Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Gamely, Xavier made an effort to investigate, he knew not precisely what: and felt the more self-conscious, and a bit of a dandy and a fool, under the close scrutiny of his cousin. With a gingerly motion he drew a dust-heavy sheet from off an ottoman, in itself discolored by dust, to discover naught but a little gathering of dead moths, their wings turned to paper, and their bodies but dried husks. Elsewhere, in opening with fumbling fingers a lady’s hat-box tightly bound with twine, he frightened up a mouse, whose panicked scuttling quite startled both himself and Perdita, and made the pulse behind his eyes throb the more sullenly.

  So malodorous was the air, and so inhospitable the general terrain, he could not bring himself to stay for very many minutes; and busied himself poking, and prying, and sniffing, about a massive sideboard of Chippendale design, rather more because its numerous drawers were locked than because it aroused his suspicions. This ungainly piece of furniture, not unlike one belonging to his De Forrest grandparents, was perhaps eight feet in length, with excessive Oriental ornamentation in mock-bamboo trim, and bird “claws” for feet, and raised sections at either end, housing a series of drawers with bamboo knobs. The high-gloss French finish had long since faded; the lavish cornucopia carvings on either side of the splashboard were all but obscured in dust; so layered with grime was the oval mirror, Xavier would have been hard put to recognize his own image there, afloat in a cloudy sea. Two of the drawers opened easily, and were empty; the others were locked; as was the large central panel,—a fact Xavier’s boyish self told him must be suspicious, but his more mature self supposed meant very little. Yet he poked and pried about, under his cousin’s sweet gaze, as methodically as possible, for, even so prematurely in his “career,” he knew that he must not surrender to the tide of doubt, hopelessness, and near-sickened self-contempt, it seemed to him altogether reasonable to feel at this juncture.

  Alas, how opportunely it always happened, at precisely such “calm” moments in the adventures of Xavier’s detective-heroes, that a clue of some sort thrust itself forward; or even a sudden eructation of danger. But, sadly, this was not to be Xavier’s experience in the attic; and it was with an air of somewhat shamed disappointment that he gave up, and followed Perdita back to the stairs. All fleetingly it crossed his mind that, even here, in this unprepossessing region, he was being observed: and could not help himself from glancing uneasily about. But of course there was nothing to be seen; and, apart from the idle buzzing of the flies, nothing to be heard.

  “And now, perhaps, dear Xavier, you might take your leave,” Perdita said, with a worried glance to both sides, as the young people stealthily descended the stairs, “—for while Georgina is confined to her sickbed, and not likely to discover us, I cannot answer to poor Thérèse’s wanderings,—or to old Pride, who might turn up anywhere, in ‘guarding,’ as he imagines it, our household; and I am certain the tyrant carries tales back to his mistress, about all of us.”

  Xavier felt the wisdom, and the reasonableness, of his companion’s words; and surely his own instinct urged him to escape, with great relief, to the freshness of the June sunshine,—indeed, to all the vast, unfettered, healthsome world beyond Glen Mawr Manor! But some measure of detectively stubbornness resided in his breast; and, it may have been, a romantic disinclination to leave little Perdita: for when again might he hope to see her?—when again, to stand so close beside her, to gaze upon her enchanting face, to exchange such intimate confidences? More than once, during the course of the past hour, occupied as he was with investigation, the cunning youth had stolen a glance at his cousin; and felt the forbidden knowledge that he might, if he wished to press hard enough, dare to brush his lips against her cheek,—nay, against her very lips! Now it came over him again, with the force of delirium, that it was within his power, if he so wished, to take Perdita’s small hand, and fondle it; to caress her shoulders, and her lovely neck; to bring his warm lips close,—ah, very close—to her ear, her throat, her mouth; to confess to her, in a low, tremulous, yet altogether sincere voice, that he believed he was in love with her: if love was not an offense, or an outrage to her tender ear.

  But he dared not risk such boldness: and contented himself with drawing very close to her, and stooping to murmur in her ear, whether he might explore, however briefly, the cellar: and then, he promised, he would be off,—and never trouble her again on such a fool’s errand.

  Perdita’s cheeks faintly colored, as if taking heat from Xavier’s warm breath; and a childish frown appeared between her delicate brows. She reiterated her suggestion that he leave, and quickly,—for a considerable space of time had passed since his arrival. (To his uneasy surprise, Xavier saw by means of a grandfather’s clock nearby that more than two hours had elapsed!—with the brevity and fluidity of less than one.) Still he persisted: touching as if by accident the girl’s arm, and her slender shoulder: and promising that he would remain below-stairs only ten minutes, or less: and then he would be gone.

  After a prolonged hesitation Perdita sighed, and essayed to smile, with a droll and innocently coquettish upward turn of her eyes, saying that she might as well acquiesce; that she was after all accustomed to such: and only hoped that Georgina would not find out and, when the strength in her arm returned, subject her to a sound whipping. When Xavier evinced surprise at hearing this, Perdita somewhat irritably drew away, saying that neither she nor Thérèse had ever been punished, by Georgina or by their dear father, without having brought it on themselves: and she, Perdita, was by far the worse offender. “But surely you are not actually whipped?” Xavier said, staring at her. “For it was altogether rare that my father ever laid a hand to us, over the years: and Wolf was particularly deserving as a boy.” Perdita shrugged her shoulders, and made a charming little grimace, saying that “Justice was a more precious matter than mere Mercy,”—that, in any case, she had only used a figure of speech: whipping to signify scolding.

  Being led down a narrow stairs to the cellar, Xavier had prescience enough to take, from a shelf, a waxen stub of candle, and to light it, that they might see some six or eight feet before them—but, alas, not very clearly. He was reminded as they descended, Perdita just before him, of an old fairy tale or legend his mother used to read to him, oft-times as he drifted off to sleep, of children entering a dark wood: a boy and a girl, alone and lost, or soon to be lost: clutching at each other in fearful desperation. Yet it seemed to him, even in the face of the murky and ill-smelling cellar, with its earthen floor, that to be lost in such a space, in lovely Perdita’s company, would prove a delight indeed—!

  So they descended; and walked stumblingly about; assailed by divers odors of mustiness, and rot, and drainage, and rich dark earth, and food gone rancid; and Xavier’s sensitive nostrils picked up a faint smell of something decaying, or feculent,—which so disgusted him, he halfway wished to turn back. Perdita whispered that she knew very little of the cellar, save that it did not extend beneath the entire house, but only the central area; that it frequently flooded in the spring; and that there were rats, surely, throughout,—for which reason, she said, shivering, she wished not to stay there very long.

  Still, Xavier wished to poke about, so long as his candle lasted. He followed the sound of trickling water until he came to a stone wall embedded in the earth; he followed the scent of decayed fruit until he came to a storage room; he groped about until his hand brushed against an iron grating, and sizable iron hinges, on a heavy oaken door,—a dungeonlike chamber, it seemed, not very distant from the stairway, but recessed beneath it.

  He asked Perdita what this was, but she seemed not to know: a part of the fruit cellar, perhaps: though why a mere storage room should have a door with an iron bolt, and a grated opening, very like a dungeon cell, she could not say. Xavier tugged at the door, which, though difficult to move, and creaking on its hinges, was unlocked; and went boldly inside, his candle aloft, to reveal, amidst somber cobwebbed shadows, a windowless space of some ten feet in diameter, of an irregular circular shap
e. Divers odors assailed him, of a kind he did not care to identify: and he felt for a moment he might be ill. Though, upstairs, he had been uncomfortably perspiring for some time, he now began to shiver, so that his teeth came near to chattering; and the sensitive hairs at the nape of his neck stirred. What place was this? What human presence even now emanated from it? Though altogether empty, and starkly devoid of any “evidence,” it seemed to him a place of unmistakable damnation.

  Perdita whimpered that they must leave, but Xavier paid her no mind, stooping to examine the hard-packed earthen floor, in which a multitude of footprints might be discerned, most with compact little heels, as of a lady’s tiny shoe; and squatting to examine some scratchings, or actual writing, in one area of the stone wall. “It is nothing,” Perdita said in a frightened voice, in which an air of impatience might have been discerned. “It is very old, and worthless, going back to ancient times: I beg of you, Cousin, do come out.” But Xavier squatted now on his heels, holding the tremulous candle-flame aloft, that he might, with painstaking difficulty, decipher the letters so crudely carved in the rock: for, it seemed, there was a message of sorts here, and a most remarkable one, in the form of verse. Ignoring Perdita’s entreaties, and even her shy pokings against his shoulder, and the brush of her knuckles against his hair,—which would, doubtless, at another time, have greatly aroused him—Xavier haltingly read out these words:

  Herein, a broken Sinner—

  Ah, engorged in Shame!—

  Godly Husband & Father—

  Blessèd be Thy name!

  If—You will forgive—

  & I rise to Your bosom—again—

  “But the verse breaks off,” Xavier said aloud, “and the rhyme is not completed.” Nor could he, by groping about, and peering along the stretch of the damp chill rock, locate any further markings.

  So absorbed was the impetuous youth in his search, he was but dimly aware of Perdita’s distress, or ire; and of the strain upon his back and thighs; and the sickly throbbing of his head. How strange was this discovery, and what exultation flooded him—! Now he knew that he had not been mistaken to believe that anything and everything possessed meaning: and that, with luck and persistence, he should decipher it. He inquired of his companion who might have scratched that verse into the rock, and when, and why: if the language did not suggest to her that of her own sister Georgina;—assuming that Perdita was familiar with her sister’s odd poetry, as he was. Irritably, in a voice of uncharacteristic harshness, Perdita said that the “doggerel” he had quoted dated back, as she had explained, to “ancient times”: that, many generations ago, before anyone who now lived was born, certain “criminal” Indians, slaves, and servants had been sequestered in the cellar of Glen Mawr, for safekeeping, she knew not altogether why: but so her father had chanced to mention, and so it must be true.

  As he was examining with his fingertips the abrasive, marred surface of the stone, to see if he might discover any further markings, Xavier failed to fully attend to her words, or her reiterated plea that he at last come out: for, she declared, she could not breathe in so foul a place, and felt sickened to her very soul. Xavier murmured an assent; but was inwardly cursing himself that he had not the wherewithal to make a rubbing of the verse,—tissue paper and charcoal being all that he would need. “Next time,” the perspiring youth bethought himself, “I shall come better prepared.”

  Not a minute afterward, while he was still vainly groping along the wall, he felt an emanation of sharply cold air: and only chanced to look over his shoulder, at the very moment the oaken door swung shut, and locked!—with a remarkable force, as if it had been blown by a violent wind, or angrily pushed. And, ah!—with what horror he saw that Perdita was no longer close behind him, but had, it seems, “vanished”: nor did she answer to his strangulated cry, as he sprang to the door, to discover that it was bolted from without.

  In this precipitant motion, the unhappy boy dropped his candle-stub, and the airless space was engirded in darkness.

  So numbed was Xavier by this remarkable development, he could scarcely grasp the sequence of events, still less what he might do: and such was his pitiful gallantry that, for the first several minutes, he could not comprehend that sweet Perdita had slammed the door upon him; and imagined that she might be in danger, and requiring of his aid. Thus it was, he murmured only her name, repeatedly, beseechingly, as if it were a summons,—or a plea,—or a prayer.

  “Perdita—!”

  BUT NO SOUND RESPONDED,—save the tranquil trickling of water across rock.

  The Lost Suitor

  As to Miss Georgina Kilgarvan’s aloof, faunlike, yet, it was claimed, unfailingly courteous young man, Mr. Malcolm Guillemot,—believed, in truth, to be two or three years her junior—there had seemed to Winterthurn a substantial gathering of facts regarding him, in the twelve-month space of time during which he “courted” Georgina: yet, as these shards, ellipses, impressions, and mere innuendos (frequently contradictory) failed, it seemed perversely, to add up to a uniform portrait, general mystification and disappointment were felt on all sides. Of the actual likelihood of Miss Georgina Kilgarvan becoming a bride, there was an informal consensus amongst the Kilgarvans’ set that this would never transpire: but a contentious division as to whether the match must fail because Chief Justice Erasmus Kilgarvan would never give up his cherished daughter (and to a young man, it was whispered, of exceedingly modest resources,—both his father and grandfather being Presbyterian ministers in a neighboring state); or as a consequence,—so the men jocosely predicted—of Mr. Guillemot’s delayed good sense.

  Indeed, it was a perennial debate as to Miss Georgina’s virtues in the comparative light of those of other Winterthurn heiresses of her generation. A goodly contingent of ladies, the older matrons in particular, held that Erasmus’s eldest daughter was a decidedly handsome young woman, with fine sharp “snapping” eyes, and a smile that charmed when it would, and an excellent carriage,—albeit there was sometimes a haughtiness in even her warmer manner that unsettled where it wished to please. Yet numerous other persons, amongst them detractors of the Judge, or those who had actually felt the deadly whiplash of his scorn, deemed her sour, and petulant, and frankly plain: as if the defiant unprettiness of her verse were matched by her public manner. Miss Kilgarvan was a lady, it was granted,—but only by virtue of her station, and not her character.

  For was “Iphigenia” not, like her poetry, a vexing sort of puzzle: intransigent, offensive, with an air of concealing far more than she yielded—?

  OF THE THIRTY-ODD LADIES PRESENT at that meeting of the Thursday Afternoon Society, at which the visiting lecturer Mr. Guillemot recited in a high, impassioned, slightly quavering voice his “renderings into English” of certain lyric poems of Heine, some declared themselves most struck by his large, wide-set, sensitive brown eyes, their gaze affixed, it seemed, in space; and by the marblelike smoothness of his narrow brow; and by the charming way in which, as if windblown, his silky fair hair fell in two distinct “wings” about his delicate face. Others, no less equally impressed, took note of the stylish cut of his frock coat and trousers, in a subtle hue of heather beige; and the propriety of his ascot tie, in russet satin; and the subdued richness of his vest, embroidered in scarlet, beige, and creamy silk. It was afterward debated as to whether the young visitor had recited his translations with a lisp, or no; and whether he had, at the podium, rocked gently to and fro, with the mesmerizing rhythms of the verse. And the ladies were in amiable disagreement concerning the effect of his performance: the most controversial of the pieces being Heine’s “Die Götter Griechenlands,” which, some averred, was almost too powerful in certain of its lines,—

  And you also I recognize,—you too, Aphrodite:

  Golden once, and now, alas, silver!

  Though the charm of the bridal gown adorns you,

  Secretly I dread your beauty;

  And if your chaste body should delight me

  Like other heroes, I woul
d die of terror.

  As a Death Goddess you reveal yourself:

  Venus Libitina!

  —these final words being uttered by Mr. Guillemot in so impassioned a tone, his very voice seemed to shudder.

  Afterward it was asserted, altogether erroneously, that Malcolm Guillemot had been gazing upon Miss Georgina Kilgarvan throughout his performance, and that he had, from the first, directed his recitation toward her. Clarice Von Goeler, who had accompanied Georgina to the meeting, knew that this was hardly the case, and was to recall, for years afterward, with a pang of jealousy, how avidly Georgina had hung upon Guillemot’s every syllable,—how, indeed, the young woman had leaned forward in her seat, her neck and shoulders near-quivering with strain. During the question period, when tea and sandwiches were being served, Georgina had somewhat recovered herself, and asked the handsome visitor whether it was a valid supposition, or a mere whimsy of her own, that “all poetry was, in a sense, translation, or artful rendering, of the Unknown depths of passion, into the Known strictures of language.”

  Precisely how Mr. Guillemot essayed to answer this riddlesome question of “Iphigenia’s,”—whether in truth the startled gentleman had answered it—very few witnesses could afterward agree. But that he had, for the remainder of the hour, fixed his attention pointedly upon Miss Georgina Kilgarvan, all concurred.