Mysteries of Winterthurn Read online

  (Yet, as the Irish girl half-tearfully repeated, it was very unlike her mistress to lie abed so late, for, back home, she rose each morning at seven o’clock, punctually; and the baby had never yet slept past dawn. Thus it seemed to her incontestable,—though she surely did not wish to cause any upset—that something had gone amiss; and why, indeed, should the door be locked?)

  So the minutes passed, in whispered agitation; and none of the domestic staff knew what strategy to take.

  Miss Georgina had arisen even earlier than was customary, it seemed, and had gone out, accompanied by old Pride, no one knew where: whether she had gone on an errand, afoot; or whether she had perambulated along the mist-shrouded bank of the river, in prayerful meditation, as, even in inhospitable weathers, she oft-times did,—no one was to know until, some hours afterward, the proprietor of Cutter Mills, on the Temperance Vale Road, would report his mystifying transaction with her: which only served to aggrandize, rather than diminish, the mystery. (Nor would the elderly Pride condescend to explain, to either the authorities or his fellow servants,—for he was of a sour and taciturn disposition, and generally disliked, even by the Negroes.)

  As midmorning waxed, however, and the damp flurried snow began to melt, and the overcast sky gave way, by degrees, to a sunny expanse of blue more suitable to the season, it did become evident that something had happened to Mrs. Whimbrel: and that Miss Georgina must be summoned: for Simon Esdras rarely rose before eleven o’clock, and, even then, could not be relied upon to offer any advice concerning the household,—such matters being too trivial, and too vulgar, for his attention. (Both Thérèse and Perdita stood about confused, in their school uniforms, yet little inclined to leave the Manor: nor did the old Negro ready the carriage to take them into the city: for, it seemed, this was a weekday morning quite out of the ordinary,—though what was amiss no one knew, or dared to contemplate.)

  Called forth, Miss Georgina responded with some irritation, as, to her way of thinking, her cousin might sleep until noon, should she so wish: nor did it seem entirely infelicitous that the Whimbrel infant had not yet begun to wail. But she rapped at the door soundly enough; called out Abigail’s name; rattled the knob; and even pressed her ear against the oaken panels, yet could hear nothing. (The Irish nursemaid, and one or two of the Manor staff, had similarly applied their ears to the door, earlier,—and heard, or seemed to hear, noises within, of an indefinable nature.) “It seems Mrs. Whimbrel sleeps,” Miss Georgina said, with knitted brow, and downcast shadowed eyes, “—and very soundly. Yet, I suppose, she cannot be allowed to sleep forever.”

  At this, Thérèse hurried forward, and asked if she might be of assistance: but Georgina, scarcely glancing at her, told her to return to her bed-chamber,—for what help might she be, unless she could reduce herself to a vapor, and wriggle through the keyhole? Some yards away, at the head of the stairs, little Perdita stood, sucking at a forefinger; but had more discretion than to approach Georgina. “The Honeymoon Room is locked,—decidedly locked—occupied—sequestered—taken over, indeed,” Georgina murmured, again rattling the doorknob, and drawing back her lips in a joyless smile that revealed pale gums, “but, I suppose, it cannot be allowed to remain so, forever.” And yet again she rapped on the door, with such sudden violence that one of her knuckles began to bleed.

  So the morning of May 3 passed, with wretched slowness: and several of the servants took note of the curious fact that Jupiter, far from sniffing and nosing about the upstairs hall, as one might have expected of him, betook himself, shivering, and whimpering like a cowardly pup, to hide beneath the kitchen stairs—!

  At last Simon Esdras was summoned, and came to join the others, at first vexed at being called away from his work (for he but dimly recalled that a houseguest had come to stay at the Manor, and had forgotten altogether that it was a niece from Contracoeur, with a babe in arms): then, realizing the gravity of the situation, he too rapped upon the door, and turned the knob, and called out, to inquire if something was amiss—but was greeted, like the others, with silence. By now, Miss Georgina’s composure had begun to erode; like Thérèse she paced aimlessly about, and wrung her hands, and returned to knock on the door, with ever-increasing agitation. Simon Esdras commanded Mrs. Whimbrel to unlock the door, as everyone was gravely upset; he expressed his great disappointment in her that she should be so thoughtless as to throw a household of womenfolk into disarray; raising his voice, and betraying a faint tremor of alarm, he warned that her parents and her husband would be notified of her behavior, and that she should never again be welcome at Glen Mawr.

  Alas, not even these threats could bestir her!—and now clocks throughout the house were chiming ten-thirty; and it became obvious that drastic measures must be taken.

  Simon Esdras removed his pince-nez, and absently polished them on his sleeve, the while, in a voice of methodical and uninflected calm, he stated the logical alternatives: whether to smash the door in or remove it from its brass hinges; or to order one of the menservants to scale the outer wall of the house, and break a window. As Miss Georgina seemed not to hear, or to comprehend, he repeated himself: and again repeated himself,—“The one; or the other? The door; or the window?”—while a dozen servants milled uselessly about, and Thérèse sobbingly prayed aloud that no one was harmed.

  How long the household might have remained at this snarled impasse, had not the child Perdita so precociously acted, one cannot speculate: but, of a sudden, she appeared running from the back stairs (where she had disappeared unnoticed), an ax from the woodshed in her slender arms, and an expression of affrighted resolution on her face—! It may have been that she proffered the unwieldy instrument to her uncle, or to her eldest sister, who shrank from touching it: or to one of the servants: but, as no one accepted it from her, she made the decision to use it herself; and, demonstrating a remarkable strength for one so tender in years, and so delicate of frame, she simply began to batter at the door,—once, twice, thrice, and yet a fourth time, and a fifth!—as the heavy oaken panels cracked and gave way, with sickening shrieks, beneath the ax’s mortal blows!

  Thus it was, little Perdita, gasping for breath, her wavy hair all atangle about her heated face, broke in the door of the Honeymoon Room: and exposed the hellish spectacle inside: which was of a species that defies description, even as, being viewed, it stuns and repulses the eye,—and threatens the observer with faintness.

  For there, reclining gracelessly on the antique canopied bed, amidst bloodstained sheets, and torn silken spread, one plump white breast bared as if for nursing, lay the vacant-faced Abigail Whimbrel, scarcely recognizable as the robust woman of the previous day: humming tunelessly beneath her breath the old nursery rhyme of “Baby Bunting”; and, with piteous maternal solicitude, pressing against her bosom the limp, lifeless form of her belovèd baby: the which tiny figure could be seen even from a distance of some yards, to have suffered a savage assault,—part of the throat and torso, and much of the back of the tender head, having been, it seemed, eaten away.

  “Iphigenia”

  In later years it was thought that Miss Georgina Kilgarvan began to publish her queer, crotchety, unmelodic poesy only after the disappearance of her suitor, and the death by “misadventure” of her young stepmother: but in truth this was not the case, for even as a schoolgirl at the Canandaigua Female Seminary she had placed, as it were, stealthily, certain riddlesome poems in the very literary magazine it was her responsibility to edit, under divers coy pseudonyms—one of them being “Iphigenia.”

  As to what purpose lay behind this subterfuge, and why, indeed, the name “Iphigenia” had been expressly chosen: why a young miss still in her teens should lock herself away in her room, or prowl about the woods like Crazy Eliza of old—a madwoman of Colonial years still celebrated in ballads, oft-times of a bawdy nature, in the hill country—brooding, and shunning company, and scrawling lines in a school notebook that might have been put to better use; and what, in fact, her obscure versifying meant:
no one, not even Georgina’s childhood acquaintance (for it would be to inflate the significance of their relationship, to call her friend) Miss Clarice Von Goeler, could have said.

  Certain early verses, published under her own name, did not displease her family, and even gave promise of some native talent: for, consider the solemnity, the precocious wisdom, and the near-perfection of the rime, in these lines penned by Georgina in memory of her deceased mother:

  All that, poor mortal, to thee blinds, to God is day,

  And all our fates, He knoweth:

  Thus rest assured, ’tis no confus’d way

  The spirit eternal goeth.

  (Owing to an unfortunate falling-out between the two families,—the Kilgarvans of Winterthurn City and the Battenbergs of Contracoeur—following close upon the untimely death of Georgina’s mother, it happened that Georgina was not able to visit her mother’s grave for many years, and then in secret defiance of her father’s wishes: for the Battenbergs had been quite bellicose in their insistence that their daughter be buried at home, in the Battenberg family plot in Contracoeur; and Erasmus Kilgarvan had been so despondent, and, it may be, had harbored so potent a silent fury against his departed wife, that he had not protested. Nor had Georgina been allowed, owing to the Judge’s extreme sensitivity on the subject, to speak of her mother in his presence, let alone betray effusive tears and sentiment. Yet, when with childish hope she presented him with this little poem, it was said that he knit his brow, and brushed tears from his eyes, and gripped his daughter’s arm with sudden passion, murmuring: “Ah, yes, ’tis so; ’tis ever so!—All our fates, He knoweth—”)

  With the passage of time, however, as Georgina grew into a tall, willowy, headstrong young miss, a queer admixture of the outspoken and the taciturn, the gregarious and the reclusive (for while she thrived, as it were, upon the rougher sort of schoolgirl athletic activities, and had an insatiable appetite for chairing meetings, she nonetheless rejoiced in solitude, and could vanish for hours at a time),—as she encountered new and alien influences, in New York City primarily (and precisely what those influences were, with whom she was intimate while attending Barnard, no one in Winterthurn, not even Miss Von Goeler, was to know),—as, in short, she left behind the simplicities of childhood, and took on the knotty complexities of adulthood, her poetical talent was by degrees corrupted, and a new and ever more strident voice asserted itself, to the despair of all. Now there were rude jarring images, and dashed-off lines; a penchant for the sickly, the morbid, the willfully unfeminine; an air not of Christian calm, but of pagan febricity. It was scarcely a secret in Winterthurn that those poems by the poetess “Iphigenia,” appearing irregularly in journals of such varying prestige as the local Gazette, and Hudson Valley Leaves, and Vanderpoel Review, and Atlantic Monthly, were by Miss Georgina Kilgarvan of Winterthurn: scarcely a secret, too, that her family very much objected to them, and were responsible for the eventual curtailment of the poetess’s “career,”—though, as it would turn out, upward of five hundred of these incoherent scribblings were to be found, in packets of creamy-rose stationery, held together by yarn looped through them in the spine, amidst the spinster’s personal effects after her death.

  That “Iphigenia” was a foreign-sounding name, arcane, enigmatic, suggestive of the exotic and the forbidden, no one could doubt: that it had been chosen for reasons of subterfuge and coyness, seemed altogether plain. A Greek goddess?—a mortal woman?—a personage from Attic tragedy, whose fate might be as repulsive to consider, as it was distant from the self-evident truths of Christian doctrine? Such speculations freely aired themselves, amidst acquaintances of the Kilgarvans, and, indeed, those who scarcely knew them at all,—for Winterthurn City was, in those times, so modestly populated (containing some twenty thousand persons, if South Winterthurn were included) as to allow everyone to know everyone else, and to gossip, whether idly or maliciously, with unstinting zest.

  And who should not think it a matter for speculation that Miss Georgina Kilgarvan, the Judge’s daughter, should so forget her station in society, and her obligations to her father’s rank, as to wish to publish, for the smiling perusal of all, such overexuberant lines as these,—

  Blow,—winds! Toss,—sea!

  ’Tis but my Soul

  In shameless hunger—

  Of Thee!

  and,

  In my skull the mourners tramp’d—

  & church bells sounded, to & fro—

  The very air turned—Inky—

  ’Til Your love drew me thru—

  and,

  Father of All—

  Sin do—appall—

  Thy Love so near—

  E’en terror, endear—

  Meritorious Christian sentiment, yet was the tone of such verse not somehow improper?—were the rhythms not too forced, too sprightly, indeed, too suggestive of female excitation? It was suspected that the Winterthurn Gazette published a dozen of Miss Georgina’s poems, over a period of years, solely because the elderly proprietress of the “Poetry Page” had long been a champion of Georgina’s, harking back to Georgina’s schoolgirl days; it was known that Hudson Valley Leaves, a ladies’ venture exclusively, required of its contributors that they help defray printing costs, and agree to buy up a number of copies of each issue in which their work appeared. As to what possessed the poetry editors of the more distinguished journals to publish, even sparingly as they did, “Iphigenia’s” awkward effusions,—no one in Winterthurn could have said. Even Miss Clarice Von Goeler professed surprise: for her religious odes, though strictly metered and unfailingly rimed, were consistently rejected by both the Vanderpoel Review and the Atlantic Monthly.

  AS XAVIER KILGARVAN was balked in his earliest effort to gain access to the scene of the crime, or, by firsthand detection, to attempt to penetrate, pierce, unravel, illuminate, or in any wise solve, the mystery of the infant Whimbrel’s death, he directed his boyish energies to poking about, as it were, in agèd back issues of the Gazette, kindly provided for him by a librarian: and, in his confused hope that he might, all by accident, hit upon some stray clue regarding the catastrophe, he stumbled upon a number of “Iphigenia’s” poems, dating back to many years before his own birth. The most memorable of the verses he copied out, he knew not altogether why, in a school notebook,—

  Know, Sweet Babe—

  Thy Father’s hand—

  Rudders—all thou fearest—

  ’Tis of Him—of him—

  (& not of me—)

  These Seraphim sing—

  Thou hearest—!

  Slaughtered Lambs

  It was at the very end of May, on a humid, overcast, hazily warm morning,—now some twenty-six days since the tragedy at Glen Mawr Manor—that Xavier recklessly played truant from school, and inveigled his brother Colin into accompanying him, that they might investigate a report of “mysteriously slaughtered lambs” belonging to a farmer named Upchurch, whose property bordered that of Glen Mawr Manor: a boyish excursion that not only would result in no clear evidence, clues, or leads, so far as Xavier was concerned, but would cause, for reasons ever to remain obscure, an actual rift between the brothers.

  In brooding over the incident afterward, Xavier would not know whether to blame himself,—for, indeed, Mr. Kilgarvan, sensing his son’s unwholesome interest in the “mystery” at the Manor, had expressly forbidden him to pursue it (“You are not to go anywhere near Glen Mawr,” he said, so forgetting himself that he gripped Xavier’s shoulder hard, and made the slender boy wince, “not because the place is accursed, not because your relatives would, in any case, turn you away, but because I, your father, forbid it”)—or whether to blame the queer hurtful malaise of that spring morning, which, quite apart from the piteous and sickening spectacle of the mutilated lambs themselves, suggested some causeless rift in the human soul: the heavy, settled, hazy air of a premature summer subject to random incursions of chill, from a capricious northeast wind that blew across the mountains. What most distu
rbed the youthful “detective” (for so, in truth, the sixteen-year-old schoolboy secretly thought himself) was that events from this date onward seemed to proceed not only with a logic of their own but with a logic antithetical to his wishes: which was never the case, so far as he could determine, in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, C. Auguste Dupin, George B. Jashber, or the canny Pudd’nhead Wilson.

  Xavier is to be forgiven a certain canniness of his own, verging, I suppose, upon actual improbity, when, while sulkily acceding to his father’s unusually harsh admonition, in his innermost heart he thought, Xavier Kilgarvan does what he wishes,—what Mystery requires of him, to be solved.

  So it was, he enjoined Colin to absent himself from a morning’s work at the livery stable on Railroad Street, and to bicycle some ten miles out into the country, that they might investigate this most recent in a series of unexplained incidents involving livestock, in the general vicinity of Glen Mawr Manor. (Over a period of several weeks there had been isolated reports of slaughtered and part-devoured kids, piglets, calves, and spring lambs; a yearling pony and a fully mature sheep had died from a loss of blood.) As to what predators were responsible for these assaults,—the sheriff’s office could offer only the theory that they had been committed by a pack of wild dogs, unusually vicious coyotes, or actual wolves (for, in these years long past, timber wolves still inhabited the mountainous terrain surrounding Mt. Provenance). It goes without saying that the more ignorantly superstitious amongst the country folk murmured of certain fabulous creatures about whom mountain legends had long accrued,—the giant snowy-white “King of the Wolves,” batlike flying reptiles with hooked beaks, great bloodsucking vampire bats, et al.; and since whispered rumors had spread of Mrs. Whimbrel’s incoherent mutterings, before her collapse, of “angels” and “angel-demons,” it naturally followed that such shadowy creatures were sighted as well,—though in no case could witnesses agree upon a description. (Nor did anyone really know what Abigail Whimbrel had raved of, in her dazed and delirious state, on the morning of May 3: for so far as the authorities were concerned, her near-unconscious condition precluded anything approaching testimony, or a reliable account.)