9.22

Dream, 22 of Sept, 1884
It seems to me, now, that the divorce was ever among my chiefest sorrows. Even at my blackest moments, I found I could rely on her to bring on a deeper darkness still. And she was game for it! I could not escape her all-too-familiar silken cloutch.
Imagine my surprise, then, when on the night of the twenty second of November of last year I was harried from my bed by a frenzy of banging on my door. Even as I stepped to the threshold, the clatter increased to fever pitch, and throwing the latch and door together, I espied there upon the manor grounds and well into the carriage path besides nothing; save for this single porcelain feather laid in great haste and still spinning slowly upon my step in the gloom. I closed and relocked the door, gripping my key with ghostly knuckles and pallid face, and, returning to my bed, was greeted by her sudden reappearance in my life as a corpse. Of course, I called upon the police immediately, and they have called upon Scotland Yard, and Lieutenant Cuthings has called upon you. The remainder of the case should be familiar to you if you have maintained a familiarity in the past four months with any of the major newspapers, save these scant details: first and chieftest, that as a bachelor, of course I maintain some household, but the cook has always slept in some outbuilding built by Spanish immigrants in the last century, the maid takes her leave until well into the midmorning and changed her schedule none that day, but, as the papers could never have gotten wind of it excepting to his shame, my valet had taken to occupancy of some mean hovel just down the carriageway while he and I worked out a petty labour dispute. It was, in fact, his place that I called second, and that is why he arrived, just as sergeant Andrews did, to find the front gate barred and the porcelain feather still spinning softly in the icy blast of ill wind that curled around my front door in the fell autumn wind. We have managed to keep little else out of the papers, but I have hope that seeing the body and the estate will bring you further clues than even those insatiable newspapermen were able to unearth, and to do so without ruining the reputation of my servants, such as they are, or of my recently deceased ex-wife. For myself, the damage is done, come what may.

Yours,
Sir Carlton Weigton of Lambraith Manor