“Watson, you are, as so often, entirely correct. I count upon her disbelieving it. Have you not grasped it? That is the whole point. What she is therefore obliged to believe is that her closest and most dreadful secret, supposed to be known only to her lover and herself, is running loose all over London. I added the lines from Ozymandias for her benefit. They happen to be the work of the man she claims to be her natural great-grandfather and whose name she bears.”
“Shelley!”
He did not reply. Instead, he tapped sharply on the roof with his stick. The cab jerked forward.
From my seat in the far corner of the darkened vehicle, I could see two figures who had emerged from the house of the seance. One was the manservant who had taken in Holmes’s hatbox and hamper on our arrival. The other, fluttering to and fro in urgent expectation of a cab, was my pretty witch, Madame Rosa’s handmaid.
The servant raised his hand. Tom Rathbone reined in the horse. We came alongside the pavement, behind another cab, apparently called for Miss Shelley. Holmes opened our door and got down. He walked across to hold open the door of the cab in front, and courteously doffed his hat to the young woman.
“Professor Scott Holmes!” Her voice was startled and not pleased.
“We are at your disposal, Miss Shelley—or should I say Miss Jessel?”
She stood pierced by shock, unable for a moment to reply. My friend continued in the same quiet voice.
“I must confess that I am more often known as Sherlock Holmes. You may have heard of me.”
The breath had been knocked from her but she now managed a whisper.
“You are mistaken, sir! I am Miss Shelley!”
“Indeed you are,” said Holmes sympathetically. “More precisely, however, you are Maria Shelley Jessel. Are you not?”
Miss Jessel—the ghost of Bly if anyone was—looked about her. The cab whose door Holmes held open was plain and black. Its driver wore a dark high-collared tunic. On the off-side, two women in black uniform clothes stepped down and walked to where Holmes and his new acquaintance stood. This pair could only be police matrons, accompanied by a duty constable.
Holmes left our quarry with them. He returned and slid across the buttoned leather of the seat to the corner where he had been sitting.
“Scotland Yard, I think, Gregson,” he said thoughtfully.
9
Tobias Gregson sat at one end of this table. To his right, Holmes and I were side by side. Opposite us was Miss Shelley. A police matron accompanied her, sworn to silence by the Official Secrets Act of 1889.
The chair that Miss Shelley occupied had accommodated Dr Neill Cream the Lambeth Poisoner, Oscar Wilde at the time of his downfall and more recently Ada Chard the baby farmer. Even Montague Drewitt had sat there, the man whom the late Commissioner, Sir Melville Macnaughton, swore to Holmes and me was “Jack the Ripper” but could never quite prove it. To me, this plain official room had a far more sinister ambience than all the haunted landscapes of Bly.
Miss Shelley had not yet asked for an attorney to represent her. Gregson had not charged her and so perhaps she hoped that she did not need one. Perhaps she did not even know that she was entitled to one. She must have hoped that, once the matter of her name was cleared up, she would be free to go. Too soon she realised her mistake but, all the same, the inspector got nowhere with his questions. Our suspect no longer denied that she was Maria Jessel but she did not admit to anything else.
During a pause, Holmes broke in upon the interrogation.
“I fear you are not cut out to be a criminal, Miss Jessel, let alone an accessory to murder,” he said sympathetically.
“I have no idea what you mean, sir.”
“Have you not? You face arrest and detention, perhaps much worse. What will become of your child in that case? Please do not shake your head at me, madam. We know you have a child.”
I knew no such thing—nor, to judge from his expression, did Gregson.
“I do not understand you, sir,” she insisted, “I have nothing to do with you. I do not know why I am here. I certainly do not know why you are!”
Holmes became her friend.
“Come, now! While you were governess at Bly you became the mistress of Major James Mordaunt, did you not? It is not an uncommon thing between a young governess and an unmarried employer. There may even be a prospect of marriage. After some months, however, it became inconveniently evident that you were carrying a child. The prospect faded.”
She lowered her eyes but still shook her head.
“The truth is best,” Holmes said coaxingly, “What better solution was there than to tell Mrs Grose you were going home for a long holiday—and then let it be known, through your employer himself, that you had died during this absence? Believe me, it is a common enough subterfuge resorted to by young women in such a predicament.”
He had taken a terrible gamble in jumping to this conclusion. Yet the expression on her face convinced me he had hit the answer at his first shot. She shook her head again, but he went on in the same quiet voice.
“The story of your death would satisfy Mrs Grose—and she in turn was bound by a promise that the other servants were not to be told for fear it would upset them. She would not question the truth of the report, if her master did not. So now that the two children are dead and Mrs Grose has gone to live with her son in Wales you might even return with Major Mordaunt to Bly—unless he has other plans for you. If there were a few people who had heard a mere rumour of your death, and if they chanced to see you now, they would simply know that such tittle-tattle could not have been true.”
She kept her face lowered, pressing her handkerchief to her mouth. Holmes sighed.
“You would be perfectly safe to the end of your life, unless questions were asked. Unfortunately, even a novice criminal investigator would go first to Somerset House to find your death certificate. There is none, is there?”
She stared at him, visibly paler, eyes reddened. My friend continued.
“What there is, however, is a birth certificate. It registers a male child, Charles Alfred Jessel, born several months after your departure from Bly. He is Jessel on the certificate and his mother’s name is Maria Shelley Jessel. His father’s name and occupation are blank. James Mordaunt did not think enough of you to give your child his name. Is that it?”
How I pitied her! Her teeth were clenched on the hem of the handkerchief, as if she might tear it! But then she looked up fiercely—and her silence broke.
“I do not want his name!”
“Do not? Or did not?” Holmes asked gently, “Think carefully, I beg you. The difference may be the thickness of a hangman’s rope.”
“Did not!” she burst out, “James Mordaunt had gained power over me. He had got my child, not I. It was put away where neither he nor I might see it. Those were his terms.”
“Because it was not his child, was it?” Holmes suggested coaxingly, and once again my heart missed a beat at this dangerous leap in the dark. But I saw from her expression that he had hit the bull’s-eye twice in a row. His voice softened. “Mordaunt would not take you from Bly to live with him in Eaton Place, so long as there was this reminder of another man under his roof.”
It was so simple! The secret love of James Mordaunt for Maria Jessel was as dead as the two children of Bly.
