The Revenant of Thraxton Hall: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (7 page)

Conan Doyle made a face as if he had just swallowed his own tongue. He threw Wilde a cutting look and pulled his features into a smile. “Why are we here? Well—” His mouth opened. His vocal chords strained. No sound came out.

There was a kerfuffle at the front door as a short and portly man shouldered his way past the waiting servants. He had protruding eyes and they rolled, showing the whites, as he entered in a great state of agitation, jowls quivering.

His eyes first affixed themselves upon the man and woman who claimed to be the owners of the house. “Mr. and Mrs. Jennings, I do most humbly apologize for my tardiness—impenetrable traffic on Hungerford Bridge and then I could not locate a cab.”

“Yes, quite,” said Mr. Jennings, with obvious irritation. He nodded in the direction of Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde. “Perhaps you would be so good as to explain to these two, ahem, theatrical gentlemen as to who is the legal owner of this property?”

The bulbous eyes rolled onto the two friends, first taking in Wilde’s broad frame and then settling upon Conan Doyle.

“I must apologize. I am Alfred Cheetham, Realtor. I handled the rental of this property.”

“Rental?” Conan Doyle pounced. “And who was the former tenant?”

The man’s face contorted in a sickly smile. “Sorry, sir, but I am not at liberty to divulge that information. Suffice it to say, it was a person of rank from a noble family that rented the property while Mr. and Mrs. Jennings were wintering in Tuscany.”

Conan Doyle was dumbstruck. “But I was just here yesterday and they were still in residence.”

“I, er, yes, the previous tenant earnestly communicated the need for a rapid removal—a family emergency of some kind.”

“Rapid enough to require prying the knocker from the front door?”

The Realtor nodded, jowls quivering. “I woulda said they was doing a bunk, except everything was paid for up front and proper.”

“Well, there you have it, Arthur,” Wilde said. “We may never know the truth.”

“Ah!” the estate agent said, reaching into an inner pocket. “Are you Doctor Doyle? Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle?”

The Scottish author affirmed that he was.

“The party in question, the former tenant of the house, believed you might stop by. I was instructed to personally deliver this letter into your hands.”

Conan Doyle plucked the handsome bond envelope from the estate agent’s sweaty grip. It was addressed simply: D
OCTOR
D
OYLE
. He opened it by tearing off one end of the envelope and shook the letter out.

All parties watched silently as Conan Doyle’s eyes skimmed the blue swirl of handwriting. His expression seemed to change at one point. From the flicker of his eyes it was apparent that he was rereading one particular line several times. Then he refolded the letter, returned it to its envelope, and secured it in an inner pocket of his overcoat. He looked up at Wilde and smiled. “Well, Oscar,” he said with forced good humor. “I believe we have been sent on a wild goose chase.”

He reached forward and shook the hands of the returning homeowners. “It’s all clear now. A simple miscommunication. You have been very gracious. Oscar and I are so sorry to have bothered you.”

*   *   *

“What did the letter say, Arthur?” Wilde asked as they were walking down the front path to the waiting carriage. “Was it from our mysterious medium?”

Conan Doyle gave a careless shrug and muttered, “No, it was nothing, Oscar. I am afraid it’s all been a misunderstanding. I’m sorry to have involved you.”

They climbed back into the carriage and set off across London. Oscar Wilde bided his time and then asked again as the carriage was crossing Piccadilly Circus, “Arthur, are you going to tell me what was in that letter? I watched your face as you read it. You have a positive genius for storytelling, but I’m afraid you could never make a living in the theater. What you read in that letter disturbed you greatly.”

“It is nothing, Oscar. I think I’ve been the butt of an enormous practical joke.”

“Really? How droll. I like a good joke, Arthur. Please share the hilarity.” Wilde furrowed his brow in reprimand. “Read me the letter.”

“No, my friend, it’s really nothing—”

Oscar Wilde rapped three times on the carriage roof with his walking stick. “Stop here, Gibson,” he shouted. The carriage ground to an immediate halt.

Conan Doyle snatched a look out the window. They had stopped right in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. “What? Why have we stopped?”

“Read the letter, Arthur.”

Conan Doyle cast a glance out the window. Their carriage was blocking traffic. Cab drivers began to hoot and whistle. Two rough-looking laborers seated on a brewery wagon laden with barrels shook their meaty fists and began to curse at them in the vilest Billingsgate.

“Oscar!”

Wilde leaned back in his seat, drew a silver hip flask from his pocket, unscrewed the cap, and took a nip. Conan Doyle scented the smoky aroma of single malt. Wilde savored the mouthful, smacking his lips before saying, “I’m sorry, Arthur, but this carriage shall not move until you have read me that letter.”

The roar of screams and imprecations from outside grew louder as the knot of traffic with Wilde’s carriage at its center tightened around them.

“But Oscar—!” Conan Doyle pleaded, beginning to sweat.

“I have all the time in the world, Arthur.” Wilde took another nip from his flask and leisurely screwed the cap back on. “From the brouhaha around us, it seems the rest of London does not.”

Something thudded against the side of the carriage with a shattering crash—a hurled bottle.

“Very well, Oscar! Very well!”

Oscar Wilde suppressed a smirk and rapped on the ceiling with the head of his walking stick. “Drive on, Gibson!”

The carriage lurched forward. Wilde looked at his friend expectantly.

Conan Doyle swallowed his frown and unfolded the letter on his lap. “It’s just nonsense, Oscar—”

“Read it!”

Conan Doyle cleared his throat and began:

Dear Doctor Doyle,

I have had cause to reconsider my request to you. Please burn this and all letters you have thus far received from me. It is not myself I fear for—I believe in Fate and that nothing can change what has been foreordained. However, the other night I had a peculiarly vivid dream. I saw you in a coffin, your hands folded upon your chest. Your face was ghastly pale. Your chest did not rise and fall. You were dead. Quite dead—of that I am sure, for I sensed, even within the dream, that your soul had departed your body. I believe this is a vision of the near future and that further contact between us will cause you to suffer great harm. This is the reason I have quit my London home on such short notice. Thank you for your concern. Please keep me in your thoughts and prayers.

It was signed as before, with nothing more than a flourish of blue ink.

Conan Doyle fell silent after reading the letter. He folded the letter, slid it back into its envelope, and returned it to his inside jacket pocket, hands visibly shaking. The carriage trundled along streets thronged with traffic: omnibuses; ostler’s wagons; barrows piled high with wilted flowers, stinking fish, blackening turnips.

All of London going about its daily business.

Neither man spoke for some time, and then Oscar Wilde said, “Of course, anyone who sends a letter and then begs the recipient to burn it means quite the opposite.” He pondered a moment, tapping steepled fingers against his full lips, and then asked: “The letter had the same phoenix watermark? The Thraxton family crest?”

Conan Doyle nodded, with grim emphasis.

“Of course, you are still going to Thraxton Hall, aren’t you, Arthur?”

Conan Doyle nodded again, and said, “Of course.” He stared blindly out the window at a pair of working men brawling in the street outside a gin palace. Both men were staggering drunk and their wild, flailing punches did little real damage as they rolled in the gutter in a tangle of limbs.

“Of course,” Wilde repeated. “And, of course, I shall be going with you.”

CHAPTER 6

THE JOURNEY TO SLATTENMERE

Two weeks later, Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle, accompanied by Oscar Wilde, thundered north in the first-class carriage of a steam train. Conan Doyle shuffled three letters in his lap: the original summons to number 42 ______ Crescent, the invitation from the Society for Psychical Research, and the most recent missive warning him of the psychic’s vision of his death. He lifted the Thraxton letters to the light streaming in through the carriage window so that the watermark, a silver phoenix uncoiling from its nest of flame, floated up from the paper.

He looked up at a sharp snap and riffle of playing cards. In the seat opposite, Wilde absentmindedly shuffled a deck of cards. “Care for a game of cribbage?” he asked.

“We don’t have a cribbage board.”

By way of answer, Wilde reached over to one of his open bags and drew out a full-size cribbage board.

Conan Doyle’s mouth fell open. He dreaded to think what Wilde did
not
have in all that luggage. “Not just now Oscar.”

Wilde noticed the pages in Conan Doyle’s lap. “Reading those letters again, Arthur? You’re going to wear them to dust from the abrasion of your gaze.”

“They’re the only pieces to the puzzle we have. I’m perplexed.”

“And I’m homesick,” Wilde said, rising from his seat and tugging down a suitcase from the overhead rack. He opened the case, tossed inside the deck of cards, and then lifted out a fuchsia shirt with lace cuffs, holding it up to his neck and checking his reflection in the carriage window. “You’re a doctor, Arthur. Is homesickness a malady one can die of?”

Conan Doyle harrumphed. “We’re only two hours out of London, Oscar, and no, I don’t believe homesickness has ever claimed a victim.” He lowered the letters in his lap. “Speaking of victims, I am pondering how to save our lady medium. How does one prevent a death foretold?”

Wilde had pulled down a hatbox and was trying on a wide-awake hat with a yellow flower stuck in the brim. He scowled at his reflection in the carriage window and tossed the rejected head gear back into its box. “I would argue that the best way to avoid being shot is to arrange not to be in the same space as the bullet will occupy after the gun has been fired.”

Conan Doyle chuckled. “Very metaphysical, Oscar.” But then his eyes widened as the thought percolated in his brain. “Although, you may have struck upon something. If we stop the séance from happening, or somehow interrupt it, the premonition can never come to pass.”

“Or it may still happen, in some hitherto unforeseen fashion—Fate and all that.”

Conan Doyle shifted uneasily in his seat. The idea of Fate, a future that is somehow unavoidable, had crossed his mind many times in the last two weeks.

When he looked up, Wilde had taken down yet another hatbox and was trying on a straw boater.

“Did you really find it necessary to bring quite so much luggage?” Conan Doyle asked, eyeing the teetering stack of leather suitcases jammed in the overhead rack and piled on the empty seats around them—and that was merely the overflow—the bulk of Wilde’s luggage had been consigned to the baggage car.

The Irishman paused and threw a pitying look at Conan Doyle’s solitary suitcase, which occupied the seat next to the author.

“No doubt you have three tweed suits in that small case, Arthur—all identical. Stout, sensible clothing for the stout, sensible fellow you are. However, I am not like you. Though it pains me to admit the truth, I am somewhat corpulent these days. A man of my height and girth cannot wear tweed—it makes me look like a map of Scotland. If I am to appear at my best, I must dress in a fashion to suit the occasion, my mood, the lighting, the season—even the time of day. It has ever been a source of complication in my life.” Wilde cast a second doubting glance at Conan Doyle’s sad item of luggage, double-taking at the cricket bat fastened to the bag with a leather strap. “Why on earth did you bring a cricket bat, Arthur? I know you’re inordinately fond of the game, but I hope you’re not expecting the members of the Society for Psychical Research to break into two teams for an impromptu cricket match on the manor grounds.”

Now it was Conan Doyle’s turn to become defensive. “No. The bat is … it’s a … good luck charm. I always keep it near. It helps me write.”

Wilde raised his shaggy eyebrows as he looped an ivory silk cravat around his throat and drew it into a bow. “Then it is fortunate indeed that your preferred sport is not polo. There would not be room even in a first-class compartment for
my
baggage and
your
pony.”

Conan Doyle began to mouth a question, but then thought better of it. However, a few moments later, he worked up the nerve to ask: “That acquaintance of yours. George—Georgina.”

Wilde threw his friend a lascivious look and drawled suggestively: “Yeeeeeesss?”

“The other night you said—I mean … is
he
? I mean … is
she
—?”

“Is Georgina really an hermaphrodite?” Wilde said, preempting him. “Why do you ask, Arthur?” A wicked grin twitched the corners of his mouth. “Are you interested?”

“What? Oh, no! Good heavens, no!”

“Don’t be shy, Arthur. Curiosity is a natural human emotion. If you like, I could put in a word for you.”

Conan Doyle turned crimson. “I—I—I merely ask out of medical curiosity. As a doctor. Just. Professional. Purely. Professional.”

“Of course,” Wilde echoed, an impish smile on his large face. “
Professional
interest.”

The Scotsman turned his flushed face to the carriage window, murmuring something inaudible.

Wilde finished dressing. He had changed into the attire of a country gentleman: black leather riding boots, voluminous jodhpurs, a scarlet felt jacket, and a long waxed coat designed to shed a tumultuous downpour. “There,” he said turning to model his outfit for Conan Doyle, “do I not look the picture of a bucolic gent?”

Conan Doyle raised his eyes and took in Wilde’s outlandish garb. “You are sure to leave a memorable impression upon the people of Slattenmere, Oscar. I have little doubt your visit will soon become a colorful anecdote of local history.”