About the Book
75,000 words
Welton Keynes sees a job as male secretary advertised by Miss Ferriby of The Lawns in London. On the way to the interview he is warned by neighbours that several young men employed in that house have disappeared. Ignoring the advice, he takes the job, but it is not long before Welton Keynes realizes something strange and dangerous is taking place in Miss Ferriby's house. There are her mysterious clients, wealthy men and women coming to attend her séances. Although the large house is well kept, there seem to be no servants apart from the footman who is strangely out of place in that role. Welton decides to explore behind the locked doors. What he discovers will sign his death warrant, unless ...
This is an old fashioned story of murder, robbery and séances, with a touch of romance. It was written in 1910 when political correctness in fiction was not even on the horizon, and the main villain was often physically disabled or disfigured (as here) to make him or her appear more villainous. Note that the physical descriptions of the characters are from the original book. It's how writers of popular fiction generally wrote, and what their readers read. Be warned: Miss Ferriby will carry on living in the some dark corner of your mind long after you have finished the story.
Miss Ferriby's Clients
by
Florence Warden 1857-1929
First published 1910
This edition ©2016 North View Publishing
Miss Ferriby's Clients is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this edition.
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Table of Contents
Cover
About the Book
Publisher's Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
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(Publisher's note: There are some minor edits made to this story to help readability, while bringing the punctuation and formatting into line with modern practice. The frequent use of But and And at the start of sentences are in the original. Nothing in the storyline has been changed. The value of money in 1910 when the story was written needs to be multiplied by at least 100 to get today's equivalent. So the clients paying 10 pounds for a single consultation with Miss Ferriby were paying over 1,000 pounds -- or $1,500.)
Chapter 1
Welton Keynes was that most unlucky of men; the wellborn, well-educated son of a rich man who had grown suddenly and unexpectedly poor.
Welton's father had been engaged in the City, and although financial speculations had kept him afloat and prosperous long enough to allow him to educate his two sons well and to bring them up in every luxury. It had taken wings with surprising suddenness at a time of City uneasiness, with the result that he had found himself one morning a ruined man.
Unable to bear the blow, his father disappeared on the day following the crisis, and was believed to have committed suicide on the boat as he crossed from Dover to Ostend.
The sons, left to struggle along in the world which had hitherto seemed a very paradise to them, looked out for something to do. The younger, Basil, a youth of eighteen, who had just left Eton and had expected to go on to Cambridge, at once obtained a post as clerk in a bank, through the help of some friends.
But the elder, Welton, who was twenty-four, was more difficult to provide for.
Day after day he searched the advertisement columns of the newspapers, but there were so many men in his own position, with no business training, and with their birth, breeding, good looks and expensive habits as sole assets, that each post suitable to him he found to have suited someone else before he got wind of it.
At the end of three weeks of failure to obtain any employment by which he could hope to make a living, Welton Keynes seemed as far off as ever from the goal, when he read an advertisement worded in the following way:
Secretary wanted, not over twenty-five, University man preferred, by elderly lady engaged in philanthropic work. Salary 500 pounds per annum. Address: Miss Ferriby, The Lawns, Chiswick.
Now this he felt to be too good for him to get. An elderly lady who wanted a secretary and was willing to give him five hundred pounds a year, would certainly have five hundred applications to choose from, and Welton despaired of his chances.
However, he went at once to Chiswick, but as it was late in the day before he read the advertisement, he felt sure that he would find he had been forestalled. He began to think the advertisement itself was a bad joke when he found that nobody knew where The Lawns was.
Almost sure that he had wasted his time, and in a very ill humour, Welton Keynes thought of entering a small newspaper shop which he passed on his wanderings, and making inquiries there. An old lady was being served with some notepaper, and a young one was standing behind her, waiting. Welton was struck with the face of the younger lady. She was tall and dark-haired, and dark-eyed, with a singularly pale olive complexion. Dressed almost shabbily, she yet had an air of extreme refinement which attracted the young man's attention, and made him glance at her again as he waited for his turn.
The old lady was exacting, after the manner of her kind. But there was about her voice and manner, and even about her dress, which was as shabby as that of the younger lady, the same air of refinement which marked the other; and she had enough remains of personal beauty for Welton Keynes to decide that they must be mother and daughter.
When at last the elder lady had made her purchases, she retreated from the counter, but instead of at once leaving the shop, she turned to the opposite counter and began looking at the illustrated papers through her glasses.
"Come along, Mama," said the daughter impatiently, in a voice which struck Welton, already attracted, as particularly musical.
Meanwhile Welton, making the excuse of buying a packet of cigarettes, asked the man in charge of the shop if he could direct him to The Lawns.
"Miss Ferriby's? Oh, yes, sir. I've been asked that a good many times today. She put an advertisement in the papers, sir, and there's been quite a rush of gentlemen after it."
Welton Keynes, though not surprised, felt downcast at the words which confirmed his own suspicions as to the remoteness of his own chances.
"Oh yes, thanks," he said. "Where did you say the place was?"
"I'll show you, sir. The name used to be Glenavon, and it's only recently been changed to The Lawns. That's why people don't know it. But I've served Miss Ferriby with papers for some time, sir, so I can tell you what you want to know."
The talkative man came out from behind his counter, and from the door of the shop gave the necessary directions. In the meantime Welton cast another furtive glance at the young lady who had so greatly attracted him, and he noticed that she looked at him in what seemed to him rather a strange manner and then that she whispere
d something hastily to her mother, who said "What! What! I can't hear. What young man?" in an audible undertone.
Welton thanked the shopkeeper and went out, following the directions given him until after several turns down rather tortuous bystreets, he came in sight of a high wall with a little dark green door in it, upon which were painted in tiny white letters the words "The Lawns."
He could just see the first floor of what appeared to be a long comfortable-looking, old-fashioned house above the top of the wall.
The house, which was surrounded by trees, now in the October evening looked grey and shabby in their thin autumn covering. It stood in a little lane which led down to the river. Glancing in that direction, Welton Keynes thought what a dreary position it was, how strangely isolated and cut off from the world the house looked; and what a danger there might be for some visitor, arriving late at night and looking for the house, to drive right past under the high wall, and to find himself suddenly plunged into the dark waters of the river at the end of the lane.
It was rather out of curiosity than with any more keenly interested motive that he had come; for he knew that long before this the old lady would have had enough applicants for the post to make her selection.
He scarcely thought it worth while even to pull the long iron bell handle that hung beside the green door in the wall. While looking at it and hesitating, he heard a footstep behind him, and turning, saw the young lady of the newspaper shop running towards him. Behind her, some distance away, came, at a slower pace, and with more exertion, the elder lady.
"I beg your pardon," said the girl, hesitating and shy, "but my mother wants to speak to you. Would you mind coming back to her? She can't walk very fast, and she's been trying hard to catch you up before----"
She did not finish the sentence, but she glanced at the handle beside the green door.
Welton Keynes, raising his hat, surprised and interested at this unexpected address, went back at once. The young lady walked silently by his side till they reached the elder, who was looking flushed and rather nervous.
"Oh, Barbara," she began at once, addressing not the young man, but her daughter, "really I don't know that we ought to interfere." Then she turned to Welton. "I'm sure it's nothing at all but our fancy, and because being two women living alone we get all sorts of things into our heads, and really we haven't anything to say, and I'm sorry we spoke to you."
The girl frowned with some trace of gentle impatience. "Really, Mama, since you insisted I should speak to this gentleman, I think you had better say what you wanted to say now."
The elder lady was in a flutter of excitement and distress at this challenge. "Really, Barbara," she began again. And then she stopped, looked up at Welton Keynes, who was a tall, well-built young man of some six feet two inches, with laughing blue eyes, and sighed. "Well," she said at last, in a reluctant and yet important voice, "perhaps after all I'd better warn you. But mind," -- and she raised a warning finger in a carefully mended black kid glove -- "I may be quite wrong, of course."
Welton Keynes, much mystified, could only bow and wish she would get on with her story. At last, with another sigh, and a furtive glance round her, she spoke again.
"Well, you must know that we live in one of the two little houses -- cottages they are really -- at the end of the lane, just where it joins the high road. So we see a good deal of what goes on here, and we hear a good deal too. Well, if you're interested in the advertisement about secretaries, I think you ought to know that Miss Ferriby changes her secretary very often, and ... and nobody seems to know what becomes of them."
Although this was obviously the most arrant gossip of a talkative old woman, who would have been better employed reading her Bible than spying upon her neighbours and listening to the chatter of her maid, Welton Keynes was so much interested in the pretty girl who was the old lady's daughter, that he not only listened courteously and pretended to be grateful for the nonsense she was talking, but asked her, with an appearance of intense interest, for further information.
"Indeed!" he said, with all the appearance of intense interest which he could muster. "That's very strange, isn't it? How do you account for it?"
The old lady pursed her lips and drew back her head. Her daughter twitched her mother's sleeve, as a warning to her not to be too communicative to an utter stranger. But the mother clearly did not like being interfered with, and she frowned impatiently at her daughter and went on with her warnings.
"Well, one doesn't like to talk scandal about one's neighbours, and I myself have a horror of it. But certainly it seems strange to see so many new faces, one after another, and to know nothing about what becomes of them."
"Won't Miss Ferriby herself say anything about them then?" asked Welton, naturally enough taking it for granted that the old lady must be a personal friend, or at least acquaintance of the woman about whose private affairs she professed to know so much.
"Oh, how can I tell what she says? She isn't a person I should care to know," said the lady with dignity.
Welton felt greatly perplexed. If she did not know Miss Ferriby, how could she possibly expect to be supplied with full details concerning the fate of her secretaries? This question, however, he of course did not care to put. He looked puzzled, and she went on:
"But one learns a great deal about one's near neighbours without the necessity of personal acquaintance. You see, we live so very near, and you know how our servants gossip?"
Welton assented to this, though it occurred to him to wonder whether they could possibly do more in that way than their mistresses.
There was a pause, and then the old lady said, "Well, I won't detain you, and I must really apologize to you for having insisted upon speaking to you. But really, after the things I've heard -- it seemed better, you know -- don't you think so?"
As she made this vague suggestion, the elderly lady peered up into his face for the look of gratitude she evidently considered her due.
He thanked her quite effusively, and glancing at the handsome girl by her side as he did so, wondered what she thought of her mother's eccentric behaviour. To his surprise, she did not look as impatient and angry as he would have expected. The whole affair seemed to him so preposterous, to waylay a stranger in order to warn him vaguely about a danger which certainly did not exist, that he would have expected the younger and brighter-witted lady to laugh at her mother's interference. But the girl appeared to take it quite seriously, and when her mother bowed and turned to go into her house, which was only a few yards away, she bowed too without a word, and followed her mother without any remonstrance or protest.
Welton watched them go through the tiny garden in front of one of the three small cottages which stood at the end of the lane. All three had once been merely labourers' cottages, and they had been transformed by an enterprising landlord into bijou residences, by the simple expedient of painting the doors beetle-green, the window-sashes a staring white, and by substituting "art" curtains and "brise bise" lace blinds for the old-fashioned Venetian blinds and looped-up curtains of coarse white lace.
Then Welton, much amused, puzzled and interested by the incident, walked past the green door in the wall of The Lawns, more interested in the pretty girl with the pale skin and large eyes than in Miss Ferriby and the post which he knew he would not get.
He passed the three bijou residences, and saw the pretty girl at the window of the little front room. She was looking out, with an expression of eager interest upon her face, and as she watched him pass, he ventured to raise his hat again. She responded by bending her head, and continued to watch him with the same expression of interest, as he found by turning suddenly before he had gone many steps.
He got out into the high road, and then turned back and went the length of the lane towards the river. On his left hand, he presently came to a road which was very isolated, being bounded by high garden walls well away from the houses to which they belonged.
It was by this time getting dark, and rath
er pleased with the sense of distance from the hum of the busy streets which this retired neighbourhood presented, he sauntered on, turning out of one quiet, winding road into another, until in a back way shadowed by trees which stretched their branches over the walls on each side, he saw before him a sight which roused his curiosity by its oddity.
Between two huge mastiffs, evidently prize dogs of great value, there walked, or rather hobbled, a little old woman dressed most quaintly in a full, round skirt and a full, round black cape and a small black mushroom hat, from which depended a long, loose, flowing black veil.
She was deformed and stunted, and her enormous head was supported on two thin and narrow shoulders quite disproportioned to the weight and size of what it had to carry. Her back was humped, and from each side protruded a long, lean arm, with a very large and muscular hand at the end of it. In each hand she held a strap by which she led one of the dogs, and she called to them in a deep, masculine voice as she went along.
"Steady, Jock! Quicker, Jack! Good dog, good dog!"
Welton Keynes, fascinated by the oddity of the combination of the dwarf and the two splendid animals which protected her, followed slowly, watching the odd trio as they walked at a fairly good pace, first along one quiet lane and then down another.
Presently he saw a man's head appear above the top of the wall a little in front of the strange group. Slackening his own pace, and keeping in the shadow of the overhanging trees, he was able to see that the man appeared to be lying in wait for somebody and that he carried a thick stick, the end of which was just visible over the top of the wall.
The woman who, by reason of her deformity, carried her head in a downward direction, had evidently not caught sight of the man. Neither did the dogs appear to have seen him.
Suddenly, before Welton Keynes had time to utter a shout of warning, the man with the stick had leapt over the wall, reached the ground, and was in the act of attacking the old woman.
The dogs sprang free from the straps by which she held them, and made a dash for the assailant; but at the same moment a second man came over the wall, and rushing up to the bent woman he would have knocked her down but for the timely interference of Welton Keynes, who running as fast as his legs would carry him, managed to trip the man up just as he was raising his stick for a second attempt to strike the old woman, who had avoided his first attack with nimbleness surprising in one of her years and apparent helplessness.
In the meantime the first man was finding the combined attack of the two mastiffs too much for him. And upon hearing the shout with which Welton came to the rescue, and the warning blasphemies of the second assailant, he contented himself with attempting to beat off the dogs, as he whistled to the other man to "get out of it."
But this was not so easy. Welton was tall and athletic, and was ready for his man when the latter got up from the ground. There was a short scuffle, a blow dealt and returned, and then the second man took to his heels, following the first, and leaving the formidable, club-headed stick with which he had attacked the old woman, in the possession of his opponent.
Welton Keynes watched the two rascals as they disappeared round the nearest corner amid the ferocious barking of the two dogs, who were in a state of wild excitement, making little runs in the direction of the flying men, and returning reluctantly at the harsh call of their mistress.
Welton Keynes turned to her, and raising his hat, asked her if she was hurt.
The old woman was leaning against the wall and panting violently. She shook her head. Then, suddenly throwing back her flowing black veil, she showed him a face which struck him as being the most singular he had ever seen.
Features large enough for those of a man: nose prominent and masculine, mouth large and firmly closed, a jaw denoting decision and strength of will; and most striking of all, a pair of enormous grey eyes, peering out from under shaggy grey eyebrows, and full of strange lights and fire.
Above this striking face was a tangled mass of untidy grey hair, coarse and stringy and hanging in a sort of bush over the broad forehead and the extraordinary eyes. Welton looked at her, fascinated. So strong was the contrast between her feeble walk and bent, infirm figure, grey hair and grey eyebrows, on the one hand, and her hard, strong face and deep, masculine voice and fiery, flashing eyes on the other, that it seemed as if the component parts of this strange personality could not possibly belong to the same creature. So ill did the strong and the young elements combine with the old and the feeble.
"You came most opportunely," she said, and he was surprised at the feminine graciousness with which she spoke, and the softness which she was able to put into her deep-toned, harsh voice. "I'm very much obliged to you. No, I'm not hurt. I'm annoyed with myself, though, for needing your help I'd imagined myself so safe with my two protectors."
"Well, you were attacked unawares," said Welton. "These dark roads are dangerous for a lady at night."
"Well, I feel that, and so I'd provided myself, as I thought, with a strong escort. I shall take more care still in the future. And you -- did the brute hurt you?" she added solicitously.
"Not a bit. It was the other way. I think I hurt him. However, he got no more than he deserved. May I see you well out of these byroads into one of the more open thoroughfares, where I'll know you are safe?"
She smiled, showing two rows of beautiful white teeth, which somehow seemed rather grotesque than attractive in the little deformed old woman. His first idea about them was that they must be false.
"You shall see me farther still, if you will. I should like you to come as far as my house, and to let me thank you there. It is not far."
"Thank you. It's nothing to thank me for. It was good fun to see the beggars run."
"Then you won't come?"
"I thank you very much. But I have an appointment to keep."
The old lady frowned. She gave him the impression of being a person who was accustomed to consider her will as law. She even seemed offended by his refusal.
"As you like, of course," she said, with a sudden change from sweetness to frigidity. "But I can tell you that the little hump-backed old woman lives in a very nice little shell, and knows how to treat her friends handsomely. However, it's as you please. And I thank you all the same."
She suddenly put out one of those long, strong, bony hands which he had already noticed, and shook hands with him with a grip like a man's.
"You have proved a most charming acquaintance. I'm sorry you won't be more," she said, altering her voice back again until it was once more gentle and sweet. "Good night."
"Good night," said Welton, raising his hat as she seized the strap of her mastiffs, and turning rapidly with them into a street that was a little more open, disappeared from his sight.