The Revenant of Thraxton Hall

CHAPTER 31 A STEP INTO THE LIGHT

“Come along,” Conan Doyle coaxed. “You’ll be quite all right, I promise.”

He and Wilde stood on either side of the phoenix steps that climbed to the front doors of Thraxton Hall. It was early on a gray morning. Dawn had yet to break. The rest of the SPR members stood assembled at the base of the steps. All attention was fixed on the shadowy threshold, where Lady Hope Thraxton lingered.

“I–I’m frightened,” she said in a tremorous voice.

Conan Doyle climbed a step toward her and held out his hand encouragingly. “Take my hand. The sun has yet to rise. I promise as a doctor that you will suffer no ill effects from the light.”

Several of the waiting Society members now called out encouragement. Agnes the maid was standing behind her mistress, hands pressed to her mouth, tears shining in her eyes. Hope Thraxton took a tentative step over the threshold and Conan Doyle guided her down to the next. A ripple of applause greeted her.

Hope shielded her eyes with one hand as she peered around uncertainly. “The world is so bright.”

“Yes,” Conan Doyle agreed. “And you make it brighter still.”

“And you have the rest of your life to explore it,” Wilde added.

Taking both their hands she stepped down until she stood between the two friends. “I can never thank you enough. You have both done so much.”

“There is one task that remains to be done your ladyship. A task that only you can perform.” Conan Doyle indicated the center of the circular drive where the gardener had stacked a bundle of branches and wooden faggots: a bonfire waiting to be lit. The three descended the steps to the fire. Something tall was set in the middle of the kindling, draped with a tarpaulin. Conan Doyle snatched it away, revealing the portrait of Lady Mariah that had hung in the entrance hall.

Conan Doyle beckoned forward Toby, the gardener, who handed him a lit taper. He, in turn, placed it in the hand of Hope Thraxton. She looked at the taper and then at the portrait, her wide violet eyes brimming with reluctance. “Oh, no! Must I really burn it? Surely not!”

He nodded. “We have destroyed the scrying mirror and every mirror in the house. There is no place left for the malevolent spirit of Mariah Thraxton to hide — no place except for the portrait. It is the last remnant of her malign presence, and I fear this house will forever be under her curse until it is destroyed.”

Oscar Wilde studied the portrait discriminatingly, tilting his large head this way and that. “I don’t know,” he mused. “I’d quite like it for my parlor. It would go well with the French sofa—” Conan Doyle silenced him with an elbow in the ribs before he could say more.

Doubt and uncertaintly swept the young woman’s face. She dropped the burning taper on the ground. “No. I cannot burn it. We are of the same blood. If she was wicked, then she was driven to it by the brutality of the age. I cannot judge her.”

“What about Madame Zhozhovsky,” Conan Doyle asked, “murdered at her behest? What of Mrs. Kragan and Seamus? Both their deaths can be laid at her feet, for Mariah’s evil poisoned their minds.” He stooped, picked up the still-burning taper, and held it out to Lady Thraxton. “It is a malevolence that must be destroyed. You must burn the portrait. Only then will you lift Mariah’s curse from the house of Thraxton.”

Lady Thraxton took the taper with a trembling hand. But as she leaned closer and extended the burning candle, a burst of foul-smelling air gusted, snuffing the flame. She gasped and looked up at Conan Doyle in fear. He snatched the taper from her hands, quickly relit it, and handed it back. But the second time she tried to light the wood, the wind gusted again and the flame went out.

“Allow me,” said Wilde. He scratched a match to life on the sole of one of his ruined two guinea shoes, paused to light a Turkish cigarette, then casually tossed the burning match into the pile of wooden faggots. The kindling had been drizzled with turpentine and lit with a dull whumph. The portrait caught fire immediately and tongues of luminous blue flame licked up the canvas.

A piercing scream shattered the morning quiet. They shrank back from the fire, hands clamped over their ears. Within moments, the bonfire was a roaring blaze, spitting and crackling. The screaming pitched to an agonized howl as the canvas blackened and buckled in its frame and the painted eyes of Mariah Thraxton burned through, releasing gouts of orange flame. A sudden whirlwind lashed the treetops of the nearby coppice, filling the air with leaves and small branches. It swept across the courtyard and centered on the fire, where it sucked the burning canvas from its frame and tumbled it in spindizzy circles above their heads. The flames greedily devoured the image of Mariah Thraxton until the last canvas tatters disintegrated in a swarm of fiery embers. The screaming abruptly ceased, and then the whirlwind moved on, snaking across the gravel drive before it whirled away across the fields.

Calm returned, just as the sun kissed the horizon, and the first rays of dawn illuminated the limestone façade of Thraxton Hall and the stunned faces of Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and the members of the Society for Psychical Research.

An hour later, several carts, traps, and a single enclosed carriage arrived to conduct the SPR members back to the Slattenmere train station. As they were loading baggage onto the carts, workmen from the village arrived toting tall ladders and began to screw tight the shutters at every window.

After a brief period of awakening, Thraxton Hall was returning to its gloomy somnolence.

“Reet, then,” Young Frank said, sliding onto the wooden seat next to Conan Doyle and Wilde. This time he had loaded the cart with Wilde’s extravagant surfeit of baggage without a single word of complaint. “Are we ready for the off?”

“One moment,” Conan Doyle said, jumping down from the cart. “I must say a final good-bye.”

He vaulted up the stone steps and plunged through the shadowy maw of the doorway. In the echoing marble entrance hall, Hope Thraxton stood waiting beneath the place where Mariah Thraxton’s portrait had once hung, the space around her visibly darkening as window shutters were banged shut, and the once-banished shadows crawled back into their old familiar places.

Conan Doyle approached her hesitantly, finding himself struck speechless: a man with too much to say and no time in which to say it. But she spoke first. “I must thank you again. You have saved me.”

“I am happy to hear you say that.” His face lost composure as he grappled with his emotions. “I… you know I am not free. I am a married man. But my wife is… one day… in the near future…”

She touched two fingers to his lips to shush him. “I know what is in your heart. But you must live your life as it happens; do not yearn for a tomorrow that even a medium cannot predict.”

At her words, all his pent-up feelings released. He dropped his head in a nod of surrender. When he had gained control of himself again, he quietly asked, “After you come into your inheritance, will you remain at Thraxton Hall?”

Hope’s eyelashes fluttered. A tear fell to the marble floor. “Where else can I go?”

“You could close the house. Move to London.”

She wiped away another tear and laughed bitterly. “Why? You know of my condition. It matters little where I reside. One darkness is much the same as another.”

“But in London you could have friends. Receive guests. Perhaps… perhaps I could visit—”

She interrupted before he could finish. “I have looked into your future, Arthur. You shall find love… but not with me.”

“Can you be so sure? As you once said, even to a medium the future is a glass swept by clouds and darkness.”

She flashed a smile of broken melancholy. “Then let us believe that we shall meet again someday.”

He swallowed the knot tightening in his throat. When he spoke again, his voice was ragged. “You must come to London. You must. I despair to think of you living alone in this place that has known so much unhappiness.”

“No.” She shook her head resignedly. “I must remain in Thraxton Hall and keep company with its ghosts… until I become one.”

“I will not say good-bye. Just farewell.”

She took his hand. “You will fare well, Arthur Conan Doyle. You are a good man, brave and kind and deserving of love. You will.”

He clasped her small hand between both of his, not willing to let go. And then, with a wrench that tore him all the way to his soul, Conan Doyle drew his hands from hers and turned to walk away. As he stepped through the door of Thraxton Hall into a dazzle of morning light, he turned to look back a final time. Hope Thraxton remained in the shadowy entrance hall, but now there was a small figure standing beside her, holding her hand — a young girl in a bright blue dress.

Before they set off, Henry Sidgwick insisted they all take a vow of secrecy, promising to never reveal the events that had transpired to protect the name of a great English family. Conan Doyle thought of his Casebook and the astonishing revelations he would never be able to share with the world — at least, during his lifetime.

The two friends rode side by side on the front seat of Frank Carter’s wagon. Lost in his own thoughts, Conan Doyle said little during the journey. Even Oscar Wilde was uncharacteristically quiet.

As the wagon reached the gnarled hanging tree at Gallows Hill, they found a ragged-tailed crow lying dead in the road in a sprawl of wings, its black claws curled around nothing.

At the sight, both friends exchanged a wordless look that spoke volumes.