Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

4

None of this persuaded me to believe in Victoria Temple’s “apparitions.” She was an honest witness, but I had treated too many hysterics and neurotics in twenty years of medical practice to regard such visitations as anything but a disturbance of troubled minds. Like Scrooge in his dream, I would dismiss a nocturnal ghost as nothing but a piece of undigested cheese.

Yet if any place could persuade me of hauntings, I suppose it would be the landscape of Bly. Even the governess’s journal of her six months’ residence had not prepared me for its air of the remote and the abandoned. Where the ghosts were said to have walked, we were warned that several wooden steps inside the garden tower were now missing. We soon saw for ourselves that the lakeside structures were in decay. A sense of isolation was pervasive. Yet the railway line with restaurant cars and morning newspapers was only five miles away across the fields. There was a village just a mile off and several nearby farms to the north-west.

Our carriage turned from the country lane into a gravelled drive, running over flat pasture through an avenue of tall lime trees. After the traffic and street cries of London, this seemed like the last place on earth. The housekeeper, housemaid, dairywoman, groom and gardener had done nothing but keep the place tidy for the absentee Major James Mordaunt. But his interest in it had long withered. He had no taste for riding to hounds or weekend parties. Bly’s empty rooms, dark corridors and crooked staircases, its stables and yew-tree walks, needed a family complete with attendants. Without them, it was dead.

The house had been built three centuries ago for some Elizabethan Master-in-Chancery or Baron of the Exchequer. Its first owners had been too occupied in the London courts to come down here often. Bays of leaded windows rose handsomely from lawn to rooftop. Yet the prison-grey stone, enclosing its gravelled forecourt, looked no better than cement rendering. This plain front and tall chimneys gave it a barrack-like appearance.

Sherlock Holmes left our driver and strode to a wrought-iron gate leading to the territory of the apparitions: the gardens, lakes and terraces at the rear of the house. Here the dead had “materialised” in full daylight.

The grounds were a pleasant contrast to the dreary front. Their wide lawns were particularly fine. The first was set with oval vase-shaped yew trees, regular as pieces on a chess-board. Beyond it, over the drop of a ha-ha, a broad meadow lay picturesquely detailed beside a willow vale of river trees. Cattle grazed or rested in the shade of ancient oaks.

All that remained of Miss Temple’s drama was a child’s swing, hanging disused from the canopy of a great cedar tree. A rusted garden roller stood under the boughs of a beech, as if pushed to that point and abandoned for ever. Poignant symbols of two young lives brought to an untimely end! Thankfully, they were not evidence that the cursed spirits of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel now held the children’s souls in pawn.

According to Miss Temple’s journal, that evil pair manifested themselves on the top of the tower and across the lake. Here they had beckoned the children to destruction, through the gates of hell. Even to catch oneself thinking like this showed the effect of the place on a rational mind.

The lawns and the alleys behind the house ran down to a long ornamental lake, the chief feature of the grounds. A small river fed its waters, controlled by a bank and an iron sluice at the far end. The banks were shaded by ash and sycamore, beech and oak. Level with the rippling surface, stretches of tall rhododendrons in purple bloom trailed their tendrils and scattered their petals among the shallows. Through gaps in the trees, the hills of summer shimmered in a sunlit distance.

This placid lake was large enough to have an island with a dilapidated garden pavilion among its trees. Much of the shimmering surface of the water was covered by clusters of cream water-lilies, some in masses twenty feet across. They looked treacherously like a planting that might support an unwary footfall. Silence and stillness were broken only by a dance of yellow hover-flies in the warmth of the May afternoon.

Despite my scepticism, I recognised our governess’s account of the quietness which accompanied her visions. Clouds hung motionless as a stage-set against blue sky. Hardly a falling leaf or a breath of air marked the passing of that calm afternoon.

What a perfect place to fabricate a haunting! What effect must these surroundings have had on a young woman’s morbidly nervous temperament! Suppose Maria Jessel or Peter Quint now stepped out before us from the trees on the far bank, a hundred yards away. We were too far off to interrogate them or even to describe them in detail. They would have time to fade—or more probably tiptoe off-stage—before we could reach them.

Holmes paused. From where we now stood Miss Temple had twice seen a handsome young woman, waiting motionless in shabby mourning. My companion interrupted my thoughts.

“I believe, Watson, we may allow ourselves a circuit of the lake. It cannot be more than a mile.”

I drew my watch from my waistcoat pocket.

“And what of our engagement to take tea with Mrs Grose?”

He waved this away

“As I intended, we have almost an hour in hand. It will be easier to absent ourselves now than later. I should prefer to examine the shore of the lake by full daylight.”

It proved impossible to follow the water’s edge at all points. Where rampant overgrowths of tall rhododendrons in luscious bloom prevented this, the footpath took an inland detour for a hundred yards or so. To a photographer or an artist, the view across the water to the far bank might be charming. To me it still remained a place strangely without sound or movement.

Within the hour we came full circle. Our walk ended at a small overgrown area of the bank, boarded over in part as a makeshift landing-stage and otherwise surrendered to weeds. A wooden cradle several feet long supported a delicately-built rowing-boat. It had lost much of its white paint, though its interior looked sound and dry. I doubted whether it had been launched for some months, perhaps not since Miles Mordaunt took Miss Temple “spooning.” A stake driven into the shallows at an angle trailed a filament of thin rope, but nothing had been moored there recently.

Holmes broke the silence.

“If Miss Temple is correct in her supposition, Flora rowed alone to the point from which Miss Jessel was seen. When the governess and housekeeper walked back with the child, the boat had gone. The ghostly Miss Jessel cannot have taken it, for she was on the other side of the water. Who then?”

“Miles Mordaunt,” I said caustically. “No doubt the young master had wearied of practising Beethoven’s minuet! The whole thing is nonsense.”

And yet the gardens of Bly House still affected me. Why? I caught myself wondering whether children may not after all be the victims or agents of evil spirits—living rather than dead. Ghosts do not impress me, but I am readily convinced of the existence of human depravity, pitiless and all-devouring in its malice. If you were to argue that such evil influences may somehow survive the death of the body, I would listen with an open mind.

But if Miss Temple truly experienced a vision, reason suggested that she alone was the target. Why else did these alleged apparitions confront her when the children were not present—from the garden tower on a summer evening, at the dining-room window by November lamplight, perhaps even indoors? I looked at my watch again and was cross with my thoughts. Even to think in this way was a sign of reason yielding to tomfoolery.

At one side of the alleys and borders, stretching from the rear of the house to the lake, dusty brick walls divided smaller gardens into a series of enclosures, almost like large open-air rooms. Each enclave of trim grass, pink tea-roses and trailing plants concealed a gardener’s store, or a tool-room, or a potting-shed. The structures themselves were abandoned. The potting-shed contained only a scattering of brown leaves and a few pieces of parched earthenware. The spades and jars had gone from the hooks and shelves of the gardener’s store, leaving only two fruit-boxes of broken wood.

Holmes examined each forlorn outbuilding until he stood finally at the door of the tool-room with its brick lintel, walls of stone and flint and slate roof. I waited, turning my back and ostentatiously admiring a rough-stone pillar with a figured rustic vase of the seventeenth century on its summit.

Holmes said, “Keep watch for a moment, there’s a good fellow.”

There was no one to be seen in any direction. How should there be? He took the handle of the tool-room door and turned it. This time it was locked fast. Had it opened, I believe he would have lost all interest. The need to lock this shed when all of the others were open naturally stimulated his curiosity. He opened his pocketknife and inserted the point of the smallest blade into the keyhole. I tactfully studied the tiger-lilies and agapanthus, enjoying the warmth of the spring sun on my back. Presently I heard a snick of metal and the door of the stone shed creaked open.

“How intriguing, Watson! Tell me what you make of this.”

I walked across. The shed had a square small-paned window at its far end. The shelves on either side were bare. On one wall a pair of brackets held two light oars or sculls. It was impossible to be certain but, from the webs strung about them, I should not have thought they had been used for some time.

“Locking one shed which is empty, while leaving the others open,” he said to himself, “Not a profound mystery but inviting a question. Why?”

“Hardly a mystery at all!”

“Then let us call it merely the charm of the inconsistent,” he said with a smile.

He began to inspect the dusty and cobwebbed interior surfaces. The roof-space had been tightly boarded to provide a ceiling below the slates. He stretched up, doubled his fist and thumped the planking. I heard nothing but a faint reverberation of the wood. The stained and dusty glass of the little panes looked out directly at the lake. He took his reading-lens from his pocket and examined closely the corners and edges of the small glass squares with their mad erratic dance of little flies bred by the sun.

There was nothing here for us. He opened his knife again and turned round.

“And now, Watson, we must be on our way or we shall find our hostess waiting.”

We stepped outside and he used the knife blade once again to lock the door behind us.

As we crossed the lawns in silence I thought that the gardens had allowed my friend very little opportunity of putting on one of his erudite performances. He rather liked to begin a visit with something of the kind, like a tenor exercising his larynx before the rise of the curtain. As it was, we left the territory of the apparitions behind us and turned to the homely prospect of afternoon tea.