Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (24 page)

“
Now exactly at what hour of the evening of December the
twenty-fourth did Professor Pohlman query you as to the best method of killing
Miss Burkhardt?”

Baroness
Orczy was not born in Barchester Towers, but her readers may be forgiven for
thinking so. She was the daughter of a Hungarian musician, but developed a
proficiency in her second language, English, that is rivalled only by Joseph
Conrad’s.

She is best remembered as the
creator of Sir Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel, but she also gave us The
Old Man in the Corner and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, who appears in this
story.

Lady Molly was among the first
female detectives of mystery fiction, and certainly the first female police
officer. If her attachment to Scotland Yard remained somewhat vague, her
ability to deal with dastardly criminals did not.

Her faithful companion, Mary,
describes some nefarious doings at a cozy English gathering—a familiar setting,
to be sure. Dickens and Christie would have felt at home here—a remarkable
evocation of an English Christmas from a writer who began life near the banks
of the Danube.

The Scarlet Pimpernel
was clearly her
masterpiece, but this tale of yuletide malfeasance demonstrates that Baroness
Orczy’s success was no magic fluke.

It was
a
fairly merry Christmas party, although the surliness of our host somewhat
marred the festivities. But imagine two such beautiful young women as my own
dear lady and Margaret Ceely, and a Christmas Eve Cinderella in the beautiful
ball-room at Clevere Hall, and you will understand that even Major Ceely’s
well-known cantankerous temper could not altogether spoil the merriment of a
good, old-fashioned, festive gathering.

It is a far cry from a
Christmas Eve party to a series of cattle-maiming outrages, yet I am forced to
mention these now, for although they were ultimately proved to have no
connection with the murder of the unfortunate Major, yet they were undoubtedly the
means whereby the miscreant was enabled to accomplish the horrible deed with
surety, swiftness, and as it turned out afterwards—a very grave chance of
immunity.

Everyone in the
neighbourhood had been taking the keenest possible interest in those dastardly
outrages against innocent animals. They were either the work of desperate
ruffians who stick at nothing in order to obtain a few shillings, or else of
madmen with weird propensities for purposeless crimes.

Once or twice suspicious
characters had been seen lurking about in the fields, and on more than one
occasion a cart was heard in the middle of the night driving away at furious
speed. Whenever this occurred the discovery of a fresh outrage was sure to
follow, but, so far, the miscreants had succeeded in baffling not only the
police, but also the many farm hands who had formed themselves into a band of
volunteer watchmen, determined to bring the cattle maimers to justice.

We had all been talking
about these mysterious events during the dinner which preceded the dance at
Clevere Hall; but later on, when the young people had assembled, and when the
first strains of “The Merry Widow” waltz had set us aglow with prospective
enjoyment, the unpleasant topic was wholly forgotten.

The guests went away
early, Major Ceely, as usual, doing nothing to detain them; and by midnight all
of us who were staying in the house had gone up to bed.

My dear lady and I shared
a bedroom and dressing-room together, our windows giving on the front. Clevere
Hall is, as you know, not very far from York, on the other side of
Bishopthorpe, and is one of the finest old mansions in the neighbourhood, its
only disadvantage being that, in spite of the gardens being very extensive in
the rear, the front of the house lies very near the road.

It was about two hours
after I had switched off the electric light and called out “Good-night” to my
dear lady, that something roused me out of my first sleep. Suddenly I felt very
wide-awake, and sat up in bed. Most unmistakably—though still from some considerable
distance along the road—came the sound of a cart being driven at unusual speed.

Evidently my dear lady
was also awake. She jumped out of bed and, drawing aside the curtains, looked
out of the window. The same idea had, of course, flashed upon us both, at the
very moment of waking: all the conversations anent the cattle-maimers and their
cart, which we had heard since our arrival at Clevere, recurring to our minds
simultaneously.

I had joined Lady Molly
beside the window, and I don’t know how many minutes we remained there in
observations, not more than two probably, for anon the sound of the cart died
away in the distance along a side road. Suddenly we were startled with a
terrible cry of “Murder! Help! Help!” issuing from the other side of the house,
followed by an awful, deadly silence. I stood there near the window shivering
with terror, while my dear lady, having already turned on the light, was
hastily slipping into some clothes.

The cry had, of course,
aroused the entire household, but my dear lady was even then the first to get
downstairs, and to reach the garden door at the back of the house, whence the
weird and despairing cry had undoubtedly proceeded.

That door was wide open.
Two steps lead from it to the terraced walk which borders the house on that
side, and along these steps Major Ceely was lying, face downwards, with arms
outstretched, and a terrible wound between his shoulder-blades.

A gun was lying close
by—his own. It was easy to conjecture that he, too, hearing the rumble of the wheels,
had run out, gun in hand, meaning, no doubt, to effect, or at least to help, in
the capture of the escaping criminals. Someone had been lying in wait for him;
that was obvious—someone who had perhaps waited and watched for this special
opportunity for days, or even weeks, in order to catch the unfortunate man
unawares.

Well, it were useless to
recapitulate all the various little incidents which occurred from the moment
when Lady Molly and the butler first lifted the Major’s lifeless body from the
terrace steps until that instant when Miss Ceely, with remarkable coolness and
presence of mind, gave what details she could of the terrible event to the
local police inspector and to the doctor, both hastily summoned.

These little incidents,
with but slight variations, occur in every instance when a crime has been
committed. The broad facts alone are of weird and paramount interest.

Major Ceely was dead. He
had been stabbed with amazing sureness and terrible violence in the back. The
weapon used must have been some sort of heavy, clasp knife. The murdered man
was now lying in his own bedroom upstairs, even as the Christmas bells on that
cold, crisp morning sent cheering echoes through the stillness of the air.

We had, of course, left
the house, as had all the other guests. Everyone felt the deepest possible
sympathy for the beautiful young girl who had been so full of the joy of living
but a few hours ago. and was now the pivot round which revolved the weird
shadow of tragedy, of curious suspicions and of an ever-growing mystery. But at
such times all strangers, acquaintances, and even friends in a house, are only
an additional burden to an already overwhelming load of sorrow and of trouble.

We took up our quarters
at the “Black Swan,” in York. The local superintendent, hearing that Lady Molly
had been actually a guest at Clevere on the night of the murder, had asked her
to remain in the neighbourhood.

There was no doubt that
she could easily obtain the chief’s consent to assist the local police in the
elucidation of this extraordinary crime. At this time both her reputation and
her remarkable powers were at their zenith, and there was not a single member
of the entire police force in the kingdom who would not have availed himself
gladly of her help when confronted with a
seemingly impenetrable mystery.

That the murder of Major
Ceely threatened to become such no one could deny. In cases of this sort, when
no robbery of any kind has accompanied the graver crime, it is the duty of the
police and also of the coroner to try to find out, first and foremost, what
possible motive there could be behind so cowardly an assault; and among
motives, of course, deadly hatred, revenge, and animosity stand paramount.

But here the police were
at once confronted with the terrible difficulty, not of discovering whether
Major Ceely had an enemy at all, but rather which, of all those people who owed
him a grudge, hated him sufficiently to risk hanging for the sake of getting
him out of the way.

As a matter of fact, the
unfortunate Major was one of those miserable people who seem to live in a state
of perpetual enmity with everything and everybody. Morning, noon and night he
grumbled, and when he did not grumble he quarrelled either with his own
daughter or with the people of his household, or with his neighbours.

I had often heard about
him and his eccentric, disagreeable ways from Lady Molly, who had known him for
many years. She—like everybody in the county who otherwise would have shunned
the old man—kept up a semblance of friendship with him for the sake of the
daughter.

Margaret Ceely was a
singularly beautiful girl, and as the Major was reputed to be very wealthy,
these two facts perhaps combined to prevent the irascible gentleman from living
in quite so complete an isolation as he would have wished.

Mammas of marriageable
young men vied with one another in their welcome to Miss Ceely at garden
parties, dances and bazaars. Indeed, Margaret had been surrounded with admirers
ever since she had come out of the schoolroom. Needless to say, the
cantankerous Major received these pretenders to his daughter’s hand not only
with insolent disdain, but at times even with violent opposition.

In spite of this the
moths fluttered round the candle, and amongst this venturesome tribe none stood
out more prominently than Mr. Laurence Smethick, son of the M. P. for the
Pakethorpe division. Some folk there were who vowed that the young people were
secretly engaged, in spite of the fact that Margaret was an outrageous flirt
and openly encouraged more than one of her crowd of adorers.

Be that as it may, one
thing was very certain—namely, that Major Ceely did not approve of Mr. Smethick
any more than he did of the others, and there had been more than one quarrel
between the young man and his prospective father-in-law.

On that memorable
Christmas Eve at Clevere none of us could fail to notice his absence; whilst
Margaret, on the other hand, had shown marked predilection for the society of
Captain Glynne, who, since the sudden death of his cousin, Viscount Heslington,
Lord Ullesthorpe’s only son (who was killed in the hunting field last October,
if you remember), had become heir to the earldom and its £40,000 a year.

Personally, I strongly
disapproved of Margaret’s behaviour the night of the dance; her attitude with
regard to Mr. Smethick—whose constant attendance on her had justified the
rumour that they were engaged—being more than callous.

On that morning of
December 24th—Christmas Eve, in fact—the young man had called at Clevere. I
remember seeing him just as he was being shown into the boudoir downstairs. A
few moments later the sound of angry voices rose with appalling distinctness
from that room. We all tried not to listen, yet could not fail to hear Major
Ceely’s overbearing words of rudeness to the visitor, who, it seems, had merely
asked to see Miss Ceely, and had been most unexpectedly confronted by the
irascible and extremely disagreeable Major. Of course, the young man speedily
lost his temper, too, and the whole incident ended with a very unpleasant
quarrel between the two men in the hall, and with the Major peremptorily
forbidding Mr. Smethick ever to darken his doors again.