The following day, a strange peace descended upon Baker Street. Dr Watson and Sir Percival were absent, the focus of their investigations having shifted to the area around Warminster, and, with the exception of one or two stray Colonel Middletons, we had few callers. Mr Holmes barely left his room, consuming a great deal of brown ale and the better part of a Chatsworth ham, while sending out for volumes which included, if I remember correctly, A Beginner’s Guide to Boxing Slang, Recollections of a Hare-Coursing Man, Forgotten Card Games of the Regency and a book that arrived in discreet brown-paper covers entitled The Rake’s Lexicon. Mrs Hudson meanwhile directed our daily household routines with her usual vigour, and took advantage of Dr Watson’s absence to begin one or two larger cleaning projects of the sort generally impossible when both gentlemen were in residence.
Nevertheless, I was aware that, for all her serenity, she too was growing impatient, and that afternoon she took the step of waiting on Mr Rumbelow, who had been tasked with locating Pauncefoot, Viscount Wrexham’s former valet. While she was gone, I set off, in rather sombre mood, to my next lesson in Bloomsbury Square. On arriving there, it was some consolation to find that Miss Peters refused to be downcast.
‘Nonsense, Flottie! Of course Mrs Hudson will sort it all out. She always does. Rupert says the talk at his club is all about the Viscount having been kidnapped by Nihilists who want to convert him to their views. Are Nihilists like Methodists, Flottie? If so, it can’t be much fun for him, with nothing to drink and having to listen to all those hymns. Now, do tell me, what news about that haunted house of yours?’
Miss Peters, who took a great deal of interest in the clothes of other young ladies, had been much taken by my description of Mrs Summersby, the young American lady, and frequently inquired after her, even though I had heard no new bulletins from Mr Rumbelow about the situation at Broomheath Hall. It was Miss Peters’s belief that Mrs Summersby required rescuing. She found it impossible to believe that an attractive young lady with good taste in matters of feminine attire could possibly remain in such a remote spot except under protest. Her husband, Miss Peters felt certain, was a brute.
‘I’m sure he must beat her, Flottie,’ she insisted. ‘Or perhaps she has a dreadful secret, a dark stain on her past which means she must hide herself away from the world like a nun.’
This last remark was overheard by Mr Spencer, who had joined us in the library.
‘Really, Hetty, for a young lady who has surely never got much beyond the cover of a Gothic novel in her life, you have a remarkably well developed instinct for horror. Please ignore her, Miss Flotsam. I hope you are well?’
My lesson that week was largely geographical, concerning the lines of the tropics and the significance of the Equator, and all about latitude and longitude. With the help of a very big globe, Mr Spencer showed me how the world could be reduced to a simple grid where any position could be expressed in terms of degrees, minutes and seconds, and he explained some of the difficulties in calculating longitude. He had a rare ability to convey these matters in such a conversational way that it never really felt like a lesson. And throughout he would smile so charmingly with those brown eyes of his that I felt sure, on more than one occasion, that Miss Peters had forgotten to breathe.
With all the other excitements in my life, I had rather forgotten the mysterious message Reynolds had asked me to convey to Mrs Hudson; but I was reminded of it later that evening when, as I came to depart, he slipped a note into my palm.
‘For Mrs Hudson,’ he whispered solemnly, and sent me on my way with the most elegant of bows.
I found the housekeeper at home on my return, busily engaged in chopping carrots.
‘Ah, Flotsam,’ she greeted me, ‘grab a knife and join me. There’s all the vegetables still to prepare, I’m afraid. I’m only just back from Mr Rumbelow’s, and am a little behind as a result.’
‘Did he have any news, ma’am?’ I asked hopefully, but my inquiry was met with a shake of the head.
‘I’m afraid not, Flottie. He has been in contact with the executors of Lord Beaumaris’s estate and finds that no record was kept of Pauncefoot’s new position. The valet simply worked two weeks’ notice and went. No forwarding address at all, apparently.’
I digested this as I removed my coat and hung it carefully behind the door.
‘Well, we don’t know for certain that he’d have been any help to us, do we, ma’am?’
She lopped the pointed end off a carrot with some force.
‘That’s true, Flottie. But I would most certainly have liked to speak to him all the same.’
When I gave her Reynolds’s note, she read it with a smile and then tossed it back to me.
‘Well, that’s some good news at least. Have a look, Flottie. You might find it of interest…’
The note was written in the butler’s rather beautiful handwriting and the message was succinct.
‘Turkish Delight unplaced in Lincolnshire Handicap,’ it read. ‘Cook and I most grateful for your warning. James, alas, could not be dissuaded.’
‘So that’s what he meant by Turkish Delight, ma’am! A horse! I thought he meant something completely different!’
But instead of laughing along with me as I expected, Mrs Hudson merely turned her attention to her chopping board. ‘Indeed, Flotsam,’ she agreed, ‘it would be an easy mistake to make, wouldn’t it?’ And with that solemn utterance, she once again engaged with the vegetables.
Shortly after the last carrot had been dealt with, but before Mrs Hudson and I had finished with the parsnips, Scraggs arrived.
I had scarcely seen him since the day he presented me with the bluebells, and I blushed a little on his arrival, but he gave me an affectionate grin and proceeded to help himself to some stray slices of carrot.
‘Blimey, Mrs H, you’ve had me chasing all over the place,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘I’ve been hanging around the docks like a dose of the… Well, like a dose of something nasty. This man Smith who found the ring…’
‘Yes, Scraggs?’ she asked, drying her hands carefully. ‘You’ve found him?’
‘Nah!’ he replied, unabashed. ‘And d’you know why not? I’ll tell you, Mrs H. Cos he doesn’t exist.’
The housekeeper returned the towel neatly to its place and then lowered herself into a seat by the kitchen table. Only a twitch of her eyebrow betrayed her interest.
‘Go on, Scraggs. Tell me more.’
And so we heard the full story of Scraggs’s search for the man who had claimed the discovery of Viscount Wrexham’s ring. His name and address had appeared in the large pile of police papers deposited by Sir Percival on the table upstairs. But when Scraggs had visited the address, a cheap boarding house in Shadwell, he had found no record of a lodger called Smith.
‘Of course my first thought was that he hadn’t wanted to give the police his real name. Perhaps he’d taken it in hoping for a reward, then got cold feet or something. So I went and looked up the bobby on duty at the time. I know him a bit. He’s all right. Gave me a good description, he did. Said the bloke was tall, with a big black beard, and bald as a coot. You don’t forget a man like that, he said. Spoke almost like a gentleman, he thought. So I went back to the lodgings in Shadwell with that description, but still no luck. Nobody looking like that had been staying there, nor at any of the places nearby. I checked ’em all, and nothing. I’m telling you, Mrs H, this man Smith is phoney. I don’t care who looks for him. They ain’t going to find him.’
To my surprise, this news was greeted by Mrs Hudson with quiet satisfaction. Far from despairing as another door closed in our faces, she seemed to take unusual comfort in this further proof of the problem’s impenetrability.
‘No Smith, no Pauncefoot…’ she murmured when Scraggs had left us. ‘Really, Flotsam, this grows more interesting by the day.’
And no Colonel Middleton either, it seemed, for the noises reaching Baker Street from Warminster were growing less and less encouraging. The following day, the gentlemen were back, disgruntled and weary, and in lower spirits than I had ever seen them. The Prince Leopold had proved a serviceable enough inn but nothing about it had suggested any connection to the Lazarus Testament. Neither the overt inquiries of the police nor the covert observations of Dr Watson and Sir Percival had succeeded in establishing any path for further investigation. No Colonel Middletons were known in the area. Teddington meant nothing to the people there, and Andover was known to them only as the place where the vicar had found his wife. The word tyrant simply made them think of Napoleon.
So the expedition returned, disconsolate. Sir Percival, it was understood, was expecting an extremely uncomfortable reception in Whitehall. Inspector Mapperley was grown so morose he barely spoke. That night Mr Holmes took up his violin and filled the house with another haunting melody.
Mrs Hudson, hearing it, shuddered a little, and sent me out to call on Mr Trelawney, the caretaker at the Albany, to ask him for a description of Viscount Wrexham’s valet.
Next morning, spring returned to the streets of London, filling them with a brightness and a freshness and a promise of warmth that could not help but lift my spirits. I had already run an errand to Covent Garden and another to Regent Street, and Mrs Hudson and I were at work washing up the breakfast things, when we heard a tentative tapping on the kitchen door. There, at the foot of the area steps, stood a woman of about sixty years of age, tidily but discreetly clad in mourning. From the manner of her dress, she might have been the widow of a shopkeeper but there was a pleasant brightness in her smile that belied the melancholy of her clothing.
‘Mrs Hudson?’ she asked, stepping cautiously inside and holding out her hand. ‘Mr Rumbelow sent me. My name is Elsie.’
Miss Elsie Blenkinsop turned out to be a woman of irrepressible good spirits, who, it seemed, had never allowed the reverses and the disappointments of her existence to alter her fundamental belief that life was as good as you made it, and that however bad things were, a person still had a lot to be thankful for. She perched on the edge of one of our kitchen chairs as lightly as a sparrow and filled the room with a warm breeze of good humour. And yet, her eyes were often full of tears, too, for the cause of her visit was a sad one. She lived in Brighton, she said, and she had seen Mrs Hudson’s advertisement in a local newspaper.
‘It came as a terrible shock to me,’ she told us, ‘because till then I’d no idea there was anything wrong with Bertie. I’d… I’d… Well, I’d been hoping that he might visit me…’
‘You were in touch with Mr Swan, then?’ Mrs Hudson asked gently.
‘No… Well, not for many years… It cut me up something terrible it did, once upon a time, his going away… Still, you have to make the best of these things don’t you? And I always knew he was doing what was right for him…’
Slowly and with great kindness, Mrs Hudson drew from her the full story.
Albert Swan and Elsie Blenkinsop, it emerged, had known each other as children. They were born in adjoining cottages in a village under the Downs and had been playmates from their earliest days. And they had been happy days, according to Miss Blenkinsop. The two of them were joined in their games by Bob, another child of the village, and the three of them were considered inseparable.
‘Oh, what days we had!’ Miss Blenkinsop sighed. ‘Climbing trees and pinching apples, fishing in the stream with hooks we made from old nails…’ She paused, as if to view again that sunny landscape. ‘I thought life would always be like that,’ she reflected.
But as the three children grew, they quickly found the world had other ideas. Elsie was found a place in service as scullery maid at the local manor, and Bob followed her there a few weeks later as boot boy. Albert, whose father had ambitions for him, was put to work as an errand boy with the local seed merchant.
‘He was always the golden one, was Bertie,’ Miss Blenkinsop remembered. ‘Bob was cleverer, perhaps, and everyone knew he’d do well for himself, but it was Bertie I preferred. He was strong and ever so cheerful and you always felt there was nothing he couldn’t do. He kissed me in the orchard one May Day and, you know, I thought I was the most blessed girl that ever lived.’
She laughed as she told us, but also dabbed at the corner of her eye with her handkerchief.
‘Of course, it couldn’t last. Bertie soon became a favourite with his boss and in the end got the chance to travel to South Africa. His boss knew someone there who could offer him a place. Oh, it was a great chance for him, no doubt about it, but I cried all night when he told me. He promised to write, and to be fair to him he kept his word for ten months or more. I still have the letters. But you know how these things go! We were only children really, and our lives were changing. First Bob left the village and went into service in a gentleman’s house in London, and then a little later Bertie’s letters stopped. I still wrote to him after that, but he’d moved lodgings and the letters all came back to me. A long time later I heard he’d done well for himself and married someone with money. And I was happy for him, I really was.’
Again she smiled at us, and Mrs Hudson reached out and touched her hand. ‘And you, Miss Blenkinsop? You never married?’
‘I’ve never had that happiness, Mrs Hudson. But I’ve had a full and useful life, and a happy one. I count myself a lucky woman.’
‘And recently you heard from Mr Swan again?’
Miss Blenkinsop nodded and gave a quick little smile. ‘Last summer, it was. Out of the blue, and after all those years! Quite knocked me back, it did! It was a lovely letter though. He said he wanted to apologise for losing touch and said how he blamed himself for it, and asked me to forgive him. Oh, and there was other stuff too. He said he was wealthy and a widower. And he told me that he was going to write to Bob too, and that he hoped to travel home at some point to see us both.’
Mrs Hudson nodded. ‘And that was the last you heard of him?’
‘Oh, no, Mrs Hudson! He wrote regularly after that, telling me about his plans.’ She blushed a little. ‘Very friendly letters, they were, and he was most definite about coming home. He said he’d always dreamed of seeing France, and he had a mind to take it in on his way back. He wrote to me from there, too. Very grand notepaper it was, from one of those fancy French hotels. And then, the next thing I know, your advertisement… Mr Rumbelow tells me he was hit by a carriage, ma’am?’
A tear rolled down her cheek and I found myself slipping from my seat to place an arm around her. As gently as I could, I told her about Mr Swan’s last moments and about his love for her. She cried in earnest then, and I think I joined her, and it was not until some time later, when tea and sponge cake had been served and Miss Blenkinsop’s smile restored, that any of us were in a fit state to return to the subject. Even then Mrs Hudson confined herself to a question about her childhood friend, Bob, and where he could be found.
‘Oh, Mrs Hudson!’ Miss Blenkinsop exclaimed, and her lips trembled. ‘Did I not tell you? Oh, I’m afraid my tale grows even sadder. You see, Bob is dead too.’ I saw her tears well up again, but she went on bravely. ‘Bertie wrote from the South of France and told me. He’d heard out there that Bob had found a new position. It was quite by chance that he heard about it. So he wrote to him at his new place, proposing to pay him a visit as soon as he got back to England. You can imagine his horror, ma’am, when he received a reply telling him that Bob had died of influenza within days of starting his new post. Bertie was terribly upset, I could tell. I think Bob must have seemed like a long-lost brother to him. He said in his letter to me that he planned to cut short his stay in France and to visit the grave at the earliest opportunity. But given what happened, I don’t suppose he ever did…’
Miss Blenkinsop still looked tearful, but Mrs Hudson leaned forward with another question and there was a note of urgency in her voice.
‘Tell me,’ she urged, ‘was Bob’s name really “Robert”? And if so, what were his other initials? Could it be that his surname began with “P”?’
‘Why, yes, Mrs Hudson.’ Our visitor looked surprised. ‘It’s true his name was Robert. And his initials – well, we used to joke about them, although just now the joke doesn’t seem so funny. They were a bit sombre, you see. R.I.P, that’s what they were. And I truly hope that him and Bertie both rest in peace.’
And then, while Mrs Hudson and I were exchanging looks of triumph, Miss Blenkinsop went further.
‘Yes, R.I.P. That was his full name. They stood for Robert Inigo Pauncefoot.’
‘So let’s get this straight, Flottie,’ Mrs Hudson began when we returned to the kitchen after helping Miss Blenkinsop onto a bus bound for Victoria. ‘Viscount Wrexham disappeared last October. The following month, Robert Pauncefoot, his valet, takes up another appointment. We don’t know where, but Albert Swan knew, for he wrote to him there.’
I nodded. ‘What a shame he didn’t mention where Pauncefoot had gone in his letters to Elsie, ma’am.’
‘Indeed, Flotsam. Now, let’s see… Mr Swan is wintering in France when he receives a reply to his letter telling him Pauncefoot is dead. And if that letter was accompanied by the man’s watch, he would certainly not question the truth of such a claim. But who was that reply from?’
‘I suppose it was from Pauncefoot’s new employers, ma’am.’
‘Except, Flotsam, that Pauncefoot wasn’t dead, was he? For I’m sure Mr Swan caught sight of him that morning, on the way to the station. He was probably on his way to visit Pauncefoot’s grave at the time, so it’s hardly surprising he was a little rattled by it.’
‘If only Mr Swan’s things had not been sent back to South Africa, ma’am! If we could just see his papers…’
‘Yes, Flotsam. They would make interesting reading. I’d particularly like to know who wrote the letter about Pauncefoot’s death. Did they really think he was dead? Or were they part of the deception? Unfortunately, all Mr Swan’s things are likely to be in transit to the Cape for some time to come.’
‘And in the meantime, ma’am, I just don’t understand why anyone would make it up about Pauncefoot’s death. I mean, we’ve worked out why Viscount Wrexham might want to disappear, but no one was looking for Pauncefoot. Why pretend he’s dead?’
Mrs Hudson shook her head in mystification.
‘These are shifting sands, Flottie. It seems certain that the Viscount is up to something, but are we any closer to working out what? Or, for that matter, where?’
These were questions I never answered because just then the second significant event of the day occurred: the arrival of Mr Rumbelow, red-faced and in some disarray, a telegram in his hand.
‘Mrs Hudson!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thank goodness you are here! I wished to consult you… This telegram just in… From my friend Verity… Most urgent…’
Mrs Hudson and I put our heads together to peer at the scrap of paper placed before us. And what we saw was enough to assure us that, on this occasion at least, Mr Rumbelow’s agitation was entirely justified.
GRAVES OPENED IN ALSTON STOP GHOST OF SUICIDE WALKING STOP ANCIENT CURSE UNLEASHED STOP FOR GODS SAKE SEND HELP
VERITY