Oh dear.
It’s the weather, Evy. Another day hot and sultry, and the sweetness of the sunlight sprawling across the green lawn. Everyone else has gone to Sunday services and I'm writing this out of doors, on the patio beside the conservatory. Squirrels are leaping about, and so, I fear, is my fancy.
Whatever the explanation, there was Mr Beaumont looking dark and rather dashing in his dinner jacket (and trousers, etc.).
This might have been, you may say, an innocent meeting, his engagement with Mrs Corneille. I might (almost) have believed so myself if I hadn’t, while sitting down, happened (by the purest chance) to glance into the front of the standing Mr Beaumont and discover that he was in a state that your Mrs Stopes describes as “masculine readiness.”
Perhaps-and this occurs to me only just now-making love while clothed is another of those perplexing American innovations, like the Charleston. Perhaps this is what is actually meant by “get up and go”. Perhaps when I knocked at the door he and Mrs Corneille, both fully dressed, were tumbling wildly across the floor.
No. I can-and with a vividness that is not at all unpleasant- picture Mr Beaumont so performing; but not the elegant Mrs Corneille. And yet I suspect that had I not knocked at the door, someone s clothing would have been, at the very least, profoundly rearranged.
Mr Beaumont is indefatigable, it seems.
In any event, I was flustered when I began the conversation with the two of them; and, throughout the course of it, I could feel my face flushing idiotically whenever I looked at him.
He isn’t as self-absorbed as I’ve portrayed him in these letters, Evy. He was most charming, really-both last night, when I spoke with him and Mrs Corneille, and today, during my interrogation by the pompous Inspector Marsh of Scotland Yard. He even went so far as to defend me.
But I get ahead of myself.
I told them the entire story last night. Mr Beaumont and Mrs Corneille.
Very nearly the entire story. I didn’t mention the other ghosts, the mother and the young boy I’d seen down by the mill. The more I consider them, the more I begin to believe that they were a product of my imagination. My nerves were stretched taut, the light beneath the willow tree was thin and gray. And, moreover,
My goodness. I’ve just had quite the most bizarre and disquieting conversation with Mr Houdini. I’m at a loss. If what he seems to be suggesting is true-
Let me see if I can structure this.
He came strutting down the walkway, greeted me with a cheery ‘Good day!’ plopped himself beside me on the bench, and declared that he was planning to resolve everything.
I closed my notebook-hiding this page, with its tumbling speculations-and I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’
He waved his hand quickly back and forth as though chasing away flies. ‘All this confusion, Miss Turner. Rifles and pistols and dying Earls. Ghosts. It has gone on for far too long, and I intend to resolve it.’
‘I see,’ I said. That was rather an exaggeration.
He said, ‘I have been speaking with my associate, Phil Beaumont, and that policeman from London. Phil has told me of your encounter with the Earl. I sympathize completely, Miss Turner. I realize that to a demure young woman such as yourself, the Earl’s behaviour must have seemed monstrous.’
I nodded demurely and looked down at my notebook. And blushed demurely, thinking of the things I’d written there.
‘I should tell you,’ he said, ‘that I have discovered the means by which he effected his invasion of your room.’
‘The means?’ I said stupidly.
‘Yes. By a careful examination of the Earl’s room, I was able to locate a secret passageway behind the wall. This leads down a narrow stairway to a kind of tunnel which encircles all of Maplewhite. From this tunnel, additional stairways lead upward to the various rooms of the house. One of them, no doubt, leads into your room. No doubt the Earl used this on Friday night.’
‘A secret passageway?’ I was beginning to feel rather like a parrot.
‘Correct.’
‘But I thought he simply came in through the door.’
He shook his head like a prim headmistress. ‘He has lived here all his life, and so must have known about the passageway. And why should he take a chance on being seen in the hallways? But, Miss Turner, a moment’s thought will tell you that if the Earl used the passageway, then someone else might have used it, at some other time.’
‘Yes?’ I said. I was still rather lost in visions of the Earl gliding in his long nightgown through dark vaulted passageways, torchlight flickering along stone walls, bats fluttering, rats squeaking.
‘Phil has also told me of the knife you found in your bed, last night,’ he said. ‘Whoever put it there may also have used the passageway.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see.’
‘You comprehend what this means?’
And I did, Evy. It meant that if the passageway had been used last night, it had been used by someone familiar with Maplewhite. Someone other than the Earl, who was no longer among us. ‘Yes, but-’
‘I have been pondering my preconceptions, Miss Turner,’ he said. ‘Someone attempted to kill you last night. This, I believe, was an attempt to silence you. I believe that you have heard something, or seen something, that will provide me the explanation for the mysterious events that have occurred here.’
‘But what?’
He smiled. ‘It is precisely to determine this that I have tracked you down.’ He pulled a gold watch from his vest pocket, glanced at it, frowned, and looked at me. ‘Now, Miss Turner, I would be very grateful if you will tell me everything that has happened to you since you arrived at Maplewhite.’
And, Evy, finally, I did so. I told him everything, including the tale of the two ghosts at the mill. I hadn’t told anyone of this, not Mrs Corneille, not Mr Beaumont, and certainly not the imperious Inspector Marsh. I felt that I should be unable to convince them of the first ghost’s identity if I complicated the story by mentioning a second ghost, and then a third. One truth, I felt, would have blemished the other. And, as I said, I had honestly begun to doubt their existence.
I nearly did mention them to Inspector Marsh. But the man was so accusatory, so vain and self-satisfied, so prissily officious- how he ever managed to become a police officer I cannot imagine. The London underworld and its denizens must be a good deal less robust than the press accounts suggest. Inspector Marsh would survive for perhaps five minutes in Sidmouth.
Mr Houdini possesses a certain smugness of his own, but he listened carefully to everything, paying especial attention to my chronicle of the mother and the young boy. He asked countless questions, nodding thoughtfully all the while, and then asked to hear the rest of my tale.
I gave it to him, eliminating only the story of Cecily and Mr Beaumont, which is no one’s business, I think, but theirs. At the end, he began asking me a series of really quite remarkable questions. From the gist of them-no, I can’t tell you even that,
Evy. I’m not being coy, honestly. I promised him; I swore I would tell no one what he asked me.
‘And what shall I tell Inspector Marsh,’ I asked him, ‘if he asks about the ghosts?’
He raised his head, like a Caesar. ‘Then you must tell him. Houdini always plays fair.’
And with that, he stood up, thanked me, and set off quickly back into the house.
I really don’t know what to do, Evy. This is all extremely distressing. If the ghastly things that Mr Houdini suspects are true, then-
I cannot.
I shall post this. And then I shall sit down and think everything out.
All my love, Jane
Chapter Thirty-four