The Italian Secretary Read online

  ‘My dear fellow,’ said I. ‘I happen to be a doctor …’

  More afraid of humiliation than of the supposed ‘ghost,’ I quickly passed through the bedchamber door—

  And as soon as I did, the sound of the weeping ceased. The near-blackness in the room – relieved only by the very few holes in the draperies – caused my eyes some few moments’ disorientation; but I was relatively certain that the opening and closing of any ‘secret’ doorway must at least be somewhat visible, or, even more probably (given its age), audible; and I was proved right when a few quick footsteps were followed by what sounded like an ancient mechanism turning, and then the gentle scratch of wood moving against wood.

  ‘Please!’ I said; and I cannot pretend that there was not a slightly fearful quality to the entreaty, for, my brave protests to Holmes notwithstanding, some irrational part of my own spirit had been roused by the wailing, the darkness, and the sounds of furtive movements. ‘Do not be alarmed,’ I went on, steadying my voice. ‘I am a friend, sent by friends, and I am a doctor. I am not an agent either of the royal family’s or of the duke’s – you have my word upon it. I know that you may flee, without the possibility of my following – but I do not know why. What misfortune keeps you in this dead place? And what may I do to assist you?’

  A few discouragingly silent seconds passed; and then I heard the same mechanism grinding, along with the same noise of wood sliding, and finally a sound that was anything but ghostly: a small sniffle, followed by the most delicate of coughs. And yet, if the truth be known, it was only when I heard the accompanying voice – small, tremulous, but unmistakably human – that my own breathing resumed its normal rate.

  ‘You – are a doctor?’ The voice was much less mature than the weeping had sounded: I should have guessed that it belonged to a young Scots woman of no more than seventeen or eighteen years, probably from somewhere in the west.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And do you carry med’cines wi’ you?’

  ‘I can certainly obtain some, if you are ill – will you light a candle, and let me see what is wrong?’

  ‘Aye – but what is wrong with me, ye canna’ see.’ She struck a match. ‘No’ yet …’

  My eyes squinted in the comparative glare of a single flaring candlestick; but as they adjusted, I beheld a face and figure that stood in great contrast to the portraits in the gallery without the tower. Straight, sandy-brown hair; skin that, although the face was momentarily paled by fear, was revealed by the neck, the upper chest, and the forearms to be of a healthy colour; fetching green eyes marred by hours of weeping; and thin, trembling lips; all these characterised a girl who, while extremely pretty, was somehow less engaging in her features than her movements, which had a quality of animation even when she was trying to remain still. Above all, there was a sense of enormous susceptibility about her, although her body appeared neither ill nor weak (indeed, she had the hardy frame of a household maid, for all her momentary tremulousness); and the cause of this nervous fragility was soon revealed as anything but obscure.

  ‘Well,’ she said, embarrassed by the glow of the candle she had lit, ‘now you’ve seen me – who has sent you, if no’ the master?’

  ‘I – well, I suppose no one has, really. My friend heard you crying—’

  ‘Friend?’ she repeated fearfully, making a move to blow out the candle and hide behind the heavy, filthy hangings. ‘I thought you said tha’—’

  ‘Now, now, there’s no need for that,’ said I, hurrying to her and preventing her from extinguishing the candle. ‘We are neither here to reveal your hiding place to others nor have we any desire to see you put out.’

  ‘Then – what do you want wi’ me?’ A momentary look of relieved anticipation passed over her features. ‘Did he send you? Am I to go to him now? He promised me, aye, he did, he promised me—!’

  ‘Who has promised you what, precisely?’

  But she had begun to weep again, and I could get no answer to the question. ‘These med’cines of yours,’ she finally said. ‘Oh, Doctor – do you no’ count poisons among them?’

  ‘Poisons?’ I echoed, startled. ‘My dear young lady, why should you wish for poison?’

  ‘Why does any “dear young lady” like myself wish for poison? I am lost!’

  ‘Hush, now, I implore you.’ I guided her to an ancient bed with four thick, richly carved posts that was the focus of the dreary, dusty old room. ‘Let us begin with beginnings. My name is John Watson. I have come up from London with my friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes—’

  ‘Mr Holmes?’ she cried, leaping to her feet again: It really was almost impossible to keep her still. ‘The detective from London? You came wi’ him? Oh, but I shall be found out now, I shall be—’

  ‘You shall be nothing of the sort,’ said I. ‘Neither Mr Holmes nor I has any reason to wish you harm or embarrassment – but I do warn you, all this talk of poison must stop.’ I managed to get her seated again, and, having drawn some conclusions from her few sensible statements, I put them to her: ‘So – you are hiding here, waiting for word from someone. A young man.’

  ‘No’ so young, Doctor,’ she sniffed. ‘The devil is no’ a boy …’

  ‘All right, then. There is a man, and you are waiting here for him. You have not left the palace with the rest of the staff – although, as young as you are, you were likely told to leave.’ She nodded once, and I proceeded. ‘Have you no home to go to? No family?’

  She covered her face with a soiled apron that must have been serving the same purpose for hours, if not days, on end. ‘No family tha’ will have me! No’ as I am!’

  I nodded once. ‘I understand. But he – the man who put you in this predicament – he has said he will return for you.’

  ‘Days ago! They told me to wait here, in this awful place, and he said he would come! I’m no’ so foolish as that – I know why this tower’s closed, I know who walks these halls! He will again tonight – and if I’m forced to hear it even once more, Doctor, the sound o’ that step and that voice, I shall go mad! I canna’ hear it again – it calls to me, it knows I’m here, and it will have me!’

  Finally exhausted by terror and loneliness, the poor wretch buried her face in my shoulder, and I put a hand to her head. ‘Quiet, now, you must quiet yourself – whatever happens, from this point on, you shall not be alone in it, I promise you. Do you understand me, Miss— There, now, you see, you have not yet even told me your name.’

  She came away from my shoulder, once more wiping at her eyes and nose. ‘Alison,’ she said through more sniffling. ‘Alison Mackenzie.’

  ‘And a very proper Scots name it is,’ I replied with a smile.

  ‘But no’ a proper Scots girl to go with it!’ she declared. ‘He shall no’ marry me, I begin to see it – no, and I shall be left here, to listen to that terrible spirit, and to go mad, or be murdered, or both – oh, Doctor, can ye no’ have mercy, and end my terrible troubles for me?’

  From out of the gloom surrounding the doorway came Holmes’s voice. ‘I fear your Scottish magistrates would show the Doctor little mercy, were he to agree to your plan, Miss Mackenzie …’

  Alison Mackenzie bolted up once again, to spy my friend standing across the room. I could see that he was trying his very hardest to appear sympathetic and even kind; but these were always uncertain efforts with Holmes, and Miss Mackenzie’s wits, already strained, could offer him no trust at first glance.

  ‘But he is right, nevertheless,’ Holmes went on, pointing to me. ‘We have no cause to wish you harm of any kind, and every reason to help you.’

  ‘Why?’ the girl demanded sternly. ‘Why should either of you help me – a stranger who’s alone in a forbidden place?’

  ‘Perhaps because we, too, are strangers here,’ Holmes said, his voice now full of a much more genuine sort of emotion. ‘And we are more than familiar with forbidden places …’

  Miss Mackenzie gave that a few seconds’ consideration, her features still hard; but soo
n she relented, a change signalled by a return to her apparently inexhaustible capacity for weeping. ‘But you can leave this place, when you will – I never can, save if he comes for me, and I see now that he will no’ – he will no’ come, no’ ever, and I shall be left to go mad at the sound of that step, and that voice …’

  It was the work of more than an hour to get the girl truly calmed and composed. Holmes left us to order more sandwiches and a little whisky from Hackett, confiding to me that the butler knew full well where we were and what we were doing (a statement that I initially found almost shocking, but that I would soon come to understand). Once she had something in her stomach other than her own tears, and once the whisky had reached her nervous system and produced the desired effect, Miss Mackenzie began to tell us her tale.

  Born, indeed, on a small crofter’s farm in the loch country on the other side of Scotland, she had come to serve at Holyroodhouse only in the past year, when her aunt – who, it happened, was Hackett’s kindly but very nervous wife – had recommended her for the position. Almost as soon as she had arrived, Miss Mackenzie had predictably become the recipient of the attentions of every young man in the house, whether staff, resident, or guest; but, unlike so many unfortunates in similar positions, she had been protected, not only by Hackett, but by her cousin Andrew, and finally by a third benefactor: the park ghillie, Robert Sadler, the man Mycroft Holmes had mentioned as being a particular royal favourite, and a seemingly decent soul who had taken rather a brotherly interest in the susceptible girl. Thus, it had not been this Robert who had been the instrument of her ruin.

  ‘Ye canna’ blame Master Rob, gentlemen,’ Miss Mackenzie told us, as the hour approached eight o’clock and she – having perhaps indulged in one or two ounces more of the whisky than one in her emotional state could successfully manage – began to grow what could fairly be called philosophical, for such a girl. ‘I have a gran in Glasgow, and she tells me – if she’s told me once, she’s told me nigh on ten thoosand times – “You can pick your friends, Allie,” she says, “but you canna’ pick your fam’ly.”’ A forlorn sigh followed this colourful homily. ‘Master Rob can no’ help having such a brother …’

  Holmes – who had done his very best to be patient, while I coaxed the girl into a state of calm that, if it was not entirely relaxed, was at least conversational – now spun round, hurling the stub end of his cigarette into the tall, handsomely carved granite fireplace that filled the wall of the room opposite the bed. ‘Such a brother, Miss Mackenzie? Such a brother as …?’

  Miss Mackenzie sighed heavily, lying atop the ancient bedspread and cradling her heavy head in her hands. ‘As himself, Mr Holmes … As William. Willie, to me, but “Likely Will”, to most. I ne’er could see the reason for such a name, though. Not till it was too late …’

  ‘So …’ And with that small judgement, Holmes began his infernal pacing again, that peculiarly insistent form of his usual nervous habit that had been born with this case, and had been my first indication, when I had returned to Baker Street scarcely more than twenty-four hours ago, that something particularly deep in his soul had been roiled by these goings-on. ‘“Likely Will,”’ he repeated, smiling as he did. ‘It’s an unusual epithet, Watson, you must admit. I half expected “Black Will”, or some such—’

  ‘He’s no need to declare it so openly, Mr Holmes,’ interjected Miss Mackenzie, and quite firmly. ‘For the blackness will out of him, sooner or later. Aye – they all said so, e’en Master Rob. But I would no’ listen. I knew him better than all o’ them, you see … And now, look what’s become o’ me. Ruined by that same blackness. No – he’s no need to declare it, at all …’

  ‘Indeed,’ Holmes pronounced, his moment of amusement gone and the faintest air of contrition in his voice. ‘I am quite sure. And what is his trade, this Likely Will Sadler of yours, Miss Mackenzie?’

  She let her head drop fully to the dusty bed. ‘’Twas his trade that first drew me in!’ she called, and then, anticipating our confusion, she rose to explain. ‘They call him “armourer,” up at the Castle, but he does more than that – he repairs all their old, useless things.’

  ‘At Edinburgh Castle?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye,’ answered she, ‘but he works at the palace, too – that was how we met. He’d come here to deliver a suit of armour that he’d dandied up – and had he been wearing it himself, I could no’ have been more taken with the sight of ’im! All strength and tall walking, and a smile as would make the moon sink back below the hill-sides, out o’ shame … that was Likely Will Sadler … One day I finally asked Master Rob about the name, and I dunna’ think he wished to tell me, for he could see the look in my eye. In truth, I think he even meant to warn me, in a way. ‘Likely,’ he says to me, ‘because what e’er Will sets himself at, he’ll likely do. Or have.’ And Will did set himself at me, oh, how he did … He knew girls like he knew those old machines o’ his: I felt a princess, in this palace, for all my scrubbing and hauling … But in the end – ’twas all to my everlasting shame and damnation …’

  The girl was quite beyond sobbing, at last – and yet I felt myself wishing that she could cry again, for this new form of sadness was not one for which Holmes or I or anyone else could offer any palliative, save the cold comfort of platitudes about other women who had lived through such things, and learned to raise their child, with or without the faithless men who had fathered them … But how much can talk of that kind mean to a poor young girl whose life seems, to her, to have ended before it has really begun?

  It was Holmes, oddly enough, who managed the only statement that went near to mollifying her: ‘We shall not insult you, Miss Mackenzie, by telling you that your life will be easy, in the months to come. But you are not damned – not yet.’ He went to the bed and crouched down, in order to be able to look the girl in the eye. ‘And if you can find it in you to help the Doctor and myself, you will also find, and I pledge this to you, that your damnation need never take place. You are right to believe that this Likely Will of yours has no intention of returning to take you away to what most would call a “respectable life” – indeed, you have already realised, have you not, that he has planned on your being discovered by your aunt and uncle in this tower, and returned by them to your home in disgrace.’ Silent tears drifted down the poor child’s exhausted face, as she bravely nodded assent to Holmes’s supposition. ‘Good – then you know him truly, and will not protest that he is better than we suppose. This marks you already as a superior member of your sex.’

  Miss Mackenzie’s aspect changed, at that: Surprise and hope were awakened by Holmes’s words. ‘Does it, Mr Holmes?’

  ‘Indeed. But you have another shock to bear, and it may be harder. Will you try?’ Still heartened by Holmes’s estimation of her, the girl nodded again. ‘The man who has taken so much from you has taken even more from others – and he will doubtless try to take the same dreadful measure from you, when he finds that you are still here.’

  ‘Holmes!’ I interjected. Seeing the look of dumbstruck confusion and fear on Miss Mackenzie’s face, I pulled my friend aside. ‘How can you say this so directly to a girl in so fragile a state?’

  ‘You are wrong, Watson,’ he answered firmly. ‘This girl is not the simple serving wench of Holyroodhouse that this Will Sadler has taken her for – this is a daughter of the Scottish earth, with more Bannockburn than Culloden in her soul!’ He returned to Miss Mackenzie, drawing her up by her shoulders until she sat upon the bed. ‘She has managed these days alone in this rotting, haunted wing of the palace – and she shall yet manage more! Am I right, Miss Mackenzie?’

  The girl’s cheeks had become flushed with colour as Holmes spoke, and she had just opened her mouth to give voice to assent—

  When, from the floor above, came a sound: the slow, hesitant step of booted feet against the wooden floor. With a ponderous quality that, under the circumstances, seemed doleful, the step advanced a few paces, and stopped; advanced, and then stopped; never
at regular intervals, and never moving in an intelligible direction or pattern. In addition, as if the step were not enough, it was soon joined by another chilling noise: a human voice, a man’s voice, and one that slowly, ever so slowly and mournfully, hummed a tune – an air at once familiar and utterly alien.

  Miss Mackenzie’s instantly covered her mouth, and all the newly found colour drained away from her face. ‘’Tis him!’ she whispered desperately.

  ‘Him?’ said Holmes, eyeing the panelled ceiling. ‘Sadler?’

  ‘No!’ the girl wept. ‘Him!’ She glanced at us both, horror in her every feature. ‘The poor man they murdered here, all those years ago! He has ne’er left, can ye no’ see?’ She looked at the ceiling once more. ‘The Italian gentleman – ’tis his spirit, come for revenge …’

  Chapter IX

  OF MIDNIGHT VISITS – AND VISITORS …

  My hand went quickly to the pocket in which I had been keeping the Palm-protector obtained from Shinwell Johnson (as well as a store of a dozen rounds of ammunition that were carefully wrapped in a handkerchief). The move was an instinctive one, of course – what good, after all, would a firearm be against a spirit? – but it steeled my nerve, nonetheless.

  ‘“The Italian gentleman”?’ whispered I. ‘Holmes, can she really mean—’

  ‘Indeed,’ Holmes answered, listening carefully to the step and the humming voice above. ‘David Rizzio.’

  ‘Aye!’ Miss Mackenzie breathed. ‘So he called him, right enough!’

  ‘Then Sadler told you the legend,’ said Holmes.

  ‘And showed me!’ the girl answered. ‘It is no’ a legend, Mr Holmes – I’ve seen the blood that never dries!’

  I turned to Holmes. ‘What on earth …?’

  ‘Yes – Hackett told me of it, Watson. And showed me this.’ From his pocket, Holmes produced a crudely printed pamphlet, one that I perused as the footsteps above continued to tap out their eerily distorted units of time.