The Whispering: A Haunted House Mystery(34)

We read recently that the Prussian commander, Colonel von Bülow, was shocked and surprised by the degree of Belgian resistance, and that the siege at Liège took over a week – time he had not taken into account. This, I feel, illustrates that pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall, although I suppose I must do penance for entertaining such an uncharitable thought. At least the delay allowed the British forces to lend their fighting strength to the conflict. We wept for the fall of Antwerp, though, and for the poor people forced to flee their homes.

I shall do my best to trace for you the poor young thing, Leonora Gilmore, who was swept along by your unknown saviour in the chapel and seems to have vanished with him. May God grant that she was not destined to meet a worse fate in the stranger’s company, that he continued his mission as protector of the innocent and had sufficient conscience and honour to deliver her into safe hands.

However, I fear that with your country and mine in such turmoil it will be very difficult for me to find out what happened to Leonora. She sounds an unusual and intelligent girl – it is rare for one of your Chorists to display interest in world affairs, but I think you were right to permit her to read newspaper accounts of what was happening in the world.

It is too easy, in our enclosed lives, to also enclose our minds and be unaware of the events beyond our walls. I was slightly shocked, though, at the story of how Sister Jeanne found copies of those two books in Leonora’s locker, and actually caught her reading one of them under the bed sheets by candlelight after the Great Silence. It is understandable that with an English father Leonora would be interested in the books of English writers, but I believe Mr Somerset Maugham’s private life is extremely dubious, and that of M’sieur D.H. Lawrence is little better.

However, if I can obtain news of Leonora I will assuredly write to you at once.

In the meantime, I hold you and your Sisters in my prayers.

Your loving sister in Christ,

Sr Dominique

Order of the Sacred Heart

Michael sat back, his mind filled with the images Sister Dominique’s lively letter had summoned.

It was good to hear that the sisters of Sacré-Coeur had withstood the invasion – that they had hidden out in the crypt, eating lentils and waiting for deliverance – which had either come because Iskander had sent it, or because the Belgian armies had been resisting the Germans and had come to the convent. He reread the paragraph in which the trustful Dominique had expressed concern over Leonora’s innocence, and thought she probably need not have worried, because deflowering virginal seventeen-year-olds was unlikely to have been in Iskander’s code. Rogue and burglar he might have been, but Michael thought he had possessed the principles of a gentleman.

There were no further notes after the letter, but there was, rather unexpectedly, a further letter from the ubiquitous Chuffy, giving details of a niece’s christening at which he had stood godfather – ‘The little sprog yelled her head off, and the godmother got potted on gin afterwards and had to be decanted into a taxi’ – and went on to express a hope of seeing Boots at Christmas, because somebody called Bingo was giving a party at the Club which it would be a crying shame for Boots to miss.

Michael could not see why this should have been filed with the Palestrina Choir history, and was just deciding it had been shuffled together with the notes by mistake, when he turned to page two of Chuffy’s letter, in which Chuffy observed that if Boots could not come up to Town for Bingo’s festive bash, he, Chuffy, would have to come along to what he called Boots’s draughty barracks and rout him out. Chuffy wrote:

I always felt inheriting that old place out of the blue affected you. Extraordinary how a thing like that can change a chap, although it’s a change I wouldn’t mind having in my life, not that it’s very likely, because nobody in my family has a brass farthing, and I’d hate to see the guv’nor hand in his dinner pail anyway.

It’s nothing to do with me, but I don’t think it’s good for you to be forever worrying about the house and whether it’s secure after dark, or frowsting over that stuff you’re writing. I do understand you want to find out the truth about Stephen, well, I dare say a good many of us would like to know the truth about Stephen, but all work and no play, old man … Poor old Stephen is certainly dead, in fact he’s officially dead – I remember you coming up to Town for some Court thingummy that pronounced him dead. Seven years without anyone hearing from him or something, wasn’t it? I recall I thought the length of time sounded frightfully Biblical – all those plagues and famines and whatnot. But I do know that the wigged gentlemen in Lincolns Inn pronounced Stephen dead and handed you the ownership of Fosse House.

Next time you come up to Town I’ll introduce you to one or two corking girls – it’d do you a power of good to paint the town red, or at least give it a few pink splodges.

Michael laid down the letter thoughtfully. It sounded as if it was the unknown ‘Boots’ who had been writing the history of the Palestrina Choir. He examined this deduction from several aspects and thought it stood up to scrutiny.

Stephen Gilmore had been pronounced as dead by the courts. Assuming the courts had dated his disappearance from the end of the Great War, that seemed to place Boots’s inheritance of Fosse House as 1925 at the absolute earliest.

The clock, which had been ticking quietly away to itself, suddenly chimed the half hour, making Michael jump. Six thirty. Assuming dinner would again be at seven, he had just time to see if there was any more information to be gleaned about Boots and his quest.