The Burning Court Page 9

  “The door moved outwards; the Greuze head moved with it; and the door touched the back of the chair while the woman slipped through. Hitherto it had been the immobility of the woman which was somewhat terrifying. But now that she did move—or glided, rather—the movement was equally bad. Mrs. Henderson was scared half to death, and I don’t know that I blame her. I tried to ask her something about the door; did it have a knob, for instance? Which would have been the important thing if it were an honest secret door with a concealed spring somewhere. But she couldn’t remember. Still, she never saw the woman’s face; and the door closed. A second later it was exactly the solid wall she had known. It changed back again: that’s the only way she could express it.

  “She went over to the radio and for the first time she shut off the Ingelford Soothing Hour before its end. Then she sat down and tried to think. Finally she went up boldly to the glass door, and rapped on it, and said, ‘I’ve heard enough of the radio for tonight. Is there anything you’d like?’ And Miles sang out in a quiet voice, not angry in the least, ‘Nothing at all, thanks. Go down and get some sleep; you must be tired.’ So she took her nerve in both hands, and said: ‘Who was that in there with you? I thought I heard voices.’ He laughed and said: ‘You must be dreaming; there’s nobody in here. Run along!’ But she thought that his voice was shaky.

  “And she was, frankly, afraid to stay in the house any longer. So she ran down here. Now I’ve told you how we found Miles dying, later, at two-thirty, and the cup I found—all of it. Mrs. H. came to me next morning, still frightened, and told me the story secretly. When she learned the sort of dress Lucy had been wearing that night, she didn’t know what to think. Also, remember, she still doesn’t know Miles was poisoned. Now, with the body having vanished out of the coffin, there’s something more to show that neither of us is insane. As I say, there may be a secret door in that wall. But, unless it leads to a secret passage or something going down between the walls, where does the door lead to? That’s the back wall of the house, with the windows in it. Finally, I’m certain at least that there’s no secret passage in the crypt. There’s your problem, Part, and I’ve tried to make it as little sensational as I can. Does it mean anything to you?”

  Again there was a pause.

  “That’s the story she told me, all right,” volunteered Henderson, rocking glumly. “And, my Lord, the trouble I had with her when we had to sit up all night with Mr. Miles’s body before the funeral! She got me almost seeing things myself.”

  “Ted,” Mark spoke out, abruptly, “what’s keeping you so quiet all evening? What’s the matter with you, anyhow? You’re sitting over there like a stuffed horse; and everybody’s had a try at suggesting something except you. What do you think?”

  Stevens pulled himself together. He thought he had better show signs of interest; yes, and go over theories, if only because there was a piece of information he must have without appearing to get it. He dived after his tobacco-pouch, and polished his pipe against his wrist.

  “You asked for it,” he said, “so let’s try. Let’s take what Partington would call the only possible alternatives. Can you stand having a case made out against Lucy, as the police might do it? You understand I don’t any more believe Lucy would do such a thing than I believe that—that Marie would, for instance.” He chuckled, and Mark nodded as though the comparison took a weight off his mind.

  “Oh, I can stand it. Fire away.”

  “First, then, there’s the theory that Lucy gave him arsenic in that silver cup: and afterwards left the room by a secret door, or by some mechanism we can’t at the moment understand. Second, there’s the theory that somebody was impersonating Lucy, wearing a similar dress because she knew what Lucy wore that night; that the open chinks in the curtain were left not accidentally, but deliberately; that Mrs. Henderson was intended by the murderer to look through and see the figure of a woman with her back turned, so that afterwards she could swear it was Lucy——”

  “Ah!” said Mark. “Good!”

  “Third and last, there’s the theory that this business actually is… we won’t say supernatural, because people fight shy of the word… but un-dead and un-human and on the other side of a threshold.”

  Partington let his hand fall with a smack on the table. “You, too?”

  “No, not necessarily. I’m like Mark: I believe we ought to consider every theory even if we only demolish it. That’s to say, don’t throw out plain evidence just because its conclusion suggests something we can’t believe. So long as it remains plain evidence, that can be seen and touched and handled, treat it exactly as you would treat any other sort of evidence. Suppose Mrs. Henderson said she saw Lucy (or Edith, or any woman we know) giving Miles a poisoned cup. Then suppose she said the cup was given him by a woman dead for over two hundred years. Well, treat the actual evidence with no more or less disbelief, and do Lucy at least the justice to admit the two theories are equally incredible. If you’re talking of pure actual evidence, there’s more evidence to show this thing was supernatural than it was natural.”

  Partington regarded him with sceptical pleasantry. “The academic sophistry, eh? I feel I ought to put my feet up on the table and call for beer. Go ahead.”

  “Take the first theory,” Stevens went on. He bit the stem of his pipe; he knew that, in this rush to get things off his chest, he would have to control himself sharply so as not to say too much. But the deluge had to come out, and it steadied his voice. “Lucy is guilty, then. The objection is that she has a sound alibi. Now, she was with you all evening, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes, practically. Or with others who could swear to her identity,” said Mark, with emphasis. “That is, she couldn’t have gone away without my knowing it.”

  “Well, were you masked?”

  “Yes. That was a part of the idea; we were supposed to keep all the others guessing as to who we w—” Mark stopped suddenly, and his pale-blue eyes grew fixed.

  “When did you take off the masks?”

  “The usual time; midnight.”

  “And the poison was administered, if it was administered at all,” said Stevens, drawing lines in the air with his pipe-stem, “at fifteen minutes after eleven. And a person could go from here to St. Davids in much less than three quarters of an hour, in time for the unmasking. So the policeman in a detective story says to himself, ‘What if the woman her husband saw, and the guests at the party saw, wasn’t Lucy Despard at all; and two women in Brinvilliers dresses switched identities before the unmasking?”

  Mark sat motionless. “You asked me whether I could take it, and I’m taking it. God damn it, man, do you think I wouldn’t know my own wife, in whatever kind of masquerade? Do you think others wouldn’t know her? They were only domino-masks; they don’t fool friends to any extent. Do you think…”

  “Certainly I don’t think it,” Stevens returned, testily and truthfully. “Nor will anybody else. That’s your trump card; you could bring a dozen witnesses to show it, whereas… But I was only piling up the thing, and giving it its worst look, to show you that there’s nothing in it at its worst; and that if you only examine it without the goblins you’ll see there’s nothing in it. Don’t go down so easily under a poser. There are harder posers in this world. Besides—” He stopped with a new idea turning in his mind. If it were possible to handle it properly, it might throw dust and blame nobody: which was what he wished. “Besides, among the alternatives I’ve suggested there’s another which doesn’t seem to have occurred to us. What if there was no murder? What if the woman, supernatural or natural, had nothing whatever to do with the business, and Miles died just as the doctor said he did?”

  Partington rubbed his chin. Something seemed to be bothering him as he studied Stevens covertly; he shifted and frowned, half-amused as though at something too foolish to bring up.

  “I’d like to see it turn out that way,” Partington said. “So would all of us, I think; it would be the easiest way. But—what about the body disappearing f
rom the crypt? You can make a small bet that that’s too solid to be supernatural. Besides, you would never get the police to believe that the business of the woman with a cupful of arsenic was (a) a harmless ghost-story, or (b) a harmless prank of dressing-up.”

  “The police aren’t going to have the chance,” snapped Mark. “Let’s go on with your alternatives, Ted. Second, some one impersonating Lucy.”

  “You answer it. Who could do that?”

  “Anybody. Provided,” Mark insisted, tapping the table, “provided you can imagine it in connection with any of our ordinary, harmless, good-natured group—why, anybody. But that’s what I can’t swallow. Lucy in the role isn’t much more crazy a conception than Edith. Or Margaret, the maid. Or—” He reflected. “Here’s one thing I’ve always wondered, when I’ve read accounts of murder cases; especially about the sober, quiet, respectable little fellow who goes around for twenty years tipping his hat and paying his insurance, and then all of a sudden, without changing, he kills somebody and cuts the body up into pieces to hide it. I don’t ask what made him do it—but I’d like to know what his family and his friends think about him. Do they see any change, or blink in the eye; is he changed for them? He doesn’t wear his hat any differently; he still likes mock-turtle soup. Isn’t he still just John K. Johnson, and nothing else?”

  “You’ve answered your own question,” said Partington, grimly, “about the impossibility of thinking of any of your own crowd as a murderer.”

  “Yes, but try to be human! For instance, do you think that Edith could be a murderer?”

  Partington shrugged. “She might be. If she were, I’d cover her up, which is more than— But Edith’s out of my life now; she’s been out of it for ten years; and I can take an impersonal view. I’m trying to look at it scientifically. You and Lucy, or Edith and I, or Stevens and——”

  “Marie,” supplied Mark.

  Stevens was conscious of an uneasiness when he met Partington’s gaze, although it was free and ordinary, as of a man taking casual examples.

  “Yes, I thought I’d heard the name,” said the doctor, lightly. “What I was trying to say was, any of us, scientifically considered, might commit murder. It’s a plain fact.”

  “You could believe that,” muttered Mark, slowly, as though he were turning over a problem apart from the present, “and yet you couldn’t believe anything supernatural exists. To me it’s the first alternative that’s a staggerer. As for the supernatural, I frankly don’t know and I’m frankly inclined to doubt. But, funny thing, to me it’s more credible than seeing one of us as a murderer.”

  “Look here, let’s take the third alternative for just a second,” insisted Stevens, “even if we don’t believe it. Let’s assume that there’s something of the non-dead about it, and apply the same rules of evidence we did to the other two. …”

  “Why,” asked Mark, “do you say the ‘non-dead’?”

  Stevens stared at him, and met Mark’s bright and steady eyes of interest. He was not conscious of having made any slip of speech; yet the word slipped out naturally where it was not one he might naturally have chosen. His mind groped back: Cross’s manuscript. The story he had been reading there, attached to the photograph, had been called The Affair of the Non-Dead Mistress. Was that why it had stuck in his mind?

  “I asked,” said Mark, “because I’ve found only one other person who used the term. Funny. Most people say ghosts, or some synonym. Then there’s another class, the vampires, that in mythological lore are called the un-dead. But the ‘non-dead’! Yes, funny. I’ve come across only one other person who used that term.”

  “Who?”

  “Uncle Miles, oddly enough. It cropped up in a conversation I had with Welden a couple of years ago—you know Welden, at the College?—yes. We were sitting out in the garden one Saturday morning, and the talk had gone from gardens to galleons to ghosts, in the way it does. So far as I can remember, Welden was enumerating the various forms and types of things that go bump in the night. Up strolled Miles, looking more far-away than ever, and listened for a couple of minutes without saying anything. Then he said… it’s a long time ago, and I only remember because it sounded odd coming from Miles, who never read a book in his life… he said something like: ‘There’s one separate type you’ve forgotten, sir. That’s the non-dead.’ I said: ‘What do you mean, the non-dead, except in the sense that everything alive is non-dead? Welden’s alive, and I’m alive; but I don’t think I’m non-dead.’ Miles looked at me in a vague sort of way and said, ‘How do you know?’ Then he wandered away, Welden evidently thought he was a little bughouse, and changed the subject. I forgot all about it. But I remembered—non-dead! What does it mean? Where did you get hold of it?”

  “Oh, I came across it in a book somewhere,” growled Stevens, dismissing the subject. “We don’t want to get mixed up in a choice of words. Ghosts, if you like the term better. You said the house never had a reputation for having a ghost in it?”

  “Never.—Of course, I myself might have my own views of things that have happened here in the past; but, as Part will tell you, that’s because I’m a wild-eyed cuss who could see murder in green-apple colic.”

  “Then what the devil,” demanded Stevens, “is your link with anything wild-eyed out of the past: your link with the Marquise de Brinvilliers, for one thing? You told me tonight the family was closely associated with her. You talk about a portrait, with the face gone from acid, that’s supposed to be her. Edith doesn’t seem to like the picture, and prefers to call it ‘Madame de Montespan’ when Lucy copies the costume for a masquerade; and Mrs. Henderson doesn’t even like to say its name. What’s the connection between a murderess in the seventeenth century and the Despards in the twentieth?… Was a ‘Desprez’ one of her victims, by any chance?”

  “No,” said Mark. “Something more respectable and law-abiding than that. A Desprez caught her.”

  “Caught her?”

  “Yes. Madame de Brinvilliers had fled from Paris and the law, which was howling after her. She had taken refuge in a convent at Liège; and, so long as she stayed inside the convent, they could not take her. But clever Desprez, as a representative of the French government, found a way around that. He was a handsome dog, and Marie de Brinvilliers (as you may have read) could never resist a strutting sword and periwig. Desprez went into the convent piously disguised as a priest; he met the lady, set her a-burning for him, and then suggested that they should go outside for a little walk by the river. She went eagerly, but it was a different sort of assignation from what she had expected. Desprez whistled, and the guard closed in. Within a few hours she was on the way to Paris in a closed coach, amid an escort of cavalry. She was beheaded and burnt in 1676.” Mark paused, and began to roll a cigarette. “He was a virtuous soul who had made a thrifty and well-deserved capture of a murderess who deserved to die. He was also, to my way of thinking, a black-souled Judas just the same. … He was the honored Desprez who, five years later, came to America with Crispen and laid the first timbers of the Park. He died in 1706, and the crypt was built for him to rest his bones.”

  In the same stolid voice Stevens asked, “How did he die?”

  “Of natural causes, so far as is known. The only curious thing is that a woman, who could never afterwards be identified, appears to have visited him in his room before he died. It roused no suspicion and was probably a coincidence.”

  Partington was amused. “Now you’re going to tell us, are you, that the room he occupied was the same as your uncle Miles’s room now?”

  “No,” answered Mark gravely. “But the set of rooms he occupied then adjoined what is now Uncle Miles’s room. Access to the old Desprez’s rooms was gained through a door which was bricked-up and panelled-over when that wing of the house was burnt down about 1707.”

  … There was a sharp knock at the door of the little living-room. The door opened, and Lucy Despard walked in.

  That knock had brought Henderson’s rocking-chair skittering again
st the radio again. That knock had brought them all to their feet, for they had heard no footsteps. Lucy Despard was pale, and she seemed to have dressed hurriedly for travel.

  “So they’ve opened the crypt,” she said. “So they’ve opened the crypt.”

  Mark fumbled before he found his voice. He moved forward, making soothing gestures in the air. “It’s quite all right, Lucy,” he told her. “It’s quite all right We’ve opened the crypt. Just a little——”

  “Mark, you know it isn’t all right. Please tell me. What’s going on? Where are the police?”

  Her husband stopped, and so, in one way, did the others; everything appeared to stop except the bustling little clock on the mantelpiece. After a moment during which Stevens felt his wits thicken, Mark said:

  “Police? What police? What are you talking about?”

  “We came as soon as we could,” Lucy said, rather piteously. “There was a late train from New York, and we managed to get a late train out here. Edith will be down in a second. Mark, what’s the matter? Look here.”

  She opened her handbag, took out a telegram, and handed it to him. He read it twice before he read it aloud to the others.

  Mrs. Mark Despard,

  c/o Mrs. E. R. Leverton,

  31 East 64th St.,

  New York.

  DISCOVERY RELATING CIRCUMSTANCES MILES DESPARD’S DEATH. SUGGEST YOU RETURN HOME IMMEDIATELY.

  Brennan, Philadelphia Police Dept.

  IX

  Stevens never forgot Lucy Despard standing just inside the open door, her hand on the knob, with the great elms behind her, and the lanterns still burning on the path. Lucy’s calm, alert, good-humored face had a strength about it: it was the alertness you first noticed in the light-brown, shining eyes, with very dark lashes, which were her best feature. She was small, and rather sturdy, but with an unconscious grace; nor was she exactly a beauty, except in the attractiveness and vigor of her expression. Now she was so pale that a few freckles stood out. She wore a plain tailored suit which contrived to suggest fashion without your knowing why; there was a touch of color only in her plain close-fitting hat, and the black hair was worn low over her ears.