Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The Fatal Wedding Night

  As the testimony of Mrs. Roxana Murphy,—or, I should say, Mrs. Simon Esdras Kilgarvan—was to prove no less incoherent than that of Mrs. Abigail Whimbrel some five months previous, it was never to be known with any degree of accuracy, or chronological fidelity, all that transpired in the accursèd Honeymoon Room, on the night of Simon Esdras’s ill-advised wedding to his “fancy woman”: or, indeed, what wild and altogether uncharacteristic species of masculine bravado,—provoked, it may have been, by an excess of alcoholic spirits, including the costliest of French champagnes!—had encouraged the philosopher to bring his bride to Glen Mawr, on that wind-tossed October night; in cruel defiance, as Winterthurn afterward whispered, of Miss Georgina’s express wishes. (As it happened, the “Blue Nun” was so discountenanced, and so deeply abhorred the prospect of spending even a single night beneath the same roof with the “newlyweds,” that, forcing herself up from her invalid’s couch, she fled the Manor altogether, her two half-sisters in tow, and secured the entire top floor of a boarding house for gentlewomen, on an elegant tree-lined street off Berwick Square: this being the place, and, assuredly, nowhere else, the distraught spinster spent the night of October 9, when her uncle met his hideous death.)

  After the discovery, in the morning, of this fresh, and, some would say, needless tragedy,—poor Simon Esdras having been assailed and mutilated, much like the Whimbrel infant, and Mr. Upchurch’s spring lambs; and the unfortunate Roxana, a bride of less than twenty-four hours, propelled into hopeless madness—it came to be reported, through town, that Simon Esdras had quite deliberately chosen to spend his wedding night in the very room imagined to be haunted: and that he had done so out of willfulness, and contempt for superstitious fears, in full confidence that, as the “rabid” Jupiter had long ago been removed, the room was totally free of danger,—indeed, was it not the most luxurious and desirable of honeymoon settings in all of the Valley? And it would cost him not a single penny—!

  In boasting of this plan a fortnight earlier, Simon Esdras had told Osmyn Goshawk, all smilingly, and with a childlike enthusiasm, that the more he considered the unusual circumstances of his betrothal, the more obliged did he feel, as a rationalist no less than a Kilgarvan, to refute the sickly nonsense accruing to his ancestral home: for did not common sense, no less than the discipline of Logic, suggest that, as there can be no Evil per se, apart from evil persons, evil creatures, evil actions, etc.,—the nod being given here to Aristotle, and not Plato—there can be no Evil residing in (mere) (extended) Space; which is to say, in a mere room? One might consider, too, whether Hume’s astringent notions of causality and acausality might not apply; whether Leibniz’s monad-vision might not be relevant; whether certain elementary propositions in Simon Esdras’s own Treatise on the “Probable” Existence of the World, penned some thirty-two years before—viz., “A spatial object must be situated in nonspatial, or Infinite, space”; “What possesses the property of being, cannot be expressed”; “Only propositions may express Logical Form (but) cannot contain it,”—might not prove helpful as well. With a most charming faint blush, and a lowering of his eyes, the philosopher confided to Osmyn that, at the present time, his own fiancée was not yet fully convinced of this argument; but he had every reason to hope that she was “coming round” to his position. Indeed, this robust young widow, formerly the wife of a Railroad Street tavernkeeper, had naught about her of false decorum, or simpering female coyness; and possessed, in his proud opinion, more common sense in her littlest finger or toe than all of the Winterthurn ladies combined. “She has said, it would give her infinite pleasure to spend our wedding night at Glen Mawr: indeed, to spend all the remaining days of our lives there, as ‘lord’ and ‘lady’ of the Manor, so to speak,” Simon Esdras said, with a deepening blush, and a slight wavering of his affable smile: for, as Osmyn later reported, it was so remarkable a thing for Simon Esdras Kilgarvan, of all persons, to be affianced, he seemed to contemplate it with a faint air of incredulity himself; and uttered his words as if they might be those of another.

  As to whether so simple an emotion as fear might not dictate one’s actions,—Simon Esdras replied to this hesitant query of Osmyn’s in a somewhat loftier tone, saying that the amorphous state of mind to which the term “fear” attached could not exist, apart from the term itself: and, as there was no language ab initio, it was a logical impossibility; and one to be dismissed from all serious consideration. “As every ‘grammar’ secretly communicates its own picture-proposition of the Cosmos, what is illusory may be for some functional,—as, I believe, my compatriot Charles Sanders Peirce has argued, in somewhat more clumsy terms,” Simon Esdras stated, raising his forefinger, as if to discourage his companion from interrupting, “—the paradox then being, is the functional illusory in fact, or merely in theory?” Poor Osmyn Goshawk felt quite lost by this abstruse reasoning, though, as he afterward said, he had not in the slightest doubted the logic of Simon Esdras’s argument; and was certainly nodding as the elder gentleman so amicably spoke. Indeed, the original question relating to fear was soon forgotten, as the philosopher proceeded vigorously to investigate, point by point, divers concepts that refuted, or even annihilated, opposing theories. Somehow, too, the matter of syllogistic necessity arose (“All X are Y,—E is X,— ... E is or is not Y”), having to do with the deceased Erasmus: about whom Simon Esdras spoke in a most peculiar manner,—part chiding, part gloating, yet, withal, in a tone of puzzled sobriety. “Thus I know it my duty,—and in this dear Roxana concurs,” Simon Esdras murmured, “—to succeed where, it seems, my brother so ingloriously failed: and thereby to invent a revolutionary Logic, imbued with the fresher air of the New World, and free of all Old World and Attic muddle.”

  To this, Osmyn Goshawk nervously acquiesced; as, it seems, he could scarcely quarrel.

  THE LADIES WERE LESS PATIENT, and far more scandalized, in reference to the “wayward Kilgarvan bachelor,” as certain observers called him: for they considered that, at his advanced age, when he might better have been thinking of Last Things, he was very much remiss in falling in love (as Mrs. Harrier Von Goeler put it) with a “pair of gypsy eyes,”—and eyes scarcely innocent of a veritable battery of tricks of crude cosmetry. “Roxana Murphy,” whether Miss or Mrs., was a woman by no means young, yet given to brash youthful ways; and decked out (as the witty Mrs. Von Goeler again observed) like a steamboat of old,—all frippery, all noise, part gambling casino, part floating brothel. Her tavernkeeper husband had died, it was said, under circumstances never satisfactorily explained; while perhaps not totally atheistical, she inclined toward the indifferent, in matters of religion,—claiming to be upon one occasion, Methodist; upon another, Baptist; upon yet another, “lapsed Catholic”! Most outrageous was the woman’s studied haughtiness when, by accident, she and her gentleman escort encountered members of the Kilgarvans’ social set, of old; for, it seems, “Mrs. Murphy” coolly declined to ingratiate herself with the Winterthurn ladies: and stared stonily past their flowerbedecked hats, while harmless amenities were exchanged. The hussy!—the trollop! Any fool, save Simon Esdras himself, could see how shamelessly she plotted to marry him for his money; and to overleap the lowliness of her station by becoming mistress of Glen Mawr Manor,—whose portals, in the days of Erasmus Kilgarvan, a creature of her ilk could not have hoped to enter. Alas, if only Simon Esdras were not a mere babe in matters of the corporeal life—!

  Since the subject bordered upon the indelicate, if not the frankly indecent, the ladies could speak but obliquely of it: and oft-times surrendered to stammering blushes, at what was almost, though not quite, voiced. Yet how could it be that the aging philosopher, for so many decades scornful of the material, not to say the biological, world, was now yielding to an impulse most gross, and most enigmatical—? How could it be that Simon Esdras was capable of noting a female figure, of any sort, let alone responding to it?—he who had, as it was whispered, so vaguely attended to the melancholy fates of his pr
etty sisters-in-law, with whom he shared a household, as to have perennially confused the two women, up to the very morning of Hortense’s funeral. His belated sentiments regarding the tradition of primogeniture they could, perhaps, more readily comprehend; but even these, as Simon Esdras elaborated upon them, and upon his Kilgarvan duty, soon struck a note of unworldliness, and frank absurdity. “It may have been that Simon Esdras too thoughtlessly dismissed the world of existence, in favor of that of essence,” one of the bolder of the ladies speculated. “Yet, at his age,—for I believe he is nearing seventy?—he may find it somewhat arduous in making his way back.”

  This witty if slightly suggestive remark provoked both blushes and restrained mirth: and the yet wittier observation, by a still bolder lady, that, judging by Mrs. Murphy’s air of expediency, as well as her proven cunning, no very great problem should present itself in “getting” her with child,—and providing the elderly bridegroom with an heir.

  IT WAS AT the very end of June that Simon Esdras began behaving in a conspicuous manner, affecting a dandy’s costume,—consisting of white duck trousers strapped under kid boots, and immaculate white linen coat, and snowy vest, and flowing coppery-silk ascot—and appearing about town, alone or with the brazen Mrs. Murphy, at social occasions to which, it seems, he had not invariably been invited. A lawn tennis fête at Shadow-Wood House, the ancestral abode of the Peregrines; a recital given by the piano students of Madame Charpentier, in the old Buonaparte Mansion; the Culpp-Flaxen nuptials, in the First Presbyterian Church; divers baptisms, weddings, confirmations, and funerals,—including of course that of poor Imogene Westergaard, which the philosopher attended by himself, eyeglasses sparkling with boyish wonder, and mouth fixed in a queer half-smile, both censorious and grieving. To the Colonel, and other stricken Westergaards, Simon Esdras explicitly declined to offer his condolences; but was heard to murmur repeatedly, with many a quirky shake of his head, that “it was all a bungle,—an error, a muddle,—a vulgar mistake: and they were best served by transcending it, or dismissing it forthwith.”

  ONE BRISK SATURDAY AFTERNOON in late September, as Xavier was slipping unobtrusively from the dusty recesses of the Pinckney Street Book Shop,—where, unknown to his parents, he had placed an extravagant order for several books on Continental criminology, as well as a monograph on Sir Francis Galton’s controversial theory of fingerprinting—he chanced to encounter his Uncle Simon Esdras, with the redoubtable Mrs. Murphy on his arm: the smiling gentleman attired in snowy white, with a vest of some knit material, in magenta, and a blood-red carnation in his lapel; the lady dressed with a matching boldness, in many layers of shimmering apricot-colored silks, and a slope-brimmed organdy hat, and an excess of Venetian lace. Xavier could not prevent himself from blushing as Simon Esdras not only deigned to recognize him as a nephew, and to hit, after several jocular tries, upon his actual name: but insisted that Xavier join him and his lady for a spot of tea, in Charity Street.

  (Which remarkable invitation Xavier certainly could not decline,—nor did he regret it afterward, as this would prove the last time he saw Simon Esdras alive.)

  Yet, dazzled as he was by his uncle’s circumlocutory manner of speech, and by Mrs. Murphy’s blooming and perfumed presence,—for, indeed, Simon Esdras’s fiancée did posses snapping “gypsy eyes,” which she fixed upon young Xavier with especial interest—he could not concentrate with any degree of success on what was being presented, or argued, or implied, or insinuated; nor did he derive much satisfaction from his tea, or the several mocha tarts and almond puff pastries urged upon him, by the silent, but smiling, Mrs. Murphy. Within a fortnight, Simon Esdras informed him, he and his charming companion would be man and wife,—the offices to be performed by a county justice of the peace, with as much brevity as possible; but this action should not mean, as certain gossipers would have it, any disrespect for his late brother,—on the contrary, in fact. “If one posits a belief in the immortality of the soul, which is the foundation stone, I believe, of the Christian way of thinking,” Simon Esdras said slowly, “one must acknowledge it as self-evident that the soul, being immortal, and bodiless, and no longer taken up with the vagaries of the flesh, cannot concern itself with the pettinesses of this world: thus, our actions here are not relevant. If, however,” he said, now laying a warm hand on Xavier’s wrist, and gazing solemnly at, or toward, him, “one posits a belief in the mortality of the soul, one must acknowledge it as equally self-evident that the soul, being mortal, perishes with the body: thus, the actions of the living cannot possibly be relevant,—as any fool might conclude.” To this carefully modulated speech, both Xavier and Mrs. Murphy assented: though Xavier had begun to feel the strain of the situation, and suffered a boyish wish to be elsewhere. Why did it strike him with such queer potency that his elderly uncle, though no less self-possessed than he had ever been, and fairly glowing with health, and a touching sort of pride in his female companion, was yet shadowed by,—by Xavier knew not what: an invisible fluttering or rustling, as of wings: an air of the fateful, and even the doomed, quite at odds with the cheery white wrought-iron tables of the Sweet Shoppe, and the conspicuous finery of the majority of the customers, and, indeed, the tarts and puffs and ices being daintily consumed. “Nay, it is only my irresponsible imagination,” Xavier sternly chided himself, “which has never yet served me well, or proved itself reliable.”

  The awkward session concluded with a surprising alteration of tone on the part of Simon Esdras: who lifted his glasses to rub roughly at his eyes, and to reiterate his position that no disrespect for his late brother could possibly be intended, or inferred, regardless of what his niece,—that “most irrational and unhappy Georgina”—chose to believe: for did they not live in an enlightened era, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, with fresh advances in science and invention and Logic being made on all sides?—and were the pristine motives of a gentleman in love to be questioned, by a morality couched in the prejudices of the Dark Ages? Testily, as if his silent companions had challenged him, Simon Esdras said that he so despised the vagrant muddle of superstition, he would no more condescend to question it than he would, for instance, inquire of the Sweet Shoppe manageress the recipe involved in making one of these pastries. Through the decades of his life he had never succumbed to any sort of failure of reasoning: and he had always evinced a fastidious impatience with such, whether it manifested itself in the coarsest species of peasant religion or in the infinitely more refined, though scarcely less nonsensical, species embodied by the proud Christian Church, in its numerous factions!—this impassioned speech being uttered in a voice of sufficient volume, as to enable all the patrons in the shop to absorb it if they wished.

  “And, in addition,” the now somewhat flushed philosopher said, “whether the world be ‘real,’ or but ‘illusion’: whether its existence be ‘probable,’ or only ‘possible,’ or a mere airy bubble residing in a mad person’s brain: I, Simon Esdras Kilgarvan, refute it thus!”—all brashly, and unexpectedly, seizing his fiancée’s plump hand, and raising it to his lips, with a ferocious disregard, it seemed to the blushing Xavier, for all who might overhear, or frankly stare.

  At Glen Mawr Manor: The Attic

  That The Mystery of Glen Mawr Manor; or, The Virgin in the Rose-Bower, was solved by the youthful Xavier Kilgarvan only in a manner of speaking, and that, I am afraid, unofficially, is to be explained by the peculiar circumstances surrounding his secret visit to Glen Mawr, some ten days after Simon Esdras’s funeral: and by the sudden onslaught of illness,—diagnosed by Dr. Hatch as a particularly virulent strain of brain fever—that laid him low for nearly two months, bringing with it not only such inevitable symptoms as a high temperature alternating with convulsive chills, and frequent terror of unseen things, and raving and incoherent speech, and loss of appetite, but partial amnesia,—so that, though the bold young detective may be said to have successfully plumbed the depths of the “mystery,” he was unable afterward to recall its crucial details, sav
e in broken, jumbled, and hallucinatory guise. As this circumstance was coupled with the tragic death of Miss Georgina Kilgarvan,—who, though she lingered for eleven weeks as a consequence of an ingestion of arsenic paste, never regained consciousness—it came about that the cause of the divers atrocities, and the source of an incalculable terror amongst the citizenry, was both discovered,—and lost forever!

  In contemplating this state of affairs some years afterward, and his own descent into illness in particular, Xavier Kilgarvan yet brooded over whether he had been inordinately luckless or, indeed, blessed by his Maker. “For if God had wished me to remember, in unfailing detail, why, then, I should certainly remember,” Xavier considered, “and, as that is not the case, and what I recall is most horrific, and repellent, and, indeed, unspeakable,—surely it is all to the good?”

  IT WAS ON the mild, moonlit, yet capriciously gusty, night of October 21, not long after church bells had sounded the hour of eleven, that Xavier satisfied himself that his brother Colin was deep in slumber; and slipped stealthily from their bed-chamber, and down the back stairs; and out into the lightless lane, or alley, directly behind,—where the clever lad had placed his bicycle, in readiness for the adventure at hand; and his schoolboy’s satchel, in which he had jammed such gear as he reasoned a detective might find useful: matches, and tallow candles; and ropes of varying lengths and textures; and a handsome double-bladed steel knife borrowed, with no precise acknowledgment, from his brother Wolf; and divers tools from Mr. Kilgarvan’s workshop, similarly borrowed. As Xavier had no doubt that he would return home well before dawn,—before, even, the hooves of the iceman’s horse sounded against the cobblestone of Wycombe Street—he did not greatly concern himself that any of these items might be missed; or that he himself might be missed. “I shall pedal out to Glen Mawr as quickly as possible, and examine the Honeymoon Room once again, and see what there is to be seen, with no witnesses,” he inwardly resolved, “and return at once, with no wasteful lingering; or childish diversions of a foolhardy kind.”