The Suitor

Paper #6

Paper #6 – I learnt from Cedric, a closely guarded secret from which everybody in the household had known except me. He had told me that the purpose of him telling me was to alleviate my fears at having seen what he presumed I had only thought I had seen. The horrifying truth is that it only confounds my new fear to an even greater height. I have already said that Horace Carrington had been my courtier, and he was for a time, although I had slighted him when I refused his love. It was not, as I have said also, because I was malicious, for he was an attractive fellow, but because I had not wanted, as he had, to become married. I will speak no more on this matter. A woman should be able to choose whom she marries and men whose love is unrequited should not be so brooding and selfish.

Cedric told me the whole story. There had been a great scandal, and an even greater hiding of its details. Horace, being a particularly melancholy young man, he was a poet you know, had shut himself away during the time when I had denied him my hand. He began to write then his most strange poetry. Odes to death and hymns to disease. Sonnets to demons and terrifying conceits in praise of Lucifer and his work. Of course, he shared these with nobody and the knowledge only came to pass when police searched his study later. It is rumoured that one officer, on reading one of the youth’s poems had had a terrible vision during the night in his sleep where he saw all manner of unspeakable impish things dancing around a corpse as hounds tore at the cadaver’s flesh. The man had gone mad later as he was convinced that the investigation should focus its efforts on finding young Horace Carrington, this was insane, as by this time, Horace was dead. Still the officer insisted that they should be searching Providence for the disturbed youth and he continued to persist in this manner until the commissioner himself had the man reassigned to another jurisdiction after a four week suspension.

It was after his melancholy period that Horace Carrington had committed suicide. He had walked into the lake near Blakely Manor and drowned himself.

He had left a note at his home which had caused his parents to call the police. They had found the body floating face down in the lake and one officer had remarked aloud at the presence of a certain number of small birds in the treetops which had set about singing a shrill song which rose ever high in pitch and malevolence until the body was pulled to shore.

I had found records along with newspaper cuttings from the previous year stashed away in a small box under my father’s desk in his study. Cedric had given me the key. My parents, father in particular, had wished to spare me from any role in this grave incident so I had been told that Horace had moved to New York to write his poetry there. Since my relationship with regards to the deceased had never blossomed, the detective investigating Horace’s death never had reason to call. I do remember an officer calling on our door around that time, but I was never made privy to the reasons as to why.

I told Cedric that it was Horace I had seen in the library. I told him with such conviction that I do believe that he believed me. The maids had begun a fearful vigil about their business and some of the more superstitious servants have begun to whisper terrible things about that melancholy man’s vengeful disposition.