by A S Croyle
“No, bells attached to them with string. That’s how they beg for food. They ring for lunch. You see, Lord Hervey, he’s the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Bass told me that one of Hervey’s daughters trained the swans - the ones in the five-sided moat at the palace. She trained them to ring bells by pulling strings, to beg for food. They eat right out of the caretakers’ hands.”
Sherlock turned to me. “So it’s just as Kate said then. They do eat out of someone’s hands. Someone they trust. It would be easy then to poison them.” He turned back to Abnett.”Good lad. Do you know why Mr. Bass left Wells and came here to tend to the royal swans?”
“He said something about his daughter getting hurt in the moat and he couldn’t stand to be there anymore.”
“I see. Where can I find this Matthew Bass?”
He gave us an address near St. Bart’s in one of the lodgings where many of the medical students lived. My brother had resided in a flat there when he was in training. “He knows a doctor who lives round there,” Abnett said. “He was sharing a room with him, I think.”
“Good. Thank you. Good night then, Abnett.”
With that, we left and I strained to keep up with Sherlock as we made our way toward Giltspur Street. The wind was howling and rain beat down so hard, it stung my face as we walked. Amid the gale, we searched and finally found the right location. Sherlock pounded on the door.
“Go away,” said a man from within.
“I need to speak with Matthew Bass.”
“What if he doesn’t want to talk with you?”
Sherlock’s eyebrows arched. “I have word of your daughter, sir.”
The panel snapped open. A man in his late thirties with long, black hair and a rough beard opened it and rubbed his eyes sleepily. “What? What are you going on about?”
“Are you Matthew Bass? The swan keeper? The swan killer?”
The man’s knees gave way. He pitched backward and slumped to a camp bed.
“I am Sherlock Holmes and I need to speak to you about the swans.”
“Not about my daughter?”
“Only incidentally, sir. I understand that your daughter was injured in the moat at Wells Cathedral.”
“Who told you that?”
“Irrelevant. Is it true? What happened? Was she injured in the moat? Or was she attacked by a swan?”
As if some long-repressed anger and rage could keep still no longer, he said, “First it was the dog. And then it was my sweet girl.”
“I don’t understand,” I said quietly.
“You killed the swans for revenge, didn’t you, sir?” Sherlock asked.
Suddenly, finally defeated, Bass’s eyes welled up.
“The damn swans. They were always fine except at breeding time. We warned everyone to stay away then. But the dog got loose and took off and ran into the moat.
“Elton was just playing. A spaniel, he was. He was playing and jumped in the water. Provoked the cob, I guess. He and his lady lost cygnets in some kind of shooting incident earlier in the year. And them cobs, they’re territorial. They attacked him, killed him. Drowned him. We told everyone not to go near them. But dogs are stupid. And some people. A couple boys were rowing one day and they were out near the nesting spot and the male was upset and it went at the boat, tipping it. I went out, waist deep, and helped the boys out of the water.”
“I told you, Sherlock. They can be very defensive if they feel threatened.”
“And then my little girl,” Bass croaked and averted his eyes.
“Yes, yes,” Sherlock said. “Go on.”
“My little girl. She didn’t know better. She addled the eggs in the nest. They were damaged and couldn’t hatch. And the next time she went down by the river... you see, the eggs. We found them in a nearby nest and they were addled, so they couldn’t hatch,” he repeated. “She didn’t mean it.”
“What happened to your daughter?” I whispered.
“Her eyes. The animal poked out her eyes!” he cried, his eyes red now from crying. “I broke its neck. I snapped it. And they fined me! They fired me! The damn swans are more important than people.”
“How did you come to be employed here, tending to the royal swans?” Sherlock asked.
“I used the name of a swankeeper who died a few years ago, before Bishop Hervey took over. My real name is Will Stockett, but they didn’t ask a lot of questions. It was easy. It was all easy. I answered an advertisement and bought some thornapple. And then I... I...” He stuttered and sputtered a moment. “I am not proud of what I did and I know I am a horrible person. I wanted to show them all. I wanted all of them dead, every swan in the empire. My girl can’t see and yet the swans were more important than she was. I wanted to show them.”
“You must come with me. You must-”
I touched Sherlock’s arm. “A word?”
Stockett buried his head in his hands. We moved to a corner of the room. “Sherlock, can’t we just let him go? His little girl is blind. It’s difficult to blame him.”
“But you yourself told me of the fines and penalties for-”
“His little girl is blind,” I repeated. “Because of the swans, she’s blind. Can’t we let him go? Sherlock?”
Sherlock took a deep breath and turned back to Stockett. “Where is your daughter now, sir?”
“In Bristol, with my wife and her parents.”
“Your freedom depends upon your compliance with what I say. It is essential now that you follow my advice in all respects.”
“I don’t understand, Mr. Holmes. I-”
“I believe that the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway now has service to Bristol, sir. I suggest that you get on the next train to join your family.”
“What?”
“I will be round again in 48 hours. Do not be here, sir.”
We left quickly and were once again standing in the cold with the fog swirling at our feet. Sherlock put his hands on my shoulders and asked, “So, Poppy, are you up for a trip to the Cotswolds to solve our next case?”
Chapter 23
Within hours, and after a terrible argument about it with Uncle, we were off to Chippy.
We took the train to Oxford. Then we transferred to the Chipping Norton Railway, which carried us to the depot that linked the town with Kingham via the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway. Sherlock and I both felt the tedium of travel, but we also highly anticipated what we would discover upon our arrival.
As the train pulled into town at nightfall, Sherlock turned to me and said, “Did you know that Sarah Averell Wildes was born here?”
“Who?”
“One of the Salem witches. She was wrongfully convicted, of course, and executed by hanging, though she maintained her innocence and was later exonerated. Her husband’s first wife was one of the primary accusers. Another good example of why not to marry.”
I looked out the window and sighed. Sherlock cared little for trivia, but if it helped him prove a point, he would always manage to find a way to sneak in some minutia from his brain attic to do so.
We found our way to an inn and then set out for a meal, though Sherlock did not wish to eat. He wanted to find Elizabeth Jane Hopgood, the murderer’s sister. But I coaxed him into finding a place to eat by telling him he might be able to get information from the locals. We ended up at the Fox, an ancient stone-built pub near the marketplace. We ordered chipped beef and some ale, but Sherlock immediately began asking people about the Hopgoods. I had barely eaten a mouthful when he yanked at my arm as he downed his ale, saying, “The sister lives on a hilltop in Stow-on-the-Wold, not far from here. We can rent a carriage just down the road from here. Let’s go.”
It was pitch dark and oppressive as we approached the house to which Sherlock had been directed. It was bramble-covered and ominous, but caug
ht up in the adrenalin of the adventure, London seemed dull and distant.
Sherlock knocked on the door and almost immediately a tall, heavily built woman opened it. Her black mane was sprinkled with grey and she wore thick glasses.
When Sherlock introduced himself and said he was looking for Danford Hopgood, she tried to slam the door in our faces, but Sherlock elbowed his way in. “Where is your brother?” he demanded.
“Why do you ask about him?”
“Because he is suspected of murder.”
“He is no murderer. I’ll be damned if I tell you anything!” she screamed.
Sherlock stepped toward her. “Your brother is a mad man.”
“My brother is a brilliant scientist. He will determine how a murderer’s brain works! Just like Lombroso! You don’t know anything. None of you do.”
Unaccustomed to being spoken to by a woman in such a fashion - with the possible exception of myself - Sherlock whirled around, placed his hands on her neck, choking her and pushing her up against a wall. Very deliberately he said, “Where is he?”
For a moment, she stared at him in complete silence. He shoved her away. Then he glanced around the entry and pulled her toward the kitchen. He yanked a lacy curtain from the window, tore off a slim fragment, and tossed it to me. “Bind her feet,” he said as he took another remnant and bound her hands behind her back.
“Sherlock, are you sure we should - ?”
He gave me a stern look, so I protested no further. I followed his instructions and then we began searching through the house. Soon he made his way to the door at the top of the stairs that led to the summer kitchen in the cellar.
He opened it, peered into the darkness and glanced at me. I nodded and followed him down the steps.
Chapter 24
I touched Sherlock’s shoulder. “She mentioned Lombroso, Sherlock, as you did before.” I whispered. “Is it his work that Hopgood is following then?”
“Lombroso is an Italian surgeon. A few years ago, he conducted a postmortem on a serial murderer and rapist. He discovered a hollow part of the killer’s brain, and he proposed that violent criminals were throwbacks to less evolved human types, identifiable by ape-like physical characteristics.”
Sherlock fumbled in the darkness and finally found lanterns and lit several. What we saw when the cellar was illuminated was the most grotesque and frightening display I’d ever witnessed.
On table after table were severed heads. Torsos were tossed in baskets in a corner. Some heads were shaved with markings on them indicating different sections of the brain and the so-called correlating behaviors.
This caught me off-guard in a way that even emergency medical situations had not and I felt myself wobble. Sherlock seized my arm and steered me back toward the stairs. I sat down on the bottom step. As he walked from table to table, he said, “It really began in Italy in 1871 when Lombroso met with a criminal, a man named Giuseppe Villella, a notorious thief and arsonist. Cesare Lombroso is an army doctor, who worked in lunatic asylums and become interested in crime and criminals while studying Italian soldiers. He wanted to pinpoint the differences between lunatics, criminals and normal individuals by examining inmates in Italian prisons.
“Lombroso found Villella interesting,” Sherlock continued, seemingly unaffected by the hideous and gruesome evidence before him. “So, when Villella died, Lombroso conducted a post-mortem and discovered that his subject had an indentation at the back of his skull, which resembled that found in apes. Lombroso concluded that some people are born with a propensity toward crime and were also savage throwbacks to early man.”
Sherlock wandered over to a bookcase along the stone wall. He took a book from the shelf, tapped it and walked over to hand it to me. “Lombroso wrote this,” he said. “The Criminal Man, published just a few years ago. His interest in forensics and crime is interesting but a bit warped. He seems to think that by looking at a skull, by considering palm lines and the size of orbits and cheek bones and so on, one can determine if the person is like an ape, if he’s insensitive to pain, if he craves evil for evil’s sake. Essentially, Lombroso believes that criminality is inherited and that criminals can be identified by physical defects that show them to be savage-like.”
Staring down at the skull of what appeared to be a youth, Sherlock said, “According to Lombroso,” he said, “a thief can be identified by his expressive face and small, wandering eyes. Murderers have cold, glassy stares, bloodshot eyes and big hawk-like noses.” He touched his nose and said, “I shudder to think how he would think of me.
“And rapists have what Lombroso calls ‘jug ears’. He also says that female criminals are more ruthless than males and that they are shorter and wrinkled and have darker hair and smaller skulls than normal women. And ones with prominent lower jaws are supposedly more wicked than all of the men put together. In my opinion, it’s madness.”
“Sherlock, this is... words fail me. We must find this monster. He is the one whose skull should be studied.”
“I concur.”
Chapter 25
Sherlock extinguished the lanterns and we went back upstairs. Sherlock once again attempted to extract information from Hopgood’s sister but she refused to speak. Had I not been there, I believe he would have resorted to tactics a bit more brutal than mere interrogation. When she started screaming, Sherlock gagged her with a dish towel.
He found a box of matches and lit a lamp. He placed that in the middle of the table. He took his revolver from beneath his coat and laid it down on a corner of the table. Then he found a bottle of port and took two glasses from the cupboard.
“What are you doing, Sherlock? Shouldn’t we contact the local - ?”
“We wait. I am certain he will return.”
“How do you suppose he managed to dismember Sir Gray’s body and place it in the coffin? I mean, the cemetery is not hidden by woods or-”
“Kate said she heard voices, which gave Hopgood pause, just long enough for her to get away. I suspect they were passersby and once he was sure that no one was about, he proceeded with his grisly task. The fog covers everything, Poppy. I would guess that he intended to kill Sir Gray all along. He came prepared to do so. Gray had cut off funds. He knew too much. That’s why he followed him. Hopgood did not expect to encounter Kate and she is fortunate to have escaped him. But with Kate’s help, we have arrived at the truth of it.”
He tapped his fingers idly on the table and sipped his wine calmly. I was, on the other hand, extremely nervous and paced the kitchen constantly. Hopgood’s sister was tied up, there were a dozen severed heads beneath me, and we had no idea how dangerous the upcoming encounter would be.
An hour passed, then two. Sherlock finally asked, “What is it? What is bothering you?”
“Bass. Or Stockett. Whatever. I’m wondering why you did not try to bring him to the authorities. And Kate. I hate to see her forced to live like this.”
“As to Mr. Stockett, it was you who persuaded me to let him go. And I agree. Who would it serve? Who needs to know that he is the swan assassin?”
I wondered if he would be so generous had someone killed his bees.
“I care nothing for swans, you understand,” he emphasized. “Unfortunately, Mycroft has no suspect and if no more swans are killed-” His voice trailed off as he shrugged. “Then again, he has more important things to worry about.”
“But if you do not tell him you’ve found the culprit, are you not conceding that you could not solve the case?”
He shrugged again. “And what is bothering you about Kate?”
“I hate that she has to make a living for herself in such a way,” I said.
He thought for a moment. I always thought if I listened hard enough I might hear the grinding of the wheels inside his head. “Did you not tell me that your aunt’s new cook is quite abysmal?”
“And didn’t Kate’s acquaintance say that she is an excellent cook?”
He tapped on the table again and said, “Something to think about.”
I thought back to how kind he had been to Mrs. Hudson even though she had been something of an accomplice in the blackmail scheme crafted by her estranged husband. Sherlock could be quite compassionate at times - if his compassion seemed logical and practical.
At one point, Sherlock looked at me, a serious expression, a pained expression on his face, and his skin almost white and grave. “Poppy,” he said, “about Jonathan
Younger...”
“It’s all right, Sherlock. Don’t give it another thought.”
“But this story is not over yet, Poppy. I think worse dangers than me or Dr. Younger await you. You are so very trusting.”
“What?”
“You must take care to choose carefully. I am not the right man for you to marry. We both know that.”
“Sherlock, I-”
“But I want you to take my advice. Be on your guard. Do not let your head be turned by the likes of Jonathan Younger. Could I but journey through time, far ahead, and know what is in store for you, I might rest more easily. But as of now, I do not know how or where your story will find its end.”
Part of me was desolate. I so wanted to continue to encourage Sherlock, to share in his endeavors. Often I was like a woman hypnotized. But it grieved me to do so, to continue to fawn over him, to long for him, and I knew full well that he had forced himself to become incapable of returning my affection, if he indeed had ever been truly capable of doing so. I must control my feelings. I must move on.
I looked into his frank, misty grey eyes.
“I am convinced, Sherlock, that you care for me deeply, that you always have and that you had my best interests at heart. You were just so very abrupt about Jonathan.”
“What will you do about Jonathan?”
“Do? Nothing. He means nothing to me, Sherlock. Don’t you realize - ?” I stopped short of sharing my deepest fantasies and longing yet again. There was no point. “I shall advise Michael of his friend’s indelicate behavior. I am curious, though, as to why Jonathan pursued me at all. He should have been quite disappointed in his expectations.”
