Mr Abney asks Stephen Elliott how old he is twice in the first two minutes of their acquaintance. The boy is an orphan, brought by post-chaise from Warwickshire in September 1811 to live with an elderly cousin at Aswarby Hall in Lincolnshire, and Abney darts out of his study rubbing his hands to greet him. “I’m twelve years old next birthday, sir,” Stephen says, and Abney asks when that is and answers before the boy can, “Eleventh of September, eh?”, as though he’d looked it up already. “I like—ha, ha!—I like to get these things down in my book. Sure it’s twelve? Certain?” On a first reading it’s the fussiness of an old bachelor who has no idea how to talk to children. On a second it’s the worst line in “Lost Hearts”.

It’s the second story in the collection, after Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book, and James read it to the Chit-Chat Club at Cambridge on 28 October 1893, 133 years ago tomorrow. The Pall Mall Magazine printed it in December 1895. James wasn’t fond of it and thought of it as filler, and I think he was wrong. Canon Alberic’s scholar is a tourist who buys trouble; this one is the trouble, and every clue to what he is gets laid down in plain sight long before the explanation arrives: the locked bathroom, the cellar, the equinox, the left side of a boy’s chest.

Mrs Bunch, the housekeeper, is the first person at the Hall who makes Stephen feel at home, and one November evening by her fire he asks whether Mr Abney is a good man and will go to heaven. She answers with two stories meant as proof of his kindness. Seven years back, master took in a foreign boy who came “a-tweaking his ‘urdy-gurdy round and about the drive”; before that, a silent girl with no one belonging to her. Each of them was gone one morning before anyone was up. Abney was “wonderful put about, and had all the ponds dragged.” The boy left his hurdy-gurdy behind, it’s still lying on a shelf, and Stephen spends the rest of the evening trying to get a tune out of it. Nothing with a ghost in it is as hard to read as that: a child playing the instrument of the child whose place he’s been brought in to fill.

The servants know the house is wrong, and neither of them will say so upstairs. In March Mrs Bunch finds long parallel slits in the left breast of Stephen’s nightgown, which match scratches on the outside of his bedroom door, “too high up for any cat or dog”. Her advice is to lock the door and say his prayers, and “I wouldn’t say nothing to master.” The next evening Parkes, the butler, announces that master can fetch his own wine after dark, because he’s heard voices behind the door of the far bin in the cellar. Michael Kellermeyer, at Oldstyle Tales, reads the adults in the story as “either clueless enablers or sinister threats”. These two are enablers, but of a particular kind: frightened, decent, and dependent on the one man they’d have to accuse.

Stephen has already seen one of the children by then, in a dream: a figure in the locked, disused bathroom at the end of his passage, hands pressed over its heart. The narrator steps out from behind the story to describe it. It reminds him, he says, of “what I once beheld myself in the famous vaults of St Michan’s Church in Dublin, which possess the horrid property of preserving corpses from decay for centuries.” It’s the only place where the narrator admits to having seen anything like it himself, and that one dry sentence from a man who has toured a crypt does more for the dream than any adjective could.

Abney, meanwhile, keeps reminding his cousin that the spring equinox is coming, that the ancients thought it “a critical time for the young”, that he should shut his bedroom window at night, and that Censorinus had some valuable remarks on the subject. I’ve gone back and forth on what that warning is. It could be plain malice, a man enjoying a joke only he understands. I think it’s more likely bookkeeping. His papers later dismiss the ghosts’ “feeble efforts”, but feeble against a man of philosophic temperament, he means. The slits in that nightgown show they weren’t feeble against a boy, and that may be exactly what he was guarding against.

On 24 March 1812 Abney asks Stephen to come to his study at eleven that night and to tell nobody. At ten, from his window, Stephen sees the two of them on the gravel terrace: a girl with her hands clasped over her heart, and a ragged boy with nails “fearfully long”, raising his arms “with an appearance of menace and of unappeasable hunger and longing”, with “a black and gaping rent” on the left side of his chest. At eleven the study door won’t give, though the key is on the outside, and Stephen hears his cousin speaking, then trying to cry out.

The explanation is a set of papers on Abney’s table, which Stephen reads years later, “when he was of an age to understand them”. Abney has spent twenty years testing a recipe he credits to Hermes Trismegistus: absorb the hearts of three people under twenty-one, and gain “a complete ascendancy over those orders of spiritual beings which control the elemental forces of our universe.” He chose the subjects of his experiment from “such persons as could conveniently be removed without occasioning a sensible gap in society.” Phoebe Stanley, “a girl of gipsy extraction”, on 24 March 1792. Giovanni Paoli, “a wandering Italian lad”, on 23 March 1805. Stephen was to follow on 24 March 1812. The method is to burn the living heart to ashes and take them in about a pint of red wine, preferably port, and the remains, he advises, are best hidden in “a disused bathroom or wine-cellar”.

The cruelty is in the register. He finds the word “victim” “repugnant in the highest degree to my feelings”. He expects “some annoyance” from “the psychic portion of the subjects, which popular language dignifies with the name of ghosts.” And he was right about the gap. The only search either child got was the one he ordered himself, the servants talked by the fire, and nobody with any standing asked a question about a gipsy girl or an Italian street musician.

They come for him anyway. Abney is found in his chair, his face “stamped with an expression of rage, fright, and mortal pain”, with a lacerated wound in his left side exposing the heart. His knife is clean and there’s no blood on his hands. He gets a coroner, which is more than Phoebe Stanley or Giovanni Paoli ever had, though the coroner sees the open window and settles on a wild creature, and it’s left to Stephen, older and holding the papers, to come to “a very different conclusion.”

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