Holmes watched him carefully as Hereward Douglas continued.
“The previous winter, Quint had fallen head-first and smashed his skull open, after drinking late at the village inn. As usual, he had drunk far too much. He was alone in the country lanes on a bitter icy night without a lantern. It seems that he pitched over a large stone in the darkness—went flying, as they say—and broke his head clean open on the jagged flint parapet of a bridge across the stream. Two carters found him dead and frozen next morning. Miss Temple could only have seen his ghost.”
“And what did Miss Temple say to his reappearance?”
“Her first reaction, as her journal tells us, was to suppose that the servants were playing tricks on her. Or else that she had seen someone resembling Quint, as you suggest. A brother perhaps. But the man had no brother.”
“And the other residents at Bly?”
“They saw nothing. Dr Mordaunt, the guardian uncle, was living in France just then. There were only the servants and the children in the manor house. Dr Mordaunt had sometimes visited Bly before Peter Quint’s death, but he had long given up any interest in the place. He thought the house remote and dreary. Unfortunately, it was not his to dispose of. With the death of Colonel Mordaunt, it was held in trust for young Miles, the colonel’s only son.”
Holmes sighed.
“So Miss Temple’s visions of Quint and Miss Jessel are entirely unsupported?”
“Not quite.” Hereward Douglas’s young face still showed a determination to fight for the unfortunate young woman. “The housekeeper was present the second time that Miss Temple saw Miss Jessel, at a distance of a hundred and fifty feet or so across the lake. The little girl Flora was with them. It is true that Mrs Grose saw nothing, but she had a powerful sense that she was in the presence of an evil force.”
“Tell me, pray, how did she sense it?”
“There was an unnatural stillness on that autumn afternoon, Mr Holmes. When Miss Temple first saw Quint, on the tower in late sunlight, she was alerted to his presence by the same eerie way in which the sheep bells fell silent and the rooks ceased to caw. It was as if time and nature ceased when the figures appeared.”
“That is really not the same thing as if the housekeeper had also seen the apparition,” my friend said reproachfully.
“The children, Mr Holmes!” Douglas had been driven back into his corner but he came out fighting again. “Miss Temple was certain that the children saw the figures, on four occasions at least. Their reactions made it plain.”
“And what did the two little ones say about these ghostly appearances?”
“At first she thought they were too frightened to admit them. Then she saw that they were too guiltily excited to confess.”
Holmes sucked in his sallow cheeks a little and then breathed out.
“I fear that will be the rock on which your case founders, Mr Douglas. However, let us leave it for a moment. Let me ask you something else. Suppose all this is true. Suppose Miss Temple saw—or even thought she saw—these apparitions. For what reason would two such people return from the dead in order to materialise before your susceptible young friend? She had never known them. She had no interest in them, nor they in her, presumably.”
Our visitor leant forward again, eager to dispel a misunderstanding.
“You make my point for me, Mr Holmes. Miss Temple was only a bystander. Their manner and their movements convinced her that their true object had nothing to do with her. Their purpose was the seduction of the two children into the realms of evil and the world of the damned. She had been told repeatedly by the housekeeper, and by servants at Bly, of the malignant and corrupting influence that Quint and Miss Jessel exercised, during their lives, over the two children.”
If the rest of the tale was implausible, this was preposterous.
“A power sufficient to commit murder from beyond the grave?” Holmes inquired sceptically.
“No, sir. The little girl, Flora Mordaunt, died of diphtheria in the London fever hospital. Miss Temple was accused of smothering the boy a few days later.”
Holmes sat taller, fingers clasped and elbows on the arms of his chair. Hereward Douglas still held my friend’s impatient interest, if only by a thread.
“You will read in the journal, Mr Holmes, why Miss Temple was certain that the children saw the apparitions. Miles and Flora were the objects of these evil visitations. It was only some exceptional and special sensibility that enabled the governess to share the visions.”
“Neither Master Miles nor Miss Flora remarked upon these ghosts?”
“No,” said Douglas forlornly. “Both denied them.”
“Dear me,” said Holmes lightly. “So you ask us to believe in these appearances because the children—from fear or wickedness—denied them? I am bound to say, Mr Douglas, it is as well for you that you are not, at this moment, bound by the rules of evidence in a criminal court. Pray continue, however. Your narrative is most unusual, if nothing else.”
“That was not all!” Surely it was desperation that brought this protest from our visitor. “Miss Temple was certain the children saw for themselves. Do you not understand? They were in league with these visitors! The willing victims! Unless you can accept that possibility, I am wasting my time.”
Holmes shrugged.
“In league with them? But for what possible purpose?”
Douglas spoke quietly.
“To be united in death—all four—in a state of damnation to which the children were being seduced. A state for which their corrupted childhood had trained them. There is no other way to put it, Mr Holmes.”
I could see from the brightness in my friend’s gaze that this folklore of the dead possessing the living was not a mere absurdity to him. Its possibility glimmered on what Robert Browning called the dangerous edge of things. How his rational soul longed to believe!
“By what means were the children to be drawn to damnation?” I asked. Hereward Douglas turned in his chair.
“By self-destruction, Dr Watson. Quint and Miss Jessel were usually seen ‘across and beyond,’ as Miss Temple puts it. They appeared almost motionless, at a distance, and almost always where they were inaccessible. Death beckoned the children across the deep waters of a treacherous lake—the Middle Deep, as it was called—or from the height of a dilapidated tower. It was as if the two devils summoned their victims to come to them and perish in the attempt. Quint also appeared twice to Miss Temple through the closed windows of a room. Terrifying but, once again, always inaccessible.”
“Not tempting her to destruction, however?”
He shook his head.
“No. Taunting her. Doing battle with her for the souls of two innocents.”
Holmes met this with the cold inquiry of the logician. Could he believe or could he not?
“If the children should perish, what would that accomplish?”
Our visitor was careful not to give away too much.
“In Miss Temple’s mind—and even to the housekeeper—Miss Jessel and Quint were damned, as they deserved to be. Their spirits lusted for the children to share their hellish privations.”
This talk of hell and damnation was too much for me. I was about to say so, but Holmes glanced at me and Hereward Douglas resumed.
“Mrs Grose, of course, did not share Miss Jessel’s vision of the dead. If she believed in the possibility of their evil presences, it was because she had known the man and woman during their lives. She had sensed the depravity of which they were capable towards the sensitive and imaginative children in their care.”