“Looks like the coronation is about to begin,” Major Tell said, coming up to us. “I’ll need a cup for the toast.”
We were joking at the far end of the table when a tremendous crash sounded. We turned to see a distraught Wilda van Schooner looking down at the punch bowl she had just dropped. The punch had splashed down her beautiful velvet dress, leaving her drenched and mortified.
“Oh-Oh,” Tell said under his breath. “Now we’ll hear some fireworks from Dame van Schooner.”
True to his prediction, the Dame sailed across the floor and gave biting instructions to the footmen to bring mops and pails. A woman, who Tell told me in a whisper was Hetta van der Malin, the Dame’s sister, came out of the crowd of tittering guests to cover her niece’s embarrassment.
“She was only trying to help, Ilsa,” the aunt said as she dabbed the girl’s dress with a handkerchief.
The Dame glared at them. “You’d better help her change, Hetta, if she is going to attend the coronation.”
The aunt and niece quickly left the ballroom, and the Dame whirled her skirts and returned to the Governor’s side. I overheard her say her apologies to him, and then she added, “My children don’t seem to know what servants are for. Well, shall we begin?”
At a wave of her hand, the orchestra struck up the “Grenadier’s March,” and six young stalwarts lined up in two ranks before the Governor. At his command, the lads did a left turn and marched off towards the rear portal in the distinctive long step of the regiment whose music they had borrowed for the occasion.
They disappeared into the room where Gretchen waited for transport, and within seconds they returned bearing the ornate screened sedan chair. “Aah’s” filled the room over the beauty and pageantry of the piece. I shot a glance at Dame van Schooner and noted that she was beaming proudly at the impeccably executed production.
When the sedan chair had been placed before the Governor, he stepped forward, took the curtain drawstrings, and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our New Year’s Queen.”
The curtains were pulled open, and there she sat in majesty. More “aah’s” from the ladies until there was a screech and then another and, suddenly, pandemonium. Gretchen van Schooner sat on her portable throne, still beautiful, but horribly dead, with a French bayonet through her chest.
“My Lord!” Major Tell gasped and started forward toward the sedan chair. Cork touched his arm.
“You can do no good there. The rear room, man, that’s where the answer lies. Come, Oaks.” He moved quickly through the crowd, and I followed like a setter’s tail on point. When we reached the door, Cork turned to Tell.
“Major, use your authority to guard this door. Let no one enter.” He motioned me inside and closed the door behind us.
It was a small room, furnished in a masculine manner. Game trophies and the heads of local beasts protruded from the walls and were surrounded by a symmetrical display of weaponry such as daggers, blunderbusses, and swords.
“Our killer had not far to look for his instrument of death,” Cork said, pointing to an empty spot on the wall about three feet from the fireplace and six feet up from the floor. “Move with care, Oaks, lest we disturb some piece of evidence.”
I quickly looked around the rest of the chamber. There was a door in the south wall and a small window some ten feet to the left of it.
“The window!” I cried. “The killer must have come in-”
“I’m afraid not, Oaks,” Cork said, after examining it.
“The snow on the sill and panes is undisturbed. Besides, the floor in here is dry. Come, let’s open the other door.”
He drew it open to reveal a short narrow passage that was dimly lit with one sconced candle and had another door at its end. I started toward it and found my way blocked by Cork’s outthrust arm.
“Have a care, Oaks,” he said. “Don’t confound a trail with your own spore. Fetch a candelabrum from the table for more light.”
I did so, and to my amazement he got down on his hands and knees and inched forward along the passageway. I, too, assumed this stance and we crept along like a brace of hounds.
The polished planked floor proved dry and bare of dust until we were in front of the outer door. There, just inside the portal, was a pool of liquid.
“My Lord, it is blood!” I said.
“Mostly water from melted snow.”
“But, Captain, there is a red stain to it.”
“Yes,” he said. “Bloody snow, and yet the bayonet in that woman’s breast was driven with such force that no blood escaped from her body.”
Cork got to his feet and lifted the door latch, opening the passageway to pale white moonlight which reflected off the granules of snow. He carefully looked at the doorstoop and then out into the yard.
“Damnation,” he muttered, “it looks as if an army tramped through here.”
Before us, the snow was a mass of furrows and upheavals with no one set of footprints discernible.
“Probably the servants coming and going from the wood yard down by the gate,” I said, as we stepped out into the cold. At the opposite end of the house, in the left wing, was another door, obviously leading to the kitchen, for a clatter of plates and pots could be heard within the snug and frosty windowpanes. I turned to Cork and found myself alone. He was at the end of the yard, opening a slatted gate in the rear garden wall.
“What ho, Captain,” I called ahead, as I went to meet him.
“The place abounds in footprints,” he snarled in frustration.
“Then the killer has escaped us,” I muttered. “Now we have the whole population of this teeming port to consider.”
He turned slowly, the moonlight glistening off his barba, his eyes taking on a sardonic glint. “For the moment, Oaks, for the moment. Besides, footprints are like empty boots. In the long run we would have had to fill them.”
I started to answer, when a voice called from our backs, at the passage doorway. It was Major Tell.
“Hello, is that you there, Cork? Have you caught the dastard?”
“Some gall,” I said to the captain. “As if we could pull the murderer out of our sleeves like a magician.”
“Not yet, Major,” Cork shouted and then turned to me. “Your powers of simile are improving, Oaks.”
“Well,” I said, with a bit of a splutter. “Do you think magic is involved?”
“No, you ass. Sleight of hand! The quick flick that the eye does not see nor the mind inscribe. We’ll have to use our instincts on this one.”
He strode off towards the house, and I followed. I have seen him rely on instinct over hard evidence only two times in our years together, and in both cases, although he was successful, the things he uncovered were too gruesome to imagine.
The shock that had descended on the van Schooner manse at midnight still lingered three hours later, when the fires in the great fireplaces were reduced to embers, the shocked guests had been questioned, and all but the key witnesses had been sent homeward. Cork, after consultation with the Royal Governor, had been given a free hand in the investigation, with Major Tell stirred in to keep the manner of things official.
Much to my surprise, the captain didn’t embark on a flurry of questions of all concerned, but rather drew up a large baronial chair to the ballroom hearth and brooded into its sinking glow.
“Two squads of cavalry are in the neighbourhood,” Major Tell said. “If any stranger were in the vicinity, he must have been seen.”
“You can discount a stranger, Major,” Cork said, still gazing into the embers.
“How so?”
“Merely a surmise, but with stout legs to it. If a stranger came to kill, he would have brought a weapon with him. No, the murderer knew the contents of the den’s walls. He also seems to have known the coronation schedule.”
“The window,” I interjected. “He could have spied the bayonet, and when the coast was clear, entered and struck.”