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!”