Free The Burning Court by John Dickson Carr

Won’t you be careful?”
    Yet there was an air of change about the kitchen; all things had changed. Even when he looked at the brown porcelain umbrella-stand in the hall, it had an appearance of being painted in new colors. Putting down the knife with a small rattle on the enamelled shelf of the cabinet, she came up to him and took him by the arms.
    “Listen, Ted. I love you. You know I love you, don’t you?”
    He did know it, in his bones and soul.
    “And as,” he said, “for what I was thinking——”
    “Listen again, Ted. That will last as long as I know you, or you know me. What you may have got into your head I don’t know. Sometime I may tell you about a house at a place called Guibourg, and my aunt Adrienne, and you’ll understand. But it isn’t the kind of thing you ought to be thinking about. Don’t grin in that superior way. I am older than you, much, much older; and if you saw my face shrivel up and blacken right at this minute——”
    “Stop that! You’re hysterical!”
    The knife had fallen out of her hand and her mouth was pulled open. She picked up the knife.
    “I’m crazy,” she said. “Now I’ll tell you something. You’re going to open a grave tonight, and my guess… it’s only a guess… is that you’ll find nothing.”
    “Yes. I don’t think we’ll find anything, either.”
    “You don’t understand. You wouldn’t understand. But please, please, don’t tamper with this too far. If I asked you for my sake not to, would you? I want you to think. And that’s as much as I can tell you now. Think what I’ve said; don’t try to understand it; but just trust me. Now eat up a few of these sandwiches, and take a glass of milk. Then go up and change your clothes. That old sweater of yours will do you, and there’s a pair of old tennis-flannels in the cupboard of the spare room; I forgot to get them cleaned last year.”
    Charlotte, like a well-conducted hausfrau, went on cutting bread and butter.

II
EVIDENCE
    “Fly open, lock, to the dead man’s knock,
Fly bolt, and bar, and band!——”
    —R. H. B ARHAM , Ingoldsby Legends
     
VI
    Stevens walked up King’s Avenue the short distance to the gates of the Park. There was no moon, but a crowding of stars. As usual, the iron-grilled gates—with each entrance pillar topped by an unimpressive stone cannon-ball—stood wide open. He shut them, and dropped the bar. The gravel drive went slightly uphill; it was a long distance to the house, and seemed longer by reason of the drive’s windings among shrewd landscaping. Henderson required two assistants to keep these grounds in order. With all their riding round on motor mowing-machines, somebody’s head was always to be seen up over the top of an ornamental hedge, or seeming, in ghostly fashion to stick out of a tree: to the accompaniment of a snip-snip-pause-snip-snip of shears. It made a drowsy sound in summer, when you might lounge in a deck-chair at the crest of the lawns, and look down over a blaze of flower-beds under the sun.
    As he went up the drive, Stevens kept himself thinking of this. He refused to think of anything else. Non cognito, ergo sum.
    The house was long and low, built of stone in the form of the head of a letter T with its short wings towards the road. There was nothing at all distinguished about the house, except that it had grown old well. It did not butt against the years, or show its bones and wait for death; but it had become a part of the soil. Its curved roof-tiles had become an unobtrusive reddish brown; its thin chimneys seemed proper, though no smoke went up from them. The windows were small, in casement fashion after the French style of the late seventeenth century. Some one in the nineteenth century had added a low front porch, but even this had ceased to obtrude itself; and had almost taken root. The porch light was burning. Stevens went up and hammered the knocker.
    Otherwise the house seemed to be dark. After a few minutes Mark opened the