The Burning Court

by John Dickson Carr

  Stevens set out glasses and a siphon of soda.

  “Look here, Mark. I’ll keep the secret, naturally,” he said, with more fervency than the other could know. “But suppose you do find what you suspect; suppose you prove he was murdered? Then what are you going to do about it?”

  Mark pressed his hands to his forehead. “God knows. That’s what’s been driving me half crazy. What can I do about it? What would you do about it? What would anybody do about it? Execute private vengeance? Commit another murder? No, thanks. I wasn’t fond enough of Uncle Miles for that. But we’ve got to KNOW: you see that. We can’t go on knowing there’s a poisoner in the house. … And I hate the deliberate infliction of pain, Ted. Uncle Miles didn’t snuff out quickly; it was a cruel death. Somebody must have enjoyed very much watching a man die.” He struck the arm of the chair. “And another thing—straight—if you want to know it. Somebody had been systematically poisoning him for days, or even weeks. I don’t know. It may be impossible to tell just when the arsenic began to be administered, because he really did have that stomach trouble that gives the same symptoms as arsenic poisoning. Before he was taken bad and we had to bring in a trained nurse, he always had his lunch and dinner sent up on a tray. He wouldn’t even have Margaret”—Mark turned to Partington—“he wouldn’t even have Margaret—that’s the maid—take the tray into his room. He always made her put it down on a table outside the door, and he would take it in at his own leisure. Sometimes it stayed there for quite a while. Consequently, anybody in the house (or any outsider, for all I know) could have got amusement out of soaking the food with poison. But——

  “But,” said Mark, his voice rising in spite of himself, “on the night he took his last full dose and died at three o’clock the next morning, it was a different matter. There we get into a realm of detective-story suspects. And I’ve got to thrash this thing out. I’ve got to get to the root of it somehow, if only to prove that the person who killed Uncle Miles wasn’t my own wife.”

  Stevens, who was getting out a box of cigars, stopped with the box held in mid-air. Whoever had dealt the cards for this little game of devilment, there were some very odd hands turning up. Mark and Lucy: he thought of Lucy—trim, good-looking, efficient, with her black hair parted on one side, her faint trace of freckles round the nose, her laughing face; the kind of whom everyone speaks as “a good sort on a party”; and partner in another thoroughly happy marriage—he thought of Lucy, and found it nonsensical.

  Mark jeered savagely.

  “I see what you’re thinking,” he observed. “Crazy, isn’t it? Absolute bosh and drivel, isn’t it? Yes, I know that. I know it as well as I know I’m sitting in this chair; but that isn’t the point. I know that the whole night during which Miles got his last heavy dose Lucy was with me at a masquerade ball at St. Davids; but still that isn’t the point. It’s the damned circumstantial evidence I’ve got to get round. You don’t have to face a situation like that, Ted, and you can thank your lucky stars you don’t. It’s the damned circumstantial evidence you’ve got to get round, though you know there’s nothing in it, because you hate secrets and funny business. I have got to find out who killed Uncle Miles, so that I can find out who was trying to put her in a bad position; and then, I warn you, there’s going to be trouble. I don’t suppose I can explain it to you so you’ll understand. …”

  “Think not?” remarked Stevens. “Well, never mind. You talk about circumstantial evidence. What circumstantial evidence?”

  So far the bottle and the glasses had remained untouched on the table. Mark, drawing a breath as though he were inhaling smoke deeply, poured several fingers of whisky into a glass, held it up against the light, and then drained it neat.

  He said: “Mrs. Henderson, the cook and prop of our household, saw the murder done. She saw the last dose administered. And, by what she says, the only person who could have given it was Lucy.”

  IV

  Partington leaned forward. “You take it coolly, and that’s a good sign,” he asserted. “But it strikes me that there’s a weak star witness.”

  His heavy eyes followed Mark while the latter drank. Stevens saw that Partington wanted liquor badly: but he would make no move to take it, and affected not to notice the glass in Mark’s hand. Stevens mixed him a whisky-and-soda, which he took casually, and with that curious stateliness which points out the quiet, unobtrusive, steady drinker. Partington went on:

  “You mean Mrs. Henderson, the old woman who’s been with you for so long? Isn’t it possible that she was——?”

  “Anything’s a possibility,” Mark told him, wearily, “in this mess. But I don’t think she was either hysterical or lying. She’s an inveterate gossip, of course; but did she ever strike you as being the hysterical sort? Furthermore, as you say, she and her husband have been with us since I was a kid; she nursed Ogden… you remember my brother Ogden, Part? He was a boy in grade school when you left. … And I know that Mrs. H. genuinely is fond of our family. She’s fond of Lucy; I know that too. And, you see, she doesn’t have any suspicion at all that Uncle Miles was really poisoned. She thinks he died of stomach trouble, and that what she saw was an ordinary unimportant incident. That’s why I’ve had such a devil of a job keeping her quiet.”

  “Wait a minute,” interposed Stevens. “Does this story of hers concern the mysterious woman in old-fashioned clothes, the one who walked through the door that didn’t exist?”

  “It does,” admitted Mark, and stirred uneasily. “That’s what’s got me going. For there, right there, is the one part of the whole story which will not fit in anywhere. It won’t make sense! I tested it out on you the other day, to see how you’d take it, and I had to make fun of the whole busi—Well, look! Judge for yourselves.” His restless, spatulate fingers were busy again with cigarette-papers and a little bag of tobacco; Mark liked to roll his own cigarettes, and made almost a sleight-of-hand business out of it. “I’ll tell you the whole thing from the start, because there are such queer places in it that I feel I’m making a map of hell, somehow. And I’d better begin with a little family history. By the way, Part, did you ever meet Uncle Miles in the old days?”

  Partington reflected. “No. He was always off in Europe somewhere.”

  “Uncle Miles and my father were born within a year of each other: Uncle Miles in April, ’73, and my father in March, ’74. You’ll see why I stress these details. My father married early, at twenty-one; Uncle Miles never married at all. I was born in ’96, Edith in ’98, and Ogden in ’04. The money came from land—the old Despards got a tolerable slice in Philadelphia, and a good deal of land hereabouts. Miles inherited most of it, but it never worried my father; he was a good up-and-at-’em kind, who had a flourishing law-practice. (Both my mother and my father died six years ago, of pneumonia; she insisted on nursing him, and she caught it.)”

  “I remember them,” put in Partington, briefly. He was sitting with his hand shading his eyes, and he did not seem to relish the memory.

  “And I tell you this.” growled Mark, “to show how commonplace the whole background is. No bad patches. No bad blood. No luridness. Miles was an old rounder, yes; but the kind of high-flown boozings and gallantries he used to carry on were done so much in the old style that they seem decorous in this day and age. I think I can say that he literally hadn’t an enemy in the world. In fact, he’d lived so much abroad that he hardly knew anyone hereabouts. If some one poisoned him, it was for the pleasure of seeing a man die… or for his money, of course.”

  Mark faced them.

  “If it was for his money, you can say that all of us are under suspicion, myself most of the whole crowd. Each of us inherits a heavy sum. We knew we were going to get it. As I told you, Miles and my father, being born so close to each other, were brought up almost like twins and were good friends; Miles never intended to marry, so long as my father produced heirs. There was never a question of anything else. And this, my lads, was the quiet domestic situation when someone began to fee
d him arsenic.”

  “I want to ask two questions,” interposed Partington: still stolidly, but with more fluent ease. “First, where’s your proof that he was being fed arsenic? Second, you’ve been dropping vague hints about your uncle’s behavior being odd towards the end—shutting himself up in his room, and the rest of it. When did that behavior start?”

  Again Mark hesitated, opening and shutting his hands.

  “It’s easy to give a wrong impression,” he said, “and that’s what I want to avoid. Don’t get the idea that he’d turned wildly eccentric, or was a crank, or disrupted the household; he always prided himself on his old-school manners. I suppose it was the difference in him from the old days. We first noticed a trace of that difference not quite six years ago, when he returned from Paris after my parents died. He wasn’t the genial uncle any longer; not that he’d become depressed, but simply that he seemed abstracted, or puzzled, and that something had got into his mind. He didn’t shut himself up then, either. That began… h’m.” Mark reflected. “By the way, Ted, how long have you been living here in this house?”

  “About two years.”

  Mark nodded, amused by the coincidence. “Well, it was a couple of months after that. He didn’t exactly shut himself up; he only had his lunch and dinner there, and spent the evening there. You know his routine. He would come down-stairs to breakfast, and walk in the garden in good weather, and smoke a cigar. He spent some time in the picture-gallery, too. He was just—puzzled, you’d have said; wandering round in a fog. By noon he’d be back in his room for the rest of the day.”

  Partington scowled. “But what did he do there all that time? Reading? Studying?”

  “No, I don’t think so. You couldn’t call him a man of books. There’s a back-stairs rumor that he just sat in a basket-chair looking out of the window. There’s also a rumor that he spent a lot of time changing his clothes, apparently for lack of something else to do. He had an enormous wardrobe; he was always very proud of his appearance, and the figure he cut.

  “Six weeks ago he began to have these attacks—vomiting, cramps, the rest of it. And he wouldn’t hear of having a doctor in. He said: ‘Nonsense! I’ve had this before. A mustard plaster and a glass of champagne will put me right again.’ Then he had such an acute one that we got Dr. Baker in a hurry. Baker shook his head—gastro-enteritis, all right. Too bad. We got a nurse in, and whether or not it had really been only stomach trouble before, it’s a notable fact that from that time on he began to get well. At the end of the first week in April he was so much improved that nobody had any more anxiety. And so we come to the night of April 12th.

  “There were eight people in the house: Lucy, Edith, Ogden, and myself; old Henderson—you remember, Part? he’s a sort of groundkeeper-gardener-general-utility man—and Mrs. Henderson ; Miss Corbett, the nurse, and Margaret, the maid. Lucy and Edith and I went to a masquerade ball, as I told you. Moreover, the arrangements were such that nearly everybody was to be out of the house that night. Like this:

  “Mrs. Henderson had been away for nearly a week. She was standing godmother to some relative’s kid in Cleveland; she likes being a godmother. There was to have been a big family celebration there and she had a good stay of it. The 12th, a Wednesday, was Miss Corbett’s regular evening off. Margaret had an unexpected date with a boy-friend about whom she raves, and didn’t have much difficulty persuading Lucy to let her go out. Ogden was going into town—a party somewhere. That would leave only Henderson in the house with Uncle Miles.

  “Edith, as usual, fretted about that. She has the usual idea that only a woman is any good when somebody’s sick, so she was going to stay at home herself. But Miles wouldn’t hear of it. Besides, Mrs. Henderson was due back home early that evening; she was to be on the train that comes into Crispen at 9:25. Then Edith got a new cause for worry. Henderson was going down with the Ford, to meet the old girl at the train, which would leave a full ten minutes while there would be nobody in the house. So Ogden said, ‘Oh God,’ and agreed to wait there until Mrs. H. turned up. Consequently, everything was settled smoothly.

  “Margaret went out early; so did Miss Corbett, leaving instructions written for Mrs. H. in case she should need ’em. Lucy, Edith, Ogden, and I had a light dinner about eight o’clock. Miles had sent down word that he didn’t want anything to eat, and wouldn’t have anything; he was in one of his touchy moods. He consented, though, to have a glass of warm milk. After dinner, when we were all going upstairs to dress, Lucy carried it up on a tray. Here’s one thing I have good cause to remember: Edith overtook her on the landing, and said, ‘You don’t even know where things are in your own house. That’s the sour milk you’ve got.’ But they both had a taste of it, and it was good.”

  Stevens, listening to Mark’s deliberate voice, had no difficulty in calling up that scene at Despard Park, on the landing of the oak staircase under the big window. There was a big portrait on the wall, and underfoot an Indian rug as heavy as a bath mat, and in the embrasure of the window a telephone-table. Why, Stevens wondered, did his mind keep running on telephone-tables? He could imagine Lucy, very brisk and pleasant, with her black hair parted on one side, her suspicion of freckles; the “good sort on a party.” He could imagine Edith, taller, brown-haired, still good-looking, but drying and growing faintly hollowed round the eyes; inclined to fussiness and to speak much of Good Taste. He could imagine them wrangling without rancor over a glass of milk (for there never was any friction in that family)—while satirical young Ogden stood in the background, his hands in his pockets. Ogden lacked Mark’s tensity and seriousness. He was a good sort on a party, as well. …

  But what obsessed Stevens’s mind was the question: Am I certain where Marie and I were on that same night? He knew the answer, though he did not like to know it. They had been here, at the cottage in Crispen. It was not usual for them to come down from New York during the middle of the week. But he had to come down on business, to see the Rittenhouse Magazine people about serial rights. So he and Marie had spent the night here after driving from New York, and had gone back early in the morning: he had not learned of Miles’s death until two days later. And they had spent a quite ordinary evening at home, having no company in, and going to bed fairly early. Yes, they had gone to bed early, with all serene.

  He became aware that Mark was speaking again.

  “So, I repeat, the milk was good,” Mark continued, looking from one to the other of them. “Lucy carried it up, and knocked at Miles’s door. She was going to set it down on the table there—I’ve told you that usually he didn’t come to the door immediately—but this time he opened the door and took the tray himself. He was looking a whole lot better. He didn’t have quite so much of that misty look, as though he were searching for something and didn’t know quite what it was. (You never saw him, Part. Imagine a handsome oldish gent, going a little scrawny round the neck, with a grey moustache, and a high forehead.) That night he was even wearing a blue quilted dressing-gown of the old-fashioned sort, with a white collar and a scarf round his neck.

  “Edith said: ‘You’re sure you’ll be all right now? Remember, Miss Corbett is out, and nobody can hear your bell downstairs. If you want anything, you’ll have to get it for yourself. Can you do it? Wouldn’t it be better,’ she said, ‘if I left instructions for Mrs. Henderson to come up and sit in the hall after she gets back?’

  “Uncle Miles said: ‘Until two or three o’clock in the morning, my dear? Nonsense! You go along, and I shall be perfectly comfortable. I’ve beaten it now.’

  “Just then it happened that Joachim—Edith’s cat—who had been stalking something imaginary in the hall, sidled round Miles’s foot and into Miles’s room. Miles liked Joachim. He said something about the cat being all the company he needed; he told us to have a good time, and, closed the door. So we all went to dress.”

  Stevens threw in a question with apparent irrelevance. “I think you told me,” he suggested, “that Lucy went to this party dressed as Madam
e de Montespan?”

  “Yes. That is… officially she did,” replied Mark, and seemed (for some reason) startled for the first time. He eyed Stevens. “Edith—I don’t know what had got into her head—insisted it should be Madame de Montespan. Maybe she had an idea it would be more respectable.” He grinned crookedly. “Actually, her dress (Lucy made it herself) was an exact copy of one in a full-length portrait in the gallery. It’s a portrait of a lady contemporary with Montespan, anyhow: though who it may be is still dubious. Most of the face and part of the shoulder have been defaced with some sort of acid, apparently very many years ago. I remember my grandfather once told me somebody had tried to have it restored; but it was impossible to do it. Anyhow, it appears to be a genuine Kneller, which is why they keep it, though it looks like nothing on earth. It’s supposed to be a picture of a certain Marquise de Brinvilliers. … What the devil’s the matter with you, Ted?” he demanded, with a fretful jump, as though his nerves were wearing thin.

  “I need food, I suppose,” Stevens said, casually. “All right. Keep on going. You mean the seventeenth-century French poisoner? How do you happen to have a picture of her?”

  Partington muttered to himself. He leaned out, with his usual laborious movements, and this time was not backward about pouring himself more whisky.

  “If I remember,” said Partington, looking up, “there’s some traditional connection, isn’t there? Or she was associated with some one in your family back in the very misty past?”

  Mark was impatient. “Yes. Didn’t I tell you our name’s been changed and Anglicized? It used to be spelled Desprez, and it was French. But never mind madame la marquise. I was only telling you that Lucy copied the costume in the picture, and made it herself in three days.

  “We left the house about nine-thirty. Lucy was in her finery, Edith in her Florence Nightingale hoopskirts, and I in some contraption which the man at the costumer’s in town confidently declared to be ‘cavalier.’ It was surprisingly comfortable, considering the look of it; and, anyway, who can resist wearing a sword when you get the chance? Down we went to the car, with Ogden standing on the porch under the roof light and making riotous comments. Just as we turned down the drive, we passed Henderson in the Ford, coming back from the station with Mrs. H.