Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons

by James Lovegrove

  “Speaking as one who does have a brother, I can echo the sentiment. Mycroft and I may not always see eye to eye, but he has been there in my hour of need and I likewise in his, and I trust that that shall long continue. But please, go on.”

  “Audrey, though tired, decided to go for an evening walk,” Sir Henry said. “This was a frequent habit of hers.”

  “How frequent?”

  “Practically every day, unless the weather was unduly inclement.”

  “A regular occurrence, in other words.”

  “Yes. Is that significant?”

  “It may be. It may not.”

  “She always maintained that a stroll upon the moor soothed her soul and restored her energies,” said Sir Henry. “She grew up around here, you see, and Dartmoor was her childhood playground. Her family, the Lidstones, are landed gentry, with roots in the area going back generations, much like the Baskervilles. Audrey herself, however, was born with something of a wild streak. As a young girl she was forever straying from home. Once, she befriended a tribe of gypsies, and she told me she almost ran away with them, seeing untrammelled freedom in their nomadic lifestyle. Another time, without her family’s knowledge, she camped out overnight in one of the prehistoric stone huts which dot the region.”

  “A form of accommodation I am only too familiar with,” said Holmes.

  “She was the despair of her mother and father, as you can imagine. Even Cheltenham Ladies’ College and a finishing school could not tame her. Her parents truly believed she was never going to settle down and would one day bring unconscionable shame upon the Lidstone name. I think they were profoundly relieved when she and I met and formed an instant connection. I was, at the time, considered one of Devon’s most eligible bachelors and was forever receiving dinner invitations from people with unmarried daughters my age. When the Lidstones asked me over, I thought it would be just another evening spent sitting next to some simpering spinster of modest attractions who would shower me with compliments and insinuate what a good match we were. Miss Audrey Lidstone was anything but that. She challenged and teased me throughout the meal, and I, gentlemen, adored every minute of it. And as if her personality alone was not enough to enrapture me, she was blessed with dazzling eyes, a sweet, heart-shaped face and an irresistibly impish smile.

  “Up until then, during my first months as a resident at the Hall, I had had a couple of brief dalliances that had come to naught. One of those was with Beryl Stapleton, widow of my would-be nemesis. But alas, that did not develop as I might have hoped.”

  “Any particular reason why not?” Holmes asked.

  “Shame,” said Sir Henry. “Beryl felt a certain complicity in all her husband had done and had tried to do. Although she had acted against him, in my favour, and indeed had been the victim of his strongarm tactics, she was nonetheless guilty by association, in her mind at least. She could not live with that, and against my protests she decided to quit the area. Where she has gone, I don’t know. She left abruptly and gave me no indication whether she might return or where I might find her. I think she felt it was better for the both of us just to cut herself out of my life. It was the impulsive Latin temperament at work. But perhaps she was right. Perhaps it could never have been a successful match, the two of us, given the nature of the events that brought us together in the first place. A relationship born in blood and tragedy is surely not destined to last.

  “So, in the circumstances, I had begun to doubt I would ever find a mate. For that matter, I had begun to question whether Dartmoor was really the best place for me. I was lonely. It had occurred to me that I might be better off selling Baskerville Hall and relocating somewhere a little more populous and civilised.

  “All that changed in a trice, the moment I encountered Audrey Lidstone. Not to put too fine a point on it, we fell head over heels in love. Within a fortnight we were engaged. Within two months we were wed and honeymooning in Paris. We were deliriously happy, the more so when, a little under a year later, Audrey blessed me with a baby boy. It seemed to me that after the horror and suffering that attended my inheritance, the baptism of fire that was my introduction to Baskerville Hall and the baronetcy, I could finally put all that behind me. Life from now on would be carefree and easy. Little did I know…”

  Sir Henry paused, then picked up his thread again.

  “At any rate, out she went that evening. All that week it had been relatively balmy for this time of year, and I offered to accompany her, but she refused. I had been up in London all day, visiting my stockbroker on Threadneedle Street, and was exhausted. Financial affairs make my head spin. I do not know one end of a ledger from another. Audrey told me to put my feet up and rest. Besides, she never minded going for walks on her own, in many ways preferring it. She knew every inch of the moor and felt as safe on it as you or I might in our back garden.

  “Nonetheless I exacted a promise from her that she would return before nightfall. As a concerned, devoted husband, I could do no less. Her last words to me, as she threw on her cloak, were kindly ones. I shall never forget the gentle loving glance she cast at me over her shoulder as she set off down the drive.

  “It was perhaps an hour later that I awoke from a light doze. I had nodded off in my study armchair. I glanced at the clock, then out of the window. It was full dark outside. I assumed that Audrey had come home already, and so went in search of her. I was startled to learn from Mrs Barrymore that she was not back yet. Availing myself of a lantern, I went outside to wait. I was not fearful, not then. As I said, Audrey knew every inch of the moor. I approached the gates, shining the lantern around in the hope that she would see it – a friendly beacon to guide her homeward.

  “I loitered at the gates for a good twenty minutes, with still no sign of Audrey. That was when needles of apprehension first began to prick. Had she got lost? Or had she – perish the thought – met with some kind of accident? I discounted the first possibility but not the second. Dartmoor can be a treacherous place, as you well know, Holmes. I pictured the lip of some steep rocky precipice crumbling beneath Audrey’s feet, sending her plummeting to the bottom. That or her stumbling and turning an ankle, even breaking a leg. There are vagabonds out there, too, human wolves who pose a threat to the unwary traveller and to whom a lone young woman would be a choice target.

  “As these dire imaginings filled my head, I was seized by self-recrimination. I should have forbidden Audrey from venturing out. At the very least I should have been more insistent about going with her. What a fool I had been! Fired with sudden resolve, I thrust open the gates and headed out.

  “There is, just beyond the eastern edge of the shallow bowl in which the Hall lies, a large rock. It projects up from the earth at an acute angle, rising some twenty feet into the air, and seen from a certain viewpoint it resembles an old, hunchbacked man. The locals have christened it Crookback Samuel. The name, I am told, derives from a long-ago Samuel from hereabouts, an itinerant pedlar who was indeed afflicted with severe curvature of the spine. My path took me towards this rock. I had planned on scaling its slope in order to gain height, so that my lantern’s light might be more widely visible to Audrey. In the event, there was no need.

  “I… I saw a pale form, prostrate on the ground at the foot of Crookback Samuel. I knew in an instant that it was Audrey. I ran to her, my heart in my mouth. I presumed she had fainted, or else, as I earlier surmised, had met with some kind of accident.

  “But she lay so still. Too still. Not a breath stirred within her. And the lantern’s beam showed me a face that was deprived not only of animation but of hue, whiter than white.

  “My God, gentlemen! You cannot know the agony I felt then. It was as though a part of my soul had been torn from me. I collapsed to my knees and howled. My cries were guttural, primal, like those of a trapped animal. I pleaded with the heavens to return my wife to me. I would have given anything – my wealth, my health, even my life – if the other end of the bargain was Audrey brought back to this world.
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  “The Barrymores heard my lamentation. Mrs Barrymore remained at the house, so that the sleeping Harry would not be left unattended, while her husband rushed out to look for me. Somehow Barrymore managed to get me back to the Hall. I was in such a wretched state, I could barely walk. It was Barrymore who summoned the police. He sent a message to Dr Mortimer as well. You remember Mortimer, don’t you, Holmes, from last time?”

  “Very well. An excellent young man.”

  “Mortimer came post-haste,” said Sir Henry. “He prescribed me a sedative, then took charge of the body and all the related arrangements. He really was an angel, and I am eternally grateful to him.

  “Thereafter, things become hazy in my memory. I dimly recall the funeral. Audrey was interred in the Lidstones’ vault, at the parish church near the family seat. Her parents and siblings were quite broken. Her mother did not even make it to the end of the ceremony; she swooned halfway through and had to be taken home. Beyond that, all I know is that I have been alternately wracked with grief and overcome by mindless rage. Then, between times, there has been terror.

  “I can date the origin of the terror to the day after Audrey died, when Mortimer was kind enough to drop round and enquire after my welfare. He told me he had just conducted an examination of the body. Whether or not I asked him to – I suspect I did – he informed me of the cause of death. Audrey’s blood had been drained out of her through a wound in her neck, by some means or other. He tried to assure me that, as deaths go, it would have been comparatively peaceful. After the initial pain of the incision, Audrey would have swiftly lost consciousness as the blood flowed out. It would, he said, have been much like drifting off to sleep.

  “These words were clearly intended to comfort me. They did not. Rather, I was reminded immediately of the reports of sheep being killed on the moor in just the same fashion. These stories, and rumours of a gigantic moth being seen at night, were rife. Everyone knew about it.

  “To think that the method which had been used to slay mere sheep was also used to end my Audrey’s life. To think that she had been butchered as though she were… she were just a piece of livestock.”

  Sir Henry’s expression was a mixture of incredulity and raw disgust.

  “But for me,” he said, “there was more to it than that. For I was sure then, as sure as I have ever been of anything, that this moth must be real; and not only that but Audrey hadn’t been simply some random victim of its unholy appetites. The connection was quite clear in my mind. And, now that I think of it, it must be clear in yours too, Holmes. Doubtless you have divined the significance of the fact that it is a moth that murdered the wife of Sir Henry Baskerville – a moth rather than any other species.”

  “The line of logic is certainly one along which my thoughts have travelled,” said Holmes.

  “Whereas I am one upon whom the significance is lost,” Grier interjected. “Would either of you care to enlighten me?”

  “It all depends, Grier,” said Holmes, “on you knowing the professional specialism of the man who murdered Sir Henry’s uncle and almost succeeded in murdering Sir Henry.”

  “Stapleton, right? Jack Stapleton.”

  “The very same. Born Jack Baskerville, later known as Jack Vandeleur, later still as Jack Stapleton.”

  “He was a naturalist, yes?” said Grier.

  “A naturalist with an interest in entomology, whose particular area of expertise was Lepidoptera.”

  “Lepidoptera. That’s butterflies and moths. You’re saying—”

  “I’m saying,” Sir Henry declared, clenching his fists and narrowing his eyes, “that Jack Stapleton has returned from the grave to plague me once more, and he has begun his campaign of vengeance by engineering the death of my wife in the most loathsome fashion imaginable.”

  Chapter Ten

  IN THE SHADOW OF CROOKBACK SAMUEL

  The following morning, at first light, Holmes sallied forth from Baskerville Hall to visit the scene of the crime, the rock formation known as Crookback Samuel.

  The day had dawned blustery but bright. The weather on Dartmoor was nothing if not mutable, and all trace of the previous day’s gloomy dampness was gone as if it had never been. The grass and gorse gleamed as though newly minted. The rocks and trees seemed to bask in the sunlight. A few small breeze-driven clouds scudded overhead like racehorses at the gallop.

  As he walked, Holmes reflected upon the previous night’s conversation with Sir Henry. It had drawn to a close not long after Jack Stapleton’s name came up. Sir Henry was by then quite inebriated, and Holmes, believing he would get little further out of him of any use, proposed going to bed so that they could all reconvene in the morning, refreshed and rested. Although Sir Henry had promised Harry he would tuck him in, it was Holmes and Grier who ended up tucking Sir Henry in. The baronet fell asleep still fully clothed, but his face, in repose, was more tranquil than before, or so it seemed to Holmes at any rate. Now that allies were there in the form of Sherlock Holmes and Benjamin Grier, men whose stout hearts and steadfast support could not be in doubt, Sir Henry was able to relax for the first time in many days.

  Had Jack Stapleton really come back from the dead to bedevil Sir Henry once more? Was it possible? And if so, was the lepidopterist, so well-regarded as an authority on the subject that he had even had a species of moth named after him, now in possession of an inordinately large vampiric moth that he had trained to kill, much as he had trained his hound?

  Holmes turned these questions over in his mind.

  “And your conclusions?” I asked.

  “You know that I spurn the very idea of ghosts and revenants, Watson,” replied he. “Not for one second was I prepared to entertain the notion that Stapleton had arisen from the great Grimpen Mire after five years of immersion and was now shambling around Dartmoor as some half-rotted, hate-driven ghoul, engaged in an elaborate scheme to bring about Sir Henry’s downfall. And yet…”

  “And yet?”

  “Cast your mind back to the postscript to the climax of our adventures on Dartmoor.”

  “If I must.”

  “The morning after we slew Stapleton’s hound, we went in search of Stapleton himself. His wife assisted, directing us to the safe path through the Grimpen Mire, which was marked out by wands. There were signs that someone had passed that way before us, the most obvious of these being Sir Henry’s stolen boot, which Stapleton had evidently discarded during his flight. Of the villain himself, however, nothing was to be seen, and the only reasonable inference one could draw was that he had failed to reach the little island of terra firma in the midst of that morass where lay the old, abandoned miners’ cottage in which he had kept the dog hidden; and that, instead, becoming disorientated in the fog on his way to this refuge, he had veered off the path into the mire.”

  “You mean, what if you were wrong?” I said. “What if Stapleton did not perish as you surmised? By leaving the boot for us to find, he was laying a false trail and wished us to conclude exactly what we did conclude. Good Lord, Holmes, can that be it?”

  “In which case,” Holmes said, the corners of his mouth turning down in a dour grimace, “I would be guilty of the gravest of blunders, one that led directly to Lady Audrey’s death.”

  He sat in contemplative silence for a while, puffing at his pipe.

  “I am not so arrogant as to think I am infallible, Watson,” said he at last. “You have seen me, on more than one occasion, admit to an error, and there have been times when those errors have put in jeopardy the very people I am aiming to protect. If, however, Stapleton did outwit me by leading me to believe that he was dead when he was not, it could surely be considered the nadir of my career, a catastrophe beyond redemption.”

  There was no denying the severity with which Holmes spoke, yet he did not strike me as despondent. Hence I felt safe in saying, “Am I to take it that this has proved not to be the case?”

  “All in due course, old fellow. I am mimicking the format of one of your narrativ
es, remember. It would not do to give all the answers at once. One must consider dramatic tension. Now then, where was I?”

  It amused Holmes to think that he was giving me a taste of my own medicine. I refused to be irked. “Approaching Crookback Samuel,” I said evenly.

  “Just so.”

  The rock formation was as advertised. It jutted steeply from the earth, flattening out at its apex to form an overhang. Holmes, though not of a notably fanciful bent, had little trouble seeing the profile of a man in its configuration, one who appeared to be striding doubled over, bandy-legged, with his head raised questingly forward.

  The chances of uncovering clues at the site were, he freely admitted, remote. Ten days on from Lady Audrey’s death, most if not all of the evidence was likely to have been erased by the weather. Holmes performed several circuits of Crookback Samuel anyway, subjecting the ground immediately around its base to intense scrutiny. What he found, imprinted in the muddy soil, were examples of the spoor unique to what he termed “a certain peculiarly destructive breed of cattle, the common or garden variety policeman”. Regrettably he knew only too well the signs, from previous cases. Judging by the sizes of the various footprints, the tread on the soles of the boots, and above all the pattern of the paths they followed, which meandered and overlapped seemingly at random, a grand total of three members of Her Majesty’s constabulary had explored the vicinity of the rock, and as usual the policemen had gone about their task with a zeal that was in no way tempered by methodicality or thoroughness. If anything, this particular herd had trampled more comprehensively than was their wont. Whatever useful data the ground might have yielded to the expert criminalist was lost for good.

  Stepping back to get a better view of Crookback Samuel, Holmes did establish, if nothing else, that this was a prime spot for an ambush. A man crouching on the rock’s uppermost face might easily leap down onto someone below, catching his victim unawares. Likewise, a man lurking in the lee of the overhang would be well hidden from sight, until he chose to make his presence known.