"What an extraordinary tale!” said Doyle. He sat on one of the padded leather library chairs, his great red head thrust forward, his heavy forearms planted on knees the size of pineapples. He shook the head a few times in amazement and then turned it toward the Great Man. “And you’re quite all right, are you?”
“Oh yes,” said the Great Man, tapping his palm lightly against his thigh. He sat opposite Doyle in another leather chair, beside my own. “I am in perfect health, as always.”
Seated, Doyle was more subdued. It was as though his age somehow caught up with him when he stopped moving, and then settled over his heavy shoulders like a shawl. “And the young woman? Miss Turner?”
“She’s fine, considering,” said Lord Bob, who sat to my right. “Resting in her room. Poor girl’s had rather a thin time of it. Disturbances last night, and then her horse ran away with her. And now this. Some filthy sod firing a bloody rifle. Can’t blame her for feeling a bit under the weather, eh?”
Beneath his white mustache, Doyle’s lips tightened. “Disturbances, you say? Last night? What sort of disturbances?”
Lord Bob waved his hand lightly. “A nightmare.”
“She believed,” said the Great Man, “that she had seen the ghost of Lord Purleigh’s ancestor.”
Doyle nodded his big head at the Great Man and said to Lord Bob, “That would be Lord Reginald?”
“Yes. My fault, I expect. Shouldn’t have told her the story. Cousin of my wife’s pried it out of me. Persistent woman.”
“But perhaps Miss Turner did see Lord Reginald.”
Lord Bob frowned, as though he didn’t want to discuss this possibility. “Irrelevant, isn’t it?” He held up a placating hand. “Sorry, Doyle, know you’re fond of all that-ghosts, spirits, et cetera. Fair enough. One man’s meat, eh? Agree to disagree, eh? But just now, seems to me, we’ve got to deal with this Chin Soo fellow.”
“I concur,” said Doyle. He sat back in his chair and I noticed a small brief wince of annoyance flicker across his mouth. Rheumatism, or arthritis, or maybe just ligament and bone that had grown wary of sudden movements. Whatever it was, he wasn’t as limber as he would’ve liked to be. Probably no one was, except the Great Man.
Doyle reached into the right-hand pocket of his coat, looked over at Lord Bob. “May I smoke?”
Lord Bob waved his hand. “Course you may.” He smiled. “A two-pipe problem, eh?”
Doyle smiled back, but wanly, as though he had heard this before, often. He pulled from the pocket a meerschaum pipe and a leather tobacco pouch. He opened the pouch and dipped the pipe into it and he glanced over at the Great Man. “When did all this begin?”
The Great Man put his arms on the arms of the chair. “One month ago,” he said. “In the city of Buffalo, in New York State. Both Chin Soo and I were performing there. I was at the Orpheum, he was at the Palace. You know, perhaps, that the vaudeville houses in America are extremely competitive these days, due to the increasing popularity of the cinemas.”
Doyle had pulled out a small box of Swan Vespa matches. He struck one alight. Nodding at the Great Man, he held the flame to the bowl of his pipe.
“Naturally,” said the Great Man, “I myself have no trouble filling a house, even in these difficult days. But for a performer of lesser magnitude, such as Chin Soo, the situation can be truly formidable. And when Houdini is playing the same town, at the same time, well, of course, the situation becomes in fact hopeless.” With a lot of puffing at the stem of his pipe, Doyle had finally gotten the thing lit. He slipped the matches back into his coat pocket and blew out a streamer of smoke. The smoke drifted across the room, smelling like smoldering burlap.
“Not surprisingly,” said the Great Man, “Chin Soo’s ticket sales were very poor. He grew desperate. He ordered his minions, common hoodlums of the street, to begin pasting his boards-his advertising posters-over my own. Naturally, to protect myself, I retaliated by having my assistants do the same to his. But interfering with my advertisements was not enough for the man. He began denouncing me on stage, before his performance, calling me a fraud, a charlatan. He went so far as to claim, in a press interview, that I had stolen my legendary coffin escape from him. Him, a mediocre trickster who had never in his life given a coffin a second thought.”
“Only fair to point out, though,” said Lord Bob to Doyle, “that the chap does catch bullets in his teeth.”
“A trick, merely,” said the Great Man. “But no matter. What then happened, I called a press conference and I revealed the truth to the assembled reporters. That it was Chin Soo who was the fraud. That the man was a liar and an incompetent. I challenged him to appear on stage with me, bringing any restraint of his own choosing-chains, handcuffs, shackles, whatever he liked-and attempt to render me captive. I would, in turn, provide a restraint of my own choosing, for him. Whoever succeeded in escaping in the least amount of time would be considered the winner. This seemed to me utterly fair-minded.”
Doyle nodded, puffing at his pipe.
The Great Man shrugged. “But naturally, Chin Soo declined the challenge. And, naturally, as a result, he was ridiculed in the newspapers. His last performance played to an empty house. Or it nearly played, I should say. When he discovered that most of the seats were unoccupied, he stormed from the stage. Typical behavior, from such an egomaniac. He left the theater and removed all his things from his rooming house. He simply disappeared.”
The Great Man paused for a moment, letting that sink in. Then he said, “That night, as I left the Orpheum by the stage door, someone attempted to shoot me.”
“Good heavens,” said Doyle, and raised his eyebrows.
“He missed me, but by a matter of inches only. My quick reflexes enabled me to dash back to the safety of the theater. The police were notified, and when they arrived I explained the situation. They immediately suspected Chin Soo, of course. But when they attempted to locate him, they learned he had gone.”
“One moment,” said Doyle, taking his pipe from his mouth. “You said earlier that no one knew what Chin Soo actually looked like, without his stage make-up. And yet he had taken lodgings. Wouldn’t the people there-the landlord, for example-wouldn’t someone have seen him as he truly appeared?”
“No,” announced the Great Man. “Before Chin Soo arrived in a city, he retained someone to engage a room for him, and pay for it in advance. Chin Soo would arrive on the date specified, but he would be wearing his make-up. No one would ever see him without it, at least wittingly.” He sniffed dismissively. “It was something he did to make himself appear fascinating. Part of his so-called mystique.”
“And you’re quite sure,” said Doyle, “that it was make-up?”
“Oh yes. No one has ever seen Chin Soo arrive in any city in which he was performing. Not by automobile, by train, or by boat. He travels undisguised. Or perhaps disguised as someone else.”
“But how-and just when, exactly-does he transform himself into his Chin Soo identity?”
The Great Man shrugged. “If he travels by means of an automobile, perhaps he changes inside it. Perhaps he uses public lavatories. Perhaps he engages some other lodgings, from which he can come and go unseen.”
“Extraordinary,” said Doyle, and shook his head. “And you’re certain that it was Chin Soo who attempted to shoot you?”
“He himself admitted as much to me. On the day after the incident, I returned to my home in New York City, and that evening he telephoned me-on my private number-and spoke with me. He used his stage voice, and he asked me whether I would like him to give me lessons in catching bullets. I told him, of course, that I needed no lessons of any kind from him. And I suggested to him that perhaps he required some lessons himself, in marksmanship.”
Doyle smiled around the pipe stem. “Good man. Giving him his own back.” He frowned slightly. “But you say he used his stage voice?”
“On stage he speaks in a singsong Oriental manner. It was in such a voice that he spoke with me.”
“And this Oriental voice is assumed, I take it?”
“Yes. He possesses, I admit, some accomplishments as a mimic. He has telephoned me several times since then, and each time he used a different voice, a different accent. A feeble attempt at wit, I suppose. But always he has made his identity clear.”
“How did he obtain your private telephone number?”
“From someone in the telephone company, no doubt. No doubt he paid bribes. I have had the number altered several times, and each time he has somehow acquired the new one.”
“And he threatened you, you say, before you went to Philadelphia?”
“Yes. That was my first appearance after the engagement in Buffalo, and it was to be my last in the United States, before I sailed for Europe. He telephoned me two days before I left, and said that he was looking forward to seeing me in Philadelphia. At my wife’s suggestion, I discussed the matter with the Philadelphia Police Department. As I told you, they attempted to capture him, and they failed.”
Doyle nodded. “And between the time you appeared in Buffalo and the time you appeared in Philadelphia, no one has seen Chin Soo?”
“No one. He had several bookings, small theaters in insignificant cities, but he canceled them all.”
“And he made no attempt to harm you while you were in New York City?”
“No. Perhaps he is aware of the esteem in which I am held there. Or perhaps he wishes to harm me only while I am on tour. Perhaps he feels that this would be more dramatic.”
“And it was at the start of the tour that you retained Mr. Beaumont’s services?”
“Correct, yes.”
Doyle turned to me and took the pipe from his mouth. “Do you have anything to add, Mr. Beaumont?”
Across the carpet, Lord Bob scowled.
“A couple of things,” I said. “First off, although Harry doesn’t agree with me, I think that maybe Chin Soo isn’t really trying to kill him.”
“We have discussed that, Phil,” said the Great Man. Suggesting that there was no point discussing it again.
“What do you mean?” Doyle asked me.
“Maybe Chin Soo is just trying to rattle Harry. Shake him up. Make him nervous, so he’ll lose his concentration on stage, botch up the performance. Bungle it.”
“Phil,” said the Great Man, “ nothing could make me lose my concentration. I have never bungled anything in my life.”
I smiled. “Like I told you, Harry, maybe Chin Soo figures there’s a first time for everything.”
Doyle said to me, “You’re basing this notion upon what? Your understanding of Chin Soo’s character?”
“Partly,” I said. “I think Chin Soo would love the idea of Harry screwing up-making a mistake. But also, Harry’s told me about this bullet-catching trick. In order to pull it off, you’ve got to know a fair amount about guns and bullets. You’ve got to be a pretty good shot yourself.”
“Just how is the trick performed?” Doyle asked me.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s Harry’s cat.” I turned to the Great Man. “He’ll have to let it out of the bag himself.”
The Great Man smiled sadly. “I regret to say, Sir Arthur, that-”
Doyle held up the palm of his hand. “I understand completely. I should never have asked.” He turned back to me, took hold of the bowl of his pipe, puffed. “You were making a point about Chin Soo’s marksmanship.”
“Yeah. He’s a good shot. But one of our ops-operatives, agents-examined that alley in Buffalo. The one where the shooting took place. Harry was standing only about fifteen feet from the spot where the gun was fired.”
Doyle nodded. “And yet Chin Soo’s bullet missed him.”
The Great Man shifted in his seat. “The alley was dark, Phil.”
“The gas lamps were lit,” I said. “Harry, you were a sitting duck, and he missed you.”
Doyle said to me, “But I understood that he did shoot a police officer in Philadelphia.”
“When the guy was trying to nab him.”
The Great Man said, “But you have no way of proving that Chin Soo wouldn’t have shot me, if I had been in the room.” He was dead set on getting shot at.
Doyle said to him, “The shot that was fired today.” He puffed at the pipe. “That missed you, as well.”
“Yes,” he said, “but it was fired from-what was it, Phil? — something like two hundred yards.”
“A hundred and fifty.”
“Still, his missing me is entirely understandable.”
“Why didn’t he fire again?” I asked him. “You were standing there and he just walked away.”
“A single-fire rifle, perhaps?” suggested Doyle.
Lord Bob said, “Filthy sod spotted me chasing after him.”
“A single-shot rifle, maybe,” I said to Doyle, and I turned to Lord Bob. “But if it wasn’t, he had plenty of time to let off another shot before you got to him. And plenty of time to shoot you, if he wanted to.” I looked at the Great Man. “And, Harry, it was a handgun he used in Buffalo. A Colt forty-five, a semi-automatic. Cops found the slug and the spent cartridge. Why didn’t he empty the whole clip into your back?”
“Phil,” he said, “as I have explained to you countless times, I moved too quickly for him to attempt a second shot.”
“Seems to me,” I said, “if he was serious, he would’ve given it another try.”
Doyle took his pipe from his mouth and narrowed his eyes and he said, “You do realize, Mr. Beaumont, that even if these speculations of yours are correct, your own position remains essentially the same.”
“Sure,” I said. “Even if he’s just trying to spook Harry, I’ve still got to stop him. He could make a slip, and kill him by mistake. But the idea that he’s trying to shake him up, not kill him, that’s the only thing that gives me a sliver of hope. Because if I buy the idea that he really wants to kill Harry, I might as well pack up and go home. There’s no way that one man can stop him.”
“And,” Doyle said, “despite your doubts, you must proceed as though the man were in fact determined to effect Houdini’s death.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s why I want to bring in the cops. Lord Purleigh and Harry disagree with me.”
Lord Bob leaned forward in his chair. “What do you think, Doyle?”
The Evening Post (continued)
Again, as I had before, I simply stood there. Sir David held the crop; I held still; so did Time.
Evy, I wish I could tell you that I drew upon some secret reservoir of courage; but in fact I was still functioning on another plane, in a dimension slightly out of step with this one, slightly behind it. I had not yet reached even the stage of disbelief. If he had hit me, I think that I should not have realized it until sometime the next day.
He didn’t hit me. He lowered the crop and grasped its ends in his hands. Slowly, the wickedness and the fury left his face. He drove them away, Evy, by an effort of will, an effort I could sense and could, from within my curious remoteness, very nearly admire. When he spoke, his voice was completely under control and laced with that familiar mocking irony. ‘A saint,’ he said lightly, ‘would turn the other cheek.’
I said, ‘A saint would have no need to.’
He reached up and touched the cheek. The marks of my fingers were stencilled bright red against the pale skin. ‘You are,’ he said, ‘a plucky young woman, Jane.’
‘And you, Sir David, are a boor.’ I said it without thinking; had I stopped to consider, had I remembered the wickedness I’d glimpsed, I should have said nothing, perhaps.
But he merely smiled again, then faintly shrugged. ‘We’ve done the introductions and exchanged the mutual appraisals. What do you say to our getting to know each other better?’
‘The others are waiting for you. May I have my crop?’
With a small bow, he presented it. He smiled. ‘We’re not finished, Jane. You know that, don’t you?’
‘They’ll be wondering why you’re late, Sir David.’
He smiled once more, looked deep into my eyes, or, rather, pretended to, and then, with another bow, turned and walked away.
And that, Evy, is the story of the fondling and the proposition.
But I do think I did that rather well, don’t you? ‘A saint would have no need to.’ Mrs Applewhite would have been proud of me, don’t you feel?
He alarmed me, though, I admit it. I saw, for a moment, the cruelty and the evil that lie beneath his surface. There is a great deal more of it, I think, than there is of surface. I wonder how many others have seen it.
But we move now from the swine to the horse. And the ghosts.
Cecily had given me directions to the stable, where a young groom saddled my mount, a gorgeous black gelding named Storm, and equipped me with a handful of sugar lumps to offer as bribes. The horse was lovely. Despite his name, and his size- above fifteen hands-he was a lamb, gentle and responsive; I scarcely used, scarcely needed, the reins. Initially, at any rate.
He and I sauntered out onto the grounds. For a while we drifted lazily along, following the footpath that ambles around the edge of the vast park of Maplewhite. Evy, how I wish I could convey to you the beauty of it all. No; not convey it; somehow present it, actually hand it over to you, physically, so that you might share it with me.
The sun was shining, gloriously. I sometimes believe that we poor English are allowed only a specific (and very small) number of bright, madly beautiful sunny days; and often it seems to me that I spent my entire allowance in childhood. Sunlight sweeps through all my early memories: streams through the lace curtains in the family parlour, dapples the rosebushes in Mrs Applewhite’s garden, rolls in from the flat blue sea at Sidmouth to wheel down that broad green ribbon of meadow along the cliff tops. But since the War, since my parents died, the days seem to have clouded over. The world has gone grey.
I speak here of meteorology, not sentiment. The weather was better then.
Today, however, was spectacular. The sky was a dome of blue, with only a few fluffy white clouds slowly sailing beneath it. Larks trilled. Thrushes and blackbirds flitted between the elms and the maples and the oaks. Squirrels scampered along the tree trunks and played hide and seek with me as I passed. To my left,
Maplewhite rose grey and stately from the lake of emerald grass, like a castle in a dream.
But dreams, in the end, must surrender to reality, and mine finally buckled under to the prickle and itch of the riding habit. Perfectly appropriate to any other day of the year, the black woollen habit hung on me this afternoon like a penitential suit of sacking. I began, as Mrs Applewhite would have put it, to glow. I began, in fact, to melt.
At the very moment that I was thanking Fortune for not flinging witnesses helter-skelter about the landscape, I saw, at some distance, two people strolling toward me on the path. I had put my spectacles in my pocket, for fear of losing them, and I couldn’t identify the two until I was nearly on top of them. They were Mr Houdini and Mr Beaumont.
In the larger scheme of things, I suppose it hardly matters that Mr Houdini and Mr Beaumont should observe my disarray. But, Evy, you know that I tend to live within the (much) smaller scheme of things; and of course it did matter. I resolved to confront the catastrophe with typical British fortitude: by denying it. This is not perspiration; this is dew.
We chatted a while, inconsequentially. Anxious to be away, I was somewhat abrupt, I suspect; but I doubt that Americans would notice this.
As soon as I was free, I made a run for the shade of the forest. Some twenty or thirty yards ahead, a small trail led off from the main path, into the trees, and I urged Storm onto it.
The smaller path hadn’t been used in some time. Our progress was slow and unpleasant. Brambles crowded in on us from either side. Spider webs as thick as shrouds stretched like great bats across the track. Gnarled muscular roots with flaking bark twisted from the earth and snaked along it.
At last we came to another, broader path in the looming forest; an ancient road, it seemed, roughly perpendicular to the track. I gave Storm-my brave unflinching mount-some sugar and then urged him to the left.
The forest was dark and silent. In light of what happened, you will claim that, now, retrospectively, I invent the silence. Forests, you will claim, are never silent, no matter what the poets say. Always, birds whistle and chirp, insects buzz and whine and whiz annoyingly about. But, truly, all I could hear was the dry whisper of Storm’s hooves as they moved through brown decaying leaves, and an occasional sharp crackle as they snapped a dead twig.
Beside the path ran a narrow brook, its water clear but tinted the colour of rust, as though some large creature had bled away its life upstream; and even the brook was soundless.
I’ve whimpered often enough about the noise and bustle of London, but I found this stillness unsettling. The trees, with their black, deformed trunks, seemed to grow taller, wider, blacker and more deformed, and to edge more closely together, and closer to the path. Overhead, the dense netting of limb and leaf seemed to grow denser. My brave unflinching mount, perhaps sensing its rider’s unease, twitched his ears and flicked his head from side to side. He whickered-nervously, I judged. I was about to turn him back, return to the comfort and safety of the manor, when I saw that, up ahead, the path opened onto a sunlit clearing. I kicked Storm lightly, and he trotted reluctantly forward.
We stopped when we reached the light. In the clearing was a pond, perhaps fifty feet across, smooth and glossy in the sunshine, but as black as a pool of tar. Grey rushes sagged along its banks.
To the right, some twenty feet away, crouched an old mill house.
It was a ruin: the grey thatched roof was torn and tufted, the grey stone walls were crumbling, the big grey wooden wheel, collapsed from its shaft, lay atilt in the murky stream, buckled and smashed.
Beneath that gaudy sun, under that taut blue canopy of sky, the ruin should have seemed quaint, rustic, picturesque. It did not. It seemed to me (and again you will claim that I invent) ominous, even sinister. The exposed ribs of the roofing, gaunt and rotting, seemed somehow grotesque. The grey stones of the disintegrating walls seemed to radiate a kind of bitter, empty cold. One got the feeling, I got the feeling, that the mill had been abandoned because of some long-ago, horrific death which took place here: some slaughter or pestilence.
I suddenly realized that this was the old mill Cecily had mentioned at dinner. The old mill where came, so she said, the two mysterious ghosts, the mother and the small boy.
I glanced to my left, and there, across the pond, was the willow tree, its pale branches draped over the black water like a woman’s hair over a basin. And there, in the shade beneath it, as real and as substantial as everything else, as real as anything I have ever seen, the two of them stood. A tall slender woman and a slender young boy.
Do you know the opening to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor? Those three abrupt notes from the organ, so swift and harsh and chill? When I saw the two figures silently standing there, exactly where they ought to be, but could not be, I felt those notes hammer through me, blood and bone, as if my spine were an organ, and some demented organist were flailing at it.
They were there, Evy. I saw them. They were there, under the willow tree, the woman and the young boy.
At first they were gazing at each other, the woman’s hand along the boy’s cheek. She was wearing white, he was wearing black. Then, as I watched, she dropped her arm and the two of them turned toward me. They gazed at me from across the glistening, pitch-black pond.
I feel that, whatever my faults, I am a woman of basically sound mind. Or so I once felt, before I arrived at Maplewhite. At any rate, my reaction, when they turned to me, was less stalwart than I should have hoped. And certainly less so than Mrs Applewhite would have demanded of me.
I panicked completely. I tugged at the reins, snapping poor Storm’s head around. As he spun about, lunging back down the path, I raked his flanks with my spurs. I whacked at him with the crop, again and again, like a maniac.
But how we raced! Storm was a marvel, swift and strong and powerful, and we thundered over the earth like some mythological beast. Trees whisked by us, the path spun away beneath. It’s been years since I’ve had a horse under me: if I hadn’t already been reeling with fear, I should have been reeling with excitement. I think that perhaps I was, even so.
I rose higher in the stirrups and turned around, to look back. This was an error. A low-hanging branch smashed into my shoulder and I toppled, buttock over bonnet, from the saddle.
I cannot remember alighting. I was unconscious for a time-I couldn’t say for how long-and then I was lying on my back and something was thumping me in the side.
Storm.
I attributed his concern, at first, to a laudable equine loyalty; but realized, when his nose nudged at me again, that he was after his sugar. I clambered to my feet and determined that I was more or less intact. No bones appeared to be broken.
The horse, big boorish brute, was still prodding me. I gave him a few lumps of his damnable sugar and then climbed stiffly back into the saddle.
Speed seemed less crucial now. No ghosts pursued me. My body throbbed all over. I let Storm walk at his own pace for a bit, and then, when we came to a path that looked as though it led back toward the manor, I eased him onto it. I didn’t see the snake until Storm reared up and nearly tossed me from the saddle again.
I haven’t the faintest idea what sort of snake it was. It was no adder, I believe, and it was perfectly harmless, and far more terrified than I.
But not more terrified than Storm. His forelegs came pounding down and he thrust his head forward and bolted up the path, muscles pumping, hooves thudding. The reins slipped from my grasp. I was only barely holding on, one arm around his wide slick neck, the other groping frantically for the reins, when we burst from dimness into sunshine and green. I realized that we were on the pathway that circled Maplewhite; and, just then, finally, I managed to snag the reins.
When I had the horse under control again, I discovered that my return to civilization had not been effected in altogether the privacy I should have preferred. Ahead of me, in an excited group by the side of the pathway, beneath a big copper beech, were Lord Purleigh, Mrs Corneille, Mr Houdini, and Mr Beaumont. And, of course, the Allardyce.
As soon as I was near enough, they all began to hurl questions at me. I couldn’t find my voice, Evy. I could only stare at them, hopelessly, and mumble.
And then, off to my left, there was a bright quick flicker of light, and a sharp explosive crack. I believed-in a kind of delirium, I suppose-that my two ghosts had stalked me all this way, followed me back to the manor, and that now they were shooting at me. And so, with the quickness of mind common to all gothic heroines, I fainted dead away.
Enough for now. My hand is cramping. I’ll post this and I’ll write again, later.
All my love, Jane