Shadows over Baker Street

by John Pelan;Michael Reaves

  “What, at this season of the year?” Holmes thumbed the card she handed him, angled it to the window’s glaring light. “Heavy stock, one and six the hundred, printed in America in a typeface of a restraint generally found only in the most petrified of diplomatic circles but smelling of—” He broke off, and glanced at Mrs. Hudson with eyes suddenly sharp with wary interest. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I shall see this gentleman. Watson, if you would remain, I would much appreciate an outsider’s unbiased view of our guest.”

  For I had folded together the newspaper, which for the past hour I had stared at, unseeing, preparatory to making a retreat to my bedroom. To tell the truth I welcomed the invitation to remain, and helped Holmes in his rapid disposal of alembic and pipettes into his own chamber. As I reached down for the card, still lying on the much scarred rosewood, Holmes twitched it from my fingers and slipped it into an envelope, which he set in an obscure corner of the bookcase. “Let us not drip premature surmise into the distilled waters of your observation,” he said with a smile. “I am curious to read what would be writ upon a tabula rasa.”

  “Behold me unbesmirched,” I replied, throwing up my hands, and settled back onto the settee as the door opened to admit one of the most robust specimens of American manhood that it has ever been my privilege to encounter. Six feet tall, broad of shoulder and chest, he had dark eyes luminous with intelligence under a noble brow in a rather long face, and by his well-cut, if rather American brown suit and gloves of fawn kid, he clearly added material wealth to the blessings of kindly nature. He held out his hand to Holmes and introduced himself, and Holmes inclined his head.

  “And this is my partner and amanuensis, Dr. Watson,” said Holmes, and Mr. Colby turned unhesitatingly to shake my hand. “Anything that may be said to me may be said in his presence as well.”

  “Of course,” said Colby, in his deep, pleasing voice, “of course. I have no secrets—that’s what gravels me.” And he shook his head with a ghost of a chuckle. “The Colbys are one of the wealthiest families in New England: we’ve traded with China for fifty years and with India for twice that, and our railroad interests now will better those profits a thousand percent. I’ve been educated at Harvard and Oxford, and if I may say so without tooting my own horn, I’m reasonably good to look on and I don’t eat with my knife or sleep in my boots. So what would there be about me, Mr. Holmes, that would cause a respectable girl’s guardians to reject my suit out of hand and forbid me to exchange a word with her?”

  “Oh, I could name a dozen commonplace possibilities,” replied Holmes, gesturing him to a chair. “And a score more if we wished to peruse a catalog of the outré. Perhaps you could tell me, Mr. Colby, the name of this unfortunate young lady and the circumstances under which you were so rudely ejected from her parents’ favor?”

  “Guardians,” corrected our visitor. “Her uncle is the Honorable Carstairs Delapore, and her grandfather, Gaius, Viscount Delapore, of Depewatch Priory in Shropshire. It’s a crumbling, moldering, Gothic old pile, sinking into decay. My family’s money could easily rescue it—as I’ve said to Mr. Delapore, any number of times, and he agrees with me.”

  “A curious thing to do, for a man rejecting your suit.”

  Colby’s breath gusted again in exasperated laughter. “Isn’t it? It isn’t as if I were a stranger off the street, Mr. Holmes. I’ve been Mr. Delapore’s pupil for a year, have lived in his household on weekends, eaten at his table. When I first came to study with him I could have sworn he approved of my love for Judith.”

  “And what, precisely, would you say is the nature of Mr. Delapore’s teaching?” Holmes leaned back in the basket chair, fingertips pressed lightly together, closely watching the young American’s face.

  “I guess you’d say he’s . . . an antiquarian.” Colby’s voice was hesitant, as if picking his words. “One of the most remarkable students of ancient folklore and legend in the world. Indeed, it was in the hopes of studying with him that I came to Oxford. I am—I guess you might call me the intellectual black sheep of the Colby family.” He chuckled again. “My father left the firm to my brothers and myself, but on the whole I’ve been content to let them run it as they wished. The making of money . . . the constant clamor of stocks and rail shares and directors . . . From the time I was a small boy I sensed there were deeper matters than that in the world, forgotten shadows lurking behind the gaslights’ artificial glare.”

  Holmes said nothing to this, but his eyelids lowered, as if he were listening for something behind the words. Colby, hands clasped, seemed almost to have forgotten his presence, or mine, or the reality of the stuffy summer heat. He went on, “I had corresponded with Carstairs Delapore on . . . on the subject of some of the more obscure Lammastide customs of the Welsh borderlands. As I’d hoped, he agreed to guide my studies, both at Oxford and, later, among the books of his private collection—marvelous volumes that clarified ancient folkloric rites and put them into contexts of philosophy, history, the very fabric of time itself! Depewatch Priory . . .”

  He seemed to come to himself with a start, glanced at Holmes, then at me, and went on in a more constrained voice, “It was at Depewatch Priory that I first met Mr. Delapore’s niece, Judith. She is eighteen, the daughter of Mr. Delapore’s brother Fynch, a spirit of light and innocence in that . . . in that dreary old pile. She had just returned from finishing school in Switzerland, though plans for her come-out into London society had run aground on the family’s poverty. Any other girl I know would have been pouting and in tears at being robbed of her season on the town. Not she! She bore it bravely and sweetly, though it was clear that she faced a lifetime of stagnation in a tiny mountain town, looking after a decrepit house and a . . . a difficult old man.”

  From his jacket pocket Colby withdrew an embossed cardboard photograph case, opening it to show the image of a most beautiful young lady. Thin and rather fragile looking, she wore her soft curls in a chignon. Her eyes seemed light, blue or hazel so far as I could tell from the monotone photograph, her hair a medium shade—perhaps red, but more likely light brown—and her complexion pale to ghostliness. Her expression was one of grave innocence, trusting and unselfconscious.

  “Old Viscount Delapore is a grim old autocrat who rules his son, his niece, and every soul in the village of Watchgate as if it were 1394 instead of 1894. He owns all of the land thereabouts—the family has, I gather, from time immemorial—and so violent is his temper that the villagers dare not cross him. From the first moment Judith declared her love for me, I offered to take her away from the place—to take her clean out of the country, if need be, though I hardly think he would come after her, as she seems to fear.”

  “Does she fear her grandfather?” Holmes turned the photograph thoughtfully over in his hands, examining the back as well as the front most minutely.

  Colby nodded, his face clouding with anger. “She claims she’s free to come and go, that there’s no influence being brought to bear upon her. But there is, Mr. Holmes, there is! When she speaks of Viscount Delapore she glances over her shoulder, as if she imagines he could hear her wherever she is. And the look in her lovely eyes . . . ! She fears him, Mr. Holmes. He has some evil and unwholesome hold upon the girl. He’s not her legal guardian—that’s Mr. Carstairs Delapore. But the old man’s influence extends to his son as well. When I received this”—he drew from the same pocket as the photograph a single sheet of folded paper, which he passed across to Holmes—“I begged him to countermand his father’s order, to at least let me present my case. But this card”—he handed a large, stiff note to Holmes—“was all I got back.”

  The letter was dated August 16, four days ago.

  My best beloved,

  My heart is torn from my breast by this most terrible news. My grandfather has forbidden me to see you again, forbidden even that your name be mentioned in this house. He will give no reason for this beyond that it is his will that I remain here with him, as his servant—I fear, as his slave! I have written to my
father, but fear he will do nothing. I am in despair! Do nothing, but wait and be ready.

  Thine only,

  Judith

  The delicate pink paper, scented with patchouli and with the faint smoke of the oil lamp by which it must have been written, was blotted with tears.

  Her father’s card said merely:

  Remove her from your thoughts. There is nothing which can be done.

  Burnwell Colby smote the palm of one hand with the fist of the other, and his strong jaw jutted forward. “My grandfather didn’t let the mandarins of Hong Kong chase him away, and my father refused to be stopped by Sioux Indians or winter snows in the Rockies,” he declared. “Nor shall this stop me. Will you find out for me, Mr. Holmes, what vile hold Lord Gaius has upon his granddaughter and his son, that I may free the gentlest girl that ever lived from the clutches of an evil old man who seeks to make a drudge of her forever?”

  “And is this all,” asked Holmes, raising his eyelids to meet the American’s earnest gaze, “that you have to tell me about Carstairs Delapore and his father? Or about these ‘lurking shadows’ that are Delapore’s study?”

  The young man frowned, as if the question took him momentarily aback. “Oh, the squeamish may speak of decadence,” he said after a moment, not offhandedly, but as if carefully considering his words. “And some of the practices which Delapore has uncovered are fairly ugly by modern standards. Certainly they’d make my old pater blink, and my poor hidebround brothers.” He chuckled, as if at the recollection of a schoolboy prank. “But at bottom it’s all only legends, you know, and bogies in the dark.”

  “Indeed,” said Holmes, rising, and held out his hand to the young suitor. “I shall learn of this what I can, Mr. Colby. Where might I reach you?”

  “The Excelsior Hotel in Brighton.” The young man fished from his vest pocket a card to write the address upon—he seemed to carry everything loose in his pockets, jumbled together like cabbages in a barrow. “I always stay there,” he explained as he scribbled. “It was how Miss Delapore knew where to reach me. How you can abide to remain in town in weather like this beats me!” And he departed, apparently unaware that not everyone’s grandfather rammed opium down Chinese throats in order to pay the Excelsior’s summer-holiday prices.

  “So what do you think of our American Romeo?” inquired Holmes as the rattle of Colby’s cab departed down Baker Street. “What sort of man does he appear to be?”

  “A wealthy one,” I said, still stung by that careless remark about those who remained in town. “One not used to hearing the word no. But earnest and good of heart, I would say. Certainly he takes a balanced view of these ‘decadent’ studies—to which the Delapores can scarcely object, if they share them.”

  “True enough.” Holmes set letter and note upon the table, and went to the bookcase to draw out his copy of the Court Gazette, which was so interleaved with snipped-out society columns, newspaper clippings, and notes in Holmes’s neat, strong handwriting as to bulge to almost double its original size. “But what are the nature of these folkloric ‘practices’ which are ‘fairly ugly by modern standards’? Ugliness by the standards of a world which has invented the Maxim gun can scarcely be termed bogies in the dark.

  “Carstairs Delapore,” he read, opening the book upon his long arm. “Questioned concerning his whereabouts on the night of the twenty-seventh August, 1890, when the owner of a public house in Whitechapel reported her ten-year-old son Thomas missing; a man of Delapore’s description—he is evidently of fairly unforgettable appearance—seen speaking with the boy that evening. Thomas never found. I thought I recognized the name. Delapore was also questioned in 1873 by the Manchester police—he was in that city, for no discernible reason, when two little mill girls went missing . . . I must say I’m astonished that anyone reported their disappearance. Mudlarks and street urchins vanish every day from the streets of London and no one inquires after them any more than one inquires the whereabouts of butterflies once they flitter over the garden fence. A man need not even be very clever to kidnap children in London.” He shut the book, his eyes narrowing as he turned his gaze to the endless wasteland of brick that lay beyond the window. “Merely careful to pick the dirtiest and hungriest, and those without parents or homes.”

  “That’s a serious conclusion to jump to,” I said, startled and repelled.

  “It is,” Holmes replied. “Which is why I jump to nothing. But Gaius, Viscount Delapore, was mentioned three times in the early reports of the Metropolitan police—between 1833 and 1850—in connection with precisely such investigations, at the same time that he was publishing a series of monographs on ‘Demonic Ritual Survivals Along the Welsh Borders’ for the discredited Eye of Dawn Society. And in 1863, an American reporter disappeared while investigating rumors of a pagan cult in western Shropshire, not five miles from Watchgate village, which lies below the hill upon which Depewatch Priory stands.”

  “But even so,” I said, “even if the Delapores are involved in some kind of theosophistic studies—or white slaving, for that matter—would they not seek rather to get an outsider like Delapore’s niece out of the house, rather than keeping her there as a potential source of trouble? And how would the old man use a pack of occult rubbish to dominate his granddaughter and his son against their will?”

  “How indeed?” Holmes went to the bookcase again, and took down the envelope in which he had bestowed Burnwell Colby’s card. “I, too, found our American visitor—despite his patent desire to disown association with his hidebound and boring family—an ingenuous and harmless young man. Which makes this all the more curious.”

  He held out the envelope to me, and I took it out and examined it as he had. The stock, as he had said, was expensive and the typeface rigidly correct, although the card itself bore slight traces of having been carried about loose in Mr. Colby’s pockets with pens, notes, and photographs of his beloved Judith. Only when I brought it close to examine the small dents and scratches on its surface was I conscious of the smell that seemed to imbue the thick, soft paper, a nauseating mix of frankincense, charred hair, and . . .

  I looked up at Holmes, my eyes wide. I had been a soldier in India, and a physician for most of my life. I knew the smell.

  “Blood,” I said.

  The note Holmes sent that afternoon received an answer within hours, and after we had finished our supper he invited me to accompany him to the home of a friend on the Embankment near the Temple: “A curious customer who may fill in for you some hitherto unsuspected colors in the palette of London life,” he said. Mr. Carnaki was a thin young man of medium height and attenuated build, whose large gray eyes regarded one from behind thick spectacle lenses with an expression it is hard to define: as if he were always watching for something that others do not see. His tall, narrow house was filled with books, even lining the walls of the hallways on both sides, so that a broad-built man would have been obliged to sidle through crabwise, and through the darkened doorways I glimpsed the flicker of gaslight across what appeared to be complex chemical and electrical apparatus. He listened to Holmes’s account of Burnwell Colby’s visit without comment, his chin resting on one long, spidery hand, then rose from his chair and climbed a pair of steps to an upper shelf of one of the many bookcases that walled the small study at the back of the house to which he’d led us.

  “ ‘Depewatch Priory,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘stands on a cliff above the village of Watchgate in the wild hill country on the borders of Wales, where in 1215 King John confirmed the appointment of an Augustinian prior over an existing “hooly howse” of religion said to date back to foundation by Joseph of Arimathea. It appears from its inception to have been the center of a cycle of legends and whispers: indeed, the king’s original intent was apparently to have the place pulled down and salt strewn on its foundations. One Philip of Mundberg petitioned Edward IV, describing the monks there engaged in “comerce wyth daemons yt did issue forth from Hell, and make knowne theyr wants by means of certain drem
es,” but he apparently never reached the king himself and the investigation was dropped. There were repeated accusations of heresy involving the transmigration of the souls of certain priors, rumors which apparently transferred themselves to the Grimsley family, to whom Henry VIII presented the priory in 1540, and surfaced in the 1780s in connection with the Delapores, who succeeded them through marriage.’

  “William Punt”—he tapped the black leather covers of the volume as he set it on the table beside Holmes—“in his Catalogue of Secret Abominations described the place in 1793 as being a ‘goodly manor of gray stone’ built upon the foundations of the Plantagenet cloister, but says that the original core of the establishment is the ruin of a tower, probably Roman in origin. Punt speaks of stairs leading down to a subcrypt, where the priors used to sleep upon a crude altar after appalling rites. When Lord Rupert Grimsley was murdered by his wife and daughters in 1687, they apparently boiled his body and buried his bones in the subcrypt, reserving his skull, which they placed in a niche at the foot of the main stair in the manor house itself, ‘that evil dare not pass.’ ”

  I could not repress a chuckle. “As protective totems go, it didn’t do Lord Rupert much good, did it?”

  “I daresay not,” returned Holmes with a smile. “Yet my reading of the 1840 Amsterdam edition of Punt’s Catalogue leads me to infer that the local population didn’t regard Rupert Grimsley’s murder as particularly evil; the villagers impeded the Metropolitan police in the pursuit of their duties to such effect that the three murderesses got completely away.”

  “Good heavens, yes.” Carnaki turned, and drew out another volume, more innocuous than the sinister-looking tome of abominations: this one was simply a history of West Country families, as heavily interleaved with clippings and notes as was Holmes’s Gazette. “Rupert Grimsley was feared as a sorcerer from Shrewsbury to the Estuary; he is widely reputed to have worked the roads as a highwayman, carrying off not valuables but travelers, who were never seen again. Demons were said to come and go at his command, and at least two lunatics from that section of the Welsh border—one in the early part of the eighteenth century and one as recently as 1842—swore that old Lord Rupert dwelled in the bodies of all the successive Lords of Depewatch.”