“About here, they say, a former occupant of the mansion, the one who built that summer-house, was found.”
“How found?”
“Dead, Mr. Bannerlee, with his head neatly shorn away from the rest of him. That was nearly two hundred years ago.” He grunted. “The chap ought to have been killed for putting up that thing.”
“Good heavens! Who had done it?”
“I wish I could tell you. He was never discovered. I don’t think the victim was a very popular gentleman; so there may have been connivance in keeping the secret locked away. A baffling affair it must have been for the Salts of that day. The time-and-space problem was mystifying then as now it is in Cosgrove’s death.”
I looked curiously at the little man with the broad shoulders. “Doctor, you certainly hit upon the queerest tales. Where could you have found that recorded?”
“On a special pasted-in leaf of an old family Bible. Quite a fascinating library Crofts owns without comprehending it.”
“This is accursed ground,” said Maryvale. “It reeks with lawless bloodshed.”
We left the park with its sickly poetry and bore to the right by a field-path toward the prosaic potato-patch of the sisters Delambre, where the scarecrow bore almost too great a likeness to Baron Ludlow in his tweeds to be laid to coincidence. It was here that the brook later spanned by the absurd bridge came down from the indentation of the hill. We followed the narrow channel, where the rain-swollen stream now leaped against its banks, to where the deserted cottage stood in an oak-clump. The morsel of a stone-roofed house gave only a shy peep from its covert; it was like a doll’s house, dwarfed by overshadowing branches.
“Do you think it possible that these women were concerned either last night or the night before? What were they like?”