Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [106]
“Sir Lewis seemed, for once, at a loss. Slowly recovering his self-possession, he descended the stair in his turn and stood irresolutely at Claire’s door. Twice he raised his hand as if to knock, but did not do so; finally, he continued on down and disappeared into his own private domain. Rosina then made haste to rejoin her mistress, expecting Claire to respond when she tapped with their special signal upon the door, and called softly to ask if she could be of help, but there was no reply. The house was very quiet, and as she waited at the door she became aware of a very faint scratching sound from within. She tapped once more, but there was again no response, and the faint scratching or rustling sound continued without pause.
“Several times during the next few hours, as afternoon gave way to evening and darkness fell, Rosina returned to the sitting-room door, with the same result. The rest of the house remained deathly quiet; no one came to give her any orders; no bells were rung. Finally, she went miserably upstairs to her own quarters, where she fell at last into an exhausted sleep.
“Next morning she was awakened by the maidservant with whom she shared the attic with the news that the lock of her mistress’s room was about to be forced. Dressing hastily, Rosina was just in time to see this done. A footman broke open the door and stood back to allow Sir Lewis to pass. From her position on the stair, Rosina saw her mistress lying motionless upon a sofa, with her dead child in her arms. Unable to restrain herself, she ran into the room, to be roughly ejected by Sir Lewis’s valet, but not before she had taken in the scene in one terrible glimpse: the dead mother and child in their last embrace; the empty vial of laudanum; and on the writing table nearby, a pile of handwritten pages surrounded by several pens, sheets of blotting paper, and an open bottle of ink.
“Rosina was shortly summoned by the housekeeper, given immediate notice, and sent upstairs to pack. Instead, overcome by grief and horror, she threw herself upon her bed and wept until sleep overtook her. By the time she woke, it was late in the evening. She had gathered together her few things and was venturing out upon the landing when a fearful shriek came echoing up the stairwell. There followed a brief silence, then sounds of shouting and of running feet. Afraid to descend, she waited for what seemed like hours until her friend appeared. The cry had been that of Sir Lewis’s valet, who had found his master dead on the floor of his dressing room, surrounded by the scattered pages of a manuscript. The corpse’s face was frozen into an expression of indescribable terror, and entirely blanched, as if vitriol had been flung across the features.”
Maurice paused, staring into the dwindling glow of the coals. A formless dread that had crept upon me was beginning to assume a more definite shape, as if some sinister presence were materialising in the shadows behind the slumbering bishop.
“There was a kind of fatality about the way in which that manuscript came into my possession. It so happened that Sir Lewis’s valet was entirely unlettered, but most reluctant to admit as much; and it was he who collected up the scattered pages whilst his master’s corpse was being removed under the doctor’s direction, and carried them off to the study nearby, where he placed them in one of the pigeonholes in Sir Lewis’s desk. And since it was later asserted that Sir Lewis had been looking over some legal document at the time of his death—the cause being given as a stroke, with the curious blanching of the face put down as an unusual complication—I believe the valet mistook one set of papers for another, without any idea that he had done so. The executors must have been exceptionally scrupulous, for they returned all of Claire’s personal effects to her mother, including an envelope labelled “manuscript, in the hand of the late Lady Wainwright,” which her mother, in recognition of the literary