The Markenmore Mystery. J. S. Fletcher

Braxfield, who had been butler to Sir Anthony Markenmore, Baronet, of Markenmore Court, for thirty years, was a man of method. All his life he had cultivated the habit of doing certain things at certain times: the older he grew (and he was now a little over sixty) the more this habit grew upon him. Virtually, he was master of the house; Sir Anthony was an invalid who kept his room; Mr. Guy Markenmore, the elder son, had never crossed his father’s threshold for some years; Mr. Harry Markenmore, the younger son, preferred anybody but himself to exercise merely domestic authority; Miss Valencia Markenmore, the only daughter, had been but recently released from the schoolroom; accordingly, Braxfield, one way and another, and without seeming to do so, wielded a mild, unobtrusive autocracy. He had many good rules, and some others that were little better than fads—amongst the last was his trick of locking up the house at precisely eight o’clock every evening.

Had anybody questioned Braxfield as to this curious regulation, the old butler would have given what he believed to be good reasons for his insistence upon it. Markenmore Court was a very old and a very large house, originally built in the last years of Queen Elizabeth, added to during the reign of Charles the Second, and finally restored and modernized in the time of George the Fourth. It stood on the slope of a gently-rising hill, a mile out of a village which had taken its name from the Markenmore family—a family that had been settled in those parts since the early days of the Norman Conquest; with the exception of a lodge at the entrance gates, there was no dwelling very near it. It possessed an unusual number of doors; doors opening on the terrace, on the courtyard, on the gardens, on the lawns, on the stables, on private walks that wound through the thick shrubberies; it had also corridors, galleries, chambers, little used by the family and the servants.

The family was small; the servants were few; for the Markenmores were comparatively poor, and kept up next to nothing of their ancient state. But poor though they were, they possessed a considerable share of gold and silver plate, of rare china, of valuable glass; there were also pictures in the house that were worth a fortune, and there was scarcely an apartment in which some easily removable thing that would have fetched a handsome price in the sale-room was not openly displayed.

Braxfield, a highly conscientious man, felt himself to be custodian of these family treasures, and he lived in perpetual, nervous fear of their being stolen. Had he been able to have his own way, he would have long since constructed a strong-room, fire-proof, thief-proof, and bundled into it everything of value that the old house contained. But the Markenmores, easily as they allowed their butler to rule them in certain things, were folk who would not permit interference with time-honoured custom and arrangement, and so gold cups and silver salvers, meticulously polished and carefully dusted, glittered in careless profusion on the massive oak sideboards, and rare ivories and priceless china stood on the open presses and ancient cabinets—as if, said Braxfield plaintively, they were of no more value than the trumpery things arranged in the museum of the neighbouring market-town. And therefore he locked up the house at eight o’clock every night, and carried the keys of some baker’s dozen of doors to his butler’s pantry: whoever, master or man, maid or mistress, desired to walk out of Markenmore Court, after that hour, had to apply to Braxfield for the means of egress.

On a certain evening in the third week of April, in the year 1912, Braxfield, the simple dinner to which Mr. Harry Markenmore and his sister Valencia sat down every night at seven o’clock, being well over, set out on his usual round of the doors. He always began with the smaller ones and ended up with the great triple door that opened on the terrace. And here came in another of his fads—before finally locking and bolting that door, Braxfield invariably stepped out on the terrace, crossed it to the balustrade which fenced it in from the widespreading park that stretched in front, and took a view of all that lay before him: he did this irrespective of the seasons; sometimes, therefore, as in the case of dark winter evenings, he saw nothing but gloom: in summer he saw a great deal of beauty. On

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