The Riddle of Foxwood Grange

by Denis O. Smith

  Yours sincerely,

  Farringdon Blake

  “Not much to go on,” said Holmes as I finished reading. “The name seems vaguely familiar. I think he may be a journalist.”

  “Of course!” I cried. “I remember now. I have read several of his articles in different newspapers and magazines. I think his speciality is to explain the most abstruse of scientific concepts in simple, everyday language - or, at least, to try to. They are the sort of articles that make you feel extremely clever while you are reading them, as you seem to understand the subject perfectly. An hour later, however, you find you cannot recall it all with sufficient clarity to reconstruct the matter for yourself. Will you accept his invitation?”

  “I may as well. I have nothing else on at the moment, and will at least get lunch out of it. My brain could certainly do with a little fresh stimulation. Will you come?”

  “I haven’t been asked.”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t worry about that,” said my companion in a dismissive tone. “I can’t imagine that Farringdon Blake will object to your presence, and if you hear his account first hand, it will save my having to repeat it all to you when I get back. Of course, one must always be prepared for disappointment. Journalists have a knack of making things sound more interesting than they really are. Despite the terms in which Mr Blake describes the matter, it may amount to nothing of significance and be simply a waste of our time.”

  In this pessimistic conjecture, however, my friend was completely mistaken.

  2: Mr Farringdon Blake

  THE DINING-ROOM at the Great Western Hotel was crowded, the clatter of knives and forks and the buzz of conversation almost deafening, but upon our giving Farringdon Blake’s name to the waiter, we were at once shown to a table at the far end of the room where a man in a tweed suit was sitting alone. He stood up as we approached, Holmes introduced us and we all shook hands.

  “I am so glad you were able to come,” said he as we took our seats. He was a tall, slim man of perhaps five and thirty, with black hair and a neatly trimmed beard and moustache. In his eyes as he addressed us was a thoughtful, intelligent look. “I have been debating with myself for a couple of weeks whether to consult you or not,” he added.

  “Even in the last twenty-four hours you were still undecided,” remarked Holmes.

  “That is true. How do you know?”

  “You evidently wrote your letter earlier in the week, as you state the day of our meeting as ‘Friday’ rather than ‘today’ or ‘tomorrow’, yet you did not submit it to the postal authorities in the usual way. I can only assume that having written it you were unsure whether to send it, and made a decision on the spur of the moment to hand it to a chance acquaintance this morning.”

  “You are quite correct. I should perhaps explain that I don’t reside in London any more. I come up just once a week, usually on a Friday. I had brought the letter with me in my satchel, but remained undecided about it until the train reached Paddington, when I saw something that made my mind up for me.”

  “What was that?”

  “A man. A particular man. At least, I think I saw him. I’m not entirely certain about it.”

  “Hum!” said Holmes. “Let us be clear. Is your indecision as to whether to consult me because you think that your problem may, after all, be but a trifling business, which will likely sort itself out in due course and is thus not worth looking into further, or is it because you believe you may have misunderstood the matter altogether and there may actually be nothing to look into? Or is it something else?”

  Mr Blake hesitated. “I’m not sure I can even answer that question with any confidence, Mr Holmes. It’s an odd thing: I spend my time trying to explain difficult scientific questions to the general public, and here is something bearing directly upon my own life that I cannot even explain to myself!”

  “I imagine,” said Holmes after a moment, “that sometimes when you are trying to explain a scientific point to your readers and you are not sure where to begin, you find it helpful to return in thought to the period before that particular theory was propounded. That is, you describe what it was that led Galileo or Newton, say, to find previous views inadequate, and led them to propound their own new theories. Sometimes, a chronological approach rather than an analytical one can clarify the issues involved. The chronological approach can also be clarifying in the case of personal mystification, Mr Blake, and that is the approach I suggest you adopt.”

  “You are quite right,” said Blake, “and you express the matter eloquently. As a matter of fact, your powers of expression are one of the two things that led me to consider consulting you. I have read one or two of your articles in journals,” he added, as Holmes raised his eyebrows in surprise. “I was impressed both by your analysis and by the way you presented it.”

  “Thank you. That is gratifying,” said Holmes with evident pleasure. “From the response I got at the time, I rather feared that my humble essays had passed, unmourned and forgotten, into oblivion. What was the other reason you decided to consult me?”

  “An account Dr Watson wrote of one of your cases, entitled ‘A Mysterious Murder’. I think it was in Tit-Bits that I saw it. It concerned the murder of two American men who had been staying in London by - as it turned out - a fellow-countryman of theirs. It was rather brief, and thus somewhat condensed, and I should like to have known more details of the matter, especially the antecedents of the case, but it made it clear that it was entirely due to your powers of observation, Mr Holmes, that the culprit was apprehended.”

  I laughed. “I readily concede it was too brief and too dense,” I remarked, “but that was because I was allowed less than a thousand words to describe the whole business. I had no sooner described the strange circumstances in which the first murdered man was found than I had to detail Holmes’s analysis of the matter, the conclusions it led to and the surprising capture of the murderer. The antecedents of the matter were in fact unusually interesting, and it is my hope to one day bring out a fuller account of the case. The banal title was not my choice, by the way. I had wanted to call it ‘A Tangled Skein’, but the editor rejected that on the grounds that many of his readers would not know how to pronounce ‘skein’. I did not trouble to argue the point very forcefully: I had had to abbreviate my account so much that it no longer seemed quite so ‘tangled’ anyway!”

  “I have had similar experiences,” said Blake with a chuckle. “On one occasion, because an editor wanted to fill up a page in a hurry, I was allowed precisely three hundred words to try to say something interesting and enlightening about volcanoes!”

  “Having now established that we are all distinguished men of letters,” said Holmes in a tone of amusement, “let us now move on to the business that has brought us together today. Pray begin your chronological account, Mr Blake!”

  “Certainly,” said the other. “As you appear to know, I contribute articles to all manner of newspapers and periodicals, generally on scientific or medical matters.”

  “I have read several,” I interjected. “I have often been struck by the very broad range of your knowledge.”

  “Ah! There, I regret, you make an understandable error, Dr Watson. In fact, my scientific knowledge is considerably slighter than you suppose. I should be obliged if you did not mention it to anyone else, but I will confess to you that I myself don’t always fully understand the subjects that I attempt to explain to others. I subscribe to numerous learned journals to keep up with the latest research, leave aside all the things I myself don’t understand and select from the rest anything which I think might be of interest to the average reader. Like a schoolboy before an examination, I cram myself full of all the relevant facts I can find, so that my article will be both accurate and interesting, but if you were to question me on the subject two weeks later, I might not be able to give you any sensible answers, as my brain will have moved o
n to fresh material, and the new knowledge will have pushed out the old. Sometimes this makes me feel something of a fraud, but I console myself with the thought that I am at least serving a useful purpose: entertaining and educating the general public on matters about which they probably know little, and giving publicity to the latest theories of really clever scientific and medical men which might otherwise remain unknown outside the pages of obscure learned journals.

  “However,” Blake continued after a moment, “to return to my chronological account: I began my career as a journalist with the Standard, moved after some years, to the St James’s Gazette and later the Telegraph. At the same time I used to contribute occasional anonymous short pieces to other papers and magazines - ‘sketches of London life’ and that sort of thing. But I was often struck by the very large number of letters we used to receive which demonstrated profound ignorance of some very basic scientific and mathematical truths, or which freely admitted the writer’s lack of knowledge and asked for enlightenment. Gradually, my own independent articles began to have a scientific slant to them, if only to describe how certain scientific and mathematical notions underlie our everyday life, especially in a modern city such as London, and my name began to appear frequently above them. Soon, I was earning more from these articles than I did from my regular journalistic work. People were always writing to me, asking me to explain something or other, or suggesting subjects that I might write about, and I always did my best to satisfy their curiosity. Eventually, I was so busy that I could hardly cope with the amount of work I had. A decision had to be made: either I give up most of my independent work and concentrate all my energies on my work at the Telegraph, or I throw up that job, cast myself adrift upon the uncertain seas of independence and trust to fortune that I didn’t end up on the rocks. I much preferred the idea of independence, but it was a path bestrewn with pitfalls and uncertainties, promising little in the way of security and much in the way of anxiety and endeavour.

  “By chance, at precisely the same time as I was considering this momentous decision, I received a letter from my late father’s cousin, George Stannard, an elderly man from whom I had heard nothing for several years. He lived in an ancient house known as Foxwood Grange, in the wooded country of north Oxfordshire, close to the border with Warwickshire. He invited me to pay him a visit whenever I could get away, when he would, he said, put a proposal to me. Of course, I had no idea what was in his mind, but two weeks later I went down there to see him.

  “He appeared much older than the last time I had seen him, but although physically frail he was still mentally alert. Save for an elderly couple, the Caxtons, who were his only servants, he lived all alone in that rambling old house, which stands by itself in its own extensive grounds. It is a very handsome old place, late Tudor in origin, built on the side of a gentle hill, so that the gardens drop away below it in a series of terraces, down to a little brook in the wooded valley below. At one time, I understand, there was a considerable amount of farmland attached to the Grange, but most of it had been sold off over the years, until just two fields now remained, which Mr Stannard let out to local farmers for grazing. When I had visited there with my father, as a boy, the house had seemed to me to be miles from anywhere, but in truth it is little more than half a mile from the village of Foxwood, and only a mile and a half from the railway station at Rushfield.

  “Mr Stannard greeted me very cordially, I must say, and we soon slipped into easy and amiable conversation. Much of it was about the past, when he and my father had been good friends, but he was also very interested in what I was doing now, and questioned me closely about my work. That evening, as we sat after supper with a glass of port, he put his proposal to me. So far as he was aware, he said, I was his closest living relative, and would one day inherit Foxwood Grange. This came as a surprise - a shock, almost - to me. It was not something I had ever given a moment’s thought to. There were some other relatives on the other side of his family, he said, some people called Betteridge, who lived near Nottingham. He was not certain which of us was, legally speaking, his closest relative, but it did not matter, he said, as he intended to leave me the house in his will.

  “I was so taken aback by this that I scarcely knew what to say. I thanked him profusely, but he waved aside my thanks.

  “‘I come now,’ said he, ‘to the proposal I mentioned in my letter. Although I am very fond of this old place, I am becoming a little old to enjoy it properly, and would dearly love to move to somewhere smaller. I have friends in Foxwood village and have my eye on a cottage there which will shortly fall vacant. I am willing to sell you Foxwood Grange now, for a fairly nominal sum - just enough to enable me to purchase the cottage in the village. What do you say?’

  “I hesitated. ‘The prospect is a very enticing one,’ I replied, ‘but I am not very flush of funds at the moment.’

  “‘I can sympathize with that,’ said my host with a chuckle. ‘I have a little money invested in consols which provides me with sufficient income to just about tick along, but no more than that. But surely you can raise a small loan against the value of this estate? You will not lose by it: when I die the cottage will be yours, too, and you can sell it and pay off the loan there and then.’

  “As I sat there, considering the matter, uncertain what to say, Mr Stannard spoke again. ‘If you give up your job at the Telegraph, and devote yourself to your scientific articles - as I certainly think you should, my boy - you could live comfortably here - far more cheaply than in London - and just send off your articles in the post.’

  “‘It is not always so simple as that,’ I said, laughing at his enthusiastic tone. ‘Editors sometimes need a little personal persuasion. Things they receive in the post tend to be put on one side to be looked at later, and “later” may mean not for several weeks’ time.’

  “‘I understand,’ said Mr Stannard, nodding his head. ‘In that case, you could do all your work here in peace and quiet, and perhaps just travel up to town one day a month. My library has plenty of scientific volumes in it - although I can’t claim I have the latest editions of anything.’

  “‘Very well,’ said I, laughing again at his pleading manner. ‘You have persuaded me, Mr Stannard! I accept your proposal with grateful pleasure and shall set about raising some money as soon as I get back to London!’

  “That was about three years ago, near enough. Within three months I had raised sufficient money for Mr Stannard to move into his cottage, had resigned my position at the Telegraph and had moved myself and my possessions to Foxwood Grange. I have gone into some detail on the matter so you will understand how I came to be living in such an odd, out-of-the-way spot.

  “When I moved into the Grange, incidentally, I not only took over the house and its library, together with most of the old furniture and pictures, but I also took over the Caxtons, Mr Stannard’s only domestic staff, as I mentioned before. When Mr Stannard moved into his cottage, he judged that he could get by with the daily help of a woman from the village, and asked me if I would keep the Caxtons on here. I was only too pleased to do so. Mr and Mrs Caxton have been at the Grange as long as I can remember, and know the place and its requirements inside out. I knew, too, that Mr Stannard had always found them to be completely reliable and trustworthy. Since then, the three of us have rubbed along very harmoniously for the last three years.

  “About six months ago, however, I could see that Mrs Caxton’s work was becoming a little too much for her, so I took in a young local girl, Ann Wallingford, to help her. This has proved most successful, as Ann is a good worker, with a lively and pleasant disposition, and her cheery presence has definitely brightened the old place up a bit. Then, about three months ago, I had a letter from the secretary of St Matthew’s College, Oxford, with which I have had considerable contact over the last three years in the course of my work, to ask if I would consider taking on one of their graduate students, Alexander Whitemoor, as a se
cretary or assistant for a term or two. I readily agreed to this request, as my papers had got into a very disordered state, and I had been too busy to sort them out myself. Whitemoor’s intention had been to read for a doctorate, his interest being in the history and development of scientific thought, but his studies had been interrupted by his widowed mother’s falling seriously ill, which had obliged him to return home at frequent intervals. It was felt, under the circumstances, that it might be best to postpone the resumption of his formal studies until next year, and in the meantime he could assist me and perhaps learn something as he did so of the way in which scientific theories are built upon what has preceded them. His presence, too, has been a success, and, young though he is, it has been stimulating to me, I must say, to have someone else of an intellectual bent about the house. Staying at Foxwood, incidentally, also means that Whitemoor is much closer to where his mother lives, at Towcester in Northamptonshire, and he returns home to visit her most week-ends. I think that brings the household of the Grange up to date. I can give you any further details later, should you require them.”

  Farringdon Blake paused and poured himself a glass of water from a carafe. “Now,” said he, as he took a sip, “to tell you what has happened recently. I must first emphasize what a peaceful and delightful part of the country it is in which I live, with woods on the hills, meadows in the valleys, and pretty little villages nestling between them. As I have got to know my neighbours, I have found them on the whole charming and friendly. I have never once regretted moving there and am sure I could not be happier living anywhere else in England.

  “The first inkling I got that my contentment with life might be misplaced, and that something strange was afoot, something mysterious about which I know nothing even though I seem to be the focus of it, was just two weeks ago today. I had come up to town on an early train as usual, arriving about half past ten. As I was leaving the station here I chanced to observe a man in a light overcoat standing by the main entrance. For a second our eyes met, then he looked away, as can happen at any time with a total stranger. There was nothing especially notable about him, and I dare say I should normally have soon forgotten I had ever seen him, were it not for what happened later that day. I had gone down to see the editor of Redfearn’s Magazine which has offices just off the Strand. As I was leaving their building, I saw the man I had seen here at Paddington standing on the other side of the street. As I glanced across at him, he turned away, whether deliberately or simply by chance I could not tell. In any case, his turn was not quick enough to prevent my seeing his face, and I was certain it was the same man. At the time, I simply thought it was an odd coincidence, and gave it no more thought. On the train home that afternoon, however, the mental picture I had of his turning away when I looked at him came back to me, and I could not help feeling that there was something furtive in his manner.”