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I gave him one of my hairpins, assuming he would know how to use it.
As he fiddled with the lock, I listened to the horrible sounds that accompanied the violence on the other side: thuds and thumps, shrieks and wails and groans, and then a shocking, liquid hissing, followed by a gurgle, and then the heaviest thud of all, and then silence.
By the time Jesperson managed to get the door open, it was all over. Harcourt was dead. His bloody, battered corpse lay on the carpet, surrounded by the remnants of his murderous collection. Whatever life had possessed them had expired with his. There was a sharp, acrid stench in the room—I guess from the contents of various broken bottles—but nothing so foul as the atmosphere it replaced.
“Vitriol,” said Jesperson. “Don’t look.”
But I had already seen what was left of the face, and it was no more shocking than the sounds had led me to imagine.
As I went out to give Flora Bellamy the news, and to send the maid to fetch the police, I already knew that this had not turned out to be a case I could write about for publication.
And, as it developed, it got worse.
It was fortunate indeed that Jasper Jesperson had some influential relatives who moved in the circles of power, for otherwise I think the local police would have been pleased to charge him with murder, in the absence of more likely suspects, and if he hadn’t done it, I was their next choice.
Even though we might argue we had saved his life, our client was so far from pleased with the outcome of our investigations that he refused to pay us anything. It was not Harcourt’s death that bothered him so much as Miss Bellamy’s insistence on releasing him from their engagement. She would give him no better reason for her change of heart than to say that she was reconsidering how she might best spend her life, and that she was inclined to seek some form of employment by which to support herself “like Miss Lane.”
Flora Bellamy never set foot inside The Pines again. Even though her guardian was dead, she had decided to take no chances, and hired others to empty the house before selling it. In his will, Harcourt left everything to his ward, with only one caveat: Although she could decide whether to keep or dispose of ?
??the collection,” she must do so as a whole, and not break it up.
This stipulation she decided to ignore.
“Perhaps I’m wrong,” she said to me, the last time I saw her, “but I believe it could be dangerous. Individual objects are only things, but when gathered together, they became something more—first in Mr. Harcourt’s imagination, and then in reality.
“The concept in law of the deodand was that something which had once done evil could be remade into something useful, even holy, by good works. That was not allowed to anything in Mr. Harcourt’s collection—his use of those things was opposed to good; it venerated the evil deed.”
Her way of redemption was to donate everything that remained in the house to a good cause. Being extra cautious, she chose one so far away that she would not have to fear an accidental encounter with her former possessions, and had everything sent to a leper colony on the other side of the world.
I took it as a positive sign that she did not feel obliged to sacrifice herself in a similar way.
She decided to share a flat with her school friend, and embarked on a course of training in bookkeeping and office management.
Jesperson and I, naturally, discussed the details of this case—which began with one unsolved murder, and concluded with two—at great length when we were alone together, and also with Mrs. Jesperson, but we were never able to agree upon how to assign the blame for the killings. We all agreed that both Adcocks and Harcourt were murdered, yet we also agreed that if there was no murderer, murder could not have been done.
I hope our next case will be less of a curiosity.
LORD JOHN AND THE PLAGUE OF ZOMBIES
by Diana Gabaldon
New York Times bestselling author Diana Gabaldon is a winner of the Quill Award and of the Corine International Prize for Fiction. She’s the author of the hugely popular Outlander series, international bestsellers that include Outlander (published as Cross Stitch in the UK), Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, A Breath of Snow and Ashes, and An Echo in the Bone, plus a graphic novel, The Exile, based on Outlander. The Lord John Grey novels are a subset of the Outlander series, being part of the whole but focused on the character of Lord John and structured (more or less) as historical mystery. The Lord John series includes the novels Lord John and the Private Matter, Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, and Lord John and the Scottish Prisoner (to be published Fall 2011), and a collection of Lord John novellas, Lord John and the Hand of Devils (including “Lord John and the Hellfire Club,” “Lord John and the Succubus,” and “Lord John and the Haunted Soldier”). She has also written The Outlandish Companion, a nonfiction volume, providing background, trivia, and resources, as well as articles on the writing and research of the series.
Here Lord John brings an armed force to the beautiful but faintly sinister island paradise of Jamaica, where he is ordered to suppress an incipient slave rebellion. The uprising is the least of his problems, what with murder, cannibalism, spiders, snakes, and other deadly creatures. Including, of course, zombies.
THERE WAS A SNAKE ON THE DRAWING ROOM TABLE. A SMALL SNAKE, but still. Lord John Grey wondered whether to say anything about it.
The governor picked up a cut-crystal decanter that stood not six inches from the coiled reptile, appearing quite oblivious. Perhaps it was a pet, or perhaps the residents of Jamaica were accustomed to keep a tame snake in residence, to kill rats. Judging from the number of rats he’d seen since leaving the ship, this seemed sensible—though this particular snake didn’t appear large enough to take on even your average mouse.
The wine was decent, but served at body heat, and it seemed to pass directly through Grey’s gullet and into his blood. He’d had nothing to eat since before dawn, and felt the muscles of his lower back begin to tingle and relax. He put the glass down; he wanted a clear head.
“I cannot tell you, sir, how happy I am to receive you,” said the governor, putting down his own glass, empty. “The position is acute.”
“So you said in your letter to Lord North. The situation has not changed appreciably since then?” It had been nearly three months since that letter was written; a lot could change in three months.
He thought Governor Warren shuddered, despite the temperature in the room.
“It has become worse,” the governor said, picking up the decanter. “Much worse.”
