The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes

by Arthur Conan Doyle

  “I guess you can fill in for yourselves what he did. He opened the window and made the mark on the sill to give an idea of how the murderer escaped. It was a tall order, that, but as the bridge was up there was no other way. Then, when everything was fixed, he rang the bell for all he was worth. What happened afterward you know. And so, gentlemen, you can do what you please; but I’ve told you the truth and the whole truth, so help me God! What I ask you now is how do I stand by the English law?”

  There was a silence, which was broken by Sherlock Holmes.

  “The English law is in the main a just law. You will get no worse than your deserts from it. But I would ask you how did this man know that you lived here, or how to get into your house, or where to hide to get you?”

  “I know nothing of this.”93

  Holmes’s face was very white and grave. “The story is not over yet, I fear,” said he. “You may find worse dangers than the English law, or even than your enemies from America. I see trouble before you, Mr. Douglas. You’ll take my advice and still be on your guard.”

  And now, my long-suffering readers, I will ask you to come away with me for a time, far from the Sussex Manor House of Birlstone, and far also from the year of grace in which we made our eventful journey which ended with the strange story of the man who had been known as John Douglas. I wish you to journey back some twenty years in time,94 and westward some thousands of miles in space, that I may lay before you a singular and terrible narrative—so singular and so terrible that you may find it hard to believe that even as I tell it, even so did it occur. Do not think that I intrude one story before another is finished. As you read on you will find that this is not so. And when I have detailed those distant events and you have solved this mystery of the past, we shall meet once more in those rooms on Baker Street, where this, like so many other wonderful happenings, will find its end.

  78 James Montgomery, in A Case of Identity, identifies the pamphlet as St. John the Evangelist, Groombridge, Kent, by B. W. Shepherd-Walwyn, purchasable in 1955 from the local tobacconist for sixpence.

  79 Charles I’s stormy relationship with Parliament led to two civil wars, in 1642–1646 and 1648. In 1644, Charles was soundly defeated by parliamentary forces at Marston Moor, a loss that helped turn the tide of the war against the royalists, undoubtedly leading the “parliamentary colonel” to feel justified in seizing whatever property he may have needed.

  Toward the end of his reign, Charles’s military and political difficulties gave him plenty of reasons to require protection. He surrendered to the Scots in 1646 and was handed over to Parliament, but escaped in 1647 and took refuge on the Isle of Wight. Re-enlisting the aid of the Scots, Charles returned to battle almost immediately; but his forces were overwhelmed, and the second civil war was quickly over. Charles was beheaded in 1649. See also A Study in Scarlet, note 149.

  80 George II (1683–1760) was king of Great Britain and Ireland from 1727 to 1760. Passionate about military affairs, he was the last British monarch to appear personally on the battlefield, doing so at Dettingen in 1743 during the War of Austrian Succession.

  81 ”We see in The Lion’s Mane an example of how Holmes could bring his out-of-the-way knowledge to bear on a problem,” comments T. S. Blakeney, in his seminal work Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction? (1932), “and he has a number of interesting remarks on this point in The Five Orange Pips.” In “The Lion’s Mane,” Holmes’s recollection of a pamphlet on Cyanea capillata, a rare form of jellyfish, provides the solution to a mysterious death; in “The Five Orange Pips,” Holmes’s immediate recognition of “K.K.K.” as related to the Ku Klux Klan (no mean feat for an Englishman in 1891, when the story was published) proves critical to finding the culprits.

  82 This ends the portion published in the December 1914 issue of the Strand Magazine. The balance of the chapter appeared in the January 1915 issue and was headed by the following summary:

  The opening chapters of this new and thrilling adventure of Sherlock Holmes described the receipt by Holmes of a cipher message, from which he deduces that some devilry is intended against a man named Douglas, a rich country gentleman living at the Manor House, Birlstone, in Sussex, and that the danger is a pressing one. Almost as soon as he has deciphered the message he is visited by Inspector MacDonald, of Scotland Yard, who brings the news that Mr. Douglas has been murdered that morning [sic].

  Holmes, Dr. Watson, and the inspector proceed to the scene of the tragedy, where they are met by Mr. White Mason, the chief Sussex detective. The murdered man had been horribly injured, while lying across his chest was a curious weapon—a shot-gun with the barrel sawn off a foot in front of the triggers. Near him was found a card with the initials “V. V.” and the number “341” scrawled on it in ink, and about half-way up the forearm was a curious design—a branded triangle inside a circle. His wedding-ring had been removed and the ring above it replaced.

  There is no clue to the murderer except a bloody footprint on the window-sill, and he had apparently made his escape by wading across the moat. Holmes is much struck by the fact that one of Douglas’s dumb-bells is missing.

  Cecil Barker, Douglas’s most intimate friend, is considerably flustered while being cross-examined by the detectives, and confesses that Douglas had been jealous on account of his attentions to Mrs. Douglas. Holmes ascertains from Ames, the butler, that on the previous evening Barker was wearing a pair of bedroom slippers which were stained with blood, and on comparing them with the footprints on the window-sill finds that they correspond.

  Holmes gives Watson his reasons for believing that Mrs. Douglas and Barker know all about the murder. He advises the other detectives to abandon the case and asks them to meet him that same evening when he promises they shall share everything he knows. The last instalment ends with the dispatch, at Holmes’s suggestion, of the following letter to Barker:—

  “It has struck me that it is our duty to drain the moat, in the hope that we may find something which may bear upon our investigation. I have made arrangements, and the workmen will be at work early to-morrow morning diverting the stream, so I thought it best to explain matters beforehand.”

  83 “In your patience possess ye your souls.”—Luke, 21:19. Holmes offers the same advice to Watson in “Wisteria Lodge” and “The Three Garridebs.” Patience is an important component of Holmes’s method: In “The Sussex Vampire,” he explains that “[o]ne forms provisional theories and waits for time or fuller knowledge to explode them.”

  84 This tendency, exhibited in frequent dramatic denouements (for example, “The Naval Treaty”) and intricate disguises (for example, the Nonconformist clergymen of “A Scandal in Bohemia”) may have led Inspector Athelney Jones to remark, in The Sign of Four “You would have made an actor and a rare one.” Holmes himself notes, in “The Mazarin Stone,” that “ ‘Old Baron Dowson said the night before he was hanged that in my case what the law had gained the stage had lost.’ ”

  85 T. S. Blakeney remarks, “This art was one of Holmes’s strongest assets as a detective—[in The Hound of the Baskervilles,] he called it the scientific use of the imagination, ‘the region where we balance probabilities and choose the most likely.’ ”

  86 Kelvin Jones identifies this as the shotgun, “so named because these guns were used to shoot wild fowl.”

  87 “Vermissa” is generally thought to be Pottsville, Pennsylvania, near Schuylkill, where anthracite, or hard coal, was mined. The locations of the events in the “Vermissa Valley” are discussed in detail in Part II, Chapter I.

  88 A fictitious name, as will be seen.

  89 French for “intense and severe punishment,” or a form of torture used against prisoners, arraigned of felonies, who refused either to enter a plea or to submit testimony (known as “standing mute”). Instituted during the reign of Henry IV (1399–1413), the peine forte et dure saw the uncooperative prisoner stretched out upon his back; heavy weights were then placed upon his person until he either entered a plea or died. The pract
ice was often referred to as “pressing.”

  The Newgate Calendar, Volume I, recounts the death in this manner of one Major George Strangwayes. Accused of killing his brother-in-law, Strangwayes admitted to having orchestrated the murder but not to having committed it. Beyond that, he would not discuss the details of the case, nor would he enter a plea, as he hoped to prevent the seizure of his property by the court. When the entreaties of the court proved useless, the chief justice ordered that Strangwayes be “put into a mean room, where no light can enter; that he be laid upon his back, with his body bare, save something to cover his privy parts; that his arms be stretched forth with a cord, one to one side of the prison, and the other to the other side of the prison, and in like manner his legs shall be used; that upon his body be laid as much iron and stone as he can bear, and more … and this shall be his punishment till he dies.” His friends were given the task of putting the weights on him, and after seeing “the agonies he was put into, and hear[ing] his loud and doleful groans,” they added the weight of their own bodies so as to hasten his death and end his suffering.

  The last instance of pressing to death occurred at the Cambridge assizes in 1741, and the torture was abolished in 1772, when a refusal to plead either guilty or not guilty to a felony was deemed equivalent to a conviction. In 1828, that law was changed, with any such refusal being construed to imply a plea of not guilty.

  90 Douglas refers here to the provisions of British law that have long required the police to warn prisoners, before receiving their confessions, that what they say may be held against them—much as police officers in the United States must issue “Miranda” warnings. See “The Dancing Men” for another example of such warnings being given.

  91 Douglas’s clothes must have been soaked with blood and gore as a result of his dressing the corpse; yet Holmes made no comment, and Watson made no note of it. Ian McQueen offers this explanation: Douglas’s clothing remained unsoiled because he committed pre-meditated murder and was not acting in self-defence. After overpowering Baldwin, Douglas saw an opportunity to rid himself of his pursuers. He demanded at gunpoint that Baldwin change clothes with him, and then, with Barker’s help, he killed him.

  92 McQueen also points out that unless Douglas deliberately dirtied the piece of plaster, it should have immediately alerted observers to something amiss. A genuine piece of plaster would have been affected by powder blackening and sprayed wadding resulting from the shotgun blast, as well as considerable bleeding.

  93 In “Moriarty and the Molly Maguires,” Linda J. Reed argues that Cecil Barker is most likely to have been the source of information, perhaps motivated by his desire for Mrs. Douglas.

  94 See Appendix 3 for a discussion of the chronology of the story.

  PART95

  II

  The Scowrers96

  95 Who wrote this portion of The Valley of Fear? Is this merely a re-telling of the contents of Douglas’s “bundle of paper”? “[I]t is practically certain that Part Two of the present form of [The Valley of Fear], ‘The Scowrers,’ is not the work of Watson,” writes B. M. Castner. “Its author was a skilled writer of fiction, careful with such details as dates, who, given certain basic matters to be worked into the narrative, has turned out a story complete in itself. Internal evidence suggests that it is by the same hand that wrote ‘The Country of the Saints,’ for A Study in Scarlet; and I have no doubt that the hand is that of Watson’s long-time advisor and agent, whose initials are believed to have been A.C.D., and who would have been readily accepted by Holmes and Watson, as by any other Britishers, as an authority upon the American scene.” Newt Williams, in “Who Wrote ‘The Scowrers?,’ ” makes a similar case that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote this section. But Colin Prestige, in “A Study in Fear or the Scarlet Valley,” contends that John Douglas wrote Part II, whereas Edgar W. Smith (in “On the Authorship of the Tales-Within-the Tales”) argues for Allan Pinkerton himself, premier American detective and author of The Molly Maguires and the Detectives. Smith suggests that Pinkerton actually helped Watson with the narrative, but this overlooks that Pinkerton died in 1884, many years before Watson would have been interested in the case.

  96 It is generally accepted that the “Scowrers” are a thinly disguised version of the Molly Maguires. The Mollies, as they were known, were a secret organisation of some 3,000 miners—most of them Irish-American and Irish immigrants—working in the anthracite coal region of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. From 1862 to 1876, the men were allegedly responsible for scores of brutal acts, including the beatings and murders of several mine owners and managers. According to some sources, the group took its name from an Irish widow who resisted when anti-Catholic authorities attempted to oust her from her cottage—“Take that from a son of Molly Maguire!” was the cry.

  The Molly Maguires were brought down in 1876, and nineteen members were hanged as a result. Initially, the breakup of the Molly Maguires was lauded as a case of justice served against a ruthless terrorist organisation. “[T]he Molly Maguires killed men and women with whom they had had no dealings, against whom they had no personal grievances, and from whose death they had nothing to gain, except, perhaps, the price of a few rounds of whiskey,” raged Cleveland Moffett, in “The Overthrow of the Molly Maguires: Stories from the Archives of the Pinkterton Detective Agency,” published in McClure’s Magazine in 1894. “They committed murders by the score, stupidly, brutally, as a driven ox turns to left or right at the word of command, without knowing why, and without caring.”

  Yet history has been kinder to the Mollies, who faced horrendous working conditions and blatant discrimination. Pennsylvania mines in those days were unsanitary and dangerous, and workers were forced to endure low wages, black lung disease, and complete dependence on the local employers. In 1868, 179 miners died when the Avondale mine collapsed and a fire erupted, with no safety exit to allow for the miners’ escape. “Such conditions, then as now, tried men’s souls,” writes Hyman Parker, in “Birdy Edwards and The Scowrers Reconsidered.” Irish Catholics in particular had to suffer the indignity of encountering “Help Wanted” signs that added, “Irish need not apply.”

  Serious questions have been raised about the fairness of the proceedings against Mollies who stood trial: There were no Irish or Catholic jurors, and there was at least one juror who did not understand English. Most of the witnesses were turning state’s evidence in return for leniency or freedom, and there was much conflicting testimony. The accused maintained their innocence until the end.

  Whatever the Molly Maguires’ crimes, the organisation played a pivotal role in the history of the American labor movement—as did its official labour union, the fledgling Workingmen’s Benevolent Associatioin (WBA), founded in 1868. Literature on the Molly Maguires is complex and controversial. Certainly the starting place, albeit extremely one-sided, is Allan Pinkerton’s The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877). Anthony Bimba’s The Molly Maguires (tellingly subtitled “The true story of labor’s martyred pioneers in the coalfields”) presents a different viewpoint. See also The Molly Maguires, by Wayne G. Broehl, Jr., and F. P. Dewees’s The Molly Maguires: The Origin, Growth, and Character of the Organization. Philadelphia Sherlockian Arthur H. Lewis’s Lament for the Mollies is a fine work; most recently, Kevin Kenny’s Making Sense of the Molly Maguires attempts to bring a historical perspective to the struggle. S. B. Liljegren’s pamphlet The Irish Element in The Valley of Fear is too accepting of Pinkerton’s account to be valuable to historians, but traces the history of the “Irish element” in other literature as well as The Valley of Fear. H. T. Crown and Mark T. Major’s new A Guide to the Molly Maguires provides a helpful compendium of facts.

  Kelvin Jones identifies the name “Scowrer” as derived from seventeenth-century slang for wild and boisterous men who roamed the streets, terrorising people.

  A table summarising the likely historical counterparts to the places and persons named in The Valley of Fear is set forth in Appendix 2.

  CH
APTER

  I

  THE MAN

  IT WAS THE fourth of February in the year 1875.97 It had been a severe winter, and the snow lay deep in the gorges of the Gilmerton Mountains.98 The steam ploughs had, however, kept the railroad track open, and the evening train which connects the long line of coal-mining99 and iron-working settlements was slowly groaning its way up the steep gradients which lead from Stagville on the plain to Vermissa, the central township which lies at the head of Vermissa Valley. From this point the track sweeps downward, to Barton’s Crossing, Helmdale, and the purely agricultural county of Merton.100 It was a single track railroad; but at every siding—and they were numerous—long lines of trucks piled with coal and iron ore told of the hidden wealth which had brought a rude population and a bustling life to this most desolate corner of the United States of America.

  For desolate it was. Little could the first pioneer who had traversed it have ever imagined that the fairest prairies and the most lush water pastures were valueless compared to this gloomy land of black crag and tangled forest. Above the dark and often scarcely penetrable woods upon their sides, the high, bare crowns of the mountains, white snow, and jagged rock, towered upon each flank, leaving a long, winding, tortuous valley in the centre. Up this the little train was slowly crawling.

  Allan Pinkerton.

  Harper’s Weekly, July 12, 1884

  The oil lamps had just been lit in the leading passenger-car, a long, bare carriage in which some twenty or thirty people were seated. The greater number of these were workmen returning from their day’s toil in the lower portion of the valley. At least a dozen, by their grimed faces and the safety lanterns which they carried, proclaimed themselves as miners. These sat smoking in a group and conversed in low voices, glancing occasionally at two men on the opposite side of the car, whose uniforms and badges showed them to be policemen.