The Tragedy in Dartmoor Terrace

The Tragedy in Dartmoor Terrace

"The Tragedy in Dartmoor Terrace" is a short mystery story by Baroness Emmuska Orczy, narrated through the characteristic framing device of the unnamed female journalist and the eccentric "man in the corner," who recounts a puzzling case while fidgeting obsessively with a piece of string. The story centers on the death of Mrs. Yule, a wealthy, strong-willed widow living at Number 9 Dartmoor Terrace in Kensington. She is a deeply eccentric woman who, when her son William married a woman of whom she disapproved, disinherited him entirely and replaced him with a young man named William Bloggs, the son of her gardener. She adopted Bloggs, sent him to school, established him in a bank position, and grew so fond of him that she arranged to transfer her entire estate of some thirty thousand pounds to him by deed of gift, to be formally presented on his twenty-first birthday. To ensure the arrangement could not be reversed in a moment of weakness, she had herself examined by specialists to confirm her soundness of mind, and obtained multiple legal opinions on the deed's validity. Her solicitor, Mr. Statham, reluctantly drew up the document and secured a five-hundred-pound annual annuity for Mrs. Yule in return. Six days before Bloggs was due to receive the deed, Mrs. Yule was found dead at the foot of her stairs early in the morning, having apparently fainted and fallen while preparing to attend six o'clock church services. Her desk had been broken open and the deed of gift had vanished. The coroner's inquest returned an ambiguous verdict acknowledging she had fallen downstairs during a fainting episode, but noting that how she came to fall was not clearly established. The inquest produced dramatic revelations. The cook testified that a veiled woman calling herself Mrs. William Yule had arrived the previous evening and been admitted to see Mrs. Yule. The housemaid, Annie, overheard a furious quarrel, with the old lady shouting at the visitor to leave her house. Young Bloggs intervened to prevent the woman from being turned out into a violent storm, and Mrs. Yule agreed to let the visitor sleep in the spare room on the condition she be gone before Mrs. Yule returned from church. The visitor was heard leaving the house around midnight. The following morning, Mrs. Yule was found dead, and the spare room was empty, the bed unslept in. Suspicion fell heavily on William Yule and his wife, as the natural beneficiaries of the deed's disappearance. Bloggs gave evidence that the visitor had been making financial demands on Mrs. Yule. William Yule, enraged, struck Bloggs in the courtroom. His wife appeared at the adjourned inquest and calmly denied ever having visited Dartmoor Terrace, stating they were not in financial difficulty, as her husband had recently sold a painting. Without corroborating witnesses, however, no prosecution was possible, and the Yules retained the inheritance by default, since the deed had never been formally delivered. They left England due to hostile public sentiment, and Bloggs was taken on as an articled pupil by Mr. Statham, with friends subscribing a thousand pounds on his behalf. The man in the corner, however, dismisses the accepted version entirely. His key observation is Mrs. Yule's offer to let the visitor stay overnight. Had the visitor been traveling from West Hampstead, where the Yules lived, she could easily have caught a late train from the nearby Kensington station, and the ill-tempered Mrs. Yule would simply have thrown her out. The offer to stay indicates the woman had come from somewhere much farther away, suggesting she was not Mrs. William Yule at all, but a woman who believed she had married a man named William Yule, that man in fact being young Bloggs himself, who had been using the Yule name in anticipation of eventually adopting it legally. This secret wife, discovering her husband's true circumstances and calling at Dartmoor Terrace under the impression she was meeting his natural mother, provoked the old lady's fury by inadvertently revealing Bloggs's deception. Realizing the deed would now never be delivered, Bloggs himself pushed Mrs. Yule down the stairs in the early morning darkness, then broke open the desk to simulate a theft and cast suspicion on the William Yules. His lie under oath identifying the visitor as Mrs. William Yule was deliberate, calculated to direct blame away from himself. He subsequently traveled abroad and returned with the woman he had secretly married. The man in the corner concludes that Bloggs engineered the entire affair, committed murder, and emerged from the episode as a figure of public sympathy, while the innocent Yules remained under a cloud of unproven suspicion.

By Baroness Emmuska Orczy · Genre: Mystery, Detective Fiction, Crime Fiction · 4 chapters

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