The Riddle of Foxwood Grange

by Denis O. Smith

  “Pointless or not, it certainly occurred,” remarked Blake.

  “Indeed,” returned Holmes. “That is the enigma.”

  “I suppose if it appears pointless, then there is nothing we can learn from it,” observed Blake after a moment.

  “Not necessarily. On the contrary, it is often what seem the most pointless features of a case that are in the end the most instructive.”

  “Does anything suggest itself to you in the present case?”

  “Yes, several things; but some of them are mutually contradictory, so there is no point in listing them at present.”

  As we left the study, Blake gestured to the right. “The kitchen is that way,” he said. “There is also a corridor across the back of the house which is jocularly known as ‘the long gallery’, in imitation of such rooms in far grander houses. In truth, it is not very long, and is not really much of a gallery, either, although it does have a row of windows which overlook the back yard!”

  Our guide then took us on to the other rooms of the ground floor, each oak-panelled in the same dark way as the study, and I confess I began to find it a little oppressive. It was certainly all interesting, historically speaking, and very handsome in its own way. But as we passed from one room to the next, a vision of the light and airy sitting-room in our own lodgings in London arose unbidden in my mind, and I found myself reflecting on the differences, and concluding that, personally speaking, I was happy in Baker Street, and should not really care to live at Foxwood Grange.

  Presently, our circular tour of the ground floor of the Grange came to the final room, the library, which occupied the front west corner of the building, directly across the hall from the drawing-room in which we had been sitting earlier. As Blake opened the door, I was for a moment almost dazzled by the sudden burst of golden sunlight, for the low sun was shining straight in through the diamond-paned windows, and onto a highly polished reading table in the middle of the room. It was a large room, and save for the broad windows and an immense stone fireplace on our right, all the walls were lined with book-shelves.

  “This is a very fine room,” I said.

  “It is indeed,” agreed Holmes. “Ah!” he cried, and, following his gaze, I saw that he was looking up at the deep lintel over the doorway through which we had just entered. Three lines of lettering had been carved with great precision into the wood there, which read as follows:

  TRUTH ITSELF IS ALWAYS

  THE HIGHEST AND BEST GOAL

  OF HUMAN EFFORT

  “It is Francis Bacon,” cried Holmes in a voice suffused with delight. “What a splendid observation to have above one’s head in a library!”

  “I am glad it pleases you,” responded Blake in an appreciative tone. “Bacon stayed here in 1620, and the carving was done then, in his honour. I think you are the first visitor I have had who has recognized the source of the quotation.”

  “Well, well,” said Holmes, “it is an inspiring maxim not just for those in the scientific and scholarly disciplines, but for everyone who reflects on life, and perhaps above all for anyone in my own humble profession. Perhaps I should have it carved above my own doorway! This is certainly a splendid room, Mr Blake! Some of these books look very old. Are any of them from Elizabeth’s reign?”

  “Yes, quite a number, although several were rebound in the first half of the seventeenth century to match some of the books acquired then. There are some wonderful books here - enough to keep one fully occupied for a year or two, I should think!”

  “No doubt. And what is this? Yet more worthy maxims?”

  I turned from the book I was examining, to see what Holmes was looking at. Over the fireplace, hanging in a gilded wooden frame on the chimney-breast, was a large document of some sort, written in black ink, in a flowing, old-fashioned hand, the initial letters of each line decorated with loops and twirls done in red ink.

  “It looks like a charter of some kind,” I remarked. “Or is it a poem?”

  “Of a sort,” said Holmes, examining it closely. “Or perhaps one should deem it more a moral tract.”

  I joined him by the fireplace and read the following:

  If error be in the heart

  Nor all thy diligence nor all thy talent

  Nor all that learning can bestow

  Shall bring forth fruit.

  Like seed scatter’d unto rocks

  Or bulbs thrust into mud

  All that might have been

  Is but a vain and empty vision

  “What is the source of this passage?” asked Holmes. “It has an eighteenth century flavour to it, but I don’t recognize it.”

  “Nor me,” I said.

  “That is not surprising, gentlemen,” replied Blake. “It was composed by a former owner of this house, a man not previously noted for putting pen to paper very often except to write out gambling slips and sign his name to the debts he owed to all and sundry.”

  “An ancestor of Mr Stannard?” queried Holmes.

  “No, not at all,” returned Blake. “Foxwood Grange was only in the Stannard family for three generations, Mr Stannard’s grandfather having bought it in 1795. Before that, the house had had a very chequered history, and had passed through many hands.” Blake indicated the chairs set round the table. “Take a seat.” he said, “and I’ll give you a brief history of the house and of that document. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting, for there is something of a mystery surrounding it.

  “First of all,” he continued after a moment, “the house was built for Sir William Stamford in 1592. His estates were the largest in the district at the time, and this house was of some importance. It remained in his family for about forty years, but in the 1630s there was no direct heir, and it passed by marriage to some people called Hollings. They seemed to have managed to keep out of the political upheavals that engulfed most of the country in the middle of that century, and the house remained in their family until the 1680s, when it was sold to a man called Podmore. He didn’t live here for very long, however, and there were then three more short-lived owners, until it came, in 1746, into the hands of one Samuel Harley, the author of that document you were looking at over the fireplace. This was undoubtedly the most notorious period in the history of this old place. You have perhaps heard of the ‘Hell-Fire Club’.”

  “What, Sir Francis Dashwood and his disreputable circle?” I asked.

  “Exactly. If you know anything about Dashwood, then you will have a good idea what Samuel Harley was like, for he was cut from the same cloth. In short, he was a rake and a libertine, notorious for his behaviour even in an age which had no shortage of such figures. If I mention that his cronies included George Augustus Selwyn, Bubb Doddington, George ‘Swine’ Darcy and all those people, you will understand the sort of thing I mean. To call them a dissolute, debauched gambling set scarcely does their behaviour justice. They scandalised mid-eighteenth-century society, and one of their chief haunts was this house, Foxwood Grange. Harley had, by a series of chances, inherited enormous wealth when still a young man, and proceeded to work his way through it with the speed of a forest fire. Among his possessions were a large house in Mayfair, in London, another near Derby and this one, Foxwood Grange, which seems to have been the one he regarded as his home, probably because he had spent a large part of his childhood here.

  “At the height of his notoriety, the pattern of Harley’s debauchery was well established. He would go up to London for a few weeks, spend money there in colossal amounts, waste even more and gamble away yet more, then return to Foxwood with his cronies and other guests, both male and female, and repeat the performance here. When he was at length tired of having the house full of drunken revellers, he would pack them all off to London and spend a few weeks recovering from his excesses until boredom overcame him and he set off once more for London, to begin the whole sordid
round once again.

  “Even such great wealth as Harley possessed cannot last forever in the hands of a committed wastrel, and so it was in this case. Bit by bit, Harley’s fortune dribbled away until there was very little of it remaining. He sold all his houses but this one, and sold all the land he owned save for a few small fields. All his other valuables - gold, silver and so on - had by this time long gone. Then, one fateful night here at Foxwood, when Harley was even more inebriated than usual, he made a disastrous mistake. He had been gambling all day and all evening, and had lost heavily. In the end, in a desperate attempt to recoup his losses, he staked Foxwood Grange itself against all his debts. Some accounts say it was staked on a roll of the dice, others say it was on a hand of cards. Whichever was the case, it scarcely matters, as he lost. In a matter of moments, Foxwood Grange and what was left of its estate no longer belonged to Harley, but were the property of George ‘Swine’ Darcy. This concluded a month or more of such bad decisions and ill-fortune, and Samuel Harley was now a ruined man. He was given three months to get his affairs in order and leave the house. It was during this period that he composed that document you were looking at, and left it here for those who came after him to read.”

  “I suppose he was overcome with remorse,” I observed, “and wanted to leave a warning to others to avoid his wretched fate.”

  “Presumably. He was by all accounts not a stupid man, and without the influences he had fallen under at an early age might well have made a worthy citizen, in which case his life might have been completely different.”

  “What became of him?” asked Holmes.

  “No-one knows for certain, but it seems he went out to Italy, to stay with some old crony of his. How long he lasted there, though, I have no idea, as he dropped completely out of sight and nothing was ever heard of him again. The general belief is that he drank himself to death.”

  “What a wretched tale,” I remarked with a shake of the head.

  “Indeed,” said Blake, “but that wasn’t quite the end of it. Rumours began to circulate, two or three years later, that he had not been quite so destitute as it had first appeared, and that before his final, miserable decline he had used some of his wealth to purchase items of value - rubies and other precious stones were suggested - which he had secreted away somewhere.”

  “That seems a little unlikely from your account,” said Holmes. “If he possessed such assets, why then did he not sell them to raise the money to save himself from destitution?”

  “I agree,” returned Blake. “I believe the rumour only arose because of a letter he had written from Italy to his heir - a distant cousin - in which he stated that he had left something for him at Foxwood which he might find of value. But I think he was probably just referring to the moral lesson in that document over there. There is certainly no record of anything else ever having been found here, and Darcy, who owned the house at the time, declared that the rumours were utterly untrue.”

  “Perhaps Darcy himself had found whatever it was, and pocketed it for his own use.” I suggested.

  Holmes shook his head. “That is of course possible,” he said. “But if it seems unlikely that Harley really possessed the objects of value that were rumoured, it is surely even more unlikely that he would simply have left such things here, for he would have known that they would be more likely to be found by Darcy than by anyone else.”

  “My conclusion precisely,” said Blake, “which is why I think he was simply referring to the moral tract he had left here. Anyway, gentlemen, that is the sorry story of Samuel Harley, and of the most notorious period in the history of this old place.”

  “What became of the house afterwards?” I asked.

  “I don’t think Darcy ever spent much time here,” Blake replied, “although Harley’s moral composition evidently amused him in some way, for it was he that had it framed and hung where you see it now. Anyway, he sold the house about five years later, to someone called Mayhew. It then passed through several other hands until Mr Stannard’s grandfather bought it in 1795, as I mentioned before.”

  As he was speaking, the library door opened and the elderly servant put his head in.

  “What is it, Caxton?” asked Blake.

  “I do beg your pardon, sir, but the news of old Mr Brookfield knocked me quite out of my stride, and I forgot to inform you that Mrs Booth called this afternoon, while you were absent.”

  “Oh? Did she want anything in particular?”

  “No, sir. She specifically asked me to convey that fact to you. She was in her little trap with the boy, and said she was simply out for a Sunday drive round the district.”

  “She did not leave any other message?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Who, if I may ask,” said Holmes when the servant had left us, “is Mrs Booth?”

  “Just a neighbour of mine.”

  “But you did not mention her in the list of neighbours you gave me earlier.”

  “I had to draw the line somewhere, Mr Holmes. I can hardly imagine Mrs Booth climbing up a tree to spy on me!”

  “Nevertheless, as she is evidently someone who feels able to call on you without notice, she is a part of the tapestry of this parish which I am trying to get clear in my mind. Is she an elderly woman?”

  “No, not at all. She is not yet thirty.”

  “A widow, perhaps?”

  “No. I suppose I shall have to tell you, even though she can have nothing to do with my little mystery. She is simply someone with whom I have become friendly over the last year. She is separated from her husband and lives with her three-year-old boy, Henry, in a house on the other side of the village. We happened to meet and strike up a conversation at the village fete last summer, and hit it off rather well. On the strength of that, she invited me to call round at her house for a cup of tea any time I was over in that direction.”

  “And have you?”

  “Yes, many times. And she has come here many times.”

  “I am sorry if my questions seem unnecessarily intrusive, Mr Blake,” said Holmes, taking his note-book from his pocket, “but I must get all the facts straight in my mind if I am to make progress in the case.”

  “I understand.”

  “What is Mrs Booth’s first name?”

  “Penelope,” replied Blake, appearing a little discomfited.

  “And that is, perhaps, how you customarily address her?” queried Holmes, eyeing his client keenly.

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  “Do you know anything about her husband, or why the two of them are separated?”

  “Not really. I have never raised the subject. It would seem to me impolite - indeed, grossly impertinent - to do so. But from occasional remarks she has made, I have gained the impression that her husband treated her very badly. Eventually, she felt she had little choice but to leave the marital home. She has a little money of her own and just about manages to get by on that, but she is not very well off.”

  “Do you know where her husband is living now?” asked Holmes.

  “Somewhere near Birmingham, I believe. It might be Solihull, but I am not certain.”

  “Very well,” said Holmes, shutting up his note-book. “That will do for the moment.”

  “I might say,” Blake added in a somewhat hesitant voice, “lest you get the wrong impression, that I am not the only one in Foxwood who pays visits to Mrs Booth. I know for a fact, for instance, that my neighbour, Ashton, has called upon her on several occasions, although I like to think that she finds my conversation somewhat more interesting than his.”

  “I seem to detect a note of rivalry in your tone,” remarked Holmes with a little smile. “Would I be correct in inferring that Mrs Booth is a woman of some attractions?”

  “You could say that,” returned Blake with an embarrassed chuckle. “I think so, an
yway.”

  At dinner that evening, we discussed our host’s work, and, largely because he himself had an unpretentious, self-depreciating view of it, the conversation was a very light-hearted and amusing one. This came as something of a relief, I must confess, after the gloomy and disturbing matters with which we had been concerned over the last couple of days. I asked Blake if he had ever found himself repeating things he had already written about before, at which suggestion he nodded his head vigorously.

  “Many times,” he replied. “For instance, I think I must have explained the general principles of the telephone at least five times in different publications.”

  “Seven, actually,” corrected Whitemoor. “I found two more this afternoon.”

  Blake laughed. “That is one of the most important tasks that Whitemoor is doing for me,” he remarked. “He is going through all my past articles and cross-indexing them all, something I have never had the time to do. Then, in future, if I am asked to write about the telephone, say, or the rainbow - I’ve explained that three or four times, too - I shall only need to consult the index to see what I have written before on the subject. This will make my work a lot easier. In some cases, indeed, I shall probably be able to completely re-use an old article, with just a few words changed here and there to freshen it up a little!”

  Thus the conversation proceeded in a gay, light-hearted manner, brightening up that dark and somewhat severe dining-room in which we were taking our meal. And yet, despite the gaiety of the gathering, my mind kept wandering, in each brief moment of silence, back to the room next door, the library, in which Blake had recounted to us the melancholy tale of Samuel Harley, and back, also, to the dark office in London where, less than twenty-four hours earlier, we had encountered such a scene of horror. When I retired to my bed that night, my thoughts were an incoherent jumble of all that we had seen and heard since that fateful moment on Friday morning when Mr Coleford of the Great Western Railway had arrived with a letter for Sherlock Holmes. As I drifted off to sleep, I wondered what, if anything, my friend was making of the case, or if he was, in truth, as mystified by it all as I was myself. Knowing his keen intellect as I did, I looked forward to hearing a word from him which might bring a little light into the darkness.