Mysteries of Winterthurn Read online

  When the Kilgarvan boys arrived at the Upchurch farm, the sheriff and his deputies had already departed, and Upchurch, discovered in the act of burying the dead lambs, did not seem overly pleased to see them approach: for there had been a great many “gawkers and gapers,” as he expressed it, milling about his property through the morning, and he was sick of busybodies tramping in his pasture. Xavier swallowed his pride, and asked only if he and Colin might “examine” the corpses: whereupon the shrewd Mr. Upchurch, handing over his shovel to Xavier, told him they were welcome to examine all they wished, if their stomachs could bear it; provided they completed the job of burial,—making certain that the lambs were buried at least four feet deep, so that scavengers should not unearth them.

  Xavier readily assented to this proposition, and Colin, less readily: for the elder boy, being rather more acquainted with manual labor than his brother, looked upon it with less favor.

  Before Mr. Upchurch excused himself, Xavier dared to ask him a few questions regarding the lambs: and was informed that the three corpses had been discovered very early that morning, in the lower pasture; that the bleating of the ewes (which continued still,—an uncanny, stirring sound not unlike a human keening) first aroused the farmer’s attention; that nothing quite like it had happened in the past, though, in Upchurch’s grandfather’s time, white-furred wolves some ten feet in length made forays into barnyards when their natural prey was scarce in the mountains,—albeit no one had ever trapped or shot one of these creatures, nor had they been sighted in the past thirty years. Frank Shearwater, the sheriff of Winterthurn County, was of the opinion that wild dogs were responsible for the slaughter, and so Upchurch intended to set out steel-jawed traps to protect his livestock; but, as he told the boys with some bitterness, he halfway wondered if he should retain a Berwick Square attorney (“Berwick Square” having reference to professional gentlemen—lawyers, physicians, stockbrokers—of a reputedly élite, or in any case costly, stature) to inquire into bringing a lawsuit against the Kilgarvans of Glen Mawr Manor, since, in the opinions of many country people, it was from the Manor these “predators” came. Seeing the boys’ startled expressions, Upchurch went on to say that the entire clan of Kilgarvans,—harking back to Colonial times—were a bloodthirsty lot, as apt to turn upon their own kin as upon outsiders: and it was not so very surprising, to those who knew of their ways, that an infant should be killed up there, since numberless queer things had transpired in the Manor, over the years,—though he was not one to speak idly and irresponsibly. His neighbor Phineas Cutter, however, told a most suspicious tale indeed, of the “Blue Nun,” who had awakened him before dawn on the very morning the killing was discovered . . .

  The farmer spoke with such cold vehemence, and with so furrowed a brow, that neither Xavier nor Colin was inclined, as the reader might well imagine, to reveal his identity; or to choose to interrogate the older man much further. Xavier said, in a faltering voice, that he did not quite see how any predators, as such, might come from the Manor: for he had heard that the Kilgarvans’ mastiff, though toothless with age, and surely innocent, had been summarily shot by one of the sheriff’s deputies, at the sheriff’s command, when, at the very first, it was imagined that the dog had somehow killed the baby—and the Kilgarvans kept no other beasts at the present time. This reasonable objection Upchurch negligently brushed aside, and reiterated his notion of bringing a lawsuit against the “high and mighty” Kilgarvans: for whether the predators be natural or unnatural creatures, whether, like dogs, they crept along the earth or, like “demon birds,” they flew, there was growing suspicion in the neighborhood that the Kilgarvans, and only they, were responsible for the slaughtered livestock. In turning abruptly away, Upchurch wagged a forefinger at Xavier, and instructed him to bury the lambs deep, and carefully, before he left.

  As exhilarating a prospect as it had seemed, earlier that morning, to investigate with their own eyes the several slaughtered lambs of which they had just heard (news of any kind spreading swiftly through the city, well in anticipation of the Gazette), the actual experience was altogether different: for neither boy was truly prepared for the stark, pitiful, palpable reality of the small corpses. Xavier, being easily sickened, and inclining toward the squeamish, had to resist with all his strength the impulse to gag; and the sudden childlike desire to weep, or to run away. For the physicality of the dead lambs (involving, as it did, the presence of buzzing bottle-green flies, and swarms of red ants) was nearly too much for him, and struck him, he knew not why, as a kind of betrayal . . . When the great Vidocq came upon murdered men and women, or, indeed, had a hand in murdering them himself; when Jonathan Whicher of the original “Scotland Yard” examined a corpse; when such amateur detectives as Dupin and Holmes arrived at the scene of a crime—why, it had never seemed to greatly distress them that an actual physical presence lay before them: nor did it strike the reader, by way of the language employed, that something had truly occurred of an irreversible and irremediable sort. For now, blinking and staring at the dead lambs, Xavier saw not only victims, corpses, and evidence, but fellow sentient beings who had, not long previously, been alive; and were now dead. And he felt a sickened paralysis, as the unwanted thought entered his brain that, even should he solve the mystery, even should there be a “mystery” to be “solved,” the lambs would not live again: for their time on earth was over.

  Such niceties of thought did not suggest themselves to Colin, who merely grunted in disgust: observing that the lambs were, indeed, “dead and done for,—wounded in the necks”: that there was nothing else to be seen, or learned: that Upchurch had played them for fools, and they well deserved their ill-luck, in being required to dig a grave four feet deep in such resistant, clayey soil. For emphasis, Colin gave Xavier a sharp little blow on the upper arm; and muttered that he had half a mind not even to assist him, since this wild-goose chase was primarily Xavier’s doing.

  Xavier coolly replied that he would be pleased to dig the grave himself; and that he hoped to gain more from the investigation than Colin’s cursory discoveries.

  So it was, Xavier swallowed hard, and forced himself to examine the pitiful creatures more closely, while Colin, contented with turning them over with his foot, stood with arms akimbo, whistling thinly under his breath. Xavier blinked tears of helpless sympathy from his eyes: for, ah! were the baby animals not sweet, and innocent, and comely, even in their stiffened postures?—was not the odor of their spilt blood and violated flesh poignant?—did they not seem to gaze at him, through fine-lashed eyes, with expressions of such soulful intelligence, he could well frighten himself with thinking he stared into a mirror? If these be but animal corpses, the youth uneasily pondered, how shall I feel, confronted with a human corpse? He would, he resolved, beg of the county coroner, Hans Deck, that he might one day be allowed admittance into the morgue,—thereby to see an actual corpse, and to steel himself against cowardly responses.

  Gradually, his strength, his calm, and his reason returned; and he took out of his jacket his artist’s sketchbook and a piece of charcoal, that he might quickly limn the spectacle before him; telling the disgruntled Colin that he had lately made inquiries into the techniques of killing employed by certain canines, and believed that these lambs must have been killed by another sort of creature after all. A dog plunges to the kill by hamstringing an animal, and ripping out its stomach; a coyote, by crushing the larynx, thereby inducing strangulation; a wolf . . . “One can readily see that these lambs have been attacked from above,” Xavier said, “for note the deep puncture marks along the spines, and on the necks: and is it likely that these marks have been made by canine teeth? Rather more likely by claws, or talons. It is said that dogs and coyotes will eat their way through their prey by way of the hindquarters, and into the stomach, whereas these victims have been assaulted at the neck, and the rear of the head,—as, it seems, Abigail Whimbrel’s baby was assaulted—and, too, not one rib has been cracked in all three: and canines rejoice in cracking
ribs as they feed. Ah, what a pity, that the pasture is all grass, and there are no prints, for then we should assuredly know—! Do you not think it suspicious, too, Colin, that so little of the carcasses has been devoured—?”

  As Colin’s interest in the slaughtered lambs had rapidly diminished, and was not to be pricked even by his brother’s surprising recitation of facts, still less by “suspicion,” his reply was but a murmur of bland assent; and he detached himself from the scene, to drift off in the direction of a most idyllic pond, or waterhole, a short distance away at the foot of a grassy slope. If Xavier was somewhat disappointed in his brother’s response, he gave no sign, but continued with his rapid sketches, making one after the other with such dexterity (though, it should be said, not always with scrupulous accuracy), it almost seemed his fingers moved of their own volition: and allowed him that curious, and somehow elating, sensation he invariably had while drawing, or composing tunes at the piano,—of the more enhancing his senses by their simple employment. For did it not seem to him, as he sketched the dead lambs, and the contours of the pasture about them, and the irregular outline of a hedgerow beyond, even as he attempted, with deft rough strokes of his charcoal stick, to suggest the texture, and the hazy glowering oppression, of the sky overhead,—did it not seem that, by these efforts, he could suddenly see more?—that it might be his privilege, in the next minute or two, to see beyond?

  AS, IN THE first confused minutes when Mr. Shearwater, the county sheriff, and several of his deputies arrived at Glen Mawr Manor, late in the morning of May 3, it seemed to be the consensus,—most vociferously, though disjointedly, expressed by Miss Georgina Kilgarvan—that a pet dog, grown unaccountably vicious, had attacked the baby during the night, it seemed only reasonable that the deputies seek out the cowering, quivering, clearly terrified creature, in his burrow beneath a stairway: and, with very little hesitation or compunction, execute him at once. Thus, the summary end of the agèd, near-toothless, arthritic Jupiter, a mastiff of yet-noble proportions, who had, in his prime, been Judge Kilgarvan’s especial favorite: subject to this cruel dismissal, for being suspected of an act not in his character, and performed in a locked room.

  That Jupiter was responsible for the infant Whimbrel’s death is plainly absurd; yet there were to be a number of persons, among them the stubborn Simon Esdras, who insisted that this was so: though not, for one reason or another, the “Blue Nun,” who afterward changed her opinion, to concur with the coroner’s report,—that the specific cause of death was unknown, but rats (of the gigantic Norway species) were most likely to blame. As for the bereft mother’s ravings of angels, and angel-demons, and Baby Jesus,—these were so clearly the consequence of a disordered imagination, drawn in part from a remarkably lifelike mural painted on the wall and ceiling, that they were dismissed as worthless: albeit Mr. Shearwater and his men treated Mrs. Whimbrel,—as, indeed, they treated the entire Kilgarvan household—with unfailing if guarded courtesy.

  Initially distracted, and speaking with a frightened stammer, Simon Esdras rallied by degrees: and seemed finally to take solace in the “tragical syllogism,” as he expressed it, that, as Jupiter had been responsible for the outrage, and Jupiter had been removed from the scene with such dispatch, the task of the authorities would seem to be completed: and they might now take their leave. For naught remained for the principals save the usual exigencies of grief, yet another visit to the churchyard,—this time, he supposed, far away in Contracoeur: and he very much doubted he would be able to attend.

  So far as Thérèse and Perdita were concerned, their stunned and bewildered air, their youth, and what gave every impression of their genuine ignorance, quite precluded them from giving testimony: nor were the servants helpful, beyond a few much-repeated statements, and some contradictory information, of minimal worth. When, later in the day, Phineas Cutter reported the visit of Miss Georgina to his establishment, and the nature of her purchase, Mr. Shearwater returned to speak with her; but satisfied himself as to her innocence, as it were, regarding any especial information. (Miss Georgina, though visibly shaken, and drained of that palely radiant energy which oft-times suffused her, answered the sheriff’s several questions in a small, still, yet never inaudible voice; and made an excellent impression on him,—for had he not heard idle tales of the “Blue Nun” for many years?—in her somber but freshly ironed black muslin housedress, with stand-up collar in Belgian lace, and impeccably starched cuffs. Why she had gone out so unusually early in the day,—why she had made her purchase of fifty pounds of quicklime not seven hours, it was estimated, after the tragedy,—was explained very simply: she realized that her need for the gardening aid was pressing, as it had been her intention to work that morning, indeed, through the morning, in the rose-garden at the rear of the house, which had been shamefully neglected of late; and which her belovèd father had particularly prized . . .)

  Meeting young Harmon Bunting, the assistant pastor of Grace Episcopal Church, who was, it seems, on his way to the Manor to offer the solace of their common faith to the Kilgarvans, Sheriff Frank Shearwater shook his hand, and spoke with him for several minutes, happening to mention, in an abashed aside, that he had long been curious as to Miss Georgina’s true self,—for tongues did wag in Winterthurn City, and his own womenfolk were not guiltless!—but found their interview, though brief and formal, highly gratifying, and rewarding in its own way. This attempt at a species of camaraderie between Mr. Shearwater (who was well regarded in the county, but scarcely well born), and Mr. Bunting (the descendant of the Joshua Bunting who had, some two hundred thirty years previous, led an entirely successful attack against a bastion on the Winterthurn River, manned by the settlers of New Sweden), came to very little, as the youthful pastor would never stoop to common gossip about one of his parishioners, let alone a personage of such distinction as Erasmus Kilgarvan’s eldest daughter. In a courteous, but unmistakably prim, reply, Mr. Bunting said that an interview with a lady must invariably be highly gratifying, and doubtless rewarding as well: but he could not imagine why, in this hour of fresh grief, poor Miss Kilgarvan had been harassed.

  DESPITE THE FINDINGS of the authorities, and a lengthy article on the front page of the Gazette, calculated to have a calming effect upon the inhabitants of the area (for Mr. Osmyn Goshawk, the editor and publisher of the paper, had always had the highest regard for Erasmus Kilgarvan), it was the case that tongues wagged and wagged, with an ever-increasing fervor, in the days and weeks to follow. The coroner’s suspicion of Norway rats, made public, was scandalous and titillating, indeed: all of Winterthurn City, from the most affluent households descending to the most impoverished, reasoned that it should never be outlived that rats of any sort might be acknowledged at Glen Mawr Manor,—the “Showplace of the Valley,” as Phillips Goode had boastfully named it. Yet the verdict came too quickly, and perhaps even too plausibly, to satisfy: and was brushed aside by many, with as much elated contempt as the notion that the Judge’s agèd mastiff had been guilty. A brutal deed it had been, but had it necessarily been the work of a mere brute—? Might not a human agent (whether mortal or demonic) have been involved—?

  So disagreeable were most of the rumors and speculations that spread through the town in May, so improbable the reports of “eyewitnesses,” that I hesitate to include here more than a brief sampling, drawn from R. S. Gilder’s copious study, The Kilgarvans of Glen Mawr Manor: An History and an Interpretation (1899); but such an approach is required, if the reader is to grasp the mentality of the times, and the fulsome barrage of fables, fancies, tales, and outright lies that the youthful detective confronted, in his unflagging, if oft-times directionless, search for the Truth.

  The Westergaards, whose seventy-acre estate was contiguous with Glen Mawr on the east, claimed to see, at dusk, “undulating figures of an unearthly luminosity” playing in the pine and beech woods belonging to the Kilgarvans: but had no success in identifying them, let alone capturing them (as young Valentine Westergaard wished to do).
Miss Imogene Westergaard, the outspoken and somewhat free-thinking heiress daughter of the Colonel, twenty-seven years old but fired with the verve of a self-proclaimed spinster twice her age, insisted that these “undulating figures” approached her, with an air of actual enticement, while she walked her twin Irish terriers along the river path: but that the dogs’ frenzied yapping drove them away. (Level-headed as Miss Westergaard was in most respects, observers believed that her testimony could not be taken seriously, in this case, as her clumsy descriptions of angels, cherubs, or vaporous human infants resembled too closely the ravings of Abigail Whimbrel, and had doubtless been influenced by them. And Miss Westergaard’s ire was the more fueled, when, attempting to visit Georgina a fortnight after the tragedy, she was told by a most discourteous black butler that his mistress was not in: and cared not to receive visitors when she was.)

  As for Miss Georgina,—of a sudden everyone whispered of her, and knew fresh news of the “Blue Nun,” oft of a highly contradictory and implausible nature! For instance, it was said that she had locked herself in her bed-chamber, and refused most foods; that she disciplined herself harshly,—taking purges of a violent nature, administering enemas and douches of the most pitiless sort, injuring herself with hat-pins, candle-flames, riding crops, etc.; that she would communicate only with old Pride, and then through a locked door. Ringgold Peregrine, Henry’s son, a corpulent, sweet-natured, idle youth, swore that he had seen Miss Georgina walking in the woods, at the edge of Juniper Park: that she was dressed in her habitual mourning clothes, which must have been uncomfortably warm in the sunshine; that she was heavily veiled, with a dark velvet hood, instead of a hat, completely covering her head; that she carried what Ringgold supposed to be a walking stick at first, but which was, in fact, a riding crop . . . What was surprising was Miss Georgina’s behavior: for, as she walked along, hurrying, in a swaying erratic stride, of a kind young Ringgold had never observed in a lady, she paused frequently to swipe at the ground with the riding crop, as if something invisible were creeping along beside her and nipping at her ankles. Despite the congenital slothfulness for which Ringgold was known amongst his schoolmates, he was, it seems, well-mannered enough when the situation arose: and knew that, as a Peregrine, it might well be deemed his responsibility to “protect” Miss Georgina Kilgarvan if she required protection,—for it was most unusual, indeed, to glimpse a lady of Miss Georgina’s stature strolling without an escort in Juniper Park. Ringgold therefore called out to her, to ask if she needed assistance: whereupon Miss Georgina behaved yet more oddly, in glancing over her shoulder at him for the briefest of instants (with what expression—whether surprise, alarm, chagrin, ire—he could not discern through her thick veil), then turning away, and walking hurriedly deeper into the woods, with no word or sign of recognition. Poor Ringgold, already somewhat short of breath, stood on the path staring after her, in utter perplexity, and watched as her somber figure disappeared into the woods, with very little sound,—for, indeed, it seemed to him that even the birds had ceased their chattering, and the squirrels their raucous scolding, as the “Blue Nun” passed rapidly beneath.