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.”