yours and never let them go. His were hard as jet and black as hell. You couldn’t wait to look away and give him the satisfaction of staring you out!”
Holmes nodded again.
“And what of Quint’s conduct with Miles Mordaunt?”
“He acted like the boy’s tutor more than a valet. If Master Miles was bad at King Alfred’s, Quint made him bad before the child ever went there. Miss Temple thought the boy an angel, even though he came back in disgrace. Quint was dead by then, of course. She told me both children had an unnatural beauty, an unnatural goodness. Something from another world. But I heard Master Miles tell her once that he was bad. Then he laughed at her, as if he was telling her there was nothing she could do about it. He was the master—her master.”
“Very well,” said Holmes patiently. “How was Miles bad when Quint was still here?”
“I warned the boy that he was a gentleman’s son and not to put himself under a menial. And what do you think? Miles turned round on me and swore Quint was a gentleman. Quint had been a soldier. Quint knew something of the world. I was the ‘menial,’ if you please, the scullery-maid. That was the very word he used to me—this boy of eight or nine, as he was then! After that he lied and was impudent—and Quint protected him. I could do nothing with him. That’s how he came to be sent to King Alfred’s. To make him knuckle under.”
“And when he came back in disgrace?”
“He was worse! He got his way with Miss Temple by smiles and bossing. As Quint would have done. As if Quint was whispering to him, dead or alive. He courted his governess, this child, like a grown man. He had Quint’s way with women. What was it he called her one day, talking to me? Words I don’t just recall, Mr Holmes, but they gave me a shudder.”
“Indeed,” said my friend indulgently.
The sunlight moved from the lawn and cedar tree at the side of the house. Mrs Grose seemed about to tell us something we should not care for.
“I would not harm Miss Temple, sir, but I must speak the truth.”
“The truth will not harm her, Mrs Grose.”
“The foolishness was on both sides, sir. If Master Miles courted her like a grown man, she behaved like his obedient sweetheart. He could do what he liked with her and she would forgive him. She never seemed sure of herself with him. Out of her depth, you might say.”
“You need not fear that it will damage her case, Mrs Grose,” said Holmes quietly. But he showed no inclination to inquire further.
I recalled Dr Annesley mentioning Miles Mordaunt’s boast of “spooning” with his young governess. I had felt uneasy, though reassured on meeting her. The fragile emotional balance of this young woman had been the sport of predatory children—as well as of her own “ghosts” in her imagination. Why did the little ones taunt her with their mewling of cats behind her back? Why had the boy boasted falsely to his cronies at school of having drowned his governess? Why were kittens to be drowned before they could grow into cats? Thanks to Holmes, I had read a little of the new psychopathology. Professor Krafft-Ebing would surely diagnose psychopathy in the mind of this child. A boy dreamed of murder giving him a power over women, which his lack of manhood still denied him in any other form.
Our time was almost up and I roused myself from contemplating worse horrors than any so-called ghost. There were questions I must ask, as a medical man.
“Mrs Grose, will you tell me about the deaths of the children?”
She nodded calmly. No doubt she had been questioned at the time.
“Flora was taken ill in London?” I prompted her.
“A week or so after the upset by the lake, I took the poor little soul to her mother’s sister, Lady Camerton in London, away from Bly and its ghosts. But at Apsley Square the child grew feverish. Two days later an infection began in her throat and lungs. She was moved to the fever hospital. Then it became full-blown diphtheria. We thought she got it in London or travelling there. Now it seems both children probably caught it from the same source of infected water. The major wanted the best for her. But, most of all, he had wanted Miles kept away from Flora’s illness.”
“You returned alone to Bly from London soon after the little girl died?”
“And Master Miles was gone by then. What a dreadful business that was! But they never thought of diphtheria in his case for there was no time. It was Miss Temple who smothered him in her madness. I grieve for her but it must be she who did it.”
“Can you be sure?” Holmes asked.
“Until the post-mortem they never knew diphtheria was in him—just feverishness. He’d had lung fever at school and thrown it off. He could have thrown off this. What happened that last day, I can only tell you as it was told to me. Master Miles was a little poorly but quite well enough to come downstairs. That counted against Miss Temple at her trial. They even talked of which new school he might go to.”
“And the rest,” Holmes interposed, “is in Miss Temple’s journal.”
“So I understand, sir. They were in the dining-room talking of another school, when she saw Quint at the window. Just as she did before Evensong a few weeks earlier. She tried to stop Miles seeing that evil man. She was strong as a field-girl, governess or not. She held him tight, felt his pulse race with fear. He was white as chalk and cold sweat running from him. So I was told.”
Holmes kept his eyes on his notes as Mrs Grose continued. Then he said, “She says that she seized him and felt his heart flutter, not that he gasped for breath. She tells us his face looked ravaged by those eyes glaring through the glass. She too felt sick and faint. At the window was a spectre of damnation. She fought with that demon for the child’s soul.”
The poor woman lowered her head and there were tears in her reply.
“Perhaps she fought the evil beyond the glass—but more the evil in the child, for evil there was. If the boy died for want of breath, I swear she could not know it. And when she went under, in her faint, she thought she heard Miles cry out, ‘Peter Quint—you devil!’ Who did he mean was the devil—she or Quint? Either way, she held him tighter to protect him. Better he should die in her arms, I suppose she thought, than go to damnation with Quint. But when she came to herself, that devil had gone and the child’s soul with him.”
After a moment’s respite, Holmes spoke again.
“It grieves me, Mrs Grose, that we can bring you so little comfort. But let there be justice for Victoria Temple.”
“I hope so, sir. This has been an unlucky house. Masters and mistresses coming to grief. You’d never think it on a sunny afternoon like this. Sir Guy Mordaunt hanging from the cedar tree after his young wife’s death. Harry Varley the poacher swimming the lake by night. The weed in the Middle Deep got his legs and held him, the poor fellow jumping like a trout for air but always pulled back, until he could jump no more,”
“You may depend on it, Mrs Grose, that I shall do all in my power to set Miss Temple free. When we meet again, I hope she will be with us.”
The poor woman looked a little flustered.
“I don’t think you’ll see me again, sir. The house will be shut up in a day or two. There’s only me, the maid and the agent’s man at the gate-house.”
“Then where will you go?” I asked politely.
She brightened at this.
“To my son. At Cwm Nant Hir, the valley of the long river, a sheep farm, among the mountains of Wales. I won’t miss Bly without the children.”
At seven that evening we joined the London express. In the restaurant car, after dinner, two glasses of brandy stood before us. Holmes sighed.
“What would Professor Sidgwick and the Society for Psychical Research make of all this?”
“What the Court of Criminal Appeal may think is surely more to the point.”
Trailing white smoke and steam across ripening cornfields, we rushed towards a slim gothic spire against a darkening sky.
“Odd that diphtheria was ignored by the defence,” Holmes continued thoughtfully, “with the threat of a wilful murder verdict still possible.”
“Diphtheria could not have gone far enough to cause death on its own. It merely weakened the child and made suffocation that much easier. That is all.”
