, after the little bottle had been returned…”

“Returned?” said Mark, quickly. “Yes; that’s what I was going to ask you. What happened to the bottle? Baker didn’t just let it float round the house, and laugh ha-ha, did he? You say it was returned?”

“Yes. Evidently on the Sunday night. It was gone only twenty-four hours, you see, so there wasn’t time for a real fuss or hue-and-cry. Yes, it was the Sunday night; I remember because Marie had just been up to say hello and good-bye, that she and Ted were driving to New York next morning. I went out of my room about nine o’clock, and met Miss Corbett in the upstairs hall. She said: ‘Thank some one for me; the bottle has been returned. Some one put it on the table outside Mr. Despard’s, meaning Miles’s, door.’ I said, ‘Is everything all right?’ She said, ‘Yes, everything seems all right.’”

“Then I see it,” declared Mark. “It means that Miles himself stole them.”

“Miles himself?” repeated Edith, blankly.

“Exactly,” said Mark, afire with a new idea. “Now tell me, Part, could that bottle have contained
morphia
tablets?”

“Yes, certainly. You say he had been in considerable pain, and wasn’t sleeping well.”

“And you remember,” cried Mark, turning on the others and pointing his finger, “that Uncle Miles was always wanting more morphia than the doctor would give him, when he had the pains? Right! Now suppose Miles stole the bottle out of the nurse’s room, lifted a few tablets—and returned it? Here, wait a minute! On the night he died he called out for somebody to go down to the bathroom and get the ‘tablets that would ease pain,’ didn’t he? Suppose those were the stolen morphia tablets, which he put into the medicine-chest in the bathroom so the nurse wouldn’t find them in his own room?”

“No, that won’t work,” said Lucy. “There were no morphia tablets there. Those were only the ordinary veronal tablets we keep there all the time.”

“All right; but does the other part of it sound reasonable?”

“Yes, it’s entirely possible,” agreed Partington.

“What is the matter with all of you?” asked Edith. She spoke in a calm tone; but then, unexpectedly, her voice went up almost to a scream. “Don’t you see what is happening? The first thing you tell me is that Uncle Miles’s body has been stolen. Stolen!—taken out of that vault and maybe chopped up or heaven knows what; and that’s the least, the easiest thing, that could have happened. Yet you all take it very calmly, and try to hoodwink me with gentle talk. Oh yes, you do. I know it. Even you do, Lucy. I won’t stand it. I want to know what’s going on, because I know it’s something horrible. I’ve been through too much in the last two weeks. Tom Partington, why do
you
want to come back and torture me? All we need now is Ogden making jokes, and it would be complete, wouldn’t it? I tell you I won’t stand it.”

Her hands were shaking, and so was her neck: it was the handsome hag come back again, fluttering on the edge of tears in the big chair. Lucy was regarding her with steadily shining brown eyes: Stevens noted the steady shining of that look, as of a sympathy too great to be expressed. Mark lumbered over and put his hand on her shoulder.

“You’ll be all right, old girl,” he said, gently. “You need one of those veronal tablets yourself; and a lot of sleep; that’s all. Why not go upstairs with Lucy, and she’ll give you one. You trust to us—whatever has happened, we’ll handle it. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know it,” Edith replied, after a silence. “It was silly of me to fly up like that; but, really, I feel better for it. You can’t help the thoughts that come sometimes.” (An echo of Mark himself.) “I know I shouldn’t lay any foolish claim to being psychic, although a gipsy woman once told me I was; but, Lucy, I knew it was unlucky of you to make a copy of that dress in the picture, and wear it. It’s always been considered unlucky. I know we’re supposed to have outgrown all that, and yet I shouldn’t like to go through the world balancing common sense like a pail of water on my head, and not dare to bend my back or turn my head in case the pail should spill. Still, it’s a plain scientific fact, isn’t it, that the changes of the moon have a direct bearing on certain types of human brain?”

“For the moon is the mother of lunatics,” said Partington, dreamily, “and has given to them her name.—Some say so.”

“You always were a materialistic soul, Tom. Still, there’s truth in it. And is there anything queerer or more outlandish in the supernatural,”—at this point Stevens saw the expressions on his companions’ faces change; he had no doubt his own did as well—“than,” said Edith, “that somebody’s mind should be affected from umpty-million miles away by a—well, a——”

“A piece of green cheese,” said Partington. “I suppose not, but why this mysticism?”

“Because I hope you’ll laugh me out of it. I want,” said Edith, grimly, “to see a piece of green cheese. Remember, Lucy, there was a full moon on the night Uncle Miles died; and how we admired it; and you and Mark sang coming home? When a person begins to think about the non-dead…”

Mark spoke as quickly and heartily as though he had never heard the term; but his voice was, if anything, a trifle too loud. “The what? Here, where did you pick up that rubbish?”

“Oh, I read it in a book somewhere. … I’ll not go upstairs, but I will go out and find something to eat. Come on, Lucy. I’m tired; I’m dreadfully tired. Will you make some sandwiches?”

Lucy bounced up briskly, and winked at Mark over her shoulder. When they had gone, Mark prowled twice round the room with moody absorption before he stopped by the fireplace and began to roll a cigarette. Somewhere in the room a concealed radiator began to rattle and whack as Henderson in the cellar got up steam.

“We’re all keeping something back from one another,” Mark said, and flicked a match across the stone. “You notice that Miles’s body disappearing didn’t seem to startle them—or at least Edith—overly. They didn’t want details. They didn’t want to peep. They didn’t want to… Oh, damn it, what’s in Edith’s mind? The same thing that’s occurred to us? Or is it only night-time and the jimjams? I wish I knew.”

“
I
can tell you,” growled Partington.

“And she read it in a book, too. The non-dead. She read it in a book, the same as you did.” He looked at Stevens. “I suppose it was the same book?”

“It couldn’t very well be. This one is still in manuscript. It’s Cross’s new one—Gaudan Cross. You’ve read some of his stuff, haven’t you?”

Mark stopped. The match was still burning in his hand as he stared at the other; he held it levelly, and, as though at some instinct beyond sight, just before it burnt his fingers he twitched it out. But he continued to look at Stevens with eyes wide open.

“Spell that name,” he requested. Then he said: “It can’t be. You’re right, Part; I am getting the jimjams, and very shortly my imagination will put me in a state where I need a sedative myself. The proof of it is that I’ve seen that name dozens of times, and yet it never occurred to me (in my right senses) to see any resemblance before. Gaudan Cross… Gaudin St. Croix. Ho-ho-ho! Give me a kick, somebody.”

“Well, what about it?”

“Don’t you see?” demanded Mark, with a sort of ghoulish eagerness and mirth. “When you get into such a business as this, all you’ve got to do is let your imagination run and it’ll see anything you like. Here’s Gaudan Cross, probably a harmless old son of a what not, who writes pretty good stuff; and yet by looking at that name you can construct a whole cycle of the non-dead, and a return for ever of the slayers and the slain. … Gaudan Cross. Gaudin St. Croix, in case it interests you, was the celebrated lover of Marie D’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers, who first instructed her in all the arts of poison. He died before her; in his laboratory over his own poison-kettle; otherwise he’d have been broken to death on the wheel, or sent to the stake by the tribunal they established to deal with poisoning cases—a tribunal called The Burning Court. It was through St. Croix’s death that they discovered evidence, in a certain teakwood box, which led Madame to be suspected. She had grown tired of him, and had grown to hate him; but that’s neither here nor there. St. Croix died somehow. … Dumas says he was trying to manufacture a poison gas when his glass mask slipped and he fell forward dead of its fumes with his head in his own cauldron… and the hunt was up for Madame la Marquise.”

“I’ve had about enough of this for one night,” said Stevens, curtly. “If you don’t mind, I’ll get along home now, and we can wall up that tomb in the morning.”

Partington looked at him. “It’s a fine night,” Partington said. “I’ll walk down as far as the gate with you.”

They walked down the drive, under great trees and past places of shrubbery. For a time both Partington and Stevens were silent. Mark had gone out for a last conference with Henderson, and to put the tarpaulin used for the tennis court over the entrance to the crypt. Stevens wondered what (if anything) was on Partington’s mind; so he opened the attack.

“Any ideas about the theft and return of the bottle,” he asked, “beyond what you told the women?”