To Say Nothing of the Dog

  “M,” Mrs. Mering said. “CM.”

  “What sort of word begins with CM?” Terence said.

  “Could she be saying ‘come’?” Tossie said.

  “Yes, of course,” Mrs. Mering said. “But where does she wish us to come? ABC—” and Verity clacked on cue, but I didn’t see what good it was going to do us. We’d never make it to “O,” let alone “V.”

  “A—” Mrs. Mering said.

  I stamped down hard on Madame Iritosky’s foot, but it was too late.Rap. There was no mistaking the fury behind the rap this time. It sounded like she’d broken a toe.

  “C-A—” Mrs. Mering said.

  “Cat,” Madame Iritosky pronounced. “The spirit is trying to communicate news of Miss Mering’s cat.” Her voice abruptly changed. “I bring you word of Princess Arjumand,” she said in a low husky growl. “She is here with us on the Other Side—”

  “Princess Arjumand? On the Other Side?” Tossie said. “But she can’t be! She—”

  “Do not grieve that she has passed over. She is happy here.”

  Princess Arjumand chose this moment to jump onto the table, scaring everyone and startling Tossie into a screamlet.

  “O, Princess Arjumand!” Tossie said happily. “I knew you hadn’t passed over. Why did the spirit say she had, Madame Iritosky?”

  I didn’t wait for her to come up with an answer. “The message was not ‘cat.’ C-A—What are you trying to say to us, spirit?” and rattled off the alphabet as fast as I could. “ABCDE-FGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUV—”

  Verity clacked, and Tossie said, “C-A-V? What does that spell? ‘Cave’? She wishes us to come to a cave?”

  “Cahv?” I said helpfully. “Cuhv?”

  “Coventry,” Mrs. Mering said, and I could have kissed her. “Spirit, do you wish us to come to Coventry?”

  A fervent clack.

  “Where in Coventry?” I said, put my full weight on Madame Iritosky’s shoe, and started through the alphabet at a gallop.

  Verity wisely decided not to try for “Saint.” She clacked on M, I, and C, and, not sure how long I was going to be able to hold Madame Iritosky down, I said, “St. Michael’s,” got a clack of confirmation, asked, “Do you wish us to come to St. Michael’s Church?” Another clack, and I withdrew my feet.

  “St. Michael’s Church,” Mrs. Mering said. “Oh, Madame Iritosky, we must go first thing tomorrow morning—”

  “Silence,” Madame Iritosky said, “I sense a malicious spirit re,” and I groped wildly for her foot with mine.

  “Are you a wicked spirit?” she said.

  Rap.

  I waited for Verity to clack a second time, but there was nothing but a frantic rustling. She must have moved the sugared-violets box back up above her knee.

  “Are you being controlled by an unbeliever?” Madame Iritosky asked.

  Rap.

  “Baine, bring up the lights,” Madame Iritosky said com-mandingly. “There is someone rapping here who is not a spirit.”

  And I was going to be caught with wires sticking out of my wrists. I tried to pull my hand out of Madame Iritosky’s (or the Count’s), but whoever it was had an iron grip.

  “Baine! The lights!” Madame Iritosky ordered. She struck a match and lit the candle.

  There was a gust of air from the French doors, and the candle blew out.

  Tossie screamed, and even Terence gasped. Everyone looked toward the billowing curtains. There was a sound, like a low moan, and something luminous appeared beyond the curtains.

  “My God!” the Reverend Mr. Arbitage said.

  “A manifestation,” Mrs. Mering breathed.

  The shape floated slowly toward the open French doors, canting slightly to port and glowing with a ghastly greenish light.

  The hand holding mine relaxed, and I shoved the wires up my sleeves all the way to my elbows. Next to me, I could feel Verity pulling up her skirts and then reaching over and jamming the sugared-violets box down the side of my right boot.

  “Count de Vecchio, go turn up the lights!” Madame Iritosky said.

  “Una fantasma!” the Count exclaimed and crossed himself.

  Verity straightened and took my hand. “O manifestation, are you the spirit of Lady Godiva?”

  “Count de Vecchio,” Madame Iritosky said, “I command you to turn up the gas!”

  The shape reached the French doors and then seemed to rise and take shape as a face. A veiled face with large dark eyes. And a mashed nose. And jowls.

  Verity’s hand, holding mine, gave a little spasm. “O spirit,” she said, her voice controlled, “do you wish us to come to Coventry?”

  The shape drifted slowly back from the door, and then turned and vanished, as if a black cloth had been thrown over it. The French doors slammed shut.

  “It bids us go to Coventry,” I said. “We cannot ignore the spirit’s summons.”

  “Did you see that?” Count de Vecchio said. “It was horrible, horrible!”

  “I have seen a seraphim in the flesh,” the Reverend Mr. Arbitage said rapturously.

  The lights came up, revealing Baine standing calmly by the lamp on the marble-topped table, adjusting the flame.

  “O, Madame Iritosky!” Mrs. Mering said, collapsing onto the carpet, “I have seen the face of my own dear mother!”

  “In all my experience . . . I have never met with such

  a thing as a trifle yet.”

  The Moonstone

  Wilkie Collins

  CHAPTER 18

  A Good Night’s Sleep—An Alias—Sudden Departure—More Aliases—Madame Iritosky’s Future Predicted—The Mystery of the Penwiper Solved—The Bishop’s Bird Stump as Murder Weapon—A Robbery—The Mystery of the Rubies Solved—The Mystery of the Diary Solved—An Extended Departure—On the Train to Coventry—A Setback

  It took the better part of an hour and a bottle of benzene to get the Balmain’s Luminous Paint off Cyril, with Princess Arjumand assisting, and the fumes must have got to us, because the next thing I knew, Baine was shaking me and saying, “Sorry to wake you, sir, but it’s past six, and Colonel Mering asked me to wake him and Professor Peddick at seven.”

  “Umm,” I said, trying to come awake. Cyril burrowed deeper into the covers.

  “Jimmy Slumkin, sir,” Baine said, pouring hot water into the washbowl.

  “What?”

  “The true name of the Count. Jimmy Slumkin. It was on his passport.”

  Slumkin. Well, so much for the Count as the mysterious Mr. C, which was probably just as well, but I wished we had at least one suspect. Verity’s Lord Peter’s and Monsieur Poirot’s problem was always that they had too many suspects. I had never heard of a mystery where the detective didn’t have any.

  I sat up and put my feet over the bed. “With an ‘S’ or a ‘C’?”

  Baine stopped setting the straight razors out and turned to look curiously at me. “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Slumkin. Is it spelled with an ‘S’ or a ‘C’?”

  “An ‘S,’” he said. “Why, sir?”

  “Madame Iritosky told Miss Mering she would marry someone whose name began with a ‘C,’” I said, stretching the truth a bit.

  He turned back to his razors. “Really. Perhaps the ‘C’ stood for Count.”

  “No,” I said, “she very definitely specified a Mr. C. You don’t know of any eligible gentlemen in the area whose names begin with ‘C,’ do you?”

  “Gentlemen?” he said. “No, sir.”

  I got shaved and dressed and then tried to get Cyril out of bed. “I am not going to carry you this time.”

  “It’s rather cold and cloudy outside this morning,” Baine said, not helping matters. “You’d best wear a coat.”

  “Cloudy?” I said, wrestling Cyril to the edge of the bed.

  “Yes, sir,” Baine said. “It looks as though it might rain.”

  Baine hadn’t exaggerated. It looked like it might pour at any minute, and it felt like I had just made a drop into the middle of D
ecember. Cyril took one sniff out the door and bolted halfway up the stairs before I was able to catch him and carry him down again. “It’s not that cold in the stable,” I told him, which was a flat lie. It was freezing, and dark. The groom must have overslept, too.

  I groped for matches and a lamp, and lit it. “Hullo,” Verity said. She was sitting on a stack of hay bales, swinging her legs. “Where have you been?”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Madame Iritosky and the Count left at four. They bribed the groom to take them to the station.”

  Cyril, who claims he cannot make it up the height of a single stair tread without assistance, made a flying leap onto the hay bales and into Verity’s lap.

  “Hullo, Cyril,” Verity said. “I thought perhaps you were right about Count de Vecchio being Mr. C, so I followed them out to make certain he didn’t carry Tossie off with him.”

  “He’s not Mr. C,” I said. “He’s Jimmy Slumkin.”

  “I know,” she said, scratching Cyril behind the ears. “Also known as Tom Higgins, Comte de Fanaud, and Bob ‘the Weasel’ Wexford. I went through after they left and checked Scotland Yard’s archives. I also know why they were here.”

  “To case the joint?”

  “Probably,” she said. Cyril turned on his side, sighing. Verity stroked his stomach. “It seems that night before last Madame Iritosky gave a special séance for the Psychic Research Society so they could test her authenticity. They bound her hands and feet and locked her in her cabinet, after which the spirit of Cleopatra appeared, played a tambourine, and danced around the table, touching the participants and telling them to beware the sea.”

  She grinned at me. “Unfortunately, one of the Psychic Research Society members was so overcome by Cleopatra’s charms that, in spite of Madame Iritosky’s warnings, he grabbed her wrist and attempted to pull her onto his lap.”

  “And then what?”

  “The spirit yanked his hair and bit him. He yelped, and at that point another Psychic Research Society member turned up the lights, unlocked the cabinet—”

  “Which was, oddly enough, empty.”

  “And tore the veils off Cleopatra, who turned out to be Madame Iritosky. Three days later she and her accomplice sailed for France, where she was exposed by Richet, who believed in everybody, and after that for Calcutta, where she learned a new set of tricks from an Indian fakir. In 1922, she went to America, just in time to be exposed as a fraud by Houdini, and thence back to Oxford, where Arthur Conan Doyle pronounced her ‘the greatest medium I have ever seen. There can be no doubt of the truth of her mediumistic talents.’”

  She looked fondly at Cyril. “When we’ve got Tossie safely connected to Mr. C,” she said, scratching behind his ears, “I think I’ll take you back with me.”

  She looked up at me impishly. “I’m kidding,” she said. “I’ve sworn off incongruities. I would like to have a bulldog, though.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  She ducked her head. “They haven’t got Carruthers out yet,” she said. “The net still won’t open. Warder thinks perhaps it’s a temporary blockage. She’s switched to an accelerated four-hour intermittent to try and get past it.”

  “Has T.J. solved the mystery of why the incongruity was able to get past the net’s defenses?” I asked.

  “No. He’s figured out why Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo, though.” She grinned, and then said more seriously, “And he was finally able to generate an incongruity.”

  “An incongruity?” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It was only a simulated incongruity. And it’s not the right sort. It occurred as part of a self-correction. It was one of those sims where he had an historian kill Wellington. When he introduced a second historian into the sim, the historian was able to steal the rifle that the first historian was going to shoot Wellington with and bring it forward through the net, so that it prevented an incongruity rather than causing one. But he said to tell you that at least it proves bringing something forward through the net is theoretically possible, even if it didn’t apply to our case.”

  Theoretically possible. It still didn’t solve the problem of getting the net open to get the first historian through to kill Wellington in the first place.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “No. He and Mr. Dunworthy were happy that we’d managed to persuade Tossie to go to Coventry. They both think the fact that they haven’t been able to find any increased slippage around the original drop means the incongruity was short-term and that all it needs to correct itself is for us to get her to St. Michael’s on time.”

  She ducked her head again. “And, if it does, we’ll be done here and have to go face Lady Schrapnell. And I promised I’d help you find the bishop’s bird stump. So I decided to wait for you.”

  She shifted Cyril off her lap and pulled a pen, a bottle of ink, and some sheets of paper out of her pocket and set them on the hay.

  “What’s all that for?” I asked.

  “For making a list of all the possibilities of what might have happened to the bishop’s bird stump. Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane made a list in Have His Carcase.”

  “There’s no such thing as listing all the possibilities,” I said. “The continuum’s a chaotic system, remember?”

  She ignored me. “In an Agatha Christie mystery, there’s always one possibility you haven’t considered, and that’s the solution to the mystery. All right,” she said, dipping her pen in the ink. “One, the bishop’s bird stump was in the cathedral during the raid and was destroyed in the fire. Two, it was in the cathedral, survived the fire, and was found in the rubble. Three,” she said, writing busily, “It was rescued during the raid.”

  I shook my head. “The only things saved were a flag, two sets of candlesticks, a wooden crucifix, and the altar books. There’s a list.”

  “We are writing down all the possibilities,” she said. “Later, we’ll eliminate the ones that are impossible.”

  Which so far was all three.

  “Four,” she said, “it survived the raid, even though it didn’t make the list for some reason, and it’s stored somewhere.”

  “No,” I said. “Mrs. Bittner went through all the things in the cathedral when they sold it, and it wasn’t there.”

  “Lord Peter didn’t keep contradicting Harriet when she was making a list,” she said. “Five, it wasn’t in the church during the raid. It was removed sometime between the tenth and the fourteenth of November.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “For safekeeping. With the east windows.”

  I shook my head. “I went to Lucy Hampton rectory to see. The only things they had of Coventry’s were the windows.”

  “Oh. Well, what if some member of the congregation took the bishop’s bird stump home for safekeeping? Or to polish it or something, so that it just happened to be out of the cathedral that night?”

  “If that happened, why didn’t the person bring it back?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, biting her lip. “Perhaps he was killed during the raid, by a high-explosive bomb, and whoever inherited it didn’t know it belonged to the cathedral.”

  “Or he could have thought to himself, ‘I can’t do this to the people of Coventry. They’re already going to have to suffer the loss of their cathedral. I can’t inflict the bishop’s bird stump on them as well.’”

  “Be serious,” she said. “What if he didn’t bring it back because it was destroyed in the raid, by a bomb or something.”

  I shook my head. “Even a high-explosive bomb couldn’t destroy the bishop’s bird stump.”

  She flung the pen down. “I am so glad we’re going to Coventry today so I can actually see the bishop’s bird stump. It cannot possibly be as bad as you say.”

  She looked thoughtful. “What if the bishop’s bird stump was involved in a crime? It was used as a murder weapon, and it got blood on it, so they stole it to keep anyone from finding out about the murder.
”

  “You have been reading too many murder mysteries,” I said.

  She dipped her pen in the ink again. “What if it was stored in the cathedral, but inside something else, like Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’?” She started to write and then stopped and frowned at the pen. She pulled an orange dahlia penwiper out of her pocket.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Wiping my pen,” she said. She stuck the pen into the dahlia and wiped it off between the layers of cloth.

  “It’s a penwiper,” I said. “A pen wiper! It’s used to wipe pens!”

  “Yes,” she said, looking at me dubiously. “There was ink on the point. It would have blotted the paper.”

  “Of course! So you wipe it on a penwiper!”

  “How many drops have you had, Ned?” she said.

  “You’re a wonderful girl, you know that?” I said, grabbing her by the shoulders. “You’ve solved a mystery that’s been plaguing me since 1940. I could kiss—”

  There was a bloodcurdling scream from the direction of the house, and Cyril buried his face in his paws.

  “What now?” Verity said, looking disappointed.

  I let go of her shoulders. “The daily swoon?”

  She stood up and began brushing straw off her skirts. “This had better not be anything that keeps us from going to Coventry,” she said. “You go first. I’ll come in through the kitchen.”

  “Mesiel!” Mrs. Mering shrieked. “O, Mesiel!”

  I took off for the house, expecting to find Mrs. Mering laid out among the bric-a-brac, but she wasn’t. She was standing halfway down the stairs in her wrapper, clutching the railing. Her hair was in two operatic braids, and she was waving an empty velvet-lined box.

  “My rubies!” she was wailing to the Colonel, who had apparently just come out of the breakfast room. He still had his napkin in his hand. “They’ve been stolen!”

  “I knew it!” the Colonel, shocked into using a subject, said. “Should never have allowed that medium person in the house!” He threw down the napkin. “Thieves!”

  “O, Mesiel,” Mrs. Mering said, pressing the jewel case to her bosom, “surely you don’t think Madame Iritosky had anything to do with this!”