He finally turned in at a trim little cottage with a doll’s-house drive, got out, and reluctantly went up to the front door. It opened to his knock immediately, as if she had been lying in wait for him. He had half wished she would not be at home.
“Deborah Osbourne Spain,” he said, looking down at her. “Hello.”
She was very old, of course; she must be in her late 80s, according to his calculations. The manuscript had not given her age on the day Holmes and Watson visited Shires Castle, except in approximate figures. She could be 90.
Like so many very old ladies, especially the tiny plumpish ones, there was a slightly withered-apple look to her, with the bloom still touching her cheeks. Her bosom was large for her size, and fallen, as if tired of its weight. Only her eyes were young. They were bright, and direct, and they twinkled in spite of themselves.
“Do come in, Mr. Queen.”
“Could you make it Ellery, Mrs. Spain?”
“It is something I have never quite become accustomed to,” she said, ushering him into a cozy little parlor, as mid-Victorian as Victoria’s bustle, Ellery thought. It was like stepping into 19th Century England. “I mean, the American habit of instant familiarity. However―take that Morris chair, Ellery―if you wish.”
“I wish.” He sat down and looked about. “I see you’ve kept the faith.”
She seated herself in a ducal chair, in which she looked lost. “What else does an ancient Englishwoman have?” she asked with a faint smile. “I know―I sound disgustingly Anglophilic. But it’s so difficult to get away from one’s beginnings. Actually, I’m quite comfortable here. And a visit to New Rochelle once in a while to see Rachel’s roses rounds out my existence.”
“Rachel was the one.”
“Oh, yes. At my request.”
“Miss Hager is related to you how, exactly?”
“My granddaughter. Shall we have tea?”
“Not just now, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Spain,” said Ellery. “I’m too chockful of questions. But first.” He sat on the edge of the chair, avoiding the lace antimacassar. “You saw him. You met them both. Holmes. Watson. How I envy you!”
Deborah Osbourne Spain’s eyes looked far into the past. “It was so very long ago. But of course I remember them. Mr. Holmes’s glance, sharp as a sword. And so reserved. When I put my hand in his, I’m sure it disconcerted him. But he was very sweet. They were both such gentlemen. That above all. In those days, Ellery, being a gentleman was important. Of course, I was a little girl, and I recall them as giants, towering to the sky. As I suppose they were, in a way.”
“May I ask how you came by the manuscript?”
“After Dr. Watson wrote it, the journal was turned over by Mr. Holmes to the Osbourne estate. It became the responsibility of the estate’s solicitor, bless him! He was so faithful to my interests. Then, after I was grown, and shortly before he died, he told me about the manuscript. I begged for it, and he sent it to me. His name was Dobbs, Alfred Dobbs. I think of him so often.”
“Why did you wait so long, Mrs. Spain, before doing what you did?”
“Please. Everyone calls me Grandma Deborah. Won’t you?”
“Grandma Deborah it shall be.”
“I don’t know why I waited so long,” the old lady said. “The idea of asking an expert to verify my conviction never crystallized in my mind, although I am sure it has been there for a long time. Lately, a feeling that there is a need to hurry has come over me. How much longer can I live? And I should like to die in peace.”
The implicit plea moved Ellery to her aid. “Your decision to send me the manuscript came from the manuscript itself, I take it?”
“Yes. Afterwards, Mr. Ames confided in Rachel about the hunt you sent him on.”
“Grant’s searching accomplished an end, though not the one I expected,” Ellery smiled.
“Bless him! Bless them both. I know he gave you no help, Ellery. I also knew you would find me, just as Mr. Holmes had no difficulty in tracing the owner of the surgeon’s kit. But I’m still curious as to how you did it.”
“It was elementary, Grandma Deborah. It was obvious from the first that the sender had some personal interest in the case. So I put a call through to a friend of mine, a genealogist. He had no trouble tracing you from Shires Castle, as a child, to the custody of the San Francisco branch of the family. I had the names of Grant’s four young ladies, and I was sure one of the names would pop up somewhere. From your marriage to Barney Spain in 1906 my expert got to the marriage of your daughter. And, lo and behold, the man your daughter married was named Hager. Q.E.D.” His smile became a look of concern. “You’re tired. We can put this off for another time.”
“Oh, no! I’m fine.” The young eyes pleaded. “He was a wonderful man, my father. Kind, gentle. He was not a monster. He was not!”
“You’re sure you don’t want to lie down?”
“No, no. Not until you’ve told me…”
“Then lie back in your chair, Grandma. Relax. And I’ll talk.”
Ellery took the withered old hand in his, and he talked against the ticking of the grandfather i clock in the corner., its pendulum, like a mechanical finger, wiping the seconds off the face of time.
The little frail hand in Ellery’s squeezed at irregular intervals. Then it stopped squeezing, and lay in Ellery’s hand like an autumn leaf.
After a while, there was a movement of the portieres at the archway to the parlor, and a middle-aged woman appeared, wearing a white housedress.
“She’s fallen asleep,” Ellery whispered.
He carefully laid the old hand on her breast and tiptoed from the room.
The woman accompanied him to the door. “I’m Susan Bates. I take care of her. She falls asleep like that more and more.”
Ellery nodded and left the cottage and got into his car and drove back to Manhattan, feeling very tired himself. Even old.
The Ripper Case Journal
Final Note
January 12, 1908
Holmes vexes me. I confess, because he was out of England for an extended period, that I took it upon myself, against his wish, to put my notes for the Jack the Ripper case into narrative form. Twenty years have now passed. For nine of these, a new heir, a distant relation, has borne the Shires title. One, I might add, who spends but a fraction of his time in England, and cares little for either the title or its illustrious history.
I had come to feel, however, that it was high time the world was informed of the truth about the Ripper case, which held an equally illustrious place―if that is the word!―in the history of crime, and about Holmes’s struggle to end the monster’s bloody reign in Whitechapel.
On Holmes’s return from abroad, I broached this to him, expressing myself in the most persuasive terms I could muster. But he is adamant in his refusal.
“No, no, Watson, let the bones lie mouldering. The world would be no richer from the publication of the story.”
“But, Holmes! All this work―”
“I am sorry, Watson. But that is my last word in the matter.”
“Then,” said I, with ill-concealed annoyance, “allow me to present you with the manuscript. Perhaps you will find use for the paper as pipe-lighters.”
“I am honoured, Watson, and touched,” said he, most cheerfully. “In return, allow me to present you with the details of a little matter I have just brought to a successful conclusion. You may apply to it your undeniable flair for melodrama, and submit it to your publishers without delay. It has to do with a South American sailing-man, who came very close to duping a European financial syndicate with a genuine roc’s-egg. Perhaps The Case of the Peruvian Sinbad will in some measure assuage your disappointment.”