‘1832, and no survivors?’ We faced each other in the library – to which Holroyd, a hand on my elbow, had impulsively led me. The Gothicising of Vailes had been carried into few of its interior features, but this was one of them. The room gave the effect of a chunk of Scott’s Abbotsford (or, I suppose, Beckford’s Fonthill) lurking like a foreign body in an alien organism. The books were less shelved than entombed, and there was nothing to sit on that looked more comfortable than a choir-stall. Senderhill’s working quarters had been elsewhere – in a study combining modern convenience with Georgian elegance, but in that we had for some reason refrained from ensconcing ourselves.
‘All hands, and all passengers too. In the Bay of Biscay.’
‘Then that disposes of one idea that has passed through my mind.’ I sat down gingerly on a settle of the kind on which lovers gaze into one another’s eyes in Pre-Raphaelite canvases. ‘It occurred to me that Lucius Senderhill might once have been in a shipwreck himself.’
‘Ho-ho! An interesting conjecture! We should then have a staggering example of eidetic imagery.’
‘What the devil is that?’
‘The reviving of a past optical impression with hallucinatory clearness. But it won’t wash.’
‘Evidently not. My other conjecture has taken me definitely into the realm of the supernatural. Some ancestor of Senderhill’s had perished at sea.’
‘Ah, now you’re in the target area. But I don’t know what you mean by the supernatural. It has never seemed to me a very helpful term.’
‘Then I promise not to use it again.’ I couldn’t help laughing at the largeness of Holroyd’s dismissal of one of the master interests of his species. ‘I know how sublimely a rationalist you are. Don’t you even manage to take your friend O’Rourke and his prescient dice in your scientific stride? But tell me about the Gloriana, and how you’ve come on her.’
‘Extremely simply. I’ve spent the morning with the printed memorials of the Senderhills. Naturally, there are family histories and biographies and memoirs enough. But a very brief rummage happened to turn up Bertrand Senderhill. Only a sentence or two, because he wasn’t at all important. But something at least to the point. He was drowned at sea.’
‘But is not an ancestor of our late friend?’
‘Definitely not. He was a young unmarried man of no more than nineteen.’
‘Was he brought up here at Vailes?’
‘Yes, he was. His father – who was an Otho, which is a regular family name – was only the second son of the first Marquess. But he married a considerable heiress from the City, and for some reason he kept up, and lived at, Vailes, throughout the minority of the second Marquess. Bertrand was Lord Otho’s eldest child, and he was sent to Eton and then to Christ Church. But it seems he soon decided he’d had enough of Oxford, and he told his father that he was clearing out. He said he wanted to travel. So he was packed off on the Grand Tour.’
‘Was it still called that in 1832?’
‘You’re a most pedantic chap. Whatever it was called, off Bertrand went.’
‘With a private tutor in the traditional style?’
‘Apparently not. He said he was going to join Lord Somebody-or-other in Italy – a college friend who was already equipped in that way. Do you think that he was perhaps pulling a fast one on Mum and Dad? Ho-ho! You may be right.’
‘But it was no laughing matter, since he was incontinently drowned?’
‘Just that. The Gloriana went down.’
‘I see.’ I got up from the settle – which had been designed, I imagine, by William Morris, and creaked badly. ‘And that’s all?’
‘It’s all I know.’ Holroyd, who had been prowling the library, came to a halt before a chimney-piece much encumbered with heraldic devices. ‘The question is, did Lucius Senderhill know the story?’
‘Surely he must. After his vision, or whatever it’s to be called, he must have searched the family papers for records of shipwreck.’
‘One would suppose so. Indeed, he might well have known of the young man’s drowning already. But perhaps he never got round to it. What Tommy Hartsilver told us the other evening doesn’t suggest that he did.’
‘He must have – if you want a tolerably rational explanation of his experience.’ I paused to work this out. ‘Say that the story of Bertrand’s drowning had come to him as a child, and enormously impressed him. Then he forgot about it – even repressed it, as I believe the expression is, because it was so terrifying. Then – after his calamitous love affair and when he was in low spirits – it suddenly miraged up on him. He took a look at his blessed lake in moonlight, and suddenly he saw something.’
‘It sounds like that.’ Holroyd was staring at me doubtfully. ‘I can’t quite make it out, all the same. A hallucination of such a kind – suddenly a whole actual scene blotted out, and what you might call a first-class spectacular taking its place: well, it needs some uncommonly potent psychic charge somewhere. You understand me? Some link between that drowned youth and our Lucius Senderhill – himself still a young Senderhill, remember. A congruity of circumstances – something like that.’
‘You beckon me into deep waters. I suggest we discover what Mrs Uff is providing for lunch, and then take thought about the possibility of discovering anything else.’
‘There must be something else.’ Holroyd spoke with a sudden vehemence which surprised me. ‘We go on rummaging until we find it.’
I have admitted that it was curiosity which really took me to Vailes. But my expectations had been those of an amateur historian; it had appeared to me possible that, while allaying Lord Melchester’s unnecessary anxieties, I might take a look at some of the older papers preserved in the place for anything of interest they might contain; I certainly had no notion of being drawn into Holroyd’s kind of thing. And I believe it was at this point – and when, to be precise, my friend again used that word ‘rummage’ – that I was conscious in myself of a reluctance to pursue at Vailes any further enquiry into the affairs, whether natural or preternatural, of the Senderhill family. I believe I even had an impulse to pack my bag and send for a cab.
That I was actually under the influence of what is called a presentiment is something I would be inclined to deny, although my mind is without conviction on the point as I now write. I had never been subject to anything of the kind, and I should have received with complete scepticism the suggestion that either that or any other uncanny experience would ever visit me. There must be a streak of superstition in me, all the same. The oppressive emptiness of the mansion – which we had touched on during our dinner with Hartsilver – was coming to bear on me more heavily, and I had taken something very near a dislike to that harmless, and indeed quietly beautiful, lake.
I also felt an uneasiness in the presence of Martha Uff (who had turned up to serve us, after a fashion, at lunch), and I am glad to recall now that this was at least not mingled with any sense of hostility. Nor was I antagonised by the impatience with which Holroyd marched me off to the muniment room after the meal. His pertinacity still amused and even attracted me. Nevertheless I was some way from regretting my own conviction that no more light was going to be vouchsafed us on Lucius Senderhill’s long-past hallucination. It was almost as if I had begun to share Mrs Uff’s primitive conviction that there are matters not meant for man to know. The dangerousness of trafficking with the supernatural is an immemorial persuasion, and probably a healthy one. The ghost of Hamlet’s father might indeed have been a goblin damn’d, and tempted him towards the flood as Horatio feared. Although I had never much considered the matter, I was at least aware of the traditional notion that such apparitions may do us injury.
But that we may injure them was something that had never come within the scope of my imagining.