“What on earth has that to do with it?” I ejaculated.
“My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining light as to the tendencies of a child by the study of the parents. Don’t you see that the converse is equally valid. I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children. This child’s disposition is abnormally cruel, merely for cruelty’s sake, and whether he derives this from his smiling father, as I should suspect, or from his mother, it bodes evil for the poor girl who is in their power.”
“I am sure that you are right, Mr. Holmes,” cried our client. “A thousand things come back to me which make me certain that you have hit it. Oh, let us lose not an instant in bringing help to this poor creature.”
“We must be circumspect, for we are dealing with a very cunning man. We can do nothing until seven o’clock. At that hour we shall be with you, and it will not be long before we solve the mystery.”
We were as good as our word, for it was just seven when we reached the Copper Beeches, having put up our trap at a wayside publichouse. The group of trees, with their dark leaves shining like burnished metal in the light of the setting sun, were sufficient to mark the house even had Miss Hunter not been standing smiling on the doorstep.
“Have you managed it?” asked Holmes.
A loud thudding noise came from somewhere downstairs. “That is Mrs. Toller in the cellar,” said she. “Her husband lies snoring on the kitchen rug. Here are his keys, which are the duplicates of Mr. Rucastle’s.”
“You have done well indeed!” cried Holmes with enthusiasm. “Now lead the way, and we shall soon see the end of this black business.”
We passed up the stair, unlocked the door, followed on down a passage, and found ourselves in front of the barricade which Miss Hunter had described. Holmes cut the cord and removed the transverse bar. Then he tried the various keys in the lock, but without success. No sound came from within, and at the silence Holmes’s face clouded over.
“I trust that we are not too late,” said he. “I think, Miss Hunter, that we had better go in without you. Now, Watson, put your shoulder to it, and we shall see whether we cannot make our way in.”
It was an old rickety door and gave at once before our united strength. Together we rushed into the room. It was empty. There was no furniture save a little pallet bed, a small table, and a basketful of linen. The skylight above was open, and the prisoner gone.
“There has been some villainy here,” said Holmes; “this beauty has guessed Miss Hunter’s intentions, and has carried his victim off.”
“But how?”
“Through the skylight. We shall soon see how he managed it.” He swung himself up onto the roof. “Ah, yes,” he cried, “Here’s the end of a long light ladder against the eaves. That is how he did it.”
“But it is impossible,” said Miss Hunter, “the ladder was not there when the Rucastles went away.”
“He has come back and done it. I tell you that he is a clever and dangerous man. I should not be very much surprised if this were he whose step I hear now upon the stair. I think, Watson, that it would be as well for you to have your pistol ready.”
The words were hardly out of his mouth before a man appeared at the door of the room, a very fat and burly man, with a heavy stick in his hand. Miss Hunter screamed and shrunk against the wall at the sight of him, but Sherlock Holmes sprang forward and confronted him.
“You villain!” said he, “where’s your daughter?”
The fat man cast his eyes round, and then up at the open skylight.
“It is for me to ask you that,” he shrieked, “you thieves! Spies and thieves! I have caught you, have I? You are in my power. I’ll serve you!” He turned and clattered down the stairs as hard as he could go.
“He’s gone for the dog!” cried Miss Hunter.
“I have my revolver,” said I.
“Better close the front door,” cried Holmes, and we all rushed down the stairs together. We had hardly reached the hall when we heard the baying of a hound,31 and then a scream of agony, with a horrible worrying sound which it was dreadful to listen to. An elderly man with a red face and shaking limbs came staggering out at a side door.
“My God!” he cried. “Some one has loosed the dog. It’s not been fed for two days. Quick, quick, or it’ll be too late!”
Holmes and I rushed out, and round the angle of the house, with Toller hurrying behind us. There was the huge famished brute, its black muzzle buried in Rucastle’s throat, while he writhed and screamed upon the ground. Running up, I blew its brains out, and it fell over with its keen white teeth still meeting in the great creases of his neck.32 With much labour we separated them, and carried him, living but horribly mangled, into the house. We laid him upon the drawing-room sofa, and having despatched the sobered Toller to bear the news to his wife, I did what I could to relieve his pain. We were all assembled round him when the door opened, and a tall, gaunt woman entered the room.
“ ‘You villain!’ said he. ‘Where’s your daughter?’ ”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1892
“Mrs. Toller!” cried Miss Hunter.
“Yes, miss. Mr. Rucastle let me out when he came back before he went up to you. Ah, miss, it is a pity you didn’t let me know what you were planning, for I would have told you that your pains were wasted.”
“Ha!” said Holmes, looking keenly at her. “It is clear that Mrs. Toller knows more about this matter than any one else.”
“Yes, sir, I do, and I am ready enough to tell what I know.”
“Then, pray sit down, and let us hear it, for there are several points on which I must confess that I am still in the dark.”
“I will soon make it clear to you,” said she; “and I’d have done so before now if I could ha’ got out from the cellar. If there’s police-court business over this, you’ll remember that I was the one that stood your friend, and that I was Miss Alice’s friend too.
“She was never happy at home, Miss Alice wasn’t, from the time that her father married again. She was slighted like, and had no say in anything; but it never really became bad for her until after she met Mr. Fowler at a friend’s house. As well as I could learn, Miss Alice had rights of her own by will, but she was so quiet and patient, she was, that she never said a word about them, but just left everything in Mr. Rucastle’s hands. He knew he was safe with her; but when there was a chance of a husband coming forward, who would ask for all that the law would give him, then her father thought it time to put a stop on it. He wanted her to sign a paper, so that whether she married or not, he could use her money. When she wouldn’t do it, he kept on worrying her until she got brain-fever,33 and for six weeks was at death’s door. Then she got better at last, all worn to a shadow, and with her beautiful hair cut off; but that didn’t make no change in her young man, and he stuck to her as true as man could be.
“Ah,” said Holmes, “I think that what you have been good enough to tell us makes the matter fairly clear, and that I can deduce all that remains. Mr. Rucastle then, I presume, took to this system of imprisonment?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And brought Miss Hunter down from London in order to get rid of the disagreeable persistence of Mr. Fowler.”
“You thieves. Spies and thieves.”
Artist unknown, Chicago Inter-Ocean, June 12, 1892
“That was it, sir.”
“Running up, I blew its brains out.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1892
“But Mr. Fowler being a persevering man, as a good seaman34 should be, blockaded the house, and, having met you, succeeded by certain arguments, metallic or otherwise, in convincing you that your interests were the same as his.”
“Mr. Fowler was a very kind-spoken, free-handed gentleman,” said Mrs. Toller, serenely.
“And in this way he managed that your good man should have no want of drink, and that a ladder should be ready at the moment when your master h
ad gone out.”35
“You have it, sir, just as it happened.”
“I am sure we owe you an apology, Mrs. Toller,” said Holmes, “for you have certainly cleared up everything which puzzled us. And here comes the country surgeon and Mrs. Rucastle, so I think, Watson, that we had best escort Miss Hunter back to Winchester, as it seems to me that our locus standi36 now is rather a questionable one.”
And thus was solved the mystery of the sinister house with the copper beeches in front of the door. Mr. Rucastle survived, but was always a broken man, kept alive solely through the care of his devoted wife. They still live with their old servants, who probably know so much of Rucastle’s past life that he finds it difficult to part from them. Mr. Fowler and Miss Rucastle were married, by special license, in Southampton the day after their flight, and he is now the holder of a Government appointment in the Island of Mauritius.37 As to Miss Violet Hunter, my friend Holmes, rather to my disappointment, manifested no further interest in her38 when once she had ceased to be the centre of one of his problems, and she is now the head of a private school at Walsall, where I believe that she has met with considerable success.39
1“The Copper Beeches” was published in the Strand Magazine in June 1892 and was the last of the first series of twelve “Adventures” published in that magazine.
2The Daily Telegraph was originally founded by Colonel Sleigh on June 29, 1855, and printed for him by Joseph Moses Levy, owner of the Sunday Times (which was deliberately named after The Times but not connected to it otherwise). When Sleigh proved unable to pay his bills, Levy took over, lowering the price—the Daily Telegraph became the first “penny newspaper” in London—and appointing his son, Edward Levy-Lawson and Thornton Leigh Hunt to serve as editors. The paper was relaunched on September 17, 1855. The reading public early embraced the Daily Telegraph’s colourful style, and within less than a year, Levy’s newspaper was outselling not only The Times but also every other newspaper in England.
3The case occurred between 1885 and 1890 (see Chronological Table), and the reference to “little records of cases” (as contrasted with the “big records of cases” of A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four) must be to Watson’s manuscripts, for the stories themselves had not yet been published. This remark belies the theory that Watson did not start to write the Adventures until after Holmes’s disappearance at the Reichenbach Falls in 1891.
4Holmes’s superior attitude changed when he had to write his own account of “The Blanched Soldier”: “[H]aving taken my pen in my hand, I do begin to realize that the matter must be presented in such a way as may interest the reader.”
5The characteristic to which Holmes refers concerns the mark left when one uses his or her teeth to cut thread. Remsen Ten Eyck Schenck examines this practice in “The Effect of Trades Upon the Body,” quoting Lester Burket’s Oral Medicine in discovering, “Tailors and seamstresses who are in the habit of cutting their thread with their teeth may show a characteristic tooth defect which consists of sharp V-shaped notches in the middle of the incisal [cutting] edge of the incisors.”
6Schenck’s research also turns up the explanation behind this reference; he notes that the tip of a compositor’s left thumb often sported a callus, with an abrasion displayed further down on the “ball” of the thumb. Such markings came about because the composing stick was held in the left hand, and letters of type were placed into it with the right. The left thumb would be used to slide each piece of type into position and hold it snugly against the last piece added.
7Holmes’s hobby of collecting Violets (there are four in the Canon) is noted by many commentators, who often suppose that women so named had some special importance to the detective. Esther Longfellow, writing in 1946, found the supposition “absurd when we face the probability that every tenth woman in England was, and still is, called Violet.”
8Canada achieved independent federation status in 1867, with Nova Scotia as one of its four original confederate members. Yet Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, remained an important British Army and Navy base—one of the most heavily fortified outside Europe—until its dockyard and defences were taken over by the Canadian government in 1906. In addition, Halifax was the North American port of the first transatlantic steamship service, which started in 1840.
9Until late in the nineteenth century, the position of governess was one of the few career options available to single women of the middle class or to women of the upper class whose families’ fortunes had fallen. A governess’s pay was meagre (note Miss Hunter’s previous pay of £4 per month), and the experience could be demeaning: as teacher and nanny to the children of an upper-class household, a governess was expected to act like a lady but was treated like a servant. Yet the servants often despised the governess, because “they give themselves the hairs and hupstarts of ladies and their wages is no better than you nor me,” says Mrs. Blenkinsop in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847). The Quarterly Review, a magazine from that period, described a governess as a person “who is our equal in birth, manners and education but our inferior in worldly wealth.” Some attempt to mitigate the economic drawbacks of the profession was made with the 1841 foundation of the Governesses’ Benevolent Association, which established a system of compensation for governesses too old to work.
The figure of the governess was a popular one in Victorian literature, particularly in novels written by women. In fact, Charlotte Brontë, whose father was a clergyman, worked for some years as a governess, an experience reflected in her fiction. Jane Eyre (1847) features one of literature’s most famed governesses: the homely, orphaned Jane, whose intellect and candor earned the love of the master of the house. While Mr. Rochester treats her with respect, the opposing viewpoint is presented by a group of visiting ladies and gentlemen, who speak scornfully of the profession even though Jane is clearly in the room. “You should hear mama on the chapter of governesses,” the frivolous Blanche Ingram declares. “Mary and I have had, I should think a dozen at least in our day; half of them detestable and the rest ridiculous, and all incubi—were they not, mama?” Her mother obligingly replies, “My dearest, don’t mention governesses; the word makes me nervous. I have suffered a martyrdom from their incompetency and caprice. I thank Heaven I have now done with them!”
The governess also faced possible harassment by her male employer. “Thor Bridge” and “The Solitary Cyclist” both deal with governesses in positions with employers making inappropriate advances. However, for some, the household with an eligible young man was a possible escape route; the visiting Hippolyte Taine wrote in his Notes on England (1872) that a good many well-off men in London kept governesses as their mistresses, and, at least in fiction (Becky Sharp, in Vanity Fair, David Copperfield’s mother, and, indeed, Jane Eyre), the governess often married into the household.
10Those who believe that Violet Hunter held romantic intentions have scrutinised her behaviour in the story, and some see this listing of attributes as a calculated ploy to put herself in a favourable light. “We may be sure [that Violet Hunter] knew of [Holmes’s] French ancestry, of his knowledge of German, of his love for music, and that art was in his blood,” Isaac S. George writes in “Violet the Hunter.” “She simply parades for Holmes’s benefit the talents she feels he would appreciate in a woman as a companion. . . .” Both Lee Shackleford and H. W. Bell take another tack, arguing that Watson was her target, not Holmes. Yet Dorothy Sayers refutes this suggestion in detail. First, she explains, this argument makes the “heartless and abominable suggestion that, at the very moment when his wife lay stricken with a mortal illness, Watson was endeavouring to get up an intrigue with another woman . . .” She goes on to contrast Watson’s description of Hunter with his description of Mary Morstan, finding little positive comment in the former.
11Why did Rucastle dwell upon his “fads” with Miss Hunter? Surely the wearing of distinctive clothing (a uniform) is not an unusual job condition. Had he not mentioned the dress or the “sitting here or there,” her
suspicions would have been lessened and Holmes’s involvement avoided.
12Miss Hunter refers, of course, to the Venetian painter Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, 1477–1570), whose preference for golden auburn colours gave rise to the adjective “titian” and was much admired, according to Richard Lancelyn Green, by the purist Pre-Raphaelite painters of the Victorian era, which included Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) and Sir John Everett Millais (1829–1896). Some Sherlockians point to this comment as another of Miss Hunter’s strategies to gain Holmes’s affections; Richard Asher, in “Holmes and the Fair Sex,” makes note of her “brazen” bit of self-praise, observing acidly, “No doubt she wished to draw Holmes’s attention to her best feature and keep his eyes off her face which Watson records was ‘freckled like a plover’s egg.’ ”
13In the Victorian era, women generally wore their hair long, usually atop the head. Yet short hair was not uncommon, as in the “titus” hairstyle in which hair was cut close around the face and worn in curls. And as long hair could be used to make wigs and hairpieces, middle-class women sometimes even cut off their locks and sold them, as Jo March did in Little Women (1868–1869).
14“It is just here that the lady gives herself away completely,” writes Isaac George, further asserting that Violet Hunter’s purpose was not to employ Holmes but to woo him. Why else, he wonders, would she consult a private detective but then state definitively that she had already made a decision—without even waiting for Holmes to offer advice of any kind?
15Some commentators take this statement to mean that Holmes had a sister or sisters (as with his remark regarding sons in “The Beryl Coronet”).
16Robert C. Burr points out, in “The Long Consultation,” that Violet Hunter arrives at Baker Street at 10:30 A.M. but bids Holmes and Watson “good-night” upon her departure. What has been going on for seven or eight hours?
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 1) (The Annotated Books) Page 53
