Ngaio Marsh - Spinsters in Jeopardy

“Good girl,” Alleyn thought, “she’s remembered the rings.”

He followed quickly. He was tall enough to reach the rings and hold the top of the curtain to the rail while he raised the skirt for Raoul to pass through.

Now Raoul was in the great hall where the candellabrum still burned on the central table. Teresa had already passed into the entrance lobby. Alleyn still held the curtain in his hand when Teresa blew her nose.

He slipped back behind the curtain, leaving a peephole for himself. He saw Raoul hesitate and then move forward until his back was to the light and he saw a white-robed figure that might have been himself come in from the lobby. Looking beyond the six burning candles he watched the two figures confront each other. The white hood was thrust back and Carbury Glande’s red beard jutted out. Alleyn heard him mutter:

“Well, thank God for you, anyway. You have put him in a tizzy! What happened?’

The black cowl moved slightly from side to side. The head was bent.

“Oh, all right!”Glande said pettishly. “What a stickler you are, to be sure!”

The white figure crossed the end of the hall and disappeared up the stairway.

Raoul moved on into the lobby and Alleyn came out of cover and followed him. When he entered the lobby, Alleyn went to the carved chest that stood against the back wall. It was there that the Egyptian servant had put the key of the wrought-iron door. Alleyn found the key and through the grill tossed it out of reach into the outside passage-way.

From the lobby, the staircase wound downstairs. Teresa’s candle, out of sight and sinking, threw up her own travelling shadow and that of Raoul. Alleyn followed them, but they moved faster than he and he was left to grope his way down in a kind of twilight. He had completed three descending spirals when he arrived at the landing. The door he had noticed on his previous visit was not open and beyond it was a bedroom with a light burning before a looking-glass. This, evidently, was Robin Herrington’s room. Alleyn went in. On the inside door-handle hung a notice: “ Heure de Méditation. Ne dérangez pas. ” He hung it outside and shut the door.

The room had the smell and sensation of luxury that were characteristic of the Chèvre d’Argent. A white robe, like his own, was laid out together with silk shorts and shirt and a pair of white sandals. Alieyn changed quickly. On a table near the bed was a silver box, an ashtray, an elaborate lighter and, incongruously, a large covered dish which, on examination, proved to contain a sumptuous assortment of hors d’oeuvres and savouries. In the box were three cigarettes: long, thin and straw-coloured. He took one up, smelt it, broke it across and put the two halves in his case. He held a second to his candle, kept it going by returning it continuously to the flame and, as it was consumed, broke the ash into the tray.

“Three of those,” he thought, “and young Herrington’s values would be as cockeyed as one of Carbury Glande’s abstracts.”

There was the lightest of taps on the door. It opened slightly. “Monsieur?” whispered Teresa.

He let her in.

“Monsieur, it is to tell you that I have executed your order. I have spoken to M. Oberon. Tonight he was not as formerly he has been. He was not interested in me, but all the same he was excited. One would have thought he was intoxicated, Monsieur, but he does not take wine.”

“You gave the message?”

“Yes, Monsieur. He listened eagerly and questioned me, saying: ‘Have you seen her?’ and I thought best, with the permission of the saints, to say ‘yes.’ ”

“Quite so, Teresa.”

“He then asked me if Mademoiselle Taylor was quite well and I said she was and then if she seemed happy and I said: ‘Yes, she seemed pleased and excited,’ because that is how one is, Monsieur, when one keeps an appointment. And I repeated that Mademoiselle had asked to be alone and he said: ‘Of course, of course. It is essential,’ as if to himself. And he was staring in a strange manner as if I was not there and so I left him. And although I was frightened, Monsieur, I was not troubled as formerly by M. Oberon because Raoul is the friend of my bosom and to him I will be constant.”

“I should certainly stick to that, if I were you. You are a good girl, Teresa, and now you must catch your bus. Tomorrow you shall choose a fine present against your wedding-day.”

“Ah, Monsieur!” Teresa exclaimed and neatly sketching ineffable astonishment and delight, she slipped out of the room.

It was now eight o’clock. Alleyn settled down to his vigil. He thought of poor Miss Truebody and of the four remaining guests and Mr. Oberon, each in his or her room, and each, he believed, oppressed by an almost intolerable sense of approaching climax. He wondered if Robin Herrington had followed his advice about blocking the vent in the cap on his petrol tank and he wondered if Troy had had any success in breaking down Ginny’s enthralment.

He turned over in his mind all he had read of that curious expression of human credulity called magic. As it happened he had been obliged on a former case to dig up evidence of esoteric ritual and had become fascinated by its witness to man’s industry in the pursuit of a chimera. Hundreds and hundreds of otherwise intelligent men, he found, had subjected themselves throughout the centuries to the boredom of memorizing and reciting senseless formulae, to the indignity of unspeakable practices and to the threat of the most ghastly reprisals. Through age after age men and women had starved, frightened and exhausted themselves, had got themselves racked, broken and burned, had delivered themselves up to what they believed to be the threat of eternal damnation and all without any firsthand evidence of the smallest success. Age after age the Obérons and Baradis had battened on this unquenchable credulity, had traced their pentagrams, muttered their interminable spells, performed their gruelling ceremonies and taken their toll. And at the same time, he reflected, the Oberons (never the Baradis) had ended by falling into their own traps. The hysteria they induced was refracted upon themselves. Beyond the reek of ceremonial smoke they too began to look for the terrifying reward.

He wondered to what class of adept Oberon belonged. There was a definite hierarchy. There had always been practitioners who, however misguided, could not be accused of charlatanism. To this day, he believed, such beings existed, continuing their barren search for a talisman, for a philosopher’s stone, for power and for easy money.

Magical rituals from the dawn of time had taken on the imprint of their several ages. From the scope and dignity of the Atkadian Inscriptions to the magnificence of the Graeco-Egyptian Papyri, from the pious Jewish mysteries to the squalors, brutalities and sheer silliness of the German pseudo-Faustian cults. From the Necromancer of the Coliseum to the surprisingly fresh folklorishness of the English genre: each had its peculiar character and its own formula of frustration. And alongside the direct line like a bastard brother ran the cult of Satanism, the imbecile horrors of the Black Mass, the Amatory Mass and the Mortuary Mass.

If Oberon had read all the books in his own library he had a pretty sound knowledge of these rituals together with a generous helping of Hinduism, Voodoo and Polynesian mythology: a wide field from which to concoct a ceremony for the downfall of Ginny Taylor and her predecessors. Alleyn fancied that the orthodox forms would not be followed. The oath of silence he had read in Baradi’s room was certainly original. “If it’s the Amatory Mass as practised by Madame de Montespan,” he thought, “poor old Raoul’s sunk from the word go.” And he began to wonder what he should to if this particular crisis arose.