Mysteries of Winterthurn Page 12
With a slight bow, Dr. Hatch murmured that he should not of course think of billing her: for no examination, and no consultation, had in truth taken place.
SOME DAYS LATER, as she was leaving for school, Clarice discovered, to her delight, a small wicker basket hanging from her doorknob, filled with sprays of lilac,—of lavender, deep purple, and white hues: most beautiful, indeed most captivating, to both the sense of sight and the sense of smell. She brought it inside, to discover, beneath the lilacs, a poem written in Georgina’s blunt though meticulous hand, inscribed “to C.—,” and signed “Iphigenia.”
“RIDDLE-WISDOM”
If I—am You—
Shall You—be me?
If You—scorn I—
Where then—We—
Be—?
Quickly Clarice reread these enigmatic lines, and again reread them,—with the unlooked-to result that, of a sudden, she burst into tears: for she did not,—ah, she could not!—make any sense of them, or of her unhappy friend: and she knew beforehand that if she were to confront Georgina, to inquire of her what the “Riddle-Wisdom” was, and what mystery appeared to govern Georgina’s life, she would be greeted by a chill, stony demeanor: and not a word of explanation, or affection.
The Corpse
As young Xavier Kilgarvan privately thought himself a pitiful sort of detective, having failed to investigate the scene of the crime at Glen Mawr Manor, and having, moreover, yet to examine an actual corpse (or even to gaze upon one not formally attired, and meticulously groomed, by the undertaker’s skillful hand), he resolved to make amends: one day soon, he knew not precisely when, to make a bold sortie against the Manor: and one day very soon, to view a dead body at the county morgue,—for he had several times appealed to Mr. Deck that, when a likely corpse was in his keeping, Xavier might be summoned.
All too quickly, it seemed, in the first week of June, word came to Xavier that he might drop by the morgue, at his convenience: the message brought to him by a mystified neighborhood boy while Xavier was in the midst of his morning chores. (He had been prevailed upon by his father to aid Mr. Kilgarvan’s Negro assistant Tobias in packing several dozen boxes of toys for railway shipment, a task he particularly disliked: for was it not tedious, and menial, and mechanical?—was it not dismayingly brainless? Xavier especially resented packing dolls, for, being breakable, they required a great deal of attention, and he was sure to be blamed if any accidents occurred en route. Also, though he had seen it for years, Mr. Kilgarvan’s famed “Bonnie” doll, with its faint kittenish cry that emanated from its midriff, and its hinged eyelids that snapped open so starkly, never failed to startle him: for the glassy eyes, whether brown, or green, or the blue of the clearest sky, always stared, it seemed, directly at him.)
So it was, he made his decision to slip quietly away, though but a quarter of the toys had been packed, and Mr. Kilgarvan was certain to be angry with him: for he could not, he reasoned, allow such humble exigencies of his personal life to interfere with his profession. (As for Tobias, being fond of Xavier, and, in any case, possessed of a charitable disposition, he assured the lad that he did not mind in the slightest being left to pack the crates single-handed: for, by so doing, he could satisfy himself that they were done properly.)
As Xavier ran by way of alleys, lanes, and footpaths the short distance to Courthouse Green, where, at the rear of the stately domed courthouse building, certain county functions were housed,—the sheriff’s headquarters, the jail, the morgue—he felt buoyed along by a wondrous sort of elation: and all the sights, sounds, and odors that presented themselves to his confused delectation seemed but the expression of a single grand substance, and overarching purpose. Indeed, since having taken on the secret mantle of the Detective, Xavier often felt that anything and everything was significant: and bore, he knew not immediately how, upon the mystery at Glen Mawr Manor, if only he possessed the wit to interpret it.
This certainty began to ebb somewhat, as, now breathless, the boy entered the drab and near-windowless stucco building that housed the morgue, and was greeted with little hospitality by an elderly filing clerk, who seemed not to know his name, or why he had come. If he did not wish to identify the body that had just come in, if he was not a relative, then what was his business at the morgue?—a question put to him with such chill indifference, Xavier would not have known how to reply; and was saved by Hans Deck’s intervention.
“The lad has come not to identify our ‘John Doe’ of the moment,” Mr. Deck bemusedly said, allowing a companionable arm to fall upon Xavier’s shoulder, “but, I believe, to identify Death.”
So it was, Xavier was led along a narrow and near-lightless corridor, to a refrigerated chamber at the rear of the building, which gave the uneasy impression of being subterranean: and presented, with no propaedeutic courtesy, with an actual corpse,—the dead body of a youth “freshly killed” in a brawl out the Old Winterthurn Pike, in the region of Rivière-du-Loup. With a gesture somehow lacking in finesse, Mr. Deck whipped off the soiled white sheet that covered the man, to reveal, to Xavier’s affrighted eye, a naked masculine body,—a body badly abused—a body so demeaned by divers imperfections (pimples, warts, moles, boils; misshapen and filth-encrusted toes; slack fatty tissue at the waist, belly, and thighs; an Adam’s apple painfully prominent; discolorations or bruises virtually everywhere; eyes open in glassy idiocy; bloodied lips agape, to reveal irregular and yellowed teeth)—that Xavier could but blink, and stare, and swallow, and blink the more: for he had expected to see something quite different, though he knew not precisely what.
Though Hans Deck’s reputation in the city was that of an upstanding but somewhat chill and disagreeable personality, a consequence, doubtless, of the somber trappings of his trade, he spoke most congenially,—indeed, almost warmly—to poor Xavier, who stood staring down at the corpse on its slanted porcelain table, with no more boyish vivacity than that of an actual relative of the victim, and no more conversation than a mute. “’Tis Death you gaze upon,” Mr. Deck said, in a near-tender voice, “—the poor fool that was, the ‘John Doe’ who had lately inhabited that flesh, having fled forevermore.”
Xavier made an enfeebled attempt to respond to this, and to ease himself away from the elder gentleman’s comradely arm, which lay, still, upon his shoulder; but Mr. Deck gave no sign of hearing, and continued, in a grave, low, caressing voice, to explain that the dead man was most likely about twenty-eight years of age; that, under the cognomen of “Buck” he had been employed upriver, at one of the lumber camps; that, in a drunken state, he had been so badly beaten about the stomach, torso, and head (the back of the skull being broken,—would Xavier care to see?), he had died of internal injuries, of a multifarious nature. As to who had killed him, or why,—it was doubtful that Shearwater could make any arrests, or would even trouble to attempt them, for no witnesses might ever be found to the slaying: and, indeed, it had probably not been a “slaying” as such, since the brutish young man would doubtless have beaten his opponent or opponents to death, in similar wise, if circumstances had been but slightly altered. “Such legalistic niceties do not concern us,” Mr. Deck said,—now giving “Buck” a playful rap on the shin bone with his knuckles,—“who deal primarily with the flesh; and limit our musings to it.”
At this, Xavier faintly essayed another response, for it had struck him,—with the force of both the wildly comical and the horrific—that the luckless young man possessed a coarse sort of family resemblance to the male Kilgarvans: there being something about the hard slant of the brow, and the husky set of the chin, and even about the dark guileless eyes that reminded him of his brothers, Bradford and Colin. But this observation was too weakly asserted for Mr. Deck to hear; and the gentleman was in any case expostulating on several pathological conditions (exclusive of the violent hemorrhages that had caused death) of uncommon interest to be found in the corpse. For instance, the divers sores,—pustules, tubercles, blebs, scales, crusts, fissures, and papules; liberally scat
tered across the body, with the innocence of mere freckles—were, as Xavier might know, the unmistakable symptoms of venereal disease, in its secondary stage: a scourge and a warning of God that young men must behave with propriety at all times, and resist the wiles of the female sex,—apart, that is, from the blessèd marital bed. “For it is very much as Reverend De Forrest would have it,” Mr. Deck said, “that so repulsive a disease is, in a sense, an actual boon of God, for its efficacy in warning us against the snares of the flesh. Why, last month, I had on this selfsame slab an old codger so rotted with his sins, you could see his actual brain through a hole the size of a silver dollar in the roof of his mouth!—a hellish sight, I assure you, yet most powerfully instructive. Though he had been too far gone, for years, to profit from it. But I trust,” Mr. Deck said, in a more kindly tone, “your father has well acquainted you with such wisdom.”
In truth, Lucas Kilgarvan had somewhat abrogated his paternal duty, in postponing a discussion of this nature with his youngest, and most sensitive, son: for even the unperturbable Bradford, and the raffish Wolf, and the stolid Colin, had evinced considerable upset at being exposed to the harrowing daguerreotypes in Dr. Horace Motley’s A Recent History of Disease and Pathology, and Dr. Findley Litz’s famed Scourges of God,—these being the two most frequently employed texts in Winterthurn City, in these years, for enlightening young men to the facts of life. Yet such was Xavier’s caution that he did not wish to question Mr. Deck more closely, as to the nature of this “wisdom.”
Of interest as well, the coroner said, seizing a particularly bruised flap of skin in the lower region of the deceased’s belly, was this evidence of advanced abdominal hernia: which must have given the young man a great deal of discomfort. And, too, had Xavier’s keen eye taken in the malformation of several toes; the oversized and apish nature of the genitals; the concentration of pustules at the navel; the sickly rotted teeth; and the general unwholesomeness of the corpse,—apart, that is, from the actual markings of death? “Dr. Hatch, who dropped by late last night, on his way home from the hospital, paused to see what our ‘catch’ of the day was: and informally diagnosed one of his ailments as a kidney disorder, which would have resulted in a particularly odious death, by way of uremic poisoning,” Mr. Deck said, in a voice both sympathetic and chiding, as he lifted the corpse’s battered lips to show his gums; and,—as Xavier involuntarily winced—lifted up his eyelids to show his yellowed and bloodshot eyeballs. “Colney works very hard, as you know; yet he told me he is eager to acquire our ‘John Doe’ for his dissection laboratory at the hospital,—many of the corpses sent him being, it seems, badly deteriorated, as a consequence of extreme old age and indigence,” Mr. Deck said. He pinched the corpse’s cheek, and chuckled, saying that “Buck” was fortunate to be finding his way to Dr. Hatch’s professional hands: for bodysnatchers of the most shameless sort were operating throughout the state, digging up the dead in paupers’ cemeteries, and elsewhere, and peddling them,—why, God knew where!—this “business” having become quite a scandal in recent years.
Xavier could not even bring himself to murmur an assent to this speech, as, by degrees, the warmth of his skin had yielded to the metallic chill of the morgue; and his earlier ebullience had long since ebbed, to be replaced by a sensation of light-headedness and nausea. Ah, his hopes!—his schoolboy intentions! He had wished to query Hans Deck closely on the matter of the Whimbrel infant’s death, and whether the coroner’s office, or the sheriff’s office, had ascertained that rats’ teeth would make the sort of wounds and marks to be found on the baby; he had hoped, after a sort of camaraderie had been forged, here in the morgue, that he might prevail upon Mr. Deck to show him divers reports, records, even photographic evidence (if such existed), pertaining to the death. But all this was swept away on a rising tide of nausea that terrified as it sickened: and Xavier recalled with especial horror the breakfast of boiled eggs, sausage, kidneys, and buttermilk pancakes liberally soaked in maple syrup that he had devoured with so innocent an appetite not four hours previous.
“Unlike Alexander the Great,” Hans Deck said cheerily, “I require no slave beside me, to whisper in my ear that I am mortal: so long as I stay close to my sanctuary here, hidden away behind the Courthouse so very cozily—!”
It then happened that Mr. Deck lifted one of the corpse’s limp, hairy, badly bruised arms, to let it fall back heavily upon the table; and, it seemed, poor “Buck” responded with a flicker of startled displeasure about the eyes; with the consequence that Xavier felt his vision spin, and his very soul go cold, and his knees lose all their strength: and saw the floor rear up to strike him with an amazing suddenness—!
In short, the hapless youth fainted,—as his elder companion gazed upon him with a bemused and pitying eye.
“’Tis only Death,” he murmured, “—Death, and not Life: and how might mere Death injure you, my boy?”
At Glen Mawr Manor
The Dungeon
I
A fortnight after his visit to the Winterthurn county morgue, Xavier made a decision to brave Glen Mawr Manor itself,—no matter who forbade it, or warned against it; or what fears he himself harbored. For he had suffered so potent a dream the previous night, he knew himself fated. “And if I am in danger,” he thought with somber childlike resolve, “God will protect me, for my purpose, surely, is good.”
It may have been a source of further encouragement to him to learn, by overhearing a fragment of a conversation between his mother and a lady friend, that Miss Georgina Kilgarvan was said to be confined to her bed at the Manor: and that so goodly a percentage of the Manor’s domestic staff,—both whites and Negroes—had departed, since early May, that most of the rooms were shut off; and Henry Peregrine, the family’s attorney for several decades, was strongly advising the Kilgarvans to decamp, and live elsewhere in Winterthurn for the time being. (Not only was the great old house falling into disrepair, but, as certain servants and tradesmen whispered, it seemed to be haunted by the faint, pitiable, yet unfailingly horrific wails of a baby, which emanated from the walls and ceilings at any hour of the day.)
As to any further official developments of the case: there were none. Nor did Mr. Shearwater, or his deputies, or any of the city police, take it kindly when they were questioned of their “progress” in the matter: for while they could not consider the case closed, they scarcely wished to consider it open, for divers reasons. (It was rumored that a lowlife secret society, whether the Knights of the White Camelia, or the Brethren of Jericho, or an unknown third, had taken it upon themselves to make an unofficial investigation of the case, to see whether the foul deed might have been committed by one of the Kilgarvans’ Negro servants: their prime suspect being the elderly Pride, who had long displeased whites in the area with his truculence, and his failure to ingratiate himself with them. No persons of good society would have anything to do with such riffraff “vigilante” groups, which had, it seems, sprung into being spontaneously, in the troubled year 1865, though doubtless drawing upon old Copperhead sentiment, which had been strong in the Valley: Mr. Kilgarvan in particular denounced them as “un-American,” “un-Christian,” and “un-human,” and worried that Mr. Goshawk’s Gazette did not take a firmer stand against them. So it was, Xavier knew very little about them; and the rumors, in any case, may well have been groundless.)
A firsthand particle of information pertaining to Mr. Simon Esdras Kilgarvan was gleaned, as it were, accidentally, while Xavier was in the cobbler’s shop on Charity Street, on an errand for his mother, and happened to overhear a conversation between Mrs. Harrier Von Goeler and old Miss Verity Peregrine. The philosopher had been overindulging in alcoholic spirits of late, with a childlike innocence, and unfortunate results, in numerous places about town,—not only the staid Corinthian Club, where he might be watched over, but in less decorous establishments along Water Street, and even in South Winterthurn, where only the name Kilgarvan might be known. It was said that he had startled Reverend De Forrest b
y speaking of Erasmus as if, in some way, he were yet alive, but behaving “reprehensibly”; and by musing at awkward length upon the need,—now fallen to him—to propagate a male heir, to carry on Glen Mawr’s tradition. “For Erasmus, despite his tiresome pride in his manhood, and the disagreeable heatedness of his blood, did fail most shamefully along these lines,” Simon Esdras averred, with a melancholy shake of his head, yet, it was reported, a queer sort of smile.
XAVIER KNEW HIMSELF summoned to the Manor, and fated for,—he dared not guess: when, very late of a Sabbath eve, past two o’clock by the solemn tolling of divers church bells, he woke startled from a dreamless slumber to see, gliding across the floorboards of his room, in a long white nightgown of some filmy material, barefoot, with her wavy hair atumble down her back, none other than the diminutive figure of his cousin Perdita. As in life, whether “spied upon” in church by Xavier, or glimpsed somewhat more by accident, leaving the Parthian Academy in the company of her sister, the young girl did not deign to notice him, or to acknowledge his existence by more than a frisson of her head and shoulders, so too in this most intimate of contexts she did not glance in his direction: nor did she seem to take cognizance of the fact that Colin slept beside him, faintly snoring, in his customary heavy slumber.
Xavier was so astonished, he rose on one elbow to stare, and quite risked losing her, for all his clumsy boldness: but, it seemed, the lovely girl was possessed of too much pride, and too deeply imbued a sense of propriety, to be thus routed. Making no sound, gliding on her small, white, exquisite feet, Perdita passed through an effulgence of moonlight, the silken ribands at her breast lightly fluttering, and her slender arm upraised: for she was holding a sprig of lilac to her lips, the heady fragrance of which was, in that very instant, released most powerfully into the air. “How is it possible! How,—and why!” Xavier inwardly whispered, the while, all agape, he rudely stared; and felt his besotted heart knocking against his ribs.