The Burning Court (7 page)

“What’s the ordinary fatal dose?”

Partington shook his head. “There’s no ‘ordinary’ fatal dose. As I say, death has ensued from taking two grains. On the other hand, a victim has been known to swallow two hundred grains, the largest known dose, and recover afterwards. You’ve got a pretty broad range between. For instance, you’ve heard of the case of Madeleine Smith, the Glasgow beauty who was accused of poisoning her French lover in 1857? Yes. There were eighty-eight grains of arsenic in L’Angelier’s stomach. Counsel at the trial, therefore, argued that the death must have been suicide, for no person could have swallowed such an enormous dose without noticing it at the time. Undoubtedly it had an effect on the verdict—the Scotch verdict of ‘Not proven,’ which they say is the equivalent of ‘Not guilty, but don’t do it again.’—Still, six years after that business a woman named Hewitt was tried at Chester for the murder of her mother. The old lady had died without suspicion; the doctor said death was due to gastro-enteritis; and it wasn’t until the body was dug up that they discovered a hundred and fifty-four grains of arsenic in the stomach alone.”

Partington’s tongue was loosened; he even seemed to be enjoying himself; though the judicial expression remained on his blue-jowled face.

“Then again,” he went on, waggling an empty glass, “there was the case of Marie D’Aubray at Versailles, in the early ’sixties. A bad business. Very little motive to
her
various bumpings-off, it would seem… just the pleasure of watching them die. … One of the victims got as little as ten grains of arsenic, another as much as a hundred. She wasn’t as lucky as Madeleine Smith. She got the guillotine.”

By this time Stevens had risen and was sitting on the edge of his desk. He tried to nod casually and understandingly, but he was looking across at the white-painted door to the hall. For some moments he had been noticing something about that door. The light in the hall was brighter than the one in here. As an ordinary thing, you could see a glow shining through the large keyhole; but no chink was visible now, for someone must be listening outside the door.

“However,” said Partington, “that’s not the most important thing: I’ll do the post-mortem. The important thing is when the poison was administered. If you’ve got all your times straight, it was damned rapid. Say a very large dose is given. Ordinarily the acute symptoms will come on anywhere from minutes to an hour afterwards—depending whether it was in solid or liquid form—and death will ensue from six to twenty-four hours afterwards, or even longer. It’s been known to hold off for several days. So you can see how quickly your uncle went. You left him at half-past nine, in at least tolerably good health. You returned and found him on his last legs at half-past two, and he died not long afterwards. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

Partington brooded, “Well, it’s entirely on the cards, of course. It’s even probable. He was already eaten up with the organic disease; he was being slowly poisoned on top of it (if you’re right); so he’d be finished off quickly with a heavy dose. If we knew just when he took the last one–—”

“I can tell you exactly when it was,” snapped Mark. “It was at a quarter past eleven.”

“Yes,” put in Stevens, “and that’s this mysterious story Mrs. Henderson told, isn’t it? That’s what we want to know, and you keep putting it off. What the devil was the story? Why don’t you like to talk about it?”

He was afraid he had shown more excitement, more of a trace of nerves, than he ought to have allowed, but Mark did not notice it. Mark had the air of one coming to a decision.

“For the moment,” he said, “I’m not going to tell it”

“Not going to tell it?”

“Because you’d think I was crazy, or Mrs. H. was,” the other answered, as though he were groping in his mind. He raised his hand. “Wait! Wait a minute, now! I’ve been over this whole thing a hundred times. I can’t sleep for thinking of it. But when I tell somebody for the first time, when I put out each fact as plain as beef… why, I see that the other part of the story would be plain incredible. You might even think I was leading you on a wild-goose chase over opening the crypt. And Uncle Miles’s death has got to be settled. Will you give me a couple of hours’ leeway? That’s all I want, until we can settle the first part of it.”

Partington stirred. “You’ve changed, Mark. By George! I don’t understand you! Here: what’s so incredible about this story? What you’ve told us already isn’t anything very wild; bad, if you like, or devilish, or—but not out of the way. It’s plain murder. What’s so incredible about the rest of it?”

“That a long-dead woman,” said Mark, calmly, “might still be alive.”

“What damned nonsense…!”

“No, I’m absolutely sane,” Mark told him, nodding calmly. “Feel my pulse; give me a crack across the knee and watch my leg jump. I don’t believe it, naturally—any more than I believe Lucy had anything to do with it. There are two theories, both impossible. I only tell you it’s a stray idea that’s got stuck in the back of my mind, so I want to drag it out and laugh at it. But, if I told you now, God knows what you’d get to thinking. …
Will
you help me open that crypt first?”

“Yes,” said Stevens.

“What about you, Part?”

“I haven’t come three thousand miles to back out now,” the doctor grunted. “But understand: you’re not going to keep up this mumbo-jumbo once I’ve done the business. By George! you’re not! I wonder how Edith—” There was a flash of anger in his stolid brown eyes, but he became affable as Mark filled his glass for the third time. “How do we open this crypt?”

Mark was brisk again. “Good! Good! It’s not a hard job, but it’ll require plenty of time and muscle and elbow grease. It’ll need four men—the fourth is Henderson, who can be trusted and who’s right in his element at this sort of work. He’s the only one in the house now. Besides, his and Mrs. H’s living-quarters are right beside the path going to the crypt: we couldn’t disturb a stone without his knowing it afterwards by one look. … All the rest of ’em I’ve got rid of on one pretext or another; you couldn’t as much as shuffle a couple of stones—let alone what we’ve got to do—without everybody at the back of the house hearing it. As for the work…”

Stevens thought of the scene. At the rear of the long, low grey house there ran out a broad and straight path laid out in crazy-paving with concrete between the stones. On either side was a sunken garden. Beyond the gardens the path was lined with elm trees, and it terminated, some sixty yards from the house, in a small private chapel which had been shut up for more than a century and a half. Not far in front of the chapel, and to the left of the path as you walked down it, was a small house where the Despards had once “kept” a clergyman. The Hendersons lived there now. Stevens had heard that the entrance to the crypt (of which no sign was visible) was somewhere under the crazy-paving before the chapel door. Mark explained it now.

“About seven square feet of paving will have to come up,” he said. “And, since we have to work in a hurry, there’ll be a lot of breaking. We’ll get a dozen steel wedges—long ones—into the concrete between the stones, and drive them in as far as they’ll go, and then knock them to one side. That’ll lift and split most of the joinings. Then we crack it all over with a sledge-hammer, and we can take it up in pieces. Under that there’s gravel and soil; six inches or so. Under
that
there’s a flat stone that covers the hole down into the place. The stone’s six feet by four, and, I warn you, it weighs between fifteen and eighteen hundred pounds. The heaviest job will be to get bars under it and lever it up on its end. Then we go down the stairs. I know it sounds like a lot of work…”

“It’s a lot of work, all right,” grunted Partington, and slapped his knees. “Let’s get down to it, then. And look here: you don’t want anybody to know about this, do you? After we make all that mess, do you think we can get it back afterwards so that nobody will know it’s been disturbed?”

“Not altogether, no. Anybody with an eye for it, like Henderson or myself, would see it. But I doubt whether anybody else would. There was a slight tear-up at the edges last time it was opened, for Miles’s funeral; and most crazy-paving looks alike.” Mark had become restless again. He got to his feet, brushing the matter away, and took out his watch. “That’s settled, then. It’s half-past nine now; let’s get started as soon as we can. There’ll be nobody up there to disturb us. We’ll go on up ahead, Ted; you get something to eat and follow us as soon as you can. Better wear old cl—” He stopped, in an alarm that was growing out of his uneasy nerves. “Good God! I forgot! What about Marie? What excuse are you going to make to her? You won’t tell her, will you?”

“No,” Stevens said, with his eye on the door; “no, I won’t tell her. Leave it to me.”

He could see that they were both surprised at his tone, but both appeared to have concerns of their own and they believed him. With the smoke-filled air of the room and his own lack of food, he found when he got up that he was a little light-headed. And it made him remember something else about the night of Wednesday, April 12th, which he and Marie had spent at this cottage, and on which he had gone to bed so early. He had gone to bed at ten-thirty because he had felt unaccountably drowsy, and had nearly banged his head forward against the manuscript on the desk. Marie said it was a taste of the open air, after New York.

He accompanied Mark and Partington out into the hall. Marie was not in sight. Shouldering ahead, Mark appeared in a hurry to get out of the house. Partington hesitated near the front door, looked round politely with his hat against his chest, and murmured something about Mrs. Stevens before his footsteps creaked after the other’s down the brick path. Standing in the open door, breathing the night, Stevens saw the lights of Mark’s car go on; he heard the jerk and throb of the engine, and the trees rustling at gossip. Well? He turned back, closing the door with care, and looked at the brown porcelain umbrella-stand. Marie was in the kitchen: he could hear her moving about, half humming, half singing,
“Il pleut, il pleut berg
è
re—”
that china-shepherdess song she liked so much. He went out through the dining-room, and pushed open the swing-door to the kitchen.

Ellen, evidently, had gone. Marie, wearing a house apron, stood at the kitchen cabinet, cutting cold-chicken sandwiches, spreading them with lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise, and ranging them in neat piles on a plate. When she saw him she pushed back a strand of the dark-yellow hair with the hand that held the bread-knife. The heavy-lidded grey eyes looked at him gravely, yet with an expression which suggested a smile. What went through his head was Thackeray’s jingle in burlesque of Goethe:

Charlotte, like a well-conducted maiden,
Went on cutting bread and butter.

The kitchen was white-tiled, and there was a humming noise from the electric refrigerator. This whole business was nonsensical.

“Marie—” he said.

“I know,” she declared, cheerfully. “You’ve got to go. You eat these, darling.” She tapped the sandwiches with the bread-knife. “They’ll stay by you.”

“How do you know I’ve got to go?”

“I listened, of course. You were all so horribly mysterious. What did you expect me to do?” There was a very faint look of tensity about her face. “It’s spoiled our evening, but I know you’ve got to go, or you’d never get it off your mind. Darling, I did a good thing tonight to warn you—about being morbid. I expected this.”

“Expected?”

“Well, maybe not exactly that. But they’re talking about it in what few houses Crispen has. I got here this morning, and I’ve heard a hint of it. I mean that there’s something wrong at the Park;
something;
nobody seems to know what. Nobody knows how the rumor got started. If you try to trace it back, you can’t find it. Even if you try to remember who told it to you, you can’t be careful. Won’t you be careful?”

Yet there was an air of change about the kitchen; all things had changed. Even when he looked at the brown porcelain umbrella-stand in the hall, it had an appearance of being painted in new colors. Putting down the knife with a small rattle on the enamelled shelf of the cabinet, she came up to him and took him by the arms.

“Listen, Ted. I love you. You know I love you, don’t you?”

He did know it, in his bones and soul.

“And as,” he said, “for what I was thinking——”

“Listen again, Ted. That will last as long as I know you, or you know me. What you may have got into your head I don’t know. Sometime I may tell you about a house at a place called Guibourg, and my aunt Adrienne, and you’ll understand. But it isn’t the kind of thing you ought to be thinking about. Don’t grin in that superior way. I am older than you, much, much older; and if you saw my face shrivel up and blacken right at this minute——”

“Stop that! You’re hysterical!”

The knife had fallen out of her hand and her mouth was pulled open. She picked up the knife.

“I’m crazy,” she said. “Now I’ll tell you something. You’re going to open a grave tonight, and my guess… it’s only a guess… is that you’ll find nothing.”

“Yes. I don’t think we’ll find anything, either.”

“You don’t understand. You wouldn’t understand. But please, please, don’t tamper with this too far. If I asked you for my sake not to, would you? I want you to think. And that’s as much as I can tell you now. Think what I’ve said; don’t try to understand it; but just trust me. Now eat up a few of these sandwiches, and take a glass of milk. Then go up and change your clothes. That old sweater of yours will do you, and there’s a pair of old tennis-flannels in the cupboard of the spare room; I forgot to get them cleaned last year.”

Charlotte, like a well-conducted hausfrau, went on cutting bread and butter.

“Fly open, lock, to the dead man’s knock,
Fly bolt, and bar, and band!——”

—R. H. B
ARHAM
,
Ingoldsby Legends

Stevens walked up King’s Avenue the short distance to the gates of the Park. There was no moon, but a crowding of stars. As usual, the iron-grilled gates—with each entrance pillar topped by an unimpressive stone cannon-ball—stood wide open. He shut them, and dropped the bar. The gravel drive went slightly uphill; it was a long distance to the house, and seemed longer by reason of the drive’s windings among shrewd landscaping. Henderson required two assistants to keep these grounds in order. With all their riding round on motor mowing-machines, somebody’s head was always to be seen up over the top of an ornamental hedge, or seeming, in ghostly fashion to stick out of a tree: to the accompaniment of a snip-snip-pause-snip-snip of shears. It made a drowsy sound in summer, when you might lounge in a deck-chair at the crest of the lawns, and look down over a blaze of flower-beds under the sun.