Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

5

Our cab still waited in the gravelled courtyard. A woman of sixty or so was talking to the driver. Holmes had dressed formally for this visit and he now doffed his black silk hat.

“Good afternoon, madam. You are Mrs Grose, I believe? I am Sherlock Holmes and this is my colleague Dr John Watson. We arrived a little early and have been admiring the glories of your garden. The penstemon, the tea-roses, the agapanthus, the sedum and sweet peas are charming. Your tiger lilies are splendid and your cedar trees are a glory.”

Blushing with pleasure, she dropped a half-curtsey. Mrs Grose was a comfortable figure in dark grey dress and white cap. Her face had filled out with age, but the grey wide-set eyes and handsome features suggested that she had been a “stunner” in her youth. A comfortably furnished room was set apart for her on the first floor. Presently we stood in its window, looking down on the geometry of the garden.

“What is on the island at the end of the lake, Mrs Grose?” I inquired

She chuckled.

“Not much, sir! Mostly covered in trees and bushes now. So overgrown you’d very likely hitch a foot and break an ankle. There was a summer house, so called. Hard to see it for the overgrowth now. What the man Quint called the temple of Pros-er pine. Whatever that may be!”

“Pro-ser-pine,” said Holmes pedantically. “The goddess of hell.”

She pursed her lips.

“Well he should know, Mr Holmes, because that’s where he is now. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say.”

Our hostess shivered but continued her explanation.

“Master Mordaunt, father to Mr Charles and Mr James, built it as a pleasure pavilion, when he came home from Asia. Fitted it up with chairs and cushions, even a piano of sorts that went out in sections on a cattle raft. In those days, they had music and lanterns on summer evenings. But they tired of it all even before the father died. With Mr Charles in India it was left to rot. Then Mr James did nothing to it but wouldn’t have it touched, though it had gone so shabby and the raft might have cleared it. I daresay he had some plan of his own.”

Mrs Grose put a certain emphasis on this last remark. I guessed the housekeeper and I were thinking of the same plan. Two lovers naked together in perfect safety, as they could never quite be in the house itself. Once the major had taken the only boat to the island, there would be no spies and no interruptions.

“Tell me, Mrs Grose,” said Holmes quietly, “are the stone sheds in use at this end of the lake? They appear abandoned, which seems a waste.”

“They want taking down and clearing away likewise,” she said with a knowing smile. “All the tools were moved last winter when they built the new kitchen garden to the other side of the house. Major Mordaunt was spoken to about it but he had no more interest than his brother used to have. They’ll fall down before they’re took down. You can’t run a house like Bly with an absentee master, sir. And that’s what both brothers have been.”

With that, it seemed she had been as indiscreet as she was prepared to be. As we sat down, a silver tray was brought in by a maid. She studied Holmes and me as eagerly as if we were exhibits in a zoo.

Mrs Grose poured tea and said, “Master James being in France, as is usual with him in spring, I took on myself to receive you gentlemen here. He hates being bothered and I know as much about the place as he does. Anything that attracted sightseers would be disagreeable to him. If Miss Temple’s visions became gossip, we might have folk coming to stand and stare, when summer’s here.”

“And Major Mordaunt would not care for that,” Holmes said firmly.

“I should think not!” She looked at him as if they were sharing a joke. Then she became solemn. “To be fair, though, when Miss Temple was in trouble, he did everything for her. He was away in Paris at the time but he never begrudged a penny of what it cost to save her from prison—or worse. Still, he’d rather those ghosts should be delusions of her poor frightened mind than horrors for the world and its wife to come tripping after.”

“And Miss Temple?” I inquired.

Her pause told me that she disliked this question more than the ghosts.

“Of course, sir, we all hope she’ll be well again and they’ll set her free.”

Holmes listened, his left thumb under his chin and two fingers curled across his mouth. Then he lowered his hand and took the tea-cup. “What about you, Mrs Grose? You are not a believer in apparitions?”

She put down the pot and spoke carefully.

“Not exactly, sir. But I was by the lake with Miss Temple and Miss Flora, the second time Miss Jessel was supposed to appear. The little girl had gone ahead of us. Perhaps she unhitched the boat and rowed to where we found her. She was alone. The boat was almost out of sight, tied to the fence where it comes down to the water.”

Holmes nodded, saying, “Miss Temple described seeing Miss Jessel on the far bank, beyond the Middle Deep. On the island. Flora, I believe, was positive she saw no one. You neither saw nor noticed anything?”

“Saw? No, sir. Noticed? It felt for that moment as if the world had stopped. As if you might look at your watch five minutes later and find the time just the same as when it all began. Everything motionless. Just like the figure of Miss Jessel herself was said to be.”

“How long did this last?”

She looked at him awkwardly.

“That’s just it, sir. I couldn’t say.”

“Of course not,” he said courteously. “And what else?”

“Looking at Miss Temple, I’d take my oath she saw something. Or perhaps she only thought she saw it, but she was not making up a story. Like when she saw Quint at the dining-room window, just before evening church. I never saw anyone then but I was afraid without knowing why. Even Miss Temple said I was white as if I’d seen a ghost myself.”

“Was she afraid of these apparitions?”

“Angry, more like.”

“And you were there with the children present?”

“Only when Miss Flora was with us by the lake. Just once.”

“Of course,” said Holmes kindly. “Flora was there, before you and Miss Temple. We shall never know what may have passed between her and the vision of Miss Jessel before you both arrived.”

“Something happened to that child, Mr Holmes, while the world was so quiet and still. Something she was glad of. I stood to one side but Flora was with Miss Temple. And Miss Temple was pointing her to look across to where there was a gap between the bushes on the far bank. I couldn’t see because of a rhododendron bush immediately beside me.”

She paused, glancing towards the window with the garden view beyond, recalling her thoughts. Then she spoke firmly.

“Miss Flora vowed she never saw anything. But I know children. That child was too upset for nothing to have happened. She clung to my skirts, crying to be taken from her hateful governess! When we were alone together the poor little mite told me horrors. What she heard Miss Temple had said and done at other times. How Miss Temple was in league with the dead, if you please! You may be sure she got that from Master Miles and his loose talk. And she talked scandal of Miss Temple misbehaving with the master! How could she when he was in France? But that child’s words shocked me, sir. I can’t think where she picked them up, not even from her brother.”

Holmes nodded, as if all this was to be expected. To me, such talk of a league with the dead reeked of Miles Mordaunt.

“After the incident at the lake, you took the same route back?” I asked.

“We did.”

“And you passed the boat which the little girl had moored there?”

Mrs Grose stiffened, as if caught in an untruth.

“No, sir. We went through the gate in the fence but the boat had gone. Most likely, Master Miles took it while we were further on. It’s a little thing, convenient to handle.”

Holmes returned to his ghosts.

“At other times, did Miss Temple herself think the children behaved as if they had seen Maria Jessel or Peter Quint, even though she had not?”

She looked from one to the other of us.

“I know children! These two were up to some mischief or other. I’d catch them whispering and laughing together. They’d smile at us, as if they knew what we were thinking. As if saying they’d have their way with us and nothing we could do would prevent it.”

It was almost exactly what Victoria Temple had said to us. Perhaps she had got it from Mrs Grose.

“But, so far as you know,” Holmes asked, “they did not misbehave behind your backs?”

She looked a little awkward.

“I never told Miss Temple, Dr Watson. They used to creep after her, making a noise, sniggering and mewling. But she’d look round and they’d just be sitting there with their books or games, good as gold. As soon as she looked away they’d start again It was as if they wanted to make her think there might be an animal hidden close by. As if it might be calling for her.”

I thought of Quint’s policy of drowning kittens so that they should not grow into cats, and my spine tingled. Perhaps sensing something of this, Mrs Grose added, “It was nothing to Miss Temple, sir. She never condescended to notice it.”

Without thinking sufficiently, I asked a question that sounded ill-judged as soon as it was spoken.

“If it was ever necessary to drown unwanted kittens on the estate, would Miles have been allowed to do it?”

Mrs Grose gave a soft, surprised laugh.

“Bless you, sir, no! A child? Never!”

“Who then?”

“If ever it came …” She paused. “Quint the handyman. Who else?”

That was the last thing I wanted to hear.

“And the boy might be there with him?”

“There was no reason for it.”

“But he might let the boy be there as a special favour?” I persisted.

I caught her sudden realisation, quickly masked by a grimace of distaste.

“Oh,” she said awkwardly, “it might happen. Anything like that might happen.”

Holmes interrupted.

“What did the children talk of between themselves? Did you ever overhear them?”

She shook her head.

“Miss Temple swore they talked of horrors, hearing the voices of the damned. She only saw visions of Quint and Miss Jessel, but the children might hear their voices as well. Just as a dog or a cat can hear sounds a man can’t.”

I had blundered a moment ago and now I must intervene on behalf of common sense.

“Suppose that there were no ghosts, Mrs Grose. Suppose the two figures were common intruders, as Miss Temple first thought. Could they not stand where she could see them but you could not? Could not trespassers reach the places where she saw them, without being challenged?”

The cautious soul reckoned this up. Then she replied.

“Anyone can come up the drive or over the meadow. They might be seen and asked their business—or not. Keeping to the path through Bly woods, they need not be seen.”

“And indoors?”

“Miss Temple told me she thought she saw Quint and Miss Jessel on the stairs in the dark. But without a candle she’d never see who was below her. And they’d be gone before she could get down there.”

“And the garden tower?”

“The first time she saw Quint he was on the tower. An intruder might get there through the house. The wooden stairs badly want mending, have done for ages. But no one goes up there, so no one bothers. And no one locks the doors by day. Except for Miss Temple and the children, there’d hardly be anyone about when the servants were below stairs. We’d only be upstairs to lay fires, make beds, polish furniture and the like. And serve dinner, of course.”

Holmes intervened courteously.

“On a Sunday morning in November, Miss Temple came home early from church. She thought she was alone in the house and went into the schoolroom. Miss Jessel was standing at the far end by her desk. Miss Temple recalls shouting, ‘You terrible, miserable woman!’ In an instant the figure dissolved to dust in a beam of sunlight. Our friend lost all sense of where she was until she came to herself a moment later. The same loss of consciousness occurred when Miles died in her arms.”

“I think she had what they call ‘drops,’ Mr Holmes. It was spoken about by doctors at her trial. But you know that already, sir. More than that I can’t tell you.”

Time was pressing and I was determined to hunt out the evil genius.

“What of our other ghost, Peter Quint? Why did no one like him?”

She wrinkled her brow.

“He was low, doctor. Low and mean. Too free with the maidservants. Much too free with Miss Jessel—and she with him. Too free with the boy, worst of all. Major Mordaunt was squire while his brother was in India. But the major was seldom here. He gave his valet the run of Bly. I’ve seen Quint, with my own eyes, wearing smart clothes or fancy links and chains that I knew to be his master’s. He went like a gentleman in stolen clothes to be handy with the parlourmaids or village girls. Even a little piece where his hair was gone at the front. Call that a gentleman!”

“And his dealings with the children?”

“He never came near Miss Flora. I saw to that. Master Miles was God’s angel, until Quint came here. That fellow taught him to talk to women.”

She paused as if I had not caught her true meaning.

“To talk to women like a man, not a child” she insisted. “A boy of eight or nine, if you please! Quint taught him things a boy shouldn’t know until he’s a man.”

“And what of Miles’s dismissal from school?” my friend interposed.

“Whatever wickedness the child took to school, sir, he got it from Quint. He was in that man’s company from breakfast to dinner!”

“And Major Mordaunt? Did he not know the boy was dismissed from school?”

“That was a bad business, Mr Holmes. Major Mordaunt should never have acted as he did. The headmaster wrote to him that Miles was dismissed. When the major saw Dr Clarke’s writing on the envelope, he never opened it. He sent it on to Miss Temple with a note saying the headmaster was a bore. She was to deal with it, whatever it was. Probably school fees owing. She could arrange that with the lawyers. He was just off to France, if you please!”

“So he did not know that the boy had been dismissed?”

“Not then, sir. Of course, Miss Temple wrote to tell him. Then to cap it all, as we found out too late, Miles used to open her letters to the master while they were lying on the hall-stand here to be posted. He read this one and destroyed it. I once heard him say outright that he wouldn’t have a servant-girl—that’s what he called her!—sneaking to his uncle. Before the major got wind of all that had happened, the poor child was in his coffin.”

“Thank you,” said Holmes encouragingly. “Now, if I may impose on you for the last time, how did Peter Quint die?”

Her face reflected an aversion to this repetition of the man’s name.

“Miles was still away at school. Miss Jessel was here as governess to Miss Flora. I shan’t forget that night. Quint used to come out of the village inn, always the worse for drink. It was a winter midnight with the roads like glass. He must have come a real cropper on the ice. In the darkness he came down with a proper smash. Went flying into the wall of the little bridge that crosses the stream and cut his head open on the stone-work. That lane leads nowhere but up to Bly House. So he was only found next morning. The blood from his wound had frozen and he was dead.”

“There was an inquest?”

“Of course. What could it say? Accidental death.”

Holmes’s eyes suggested it might have said a good deal more.

“And by then Quint had corrupted the boy?”

Mrs Grose stared at him, straight and hard, as if prepared to reveal something she had kept locked in her heart.

“That man was a fountainhead of corruption, Mr Holmes!” The good woman paused, self-conscious at such a chapel-preacher’s phrase. Then she continued. “I may not have seen the ghosts, Mr Holmes, but as soon as Miss Temple described the figure on the tower, I knew who it was. Dead or alive! His eyes were the worst. He caught yours and never let them go. His were hard as jet and black as hell. You couldn’t wait to look away and give him the satisfaction of staring you out!”

Holmes nodded again.

“And what of Quint’s conduct with Miles Mordaunt?”

“He acted like the boy’s tutor more than a valet. If Master Miles was bad at King Alfred’s, Quint made him bad before the child ever went there. Miss Temple thought the boy an angel, even though he came back in disgrace. Quint was dead by then, of course. She told me both children had an unnatural beauty, an unnatural goodness. Something from another world. But I heard Master Miles tell her once that he was bad. Then he laughed at her, as if he was telling her there was nothing she could do about it. He was the master—her master.”

“Very well,” said Holmes patiently. “How was Miles bad when Quint was still here?”

“I warned the boy that he was a gentleman’s son and not to put himself under a menial. And what do you think? Miles turned round on me and swore Quint was a gentleman. Quint had been a soldier. Quint knew something of the world. I was the ‘menial,’ if you please, the scullery-maid. That was the very word he used to me—this boy of eight or nine, as he was then! After that he lied and was impudent—and Quint protected him. I could do nothing with him. That’s how he came to be sent to King Alfred’s. To make him knuckle under.”

“And when he came back in disgrace?”

“He was worse! He got his way with Miss Temple by smiles and bossing. As Quint would have done. As if Quint was whispering to him, dead or alive. He courted his governess, this child, like a grown man. He had Quint’s way with women. What was it he called her one day, talking to me? Words I don’t just recall, Mr Holmes, but they gave me a shudder.”

“Indeed,” said my friend indulgently.

The sunlight moved from the lawn and cedar tree at the side of the house. Mrs Grose seemed about to tell us something we should not care for.

“I would not harm Miss Temple, sir, but I must speak the truth.”

“The truth will not harm her, Mrs Grose.”

“The foolishness was on both sides, sir. If Master Miles courted her like a grown man, she behaved like his obedient sweetheart. He could do what he liked with her and she would forgive him. She never seemed sure of herself with him. Out of her depth, you might say.”

“You need not fear that it will damage her case, Mrs Grose,” said Holmes quietly. But he showed no inclination to inquire further.

I recalled Dr Annesley mentioning Miles Mordaunt’s boast of “spooning” with his young governess. I had felt uneasy, though reassured on meeting her. The fragile emotional balance of this young woman had been the sport of predatory children—as well as of her own “ghosts” in her imagination. Why did the little ones taunt her with their mewling of cats behind her back? Why had the boy boasted falsely to his cronies at school of having drowned his governess? Why were kittens to be drowned before they could grow into cats? Thanks to Holmes, I had read a little of the new psychopathology. Professor Krafft-Ebing would surely diagnose psychopathy in the mind of this child. A boy dreamed of murder giving him a power over women, which his lack of manhood still denied him in any other form.

Our time was almost up and I roused myself from contemplating worse horrors than any so-called ghost. There were questions I must ask, as a medical man.

“Mrs Grose, will you tell me about the deaths of the children?”

She nodded calmly. No doubt she had been questioned at the time.

“Flora was taken ill in London?” I prompted her.

“A week or so after the upset by the lake, I took the poor little soul to her mother’s sister, Lady Camerton in London, away from Bly and its ghosts. But at Apsley Square the child grew feverish. Two days later an infection began in her throat and lungs. She was moved to the fever hospital. Then it became full-blown diphtheria. We thought she got it in London or travelling there. Now it seems both children probably caught it from the same source of infected water. The major wanted the best for her. But, most of all, he had wanted Miles kept away from Flora’s illness.”

“You returned alone to Bly from London soon after the little girl died?”

“And Master Miles was gone by then. What a dreadful business that was! But they never thought of diphtheria in his case for there was no time. It was Miss Temple who smothered him in her madness. I grieve for her but it must be she who did it.”

“Can you be sure?” Holmes asked.

“Until the post-mortem they never knew diphtheria was in him—just feverishness. He’d had lung fever at school and thrown it off. He could have thrown off this. What happened that last day, I can only tell you as it was told to me. Master Miles was a little poorly but quite well enough to come downstairs. That counted against Miss Temple at her trial. They even talked of which new school he might go to.”

“And the rest,” Holmes interposed, “is in Miss Temple’s journal.”

“So I understand, sir. They were in the dining-room talking of another school, when she saw Quint at the window. Just as she did before Evensong a few weeks earlier. She tried to stop Miles seeing that evil man. She was strong as a field-girl, governess or not. She held him tight, felt his pulse race with fear. He was white as chalk and cold sweat running from him. So I was told.”

Holmes kept his eyes on his notes as Mrs Grose continued. Then he said, “She says that she seized him and felt his heart flutter, not that he gasped for breath. She tells us his face looked ravaged by those eyes glaring through the glass. She too felt sick and faint. At the window was a spectre of damnation. She fought with that demon for the child’s soul.”

The poor woman lowered her head and there were tears in her reply.

“Perhaps she fought the evil beyond the glass—but more the evil in the child, for evil there was. If the boy died for want of breath, I swear she could not know it. And when she went under, in her faint, she thought she heard Miles cry out, ‘Peter Quint—you devil!’ Who did he mean was the devil—she or Quint? Either way, she held him tighter to protect him. Better he should die in her arms, I suppose she thought, than go to damnation with Quint. But when she came to herself, that devil had gone and the child’s soul with him.”

After a moment’s respite, Holmes spoke again.

“It grieves me, Mrs Grose, that we can bring you so little comfort. But let there be justice for Victoria Temple.”

“I hope so, sir. This has been an unlucky house. Masters and mistresses coming to grief. You’d never think it on a sunny afternoon like this. Sir Guy Mordaunt hanging from the cedar tree after his young wife’s death. Harry Varley the poacher swimming the lake by night. The weed in the Middle Deep got his legs and held him, the poor fellow jumping like a trout for air but always pulled back, until he could jump no more,”

“You may depend on it, Mrs Grose, that I shall do all in my power to set Miss Temple free. When we meet again, I hope she will be with us.”

The poor woman looked a little flustered.

“I don’t think you’ll see me again, sir. The house will be shut up in a day or two. There’s only me, the maid and the agent’s man at the gate-house.”

“Then where will you go?” I asked politely.

She brightened at this.

“To my son. At Cwm Nant Hir, the valley of the long river, a sheep farm, among the mountains of Wales. I won’t miss Bly without the children.”

At seven that evening we joined the London express. In the restaurant car, after dinner, two glasses of brandy stood before us. Holmes sighed.

“What would Professor Sidgwick and the Society for Psychical Research make of all this?”

“What the Court of Criminal Appeal may think is surely more to the point.”

Trailing white smoke and steam across ripening cornfields, we rushed towards a slim gothic spire against a darkening sky.

“Odd that diphtheria was ignored by the defence,” Holmes continued thoughtfully, “with the threat of a wilful murder verdict still possible.”

“Diphtheria could not have gone far enough to cause death on its own. It merely weakened the child and made suffocation that much easier. That is all.”

He brooded on this for a moment, his lean profile reflected in the darkened window of the carriage. Then he brightened up.

“As always, we must bow to the evidence. I shall attend Somerset House tomorrow morning, to view the death certificate of Miles Mordaunt. I believe we must test your presumption that diphtheria could not have gone far enough to kill him on its own.”

It was dark across the marshes. The bright, square illumination of the carriage windows flashed on hedgerows and embankments as we thundered into the night.