The Riddle of Foxwood Grange

by Denis O. Smith

  Holmes was agreeable to this, so after lunch we took the pony and trap, and, ten minutes later, the three of us arrived at Netherfield Lodge, where we were shown into the drawing-room. After a moment, we were joined by Mrs Booth.

  “This is Mr Sherlock Holmes, Penelope,” said Blake. “He wishes to ask you a few questions.”

  “By all means,” said Mrs Booth, as she turned to Holmes, an expression of curiosity mingled with apprehension upon her face. “What is it you wish to know? Don’t tell me you have had another stone-throwing incident!”

  Holmes shook his head. “I simply wish to ask you how you came to be living here, in Foxwood.”

  “I do not understand. I imagined you would have heard from Mr Blake of my separation from my husband. Everyone else seems to know all my business.”

  “Indeed,” said Holmes. “I do understand all that. My meaning is simply this: why Foxwood, rather than anywhere else?”

  “The house just happened to be available,” she replied, evidently surprised by the question.

  “No doubt, but there must surely have been other houses available at the time, too. Where were you living before, when you were with your husband?”

  “Solihull, near Birmingham.”

  “Is that where you spent your childhood?”

  “No. I grew up in Aston, in Birmingham, where my family still live. My father owns an engineering business there.”

  “Did your father assist you in getting this house, either financially or in any other way?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Why, then, did he look this way when there must have been properties available in Birmingham, or, at least, nearer to Birmingham than Foxwood? Did he, or you, have some previous connection with this part of the country?”

  “Yes, he did, as a matter of fact. He had a number of friends who lived in these parts.”

  “Was your husband related to any of these friends?”

  “Yes, he is the son of one of them. He and I first met when my family was paying a visit to his, some years ago.”

  “That connection must have created difficulties when you informed your family of your intention to separate from your husband.”

  “It did. My mother and father were very distressed and begged me to reconsider, but I remained resolute in my decision. At length, when they accepted that I could not be dissuaded, they were very helpful to me.”

  Holmes nodded. “And Mr Ashton? Is he, too, a friend of your father’s?”

  “Not especially. They have met once or twice at the house of a mutual acquaintance, but that is all.”

  “But he is, perhaps, a friend of your husband’s family?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when Mr Ashton calls round to see you, as I have heard he does, does he attempt to persuade you to return to your husband?”

  Mrs Booth nodded her head. “His visits almost always begin simply as casual social calls, with chit-chat about the village and so on, but invariably end up with his trying to persuade me to heal the breach with my husband.”

  “I suspected it might be so. His visits are, then, perhaps, not especially welcome?”

  “I have come to dread them.”

  Blake leaned forward, an expression of surprise upon his face. “You never told me anything of this, Penelope,” said he.

  “I did not wish you to become embroiled in my distressing family affairs,” she returned.

  Blake sat back in his chair, blew out his cheeks and ran his fingers through his hair. “Well, I never,” said he.

  “What?” said Mrs Booth with a little smile, reading the expression upon his face. “Surely you did not ever regard Mr Ashton as a rival? Your visits here are always welcome to me, John. His are not.”

  “When my friends here called upon you earlier in the week,” continued Holmes after a moment, addressing Mrs Booth, “you informed them that although you had received a series of letters from your husband, he had not been here to see you at any time in the last year.”

  “That is correct.”

  “But I fancy that that is no longer the case.”

  Mrs Booth hesitated. “How do you know?” she asked at length.

  In answer, Holmes leaned forward. “May I?” he asked, then he gently pushed back the left cuff of Mrs Booth’s dress. Upon her wrist was a dark bruise. “Is this your husband’s work?” he enquired, at which she nodded her head, her gaze averted to the floor. “And the small cut I see on your eyebrow?” he continued, to which she again nodded her head.

  “He appeared without warning on Wednesday evening,” Mrs Booth said at length, “and would not be denied entry. Of course, we quarrelled, as you might expect, and he struck me.”

  Blake rose to his feet and put his arm around Mrs Booth’s shoulders. “How dreadful!” said he. “You should have told me.”

  “I did not want you to become involved,” she responded. “I just felt so ashamed of the whole business.”

  “Well, well,” said Holmes, rising to his feet, after we had remained a few moments in silence, “Watson and I will be on our way now. I wish to speak to Mr Needham before I do anything else.”

  “Feel free to take the trap,” returned Blake, who had seated himself beside Mrs Booth. “I shall walk back to the Grange a little later. But if you are going to see Needham, you may need to bang his door-knocker very energetically. His housekeeper is never there on a Friday, and he himself is a little deaf.”

  We took the pony and trap as Blake had suggested, and, a few minutes later, were rattling along the road in the sunshine.

  “At least,” said Holmes, “we are now justified in conjecturing with some confidence not only that it was indeed Booth who threw the stones at us, but also that he has been secretly staying at Oldstone House, Ashton’s place.”

  “That certainly seems likely from what we have heard,” I agreed. “In which case, it was probably Ashton who told Booth of the burgeoning friendship between his wife and Farringdon Blake.”

  Holmes nodded his agreement. “It is also possible,” said he, “that Booth observed his wife driving herself round to the Grange on Sunday. If so, that was probably the incident which precipitated Booth’s dramatic warning the following day, although, of course, Blake had not even been at home when Mrs Booth called.” My friend fell silent then, and it was clear that his thoughts had moved on to some other matter. As for my own thoughts, they circled round and round the new information we had received concerning Booth and Ashton. What did it mean for the other mysteries in the case, which remained as yet unresolved? The only thing I felt certain about was that Sherlock Holmes would have an opinion on the matter, but what that opinion might be, I could not imagine.

  It took us a little more than ten minutes to reach Needham’s house. I had asked Holmes as we jogged along what it was he wished to speak to Needham about, but he was unforthcoming, saying only that he wished to ask him a couple of questions. As it turned out, however, my friend was destined to be disappointed. Our knock upon the door elicited no response, and though we repeated it several times, no-one came to the door, and the house remained in complete silence.

  “It seems it is not only his housekeeper but Needham himself who is away,” I remarked, as we made our way back to where we had tethered the pony.

  “So it would seem,” returned Holmes. “However, it makes little difference to my immediate plans.”

  “What, if I may ask, are they?”

  “To return to the Grange, have a cup of tea and put my theory about Samuel Harley’s puzzle to the test.”

  14: The Error in the Heart

  ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING FEATURES of Sherlock Holmes’s singular character was his reluctance to share his thoughts on a case until he was certain that his theories had been proved beyond all possible doubt. As we sat together with a p
ot of tea, on the little terrace outside the French windows of the drawing-room, I endeavoured to draw him out on the mystery surrounding his client, but without success. To all my enquiries he simply replied that he would explain the matter later.

  “Did you find my reports at all useful to you in refining your theories?” I asked, not because I was seeking to gain a compliment, but simply as another attempt to draw my friend out on the matter.

  “They were very interesting and thorough,” said he, as he put a match to his pipe.

  “I feared they might better be described as rambling and incoherent,” I remarked, “but, having no idea what might or might not be relevant, I felt obliged to include almost everything I saw and heard.”

  Holmes nodded. “That was not a weakness but a strength,” said he. “If you had already had some strongly held theory about Blake’s little mystery - whether right or wrong - it would have insensibly influenced your judgement as to what was important and what was not, and your reports would very likely not have been so comprehensive. I myself had formed a tentative hypothesis on the matter before I left here for London, and I am glad to say that there is nothing in your reports, even among the smallest details, which in any way contradicts my view of the matter. So, to that extent, they were certainly useful. Had there been some detail in your account which my theory could not accommodate, I should have been obliged to review it.”

  “Is that all?” I asked in some disappointment, “that my reports confirmed your views only in a negative sort of way, by not contradicting them?”

  “Not at all,” replied my companion with a chuckle. “The issues surrounding our client are manifold and complex. Some are linked and some are not. Your record of the week’s events shed light on all of them in varying degrees.”

  “Did any one incident stand out?”

  Holmes hesitated. “I am inclined to say that the most interesting thing you reported was the little slip of paper which you included among the leaves of your note-book.”

  “What!” I cried in surprise. “The scrap of paper which had the word ‘shrub’ written on it? You amaze me, Holmes! I considered that little scrap so utterly and completely irrelevant to anything else that I almost did not mention it at all! I only did so because of the circumstances in which it happened to come to light. Why, it could have blown into the house from anywhere, at any time!”

  “Well, well, I am sure that the path it followed from its origin to the moment you found it was indeed a tortuous one. Yet it turned up when it did, and not at any other time, and I believe it to be of the very greatest significance. There!” he continued with a smile, “I have let you in to a part of my reasoning, Watson, and, now I have done so, I should be obliged if you did not mention it to anyone else.”

  “Not even your client?”

  “No.”

  Blake himself returned shortly afterwards, while Holmes and I were still sitting in conversation, discussing the inquests we had attended.

  “Mrs Booth should be all right now,” he remarked, as he joined us on the terrace. “I think her husband’s assault had shocked her deeply, but she had kept the matter to herself until you drew it out of her, Mr Holmes.”

  Holmes nodded. “Such affairs are always distressing for all concerned, but it is generally better to have these things out in the open. Will she now seek a divorce?”

  “Yes, and, in the light of her husband’s physical ill-treatment of her, I should think it will be granted.”

  “Very well,” said Holmes, rising to his feet. “Let us now consider Samuel Harley’s puzzle. If you will come with me to the library, I will explain to you my reflections on the matter.”

  Blake hesitated. “Forgive me for querying this point again, Mr Holmes,” he began in a dubious tone, “but you are sure, are you, that this old riddle is relevant to the concerns for which I consulted you - that I was spied upon here, and followed in London?”

  “I am certain of it.”

  “Then you have my full attention,” said Blake in a brighter tone. “I could do with something to lift my spirits a little!”

  In the library, Holmes took from his pocket several sheets of paper, which he unfolded and spread out on the table. One of them was the copy he had made of the puzzle-square in the orangery, except that he had now added a number to each column, one to thirteen, across the top, and to each row, one to thirteen, down the left-hand side.

  “You will no doubt recall,” he began, “that we discussed briefly a possible connection between the puzzle-square and the poem on the wall there. As I reflected further on this possibility, I discovered a curious fact. There are, as you are aware, precisely one hundred and sixty-nine letters in the array. Harley’s moral poem, meanwhile, contains one hundred and eighty-eight letters. On the sheet I was working from” he continued, indicating another of his papers on the table, “I have noted the number of letters in each line, as you see.”

  I leaned over to study his sheet, which appeared as follows:

  If error be in the heart, 19

  Nor all thy diligence nor all thy talent 33

  Nor all that learning can bestow 27

  Shall bring forth fruit. 20

  Like seed scatter’d unto rocks, 25

  Or bulbs thrust into mud, 20

  All that might have been 20

  Is but a vain and empty vision. 24

  Total:188

  “You will observe,” Holmes continued, “that the length of the first line is nineteen letters. If that line is discounted, the sum total of the remainder of the poem is therefore one hundred and sixty-nine letters, the same as the number of letters in the puzzle-square.”

  “What an odd coincidence!” I cried.

  “Well, of course, it could simply be a coincidence,” returned Holmes, “but if so it is certainly a singular one. As you know, Watson, I dislike simply accepting anything as a coincidence. In my line of work, anything which appears at first sight to be a coincidence is almost always open to some more constructive interpretation. So it is, I am sure, in this case. Fortunately, there is a simple way of verifying that we are on the right lines in our conjecture.”

  “I cannot imagine what that could be,” I remarked.

  “Nor I,” agreed Blake.

  “Really?” said Holmes in surprise. “It is a perfectly elementary matter. I am sure that if you reflected on what I have suggested for longer than five seconds, you could not fail to see it for yourselves. If we ignore the first line of the poem, and consider the rest, from ‘Nor all thy diligence’ to ‘empty vision’, and count the number of instances in it of every individual letter of the alphabet, we can compare that with a similar examination of the letters in the orangery puzzle. Here are the results,” he continued, unfolding another piece of paper on the table, on which I read the following:

  “You will note that there is only one list of letters on this sheet,” said Holmes. “The reason for that is that the figures for the poem and the figures for the puzzle are in fact identical. You surely cannot still suppose that such an exact concordance is simply coincidence, Watson! Why, the odds against it must be almost beyond the wit of man to calculate!”

  “I agree,” I said. “You must be right!”

  “Thank you. Now, when I first realized the facts I have just described to you, I conjectured that, as the rest of the poem matches the puzzle-square, letter for letter, the first line of the poem should perhaps be considered separately from the rest of it. Of course, in one sense - the obvious one - the first line is an intrinsic part of the poem. The whole piece is in the form of a conditional proposition - ‘if this, then that’ - in which the first line is, to use the traditional terminology of the schoolmen, the protasis. The next three lines form the apodosis, that is to say, the consequence if the first line is the case, and the four lines whi
ch follow are a sort of amplification of the apodosis, comparing it with other activities that the writer regards as equally futile. In that sense, then, the first line cannot be ignored without destroying the whole point of the conditional statement. However, I conjectured that it was possible that the first line had a double meaning: that is, some other meaning as well as the obvious one. But what other meaning could I attach to the phrase ‘If error be in the heart’?

  “For some time I pondered this mystery, convinced that I was on the right track, but unable to see what the next step forward should be. Then, as I read through all my material again, it struck me that the poem itself contains an error.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Blake, turning to study the framed poem on the wall once more. “It appears straightforward enough to me.”

  “Yes, the general meaning is clear enough,” returned Holmes, “and the poem is composed in a thoughtful and convincing way. There is nothing wrong with it in that sense. But one of the individual letters is arguably incorrect.”

  “I cannot see anything which is obviously wrong,” I remarked as I ran my eye over the poem.

  “No doubt,” said Holmes, “but that is the point of it. It is a subtle matter. Yet consider for a moment the fifth line, Watson: ‘Like seed scatter’d unto rocks’. What I suggest is that the word ‘unto’ is incorrect. It is acceptable, but ‘onto’ would surely make better sense in the context. Arguably, then, the ‘u’ is an error and should be an ‘o’.”

  I closed my eyes to concentrate. “Yes,” I said at length, “I am sure you are right.”

  “I agree,” said Blake. “The more I think about it, the more amazed I am that it has never struck me before!”

  “Very well,” said Holmes. “We are agreed, then, that what I am suggesting is possible, at the very least.”

  “I think it more than simply possible,” I said. “I think it is a brilliant conjecture. I don’t think it would have occurred to me if I had studied the poem for the next ten years. But where does it leave us?”