“Were I anticipating human sacrifice, I’d have been sorely disappointed,” said Miss Charlotte with her customary sangfroid. “There wasn’t even a beheaded chicken in the mix.”
“They drank their own—and each other’s—blood.” Mrs. Watson shuddered. The sight made her not want to have wine ever again and she loved a glass of good claret.
Miss Charlotte remained unexcited. “Conceptually it isn’t that different from the Eucharist.”
“But the Eucharist isn’t done with the collected vital fluid of the congregation!”
Mrs. Watson managed to keep her voice down to a whisper, but she couldn’t help the movement of her arms. The light from her lantern, a circle of weak coppery glimmer, jerked to and fro as she gesticulated wildly.
“At least we’ve now seen the inside of the sanctuary. I no longer need to find a way to break into it without getting caught.”
Mrs. Watson sighed. Miss Charlotte had mentioned, once upon a time, that Miss Olivia did not find her a very satisfying partner in the airing of grievances: She frequently failed to vindicate Miss Olivia’s passionate feelings of dissatisfaction.
Mrs. Watson tried to explain herself better. “I don’t think it’s the blood and whatnot that I mind the most—although I do mind it greatly—it’s more that I’m now afraid these people might be fanatics under their seemingly rational and civilized veneers. What if they are? And what if Miss Baxter realized it much too late, wished to leave, but couldn’t?
“A simple rite of homecoming is already so . . . unconventional. What if there are other rituals that do feature the sacrifice of chickens, goats, and such? If word got out, what do you think would happen? I’m not saying that the residents of the Garden would be tarred and feathered but do you think they’d still be allowed to have their heathen community and their little homecoming ceremonies in peace?”
Before Miss Charlotte could reply, a cheerful voice called out, “Mrs. Watson, Miss Holmes!”
Mr. Peters, coming to them with a sweet smile on his face.
With a similar smile, Miss Charlotte greeted him, “Why, good sir, how do you do? And will Mrs. Crosby not be joining us?”
“Mrs. Crosby wants a minute alone in the sanctuary and then she will be off to call on Miss Baxter, who, I’m sure, will be most interested in hearing her impression of you ladies.”
Mrs. Watson had not believed Mrs. Crosby’s claim that she saw Miss Baxter this very day. But with Mr. Peters’s fluent assertion that she would shortly see Miss Baxter again, Mrs. Watson began to wonder whether her judgment had been too premature—or whether she was somehow responding to the authority with which these lies were being repeated.
“Miss Baxter can take our measure herself,” answered Miss Charlotte. “We’ll be happy to meet with her anytime.”
“All in good time, I’m sure,” said Mr. Peters, still smiling. “All in good time.”
He indicated the side of the building. “Shall we?”
The former farmhouse had been a larger house and a smaller house divided by a shared wall. The bigger part had been turned into a mess hall and later, the sanctuary. The lesser part, when the place had been intended as a holiday village, had already been a reading room, a place for the guests to sit down with a book or to write letters and postcards to friends and relatives back home. Therefore, when Miss Fairchild took over the property, it had seemed natural to convert the space to a library to house the collection of Hermetic writings that the community intended to acquire.
This, Mr. Peters told them while they walked up to the door. As he put key to lock, Miss Charlotte said, “I’m looking forward to seeing the library—I enjoyed the sanctuary.”
Oh, this girl, grumbled Mrs. Watson silently. It would be just like her to have sincerely reveled in the spectacle, too.
Once inside, Mr. Peters lit a pair of sconces in quick succession, and Mrs. Watson very nearly stumbled at the sight of an enormous skull with a serpent emerging from one empty eye socket and a nearly naked young woman held between the grinning teeth.
It was a large painting, six feet wide and eight feet high at the very least, so eerie and macabre that after Mrs. Watson closed her eyes and reopened them, she still had to suppress a gasp: This time she noticed the blood dripping from the skull’s other eye socket, which eventually fell into the young woman’s long loose golden hair, dying it scarlet, before dripping off again from its tips.
“Fascinating,” said Miss Charlotte.
She walked forward. Mrs. Watson, unwilling to go any closer to the painting, but even more unwilling to be left alone, followed closely in her wake. She averted her gaze from the awful image, only to see, on the shelves that lined the walls, between books, manuscripts, and alembics, a great many more skulls, both animal and human.
And now that they stood immediately before the painting, Mrs. Watson had no choice but to witness the hundreds of tiny skulls that had been set into the large, ornate frame. She recoiled, her stomach feeling rammed through.
Miss Charlotte reached out one gloved finger and caressed the frame. “Are these rat skulls?”
“Indeed they are,” answered Mr. Peters, his easy smile remaining in place. Mrs. Watson had the sense that he was mocking her chagrin. “The painting was done by Miss Baxter, by the way, a masterpiece on the human condition and what we must overcome to achieve any measure of transcendence. She was very particular about how it was to be framed and I had to go into Exeter and find a ratcatcher, to obtain the number of skulls needed to cover the frame. But what effect, do you not think?”
“I think so indeed,” agreed Miss Charlotte readily. “But surely the other animal skulls did not come from an Exeter ratcatcher.”
There was a whole zoo’s worth of additional animal skulls, a big cat, a shark, a crocodile, all with their maws open and their sharp teeth pointing out. But these predators Mrs. Watson found less disconcerting than the score or so smaller skulls that must have belonged to cats and dogs.
“Most of those we inherited from Mr. Kaplan, who was an amateur naturalist,” answered Mr. Peters.
The name sounded familiar to Mrs. Watson—she had come across it in the dossier. Mr. Kaplan was one of the three who had died in rapid succession several years ago. She’d mentioned the deaths to Miss Charlotte and Lord Ingram, but Miss Charlotte had not thought them necessarily ominous. “The late Mr. Kaplan who passed away from pneumonia?”
“Yes, that estimable gentleman.”
“Did he bequeath to you the human skulls, too?”
There were a good dozen, grinning from everywhere. Miss Charlotte, as she asked her question, ran her finger directly over the incomplete teeth of one.
“Most of the human skulls are plaster replicas and will shatter if you drop them,” said Mr. Peters. “We only have one that is real—the one you are studying, in fact.”
Miss Charlotte lowered her head for a closer look.
“Someone gave it to Dr. Robinson long ago,” continued Mr. Peters, “and once he saw the interior of the library, he decided to deposit it here.”
Mrs. Watson had been married to a doctor who had boasted not only a plaster skull in his possession, but an entire plaster skeleton. When they’d lived in India her dear John had even kept an excised tumor in a jar of formaldehyde and they had clinked glasses and shared meals in its vicinity. Her niece, too, was a medical student and did not shy away from discussing what she witnessed during her coursework.