The Seance (39 page)

‘But there was one serious difficulty. Lightning might strike the Hall next week; on the other hand, it might not strike for another ten years, with no guarantee that Cornelius would actually occupy the suit. And
Magnus, having prepared John Montague for Cornelius’s imminent decease, now had to ensure it. His plan, I am sure, was to leave his London house, ostensibly for some remote part of the country – Devon, let us say – adopt a suitable disguise, and make his way to the Hall. Once in his uncle’s apartment – and I remind you, we have only Magnus’s own word for the state of relations between them – he could easily smother the old man, place the body in the armour, and discharge a “thunderbolt” from the safety of the woods nearby.

‘Risky, you will say, and I agree. But like any true artist, he was prepared to run risks in order to achieve the effect he wanted. And then fortune came to his aid with a remarkable stroke of luck: John Montague became so anxious about the gathering storm that he wired Magnus to that effect, giving him several hours’ grace in which to prepare.

‘There was now no need of artificial thunder; Magnus had only to place the body in the armour and slip away without being seen. But why was the body not found? Even supposing that lightning actually did strike the Hall, I don’t believe that Cornelius could have been vaporised out of existence; Magnus’s own eventual fate is proof of that. And I refuse to believe that his vanishing so precisely on cue was mere coincidence. Yet it was plainly not in Magnus’s interest for Cornelius to vanish; in the event it cost him two years’ delay, and an expensive court case, before he could take possession of the estate.’

He raised his hand to forestall a question from Professor Charnell.

‘With your permission, I should like to complete my thesis before we debate it. During that two-year interval, Magnus Wraxford married a young woman supposedly possessed of psychic powers; an ideal accomplice for the fraud he set out to perpetrate.’

I had listened, thus far, with rapt attention, but the last remark brought me up short. I was about to protest when I realised that I could only do so by revealing the existence of the journal.

‘Though the evidence of Godwin Rhys, John Montague and the manservant Bolton led the court to believe that the Wraxfords had been estranged
for some time, it is possible that the appearance of estrangement was – initially – contrived between them, to further Magnus’s seduction of Mrs Bryant, and also perhaps to heighten the effect of Eleanor Wraxford’s powers; if she could be seen to be acting the part of medium against her will, the illusion would be all the more convincing. Magnus made the first approach, and succeeded in charming an initial ten thousand out of Mrs Bryant before Eleanor Wraxford appeared on the scene. That money, as you know, he had converted into diamonds; a highly portable and negotiable asset.

‘His intention, I am sure, was to stage a séance along the lines of tonight’s demonstration. Eleanor Wraxford’s gift would have been brought into play; and Mrs Bryant’s late husband would surely have appeared, encouraging her to devote her entire fortune to Magnus Wraxford’s Sanatorium. But by the time the party arrived at the Hall, Eleanor Wraxford had turned against her husband. Perhaps she was jealous of Mrs Bryant; or perhaps, as some have suggested, she meant to elope with a lover. Her mental condition, at any rate, was certainly unstable. She was estranged from her own family; her previous fiancé had died here at the Hall in mysterious circumstances; and according to Magnus, as reported by Godwin Rhys, she had foreseen his death in a vision. Magnus had sent her down here with her child, from whom she would not be parted, to prepare for her part in the fraud.’

Again I opened my mouth to protest, and thought better of it.

‘He must have been very confident of his power over her. But then his plan misfired with the death of Mrs Bryant on the night of their arrival.

‘You may recall that a note was found, in Eleanor Wraxford’s handwriting, inviting Mrs Bryant to meet her here in the gallery at midnight. There are several possibilities here. It may be that she meant to betray Magnus’s scheme, or simply to wreck it by frightening Mrs Bryant out of her wits. You can see how easily, using this apparatus, a woman with a weak heart could be frightened literally to death. Of course Magnus
risked killing the golden goose with his intended demonstration, but that was a risk he had to run; and Mrs Bryant would have gone to the séance expecting to witness something remarkable, whereas here she was taken completely by surprise.

‘The rest is simply told: Eleanor Wraxford managed to regain the safety of her room while the alarm was still being raised. As I need scarcely remind you’ – this with a bow to Dr Davenant – ‘the popular understanding of madness is quite misguided. A man – or, as here, a woman – in the grip of delusion may commit the most monstrous crimes, and yet remain lucid and to all appearances rational.

‘Some time during that night, Eleanor Wraxford staged her disappearance. She concealed her child, or murdered it – I am sorry to distress you, Miss Langton, but the latter seems most probable. A woman alone would have had a fair chance of evading the search that followed; a woman carrying an infant, scarcely any. Unless she had arranged to give the child to an accomplice, which she would have to have done in advance – and why then bring the infant to the Hall in the first place?’

I had not thought of this objection to my own theory, but I saw, with a horrid sinking feeling, the force of it.

‘Whatever the fate of the child, Eleanor Wraxford managed to conceal herself until Magnus alone remained at the Hall. She confronted him with her pistol, took the diamonds, forced him into the armour and jammed the mechanism – so much is plain from the lawyer Montague’s evidence. She may have intended only to trap him long enough for her to escape, or else her nerve failed her at last, as witness the discarded pistol and the torn piece of her gown caught in the armour.

‘And then came the final irony: lightning really did strike the Hall a day or so later. Perhaps Magnus Wraxford was already dead; I rather hope so; I shouldn’t wish such a fate upon my worst enemy. I don’t believe he was instantly reduced to ashes, as the coroner concluded; men have been struck in the open, after all, and survived. Most likely the heat
of the blast set fire to his clothing and the body burned slowly away, as with spontaneous combustion, so vividly described by Dickens, except that in this case the combustion occurred within a confined space, and so was more complete.

‘And there, ladies and gentlemen, you have it. We shall never know what became of Eleanor Wraxford and her child; I suspect that both are lying in some undiscovered hollow in Monks Wood.’

He bowed, and the men responded with a brief round of applause, in which I did not join. The fire had burned low while he was speaking; my feet were numb with cold; the promised revelation had come to nothing. His admiration for Magnus had been plain throughout, whereas he had dismissed Nell as a madwoman who had spoiled an elegant plan. It struck me, indeed, that Vernon Raphael and Magnus Wraxford had a good deal in common.

I looked up to find the men waiting expectantly for me to rise. The thought of listening to their debate was suddenly unbearable; I was neither hungry nor thirsty, only mortally cold.

‘I should like to retire,’ I said to Edwin. ‘I want nothing; only a lantern. So if you will excuse me, gentlemen ...’

I rose unsteadily to my feet, and the room seemed to sway around me, so that I was obliged to take Edwin’s arm. Accompanied by murmurs of concern, we moved slowly down the long expanse of the gallery and out into the deeper chill of the landing, where Edwin immediately began to apologise for the evening’s ordeal.

‘I chose to come here,’ I replied, ‘so let us not speak of it.’ I felt his yearning for a glance, a smile, some token of intimacy, but I was incapable of responding.

Someone had made up the fire in my room, and as soon as I had bolted the door behind Edwin I lit the two dusty candles on the mantelpiece,
dragged the camp bed as close as I dared to the hearth and lay down fully clothed, with the lantern on a chair beside me. The smell of oil and hot metal was vaguely comforting, as was the knowledge that Edwin would be in the room next door, between me and the landing.

As the warmth crept back into my veins, I realised that what had so dispirited me, aside from Vernon Raphael’s tone, was the fear that he might be right about Nell; he had, after all, deduced from what I
had
shown him that Magnus had murdered – or at least set out to murder – his uncle. I had never considered the possibility, yet it all made perfect sense; whereas his account of the Mystery, on all but a few points, had merely echoed the coroner’s findings.

But if I had shown him the rest of the papers, they would only have reinforced his conviction of Nell’s guilt.

Yet there was
something
he had said; something that had struck a faint chord, even as it poured cold water upon my own theory ... yes; that if Nell had been willing to surrender Clara to an accomplice, why bring her here in the first place?

And why, of all the rooms she might have chosen, had she put Clara in that dark, airless closet?

Because with the door closed, no one could tell whether there was a child in it or not.

I took up Nell’s journal and John Montague’s account of the inquest and skimmed the pages by the light of the lantern.

There was no record of anyone else having seen Clara at the Hall.

I turned back to the first page of the journal, the journal she said she had not dared begin in London, for fear Magnus would find it. And which she had left open on the writing-table.

She had
meant
him to find it. I had been deceived; the journal was a fiction, and nothing in it could be trusted.

No; not exactly. Everything about the failure of their marriage; her loathing of him; Mrs Bryant: everything that Magnus knew or could
check – all of that would have been true, and meant to wound, to strike him on the raw so that he would not doubt the rest.

Clara had never been at the Hall. Someone – the maid Lucy? – had borne her off to safety while Nell came on to the Hall alone. That would have been the most dangerous part, getting the ‘child’ – a doll bundled in swaddling clothes, perhaps – from the carriage to the room. No wonder she had insisted upon doing everything herself.

But why? What was the point of the deception?

To make it appear that the curse of Wraxford Hall had struck again; that she and Clara had been carried off by the powers of darkness. She had invented the final visitation to ‘foretell’ their fate.

But the deception had not succeeded. Magnus had looked through the journal and immediately ordered a search.

Had Nell assumed that, for all his professed scepticism, he was a believer? Or that others would believe it, even if he did not? Or had Mrs Bryant’s death disrupted her own plan?

And how had she meant to escape? Without Clara, she could have got away on foot. And since the journal had been left for Magnus to find, she had every reason to escape as soon as it was light enough to see her way through Monks Wood.

What was it Vernon Raphael had said about Magnus? ‘A genius for improvisation’.

Nell had been so intent on creating her own illusion that she had not realised how the journal might be used against her. Magnus’s letter – the one John Montague had found, addressed to Mr Veitch – that, too, had been false, like the fragment of Nell’s dress caught in the armour. Nell had never returned to the Hall, and Magnus had not died here.

Then whose were the ashes in the armour?

Not Nell’s, at least; the doctor at the inquest had said they were the remains of a man of about Magnus’s age and height.

To stage a convincing séance, every medium needed an accomplice. Magnus had said that Bolton was going to work the influence machine;
but the machine was a mere prop. And Magnus was surely far too astute to have trusted Bolton.

No; the accomplice had been someone else entirely, a man nobody had seen, smuggled into the house at night and hidden somewhere in the maze of rooms on the upper floor, where no one had been allowed to go. Paid handsomely, perhaps, without even knowing what was at stake – and destined never to leave the Hall alive.

There was something John Montague had mentioned . . . yes, the lightning people in Chalford thought they had seen from Monks Wood on the Sunday night . . . Magnus had burned the body in the armour, and then discharged the ‘lightning’, just as Vernon Raphael had done tonight.