be brandishing his endowments (which were considerable, by the way); not for me, and not for anyone else, poor soul.
But to return to the equally astonishing Mr Beaumont. Last night, at a few minutes before one o’clock, after sealing your letter, I switched off the light and eased open my bedroom door and peeped out. I looked to the left. I saw nothing. I looked to the right. I saw Cecily Fitzwilliam, sheathed in a filmy silk robe, slide into Mr Beaumont’s darkened room as easily and as comfortably as a powdered foot slides into a familiar slipper.
I’d known about them, of course, about their affair. Still, I was rather shocked (and not a little envious, I confess) at the brazenness of the woman-promenading semi-naked through the hallways, where anyone might see her, even a slinking, spiteful paid companion.
I waited. I listened for the silence that would signal safety. This I heard, and I opened the door, closed it quietly behind me, and then galloped down the corridor to the post box. I slipped your letter inside and then I cantered down the stairs and through another hallway and up some more stairs and down another corridor to the Earl’s room, where I found the wig and the beard beneath his bed.
Why the Earl’s room?
Why must you pester me with questions?
I was beneath the bed myself at the time, or I shouldn’t have discovered the beard and the wig.
Oh, it’s an impossibly long story, Evy, and I’ll relate it to you one day, I promise, but just now I want to get to the knife and to
Mr Beaumont.
The knife was a silver dagger-an antique, and quite handsome, really-and it was thrusting out of my bed like a wicket when I returned to my room. I’d created a Sylvia-you remember the Sleeping Sylvias we fashioned from pillows and bolsters before we crept out the window of Miss Applewhite’s? I’d constructed a Sylvia before I set off for the Earl s room, and this one had been impaled.
I became an imbecile for a moment or two, wondering how on earth the knife had got there. And then I realized that of course someone had put it there, deliberately, stabbed it there, having mistaken Sylvia for myself; and I promptly came down with a very bad case of the collywobbles.
No, I don’t know who did it. And I can’t imagine why.
After a few moments, in a sort of daze I snatched up the knife and went stumbling off toward Mrs Corneille’s room.
I knocked on the door. She opened it and I staggered in. And who should be there, lurching up from a small rococo sofa, but Mr Beaumont.
He was fully dressed. Perhaps he’d clothed himself again, after the earlier rendezvous with Cecily. Or perhaps, back in his room, Cecily had lunged upon him like a panther while he still wore them, and the two had toppled to the floor, and there, without wasting a moment, in the hurried lunge and thrust of passion, they…
Oh dear.
It’s the weather, Evy. Another day hot and sultry, and the sweetness of the sunlight sprawling across the green lawn. Everyone else has gone to Sunday services and I'm writing this out of doors, on the patio beside the conservatory. Squirrels are leaping about, and so, I fear, is my fancy.
Whatever the explanation, there was Mr Beaumont looking dark and rather dashing in his dinner jacket (and trousers, etc.).
This might have been, you may say, an innocent meeting, his engagement with Mrs Corneille. I might (almost) have believed so myself if I hadn’t, while sitting down, happened (by the purest chance) to glance into the front of the standing Mr Beaumont and discover that he was in a state that your Mrs Stopes describes as “masculine readiness.”
Perhaps-and this occurs to me only just now-making love while clothed is another of those perplexing American innovations, like the Charleston. Perhaps this is what is actually meant by “get up and go”. Perhaps when I knocked at the door he and Mrs Corneille, both fully dressed, were tumbling wildly across the floor.
No. I can-and with a vividness that is not at all unpleasant- picture Mr Beaumont so performing; but not the elegant Mrs Corneille. And yet I suspect that had I not knocked at the door, someone s clothing would have been, at the very least, profoundly rearranged.
Mr Beaumont is indefatigable, it seems.
In any event, I was flustered when I began the conversation with the two of them; and, throughout the course of it, I could feel my face flushing idiotically whenever I looked at him.
He isn’t as self-absorbed as I’ve portrayed him in these letters, Evy. He was most charming, really-both last night, when I spoke with him and Mrs Corneille, and today, during my interrogation by the pompous Inspector Marsh of Scotland Yard. He even went so far as to defend me.
But I get ahead of myself.
I told them the entire story last night. Mr Beaumont and Mrs Corneille.
Very nearly the entire story. I didn’t mention the other ghosts, the mother and the young boy I’d seen down by the mill. The more I consider them, the more I begin to believe that they were a product of my imagination. My nerves were stretched taut, the light beneath the willow tree was thin and gray. And, moreover,
My goodness. I’ve just had quite the most bizarre and disquieting conversation with Mr Houdini. I’m at a loss. If what he seems to be suggesting is true-
Let me see if I can structure this.
He came strutting down the walkway, greeted me with a cheery ‘Good day!’ plopped himself beside me on the bench, and declared that he was planning to resolve everything.
I closed my notebook-hiding this page, with its tumbling speculations-and I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’
He waved his hand quickly back and forth as though chasing away flies. ‘All this confusion, Miss Turner. Rifles and pistols and dying Earls. Ghosts. It has gone on for far too long, and I intend to resolve it.’
‘I see,’ I said. That was rather an exaggeration.
He said, ‘I have been speaking with my associate, Phil Beaumont, and that policeman from London. Phil has told me of your encounter with the Earl. I sympathize completely, Miss Turner. I realize that to a demure young woman such as yourself, the Earl’s behaviour must have seemed monstrous.’
I nodded demurely and looked down at my notebook. And blushed demurely, thinking of the things I’d written there.
‘I should tell you,’ he said, ‘that I have discovered the means by which he effected his invasion of your room.’
‘The means?’ I said stupidly.
‘Yes. By a careful examination of the Earl’s room, I was able to locate a secret passageway behind the wall. This leads down a narrow stairway to a kind of tunnel which encircles all of Maplewhite. From this tunnel, additional stairways lead upward to the various rooms of the house. One of them, no doubt, leads into your room. No doubt the Earl used this on Friday night.’
‘A secret passageway?’ I was beginning to feel rather like a parrot.
‘Correct.’
‘But I thought he simply came in through the door.’
He shook his head like a prim headmistress. ‘He has lived here all his life, and so must have known about the passageway. And why should he take a chance on being seen in the hallways? But, Miss Turner, a moment’s thought will tell you that if the Earl used the passageway, then someone else might have used it, at some other time.’
‘Yes?’ I said. I was still rather lost in visions of the Earl gliding in his long nightgown through dark vaulted passageways, torchlight flickering along stone walls, bats fluttering, rats squeaking.
‘Phil has also told me of the knife you found in your bed, last night,’ he said. ‘Whoever put it there may also have used the passageway.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see.’
‘You comprehend what this means?’
And I did, Evy. It meant that if the passageway had been used last night, it had been used by someone familiar with Maplewhite. Someone other than the Earl, who was no longer among us. ‘Yes, but-’
‘I have been pondering my preconceptions, Miss Turner,’ he said. ‘Someone attempted to kill you last night. This, I believe, was an attempt to silence you. I believe that you have heard something, or seen something, that
