The Burning Court

by John Dickson Carr

  Stevens thought of the scene. At the rear of the long, low grey house there ran out a broad and straight path laid out in crazy-paving with concrete between the stones. On either side was a sunken garden. Beyond the gardens the path was lined with elm trees, and it terminated, some sixty yards from the house, in a small private chapel which had been shut up for more than a century and a half. Not far in front of the chapel, and to the left of the path as you walked down it, was a small house where the Despards had once “kept” a clergyman. The Hendersons lived there now. Stevens had heard that the entrance to the crypt (of which no sign was visible) was somewhere under the crazy-paving before the chapel door. Mark explained it now.

  “About seven square feet of paving will have to come up,” he said. “And, since we have to work in a hurry, there’ll be a lot of breaking. We’ll get a dozen steel wedges—long ones—into the concrete between the stones, and drive them in as far as they’ll go, and then knock them to one side. That’ll lift and split most of the joinings. Then we crack it all over with a sledge-hammer, and we can take it up in pieces. Under that there’s gravel and soil; six inches or so. Under that there’s a flat stone that covers the hole down into the place. The stone’s six feet by four, and, I warn you, it weighs between fifteen and eighteen hundred pounds. The heaviest job will be to get bars under it and lever it up on its end. Then we go down the stairs. I know it sounds like a lot of work…”

  “It’s a lot of work, all right,” grunted Partington, and slapped his knees. “Let’s get down to it, then. And look here: you don’t want anybody to know about this, do you? After we make all that mess, do you think we can get it back afterwards so that nobody will know it’s been disturbed?”

  “Not altogether, no. Anybody with an eye for it, like Henderson or myself, would see it. But I doubt whether anybody else would. There was a slight tear-up at the edges last time it was opened, for Miles’s funeral; and most crazy-paving looks alike.” Mark had become restless again. He got to his feet, brushing the matter away, and took out his watch. “That’s settled, then. It’s half-past nine now; let’s get started as soon as we can. There’ll be nobody up there to disturb us. We’ll go on up ahead, Ted; you get something to eat and follow us as soon as you can. Better wear old cl—” He stopped, in an alarm that was growing out of his uneasy nerves. “Good God! I forgot! What about Marie? What excuse are you going to make to her? You won’t tell her, will you?”

  “No,” Stevens said, with his eye on the door; “no, I won’t tell her. Leave it to me.”

  He could see that they were both surprised at his tone, but both appeared to have concerns of their own and they believed him. With the smoke-filled air of the room and his own lack of food, he found when he got up that he was a little light-headed. And it made him remember something else about the night of Wednesday, April 12th, which he and Marie had spent at this cottage, and on which he had gone to bed so early. He had gone to bed at ten-thirty because he had felt unaccountably drowsy, and had nearly banged his head forward against the manuscript on the desk. Marie said it was a taste of the open air, after New York.

  He accompanied Mark and Partington out into the hall. Marie was not in sight. Shouldering ahead, Mark appeared in a hurry to get out of the house. Partington hesitated near the front door, looked round politely with his hat against his chest, and murmured something about Mrs. Stevens before his footsteps creaked after the other’s down the brick path. Standing in the open door, breathing the night, Stevens saw the lights of Mark’s car go on; he heard the jerk and throb of the engine, and the trees rustling at gossip. Well? He turned back, closing the door with care, and looked at the brown porcelain umbrella-stand. Marie was in the kitchen: he could hear her moving about, half humming, half singing, “Il pleut, il pleut bergère—” that china-shepherdess song she liked so much. He went out through the dining-room, and pushed open the swing-door to the kitchen.

  Ellen, evidently, had gone. Marie, wearing a house apron, stood at the kitchen cabinet, cutting cold-chicken sandwiches, spreading them with lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise, and ranging them in neat piles on a plate. When she saw him she pushed back a strand of the dark-yellow hair with the hand that held the bread-knife. The heavy-lidded grey eyes looked at him gravely, yet with an expression which suggested a smile. What went through his head was Thackeray’s jingle in burlesque of Goethe:

  Charlotte, like a well-conducted maiden,

  Went on cutting bread and butter.

  The kitchen was white-tiled, and there was a humming noise from the electric refrigerator. This whole business was nonsensical.

  “Marie—” he said.

  “I know,” she declared, cheerfully. “You’ve got to go. You eat these, darling.” She tapped the sandwiches with the bread-knife. “They’ll stay by you.”

  “How do you know I’ve got to go?”

  “I listened, of course. You were all so horribly mysterious. What did you expect me to do?” There was a very faint look of tensity about her face. “It’s spoiled our evening, but I know you’ve got to go, or you’d never get it off your mind. Darling, I did a good thing tonight to warn you—about being morbid. I expected this.”

  “Expected?”

  “Well, maybe not exactly that. But they’re talking about it in what few houses Crispen has. I got here this morning, and I’ve heard a hint of it. I mean that there’s something wrong at the Park; something; nobody seems to know what. Nobody knows how the rumor got started. If you try to trace it back, you can’t find it. Even if you try to remember who told it to you, you can’t be careful. Won’t you be careful?”

  Yet there was an air of change about the kitchen; all things had changed. Even when he looked at the brown porcelain umbrella-stand in the hall, it had an appearance of being painted in new colors. Putting down the knife with a small rattle on the enamelled shelf of the cabinet, she came up to him and took him by the arms.

  “Listen, Ted. I love you. You know I love you, don’t you?”

  He did know it, in his bones and soul.

  “And as,” he said, “for what I was thinking——”

  “Listen again, Ted. That will last as long as I know you, or you know me. What you may have got into your head I don’t know. Sometime I may tell you about a house at a place called Guibourg, and my aunt Adrienne, and you’ll understand. But it isn’t the kind of thing you ought to be thinking about. Don’t grin in that superior way. I am older than you, much, much older; and if you saw my face shrivel up and blacken right at this minute——”

  “Stop that! You’re hysterical!”

  The knife had fallen out of her hand and her mouth was pulled open. She picked up the knife.

  “I’m crazy,” she said. “Now I’ll tell you something. You’re going to open a grave tonight, and my guess… it’s only a guess… is that you’ll find nothing.”

  “Yes. I don’t think we’ll find anything, either.”

  “You don’t understand. You wouldn’t understand. But please, please, don’t tamper with this too far. If I asked you for my sake not to, would you? I want you to think. And that’s as much as I can tell you now. Think what I’ve said; don’t try to understand it; but just trust me. Now eat up a few of these sandwiches, and take a glass of milk. Then go up and change your clothes. That old sweater of yours will do you, and there’s a pair of old tennis-flannels in the cupboard of the spare room; I forgot to get them cleaned last year.”

  Charlotte, like a well-conducted hausfrau, went on cutting bread and butter.

  II

  EVIDENCE

  “Fly open, lock, to the dead man’s knock,

  Fly bolt, and bar, and band!——”

  —R. H. BARHAM, Ingoldsby Legends

  VI

  Stevens walked up King’s Avenue the short distance to the gates of the Park. There was no moon, but a crowding of stars. As usual, the iron-grilled gates—with each entrance pillar topped by an unimpressive stone cannon-ball—stood wide open. He shut them, and dropped th
e bar. The gravel drive went slightly uphill; it was a long distance to the house, and seemed longer by reason of the drive’s windings among shrewd landscaping. Henderson required two assistants to keep these grounds in order. With all their riding round on motor mowing-machines, somebody’s head was always to be seen up over the top of an ornamental hedge, or seeming, in ghostly fashion to stick out of a tree: to the accompaniment of a snip-snip-pause-snip-snip of shears. It made a drowsy sound in summer, when you might lounge in a deck-chair at the crest of the lawns, and look down over a blaze of flower-beds under the sun.

  As he went up the drive, Stevens kept himself thinking of this. He refused to think of anything else. Non cognito, ergo sum.

  The house was long and low, built of stone in the form of the head of a letter T with its short wings towards the road. There was nothing at all distinguished about the house, except that it had grown old well. It did not butt against the years, or show its bones and wait for death; but it had become a part of the soil. Its curved roof-tiles had become an unobtrusive reddish brown; its thin chimneys seemed proper, though no smoke went up from them. The windows were small, in casement fashion after the French style of the late seventeenth century. Some one in the nineteenth century had added a low front porch, but even this had ceased to obtrude itself; and had almost taken root. The porch light was burning. Stevens went up and hammered the knocker.

  Otherwise the house seemed to be dark. After a few minutes Mark opened the door. He led the way through the familiar hall, which smelt of age and Bibles and furniture-polish, out through the house into the kitchen. Modern implements looked small in that kitchen, and it had the appearance of a workroom as well. Partington, more bulky than ever in ancient sheathing of Harris tweeds, remained stolidly by the gas-range and smoked a cigarette. At his feet lay a black bag and a large leather-covered box. Ranged against the table were the hammers, the shovels, the picks, the steel wedges, and two flat steel bars about eight feet long, of which Henderson was taking stock now. Henderson was a smallish but very wiry old man in corduroys, with a long nose, blue eyes encircled in wrinkles like walnuts, and a bald head brushed over with such indeterminate wisps of grey hair that they seemed like an illusion of hair. There was an air of uneasiness in the kitchen, a conspiratorial air which drew everyone together, and Henderson was the most uneasy. When Mark and Stevens came in, he jumped up, scratching the back of his neck.

  “It’s all right,” Mark said, testily. “We’re not going to commit any crime. Got all your doings, Part? You, Ted, you can make yourself useful. Fill these up.” From under the sink he brought out two lanterns and a big tin of kerosene. “I’ve got a flashlight for the crypt, but these will be the only things to use while we dig. Yes, I hope it’s all right. You know, we’re going to make a hell of a lot of racket with those hammers. …” He hesitated. “You don’t suppose——?”

  Henderson spoke aggrievedly, in a heavy bass voice. He still scratched the back of his neck, and squared round. “Well, Mr. Mark, don’t you get to being nervous now. I don’t like this thing, and your pap wouldn’t ’a’ liked it; but if you say it’s all right, I’ll do it. If you want me to, I can muffle up them hammers a little, so they’ll make less noise. Do you remember, I did it once when Miss Edith was sick and we were changing the wall in the garden? But I don’t think anybody’ll hear, down as far as the road; no, it’s not likely anybody’ll hear, down as far as the road; and all I’m afraid of is that maybe your wife or your sister or my wife will come back here, or Mr. Ogden. I can tell you, and you know yourself, Mr. Ogden he’s a pretty curious young fellow, and if he takes it into his head…”

  “Ogden’s in New York,” Mark said, shortly. “The rest of them are in good hands, and they won’t be back until next week. Ready?”

  Stevens had found a tin funnel in the kitchen cupboard, and had filled both lanterns. Laden with their gear, they went out the back door. Mark and Henderson walked ahead with the lanterns swinging. That homely, honest, look-out-for-the-railway-crossing light gave a better look to their body-snatchers’ implements. All the same, the Park did not like it. Ahead the broad path stretched in patchwork paving, first with the sunken gardens on either side, then the tall lines of elms, and, far at the end, the chapel dark under starlight. Presently they passed the small house occupied by the Hendersons, and some twenty feet farther on—no great distance in front of the chapel door—Mark and Henderson set down the lanterns. The latter dug the heel of his boot into mud and drew out on the stones the area they were to attack, before he put each into position.

  “Now just you be careful you don’t kill each other with them picks,” he said, rather malevolently. “That’s all I ask of you, just you be careful. Make a hole with the pick for the wedge to go in, and then use your hammers. All I have to say is——”

  “Right,” said Partington cheerfully. “Let’s go.”

  The picks came down with a crash, and Henderson wailed.

  It took two hours. At a quarter to twelve by his wrist watch, Stevens found himself sitting back flat in the wet grass beside the path, taking big breaths. His whole body was clammy with sweat in the cool wind, his heart was bumping, and he felt as though he had been through the wringer. Sedentary life, eh? That was it. But, with the possible exception of Mark, he was the strongest of the three, and he felt that the whole weight of that stone had been on him.

  Taking up the paving had not been over-difficult, though it seemed to rouse such a hellish din that he felt it must be audible for half a mile, and once Mark had made a trip to the front of the house to find out whether it was as bad as it sounded. Nor was the removing of the gravel and soil too difficult; but Henderson, a martinet, insisted on having it in neat piles afterwards, and it had taken some time. Afterwards the levering up of a stone slab weighing nearly half a ton was the hardest; once Partington had slipped, the stone had wavered, and for a second Stevens thought the whole thing was coming over on them. Now the stone stood upright on its side, like the lifted lid of a chest, held there by its own weight. The entrance to the crypt had the appearance of the inside of a chest, being a stone-wailed oblong with a flight of stone steps going down ten feet.

  “Done it,” said Partington, still cheerfully, although he was panting and coughing. “Any more impediments? If not, I’ll go back to the house and wash my hands for what’s got to be done.”

  “And to get yourself a drink,” breathed Mark, looking after him. “Well, I don’t blame you.” He turned back again, holding up the lantern, and grinning at Henderson like a wolf.

  “Do you want to go down first, H., my lad?”

  “No, I don’t,” snapped the other, “and you know I don’t. I’ve never been down in that place, not when your father nor your mother nor your uncle was buried, and I wouldn’t go down now if it wasn’t for helping you lift the coffin—”

  “You needn’t worry about that,” Mark told him, holding the lantern higher, “if you don’t want to go down. It’s a wooden coffin, not very heavy, and two men could handle it easily.”

  “Oh, I’m going down, all right; you can bet your last dollar on that; I’m going down,” declared Henderson, with belligerent emphasis which was a trifle scared just the same. “You talking about poisons, like books! Poisons! Your pap’ud poison you if he was here! I never heard such foolishness in my life. I know, I know, I oughtn’t to sass you back. I’m only old Joe Henderson, that whacked you good and hard many’s the time when you was a kid. …” He stopped and spat. Now appeared the real reason behind this querulousness, for he said, quietly: “Honest to God, now, are you sure you haven’t heard anybody around here watching us? I been feeling like that ever since we came out here.”

  His eyes flashed over his shoulder. Stevens got up, opening and shutting stiff hands, and came over to join them by the mouth of the crypt. Mark moved the lantern round; wind stirred in the elms; nothing more.

  “Come on,” Mark said, abruptly. “Part’ll catch up with us. Leave the lanterns here. They use
up air; and there’s no ventilation down there; and we want all the ventilation we can get. Smell it? I’ve got a flashlight. …”

  “Your hand’s shaking, Mr. Mark,” said Henderson.

  “And you lie,” said Mark. “Follow on.”

  The enclosure of the little staircase, although damp, was completely free from marshiness. Its close air pressed the lungs with almost a feeling of warmth. At the foot of the stairs was a rounded archway, with a rotted wooden door hanging from its frame, opening into the crypt; and a heavier air stirred at their coming. The beam of Mark’s flashlight moved inside. That crypt had been opened only ten days ago: which, Stevens thought, made it easier to go into now. Its damp closeness was still thick with an overpowering odor of flowers.

  Mark’s light showed a mausoleum oblong in shape, some twenty-five feet long by fifteen feet wide, and built throughout of massive granite blocks. In the centre an octagonal granite pillar supported the groined roof. On two sides the crypt was a catacomb. In the one long wall facing them as they entered, and in the short wall to the right, niches had been made in regular tiers to contain the dead. The exposed coffins were set into the wall endways, evidently from some one’s business-like wish to save space even in the grave; and the niches were barely larger than the coffins. Near the top, where the old Despards lay, most of the niches were ornamented with marble facings, scrollwork, a contorted angel or two, even a Latin eulogy; but lower down they became more severe. Some tiers were filled, some almost empty; and eight coffins could be laid along one tier.