Good Night, Mr. Holmes (18 page)

Our carriage slowed before an ornate wrought-iron gate. The fencing was fully as formidable as that surrounding the seventeenth-century Royal Hospital that Wren had built in Chelsea, but this establishment was buried deep in fragrant countryside. No sound came to us but the calling of thrushes and the occasional bleats of the black-feathered rooks perched atop the sycamore trees.

A sign on the right gatepost proclaimed the place to be that which we sought. A gateman’s presence announced that our trek might have been in vain.

“Your business?” he demanded brusquely.

Irene leaned out the lowered window, expertly tilting her head so as not to dislodge her ecru straw bonnet trimmed in blue velvet and cream-colored plumes.

“We are here to visit one of the residents,” she said in a tone equally alloyed of command and charm.

“You’ll have to register with the main desk at the house.”

“Of course. And you’ll have to open the gate for my coachman.” Soon I heard the squeak of hinges, oddly rusted for so well maintained an estate. “Many thanks and good day,” Irene waved in farewell as the wheels crunched over a gravel drive between an avenue of plane trees.

“In truth, Irene,” I said, “I wonder that you don’t simply use ‘open sesame’ in such instances and save yourself the trouble of chitchat.”

She smiled at my tart tribute to her powers of persuasion but remained silent. I sensed a barely controlled excitement in her that our outing to bucolic Croydon hardly seemed to merit. The house hove to on our right, a massive Jacobean pile with immaculate grounds.

“I imagine some of Mr. Godfrey Norton’s pounds have gone to clip these boxwood hedges, my dear Nell.”

“Why? He is a pure city dweller. Why underwrite an estate in the country?”

Irene favored me with her most mysteriously knowing look. “When we arrive inside, allow me to set the scene.”

“When have I not?” I retorted, following her out of our vehicle and up some shallow steps, then across a broad pavement to the front doors.

Irene yanked the bell. So large was the house that I heard only a far, faint ring. A peephole snapped open and a set of red-rimmed eyes regarded us.

“We are here to see Mr. Norton,” Irene said boldly.

I tried not to start, but I believe that my hat plumes wavered a bit. How did Irene know what to expect without having been forewarned by the younger Norton, as I had been? My pulses began to flutter when I considered the depth of her perception and the guilt of my own secret.

The raffish eyes behind the peephole widened. “Then you don’t know the news—I’ll let you in.”

“Thank you.” Irene waited regally as bars, locks and various mechanisms grated free on the other side of the door.

When it swung wide the butler—for I assumed so grand a house would have one—admitted us to a hall paved in checkerboard marble after the Wren style.

“Mr. Edgewaithe is in the office, directly ahead,” said he.

“What
don’t we know?” I whispered as I followed close on Irene’s heels. “Why does a private residence require an ‘office,’ and isn’t that butler’s manner rather familiar?”

“He’s not a butler, merely a doorman—and this ‘residence’ is both more public and more private than you suspect,” was all that she would say.

Mr. Edgewaithe rose from behind a Queen Anne desk as we entered. “Ladies, please be seated. You are new to The Sycamores...”

“New, yes,” Irene said, softly rustling into a chair. “I am Clytemnestra Saunders and this is my cousin, Henrietta Rushwimple. We are distant cousins of Mr. Norton, and had not learned of his residence here until lately.”

“Norton, is it?” Mr. Edgewaithe frowned. He was a lean, stooped man in a frockcoat. The thick swag of watch chain across his concave belly echoed the gilt spectacles on his worried face. “How tragic that you did not come yesterday, as his son did.”

“Godfrey was here?” Irene inquired alertly. “Then I presume that our relation has—”

“—been called to quieter pastures,” our host finished solemnly.

“Plainly speaking, he is dead? And only yesterday?”

Irene’s businesslike tone brought a pained look to Mr. Edgewaithe’s professionally furrowed features. “He was of an age for it. There was no irregularity, I assure you. His son would swear to that.”

“Oh...” Irene blinked prettily, as if batting back tears, “we have come so far, after so long. It is possible to... see him?”

“See him? I’m afraid not. The Sycamores is accustomed to sudden death. The local doctor signed the death certificate and Mr. Norton was interred last night. You may visit the mausoleum, which is on a particularly lovely portion of our grounds...”

“Of course.” Irene pulled a handkerchief from her reticule and waved it ostentatiously. “Cousin Henrietta and I must see the—the place of interment. But to make our journey and come away with no... feeling for the man. It is so sad. May we not at least see where he stayed?”

Mr. Edgewaithe’s face took on a queer expression at her last words. Irene noticed it as quickly as I.

“Or perhaps I should say, where he was... kept? Pray do not think you shock us, sir. When we learned of our cousin’s whereabouts, no secret was made of his condition. This is a private sanatorium for the mentally disturbed, is it not?”

“For the brain-feeble, yes. Your cousin suffered from the slings and arrows of old age. He had grown quite forgetful and confused. He even failed to recognize his own son; one can hardly blame the lad for visiting so seldom. But young Godfrey never failed in his financial duties to his father’s caretakers, nor we, I trust, in our tending of the gentleman.”

Irene buried her face in the linen. “To see where he spent his last days would do more to set our souls at rest than to see where he lies now.”

“If you insist, ladies. The Sycamores has nothing to conceal in its accommodation, which is the best in the environs of London. If you will follow me.”

We did, through waxed and dusted halls, up shining stairwells and down a corridor lined with doors equipped with small peepholes.

This last touch overshadowed the place’s beeswax-scented cleanliness, that grim line of barred doors with their spy-holes. Then, too, the odd chirps and moans that drifted from beyond all those doors did little to calm my fears.

There was apparently nothing wrong with their hearing—the mad—for as we passed nails scratched the far sides of the doors, and fists pounded and faint voices pleaded.

Then I realized that it was not our passing footsteps that so disturbed the unseen denizens behind the doors, but the cheerful jingle of the keys in their warder’s hand. Mr. Edgewaithe made this wordless passage as if he heard nothing. Irene’s face was composed as for a photograph, fiercely still.

Finally the keys made a last clash and our guide paused before a door. I noted a brass number on the panel: 12. The key turned; I fancied I heard wails all up and down the hall as those other locked doors stayed shut. This one swung ajar on silent, oiled hinges.

Irene stepped through. No carpet softened our footfalls. No curtains festooned the window, which was barred. How had I failed to notice those barred windows from the driveway? There was a bed, stripped to its ticked mattress. A bare table. A metal pitcher and bowl, even a brass chamber pot.

There was not a book, or a mirror, or a picture upon the wall. I had wondered at Godfrey Norton’s paying so royally to keep his hated father here until I saw the emptiness of that room. It struck me that the son’s mercy had literally killed his father with kindness—or what passed for it toward the feeble-minded.

Irene walked to the window. “Did... cousin John... have an opportunity to enjoy these lovely grounds?”

“Of course.” Mr. Edgewaithe was eager to relate his institution’s amenities. “Each resident is escorted outside on a regular schedule, as the weather allows. Your cousin particularly enjoyed sitting by the duck pond.”

“By that great beech tree I see from here?”

“Why, yes. That was his special spot. How did you guess?”

“It’s the only landmark visible from here. I imagine one would spend many hours staring out this window. No matter how shattered one’s mind, it would still turn to the exceptional, else why do we all swoon at a sunset when they are so frequent?”

“Mr. Norton was not facing the west, unfortunately.”

“Well, the sunrise then,” Irene returned. “To Mr. Norton they must have been much the same.”

Mr. Edgewaithe frowned, as if sniffing a criticism he couldn’t name. “Is there anything else, then, ladies, before you visit the mausoleum, which is just the other side of the pond?”

“Via the little bridge. Ah, Henrietta, how charming. Our cousin found, at last, a lovely place to die.”

We swept out, Irene sweeping as only she could, her layered skirts swishing, I merely swept up in her progress. Downstairs in the main hall another visitor awaited Mr. Edgewaithe’s return, pacing on the black-and-white paving stones.

“Good day, then, ladies; many thanks for such humane concern for your cousin.” Mr. Edgewaithe’s words were a dismissal. He had already turned to his new visitor, an angular, hawk-nosed gentleman in a checked Inverness cloak and a deerstalker cap. Despite the dusty country clothes, the gentleman’s clipped speech and impatient eyes bespoke a city dweller.

He glanced sharply at us as we passed, not with any impertinent interest, but as he would catalogue a new variety of tree, a sort of unthinking, ever-constant observation. Irene was burying her face in her handkerchief again, so affected by her own crocodile tears that she had to draw me against the paneling while she collected herself.

“Irene, why are you carrying on so?” I whispered. “Mr. Edgewaithe isn’t paying us the least mind any more—”

“Shh!”
She seized my throat as if to strangle me.

“—Holmes,” I heard the stranger’s acerbic tones announce behind me. “I read the obituary in the
Telegraph
this morning and came down immediately.”

“Norton’s obituary?” Edgewaithe guessed.

“Yes. Norton. He had dropped from sight these last few years. Some of his old associates wanted to assure themselves of his well-being, such as it might have been.”

“Come into my office, Mr. Holmes,” Edgewaithe invited, with a cordiality alien to us. “I’d be happy to assist in any way I can. Never telling when a gentleman like yourself might require The Sycamores for a dear one. Tragedy can strike even a young man, perhaps a wife—

“I am not married, Mr. Edgewaithe, nor do I expect to be. But I
am
interested in the particulars of Mr. Norton’s life here and last illness—”

The broad doors closed, ending our eavesdropping.

“Yes, I imagine many an inconvenient wife languishes above,” Irene said grimly. “Instead of a whited sepulcher we have a well-landscaped one. Only in England could greenery cover so much greed! But why Holmes? Here? Now? Ah, he has not forgotten the Zone, either.”

“You talk of greed,” I said quietly.

She gave me an incredulous look. “Greed does not motivate him, no more than it does myself. Or rather a higher form of greed; ambition to know all, that is our mutual flaw, Mr. Holmes’s and mine. He is younger than I had imagined, and such a
busy,
interesting face. It’s a pity he considers women beneath notice.”

“But he noticed us!”

“As he would a garden variety of cucumber, Nell, with no real recognition. I fancy he will pay for the failing someday, though he does not strike me as a truly prejudiced man—only arrogant in his intelligence and self-sufficiency.”

“As some might say of you.”

“Penelope! You show signs of becoming a character reader. I shall have to set you up with a crystal ball in the King’s Road and see how many fortune seekers you attract. It might pay better than type-writing.”

“No, thank you. And may we go home now?”

“Certainly. But first we picnic.”

“Picnic?” We had wandered onto the entry pavement. The bushes were alive with birds trilling like the emperor’s nightingale. Honeysuckle and lilac bloomed along the lanes and fanned their fragrance to us on zephyrs of sun-steeped air. The day seemed the warm amber color of Earl Grey tea.

“Picnic,” Irene reiterated, heading for the carriage. “I fancy a banquet by that towering beech tree. Coachman, could you fetch our hamper from the carriage—and have you a shovel aboard?”

His plain face froze in stupefaction.

“A crowbar, then?” she prompted him. “Surely you carry
something
in the nature of a tool for difficulties you may encounter along the road, man? I suspect our tins of sardines will prove somewhat stubborn to open,” Irene finished with an air of helpless femininity as false as the rouge that pinked her lips.

Without a word, the coachman pulled a short-handled shovel from beneath his seat.

“Capital!” Irene said, seizing it eagerly. “We will bring you the leftovers.” With that she slipped it under the lid of our hamper—the handle protruded quite visibly until she draped my best Chinese shawl over it—and we went together down the lilac-laden lane, the hamper swinging by its handles between us.

I was silent for some time, and then I could no longer contain myself.

“Tell me, Irene,” I begged, “that you don’t really intend to disinter the unfortunate Mr. Norton!”

She would not answer.

Chapter Twelve