“ ‘And how came it in the pond?’
“ ‘Ah, that is a question that will take some time to answer.’ And with that I sketched out to him the whole long chain of surmise and of proof which I had constructed. The twilight had closed in and the moon was shining brightly in the sky before my narrative was finished.
“ ‘And how was it, then, that Charles did not get his crown when he returned?’ asked Musgrave, pushing back the relic into its linen bag.
“ ‘Ah, there you lay your finger upon the one point which we shall probably never be able to clear up. It is likely that the Musgrave who held the secret died in the interval, and by some oversight left this guide to his descendant without explaining the meaning of it. From that day to this it has been handed down from father to son, until at last it came within reach of a man who tore its secret out of it and lost his life in the venture.’39
“And that’s the story of the Musgrave Ritual, Watson. They have the crown down at Hurlstone—though they had some legal bother, and a considerable sum to pay before they were allowed to retain it.40 I am sure that if you mentioned my name they would be happy to show it to you. Of the woman nothing was ever heard, and the probability is that she got away out of England, and carried herself, and the memory of her crime, to some land beyond the seas.”41
THE RITUAL OF THE MUSGRAVES
INTERPRETATION of the Ritual is perhaps not as simple as Holmes’s account suggests.
“What was the month? The sixth from the first.”
The first troublesome matter is the question of what month was indicated. Based on the shadows, H. W. Bell places the events recounted by Holmes near the autumnal equinox. The English legal year begins in March, and therefore, concludes H. W. Bell, if six months is added to March, the autumn month of September is indicated. Yet John Hall, in “What Was the Month?” argues that common sense requires the normal Gregorian calendar be used, and that July—the sixth month from January—would be the proper choice. As confirmation of this interpretation, he points out that Brunton desperately requested a fortnight’s additional time at the manor; the events recounted took place in mid-June, and he wanted to remain employed until July.
Historical events also fall in line with Hall’s theory: The Ritual must have been composed shortly after the defeat of Charles I at Naseby on June 14, 1645. Eleven days were “lost” when the Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1752, and therefore if Sir Ralph Musgrave waited a few weeks after the battle at Naseby to compose the Ritual, it would, in modern dates, have been composed in the middle of July.
“How was it stepped? North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one, and so under.”
In order to study the “traverse,” as Edward Merrill terms it in “For the Sake of the Trust”: Sherlock Holmes and the Musgrave Ritual, one must make assumptions about both the shape of the house around which Holmes (and Brunton) walked (and in particular the location of the “old door”) and the situation of the house on the property (that is, in which direction it “faced.”)
It is built in the shape of an L, the long arm being the more modern portion, and the shorter the ancient nucleus from which the other has developed.
First, scholars suggest several choices for the shape of the house, broadly interpreting the “shape of an L.”
Possible shapes of Hurlstone.
Three of the proposed shapes permit the pacing to have been carried out as described, while the fourth admittedly requires a “revisionist” view:
1.Figure A shows the “traditional” view, which requires the presence of a window in the west wall to satisfy Holmes’s description.
2.Figure B has the last steps paced inside the house and hardly can be called L-shaped.
3.Figure C, a “revisionist” theory, amends the “west” to “east,” on the basis of Watson’s handwriting.
4.Finally, Figure D shows Edward Merrill’s suggestion, which neatly explains the description “centre of this old part” but again plays loose with the phrase “shape of an L.”
All four proposals ultimately put Holmes at a stone-paved passage with an opening to the west and a stone stair descending to a cellar. “What matter” says Merrill, “if, to arrive there, we must (1) accept a long, narrow wing as a reasonable shape for a manor house [Figure A], or (2) change a preposition from ‘to’ to ‘over’ [Figure B], or (3) agree that an interval of twenty-five to thirty feet is ‘almost to the wall’ [Figure C], or (4) adopt a broad construction of the term ‘centre of this old part’ [Figure D].”
Once the shape of the house is established, there are eight possible emplacements (rotations) for the house:
Possible layouts of Hurlstone.
In each case the shaded portion is an ancient nucleus. Nicholas Utechin, in “Hurlstone and the Ritual,” examines each plan with care, comparing the Ritual directions and Holmes’s observations to the plan. He swiftly eliminates Plans 3, 5, and 7 on the basis of the wall lengths required to carry out the walking directions; Plan 8 fails because the oak would no longer be “right in front of the house.” Plan 1 makes nonsense of the “left, right, right” directions. Plan 2 he finds “aesthetically . . . not pleasing.” As between Plans 4 and 6, Utechin prefers Plan 6, while Edward Merrill opts for Plan 4, on the grounds of personal preference. Both admit, however, that we have “come into those realms of conjecture, where the most logical mind may be at fault” (“The Empty House”).
1“The Musgrave Ritual” was published in the Strand Magazine in May 1893 and in Harper’s Weekly (New York) on May 13, 1893.
2The name “Boxer” was used in England as a generic name for any centre-fire cartridge, after Colonel Boxer, R.A., in 1867. Gun enthusiasts debate at length whether such cartridges were available for pistols and whether they were available in sufficiently small calibre to produce the “handwritten” decoration on the wall—or would rather have blown away the entire wall!
3For Victoria Regina, or Queen Victoria.
4See “The ‘Gloria Scott,’ ” note 2 for a discussion of this docket.
5In A Study in Scarlet, Chapter 2, Watson writes, “Nothing could exceed [Holmes’s] energy when the working fit was upon him; but now and again a reaction would seize him, and for days on end he would lie upon the sofa in the sitting-room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night.”
6Most chronologists tend to ignore the issue of when Holmes sat with Watson to tell him the tale of “The Musgrave Ritual.” In light of this remark and Holmes’s later comment “You see me now when my name has become known far and wide,” this scene clearly occurs no earlier than 1887, the date Watson’s first efforts were published (D. Martin Dakin puts his estimate at the winter of 1888). While logic might suggest that Holmes was speaking at some date after 1891, when the Adventures were published, the detective was in fact absent from 1891 until 1894 (“The Empty House”), whereas “The Musgrave Ritual” was first published in 1893. Therefore, this conversation between Holmes and Watson must have taken place before 1891, when only A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four had been published.
7Vamberry is identified by several scholars with Arminius, or Armin, Vambery (Hermann Vamberger, 1832–1913), a Hungarian professor of Oriental languages at the University of Buda-Pesth and a renowned wine collector. In his twenties he travelled throughout Armenia and Persia for several months, disguised in native dress, writing about his experiences in such books as Sketches of Central Asia (1868), The Life and Adventures of Arminius Vambery (1884), and The Story of My Struggles (1904). According to David Pelger, Vambery travelled to London in 1885, where he spent three weeks lecturing to the public on the Russian threat in Central Asia. He and Holmes may have met then. The character of Professor Van Helsing in the work Dracula is said by some to be drawn from Vambery, whom Bram Stoker may have consulted for his expertise on Romania and vampirism.
8Aluminium crutches were certainly not commonly available as medical devices at the time
of “The Musgrave Ritual.” In 1886, only 15 tonnes of aluminium were produced worldwide, and the modern technique for producing aluminium was not invented until 1886. Before the “Bayer Process” for commercial smelting was developed in 1888, aluminium was far more precious than gold or silver. By 1900, production had risen to 8,000 tonnes, and aluminium became a common industrial metal.
9D. Martin Dakin points out that the native name for the Abominable Snowman is “yeti” and suggests that what Holmes really said was “the wrinkled yeti of the club foot and his abominable life.”
10Several other cases may be assigned to this “pre-Watson” period: the matter of Mortimer Maberley (“The Three Gables”), the Farintosh case (“The Speckled Band”), and the forgery case (A Study in Scarlet—brought to Holmes by Lestrade). In dangling before Watson the “tantalizing references” of still others, suggests Vincent Starrett in his monumental The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, the detective may very well have been engaging in a bit of sport by proving to his “Boswell” how much he still did not know.
11How Sherlock Holmes spent his early postgraduate years, between his years at “university” and the time of his move to his Montague Street lodgings, is the subject of much speculation. A number of scholars posit a visit to America during the period, explaining Holmes’s familiarity with things American and his friendship with Wilson Hargreave of New York (“The Dancing Men”). Others take literally Watson’s remark in “A Scandal in Bohemia” (“The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime”) and credit Holmes with a brief acting career. Dorothy L. Sayers thinks that Holmes spent some time at a German university, vacationing in France and Italy (improving his evident language skills), while several writers believe that Holmes worked briefly as a journalist (evidenced by his several appearances in print) and cabdriver (explaining his intimate knowledge of London’s streets).
12Michael Harrison, in The London of Sherlock Holmes, puts Holmes’s early London residence at No. 26, Montague Street, Russell Square, a four-storey house that was subsumed by the Lonsdale Hotel sometime around 1900. He reaches this conclusion on the basis that No. 24, Montague Street, next door, was leased by one “Mrs. Holmes” in 1875. “It would be stretching coincidence too far to assume that Mrs. Holmes was not related in some way to young Mr. Holmes, and we may assume that the lady took the house in Montague Street to provide a home for Sherlock when he should come down from the university and begin his professional career in London.”
13The core of the British Museum’s original holdings consisted of the vast collection—a museum in its own right—of Sir Hans Sloane, who sold it to the nation for far less than its real value upon his death in 1753. (See “The Three Garridebs,” note 20, for more on Sloane.) Sloane’s collection, comprising valuable prints, drawings, and manuscripts as well as fossils, precious stones, dried plants, and human and animal skeletons, was housed along with the Harleian library (a collection of legal documents compiled by Robert Harley, the first Earl of Oxford) and Sir Robert Cotton’s library of Greek, Hebrew, and Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in a house once belonging to the dukes of Montague. The museum was opened to the public in 1759. In its early years, the British Museum was, in historian Roy Porter’s words, “ill-managed and inaccessible”; in fact, the seventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica notes that the fields behind the museum were once “so solitary, that they were usually selected as the place for deciding what were called affairs of honour.” Throughout the nineteenth century, however, the museum went through several crucial expansions and made many important acquisitions, including the Rosetta Stone, sculptures from the Parthenon, and the books of George III’s library. By 1883, the natural history exhibits were moved offsite to a location in South Kensington, ultimately becoming the separate Museum of Natural History in 1963; the British Library was split off as a distinct organisation in 1973.
14Although he does not say so, one imagines Holmes ensconced in the “Reading Room” of the British Museum, which opened in 1857 and was originally accessible only to those visitors with a “reader’s ticket.” (It was opened to the general public in 2000.) Every reader was provided with a chair, a folding desk, a small hinged shelf for books, pens, and ink, a blotting-pad, and a peg for his hat. On a visit to the Reading Room in the mid-1970s, this editor obtained a brochure from the Reading Room listing famous readers, including Karl Marx but not including Holmes. When a guard who appeared quite ancient was questioned about this omission, he curtly stated that he had “never seen Holmes here.”
15Sadly, the first two are unknown. Note that “The ‘Gloria Scott’” preceded the period about which Holmes is speaking.
16This remark, and Musgrave’s aristocratic ancestry, led many scholars to conclude that Holmes attended Oxford. See “The ‘Gloria Scott,’” note 3.
17A younger branch of the family.
18David L. Hammer, in For the Sake of the Game, identifies “Hurlstone” as “Danny,” located in West Sussex, the family seat of the Campion family. William John Campion and the Rev. John Goring (see note 36, below) were the two largest landholders in West Sussex in 1867, according to Kelly’s Directory.
19That is, windows with their panes divided by a vertical bar.
20By which he presumably meant that he was one of the two Members of Parliament elected at large to represent the parliamentary division of western Sussex.
21Holmes and Musgrave were never more than “slight acquaintance[s]”; thus it is possible that the struggling young detective saw not a social visit but a business opportunity when Musgrave walked through his door. June Thomson speculates that Holmes may have charged Musgrave a fee for his services, pointing to his “living by my wits” remark as “possibly a hint that he had turned professional and expected to be paid.”
22To raise and protect game for purposes of sport.
23October through January, during which the shooting of pheasant is legal in Great Britain.
24The notion of “the butler did it” is a popular literary device in mystery novels, owing in large part to issues of class. In Victorian England in particular, middle- and upper-class reliance on domestic staff (especially in country manors such as Musgrave’s) was so absolute, and trust in the loyalty of one’s servants so necessary, that many employers privately harboured fears of betrayal or even class revolt. That anxiety is capitalised upon in “whodunnit” tales in which the butler, given his position of authority over the household, quiet obsequiousness, and ability to move easily around the house, often seems the “ideal culprit,” as noted in The Oxford Companion of Crime and Mystery Writing. “The Musgrave Ritual” is cited there as the earliest example of a story in which a butler may have been involved in foul play. Still, in many such stories, the butler-as-suspect device is more often than not used as a literary red herring, meant to tease readers and manipulate the plot. “In fact,” the Oxford Companion contends, “there are surprisingly few detective novels in which the butler is actually guilty of a crime.” In Dilys Winn’s charming essay “The Butler,” retired butler Mr. John Mills explains the public’s easy assumption that “the butler did it”: “ ‘Oh, I expect that’s because we did everything else.’ ”
25By this technical term Musgrave refers to the family coat of arms and its details.
26If this were Musgrave’s view of the importance of the Ritual, why then did he bring it with him to Montague Street? Why would Brunton read the Ritual at night, when he risked discovery, rather than during the day when Musgrave was out?
27In the Strand Magazine and American editions, the phrase “and the outhouses” is replaced by “from cellar to garret.” Perhaps Watson realized later that Musgrave’s search had been less than thorough.
28A lake, pond, or marsh.
29Holmes’s perception of the Welsh temperament may have arisen from the somewhat embattled history of Wales, a rugged, individualistic land seemingly constantly under siege: by the Romans, by the English (Wales beca
me a part of England in 1536), and by cultural British impositions such as language, law, Puritanism, and industrialisation. The sheep-farming nation did not take too well to the Industrial Revolution and its push toward coal mining; the Rebecca Riots of 1843, in which poor farmers, dressed in women’s clothing, destroyed toll booths to protest road tolls, were but one manifestation of that conflict. (The “Rebecca” was taken from the Bible: “And they blessed Rebecca and said: Let thy seed possess the gates of those who hate thee.”)
Religious tension was another constant, since many Welsh resented having to tithe one-tenth of their incomes to the Church of England when they had established their own denomination, the Calvinist Methodist Church. British displeasure with the obstinacy of Welsh nonconformity was responsible in part for the scathing indictments of the 1847 Report of the Commissioners for Education, which not only lambasted the Welsh educational system but also depicted the Welsh (particularly women) as slovenly, morally corrupt, ignorant, and promiscuous. Given all that, it seems likely that Holmes’s description of Rachel Howells as “fiery and passionate” was not meant as much of a compliment.
30Edgar W. Smith points out that when “The Musgrave Ritual” was first published in the Strand Magazine, May 1893, this couplet (“What was the month? . . .”) was not present; it first appeared in the English book text, while the American editions, for reasons unknown, have followed the Strand text.
31T. S. Eliot paraphrases the Ritual in Murder in the Cathedral:
Thomas: Who shall have it?
Tempter: He who will come.
Thomas: What shall be the month?
Tempter: The last from the first.
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 74
