There was a long silence. Nigel was staring down his nose, unwilling to meet the old lady’s eyes. Georgia fidgeted with her cigarette-holder, for once at a loss for words.
‘Why have you told us about this?’ said Nigel at last, looking up.
Clarissa Cavendish’s scintillating eyes held his. There was an excitement in them he could not fathom; they seemed to expect something from him, too, as though she were a teacher who could hardly restrain herself from prompting a pupil towards the correct answer. She said:
‘First, Mr Strangeways, what is your own opinion of the incident?’
‘Either the cat was seeing a ghost, or she wasn’t. If it had been a ghost, she’d have been frightened, arched her back, spat, but surely not have delivered a series of assaults. Besides, we are agreed to shelve the supernatural until we are sure no rational explanation can be found. The violence of the animal’s behaviour – how old is she, by the way?’
‘Three years old,’ said Clarissa.
‘– precludes us from attributing it to mere kittenishness. Suppose she was drugged. You say she’d just been given a saucer of milk. I don’t know what poison would produce such symptoms without leaving more severe after-effects. But suppose someone doped the milk, or gave her an injection before your séance began. Why should he do it? To frighten the party, seems the only possible answer. A practical joke. Or to frighten one of the party, seriously.’
‘It sounds to me rather elaborate and cruel for an ordinary practical joke,’ said Georgia. ‘If the joker had dressed up in a cambric nightdress, and clutched his belly and groaned – but the phantom bishop seems to have got left on the side-lines.’
Miss Cavendish nodded vigorously, and gave the arm of her chair a little applauding pat.
‘If the joke was a more serious one,’ resumed Nigel, ‘aimed at some particular member of the party, it must mean that there was something about the cat’s behaviour which would be understood by the victim and frighten him more than the others. Was anyone especially upset, apart from Miss Ainsley?’
‘You are familiar with the play, Hamlet, Mr Strangeways?’
Nigel admitted it.
‘You recollect the play within the play – how the King watched the players, and Hamlet watched the King. On Christmas Eve we were not all engaged with the antics of the cat. I chanced to look aside and noticed Andrew Restorick gazing fixedly at another member of the party.’
‘Which one?’
‘That I cannot tell you. The chairs were arranged in an arc. Andrew was sitting on the extreme left, and gazing at some one of those at the other end, it might have been his sister, Elizabeth, or Dr Bogan, or Mr Dykes.’
‘You were not altogether engrossed in the play yourself, then, Miss Cavendish?’
‘La, sir, you are very pertinacious!’ she exclaimed, with a coquetry that did not quite conceal a certain discomfiture. ‘I have my understandings still, I hope. I may be allowed to use my eyes.’
‘And did any of those three appear particularly upset?’
‘I cannot pretend so. Betty looked dumpish, I thought she was too tipsy for alarm. Mr Dykes seemed to be swearing to himself. Dr Bogan maintained an air of reserve. I saw him and Betty with their heads together afterwards, though.’
‘Have there been any repercussions since?’
Miss Cavendish gazed at him blankly, as though the word did not come into her vocabulary.
‘You spoke in your letter of being apprehensive,’ Nigel persisted. ‘Are you afraid there’s more to it than a cat’s hallucinations? Was that only a beginning?’
The old lady seemed strangely unwilling to speak. Her eyes, unfocused now, stared vaguely and painfully in front of her. She looked lost. At last, rising from her chair, leaning heavily upon her tasselled, ivory stick, she moved across to the far end of the room, ran her finger over a print upon the wall and, with her back turned to Nigel and Georgia, said:
‘Yes. I am afraid. There is something rotten in that house. I cannot put my finger upon it, but I know it is so. I have’ – her voice faltered slightly – ‘I have special reasons for being interested in the family – in Elizabeth and Andrew particularly. My reasons are of no consequence, I beg leave to say no more of them. This I can tell you – that I had rather face the devil and all his angels than the influence, whatever it may be, which is at work in Easterham Manor.’
‘I understand,’ said Nigel gently. ‘You wish me to –’
Clarissa Cavendish swung round from the wall, and pointed her ivory stick at Nigel like a rapier. Her voice now had an incisiveness that brought him upright in his chair.
‘I wish you to find out what is wrong. I wish you to find out what Dr Bogan is doing in that house: I reckon him to be an objectionable creature. And what Hereward Restorick is afraid of. And what was in Andrew Restorick’s heart that night when he paid no attention to the cat but was staring so fixedly at one other person in the room. And I wish,’ she added in a whisper that Nigel only just caught, ‘you may save Elizabeth from damnation.’
She returned to her chair, and gazed expectantly at Nigel.
‘They’re all there still – the house party?’
‘They come and go. But at present they are all at the Manor, and like to stay. The roads in winter are very dirty.’
‘But, you know,’ Nigel pointed out gently, ‘I have no authority to –’
‘I have arranged for that. There is, I understand, a society for Psychical Research. You are to be a member of it. I have asked you to stay with me so that you may investigate the incident of the cat in the Bishop’s room. It is all arranged.’
‘But I don’t know the first thing about psychical research.’
‘I have purchased some volumes on the subject from my bookshop. You will study them to-morrow, and in the evening we are invited to take dinner at the Manor.’
Nigel gasped a little at Miss Cavendish’s high-handedness. He would have liked to feel more sceptical about the extraordinary statements she had made, but against his will he had been impressed. Moreover, she had inspired him with a strong curiosity, an impatient desire to fill in the shadowy outlines of the characters she had described.
‘What is this Dr Bogan a doctor of?’ he asked.
‘Medicine, I dare say. I hope I may not have to take any of his medicines.’
‘Who invited him, do you know?’
‘Elizabeth brings many unsuitable persons to stay at the Manor.’
‘She comes down quite often herself, then?’
‘Yes. She is a sadly erratic girl, I fear. But Hereward can scarcely forbid her the house.’
Miss Cavendish’s replies were not very revealing, thought Nigel. He tried another track.
‘Were any explanations of the cat’s behaviour offered at the time? Did anyone think of examining the saucer?’
‘I am not to know what the party said of it later. At the time, Hereward took upon himself to break up the assembly. He is the sort of man that chooses to ignore what he cannot understand: he would pile on a hundred mattresses rather than search for the pea. I do not know whether the saucer was examined.’
‘You say that Dr Bogan and Elizabeth Restorick put their heads together after the incident. Did you hear anything they said?’
‘Nothing material, I am sure. I am a little deaf, but adept in lip-reading. I fancied Dr Bogan said to Elizabeth, “Stick it, E.” – but I was not paying them much attention. And now, my dears, we have had an exhausting day. You will forgive me if I retire. If you desire a dish of chocolate before retiring, pray ring for Annie. I am happy to have you both in my house.’
With remarkable dignity, the old lady rose, kissed Georgia, offered Nigel her frail, jewelled fingers, and took herself and her ivory stick up to bed.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘O’er all there hung a shadow and a fear.’
THOMAS HOOD
EASTERHAM MANOR, AS they emerged next evening from the car which Hereward Restorick had sent to fetch them, was no m
ore than a blacker bulk against the blackness of the night. Nigel had to take Clarissa Cavendish’s word for it that the house had been built in Queen Elizabeth’s reign and little altered since. The Virgin Queen and her subjects, he reflected, never suffered from such a black-out. The car drove off, the chains round its tyres clinking, a faint fume of snow marking the course of the invisible wheels. The front door opened. Easterham Manor was evidently the kind of house where the front door opened without your having to ring the bell. There ought to be a slap-up dinner. Nigel squeezed Georgia’s arm as they scurried inside, and the butler closed the door quickly behind them.
A maid-servant led Georgia and Miss Cavendish upstairs to take off their wraps. For Miss Cavendish this would be a formidable undertaking, since, in spite of their host’s solicitude in sending a car, and the shortness of the journey from door to door, she had snugged herself up as if for an Arctic expedition, putting on a bonnet, a fur coat, and a leather golf-jacket over her party dress, and six or seven petticoats – to judge by her Mrs-Noah-like figure – beneath it.
While the disrobing was going forward, Nigel had leisure to observe the hall in which he had been left. It was big enough to have been set down in the World Fair and create a sizable obstruction there, it was warm as toast (‘American wife; central heating; plenty of cash,’ said Nigel to himself), but otherwise almost overpoweringly Elizabethan with its great oaken and cedar chests, rush mats, iron flambeaux, and coats of arms upon the walls – the kind of hall that Charlotte Restorick would probably have described as ‘just too cute’.
Yes, she certainly would, thought Nigel, a few moments later, when Mrs Restorick, superbly gowned in gold lamé, swam forward to meet them. He had the utmost difficulty in not addressing her as ‘Mrs Rittenhouse’, for she resembled to the life the stately, arch, sorely put-upon hostess of Animal Crackers.
‘So nice to have you here, Clarissa,’ she boomed in a voice like a stag belling. ‘And this is the famous Georgia Strangeways. Hereward, haven’t I always said I was dying to meet Mrs Strangeways?’
Hereward Restorick assented, in a well-bred mumble, pulling at the ends of his moustache.
‘Pleasure,’ he was understood to say. ‘Distinguished woman. Read your novels.’
‘Oh, how provoking men are!’ exclaimed his wife archly. ‘Mrs Strangeways is not a novelist, Hereward. She’s the explorer, you know. Welcome to Easterham Manor, Mr Strangeways. I think psychical research is just too cute. Hereward, the sherry – these poor things are dying of cold. Now, Mrs Strangeways, I want to have you know Mr Dykes. Will Dykes, you know, the proletarian novelist. I’m sure you’ll have so much in common, you two clever people. Eunice, this is Mr Strangeways, who is going to find out all about our ghost for us. Mr Strangeways, Miss Ainsley.’
Presently the note of a gong, hardly less portentous than Big Ben, was heard, vieing not altogether successfully with Mrs Restorick’s bell-like tones. Two men came into the room, one slim, bronzed, with a light, athletic tread; the other sallow, stooping, and bearded. They were introduced as Andrew Restorick and Dr Dennis Bogan. It was at this moment that, amid the confused bubble of conversation, Clarissa’s voice sounded like a tinkling icicle.
‘Where is Elizabeth?’ she said. ‘Is she not to be with us?’
The effect of this innocuous question was quite extraordinary. It created a momentary silence which set all Nigel’s nerves tingling, as though Clarissa had made some unforgivable accusation. He noticed several of the party glancing covertly at each other, as if to estimate the effect of Miss Cavendish’s question upon their neighbours. Everything, for an instant, seemed frozen into the helpless unreality of a nightmare. Then their hostess said:
‘So sorry. Elizabeth is not well. She’s had one of her attacks and won’t be able to come down to-night. So disappointing for her. How is she, Dr Bogan?’
‘The pulse is still a little high. But I hope we shall be able to get her up to-morrow.’ The doctor’s voice was smooth as oil upon troubled waters. By rights, it should have put an end to the odd little situation, but Clarissa Cavendish said:
‘Too many cocktails. You should forbid them to her. They undermine the system.’
It was an outrageous remark, and doubly so coming from Miss Cavendish – thought Nigel – who was normally so very much the mistress of ceremony. Its reception, however, showed that she was more intimate with the household than he had realized. It seemed to relax the tension rather than increase it, though Nigel felt it had been quite out of character. Several of those in the room laughed indulgently, and Andrew Restorick said:
‘Miss Cavendish, you’re incorrigible. I believe you would rather see us all under the table with sherry or claret than sipping one tiny glass of watered-down gin and angostura.’
‘In my day,’ replied the old lady briskly, ‘gin was drank only by the low. A penny a quartern. Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence, was the saying.’
Once again Nigel’s scalp crawled. It was uncanny – that ‘in my day’ – referring to a time two hundred years back, a century from which Clarissa Cavendish, sitting bolt upright in her flowered dress and aura of elaborate courtliness, might have been a revenant.
‘A penny a quartern!’ exclaimed Miss Ainsley. ‘Those were the days! But I thought it was loaves you sold by the quartern.’
Miss Cavendish surveyed the flushed, jerky young woman through her lorgnette with considerable disdain, but offered no reply. Will Dykes muttered audibly.
‘Anyone’d think Betty was a dipsomaniac, the way some people talk.’
‘Really, Dykes,’ protested Hereward Restorick, massaging his moustache even more vigorously. ‘I’m not aware that anyone suggested –’
‘Oh, no. We’re not suggesting anything. We’re just sitting round being polite ladies and gentlemen, pretending not to notice the bad smell in the room.’
‘A rough diamond,’ Charlotte Restorick murmured in Georgia’s ear. ‘But such talent, such native honesty, poor fellow. He was born in the gutter, but literally in the gutter, my dear. So wonderful, don’t you think?’
Georgia was saved from having to express an opinion on the miraculous birth of Mr Dykes, by the butler’s announcing dinner. Nigel found himself seated beside his hostess, with Dykes opposite him. The novelist, whom he could now study at more leisure, was evidently a fish out of water in this company, and did nothing to conceal his incompatibility. His hair lying in an oiled quiff over a broad forehead, his coarse skin and jutting underlip gave him an unattractiveness which was redeemed by the lively, searching eyes and a voice of unusual resonance. Nigel judged that he was neither trading on his proletarian origin here, nor at all awed by his surroundings. There had been something appealing in the way he had taken up the cudgels for Elizabeth Restorick. Was he in love with her, perhaps? What else could account for his coming into a society so obviously uncongenial to him? And, a still more teasing question, why had the mention of the absent Elizabeth produced such sharp and varied reactions from these people? Yes, there was a spectre at this festal board all right; and Nigel fancied it had nothing to do with the hallucinations of the cat, Scribbles.
Nigel had the gift, more common amongst women than men, of being able to take active part in a conversation while his attention was directed elsewhere. Now, though he was on the alert towards the other diners, he was also keeping his end up quite adequately with Mrs Restorick. Indeed, once he began to disentangle her from his initial associations with Mrs Rittenhouse, he found her a real enough person. She had that positive snobbery of the American, so much more agreeable than its negative English counterpart because it proceeds from a zest and appetite for experience.
‘We shall all go up to the Bishop’s room after dinner,’ she was saying. ‘You will want to reconstruct the scene of the crime, I’m sure, Mr Strangeways.’
The remark was accompanied by a light, conventional laugh, but also by a look from her sapphire-blue eyes that brought Nigel up all standing. Now just what does she mean by t
hat, he wondered. What an odd way to talk about the haunted cat. He said:
‘I’m afraid I’m only an amateur, you know, Mrs Restorick. You mustn’t expect too much from me. Don’t be disappointed if I fail to bring your ghost out into the open.’
‘Ah, yes. The ghost. I suppose every old family in this country has its’ – she paused a moment – ‘its skeleton.’
‘The Bishop must be a very substantial skeleton, by all accounts. Have you seen or heard anything in that room yourself, Mrs Restorick?’
‘No. I’m afraid I can’t be psychic.’ She turned her head to include Will Dykes in the conversation. ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Mr Dykes?’
Nigel attended with one ear to the novelist’s pugnaciously dogmatic reply. But he was also listening to the conversation at the other end of the table where Hereward Restorick, Andrew, Georgia, and Clarissa were sitting. Mrs Restorick’s remark about ‘the scene of the crime’ must have started a subject over there. Hereward and Georgia were discussing a detective novel they had both read. Suddenly Andrew broke in with:
‘The trouble about detective novelists is that they shirk the real problem.’
‘The real problem?’ asked Georgia.
‘The problem of evil. That’s the only really interesting thing about crime. Your ordinary four-a-penny criminals, who steal because they find it the easiest way to make a living, who murder for gain or out of sheer exasperation – they’re of no interest. And the criminal in the average detective story is duller still, a mere king-pin to hold together an intricate, artificial plot, the major premiss of an argument that leads nowhere. But what –’ here Andrew Restorick’s quiet voice took on a louder, compelling note which made the whole table listen – ‘what about the man who revels in evil? The man or woman whose very existence seems to depend upon the power to hurt or degrade others?’
There was a shocked silence. That phrase, ‘the man who revels in evil’, arrested the whole company in a stony silence, as if Andrew had produced the Gorgon’s head out of his table-napkin. Yet again, Nigel was conscious of a general shrinking – an apprehension far greater than the remark should have produced; not so much an apprehension, perhaps, as a shrinking horror at the appearance of something which they had all been expecting. Nonsense, said Nigel irritably to himself, you’re getting as bad as Scribbles. Hereward was heard to say: