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.
6
The powers of memory exhibited by Sherlock Holmes would have been worth a whimsical monograph of the kind that only he could write. How any human being could have so encyclopaedic a recollection of so many divers facts was beyond me, and I no longer sought the answer. Once he had tried to explain it by saying that the only thing necessary was a passion for knowledge which made it impossible to forget. Then he tried to define it as a system, in which knowledge of one thing led by association to two more—and so on by geometrical progression. It seemed far simpler to accept that once his indomitable memory learnt a fact, he never forgot it.
None of this prepared me for the next day’s bombshell.
On the morning after our return from Bly, I was later than usual coming down to breakfast. Holmes was seldom an early riser and I was not surprised to see the Morning Post unopened. But his knife, fork and plate had been cleared away. Therefore he had gone out even before the paper was delivered. Once the game was afoot, as he called it, there were nights when his head hardly touched the pillow before he was up and about again.
I finished breakfast and was reading the county cricket scores in The Times. The rasp of a wheel rim against the kerb indicated that a cab had pulled up. Slow and hollow hoofbeats signalled the driver’s return to the Regent’s Park rank. I waited to hear Holmes’s key in the lock and his footsteps on the stairs, while I followed the report of yesterday’s match at Bath between Middlesex and Somerset. As time ran out—ten to make and the match to win!—Hereward Douglas had hit a stylish half century for the visiting team.