Escapade Page 4

In her hand, lightly, she held a long brown cigarette. She inclined her head toward the Great Man and she smiled.

  “And this gentleman,” said Dr. Auerbach, “is Sir David Merridale.”

  Sir David was in his forties. His shoulders were broad beneath his tailored black coat, his stomach was flat beneath his tailored black vest. His hair was black, too, except for the elegant waves of gray that lapped elegantly back over his temples. He had a high forehead, a strong nose, a black mustache, and a dark broad mouth. He sat comfortably, sprawled back in a padded leather chair, his hands along its arms, his legs crossed at the knees. He held a glass of champagne in his left hand, comfortably. He seemed permanently bemused.

  Sir David nodded hello. The Great Man said, “And this is my secretary and close personal friend, Mr. Phil Beaumont.”

  I nodded and I smiled. Politely. It was easy once you got used to it.

  Sir David said, “Do join us. Dr. Auerbach was just explaining psychoanalysis.”

  “Oh no, no,” said Dr. Auerbach quickly, and semaphored his small manicured hands. He had obviously taken charge. “We finish this now, with the great Houdini here. Please, Miss Fitzwilliam, you will sit beside me?”

  She did, on the embroidered love seat. The Great Man chose the empty leather chair at the head of the table, which wasn’t much of a surprise. The only seat remaining was the one beside Mrs. Corneille, on the sofa, and I took that. She inhaled a puff from the cigarette and exhaled pale blue smoke through her delicate nostrils, and she looked at me from beneath slightly lowered eyelids. She was wearing a perfume that had been distilled from flowers grown in the Garden of Eden.

  Sir David was studying the new arrivals. He was still bemused. “So,” said Dr. Auerbach, leaning toward the Great Man, rubbing his hands together. “You are here for a test of the medium, isn’t it? To verify her genuineness, yes?”

  Houdini nodded judiciously. “I see you know of my work. Yes, I have had much success uncovering the fraudulent techniques used by these people. But in my youth I was a noted stage medium myself—although only for a brief time, and only for the purpose of healthy family entertainment. Since then, I have made a lifelong study of the occult. I have put together the finest and most extensive library on this subject in the world. And so naturally, Houdini is better equipped than most men to determine trickery and fraud.” He smiled. “Only as we grow older do we acquire wisdom.”

  Sir David said, “Do you really think so? In my experience, people seldom actually acquire wisdom. They merely accumulate evidence.”

  Houdini put a polite expression on his face. “Oh?” he said.

  “Evidence of what, Sir David?” asked Dr. Auerbach.

  “Their own fundamental correctness,” said Sir David.

  The Great Man kept the polite expression on his face while he waited for the others to stop talking.

  Mrs. Corneille glanced at Sir David. “You include yourself, do you, David?” Her voice was dark and thick, like sealskin.

  “Certainly.” He smiled. “But of course, my own correctness is more fundamental.”

  “Of course.” She turned to the Great Man. “So you’re not a believer then.”

  “I am neither a believer nor a disbeliever, madam,” the Great Man announced. “I approach these things objectively, in the manner of a careful scientist. But a scientist who has had much experience in this field.”

  “Dr. Auerbach,” said Sir David. “Does your colleague Dr. Freud have an opinion about Spiritualism? He seems to have one about everything else.”

  Once again Houdini put a polite expression on his face and waited.

  Dr. Auerbach said, “Herr Doktor Freud has yet to write about Spiritualism specifically. But he is rationalist, yes? I think it is not presumptuous of me to say that he would consider it a form of superstition. And as such, he would of course see it as a regression.”

  “A regression?” said Mrs. Corneille.

  He nodded. “A retreat, so to say, to an earlier level of development. Even the most well-adjusted individual, as a relief from anxiety, does this from time to time. He may bite his nails, for example, or indulge in unusual sexual activities, or read mystery stories.”

  “I’m all for unusual sexual activities, of course,” said Sir David, smiling. “But if I were you, I shouldn’t mention mystery stories in the same context to Conan Doyle when he arrives.”

  “As a psychic evaluator,” said the Great Man, “I often discover that medical doctors and academic professors, when they approach this field, are the most easily misled of investigators. They work with matter, you see, and with physics. And neither of these, no matter how complicated they might be, possesses an intent to deceive. But all the so-called psychics I have unmasked in my career, they have possessed this.”

  “How fascinating,” said Mrs. Corneille. She turned to me and said, “And what of you, Mr. Beaumont? Are you a skeptic?”

  “I never gave it much thought,” I told her.

  She smiled. Her black, almond-shaped eyes looked into mine. “You mean to say you’ve never wondered what happens to us when we die?”

  “Seems to me there’s only one way to find out. I’m not in any hurry.”

  She smiled again, more widely. Her teeth were very white. “Personally,” said Sir David, “the Spiritualist notion of the Great Beyond sounds terribly tedious to me. Not a single caneton a Vorange in sight. Nor a single grisette. I much prefer Paris.”

  Mrs. Corneille smiled at him. “But David, they wouldn’t let you in. You’ve spent so much time there already. You’ll probably be sent somewhere quiet and unpretentious. Like Brighton.”

  “I will go to Paris,” he said. “I shall travel incognito.”

  “Yes,” said the Great Man. “It is a wonderful city, Paris. The good people of Paris have always been very kind to me, very appreciative. It was in Paris, several years ago, that I introduced my famous Milk Can escape.”

  Cecily raised her champagne glass and drawled, “Mr. Houdini escapes from things.” She sipped at the champagne.

  Sir David was bemused again. “Whatever were you doing in a milk can?”

  “Escaping from it,” said the Great Man. “No one had ever attempted this before.”

  “I can well imagine,” said Sir David.

  Sir David, Dr. Auerbach, and the Great Man. It was like watching a three-way taffy pull. If you scooped up all the ego gathered around that table and dumped it on an ocean liner, the ship would keel over and sink like a stone.

  “It is a most extraordinary illusion,” said the doctor. He was back in charge. “Into a milk can somewhat larger than normal, and filled with water, Mr. Houdini is locked. With four padlocks.”

  “Six,” corrected the Great Man.

  “Six, yes, better still. You must imagine—he has no air to breathe, no key, no means of escape. Before the milk can a screen is drawn, to conceal it from the audience. The audience awaits. Time passes. One minute, two minutes, three. The people grow concerned, yes? They grow apprehensive. Surely no one can, under the water, survive for so long? But then at last, suddenly, Mr. Houdini steps out from behind the screen and he waves. Great, great applause. The screen is withdrawn, and there is the milk can, still locked. When unlocked, it is shown to be filled, still, with water.”

  The Great Man spoke. “A very accurate description. Except, if you will excuse me, for the word illusion. The milk can is real. The water is real. Houdini is real.”

  Dr. Auerbach nodded quickly. “Yes, yes, of course, it is a word only.”

  The Great Man smiled and waved a hand, grandly forgiving.

  Dr. Auerbach didn’t notice that he had been forgiven. His eyes narrowed and he said, “It is almost mythic, yes? In a way, it is a recreation of the trauma of birth, the escape from the womb. The darkness of the womb you have there, inside the milk can. And the amniotic fluid, which is the water, yes? You yourself are quite curled up, like the fetus. And then, like the fetus, you burst all at once into the light of day.” He shook h
is head in admiration. “Extraordinary.”

  Houdini had shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Dr. Auerbach, if you will excuse me, perhaps such language is not entirely appropriate at the moment.” He made a courtly nod toward Mrs. Corneille, and then toward Cecily.

  Dr. Auerbach frowned.

  Sir David blandly said, “Pity you weren’t here when the good doctor was explaining Dr. Freud’s Oedipus complex. Really a wonderful notion. Seems we’re all of us men a bit fonder of our mothers than we ever imagined. Secretly we’d like to topple the old dear onto the breadboard and have a go at her. Did I get that right, Doctor?”

  “You oversimplify, Sir David, I am afraid.” Dr. Auerbach turned to the Great Man. “What Herr Doktor Freud has established, you see, is that the young male child craves exclusive sexual possession of the mother. After the witnessing of the Primal Scene—that is, of sexual intercourse between the parents—the child develops a hostility toward the figure of the father.”

  “Dr. Freud has obviously never met my mother,” said Sir David. “One look at Evelyn and he’d chuck that theory straight away. Along with dinner, I expect. Any child in his right mind”—he smiled at Mrs. Corneille—“and I include my younger self, of course—any child would be perfectly happy to let an entire rugby team take their chances with the old cow.”

  “David,” said Mrs. Corneille, “you really are a dreadful man.” “If you think me dreadful, Vanessa, then you really must meet Evelyn.”

  Dr. Auerbach was shaking his head. “It is not at all important what the mother looks like, Sir David. It is only important that—”

  “Excuse me.” This came from the Great Man, who was rising from his chair. His face was white. His voice was weak and his body seemed unsteady. “I feel not well. Excuse me.”

  Holding his hand against his stomach, he nodded once, to no one in particular, and then he turned and stiffly walked away.

  Mrs. Corneille looked at me. “Is it something he’s eaten?”

  Sir David raised his eyebrows blandly. “His mum, perchance?”

  Mrs. Corneille turned to him, frowned, turned back to me. “He looked quite ill. Will he be all right, do you think?”

  “Probably,” I said. “But it’s been a long trip.”

  “You motored down from London?” asked Sir David.

  I nodded. “And took the boat from Amsterdam, day before yesterday.”

  “That explains it then,” he said. “English food on top of Dutch. A marvel he can still walk.”

  I said to Mrs. Corneille, “I’d better go check on him.”

  She raised an eyebrow, as though mildly surprised. “Yes,” she said. “Perhaps you’d better.”

  The Morning Post

  Maplewhite, Devon

  August 17 (Early Morning)

  Dear Evangeline,

  Night time, cuddled up against the bolster in my four-poster, toasty warm beneath the sheets and blankets, scribbling away, so ridiculously happy that from time to time (no one else being present) I hug myself. And from time to time I quite forget that the Allardyce is snoring away in the next room.

  Maplewhite actually is haunted, Evy; there is at least one ghost in residence. Isn’t that wonderful?

  It was at dinner that I first learned of the ghost. We were all of us sitting round the table, Lady Purleigh at one end and Lord Robert at the other. It was the Allardyce who brought up the subject, between the turbot and the brandied chicken. ‘Now, Alice,’ she said, and even a blind man could have perceived how very much she relished this familiarity with the lady of the manor: the pleasure in her voice was so thick it had clotted, like Devon cream. ‘You really must tell us all about this ghost of yours. Rebecca de Winter mentioned a few things, but she was very vague about the details.’

  Lady Purleigh smiled. She has a lovely smile. She is, as I said, a lovely woman. (She was wearing a dress of black silk crepe de chine, cut on the bias; there are desperate women, I expect, who would kill to obtain this dress.) ‘But I’ve never really seen it,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard it, of course.’

  ‘What does he say?’ asked the Allardyce.

  ‘He doesn’t say anything, actually. He only moans and groans. And only sometimes, late at night.’ She seemed very nearly apologetic. That she is in any way related to the Allardyce will forever remain one of life’s great mysteries. ‘He’s not an awfully interesting ghost, I’m afraid.’

  ‘But that’s only one of them, Mother.’

  This came from the Honourable Cecily, the daughter. The paragon. (Who was wearing a lovely sleeveless little thing in grey silk, scooped at the neck to flaunt her aristocratic throat.)

  ‘There are more?’ said the Allardyce, turning to her.

  ‘There are three of them,’ said the Honourable Cecily in that plummy voice of hers. ‘There’s Lord Reggie and there are the other two. One’s a woman and the other is a young boy.’

  ‘Cecily’s been listening to MacGregor again.’ This was from Lord Robert, who was smiling at his daughter with a kind of impatient fondness. She sat to his right.

  ‘And who is MacGregor?’ asked the Allardyce.

  ‘The gamekeeper,’ said Lord Robert. ‘Soundest chap you could ever find at minding deer. But a trifle over-imaginative. A Scot,’ he added, as though this explained everything.

  ‘But he’s seen them, Daddy,’ said the Honourable Cecily. ‘At the pond, down by the old mill. Beneath the willow tree. A woman in a long white dress, holding the hand of a young boy.

  MacGregor says the boy is ten or twelve years old. The two of them stand there, MacGregor says, staring out over the water. Whenever you approach them, they simply vanish.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Lord Robert. He turned to the Allardyce. ‘Before MacGregor, no one ever said a word about ghosts down by the pond. Only ghost story here at Maplewhite was the story of the ghost in the East Wing. Been there for centuries, so the story goes. Supposed to be an ancestor. Reginald Fitzwilliam, the third Earl. Exploitive old swine. Worst relic of the feudal system. Got half the girls in the district in the family way. One of the tenants killed him in the end. Enraged father. Jumped out of a tree while Reggie was out riding, landed on Reggie’s neck and snapped it. Snapped his own ankle, as well. He was hanged, of course, poor devil.’

  ‘When was this?’ asked Mrs Corneille.

  ‘It must have been in the autumn,’ said Sir David Merridale, ‘if the tenants were falling from the trees.’

  Sir David fancies himself a wit. He is clever, in a jaded way, and also handsome, in a jaded way; but neither so witty nor so handsome as he believes. I confess that I dislike him. Whenever he says something mildly clever, he glances at me significantly, as though he expected me to hurl myself, simpering, at his aristocratic feet.

  But even more irritating are his un-significant glances. Have you noticed the way that certain men, when they believe themselves unobserved, observe women? They examine them as though the women were offerings, and as though they, the men, were coolly trying to decide whether to accept or reject them. Sir David is one of those.

  Lord Robert answered her, ‘In 1670. Under the Stuarts.

  Charles the Second.’

  Cecily said to her father, ‘But I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts, Daddy.’ Listening closely, one might possibly have imagined that one detected a faint feline purr in Cecily’s aristocratic voice.

  ‘I don’t,’ he said gruffly. ‘A lot of bourgeois rubbish, ghosts. But it’s the ghost in the East Wing I don’t believe in. That's the ghost people have been talking about for ages.’

  ‘Has anyone ever seen him?’ said Mrs Corneille. She’s a widow, stunning and slender and almost unbearably chic.

  Lady Alice smiled at her. ‘He’s quite harmless, Vanessa.’

  ‘He wasn’t always, though,’ said Sir David. ‘According to the stories, no virgin was safe anywhere in the East Wing.’ He glanced at me and faintly smiled.

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Lord Purleigh. ‘Bourgeois fairy tales.’

&
nbsp; Talk of ghosts dwindled along with the chicken, but it was picked up later, and once again by the Allardyce. We were all sitting in the drawing room, where every wall is hung with the most beautiful and probably priceless Belgian tapestries, each depicting scenes from the Rape of the Sabine Women. (You do remember the Sabine Women? That afternoon in the garden of Mrs. Applewhite’s Academy for Young Ladies? I seem to recall a rather forceful performance, by yourself, as a Roman.)

  Another guest had arrived after dinner: a Dr Erich Auerbach, an Austrian psychologist. (Not a very interesting man, I think; and short; several inches shorter than I.) He was sitting at the other end of the vast room with the Merridales and Mrs Corneille. When Lord Robert—out of sheer kindness, I suspect—sat down with the Allardyce and me, she said to him, ‘Do tell us, Robert. This dreadful ghost of yours. What does he look like?’

  ‘Never saw him, Marjorie. Told you, I don’t credit all that nonsense.’

  ‘Rebecca said that he’s in his seventies. And that he has this terrible long white hair and a long white beard. He holds his head at a peculiar sort of angle.’

  ‘Rubbish.’ Here he turned to me and smiled. ‘Not to worry, Miss Turner. Hundreds of women have stayed in the East Wing, thousands of’em. And a fair share of virgins among ’em, I dare say. And not a one of ’em’s been bothered by a ghost.’

  We were interrupted then by one of the footmen, who was escorting the two newest arrivals, one of whom was the famous American magician, Harry Houdini. He’s much shorter than I should have imagined, but very exotic looking and very energetic. And talented, as well: he ‘found’ a five-pound note in the Allardyce’s teapot (a lovely piece of rococo silver, flower-chased, that one of the footmen provided for her when she explained that she simply couldn’t drink coffee). Mr Houdini made her a present of the banknote, which thrilled her, needless to say. She would have been thrilled by a ha’penny, but of course he wasn’t to know that.

  The other arrival was Mr Houdini’s secretary, a tall, swarthy American named Beaumont who seems to spend most of his time smirking. Obviously, and for no reason that I can determine, he is extremely taken with himself. Like Sir David, but without even his feeble wit.