The Plague Court Murders

by John Dickson Carr

  “What,” he said, sharply, “what’s on your mind, if I may ask? The last time you got a hunch like this, we were able to arrest—”

  I denied, not quite truthfully, that I had any idea to play with. Masters said nothing, since he didn’t believe me, and jerked his head to McDonnell. When they had gone I turned up the collar of my coat, sat down on the packing-case Masters had vacated, and put the parcel before me. Instead of opening it, I lit my pipe.

  There were two ideas; both obvious, and they conflicted. If Darworth had not been terrified by any faked ghost-writing, it followed that he had been terrified by some genuine, everyday, human thing, say a threat or a revelation of knowledge. This might have been supernatural (although I was not, as yet, prepared to accept it as that), or it might have been managed in some such sleight-of-hand fashion as Masters described. In any event, it was something of devastating power and import; and derived added force from having been presented in that manner. On the other hand, it probably had no connection with this house or the events that were now going on here.

  This was sheer theorizing, yet it seemed to me that, if Darworth were so panic-striken by a threat having to do with this house, he would scarcely have acted in the way he did tonight. He alone was calm and sure. He alone enjoyed working his marionettes, and sitting by himself in dark places. Had the writing on that paper really concerned Plague Court, he would in all likelihood have shown it to the others. He mentioned Plague Court because it was a bogey to the others, but not to him.

  In that supposition, you perceive, lay the conflict. All the nebulous terrors of Darworth’s acolytes centered round this house. They believed that here existed a deadly earth-bound which must be exorcised, lest it take possession of a human soul. Now there had been so much nonsense in what Lady Benning had told us, that spiritualism seemed to violate its own rules; and presumably Darworth had only confused them with vague, Delphic hints. He could make vagueness even more terrifying. Yet, though it did not at all alarm Darworth the mystic, it had struck with ill-controlled panic Halliday the hard-headed and practical man.

  I watched the pipe-smoke slide round the candle flames, and the whole room whispered with unpleasant suggestions. After glancing sharply over my shoulder, I pulled the wrapping paper off the parcel. It was a heavy cardboard letter-file opening like a book, and it rattled with papers.

  Inside were three things: a large folded sheet, flimsy and brownish-mottled with age; a short newspaper-cutting; and a bundle of foolscap letter pages, as old as the first. On the last, the writing was so faded as to be indecipherable under the yellow blotches, but there was a newer copy in longhand folded and wedged under the tape.

  The large sheet—which I did not entirely open because I feared to tear it—was a deed. At the commencement the spidery script was so large that I could make out the parties to the sale: Thomas Frederick Halliday, Gent., had bought this house from Lionel Richard Maulden, Lord Seagrave of Seagrave, as attested on March 23, 1711.

  From the newspaper-cutting, the headline leapt up: “PROMINENT CITY MAN A SUICIDE,” accompanied by a pale photograph showing a rather goggle-eyed man in a high collar, who seemed afraid of the camera. In the picture of James Halliday, Esq., there was a horrible resemblance to Doctor Crippen. There were the same double-lensed spectacles, the same drooping mustaches, the same rabbit-like stare. The cutting told briefly of his connections; that he had shot himself at the home of his aunt, Lady Anne Benning; that he had been worried and depressed for some weeks, “seeming always to search for something about the house”; that it was all very mysterious, and that Lady Benning twice broke down at the inquest.

  I pushed it away, untied the tape, and drew out the other documents. The copy of those creased, faded, decaying sheets was headed: “Letters. Lord Seagrave to George Playge, the Steward and Manager of his Estates, Together with Reply. Transcribed. J.G. Halliday, Nov. 7, 1878.”

  I began to read, under the uncertain candles in that bleak room, now and then referring to the original. There was no noise but the stirrings that are always in an old house; but on two occasions it seemed to me that someone had come in and was reading over my shoulder:

  Villa della Trebbia,

  Roma,

  13th October, 1710.

  PLAYGE:

  Your master (and friend) is too ill and distracted to write as befits him, yet I would pray you and charge you, as you love your God, to tell me the truth of this horrible thing. Yesterday comes a letter from Sir J. Tollfer, that my brother Charles is dead at home, and this by his own hand. He said no more, but hinted at some foul business, and when I brought to mind all the things that are said about our House, I was driven near mad; since also my Lady L. is in worse failing health, and troubleth my mind exceedingly, and I cannot travel home; though a learned doctor of physick says she may be cured. So I charge you to tell me everything, Playge, as one who hath been in our family since a boy, and your father before, and pray God Sir J. Tollfer was mistaken.

  Believe me, Playge, now more your friend than your master,

  SEAGRAVE.

  London,

  21st November, 1710.

  MY LORD:

  If it had pleased GOD to avert this misfortune which is upon your Lordship, and indeed on all of us, 1 should never have been constrained to speak. For indeed I thought it was but a passing calamity, but now I know it was not; and it is a sore task which is laid upon me now, since GOD knows I feel the weight of my guilt. I must tell your Lordship more than you have asked, and of events during my father’s stewardship during the Great Plague; but of that I shall speak hereinafter.

  Of my Master Charles’s death I must tell you this: your Lordship knows him to have been a boy of quiet and studious habits, sweet of disposition and beloved by all. During the month preceding his death (which took place on Thursday, the 6th September) I had indeed noticed him pale and restless, but this I laid to overstudy. G. Beaton, his bodyservant, had told me that he would break into sweats at night; and on one occasion Beaton, waked and roused from the truckle-bed by a cry, found him clutching back the bed-curtains and grasping at his neck as though in dreadful pain. But of this Master Charles remembered nothing next morning.

  Nor would he wear a sword, but seemed always restless and seeking for something else at the side of his longcoat, and yet more pale and weary. Moreover, he took to sitting at the window of his bedchamber—which, as well your Lordship knows, looks over the court or yard behind our House—and this he would do especially at twilight, or when the moon was up. Once, he suddenly cried out from this window, and, pointing to a dairymaid who was returning to the house, he cried to me for Christ’s sake to lock this girl up, and that he could see great sores on her hands and body.

  Now I must ask your Lordship to call to mind a certain stone house which stands in the yard, and is connected with it by a covered arbor.

  This house has been vacent of use for above fifty years. The reason given by your Lordship’s father, and his father, is this: viz., That the house was built by mischance above a cesspool, and that all things sicken there. To maintain this which is untrue, they had not perforce to pull it down, lest the cesspool should poison us all; and nothing of provisions could be stored there save straw, grain, oats, or the like.

  We had then in our service a young man, Wilbert Hawks by name, an ill-faced fellow employed as porter, who got on so ill with the other servants that he would not sleep with them, and cast about him for another bed. (All this, you may be sure, I did not know then.) He vowed he believed in no cesspool, since never was there an ill savor about the place; but that the ruling was of mine, to keep honest servants out of a good bed of clean straw. They told him it was forbidden. Says he, then—’Why, I’ll take the key of the padlock from Master Snoopnose Playge’s ring, when he hangs it up at night, and be up each morning and put it back before him.’

  And this he did, this being the wet season and full of high winds. And when they asked him how he had slept, and if the bed was good,
‘Aye,’ says he, ‘good enough. But which of ye thinks to cozen me by trying the door at night, and knocking on it lightly, and pawing round the house, and peering in at the windows? For you’ll not befool me to think ’tis Master Snoopnose, and open.’

  Whereat they jeered at him, and said he lied, forasmuch as none in the house was by some feet tall enough to look in at the windows. They noticed that he seemed pale, and had no liking to go on errands after dark; but he kept his bed, least they should taunt him.

  And then began the first week of September, which was wet and windy, and it began to befall as I shall tell you: Master Charles kept to his bed, being ailing, and was attended by Dr. Hans Sloane himself.

  On the night of the 3rd September, the servants complained of somebody in the house, who seemed to brush them in the dark hallways. Moreover, they said the air was hard to breathe, and sickened them; but they saw nothing.

  On the night of the 5th September, one Mary Hill, a maidservant, was sent out after dark into the passage which runneth past the storerooms and counting house to water some stone boxes of geraniums which stand on the window-ledges inside the passage. So goes she out—this part of the house being now deserted—with her candle and watering-pot, though afeard to do so. And when she did not return after many minutes, they grew sore alarmed and began to shriek, whereat I myself went out after her, and found her lying in a swound there, her face a blackish color.

  She did not speak until morning (it being necessary for two women to sit up with her) she finally told us that this was true: viz., that, as she was watering the geraniums a hand appeared between the bars of the window before her. That this hand was of a grayish hue, very wasted, and covered with large bursting sores. That this hand twitched weakly in the flowers, and tried to seize her candle. That there was another hand, holding something like an awl or a knife, with which it picked at the window; but this she was not sure of, because she remembered no more.

  I pray that your Lordship will excuse me of writing fully what occurred the succeeding night, 6th September. I will say that towards one of the clock, in the morning, we were roused by a screaming which came from outside. And when I went out with pistol and lanthorn, and others behind me, we found that the door of the little stone house was barred on the inside. Hawks, who had been sleeping there, presently opened it, but we could not persuade him to talk in a befitting manner. But he told us, most piteously, Not to let it in—not to let it in, for God’s sake. And then he said, It was hacking at the bars with its awl, seeking to get in, and he could see its face.

  This was the night (or it was rather towards morning, as G. Beaton told the constables) that Master Charles expired of cutting his throat, in his bed. I will say, with obedient circumspection, and in the hope that your Lordship will understand me, that certain swellings which I observed upon his face and body, were altogether disappeared by the time the laying-out women—

  I found my heart beating heavily, and I was warm despite the damp air. These people lived before me: the pale lad sitting at the window, the steward painfully writing his account, the shadows of that cramped and greasy time come back upon a damned house. I began to have a hideous notion of what haunted Dean Halliday now.

  Then I got up, with a muscle of fear jerking in my leg, because I could have sworn somebody had walked down the passage, and past my door. It was only a flash out of the tail of the eye; I went over to reassure myself. Stone window-boxes? They were not here now, although I could remember one, the passage was empty.

  Returning, and wiping my hands aimlessly on my overcoat, I wondered whether I ought to call Masters and show him. But the spell took me.

  … And now it behooves me, though with a sick and doubtful heart, to throw what light I can upon this Visitation which GOD in his inscrutable ways hath wrought. Some part of it I observed myself, but most I learned in later time from my father; for I was bare ten years old then, which was in the year of the Great Plague, or 1665.

  Doubtless your Lordship has heard men talk of this time, since there are many now alive who did not flee the city, yet survived.

  My father, who was a good and pious man, used to gather us his children and in his great voice he would read the text which says, ‘Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noon day. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.’ this was in August and September, the worst months because the hottest. Even shut into our room I can remember hearing from the upper windows of neighboring houses the shrieks of the women that broke the great silence that was on the city. Once my sister and I crept out on the roof-tiles, at a giddy height, and saw the hot murky sky, and no smoke going up from the chimneys, and such people as were abroad hurrying in the middle of the streets, and the watchmen with their red wands before houses that were marked in a red cross on the doors below the words, ‘Lord, have mercy upon us.’ I only saw a plague-cart once, which was when I crept to a window at night: It had stopped near by, and the bellman was clanging his bell and bawling towards an upstairs window, and so was the watchman, and the linkman was holding up his light so that I saw the cart full of bodies that were covered with sores. I heard these carts every night.

  However, this was later, as I shall speak of hereinafter, and the Plague (which broke out in the parish of St. Giles) took so long a time to reach us that people said it would not come at all; and it was mayhap to my father’s forethought that we owed our lives. For my father took thought to GOD’s signs and omens, like others less fortunate. When the great comet appeared, and burned dull and sluggish in the sky, he went to Sir Richard—as he was then, your Lordship’s grandfather—and told him what it was. (This was in the month of April.)

  Now Sir Richard’s own room of business, set apart from his counting-room and warehouses, was the stone house before mentioned. Here he entertained the great people who came to buy of him: which is to say, inside by the fire in cool weather, and outside under the trees in fine. Sir Richard was a vasty awesome figure in his great periwig and grave fur gown, with the gold chain round his neck; but he did not take amiss what my father said to him.

  My father urged on him the precaution he had heard was taken by a Dutch family in Aldersgate Street: viz., that the house should be well provisioned and shut up of itself, suffering none to go in or out until the scourge abated. Sir Richard heard him out, and pinched his chin and was mighty thoughtful. For he had a dear wife, who was soon to be brought to bed of child; likewise a beloved daughter Margaret, and a son Owen, your Lordship’s own father. Whereat he said—Ay, there was reason in the plan, and if the plague showed no abatement in a fortnight, they would do it. For they dared not leave the town, because of his wife.

  Your Lordship well knows that it did not abate; nay, that it breathed fiercer as the warm weather came with the flies (although all birds had gone from the town). It smote northwards to Holbourne, down the Strand and Fleet Street, and was upon us, and everywhere were people fleeing mad from the stricken town with their goods piled into carts and waggons. These stormed at the gates of the Mansion House, beseeching of my Lord Mayor passes and certificates of health, without which no other town would suffer them to enter, or no inn allow them to lie there. To some it came slowly, first the pains and vomit, then the swelling sores, and mayhap lingered a week ere dying in convulsions; to others it came in the vitals, without outward sign, until they fell in the street and died there.

  Whereupon Sir Richard ordered the house to be shut up, dismissing his clerks and keeping only such servants as were of necessity. He desired his son and daughter to leave and join the Court (which had fled to Hampton), but they would not. So none were suffered to go out into the air, save only within the enclosure of our wall; and these with myrrh and zedory in their mouths. I except only my father, who manfully offered to carry abroad such messages as Sir Richard should wish. But indee
d he would have thought himself fortunate, had it not been for one thing: that is to say, his half-brother, Louis Playge.

  Now in truth I turn sick when I write of this man, who hath affrighted my dreams. I saw him only twice or thrice. Once was when he came boldly to the house, demanding to see the steward his brother; but the servants knew who he was, and ran from him. He caught my little sister, so that when my father came upon him he was twisting her arm horribly, and laughing, and telling her how they cut up a man at Tyburn yesterday. (For your Lordship must know he was assistant to the Hangman, a thing of horror and shame to my father, and which he strove to conceal from Sir Richard.) Nor had he the courage or skill for the Hangman’s office, but could only stand beside and …

  Some things I shall not include; it is not well that I should.

  … But my father said—That if once he could gain the stomach for all he desired to do, then, Louis Playge must be so evil that he could not die like other men. In appearance he was a short man, with a face something bloated. He wore his own lank hair, and had a greasy flopping hat pinned up at one side; and instead of a sword he wore at his side a curious dagger with a blade like a thick awl, which he was very proud of because he had made it himself, and which he called Jenny. He used it at Tyburn for …

  But when the noisome pestilence blew upon us, we did not see him, and I know my father hoped him dead. Then one day (it was August) my father went abroad with a message, and when he returned he sat down by my mother in the kitchen—and put his head in his hands. For he had seen his brother Louis in an alley off Basinghall Street, and his brother was kneeling and stabbing at something with his weapon. Beside him there was a handcart full of small furry bodies, the which were cats. (For your Lordship must know that by an ORDER conceived by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, no hogs, dogs, cats or tame pigeons, being bearers of contagion, were suffered to be kept; but all must be made way with, and killers appointed for that purpose). …