Chiara C. Rizzarda's Blog

Marjorie Bowen — The Extraordinary Adventure of Mr John Proudie

Published in Crimes of Old London in 1919 and then again in The Bishop of Hell and Other Stories (1949), today we feature another spooky story by Marjorie Bowen.

MR. JOHN PROUDIE kept a chemist’s shop in Soho Fields, Monmouth Square; it was a very famous shop, situated at the corner, so that there were two fine windows of leaded glass, one looking on Dean Street and one on the Square, and at the corner the door, with a wooden portico by which two steps descended into the shop.

A wooden counter, polished and old, ran round this shop, and was bare of everything save a pair of gleaming brass scales; behind, the walls were covered from floor to ceiling by shelves which held jars of Delft pottery, blue and white, and Italian majolica, red and yellow, on which were painted the names of the various drugs; in the centre the shelves were broken by a door that led into an inner room.

On a certain night in November when the shop was shut, the old housekeeper abed, and the fire burning brightly in the parlour, Mr John Proudie was busy in his little laboratory compounding some medicines, in particular a mixture of the milky juice of blue flag root and pepper which he had found very popular for indigestion.

He was beginning to feel cold, and, not being a young man (at this time, the year 1690, Mr Proudie was nearly sixty), a little tired, and to think with pleasure of his easy chair, his hot drink of mulled wine on the hearth, his Gazette with its exciting news of the war and the Commons and the plots, when a loud peal at the bell caused him to drop the strainer he was holding—not that it was so unusual for Mr Proudie’s bell to ring after dark, but his thoughts had been full of these same troubles of plots and counter-plots of the late Revolution, and the house seemed very lonely and quiet.

‘Fine times,’ thought Mr Proudie indignantly, ‘when an honest tradesman feels uneasy in his own home!’

The bell went again, impatiently, and the apothecary wiped his hands, took up a candle, and went through to the dark shop. As he passed through the parlour he glanced up at the clock and was surprised to see that it was nearly midnight. He set the candle in its great pewter stick on the counter, whence the light threw glistening reflections on the rows of jars and their riches, and opened the door. A gust of wind blew thin cold sleet across the, polished floor, and the apothecary shivered as he cried out: ‘Who is there?’

Without replying a tall gentleman stepped down into the shop, closing the door behind him.

‘Well, sir?’ asked Mr Proudie a little sharply.

‘I want a doctor,’ said the stranger, ‘at once.’

He glanced round the shop impatiently, taking no more notice of Mr Proudie than if he had been a servant.

‘And why did you come here for a doctor?’ demanded the apothecary, not liking his manner and hurt at the insinuation that his own professional services were not good enough.

‘I was told,’ replied the stranger, speaking in tolerable English, but with a marked foreign accent, ‘that a doctor lodged over your shop.’

‘So he does,’ admitted Mr Proudie grudgingly; ‘but he is abed.’

The stranger approached the counter and leant against it in the attitude of a man exhausted; the candlelight was now full on him, but revealed nothing of his features, for he wore a black mask such as was used for travelling on doubtful rendezvous; a black lace fringe concealed the lower part of his face.

Mr Proudie did not like this; he scented mystery and underhand intrigue, and he stared at the stranger very doubtfully.

He was a tall, graceful man, certainly young, wrapped in a dark blue mantle lined with fur and wearing riding gloves and top boots; the skirts of a blue velvet coat showed where the mantle was drawn up by. his sword, and there was a great deal of fine lace and a diamond brooch at his throat.

‘Well,’ he said impatiently, and his black eyes flashed through the mask holes, ‘how long are you going to keep me waiting? I want Dr Valletort at once.’

‘Oh, you know his name?’

‘Yes, I was told his name. Now, for God’s sake, sir, fetch him—tell him it is a woman who requires his services!’

Mr Proudie turned reluctantly away and picked up the candle, leaving the gentleman in the dark, mounted the stairs to the two rooms above the shop, and roused his lodger.

‘You are wanted, Dr Valletort,’ he said through the door; ‘there is a man downstairs come to fetch you to a lady—a bitter night and he a foreign creature in a mask,’ finished the old apothecary in a grumble.

Dr Francis Valletort at once opened the door; he was not in bed, but had been reading by the light of a small lamp. Tall and elegant, with the pallor of a scholar and the grace of a gentleman, the young doctor stood as if startled, holding his open book in his hand.

‘Do not go,’ said Mr Proudie on a sudden impulse; ‘these are troubled times and it is a bitter night to be abroad.’

The doctor smiled.

‘I cannot afford to decline patients, Mr Proudie—remember how much I am in your debt for food and lodging,’ he added with some bitterness.

‘Tut, tut!’ replied Mr Proudie, who had a real affection for the young man. ‘But no doubt I am an old fool—come down and see this fellow.’

The doctor took up his shabby hat and cloak and followed the apothecary down into the parlour and from there into the shop.

‘I hope you are ready,’ said the voice of the stranger from the dark; ‘the patient may be dead through this delay.’

Mr Proudie again placed the candle on the counter; the red flame of it illuminated the tall, dark figure of the stranger and the shabby figure of the doctor against the background of the dark shop and the jars—labelled ‘Gum Camphor’, ‘Mandrake Root’, ‘Dogwood Bark’, ‘Blue Vervain’, ‘Tansy’, ‘Hemlock’, and many other drugs, written in blue and red lettering under the glazing.

‘Where am I to go and what is the case?’ asked Francis Valletort, eyeing the stranger intently.

‘Sir, I will tell you all these questions on the way; the matter is urgent.’

‘What must I take with me?’

The stranger hesitated.

‘First, Dr Valletort,’ he said, ‘are you skilled in the Italian?’

The young doctor looked at the stranger very steadily. ‘I studied medicine at the University of Padua,’ he replied.

‘Ah! Well, then, you will be able to talk to the patient, an Italian lady who speaks no English. Bring your instruments and some antidotes for poisoning, and make haste.’

The doctor caught the apothecary by the arm and drew him into the parlour. He appeared in considerable agitation.

‘Get me my sword and pistols,’ he said swiftly, ‘while I prepare my case.’

He spoke in a whisper, for the door was open behind them into the shop, and the apothecary, alarmed by his pale look, answered in the same fashion: ‘Why are you going? Do you know this man?’

‘I cannot tell if I know him or not—what shall I do? God help me!’

He spoke in such a tone of despair and looked so white and ill that Mr Proudie pushed him into a chair by the fire and bade him drink some of the wine that was warming.

‘You will not go out tonight,’ he said firmly.

‘No,’ replied the doctor, wiping the damp from his brow, ‘I cannot go.’

John Proudie returned to the shop to take this message to the stranger, who, on hearing it, broke into a passionate ejaculation in a foreign language, then thrust his hand into his coat pocket.

‘Take this to Francis Valletort,’ he answered, ‘and then see if he will come.’

He flung on the counter, between the scales and candle, a ring of white enamel, curiously set with alternate pearls and diamonds very close together, and having suspended from it a fine chain from which hung a large and pure pearl.

Before the apothecary could reply Francis Valletort, who had heard the stranger’s words, came from the parlour and snatched at the ring. While he was holding it under the candle flame and gazing at the whiteness of diamond, pearl, and enamel, the masked man repeated his words.

‘Now will you come?’

The doctor straightened his thin shoulders, his hollow face was flushed into a strange beauty.

‘I will come,’ he said; he pushed back the brown locks that had slipped from the black ribbon on to his cheek and turned to pick up his hat and cloak, while he asked Mr Proudie to go up to his room and fetch his case of instruments.

The apothecary obeyed; there was something in the manner of Francis Valletort that told him that he was now as resolute in undertaking this errand as hitherto he had been anxious to avoid it; but he did not care for the adventure. When the stranger had thrust his hand into his pocket to find the ring that had produced such an effect on the doctor, Mr Proudie had noticed something that he considered very unpleasant. The soft doeskin glove had fallen back, caught in the folds of the heavy mantle as the hand was withdrawn, and Mr Proudie had observed a black wrist through the lace ruffles: the masked cavalier was a negro. Mr Proudie had seen few coloured men and regarded them with suspicion and aversion; and what seemed to him so strange was that what he styled a ‘blackamoor’ should be thus habited in fashionable vestures and speaking with an air of authority.

However, evidently Francis Valletort knew the man or at least his errand—doubtless from some days of student adventure in Italy; and the apothecary did not feel called upon to interfere. He returned with the case of instruments to find the stranger and the doctor both gone, the parlour and the shop both empty, and the candle on the counter guttering furiously in the fierce draught from the half-open door.

Mr Proudie was angry; there had been no need to slip away like that, sending him away by a trick, and still further no need to leave the door open at the mercy of any passing vagabond.

The apothecary went and peered up and down the street; all was wet darkness; a north wind flung the stinging rain in his face; a distant street lamp cast a fluttering flame but no light on the blackness.

Mr Proudie closed the door with a shudder and went back to his fire and his Gazette.

‘Let him,’ he said to himself, still vexed, ‘go on his fool’s errand.’

He knew very little of Francis Valletort, whose acquaintance he had made a year ago when the young doctor had come to him to buy drugs. The apothecary had found his customer earnest, intelligent, and learned, and a friendship had sprung up between the two men which had ended in the doctor renting the two rooms above the shop, and, under the wing of the apothecary, picking up what he could of the crumbs let fall by the fashionable physicians of this fashionable neighbourhood.

‘I hope he will get his fee tonight,’ thought Mr Proudie, as he stirred the fire into a blaze; then, to satisfy his curiosity as to whether this were really a medical case or only an excuse, he went to the dispensary to see if the doctor had taken any drugs. He soon discovered that two bottles, one containing an antidote against arsenic poisoning, composed of oxide of iron and flax seed, the other a mixture for use against lead poisoning, containing oak bark and green tea, were missing.

‘So there was someone ill?’ cried Mr Proudie aloud, and at that moment the door bell rang again.

‘He is soon back,’ thought the apothecary, and hastened to undo the door; ‘perhaps le was really hurried away and forgot his case.’ He opened the door with some curiosity, being eager to question the doctor, but it was another stranger who stumbled down the two steps into the dark shop—a woman, whose head was wrapped in a cloudy black shawl.

The wind had blown out the candle on the counter and the shop was only lit by the illumination, faint and dull, from the parlour; therefore, Mr Proudie could not see his second visitor clearly, but only sufficiently to observe that she was richly dressed and young; the door blew open, and wind and rain were over both of them; Mr Proudie had to clap his hand to his wig to keep it on his head.

‘Heaven help us!’ he exclaimed querulously. ‘What do you want, madam?’

For answer she clasped his free hand with fingers so chill that they struck a shudder to the apothecary’s heart, and broke out into a torrent of words in what was to Mr Proudie an incomprehensible language; she was obviously in the wildest distress and grief, and perceiving that the apothecary did not understand her, she flung herself on her knees, wringing her hands and uttering exclamations of despair.

The disturbed Mr Proudie closed the door and drew the lady into the parlour; she continued to speak, rapidly and with many gestures, but all he could distinguish was the name of Francis Valletort.

She was a pretty creature, fair and slight, with braids of seed pearls in her blonde hair showing through the dark net of her lace shawl, an apple-green silk gown embroidered with multitudes of tiny roses, and over all a black Venetian velvet mantle; long corals were in her ears, and a chain of amber round her throat; her piteously gesticulating hands were weighted with large and strange rings.

‘If you cannot speak English, madam,’ said Mr Proudie, who was sorry for her distress, but disliked her for her outlandish appearance and because he associated her with the blackamoor, ‘I am afraid I cannot help you.’

While he spoke she searched his face with eager haggard brown eyes, and when he finished she sadly shook her head to show that she did not understand. She glanced round the homely room impatiently, then, with a little cry of despair and almost stumbling in her long silken skirts, which she was too absorbed in her secret passion to gather up, she turned back into the shop, making a gesture that Mr Proudie took to mean she wished to leave. The apothecary was not ill-pleased at this; since they could not understand each other her presence was but an embarrassment. He would have liked to have asked her to wait the doctor’s return, but saw that she understood no word of English; he thought it was Italian she spoke, but he could not be even sure of that.

As swiftly as she had come she had gone, unbolting the door herself and disappearing into the dark; as far as Mr Proudie could see, she had neither chair nor coach; in which case she must have come from nearby, for there was but little wet on her clothes.

Once more the apothecary returned to his fire, noticing the faint perfume of iris the lady had left on the air to mingle with the odours of Peruvian bark and camomile, rosemary and saffron, beeswax and turpentine, myrrh and cinnamon that rendered heavy the air of the chemist’s shop.

‘Well, she knows her own business, I have no doubt,’ thought Mr Proudie, ‘and as I cannot help her I had better stay quietly here till Francis Valletort returns and elucidates the mystery.’

But he found that he could not fix his thoughts on the Gazette, nor, indeed, on anything whatever but the mysterious events of the evening.

He took up an old book of medicine and passed over the pages, trying to interest himself in old prescriptions of blood root, mandrake and valerian, gentian, flax seed and hyssop, alum, poke root and black cherry, which he knew by heart, and which did not now distract him at all from the thought of the woman in her rich foreign finery, her distress and distraction, who had come so swiftly out of the night.

Now she had gone, uneasiness assailed him—where had she disappeared? Was she safe? Ought he not forcibly to have kept her till the return of Francis Valletort, who spoke both French and Italian? Certainly he had been the cause of the lady’s visit; she had said, again and again, ‘Valletort—Francis Valletort.’ The apothecary drank his spiced wine, trimmed and snuffed his candles, warmed his feet on the hearth and his hands over the blaze, and listened for the bell that should tell of the doctor’s return.

He began to get sleepy, almost dozed off in his chair, and was becoming angry with these adventures that kept him out of his bed when the bell rang a third time, and he sat up with that start that a bell rung suddenly in the silence of the night never fails to give.

‘Of course it will be Francis Valletort back again,’ he said, rising and taking up the candle that had now nearly burnt down to the socket; it was half an hour since the doctor had left the house.

Once again the apothecary opened the door on to the wet, windy night; the candle was blown out in his hand.

‘You—must come,’ said a woman’s voice out of the darkness; he could just distinguish the figure of his former visitor, standing in the doorway and looking down on him; she spoke the three English words with care and difficulty, and with such a foreign accent that the apothecary stared stupidly, not understanding, at which she broke out into her foreign ejaculations, caught at his coat, and dragged at him passionately.

Mr Proudie, quite bewildered, stepped into the street, and stood there hatless and cloakless, the candlestick in his hand.

‘If you could only explain yourself, madam!’ he exclaimed in despair.

While he was protesting she drew the door to behind him and, seizing his arm, hurried along down Dean Street.

Mr Proudie did not wish to refuse to accompany her, but the adventure was not pleasing to him; he shivered in the night air and felt apprehensive of the darkness; he wished he had had time to bring his hat and cloak.

‘Madam,’ he said, as he hurried along, ‘unless you have someone who can speak English, I fear I shall be no good at all, whatever your plight.’

She made no answer; he could hear her teeth chattering and feel her shivering; now and then she stumbled over the rough stones of the roadway. They had not gone far up the street when she stopped at the door of one of the mansions and pushed it gently open, guiding Mr Proudie into a hall in absolute silence and darkness. Mr Proudie thought that he knew all the houses in Dean Street, but he could not place this; the darkness had completely confused him.

The lady opened another door and pushed Mr Proudie into a chamber where a faint light burned.

The room was unfurnished, covered with dust and in disrepair; only in front of the shuttered windows hung long, dark blue silk curtains. Against the wall was hung a silver lamp of beautiful workmanship, which gave a gloomy glow over the desolate chamber.

The apothecary was about to speak when the lady, who had been standing in an attitude of listening, suddenly put her hand over his mouth and pushed him desperately behind the curtains. Mr Proudie would have protested, not liking this false position, but there was no mistaking the terrified entreaty in the foreign woman’s blanched face, and the apothecary, altogether unnerved, suffered himself to be concealed behind the flowing folds of the voluminous curtains that showed so strangely in the unfurnished room.

A firm step sounded outside and Mr Proudie, venturing in the shadow to peer from behind the curtain, saw his first visitor of the evening enter the room. He was now without mask, hat, or wig, and his appearance caused Mr Proudie an inward shudder.

Tall and superb in carriage, graceful, and richly dressed, the face and head were those of a full-blooded negro; his rolling eyes, his twitching lips, and an extraordinary pallor that rendered greenish his dusky skin showed him to be in some fierce passion. His powerful black hands grasped a martingale of elegant leather, ornamented with silver studs.

With a fierce gesture he pointed to the lady’s draggled skirts and wet shawl, and in the foreign language that she had used questioned her with a flood of invective—or such it seemed to the terrified ears of Mr Proudie.

She seemed to plead, weep, lament, and defy all at once, sweeping up and down the room and wringing her hands, and now and then, it seemed, calling on God and his saints to help her, for she cast up her eyes and pressed her palms together. To the amazed apothecary, to whom nothing exciting had ever happened before, this was like a scene in a stage play; the two brilliant, fantastic figures, the negro and the fair woman, going through this scene of incomprehensible passion in the empty room, lit only by the solitary lamp.

Mr Proudie hoped that there might be no violence in which he would be called upon to interfere on behalf of the lady: neither his age nor his strength would give him any chance with the terrible blackamoor—he was, moreover, totally unarmed.

His anxieties on this score were ended; the drama being enacted before his horrified yet fascinated gaze was suddenly cut short. The negro seized the lady by the wrist and dragged her from the room.

Complete silence fell; the shivering apothecary was staining his ears for some sound, perhaps some call for help, some shriek or cry.

But nothing broke the stillness of the mansion, and presently Mr Proudie ventured forth from his hiding-place.

He left the room and proceeded cautiously to the foot of the stairs. Such utter silence prevailed that he began to think he was alone in the house and that anyhow he might now return—the front door was ajar, as his conductress had left it; the way of escape was easy.

To the end of his days Mr Proudie regretted that he had not taken it; he never could tell what motives induced him to return to the room, take down the lamp, and begin exploring the house. He rather thought, he would say afterwards, that he wanted to find Francis Valletort; he felt sure that he must be in the house somewhere and he had a horrid premonition of foul play; he was sure, in some way, that the house was empty and the lady and the blackamoor had fled, and an intense curiosity got the better of his fear, his bewilderment, and his fatigue.

He walked very softly, for he was startled by the creaking of the boards beneath his feet; the lamp shook in his hand so that the fitful light ran wavering over walls and ceiling; every moment he paused and listened, fearful to hear the voice or step of the blackamoor.

On the first floor all the doors were open, the rooms all empty, shuttered, desolate, covered with dust and damp.

‘There is certainly no-one in the house,’ thought Mr Proudie, with a certain measure of comfort. ‘Perhaps Valletort has gone home while I have been here on this fool’s errand.’

He remembered with satisfaction his fire and his bed, the safe, comfortable shop with the rows of jars, the shining counter, and the gleaming scales, and the snug little parlour beyond, with everything to his hand, just as he liked to find it. Yet he went on up the stairs, continuing to explore the desolate, empty house, the chill atmosphere of which caused him to shiver as if he was cold to the marrow.

On the next landing he was brought up short by a gleam of light from one of the back moms. In a panic of terror he put out his own lamp and stood silent and motionless, staring at the long, faint ray of yellow that fell through the door that was ajar.

‘There is someone in the house, then,’ thought Mr Proudie. ‘I wonder if it is the doctor.’

He crept close to the door, but dared not look in; yet could not go away. The silence was complete; he could only hear the thump of his own heart.

Curiosity, a horrible, fated curiosity, urged him nearer, drove him to put his eye to the crack. His gaze fell on a man leaning against the wall; he was dressed in a rich travelling dress and wore neither peruke nor hat; his superb head was bare to the throat, and he was so dark as to appear almost of African blood; his features, however, were handsome and regular, though pallid and distorted by an expression of despair and ferocity.

A candle stuck into the neck of an empty bottle stood on the bare floor beside him and illuminated his sombre and magnificent figure, casting a grotesque shadow on the dark, panelled wall.

At his feet lay a heap of white linen and saffron-coloured brocade, with here and there the gleam of a red jewel. Mr Proudie stared at this; as his sight became accustomed to the waving lights and shades, he saw that he was gazing at a woman.

A dead woman.

She lay all dishevelled, her clothes torn and her black hair fallen in a tangle—the man had his foot on the end of it; her head was twisted to one side and there were dreadful marks on her throat.

Mr John Proudie gave one sob and fled, with the swiftness and silence of utter terror, down the stairs, out into the street, and never ceased running until he reached home.

He had his key in his pocket, and let himself into his house, panting and sighing, utterly spent. He lit every light in the place and sat down over the dying fire, his teeth chattering and his knees knocking together. Like a man bewitched he sat staring into the fire, raking the embers together, rubbing his hands and shivering, with his mind a blank for everything but that picture he had seen through the crack of the door in the empty house in Dean Street.

When his lamp and candles burnt out he drew the curtains and let in the colourless light of the November dawn; he began to move about the shop in a dazed, aimless way, staring at his jars and scales and pestle and mortar as if they were strange things he had never seen before.

Now came a young apprentice with a muffler round his neck, whistling and red with the cold; and as he took down the shutters and opened the dispensary, as the housekeeper came down and bustled about the breakfast and there was a pleasant smell of coffee and bacon in the place, Mr Proudie began to feel that the happenings of last night were a nightmare indeed that had no place in reality; he felt a cowardly and strong desire to say nothing about any of it, but to try to forget the blackamoor, the foreign lady, and that horrible scene in the upper chamber as figments of his imagination.

It was, however, useless for him to take cover in the refuge of silence—old Emily’s first remark went to the root of the matter. ‘Why, where is the doctor? He has never been out so late before.’

Where, indeed, was Francis Valletort?

With a groan Mr Proudie dragged himself together; his body was stiff with fatigue, his mind amazed, and he wished that he could have got into bed and slept off all memories of the previous night.

Bur he knew the thing must be faced and, snatching up his hat and coat, staggered out into the air, looking by ten years an older man than the comfortable, quiet tradesman of last night.

He went to the nearest magistrate and told his story; he could see that he was scarcely believed, but a couple of watchmen were sent with him to investigate the scene of last night’s adventure, which, remarked the magistrate, should be easily found, since there was, it seemed, but one empty house in Dean Street.

The house was reached, the lock forced, and the place searched, room by room.

To Mr Proudie’s intense disappointment and amazement absolutely nothing was found: the blue silk curtains had gone, as had the silver lamp the apothecary had dropped on the stairs in his headlong flight; in the upper chamber where he had stared through the crack of the door nothing was to be found—not a stain on the boards, not a mark on the wall. Dusty, neglected, desolate, the place seemed as if it had not been entered for years.

Mr Proudie began to think that he had been the victim of a company of ghosts or truly bewitched. Then, inside the door, was found the pewter candlestick he had held mechanically in his hand when hurried from his shop and as mechanically let fall here as he had afterwards let fall the lamp.

This proved nothing beyond the fact that he had been in the house last night; but it a little reassured him that he was not altogether losing his wits.

The fullest inquiries were made in the neighbourhood, but without result. No-one had seen the foreigners, no-one had heard any noise in the house, and it would have been generally believed that Mr Proudie had really lost his senses but for one fact—Francis Valletort never returned!

There was, then, some mystery, but the solving of it seemed hopeless, No search or inquiries led to the discovery of the whereabouts of the young doctor, and as he was of very little importance and had no friends but the old apothecary, his disappearance was soon forgotten.

But Mr Proudie, who seemed very aged and, the neighbours said, strange since that November night, was not satisfied with any such reasoning. Day and night he brooded over the mystery, and hardly ever out of his mind was the figure of the young scholar in his shabby clothes, with the strange face of one doomed as he stood putting his heavy hair back from his face and staring at the little white ring on the old, polished counter.

As the years went by the rooms over the chemist’s shop were occupied by another lodger and Mr Proudie took possession of the poor effects of Francis Valletort—a few shabby clothes, a few shabby books; nothing of value or even of interest. But to the apothecary these insignificant articles had an intense if horrid fascination.

He locked them away in his cabinet and when he was alone he would take them out and turn them over. In between the thick, yellow leaves of a Latin book on medicine he found the thin leaves of what seemed to be the remains of a diary—fragments torn violently from the cover—mostly half-effaced and one torn across and completely blotted with ink.

There was no name, but Mr Proudie recognised the handwriting of Francis Valletort. With pain and difficulty the dim old eyes of the apothecary made out the following entries:

July 15th, 1687—I saw her in the church today—Santa Maria Maggiore. He is her husband, a Calabrere.’ Several lines were blotted out, then came these words—’a man of great power; some mystery—his half-brother is an African…children of a slave…that such a woman…

July 27th—I cannot see how this is going to end; her sister is married to the brother—Vittoria, the name—hers Elena della Cxxxxxx.

August 3rd—She showed me the ring today. I think she has worn it since she was a child; it only fits her little finger.’

Again the manuscript was indecipherable; then followed some words scratched out, but readable—

As if I would not come to her without this token! But she is afraid of a trick. He is capable of anything—they, I mean; the brother is as his shadow. I think she trusts her sister. My little love!

On another page were found further entries:

October 10th—She says that if he discovered us he would kill her—us together. He told her he would kill her if she angered him; showed her a martingale and said they would strangle her. My God, why do I not murder him? Carlo Fxxxxxx warned me today.

October 29th—I must leave Padua. For her sake—while she is safe—if she is in trouble she will send me the ring. I wonder why we go on living—it is over, the farewells.

Mr Proudie could make out nothing more; he put down the pages with a shudder. To what dark and secret tale of wrong and passion did they not refer? Did they not hold the key to the events of that awful night?

Mr Proudie believed that he had seen the husband and brother-in-law of some woman Francis Valletort had loved, who had followed him to England after the lapse of years; having wrung the secret and the meaning of the white ring from the wretched wife, the husband had used it to lure the lover to his fate; in his other visitor the apothecary believed he had seen the sister Vittoria, who, somehow, had escaped and endeavoured to gain help from the house where she knew Francis Valletort lived, only to be silenced again by her husband. And the other woman—and the martingale?

‘I saw her, too,’ muttered Mr Proudie to himself, shivering over the fire, ‘but what did they do with Frank?’

He never knew, and died a very old man with all the details of this mystery unrevealed; the fragments of diary were burnt by some careless hand for whom they had no interest; the adventure of Mr Proudie passed into the realms of forgotten mystery, and there was no-one to tell of them when, a century later, repairs to the foundations of an old house in Dean Street revealed two skeletons buried deep beneath the bricks. One was that of a man, the other that of a woman, round whose bones still hung a few shreds of saffron-coloured brocade; and between them was a little ring of white enamel and white stones.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman — The Giant Wistaria

Charlotte Perkins Gilman is best remembered today for her groundbreaking short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), a tale that has become a classic of both Gothic fiction and feminist literature. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Gilman was a writer, lecturer, and social reformer who used her pen to challenge the conventions of her time, particularly the restrictive roles imposed on women in marriage and society.

Her fiction often explores the psychological toll of confinement, repression, and enforced domesticity, turning everyday spaces into sites of terror. In doing so, Gilman transformed Gothic motifs into sharp social critique: haunted houses became metaphors for oppressive homes, and madness revealed the consequences of silenced voices.

Beyond her ghostly or unsettling stories, she was a powerful advocate for women’s rights, publishing essays, lectures, and even her own magazine (The Forerunner). Yet it is through her Gothic-inflected fiction that she continues to disturb, fascinate, and resonate with modern readers.

Today we see one of her short stories.

“Meddle not with my new vine, child! See! Thou hast already broken the tender shoot! Never needle or distaff for thee, and yet thou wilt not be quiet!”

The nervous fingers wavered, clutched at a small carnelian cross that hung from her neck, then fell despairingly.

“Give me my child, mother, and then I will be quiet!”

“Hush! hush! thou fool-some one might be near! See-there is thy father coming, even now! Get in quickly!”

She raised her eyes to her mother’s face, weary eyes that yet had a flickering, uncertain blaze in their shaded depths.

“Art thou a mother and hast no pity on me, a mother? Give me my child!”

Her voice rose in a strange, low cry, broken by her father’s hand upon her mouth.

“Shameless!” said he, with set teeth. “Get to thy chamber, and be not seen again to-night, or I will have thee bound!”

She went at that, and a hard-faced serving woman followed, and presently returned, bringing a key to her mistress.

“Is all well with her-and the child also?”

“She is quiet, Mistress Dwining, well for the night, be sure. The child fretteth endlessly, but save for that it thriveth with me.”

The parents were left alone together on the high square porch with its great pillars, and the rising moon began to make faint shadows of the young vinc leaves that shot up luxuriantly around them: moving shadows, like lit-tie stretching fingers, on the broad and heavy planks of the oaken floor.

“It groweth well, this vine thou broughtest me in the ship, my husband.”

“Aye,” he broke in bitterly, “and so doth the shame I brought thee! Had I known of it I would sooner have had the ship founder beneath us, and have seen our child cleanly drowned, than live to this end!”

“Thou art very hard, Samuel, art thou not afeard for her life? She grieveth sore for the child, aye, and for the green fields to walk in!”

“Nay,” said he grimly, “I fear not. She hath lost already what is more than life; and she shall have air enough soon. To-morrow the ship is ready, and we return to England. None knoweth of our stain here, not one, and if the town hath a child unaccounted for to rear in decent ways–why, it is not the first, even here. It will be well enough cared for! And truly we have matter for thankfulness, that her cousin is yet willing to marry her.”

“Has thou told him?”

“Aye! Thinkest thou I would cast shame into another man’s house, unknowing it? He hath always desired her, but she would none of him, the stubborn! She hath small choice now!”

“Will he be kind, Samuel? can he-“

“Kind? What call’st thou it to take such as she to wife? Kind! How many men would take her, an’ she had double the fortune? and being of the family already, he is glad to hide the blot forever.”

“An’ if she would not? He is but a coarse fellow, and she ever shunned him.” “Art thou mad, woman? She weddeth him ere we? sail to-morrow, or she stayeth ever in that chamber. The girl is not so sheer a fool! He maketh an honest woman of her, and saveth our house from open shame. What other hope for her than a new life to cover the old? Let her have an honest child, an’ she so longeth for one!”

He strode heavily across the porch, till the loose planks creaked again, strode back and forth, with his arms folded and his brows fiercely knit above his iron mouth.

Overhead the shadows flickered mockingly across a white face amoung the leaves, with eyes of wasted fire.

“O, George, what a house! what a lovely house! I am sure it’s haunted! Let us get that house to live in this summer! We will have Kate and Jack and Susy and Jim of course, and a splendid time of it!”

Young husbands are indulgent, but still they have to recognize facts.

“My dear, the house may not be to rent: and it may also not be habitable.”

“There is surely somebody in it. I am going to inquire!”

The great central gate was rusted off its hinges, and the long drive had trees in it, but a little footpath showed signs of steady usage, and up that Mrs. Jenny went, followed by her obedient George. The front windows of the old mansion were blank, but in a wing at the back they found white curtains and open doors. Outside, in the clear May sunshine, a woman was washing. She was polite and friendly, and evidently glad of visitors in that lonely place. She “guessed it could be rented-didn’t know.” The heirs were in Europe, but “there was a lawyer in New York had the lettin’ of it.”

There had been folks there years ago, but not in her time. She and her husband had the rent of their part for taking care of the place. “Not that they took much care on’t either, but keepin’ robbers out.” It was furnished throughout, old-fashioned enough, but good; and “if they took it she could do the work for ’em herself, she guessed-if he was willin’!”

Never was a crazy scheme more easily arranged. George knew that lawyer in New York; the rent was not alarming; and the nearness to a rising sea-shore resort made it a still pleasanter place to spend the summer.

Kate and Jack and Susy and Jim cheerfully accepted, and the June moon found them all sitting on the high front porch.

They had explored the house from top to bottom, from the great room in the garret, with nothing in it but a rickety cradle, to the well in the cellar without a curb and with a rusty chain going down to unknown blackness below. They had explored the grounds, once beautiful with rare trees and shrubs, but now a gloomy wilderness of tangled shade.

The old lilacs and laburnums, the spirea and syringa, nodded against the second-story windows. What garden plants survived were great ragged bushes or great shapeless beds. A huge wistaria vine covered the whole front of the house. The trunk, it was too large to call a stem, rose at the corner of the porch by the high steps, and had once climbed its pillars; but now the pillars were wrenched from their places and held rigid and helpless by the tightly wound and knotted arms.

It fenced in all the upper story of the porch with a knitted wall of stem and leaf; it ran along the eaves, holding up the gutter that had once supported it; it shaded every window with heavy green; and the drooping, fragrant blossoms made a waving sheet of purple from roof to ground…”Did you ever see such a wistaria!” cried ecstatic Mrs. Jenny. “It is worth the rent just to sit under such a vine,-a fig tree beside it would be sheer superfluity and wicked extravagance!”

“Jenny makes much of her wistaria,” said George, “because she’s so disappointed about the ghosts. She made up her mind at first sight to have ghosts in the house, and she can’t find even a ghost story!”

“No,” Jenny assented mournfully; “I pumped poor Mrs. Pepperill for three days, but could get nothing out of her. But I’m convinced there is a story, if we could only find it. You need not tell me that a house like this, with a garden like this, and a cellar like this, isn’t haunted!”

“I agree with you,” said Jack. Jack was a reporter on a New York daily, and engaged to Mrs. Jenny’s pretty sister. “And if we don’t find a real ghost, you may be very sure I shall make one. It’s too good an opportunity to lose!”

The pretty sister, who sat next him, resented. “You shan’t do anything of the sort, Jack! This is a real ghostly place, and I won’t have you make fun of it! Look at that group of trees out there in the long grass-it looks for all the world like a crouching, hunted figure!”

“It looks to me like a woman picking huckleberries,” said Jim, who was married to George’s pretty sister.

“Be still, Jim!” said that fair young woman. “I believe in Jenny’s ghost as much as she does. Such a place! Just look at this great wistaria trunk crawling up by the steps here! It looks for all the world like a writhing body-cringing-beseeching!”

“Yes,” answered the subdued Jim, “it does, Susy. See its waist,-about two yards of it, and twisted at that! A waste of good material!”

“Don’t be so horrid, boys! Go off and smoke somewhere if you can’t be congenial!”

“We can! We will! We’ll be as ghostly as you please:’ And forthwith they began to see bloodstains and crouching figures so plentifully that the most delightful shivers multiplied, and the fair enthusiasts started for bed, declaring they should never sleep a wink.

“We shall all surely dream,” cried Mrs. Jenny, “and we must all tell our dreams in the morning!”

“There’s another thing certain,” said George, catching Susy as she tripped over a loose plank; “and that is that you frisky creatures must use the side door till I get this Eiffel tower of a portico fixed, or we shall have some fresh ghosts on our hands! We found a plank here that yawns like a trap-door-big enough to swallow you,-and I believe the bottom of the thing is in China!”

The next morning found them all alive, and eating a substantial New England breakfast, to the accompaniment of saws and hammers on the porch, where carpenters of quite miraculous promptness were tearing things to pieces generally.

“It’s got to come down mostly,” they had said. “These timbers are clean rotted through, what ain’t pulled out o’ line by this great creeper. That’s about all that holds the thing up.”

There was clear reason in what they said, and with a caution from anxious Mrs. Jenny not to hurt the wistaria, they were left to demolish and repair at leisure.

“How about ghosts?” asked Jack after a fourth griddle cake. “I had one, and it’s taken away my appetite!”

Mrs. Jenny gave a little shriek and dropped her knife and fork.

“Oh, so had I! I had the most awful-well, not dream exactly, but feeling. I had forgotten all about it!”

“Must have been awful,” said Jack, taking another cake. “Do tell us about the feeling. My ghost will wait.” “It makes me creep to think of it even now,” she said. “I woke up, all at once, with that dreadful feeling as if something were going to happen, you know! I was wide awake, and hearing every little sound for miles around, it seemed to me. There are so many strange little noises in the country for all it is so still. Millions of crickets and things outside, and all kinds of rustles in the trees! There wasn’t much wind, and the moonlight came through in my three great windows in three white squares on the black old floor, and those fingery wistaria leaves we were talking of last night just seemed to crawl all over them. And-O, girls, you know that dreadful well in the cellar?”

A most gratifying impression was made by this, and Jenny proceeded cheerfully:

“Well, while it was so horridly still, and I lay there trying not to wake George, I heard as plainly as if it were right in the room, that old chain down there rattle and creak over the stones!”

“Bravo!” cried Jack. “That’s fine! I’ll put it in the Sunday edition!”

“Be still!” said Kate. “What was it, Jenny? Did you really see anything?”

“No, I didn’t, I’m sorry to say. But just then I didn’t want to. I woke George, and made such a fuss that he gave me bromide, and said he’d go and look, and that’s the last I thought of it till Jack reminded me-the bromide worked so well.”

“Now, Jack, give us yours,” said Jim. “Maybe, it will dovetail in somehow. Thirsty ghost, I imagine; maybe they had prohibition here even then!”

Jack folded his napkin, and leaned back in his most impressive manner.

“It was striking twelve by the great hall clock-” he began.

“There isn’t any hall clock!”

“O hush, Jim, you spoil the current! It was just one o’clock then, by my old-fashioned repeater.

“Waterbury! Never mind what time it was!”

“Well, honestly, I woke up sharp, like our beloved hostess, and tried to go to sleep again, but couldn’t. I experienced all those moonlight and grasshopper sensations, just like Jenny, and was wondering what could have been the matter with the supper, when in came my ghost, and I knew it was all a dream! It was a female ghost, and I imagine she was young and handsome, but all those crouching, hunted figures of last evening ran riot in my brain, and this poor creature looked just like them. She was all wrapped up in a shawl, and had a big bundle under her arm,-dear me, I am spoiling the story! With the air and gait of one in frantic haste and terror, the muffled figure glided to a dark old bureau, and seemed taking things from the drawers. As she turned, the moonlight shone full on a little red cross that hung from her neck by a thin gold chain-I saw it glitter as she crept noiselessly’ from the room! That’s all.”

“O Jack, don’t be so horrid! Did you really? Is that all! What do you think it was?”

“I am not horrid by nature, only professionally. I really did. That was all. And I am fully convinced it was the genuine, legitimate ghost of an eloping chambermaid with kleptomania!”

“You are too bad, Jack!” cried Jenny. “You take all the horror out of it. There isn’t a ‘creep’ left among us.”

“It’s no time for creeps at nine-thirty A.M., with sunlight and carpenters outside! However, if you can’t wait till twilight for your creeps, I think I can furnish one or two,” said George. “I went down cellar after Jenny’s ghost!”

There was a delighted chorus of female voices, and Jenny cast upon her lord a glance of genuine gratitude.

“It’s all very well to lie in bed and see ghosts, or hear them,” he went on. “But the young householder suspecteth burglars, even though as a medical man he knoweth nerves, and after Jenny dropped off I started on a voyage of discovery. I never will again, I promise you!” “Why, what was it?”

“Oh, George!”

“I got a candle-“

“Good mark for the burglars,” murmured Jack.

“And went all over the house, gradually working down to the cellar and the well.”

“Well?” said Jack.

“Now you can laugh; but that cellar is no joke by daylight, and a candle there at night is about as inspiring as a lightning-bug in the Mammoth Cave. I went along with the light, trying not to fall into the well prematurely; got to it all at once; held the light down and then I saw, right under my feet-(I nearly fell over her, or walked through her, perhaps),-a woman, hunched up under a shawl! She had hold of the chain, and the candle shone on her hands-white, thin hands-on a little red cross that hung from her neck-ride Jack! I’m no believer in ghosts, and I firmly object to unknown parties in the house at night; so I spoke to her rather fiercely. She didn’t seem to notice that, and I reached down to take hold of her-then I came upstairs!”

“What for?”

“What happened?”

“What was the matter?”

“Well, nothing happened. Only she wasn’t there! May have been indigestion, of course, but as a physician I don’t advise any one to court indigestion alone at midnight in a cellar!”

“This is the most interesting and peripatetic and evasive ghost I ever heard of!” said Jack. “It’s my belief she has no end of silver tankards, and jewels galore, at the bottom of that well, and I move we go and see!”

“To the bottom of the well, Jack?”

“To the bottom of the mystery. Come on!”

There was unanimous assent, and the fresh cambrics and pretty boots were gallantly escorted below by gentlemen whose jokes were so frequent that many of them were a little forced.

The deep old cellar was so dark that they had to bring lights, and the well so gloomy in its blackness that the ladies recoiled.

“That well is enough to scare even a ghost. It’s my opinion you’d better let well enough alone?” quoth Jim.

“Truth lies hid in a well, and we must get her out,” said George. “Bear a hand with the chain?”

Jim pulled away on the chain, George turned the creaking windlass, and Jack was chorus.

“A wet sheet for this ghost, if not a flowing sea,” said he. “Seems to be hard work raising spirits! I suppose he kicked the bucket when he went down!”

As the chain lightened and shortened there grew a strained silence among them; and when at length the bucket appeared, rising slowly through the dark water, there was an eager, half reluctant peering, and a natural drawing back. They poked the gloomy contents. “Only water.”

“Nothing but mud.”

“Something-“

They emptied the bucket up on the dark earth, and then the girls all went out into the air, into the bright warm sunshine in front of the house, where was the sound of saw and hammer, and the smell of new wood. There was nothing said until the men joined them, and then Jenny timidly asked:

“How old should you think it was, George?”

“All of a century,” he answered. “That water is a preservative-lime in it. Oh!-you mean?–Not more than a month: a very little baby!”.There was another silence at this, broken by a cry from the workmen. They had removed the floor and the side walls of the old porch, so that the sunshine poured down to the dark stones of the cellar bottom. And there, in the strangling grasp of the roots of the great wistaria, lay the bones of a woman, from whose neck still hung a tiny scarlet cross on a thin chain of gold.

Marjorie Bowen — Scoured Silk

This is a tale that might be told in many ways and from various points of view; it has to be gathered from here and there—a letter, a report, a diary, a casual reference; in its day the thing was more than a passing wonder, and it left a mark of abiding horror on the neighbourhood.

The house in which Mr. Orford lived has finally been destroyed, the mural tablet in St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, may be sought for in vain by the curious, but little remains of the old piazza where the quiet scholar passed on his daily walks, the very records of what was once so real have become blurred, almost incoherent in their pleadings with things forgotten; but this thing happened to real people, in a real London, not so long ago that the generation had not spoken with those who remembered some of the actors in this terrible drama.

It is round the person of Humphrey Orford that this tale turns, as, at the time, all the mystery and horror centered; yet until his personality was brought thus tragically into fame, he had not been an object of much interest to many; he had, perhaps, a mild reputation for eccentricity, but this was founded merely on the fact that he refused to partake of the amusements of his neighbors, and showed a dislike for much company.

But this was excused on the ground of his scholarly predilections; he was known to be translating, in a leisurely fashion, as became a gentleman, Ariosto’s great romance into English couplets, and to be writing essays on recondite subjects connected with grammar and language, which were not the less esteemed because they had never been published.

His most authentic portrait, taken in 1733 and intended for a frontispiece for the Ariosto when this should come to print, shows a slender man with reddish hair, rather severely clubbed, a brown coat, and a muslin cravat; he looks straight out of the picture, and the face is long, finely shaped, and refined, with eyebrows rather heavier than one would expect from such delicacy of feature.

When this picture was painted Mr. Orford was living near Covent Garden, close to the mansion once occupied by the famous Dr. Radcliffe, a straight-fronted, dark house of obvious gentility, with a little architrave portico over the door and a few steps leading up to it; a house with neat windows and a gloomy air, like every other residence in that street and most other streets of the same status in London.

And if there was nothing remarkable about Mr. Orford’s dwelling place or person there was nothing, as far as his neighbors knew, remarkable about his history.

He came from a good Suffolk family, in which county he was believed to have considerable estates (though it was a known fact that he never visited them), and he had no relations, being the only child of an only child, and his parents dead; his father had purchased this town house in the reign of King William, when the neighborhood was very fashionable, and up to it he had come, twenty years ago—nor had he left it since.

He had brought with him an ailing wife, a house-keeper, and a man-servant, and to the few families of his acquaintance near, who waited on him, he explained that he wished to give young Mrs. Orford, who was of a mopish disposition, the diversion of a few months in town.

But soon there was no longer this motive for remaining in London, for the wife, hardly seen by anyone, fell into a short illness and died—just a few weeks after her husband had brought her up from Suffolk. She was buried very simply in St. Paul’s, and the mural tablet set up with a draped urn in marble, and just her name and the date, ran thus:

Flora, Wife of Humphrey Orford, Esq.,
of this Parish,
Died November, 1713, Aged 27 Years.

Mr. Orford made no effort to leave the house; he remained, people thought, rather stunned by his loss, kept himself close in the house, and for a considerable time wore deep mourning.

But this was twenty years ago, and all had forgotten the shadowy figure of the young wife, whom so few had seen and whom no one had known anything about or been interested in, and all trace of her seemed to have passed out of the quiet, regular, and easy life of Mr. Orford, when an event that gave rise to some gossip caused the one-time existence of Flora Orford to be recalled and discussed among the curious. This event was none other than the sudden betrothal of Mr. Orford and the announcement of his almost immediate marriage.

The bride was one who had been a prattling child when the groom had first come to London: one old lady who was forever at her window watching the little humors of the street recollected and related how she had seen Flora Orford, alighting from the coach that had brought her from the country, turn to this child, who was gazing from the railing of the neighboring house, and touch her bare curls lovingly and yet with a sad gesture.

And that was about the only time anyone ever did see Flora Orford, she so soon became ailing; and the next the inquisitive old lady saw of her was the slender brown coffin being carried through the dusk towards St. Paul’s Church.

But that was twenty years ago, and here was the baby grown up into Miss Elisa Minden, a very personable young woman, soon to be the second Mrs. Humphrey Orford. Of course there was nothing very remarkable about the match; Elisa’s father, Dr. Minden, had been Mr. Orford’s best friend (as far as he could be said to have a best friend, or indeed any friend at all) for many a long year, both belonged to the same quiet set, both knew all about each other. Mr. Orford was not much above forty-five or so, an elegant, well-looking man, wealthy, with no vices and a calm, equable temper; while Miss Elisa, though pretty and well-mannered, had an insufficient dowry, no mother to fend for her, and the younger sisters to share her slender advantages. So what could anyone say save that the good doctor had done very well for his daughter, and that Mr. Orford had been fortunate enough to secure such a fresh, capable maiden for his wife?

It was said that the scholar intended giving up his bookish ways—that he even spoke of going abroad a while, to Italy, for preference; he was of course, anxious to see Italy, as all his life had been devoted to preparing the translation of an Italian classic.

The quiet betrothal was nearing its decorous conclusion when one day Mr. Orford took Miss Minden for a walk and brought her home round the piazza of Covent Garden, then took her across the cobbled street, past the stalls banked up with the first spring flowers (it was the end of March), under the portico built by the great Inigo Jones, and so into the church.

“I want to show you where my wife Flora lies buried,” said Mr. Orford.

And that is really the beginning of the story.

Now, Miss Minden had been in this church every Sunday of her life and many weekdays, and had been used since a child to see that tablet to Flora Orford; but when she heard these words in the quiet voice of her lover and felt him draw her out of the sunlight into the darkness of the church, she experienced a great distaste that was almost fear.

It seemed to her both a curious and a disagreeable thing for him to do, and she slipped her arm out of his as she replied.

“Oh, please let us go home!” she said. “Father will be waiting for us, and your good Mrs. Boyd vexed if the tea is over-brewed.”

“But first I must show this,” he insisted, and took her arm again and led her down the church, past his seat, until they stood between his pew end and the marble tablet in the wall which was just a hand’s space above their heads.

“That is to her memory,” said Mr. Orford. “And you see there is nothing said as to her virtues.”

Now, Elisa Minden knew absolutely nothing of her predecessor, and could not tell if these words were spoken in reverence or irony, so she said nothing but looked up rather timidly from under the shade of her Leghorn straw at the tall figure of her lover, who was staring sternly at the square of marble.

“And what have you to say to Flora Orford?” he asked sharply, looking down at her quickly.

“Why, sir, she was a stranger to me,” replied Miss Minden. Mr. Orford pressed her arm.

“But to me she was a wife,” he said. “She is buried under your feet. Quite close to where you are standing. Why, think of that, Lizzie, if she could stand up and put out her hand she could catch hold of your dress—she is as near as that!”

The words and his manner of saying them filled Miss Minden with shuddering terror, for she was a sensitive and fanciful girl, and it seemed to her a dreadful thing to be thus standing over the bones of the poor creature who had loved the man who was now to be her husband, and horrible to think that the handful of decay so near them had once clung to this man and loved him.

“Do not tremble, my dear girl,” said Mr. Orford. “She is dead.”

Tears were in Elisa Minden’s eyes, and she answered coldly:

“Sir, how can you speak so?”

“She was a wicked woman,” he replied, “a very wicked woman.”

The girl could not reply as to that; this sudden disclosing of a painful secret abashed her simple mind.

“Need we talk of this?” she asked; then, under her breath—”Need we be married in this church, sir?”

“Of course,” he answered shortly, “everything is arranged. Tomorrow week.”

Miss Minden did not respond; hitherto she had been fond of the church, now it seemed spoilt for her—tarnished by the thought of Flora Orford.

Her companion seemed to divine what reflection lay behind her silence.

“You need not be afraid,” he said rather harshly. “She is dead. Dead.”

And he reached out the light cane he wore and tapped on the stone above his wife’s grave, and slowly smiled as the sound rang hollow in the vaults beneath.

Then he allowed Elisa to draw him away, and they returned to Mr. Orford’s comfortable house, where in the upper parlor Dr. Minden was awaiting them together with his sister and her son, a soldier cousin whom the quick perceptions of youthful friends had believed to be devoted to Elisa Minden. They made a pleasant little party with the red curtains drawn, and the fire burning up between the polished andirons and all the service for tea laid out with scones and Naples cake, and Mrs. Boyd coming to and fro with plates and dishes. And everyone was cheerful and friendly and glad to be indoors together, with a snowstorm coming up and people hurrying home with heads bent before a cutting wind.

But to Elisa’s mind had come an unbidden thought:

“I do not like this house—it is where Flora Orford died.”

And she wondered in which room, and also why this had never occurred to her before, and glanced rather thoughtfully at the fresh young face of the soldier cousin as he stood by the fire in his scarlet and white, with his glance on the flames.

But it was a cheerful party, and Elisa smiled and jested with the rest as she reserved the dishes at tea.

There is a miniature of her painted about this time, and one may see how she looked with her bright brown hair and bright brown eyes, rosy complexion, pretty nose and mouth, and her best gown of lavender blue tabinet with a lawn tucker and a lawn cap fastened under the chin with frilled lappets, showing now the big Leghorn hat with the velvet strings was put aside.

Mr. Orford also looked well tonight; he did not look his full age in the ruddy candle glow, the grey did not show in his abundant hair nor the lines in his fine face, but the elegance of his figure, the grace of his bearing, the richness of his simple clothes, were displayed to full advantage; Captain Hoare looked stiff and almost clumsy by contrast.

But now and then Elisa Minden’s eyes would rest rather wistfully on the fresh face of this young man who had no dead wife in his life. And something was roused in her meek youth and passive innocence, and she wondered why she had so quietly accepted her father’s arrangement of a marriage with this elderly scholar, and why Philip Hoare had let her do it. Her thoughts were quite vague and amounted to no more than a confused sense that something was wrong, but she lost her satisfaction in the tea-drinking and the pleasant company, and the warm room with the drawn curtains, and the bright fire, and rose up saying they must be returning, as there was a great store of mending she had promised to help her aunt with; but Mrs. Hoare would not help her out, but protested, laughing, that there was time enough for that, and the good doctor, who was in a fine humor and in no mood to go out into the bleak streets even as far as his own door, declared that now was the time they must be shown over the house.

“Do you know, Humphrey,” he said, “you have often promised us this, but never done it, and, all the years that I have known you, I have never seen but this room and the dining-room below; and as to your own particular cabinet—”

“Well,” said Mr. Orford, interrupting in a leisurely fashion, “no one has been in there, save Mrs. Boyd now and then, to announce a visitor.”

“Oh, you scholars!” smiled the doctor. “A secretive tribe—and a fortunate one; why, in my poor room I have had three girls running to and fro!”

The soldier spoke, not so pleasantly as his uncle.

“What have you so mysterious, sir, in this same cabinet, that it must be so jealously guarded?” he asked.

“Why, nothing mysterious,” smiled the scholar; “only my books, and papers, and pictures.”

“You will show them to me?” asked Elisa Minden, and her lover gave graceful consent; there was further amiable talk, and then the whole party, guided by Mr. Orford holding a candle, made a tour of the house and looked over the fine rooms.

Mrs. Hoare took occasion to whisper to the bride-to-be that there were many alterations needed before the place was ready for a lady’s use, and that it was time these were put in hand—why, the wedding was less than a fortnight off!

And Elisa Minden, who had not had a mother to advise her in these matters, suddenly felt that the house was dreary and old-fashioned, and an impossible place to live in; the very rooms that had so pleased her good father—a set of apartments for a lady—were to her the most hateful in the house, for they, her lover told her, had been furnished and prepared for Flora Orford, twenty years ago.

She was telling herself that when she was married she must at once go away and that the house must be altered before she could return to it, when the party came crowding to the threshold of the library or private cabinet, and Mr. Orford, holding the candle aloft, led them in. Then as this illumination was not sufficient, he went very quickly and lit the two candles on the mantelpiece.

It was a pleasant apartment, lined with books from floor to ceiling, old, valuable, and richly bound books, save only in the space above the chimney piece, which was occupied by a portrait of a lady and the panel behind the desk; this was situated in a strange position, in the farthest corner of the room fronting the wall, so that anyone seated there would be facing the door with the space of the room between; the desk was quite close to the wall, so that there was only just space for the chair at which the writer would sit, and to accommodate this there were no bookshelves behind it, but a smooth panel of wood on which hung a small picture; this was a rough, dark painting, and represented a man hanging on a gallows on a wild heath; it was a subject out of keeping with the luxurious room with its air of ease and learning, and while Mr. Orford was showing his first editions, his Elzevirs and Aldines, Elisa Minden was staring at this ugly little picture.

As she looked she was conscious of such a chill of horror and dismay as nearly caused her to shriek aloud. The room seemed to her to be full of an atmosphere of terror and evil beyond expression. Never had such a thing happened to her before; her visit to the tomb in the afternoon had been as nothing to this. She moved away, barely able to disguise an open panic. As she turned, she half-stumbled against a chair, caught at it, and noticed, hanging over the back, a skirt of peach-colored silk. Elisa, not being mistress of herself, caught at this garment.

“Why, sir,” cried she hysterically, “what is this?”

All turned to look at her; her tone, her obvious fright, were out of proportion to her discovery.

“Why, child,” said Mrs. Hoare, “it is a silk petticoat, as all can see.”

“A gift for you, my dear,” said the cheerful doctor.

“A gift for me?” cried Elisa. “Why, this has been scoured, and turned, and mended, and patched a hundred times!”

And she held up the skirt, which had indeed become like tinder and seemed ready to drop to pieces.

The scholar now spoke.

“It belongs to Mrs. Boyd,” he said quietly. “I suppose she had been in here to clean up, and has left some of her mending.”

Now, two things about this speech made a strange impression on everyone; first, it was manifestly impossible that the good housekeeper would ever have owned such a garment as this, that was a lady’s dress and such as would be worn for a ball; secondly, Mr. Orford had only a short while before declared that Mrs. Boyd only entered his room when he was in it, and then of a necessity and for a few minutes.

All had the same impression, that this was some garment belonging to his dead wife and as such cherished by him; all, that is, but Elisa, who had heard him call Flora Orford a wicked woman.

She put the silk down quickly (there was a needle sticking into it and a spool of cotton lying on the chair beneath) and looked up at the portrait above the mantelpiece.

“Is that Mrs. Orford?” she asked.

He gave her a queer look.

“Yes,” he said.

In a strange silence all glanced up at the picture.

It showed a young woman in a white gown, holding a crystal heart that hung round her neck; she had dark hair and a pretty face; as Elisa looked at the pointed fingers holding the pretty toy, she thought of the tablet in St. Paul’s Church and Mr. Orford’s words—”She is so near to you that if she could stretch out her hand she could touch you,” and without any remark about the portrait or the sitter, she advised her aunt that it was time to go home. So the four of them left, and Mr. Orford saw them out, standing framed in the warm light of the corridor and watching them disappear into the grey darkness of the street.

It was a little more than an hour afterwards when Elisa Minden came creeping down the stairway of her home and accosted her cousin, who was just leaving the house.

“Oh, Philip,” said she, clasping her hands, “if your errand be not a very important one, I beg you to give me an hour of your time. I have been watching for you to go out, that I might follow and speak to you privately.”

The young soldier looked at her keenly as she stood in the light of the hall lamp, and he saw that she was very agitated.

“Of course, Lizzie,” he answered kindly, and led her into the little parlor off the hall where there was neither candles or fire, but leisure and quiet to talk.

Elisa, being a housekeeper, found a lamp and lit it, and apologized for the cold, but she would not return upstairs, she said, for Mrs. Hoare and the two girls and the doctor were all quiet in the great parlor, and she had no mind to disturb them.

“You are in trouble,” said Captain Hoare quietly.

“Yes,” replied she in a frightened way, “I want you to come with me now to Mr. Orford’s house—I want to speak to his housekeeper.”

“Why, what is this, Lizzie?”

She had no very good explanation; there was only the visit to the church that afternoon, her impression of horror in the cabinet, the discovery of the scoured silk.

“But I must know something of his first wife, Philip,” she concluded. “I could never go on with it—if I did not—something has happened today—I hate that house, I almost hate—him.”

“Why did you do it, Lizzie?” demanded the young soldier sternly. “This was a nice homecoming for me…a man who might be your father…a solitary…one who frightens you.”

Miss Minden stared at her cousin; she did not know why she had done it; the whole thing seemed suddenly impossible.

“Please, you must come with me now,” she said.

So overwrought was she that he had no heart to refuse her, and they took their warm cloaks from the hall and went out into the dark streets.

It was snowing now and the ground slippery under foot, and Elisa clung to her cousin’s arm. She did not want to see Mr. Orford or his house ever again, and by the time they reached the doorstep she was in a tremble; but she rang the bell boldly.

It was Mrs. Boyd herself who came to the door; she began explaining that the master was shut up in his cabinet, but the soldier cut her short.

“Miss Minden wishes to see you,” he said, “and I will wait in the hall till she is ready.”

So Elisa followed the housekeeper down to her basement sitting-room; the man-servant was out, and the two maids were quickly dismissed to the kitchen.

Mrs. Boyd, a placid soul, near seventy-years, waited for the young lady to explain herself, and Elisa Minden, flushing and paling by turns, and feeling foolish and timid, put forth the object of her coming.

She wanted to hear the story of Flora Orford—there was no one else whom she could ask—and she thought that she had a right to know.

“And I suppose you have, my dear,” said Mrs. Boyd, gazing into the fire, “though it is not a pretty story for you to hear—and I never thought I should be telling it to Mr. Orford’s second wife!”

“Not his wife yet.” said Miss Minden.

“There, there, you had better ask the master yourself,” replied Mrs. Boyd placidly; “not but that he would be fierce at your speaking of it, for I do not think a mention of it has passed his lips, and it’s twenty years ago and best forgotten, my dear.”

“Tell it me and then I will forget,” begged Miss Minden.

So then Mrs. Boyd, who was a quiet, harmless soul with no dislike to telling a tale (though no gossip, as events had proved, she having kept her tongue still on this matter for so long), told her story of Humphrey Orford’s wife; it was told in very few words.

“She was the daughter of his gamekeeper, my dear, and he married her out of hand, just for her pretty face. But they were not very happy together that I could ever see; she was afraid of him and that made her cringe, and he hated that, and she shamed him with her ignorant ways. And then one day he found her with a lover, saving your presence, mistress, one of her own people, just a common man. And he was just like a creature possessed; he shut up the house and sent away all the servants but me, and brought his lady up to town, to this house here. And what passed between her and him no one will know, but she ever looked like one dying of terror. And then the doctor began to come, Dr. Thursby, it was, that is dead now, and then she died, and no one was able to see her even she was in her coffin, nor to send a flower. ‘Tis likely she died of grief, poor, fond wretch. But, of course, she was a wicked woman, and there was nothing to do but pity the master.”

And this was the story of Flora Orford.

“And the man?” asked Miss Minden, after a little.

“The man she loved, my dear? Well, Mr. Orford had him arrested as a thief for breaking into his house, he was wild, that fellow, with not the best of characters—well, he would not say why he was in the house, and Mr. Orford, being a Justice of the Peace, had some power, so he was just condemned as a common thief. And there are few to this day know the truth of the tale, for he kept his counsel to the last, and no one knew from him why he had been found in the Squire’s house.”

“What was his end?” asked Miss Minden in a still voice.

“Well he was hanged,” said Mrs. Boyd; “being caught red-handed, what could he hope for?”

“Then that is a picture of him in the cabinet!” cried Elisa, shivering for all the great fire; then she added desperately, “Tell me, did Flora Orford die in that cabinet?”

“Oh, no, my dear, but in a great room at the back of the house that has been shut up ever since.”

“But the cabinet is horrible,” said Elisa; “perhaps it is her portrait and that picture.”

“I have hardly been in there,” admitted Mrs. Boyd, “but the master lives there—he has always had his supper there, and he talks to that portrait my dear—’Flora, Flora’ he says, ‘how are you tonight?’ and then he imitates her voice, answering.”

Elisa Minden clapped her hand to her heart.

“Do not tell me these things or I shall think that you are hateful too, to have stayed in this dreadful house and endured them!” Mrs. Boyd was surprised.

“Now, my dear, do not be put out,” she protested.

“They were wicked people both of them and got their deserts, and it is an old story best forgotten; and as for the master, he has been just a good creature ever since we have been here, and he will not go talking to any picture when he has a sweet young wife to keep him company.”

But Elisa Minden had risen and had her fingers on the handle of the door.

“One thing more,” said she breathlessly; “that scoured silk—of a peach color—”

“Why, has he got that still? Mrs. Orford wore it the night he found her with her sweetheart. I mind I was with her when she bought it—fine silk at forty shillings the yard. If I were you, my dear, I should burn that when I was mistress here.”

But Miss Minden had run upstairs to the cold hall.

Her cousin was not there; she heard angry voices overhead and saw the two maid-servants affrighted on the stairs; a disturbance was unknown in this household.

While Elisa stood bewildered, a door banged, and Captain Hoare came down red in the face and fuming; he caught his cousin’s arm and hurried her out of the house.

In an angry voice he told her of the unwarrantable behavior of Mr. Orford, who had found him in the hall and called him “intruder” and “spy” without waiting for an explanation; the soldier had followed the scholar up to his cabinet and there had been an angry scene about nothing at all, as Captain Hoare said.

“Oh, Philip,” broke out poor Elisa as they hastened through the cold darkness, “I can never, never marry him!”

And she told him the story of Flora Orford. The young man pressed her arm through the heavy cloak.

“And how came such a one to entangle thee?” he asked tenderly. “Nay, thou shalt not marry him.”

They spoke no more, but Elisa, happy in the protecting and wholesome presence of her kinsman, sobbed with a sense of relief and gratitude. When they reached home they found they had been missed and there had to be explanations; Elisa said there was something that she had wished to say to Mrs. Boyd, and Philip told of Mr. Orford’s rudeness and the quarrel that had followed.

The two elder people were disturbed and considered Elisa’s behavior strange, but her manifest agitation caused them to forbear pressing her for an explanation; nor was it any use addressing themselves to Philip, for he went out to his delayed meeting with companions at a coffee-house.

That night Elisa Minden went to bed feeling more emotion than she had ever done in her life; fear and disgust of the man whom hitherto she had placidly regarded as her future husband, and a yearning for the kindly presence of her childhood’s companion united in the resolute words she whispered into her pillow during that bitter night.

“I can never marry him now!”

The next day it snowed heavily, yet a strange elation was in Elisa’s heart as she descended to the warm parlor, bright from the fire and light from the glow of the snow without.

She was going to tell her father that she could not carry out her engagement with Mr. Orford, and that she did not want ever to go into his house again.

They were all gathered round the breakfast-table when Captain Hoare came in late (he had been out to get a newsletter) and brought the news that was the most unlooked for they could conceive, and that was soon to startle all London.

Mr. Orford had been found murdered in his cabinet.

These tidings, though broken as carefully as possible, threw the little household into the deepest consternation and agitation; there were shrieks, and cryings, and running to and fro.

Only Miss Minden, though of a ghastly color, made no especial display of grief; she was thinking of Flora Orford.

When the doctor could get away from his agitated womenkind, he went with his nephew to the house of Mr. Orford.

The story of the murder was a mystery. The scholar had been found in his chair in front of his desk with one of his own bread-knives sticking through his shoulders; and there was nothing to throw any light as to how or through whom he had met his death.

The story, sifted from the mazed incoherency of Mrs. Boyd, the hysterics of the maids, the commentaries of the constables, and the chatter of the neighbors, ran thus:

At half-past nine the night before, Mrs. Boyd had sent one of the maids up with her master’s supper; it was his whim to have it always thus, served on a tray in the cabinet. There had been wine and meat, bread and cheese, fruit and cakes—the usual plates and silver—among these the knife that had killed Mr. Orford.

When the servant left, the scholar had followed her to the door and locked it after her; this was also a common practice of his, a precaution against any possible interruption, for, he said, he did the best part of his work in the evening.

It was found next morning that his bed had not been slept in, and that the library door was still locked; as the alarmed Mrs. Boyd could get no answer to her knocks, the man-servant had sent for someone to force the lock, and Humphrey Orford had been found in his chair, leaning forward over his papers with the knife thrust up to the hilt between his shoulders; he must have died instantly, for there was no sign of any struggle, nor any disarrangement of his person or his papers. The first doctor to see him, a passer-by, attracted by the commotion about the house, said he must have been dead some hours—probably since the night before; the candles had all burnt down to the socket, and there were spillings of grease on the desk; the supper tray stood at the other end of the room, most of the food had been eaten, most of the wine drunk, the articles were all there in order excepting only the knife sticking between Mr. Orford’s shoulder-blades.

When Captain Hoare had passed the house on his return from buying the newsletter he had seen the crowd and gone in and been able to say that he had been the last person to see the murdered man alive, as he had had his sharp encounter with Mr. Orford about ten o’clock, and he remembered seeing the supper things in the room. The scholar had heard him below, unlocked the door, and called out such impatient resentment of his presence that Philip had come angrily up the stairs and followed him into the cabinet; a few angry words had passed, when Mr. Orford had practically pushed his visitor out, locking the door in his face and bidding him take Miss Minden home.

This threw no light at all on the murder; it only went to prove that at ten o’clock Mr. Orford had been alive in his cabinet.

Now here was the mystery; in the morning the door was still locked, on the inside, the window was, as it had been since early evening, shuttered and fastened across with an iron bar, on the inside, and, the room being on an upper floor, access would have been in any case almost impossible by the window which gave on to the smooth brickwork of the front of the house.

Neither was there any possible place in the room where anyone might be hidden—it was just the square lined with the shallow bookshelves, the two pictures (that sombre little one looking strange now above the bent back of the dead man), the desk, one or two chairs and side tables; there was not so much as a cupboard or bureau—not a hiding-place for a cat.

How, then, had the murderer entered and left the room?

Suicide, of course, was out of the question, owing to the nature of the wound—but murder seemed equally out of the question; Mr. Orford sat so close to the wall that the handle of the knife touched the panel behind him. For anyone to have stood between him and the wall would have been impossible; behind the back of his chair was not space enough to push a walking-stick.

How, then, had the blow been delivered with such deadly precision and force?

Not by anyone standing in front of Mr. Orford, first because he must have seen him and sprung up; and secondly, because, even had he been asleep with his head down, no one, not even a very tall man, could have leaned over the top of the desk and driven in the knife, for experiment was made, and it was found that no arm could possibly reach such a distance.

The only theory that remained was that Mr. Orford had been murdered in some other part of the room and afterwards dragged to his present position.

But this seemed more than unlikely, as it would have meant moving the desk, a heavy piece of furniture that did not look as if it had been touched, and also became there was a paper under the dead man’s hand, a pen in his fingers, a splutter of ink where it had fallen, and a sentence unfinished. The thing remained a complete and horrid mystery, one that seized the imagination of men; the thing was the talk of all the coffee-houses and clubs.

The murder seemed absolutely motiveless, the dead man was not known to have an enemy in the world, yet robbery was out of the question, for nothing had been even touched.

The early tragedy was opened out. Mrs. Boyd told all she knew, which was just what she had told Elisa Minden—the affair was twenty years ago, and the gallows bird had no kith or kin left.

Elisa Minden fell into a desperate state of agitation, a swift change from her first stricken calm; she wanted Mr. Orford’s house pulled down—the library and all its contents burnt; her own wedding-dress did she burn, in frenzied silence, and none dare stop her; she resisted her father’s entreaties that she should go away directly after the inquest; she would stay on the spot, she said, until the mystery was solved.

Nothing would content her but a visit to Mr. Orford’s cabinet; she was resolved, she said wildly, to come to the bottom of this mystery and in that room, which she had entered once and which had affected her so terribly, she believed she might find some clue.

The doctor thought it best to allow her to go; he and her cousin escorted her to the house that now no one passed without a shudder and into the chamber that all dreaded to enter.

Good Mrs. Boyd was sobbing behind them; the poor soul was quite mated with this sudden and ghastly ending to her orderly life; she spoke all incoherently, explaining, excusing, and lamenting in a breath; yet through all her trouble she showed plainly and artlessly that she had had no affection for her master, and that it was custom and habit that had been wounded, not love.

Indeed, it seemed that there was no one who did love Humphrey Orford; the lawyers were already busy looking for a next-of-kin; it seemed likely that this property and the estates in Suffolk would go into Chancery.

“You should not go in, my dear, you should not go in,” sobbed the old woman, catching at Miss Minden’s black gown (she was in mourning for the murdered man) and yet peering with a fearful curiosity into the cabinet.

Elisa looked ill and distraught but also resolute.

“Tell me, Mrs. Boyd,” said she, pausing on the threshold, “what became of the scoured silk?”

The startled housekeeper protested that she had never seen it again; and here was another touch of mystery—the old peach-colored silk skirt that four persons had observed in Mr. Orford’s cabinet the night of his murder, had completely disappeared.

“He must have burnt it,” said Captain Hoare, and though it seemed unlikely that he could have consumed so many yards of stuff without leaving traces in the grate, still it was the only possible solution.

“I cannot think why he kept it so long,” murmured Mrs. Boyd, “for it could have been no other than Mrs. Orford’s best gown.”

“A ghastly relic,” remarked the young soldier grimly.

Elisa Minden went into the middle of the room and stared about her; nothing in the place was changed, nothing disordered; the desk had been moved round to allow of the scholar being carried away, his chair stood back, so that the long panel on which hung the picture of the gallows, was fuller exposed to view.

To Elisa’s agitated imagination this portion of the wall sunk in the surrounding bookshelves, long and narrow, looked like the lid of a coffin.

“It is time that picture came down,” she said; “it cannot interest anyone any longer.”

“Lizzie, dear,” suggested her father gently, “had you not better come away?—this is a sad and awful place.”

“No,” replied she. “I must find out about it—we must know.”

And she turned about and stared at the portrait of Flora Orford.

“He hated her, Mrs. Boyd, did he not? And she must have died of fear—think of that!—died of fear, thinking all the while of that poor body on the gallows. He was a wicked man and whoever killed him must have done it to revenge Flora Orford.”

“My dear,” said the doctor hastily, “all that was twenty years ago, and the man was quite justified in what he did, though I cannot say I should have been so pleased with the match if I had known this story.”

“How did we ever like him?” muttered Elisa Minden. “If I had entered this room before I should never have been promised to him—there is something terrible in it.”

“And what else can you look for, my dear,” snivelled Mrs. Boyd, “in a room where a man has been murdered.”

“But it was like this before,” replied Miss Minden; “it frightened me.”

She looked round at her father and cousin, and her face quite distorted.

“There is something here now,” she said, “something in this room.”

They hastened towards her, thinking that her over-strained nerves had given way; but she took a step forward.

Shriek after shriek left her lips.

With a quivering finger she pointed before her at the long panel behind the desk.

At first they could not tell at what she pointed; then Captain Hoare saw the cause of her desperate terror.

It was a small portion of faded, peach-colored silk showing above the ribbed line of the wainscot, protruding from the wall, like a garment of stuff shut in a door.

“She is in there!” cried Miss Minden. “In there!”

A certain frenzy fell on all of them; they were in a confusion, hardly knowing what they said or did. Only Captain Hoare kept some presence of mind and, going up to the panel, discerned a fine crack all round.

“I believe it is a door,” he said, “and that explains how the murderer must have struck—from the wall.”

He lifted the picture of the hanged man and found a small knob or button, which, as he expected, on being pressed sent the panel back into the wall, disclosing a secret chamber no larger than a cupboard.

And directly inside this hidden room that was dark to the sight and noisome to the nostrils, was the body of a woman, leaning against the inner wall with a white kerchief knotted tightly round her throat, showing how she had died; she wore the scoured silk skirt, the end of which had been shut in the panel, and an old ragged bodice of linen that was like a dirty parchment; her hair was grey and scanty, her face past any likeness to humanity, her body thin and dry.

The room, which was lit only by a window a few inches square looking onto the garden, was furnished with a filthy bed of rags and a stool with a few tattered clothes; a basket of broken bits was on the floor.

Elisa Minden crept closer.

“It is Flora Orford,” she said, speaking like one in a dream.

They brought the poor body down into the room, and then it was clear that this faded and terrible creature had a likeness to the pictured girl who smiled from the canvas over the mantelpiece.

And another thing was clear and, for a moment, they did not dare speak to each other.

For twenty years this woman had endured her punishment in the wall chamber in that library that no one but her husband entered; for twenty years he had kept her there, behind the picture of her lover, feeding her on scraps, letting her out only when the household was abed, amusing himself with her torture—she mending the scoured silk she had worn for twenty years, sitting there, cramped in the almost complete dark, a few feet from where he wrote his elegant poetry.

“Of course she was crazy,” said Captain Hoare at length, “but why did she never cry out?”

“For a good reason,” whispered Dr. Minden, when he had signed to Mrs. Boyd to take his fainting daughter away. “He saw to that—she has got no tongue.”

The coffin bearing the nameplate “Flora Orford” was exhumed, and found to contain only lead; it was substituted by another containing the wasted body of a woman who died by her own hand twenty years after the date on the mural tablet to her memory.

Why or how this creature, certainly become idiotic and dominated entirely by the man who kept her prisoner, had suddenly found the resolution and skill to slay her tyrant and afterwards take her own life (a thing she might have done any time before) was a question never solved.

It was supposed that he had formed the hideous scheme to complete his revenge by leaving her in the wall to die of starvation while he left with his new bride for abroad, and that she knew this and had forestalled him; or else that her poor, lunatic brain had been roused by the sound of a woman’s voice as she handled the scoured silk which the captive was allowed to creep out and mend when the library door was locked. But over these matters and the details of her twenty years’ suffering, it is but decent to be silent.

Lizzie Minden married her cousin, but not at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden. Nor did they ever return to the neighbourhood of Humphrey Orford’s house.

Marjorie Bowen was the pen name of Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long, a prolific British writer who left behind more than 150 books across genres—historical novels, biographies, romances, thrillers, and, of course, ghost stories. Writing under multiple pseudonyms to satisfy both publishers and her own astonishing output, Bowen became one of the most versatile and widely read authors of the early twentieth century.

Her supernatural tales, often overshadowed by her historical fiction, hold a distinctive place in the Gothic tradition. Bowen’s ghosts rarely linger for mere fright: they are woven into stories of revenge, guilt, passion, and moral reckoning. Her style is spare but effective: unsettling atmosphere, sudden glimpses of the uncanny, and an unrelenting sense that the past refuses to remain buried.

Critics of her time praised her ability to combine psychological intensity with spectral unease. Today, her ghost stories are valued for their elegance and their ability to chill without resorting to sensationalism. In them, we find not only the trappings of Gothic horror, but also a sharp insight into human nature at its most haunted.

We’ll see more of her stories throughout the month.

Charlotte Riddell — The Old House in Vauxhall Walk (3)

Third and final chapter of Elizabeth Gaskell’s ghost story.

‘I hope you slept well, sir.’ It was William, who, coming into the hall with the sunlight of a fine bright morning streaming after him, asked this question: ‘Had you a good night’s rest?’

Graham Coulton laughed, and answered:

‘Why, faith, I was somewhat in the case of Paddy, “who could not slape for dhraming”. I slept well enough, I suppose, but whether it was in consequence of the row with my dad, or the hard bed, or the cheese—most likely the bread and cheese so late at night—I dreamt all the night long, the most extraordinary dreams. Some old woman kept cropping up, and I saw her murdered.’

‘You don’t say that, sir?’ said William nervously.

‘I do, indeed,’ was the reply. ‘However, that is all gone and past. I have been down in the kitchen and had a good wash, and I am as fresh as a daisy, and as hungry as a hunter; and, oh, William, can you get me any breakfast?’

‘Certainly, Master Graham. I have brought round a kettle, and I will make the water boil immediately. I suppose, sir’—this tentatively—’you’ll be going home today?’

‘Home!’ repeated the young man. ‘Decidedly not. I’ll never go home again till I return with some medal hung to my coat, or a leg or arm cut off. I’ve thought it all out, William. I’ll go and enlist. There’s a talk of war; and, living or dead, my father shall have reason to retract his opinion about my being a coward.’

‘I am sure the admiral never thought you anything of the sort, sir,’ said William. ‘Why, you have the pluck of ten!’

‘Not before him,’ answered the young fellow sadly.

‘You’ll do nothing rash, Master Graham; you won’t go ‘listing, or aught of that sort, in your anger?’

‘If I do not, what is to become of me?’ asked the other. ‘I cannot dig—to beg I am ashamed. Why, but for you, I should not have had a roof over my head last night.’

‘Not much of a roof, I am afraid, sir.’

‘Not much of a roof!’ repeated the young man. ‘Why, who could desire a better? What a capital room this is,’ he went on, looking around the apartment, where William was now kindling a fire; ‘one might dine twenty people here easily!’

‘If you think so well of the place, Master Graham, you might stay here for a while, till you have made up your mind what you are going to do. The landlord won’t make any objection, I am very sure.’

‘Oh! nonsense; he would want a long rent for a house like this.’

‘I dare say; if he could get it,’ was William’s significant answer.

‘What do you mean? Won’t the place let?’

‘No, sir. I did not tell you last night, but there was a murder done here, and people are shy of the house ever since.’

‘A murder! What sort of a murder? Who was murdered?’

‘A woman, Master Graham—the landlord’s sister; she lived here all alone, and was supposed to have money. Whether she had or not, she was found dead from a stab in her breast, and if there ever was any money, it must have been taken at the same time, for none ever was found in the house from that day to this.’

‘Was that the reason your wife would not stop here?’ asked the young man, leaning against the mantelshelf, and looking thoughtfully down on William.

‘Yes, sir. She could not stand it any longer; she got that thin and nervous one would not have believed it possible; she never saw anything, but she said she heard footsteps and voices, and then when she walked through the hall, or up the staircase, someone always seemed to be following her. We put the children to sleep in that big room you had last night, and they declared they often saw an old woman sitting by the hearth. Nothing ever came my way,’ finished William, with a laugh; ‘I was always ready to go to sleep the minute my head touched the pillow.’

‘Were not the murderers discovered?’ asked Graham Coulton.

‘No, sir; the landlord, Miss Tynan’s brother, had always lain under the suspicion of it—quite wrongfully, I am very sure—but he will never clear himself now. It was known he came and asked her for help a day or two before the murder, and it was also known he was able within a week or two to weather whatever trouble had been harassing him. Then, you see, the money was never found; and, altogether, people scarce knew what to think.’

‘Humph!’ ejaculated Graham Coulton, and he took a few turns up and down the apartment. ‘Could I go and see this landlord?’

‘Surely, sir, if you had a hat,’ answered William, with such a serious decorum that the young man burst out laughing.

‘That is an obstacle, certainly,’ he remarked, ‘and I must make a note do instead. I have a pencil in my pocket, so here goes.’

Within half an hour from the dispatch of that note William was back again with a sovereign; the landlord’s compliments, and he would be much obliged if Mr Coulton could ‘step round’.

‘You’ll do nothing rash, sir,’ entreated William.

‘Why, man,’ answered the young fellow, ‘one may as well be picked off by a ghost as a bullet. What is there to be afraid of?’

William only shook his head. He did not think his young master was made of the stuff likely to remain alone in a haunted house and solve the mystery it assuredly contained by dint of his own unassisted endeavours. And yet when Graham Coulton came out of the landlord’s house he looked more bright and gay than usual, and walked up the Lambeth road to the place where William awaited his return, humming an air as he paced along.

‘We have settled the matter,’ he said. ‘And now if the dad wants his son for Christmas, it will trouble him to find him.’

‘Don’t say that, Master Graham, don’t,’ entreated the man, with a shiver; ‘maybe after all it would have been better if you had never happened to chance upon Vauxhall Walk.’

‘Don’t croak, William,’ answered the young man; ‘if it was not the best day’s work I ever did for myself I’m a Dutchman.’

During the whole of that forenoon and afternoon, Graham Coulton searched diligently for the missing treasure Mr Tynan assured him had never been discovered. Youth is confident and self-opinionated, and this fresh explorer felt satisfied that, though others had failed, he would be successful. On the second floor he found one door locked, but he did not pay much attention to that at the moment, as he believed if there was anything concealed it was more likely to be found in the lower than the upper part of the house. Late into the evening he pursued his researches in the kitchen and cellars and old-fashioned cupboards, of which the basement had an abundance.

It was nearly eleven, when, engaged in poking about amongst the empty bins of a wine cellar as large as a family vault, he suddenly felt a rush of cold air at his back. Moving, his candle was instantly extinguished, and in the very moment of being left in darkness he saw, standing in the doorway, a woman, resembling her who had haunted his dreams overnight.

He rushed with outstretched hands to seize her, but clutched only air. He relit his candle, and closely examined the basement, shutting off communication with the ground floor ere doing so. All in vain. Not a trace could he find of living creature—not a window was open—not a door unbolted.

‘It is very odd,’ he thought, as, after securely fastening the door at the top of the staircase, he searched the whole upper portion of the house, with the exception of the one room mentioned. ‘I must get the key of that tomorrow,’ he decided, standing gloomily with his back to the fire and his eyes wandering about the drawing-room, where he had once again taken up his abode.

Even as the thought passed through his mind, he saw standing in the open doorway a woman with white dishevelled hair, clad in mean garments, ragged and dirty. She lifted her hand and shook it at him with a menacing gesture, and then, just as he was darting towards her, a wonderful thing occurred.

From behind the great mirror there glided a second female figure, at the sight of which the first turned and fled, uttering piercing shrieks as the other followed her from storey to storey.

Sick almost with terror, Graham Coulton watched the dreadful pair as they fled upstairs past the locked room to the top of the house.

It was a few minutes before he recovered his self-possession. When he did so, and searched the upper apartments, he found them totally empty.

That night, ere lying down before the fire, he carefully locked and bolted the drawing-room door; before he did more he drew the heavy settle in front of it, so that if the lock were forced no entrance could be effected without considerable noise.

For some time he lay awake, then dropped into a deep sleep, from which he was awakened suddenly by a noise as if of something scuffling stealthily behind the wainscot. He raised himself on his elbow and listened, and, to his consternation, beheld seated at the opposite side of the hearth the same woman he had seen before in his dreams, lamenting over her gold.

The fire was not quite out, and at that moment shot up a last tongue of flame. By the light, transient as it was, he saw that the figure pressed a ghostly finger to its lips, and by the turn of its head and the attitude of its body seemed to be listening.

He listened also—indeed, he was too much frightened to do aught else; more and more distinct grew the sounds which had aroused him, a stealthy rustling coming nearer and nearer—up and up it seemed, behind the wainscot.

‘It is rats,’ thought the young man, though, indeed, his teeth were almost chattering in his head with fear. But then in a moment he saw what disabused him of that idea—the gleam of a candle or lamp through a crack in the panelling. He tried to rise, he strove to shout—all in vain; and, sinking down, remembered nothing more till he awoke to find the grey light of an early morning stealing through one of the shutters he had left partially unclosed.

For hours after his breakfast, which he scarcely touched, long after William had left him at mid-day, Graham Coulton, having in the morning made a long and close survey of the house, sat thinking before the fire; then, apparently having made up his mind, he put on the hat he had bought, and went out.

When he returned the evening shadows were darkening down, but the pavements were full of people going marketing, for it was Christmas Eve, and all who had money to spend seemed bent on shopping.

It was terribly dreary inside the old house that night. Through the deserted rooms Graham could feel that ghostly semblance was wandering mournfully. When he turned his back he knew she was flitting from the mirror to the fire, from the fire to the mirror; but he was not afraid of her now—he was far more afraid of another matter he had taken in hand that day.

The horror of the silent house grew and grew upon him. He could hear the beating of his own heart in the dead quietude which reigned from garret to cellar.

At last William came; but the young man said nothing to him of what was in his mind. He talked to him cheerfully and hopefully enough—wondered where his father would think he had got to, and hoped Mr Tynan might send him some Christmas pudding. Then the man said it was time for him to go, and, when Mr Coulton went downstairs to the hall-door, remarked the key was not in it.

‘No,’ was the answer, ‘I took it out today, to oil it.’

‘It wanted oiling,’ agreed William, ‘for it worked terribly stiff.’ Having uttered which truism he departed.

Very slowly the young man retraced his way to the drawing-room, where he only paused to lock the door on the outside; then taking off his boots he went up to the top of the house, where, entering the front attic, he waited patiently in darkness and in silence.

It was a long time, or at least it seemed long to him, before he heard the same sound which had aroused him on the previous night—a stealthy rustling—then a rush of cold air—then cautious footsteps—then the quiet opening of a door below.

It did not take as long in action as it has required to tell. In a moment the young man was out on the landing and had closed a portion of the panelling on the wall which stood open; noiselessly he crept back to the attic window, unlatched it, and sprung a rattle, the sound of which echoed far and near through the deserted streets; then rushing down the stairs, he encountered a man who, darting past him, made for the landing above; but perceiving the way of escape closed, fled down again, to find Graham struggling desperately with his fellow.

‘Give him the knife—come along,’ he said savagely; and next instant Graham felt something like a hot iron through his shoulder, and then heard a thud, as one of the men, tripping in his rapid flight, fell from the top of the stairs to the bottom.

At the same moment there came a crash, as if the house was falling, and faint, sick, and bleeding, young Coulton lay insensible on the threshold of the room where Miss Tynan had been murdered.

When he recovered he was in the dining-room, and a doctor was examining his wound. Near the door a policeman stiffly kept guard. The hall was full of people; all the misery and vagabondism the streets contain at that hour was crowding in to see what had happened. Through the midst two men were being conveyed to the station-house; one, with his head dreadfully injured, on a stretcher; the other handcuffed, uttering frightful imprecations as he went.

After a time the house was cleared of the rabble, the police took possession of it, and Mr Tynan was sent for.

‘What was that dreadful noise?’ asked Graham feebly, now seated on the floor, with his back resting against the wall.

‘I do not know. Was there a noise?’ said Mr Tynan, humouring his fancy, as he thought.

‘Yes, in the drawing-room, I think; the key is in my pocket.’

Still humouring the wounded lad, Mr Tynan took the key and ran upstairs.

When he unlocked the door, what a sight met his eyes! The mirror had fallen—it was lying all over the floor, shivered into a thousand pieces; the console table had been borne down by its weight, and the marble slab was shattered as well. But this was not what chained his attention.

Hundreds, thousands of gold pieces were scattered about, and an aperture behind the glass contained boxes filled with securities and deeds and bonds, the possession of which had cost his sister her life.

‘Well, Graham, and what do you want?’ asked Admiral Coulton that evening as his eldest born appeared before him, looking somewhat pale but otherwise unchanged.

‘I want nothing,’ was the answer, ‘but to ask your forgiveness. William has told me all the story I never knew before; and, if you let me, I will try to make it up to you for the trouble you have had. I am provided for,’ went on the young fellow, with a nervous laugh; ‘I have made my fortune since I left you, and another man’s fortune as well.’

‘I think you are out of your senses,’ said the Admiral shortly.

‘No, sir, I have found them,’ was the answer; ‘and I mean to strive and make a better thing of my life than I should ever have done had I not gone to the Old House in Vauxhall Walk.’

‘Vauxhall Walk! What is the lad talking about?’

‘I will tell you, sir, if I may sit down,’ was Graham Coulton’s answer, and then he told his story.

Fairytale Friday – The Bad Wife

A bad wife lived on the worst of terms with her husband, and never paid any attention to what he said. If her husband told her to get up early, she would lie in bed three days at a stretch; if he wanted her to go to sleep, she couldn’t think of sleeping. When her husband asked her to make pancakes, she would say: “You thief, you don’t deserve a pancake!”

If he said:

“Don’t make any pancakes, wife, if I don’t deserve them,” she would cook a two-gallon pot full, and say,

“Eat away, you thief, till they’re all gone!”

“Now then, wife,” perhaps he would say, “I feel quite sorry for you; don’t go toiling and moiling, and don’t go out to the hay cutting.”

“No, no, you thief!” she would reply, “I shall go, and do you follow after me!”

One day, after having had his trouble and bother with her he went into the forest to look for berries and distract his grief, and he came to where there was a currant bush, and in the middle of that bush he saw a bottomless pit. He looked at it for some time and considered, “Why should I live in torment with a bad wife? can’t I put her into that pit? can’t I teach her a good lesson?”

So when he came home, he said:

“Wife, don’t go into the woods for berries.”

“Yes, you bugbear, I shall go!”

“I’ve found a currant bush; don’t pick it.”

“Yes I will; I shall go and pick it clean; but I won’t give you a single currant!”

The husband went out, his wife with him. He came to the currant bush, and his wife jumped into it, crying out at the top her voice:

“Don’t you come into the bush, you thief, or I’ll kill you!”

And so she got into the middle of the bush, and went flop into the bottomless pit.

The husband returned home joyfully, and remained there three days; on the fourth day he went to see how things were going on. Taking a long cord, he let it down into the pit, and out from thence he pulled a little demon. Frightened out of his wits, he was going to throw the imp back again into the pit, but it shrieked aloud, and earnestly entreated him, saying:

“Don’t send me back again, O peasant! let me go out into the world! A bad wife has come, and absolutely devoured us all, pinching us, and biting us—we’re utterly worn out with it. I’ll do you a good turn, if you will.”

So the peasant let him go free—at large in Holy Russia. Then the imp said:

“Now then, peasant, come along with me to the town of Vologda. I’ll take to tormenting people, and you shall cure them.”

Well, the imp went to where there were merchant’s wives and merchant’s daughters; and when they were possessed by him, they fell ill and went crazy. Then the peasant would go to a house where there was illness of this kind, and, as soon as he entered, out would go the enemy; then there would be blessing in the house, and everyone would suppose that the peasant was a doctor indeed, and would give him money, and treat him to pies. And so the peasant gained an incalculable sum of money. At last the demon said:

“You’ve plenty now, peasant; arn’t you content? I’m going now to enter into the Boyar’s daughter. Mind you don’t go curing her. If you do, I shall eat you.”

The Boyar’s daughter fell ill, and went so crazy that she wanted to eat people. The Boyar ordered his people to find out the peasant—(that is to say) to look for such and such a physician. The peasant came, entered the house, and told Boyar to make all the townspeople, and the carriages with coachmen, stand in the street outside. Moreover, he gave orders that all the coachmen should crack their whips and cry at the top of their voices: “The Bad Wife has come! the Bad Wife has come!” and then he went into the inner room. As soon as he entered it, the demon rushed at him crying, “What do you mean, Russian? what have you come here for? I’ll eat you!”

“What do you mean?” said the peasant, “why I didn’t come here to turn you out. I came, out of pity to you, to say that the Bad Wife has come here.”

The Demon rushed to the window, stared with all his eyes, and heard everyone shouting at the top of his voice the words, “The Bad Wife!”

“Peasant,” cries the Demon, “wherever can I take refuge?”

“Run back into the pit. She won’t go there any more.”

The Demon went back to the pit—and to the Bad Wife too.

In return for his services, the Boyar conferred a rich guerdon on the peasant, giving him his daughter to wife, and presenting him with half his property.

But the Bad Wife sits to this day in the pit—in Tartarus.

Our final illustration of the Skazkas which satirize women is the story of the Golovikha. It is all the more valuable, inasmuch as it is one of the few folk-tales which throw any light on the working of Russian communal institutions. The word Golovikha means, in its strict sense, the wife of a Golova, or elected chief of a Volost, or association of village communities; but here it is used for a “female Golova,” a species of “mayoress.”

Next Friday: The Golovikha

Charlotte Riddell — The Old House in Vauxhall Walk (2)

Chapter 2 of Elizabeth Gaskell’s ghost story.

Lying on the settle, with the fire burnt out, and the room in total darkness, Graham Coulton dreamed a curious dream. He thought he awoke from deep slumber to find a log smouldering away upon the hearth, and the mirror at the end of the apartment reflecting fitful gleams of light.

He could not understand how it came to pass that, far away as he was from the glass, he was able to see everything in it; but he resigned himself to the difficulty without astonishment, as people generally do in dreams. Neither did he feel surprised when he beheld the outline of a female figure seated beside the fire, engaged in picking something out of her lap and dropping it with a despairing gesture.

He heard the mellow sound of gold, and knew she was lifting and dropping sovereigns. He turned a little so as to see the person engaged in such a singular and meaningless manner, and found that, where there had been no chair on the previous night, there was a chair now, on which was seated an old, wrinkled hag, her clothes poor and ragged, a mob cap barely covering her scant white hair, her cheeks sunken, her nose hooked, her fingers more like talons than aught else as they dived down into the heap of gold, portions of which they lifted but to scatter mournfully.

‘Oh! my lost life,’ she moaned, in a voice of the bitterest anguish. ‘Oh! my lost life—for one day, for one hour of it again!’

Out of the darkness—out of the corner of the room where the shadows lay deepest—out from the gloom abiding near the door—out from the dreary night, with their sodden feet and wet dripping from their heads, came the old men and the young children, the worn women and the weary hearts, whose misery that gold might have relieved, but whose wretchedness it mocked.

Round that miser, who once sat gloating as she now sat lamenting, they crowded—all those pale, sad shapes—the aged of days, the infant of hours, the sobbing outcast, honest poverty, repentant vice; but one low cry proceeded from those pale lips—a cry for help she might have given, but which she withheld.

They closed about her, all together, as they had done singly in life; they prayed, they sobbed, they entreated. With haggard eyes the figure regarded the poor she had repulsed, the children against whose cry she had closed her ears, the old people she had suffered to starve and die for want of what would have been the merest trifle to her. Then, with a terrible scream, she raised her lean arms above her head, and sank down—down—the gold scattering as it fell out of her lap, and rolling along the floor, till its gleam was lost in the outer darkness beyond.

Then Graham Coulton awoke in good earnest, with the perspiration oozing from every pore, with a fear and an agony upon him such as he had never before felt in all his existence, and with the sound of the heart-rending cry—’Oh! my lost life’—still ringing in his ears. Mingled with all, too, there seemed to have been some lesson for him which he had forgotten, that, try as he would, eluded his memory, and which, in the very act of waking, glided away.

He lay for a little thinking about all this, and then, still heavy with sleep, retraced his way into dreamland once more.

It was natural, perhaps, that, mingling with the strange fantasies which follow in the train of night and darkness, the former vision should recur, and the young man ere long found himself toiling through scene after scene wherein the figure of the woman he had seen seated beside a dying fire held principal place.

He saw her walking slowly across the floor munching a dry crust—she who could have purchased all the luxuries wealth can command. On the hearth, contemplating her, stood a man of commanding presence, dressed in the fashion of long ago. In his eyes there was a dark look of anger, on his lips a curling smile of disgust, and somehow, even in his sleep, the dreamer understood it was the ancestor to the descendant he beheld—that the house put to mean uses in which he lay had never so far descended from its high estate, as the woman possessed of so pitiful a soul, contaminated with the most despicable and insidious vice poor humanity knows, for all other vices seem to have connection with the flesh, but the greed of the miser eats into the very soul.

Filthy of person, repulsive to look at, hard of heart as she was, he yet beheld another phantom, which, coming into the room, met her almost on the threshold, taking her by the hand, and pleading, as it seemed, for assistance. He could not hear all that passed, but a word now and then fell upon his ear. Some talk of former days; some mention of a fair young mother—an appeal, as it seemed, to a time when they were tiny brother and sister, and the accursed greed for gold had not divided them. All in vain; the hag only answered him as she had answered the children, and the young girls, and the old people in his former vision. Her heart was as invulnerable to natural affection as it had proved to human sympathy. He begged, as it appeared, for aid to avert some bitter misfortune or terrible disgrace, and adamant might have been found more yielding to his prayer. Then the figure standing on the hearth changed to an angel, which folded its wings mournfully over its face, and the man, with bowed head, slowly left the room.

Even as he did so the scene changed again; it was night once more, and the miser wended her way upstairs. From below, Graham Coulton fancied he watched her toiling wearily from step to step. She had aged strangely since the previous scenes. She moved with difficulty; it seemed the greatest exertion for her to creep from step to step, her skinny hand traversing the balusters with slow and painful deliberateness. Fascinated, the young man’s eyes followed the progress of that feeble, decrepit woman. She was solitary in a desolate house, with a deeper blackness than the darkness of night waiting to engulf her.

It seemed to Graham Coulton that after that he lay for a time in a still, dreamless sleep, upon awaking from which he found himself entering a chamber as sordid and unclean in its appointments as the woman of his previous vision had been in her person. The poorest labourer’s wife would have gathered more comforts around her than that room contained. A four-poster bedstead without hangings of any kind, a blind drawn up awry, an old carpet covered with dust and dirt on the floor, a rickety washstand with all the paint worn off it, an ancient mahogany dressing-table, and a cracked glass spotted all over, were all the objects he could at first discern, looking at the room through that dim light which oftentimes obtains in dreams.

By degrees, however, he perceived the outline of someone lying huddled on the bed. Drawing nearer, he found it was that of the person whose dreadful presence seemed to pervade the house. What a terrible sight she looked, with her thin white locks scattered over the pillow, with what were mere remnants of blankets gathered about her shoulders, with her claw-like fingers clutching the clothes, as though even in sleep she was guarding her gold!

An awful and a repulsive spectacle, but not with half the terror in it of that which followed. Even as the young man looked he heard stealthy footsteps on the stairs. Then he saw first one man and then his fellow steal cautiously into the room. Another second, and the pair stood beside the bed, murder in their eyes.

Graham Coulton tried to shout—tried to move, but the deterrent power which exists in dreams only tied his tongue and paralysed his limbs. He could but hear and look, and what he heard and saw was this: aroused suddenly from sleep, the woman started, only to receive a blow from one of the ruffians, whose fellow followed his lead by plunging a knife into her breast. Then, with a gurgling scream, she fell back on the bed, and at the same moment, with a cry, Graham Coulton again awoke, to thank heaven it was but an illusion.

Return tomorrow for Chapter 3

Charlotte Riddell — The Old House in Vauxhall Walk (1)

‘Houseless–homeless–hopeless!’

Many a one who had before him trodden that same street must have uttered the same words—the weary, the desolate, the hungry, the forsaken, the waifs and strays of struggling humanity that are always coming and going, cold, starving and miserable, over the pavements of Lambeth Parish; but it is open to question whether they were ever previously spoken with a more thorough conviction of their truth, or with a feeling of keener self-pity, than by the young man who hurried along Vauxhall Walk one rainy winter’s night, with no overcoat on his shoulders and no hat on his head.

A strange sentence for one-and-twenty to give expression to—and it was stranger still to come from the lips of a person who looked like and who was a gentleman. He did not appear either to have sunk very far down in the good graces of Fortune. There was no sign or token which would have induced a passer-by to imagine he had been worsted after a long fight with calamity. His boots were not worn down at the heels or broken at the toes, as many, many boots were which dragged and shuffled and scraped along the pavement. His clothes were good and fashionably cut, and innocent of the rents and patches and tatters that slunk wretchedly by, crouched in doorways, and held out a hand mutely appealing for charity. His face was not pinched with famine or lined with wicked wrinkles, or brutalised by drink and debauchery, and yet he said and thought he was hopeless, and almost in his young despair spoke the words aloud.

It was a bad night to be about with such a feeling in one’s heart. The rain was cold, pitiless and increasing. A damp, keen wind blew down the cross streets leading from the river. The fumes of the gas works seemed to fall with the rain. The roadway was muddy; the pavement greasy; the lamps burned dimly; and that dreary district of London looked its very gloomiest and worst.

Certainly not an evening to be abroad without a home to go to, or a sixpence in one’s pocket, yet this was the position of the young gentleman who, without a hat, strode along Vauxhall Walk, the rain beating on his unprotected head.

Upon the houses, so large and good—once inhabited by well-to-do citizens, now let out for the most part in floors to weekly tenants—he looked enviously. He would have given much to have had a room, or even part of one. He had been walking for a long time, ever since dark in fact, and dark falls soon in December. He was tired and cold and hungry, and he saw no prospect save of pacing the streets all night.

As he passed one of the lamps, the light falling on his face revealed handsome young features, a mobile, sensitive mouth, and that particular formation of the eyebrows—not a frown exactly, but a certain draw of the brows—often considered to bespeak genius, but which more surely accompanies an impulsive organisation easily pleased, easily depressed, capable of suffering very keenly or of enjoying fully. In his short life he had not enjoyed much, and he had suffered a good deal. That night, when he walked bareheaded through the rain, affairs had come to a crisis.

So far as he in his despair felt able to see or reason, the best thing he could do was to die. The world did not want him; he would be better out of it.

The door of one of the houses stood open, and he could see in the dimly lighted hall some few articles of furniture waiting to be removed. A van stood beside the curb, and two men were lifting a table into it as he, for a second, paused.

‘Ah,’ he thought, ‘even those poor people have some place to go to, some shelter provided, while I have not a roof to cover my head, or a shilling to get a night’s lodging.’ And he went on fast, as if memory were spurring him, so fast that a man running after had some trouble to overtake him.

‘Master Graham! Master Graham!’ this man exclaimed, breathlessly; and, thus addressed, the young fellow stopped as if he had been shot.

‘Who are you that know me?’ he asked, facing round.

‘I’m William; don’t you remember William, Master Graham? And, Lord’s sake, sir, what are you doing out a night like this without your hat?’

‘I forgot it,’ was the answer; ‘and I did not care to go back and fetch it.’

‘Then why don’t you buy another, sir? You’ll catch your death of cold; and besides, you’ll excuse me, sir, but it does look odd.’

‘I know that,’ said Master Graham grimly; ‘but I haven’t a halfpenny in the world.’

‘Have you and the master, then—’ began the man, but there he hesitated and stopped.

‘Had a quarrel? Yes, and one that will last us our lives,’ finished the other, with a bitter laugh.

‘And where are you going now?’

‘Going! Nowhere, except to seek out the softest paving stone, or the shelter of an arch.’

‘You are joking, sir.’

‘I don’t feel much in a mood for jesting either.’

‘Will you come back with me, Master Graham? We are just at the last of our moving, but there is a spark of fire still in the grate, and it would be better talking out of this rain. Will you come, sir?’

‘Come! Of course I will come,’ said the young fellow, and, turning, they retraced their steps to the house he had looked into as he passed along.

An old, old house, with long, wide hall, stairs low, easy of ascent, with deep cornices to the ceilings, and oak floorings, and mahogany doors, which still spoke mutely of the wealth and stability of the original owner, who lived before the Tradescants and Ashmoles were thought of, and had been sleeping far longer than they, in St Mary’s churchyard, hard by the archbishop’s palace.

‘Step upstairs, sir,’ entreated the departing tenant; ‘it’s cold down here, with the door standing wide.’

‘Had you the whole house, then, William?’ asked Graham Coulton, in some surprise.

‘The whole of it, and right sorry I, for one, am to leave it; but nothing else would serve my wife. This room, sir,’ and with a little conscious pride, William, doing the honours of his late residence, asked his guest into a spacious apartment occupying the full width of the house on the first floor.

Tired though he was, the young man could not repress an exclamation of astonishment.

‘Why, we have nothing so large as this at home, William,’ he said.

‘It’s a fine house,’ answered William, raking the embers together as he spoke and throwing some wood upon them; ‘but, like many a good family, it has come down in the world.’

There were four windows in the room, shuttered close; they had deep, low seats, suggestive of pleasant days gone by; when, well-curtained and well-cushioned, they formed snug retreats for the children, and sometimes for adults also. There was no furniture left, unless an oaken settle beside the hearth, and a large mirror let into the panelling at the opposite end of the apartment, with a black marble console table beneath it, could be so considered; but the very absence of chairs and tables enabled the magnificent proportions of the chamber to be seen to full advantage, and there was nothing to distract the attention from the ornamented ceiling, the panelled walls, the old-world chimney-piece so quaintly carved, and the fireplace lined with tiles, each one of which contained a picture of some scriptural or allegorical subject.

‘Had you been staying on here, William,’ said Coulton, flinging himself wearily on the settle, ‘I’d have asked you to let me stop where I am for the night.’

‘If you can make shift, sir, there is nothing as I am aware of to prevent you stopping,’ answered the man, fanning the wood into a flame. ‘I shan’t take the key back to the landlord till tomorrow, and this would be better for you than the cold streets at any rate.’

‘Do you really mean what you say?’ asked the other eagerly. ‘I should be thankful to lie here; I feel dead beat.’

‘Then stay, Master Graham, and welcome. I’ll fetch a basket of coals I was going to put in the van, and make up a good fire, so that you can warm yourself. Then I must run round to the other house for a minute or two, but it’s not far, and I’ll be back as soon as ever I can.’

‘Thank you, William; you were always good to me,’ said the young man gratefully. ‘This is delightful,’ and he stretched his numbed hands over the blazing wood, and looked round the room with a satisfied smile.

‘I did not expect to get into such quarters,’ he remarked, as his friend in need reappeared, carrying a half-bushel basket full of coals, with which he proceeded to make up a roaring fire. ‘I am sure the last thing I could have imagined was meeting with anyone I knew in Vauxhall Walk.’

‘Where were you coming from, Master Graham?’ asked William curiously.

‘From old Melfield’s. I was at his school once, you know, and he has now retired, and is living upon the proceeds of years of robbery in Kennington Oval. I thought, perhaps he would lend me a pound, or offer me a night’s lodging, or even a glass of wine; but, oh dear, no. He took the moral tone, and observed he could have nothing to say to a son who defied his father’s authority. He gave me plenty of advice, but nothing else, and showed me out into the rain with a bland courtesy, for which I could have struck him.’

William muttered something under his breath which was not a blessing, and added aloud: ‘You are better here, sir, I think, at any rate. I’ll be back in less than half an hour.’

Left to himself, young Coulton took off his coat, and shifting the settle a little, hung it over the end to dry. With his handkerchief he rubbed some of the wet out of his hair; then, perfectly exhausted, he lay down before the fire and, pillowing his head on his arm, fell fast asleep.

He was awakened nearly an hour afterwards by the sound of someone gently stirring the fire and moving quietly about the room. Starting into a sitting posture, he looked around him, bewildered for a moment, and then, recognising his humble friend, said laughingly:

‘I had lost myself; I could not imagine where I was.’

‘I am sorry to see you here, sir,’ was the reply; ‘but still this is better than being out of doors. It has come on a nasty night. I brought a rug round with me that, perhaps, you would wrap yourself in.’

‘I wish, at the same time, you had brought me something to eat,’ said the young man, laughing.

‘Are you hungry, then, sir?’ asked William, in a tone of concern.

‘Yes; I have had nothing to eat since breakfast. The governor and I commenced rowing the minute we sat down to luncheon, and I rose and left the table. But hunger does not signify; I am dry and warm, and can forget the other matter in sleep.’

‘And it’s too late now to buy anything,’ soliloquised the man; ‘the shops are all shut long ago. Do you think, sir,’ he added, brightening, ‘you could manage some bread and cheese?’

‘Do I think—I should call it a perfect feast,’ answered Graham Coulton. ‘But never mind about food tonight, William; you have had trouble enough, and to spare, already.’

William’s only answer was to dart to the door and run downstairs. Presently he reappeared, carrying in one hand bread and cheese wrapped up in paper, and in the other a pewter measure full of beer.

‘It’s the best I could do, sir,’ he said apologetically. ‘I had to beg this from the landlady.’

‘Here’s to her good health!’ exclaimed the young fellow gaily, taking a long pull at the tankard. ‘That tastes better than champagne in my father’s house.’

‘Won’t he be uneasy about you?’ ventured William, who, having by this time emptied the coals, was now seated on the inverted basket, looking wistfully at the relish with which the son of the former master was eating his bread and cheese.

‘No,’ was the decided answer. ‘When he hears it pouring cats and dogs he will only hope I am out in the deluge, and say a good drenching will cool my pride.’

‘I do not think you are right there,’ remarked the man.

‘But I am sure I am. My father always hated me, as he hated my mother.’

‘Begging your pardon, sir; he was over fond of your mother.’

‘If you had heard what he said about her today, you might find reason to alter your opinion. He told me I resembled her in mind as well as body; that I was a coward, a simpleton, and a hypocrite.’

‘He did not mean it, sir.’

‘He did, every word. He does think I am a coward, because I—I—’ And the young fellow broke into a passion of hysterical tears.

‘I don’t half like leaving you here alone,’ said William, glancing round the room with a quick trouble in his eyes; ‘but I have no place fit to ask you to stop, and I am forced to go myself, because I am night watchman, and must be on at twelve o’clock.’

‘I shall be right enough,’ was the answer. ‘Only I mustn’t talk any more of my father. Tell me about yourself, William. How did you manage to get such a big house, and why are you leaving it?’

‘The landlord put me in charge, sir; and it was my wife’s fancy not to like it.’

‘Why did she not like it?’

‘She felt desolate alone with the children at night,’ answered William, turning away his head; then added, next minute: ‘Now, sir, if you think I can do no more for you, I had best be off. Time’s getting on. I’ll look round tomorrow morning.’

‘Good night,’ said the young fellow, stretching out his hand, which the other took as freely and frankly as it was offered. ‘What should I have done this evening if I had not chanced to meet you?’

‘I don’t think there is much chance in the world, Master Graham,’ was the quiet answer. ‘I do hope you will rest well, and not be the worse for your wetting.’

‘No fear of that,’ was the rejoinder, and the next minute the young man found himself all alone in the Old House in Vauxhall Walk.

Chapter 2 will be published tomorrow.

Future-proofing grace: a reflections on digital tools and their user experience (with a little help from a German Romantic)

In an age where our tools can draw, write, compose, and even “think” faster than we can, it’s worth asking: what makes design graceful? What gives a design action — whether a sketch, or a line of code — that quality of elegance that seems to transcend efficiency and that was proper of hand sketching? Last month I described how I think drawing will never die. And yet some of you decided to disagree with me, defending hand drawing more than I did. I’d like to spend a little more time on the elegance of the design act this week and go back to the topics of automation and control to ask ourselves, more dangerously, when does control become a burden, rather than a strength?

1. Introduction: Strings Attached

Back in 1810, Heinrich von Kleist — German playwright, soldier, philosopher, chaos-bringer — wrote a strange and beautiful short essay called “On the Marionette Theatre”, and I’ve been re-reading it of late. Don’t ask me why, it’s a long story. In the essay, two friends talk about marionettes (dolls on strings, manipulated by unseen hands), and Kleist famously argues that these puppets move with more grace than humans because they lack consciousness. They don’t second-guess. They don’t try to look good. They just move.

Pinocchio is a marionette (except Collodi, in the original text, mistakenly uses the wrong word, burattino, which means hand-puppet, and you can’t get more sloppy than that)

“Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.”
— Kleist

Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) was a prominent German poet, dramatist, novelist, and short story writer of the early 19th century, associated with the German Romantic movement. Born in Frankfurt an der Oder into a military family, Kleist initially served as an officer in the Prussian Army before resigning to pursue studies in law, philosophy, and natural sciences. He is best known for works such as the plays “The Prince of Homburg,” “Das Käthchen von Heilbronn,” “The Broken Jug,” and novellas like “Michael Kohlhaas” and “The Marquise of O.” Some of his works — notably “The Prince of Homburg”, Penthesilea, Michael Kohlhaas — are fever dreams about justice, autonomy, violence, and the disintegration of identity.

Kleist’s writing often reflects profound philosophical concerns, particularly around the fallibility of human perception, the conflict between reason and emotion, and existential struggles. Despite his literary talents, his life was marked by instability, financial difficulties, and personal despair. Kleist ultimately died by suicide in 1811, in a joint act with his terminally ill close friend Henriette Vogel, through a double pact by a lake.

The story is delicately narrated in the 2014 film Amor Fou.

His short essay “On the Marionette Theatre” is a philosophical and speculative dialogue that explores the nature of grace, movement, and human consciousness through the metaphor of marionette puppets. Presented as a conversation between a narrator and a professional dancer, the essay explores how marionettes exhibit a kind of grace and freedom that human dancers cannot achieve, as marionettes lack self-consciousness and affectation. Kleist suggests that marionettes move with perfect balance and naturalness because their limbs act as pure pendulums governed solely by mechanical laws and gravity, controlled by the puppeteer who “dances” through them. Kleist suggests that the marionette symbolises an ideal human nature where the soul and movement are unified without the interference of reflective consciousness or vanity. He argues that grace appears most purely in beings that have either no consciousness (like puppets) or infinite consciousness (like gods), implying that human self-consciousness is a barrier to attaining perfect grace. Thus, the marionette, as a mechanical, self-unconscious entity, outshines humans in embodying natural grace and beauty.

Scholars have disagreed about Kleist’s concept of “ideal human nature” in several ways, particularly regarding how to interpret the relationship between self-consciousness, grace, and human nature. Some scholars view Kleist’s ideal human nature as a paradoxical state where true grace and unity of movement can only be achieved by losing self-consciousness, like the marionette: this loss is often linked to a mythical “state of innocence” before the Fall of Man and is seen as an impossible return for humans who must live with the burden of self-awareness and alienation from their natural embodiment. Others interpret Kleist’s argument as not merely a nostalgic or mystical ideal but as an invitation to rethink human self-consciousness. They emphasise that the “fracture” or duality in human nature — the tension between body and mind, immediacy and reflection — makes perfect grace difficult but not necessarily unattainable. The marionette figuratively represents an aspiration to transcend this fracture through a reintegration of the self and the body. Other scholars, however, approach the essay through philosophical or aesthetic lenses influenced by later thinkers (like in the philosophy of embodiment) that see Kleist’s discourse as a critique of rationalism and the modern subject rather than an endorsement of mechanistic or anti-consciousness views.

Regardless of where you stand (and regardless of where I stand in this debate), Kleist’s reflection seems even more relevant as a diagnosis of modern digital life, of the tension every designer and coder feels between authorship and automation, intent and instinct, control and surrender. And Kleist — chaotic, tormented, brilliant Kleist — hands us a metaphor so sharp, it slices straight through the tangled cords of contemporary design. The puppet becomes a symbol, not of limitation, but of liberation: a body that moves without ego. Does it sound familiar?

Think of the elegance of Spider-Man swinging across New York, the effortless pathfinding of an AI agent in The Last of Us, the serene movements of K-pop choreography guided by muscle memory and hours of practice. Or on the darker side: the uncanny smoothness of a Boston Dynamics robot, or the passive perfection of AI-generated faces that never blink. They all have something in common: grace without hesitation.

Primarily because if you hesitate mid-movement, you’re dead.

Compared to his more passionate works, On the Marionette Theatre sees a significant shift in tone: Instead of rage, there is wonder; instead of anxiety, there’s a strange serenity. It’s as if Kleist glimpsed a world beyond the burden of choice, one where motion follows intention without self-doubt.

Why It Still Matters (Even to Our Revit Model)

You should be familiar with my thought experiments by now. So why drag a 200-year-old metaphor into the world of Grasshopper scripts, AI chatbots, or parametric facades?

Because Kleist’s puppet shows us the kinds of beings we build, and the kind of beings we are becoming. In the age of digital design, we are constantly playing with puppets, only now they’re made of code and geometry. When you tweak a parameter and watch an entire structure adapt, you’re not drawing anymore: you’re pulling strings.

And there’s the lingering fear that your panels might just start singing “Now I am free, there are no strings on me”.

That’s why this week I thought we might walk the tightrope between control and surrender, exploring what Kleist’s marionette can teach us about:

automation in design;the aesthetics of precision;the moral weight of agency in digital practice;and the surprising possibility that grace might not be about being flawless but about being free.

Let’s pull the first string.

2. Digital Design and the Return of the MarionetteAutomation as Contemporary Puppetry

When Kleist admired the marionette, he saw something both ancient and futuristic: a body in motion, not dissimilar to Asimov’s robots, yet freed from the weight of reflection, animated by an external will. Fast forward two centuries, and we are once again surrounded by marionettes, except now, they are not made of wood and string, but of code and computation.

We might go full circle with this, but now’s not the time.

Think of a Grasshopper script, a Houdini procedural model, or an AI image generator: these are puppet theatres where the strings are mathematical constraints, and the puppeteer’s fingers are lines of code. The architect or designer doesn’t draw every brick, every joint, every curve. Instead, they define rules and the form follows those rules with the eerie obedience of a doll on strings. We’ve covered this before.

Boston Dynamics’ Spot dancing to “Uptown Funk” is funny and disturbing for the same reason Kleist’s marionette was fascinating: there’s too much grace in its lack of hesitation. We laugh, but somewhere deep down we’re chilled to the bone.

Parametric Design and the Illusion of Intention

Parametric design was once marketed as: “Don’t draw the form, draw the logic.” Indeed, the parametric turn enabled designers to shift from micromanaging shapes to orchestrating possibilities. The puppet metaphor might seem to fit perfectly: the designer sets the strings, and the model dances.

But here’s the catch: puppetry is never neutral; every graceful motion of the marionette depends on a puppeteer. In parametric design, the illusion of intention creeps in the same way: when a façade blossoms into fractal geometry at the slide of a parameter, it feels as though the design is alive, as though the puppet itself has an aesthetic will. It doesn’t. The will is yours, except you’ve outsourced part of it to a system that amplifies some choices while erasing others. We talked about this before.

It’s like watching a video game NPC: they seem to “want” to open doors or pursue you down corridors, but in truth, they’re just executing if/then strings. The illusion of intention is powerful, and in design practice, dangerously seductive, because if you start to think the puppet is alive, you risk forgetting who’s really holding the strings. There’s a moment in Westworld (the HBO version) where the park’s androids begin to repeat their loops, over and over, until you realise that everything they do — every tender gesture, every violent outburst — is the product of a script. In the same fashion, your parametric system is not your design; it’s the conditions under which design can emerge.

Your scripts might as well start repeating “This doesn’t look like anything to me.”

To some contemporary designers, this is terrifying, as it risks becoming an administrator of constraints rather than a maker of forms. Instead of drawing buildings, you’re debugging behaviour. Instead of asking “what do I want to build?” you find yourself asking “what do I want the algorithm to want?” That’s not the reason why some people choose to pursue architecture and engineering. I get that. And that’s why we’re here. To wonder how to bring grace back into design even when it’s digital.

3. The Architect and the Algorithm

In On the Marionette Theatre, Kleist marvels at how the puppet’s limbs swing like pendulums, governed not by vanity or hesitation but by pure mechanics and gravity. What he’s really describing is a form of embodiment without self-consciousness, a movement that is both mechanical and graceful, because it bypasses the weight of reflective thought.

This is where his metaphor maps uncannily onto digital design. If the marionette’s grace comes from its strings and counterweights, what happens when our algorithms become the strings, and our design intention is the counterweights?

Embodiment in Digital Processes: Gesture, Haptics, and Kinesthetic Thinking

Design has never been a purely cerebral act. Even in the age of parametric workflows and generative models, we are still moving bodies, which is probably why VR headsets can’t penetrate our everyday workflows. They promise immersion, but immersion without tactility feels hollow. The kinesthetic gestures of design are not incidental: you like to sketch because of the way paper resists the pencil just as much as a modeller likes to model because of the way digital matter moulds under instructions.

Gestures are the very site where grace re-enters digital practice. Just as the puppeteer’s smallest wrist-flick can make a marionette glide or stumble, the quality of a digital designer’s movement mediates the flow between intention and execution. And here is where User Experience and User Interface become philosophical questions, not just ergonomic ones.

A bad interface is like tangled strings on a puppet: every motion feels clumsy, forced, graceless. A good interface, by contrast, makes you forget the strings entirely.

Take Dynamo, Autodesk’s visual programming environment. By default, it is a puppet theatre where you drag and connect nodes: powerful, yes, but abstract. You set constraints, you define logic, and geometry obeys, but only through a layer of mediation. It’s the puppeteer hidden above the stage, hands invisible, motions detached.

Usually, Dynamo asks you to describe this through constraints as if you were Gaudì in his notebooks. Except you’re not.

Now compare this to DynaShape, a package that extends Dynamo with physics-based relaxation. Suddenly, you can grab a node in the model and pull it, watching the rest of the system stretch, settle, and rebalance in real time. The difference is subtle but profound: it collapses the distance between rule and gesture. You are no longer editing constraints at a remove; you are manipulating them bodily, kinesthetically, as if the model were clay. And it’s much more graceful.

See here for details.

This is grace in Kleist’s sense. The marionette no longer just executes the puppeteer’s command — it swings with gravity, reacts to touch, finds equilibrium. And the designer is no longer reduced to a brain issuing instructions; the body is back in the loop, negotiating form through gesture and resistance.

From a UX/UI perspective, the lesson is simple but radical: the more design tools acknowledge and respond to the gestural intelligence of their users, the more they allow for grace. Not just efficiency, not just automation, but elegance, the kind that emerges when the tool feels like an extension of the hand, not an obstacle to it.

4. Designing with the Body: Grace in the Architect’s Interface4.1 The Pencil and the Mouse: What We Keep Losing

The first thing a pencil does is remind you that you have a hand. You press, you scratch, you smudge. The feedback is immediate, continuous, and noisy: your line wavers if you hesitate, it thickens if you lean in. It’s imperfect, but that imperfection is what makes it yours.

Now trade the pencil for a mouse. Suddenly, your hand no longer touches the line. You click, drag, release. The geometry appears obediently on the screen, but without friction, without resistance, without the tiny betrayals that make a stroke human. The mouse is an abstracting device: it converts gesture into symbol, and intention into instruction.

This isn’t just nostalgia for sketching, though nostalgia is powerful. It’s about tactility as intelligence, as we saw last month. When you lose the pushback of paper, clay, or wood, you lose a dialogue. And when digital tools fail to offer some form of embodied resistance, design risks becoming disembodied: a brain floating above a keyboard, issuing commands into the void.

You can even put it on a Roomba, but this doesn’t mean it’s engaged.

Some tools succeed precisely because they preserve or reinvent tactility.

ZBrush is a masterclass in this. It treats 3D modelling not as a sequence of commands, but as sculpting: you carve, pull, inflate, scrape. Every stroke is a negotiation with a surface, and that negotiation has the same kinesthetic richness as clay under your thumb.Tablets for hand sketching serve a similar purpose. With a stylus on an iPad, you feel the glide, the lag, the pressure curve. The sketch is not identical to paper, but it preserves the sense that your body matters in the mark.

The temptation is to dismiss all this as old designers being sentimental about sketching. But tactility isn’t about going back to graphite: it’s about recognising that the body is a design instrument. Without resistance, there is no rhythm; without rhythm, there is no grace.

Even outside design, the most addictive digital platforms owe their success to tactility. Scrolling TikTok isn’t just consuming content, but it’s the physical rhythm of the thumb, the endless downward sweep. Swiping Tinder is not just making choices: it’s making them through a bodily flick, a gesture that feels more intimate than pressing “yes” or “no.” These platforms succeed not because of what they show, but because of how they let you move. If Kleist’s marionette moved with careless elegance because its limbs obeyed gravity — a physical law, a constant pull — and cared about little less, our best tools today give us back something like that: digital matter that flows and makes our movements count without the oppression of fearing a mistake.

The worst tools reduce us to clicking through lists, severing gesture from outcome. The real danger isn’t that sketching will die: the danger is that, in losing tactility, we lose awareness of our own grace, we stop feeling the line. And once we stop feeling, we stop caring. The best modellers still feel that grace within the digital tools, but I don’t blame the others.

So what can we do?

4.2. Defining what you like: a Design Thinking Workshop

Digital tools are not just about what they allow you to produce, but they should also be about how they make you feel while producing it. We spend most of our lives working, after all: you should feel good while doing it. If we want to preserve grace in our workflows, we need to understand which physical joys of practice we refuse to surrender. A sketch isn’t just a line; it’s the scratch of graphite, the smudge of the palm, the chance to crumple the sheet and start again. A physical model isn’t just cardboard; it’s the resistance of the knife, the smell of glue, the delicate wobble of a fragile structure in your hands.

This design thinking workshop is about surfacing those pleasures, naming them, and then demanding that our digital tools either preserve them or invent their equivalents.

Workshop OutlineGoal: Help architects and engineers identify the tactile, embodied aspects of their practice they want to preserve or translate into digital tools.Participants: 1–12 people (works solo, but best in small groups).Materials: Paper, pens, sticky notes, favourite analogue tools (pencils, rulers, knives, etc.), laptops/tablets for comparison.Duration: 90 minutes.Output: A prioritised list (or map) of desired tactile qualities that future digital tools should emulate.Step-by-Step Warm-up Reflection (10 minutes)
Each participant selects one beloved gesture in something they like outside from work, and lists what they like about it using at least one of the five senses (e.g., the sound of apples when you cut them and the way they release their scent; the resistance of the fabric when you pierce it with the needle and the hissing sound a thread makes through fabric while you sew). Diving deeper (10 minutes)
Each participant writes down 3 of their most beloved working activities in architecture/engineering (e.g., hand sketching, cutting cardboard in physical model making, the sound the station makes in site surveying, etc.).
Ask: “When do you feel most connected to your work?” Sensory Mapping (15 minutes)
For each activity, participants write down what makes it satisfying in sensory terms:
– What do your hands do? (push, scratch, trace, cut, etc.)
– What do you feel in your body? (resistance, flow, rhythm, weight, etc.)
– What sounds, textures, or motions are part of it?
You can use sticky notes or a quick diagram (like a body map). Storytelling Swap (15 minutes)
Each participant shares their favourite activity with the group (or writes it out as a discourse if solo).
Prompt: “Tell us the story of a moment when this felt perfect.”
Capture key words: scratch, wobble, rhythm, grip, flow. Analogue-to-Digital Bridge (20 minutes)
Ask: “Where in my current digital tools do I find an equivalent feeling, if anywhere?”
Example:
– ZBrush sculpting ≈ clay carving
– DynaShape manipulation ≈ bending a wireframe by hand
– Mouse clicking ≠ sketching (gap identified)
Mark activities that already have good digital analogues, and those that don’t. The Red Line (15 minutes)
Participants draw a literal red line on paper: Above this line are the tactile experiences I refuse to lose.
Rank them in order of importance. The output is a non-negotiable map for digital grace. Group Synthesis (15 minutes)
Cluster recurring themes: resistance, flow, rhythm, texture, immediacy.
Reframe as design requirements:
– “Any tool I use must let me feel resistance.”
– “Any tool I use must make rhythm visible.”

By the end of this workshop, each participant has not just a nostalgic list of “things I like about hand drawing,” but a manifesto of tactility: what their tools must give them back. This is something we might call future-proofing grace.

5. Conclusion

Never let someone tell you that “digital killed the body.” If you know what you love in your embodied practice, you can demand it from your digital tools, and if the tools don’t give it to you, team up to invent better tools. As far as I know, DynaShape was developed by a single person. You can do it too.

Welcome to Spooktober

As the leaves turn crisp and the nights grow longer, the Gothic community prepares for its favorite season: Spooktober. October isn’t just another month on the calendar — filled with chestnuts and mushrooms and pumpkin — but a countdown to Halloween.

Spooktober is a tradition, a ritual of sorts: thirty-one days of eerie delights, unsettling tales, and the thrill of the uncanny. It’s about immersing ourselves in the strange, the gothic, and the ghostly, building anticipation one story at a time until All Hallows’ Eve finally arrives. It used to be stronger back when Twitter was a thing, so now everyone celebrates where they ended up after the diaspora (Tumblr, Instagram, Bluesky).

This year as many other years before, we’re embracing the spirit of Spooktober here on the blog. Every single day in October, we’ll publish a short story in the spirit of the season.

So light a candle, draw the curtains, and join us in celebrating Spooktober. The countdown begins today,
and the first story is waiting just around the corner.

The Naked Sun

A Mirror on Virtuality, Scarcity, and Human Dependency

Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun (1957) is the second novel in his Robots cycle, following The Caves of Steel and preceding The Robots of Dawn. These books occupy an important place in Asimov’s broader universe, where they form the narrative and conceptual bridge between the detective-driven world of Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw, and the grand sweep of the later Foundation series. They are often underestimated, remembered for their unusual fusion of science fiction and detective story, but their real power lies in how they probe social structures under pressure with the same fresh, seemingly lightheaded tone of the short stories.

In The Caves of Steel, we encounter an overpopulated Earth where humanity is literally walled in, living in enormous enclosed cities. Physical agoraphobia is the norm, privacy is almost nonexistent, and scarcity defines everything from food production to professional advancement. The Naked Sun flips this premise. Instead of claustrophobic density, we are brought to Solaria, a planet with vast open spaces, virtually unlimited resources, and an aggressively sparse population. Solarians live their lives in physical isolation, communicating almost exclusively through advanced holographic projections. Where Earthmen fear open skies, Solarians fear physical contact.

This juxtaposition is not simply a thought experiment. It frames the relationship between human beings, their environments, and the technologies they adopt or reject. Asimov uses Elijah Baley’s discomfort in Solaria—and Daneel’s role as both partner and contrast—to dramatize the ways humans adapt (or fail to adapt) when their social contracts are strained.

One of the most striking aspects of The Naked Sun is how eerily prescient it feels in today’s digital world. The Solarians’ preference for “viewing” rather than “seeing” echoes our own reliance on digital platforms for communication, work, and even intimacy. On Solaria, the holographic interface allows for interaction without risk, desire, or messiness. But this virtuality comes at the cost of genuine human connection: marriages are arranged more as contracts than relationships, and childbearing is treated as a clinical, distanced duty.

Asimov’s point is not to celebrate or condemn technology itself, but to show how dependence on virtual mediation reshapes not only habits but also values. The fear of the physical becomes ingrained, almost biological. For readers today, it resonates as a warning: if we allow convenience and efficiency to substitute for embodied presence, we may risk building a society where touch, vulnerability, and real encounter are no longer natural.

Underlying the novel is also a meditation on resource distribution. Earth, packed with billions of humans, lives in a state of perpetual scarcity. Solaria, with only 20,000 inhabitants, luxuriates in abundance. Every Solarian owns vast estates tended by countless robots, making physical labor and material want obsolete. But Asimov turns this apparent utopia into a cautionary tale. Abundance without interdependence breeds fragility. Solarian society cannot withstand disruption because no one has to cooperate for survival. People are isolated, selfish, and incapable of empathy, while Earthmen, despite their poverty, are rich in social bonds and collective resilience. Asimov suggests that resources alone cannot secure welfare: it is the patterns of distribution and the necessity of cooperation that create meaning.

As such, the most enduring theme of The Naked Sun is the triangular relationship between automation, population control, and human welfare. On Solaria, automation has eliminated economic need and robots perform every conceivable task. But this leads not to flourishing, but to stagnation. With their needs met by machines, Solarians have no incentive to work, struggle, or even interact. Low population is sustained by design, ensuring that no one has to compete for resources or share them. Welfare, in this context, is not a matter of well-being but of sedation.

In contrast, Earth shows the other side of the equation: high population, minimal automation, and constant scarcity. Here, welfare is tied to survival and the negotiation of crowded lives. Asimov’s brilliance lies in setting these two extremes against each other.

If The Naked Sun remains, at its surface, a tightly written detective story – with Elijah Baley investigating a rare crime on a planet that prides itself on order – beneath the mystery lies a meditation on what it means to live together, what kind of environments we build, and how technology mediates our social existence. The tension between Daneel’s robotic precision and Baley’s very human vulnerabilities underscores the question: what is the cost of safety, abundance, and comfort when stripped of connection and struggle?

Reading The Naked Sun today feels startlingly contemporary. Its portrayal of virtual life anticipates debates on digital mediation, social isolation, and the decline of physical community. Its reflections on resource abundance speak directly to modern anxieties about automation, sustainability, and inequality. And its exploration of how population density shapes culture and welfare remains relevant as our world grapples with both overcrowded megacities and declining birth rates.

Asimov does not offer easy answers. Instead, he dramatizes the paradox: too much density and too little space can suffocate humanity; too much automation and too little contact can dissolve it. Somewhere between Earth’s caves and Solaria’s emptiness lies the fragile balance of being human.