Holmes took the master’s hand again.
“You have been most generous with your time and advice, sir.”
“If poor Miss Temple is innocently condemned, I am at your service.”
We made our way down the narrow corridor and the staircase. Our ancient cab, spattered from the local lanes, was waiting for us. My friend said nothing until we were sitting in a compartment of the London train and the low-lying Somerset pastureland, still water-logged from spring rains, was slipping past our window. At length he spoke.
“Mr Spencer-Smith has all the trappings of the schoolmaster, does he not, Watson? A man among boys but a boy among men. I fear he and Miss Temple have told us all that they are likely to tell. By-the-by, did you observe a curious detail at the end of our conversation this afternoon?”
“What was that?”
“Major Mordaunt preferred that his nephew should be taught by a governess at Bly, rather than educated at one of our great schools, which Spencer-Smith’s offer would have made possible.”
“It was too soon after the boy’s dismissal. It would have come in time.”
Holmes relaxed.
“I wonder. Then that leaves only Bly as the key to the puzzle, perhaps in the hands of the worthy housekeeper, Mrs Grose. I fear we must return to Miss Temple’s ghosts.”
Two passengers took seats within earshot. He drew his silver cigarette case from an inner pocket. Then he opened a slim mathematical treatise on the enigma of the Riemann hypothesis and spent the rest of the journey to London in a cloud of meditation.
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.