Sherlock Holmes and the King's Evil: And Other New Tales Featuring the World's Greatest Detective

by Donald Thomas

  Roland Chastelnau, had he escaped whatever death overtook him, need only have returned to the Old Light and slid the thin iron plates of the shutters to their original position. Roland cannot have expected that Mr Gilmore and his sexton should have seen the fight—or horseplay—on the sands but even that evidence was conclusive of very little. From the facts available, Abraham Chastelnau’s death would surely have been recorded as a tragedy of tide and darkness and of his own unaccountable miscalculation.

  6

  With that we have the whole story,“ I said, almost an hour later. By now the tide was rushing and swirling below us among the wooden legs of the barrack-room. Holmes looked at me thoughtfully.

  “You are to be congratulated, Watson. It is your case and you have marshalled the facts in such a way that I am quite sure Inspector Wainwright and our friend Lestrade will be among the first to congratulate you upon your conclusions.”

  There was something in his tone that I did not quite like, hinting a little too much at irony. Just then, however, I cared less about congratulations than the opportunity to sleep. There seemed to be no food in the barrack-room, other than cocoa made with hot water. However, I have long thought that a man can do without food for quite a while provided he has sufficient sleep—and he may do without sleep for a time so long as he is adequately fed. That being so, I made myself as comfortable as possible on the barrack-room bunk, which curved slightly to follow the wall of the lighthouse.

  I was aware that Holmes was still moving about restlessly and I believe, before I fell into a deep sleep, that I was sufficiently conscious to know that he had made his way up the internal ladder to the lantern-room. I did not hear what he was doing, indeed he could have dismantled the entire lighthouse dome without disturbing me. When I woke again, it was after midnight and there was no further sound of water on the sand below us. By his own standards, Holmes had shown extreme patience in allowing me to sleep for what must have been an hour or two.

  “Watson!” I think it was the sound of the bunk creaking which provoked this summons, “I should be obliged if you would come and give your opinion in a small matter.”

  I sat up and looked for the shoes I had taken off. In a minute or two I climbed the ladder and was staring in some dismay at the dismemberment of the lantern-room clock-case. The mechanism was still functioning, so far as I could see, but Holmes had extracted several pieces of the wooden framework which were now lying on the log-book table.

  It was plain that, as so often, he had not been to bed. His face was pale as parchment but his eyes in their dark sockets were all the brighter for that.

  “Tell me, Watson, if you were possessed of some small treasure in such a place as this, where would you choose to hide it?”

  “I suppose that would depend from whom I wanted to hide it.”

  “From all the world—but most of all from your friends.”

  “Holmes, is this some matter to do with the clockwork mechanism?”

  “No. Why should it be?”

  “Very well. I should not leave it in the drawers or cupboards. There are not many of them and it would quite soon be found. Perhaps I would hide it somewhere in the mechanism of the lantern but that mechanism must be in motion twenty-four hours every day and seven days every week throughout the year. Moreover, according to Wainwright, the lantern and the reflectors are usually cleaned every few days or so, even the panes of the glass dome are polished.”

  “So far you have only explained where you would not hide it.”

  “I should prefer a place where the mechanism which is never halted might conceal it. Since you have pillaged so much of the clock case, I suppose that is where I should choose.”

  “Well done, Watson! We shall make a criminal investigator of you yet.”

  I looked at the pieces of wood, the clutter of screws and little bolts, anonymous items of brass and iron on the table. Though the machinery which regulated the reflectors was working constantly, there were convenient spaces within the wooden case, as there are in any long case clock.

  Holmes watched my eyes and read my thoughts.

  “Put your hand up into the clock-hood, behind the dials and just below the drum that winds the clock-weight. You shall see what you shall see.”

  I felt—and found a narrow wooden ledge that ran round four sides of the interior of the case.

  “There is a ledge an inch or so wide but there is nothing on it.”

  “What purpose does it serve?”

  “There is nothing resting upon it. It helps to brace the structure, that is all.”

  “Not of great interest?”

  “I would hardly think so.”

  “Put your fingers under the ledge, where it runs along the rear of the case.”

  “It feels more like metal at that point, presumably to strengthen it. The other sides are made of wood.”

  “Now push upwards on the metal piece.”

  I did so, and felt that length of the ledge lifting clear. Holmes watched me closely as I brought it out.

  “If I were to choose a hiding place,” he said thoughtfully, “I should choose also to make the object appear part of the structure of the building or the mechanism. An item that is regularly seen and therefore never examined. Something that, even if examined, would in this case appear as part of the clock case.”

  I could feel that a man of modest ability as a carpenter might cut away as much of the wooden ledge at the rear as would accommodate the strip of metal I now held in my hand. Even someone who inadvertently lifted it out might think that it had been inserted merely to brace the inner support.

  The length of corroded metal which now lay on the log-book table looked like a piece of scrap which had suffered from wind and weather. Corrosion had left the ends rough and uneven. It was a strut of some kind, six or seven inches long, an inch or so wide and a little less than that in depth. It was dirty and darkened. To judge by three regular indentations it appeared to have lost some screws which had presumably held it in place. It was too corroded to tell what metal it was made of. It might almost have been a neglected chisel with the end of its blade broken off. The rust of years had pitted the surface.

  “I should hardly bother to hide that! It would disgrace the tool-bag of the most slapdash workman! One might almost think that the rats had been at its ends!”

  “Precisely,” said Holmes, turning it over. I now saw a groove across the back, about a third of the way down, where a cross-piece might have fitted it. Plainly, this had been no chisel. I imagined the missing piece in place. It might have been many things but the image I had in mind was still in the form of a cross or, to be more accurate, a crucifix.

  “How long had it been hidden there?”

  Holmes shrugged.

  “Not long, I should imagine. It might be a few years, perhaps a few months. Not before the Chastelnau brothers became keepers of the light.”

  Keepers of the light! Combined with the idea of a crucifix, his description had the sound of a religious order!

  I looked again and saw that what I had thought to be holes for screws were merely three depressions in the tarnished and corroded metal. Holmes took from his pocket a small wash-leather bag. He withdrew the blue stone—the “Chastelnau pebble,” that is—and placed it in each depression in turn. It fitted best at the head. Another, its hue resembling the mud on the beach and retrieved from Roland Chastelnau’s pocket, filled a second depression where the cross-piece might once have been fixed to the upright. A third, of the same muddy appearance, rested lower down in the upright. The remaining two he placed at either side, where a cross-piece might have been. I felt how chill the night air was in that unheated place.

  “Why was this village called Sutton Cross?”

  Holmes looked at the pattern he had created.

  “Because it was where the river could be crossed-forded-before a bridge was built. Or perhaps because it was here that an item of royal treasure was believed to be lost, found, and then lost agai
n.”

  “Which item might that be?”

  “According to one of the court parchments known as Pipe Rolls, when the tide and the quicksands overtook King John’s baggage train in October 1216, he had been engaged in a long war with his barons. As Mr Gilmore describes it, the king had commandeered treasure from all over the land. Among this was said to be the Chester Cross, a gold and sapphire pendant worn from a sash round the waist. It had formerly belonged to the Bishops of Chester. The cross was more than a thing of beauty, if we believe the chronicles. It had the reputation, when in the hands of a holy man, of performing small miracles of healing. There was a legend that it had been handed down from the time of Edward the Confessor.”

  “Are we to assume that this unprepossessing piece of metal is part of the Chester Cross?”

  Holmes shook his head.

  “Alas no. I shall assume nothing. Imitations and fakes, masquerading as treasure trove from the baggage-train, were all too common after the disaster, according to the Pipe Rolls of the time. Yet I would give a great deal to know what either of the Chastelnau brothers assumed it to be.”

  I glanced at the window and saw that a half-moon was braving the horizon clouds of the North Sea.

  Early that morning I took my story of the brothers’ disappearance to Inspector Albert Wainwright, at the police office in Sutton Cross. I had been over it in my mind and I knew it was the only explanation that fitted the facts. From having felt the cold fear of being lost in the soft mud at night with a tide rushing in, I knew how easily a victim might be decoyed in that river estuary. There was no love lost between Abraham and Roland Chastelnau, yet it was surely Roland who contrived the death of his brother, not the other way round. It was Roland who had previously slipped those pebbles into his pocket and had adjusted the iron shutters before he left the Old Light. On the darkening beach, he had fired the shot which brought Abraham to him. There was a quarrel and afterwards, by accident or design, Roland was drowned. His brother, innocent or guilty of that death, even unaware of it, was drawn into the quicksands of the estuary as he followed the false promise of the altered lighthouse beam. How could it be otherwise on the evidence before us?

  On Holmes’s instructions, I said had nothing to Wainwright or the Freiston keeper about the curious strip of corroded metal and the pebbles. Perhaps these had been the cause of a fight to the death between the two brothers but there was no evidence of it. Before such fragments could be evidence of anything, we needed proof of what they were.

  7

  Our last visit to the Reverend Mr Gilmore was no less convivial than the first, although somewhat more frustrating. It was eleven o’clock on a sunny autumn morning. The brightness touched his churchyard yews to make a shadow pattern of garden geometry. Its reflection sparkled on the tide at low water. The rector’s maid in her starched apron had brought a silver tray, upon which stood a cut-glass decanter of Blandy’s Madeira, Solera 1868, three glasses, and three plates with slices of yellow seed-cake upon them. If Mr Gilmore had distanced himself from Trinity College, Cambridge, he had certainly not forgotten its agreeable mid-morning ritual.

  When the glasses had been filled with their sweet-smelling amber fluid, Holmes came immediately to the point.

  “It must happen from time to time, Mr Gilmore, that items are discovered which may be claimed as part of the lost treasure of King John. The sea having receded a mile or two since the year 1216, some of the debris might now lie quite shallowly underground.”

  The rector smiled the smile of one who has heard this story before.

  “I doubt whether many such claims have been made good, Mr Holmes. Certainly not in recent years. As I said before, most of the baggage-wagons and their contents probably lie buried under the fields and pastureland, inland from this village. A few items of jewels and metalwork, if they had fallen loose, might have been carried here and there by the tidal currents at the time of the disaster and left closer to the surface.”

  “And therefore might be found?”

  Mr Gilmore chuckled.

  “And therefore might be counterfeit. In the later Middle Ages, from the time of King John to the coming of the Tudors in 1485, there are records of rewards paid in the Court of Exchequer to men and women who had found certain trinkets and surrendered them to the Crown. They did not amount to very much. The Plea Rolls tell us of a man receiving as much as twenty shillings for precious stones from a collar worn by King John himself.”

  “And there has always been a history of fabricated treasure?”

  “To such an extent that after the disaster to the baggage-train, the scribe of the royal Patent Rolls was charged to make a careful inventory of all that had been lost. For some years subsequently, when it was claimed that an item was found, it was possible to check the description minutely against the entries in the parchments.”

  “And now?”

  The rector smiled.

  “At that time, Mr Holmes, most of the land round here consisted of tidal mudflats. Where we are sitting now, St Clement’s Church and the ground immediately about it, was on a spit of land just above sea-level. At high tide, the church was on an island. In the reign of King John and his successor, Henry III, it would have been possible for fragments of wreckage from the baggage-train to be carried by currents. Scraps of wood may float and some items of jewellery are too light to sink far. But anything that was engulfed in the quicksands is not likely to have been washed out of them since.”

  Holmes relaxed. His straight back and narrow shoulders reclined against the chair, the keen profile seemed to relax a little. He took his first sip from the glass of Madeira and said,

  “Mr Gilmore, I would ask you to trust me.”

  “Great heavens, Mr Holmes!” It was a burst of boyish amusement. “I am your brother Mycroft’s friend and I would certainly do more than that!”

  “I will ask you to trust me and not to ask why. I will tell you this much. A man’s life, let alone a family’s reputation may depend upon your discretion.”

  I had not the least idea what my friend meant. What man’s life? From his bag he now drew a length of folded yellow lint. From its soft covering he produced our slim length of metal with its corroded ends. From his pocket he took the leather pouch containing the five pebbles which were all that we had so far found. Using the lint as a surface, he laid the upright across the table and shook the pebbles from their bag.

  “I have gone so far as to clean a minute area of surface with carborundum, Mr Gilmore. Unless I am much mistaken, the surface metal with which this strip is covered must be gold, though not of any great quality. I should like to know whether the object suggests anything to you.”

  The rector stared for a moment. He drew a reading-glass from the breast pocket of his black clerical jacket. Opening it, he continued to gaze at the pieces, his amusement giving way to perplexity. Holmes took the five pebbles and placed three in the indentations. The other two he positioned at either side where the crossbeam of a crucifix would have been. Mr Gilmore put away his glass.

  “One moment,” he said.

  He stood up and crossed to his tall break-front bookcase. Opening its glass-panelled doors, he took out a handsome volume bound in red cloth and stamped in gold. I saw that it had been issued by the Lincolnshire and Norfolk Society of Antiquaries to its members and had been published a dozen years earlier. He laid it down on the support of his oak book-stand, open at an illustrated page. Holmes and I joined him.

  The page contained a steel engraving of a cross. It was done from a photograph but the subject was described as merely a reconstruction.

  “You will see at once,” Mr Gilmore drew his finger down the length of the engraving, the mark of an inlay made by the maker’s tool. It bears similarities to two lines on the piece that you have. Down the length of it and on either hand, the craftsman had embedded five stones. What they were was quite impossible to tell from a black and white engraving.

  “What is the picture?” I asked.
/>   Mr Gilmore held the book open firmly.

  “It is a facsimile of a twelfth century bishop’s pendant in gold, sapphire and coral. The bishops donated it to the King’s Treasury during John’s war against the barons. It was said to possess miraculous powers. As with all such treasures, it carried a warning of the ill-fortune that would attend its loss. King John reached Swineshead Abbey, just up the road from here, on the day of the disaster to his baggage-train. When the news of it was brought, he fell into great distress of mind, followed by fever and heat. He died at Swineshead seven days later, robbed on his deathbed by those who attended him.”

  “And this?” Holmes indicated the pebbles and the metal upright. Mr Gilmore shook his head.

  “Impossible to say, Mr Holmes. There have been copies, similar pieces and downright fraud. The fraud, if it is one, may be Medieval or Tudor as easily as modern. It may have been an attempt to impose upon the superstitious or the gullible five or six centuries ago by producing a miraculous relic, just as Chaucer’s Pardoner sold pigs’ bones in a glass as relics of the Christian martyrs. Much would depend on how and where this remnant was found. When you are able to tell me that, I shall perhaps be able to pass better judgment. Until then, I will keep silence, as I have promised you.”

  “That is all?” I asked.

  “No, Dr Watson. I will say this. If anyone were to claim that this fragment had been found in the earth recently, I would think that it must be a fraud. It is a near-impossibility. If it has come to us in some indirect way, that may be a different matter.”

  “In what other way?”

  “During six and a half centuries, Dr Watson, an object may be lost, found, lost again, found again, lost and found once more. I should find that easier to believe.”