“Motive!” Holmes snarled, interrupting. “Motive is crucial! Anyone can find the means to murder another human being—especially if it involves something so rudimentary as firing a pistol at close range. All it will require is a concealed weapon and the advantage of darkness. No. You must determine who has a motive to kill Hope Thraxton.”
“But I— It’s too soon. I scarcely know these people, or their history.”
“Precisely. So you must endeavor to find out. But frankly your judgment is already clouded by your infatuation with the young woman.”
“Infatuation? I don’t know what you’re speaking of—”
Holmes silenced him with a contemptuous wave. “Your wife is at home, dying of consumption. How many times has she crossed your mind? Have you spent so much as a second thinking of her?”
Conan Doyle’s mouth opened. He strained, but could think of no counter. Shamefaced, he dropped his head. “No,” he admitted in a cowed voice.
Holmes drew upon his cigarette and exhaled a plume of silver smoke. “No, you have not. Lady Thraxton has described her dream. Yours was the first face she recognized. At this moment, I would consider you the primary suspect.”
Conan Doyle bristled. “Me? That is preposterous! Why on earth would I murder Hope Thraxton? I have come to prevent harm to her.”
The hawk-like visage fixed its creator with a needling gaze. “You are the primary suspect because jealousy—especially sexual jealousy—is the number-one reason why men murder women. You have been infatuated with this woman since that first meeting in the darkened room. Even before you knew what Hope Thraxton looked like, you have been mentally undressing her.”
“That’s—! That’s—outrageous!” Conan Doyle spluttered. “Why am I having this conversation? It’s ridiculous. You’re a phantasm. You’re not real!”
“Is it ridiculous?” Holmes leaned forward in his chair. “How clearly is your mind working? If I am a phantasm, then why are you conversing with me? And how is it you can even see me? After all, the room is in darkness.” He nodded to the bedside table.
When Conan Doyle looked, he saw that the lamp was not lit, and yet he could clearly see everything in the room. When he looked back at the chair, it was empty. Sherlock Holmes had vanished.
He awoke with a start, clawing at the bedsheets. He had fallen asleep with the Casebook open on his chest and now it slid off and thumped to the carpet. The oil lamp had burned dry hours ago. The room was in darkness, but light limned the edges of the heavy curtains.
And he knew at once that he had overslept.
* * *
Breakfast was served in the conservatory, an airy glass structure with wrought-iron tables and desiccated ficus plants withering in giant urns. By the time Mister Greaves led Conan Doyle into the space, most of the other guests were already tucking into their breakfasts, and the chatter of conversation and the clatter of silverware on bone china were clamorous. Wilde sat alone at a small table in a far corner staring out the rain-streaked glass at the wet, sheep-dotted swells of grassy turf. He had pushed aside a breakfast plate scummed with the yellow remains of quail eggs. Wilde, now in his late thirties, was accumulating weight with every year. Despite the fact that he had obviously breakfasted well, he was attacking a scone with a knife.
“You look like death,” he observed as Conan Doyle flopped into the chair opposite.
The Scotsman looked at his friend with eyes that were bloodshot and dark-circled. “I did not sleep well.”
“I slept marvelously,” Wilde said, buttering a scone with his usual aplomb and then lavishing it with a dollop of clotted cream topped with a blob of rhubarb jam. “I shall be departing as soon as I’ve finished packing. As I came down to breakfast I noticed a carriage waiting outside.”
“Let us hope that carriage is not here for you, Oscar.”
“Why ever not?” Wilde mumbled, sinking his bovine teeth into the scone.
“Because it is a hearse.”
Wilde choked, spitting scone crumbs. He wiped cream from his mouth on a linen napkin and threw his friend a horrified look. “Egad! Tell me you jest.”
Conan Doyle described the strange event he had witnessed the night before: the arrival of the final guest in a most unconventional means of transport.
“The deuce you say!” Wilde said after hearing the story. “How macabre! Whatever can that be about? I almost wish I were staying for the denouement.”
A servant set down a plate with a full English breakfast before Conan Doyle—fried bacon, fried eggs, fried mushrooms, fried tomato, a thick slice of fried bread, and several rotund sausages still sizzling and suppurating fat. “I am indeed sorry that you won’t be here to find out, Oscar,” Conan Doyle said as he peppered his eggs.
But then the fierce-eyed Mrs. Kragan appeared and hovered over them, her claw-like hands knitted tightly at her bosom, her lined face set in its perpetual scowl of disapproval. “I am sorry to inform you, Master Wilde, but with all the rain we’ve had overnight the river is up and the ford is impassable.”
Wilde’s face fell at the news. “Are you saying that I shan’t be able to leave today?”
The gray head shook in a parody of regret. “No one shall be able to come or go. We are quite cut off.”
Wilde began to open his mouth, but the housekeeper guessed what he was about to ask and preempted his question. “For several days at least.”
To this pronouncement, the greatest wit in the world could only answer with a grunt of exasperation.
“Are you feeling well, Oscar?” Conan Doyle asked as he knifed off a chunk of sausage and forked it into his mouth. “You look like death.” He chuckled around the mouthful of hot sausage as he chewed. “Looks like you’ll be here for the denouement after all.”
CHAPTER 14
MESMERIZED
The members of the SPR were slowly drifting into the parlor. Many stood in knots, conversing. A few clustered about a table laid out with a punch bowl and glasses. A card table had been set up at the back of the room at which Madame Zhozhovsky sat like a small fat spider reading the palms of anyone gullible enough to fall into her web.
“Palm reading!” Wilde exclaimed as he and Conan Doyle entered the room. “How amusing. I have often thought of hiring a gypsy palm reader for one of my soirées.”
The two friends hovered close, eavesdropping on the proceedings. The Scottish doctor was open-minded about most aspects of the paranormal, but he put little faith in determining a man’s Fate based upon the wrinkles on his palms. Still, he was interested enough to listen in as Madame Zhozhovsky had managed to catch hold of the cynical Frank Podmore and presently had his hand pinned to the table. Her head was bowed as she studied his life line, so that she could not see the look of utter disdain he was lashing her with. “Your love line is interesting,” Zhozhovsky said, tracing his palm with a finger knobby and twisted with arthritis. “See how it breaks here? I see a great loss.”
Podmore recoiled as if he had touched something hot. He attempted to snatch his arm away, but the old lady held on to his hand with a firm grip and forced it back down onto the tabletop.
She studied Podmore’s palm a second time. “You have a short life line.” The penetrating gray eyes looked up into Podmore’s face. “Fear water,” she said, her tone ominous. “You will die by drowning.”
Podmore snickered as he extricated his hand from hers. “Unlikely. I am an excellent swimmer.”
The old lady’s expression never wavered. “Palmistry is an ancient wisdom, proven over millennia. You will die by drowning.”
Podmore’s sneer quivered and collapsed.
Oscar Wilde was standing at Conan Doyle’s shoulder, watching intently. “Oh, I love this sort of thing, don’t you?” he gushed. “I’ve had my palm read before. Many times. They always predict a long and happy life.”
Frank Podmore got up and slunk away, and Wilde lunged forward to occupy the vacated seat. “Do me next, Madame!” he urged.
Madame Zhozhovsky c
radled Wilde’s large hand in hers and traced a finger along his palm. “Your love line breaks most interestingly.” Her eyes swept up to meet his. “Much confusion here, I fear.”
Wilde’s eyes widened slightly. The eagerness evaporated from his face. “And what of my life line?” he asked with sudden trepidation.
She dropped her gaze, her eyes metronoming across Wilde’s fleshy palm. A brief look of distress swept her features and she sat up straight, pushing his hand away. “That I cannot read,” she said dismissively.
“No, you did see something,” Wilde pleaded. “Please … you must tell me.”
She sighed and held out her hand. He placed his large hand, palm up, in hers. Once again, her pudgy finger traced his life line. After a musing silence, she said, “You will not live a long life.”
Shock and alarm rippled across Wilde’s face. “But it will be a happy life, no?”
“Who can say?” she mused, pushing his hand away. “It is not an exact science.”
Wilde wobbled to his feet and stumbled back to join Conan Doyle, deeply shaken.
Madame Zhozhovsky’s gray graze swept the room and captured Conan Doyle’s eye. “Doctor Doyle, would you like to know your future?”
“Just going for some refreshments,” Conan Doyle answered, abandoning his friend while he arrowed toward the punch bowl. With his consumptive wife hovering on the brink of death, he had no interest in finding out about his future. He was reaching for the silver punch ladle when a female hand reached at the same moment, and their hands clashed.
“Oh, do excuse me!”
Conan Doyle looked up into the smiling face of Eleanor Sidgwick. He estimated her age to be about the same as his own, early thirties—at least twenty years her husband’s junior. She was a handsome, woman, if somewhat plain, with brown eyes and brown hair parted in the middle and scraped back into a tight bun—the very picture of an academic. She was looking straight into Conan Doyle’s eyes and drew her hand away slowly.
“May I pour you some punch, Mrs. Sidgwick?”
“How gallant! Eleanor—please call me Eleanor—and yes, that would be lovely.”
Conan Doyle ladled fruit punch into her crystal glass, and then filled his own. He turned to walk back to where Wilde was waiting and found that Mrs. Sidgwick was blocking his path and looking up at him expectantly.
“Er, I am sitting with my friend, Mister Wilde. Would you care to join—”
“Oh yes!” she leapt in. “That would be most accommodating!”
As they approached, Wilde rose from his seat and bowed. “Mrs. Sidgwick,” he said, and taking her free hand, kissed her knuckles.
“Oh!” she said, flushing. And then again, her voice a girlish flutter: “Oh!”
Conan Doyle held her chair until she sat and looked at both men with the bright eyes of a young girl who has just been invited to her first party.
“I must say,” she gushed. “I am very thrilled to sit with two men of such fame.” She threw a furtive glance across the room to where her husband, Henry Sidgwick, was holding court with Sir William Crookes and then turned her attention back to them. “It is so refreshing to converse with two giants of the arts. My husband never stops speaking of science and mathematics.”
“Oh, I hardly think I’d describe us as giants,” Conan Doyle said.
“Never argue with a lady, Arthur. Especially when she is correct.” Wilde smiled and bowed his head in homage. “The mantle of giant rests comfortably upon my shoulders.”
She moved forward in her chair, so that her knee was touching Conan Doyle’s, and whispered conspiratorially: “How are you gentlemen finding our little group of eccentrics?” He moved his leg away, but she shifted forward again, regaining contact.
“Stimulating,” Wilde said. “And Mister Hume’s demonstration of levitation exhausts my list of superlatives.”
“Indeed, Mister Hume is the brightest star of our gathering. And so handsome and at ease, as only our American cousins can be.”
“Yes,” Conan Doyle agreed. “But tell me, why is it that Frank Podmore seems, how shall I say—”
“Somewhat acerbic?”
Conan Doyle nodded.
Eleanor Sidgwick made a move to touch her hair as she scanned for anyone close enough to eavesdrop. “Of course, I don’t like to gossip.”
“Neither do we listen to gossip,” Conan Doyle assured her.
“Arthur speaks for himself,” Wilde said, laying his large hand atop hers. “Where gossip is concerned, I am a hummingbird and it is the nectar upon which I feed. Dear lady, do continue.”
Despite Wilde’s encouragement, Mrs. Sidgwick’s face betrayed her reluctance. “I will say no more than there is bad blood between Frank Podmore and Mister Hume … and between the Society in general.”
“But why?” Conan Doyle questioned. “I understand Podmore is a scientist.”
Eleanor Sidgwick tittered. “Frank calls himself a scientist. In truth he is a clerk in the post office. Oh, I suppose it is true that he did attend university and has a very keen mind.”
“Then why is he so scornful of Hume?”
She paused before answering, obviously choosing her words carefully. “Frank has experienced a number of disappointments in the spiritualist world. Especially where Mister Hume is concerned. Frank wrote a book called Phantasms of the Living, which described a number of sessions that verified Mister Hume’s abilities under strict scientific conditions. But a short time afterward, Frank turned on Mister Hume, claiming that he had faked many of his feats and duped his sitters. I believe, however, it may have been Mister Hume’s character flaws that colored Frank’s opinion.”
“Character flaws?” Wilde repeated, leaning forward in his seat. “Do go on. I never tire of hearing of other people’s flaws, especially as I have none of my own.”
“No … I really should say no more,” she said, fanning herself with a folded program. “It is all gossip and rumor.”
Wilde stroked the back of her hand and adopted a fawning expression. “Dear lady, must I plead?”
She giggled, and as Wilde had given her permission, took a deep breath and began: “Well, it appears that Mister Hume is something of a cad—especially where ladies are involved.”
“Delicious,” Wilde purred. “If I had wings, I would be buzzing now.”
“Mister Hume traveled the continent for a number of years, and always as a guest of wealthy patrons. Whilst in Paris, he was summoned to the Tuileries to perform a séance for Napoleon III. He also performed for Queen Sophia of the Netherlands. I understand she was quite smitten with his powers.” And then she added in a hugely incriminating voice: “All of them.”
“Well, I can’t say I’d fault him for using his gifts,” Conan Doyle argued, oblivious to the innuendo.
“But don’t you see? Mister Hume has no income, but lives at the expense of others: royalty, aristocrats—and especially ladies of means. The biggest scandal involves one Mrs. Lyons, a wealthy widow.”
“A wealthy widow!” Wilde said. “How titillating. I have a penchant for stories that involve wealthy widows.”
“Mrs. Lyons adopted Hume as her son.”
“As her son?” Conan Doyle said, incredulous. “How old was Hume at the time? How old was Mrs. Lyons?”
“The age difference was but a few years. You can imagine the scandal, especially when the widow gave Mister Hume sixty thousand pounds, it is said in an attempt to gain introduction to high society. When Hume failed to live up to his promise, the lady brought suit in the courts for the return of her money. The case was decided against Hume, and Mrs. Lyon’s money was returned. Of course, Mister Hume’s reputation was pilloried in the press and left Frank Podmore totally disillusioned with his onetime hero.”
At that precise moment, Daniel Dunglas Hume strode into the room and struck a theatrical pose, back arched, chest thrust out, thumbs hooked behind his lapels. Compared to the ashen-faced man who had been carried from the room the previous evening, he seemed comple
tely rejuvenated. Spotting the punch bowl, he crossed the room with the strutting gait of a barnyard rooster.
“Please excuse me,” she suddenly announced. “I am very thirsty.”
As Hume was pouring himself a glass of punch, Mrs. Sidgwick rushed over and nearly collided with him. Conan Doyle and Wilde watched as the two exchanged pleasantries and then Mrs. Sidgwick held up her glass as Hume filled it for her with the punch ladle. They moved to a nearby love seat and sat down together. Hume said something and smiled, at which she stroked his arm playfully and simpered.
“Dear me,” Wilde said. “It rather looks as if we’ve been cuckolded—despite the fact that we are giants.”
Conan Doyle grunted. “It seems Mrs. Sidgwick is seeking male company other than her husband. She acted as if she did not receive a kiss on the hand very often.”
“From the look of her aged husband,” Wilde noted, “I’d say her lips are even more lonely.”
* * *
When the grandfather clock in the corner chimed the hour, Lady Thraxton arrived in a whisper of black veils. Conan Doyle’s shoulders slumped as he watched the Count draw up a chair for the Lady and then drag a chair for himself close by. Taking the Lady’s arrival as his cue, Henry Sidgwick clapped his hands for attention and called together the Tuesday meeting of the Society for Psychical Research.
“This morning,” Sidgwick began, “Mister Frank Podmore will provide us with a lecture on Animal Magnetism.” Sidgwick waved for Podmore to come forward from his seat.
“I’ll be interested to hear this,” Conan Doyle whispered to Wilde.
Podmore took Sidgwick’s place at the center of the room. His eyes swept the audience with impatient disapproval as he waited for stray knots of conversation to shrivel up. Then he cleared his throat and launched into his lecture. “Today, I shall be speaking about a paper I wrote last year—”
A knock at the parlor door interrupted him. Mister Greaves shuffled in and bowed his head as he announced, “Lord Philipp Webb.”
A tall man in a black suit entered. He was fastidiously groomed, his short, glossy black hair parted in the middle and pomaded in place. His large nose was anchored to his face by a modest black moustache with waxed and curled ends. The nose had a prominent bump, which provided a convenient ledge for a pair of pince-nez, from which dangled a black ribbon. His black pinstripe suit showed impeccable tailoring and made Conan Doyle, in his sensible but well-worn tweeds, feel positively shabby.
The Revenant of Thraxton Hall: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Page 12
