Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly (16 page)

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D
r Austen Clarke was not approachable. His pride was to have been a boy at the most exalted Victorian school, Thomas Arnold's Rugby. He would never admit—let alone discuss—the expulsion of one of his own pupils. Fortunately our client's elder cousin, Galahad Douglas, had spent four years at King Alfred's before graduating to Eton. He offered to approach its modern-minded history master, William Spencer-Smith.

It was the headmaster who had put all blame squarely on Miles Mordaunt. This ten-year-old had sinned against heaven, in the shape of the school rules, and must go. His continued presence would “injure” the other children. By contrast, the history master, William Spencer-Smith, had argued that the school owed a duty of care towards this troubled boy and that it had failed him.

Galahad Douglas reported that Spencer-Smith would receive us on two conditions. First, our conversation must remain confidential. Second, Dr Clarke must not be told of our visit on any account. I diagnosed Spencer-Smith as an unquiet spirit who was relieved by the chance to talk of his troubles.

We left Baker Street for Paddington Station and the Taunton train on a morning just before the boys of King Alfred's returned from their Easter holidays. At the Somerset market town, a rusty one-horse hackney cab was waiting in the station approach. Holmes instructed the driver to drop us outside the school gates and await our return.

On the edge of the town, the creeper-covered stone of King Alfred's, with its low, crenellated central tower, was a copy of Oxford colleges built two centuries ago. The wide front lawn had been planted with a fine cedar of Lebanon and a stone-cross memorial to the fallen alumni of the Crimean and South African wars. Within the main building lay the Great Hall, classrooms, dormitories and chapel. The high view from the rear terrace encompassed playing fields, cricket pavilion, with the bleak heights of Exmoor and Dunkery Beacon in the distance.

Here the senior boys lived and worked. The juniors walked in for breakfast from several large houses nearby, each named after a royal dynasty: Tudor, Stuart, Brunswick and Hanover. A note in the margin of Miss Temple's journal informed us that Miles had been a member of Brunswick for two years. His housemaster was Mair Loftus, a Cambridge Master of Arts who also taught chemistry.

During the holidays the main building was silent and its grounds deserted. Yet William Spencer-Smith remained in residence. This was his home, for he had no other. We followed the porter up a wide staircase with glimpses of long dormitories and neat rows of beds to either side. At the top landing, a narrow corridor ran off under the eaves of the building. Our guide knocked on a door at the far end and we entered Spencer-Smith's cross-beamed room, immediately below the tiles.

He was a short, rotund man in his thirties with a face that was soft and kindly, his manner nervously evasive. This uneasy disposition was kept in check by quick smiles and rapid talk. I guessed that he was ragged by the boys more than he deserved.

Two broken-down easy chairs, a sofa, a cluttered desk and a length of overcrowded bookshelves made up his spartan furniture. The contents of the room were a match for his shabby jacket and flannels. As we shook hands, a westerly Atlantic wind rattled the old bones of the school at this height. After we had taken our places in the chairs, he came quickly to the point.

“I have agreed to talk of this matter—Mr Holmes—Dr Watson—because I blame myself in part for the outcome. I have thought a good deal about it. Had I argued more vigorously on the child's behalf, he might still be alive. Who knows?”

“But no longer at King Alfred's,” Holmes suggested.

Spencer-Smith shrugged.

“Of course he sometimes made mischief. What boy of spirit does not, at his age? The tragedy is that we sent him home just after his parents had died, when we should have cared for him. After all is said and done, he was only a child of ten. We might have saved him from himself. The unfortunate young governess inherited the difficulties we bequeathed to her. To be sure, the dead are beyond our aid, but it is of the highest importance that we should do all in our power for the living.”

“Your feelings do you credit,” Holmes said courteously, “To put it briefly, Miss Temple is confined in a criminal lunatic asylum. She is there because a verdict of insanity was agreed upon by the Crown and the defence—a convenient decision which now seems grievously in error.”

As they talked of Victoria Temple's plight, I scanned the bookshelves. There was little to suggest the history master, but a good deal of mental philosophy, individual psychology and the education of the child.

“You must tell me what I can do,” our host was saying. “It is a terrible thing for an innocent woman to be tormented in such a way. Galahad Douglas spoke to me of her misfortune.”

Holmes stretched back in his chair.

“Miles Mordaunt was dismissed from school,” he said languidly. “Pray tell me why. It was never made clear by Dr Clarke to the family nor to the governess.”

Spencer-Smith stared past us as though he saw something at the far end of his long garret room.

“Did he steal?” Holmes prompted him, and the poor fellow shook his head.

I put my own question before he could continue.

“It was alleged that he harmed the others. Was he immoral or depraved in some way?”

“He was not.”

“Then what did he do that he must be dismissed?” I persisted.

“He said things.”

I was about to ask what these things were. Holmes took another tack.

“To whom did he say them? It is of the greatest importance that we should have witnesses.”

“He would never give us their names. One or two admitted it of their own accord. He spoke only to a few boys, I think. To those he liked.”

Glancing at Holmes, I saw an impatient tightening of the mouth.

“And they repeated his words to others?”

“Yes. To those they liked. As a special secret, I suppose. Boys of that age are excitable. They love secrets but they never keep them.”

Spencer-Smith paused. When he spoke again it was with great deliberation.

“You should understand, Mr Holmes, that Miles Mordaunt was not as other boys. He was with us for two years but he never fitted in.”

“He was in Brunswick House, I believe?”

Spencer-Smith nodded.

“He was one of the second-year Brunswicks. Though he was intellectually gifted, he lacked normal physical stamina and agility. Perhaps he had been unwell, in some way unknown to us, before he came to King Alfred's. At all events, he avoided games and sports whenever he could. The others would take a cold plunge at Parson's Pool, where the river bends. He never did. I do not believe he could swim a stroke to save his life. Well now, a boy of that type in a school of this sort either goes under or learns to acquire strength of a different kind. He gains power over the minds of others, unless his life is to be made a misery. He must be stronger in brain than they can ever be in body. That is the key to this child's character.”

“And so he said things?” Holmes suggested laconically. “I suppose, in the end, these things came round to you?”

“They did. But it was not I who told Dr Clarke.” He looked hastily from one to the other of us. “That was done by the chaplain and another senior master before I could intervene. I should have spoken to the boy first.”

“You have no objection to revealing what the child said to his friends?”

Spencer-Smith looked still more uneasy.

“You need not fear that we shall betray confidences,” Holmes added quietly.

The history master shook his head.

“I only fear that you may think me ridiculous.” He paused awkwardly, then continued. “Miles Mordaunt told his friends that he had received supernatural powers. Others said that he claimed he had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for such powers. I could find no conclusive evidence that he ever said anything of the sort. It was hearsay.”

I intervened.

“Surely he was not expelled for hearsay?”

The selling of a soul is utter nonsense to an intelligent adult. Yet it might be terrible for a child of ten to boast of it. The more I heard of Miles Mordaunt, the more I thought the boast was possible. A new intensity in my friend's deep-set eyes suggested that he took this seriously.

“Did he offer his friends evidence of these powers?” Holmes asked.

“He was good at tricks, tricks of all kinds.” Spencer-Smith lit a cigarette, as if to steady him for what lay ahead. He shook out the match. “That made some of the others uneasy about him and some admired him. For example, he boasted of his occult power to materialise in two places at the same time. He could produce his doppelgänger, as he called it.”

“Where did he hear the word, at his age?”

“I have no idea, Dr Watson. But he proved it to them. In the previous summer, the school photograph was taken on the front lawn, with the main building as its background. The boys wore the short jackets and striped trousers of their ‘Eton suits' and stood in long rows, ranged according to height.”

He nodded at an assortment of framed prints on the far wall and then continued.

“When the photographs were printed, a slightly-built, fair-haired junior was at the left-hand end of the back row. That was Miles Mordaunt.”

“Where was the trick?”

“Behind him, doctor. As I mentioned, the front of the school building was the background. There is a three-sided oriel window in a room to the right of the main entrance door. Within the diagonal leaded lights of its Tudor window, forty feet or so behind the row at whose far end the boy stood, was also the face of Miles Mordaunt. It was a fainter image but beyond doubt it was the same child with the same look of frustrated energy. To credulous junior boys of eight or nine, he offered it as proof of his ability to materialise in two places at the same time.

“A prank,” said Holmes dismissively, “I daresay few of his dupes knew that such long photographs are taken in sections and matched together. Miles Mordaunt had only to stand within the window when the process began and then sneak round to the end of the back row before the camera lens shifted its angle.”

“With his friends who knew that, he treated it as a secret joke. If they did not know, he made it a demonstration of his psychic powers.”

“He was surely not dismissed for such a game!” I said.

“But that was only the beginning, Dr Watson. Next came a series of rumours, dark secrets confided to close friends. He described to one crony how he had drowned his sister's governess when she betrayed a promise. The intensity of his confessions was such that even you might almost believe him, until you knew better. Her death was thought to be a tragic mishap and he was never suspected. There was no truth in this. The poor lady died of natural causes at her father's home, many miles away. She was, of course, replaced by Miss Temple.”

“A great misfortune, as it turns out!” said Holmes softly.

“Mr Holmes, there was also a man at Bly, who died in an accident. He was a servant of some kind …”

“Quint,” I said at once.

“I believe so, Dr Watson. He and the boy were great chums, according to Miles. There were no other males in the household—except possibly a gardener from the outlying estate. Quint, if that was his name, had warned the boy never to let himself be put upon by any governess or female servant. Better drown them like kittens than let them grow to be cats, Quint had said, if the boy was to be believed.”

“And that was the worst that Miles said?” I asked.

“Unhappily not, Dr Watson. The boy gathered a coven about him. By closing his right fist, then extending the thumb and small finger, he taught those who swore allegiance to him how to exercise the curse of the evil eye. He confided to them how he had placed curses on those who crossed him and how these had been fulfilled. He always tailored this to misfortunes which had actually occurred, so that he was more easily believed.”

I was about to inquire where a child of his age could have picked up such poisonous nonsense, but the thought of Peter Quint provided an answer.

“A boy so young!” I said incredulously.

“Just so, doctor. Children may be capable of the worst imaginings and dishonesties.”

I followed his gaze as he spoke. Subconsciously he had led me to a bookshelf and a volume of
Cases at Salem: Drawn from Pleas of the Crown.
How strange to be reminded in this sunlit room of those innocent American men and women sworn to their deaths by children in the famous witch trials two centuries ago.

“He was believed by the junior boys?” Holmes asked.

“Not at first, I daresay. Yet it gave him an air—a reputation for malevolent power. To silence the doubters, he undertook to prove publicly the powers which his demon—Quint perhaps—had conferred upon him.”

Holmes sat back with his fingers folded together, missing no word nor nuance of the young master's explanation.

“He performed his tricks, Mr Holmes. I cannot put it any other way. For instance, he claimed that he could see through walls. He could even see into the skulls of others and read their thoughts.”

“What was his proof?”

Our host thought for a moment.

“It varied. Several times, to my knowledge, he used a pair of dice. Two boys would go into another room—even into another building—and roll the dice. Miles could not possibly see the result. He told them to take the figure on the left hand die and double it. They must then add five to that answer and multiply the whole by five. Finally they must add the number on the right hand die. Once they gave him that total, even though they had been a dozen miles away, he would give them the precise numbers on the two dice, which he now saw in their minds. He was never wrong. He claimed that he could read their minds as plainly as they themselves. Some of the little boys grew afraid of him. A few began to believe in the things that he told them. Even the seniors grew wary of him.”