“My husband has been gone now for two years, and all have given him up for dead save myself, and I will concede that even my hopes are of the faintest. During the period of correspondence between my husband and my brother, my husband began to absent himself from all human society from time to time. Gradually the frequency and duration of his disappearances increased. I feared I knew not what—perhaps that he had become addicted to some drug or unspeakable vice for the indulging of which he preferred isolation. I inferred that he had caused the construction of the sealed room for this purpose, and determined that I should learn its secret.”
She bowed her head and drew a series of long, sobbing breaths, which caused her graceful bosom visibly to heave. After a time she raised her face. Her cheeks were wet with tears. She resumed her narrative.
“I summoned a locksmith from the village and persuaded him to aid me in gaining entry. When I stood at last in my husband’s secret chamber I found myself confronting a room completely devoid of feature. The ceiling, the walls, the floor were all plain and devoid of ornament. There were neither windows nor fireplace, nor any other means of egress from the room.”
Holmes nodded, frowning. “There was nothing noteworthy about the room, then?” he asked at length.
“Yes, Mr. Holmes, there was.” Lady Fairclough’s response startled me so, I nearly dropped my fountain pen, but I recovered and returned to my note taking.
“At first the room seemed a perfect cube. The ceiling, floor, and four walls each appeared absolutely square and mounted at a precise right angle to one another. But as I stood there, they seemed to—I suppose, shift is the closest I can come to it, Mr. Holmes, but they did not actually move in any familiar manner. And yet their shape seemed to be different, and the angles to become peculiar, obtuse, and to open onto other—how to put this?—dimensions.”
She seized Holmes’s wrist in her graceful fingers and leaned toward him pleadingly. “Do you think I am insane, Mr. Holmes? Has my grief driven me to the brink of madness? There are times when I think I can bear no more strangeness.”
“You are assuredly not insane,” Holmes told her. “You have stumbled upon one of the strangest and most dangerous of phenomena, a phenomenon barely suspected by even the most advanced of mathematical theoreticians and spoken of even by them in only the most cautious of whispers.”
He withdrew his arm from her grasp, shook his head, and said, “If your strength permits, you must continue your story, please.”
“I will try,” she answered.
I waited, fountain pen poised above notebook.
Our visitor shuddered as with a fearsome recollection. “Once I had left the secret room, sealing it behind myself, I attempted to resume a normal life. It was days later that my husband reappeared, refusing as usual to give any explanation of his recent whereabouts. Shortly after this a dear friend of mine living in Quebec gave birth to a child. I had gone to be with her when word was received of the great Pontefract earthquake. In this disaster a fissure appeared in the earth and our house was completely swallowed. I was, fortunately, left in a state of financial independence, and have never suffered from material deprivation. But I have never again seen my husband. Most believe that he was in the house at the time of its disappearance, and was killed at once, but I retain a hope, however faint, that he may somehow have survived.”
She paused to compose herself, then resumed.
“But I fear I am getting ahead of myself. It was shortly before my husband ordered the construction of his sealed room that my brother, Philip, announced his engagement and the date of his impending nuptials. I thought the shortness of his intended period of engagement was unseemly, but in view of my own marriage and departure to Canada so soon after my parents’ death, I was in no position to condemn Philip. My husband and I booked passage to England, on the Lemuria in fact, and from Liverpool made our way to the family lands in Marthyr Tydhl.”
She shook her head as if to free it of an unpleasant memory.
“Upon arriving at Anthracite Palace, I was shocked by my brother’s appearance.”
At this point I interrupted our guest with a query.
“Anthracite Palace? Is that not an unusual name for a family manse?”
“Our family residence was so named by my ancestor, Sir Llewys Llewellyn, who built the family fortune, and the manor, by operating a network of successful coal mines. As you are probably aware, the region is rich in anthracite. The Llewellyns pioneered modern mining methods which rely upon gelignite explosives to loosen banks of coal for the miners to remove from their native sites. In the region of Marthyr Tydhl, where the Anthracite Palace is located, the booming of gelignite charges is heard to this day, and stores of the explosive are kept at the mine heads.”
I thanked her for the clarification and suggested that she continue with her narrative.
“My brother was neatly barbered and clothed, but his hands shook, his cheeks were sunken, and his eyes had a frightened, hunted look to them,” she said. “When I toured my childhood home I was shocked to find its interior architecture modified. There was now a sealed room, just as there had been at Pontefract. I was not permitted to enter that room. I expressed my concern at my brother’s appearance but he insisted he was well and introduced his fiancée, who was already living at the palace.”
I drew my breath with a gasp.
“Yes, Doctor,” Lady Fairclough responded, “you heard me correctly. She was a woman of dark, Gypsyish complexion, glossy sable hair, and darting eyes. I disliked her at once. She gave her own name, not waiting for Philip to introduce her properly. Her maiden name, she announced, was Anastasia Romelly. She claimed to be of noble Hungarian blood, allied both to the Habsburgs and the Romanovs.”
“Humph,” I grunted, “Eastern European nobility is a ha’penny a dozen, and three-quarters of them aren’t real even at that.”
“Perhaps true,” Holmes snapped at me, “but we do not know that the credentials of the lady involved were other than authentic.” He frowned and turned away. “Lady Fairclough, please continue.”
“She insisted on wearing her native costume. And she had persuaded my brother to replace his chef with one of her own choosing, whom she had imported from her homeland and who replaced our usual menu of good English fare with unfamiliar dishes reeking of odd spices and unknown ingredients. She imported strange wines and ordered them served with meals.”
I shook my head in disbelief.
“The final straw came upon the day of her wedding to my brother. She insisted upon being given away by a surly, dark man who appeared for the occasion, performed his duty, and then disappeared. She—”
“A moment, please,” Holmes interrupted. “If you will forgive me—you say that this man disappeared. Do you mean that he took his leave prematurely?”
“No, I do not mean that at all.” Lady Fairclough was clearly excited. A moment earlier she had seemed on the verge of tears. Now she was angry and eager to unburden herself of her tale.
“In a touching moment, he placed the bride’s hand upon that of the groom. Then he raised his own hand. I thought his intent was to place his benediction upon the couple, but such was not the case. He made a gesture with his hand, as if making a mystical sign.”
She raised her own hand from her lap, but Holmes snapped, “Do not, I warn you, attempt to replicate the gesture! Please, if you can, simply describe it to Dr. Watson and myself.”