“And yet, if the spiritualists had been in the passage, surely they would have moved the sack full of evidence. Or, at the very least, they would have examined it and noticed the presence of the red dress. I do not think Madame Farr, so meticulous in her confidence tricks, would have overlooked this detail.
“Then we have the more complex matter of administering the poison. How would Mr Melville, or Miss Griggs, have known the correct amount of poison bulb to give to Lady Esther? Their goal was to achieve a slow descent into an hallucinogenic state. If they had laced her water, they could not have known how much she would drink. Perhaps she was taking some medication for her recent chill, which was replaced with the poison bulb, but again they would have required a remarkable knowledge of prescribed dosages worthy of the Wasimbu tribe of Western Africa. Far simpler to do it once Lady Esther locked the door—perhaps by creeping into the room via the secret passage and administering a lethal dose. But why then were there no signs of a struggle? Why was no alarm raised other than that single scream?
“There was one thing—Inspector, would you be so kind as to open the wardrobe and search for a dress of blue silk?”
Lestrade frowned, but complied. He searched through the rails, finding a blue dress, but not one made of silk. “There is no such dress, Holmes,” he said at last.
“Can anyone here present confirm that Lady Esther owned a blue silk dress?” Holmes asked.
I confirmed it, as did Langton.
“Miss Griggs?” Holmes asked. “Where is the dress?”
“Sent away, sir. To… to be mended.”
“Mended indeed. Because of a tear just above the right hip, where it was caught on a nail. At roughly the height of the tear on your jacket there, Watson, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Good heavens, Holmes. Yes, of course.”
“I wonder if perhaps Eglinton would conduct a search downstairs and find the dress? It is no pressing matter, but I have a fragment of silk found on a nail in the secret passage that I am certain will match the fabric of the dress.”
“Nonsense!” Melville snapped. “Lady Esther was in no condition to traipse around that musty old passage.”
“Really? And how would you know how musty the passage is, Mr Melville? The fact remains, however, that the silk was found in the passage, and the location of the aforementioned nail corresponds rather neatly with a cut on Lady Esther’s body.
“And on the subject of the body, Watson’s examination throws up some other rather interesting findings. The redness around the eyes, the swelling at the throat and the blue fingernails are not entirely congruent with the post-mortem effects of boophone poisoning. There is also the matter of the small red spots around the throat. She was poisoned—do not doubt that for a moment—but there was something else at work. Something relating, I believe, to the needle marks found on Lady Esther’s arm.”
“Needle marks?” Crain groaned.
“These were not what you might think, Lord Berkeley,”
Holmes said, “and very soon I shall prove it. What say you, Lestrade? Shall we make our search and bring these suppositions to an end?”
“I jolly well wish we would,” Lestrade said.
There was little more to be said. Melville made some meagre protest, but there was nothing he could do, and so we allowed Crain to lead the way, gingerly, to the room of his late sister.
Once inside, Holmes paced the room, casting his eye scrupulously over every surface. It was immaculately tidy; everything in its place. He stopped at a pretty French cabinet, and tried the handles. It was locked.
“The key to this cabinet?” Holmes asked.
Crain shook his head.
Holmes looked to the doorway, where Melville and Sally stood, glaring daggers our way. “Miss Griggs,” he said. “The key, if you please.”
“No,” she said, defiantly.
Holmes nodded to Lestrade, who stepped towards the maid. “Come on now, miss, or I’ll have your room searched for the key.”
She looked in desperation to Melville, who sighed heavily.
“It’s all right, Sally,” he said, very quietly and gravely. “Give him the key.”
To my small surprise, Sally reached to her collar, and pulled out her necklace—actually a thin chain—upon which was a silver key. This she unclipped and handed to Holmes, her dark eyes full of sadness and resentment in equal measure.
Holmes unlocked the cabinet, and carefully went through the myriad tiny bottles, tins and jars within. It was an awkward business, and I could tell that even my friend, famous for his detached reason, was uncomfortable going through Lady Esther’s most private things, especially with an audience present.
At last, Holmes began to remove certain items from the cabinet, arranging them neatly on the nightstand beside it as he went.
“An amount of concealing powder and rouge,” he said first. “Not altogether suspicious, but there is an unusually large quantity. Now this is interesting. One bottle of laudanum, part used. An unlabelled bottle of pills—Watson, would you take a look please?”
He passed me the bottle, and I emptied a few pills into my hand.
“What we call ‘pink pills’,” I said. “I think I have some in my bag. Otherwise known as Blaud’s Pills.”
“For the promotion of healthy blood cells,” Holmes said.
“Yes,” I confirmed.
Holmes nodded, and returned to the cabinet. Finally, he withdrew another bottle, and this time stood up straight, holding the bottle up for us all to see. “And this,” he said, “can surely lead us to only one conclusion.”
I looked at the bottle in Holmes’s hand, and a terrible truth dawned upon me. “Fowler’s solution,” I said.
“Your medical opinion, Watson?”
I knew Holmes was already several steps ahead of me, for his encyclopaedic knowledge of medicines would rival that of most apothecaries. But I humoured him all the same. “One might at first think a patient taking such medication to be suffering from anaemia, for they promote the production of red blood cells over white. Laudanum alone is not suspicious—many ladies take small amounts for headaches and feverishness, and Lady Esther said she had suffered recently from a severe chill. But the presence of Fowler’s solution suggests something more grave. It is not commonly prescribed, for the arsenic it contains is dangerous in its own right. And so it is often given to patients whose conditions are terminal, to relieve their symptoms and improve their quality of life, at least temporarily.”
“And your examination of Lady Esther’s body, Watson? Does the discovery of these items now change your initial verdict?”
“It does, Holmes.” I turned to Lestrade and Crain. Behind them, by the bedroom door, stood Melville and Sally, and beyond I saw other expectant faces crowding in, waiting for my answer. I took a deep breath, and said, “As Holmes described earlier, Lady Esther’s body displayed a redness around the eyes, a swelling at the throat—which I would now consider symptomatic of a lymphatic irregularity—and a faint rash, or petechiae, about the throat. We know also that she bruised easily and was prone to breathlessness, and that she had complained of occasional nosebleeds. Her brother remarked recently on the amount of weight she had lost. There are many medical reasons for all these symptoms, but the discovery of these drugs can point to only one possibility. Lady Esther had leukaemia. A cancer… She was dying.”
There were gasps from the corridor. Sally Griggs fell to her knees and wept.
“This… this can’t be,” said Crain. “I would have known. She would have told me.”
“No,” Holmes said. “She kept it a secret. She used the Fowler’s solution to disguise the worst symptoms. She used laudanum to mask the pain, and make-up to hide the toll the illness was taking on her face. The marks on her arm that Watson saw…”
“A transfusion,” I said. “A risky business, but sometimes effective in terminal cases. So, Mr Melville—I thought it strange that you would take Lady Esther to a physician in London. Her family
could surely afford the finest care right here. You took her to a cancer hospital, didn’t you?”
All eyes turned now to Melville. He staggered back, leaning on the door-frame, looking exhausted. He pinched at his eyes, and said, “Yes. You are correct, Dr Watson. The transfusion was a desperate gamble. Such treatment provides relief in only a small number of cases, but I insisted that we explore every avenue. It helped, for a short time, but then the symptoms returned, and we had to plan how we would spend what remained of the short time we had left together. I even suggested we simply elope and have done with it all, but Esther’s loyalty to her family name was fierce, God love her. She would not abandon the family to these vultures.”
“So why not tell the family?” Holmes said. “Why the secrecy?”
“Because of Madame Farr. That terrible, terrible woman… Esther was afraid that Farr would use her condition to dig her claws even deeper into James. Imagine if Madame Farr had known Esther was at death’s door! She would have become a ghost in her own lifetime, with all preparations made for her passing, so that James might have her company in death. She would not be used so. She would not have her brother’s grief used so! We decided to keep it all a secret. At best, we might be able to draw some nonsense prediction out of Farr, as Esther did at the séance. You remember don’t you, Watson? That message about Esther and I having a long and happy marriage, and children… No chance of that. But better still, we hoped we could find some way of exposing Madame Farr before the end came, to reveal her as a trickster before the whole community.”
“And finally you saw an opportunity, when a certain Dr Watson was invited to Crain Manor,” Holmes ventured.
“I see no reason to continue the charade, Mr Holmes,” Melville said. “I went along with Esther’s wishes, and among those wishes was for you to come here and solve the case, for she had a great deal of admiration for you, fostered by a love of Dr Watson’s accounts of your adventures. She made sure to mention you to Dr Watson at every opportunity, saying how she wished you could be here, and she bade me say the same. Do you remember, Doctor? Her theory was that if Madame Farr could use the power of suggestion to manipulate others, then so could she. After her plan unfolded, you would be sure to send for Holmes.
“She was a woman of incredible strength and fortitude. If you only knew the pain she suffered, and yet she hid it even from her family, allowing herself to lapse only in my presence. She would show no sign of weakness to the spiritualists, whom she saw as invaders into her realm. But more than that, Esther was the cleverest woman I ever knew, and I loved that about her more than anything. She knew you would focus your ire on Madame Farr, and expose her for what she really was. Esther had tried and failed, yet remained convinced of Madame Farr’s trickery. She has accomplished in death all that she could not accomplish in life—she has freed her brother from the clutches of that vile woman, and I know she will be at peace now that her family is rid of Madame Farr’s malign influence.
“There is really no need to compound Lord Berkeley’s distress further.” Melville turned now to Crain, who sat on Esther’s bed, shivering. “Lord Berkeley—James. Forgive me. I only did as Esther asked, out of love for her. But neither of us could predict the terrible consequence of our plan. Your father… he…” Melville paused, and cleared his throat. “That is my only true regret. The late Lord Berkeley always appeared so strong. I had no idea the loss of Esther would take such a toll, and I very nearly lost my nerve when he passed away. If you never forgive me for that, I will understand.”
He turned back to Holmes, reached into his pocket, and took out a folded letter, bearing a waxen seal imprinted with the Crain family crest. “Here, Mr Holmes. Esther recorded her final testimony for you, to be handed to you on successful completion of the investigation. She wrote it yesterday, when we had finally agreed on our plan. She gave it to Sally for safekeeping, knowing that, even should her maid fall under suspicion, no one would be so indelicate as to search her person.”
Holmes took it, broke the seal, and leafed through the numerous pages. “This explains one minor detail,” Holmes said. “Watson observed that Lady Esther’s middle finger was indented slightly, as though she had written a letter moments before her death. But she had not—rather, she had written a very long letter earlier that evening, and her fingertip remained depressed due to deficiencies in her blood. I am sure she could not have foreseen that detail, but it proved to be a more complicating factor than she could have known.”
“You really are clever, Mr Holmes,” Melville said, with a curt bow. “I wish you and Esther could have met; she desired it more than anything. But in this small way, she has added to the casebook of Sherlock Holmes, and that is a fitting memorial, don’t you think?”
Holmes smiled, and I believe he was more touched by this last remark than he could admit.
“Thank you for your candour, Mr Melville,” he said. “For the record then, let us hear the truth of it, in Lady Esther’s own words.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE TESTIMONY OF LADY ESTHER
To whom it may concern,
If you are reading this, then I am dead.
There, it’s said. I knew those first words would be the hardest to write. No matter how long I have taken to get used to the idea of my own mortality, it still feels too soon now that the hour is nigh. And it is nigh, because I intend to die this night. April 15, 1894. I suppose I should write it out formally: My name is Esther Agnes Crain, born December 1, 1870. I am of sound mind, but not, sadly, of body. For my body has betrayed me most cruelly.
I hardly know where to start, so I shall begin with the illness, because it changed everything, and led to this point. Shortly after Christmas, I began to feel increasingly lethargic. I was never free of cold. No matter how much I ate, I felt weak and thin, my skin pale and spotted. Dear Geoffrey feared I had anaemia, and while I visited him in London, he insisted I go right away to see his doctor. I endured all manner of tests, and eventually discovered the awful truth. I had leukaemia, and it was terminal. The doctor told me I had six months to live, at most. That was January.
I wanted nothing more than to return to my family, and to fall into my father’s arms and feel sorry for myself. But my return to Crain Manor made all that impossible. First of all, Father had taken a nasty turn, and our family physician prescribed for him so many different drugs that I’m astonished Father managed to remember which was which. As soon as he was fit to walk the grounds, he at once threw himself into his work, such was his way; but there was something different about his manner. He was working so hard, against his doctor’s advice, that I knew he was trying to put his house in order, in case he should die. When I saw Mr Cavendish visit the house the following week, I knew I was right. And Father should, of course, have been able to rely on James at such a difficult time, but he could not, for James was otherwise indisposed. With this scenario before me, how could I tell them my own news? I knew I would have to bear it alone, at least for the time being.
It was not my brother’s fault. Please do not think for a moment that I blame him. He had never been the strongest willed of our family, and he had never recovered from the loss of our mother. He had become rather reliant on the curious pills provided him by Sir Thomas out of some misguided sense of loyalty. They had much the same effect on James’s faculties as any opiate, though supposedly with fewer physical impediments. But it was not the physical he should have been concerned with, but the metaphysical.
While I was in London, the spiritualist group James had been visiting for some time had seemingly tightened their hold over him. My brother was changed, mesmerised by Madame Farr. Her spy, Judith, had inveigled her way into my home. Her servant, Simon, was everywhere, all the time. It was obvious what Madame Farr wanted—James’s money, and influence, and patronage. Madame Farr had ambitions to elevate her station from rural table-rapper to court magician, like some latter-day John Dee. If I were to reveal my condition to the family with Madame Farr about, then
I might as well be dead already. And when I was gone, what then? Would I be supposedly summoned up, with that woman putting words in my mouth at the séance table for the amusement of her clientele? Would she tell everyone, as if with my own words, that I was so dreadfully sorry for ever having doubted her? Would my demise help ensure that James would be forever in her thrall—a noble lord of a noble old family, reduced to a sycophant? You may think ill of me for saying this, but I would not let that happen to our family.
I attended one of Madame Farr’s séances. I had read as much as I could find about the practices of spirit-mediums and their tricks. I had read every story of Sherlock Holmes penned to date by James’s old friend, Watson, that I might learn the art of deduction, and unmask Madame Farr as a charlatan. I wanted to heal the family, so that I could at last reveal my own secret without causing further harm. I failed. She was too clever for me. When I saw her using a spirit cabinet, I thought I could expose her at once. But the cabinet, just moments after emitting strange lights and smoke, was found empty. As I was about to search the room more thoroughly, Simon—the very man whom I had loudly proclaimed to be the real cause of the psychical phenomena—appeared at the back of the room, with a nasty smile on his face. Simon, it seemed, could be in two places at once. With that, I lost all support from the other sitters, and Madame Farr dismissed me as a non-believer, and a disruptive influence. To this day, I don’t know how she performed her tricks, but I am still convinced that tricks they were.
And so, disheartened, and with James pushed even further from me, I returned home. I helped my father run the estate as best I could, taking a dangerous mix of drugs to keep up appearances. I played the role of dutiful daughter, as James was manipulated by that woman like a puppet on a string. I could entrust the truth only to my loyal maid and confidante, Sally. And it was Sally, inadvertently, who planted the seed of a plan in my mind—a seed that would eventually germinate.
Sally one night overheard James and Judith talking about the Red Tower, and the legend of Lady Sybille. Madame Farr had apparently made some comment about a secret treasure hidden somewhere in the manor, and thought perhaps its discovery might lead to the laying of the famous ghost—the ‘Red Woman’. I knew this secret treasure was whispered of in the village. Father had always refused to speak of the passages, perhaps because of his own father’s superstitions. And so I set Sally the task of spying on Judith—the cuckoo in our nest would herself come under secret scrutiny! We found no secret passage, or buried treasure—but we did observe Judith twice in the act of searching for a passage: tapping panels, turning wall-sconces, and the like. And so I closeted myself away in the library as often as I could, and began to research the legend of Lady Sybille, in the hope that I could find something with which to beat Madame Farr at her own game.
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