The Turnpike House

The Turnpike House by Fergus Hume

The Turnpike House stands abandoned at a crossroads, its poverty-stricken tenants a woman and her ten-year-old son Gilbert, who dreads and hates the father he barely remembers. That night Mark Jenner, Gilbert's father, drags himself home from prison; Gilbert, in a sudden fury, tries to stab him, then falls into a rigid trance while his mother carries him to bed. Left alone, Jenner hides a stolen Bill of Exchange inside Gilbert's toy horse before his wife returns to bitterly recount their ruined marriage — his drunkenness, thefts, and imprisonment, and her own descent into poverty and dependence on charity from Mr. Cass and his sister Inez. Jenner hints he can soon get money by threatening Mr. Marshall, Cass's partner, who is about to marry Inez. A quarrel erupts; the candle is extinguished amid a cry of pain, and the woman flees into the night carrying the child, leaving a dead man behind. The Turnpike House becomes a local legend of murder and haunting. Years later, at Christmas, the story shifts to Hollyoaks, Mr. Cass's Moorish mansion. Neil Webster, a rising young violinist raised under mysterious circumstances by Cass, is secretly in love with Cass's daughter Ruth, who returns his affection though her aunt Mrs. Marshall favors the wealthy Geoffrey Heron as a match. At dinner, a group photograph triggers an inexplicable fainting fit in Neil when he sees the pictured face of a former clerk of Cass's. Mrs. Marshall confides to her husband, Frank Marshall, and later to her brother, that she recognizes Neil as the grown son of the murdered Jenner. Cass admits as much, resolving to prevent the marriage without revealing the truth. The next day, lost in a snowstorm, Neil shelters in the ruined Turnpike House and falls asleep, dreaming vividly of the murder scene and recognizing it as a buried childhood memory. He flees in horror, and that night forces Cass to tell him everything: his mother, Mrs. Jenner, is alive, imprisoned for his father's murder, having never spoken in her own defense. Neil resolves to prove her innocence, renounces Ruth for her sake, and secretly visits his mother in prison. She confesses privately that she believes it was Neil himself, in a childhood trance, who killed his father, and she has stayed silent all these years to shield him; she forbids him to reopen the case. Neil leaves Hollyoaks abruptly, breaking with Ruth by letter, and confides the truth to Geoffrey Heron, who proves a loyal friend, nursing him through a breakdown and severe illness at Bognor under the care of old Mrs. Jent, all while concealing his whereabouts from Cass. Heron, convinced Neil is innocent, investigates independently: he learns from Mrs. Jenner that the murder likely involved a red pocket-book Jenner meant to use for blackmail, and that the window had been left open, suggesting an outside killer. Meanwhile Ruth, piqued by the secrecy, tricks Mrs. Jent into revealing the truth about Neil's parentage, then meets Heron at Bognor, where the two fall in love and agree to work together to clear Mrs. Jenner's name. Ruth searches the Turnpike House and finds a broken gold cuff-link enameled with a champagne bottle design, clearly dropped by a gentleman. A clairvoyant, Mrs. Garvey, handling the link falls into a trance and describes the murder scene accurately, confirming a man other than Gilbert wore the link. Ruth also discovers, through her sister Mrs. Chisel and a matching link given to a niece as a brooch, that the links belong to a set owned by her own father, throwing suspicion on Cass himself; he admits the links are his but will not fully explain, only urging silence. Separately, the toy horse resurfaces among the Chisel children, and Jennie Brawn, the family's governess-poet, finds a hidden bill of exchange sewn inside it — a forged bill bearing Geoffrey's late father's name and Frank Marshall's endorsement. Piecing this together, Heron uncovers his own father's diary recording that Marshall had once forged a bill and been protected from exposure for Inez Cass's sake. Heron visits Mrs. Jenner again; she now names Marshall as the likely murderer, given his motive, his known intimacy with Jenner, and the blackmail scheme, and reveals she is dying and content to let the truth die with her. Heron next seeks out the elderly, disreputable moneylender Julian Roper, from whose office the bill had been stolen, to trace how Marshall's forgery came into Jenner's hands and confirm the chain of blackmail leading to the murder.

By Fergus Hume · First published 1896 · Genre: Drama, Literary Fiction, Social Commentary · 30 chapters · 95,979 words

First lines

It stood where four roads met -- a square building of two storeys, with white-washed walls and a high slate roof. The fence, and the once trim garden, had vanished with the turnpike gate; and a jungle of gooseberry bushes, interspersed with brambles, shut off the house from the roads. And only by courtesy could these be so-called, for time and neglect had almost obliterated them.

On all sides stretched a flat expanse of reaped fields, bleak-looking and barren in the waning November twilight. Mists gathered thickly over ditch and hedge and stubbled furrow a constant dripping could be heard in the clumps of trees looming here and there in the fog.

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The Turnpike House is listed on Textopian as a novel by Fergus Hume, dated 1896 CE.

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Mystery · Thriller · Suspense · Crime Fiction · Detective Novel · Classic Literature · Victorian Era · Australian Author · Gothic Elements · Atmospheric Setting · Isolated Location · Family Secrets

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