Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly (23 page)

The outline of the thing in the hatbox was clearer. The face itself, if it was a face, gave off a slight luminous glow. His voice came again.

“Speak to us, O, Spirit. Tell us who you are and whence you come.”

There was no response, but it was—surely it was—a severed head that the box contained. A head perhaps long defunct and long interred. Well, I suppose it is not hard to contrive a trick like that. The eyes appeared closed and the mouth sagged open a little. In other respects, the profile was reminiscent of the magazine engravings of Queen Nefertiti in the Egyptian museum at Berlin. Yet this complexion was wizened by the dust and decay of centuries, as real flesh must be.

“Open your eyes,” said Holmes in gentle command. “Open them.”

The intent silence was broken by a sharp gasp from the audience as the head in the hatbox slowly raised its eyelids. The light had intensified. Yet its pale glow must come from within the box. How? It was a small head, perhaps a child's, but life-size. As it grew clearer, the colours appeared more natural. Then it seemed that the image wavered, as if we might be watching it though the flame or smoke of a temple altar.

“Greet us with a smile,” said Holmes more easily. He spoke with some relief, as if he had not been confident that the spirit would answer his summons.

There was another murmur from the onlookers. This head, isolated from anything outside the hatbox, assumed a faint smile. The truly startling thing was that the smile was as natural as that of a girl walking in the park and meeting a friend. The apparition—for now I caught myself thinking this pernicious word again—was three-dimensional yet somehow insubstantial. If it was a trick, which surely it must be, how the devil was it done? This was no static magic-lantern display of glass plates. It was as far beyond slate-writing and spirit photographs as an express train is beyond a horse and cart.

From where I sat, the outline of Holmes's gaunt, motionless profile now seemed carved in ebony against the faintly-reflected night sky of the conservatory and the dimmest illumination from the hatbox itself. I looked again at the shrivelled face of a woman who was still young. Holmes resumed quietly but with the same directness of command.

“Tell us, O Spirit, who you are and whence you come.”

The following pause was so long that I was sure he had failed. But this was merely a tribute to his sense of theatre. At last she replied and stilled every movement among Madame Rosa's guests. No one had expected to hear a voice from beyond the grave, unless by an obvious trick of ventriloquism, which this could not be. The natural movement of the spirit's lips ruled out such a dodge. It was a young voice, the tone flat and almost indifferent, as if the words belonged to someone else and were of no concern to her. Even Holmes could not have imitated it. Her reply came with a great effort, distantly and with an intolerable weariness.

“I am called the Lady Teshat, daughter of the Eighteenth Dynasty, a child who will never be a woman. My service is to the god Amun of Thebes who is named the Hidden One. My master is Ozymandias, King of Kings. I am cast out for my fault, condemned to walk the future without rest, an exile through time in the courts of a Grecian underworld and the groves of a Roman Avernus.”

Most of them surely knew the thing was a trick but enjoyed the fun. Perhaps a few could scarcely believe what they heard but longed for this preposterous muddle of mythology to be true.

“Why do you answer our call?”

Her reply was little more than a whisper, yet not a syllable was lost.

“I bring words I do not understand to a world I do not know. I come to a woman who is a stranger to me. She is the mistress of two lovers, one dead and one still living. The blood of the dead lies upon the hands of the living.”

“From whom does the message come?”

“He who is the master of the message was once a servant. He was called among you the Fifth Stone.”

I caught my breath at this, recalling Spencer-Smith's account of Miles Mordaunt. I followed every word as she spoke again.

“He was a servant to her other lover who still lives, who with his mistress shed the blood of this rival. The hidden murder of her first lover calls out for vengeance. The violation of an inheritance calls for retribution. Through me the secret of the guilty one shall be known.”

“Give us your message.”

“The blood of a lover and the soul of a dead child call for blood in return. An inheritance is betrayed. This very night is the time of reckoning. Their enemies are close upon the killers. The only safety lies in flight. Within the hour their lives are forfeit unless she to whom I speak can bear a warning to her lover who lives unaware. Let her warn him before the sands of the hour run out. The blood of the dead lies on the hands of the living. The avengers have their scent.”

But how was he doing it—a live head in a hatbox, answering back!

“How shall she know that your message is for her?”

“Her lover who lies dead was that Fifth Stone. His death was also her crime. Her life, like that of her paramour, stands forfeit to the executioner.”

That was more like it, I thought—eight o'clock on a Monday morning, side by side in the execution shed of Newgate!

“Whom does the Fifth Stone signify?” Holmes asked.

“His name is not my language but a Roman title.”

The Fifth Stone! The Roman title, in dog Latin, was Petrus Quintus. Plain English made it Peter Quint! Any school-miss could put the two halves together! But now the face was fading—or rather disintegrating—as the flame-light died. Petrus Quintus! An absurd but effective mangling of tongues. The image flickered, thin as a ghost, and breathed its farewell.

“Let her carry the warning before it is too late.… Let her remember it is not sweet with nimble feet to dance upon the air.…”

Here and there I caught a gasp from the onlookers. This very month I had bought a copy of a book which had been reprinted five times since Christmas. It was talked of and quoted everywhere,
The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
Dancing on the air with nimble feet was its description of a hanging in a common English prison-shed. To judge from the look on Miss Shelley's face, she recognised the lines too well.

By the time the image fell silent, it was as if I had been told a story that ten minutes earlier I could not even guess at. Around me the others were clapping vigorously, as if at the Palace of Varieties or the Egyptian Hall. A few sat motionless, not knowing what to think. The gasolier above us was brightening, illuminating the depths of the hatbox. Where the head had appeared lay nothing but a pile of ashes. The trick had carried such conviction that I caught myself almost believing its unearthly mystery. I forgot for an instant that all this had come from the fertile genius of Sherlock Holmes.

I stood up, looking over the heads of others to see the gaunt figure of Holmes slipping through the curtains before they closed again with a rattle of rings. Perhaps the audience thought this was a pause in his demonstration. To me, his movements indicated that speed was of the essence. I shouldered my way after him. What I saw behind the curtain explained a good deal.

He was deftly but calmly fastening the hatbox, which showed no trace of dust, head or flame-light. A girl of fifteen or so was wiping greasepaint from her face with a towel. Under the paint, she was surely the cabman's child! Behind a projecting wall that hid one side of the conservatory from the séance parlour of the music room, the black metal cube of a compact but powerful magic lantern, fitted with a red lens, stood on a kitchen trolley. It was capable of focusing a concentrated beam of light upon its subject. In front of its lens, a bowl of cooling water still gave off steam. I saw at once how the beam had been angled to illuminate a plain kitchen chair from which the cabman's daughter had risen. An inspection of the hatbox would no doubt reveal a sheet of glass fitted to fill its opening and capable of being tilted at an angle. I thought at once of Dr Pepper and knew the answer to this splendid illusion!

Let me explain. Twenty years earlier, I had been despatched from medical school to Aldershot for my Army training. There I saw an evening performance of
The Haunted Murderer
at the Hippodrome, which serves as a garrison theatre. In this theatrical novelty, the source of light was hidden from the audience. I learnt that it was a powerful lamp backstage shining on an actor in the wings. This bright image was then reflected by a sheet of plate glass, fastened at an angle on the darkened stage.

The principle of the illusion was the reflected “ghost” of himself which, for example, a traveller sees when staring out into the darkness from a railway train at night. What appeared at the Aldershot Hippodrome, through the invisible slant of plate glass on the darkened stage, was a much stronger and lifelike “ghost” of the subject. As in the railway carriage illusion, the figure seemed to float in air at some distance beyond the glass. By careful stage lighting—or the lack of it—the spectre at Aldershot moved and talked like any other actor but was insubstantial as a cloud. The play on that evening was produced by the great John Henry Pepper himself. At the climax of the drama, the villain was confronted by this apparition of his better self.

The Kensington spiritualists had just seen a refinement of Pepper's trick, perfected by Holmes for the occasion. This soon became known as Colonel Stodare's “severed head” illusion and held theatre audiences in awe over the years! Unfortunately, it could not explain events at Bly because it would never work in daylight.

I glanced at the operator of the magic-lantern and saw the same wiry build and sardonic features as those of our cabdriver. Before I could say so, Holmes turned to me as he finished buckling the hatbox.

“Look sharp, Watson! We have flushed her from cover. You may depend upon it, she has dreaded this moment for the past year and more. I trust you enjoyed my little deception, my mastery of occult claptrap.”

“She? But who is she?”

He ignored this and strode to the door.

“Gregson and two plain-clothes men are watching the street. A constable has the rear of the house in view. Our driver this evening, by the way, is only an amateur cabman but a professional wizard: ‘Professor Hermann' of the Adelphi Theatre's Phantasmagoria.”

“Otherwise known as Tom Rathbone and pleased to meet you, sir,” said this new acquaintance, shaking my hand.

“And this,” Holmes added, with a graceful gesture towards the young woman “is the soi-disant ‘severed head,' his assistant and daughter, Miss Clarissa. An accomplished little actress. Now, let us be on our way.”

We went out through the kitchen door and up the steps to the street, leaving Rathbone to follow with the hatbox and basket. Holmes led the way to our cab, now drawn up in a darker stretch between the lamp-posts. From the interior, a tall fair-haired man in a dark suit craned forward. By the light of the carriage-lamp on his flaxen hair and on his clean-shaven but unnaturally pale face, I recognised Inspector Tobias Gregson.

“Good evening, Mr Holmes. I'd be obliged to you for some explanation of what is going on. What am I to tell the commissioner when he asks where all his fine brave policemen have got to?”

Holmes stepped into the cab and took his seat opposite the inspector. Rathbone was back on his perch but the vehicle did not move. Holmes glanced in the mirror at the view of the street behind him.

“To begin with, my dear Gregson, this is about murder. We seldom deal in smaller currency. And then it's about a brutal robbery by one of the most ruthless footpads that our underworld can boast. And if that won't do, it's a matter of the walking dead.”

“Indeed!” said Gregson quietly. “And where's the Belgravia division in all this? My instructions are that any message given to an officer by an infant calling itself a Baker Street Irregular goes straight to Mr Holmes. Chief Inspector Lestrade's orders, sir, but I don't like what I can't understand!”

“One moment,” said Holmes quietly. “Sit and watch quietly for two more minutes. Keep your eyes skinned for a young lady who has just had the shock of her life. A poor young creature whose every thought is shadowed by the coarse touch of a rope round her neck, a strap round her wrists and a trap-door under her pinioned feet. I trust that will do for the moment.”

“More than enough, sir!”

“Six pairs of eyes have been watching Eaton Place for the past week,” Holmes added, talking to Gregson but never taking his eyes from the mirror. “As a rule, my young friends are more concerned to avoid the police then to approach them. With my blessing, they have come to an understanding with the constables who patrol that beat—and with their sergeant. Let us leave it there. The lady in the case is our first concern.”

I took my turn.

“She won't fall for your stage magic, Holmes! Only a complete fool would be taken in by that.”

“Watson, you are, as so often, entirely correct. I count upon her disbelieving it. Have you not grasped it? That is the whole point. What she is therefore obliged to believe is that her closest and most dreadful secret, supposed to be known only to her lover and herself, is running loose all over London. I added the lines from Ozymandias for her benefit. They happen to be the work of the man she claims to be her natural great-grandfather and whose name she bears.”

“Shelley!”

He did not reply. Instead, he tapped sharply on the roof with his stick. The cab jerked forward.

From my seat in the far corner of the darkened vehicle, I could see two figures who had emerged from the house of the séance. One was the manservant who had taken in Holmes's hatbox and hamper on our arrival. The other, fluttering to and fro in urgent expectation of a cab, was my pretty witch, Madame Rosa's handmaid.

The servant raised his hand. Tom Rathbone reined in the horse. We came alongside the pavement, behind another cab, apparently called for Miss Shelley. Holmes opened our door and got down. He walked across to hold open the door of the cab in front, and courteously doffed his hat to the young woman.