I don’t know what reply I might have given to this appeal. For suddenly we were both distracted by a sound from the neighbouring attic chamber. It was a sound like a low sigh, and it was followed by a suspiration fainter still – as faint as the sound (if it is a sound) of falling snow. And through the doorway came a drift of feathers and dust.
That there was something unnerving in this moment is perhaps a persuasion which I now feel only as a kind of false memory. Certainly both Holroyd and I reacted in a commonplace way enough. We moved simultaneously towards the farther attic as if proposing to discover an eavesdropper. I think I expected to find a woman – perhaps Mrs Uff. The sound might have been the stir or rustle of a woman’s garments when incautiously moved. Yet not of modern garments. It is possible that this last thought was really in my head as I reached the door, and that I had a confused expectation of extending, as it were, my range of ghostly acquaintances. But the long, junk-filled room was untenanted, whether by the living or the dead. For a moment we were merely perplexed. And then – again simultaneously to both of us – the prosaic cause of the minute disturbance which had come to us was apparent.
I have mentioned the existence, in that farther attic, of much abandoned bedding, in particular a bulky feather mattress perched high on a wardrobe and every now and then shedding or voiding a feather which floated down to join the general detritus on the floor. The rotten ticking (as I believe it is called) of this must have split open only a minute previously, with the result that a soft silt of feathers had been trickling to the floor. This, indeed, was still happening now. And, even as we stood there, we heard another and distinct, but again quite tiny, sound. It might be described as a well-cushioned plop. Something other than feathers had tumbled from the disintegrating mattress. It lay before our eyes, but with more feathers doing their best to bury it. It was an envelope of moderate size, yellowed and blotched with age, and it had fallen face downwards, so that what we were looking at was a wax seal. This showed like a drop of congealed blood on a jaundiced skin.
Without apparent hesitation, Holroyd had stepped forward and picked the thing up. He turned it over, to reveal some lines of writing in a browned and faded ink.
‘To the Right Rev. the Bishop of Bath and Wells,’ he read aloud, ‘from the Lady Otho Senderhill. To be delivered under seal upon the writer’s death.’
‘How uncommonly odd!’ It was in natural astonishment that I stared at this undelivered missive. ‘Have you any notion who Lady Otho Senderhill was?’
‘Certainly. She was Bertrand Senderhill’s mother.’
There have been, I believe, more than seventy Bishops of Bath and Wells, and there is certainly one at the present day. To him, it seemed to me, Lady Otho Senderhill’s letter ought to be considered as addressed, since in default of a more specifically denominated ecclesiastic we could only assume that it was for the holder of the office rather than for an individual that it was intended. But Holroyd, not surprisingly, told me roundly that this was legalistic nonsense; that we were both at Vailes under a general charter to sift and enquire, and that it was thus within our province to scrutinise any document coming our way. This document had come our way in a fashion queer enough. But that didn’t affect our duty to have a look at it.
I have no doubt that my friend was right, and that my contrary proposition arose from a mounting extreme reluctance to do any more enquiring at all. Since this feeling was rationally indefensible, I was in no good position to argue. And I saw at once that Holroyd saw no need to do other than briefly humour me. Again he was probably right. We were to pocket Lady Otho’s letter, take our walk to the ruined cottage as proposed; and discuss on the way the propriety of breaking that—to me—curiously ominous seal.
On the terrace before the house we ran into Mrs Uff. She was immobile by the lichened balustrade, and gazing over the lake in so apparent a state of anxiety that for an extravagant instant I wondered whether she was fearful that Martha had done herself some mischief. And it was under this prompting that I spoke.
‘Are you looking for your daughter, Mrs Uff? She has simply gone for one of her walks, I think. In fact, I saw her set off just after my conversation with her.’
‘Oh, sir – was she disturbed in her mind? I thought I heard a weeping fit. She does have them terrible at times.’
‘I am afraid that I did upset her a little, although I only wanted to give her help. But she was fairly composed when she left me. I had promised to do my best about something.’
‘As I’ve told you, sir, Martha is a very secret child.’ Mrs Uff looked fixedly first at myself and then at Holroyd. ‘But not deceitful. I would not call Martha that.’
‘They can certainly be two very different things, Mrs Uff.’
‘I’ve been thinking at times that she has taken up with some worthless lad from the village who means no good by her, and that that is why she hides her goings and comings from me. Do you think, sir, it might be that?’
‘No, I don’t.’ I hesitated for a moment. ‘I don’t believe Martha has any encounters of that sort.’
‘Then, sir, might it be—?’ But Mrs Uff fell silent, aware of some fear too unformulated for expression. ‘If either of you gentlemen were to see her, would you beg her to come home? I—I have things for her to do.’
‘We shall certainly keep an eye open for her.’ Holroyd produced this in a kindly fashion enough, but it was obvious to me that he was impatient for us to go on our way. ‘But she’ll take no harm on a beautiful afternoon like this.’
There was no doubt about the afternoon. We moved on through it as if it belonged to some Golden Age. And it was, I believe, the full sunshine in which the scene was bathed that put a fresh theme in my head.
‘Ghosts, Holroyd – or, if you prefer it, phantasms of the dead: do they often look quite remarkably like flesh and blood?’
‘Lord, yes! The other sort – bleached and semi-transparent and floating round crumbled tombs at midnight – turn out to be in a small minority when one starts counting up. Nothing surprising in that. We are constantly seeing perfectly real-looking people inside our heads – and it’s there that you have the raw material for all those tricks of projection.’
‘And tricks of projection, as you call them, can happen in sunlight just like this?’
‘Certainly they can. And there may be nothing uncanny about them except that, so to speak, they snap on and then snap off again. But they needn’t even do that. The apparitions may simply board a bus and be carried away at a completely sublunary thirty miles an hour.’
As had happened once or twice before, I didn’t know whether to be reassured or irritated by Holroyd’s determined rationalism. If I understood him aright, he believed that the human mind is liable to perceive as external phenomena what are in fact no more than its own inner imaginings. This seemed to me probable enough. He also believed that human minds may contrive with one another channels of communication of an extra-sensory order, not yet understood by science, and that these channels can flow, as it were, very oddly in time as well as space. Beyond this, he seemed completely sceptical. Except, I supposed, that he kept an open mind about O’Rourke and his labours with those dice.
‘I gathered from you,’ I said, ‘that Bertrand’s father, Lord Otho Senderhill, was the second son of the first Marquess – and that he married what you called a considerable heiress from the City.’
‘Certainly. The young lady’s name was Lydia Cakebread.’
‘So Lydia became Lady Otho Senderhill, and in the fullness of time proposed this posthumous communication’—and I tapped the pocket in which I was carrying our discovery—’to the Bishop of Bath and Wells. How the deuce do you think it got into that bed?’
‘I imagine it to be the bed the lady died in. She had concealed the letter in some sort of slit or fold in it. She was anxious that its very existence should be unsuspected until she was actually dying. Wouldn’t that be it? She was going to produce it, and speed it on its way, when she was
in articulo mortis. Only she left it too late.’
‘Why should she propose so melodramatic a thing? And why this particular bishop? Vailes can’t be in the diocese—’
‘An Evangelical bishop, don’t you think? Formerly the spiritual adviser of the Cakebreads, whom I do know to have been excessively pious. The implication is clear. The letter was designed as a kind of deathbed confession. Theologically, the notion was perhaps a trifle irregular. But psychologically it was sound enough. Lydia Senderhill – Lady Otho – was easing her conscience, without any chance of awkward consequences on this side of the grave. Or on the other either, if the bishop did his stuff.’
‘Do you mean’—I believe I was disconcerted for a moment by my companion’s firm irreverence—’that what we are now in possession of is some kind of guilty secret?’
‘Almost certainly it is. Ho-ho! What a gorgeous afternoon.’
‘Yes, indeed – and Martha Uff is somewhere wandering round in it. Incidentally, I don’t think we gave her mother any undertaking positively to hunt for her, and I suggest we ought not to do anything which might look like that. The child must not feel harried. Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘Most certainly.’ Holroyd appeared surprised. ‘But we’re up to nothing of the kind.’
‘Not consciously. But she may well have made her way to the ruined cottage again, since it’s her favourite haunt – and the place where something uncommonly odd happens to her.’
‘And to some of her acquaintance as well.’ Holroyd gave me a cheerful sideways grin. ‘But by all means let us explore the place cautiously, and withdraw for the time being if Martha proves to be in possession.’
I accepted this reasonable suggestion, and as a consequence our approach to the derelict dwelling was by much the same route as I had followed that morning. We paused, just as I had done, where the fruitless orchard still made its despairing gestures to the sky. For a moment there seemed something unfamiliar in the scene before us, and then I realised that all that had changed was the position of the sun. A deep shadow had disappeared from before the abandoned well, and new shadows from the encroaching thorn-trees probed with lengthening fingers the small quadrangular spaces which had once sheltered the Sticklebacks and all their worldly goods. Immediately beyond the tangled space where a garden had once been, and cutting the whole composition in two with the crude effectiveness of poster-art, lay the single broad shadow of a beech. And beyond that again, but on a tree-stump a good deal farther away than before, sat Martha Uff.
I became aware that Holroyd had sat down too, and with something of the celerity of a Boy Scout going to earth during a tracking game. His perch was a fallen tree-trunk comfortably upholstered with moss, and when he silently patted a space beside him I obediently joined him. Martha, I saw, remained just visible, and the consciousness that I was thus beginning to re-enact my peeping role of earlier in the day made me feel markedly uncomfortable. My companion, however, appeared not much concerned with the girl, so that my discomfort was mingled with irritation that a distinguished investigator of psychical phenomena should treat so casually the very situation that had brought me so astounding an experience only a few hours before.
‘Well,’ Holroyd said a little impatiently, ‘out with it, my dear chap. Let’s know what the lady found to say to the bishop.’
‘As you please.’ I took Lady Otho Senderhill’s letter from my pocket. ‘But ought we to read it just here? Isn’t our talk going to disturb Martha?’
‘Not unless we lose our tempers and shout at each other.’
‘I suppose that’s so.’ I had measured the distance between Martha and ourselves. ‘But, Holroyd, don’t you realise what she’s about? She’s confidently waiting again for—’
‘Yes, yes – and you think I ought to be absorbed in the spectacle. But that part of the pattern is clear enough, is it not? Anyway, I promise to be adequately interested in anything that presently turns up. And we can have a better look at her now, if you like.’ To my surprise Holroyd produced a small pair of field-glasses from his pocket, and gave a few seconds to training them upon the girl. ‘You’ll be glad to see,’ he said, ‘that she appears to be in a composed frame of mind.’ And he handed me the instrument. Martha’s form, and then her features, leapt at me startlingly as I focused it. She was just as she had been that morning. The only difference was that, this time, her expression was more clearly revealed to me. I saw the identical grave expectation. The poor child might have been a bride on the threshold of her happiness.
‘I’ll bet you a bob I know how it begins,’ I heard Holroyd say encouragingly.
‘How what begins?’ For a moment it was almost as if I had to recall myself to my friend’s presence. ‘Oh, the letter.’ And I took the thing from my pocket. ‘It will begin “My dear Lord Bishop”.’
‘Not formal enough for a dying confession. It will be just “My Lord”.’
3
My Lord,
I beg you to excuse what must seem discourteously abrupt in this letter. You have heard of my illness; there is now no hope for me; my weakness makes it an effort to put pen to paper; there is the further difficulty that I wish to conceal what I do from those who are in almost constant attendance upon me.
You were for long – until your present elevation took you to a distant part of the country – my spiritual adviser, and you have remained my trusted friend. Did you ever guess, I wonder, that the confession of something momentous at least to myself often trembled on my lips?
It is not, thank God – and as it might be with many women of apparently unblemished reputation that I know – a confession of adultery. It is a confession that I have borne an illegitimate child. Do not condemn me harshly until you have heard me out. The secret is my dear husband’s too.
We met in Baden – a resort much frequented by my father. His wealth, as you know, had been acquired in trade, and it was in such watering-places that he found a first ready means of entry into good society. There was much of which he could not approve in such places, since both he and my mother, together with all their kinsfolk, were of the strictest religious principles. Social advancement, however, was almost equally dear to him!
Otho and I met in the gardens of the Kursaal. Later—and how grave a folly!—we used to make small clandestine expeditions amid the gentle Baden hills. Yet our love prospered, and eventually a formal alliance was approved by both Otho’s parents and mine. How happy was I in the prospect of a lifetime with my lover! And how happy was my father that this same lover was the Marquess of Melchester’s grandson!
The fell hand of war separated us, for Otho had suddenly to join his regiment in Spain. At the same time – but this was a blessing in disguise – such was the incivility of the Corsican tyrant that English persons even of quality were incommoded in many places of sojourn throughout the continent. My father judged it prudent to withdraw for a time to a more obscure resort. We had scarcely reached this refuge when I discovered myself to be with child.
Otho, meanwhile, had been taken prisoner, and we learnt that it must be many months before he should be released on parole. Yet correspondence was possible, and he and my father agreed on a plan.
It would have been unnecessary had my family been Senderhills. Our aristocracy did not at that time take much account of what would be judged the venal fault of a pre-nuptial mischance. But my own Aunt Dinah was another matter. As you will recall, my father’s fortune, although considerable, was engaged to my brothers, and it was only the great wealth which was to come to me from this relative that had prompted the Marquess to sanction the proposed marriage. My Aunt Dinah was a spinster of the most exact piety. A breath of what had happened would seal the well-springs of her benevolence forever.
You can imagine—my dear and reverend friend!—what had to be contrived. My daughter’s birth was of a like guilty secrecy to that which had attended her conception. Bavarian foster-parents in respectable circumstances were to receive her. Yet this plan my maternal fondne
ss forbade. The child was returned to England, and placed with persons of humbler station (since nothing else could safely be contrived) on one of the more remote Senderhill estates. And with that my troubles ended (worldly troubles, that is to say; of others, this repentant missive is a witness). Otho was released with unexpected expedition, and our marriage immediately followed. My dear son Bertrand (whose unhappy and untimely death at sea I must ever regard as a heavenly judgement executed upon me) was born but one year to the very day after his innocent but untimely sister.
My dear Lord Bishop, my confession is over. The chronicle is closed. I shall have been brought to another judgement ere this reaches you. Pray for my soul, dear bishop, in your heart. Protestant theology, I am told, forbids that you should do so publicly.
Your Lordship’s obedient daughter in God,
LYDIA SENDERHILL.
Post scriptum. You may wonder what happened to the child. Many years ago now, I was startled to learn that Otho had nonchalantly moved the foster-parents (and our daughter with them) to employment and a cottage on the Vailes estate itself. Otho himself has been quite without concern or curiosity over what he calls ‘the wrong-side-of- the-blanket one’. Yet she was only, I have been used to tell him, ‘the wrong-side-of-the-altar one’. And I myself dared only to see the child; never to speak to her. She emigrated to the colonies with a lover, it seems, very much about the time of poor Bertrand’s death. But I have never had particulars. The foster-parents have been strangely evasive. Their name—an absurd name—is Stickleback!
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