Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons

by James Lovegrove

  “Simple. You are far too big to be a cavalryman.”

  Grier nodded at that with some amusement. “I pity the horse that would have to carry anyone of my bulk for long distances.”

  “That makes you, by default, an infantryman,” Holmes continued, “and hence, given that there are only two foot regiments to decide between, I had an even chance of choosing the right one. Happily, the gamble paid off.”

  “Fine, but what prompted you to suggest I am a Freemason?”

  “It is a fact – not a well-known one, maybe – that the vast majority of Buffalo Soldiers are also Freemasons. The balance of probabilities that this would be true of you was, therefore, significantly in my favour.”

  “You have played your hand excellently,” said Grier, “but I am still mystified as to how you could know I have come here today by train from the West Country.”

  “The ticket stub,” said Holmes, gesturing towards the other’s chest. “The one tucked into your breast pocket. Enough of it is projecting for me to discern the words ‘at’, ‘stern’ and ‘way’, from which it is easy to extrapolate the longer words ‘Great’, ‘Western’ and ‘Railway’.”

  Grier glanced down at the stub. “The answer was in plain sight all along.”

  “The same may be said for proof that you sat in a forward-facing seat. I imagine, with the weather being warm, that it was rather stuffy in the compartment in which you rode and that the window was at least partially open. This would admit smoke from the locomotive’s chimney, and smuts from said smoke have adhered to your left shirt cuff.”

  Grier inspected said shirt cuff, observing – as I did – the few tiny dark speckles that besmirched it.

  “Compartments on Great Western Railway trains are on the left-hand side of the carriage, with the corridor on the right,” Holmes said. “The location of the smuts thus reveals that you must have been seated facing forward and, moreover, adjacent to the window. It is quite straightforward.” He threw a glance at the mantel clock. “And with that, I believe my allotted minute is up.”

  “I will grant you a brief extension to the time so that you can explain how you knew I have come in haste.”

  “Oh, as to that,” said Holmes airily, “had your journey been a leisurely one, you would surely have taken the opportunity to neaten yourself up between disembarking from the train at Paddington and making your way to my door. The carelessly neglected ticket stub implies otherwise. So, too, does the rapidity with which you took the stairs to my rooms. Indeed, your general mood is one of impatience and preoccupation. To that end, let us prevaricate no further. How, Corporal Grier, may I be of assistance to you?”

  Grier composed himself. “It is not I, Mr Holmes, who require your assistance. At least, not directly. Rather, it is an old friend of mine, a man who is already known to both you and Dr Watson.”

  Holmes steepled his fingers and leaned forward. “Go on.”

  “The gentleman in question is a Masonic brother of mine. We met in Chicago at the Hesperia Lodge in the mid-eighties, struck up a close comradeship, and have remained in touch ever since, reuniting whenever circumstances allow, although our paths in life have taken us in very different directions. He is Canadian by birth but spent much of his adulthood in America, until providence took him to the shores of your own land some five years ago, where he has remained ever since.”

  “A-ha. From that thumbnail description, I believe I can identify the fellow in question.”

  “I had a feeling you might. He has told me how you once aided him in his hour of need, when death loomed and all seemed hopeless. Regrettably, sir, a similar evil situation has befallen him again. However, the crisis, I would submit, is far more acute this time than last.”

  “I must confess I am in the dark,” I interjected.

  “A perennial condition with you, Watson,” Holmes quipped.

  “Come now. That is unfair.”

  “I apologise. Yet it surprises me, old fellow, that you have failed to interpret the clues Corporal Grier has provided. Can it be that you have forgotten our adventures on Dartmoor back in ’eighty-nine? I know full well that you made copious notes about the case, and by your own admission you have every intention of turning them into one of your published chronicles at some point.”

  “My goodness,” I breathed. It seemed an uncanny coincidence that, a mere half hour earlier, I had been forcibly reminded of Stapleton’s grim hound and its predations.

  “Yes,” said Holmes. “I see it is all coming back to you.”

  “The man I am referring to,” said Grier, “is Henry Baskerville. And I have to tell you, gentlemen,” he went on sombrely, “it is not just Henry’s life that is at stake on this occasion but his very sanity.”

  Chapter Three

  THE BASKERVILLE CURSE STRIKES AGAIN

  “But to begin at the beginning…” said Corporal Benjamin Grier.

  “If you wouldn’t mind,” said Holmes.

  Sitting back, the American commenced his narrative. “I was owed several weeks’ leave by the army, and got it into my head that I should visit with my old pal Henry all the way across the Atlantic. I was keen to see his home and get an idea of how life as a baronet was treating him. He had a wife now, too.”

  “Lady Audrey.”

  “That is she. You know her?”

  “Know of her. A Devonshire lass, and by all accounts a great beauty.”

  “He also had sired a son, and I had yet to make the acquaintance of either. I wrote him, expressing my intentions, with the proviso that if he was too grand now to consort with commoners such as myself, naturally I would not come. In his reply, Henry matched my joshing tone. ‘Normally I send peasants packing with my shotgun when they come to my house, but for you, Benjamin, I shall make an exception.’” Grier heaved a deep sigh. “Those words proved, in the event, to be horribly prophetic.

  “Throughout the ocean voyage my prevailing mood was one of joyous anticipation. Everything I knew about Henry’s present circumstances, from the correspondence he and I had exchanged over the years since he came to England, suggested that he had found happiness. He was deeply in love with Audrey, and she had provided him with a healthy heir, name of Harry, who had lately turned three and upon whom Henry clearly doted. He was settling into the ways of Dartmoor, befriending neighbours and enjoying an active social life. It seemed he had put behind him the whole episode involving the hound and Jack Stapleton, or whatever the man’s name was. About this his letters had furnished only a sketchy account, but from what I could gather, it was a horrendous ordeal. By the way, regarding you, Mr Holmes, Henry was fulsome in his praise. The same goes for you, Dr Watson. It is quite apparent that he owes you two his life. But how much can change in a single moment! How easily can disaster strike when least expected!” Grier nodded towards the whisky decanter on the sideboard with an importunate air. “I realise it is barely gone noon, sirs, but might I…?”

  I stood up, charged a glass and handed it to him. With appreciation, he drank deep.

  “That’s better,” said he, and resumed his account. “Of my arrival at Southampton and my subsequent journey to Devon, there is little to say, other than to mention a strange foreboding that came over me, its intensity increasing the further inland I travelled. At first my inexperienced eye roved with delight over the hills, rivers and quaint villages I passed in a succession of trains. Yet, as I crossed into Devon, the terrain grew not only wilder but in some weird way darker: small towns interspersed with solitary stone hovels, all huddling beneath a low, grey sky. An oppression settled over my spirits, and I ascribed it to the bleakness of my surroundings, and also to exhaustion. I had been a week at sea and am no sailor; nor had my accommodation helped, for all I could afford was a cabin in steerage. There was a part of me, however, that seemed convinced somehow that disaster lay ahead – and in this, alas, it was proved accurate.”

  “Yes, yes, enough of the hors d’oeuvres,” said Holmes, somewhat curtly. “Please, I beg you, Grier
, the entrée.”

  One might deem this remark rude, and I fear his interlocutor took it as such. I, on the other hand, who knew Holmes’s ways intimately, understood that he was excited by Grier’s story and anxious to get to the heart of the matter.

  “You are right,” the American said, a little stiffly. “Here I am, insisting that time is of the essence, and what do I go and do but get lost in digression? I shall henceforth do my best to be concise.”

  “But at the same time, you must omit no salient fact.”

  “Agreed. Well, eventually I alighted at a place called Bartonhighstock, a tiny, out-of-the-way village with an inn and a train halt to its name and not much else.”

  I knew Bartonhighstock, for it was there, at a little rural wayside railway station, that I had fetched up, along with Dr James Mortimer and Sir Henry himself, on the way to my memorable sojourn at Baskerville Hall.

  “By prior agreement, Henry was to have laid on a wagonette to collect me,” said Grier. “None, though, was to be seen. I waited a full hour, and still no wagonette appeared. This struck me as odd but explicable. Maybe there had been some kind of miscommunication. Maybe Henry had got his dates muddled up, or I had. So I assured myself, even as my misgivings mounted.

  “In the end I decided to walk, and duly went to ask for directions to Baskerville Hall. There was no station master – the station was too small for that – but there was a booking clerk. Upon hearing my destination, the fellow’s face turned grim.

  “‘You have heard about the recent tragedy there,’ said he. I shan’t attempt to replicate his thick rural burr.

  “‘Tragedy?’ I enquired.

  “‘The death of Lady Audrey.’

  “At that, my heart sank like a stone. All at once, my feelings of foreboding were justified.

  “‘Her Ladyship was killed,’ the clerk said, ‘just a short distance from the Hall.’

  “‘Killed? How?’

  “Now his expression became not just grim but evasive. ‘Well, it’s not for me to say one way or another what might have been responsible. Nobody knows for certain. But a terrible bad death it was. And there are rumours…’

  “‘What sort of rumours?’

  “‘That some monster did it. Nothing else could account for the awful state of her body.’

  “‘Monster,’ I echoed wonderingly. I pressed him for more detail, but none was forthcoming. All he would tell me was that Baskerville Hall was not somewhere I, or anyone, should go. He advised me to take the next train out of Bartonhighstock.

  “He still had not vouchsafed the Hall’s whereabouts. However, I managed to extract that morsel of information from him, if nothing else. I can be quite… persuasive when I put my mind to it. What is the good of being built so sturdily if one cannot take advantage of it from time to time?

  “I was told it was a distance of some seven miles to the Hall, and it was anything but an easy journey. Yet to a soldier who has marched, day upon day, across desert, mountain and prairie, seven miles is nothing. Having double-checked the route with the booking clerk – for there were many junctions where I would have to make turns, and few signposts for guidance – I hefted my suitcase and set off at a fast lick. A couple of hours of daylight remained, I estimated, and it would not do to get caught out in the open, somewhere remote and uninhabited, as darkness fell.

  “Along narrow lanes and up and down hillocky slopes I strode. A wind stirred, bringing enough of a chill to the air that I felt obliged to button my coat up to the neck. The overcast sky darkened. All the while, as I walked, I felt a profound pang of sorrow for my friend Henry. A widower now, after a mere four years of marriage – and his wife taken from him in circumstances which, judging by the clerk’s hints, were as violent as they were mysterious. I recalled Henry saying once, in a letter, that there was a widely held belief that the Baskervilles were cursed. The wicked antics of an ancestor of his, name of Hugo, had seen to it that the family would never know happiness. Successive generations would pay the price for their forebear’s sins. He had mentioned this laughingly, and doubtless when the supposedly spectral hound that killed his uncle was revealed to be no more than a flesh-and-blood dog, it did put Henry’s mind at rest, convincing him that he was not the victim of some supernatural legacy of suffering.

  “But now it occurred to me that perhaps, after all, the Baskerville curse was real, and Audrey was just the latest in line to fall to it.

  “Night was fast approaching when at long last I spied what could only have been the Hall. As you yourselves know, gentlemen, it is a huge, stark edifice built of black granite and dominated by a pair of twin towers, its walls covered in ivy and inset with meanly small mullioned windows. All Henry had told me about his home was that it was large and rambling, and up until that moment, in my New World ignorance, I had had in my mind’s eye some grand, porticoed mansion in the American style. I had not thought that the place would be quite so ancient, nor quite so austere.

  “The Hall sits in a natural depression in the landscape fringed with ragged trees. As I headed downhill towards it, I met a man and a woman coming the other way. He was tall, with a square black beard and a lugubrious air, while she was large and broad and similarly had a very serious look about her. They were carrying luggage, and from their stooped shoulders and repeated backward glances I could see they were in a state of some consternation. I hailed them, and soon enough, after they had overcome their initial wariness, we fell to talking. I swiftly ascertained that these two were the Barrymores, Henry’s butler and housekeeper.”

  “The Barrymores?” I said. “They are still working for Sir Henry? That is somewhat surprising, given everything that—”

  “Hush, Watson,” Holmes interrupted, wagging an admonitory finger at me. “Let Corporal Grier tell his tale.”

  “Mr Barrymore was quick to inform me that he and Mrs Barrymore had handed in their notice that very afternoon and were leaving Baskerville Hall with no intention ever to return. ‘The master’s behaviour,’ he said, ‘has become unconscionable.’

  “‘Since Lady Audrey’s death,’ said his wife, ‘he has been quite out of his mind.’

  “‘Grief may do that to a man,’ I pointed out.

  “‘Grief?’ said Mr Barrymore. ‘Oh, this is not grief, sir. This is something far worse. I would not go so far as to call it madness, but the word is as good a description as any for Sir Henry’s mental state. The fits of rage. The shouting and raving at all hours of day and night. The smashing of plates, the defacing of portraits…’

  “‘Nine days we have endured it,’ said Mrs Barrymore, who seemed a woman of some fortitude, if her stolid features were anything to go by. ‘What happened to Her Ladyship shocked us all, but nothing could have prepared us for Sir Henry’s reaction. At the funeral he scarce spoke a word, save for a few combative grunts, and it has only got worse since. This morning he even brandished a gun at my husband! Said he would shoot him, or himself, one or the other, he didn’t much mind. That was the last straw as far as we were concerned. We have quit, and good riddance.’

  “‘It is the lad I feel sorry for,’ said Mr Barrymore.

  “‘You mean Harry, Sir Henry’s son,’ I said.

  “‘We only bore it as long as we did for that poor little mite’s sake,’ said Mrs Barrymore. ‘I had half a mind to make off with him, just to preserve him from his father’s fury. But, if we had attempted to take Harry with us and Sir Henry had caught us in the act, I cannot say what would have happened. I doubt we would have survived, and maybe not Harry either. That is a mark of just how far beyond reason Sir Henry has gone.’

  “‘You say you are a friend of his, sir,’ said Mr Barrymore.

  “‘A good and, I hope, trusted friend.’

  “‘Then perhaps you may talk some sense into him, where my wife and I could not. I tell you, though, the way he is now, he is a danger to all and sundry, not least himself. To enter Baskerville Hall is to take your life into your hands.’

  “‘Co
nsider me warned,’ I said. ‘Good luck to you both.’

  “‘And to you,’ said Mr Barrymore. ‘I fear you shall need it more than we.’

  “With that, they trudged off into the night, while I squared my shoulders and, with perhaps pardonable trepidation, covered the last quarter-mile of ground to the Hall.”

  Chapter Four

  NO WAY TO WELCOME AN OLD FRIEND

  “I cannot say for certain what I thought might happen to me as I opened the lodge gates and made my way up the drive,” Grier continued. “I can say that the last thing I expected was to be shot at.”

  “The very event Sir Henry joked about in his letter,” said I.

  Grier nodded. “Yet it was no laughing matter. There was the booming report of a shotgun, and I swear to you, gentlemen, the cluster of pellets flew past my head this close.” He held up a finger an inch from his left cheek. “I felt it go by. A hand’s breadth to the right, and I would not be here now to talk about it.

  “‘Ho there, Brother Henry!’ I called out, presuming the unseen sniper to be the house’s sole adult occupant. ‘It is I, Brother Benjamin. I see you have travelled to the east.’ I was using one of the standard Masonic greetings in order to establish my bona fides beyond any question. I might equally have said, ‘Have you seen my dog, Hiram?’, but I imagined the topic of dogs might be a sensitive one for Henry.”

  “He is not alone in that,” I muttered.

  “To my astonishment, there came no verbal reply. Rather, the shotgun boomed again. This time a small divot was blasted out of the grass just to the side of the drive. I had spied the flash of the gun’s discharge in an upstairs window, and now, focusing upon that window, I could just about make out the weapon itself and the person holding it. Even at a distance and in poor light, I was able to confirm that it was Henry.