Tragedy at Sarsfield Manor Read online

  The subsequent history of the Sarsfield was tameness itself, as the family settled into the grayness of nineteenth-century American life. Although rumors about the four brothers went comparatively undiminished, their scions were so ordinary—perhaps deliberately so—that they were hardly held with the fear and loathing that was their ancestors’ fate. None of the later Sarsfields ever tried to explore the circumstances surrounding the sudden deaths of the four brothers and their servant: either because, as George had discovered to his perplexity, virtually all clues as to the details of the affair had been expunged from existing records, or because the subsequent residents of Sarsfield Manor—cousins of the unmarried brothers from the major branch of the family in Baltimore—had little interest in investigating such unsavory occurrences in a line that had almost been disowned but for their impressive assets. The later Sarsfields resided peacefully and with a remarkable dearth of incident in the manor; carrying out their role of squire with a repugnance and hesitancy that, in a line already tainted (so the brothers would have declared) with mercenary bankers and petty tradesmen, was at once ludicrous and pathetic. One wondered why anyone lived in the manor at all; but perhaps the age of Emerson and Whitman had not entirely crushed their love of Georgian elegance.

  Interest in the family arose again only with the generation preceding my own—and specifically with the John Kenneth Sarsfield who had posthumously conveyed us hither. Born in 1864, he had early cultivated a taste for the past through youthful readings of the well-stocked shelves in the library, filled with volumes in which the “long s” was the rule rather than the exception. Though his siblings—my mother, Aunt Judith, and Uncle George—had chosen to leave the manor soon after attaining adulthood, John Kenneth remained. A portentous event in his adolescence was the discovery—in a hidden compartment of a desk in the second-story study—of a substantial horde of documents relating to his ill-famed ancestors. Most of these apparently consisted of notebooks in which were scribbled over the years the rambling thoughts and schemes of the four brothers. The great majority of these documents, regrettably, had not survived; indeed, John Kenneth’s own diary in which he recorded these events suddenly stopped here, leaving one baffled as to the contents of the notebooks—no doubt filled with the massed learning of the brothers’ last two decades—and as to their influence upon John Kenneth’s subsequent life.

  It is clear, however, that his decision not to attend Johns Hopkins was the direct result of the examination of these documents, for he had declared—as letters from his disheartened parents told—that he had far more important studies to undertake than could be gained at college. The family’s financial security had alone granted his wish, along with the really keen intellect that made his parents ultimately conclude that his decision was probably not frivolous. Their death when he was thirty-three—their carriage overturning while on a visit to friends—seemed to cause him singularly little grief; and when George told us this fact (gained through servants’ whispers and neighborhood gossip), I noticed that, while all the others were shocked by their relative’s callousness, I myself could readily understand—if not wholly sympathize with—the sentiment of one who seemed from youth to have devoted his entire life to almost fanatical scholarship.

  The years immediately prior to John Kenneth’s confinement at Sheppard are almost wholly blank. We know that he codified the rumors anent his dubious ancestors only through the fact that a notebook containing them is extant; we are thus in a position we encounter all too often among the authors of classical antiquity—we must infer their lives solely from their literary remains. In this way we know that John Kenneth began studying the arcane tomes that had lain untouched for generations, and may even have begun conducting experiments of some sort (the evidence here was cloudy) upon the estate. He kept up to date on the latest mystical findings and pored over the works of Blavatsky, Summers, Donnelly, and others as soon as they were off the press. In a way I regretted the trend of his readings, for I knew that much of this work was charlatanry perpetrated by weak minds who had chosen this path in reaction to the horror of contemporary life, with its wars, its mechanization, its alienation; yet I was heartened by indications that John Kenneth did not swallow their maunderings uncritically but seemed to weigh them in a true scholarly spirit, correlating them with the arcane secrets handed down from Ramses to Friar Bacon.

  The reason for his confinement was as mysterious as that quintuple tragedy of a century and a half before which we all sensed was in some inscrutable way related to it. Officials at the sanitarium had refused to reveal their documents even to the family, and police records were also curiously lacking. We could only rely, as before, on whispers; and these inevitably took the same tone as those uttered by the neighborhood gossips a hundred and fifty years before. Was John Kenneth too an unrecognized genius whose doom had come through ignorance and small-mindednes? George was convinced of it, although a visit to his brother ten years ago—virtually the only visit the man would receive in his thirteen years of confinement—had not done much to confirm this belief. John Kenneth had been very silent, muttering innocuously but creating the impression of vast stores of knowledge held in reserve.

  Thus the history of Sarsfield Manor and its tenants ended as ambiguously as it had begun. We all felt that an enormous wealth of detail and significance lay behind and beneath even this laboriously collated narrative; but the hints were too few, and our mind’s eye looked only into an undissolving mist. And when George told us—in a rhetorical flourish whose contrivedness was so apparent that I smiled—that the four brothers Sarsfield were actually buried on the estate (for their remains had not been allowed to pollute healthier churchyards), in a dark corner at the rear, we could not but march out in a body and examine the anomalous site. Standing silently there, I could not help feeling that their remains and the half-obliterated inscriptions of their crumbling markers symbolized a barred mystery whose unlocking should be sedulously avoided.

  Chapter Five

  The next day, after breakfast, I quickly made my way upstairs before anyone could detain me. A sense of overwhelming mental exhaustion had come over me, and I wanted nothing but solitude. I had made up my mind not even to attempt the solution of the absurd riddle of the will, since I knew either that someone else would solve it in due course of time or that after at most a month of incarceration I would be released and could settle again into my scholarly routine.

  As I ascended the stairs, I glanced out of the windows and over the parklike rear of the estate. I was tempted to take a stroll in the warm and invigorating sunshine, but changed my mind when I saw Alice there leading her husband about in quest of the lucrative puzzle. They must, I thought, be going to the graves to see if those slabs harbored any clues. I merely winced and decided to retire to my room.

  As I advanced along the second-story corridor, however, I heard an anomalous muttering that made me stop in my tracks and gaze inquisitively about. At the very end of the hall and to the left, a door was ajar. To this I advanced; and, entering the room, uttered a wide-eyed gasp.

  The causes of my astonishment were twofold. The first was the contents of the room. Displayed on every wall of the roughly square room was the most remarkable collection of arms—scimitars, javelins, hand-knives, and countless other types—that I had ever seen. The weapons room at the Philadelphia Art Museum would have only barely surpassed this impressive array of killing devices. A brief glance told me that these items—as well as those in a huge glass display-case that filled the center of the room—represented the collection of Hellenistic weaponry that, as Uncle George had related, the four brothers Sarsfield had amassed over the decades. While I had been mildly intrigued at discovering this classical predilection of my ancestors, I had assumed that their collection had at some point during the past two centuries been turned over to a university or museum for proper display and study. Instead, I saw here the most extensive conglomeration of arms—from Macedonia, Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, and even as
far away as Bactria—that I had ever seen in private hands. I was amazed—almost appalled—at the discovery, and made a firm mental note to report the find to my university’s department of classical art and archaeology.

  But the othe cause of my astonishment was far more mundane; for it was merely the presence of my cousin Jacob in the room.

  Not having noticed my entrance, he was still mumbling incoherently to himself as he pored over the rectangular display-case. But when I cleared my throat to make my presence known, he wheeled around with a gasp, eyes grotesquely flashing.

  “You oughtn’t to sneak up on a fellow like that,” he said almost breathlessly. “It’s not nice, you know, it’s not nice.” He grinned luridly.

  From my few contacts with Jacob, I was felt uneasy, even a bit alarmed, in his presence. He was one of those people about whom you are ever in doubt as to their ability to control their actions and lead a normal, socially responsible life. He was not by any means mentally deficient—indeed, he was attempting to be a writer of lurid fiction, and may perhaps have even landed a story or two in some of the cheaper pulp magazines—but one always felt that the customary inhibitions that restrain most people from flaring out and committing unthinkable acts of violence were, in him, reduced to the vanishing point. I knew little of his family life with his ill-matched parents, but their obvious disappointment at his inability or unwillingness to develop into a mature, stable adult could not have been conducive to his own mental stability.

  “I just wondered,” I noted quietly, “what you were doing and saying, Jacob.”

  “As to that,” he replied tartly, “I was looking at these weapons—for you’re not the only classicist here—and I was making plans for a story. What if I mutter?” His face donned a philosophical expression that was as malapropos as it would have been on Frankenstein’s monster. “Don’t you think that talking to oneself, far from being a sign of a feeble mind, suggests that one can’t keep one’s mental wheels from turning?”

  I actually agreed with him on the point, but wondered of its validity in his case. I felt, however, that I had best not antagonize him, so I merely said:

  “It’s quite a collection here, isn’t it? It ought to be in a museum.”

  But even this was not innocuous enough for him.

  “Museum?” he flared. “What rubbish! This is our family’s collection, and it should remain here where we can appreciate it and make use of it.”

  I looked at him sharply. “Make use of it? What do you mean by that?”

  To my surprise, his anger wilted away into embarrassment or confusion. “Nothing, nothing,” he said rapidly, waving a hand at me as if I were a servant he was dismissing. “There’s much to study here, and I’d like to get to it.”

  I gave him a cold stare. I knew when my presence was not wanted, and I had no intention of extending my own acquaintance with him longer than was necessary, so I hastily exited the room. Turning around, I saw him continue to stare intently at several pieces in the display-case. He’s welcome to them, I muttered almost aloud.

  I idled till dinner, attempting to do some work but largely failing to summon up sufficient concentration to make any significant headway. Accordingly, I was almost glad of the diversion of a meal, for all that I would have to associate with relations who were becoming more and more irksome to me. I was, when I reached the dining room, one of the first to arrive; the others apparently were in the thick of the chase, poking over the whole house and grounds for clues to the ludicrous death-riddle. I found only Edward and George in the room: apparently they felt themselves too aged to engage in such frivolous if profitable activity. We waited a full fifteen minutes before all the others arrived, the last being an irritated Alice and an exhausted Winthrop who had probably never gotten so much exercise in the entirety of his previous life. Regrettably, they had found nothing—or at least nothing that seemed to have any bearing on the mystery.

  I quietly addressed Edward, remarking that he didn’t seem much interested in the riddle, to which he quickly nodded. But before he could speak, his wife spoke up sharply.

  “Well,” Judith said, “while you old men”—evidently she included me in that designation—“have been accomplishing nothing, I have not been so idle.”

  “Aunt Judith,” Alice said slyly, “what you have you been up to? Have you found the solution?”

  The response that Judith made could have been predicted. “That, my dear, is for me to know and you to find out.” Her expression suddenly became petulant. “And yet, I really cannot fit it into the riddle. It’s very curious.”

  There was an awkward silence: no one wished to press Judith, who was obviously intent on keeping her cards close to her chest, nor could anyone think of a new topic of conversation. We were all so relatively unused to one another’s presence, and had been thrown together so anomalously, that we could well have been strangers gathered from the street.

  Finally Winthrop spoke, addressing George. “Father, what have you been up to?”

  The old man looked up quickly, as if in a daze and hardly expecting anyone to bother him. “Oh, I’ve just been scanning the shelves. An astonishing library they had . . . .” He did not have to mention who his subjects were.

  “George,” said Judith half-reproachfully, “don’t tell me you’ve been puttering about those occult books?”

  “No, no, no, not at all, Judith. Why in the world would I be doing that?” His puzzlement was genuine. “No, they have some excellent classical texts; Charles”—looking at me—“you ought to examine them.” The idea had not occurred to me, and I resolved to follow his advice soon. “And they have some lovely editions of the Metaphysical Poets.” He spoke with the admiration of a pronounced bibliophile.

  “Books and books!” said Alice sharply. “Don’t you people ever think of anything but books? I daresay those books are going to help precious little in solving the riddle.”

  “But what does that matter, dear?” said George mildly.

  Alice was left speechless. I may have grinned.

  And so the dinner—admirably, if stodgily, American—passed. With the meal concluded, I quickly withdrew to the library; catching a glance, as I went, of Alice dragging poor Winthrop on some new expedition, Judith summoning George for some private conversation, Edward retiring to the drawing room, and Jacob going rather too rapidly upstairs again.

  The library was indeed as George had said: the standard classics through the nineteenth century (the recenter ones obviously added by later scions), the amazingly large collection of occult volumes—including such things as Remigius, Reginald Scot, King James’s treatise on witchcraft, and even such curiosities as some of Ainsworth’s and Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, which apparently represented some descendant’s valiant if misguided attempt to keep the collection up to date—and, of course, a classical collection that included several mouth-watering incunabula.

  I picked only one volume—Hennenius’s great 1685 edition of Juvenal—and took it away with me to my room. Somehow I thought it might impel me to do some work, but it failed to light the spark of inspiration in me. I felt the same spiritual weariness that had come over me last evening, but this time it was intensified; and it was worse because I could pinpoint no single cause. True, my relations were getting on my nerves more and more, and the inconvenience of staying here, away from my library (more than once I cursed myself for not bringing some particular volume or paper whose absence created irritating lacunae in my work), was becoming increasingly pronounced; yet there was something more.

  George’s history of the Sarsfields had bothered me more than I could account for, considering its sketchy inconclusiveness; yet the implications were the more horrific for their being ungraspable. Nameless things had happened here, and I felt that their inevitable revelation would be no less cataclysmic for their occurrence in a now distant age. Behind even the absurd riddle of John Kenneth Sarsfield peered leering chimeras of grotesqueness that were far more hideous than any realized. I
began actually to ponder the solution of the ghastly mystery—not because of the ultimate monetary prize but through an unaccountable realization that its decipherment was a necessity of the most terrific sort. I mumbled over and over to myself the puerile jingle to which each new utterance added a layer of the sinister:

  Four lights in a forest

  Shine brighter than day;

  They laugh when it’s windy,

  They laugh tho’ they’re clay.

  The first line could refer to nothing but the four brothers themselves, while the last obviously referred to the fact of their death; but, even assuming an extreme use of metaphor, there remained the difficulty of reconciling “lights” with “laugh.” In what nameless fashion could lights laugh? And what was the significance of “windy”? And on top of the intrinsic obscurity of this quatrain was the further mystery of why we were all transported here in order to solve it. What possible landmark could exist in this thoroughly normal-looking estate that could have any possible connection with the riddle? Even my cursory examination of rooms and grounds told me that there was little overt strangeness in these surroundings; while the more arduous investigations of my relatives had—but for some apparently uninterpretable evidence unearthed by Judith—been of hardly greater moment. Perhaps the answer was staring us in the face; perhaps John Kenneth Sarsfield had not been remiss in reading his Poe.

  But I tried to shake off my somber reflections and pay attention to my studies. When I was no longer in the spirit to work, I did not know what to do; for I did not wish to encounter Uncle Edward in the drawing room, nor wished to meet any of my other relatives in their canvassing of the house and grounds. I thus made a quiet way to the uninhabited library and attempted to immerse myself in the lightest reading—I think it was Thackeray—I could find. I became, to my surprise, quite engrossed and charmed by his effortless urbanity and wit, and may have passed several hours in this fashion. I was only interrupted once, when old George poked his head in and was almost startled by my presence. My first sight of him shocked me enough to give him a second glance, for his face was more haggard and pale than I had ever seen it; but, glancing at my watch and noting the late hour, I assumed that fatigue from the trip down and the previous evening’s long narrative had overcome him.