Wicked Spirits, page 6
ERNEST BRAMAH
Ernest Bramah Smith was born in 1868 and brought up in Lancashire where he attended Manchester Grammar School. After leaving school in 1884 he worked on a farm, an experience that provided the material for his first book, published that year as by Ernest Bramah. Smith next took up journalism, first working alongside Jerome K. Jerome at Today Magazine. He also started writing short stories, and in the late 1890s he created the character that was to make him famous, Kai Lung, an itinerant storyteller whose tales and proverbs help him to outwit brigands and thieves in ancient China. While many modern readers would dismiss these stories as literary yellowface, they were immensely popular and, although Smith never visited China, his portrayal of the Chinese and their customs was accepted as a guide to a country about which most of his readers and contemporary reviewers knew very little. However, the character has dated badly and Smith’s purple prose, replicating what he and others considered ‘Oriental quaintness’ and ‘the charm of Oriental courtesy’, means that the Kai Lung stories are seldom read today.
In 1913, Smith created his other great character, Max Carrados the blind detective, for a series of stories for the News of the World. Carrados was immediately hailed as something new and the stories were extremely popular. While he owes something to Sherlock Holmes, Carrados’s nearest contemporary would be the preternaturally omniscient Dr John Thorndyke, the creation of R. Austin Freeman, and there are many similarities between the characters of Carrados’s household and their equivalents in Freeman’s Thorndyke stories. More than one contemporary critic also suggested that Carrados might have been inspired by the career of Edward Emmett, a blind solicitor from Lancashire, who achieved some celebrity towards the end of the nineteenth century. As well as Carrados, Smith’s stories feature some economically drawn but memorable characters, such as the detective’s amanuensis, Parkinson, who has an eidetic but erratic memory, and the self-described ‘pug-ugly’ Miss Frensham, once known as ‘The Girl with the Golden Mug’. And the stories often feature contemporary concerns like nationalist terrorism, Christian Science and suffragacy. However, Carrados’s hyper-sensory brilliance can sometimes appear unconvincing, no more so than when he is able to detect by taste traces of whitewash on a cigarette paper that has been fired from a revolver.
A little after the outbreak of the First World War, in 1916 Smith enlisted in the Royal Defence Corps. This led to his writing non-fiction pieces for various magazines on a wide range of subjects but he continued to write stories about Kai Lung and Carrados and also completed a few stage plays, including adaptations of two of the Carrados stories as well as an original play, Blind Man’s Bluff, written in 1918 for the actor Gilbert Heron. The previous year Heron had had great success with his own adaptation of another Carrados story; In the Dark had been very successful not least for its ‘great surprise finish’ when the final scene was performed in absolute darkness. Both plays originally featured on a variety bill and, as well as detection, Smith’s play accommodates an on-stage demonstration of ju-jitsu.
The final stories about Max Carrados appeared in the 1920s, followed by a single full-length novel, The Bravo of London, in 1934—but Smith would continue to write from time to time about Kai Lung, up to his death in Weston-super-Mare in 1942.
‘Deakin and the Ghost’ is previously unpublished.
A GOOD PLACE
H. C. Bailey
In the presence of Mrs Clare Montacute, it is reported, duchesses and actresses quail. Such is the prestige of her registry office. But Jane Cummins, called from the servants’ waiting-room that Mrs Montacute might speak to her, turned not a hair of her neat head.
Mrs Clare Montacute looked and dressed like the late Queen Victoria. She surveyed Jane Cummins, a trim, buxom person, majestically, and said that Jane Cummins must think herself exceedingly fortunate, considering that she was so young and inexperienced. Jane had no reason to expect so good a situation, a very responsible situation. Mrs Montacute had not expected that Jane would satisfy Mrs Lyndishoe. Still, Mrs Lyndishoe had decided not to look further for the moment. And she hoped—emphatically hoped—that Jane would do her best to give satisfaction.
‘If the place doesn’t suit me, I’ll drop you a line,’ said Jane.
Many capable nurses, it was pointed out, would be proud to take the situation. Some with high recommendations had failed to please Mrs Lyndishoe.
Jane smoothed down her grey cloak. ‘And she took me. That’s all there is to it.’
Mrs Montacute was surprised. The Lyndishoes she wished Jane to know, were one of the oldest families in England and the little boy was the only son. A very important responsibility.
‘I dare say he don’t bite,’ said Jane quietly.
And Mrs Clare Montacute was left wondering.
It seemed to Jane Cummins entirely natural that Mrs Lyndishoe should have chosen her. She was young, she had only been an under-nurse before, but she suffered from no doubt of her superiority to an older woman. She approved of Mrs Lyndishoe, who had plainly seen it at once; in return Jane recognized her as ‘the goods,’ a lady of blue and ancient blood. The one doubt which disturbed Jane was whether she could live in a place off the map. Jane is country bred, but of the home counties, and the Lyndishoe estate is in the western midlands, which seemed to her as remote as Siberia.
This feeling was strengthened by the tedious railway journey and the long drive over wooded uninhabited hills which are the means of approach to Bransmere Abbey. The last stage, a mile or more from the lodge gates across the park, which is a wild place with many thickets and an expanse of black water, brought dismay to her cheery mind.
‘Nice and homely, I don’t think,’ said Jane to the solemn groom who drove the waggonette.
He replied in a dialect unknown to her.
‘Darkest England and no way out,’ said Jane, and shuddered into her cloak. The groom pointed his whip and made more strange sounds. Bransmere Abbey rose before her. It is a noble place, a medley indeed, Tudor work built on to and out of older stuff, but a mellow mass of stone, beautiful as a whole and infinitely interesting. Jane was not interested. She wanted her tea.
She had it in the housekeeper’s room and found the housekeeper a formal old dame, anxious to be civil. Mrs Lyndishoe had given particular orders notice was to be made comfortable. Nurse could be sure everything would be done. The housekeeper was only too glad to have her.
Jane went warily. She suspected that somebody was not glad to have her and made investigations. The child she had come to nurse, the small heir of Bransmere was Mrs Lyndishoe’s grandson. Mrs Lyndishoe, long widowed, had two sons, Charles and George. The elder went to France with his yeomanry, came back, married in haste, went to Palestine and was killed. After his death Mrs Charles bore him a son. She was not, Jane saw, approved by the family of Lyndishoe. She was a nobody. It was even whispered that she had worked in an office. She showed no proper feeling. She did not want to bring her son to Bransmere. She had tried to set up house for herself. All the authority of the family was required to induce her to come to Bransmere and take her place as the mother of the heir and have him reared as became one of the dynasty of the Lyndishoes. ‘Poor little soul,’ said the housekeeper.
‘What’s the matter with him, Mrs Edwards?’ said Jane.
‘The poor boy is well enough if he had the chance, my dear.’
‘And what’s worrying him?’
Mrs Edwards pursed her lips and looked wise. She asked if Jane had ever had to deal with a spoilt child. ‘Bless you, I never had any other sort,’ said Jane cheerfully.
‘And yet I don’t know that I could say Mrs Charles spoils him,’ the housekeeper reflected. ‘It’s not so plain as that, if you understand me.’
Jane did not and said so.
‘You will,’ said the housekeeper grimly. ‘You’ll understand a lot before you’re done … Well, it’s not for me to say, to be sure, but Mrs Charles don’t act like any other lady I ever knew that was a mother. Why, if you’ll believe me, she wouldn’t have a nurse for the boy till now. Mrs Lyndishoe had all the trouble in the world to make her take you.’
It seemed to Jane that Mrs Charles had not pleased the servants at Bransmere.
Mrs Lyndishoe then rang, and to Mrs Lyndishoe Jane was taken. The old lady looked the grandmother but not less the mistress of a great house. Jane found her benign. She hoped that Jane had had a good journey, that she had been made comfortable, that she would ask for anything she wanted. Very well. Then she wanted Jane to understand that she would be entirely responsible for Master Julian. They had been rather anxious about him. There was nothing about actually the matter with the child, but his health had not been satisfactory. He wanted looking after. He wanted taking out of himself. He must be made to feel that he was quite safe. ‘Do you understand me, Cummins?’
‘Well, no, ma’am, not wholly,’ said Jane.
Mrs Lyndishoe’s brown eyes looked through her. ‘That’s right. Always say what you think to me. You will understand. Now you are to be responsible. If anyone interferes with you or there is anything that disturbs you, come to me at once.’
Jane’s answer was lost in the coming of a man, plainly a son of Mrs Lyndishoe by the glance she gave him, by the likeness. He was a smaller edition of her and in that, in some softening of feature, in a shy look more feminine than she. But the straight lines of her face were in his, and the dark eyes. ‘This is Nurse Cummins, George,’ his mother said.
‘How do you do?’ he smiled all over his face. ‘Lucky fellow, young Julian. He’s really a jolly kid, you know, nurse. I’m sure you’ll take to each other.’ He had been looking at her and looking away again in a shy fashion which amused Jane.
‘You might fetch Phyllis, George,’ his mother suggested and then he went out. ‘My daughter-in-law has been giving us some anxiety, nurse,’ Mrs Lyndishoe explained. ‘She is—I fear she is not—’ she stopped and in a moment or two her daughter-in-law came in.
‘Oh, temper,’ was what Jane said to herself. Mrs Charles was a frail, fair woman, little more than a child, very pretty in a photographer’s fashion, but of such a worn and petulant expression that another woman could hardly allow her prettiness.
‘Here is our nurse, my dear,’ said Mrs Lyndishoe.
‘Oh, very well,’ the daughter-in-law sent Jane one glance of contemptuous dislike.
‘What a cat,’ said Jane to herself, and aloud. ‘Good evening, ma’am.’
Mrs Charles did not choose to answer. Mrs Lyndishoe said placidly, ‘We must show Cummins the nursery, Phyllis: and introduce her to Julian.’
‘I suppose you know he’ll hate you,’ Mrs Charles flashed upon Jane.
‘I hope,’ said Mrs Lyndishoe slowly as she rose to lead the way, ‘I hope he will live to be very grateful to Cummins.’
Jane stood aside to give place to Mrs Charles but was impatiently waved on. Yet Mrs Charles went with them.
‘Talk about the silent tomb!’ Jane said to herself as she looked round the nursery. It was a vast room with walls and floor that seemed to be black and for some time Jane mistook the old oak for stone. A fire on the open hearth, under a chimney-piece like a huge extinguisher, was incredibly remote. One lamp giving little light in proportion to its bronze mass was drearily incompetent to break the solid gloom. Where its rays fell on the floor a small boy sat and made patterns with coloured beads.
‘Julian,’ said Mrs Lyndishoe.
‘Go away,’ said the small boy. ‘Don’t want you. Don’t want anybody.’
Jane knelt down beside him. She is a wholesome-looking creature. The small boy gazed at her. She saw a frail body, a thin pallid face comically and calm. He saw jolly pink and white cheeks and a buxom young woman who was very much alive. He put out a thin and grubby hand and stroked her dress, then patted her face. Jane laughed.
‘This is Cummins, your nurse, Julian,’ said Mrs Lyndishoe.
‘I don’t mind,’ said Julian and returned to his beads.
‘Julian!’
‘We understand each other, ma’am,’ said Jane. She went over to the fire and put another log on. ‘But we want some more light in here. It isn’t what you call a bright room, is it?’
‘It has been our nursery for two hundred years, Cummins.’
‘Yes, it looks it, ma’am,’ said Jane.
Mrs Lyndishoe swept away. Jane went back and sat on the floor with the boy. After a moment he held out for her admiration a large and purple bead.
His mother drew nearer and nearer, watching jealously. ‘Come and help me dress for dinner, Julian,’ she said. Julian looked up and shook his head. The door banged behind her so that the beads jumped. ‘Oh ee,’ said Julian and soothed them.
‘Home sweet home, I don’t think.’ said Jane to herself. But she and the boy got on very well together. He was the most self-contained child in her experience, yet he seemed to want her. Jane was satisfied with him: ‘But this place, it’s a bad dream,’ said she as she went to bed in the night nursery, another vast and shadowy room. And she had some difficulty in going to sleep. Perhaps she had not gone when she was roused by a rustle, a consciousness that someone had come in. She sat up and in the faint gleam of the night-light made out a figure bent over the child. She sprang out of bed: ‘And what can I do for you, ma’am?’ she said.
‘Do pray mind your own business,’ Mrs Charles said, and hurried away.
‘What a look!’ Jane murmured. ‘I’m making friends, I am.’ And she examined Julian carefully. He was not damaged. He was still asleep. It appeared that his mother had only kissed him. But Jane slept badly.
She got up with her mind in some disorder. It is not her habit to take much notice of what people say, but she was not able to forget the odd things that had been said to her at Bransmere, the obscure warnings from Mrs Lyndishoe, the enigmatic malice of Mrs Charles, and with the quaintness of the child and the dreary old rooms these things were worked up into such a medley of alarms that (as she told herself) she didn’t know what was what. Things were not healthy. For two pins she would tell the old dame that she was not suited. Some have said that Jane is hard as nails. But she looked at the unnaturally calm child talking to himself on the floor and decided that she couldn’t leave the kid alone in that place.
He was, she soon discovered, a handful. At breakfast he ate enough honest food for a sparrow and then teased her for sweets and wailed. His mother rushed in, gave him many chocolates and stormed at Jane. Jane made pungent answers. At the din of battle, the small Julian dropped his sweets and retired into a corner and silently wept. Jane left his mother vainly trying to persuade him to eat them and went to complain to Mrs Lyndishoe.
The great lady was oracular. ‘Now you begin to understand me,’ said she. ‘You must do your best, Cummins, you must do your best.’
‘So must others, ma’am,’ said Jane, with her little nose very high in the air. But Mrs Lyndishoe ignored her.
Jane retired with a high temperature, saying bitter things about her sex. Some she opined were solemn donkeys and some were spiteful cats. Coming to particulars she decided that mamma would be the death of the poor kid and grandma for all her high and mighty ways was too feeble to stop it. ‘Balmy, all balmy.’
The small Julian was found telling his mother to go away and stating that he wanted Cummins. At the sight of Jane and Jane’s triumphant smile the mother fled. She also was crying. But having got his Cummins Julian was difficult as ever. He did not want to go out, he would not go out. Jane stands no nonsense. Soon a miserable small boy was being towed out into the park. This achievement was watched with smiles by his grandmother and his uncle George. Neither he nor his nurse was in any temper to reply to their patronising congratulations.
The park, like the house, is a glorious place, but no doubt you have to be in the right mood to admire it. Jane was not.
In a little while she was aware that they were being followed and saw the slight figure of his mother. ‘Spying cat,’ said Jane to herself, and talked loudly and brightly to Julian and loitered. But Mrs Charles did not catch them up. She vanished.
It was on the way back that they saw her again. She was in eager conversation with a man, a smart young man in riding-breeches.
‘Oh, quite a nut, aren’t you?’ said Jane to herself. The hand of Mrs Charles was on his arm. He was laughing and making her laugh. ‘Oho, that’s it, is it? Looking after a number two, ma’am, I see. I’ve got your measure now,’ said Jane with bitter satisfaction. ‘You’re a merry widow, aren’t you? Not half!’
She looked at the small Julian. It had been possible to explain his condition by his mother’s folly. What if she was something worse than a fool? What if he stood in her way? The mysterious hints of Mrs Lyndishoe acquired a grim importance. ‘The poor little morsel,’ said Jane to herself and became very gentle to Julian.
He did not seem to know what to make of it but clearly he liked her. He would not, if he could help it, let her out of his site. She was little harassed, for he did not want her to play with him or amuse him; he occupied himself in his odd way; her presence was all that he required and the day went well enough.
The catastrophe came at bed-time. With solemn promises that she would not be long, she obtained leave of absence on official business about bedclothes. She was not long, but while she was in the linen closet with a housemaid she heard a cry, a thud. She fled back along the corridor to the nursery. When she came to the head of the great oak staircase, she saw something white on the landing below which was Julian’s face. Julian lay there silent and still.
Others were with him almost as soon as she. Uncle George calling out as he came down six stairs at a time, ‘Good God, what’s the boy done?’ Mrs Lyndishoe majestically ascending. But the mother did not come. She leaned far out over the balustrade above, her hand at her thin side.
