of the glass. She put both hands around the snifter and raised it to her mouth and she took a swallow that would’ve done Lord Bob proud. She sat back and closed her eyes and screwed up her face.
Mrs. Corneille smiled. “You needn t swallow like that again. Unless you want to, of course. I’ll fetch a chair.
I stood, but she waved me back down. She stepped over to a spindly wooden desk, lifted the spindly wooden chair from beneath it, carried it over to us and placed it a few feet from Miss Turner.
She picked up the two brandy snifters from the end table, leaned around Miss Turner to hand me mine, and then she sat down, her back straight. “Now,” she said to Miss Turner. “Do you feel better?”
Her lower lip caught between her teeth, Miss Turner had been staring at the snifter on her lap as though there were a message floating across the surface of the brandy. She looked up at Mrs. Corneille. “Yes,” she said. Her voice was small. “I think I do. Thank you.”
“Not at all. Now. You must tell us all about it.”
Miss Turner moved her shoulders in a frail shrug. She smiled hopelessly. “I’m not at all sure where to begin, really.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Corneille. “We tried starting in the middle and that didn’t work terribly well. At the risk of sounding obvious, why don’t we try starting at the beginning. Why did you go to the Earl’s room?”
Miss Turner took another swallow of brandy. “Because of something Madame Sosostris said. At the seance.” She looked at me.
I smiled and I nodded. That was supposed to encourage her. “Madame Sosostris?” said Mrs. Corneille.
“Yes. She was talking about the Earl-she was Running Bear then, do you remember?”
“Yes?”
“She was Running Bear-playing the part, I mean-and she was talking about the Earl. She said that the Earl felt guilty now, because he’d imposed his sick desires on an innocent young woman. He felt tortured about it, she said. Well, it occurred to me that I was the woman Madame Sosostris meant.”
Mrs. Corneille smiled as though she hadn’t really followed all that. “You?”
“Yes,” said Miss Turner. She leaned toward Mrs. Corneille. “Don’t you see? The ghost. Lord Reginald. The ghost that came to my room last night. That was no ghost. It was the Earl.” She looked at me. I remembered to smile and nod some more.
Mrs. Corneille glanced at me and then looked back at Miss Turner. “But Jane,” she said. “The Earl was bedridden. Paralyzed.” “Yes,” said Miss Turner, nodding, excited now, “that’s what I told myself. But then I thought, what if he weren’t? What if he were only shamming? He knows Maplewhite. He’s lived here all his life. It would’ve been so easy for him to sneak into my room, and then run out again, while I was behaving like an hysterical schoolgirl. He could’ve slipped right past Mrs. Allardyce. It takes her forever to wake up.”
I said, “Mrs. Allardyce said she woke up when you screamed the first time.”
Miss Turner shook her head. “But that’s not possible. He had to run past her, in order to leave the room. I’m sure he must have done. I’ve been going over it tonight, trying to remember.”
“You told me,” I said, “that you weren’t sleeping when it all happened.”
“No.” She drank some brandy. “I was just lying there, in the darkness. And then, as I told you, I heard a sound, a sort of clicking noise, and I rolled over and switched on the light. And he was standing there. At the foot of the bed. Wearing an old nightgown. He had long white hair and a long white beard-I mentioned
that, didn’t I?”
I nodded. “And you screamed?”
“No,” she said. “No, not then. I think I was too frightened. To do anything, really. And then he…” Her eyelashes fluttered. “And then he did something. And said something.”
So she hadn’t told me the truth before, or all of it. “Did what?”
I asked. “Said what?”
She took another deep breath, and I got the feeling that she was steeling herself to get through this. It was the same feeling I’d gotten this afternoon, when she thanked me in the hallway.
But she didn’t talk to me this time. She turned to Mrs. Corneille. “He pulled up his nightgown,” she said, her voice flat and deliberate, “and raised it to his stomach. He was… naked. And he said”-she swallowed-“he said, ‘Want a nice little piece of this, dearie?’ ”
She was trying to be cool and detached, but the skin of her face had gone pink. I hadn’t noticed before, but it was very nice skin. It was a very nice face.
Mrs. Corneille frowned, looked at me, looked back at Miss Turner. “You honestly believe that the Earl of Axminster did that?”
“Yes,” said Miss Turner, leaning toward her over the brandy snifter, as if trying to convince her by intensity alone. “It must have been the Earl.”
“Okay,” I said. “What happened then?”
She swallowed again and sat back. “He made a move toward me, as if he were going to climb onto the bed. He was still holding up his nightgown. That was when I screamed. I screamed once, and he stopped moving. He seemed rather alarmed himself, actually.”
She smiled faintly. “In a different context, I suppose, it might have been almost comical. He dropped his nightgown and he looked around the room as though he were afraid that someone had heard me. And then I screamed again and I snatched up a pillow and threw it at him. Then I rolled off the bed, to the floor.” She took a breath. “I don’t know what I was thinking to do down there-simply trying to get away, I expect. I scrambled across the carpet to the wall. And then I turned around, and he was gone. Vanished. I pulled myself up from the floor and I looked all around and I couldn’t see him. That was when I ran into the other room. The-Mrs. Allardyce was just getting out of bed.”
“So there was time,” I said, “for the ghost, or whoever, to get past her.”
“There must’ve been,” she told me. She looked back at Mrs. Corneille. “Don’t you see? It was the Earl.”
“Jane,” said Mrs. Corneille, and her voice was kind. “You said at breakfast this morning that you’d dreamed the ghost.”
Miss Turner shook her head. “I was embarrassed. And confused.
I didn’t want to believe that I’d actually seen… what I’d seen. She turned to me. “You suggested as much, when I saw you on the lawn this afternoon. You said that I sounded as though I were trying to persuade myself. And you were right.”
“But Jane,” said Mrs. Corneille, “do I understand you correctly? Are you saying that the Earl’s ghost is actually feeling guilty about this attack on you, and that somehow that Spirit Guide of Madame Sosostris-”
“No, no, no.” Miss Turner shook her head so vigorously that her hair whipped back and forth. “No, I don’t believe in any of that. Spirit Guides, the afterlife. But I’ve read about mediums, people like Madame Sosostris. They obtain their information from whatever sources they can find, don’t they? From newspapers, from servants, wherever. And that’s what she must've done, don't you see? One of the servants must’ve known it was the Earl in my room last night, and he told Madame Sosostris.”
“But Jane,” said Mrs. Corneille. Then she frowned, as if reconsidering what she’d been about to say. Her cigarette case and a box of matches lay on the coffee table. She set her snifter on the table and picked them up.
“Okay,” I said. “So you went to the Earl’s room. You were looking for proof.”
She nodded to me and then turned to Mrs. Corneille. “It was wrong of me, I realize. Sneaking about at night. But I could hardly go to Lady Purleigh and ask her about it. And I simply had to know. Can you understand that? I’d been thinking I was going mad.”
Mrs. Corneille smiled at her. “I told you last night, Jane. You’re probably the sanest of us all.” She had one of her brown cigarettes free now. She put it between her lips.
“I very much doubt that,” said Miss Turner, and smiled another weak smile. “But thank you.”
I leaned toward Mrs. Corneille, reaching for the matches, but she shook her head. She struck a match herself and held the flame to the cigarette.
Miss Turner turned to me. “So, yes,” she said, “after the seance I asked the footman, Parsons, where the Earl’s room was located. And then later, after midnight, I went up there.” For some reason she blushed again. Again it deepened the blue of her eyes. She looked away from me.
Mrs. Corneille had blown out the match. She sat there, immobile, holding it over the ashtray, watching Miss
