Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

journey, let me show you the relevant section in his admirable volume on forensic pathology, Das Lehrbuch fur Gerichtsmedizin. Among others, he cites two recent cases of patients feeling a trifle feverish, as Miles Mordaunt did. Like him, they were not apparently suffering from any serious or specific illness. The idea that they were in the grip of diphtheria would have seemed alarmist. They resembled precisely the reported state of Master Mordaunt. Nothing was done. Both victims were found dead a few hours later with no previous suspicion that they had contracted the disease.”

“Impossible!”

He drew his volume from its shelf and continued his explanation as he turned to the page.

“The only reason, my dear fellow, that you have never known such a case is that diphtheria was not diagnosed. Like the boy, Stresemann’s cases were in the early stages of the infection which might still have yielded to treatment. A diphtheritic deposit had gathered in the throat but that would not have had time to be fatal. However a further autopsy revealed unexpected diphtheritic deposits in the bronchi. These deposits travelled suddenly and rapidly from the throat down the bronchi, the congestion created by this then causing cardiac failure. Everything in the case of the poor child at Bly corresponds with Professor Stresemann’s description and findings.”

Not for the first time, my friend’s random erudition was a cause of personal annoyance. I tried to cut him short,

“A delicate and under-developed child of ten was seized by a healthy and well-built woman in her twenties, certainly capable of overpowering him and depriving him of air.”

He shook his head.

“There is no evidence of that whatever except in her journal, which Miss Temple completed in the short period before her arrest and with her mental balance in question. She is no diagnostician and would not know the first thing about a diphtheritic deposit. She convinced herself that she must have smothered the child and worked backwards from there! It was diphtheria which killed him!”

“You think so?”

“She came round from her hysterical absence, as the French call it. The live child she had been hugging before was now dead in her arms. Therefore she concluded that she must have caused his death. Oh, she believed it, I am quite sure. Having passed judgement on herself, she then did her best to get herself hanged, as if seeking expiation. Her journal and her statements are totally uncorroborated. To say the least, she wrote the final pages in a state of extreme mental confusion. She sincerely believed that the boy’s soul had been carried off by Peter Quint as an agent of the devil. It was her fault, for which she sought punishment. Such a confession should never have been allowed in evidence! Miles Mordaunt was in all probability dead from a blow to the heart by the dislodgement of diphtheritic deposits before she took him in that last embrace.”

“Impossible to prove!”

He handed me Stresemann’s book.

“Impossible to disprove, rather. Ironically, the post-mortem evidence does not incriminate Victoria Temple. If she had never kept that journal, she might not even have been a suspect. If you do not object, however, we will keep this to ourselves for the moment.”

“While Miss Temple remains in Broadmoor?”

“For the shortest possible time. As the great military strategist Clausewitz remarked, a wise commander fights the right battle, at the right time, and in the right place. That moment is approaching but it has not quite arrived. There is still murder at the heart of this case but it is not the murder of Miles Mordaunt and certainly not of his little sister.”

“Who else can it be?”

He was not yet to be drawn. For much of that day he sat in an easy chair smoking his pipe, or droning on his violin, or lounging with a handful of Boxer cartridges and his hair-trigger revolver, elaborating with bullet pocks our patriotic VR—for Victoria Regina—on the opposite wall. Life, it seemed, was returning to normal.

It was almost dusk. Streaks of late sunlight across the carpet were deepening to a tawny orange. There came an erratic hammering at the front door, followed by a scampering on the stairs. His Baker Street Irregulars had returned. He took half a dozen sheets of paper from them and studied the contents. Then he threw back his head and began to chuckle. The chuckle grew to laughter, as if at the most preposterous tale he had ever read.

He was still laughing as the six young scamps, each clutching a half-sovereign, scrambled back down the stairs and disappeared, shouting, into the street.

7

If Holmes was right—there was an end of our case, ghosts and all! How absurd it was for him to continue talking about murder! Who the devil had been murdered, if it not little Miles Mordaunt? And who could have committed murder upon the child if not Victoria Temple? I suggested facetiously to my friend that perhaps he believed the apparitions had murdered one another. He looked at me seriously and with a nod of approval.

“As to that, Watson, you may be closer to the mark than you realise.”

The next day—and the day after that—I saw nothing of him between breakfast and dinner. This was not unusual when he had a case in progress. From time to time during our investigations there would be days of absence without explanation. Despite my impatience, I confess that they had sometimes brought about the sudden and triumphant conclusion of an inquiry.

After dinner, he showed no appetite for conversation. When the meal was over, he rang for the housemaid to clear the plates and dishes. To avoid interruption, he transferred himself to a plain wooden chair at his disreputable work-table with its stained surface, bottles of malodorous preparations and untidy piles of paper. Now he began to read, not with laconic amusement, as he read the newspapers, lounging by the fire. He devoured books and articles so quickly that one could hardly believe he had read them at all. His lean angular features were drawn in a grimace of concentration. From time to time, he made a pencil note in the margin of a volume or on his starched white shirt-cuff.

I made a pantomime of yawning, looking at the clock—and so to bed. As I passed, I noticed the titles of the books at his elbow. One was a treasure in any collection, Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft. Published in 1584, it was still in its primitive sheepskin binding. Stamped in gold on polished calf, was the Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae. It had been given to the world in 1645 by a scholar of the occult and the arcane, Father Athanasius Kircher. Even that formidable Jesuit could have known little more than Sherlock Holmes by now about the art of light and shade.

I waited for him to resume idling about the house, playing the fiddle, and reading in a desultory fashion. Despite his promise of an early solution to the mystery, a week passed. Then it seemed his work was over. He breakfasted late and went nowhere. At four o’clock that afternoon, he put down his teacup and spoke from behind the evening paper.

“If you have nothing better to do this evening, Watson, you may care to be my guest.”

There was an irony in his tone that made me uneasy.

“You have not joined a club? You of all people!”

“Certainly not. I am not inviting you to dinner, my dear fellow. I have already alerted Mrs Hudson to feed us by seven o’clock.” He folded his copy of the Globe and pushed aside the tea-plate from which he had been eating richly buttered toast. “Our destination is not a club. I might call it an intimate theatre or perhaps a learned society, which it is hoped you will join. That is the pretext for your attendance.”

“What society?”

He stood up and filled his pipe with tobacco from the Persian slipper.

“You will recall the murder at the Yokohama Club two years ago and our efforts to save Mrs Edith Carew from the gallows? That case persuaded me to keep abreast of matters which apparently defy scientific explanation. I associated myself some time ago with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Light.”*