Those sapphire eyes were a bit wild and I thought she might leap up and run away. Out the door, maybe out the window.
She didn’t. The eyes closed and she took another deep breath. She set her mouth in a firm straight line. Then she opened her eyes and looked over at Mrs. Corneille, who was pouring brandy into another snifter. With only a thin ribbon of strain left in her voice, she said, “I feel as though I’ve been pestering people and making a fool of myself all weekend.”
She was a real surprise, Miss Turner. A stronger woman than she seemed.
“Not at all,” said Mrs. Corneille. She set down the botde and carried the snifter over to Miss Turner. She had left the dagger beside the brandy bottle on the sideboard. “Only a fool,” she said, “can actually make a fool of herself.”
Miss Turner smiled with a kind of tentative irony. “Perhaps that’s why I’ve succeeded so well.”
“Nonsense,” said Mrs. Corneille. “Here you are. Have a big swallow now.”
“Thank you,” said Miss Turner. Her right hand was unsteady and the brandy shivered against the curved walls of the glass. She put both hands around the snifter and raised it to her mouth and she took a swallow that would’ve done Lord Bob proud. She sat back and closed her eyes and screwed up her face.
Mrs. Corneille smiled. “You needn t swallow like that again. Unless you want to, of course. I’ll fetch a chair.
I stood, but she waved me back down. She stepped over to a spindly wooden desk, lifted the spindly wooden chair from beneath it, carried it over to us and placed it a few feet from Miss Turner.
She picked up the two brandy snifters from the end table, leaned around Miss Turner to hand me mine, and then she sat down, her back straight. “Now,” she said to Miss Turner. “Do you feel better?”
Her lower lip caught between her teeth, Miss Turner had been staring at the snifter on her lap as though there were a message floating across the surface of the brandy. She looked up at Mrs. Corneille. “Yes,” she said. Her voice was small. “I think I do. Thank you.”
“Not at all. Now. You must tell us all about it.”
Miss Turner moved her shoulders in a frail shrug. She smiled hopelessly. “I’m not at all sure where to begin, really.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Corneille. “We tried starting in the middle and that didn’t work terribly well. At the risk of sounding obvious, why don’t we try starting at the beginning. Why did you go to the Earl’s room?”
Miss Turner took another swallow of brandy. “Because of something Madame Sosostris said. At the seance.” She looked at me.
I smiled and I nodded. That was supposed to encourage her. “Madame Sosostris?” said Mrs. Corneille.
“Yes. She was talking about the Earl-she was Running Bear then, do you remember?”
“Yes?”
“She was Running Bear-playing the part, I mean-and she was talking about the Earl. She said that the Earl felt guilty now, because he’d imposed his sick desires on an innocent young woman. He felt tortured about it, she said. Well, it occurred to me that I was the woman Madame Sosostris meant.”
Mrs. Corneille smiled as though she hadn’t really followed all that. “You?”
“Yes,” said Miss Turner. She leaned toward Mrs. Corneille. “Don’t you see? The ghost. Lord Reginald. The ghost that came to my room last night. That was no ghost. It was the Earl.” She looked at me. I remembered to smile and nod some more.
Mrs. Corneille glanced at me and then looked back at Miss Turner. “But Jane,” she said. “The Earl was bedridden. Paralyzed.” “Yes,” said Miss Turner, nodding, excited now, “that’s what I told myself. But then I thought, what if he weren’t? What if he were only shamming? He knows Maplewhite. He’s lived here all his life. It would’ve been so easy for him to sneak into my room, and then run out again, while I was behaving like an hysterical schoolgirl. He could’ve slipped right past Mrs. Allardyce. It takes her forever to wake up.”
I said, “Mrs. Allardyce said she woke up when you screamed the first time.”
Miss Turner shook her head. “But that’s not possible. He had to run past her, in order to leave the room. I’m sure he must have done. I’ve been going over it tonight, trying to remember.”
“You told me,” I said, “that you weren’t sleeping when it all happened.”
“No.” She drank some brandy. “I was just lying there, in the darkness. And then, as I told you, I heard a sound, a sort of clicking noise, and I rolled over and switched on the light. And he was standing there. At the foot of the bed. Wearing an old nightgown. He had long white hair and a long white beard-I mentioned
that, didn’t I?”
I nodded. “And you screamed?”
“No,” she said. “No, not then. I think I was too frightened. To do anything, really. And then he…” Her eyelashes fluttered. “And then he did something. And said something.”
So she hadn’t told me the truth before, or all of it. “Did what?”
I asked. “Said what?”
She took another deep breath, and I got the feeling that she was steeling herself to get through this. It was the same feeling I’d gotten this afternoon, when she thanked me in the hallway.
But she didn’t talk to me this time. She turned to Mrs. Corneille. “He pulled up his nightgown,” she said, her voice flat and deliberate, “and raised it to his stomach. He was… naked. And he said”-she swallowed-“he said, ‘Want a nice little piece of this, dearie?’ ”
She was trying to be cool and detached, but the skin of her face had gone pink. I hadn’t noticed before, but it was very nice skin. It was a very nice face.
Mrs. Corneille frowned, looked at me, looked back at Miss Turner. “You honestly believe that the Earl of Axminster did that?”
“Yes,” said Miss Turner, leaning toward her over the brandy snifter, as if trying to convince her by intensity alone. “It must have been the Earl.”
“Okay,” I said. “What happened then?”
She swallowed again and sat back. “He made a move toward me, as if he were going to climb onto the bed. He was still holding up his nightgown. That was when I screamed. I screamed once, and he stopped moving. He seemed rather alarmed himself, actually.”
She smiled faintly. “In a different context, I suppose, it might have been almost comical. He dropped his nightgown and he looked around the room as though he were afraid that someone had heard me. And then I screamed again and I snatched up a pillow and threw it at him. Then I rolled off the bed, to the floor.” She took a breath. “I don’t know what I was thinking to do down there-simply trying to get away, I expect. I scrambled across the carpet to the wall. And then I turned around, and he was gone. Vanished. I pulled myself up from the floor and I looked all around and I couldn’t see him. That was when I ran into the other room. The-Mrs. Allardyce was just getting out of bed.”
“So there was time,” I said, “for the ghost, or whoever, to get past her.”
“There must’ve been,” she told me. She looked back at Mrs. Corneille. “Don’t you see? It was the Earl.”
“Jane,” said Mrs. Corneille, and her voice was kind. “You said at breakfast this morning that you’d dreamed the ghost.”
Miss Turner shook her head. “I was embarrassed. And confused.
I didn’t want to believe that I’d actually seen… what I’d seen. She turned to me. “You suggested as much, when I saw you on the lawn this afternoon. You said that I sounded as though I were trying to persuade myself. And you were right.”
“But Jane,” said Mrs. Corneille, “do I understand you correctly? Are you saying that the Earl’s ghost is actually feeling guilty about this attack on you, and that somehow that Spirit Guide of Madame Sosostris-”