Death at Blenheim Palace (22 page)

 
A Study in Scarlet
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 
 
 
 
Mr. Lawrence had been surprised by Charles’s request to borrow his son Ned for a fortnight or so. But having heard Ned’s urgent plea and Charles’s promise to keep an eye on the boy, he rather thought, on the whole, that the proposal presented no difficulty.

From Mr. Lawrence’s dithery response, Charles got the idea that the man himself was too good-natured to refuse any reasonable appeal, but that it was just as well that Ned’s mother was absent, for she would have been likely to have raised a strenuous objection which both Ned and his father would have had no choice but to honor. Charles surmised that, in the Lawrence household, the mother firmly ruled the roost, a fact which the father did not contest but the son deeply resented.

On the way back to Blenheim in the motorcar, Charles explained in some detail what was wanted of Ned and who among the servants the boy should observe most closely—Alfred, especially, the footman who had been at Welbeck around the time of the robbery there. He also mentioned Kitty, whose disappearance might or might not have some relevance, and gave Ned instructions for communicating with himself, or at a pinch, with Winston or Kate.

“I shall probably ask to see you this evening,” he said. “If questions are asked, you might say that I am an acquaintance of your father.” He smiled at the boy, who was trying, without success, to look confident and self-assured. “Lady Sheridan, Churchill, and I—all three of us will be looking out for you. You shan’t have any problems.”

Privately, Charles was not quite so confident. There were several potential problems, especially since the stakes were so high and the people with whom they were dealing were experienced and unprincipled. But of course, he reminded himself, all this business about a ring of thieves operating in Blenheim lay entirely in the realm of theoretical speculation. Sometimes, when one was reasoning backward (as Conan Doyle had put it in one of his Sherlock Holmes stories), one saw illicit activities where there were none, or invented criminal conspiracies where none existed—especially when one was beginning with a conjectured result. Charles had to admit that this might be one of those times, and that the whole thing was a fabrication of his too-vivid imagination, the sort of fantasy that Kate and Beryl Bardwell loved to create. Ned might search and search and come up empty-handed, simply because there was nothing to find.

“Whatever happens, I’m not afraid,” Ned said staunchly. He pushed the blond hair out of his eyes. “I only want to do a good job, that’s all. If there’s something secret going on below-stairs, I’ll ferret it out.”

“That’s the spirit,” Charles said approvingly. In many ways, Ned reminded him of Patrick, the boy whom he and Kate had taken to live with them. Like Ned, Patrick had many gifts, chief among which was his talent for working with horses. He was now riding as a jockey at George Lambton’s stables at Newmarket.
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Ned was more of an intellectual than Patrick, Charles thought, but the two boys had the same energetic spirit, the same eager willingness to please.

They had come to the Hensington Gate, where the lane to Blenheim intersected the Oxford-Woodstock Road. Charles pulled onto the grassy verge and stopped.

“I’ll leave you here,” he said. “Walk down the lane, and when you come to the East Gate, tell the porter that Mr. Stevens is expecting you. When you’re taken to Stevens, tell him that you are the young man recommended by Mr. Churchill. He will put you to work straightaway.”

“I will, sir,” Ned said, jumping out. “And don’t worry about me,” he added with a brash grin. “Compared to prying brasses off church walls, this should be easy.”

That brought a smile to Charles’s lips, and he was still smiling as he put the Panhard in gear and drove off down the lane, leaving Ned to come along behind him. But the smile had faded by the time he drove across the Grand Bridge toward the Column of Victory, parked the motor car, and stood, surveying the scene.

It was getting on to five in the afternoon, and threatening clouds were piling up in the western sky. There was no breeze, and the lake was quiet, its placid surface disturbed only by several flocks of ducks and geese, a half-dozen elegant white swans, and an old man in a yellow boat, rowing in the direction of the Fishery Cottage at the north end of the lake. Charles knew he was going to be late to tea, but it could not be helped, for he could not put off having a look at Rosamund’s Well any longer.

As an afterthought, he opened a compartment in the side of his motorcar and took out his camera bag and a small wooden box—a field collection kit he used when he was pursuing his natural history researches. It contained small glass vials, muslin bags, and celluloid envelopes, all for collecting specimens, as well as a hand lens, tweezers, needles, and a penknife. Carrying his gear, he walked down the slanting hill and along the lake shore, following the narrow footpath to the well.

As he walked, he was thinking of Gladys Deacon and the telltale scrap of gold silk Kate had found that morning, snagged on a bush. While Miss Deacon had last been seen in the Blenheim garden with Botsy Northcote, the torn piece of silk seemed to suggest that she had also been here, on the far side of the lake.

But when? After her conversation in the garden with Northcote? With Northcote or with someone else?

And how had she got here? On foot—which seemed to Charles unlikely, given the young lady’s dinner costume—or by boat? He glanced over his shoulder at the yellow rowboat, disappearing under the arches of the bridge. There must be several such boats on the lake. He should have to have a look in the boathouse.

Charles had no difficulty finding Rosamund’s Well, which bubbled out of a stone wall and into a shallow pool constructed of square-cut stones and surrounded by a flagstone pavement. The spring had in medieval times been called Everswell, in recognition of the fact that it had not stopped flowing through all the centuries of recorded history, not even in the worst of droughts. No wonder, he thought, that it had become the source of so many powerful legends—the stories about Fair Rosamund and Henry and Eleanor, for example.

He glanced up the hill above the spring, wondering where Rosamund’s Bower might have stood, some six hundred years ago. On the brow of the hill, overlooking the River Glyme? Was that where Henry II had built the legendary labyrinth to protect his mistress? But the labyrinth had not kept Rosamund safe, if that’s what it was designed to do, for if legend could be believed, she had been murdered.

But that was in the distant past, and Charles’s errand had a much more immediate urgency. He had no difficulty finding the bush on which Kate had discovered the scrap early that morning, for several gold threads still clung to it. Upon close examination, however, he agreed with Kate: The little bush was not stout enough to have snagged and torn the heavy silk. So how had the scrap come to be there?

Not finding an immediate answer, Charles put down his camera and prowled around the pool, moving slowly, eyes on the ground, looking for anything out of the ordinary. It didn’t take long to find it, on the front side of the pool, the side nearest the lake. A brownish, pinkish stain that looked very much like blood, on the flagstone pavement beside the pool.

Charles took his hand lens out of his pocket and knelt down, studying the stain intently. Overall, it was ten inches or so in diameter and surrounded by a number of spatters, as if the blood had forcibly sprayed from an open wound. All of it had dried, either by the action of the air or by soaking into the porous stone, or both.

He had no way of judging, of course, how fresh the blood was; it might have been there for some hours or some days. And there was no way of deciding, short of an analytical test, whether the blood was human or animal. The test, which distinguished among the proteins of different blood residues, had been only recently developed by Paul Uhlenhuth, a German professor. It could be used on any bloodstain, regardless of the size of the stain, its age, or the material on which it was deposited. Charles had none of Professor Uhlenhuth’s serum, of course, but it could be obtained, and with that in mind, he took a penknife out of his kit, scraped a sample of dried blood into a glass vial, and corked it tightly. For the present, he would proceed on the assumption that it was human blood—an assumption which threw, he thought glumly, a new and disturbing light on the question of Miss Deacon’s disappearance.

Having found the blood, he broadened his search, and almost immediately discovered a bloody heel print, remarkably clear and well-defined, on a nearby flagstone. He studied it for a moment, then set up his camera and made several photographs of it, and of the blood spatters. At the edge of the paving, he noticed the track of disturbed dirt and leaves left by something heavy, dragged in the direction of the lake. He photographed what he could see, then followed the track until it ended at the edge of the lake. There were several deep V-shaped indentations along the shore which might have been made by beached boats, and a welter of indistinguishable footprints in the soft earth, but nothing else.

Charles turned and looked in the direction of Rosamund’s Well, some thirty feet away. Reasoning backward from the evidence, it looked to him as if someone had been standing beside Rosamund’s Well when he, or she, was attacked. The assailant had left the print of a shoe, and the dead or unconscious victim—Miss Deacon?—had been dragged to the lake, perhaps to a waiting boat.

And then what?

Was the victim alive or dead?

If dead, had the corpse been taken to a less-frequented area and buried? Or weighted with stones and dropped into the deepest part of the lake?

In spite of the warmth of the afternoon, Charles shivered.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

 
The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 
 
 
 
When Kate went back to the house after her conversation with Consuelo at the aviary, she remembered that she had intended to talk to Bess, the housemaid who was looking after Miss Deacon. Kate found her tidying the housemaids’ closet on the second floor, which was stocked with cleaning supplies, brooms and brushes, fresh linens, and everything necessary to make up the bedrooms.

“Pardon me, Bess,” she said, “may I trouble you for a moment?”

Startled, Bess turned from her work. She was a woman in her late twenties with dark hair tucked up beneath her white cap, a firm mouth, and quick, intelligent eyes under thick, strong brows. She was wearing a neat black afternoon dress and a ruffled apron.

“Of course, m’lady,” she said. She closed the closet door. “How may I help you?”

It was a pleasant response, Kate thought, different from the careless replies of most of the servants. “I wonder,” she said, “if you would accompany me to Miss Deacon’s room for just a moment. I shan’t keep you long.”

“Yes, m’lady.” As they walked down the hall, Bess’s face grew troubled. “Miss Deacon seems not to have returned to her room last night,” she said in a low voice.

“So I understand,” Kate said. “You were the maid who reported her absence to Mrs. Raleigh?” They had reached Gladys’s bedroom door. Kate took the key out of her pocket and unlocked it.

“That’s right, m’lady,” Bess said, following her inside. She gestured. “I turned down her bed last night, and laid out her nightgown, same as I always do. You see? It’s just the way I left it. Hasn’t been touched.”

“Yes, I see,” Kate said. She went to the wardrobe door and opened it. “I would appreciate it if you would look through Miss Deacon’s clothing and tell me whether anything is missing.”

“Missing, m’lady?” Bess asked. She cocked her head, her eyes bright with curiosity.

“Yes,” Kate said. She knew the maid wanted to know why she was making the inquiry, but she had no intention of telling her. “Either here in the wardrobe or in her chest of drawers. And please have a look at her footwear, as well.”

If Bess thought this an unusual request, she didn’t say so. Without a word, she began to look through the clothing, while Kate went to the dressing table and, in a desultory way, glanced through the perfumes and cosmetic items.

Parisian Pleasures
, Beryl remarked in a snide tone, as Kate picked up a scent bottle.
Sounds like something Gladys would enjoy, doesn’t it?

Kate put down the scent bottle and took up a ceramic dish with a gilded picture of a country house surmounted by the arms of the Duke of Portland. Gladys had used it as an ashtray. “Welbeck Abbey,” she mused.

Welbeck Abbey,
Beryl said.
The scene of Gladys’s crime.

“The scene of the crime? At Welbeck?” Kate reflected aloud, setting the dish down. She hardly thought that pinching an ashtray amounted to a crime. But that wasn’t what Beryl had in mind.

Not the ashtray, silly. Welbeck is where she accepted Northcote’s hand and Northcote’s diamonds, remember?
Beryl chuckled maliciously.
If that’s not a crime. I don’t know what is.

Bess finished with the wardrobe and went to the chest, where she was now pulling out the third drawer. She stopped, cocked her head, and turned.

“A crime at Welbeck?” A breath later, as an afterthought, she added, “M’lady.”

Kate laughed a little. “A jewel theft, of sorts.”

That’s exactly what it was.
Beryl replied flatly.
Gladys accepted those diamonds under false pretenses. As good as thieving, in my book.

“A jewel theft?” A sudden, wary look crossed Bess’s face.

Kate was about to correct herself and say that she was only playing with words, but something stopped her. Instead she said, “Have you been to Welbeck, Bess?”

“Welbeck?” A short, hard laugh. “Oh, no, m’lady. Not me. I just wondered what you was saying, that’s all.” She pushed in the drawer, folded her arms, and went on, in a matter-of-fact tone, “It appears that a pair of trousers and jacket are missing, m’lady. Brown, they were. Dark brown flannel. It was . . . well, it was rather like a man’s lounge suit. I believe there was a tie, as well.”