The Twelve Crimes of Christmas (22 page)

“There is the nub of it, Oaks. She left the den
by the back passage, crossed the yard, and re-entered the house by the kitchen,
in the far wing. Who would take any notice of a daughter of the house in a room
filled with bustling cooks and servants coming and going with vittles for the
buffet?”

“But she would have gotten her skirts wet in
the snow,” I started to object. “Of course! The spilled punch bowl! It drenched
her!”

Cork smiled broadly. “Yes, my lad. She entered
the kitchen, scooped up the punch bowl, carried it into the ballroom, and then
deliberately dropped it.”

“Well,” Tell grumped, “she may be sprung in the
mind, but she understands the theory of tactical diversion.”

“Self-preservation is the last instinct to go,
Major.”

“Yes, I believe you are right, Cork, but how
are we to explain all this and still shield the Dame’s secret?”

Cork looked dead at me. “You, Oaks, have given
us the answer.”

“I? Oh, when I said the killer took off his
boots to avoid tracks in the den? You rejected that out of hand when I mentioned
it.”

“I rejected it as a probability, not a
possibility. Anything is possible, but not everything is probable. Is it
probable that a killer bent on not leaving tracks would take off his boots
inside
the entry, where they would leave a puddle?
No, I couldn’t accept it, but I’m sure the general public will.”

The major looked disturbed. “I can appreciate
your desire to protect the Dame,” he said, “but to
suppress
evidence—”

“Calm yourself, Major, we are just balancing
the books of human nature. I have saved the Crown the time and expense of
trying and executing an extortionist. God knows how many victims he has fleeced
by his artistic trickery over the years. And we have prevented the Dame from
the commission of a homicide that any jury, I think, would have found
justifiable. Let it stand as it is, Major; it is a neater package. The Dame has
had enough tragedy in her life.”

The last of his words were soft and low-toned, and
I watched as he stared into the flames. By jing, could it possibly be that this
gallivanting, sunburnt American had fallen in love? But I quickly dismissed the
thought. We are fated to our roles, we two—he, the unbroken stallion frolicking
from pasture to pasture, and I, the frantic ostler following with an empty
halter, hoping some day to put the beast to work. I persist.

THE DAUPHIN’S DOLL

by
Ellery Queen

“Ellery Queen” has a split
personality. It is the pseudonym of Brooklyn-born cousins Frederic Dannay and
Manfred Lee, whose contrasting personalities gave a keen edge to their many
years of mystery collaboration. Together they wrote a long list of novels,
novelettes and short stories featuring their namesake detective, Ellery Queen.
They edited over seventy anthologies and founded and edited
Ellery Queen’s Mystery
Magazine.
Seven
Edgars and a Raven attest to
Ellery’s
popularity.

However,
Ellery Queen was more knowledgeable about crime than he was about plangonology,
as the following story demonstrates. Attitudes have drastically changed since
the 1940s. What contemporary collector wouldn’t give her eyeteeth to find the
dolls in this story under her Christmas tree?

There is a law among storytellers, originally
passed by Editors at the cries (they say) of their constituents, which states
that stories about Christmas shall have Children in them. This Christmas story
is no exception; indeed, misopedists will complain that we have overdone it.
And we confess in advance that this is also a story about Dolls, and that Santa
Claus comes into it, and even a Thief; though as to this last, whoever he
was—and that was one of the questions—he was certainly not Barabbas, even
parabolically.

Another section of the statute governing
Christmas stories provides that they shall incline toward Sweetness and Light.
The first arises, of course, from the orphans and the never-souring savor of
the annual Miracle; as for Light, it will be provided at the end, as usual, by
that luminous prodigy, Ellery Queen. The reader of gloomier temper will also
find a large measure of Darkness, in the person and works of one who, at least
in Inspector Queen’s harassed view, was surely the winged Prince of that
region. His name, by the way, was not Satan, it was Comus; and this is paradox
enow, since the original Comus, as everyone knows, was the god of festive joy
and mirth, emotions not commonly associated with the Underworld. As Ellery
struggled to embrace his phantom foe, he puzzled over this
non sequitur
in vain; in vain, that is, until Nikki Porter,
no scorner of the obvious, suggested that he
might
seek the answer where any ordinary mortal
would go at once. And there, to the great man’s mortification it was indeed to
be found: On page 262b of Volume 6,
Coleb to Damasci,
of
the 175th Anniversary edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica.
A
French conjuror of that name, performing in London in the year 1789, caused his
wife to vanish from the top of a table—the very first time, it appeared, that
this feat, uxorial or otherwise, had been accomplished without the aid of
mirrors. To track his dark adversary’s
nom de nuit
to its historic lair gave Ellery his only
glint of satisfaction until that blessed moment when light burst all around him
and exorcised the darkness, Prince and all.

But this is chaos.

Our story properly begins not with our
invisible character but with our dead one.

Miss Ypson had not always been dead;
au contraire.
She had lived for seventy-eight years, for most
of them breathing hard. As her father used to remark, “She was a very active
little verb.” Miss Ypson’s father was a professor of Greek at a small
Midwestern university. He had conjugated his daughter with the rather
bewildered assistance of one of his brawnier students, an Iowa poultry heiress.

Professor Ypson was a man of distinction.
Unlike most professors of Greek, he was a Greek professor of Greek, having been
born Gerasymos Aghamos Ypsilonomon in Polykhnitos, on the island of Mytilini, “where,”
he was fond of recalling on certain occasions, “burning Sappho loved and sung”—a
quotation he found unfailingly useful in his extracurricular activities; and,
the Hellenic ideal notwithstanding, Professor Ypson believed wholeheartedly in
immoderation in all things. This hereditary and cultural background explains
the professor’s interest in fatherhood—to his wife’s chagrin, for Mr. Ypson’s
own breeding prowess was confined almost exclusively to the barnyards on which
her income was based; he held their daughter to be nothing less than a
biological miracle.

The professor’s mental processes also tended to
confuse Mrs. Ypson. She never ceased to wonder why, instead of shortening his
name to Ypson, her husband had not sensibly changed it to Jones. “My dear,” the
professor once replied, “you are an Iowa snob.”

“But nobody,” Mrs. Ypson cried, “can spell it
or pronounce it!”

“This is a cross,” murmured Professor Ypson, “which
we must bear with ypsilanti.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Ypson.

There was invariably something Sibylline about
his conversation. His favorite adjective for his wife was “ypsiliform,” a term,
he explained, which referred to the germinal spot at one of the fecundation
states in a ripening egg and which was, therefore, exquisitely à propos. Mrs.
Ypson continued to look bewildered; she died at an early age.

And the professor ran off with a Kansas City
variety girl of considerable talent, leaving his baptized chick to be reared by
an eggish relative of her mother, named Jukes.

The only time Miss Ypson heard from her father—except
when he wrote charming and erudite little notes requesting, as he termed it,
lucrum
—was in the fourth decade of his Odyssey, when
he sent her a handsome addition to her collection, a terra-cotta play doll of
Greek origin over three thousand years old which, unhappily, Miss Ypson felt duty-bound
to return to the Brooklyn museum from which it had unaccountably vanished. The
note accompanying her father’s gift had said, whimsically:
“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

There was poetry behind Miss Ypson’s dolls. At
her birth the professor, ever harmonious, signalized his devotion to fecundity
by naming her Cytherea. This proved the Olympian irony. For, it turned out, her
father’s philoprogenitiveness throbbed frustrate in her mother’s stony womb:
even though Miss Ypson interred five husbands of quite adequate vigor, she
remained infertile to the end of her days. Hence it is classically tragic to
find her, when all passion was spent, a sweet little old lady with a vague if
eager smile who, under the name of her father, pattered about a vast and
echoing New York apartment, playing enthusiastically with dolls.

In the beginning they were dolls of common
clay: a Billiken, a kewpie, a Kathe Kruse, a Patsy, a Foxy Grandpa, and so
forth. But then, as her need increased, Miss Ypson began her fierce sack of the
past.

Down into the land of Pharaoh she went for two
pieces of thin desiccated board, carved and painted and with hair of strung
beads, and legless—so that they might not run away—which any connoisseur will
tell you are the most superb specimens of ancient Egyptian paddle doll extant,
far superior to those in the British Museum, although this fact will be denied
in certain quarters.

Miss Ypson unearthed a foremother of “Letitia
Penn,” until her discovery held to be the oldest doll in America, having been
brought to Philadelphia from England in 1699 by William Penn as a gift for a
playmate of his small daughter’s. Miss Ypson’s find was a wooden-hearted “little
lady” in brocade and velvet which had been sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to the
first English child born in the New World. Since Virginia Dare had been born in
1587, not even the Smithsonian dared impugn Miss Ypson’s triumph.

On the old lady’s racks, in her plate-glass
cases, might be seen the wealth of a thousand childhoods, and some riches—for
such is the genetics of dolls—possessed by children grown. Here could be found “fashion
babies” from fourteenth-century France, sacred dolls of the Orange Free State
Fingo tribe, Satsuma paper dolls and court dolls from old Japan, beady-eyed “Kalifa”
dolls of the Egyptian Sudan, Swedish birch-bark dolls, “Katcina” dolls of the
Hopis, mammoth-tooth dolls of the Eskimos, feather dolls of the Chippewa,
tumble dolls of the ancient Chinese, Coptic bone dolls, Roman dolls dedicated
to Diana,
pantin
dolls which had been
the street toys of Parisian exquisites before Madame Guillotine swept the
boulevards, early Christian dolls in their
crèches
representing the Holy Family—to specify the
merest handful of Miss Ypson’s Briarean collection. She possessed. dolls of
pasteboard, dolls of animal skin, spool dolls, crab-claw dolls, eggshell dolls,
cornhusk dolls, rag dolls, pine-cone dolls with moss hair, stocking dolls,
dolls of
bisque,
dolls of palm leaf,
dolls of
papier-mâché,
even dolls made of seed pods. There were dolls
forty inches tall, and there were dolls so little Miss Ypson could hide them in
her gold thimble.

Cytherea Ypson’s collection bestrode the
centuries and took tribute of history. There was no greater—not the fabled
playthings of Montezuma, or Victoria’s, or Eugene Field’s; not the collection
at the Metropolitan, or the South Kensington, or the royal palace in old
Bucharest, or anywhere outside the enchantment of little girls’ dreams.

It was made of Iowan eggs and the Attic shore,
corn-fed and myrtle-clothed; and it brings us at last to Attorney John Somerset
Bondling and his visit to the Queen residence one December twenty-third not so
very long ago.

D
ECEMBER
THE TWENTY-THIRD
is
ordinarily not a good time to seek the Queens. Inspector Richard Queen likes
his Christmas old-fashioned; his turkey stuffing, for instance, calls for
twenty-two hours of overall preparation, and some of its ingredients are not
readily found at the corner grocer’s. And Ellery is a frustrated gift-wrapper.
For a month before Christmas he turns his sleuthing genius to tracking down
unusual wrapping papers, fine ribbons, and artistic stickers; and he spends the
last two days creating beauty.