Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

9

Several floors above the river and the Victoria Embankment there is a plain green-walled office at Scotland Yard. When it is in use, a uniformed constable stands outside its door to prevent interruptions. Few sounds are overheard from within, except occasional rage or weeping. The walls are lined by plain wooden cupboards. A hat-rack stands by the door. At the centre is a wooden office table, with three upright chairs on each side and one at either end. At the quarters of every hour, the boom of Big Ben echoes like a funeral drum from the nearby Houses of Parliament.

Tobias Gregson sat at one end of this table. To his right, Holmes and I were side by side. Opposite us was Miss Shelley. A police matron accompanied her, sworn to silence by the Official Secrets Act of 1889.

The chair that Miss Shelley occupied had accommodated Dr Neill Cream the Lambeth Poisoner, Oscar Wilde at the time of his downfall and more recently Ada Chard the baby farmer. Even Montague Drewitt had sat there, the man whom the late Commissioner, Sir Melville Macnaughton, swore to Holmes and me was “Jack the Ripper” but could never quite prove it. To me, this plain official room had a far more sinister ambience than all the haunted landscapes of Bly.

Miss Shelley had not yet asked for an attorney to represent her. Gregson had not charged her and so perhaps she hoped that she did not need one. Perhaps she did not even know that she was entitled to one. She must have hoped that, once the matter of her name was cleared up, she would be free to go. Too soon she realised her mistake but, all the same, the inspector got nowhere with his questions. Our suspect no longer denied that she was Maria Jessel but she did not admit to anything else.

During a pause, Holmes broke in upon the interrogation.

“I fear you are not cut out to be a criminal, Miss Jessel, let alone an accessory to murder,” he said sympathetically.

“I have no idea what you mean, sir.”

“Have you not? You face arrest and detention, perhaps much worse. What will become of your child in that case? Please do not shake your head at me, madam. We know you have a child.”

I knew no such thing—nor, to judge from his expression, did Gregson.

“I do not understand you, sir,” she insisted, “I have nothing to do with you. I do not know why I am here. I certainly do not know why you are!”

Holmes became her friend.

“Come, now! While you were governess at Bly you became the mistress of Major James Mordaunt, did you not? It is not an uncommon thing between a young governess and an unmarried employer. There may even be a prospect of marriage. After some months, however, it became inconveniently evident that you were carrying a child. The prospect faded.”

She lowered her eyes but still shook her head.

“The truth is best,” Holmes said coaxingly, “What better solution was there than to tell Mrs Grose you were going home for a long holiday—and then let it be known, through your employer himself, that you had died during this absence? Believe me, it is a common enough subterfuge resorted to by young women in such a predicament.”

He had taken a terrible gamble in jumping to this conclusion. Yet the expression on her face convinced me he had hit the answer at his first shot. She shook her head again, but he went on in the same quiet voice.

“The story of your death would satisfy Mrs Grose—and she in turn was bound by a promise that the other servants were not to be told for fear it would upset them. She would not question the truth of the report, if her master did not. So now that the two children are dead and Mrs Grose has gone to live with her son in Wales you might even return with Major Mordaunt to Bly—unless he has other plans for you. If there were a few people who had heard a mere rumour of your death, and if they chanced to see you now, they would simply know that such tittle-tattle could not have been true.”

She kept her face lowered, pressing her handkerchief to her mouth. Holmes sighed.

“You would be perfectly safe to the end of your life, unless questions were asked. Unfortunately, even a novice criminal investigator would go first to Somerset House to find your death certificate. There is none, is there?”

She stared at him, visibly paler, eyes reddened. My friend continued.

“What there is, however, is a birth certificate. It registers a male child, Charles Alfred Jessel, born several months after your departure from Bly. He is Jessel on the certificate and his mother’s name is Maria Shelley Jessel. His father’s name and occupation are blank. James Mordaunt did not think enough of you to give your child his name. Is that it?”

How I pitied her! Her teeth were clenched on the hem of the handkerchief, as if she might tear it! But then she looked up fiercely—and her silence broke.

“I do not want his name!”

“Do not? Or did not?” Holmes asked gently, “Think carefully, I beg you. The difference may be the thickness of a hangman’s rope.”

“Did not!” she burst out, “James Mordaunt had gained power over me. He had got my child, not I. It was put away where neither he nor I might see it. Those were his terms.”

“Because it was not his child, was it?” Holmes suggested coaxingly, and once again my heart missed a beat at this dangerous leap in the dark. But I saw from her expression that he had hit the bull’s-eye twice in a row. His voice softened. “Mordaunt would not take you from Bly to live with him in Eaton Place, so long as there was this reminder of another man under his roof.”

It was so simple! The secret love of James Mordaunt for Maria Jessel was as dead as the two children of Bly. Yet some other man’s child remained the means by which he still commanded Miss Jessel’s obedience.

In the next half-hour we heard how Charles Alfred had been sent to a nursery school in Yorkshire, if baby farms for unwanted children can be called nurseries. Paid for by money drawn from the Bly estate, James Mordaunt kept it out of sight and mind at this private institution It was an establishment founded at Greta Bridge by William Shaw, twice sued by parents after children had gone blind from infection and gross neglect. Little Charles Alfred remained there, in pawn for his mother’s obedient behaviour.

I took my chance.

“Do you tell us, Miss Jessel, that Mordaunt had such a hold over your affections that you would consent to this dreadful thing for your child?”

“I think not, Watson,” Holmes interrupted gently, as our suspect began to weep. “Neither affection nor passion holds them now. Fear of discovery is the bond.”

He turned to her again.

“You had best tell us, Miss Jessel, what happened on the night that you—or more probably Major Mordaunt—killed Peter Quint at Bly House. That is to say when the father of your child, then still unborn, was killed.”

He could not be certain of so much! He seemed like the gamester who risks one throw too many because his feral instinct senses a winning streak.

She looked up in tears, her hair straggling a little, and Holmes resumed.

“Was it the jealousy of your two lovers—servant and master—that caused the quarrel?” The pitiless voice was hardly more than audible. “Was it Mordaunt’s discovery that you were carrying Quint’s child—or was it something more? Did Quint strike you, for some reason, and did Mordaunt then deal him a murderous blow in return—across the skull with a blunt instrument? You left Bly for your so-called holiday a day or two later, did you not, wearing a convenient travelling veil to hide a swollen mouth or a bruised cheek?”

There was no reply, only a relentless sobbing.

“Peter Quint was a brute,” Holmes continued quietly. “Did you perhaps strike in your own defence? You are not powerfully built, Miss Jessel, but even you might catch him from behind while he was sitting in a chair. Even you are strong enough to smash a poker down on his head. If one blow did not do it, you dared not let him recover and strike back. Blow must follow blow. Quint was a powerful man. He could kill you and your unborn child with a stroke of his arm or a swing of his boot. You had no alternative but to repeat those blows with force enough to cause that dreadful wound. Such a wound as might be mistaken for a flying impact against a stone parapet! To strike again and again for fear he should live and retaliate!”

At that instant, Holmes illustrated such violence by bringing his fist down on the table with a reverberating impact and Maria Jessel cried out, “No! Oh, no!”

But all sympathy had drained from my friend’s voice.

“To carry him to the bridge that winter night offered a desperate escape. But you could not have lifted him. Mordaunt could. I have examined the inquest papers, the photograph of the body where it lay. Your hobble-de-hoy country coroner saw simply what he expected to see. I know rather more of blood and fatal wounds—and I have read the medical evidence. Peter Quint bled too little, even on a winter night, to have died at the bridge. The dead do not bleed as freely as the living—and he had almost stopped before he was placed there. I could prove, if I had to, that he lost too little blood at that place—even in the ice and cold.”

“No!”

What did this denial mean? That Quint’s body was not carried to the bridge or that she was not involved in his death?

“Oh yes, madam,” Holmes persisted. “He was killed elsewhere and laid in the freezing darkness to be discovered next day when the medical evidence would be less clear. A man with medical knowledge, well within the competence of Surgeon-Major Mordaunt, could easily assist in misleading the coroner.”

Our poor butterfly was pinned and wriggling.

“Quint walked back to Bly that evening,” Holmes continued quietly. “At Bly he died from a blow—or blows—to the head, dealt by one or both of you. Mordaunt, let us say, carried or drove the body to the bridge. It would be frozen by morning. The correct time of death would be judged from when he left the inn. He was a drunkard who appeared to have died a drunkard’s death. Why go further? If he died at the bridge, you and Major Mordaunt were both safely at Bly House when it happened.”

He did not hurry her. At last she looked up.

“James Mordaunt,” she said. “I could not do it! I had not the strength.”

Her tears had stopped with the suddenness of fright, but her face was as wild-eyed as a fury of Greek tragedy.

Holmes was gentle with her again.

“I believe you did not do it, Miss Jessel. I believe I could prove that, if you will help me. But I can do nothing until I know why you assisted Major Mordaunt to drive Miss Temple almost out of her mind.”

In these three sentences her persecutor offered to become her champion and lit the way through her despair. She looked at him uncertainly and then burst out:

“I did not want to harm Miss Temple! Why should I? But Quint had told secrets to little Miles. Secrets that James Mordaunt assured me might destroy us both, if they went further. The little boy betrayed them innocently when he said things at school. We did not know this when Miss Temple first came and Miles was still at King Alfred’s. But we could not risk what he might say to her if she remained.”

In similar words, Spencer-Smith recalled how Miles “said things” to the other children.

“Secrets about the evil eye and the selling of souls, perhaps? Crime and criminals? Power over others?”

She nodded without looking up.

“The boy worshipped Quint like a father.”

“Go on, please.”

“Such secrets would destroy us, if ever Miles was questioned about them!”

I saw my friend take a breath before his next question, as if the croupier’s wheel was spinning once more.

“Destroy you and Major Mordaunt?”

She answered with her eyes and now I saw the whole truth, even before she told it. Maria Jessel was calmer. She addressed Holmes in a quiet monotone.

“If Miles believed that Quint was dead, James Mordaunt feared the boy might not hesitate to tell the man’s secrets. But Miles would do nothing to hurt Quint if the man might be alive in some form. If we could make the boy and his sister believe that Quint and the dead governess could somehow linger at Bly.” She dropped her voice to a whisper, “Even as ghosts. Miles loved tales of terror, as children do. He believed all that Quint had told him.”

Inspector Gregson intervened cautiously.

“Did Major Mordaunt suggest to you that if the secret of Quint’s murder was known, he would hang for his crime and you as his accomplice? Is that what it comes to?”

She looked at Holmes, as if for authority to answer. He gave a single nod.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “He suggested that threat to me—only once.”

“So Peter Quint and you, the dead governess, must appear at a convenient distance?” I asked. “Upon a tower or across a lake?”

“Half a moment,” said Gregson, lifting his hand. “The boy would know the difference between Quint and his uncle in disguise, even at a distance.”

“Of course,” said Holmes casually, “and that is why Miles was never to see him, except possibly once at the window of a tower in the dark. Miss Temple was to identify him, with Mrs Grose’s assistance. Major Mordaunt could carry off an impersonation for the benefit of Miss Temple, who had never seen Quint himself. The same build, the same clothes, the hair-piece of unusual red and the whiskers. For good measure, Flora saw the real Miss Jessel and knew she could not be mistaken. If Miles Mordaunt truly believed in the powers of darkness, then from all he heard he must have thought his prayers had been answered.”

“Apparitions?” Gregson asked anxiously.

“Only Miss Temple was to see apparitions of both the so-called Quint and Miss Jessel. If Mrs Grose confirmed the descriptions, there was powerful temptation for Miles to believe. Small wonder that the children talked excitedly together of little else but hauntings. They no doubt compared secrets about the two friends whom they must protect, even in death. We cannot be sure that it was Mordaunt whom Miss Temple had seen at the solicitor’s office. She had never met him otherwise.”

So much for ghosts!

“The timing fits,” I said hastily, “There were no apparitions in the first months of Miss Temple’s residence at Bly. They began only after Miles had been expelled from King Alfred’s for his story of the Fifth Stone. With all his poisonous nonsense about devilry and fraud, the boy was a perfect victim for deception.”

Holmes turned again to the prisoner.

“Tell us, Miss Jessel!”

She spoke clearly but quietly, as though still in a state of shock.

“Once or twice James Mordaunt went to Bly on his own after Miss Temple came there. I do not know why or what he did there. He took me three times, after Miles was sent home from school. I had not been there otherwise since I left to have my child. Twice we slipped across to the island. I was to stand where Miss Temple should see me. I did not expect Mrs Grose to be with her but I moved back, out of her view.”

“And Flora was there?”

“James Mordaunt knew she would be sure to tell Miles. When I was governess, the island had been a special place for the master and me. Once we had taken the boat, no one else could cross and surprise us together. There is an old pavilion. They call it the Temple of Proserpine. We used to go there secretly when I was at Bly. After I left, he was always kind when we went back there, kind as he used to be. Kind for several days afterwards. He was different there, as if he knew it was his home.”

“And if you had refused to act your part in this masquerade?”

“If I did not behave sensibly, as he called it, the story of Peter Quint’s death would come out in the end. He could easily escape to France, Spain, even to South America. He had the money. I should be left behind. What he asked of me was not much. I need only make Miss Temple believe his nonsense and leave us alone. I had no idea he might kill Peter Quint. I knew nothing of the Five Stones until after that. I was only to help him create a story of a poor mad governess and Miles, her besotted little admirer.”

Gregson’s expression suggested that much of this was double-Dutch to him. With the curiosity of a medical man, however, there was one question I must ask.

“What of the Sunday? When Miss Temple came back early from church? What happened then?”

“It was an accident. We went early from Abbots Langley, on our way to Cambridge, to fetch some papers from his tower room, while all the people were at church. He came to me in the schoolroom when he saw Miss Temple walking back. He said that we should give her an experience she would never forget. It would keep her nose out of our business, that was the expression he used. If I heard her on the staircase, I must simply step through a narrow door at the far end of the schoolroom. The tower steps lie beyond. That was to be our escape. He went out to look again and then returned.”

Holmes intervened.

“Did Mordaunt have anything in his hands when he came back to the schoolroom?”

She sounded surprised that he should know.

“Why, yes. He was holding a mirror, four or five inches across, from his Army days in India. He showed it to me once before. It was what he called a field heliostat. I presume he kept it with his other souvenirs.”

“A square, plain-glass signal-mirror, in other words,” said Holmes approvingly. “From the Himalayas such a device has been known to flash Morse code messages as far as sixty miles. Small wonder if it blinded Miss Temple like a migraine, even in mild October sun!”

“He had not planned it,” she said, “but when the opportunity came he knew just what to do. That Sunday was like a day in summer. From behind the lace curtain that screened the oriel balcony where he waited, he caught the sun in the glass—he had been trained to do that—and shone it directly into her face. It almost blinded her but not before she caught a glimpse of me. I heard her cry out, ‘You terrible woman!’ or something of the kind. She was fumbling or stumbling. There was a bump. Perhaps she fell, but I had gone out through the low doorway to the tower steps. I did not see what happened.”

Big Ben began to toll ten o’clock. Gregson had been patient during all this. Now he leant forward to our prisoner.

“Well, miss, act sensibly and you may have the means of getting free from this brute. But as Mr Holmes says, you must help us and you must do it quick-sharp. Tell us straight. Why should Mordaunt want Miles to believe in Quint’s ghost?”

The look of exasperation in Holmes’s eyes at the inspector’s intervention is beyond description.

“To shut the boy’s mouth!” he said impatiently. “Peter Quint turned to robbery—after he left the Army and before Major Mordaunt picked him up from the gutter and made him his valet. Is that not so, Miss Jessel? Quint was the Fifth Stone in the most important of your unsolved robberies and murders. Gossip has it there were five robbers to match the Five Stones. Evidence suggests there was one—Peter Quint. Robber and killer!”

Gregson glanced at Miss Jessel and then stared at Holmes again.

“How could a boy of ten know all this?”

Holmes glanced at his watch and then at the inspector.

“Quint treated him like a comrade in arms. It flattered the valet to entertain this child with stories of women and crime. Miles grew proud of the only man who seemed like a father to him. In a drunken or foolhardy moment, Quint boasted in some way of the Five Stones robbery. Soon after that Miles went to school. Boys of his age love to brag of their fathers. He showed off what Quint had taught him—selling his soul, the trick with the dice, the evil eye. He even talked of drowning his prim young governess because Quint said such kittens should be killed before they became cats. In the end Miles embroidered this tale of his friend by naming him as the Fifth Stone, but not as Quint. In revenge for some fancied ill-treatment, he also cast his abhorrent housemaster, Mair Loftus, as the gang’s receiver who changed the stolen gold coins for bank-notes.”

“The story of a major robbery told in masquerade,” said Gregson softly. “Then the receiver of the gold was not Mair Loftus, was he, Mr Holmes? He was our man James Mordaunt!”

To look at Maria Jessel just then was once again to know the answer.

Before Holmes could reply, there was a knock at the door. A uniformed constable entered and presented a blue police telegram to Tobias Gregson. The inspector read it and then looked across the table at the police matron.

“Remove the prisoner!”

When Maria Jessel rose, it was obvious that she was shaking. She lost her footing as she crossed to the door but the matron’s arm steadied her.

Gregson handed the form to Holmes. For my benefit, the inspector explained.

“When we arrived here, Dr Watson, I wired a request to the Royal Mail inspectors. Any communication sent to Major Mordaunt of Eaton Place to be delivered but its contents to be reported to me. After what she heard at the séance, I rather expected Miss Jessel would slip a message to her friend. She might care nothing for him, but his danger was just as much hers. This was despatched by telephone from Sambourne Avenue shortly before we detained her. To Major Mordaunt. ’The Fifth Stone is known. Cross at once. I will follow. Watch for me on the other side.’”

Holmes beamed at him.

“Cross at once, indeed!” Gregson said with satisfaction, “Watch for me on the other side! I shall wire every police-post at every cross-channel port. He fancies himself safe on the Continent, does Major Mordaunt. But not a man shall leave for France nor the Hook of Holland tonight without giving an account of himself. I fancy we shall have him, Mr Holmes!”

Holmes stared at him.

“Well done, Gregson! You are ahead of the game this time and no mistake. I prophesy there will be no stopping you!”

Even Gregson caught the irony in this. He looked as if he did not quite know how to reply.

“Of course, you do not know what your man looks like by now,” Holmes continued cheerfully, “but do not let that discourage you. Suppose him to be thick set with mutton-chop whiskers and piercing eyes, or something of that kind. You will have him the minute he tries to book his passage.”

Before I could intervene, there came a second knock at the door. It was the young uniformed constable again, looking far more flustered than before and short of breath.

“Telephone call to your office, Mr Gregson. Compliments of duty inspector, Belgravia. A gunshot was fired in Eaton Place five minutes ago. No report of injuries but no further information. A service revolver by the sound of it.”