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I |
t began with a difference of opinion, between myself and my employer, Madame la Duchesse Dubois.
“Ghosts and murders! Pepin, they do not mix.”
We had just been to L’Odeon theatre to see the thrilling new mélodrame, The Murder of Maria Marten. The audience had hissed at the villain, as he murdered his sweetheart, and buried her in the Red Barn; dabbed tears at her grieving parents, as they searched for their missing daughter (little knowing how close her corpse lay); and shuddered deliciously as the ghost of poor Maria appeared in her mother’s dream, an angry revenant. Now we were headed homewards in Madame’s phaeton, which was where the argument ignited.
“But Maria Marten was based on a real case! From Old Earth.”
Madame made a gesture that loosely translated as: Pish! “No doubt the mother had eaten cheese at supper that night, and that, coupled with her maternal anxiety, translated into a phantasmickal dream.”
“You ascribe a spectre to indigestion, Madame? Where is your sense of the sublime?”
“I find only horror in a man who cruelly murders his sweetheart. And nothing sublime in the unfortunate combination of Welsh rarebit and worry.”
I leaned back against the satin upholstery, momentarily defeated. Then I had it:
“Perhaps Madame, you as detective object to a ghost trespassing on your territory, solving its very own murder.”
I saw a sudden uncertainty creep across her impeccably powdered and rouged face.
“Peradventure. Or it may be that I merely have a very cold imagination, as Mrs Radcliffe says. I am a product of my times, Pepin, the New Eighteenth century, where there is a rational, ratiocinative explanation for everything, no matter how uncanny. I prefer Radcliffe to Monk Lewis, detection to dream revelations. And I don’t believe in ghosts, most definitely.”
In the course of the argument the phaeton had reached the Hotel Exclusif. In my capacity of Secretary, I helped Madame out, sideways, given the width of her hooped skirt.
“Shall I summon room service and ask them to toast some cheese for us?”
A definite shudder. “No Pepin. I am in no need of scientific experiment tonight, rather an undisturbed sleep.”
* * * *
How very fortuitous that a visitor next day should serve to continue the argument, this time in actuality rather than theory. I was out posting the latest in my series (Mémoires of a Lady Detective), to the publisher, Mr Colburn, and returned to find the Abigails in a positive orgy of packing.
“Pepin, we are going on a country house visit. To a Mr Longmuir, whose name perhaps should be Marten.”
“He has a Red Barn?”
“No, a mansion on the river, down from the space port. And he has a daughter living still. But if ever I saw a man who looked as if he had seen a ghost ...”
One of the Abigails gave a decisive nod.
“Did you ask him if he sups on toasted cheese, Madame?”
“He says: not with his digestion. There must be some other explanation. I will not believe in ghosts, Pepin.”
“But nonetheless we are going ghosthunting?”
“Yes, and what should I take?”
I pondered. “Flour, to test for tracks. Tripwires. And a blunderbuss.”
“I meant to wear, silly.”
An Abigail emitted a slight cough. “Nightclothes, given that hauntings occur after dark. May I suggest a peignoir or three, in some subtle, dark shades. And not too revealing, unless, Madame, you intend to set more than hairs upright.”
Where had Madame got these Abigails from? I wondered.
“I very much doubt it. Mr Longmuir is rather a prissy example of manhood. He pointedly looked anywhere but my décolletage. And begged that our visit be discreet. He has a schoolgirl daughter, apparently a paragon of purity.”
The other Abigail emitted a slight snort.
“My thoughts precisely. Innocence of a schoolgirl is only in the doting daddy’s eye.”
“Not like Mrs Longmuir, then,” said the first Abigail.
“Pray tell ...”
Always ask a servant, they know everything. And they did, talking in turns, while they folded and packed clothes into trucks.
“Rowed away, she did.”
“Down the river to the spaceport.”
“In the company of a nautical gent.”
“With twirling moustachios.”
“Captain Jasper Sparrow, of the Black Opal.”
“And Adventures of a Space Pirate.”
“It was all the fault of her reading group, they said.”
“Too many space operas.”
“Horatia Hornblower.”
“The Jasper Sparrow series.”
“And she never, ever, came back.”
* * * *
Mr Longmuir was a man in a tightly buttoned suit, with a harried air, despite a fine house and gardens landscaped down to the river. We arrived via his personal ferry, and were given a guided tour, firstly of the garden highlights: the folly, the avenue of blossoming trees, the hothouses and the ha ha. He was, quite frankly, a house and gardens bore. As our disguise was to be feature writers from The Gentlewoman’s Companion, New Ceres’ domestic bible, we were obliged to endure it. I took notes and tried not to yawn. Then, once inside, his flow of information shifted from the details of decor to what was relevant to our investigation.
“I lock all the outside doors at nine o’clock sharp,” he said, demonstrating on the front door while a liveried footman looked on. “See, Reynolds?” To us: “New servant.”
“A habit of long-standing?” Madame inquired discreetly. Her dress for this occasion was similarly discreet: slate blue silk with barely a hint of sheen, let alone hoop, a frothy lace fichu covering her décolletage.
“A man of wealth can never be too careful. Nor a father of a daughter. The windows are shuttered at the same time. I also lock all connecting doors to the servants’ quarters. Routine, Madame, the only way to run a household.”
His tour encompassed in grinding detail every room in the expansive house, a warren of interconnecting rooms, from scullery to the library. The one exception was his daughter’s quarters, where he only opened the door briefly to give a glimpse of a white muslined back, with chestnut ringlets and a powder-blue sash, busy at a desk.
“My little petal.”
Only when we were finished, and safely closeted in the master bedroom, a riot of flowery wood-carving covering walls, furniture and ceiling, did he drop the cover of genial host. He sank down on the tapestried four-poster as if suddenly drained of vitality.
“So,” Madame said. “To the business at hand.”
“I would not have bothered you, Madame, but you are the doyenne of confidential investigations, and this is a matter I wish to be kept very private.”
I sat down on the windowseat, nudging the trailing sun-blind away; Madame remained standing, no longer the bluestocking journalist, but in clear control.
“Because you have seen a ghost,” Madame prompted.
He mopped his brow, nodded reluctantly.
“Perhaps you can tell us precisely what happened.”
He put his handkerchief away, composed himself.
“Always after lock-up, I do the rounds and see dear Rebecca safely tucked up by her nurserymaid. Then I go to bed with a cup of cocoa.” He sighed. “It began late last year. I fell asleep while reading an improving book. I don’t hold with novels.”
A quick glance from Madame. It said: Not like your wife.
“When I awoke, the candle was still lit. And I saw a shadow on the wall, a silhouette, that shouldn’t have been there.”
“Where?”
He pointed at a patch of smooth wood by the bedside, miraculously free of wooden foliage.
“What did you do then?”
“I got out of bed and fled the room, so quickly the candle guttered behind me. I came back with a candelabrum for more light, but the silhouette had gone.”
Madame turned, inspecting the room.
“And your candle was?”
“On the chairseat.”
“Which was in this position?”
“No, the back was turned to the wall.”
Madame sat down in the chair, a relatively plain item of lathe-turned wooden furniture, given the rest of the room.
“Did the silhouette return?”
“No, but three months later the apparitions ... escalated. Always the same form. He closed his eyes, remembering. “I will confess I had given up reading in bed, I merely kept up the cocoa. I woke - and saw a white light in the window, where Mr Pepin is. And a figure, but standing rather than sitting.”
I glanced around involuntarily.
“What did you do?” Madame again.
“I admit that I cowered. I couldn’t scream, it would have woken dear Rebecca. Trembling, I got out of bed, neared the window, almost too scared to move, and lunged - but in my hands clutched only the curtain fabric.”
I touched it - a heavy white opaque silk.
“And the light vanished. I could feel the closed shutter through the fabric, but nonetheless opened the window, put my head out ... and saw light again, the figure down near the folly. Pointing, pointing ... then it disappeared again. I jumped out of the window, rushed around the grounds. Nothing, except the lights of the distant spaceport, a vessel falling to earth like a star.”
He curled up on himself a moment.
Madame waited, then said: “You knew the figure. No random apparition would produce this effect.”
He uncurled, nodded. “It was a face I had not seen in five years. The woman whose name I swore I would never utter again. She - once my own dear wife. Firstly as a mere silhouette, then manifesting in her wedding dress, but... but... soaked red, from her heartsblood.”
* * * *
If we had posed as being from Cookery New Ceres, we would surely have been exploded like a firecracker. Dinner that night was appalling - to the gourmand. Reynolds the footman served meagre portions of plain chicken, without its skin, and a selection of overboiled vegetables, for the sake of the Master’s digestion. Rebecca, who might possibly have made things interesting, if only by pert schoolgirlisms, was relegated to her schoolroom, a tray taken in by her nursemaid. The desultory conversation elicited only that Longmuir had always been a martyr to indigestion, even before the nervous shock of the apparition and Mrs Longmuir’s departure. I began to think the woman had left out of sheer boredom. Given such dreary domesticity, piracy had an undoubted attraction.
Longmuir gazed moodily out the window. “Not much of a sunset tonight,” he murmured. “Fog’s coming off the bay.”
Indeed, it rolled up the river and into the grounds like a greedy grey beast. Which was much like I felt. As we zigzagged through the passages to the guest apartment in the far wing, Madame went into a huddle of whispers with Reynolds the footman. Gold coin met the outstretched hand, to result, some fifteen minutes later, in a large plate of melted cheese on toast.
I waited until the door had closed behind his livery, then said:
“You’re experimenting on me!”
“Precisely. You are the subject, myself the control. If we both see ghosts, then I will believe in the supernatural. Eat up!”
The Abigails began to unlace La Duchesse’s gown. For any man it would have signalled a change of appetites, from the comestible to the carnal. But I was not a man, and I kept eating, too hungry to ignore the cheese. Once again I blessed the disguise that breeched me, safe from the perils of stays and corsets: undressing Madame was like dining on lobster.
Some half hour later, a hesitant knock sounded at the door. I opened it to reveal Mr Longmuir, in dressing gown and nightcap; he blinked at La Duchesse, who was resplendent in beribboned mob cap and a plum-coloured satin peignoir trimmed with deep lace ruffles, a gown outrageously lavish but indubitably modest. I picked up the folding bed and blunderbuss, and followed Longmuir as we tiptoed to his bedroom.
“Good night,” he murmured. “Sleep well.”
“I doubt it,” I muttered, queasy already. Then Longmuir was gone, to sleep in our apartments, while we kept watch in the haunted room.
“Not a comfortable bed,” said Madame, bouncing up and down on it. “Pepin, have you set the trip wires?”
“Set, Madame.”
“And the flour?
“Sifted and scattered.”
She lay back on the bed, a draught setting the candle flame dancing madly, a carnival of shadows. But none that looked like a silhouette, save of us. I reached out my hand, made a shadow mouse; Madame responded with a cat.
“Good night, Madame.”
“Good night, Pepin” - and she blew out the candle.
* * * *
Three things woke me: a mouse-scratch in the panelling; the cheese, rolling uncomfortably around my digestives; but most significantly the white light that poured into the room. I sat bolt upright on the folding bed, staring at the figure that had appeared on the windowseat as if standing on it, a vision insubstantial, that rippled with the curtain behind it in yet another of this room’s infernal draughts.
I cursed the cheese, then withdrew the anathema. Madame also sat up, staring: at a woman in her wedding dress, tall and handsome, with a veil of blood stretching down from her coiffed head, the length of the dress to her satin slippers. For a moment there was complete silence, the only sound the rustle of the curtain. Then I forgot my assumed manliness and screamed.
Madame reached down and gripped my shoulder - that stopped my panic, and at that moment the figure vanished. Shaking I got out of bed, fully dressed as was the plan, and reached for the blunderbuss. A match struck, as behind us in the wainscoting it seemed as if even the mice scrambled for safety. Madame lit the dark lantern, and shed mob cap and peignoir to reveal a neat plait instead of her elaborate daytime coiffure, and a plain dark man’s suit, the double of mine.
“Pepin! Is that window secure?”
I pushed the curtain aside.
“Shuttered and latched, Madame. Nobody could get in from the outside.” My hands were still a little unsteady, but I opened window and shutter, leaned out, with Madame craning behind me.
Cool night air met me, laced with fog, which was beginning to clear in the faint dawn breeze. It currently resided at just above head-height, creating an eerie grey effect reminiscent of some Gothic grotto. I heard a distant lapping from the river, as though it supped on land. Behind us came a waking commotion, the servants and Master arising, consequent to my scream. It seemed too peaceful outside to allow of any unquiet spirit, but then, near the folly, the figure reappeared, again luminescent white save the slash of red blood, but now pointing ... at what?
“Follow!” said Madame, and we leapt out the window, not something ever to do in Madame’s high-fashion hoops, but easily performed in breeches. We landed in a soft-dug flower bed, and went racing down the lawns. The figure stood as if waiting for us, absolutely still, except for that disquieting ripple. Now we faced each other across an expanse of geometric shrubbery, waiting ... for what?
“The blunderbuss, Pepin!” Madam whispered.
“But what if it is some person? An actor, the lady herself?”
“I am assured it is not. Fire!”
And I lifted the huge ponderous weapon, fired. It sounded like a cannon in the stillness, and the recoil knocked me over and into a box hedge. As I extricated myself, spitting leaves, I heard an unearthly scream and, from the house, shouts as Longmuir chivvied his servants outside.
I stood up awkwardly, to see the light gone, and Madam standing where the figure had been, apparently pulling strips of mist from the air, which fell like wafting grey blossoms.
“An apparition! That wears silk!”
I neared, to be handed a strip of torn cloth, as light and soft as thistledown.
* * * *
We searched the grounds, as the mist rose and the sun followed, without discovering anything - except that when someone falls down the ha ha, they injure themselves. In this case it was Mr Longmuir, who inflicted upon himself a broken leg, and several cracked ribs, to judge from the angle of his foot and the way he clutched his chest. Madame immediately took charge. The private ferry was commandeered to take Longmuir to the nearest infirmary; Rebecca and her nursemaid, who had joined the search just in time to fuss over the invalid, accompanied him.
Once the ferry and its cargo were dispatched, Madame clapped hands.
“I think what we need at this point is a breakfast... a good one, in the kitchen. No standing on ceremony at this time!”
And no mistaking who was wearing the pants, either.
At the back of the house we sat at the scrubbed pine table with Madame’s Abigails and the Longmuir servants, while the cook and scullery maid produced a breakfast quite unsuitable for a man of delicate digestion.
“Eggs Lincotte,” said Madame. “Pain perdu. Devilled kidneys. My compliments to the cook.”
“I’m Hannah, Ma’am, and it’s a pleasure to cook properly again.”
When in doubt, ask a servant, and this gang slipped easily into gossip mode, while I took notes. The maids were devoted readers of Mémoires of a Lady Detective, and had recognized Madame La Duchesse immediately. So much for our disguise!
“Never a spread like this since the Missus went.”
“She liked her food rich and spicy.”
“And parties, noisy ones.”
“Masks and fancy dress themes.”
“Like Pirates.”
“Then she heard a real pirate had just docked at port, on a flying visit for repairs.”
“Captain Jasper Sparrow, author of Adventures of a Space Pirate.”
“The Missus’ favourite series.”
“She sent him an invite, as a lark. And he larked back.”
“What a rager he turned out to be.”
“So was she.”
“Couldn’t blame her for running away with him, with the master so pale, dull and abstemious ...”
“And all his routines.”
“Getting worse they were.”
The gardener, a tall husky man seated at the far end of the table, had been silent. Now he cleared his throat.
“If she ran away with him.”
“Oh,” said Hannah, “Wilberforce, not that again.”
“We’re helping Madame and her secretary with their queries, aren’t we? So it’s only fair I say that Captain Sparrow was a dashing fellow, but not one for the womenfolk. Don’t ask me how, but I know for certain.”
“Thank you Wilberforce,” said La Duchesse. She opened her purse, began tipping handsomely, with most I noticed to Hannah, and also Wilberforce.
* * * *
After breakfast, we made a full tour of the premises again, in the absence of the owner, ascertaining that the trip wires and flour were intact, and that nothing had entered from outside. Madame scrutinized the sites of the hauntings, tapping the panelling of the bedroom, with tweezers removing what seemed like ordinary rubbish from the garden: fragments of old coloured window glass, espalier wire, and more of the mysterious grey silk. She also instructed me to make quick sketches. That done, we inspected the house again, leaving until last the only rooms we had not seen earlier, Miss Rebecca’s.
As we neared her bedroom door it opened a crack, to reveal a liveried rear-end, bent under the single four-posted bed.
“Ahem!” said Madame, entering and closing the door quietly behind us. “Mr Reynolds, I presume? I knew you were no servant, however new-employed.”
He crawled out backwards, stood, and gave a slight bow.
“Well-spotted, Madame. May I ask how?”
“Your thumb was in the toasted cheese.”
He sighed. “Not the sort of thing we learn in the Lumiscenti.”
“You had a report of new-fangled, forbidden technology?”
“We had a report of a phantasm, idle servant’s talk in a pothouse, but intriguing.”
“You too do not believe in ghosts?
“Only as illusions presented within the time-frame of our New Eighteenth Century. A phantom in a Phantasmagoria, an invention of the 1790s, but not a Zoetrope, or Dr Pepper’s Ghost, illusions which date from the nineteenth, and forbidden century. We license the spectacles in our theatres most carefully, and a report of an amateur performance merited investigation.”
“Performance, but by whom?” I asked.
“That remains to be seen. Consider these books ...” with a nod at the tomes on the bedside table. “Christian Huyghens! Hamlet! We have here not romances, nor conduct books, but a bluestocking child.”
“I was much the same at that age,” said La Duchesse. Sotto voce, to me: “Before I discovered the distractions of love.”
“Then consider this ...” and he led us to the connecting playroom, a higgledy-piggledy treasure trove of juvenile achievement, from the easel to the workbox, junior alchemy set, prisms, kaleidoscopes, telescope, astronomic charts, woodworking tools, and not a doll in sight. A school hat hung from a hook, and Madame gave an approving nod.
“The Madame de Stael Memorial Academy for Young Ladies, my alma mater. Nothing forbidden there, except a girl left fallow, with no cultivation of her natural abilities.”
“To judge from this mess,” Reynolds says, “Miss Longmuir had no ability for housekeeping. But for everything else, it would appear. Woodworking? I had no notion that was the latest craze for young ladies.”
“The Academy prides itself on its bluestocking tradition, and also on providing practical careers for girls. Wood-carving, locksmithing, even the stage, but props-management rather than actressing. New professions, instead of the oldest.”
“In my opinion,” Reynolds said, “Miss Longmuir is the cleverest person in this house.”
“But sufficient to cause the Lumiscenti concern, at 12 years old?”
“How clever is or was her Mamma?” I said. They both turned and stared at me.
“An excellent question, Pepin. Here we find a guide to the character and interests of the daughter. Her mother, on the other hand, is a blank. Nothing I have seen in this house suggests the personality and possessions of the absent Mrs Longmuir.”
She paused, finger to mouth.
“Which makes me wonder. A woman in a midnight flit does not usually pack anything but lightly. She must have left something behind, which her husband no doubt shut out of sight and thus remembrance.”
“There is an attic, Ma’am,” said Reynolds. “I had yet to concoct a reason to inspect it.”
A sudden movement out the window, which like the master bedroom opened onto the garden, caught my attention. The private ferryboat had returned, and was docking at the riverside jetty. But something about it was different.
“Madame, is it usual for a boat to carry the flag with its owner’s arms half-mast?”
The ferryman’s dress was subtly different too, with a band of black on sleeve and hat, clearly distinguished from the green of the household livery.
“Oh!” and Madame stood beside me, Reynolds craning over both our heads. “I fear that poor Mr Longmuir’s injuries were more serious than expected, that he has ... died.”
“Or was murdered,” said Reynolds.
Servants were running from the house to the ferry, just as two figures, tall and short, in long black cloaks disembarked: Miss Rebecca Longmuir and her nursemaid.
“There will be an inquest,” Reynolds said. “At which, as investigative agents, we will be summoned to appear. To present our conclusions.”
Madame looked from him to me.
“And the conclusions of an investigative agent, whether of the Lumiscenti, or a Lady Detective, can only take one form: to bring the mystery to an end.”
* * * *
Coronial inquests are generally convened in situ, and quickly, but it was a week before Madame, I, and the Abigails, all clad in sombre mourning, took the ferryboat back to the Longmuir estate. It was crowded: with the Coroner, doctor, and witnesses, all wrapped up in cloaks against a biting sea breeze. We disembarked, and hurried up to the house. In the library, the largest room, was where the inquest would be convened. Miss Longmuir sat there already, veiled in black on a couch, holding hands with her nursemaid.
The Coroner seated in the late master’s chair, a jury of neighbours empanelled, Madame nodded to the servants. A series of exhibits, shrouded in dustcloths, were brought in and lined against the near wall. Then the Coroner opened the proceedings, in a droning voice I found very difficult to listen to. Madame had kept me hard at work the last week, dictating letters, taking record of interviews, conducting experiments, and what with one thing or another I had very little sleep. I drifted into a light doze, then awoke with a start, as Madame took the floor, in black velvet and matching pearls.
“Mr Coroner, the function of an investigation is to be reconstructive, and I had to reconstruct first a recent sequence of events, then an older one, of five years back. That was when Mrs Longmuir notoriously eloped with Captain Jasper Sparrow, never to be seen again. Except, perhaps, in Exhibit A, published late last year.”
With a curtsey, a housemaid pulled the dustsheet away from an occasional table containing a prosaic business ledger and pile of pamphlet-sized booklets, their covers adorned with bright, gaudy engravings. I recognized the familiar format of my publisher, Mr Colburn & Co, whose popular memoir series included ...
“Adventures of a Space-Pirate. Not originating with Colburn, but licensed for distribution in New Ceres. A series with a substantial following here, even if the author is somewhat dilatory in his instalments, given his busy career in piracy. He is, at present, running several years behind actual events in his career. But last year, a new volume did appear ... and sold out almost immediately. Mr Colburn was obliged to provide me with his personal copies to read. Alas, he was quite unable to provide an actual interview with his author, who is rather elusive, natural given his profession.”
She took out a jet lorgnette, and quizzed the topmost booklet before her.
“Captain Sparrow, like others in the memoirs trade, does disguise facts and figures to prevent too close a recognition. And exaggerates, no doubt. In this one volume alone he escapes a sunspot storm, rams a space-whaler, and also ... attends a Masked Piratical ball, as himself. At a riverside mansion, on a planet that bears an unmistakable resemblance to New Ceres.”
The Coroner painstakingly noted that fact.
“The highlight of this particular narrative is a card game, with the officers of a Naval vessel, unsuspecting old adversaries of Sparrow. The fake and the real pirates play for high stakes - he cleans them out completely, and most comically. Yet, curiously, there is no mention of running off with his hostess. Indeed, the more I read these books, the more I noticed an exclusively masculine cast of characters, with no apparent need of feminine company.”
Wilberforce, seated besides the ferryman, received a visible nudge.
She closed the book, opened another, the ledger.
“Mr Colburn kindly provided me with his list of subscribers. In which I notice the Madame de Stael College.”
She passed the books to the coroner.
“Next, Exhibit B.” The housemaid gave her curtsey again, and pulled the dustsheet from Mr Longmuir’s bedroom chair.
“Mr Coroner, honourable juryfolk, consider this chair. A rather plain, lathe-turned item, but which with certain modifications could take part in a scientific experiment: to determine if a man was merely a deserted husband, or something much worse.” She put one hand on the knobs, finials on either side of the high back. “See, one unscrews ... and the other most decidedly doesn’t.”
An anticipatory silence filled the room.
“May I request the curtains be drawn ... Not now, when I signal! And for a candelabrum to be lit. Also, if I may borrow the Chinoiserie screen, by the fireplace.”
It was arranged behind the chair, the dustsheet draped over it, the candelabrum lit and placed on the seat.
“If I may humour the audience with a shadow play. In this house’s schoolroom, I observed woodworking tools, among them some lathe-turned knobs. They appeared innocuous, but in certain lights, they bore a remarkable resemblance ... to the Headmistress of the Madame de Stael College, its janitor, an unpopular figure, and to this lady, Exhibit C.”
She produced from her hanging pocket a miniature portrait.
“Mrs Longmuir, a silhouette, done from life and concealed in the family attic. Now draw the curtains.”
The room, save for the flickering candle, plunged into darkness, illuminating the knobs on the chairback and throwing their shadows against the draped dustsheet. They appeared unexceptional, at first. Then light, or rather shadow, dawned.
One knob had been cunningly turned so that it formed a face in silhouette - the counterpart of the one in the miniature.
“Jouets séditieux, seditious toys, a trifle from the Old Eighteenth Century, but surprisingly effective when used here, as an agent of justice. But not as effective as Exhibit D.”
She nodded to the maid, who removed yet another dustsheet, to reveal two metal boxes.
“A word on provenance here. The coastguards, acting on my suggestions, dragged the riverbed within a narrow radius of the jetty. They unearthed, or rather unwatered these, the insides smashed, the delicate glass scattered. Fragments could be found in the garden, including a shard of mirror. I had repairs made, but a vital component was missing.”
She removed one candle from the candelabrum, opened a hinged flap in the nearest box and inserted it. A stream of light emerged from the front, and hit the dustsheet draped over the screen.
“Ah,” said Reynolds, now in his Lumiscenti robes. “A Magic Lantern.”
“Or Lantern of Fear, as some call it. It projects: pretty panoramas, images of foreign potentates, anything that can be painted in miniature, on glass. I have here only a view of New Copenhagen, which will have to suffice. See the square of painted glass, in my hand, see me place it in the Lantern, behold on the dustsheet, the image magnified. Pepin!”
“Yes Madame?”
“Perhaps you can describe the phantom you saw in Mr Longmuir’s bedroom.”
I stood before the assembly, all eyes on me, and tried to describe what I had seen. “A lady, tall and stately, in her wedding dress, satin à la Polonaise. She was very pale, with chestnut hair, and she stood perfectly still, though she rippled slightly.”
Madame took hold of the dependant dustsheet.
“Like this, pray?” - and shook it. New Copenhagen trembled as if in an earthquake.
“Your phantom was projected onto the silk curtain. Probably from the next room, via a hole drilled in the wall and concealed among the wooden foliage.”
“I did hear a scratching sound, Madame, but thought it mice, attracted by the smell of cheese.”
“Thank you, Pepin. Wait here a moment, while I present my final exhibit ...” - a tall rectangle underneath its shroud.
From the audience Hannah the cook spoke:
“We think we know what your next exhibit will be, M’am. It used to hang over the fireplace, till Master sent it to the attic.”
“Hannah, you are perfectly correct.” The last dustsheet fell to the floor, and I beheld the spectre, to the life, or rather paint: a full-length portrait of a tall, chestnut-haired woman in white, a bride à la Polonaise.
“Madame, she was much less realistic when I saw her.”
“Because she had been copied, in miniature, and a crude swathe of red blood added. That was one image, the other was for the garden, with an arm crudely upraised, pointing ... at what? And why?”
Silence fell, broken from the other side of the room, by the sound of two hands muffled in black silk mittens, clapping.
“Well done, Madame,” said a high, girlish voice. “Open the curtains, extinguish the candlelight. You have exploded me quite.”
Rebecca Longmuir stood, pushing back her black veil. From where I stood I could see the intelligence in her face, but not, I thought, any particular malevolence. She walked slowly over to Madame, an effortless upstage.
“You were wrong in one matter. My inspiration was not the new instalment of Adventures of a Space Pirate. That was secondary. Certainly when I read it I found no mention of Mamma’s elopement. To him she was no more than Mrs Longbottom, as he called her, a merry but gracious hostess.”
One of the jurymen stood up. “As she was, that night. I was a guest, and went as Captain Sparrow. So did several others, including the genuine article. Which one of us rowed Mrs Longmuir down the misty river? I didn’t, but I can’t say who did.”
“A confusion to be exploited at a masked ball,” said Madame, “for amours or worse. Especially next morning, when everyone except the host is hungover, and the lady cannot be found.”
“Ahem,” said Rebecca, and the juryman subsided. She turned, held out one hand, and the nurserymaid joined her.
“From Captain Sparrow’s narrative, and from certain hints dropped by my dear Abigail, I acquired the dreadful suspicion Papa had been telling me fairytales. He was increasingly irksome in his strictness, and seemed to think my apex in life was to be his housekeeper. When I could read Mr Hughyens on Optics, could paint, carve wood, and shone as props lady in the end of year school mélodrame! So I resolved to test him, as Hamlet did his Uncle. I copied the silhouette, transferred it to a jouet séditieux, and substituted it for the knob on his bedside chair. It took several nights, before the angle of shadow was correct, but assuredly he reacted like the guiltiest of men.”
She turned to Madame la Duchesse.
“I have read all the Mémoires of a Lady Detective. In my innocent teatime prattle, I inserted into Papa’s mind the notion of your discreet investigations. Who better to expose his guilty secret? And so you came, to witness a Magic Lantern show, myself inside, Abigail outside, with a second Magic Lantern in the folly, projecting onto a gauze curtain hung between two trees. A Phantasmagoria, Mr Reynolds, not a Zoetrope nor Dr Pepper’s Ghost. Oh! such fun we had, until you shot your blunderbuss, Mr Pepin. Abigail and I took fright, we concealed the Lanterns beneath our shawls, then dropt them, their mechanisms smashed, into the river. Where I fear Papa dropt Mamma, when her desire for a noisy, spicy life conflicted too much with his desire for bland peace. But, I assure you, I did not drop Papa in the ha ha, that was the least of my intent. I only wished that justice would be done.”
The doctor, scheduled to give evidence last in the inquest, suddenly stood.
“I must interrupt. Death was consistent with a heart attack, there is no doubt about it.”
“Twas Nemesis, the agent of justice, pushed him,” said Hannah. “Or maybe the ghost of Mrs Longmuir herself.”
“I don’t disbelieve in ghosts,” said Rebecca.
“Indeed,” said Madame, “and why not, pray?”
“You never asked me what my inspiration was, to first try Papa, then expose his guilt before you. Why it was the ghost of dear Mamma appearing in my dream, wordless and imploring, dripping water and seaweed!”
And Madame turned to face me over the veiled chestnut head and mouthed two words: Toasted cheese!
* * * *
Back at the Hotel Exclusif, my pen scratched as I wrote the final words of the latest Mémoire of a Lady Detective:
To solve the problem seemed to be impossible, and so the case of the dream revenant, à la Maria Marten, has remained a mystery to this day — a mystery to which the Lady Detective carried the closest investigation, without being any wiser by the inquiry.
“Very good,” said Madame, reading over my shoulder. “Have you thought of a title yet? I fancy: ‘The Lantern of Fear’.”
“It suggests horror, Monk Lewis and his shuddering ilk. Also it gives the plot away, something never to do with mystery narratives.”
‘“The Phantasmagoria’?”
“Likewise, Madame.” I was the writer, and as such I had authority. So I turned to the title page, and wrote, the pen sputtering slightly:
MIST AND MURDER
* * * *
Lucy Sussex was born in New Zealand, and emigrated to Australia at 13. She has compiled three anthologies for younger readers, and She’s Fantastical, an anthology of Australian women’s non-realist fiction, was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Her award-winning fiction includes four books for younger readers and one adult novel, The Scarlet Rider (1996). She has written three short story collections, the most recent being A Tour Guide in Utopia (2005) and Absolute Uncertainty (2006). Currently she reviews weekly for the Age and West Australian newspapers. Her next book is Saltwater in the Ink, forthcoming from Red Dog Books.
Author’s note:
‘Mystery and Murder’ is a story in the first Australian crime series, by Mary Fortune. I had to do a textual comparison on it, to establish authorship, and in the process discovered a quite interesting subtext: that a man who summons a detective to investigate a haunting might be the actual murderer. ‘Mist’ rewrites the Fortune story for New Ceres, but remains true to its central tension, of the rationality of the detective faced with the Gothic horror of a ghost. It helped to have the ‘Eyes, Lies and Illusions’ exhibition visit Melbourne, so that I could learn how to fake a ghost in the eighteenth century. And part of the fun was playing around with archaic language, also the history of publishing. Colburn existed, and published Polidori’s The Vampyre. One of his clients, Rosina Bulwer Lytton, described him as an ‘Embodied Shiver’, a description I can only palely imitate.
Editors’ note:
‘Mist and Murder’ won New Zealand’s Sir Julius Vogel award for Best Short Story of 2007.