The Illingworth Legacy

December, 1925. Professor George Illingworth is returning home following the conclusion of an excavation in Egypt. Three days out of Alexandria, the captain of his ship sends word that the Professor has died in his cabin, seemingly of natural causes. His body and effects are transported to his town house in Bristol and arrangements are made with Rev. Somerville, vicar of Christ Church, Clifton, for the funeral to be held immediately. But before the Professor can be laid to rest, there must be an opportunity for his friends, relatives and colleagues to pay their respects. And there is also a Will to be read. Who will be the beneficiaries of the Illingworth Legacy?

From left to right, Wodehouse, the butler; Charlotte, Edward and Elizabeth Illingworth; Alice, the maid.

Then there were the friends of the family - Lavinia Canterville, the Society medium, returning from three years of reclusion; Archie Twistleton-Smythe, comforting the widow Charlotte; and Gabriel Goldney, close friend of Edward.

And as always, there were those persons whose connection to the deceased might be tenuous, but who for the sake of decency are compelled to attend as representatives of one family to another - Major-General Sir James Kingham in tweed and black armband, and Dr. Arthur Powell, the Spiritualist.

When it became apparent that no more guests were to be expected, Mr. Lowell annoucned that the Will would be read at nine o'clock. Until then, the mourners were welcome to take sherry and pay their respects in the Chapel of Rest. Solemnly they filed through, gazing down on the body and thinking their respectful, mortal thoughts.

"Goodbye, old chap," whispered Kingham, kissing the Professor on the cheek. Across the room, Rev. Somerville nodded approval.

At this juncture Wodehouse announced an unexpected arrival. Two young Chinese ladies, claiming to have had dealings with the Professor, appeared unescorted on the door. It being terribly impolite to turn a fellow away from a wake, Lotus Blossom and her companion were admitted - but several of the guests (and the Illingworth family) began to wonder what their purpose could be. Certainly the Professor had never travelled to China whilst working...

Polite conversation soon began in the parlour. There was speculation as to who was to inherit, for some persons had heard that they could expect sizeable legacies. And everyone wanted to know about the Chinese ladies, who were (of course) inscrutable. This conversation continued until Mr. Lowell declared that he would be reading the Will. The family and guests gathered round, with Charlotte and Edward seated to one side of Lowell and his brief-case and Elizabeth to the other. Untying the red tape that bound the Will, he began to speak, reading the Will in professional, dry tones:

"I, George Thornton Edward Illingworth, Emeritus Professor of Egyptology at Bristol University, being of sound mind and body, do commit this to be my Last Will and Testament. I am altering my Will because I have been given time and circumstance to reflect upon my position in the world, and I find that my previous Will failed to address certain matters which I feel must be addressed. It is my intent to address these matters when I return to England following my current excavation, but of course this may not be possible. My friend and colleague Lord Teddy Caernarfon felt as I do, and I attended his funeral only two years ago."

A hushed murmuring began among the guests. This was not what was expected.

"All of my property not mentioned hereafter is to be sold at auction. The proceeds, and my considerable fortune, are to be invested in a charitable Trust hereafter to be known as "The Illingworth Foundation." The Foundation is intended to provide financial assistance to any research project which increases our understanding of the world. To this end it shall be used to fund (or part-fund) research activities, provide bursaries for promising students, support organisations which push human understanding further, et cetera. My solicitors are empowered to select two Trustees who shall assist in administering the Foundation. In the selection of suitable persons, my trust in Mr. Withy and his Company is absolute."

"What?" cried Charlotte.

"Snake!" shouted Kingham, breaking the solicitor's stride. "Good God, man! Get away from it!" He began kicking at a space on the carpet.

"What's wrong, Sir James?" asked the solicitor.

"Bally great snake, just there. Saw it. Right in front of my eyes, it was. Didn't you see the damn' thing?"

"Er, no, Sir James."

"Well, there it was." He span around and slapped at one of the armchairs. "Great God! Another one! Get away from it!"

Several of the guests quickly moved to usher the Major-General from the parlour, and he was offered a cup of water by Alice. In the hallway, he saw another snake, and grabbed a broom from Wodehouse with which to beat it. The butler arched an eyebrow.

"Might I ask what Sir is doing, Sir?"

"Trying to keep the damn' snake away from the women, man!"

The butler sighed. "There is no snake, Sir."

"Yes there is," said Abdul, coming out of the parlour to see what the disturbance was about, "It's right there on the stairs."

"See!" cried Kingham, "Told you. There's two of us and one of you, and that makes you the madman. Now give me that broom!"

It took some time before the two men could be persuaded that there was not infestation of snakes. Even then, with cold water and smelling-salts, Abdul carried on jumping at shadows and the Major-General kept poking under furniture with his broom.

Rupert Lowell returned to his seat in the parlour and motioned for the Illingworths to return to their seats. Clearing his throat, he spoke up: "Now that that little disturbance is over with, let's proceed, shall we?"

"To my wife Charlotte (neé Neville), I leave our town house in Bristol and an allowance of three thousand pounds per annum from the Illingworth Foundation, on the condition that our maid, Alice, be retained in service for at least one year from my death. To my son, Edward George Illingworth, I first apologise for not being the father he needed. Since the death of my dear late wife Mags, I have spoiled you. If I do not survive my Mentehotep expedition, I shall at least be able to correct this error posthumously. To you I leave an allowance of two thousand pounds per annum, subject to the following condition: That you shall take employment immediately with Mr. Montague Smythe of Bristol and learn something other than the satisfaction of your own whims."

The Professor's widow and son exchanged shocked expressions. "Is that all?" Charlotte cried. "Oh, Edward!"

"To my close friend and long-time companion Abdul Mustafa Mostafanejad, who has assisted me countless times in explorations in Egypt, I leave the sum of five hundred pounds and the unidentified bottle of fired clay which we unearthed on our Mentehotep dig (lot A106). Perhaps you can do better than I in identifying its importance, old friend. I also leave this letter (which my solicitor will now give to you). Mah' es salaama.

"To Mr. Montague Smythe I leave that small part of my collection which interest him, namely, that part originating in Africa West of the Nile, including the Mbijli war-mask from the Congo. I also leave the sum of six thousand pounds per annum for the next ten years from the Illingworth Foundation, on condition that he employ my son Edward in his researches. Monty, I hope that the collection and gratuity compensate for having to tutor my son."

Charlotte was distraught. Stripped of her fortune in favour of a - a foundation! The allowance was more than enough to live on but it was so miserly compared to the ridiculous sum George had just given to science. It was all too much, and Charlotte fainted dead away. The staff and concerned guests made efforts to revive Charlotte and comfort Edward, whose sentence of study under Mr. Smythe (sadly not present) was hanging as heavily as any gaol term. While this happened, the two Chinese ladies approached the solicitor.

"There is one other matter," said Lotus Blossom coolly, removing a creased, folded scrap of paper from her handbag. "The Professor was indebted to me to the value of five hundred pounds."

Mr. Lowell let his gaze run over the crumpled note. "This signature is - oh, no. It's real. Well, this appears to be in order. I shall make the necessary alterations to the paperwork." And with that he left the parlour and headed upstairs.

It was at this point that Wodehouse turned on the radio and Alice came round again with another tray of sherry. The mood thus momentarily lightened, conversation began anew and the guests felt free to comment upon the nature of the Professor's bequest and, indeed, to speculate upon its validity.

This lightened mood, fitting for a wake in memory of such a great man, was not to last. Rumours began to circulate that some bounder had actually stolen the pennies from the corpse's eyes! To what ghoulish purpose could such post-mortem pilfering be turned?

No sooner had the pennies been found absent than Dr. Powell, the Spiritualist, caused something of a commotion. He stood in the corridor between the parlour and the chapel, staring into the mirror with glassy eyes. His face acquired a ghastly pallor and sick, greyish sheen, and before anyone present could ask what ailed him, he clutched at his head and fell screaming to the floor. Alice fled to telephone for a doctor, and Powell was soon assisted into the master bedroom, where he writhed upon the bed in obvious agony.

"Oh, get better and get out," snapped Edward, whose sense of decorum had evidently been shattered by the shock of his burdensome bequest.

The Spiritualist spasmed on the bed, knotting the sheets between clawed fists. Then finally, with a great effort, he managed to articulate the phrase, "Get out of my mind!" Immediately he was recovered, and after a moment to rearrange his tie and collar, he was able to explain what heppened to the concerned guests. "It was as if my flesh was rotting on my bones, as if I was decaying in the grave," he explained. A doctor was duly called, brought away from delivering triplets in Montpelier, who ascertained that Dr. Powell was entirely well though a little shaken. A vial of morphine was administered, with instructions to call upon the doctor again should the symptom recur.

While Dr. Powell recovered from his bizarre hallucination, Reverend Somerville was leading a prayer in the chapel. A sombre reading from the twenty-eighth Psalm was met with heartfelt "Amen"s from all present.

The guests left the chapel and, in the majority, returned to the parlour where the conversation orbited the subject of Dr. Powell, Sir Kingham and the Arab's curious episodes. No concrete theory was forthcoming, however, and speculation was cut short by a sudden disturbance. The smell of burning came from one of the upstairs rooms, and try as they might, the guests could not identify what was burning, nor where the burning was taking place. The mystery, like much else that night, was to stay unresolved, though certain individuals did return from the upstairs with looks of cool satisfaction upon their faces, as of a job well done.

The curious hallucinations of Dr. Powell were, like the serpentine apparitions which plagued Sir Kingham and the Professor's Arab companion, not to be confined to one indicidual. This phenomenon, known to psychologists of the Freudian school as mass hallucination, is generally considered to occur among confined groups under extremes of emotion. Such incidents have been recorded among classes of schoolgirls, and among companies of soldiers in the trenches. And indeed several others were to succumb to this second emotional disturbance, described by one of the victims as "Like Powell's, only I remember a voice, saying, 'As you slide into the grave, so I return!' It was not at all nice."

Hearing of these episodes, it was decided that Alice should telephone for the doctor once more. She was despatched to the kitchen, but soon returned in a dreadful state. "Oh, Mr. Wodehouse," she cried, "I've tried to telephone for a doctor but I can't get it to work!"

"Allow me," he replied with unflappable cool. Striding into the kitchen, he picked up the handset and listened carefully, tapping the contacts two or three times. "It is my opinion," he offered, "that the exchange is not available. There is nothing wrong with this telephone. You had better tell the guests."

The guests did not take the news at all well. Several left almost immediately, to post letters hastily penned and burdened with strange enclosures, or to accost the police upon the streets and bring them to this bizarre location. Some, indeed - notably Edward Illingworth and his crippled companion Mr. Goldney - found succor in escape, and fled the press and clamour to seek refuge upstairs in the dimly-lit master bedroom. There, soothing light, soft furnishings, and the inscrutable caresses of fine Chinese opium soothed - or at least numbed - their troubled spirits.

"This has gone far enough," declared Miss Lavinia Canterville in the parlour. "There is only one way to discover what is really going on here, and that is to ask the one person who knows."

"Who is that?" the guests asked.

"Why, Professor Illingworth, of course."

Some of the guests looked at Miss Canterville as if she were quite irredeemably mad, but Dr. Powell spoke in agreement. "Indeed. Let us hold a séance to contact the Professor."

With two eminent mediums present - though the Press had previously condemned Miss Canterville as being a 'low' Spiritualist - the matter was decided. Those who wished to sit, or to view, remained in the parlour while Wodehouse rearranged the furniture in a manner conducive to such pursuits. Others wanted none of this dabbling, which seemed to some to be in terribly poor taste. The lay preacher Thomas Street was among those to leave, though for spiritual rather than aesthetic reasons. "'Tis the Devil's work," he muttered as he closed the parlour door behind him.

The electric lights were extinguished and a pair of oil lamps placed upon the table. Dr. Powell and Miss Canterville linked hands and urged the others to do the same. Around the table, the participants in the séance nervously reached out to touch one another's fingertips.

"Concentrate on the lamp," Powell said in a low, steady voice, "Focus on the flame..."

"Are you there, Professor?" asked Lavinia.

There was a quiet, almost inaudible pop, as though a membrane or barrier had been breached by the combined exertions of the two mediums. Lavinia began to nod, as if expecting what was to come.

A reedy, hollow voice began to speak from nowhere. "Charlotte, is that you?" it asked. "You're pulling me back because of the Will, aren't you, dear? The truth is, I don't love you - never did - and the Foundation will be so much more meaningful. N-now let me go, before he comes through after me!"

As the spectral voice faded, so the séance erupted into babble. "Is that George?" asked Miss Canterville, to recieve a hurried nod from the Professor's widow. But before they could ask the Professor any further questions, the air filled with an unearthly stench and a hideous apparition appeared above Powell's head. Suffused with hellish crimson, it sneered at the sitters from burning, hate-filled eyes sunk deep within its terrible wasted face. Its beard was wrapped in golden cord and its eyes were rimmed with kohl, and it wore the head-dress of an Egyptian Pharaoh!

The apparition spoke slowly, in thick, glutinous tones, as if suspended within a viscid liquid slurring both its speech and thought. The sitters could barely understand its moaned and sighed pronouncements of horribly vague doom. But two phrases stood out: "I am Mentehotep, God-King of the Nile!" it intoned with the gravitas of a being making its introduction for the first time in unhallowed aeons, and "You of the bloodline of my desecrator, know that you shall suffer torment eternal!"

"Get rid of it!" "Dispel it!" "Make it go away!"

All their cries came to naught. The mediums had called up something which their combined power could not - at least at this juncture - turn back, and it was all they could do to remain calm. After its threats had echoed away, the spirit faded from view and there was a moment of silence. Then Edward leaped to his feet.

"Damned nonsense! What the hell was that about, eh?" He rounded on Dr. Powell. "I don't know what you've done or how you did it, but there was no call for it, you hear! You've darkened the whole mood and, if I may say so, done it in damned poor taste! Now I don't know about you, but I could do with a little light music."

And thus speaking, he reached for the switch to turn on the radio.

Afterwards, Dr. Powell described the aura of the radio as having been invaded by some auric corruption, an infection upon the astral plain which interfered with the valve-and-crystal set's etheric vibrations. What was immediately apparent to even the least psychic sitter was simply that the radio set exploded when Edward's hand fell upon it.

The parlour erupted into chaos. Mr. Oatley, the pilot, dived from the window and fell into the street. Goldney fell under the table crying, "Gas, boys! Gas! Get your masks!" The Chinese ladies leaped to their feet and began cursing the mediums for knowingly bringing demons into their midst. And the young Earl Carnarvon simply sat still in his arm-chair, repeating a phrase gleaned from certain ancient sources, and deciding upon a course of action.

The Illingworths fled upstairs in disarray, Charlotte and Edward stunned and horror-struck. Shortly afterwards, Archibald Twistleton-Smythe ascended the stairs to comfort the widow. It would not be proper to speculate as to what 'Twitters' beheld in that red-lit master bedroom, but his upper lip was close to trembling as he asked the butler for his coat and took his leave.

Events having turned thus, it seemed quite ordinary when Mr. Lowell appeared with several policemen and attempted to have the Chinese ladies arrested. The charge, he said, was extortion, as well as carrying a weapon with lethal intent, and certain violations of the Witchcraft Act. The police were swift to move, but the Chinese, typically inscrutable, had an ace up their embroidered sleeves.

"Who is your superior officer?" Loli demanded.

"That'll be Chief Inspector Warren, ma'am," replied one of the constables.

"What, not old 'Bunny' Warren?" she replied. Thus with a devastating flick of wit she proved her friends to be in higher places than those of her opponent, for Chief Inspector Cecil Warren was known as 'Bunny' to his closest, dearest companions. The police soon left, crestfallen, unable to discover evidence of any material crime.

Material crime was indeed absent (or at least well-concealed), but on a spiritual level there were victims aplenty. Edward, convinced now of a fatal curse hanging Damoclean over him, had returned to his opium pipe and was quite irrational. No calming talk, nor even the spiritual guidance of Miss Canterville, could return him to rationality. His step-mother Charlotte was distraught, made more so by the intrusions into her home and by the guests' bizarre behaviour. Miss Canterville being found fainted in a room with only the Arab as companion was the final back-breaking straw. She retired, and had Wodehouse send the guests away, whether their mourning be complete or no.

So it was that some of the guests of the previous night came to gather, with the remaining members of the Illingworth family, at Christ Church in Clifton Village. There they listened with great solemnity (and more than a little relief) to Rev. Somerville's sermon and eulogy, before following the black-draped funeral carriage across the city to the great cemetery at Arno's Vale. Stood in silence, dampened by the grey drizzle which England reserves especially for funeral days, it was generally felt that whatever the Illingworth Legacy was ultimately to be, it was better that it was buried, solidly and safely, under the ground.

"Sarge! There's a dead body in here!"
"Of course there is! It's a wake!"
"It's awake?"

"Worse things happen at sea."
Alice, forgetting that the Professor died in his cabin.

The Illingworth Legacy

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