“I believe, Mr Chastelnau, that you have been a martyr to scrofula, have you not?” I asked.
“I have heard it sometimes called that, sir. I do not quite know what it might be.”
“Your brother may have teased you unkindly?”
“He did sometimes, sir, but I would not kill a man for that—nor kill him for anything.”
Sherlock Holmes intervened.
“Dr Watson tells you that it is scrofula but have you sometimes heard it called the King’s Evil?”
“Mostly that, sir. I was taught how a king a thousand years ago, Edward the Confessor, was given power by the Pope to cure it. Afterwards a king or queen had only to touch a man or a woman. They might have such a curse as mine taken from them.
Ornaments blessed by a king might do it. There was King Edward III. He could cure poor people by giving them a gold coin with St Michael on one side and a ship on the other. An Angel, they called that coin.”
For the second time since our arrival in Suffolk, I heard a few lines of Shakespeare quoted, this time by Holmes.
“The King cured, did he not, what the Bard calls strangely-visited people? I daresay you are not familiar with the play of Macbeth.
The mere despair of surgery he cures,
Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,
Put on with holy prayers.”
“Who would look at me, as I am?” asked Abraham Chastelnau quietly.
“Because of the evil within you?”
“With the wickedness coming out through the sores, as I was taught, sir.”
I could not let this mumbo-jumbo go on.
“I had better tell you,” I said, “that what you have is not an evil curse but a chronic tubercular condition. It is not as grave as consumption but it will produce hard red swellings which commonly suppurate.”
“And what is all that, sir?”
“It is advice that you should seek a better diet, sunlight, exercise and bathing. All those together will take you a good long way.”
“And the Chester Cross?” Holmes inquired of Chastelnau, “If that is what it was.”
Light returned to the poor fellow’s eyes.
“I cannot tell, sir. It came from the oil-cake works in my father’s time. It had been thrown to one side, left in a drawer with the pebbles. I took them all when we came away. I cannot say where it was from. I heard it was bought with the pebbles as tinker’s magic for a shilling or two in my grandfather’s time. We never knew where the tinker had it from. But I hoped it might be the very one His Majesty King John had blessed all those years ago. For then surely its touch might cure me.”
Holmes led him to a chair and sat him down.
“Now, if you please, tell us the story of the sands.”
Abraham Chastelnau knew what was meant but looked up at us without a qualm.
“Roland and I never got on, sir, but the cross and the stones was the worst of it. Trumpery, he called them. When we first went to the Old Light he swore to throw them all into the sea.”
“And that was why you cut a gap in the ledge at the back of the clock case and slid the metal fragment in its place?” I suggested. Abraham Chastelnau nodded.
“And the pebbles I wrapped and pushed to the back of the table drawer. That Sunday night, I went to wind the mechanism of the clock and crank the chain of the lantern weight. It was just before eight o’clock. But when I opened the clock-case, I saw the metal piece had gone. I never bothered to wind anything but went to the table drawer. Four of the five pebbles had gone. He’d missed one of them because I always carried it with me for luck.”
“And the letter?” I asked, “Surely he would have taken that?”
Abraham Chastelnau shook his head.
“No, sir, for he was no hand at reading.”
“You heard the shot?”
“Just as I was looking in the drawer. I heard his gun and went straight down, not knowing what he might do. He always said I was a simpleton to believe such things. He’d throw them in the sea. It was dark and wet all round by then, no hard sand underfoot.”
“You fought him?”
“I went for him to get the piece of the cross and the pebbles back. He’d got them in his hands. As we struggled, I said where was the harm in them. I’m stronger than he was and he’d been drinking. He did sometimes. I got the better of him and threw him down but I thought the pebbles fell. He tried to sling the piece of the cross towards the sea but it never went far. When we broke away from each other, I went down on my knees to find the stones and the metal. Roland ran off, along the beach with the tide after him and the drink driving him on. I found no pebbles, after all. I still ran after him, not to do harm, but he turned and raised the gun. I was the stronger and he knew it but I daren’t get near his gun—not even to save him. He drew further off and further off.”
“Did he fire?” I asked.
“He kept making to. The distance between us seemed to grow. I tried to get closer, shouting at him to come back and not to be a damned fool, for he was in softer sand and almost to his knees in water. He might still have got back but then he fired in earnest. The sea was so far in I hardly heard the shot above the surf but I saw the flash. Something went wrong when he fired that seemed to knock him off his balance into the surf. The shot went well past me, but I jumped down and stayed down, for he might have reloaded the other barrel before this. When I looked up I couldn’t see him again, only the surf booming in. High tide and low tide there is miles apart. When it come in, that sea can move like an express train. With dark coming on, there was such water between us, all of a sudden, that I couldn’t get near him nor see him. Only the surf. And that was all.”
“Did you know that you were seen from the church tower?” I asked.
“I thought we must have been noticed when I heard the rook rifle. If they saw us fighting, not for the first time, and only one come back, they’d swear I’d choked him or chased him to his death. I’d never stand a chance. Better they should think we’d both gone into the sea, Roland in one of our fights and me on the way home. I went back to the Old Light, changed the shutters a little, wound up the chain, and then came away. I thought of everything, except the letter in the drawer.”
“And then you came here?” I Iolmes asked.
“I lived rough on the fens for several days. I know how to do that. When my sister came to you in London, she didn’t know I was alive. That’s true. I kept clear almost a week. Then I heard they’d found the body. After that I came to her, having nowhere else to go.”
From the settee, where she had been sitting with her face in her hands, Miss Chastelnau spoke at last.
“I do not own this house or much that is in it but I have a little money. I would give it all to him. I thought if he could get to Hull, with no one looking for him because he was believed drowned, he could find a crossing to Amsterdam and be safe there. It would take only a few hours.”
“But I could not do it,” Chastelnau said, “What was there for such as I in a place like that?”
“Admirable,” said Holmes sardonically, “Tell me Miss Chastelnau, how long would your little money last in Amsterdam? What would happen to your brother when it was gone? He does not speak Dutch nor does he know the people. He has no work. What is there then, except the danger that before long an inquisitive observer may put two and two together?”
There was a silence in the ornate little room with its view of the sunny garden and the gravel drive. Then Miss Chastelnau spoke again.
“If you do not propose to betray us, what would you have us do?”
My friend turned to the young man first.
“Because my name is Sherlock Holmes, there are people who believe I set myself above the law. On rare occasions that is true.
If I am to judge you now, I believe that what you have told us closely resembles the truth. I believe that you did not set out for the beach with murder in your heart. Your story of your brother having the pebbles appears to be true, for they
were found in his pocket. Both barrels of the shotgun had been fired, though only one was reported as being used to summon you. He meant you harm but he drowned without injuring you. Perhaps the post-mortem will find that he was in drink. These facts are not conclusive evidence of your innocence but they are enough for belief. Yet even so they would be closely-fought.”
He got up from his chair and, as was his custom on such occasions in Baker Street, crossed to the window and continued.
“At the mercy of a skilled prosecutor you would do badly before a judge and jury. As a matter of law, perhaps you have a case to answer. Yet as a matter of justice I shall not betray you.”
Now he turned and spoke to both of them.
“A man travelling alone may be suspect when a couple is not. If you love your brother, Miss Chastelnau, travel across the Pen-nine hills with him to Birkenhead docks. Travel as a betrothed couple, if you wish. Take two berths on an emigrant ship. Single men and women are separated at either end of such a vessel but may associate for an hour or so in the evening. That will suit your purposes and your story. Among so many hundreds or thousands you are unlikely to be remarked. The voyage to Australia under sail will take three months. By then the Sutton Cross mystery will be stale news.”
They both watched him but neither spoke. Holmes continued.
“When you reach Queensland or New South Wales, the country you have left will have forgotten you. The one you have arrived in will know nothing of you and will not be looking for you. You can safely be brother and sister once more. You are both young enough to begin again. Such will be the last days of the old life and the first of the new.”
Miss Chastelnau thought for a moment.
“There are only three girls in residence at the moment, Mr Holmes. I have already communicated with their parents to explain the bereavement I have suffered. I have received an undertaking that they may all be transferred to the Abbey Close school in Lincoln. As for these premises, the lease has not long to run and the rent has been paid.”
Holmes nodded. He opened his leather bag and took out an object wrapped in lint.
“Abraham Chastelnau, this shall be yours. It may be a holy relic or, for all I know, a tinker’s trick. At least one of the pebbles is a sapphire and the metal upright is gold of a common quality, not in itself of great value. If it has lacked healing properties over the past centuries, may it assume them now for you.”
10
So it was that we left Mablethorpe and Sutton So Cross, returning to our quarters in Baker Street. The three months of an emigrant voyage passed and nothing more was heard or printed concerning the mystery of the Old Light. Several months later an envelope arrived by post with my name upon it. It bore two lines of thanks from Alice Chastelnau. There was no address but it had been stamped in Brisbane. I handed it to Holmes across the breakfast table. He read the lines and handed it back with a muted snort.
“Well, let us hope they will be happy. Curious, Watson, that you have surely noticed her partiality for Abraham over Roland and yet never remarked the possibility that she might not be his sister.”
I was thunderstruck by this.
“How can that be?”
“Because she is perhaps his mother?”
“Impossible!”
“Put together the little pieces of the puzzle. She left home suddenly, at fifteen, for her health. Her father’s new wife accompanied her to the seaside. Many months of convalescence followed, for a convenient touch of consumption. The two were visited by old John Chastelnau. Shortly before their return from the seaside, news was sent to Sutton Cross that Abraham Chastelnau had been born to the step-mother. Or was he?”
“Preposterous!”
“Is it? Suppose the mother remained in touch with the child and a little learning rubbed off. He may appear something of a Neanderthal but do you not recall how he wrote ‘physician’ for ‘doctor’ and ‘afflicted’ for ‘suffering from’? Not to mention his recollections of Edward the Confessor and Edward III.”
“Absurd!”
“Very well, old fellow, you have only to go the registrar of births, marriages and deaths in Somerset House. Look up the name Chastelnau and, in this case, the mother’s maiden name. I would not be surprised to find that it was also Chastelnau.”
“I shall do no such thing. Even were it true, there are some things which it is better not to know—and certainly better not to hunt after.”
He shrugged and sighed before opening the newspaper at a fresh page. He spoke from behind it.
“Very well. A hint to you, old fellow. I recall that in the lantern-room of the Old Light I congratulated you upon some little discovery and remarked that we should make a criminal investigator of you yet. It seems I was in error. There is a certain lack of morbid persistence in your method which must always be a handicap to your powers of detection.”
III
The Case of the Portuguese Sonnets
1
In the archives of Sherlock Holmes few papers have been more jealously guarded than those which touch upon blackmail or extortion. How strange it is that these should include a small collection of literary manuscripts and rare first editions acquired in the course of an investigation in 1890. They are items which Oxford’s Bodleian Library or the British Museum or wealthy collectors like John Pierpont Morgan might have fought over in the auction rooms of the world.
To the present day, most of these treasures remain unknown to literature or scholarship. In the Baker Street files repose such lost works as the manuscript of Lord Byron’s Don Juan in the New World, in the poet’s own hand. Its stanzas confirm the great romantic rebel’s ambition to make his home in the land of Thomas Jefferson. Among other manuscripts is The Venetian Nun: A Gothic Tale, written in 1820 by the notorious William Beckford, creator of the short-lived extravaganza of Fonthill Abbey. A further portfolio contains the monologue of a famous heretic facing the flames in fourteenth century Florence, “Savonarola to the Signoria,” apparently omitted by Robert Browning from his collection of Men and Women in 1855.
A shelf of rare editions, which Holmes acquired during the same investigation, was equally remarkable. He was particularly fond of a small octavo volume in pinkish wrappers. It bore the simple title of “Sonnets By E. B. B.” At the foot of the cover was printed, “Reading: Not For Publication, 1847.” Such was the first appearance of Sonnets from the Portuguese, written by Elizabeth Barrett to express her love for her bridegroom, Robert Browning, at the time of their elopement and marriage in the previous year. No more than three or four copies of the private 1847 edition have survived. It was intended for intimate friends, the printing arranged by Miss Mary Russell Mitford. Sherlock Holmes’s copy bore a pencil inscription on the fly-leaf “For Miss Mitford, E. B. B.” It was Mrs Browning’s reminder that this copy had been set aside for her friend.
How odd that half a century later such a treasure should find its way into the pocket of a dead blackmailer.
2
The case occurred almost ten years after my first meeting with Sherlock Holmes. It followed a visit from our Scotland Yard friend Inspector Lestrade on 24 April 1890. He was now in the habit of calling upon us of an evening, once a week, sharing a glass or two of single malt and passing on the detective gossip of the day.
In the course of conversation on this occasion, he mentioned that a man in a plaid overcoat was reported to have been found dying in a Chelsea gutter. The man in question was known to the police as Augustus Howell, of whom I had never heard. It appeared that he had been suspected from time to time of demanding money with menaces but nothing had ever been proved against him. Lestrade now told us that shortly before he left his office that evening, a report of the man’s death had come in. It seemed that the gutter in which he lay was outside a bar in Kinnerton Street, Chelsea, and that the victim’s throat had been cut. Between his teeth was wedged a gold half-sovereign coin. Several years later I was to learn, in our investigation of “The Red Circle,” that in the underworld o
f Naples this is the traditional reward of a blackmailer or a police informer.
Our detective agency, as Holmes now liked to call it, had rarely received a complaint of blackmail. I had found this surprising at first because blackmail is surely one of the most common causes that drive a man or a woman to seek advice from a confidential investigator. However, the details that Lestrade gave us on that April evening suggested that the more robust victims of extortion may scorn the services of a private detective and employ those of a professional assassin.
Lestrade ended his brief summary of the message received by Scotland Yard with an important nod, as if to say, “So there!”
Holmes looked back at him and intoned, almost accurately, a line of Shakespeare from Macbeth.
“He should have died hereafter! Indeed, my dear Lestrade, in Howell’s case I can assure you he probably will continue to do so, as he has done many times before!”
“I don’t think I follow you there, Mr Holmes. How could the man be dead before this?”
Holmes lay back in his chair and began to guffaw with delight. Then he composed himself.
“A hint to you, Lestrade. In a case that involves Augustus Howell, steer well clear of the matter. Let some other poor devil at Scotland Yard beat his brains out over it.”
“I do not follow your drift, Mr Holmes, but I should not have thought this was a matter to be made fun of.”
“Then you quite evidently do not know your man. Have you any idea how many times Augustus Howell has died in the last thirty years of his disgraceful career? At least four, to my knowledge. Notice of his death is generally followed by a post-obit sale of his effects at Christie’s or Sotheby’s. His announcement of his own death is a convenient method by which he escapes his creditors from time to time. However, if what you are told is true, it seems that someone may have settled accounts with him in a more conclusive style. Or perhaps he has merely performed his usual stunt with a little more melodrama, a touch more grand guignol, than usual.”
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