With that she handed me the envelope. I was at once struck by the disparity between the quiet but self-possessed manner of the schoolmistress and the deliberation of the ill-educated hand in her brother’s writing. I should hardly have thought them brother and sister unless I had been assured of it.
I read the single sheet of paper carefully. It certainly seemed like a letter, for the address of the sender was at the top. “The Old Light, Sutton Bridge, Boston Deeps.” It is common knowledge that the Boston Deeps remain the one navigable channel through the shallow and silted waters of The Wash. The sea has receded for centuries on that part of the Lincolnshire coast. The channel is little used now, I believe, except as a temporary anchorage for the coastal trade. I had supposed the land to be so flat, like the rest of East Anglia, as to make a lighthouse something of a rarity. Presumably, this light at Sutton Cross was a warning to ships of the point at which the Boston Deeps give way to treacherous sandbanks.
I glanced at the foot of the page and saw printed in uneven capitals the name of Abraham Chastelnau. It is an unusual surname for an Englishman. Yet it reminded me that East Anglia had become the home of Protestant Huguenot craftsmen, fleeing from France at a time of religious persecution two hundred years earlier. They were industrious and law-abiding folk who had done well in their new home.
The writer’s appeal was addressed to “Dear Doctor.” Who that might be, I could not tell.
I am a man that is afflicted with evil beyond endurance. I have lived with it many years and once or twice thought I had come out of. But I was wrong. I have heard that in days gone by a holy man might have helped me. I once thought I had found his secret but now it is lost again. If I could take a wife I might be better for it. The truth is I bear the brand upon me and no woman could tolerate the company of such a man. I cannot hide what I am and none will come near me. I need a physician who can do miracles. If you are that man please write what the cost will be.
Your respectful servant,
Abraham Chastelnau.
I read this through and then laid the paper down.
“I hoped when I read it that perhaps he had heard of you and your friend,” said Miss Chastelnau softly, “But I cannot tell who this was meant for. Surely it was someone like you, for he knew no doctor at Sutton Cross.”
I looked at it again. It was a strange letter in more ways than one. The handwriting showed a semi-literate deliberation. Yet the composition of the sentences betrayed a certain education. Here was a man who wrote “physician” rather than “doctor” or “afflicted with” rather then “suffering from.” No doubt Abraham Chastelnau lacked instruction. Yet he had heard of holy men in days gone by. From whom had he got this piece of history? Here was a man who could scarcely write and yet, on the few occasions when he did so, apparently expressed himself in a way that suggested some familiarity with those who had received a schooling. Had the letter been dictated to him in part?
“There are many unanswered questions here, Miss Chastelnau. If the letter was at the back of a drawer, how long had it been there? When did your brother write it, for there is no date upon it, and did he truly intend to send it to anyone? Will you allow my colleague Mr Sherlock Holmes to read these lines?”
Alice Chastelnau nodded. Holmes, in his turn, glanced down the page. He stretched his legs towards the fireplace while he read it again, more slowly. Before he could give an opinion, we were interrupted by Mrs Hudson’s knock and the arrival of the silver tray and table linen. After tea had been poured and the sandwiches handed round, our landlady closed the curtains against the gathering fog and retired. The gas was now lit and shone brightly on the white cloth, the glimmer of china and metal. Holmes, turned to our visitor.
“I think you must help us a little more, Miss Chastelnau. There are two distinct matters here. Your brother, if I may also call him so, is troubled in spirit. Hence the letter which we have just read. Since writing that, he and your younger brother have disappeared. Do you believe that these two things are connected? Or is it only one of them that requires our advice?”
She looked at him, directly and expressionlessly.
“I cannot tell you, Mr Holmes. That is why I am here. Because my brothers are my half-brothers, they are comparative strangers to me. My father, John Chastelnau, was an oil-cake manufacturer, supplying the dairy farmers with food for their cattle. He married a second time after my mother died. When Abraham, the elder half-brother, was born I was sixteen. I had been unwell for more than a year. A touch of consumption was suspected, the very illness which took my mother from us. My step-mother found lodgings on the coast near King’s Lynn and I recuperated there for several months. A little while later Abraham was born, she returned home and I left for instruction at Miss Openshaw’s Academy in Mablethorpe. I remained there subsequently as her assistant teacher. After she died four years ago, I was employed by her trustees.”
“You are to be congratulated,” said Holmes gently, “Pray continue.”
“My life has been very different to that of my brothers and our ages are some years apart. They remained in the little coastal village of Sutton Cross. At first they followed my father in the trade of making oil-cake for cattle. With the draining of the fens and the coming of dairy farming, his works at Sutton Cross had been profitable and he employed a dozen men. With such farming in decline and cheaper animal foods brought in by the new railway, my brothers found it a meagre inheritance.”
It seemed evident that there was no close relationship between the sister and the two brothers. This allowed Sherlock Holmes to slip the leash.
“If you wish us to investigate this disappearance, Miss Chastelnau, we should be obliged for whatever else you can tell us about your brothers. In the first place, what manner of men are they? I do not wish to be peremptory with you. However, if a search is to be successful, it must be pursued with urgency. In these mysteries the scent soon grows cold.”
She remained so composed under this warning that, had we not known of her distance from the two men, I should at length have thought Miss Chastelnau quite without feeling.
“I have had little to do with them, Mr Holmes, but that is not a matter of indifference. Like many brothers and sisters, our lives have been lived apart, in different worlds. Yet I will be frank with you. I am aware that they have not been popular in the district. I believe there was once a quarrel and some violence. As to their dispositions, both my brothers are by nature reclusive. Abraham prefers his own company and Roland resents any curiosity on the part of those around him.”
“And how do they come to be keepers of the Old Light?”
“Their troubles began after my father’s death, more than ten years ago. His oil-cake manufactory did not long survive him. The old building by the river bridge stood empty for a while and then became a warehouse. After that my brothers were employed at the Old Light. For many years now it has only been in use as a simple beacon. Abraham and Roland have acted as keepers and in return they have had a roof over their heads. It is a strange life. They are hardly a mile from the village and yet surrounded only by mudflats and quicksands, cut off by the sea for several hours out of every twelve.”
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “you could tell us something more of the Old Light.”
“It is a foreshore light, on the silt at the mouth of the estuary. The wooden supports raise it some eighteen feet above the low-water mark. It stands a mile or so downstream from the bridge. There is an iron ladder from the beach to a door at the level of the barrack-room. The area around it is marsh and sandbanks, with quicksand here and there. They call that part of it ‘the quivering sands:’”
“And what of the village?” I asked.
“Sutton Cross is built on the old Roman sea wall. It had the first road bridge across the river estuary, built fifty years ago. Before that, the river could only be crossed by fording it. Now there is also a new iron bridge, carrying the Midland and Great Northern Railway from Spalding in Lincolnshire into Norfolk. Everything
downstream from the bridge is marsh and sandbank, dangerous to boats and hunters alike. The village has grown a good deal since the river was bridged, though the inn and the old church were there centuries ago.”
Holmes slipped his hand into his pocket and stared thoughtfully at the fire. He smiled.
“I was once a visitor at Sutton Cross for several days, Miss Chastelnau. It was one of Professor Jebb’s undergraduate reading parties from Cambridge. Just before the final examinations for the Classical Tripos. I recall that there is a river-bank footpath on the Lincolnshire side of the bridge, just by the inn. It follows the stream as far as the mudflats of the estuary. At that point, I recall, there used to be a light on either bank, both in Lincolnshire and in Norfolk.”
Miss Chastelnau nodded.
“Until fifty years ago two lights were needed to guide vessels from the sea into the river as far as up as Wisbech. Now the silt and the receding sea have made such navigation impossible. With a bridge standing across the river a mile from its mouth there is no scope for coastal trade and little demand. Only the Old Light on the Lincolnshire bank is kept in use. It has a single beam directed seaward to advise ships at anchor in the Boston Deeps to stand clear. Even in that anchorage there are few enough vessels of any size nowadays.”
“And the church beacon?” Holmes inquired, “I recall from my visit a quite charming medieval parish church with a high turret forming one corner of the old tower. There was a spiral staircase in the turret and a lantern at the top of the tower which must have pre-dated any lighthouse. Is that still in use?”
“Not as a guide to shipping. It would not carry so far. Its purpose, in conjunction with the Old Light, is as a landmark for eel-catchers and wild-fowl hunters on the mudbanks. The sands are dangerous, particularly after dark or in fog.”
“Very good. Now may we return to your brothers and my question, which I think you have not quite answered? What manner of men are they?”
“Roland is the younger,” she said simply, “The young people in the village taunt him as a stilt-walker.” She turned to me. “Perhaps you know what that means on the coast of the Wash, Dr Watson?”
“I have no idea.”
“Roland is called a stilt-walker because he is an enemy to change, even when others welcome it. The sea on that coast has been receding for centuries. Land is reclaimed from time to time by warping, as they call it. Sections of the marsh and sands are enclosed and dried out. They become pasture in the possession of sheep breeders or dairy farmers. They are lost to those who have always treated them as common land. The old fowlers, fishermen, goose-breeders. Centuries ago these men roamed the treacherous flats and sands by going on stilts. For years now they have been a dying breed. Their territory is stolen from them, even by the railway companies who have built embankments across the marsh and caused large sections of it to dry out. In short, to be called a stilt-walker is to be despised by the younger men.”
“And what of your elder brother, the author of the letter?”
Miss Chastelnau thought for a moment and then spoke carefully.
“I know he is lonely. I fear that John Bunyan’s giant, Despair, is his companion. There is nothing of Roland in him. They both live by what they can get, by what they can make, hunt and catch. Yet Abraham also lives in a world of dreams and legends, scraps of history and romance. Would that he could find comfort in such things but they all seem to fail him.”
“Yet it is admirable that he should dream,” said Holmes abruptly, sitting upright, “Are they loving brothers?”
“No,” she said quietly, “I think they are not. Force of circumstance obliges them to share a single life in the barrack-room of the Old Light. I have no close knowledge but I think it is a life of indifference at the best.”
She drew herself up in her chair as though she had come to the end of the matter. There was a pause.
“That will not quite do.” said Holmes gently, “Unless I am much mistaken, there is something more to this mysterious disappearance. Something which you know and which, as yet, we have not heard. That will not do, Miss Chastelnau, if we are to be of service to you. Come now, pray let us have the rest of this most interesting account. ”
She blushed a little but looked straight at him.
“Mr Holmes, you have already mentioned the old church at Sutton Cross, the turret tower with a winding staircase to the roof and the beacon. After dark it still guides hunters and fishermen going to their nets or traps on the mudflats or the marsh. If a man can see that lantern and the foreshore lighthouse, he can judge his position on the flats long after dark. He can find his way home even when the tide is racing at his heels or in the fog. Men depend upon those two lights. By this time of autumn, fog and mist are as much the enemy as the incoming sea and the quivering sands.”
She paused and for the first time showed a moment’s difficulty in continuing her story. Then she resumed.
“Last Sunday, after Evensong, the sexton and the rector went up the tower in the dusk to light the lantern. Twilight was coming on but it was not quite dark. A mist was gathering with the incoming tide, coming down like a curtain across the shore. It had not quite reached the level of the marsh. As the two men began to climb the stone steps of the winding stairs, they heard a gunshot.”
“A shot of what kind?”
“A shotgun, Mr Holmes, fired from somewhere on the marshes. It is not uncommon by daylight but unusual in the dusk, except as a signal. By the time the two men came out on to the lead of the flat roof, the incoming tide was running fast, as it does across the mud-banks. The narrowing of the estuary channels it in. Yet the worst of it, Mr Holmes, is that the marsh and the mudflats may look level but they seldom are. You may stand on a stretch of uncovered sand, where the sea is a hundred yards out, and you may think yourself safe. But the ripples have outflanked you. Your retreat is already cut off by the depth of water gathering at your back or by the softness of the flats where the tide has percolated below, undermining the firmness and turning it into quicksand. Then the sea comes rushing in on either side of you, sometimes as fast as a man can run. All this is a hundred times worse in the dusk. You see?”
“Entirely.”
“Anyone on the marsh or the flats by that time last Sunday evening was in peril. The sexton lit the beacon at once. The Old Light was already flashing. Then Mr Gilmore, the rector, and the sexton saw two men on the soft mud, below the mist that was coming with the tide. It was so far off that, with daylight fading, it was hard to tell who they were. But it seemed that they were fighting. One man appeared to seize the other and they fell together. The second man got up and ran off but the first caught him and threw him down again. Or so it seemed. The dusk thickened and the mist drew round them but a struggle of some kind went on. The mud was so soft and so slippery and they fell so often that, if there was a fight, neither seemed able to win it. There was nothing that the rector and the sexton on the roof of the tower could do, even at the risk of their own lives. They were too far off.”
“Did they think, perhaps, that these were two young fellows playing the fool?” I asked.
“No man who knew the sands would do so in such a place, Dr Watson.”
“Very well.”
“They were too far away by that time for Mr Gilmore or the sexton even to tell their ages. Yet, since then, neither of my brothers has been seen. It was the following morning, after the tide turned, that two policemen went to the Old Light. A Tynemouth collier, at anchor across the water, had seen the beam of the Old Light fail an hour or so before dawn. When I came from Mablethorpe, they helped me to climb the ladder and I was able to get into the barrack-room. There lay the letter in the table drawer.”
Now that she had come to the true end of her story, there was a moment’s silence, broken by Holmes.
“And there was nothing else that you noticed when you went into the barrack-room next day?”
“Abraham’s jacket was hanging behind the door. I went through the pockets. There wa
s a piece of a pebble in one pocket.”
“What sort of pebble?”
“I should not have bothered with it—I should not even have noticed it—except that he had folded it carefully in a piece of paper. I thought at first that the paper might have a message on it. There was none, only a pebble.”
“Where is it now?”
“I took it with me. It could not possibly be of use to the police.”
“I fear you may be in error as to that, Miss Chastelnau. Do you have it with you now?”
She reached into the pocket of her dress and took out the folded paper which, as she had said, was quite blank. I got up and stood beside Holmes as he unwrapped the pebble. Before us lay what I can only describe as a small piece of clay-coated grit or possibly a rough pebble from the shoreline. It was the size of my thumb-nail, certainly no larger.
Holmes stared at it for a moment longer and then again spoke slowly to our client, as I may now call her.
“With your permission, Miss Chastelnau, I should like to retain this item for a few hours in order to examine it. You must return to Mablethorpe tonight, I believe. We shall see you safely to King’s Cross station. You may depend upon Dr Watson and I being in Sutton Cross by noon tomorrow. I will bring the pebble with me then. I fear that I cannot assure you what the outcome of this mystery will be. However, from what you have told us, I have every confidence that the riddle of your brothers’ disappearance will be resolved within the next three days.”
“Of what possible use to you can a muddy pebble be?”
“Had it not been wrapped with such care, I should probably have thought it of no use whatever. However, such careful treatment reminds me that this is hard stone, though it came apparently from a bed of soft clay to which it did not belong. I do not call that conclusive of anything—but in the light of all the other evidence it is suggestive of something.”
Sherlock Holmes and the King's Evil: And Other New Tales Featuring the World's Greatest Detective Page 6
