by Marvin Kaye
Horrified, I said, “Surely it must have been the older brother, James, no matter what a loyal servant might have said.”
“Alas, the evidence is all there, and whichever inspector turns up will have little trouble seeing it. The housekeeper was on holiday and the brothers were left to fend for themselves. The resulting meal was atrocious: eggs full of shell fragments, burnt rashers, toast the consistency of charcoal. A nervous, frightened man, with little kitchen experience and half out of his wits with fear of the deed he was about to do, would cook such a meal—knowing it would never be consumed, merely going through the motions to allay suspicion, and far more concerned with the coffee the housekeeper’s absence had allowed him to poison.”
“Out of his wits, indeed, to drink of it himself,” I said.
“I am sure he intended it. And afterwards he tipped the mugs and drained the pot onto the floor, lest anyone else partake of his fatal brew. A man, therefore, who wished no one ill—whose crime was an act of deepest desperation. Something dire must have hung over his head, to push him to poison his own brother, quarrels notwithstanding. This was not a crime of rage, Watson, but of despair.”
“Perhaps he meant the poison for himself, and committed suicide when he realized that his brother had accidentally shared it.”
“Why, then, add the prussic acid to the pot and not simply his own mug? No, it was no scene from Hamlet. His brother drank first, and when he stood up, knocking the chair back, our murderer ran to catch him before he fell, and staggered with him to the settee, where they died in each other’s arms.”
“William, then, was the murderer,” I said slowly. “Unless Richard summoned us in hopes we would be first upon the scene.”
“Richard hoped we would aid him in unravelling their dilemma,” said Holmes. “He had no knowledge that his brother William had come up with his own, extreme solution.”
The tragedy of it, and the mental picture of their last moments, weighed on my heart for the rest of our journey.
The property in question turned out to be an estate some miles south of Trowbridge, near a small village where we succeeded in hiring a horse and buggy. We were denied access at the main gate by a surly attendant who refused to tell us the owner’s name, and when we drove around the perimeter we found ourselves followed and were soon accosted by a gang of groundskeepers who warned us vehemently away.
There was nothing for it but to take lodgings in town. I had no doubt that Holmes would not be dissuaded, and we quickly made plans to return later that night, our circumnavigation of the property having had the advantage of revealing what appeared, from a distance, to be an excavation site. The connection to our strange private collection and the British Museum letter seemed indubitable. We had also noted the location of a concealed point of entry through a long hedge not far from the site.
We spent the remainder of the daylight making discreet inquiries in the village. I feared such activities would give away our clandestine plans, but the locals had a horror of the place, and when Holmes and I reconvened for a light supper we regaled each other with the tales we had collected. Legends of shadowy apparitions on the estate, witchcraft and druidism, dark demons on the loose who would suck the marrow from the bones of anyone foolish enough to venture on the grounds after dark. That such stories existed was no surprise in the vicinity of a site of archaeological interest—located on an estate of mysterious ownership, to which access was denied to all but a few taciturn sentries. Any suspicious nocturnal activities would be likely to warp into tales of ghostly intrigue.
The landlord of the pub in which we secured rooms told us that the groundskeepers lived on the estate, but never ventured out after dark, which would certainly, we thought, facilitate our later entry. More than that he would not say, claiming it was bad luck to discuss the matter; but his wife confided, somewhat later, that there was known to be an ancient tomb on the site, an evil, haunted place from which terrible cries had once issued, now silenced, only the ghosts remaining. She suspected that we planned to return, and although she begged us to change our minds, she offered the use of a lantern should we persist in our mad course.
We set off on foot after full dark, the lantern unlit. When we had cleared the village, Holmes produced his small pocket lantern to light our way unobtrusively down the long curve of the road, through the hedge at last, and across the springy vegetation of a bog which showed no signs of ever having been cut for fuel. The legends of the unnamed estate had cost the locals many a cold night, it seemed.
A new-cut entrance to the mound was shored up by timbers. The work had been abandoned some months ago, judging from the weathering of the wood, which corresponded to Holmes’s estimate of the age of the Museum letter. The interior confronting us was a dark, endless throat. I was not prone to conjuring imaginary demons, but in my memory still resided the inexplicably human-looking shapes in their sealed vitrines, and I rather wished I had brought my pistol.
Holmes lit the lantern, and we entered a long stone passageway with a downward incline. There was an unmistakable scuttling sound from somewhere deep within the tomb. Holmes suddenly halted, but not in response to the sound: rather, he had spied something incongruous about a thinner section of stone wall.
“It’s been moved several times, once recently,” said he, examining the arc of smoothed earthen floor. “Come—let’s find out what’s behind it.”
With Holmes’s prodigious strength, the two of us managed to slide the rock in its carven path. Within was a side passageway. The lumber that maintained the structural integrity of the passage was decades older than that at the entryway, afflicted with rot and sagging at many points. I cautioned against an infirm ceiling, but Holmes forged onward, undeterred by physical danger.
We were stopped at last by what appeared to have been a cave-in. “They were trying to continue digging,” Holmes said. “See here, and there, where tunnels were started and abandoned. The bog was too soft to hold open, but they continued to try, it seems—and there, where the soil tumbled down—a more recent hand was at work there, and there . . .” He did not finish, but instead knelt down and set himself to continuing the half-finished, small-scale excavation.
An hour later, something that had once been human emerged from the damp peat. Then another. And a third.
They were the size and shape of men—larger precursors of what we had seen in the Addleton exhibit. But only the one-time flesh remained; the bones were entirely gone.
“I cannot countenance it,” I said. “How in the world were the bones removed?”
“In fact, Watson, it is quite simple,” Holmes said, “though chemically extraordinary. These bodies were preserved from oxygenation by the medium of the bog. Fleshly elements were replaced by the earthen elements iron and sulfur, while the bones dissolved in the acidic water. Quite the opposite of the conventional process of decay. It is as I suspected when I saw the contents of those vitrines. These bodies will jellify rapidly now that they have been exposed to the air. But some chemical solution might be found to retard such decay, and I suspect that the Addletons, or their colleagues, used such a solution on the creatures we saw in the exhibit.”
“Which must have come from here,” I supplied.
“I have no doubt of it.”
“How long, then, have these bodies been buried?”
“That, Watson, is the question. This tunnel is not Neolithic, though the barrow itself most certainly is. This tunnel was dug sometime in the last quarter-century. So who, then, are these men?” He paused, eyes narrowed, and then pounced on a metallic glint I had not noticed—a small tin box recently shoved into the peat.
“Open the box, Watson,” Holmes whispered, “and make as much noise about it as you can.” As I followed his directions, the rusty hinges emitting a gratifying shriek, Holmes melted into the shadows of the main passageway.
Before I could study the documents, there came a cry and a scuffle from deep within the barrow. I stuffed the papers into my vest, sna
tched up the lantern, and ran down into the heart of the tomb.
Holmes was holding a white-haired man in an iron grip. The man was gibbering in unintelligible gasps, but at last he managed to say, “Let me go, please. I can not run now that your friend has blocked the way.”
Holmes complied, and we stood there for a moment staring at each other, the only sound our laboured breathing.
At length Holmes said, “James Addleton, I presume?”
The man nodded. The resemblance to the two poor souls in Bloomsbury was unmistakable.
Holmes questioned him, but the man would say nothing, certain we were Government men sent to assassinate him. Only when Holmes convinced him of our identities did he relax somewhat. “My little brother Richard,” he said, “has a great respect for your work.”
“The papers in the box,” Holmes began again—no doubt he had heard me riffling through them and deduced the contents. “They pertain to this excavation?”
“Scandal!” Addleton burst out. A tic picked up a wild rhythm in his cheek. “Scandal that could rock the very foundations of government. A great man ruined. My heart breaks to think of it!” The man was filthy from what must have been a week here underground. What he lived on I will never know; but he had clearly confronted some demons of his own, and they were getting the better of him.
“Perhaps you might start from the beginning,” said Holmes, and we sat down among the scattered bones and artifacts and listened to James Addleton’s terrible but disjointed tale.
“I’m a geologic surveyor and contractor, you see,” he said. “Such careers run in the family, a love of the past, a respect for preserving detail. My brother William spent his life cataloguing the minutiae of political events: keeping the minutes, writing the reports and memoranda. Richard shared his love of details, but turned his talents to scientific and scholarly pursuits, though he never could advance past junior curator—too much backstabbing in the division. How ironic, how sad, that our careers should intersect upon such a terrible point! And that we cannot agree on how next to proceed. Oh, if I’d only known how it all would come together, the terrible revenge exacted upon my family . . .”
He took hold of himself with some effort. Holmes and I exchanged a glance; this was not the time to break the news of his brothers’ tragic deaths.
“I didn’t know, you see, that there was anyone here. No one knew who owned the place. All you could get out of the villagers were stories to frighten children, or so I thought—or so they were then, before I—oh, God forgive me. In 1864, I was ordered to open this mound up, for an archaeological excavation, they said. It was a Government commission, they didn’t want to use a local man, I didn’t know why and didn’t ask, I needed the work. And then, a month later, they had me back to cave the entrance in again. I couldn’t figure it, but I did what I was told. I did my job quickly, efficiently, and I left. I never heard the screams . . .”
“There were men down here, then? An excavation crew not notified to leave in time?”
“No.” The elder Addleton shook his head miserably. For a moment his eyes went wild, and he clawed at his cheek as if to yank the persistent facial spasm out; then his terror subsided, and he cast Holmes a piteous stare as he said, “They were slaves, black-skinned men from Africa, kept here on Gladstone’s estate for years, working for him, tilling his land, maybe cutting his bog, I don’t know. But someone in the Government found out about it, and was going to expose his terrible hypocrisy, and so he had to cover it up. Gladstone! Gladstone, who did so much to end such tyranny—” He began to wail and tear at his hair, and it took all of Holmes’s persuasive soothing to calm him back into something resembling a coherent narrative. “The order came down to open this mound up—and then cave it in again, with the men inside. I didn’t put them in! I didn’t know, I heard nothing, I did what I was told!”
“Who found those papers?” Holmes asked quietly.
“William,” said Addleton, wiping tears from his eyes with a soil-blacked cuff. “A stickler for details, for order. He was cleaning out old files in the Government records, and he found those letters, memoranda. The thought of what it would do to Gladstone—an old man, his sight failing, what use in bringing him down now? Then we realized what it meant to Richard’s work. I had told him about the barrow, you see, and he’d gotten funding for an excavation, it was a coup for him, an unplumbed Wiltshire barrow when the archaeologists thought they’d all been discovered long since. He let ambition cloud his judgement, for he was bitter about his career, and he lied to the Museum about the location of the barrow. He didn’t tell them that he’d never established who owned the grounds. Just came in here with his men and started digging. He preserved and catalogued everything he found, but then Gladstone must have found out. The Museum revoked its funding. Richard was furious. He moved his exhibits to our cellar, secretly, put them under lock and key and told the Museum they’d been disposed of as requested. But William couldn’t bear the thought of any evidence that might hurt Gladstone. No matter what terrible things he had done—had ordered—he was still a good man, Gladstone, and William is nothing if not loyal. He wanted the exhibit and the papers destroyed. Richard was horrified. ‘Suppress it, yes; destroy it, never!’ he cried. ‘History is far too precious a thing.’ We could not agree on what to do, any of us—and I feared that William would do something terrible, so I took the papers away, I brought them here, I put them in with the grave of the men whose death they ordered. Ever since William found them, ever since I realized what I did . . . I can’t sleep for hearing the screams, they never stop . . .”
He covered his ears and curled around himself, rocking back and forth, weeping softly.
I was reeling from his tale, but Holmes seemed more focused on the man than on the information. “They tried to tunnel out,” he said. “They died in a cave-in because they hadn’t the means of shoring the sides up adequately. The cave-in killed them, Addleton, not you. You did not know those men were here.”
His words were mesmeric, utterly convincing, perhaps because he was wholly convinced of their truth. Addleton looked up slowly. “But the screams,” he said. “Don’t you hear them? Can’t you see the shadows lurking? Fifty men, dead. Fifty poor imprisoned men, dead in their final prison under the ground, so that Gladstone might save his reputation . . .”
“Then Gladstone was the killer,” Holmes said. “You were merely an unwitting tool. Unwitting, Addleton.” He rose slowly and held out his hand. “Come,” he said. “We’ll take you back to London.”
Addleton followed, docile now, his madness subsiding somewhat under Holmes’s calming influence. What would become of him, I didn’t like to think, as we climbed slowly up the sloping passageway and breathed again the clear night-time air. The news of his brothers’ deaths would surely send him into the chasm of insanity whose edge he already skirted.
But it was not to be. As we came closer to the entrance we saw other lights bobbing outside. We had been followed after all.
Addleton deserted us with a cry, certain these were the Government men he feared, and fled back into the passageway—whether into the side tunnel or the tomb we could not tell, for this time his fears were justified. The men awaiting us were not the groundskeepers; they did not identify themselves. They escorted us back to the village, silently, unswayed by Holmes’s attempts to cajole information from them, stern and unyielding in their task. One of them stayed with us through the late-night carriage ride back to Trowbridge and saw us onto the last train for London. Overwhelmed by all that we had discovered, still I found myself relieved that we had paid for our rooms in advance, for we never saw the publican or his wife again.
“We must go back at once,” I said as the train pulled out of the station. There were no other passengers at this hour. “We cannot leave Addleton like that.”
“For the moment I’m afraid we have no choice. The property is too well guarded, ghost stories notwithstanding, and until we find out who employed those men we can exert no
pressure upon them. Addleton has hid well for many days now. We can only hope they got no glimpse of him before he ran. Now, show me the papers.”
I pulled them out of my vest with some reluctance. Gladstone ruined . . . It seemed too much to bear, and yet surely the facts must come to light. We could not suppress such a thing.
“It’s all here,” I said, when we had traded the papers back and forth to read them all with care. Ship manifests, schedules, deeds and titles and work orders signed by Gladstone. In 1852, a slave ship had been diverted on its route to Cuba and delivered fifty captive men onto English soil, where they stayed for over a decade, working Gladstone’s land in secret—and were then ordered buried alive when it seemed the secret would get out. “It will be Gladstone’s downfall. I must admit that I share Addleton’s discomfiture at bringing ignominy down on a man at the end of a lauded tenure.”
“Gladstone has brought himself down,” Holmes said, still peering closely at the papers, as if further hypocrisy and death and madness might be woven into their very fibres. Then he looked up at me, and a slow, terrible smile spread across his sallow face. “But not because of this. The claim of failing eyesight is an excuse for him to step down, after his latest defeat in the House of Lords—an admirable effort on behalf of the downtrodden, as was ever his wont. He has never abandoned his principles, Watson. What we have here is scandal indeed, but of a far more insidious nature.”
“I cannot imagine what you mean,” I said, weariness edging into irritability. I wanted no more ghastly revelations this night.
“These papers are forgeries,” said Sherlock Holmes. “The hand of Burkum Stacy, if I read it correctly, with later additions by Pearce and Kirkland, both dead now. Whatever horrors were done on that estate, Gladstone had no part of them. They were a heinous construct to discredit an honourable man. It would have been too easy, I suppose, to forge documents showing his ownership of a slave-trading ship; he could have disproved such a fiction easily, and none of it would have outraged the public, which is well aware that English ships were engaged in transporting slaves to Cuba, and thence to Virginia, until the American civil conflict put an end to the market. As a nation, we could be proud of having abolished such enslavement on our own land, and later in our colonies, while still profiting from its continuance elsewhere.”
