Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons

by James Lovegrove

  “Is it Laura herself?” Here, the voice sounded less irate, more plaintive.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Let me see.”

  The butler opened the door the whole way, to permit full view of Holmes to the other man. The ruddy cheeks and the receding, wayward white hair were familiar to Holmes from my descriptions: this fellow could only be Frankland.

  “Mr Frankland?” Holmes said. “I apologise for arriving without announcing my visit beforehand. However…”

  Frankland turned away, seemingly uninterested. To the butler he said, “My spectacles, Loach. Have you seen them? I’ve dozens of papers to read this morning, and I’m damned if I can find the blessed things.”

  “Regrettably, sir, I have no idea where they might be,” the butler replied. “Do you not have a spare pair?”

  “Lost those too,” Frankland grumbled.

  “If I might, Mr Frankland,” Holmes offered. “The commonest place for a pair of missing spectacles is upon the head of the wearer.”

  The other laid a hand on his thinning pate and patted it. No spectacles were there.

  “A joke, I see,” he growled. “One I fail to see the humour in.”

  “But in this instance,” Holmes went on suavely, “that is not the solution to the mystery. Rather, I wonder – have you thought of looking in the conservatory?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I noticed a conservatory attached to the southern end of the house. I strongly suspect that that is where your spectacles are. I would not be at all surprised, in fact, if they were stowed on a shelf where you keep your indoor horticultural tools.”

  “But…! How…? What…? Can it…?”

  This spluttering outburst preceded an abrupt departure as Frankland dashed from the hallway in the direction of the conservatory.

  Holmes and Loach the butler waited, each not quite meeting the other’s eye. A minute later, Frankland reappeared, and he was a man transformed. His previous ill temper had given way to a brighter mood, like the sun coming out after a storm. In his hand he waved a pair of gold-rimmed reading spectacles.

  “Bless me! Bless me!” he declared. “It is a miracle. You are a complete stranger, and yet you knew exactly where they were. How, sir? How is it possible?” His look turned sly. “Are you some kind of spy, by any chance? Have you been watching me?”

  “Watching, no,” replied Holmes. “Observing, yes. The windows of your conservatory are opaque with condensation. The air within is therefore kept warm and humid, implying that you are a keeper of tropical plants.”

  “I am.”

  “Earlier today you were tending to them.”

  “That is also so, but how can you tell?”

  “There are encrustations of dirt beneath the nails of both your hands. Your fingertips are, moreover, lightly dusted with the same dirt. You have been tamping down soil. Meanwhile, adhering to your right sleeve are a few tiny leaf clippings, further evidence of horticultural industry. Above all else, there is a small set of secateurs protruding from your breast pocket, the kind used for trimming botanical specimens. I put it to you that you had your spectacles on in order to facilitate your endeavours in the conservatory, which require close-up scrutiny. When you were done, you somewhat absent-mindedly slipped the secateurs into the pocket where you are wont to store your spectacles and conversely put your spectacles in the place where you are wont to store your secateurs. The rest was simple logic.”

  “My goodness,” laughed Frankland. “Who are you, man? Sherlock Holmes himself?”

  “As a matter of fact…” Holmes gave a bow.

  “You don’t say!”

  “This should serve to confirm it.” Holmes proffered his card to Loach, who in turn proffered it to his master.

  “Well, gracious,” said Frankland, putting on his spectacles to peruse the card. “An honour. Whatever can have brought the great London detective to my humble abode? You would care for coffee, perhaps? Step this way, sir. To my study. Loach will accommodate us. Loach?”

  “Coffee it is, sir,” the butler said, and glided off. Frankland, meanwhile, ushered Holmes into a well-appointed room that boasted walls lined with bookcases, a desk burdened with stacks of manila folders and a floor littered with legal documents.

  “Take a seat,” he said, gesturing towards one of a pair of plush leather wingback chairs that flanked the fireplace. He planted himself in its identical twin. “How clever of you to discern my interest in matters botanical,” he added, tapping the secateurs that were still lodged in his pocket. “It is a new hobby of mine. I am slowly amassing a fine collection of exotic orchids. Remarkable things. Infinite in their variety, extraordinary in their beauty. As you may know, I am also something of an amateur of astronomy.”

  “I was aware.”

  “I still maintain a fascination with the stars, but lately I have diversified into that other branch of the sciences. Branch. Ha! The pun was unintended. Astronomy remains my first love, but botany is gradually supplanting it. Supplanting. I pun again.”

  The conversation strayed into the field of astronomy for a while. It was a topic of no particular consequence to Holmes but one in which he was capable of holding his own if need be. On this occasion, he was happy to feign an interest in it if this would ingratiate him with Frankland. Together, they discussed planetary conjunctions and occultations, meteor showers, transits of Venus and other such celestial events. At one point Frankland mentioned Professor James Moriarty.

  “Died not so long ago, didn’t he?” he said. “It was in the papers. Great loss to the discipline. I have a copy of his Dynamics of an Asteroid somewhere. Read it three times. Not sure I understand all of it, but a sterling piece of erudition nonetheless. Now that I think about it, you had some involvement in his death, did you not, Mr Holmes? It was said to have been a climbing accident in Switzerland, but there was more to it than that.”

  “To most, Moriarty was merely an academic and a mathematics tutor,” said Holmes. “In truth, he was one of the most egregious villains ever known.”

  “That’s right. Bit of a fuss about it last year, wasn’t there? Hard to credit that someone so brilliant could also be so evil.”

  “Genius he may have had, but in him it had become corrupted and profane. If he had turned his talents to the pursuit of good, he might have contributed greatly to the betterment of mankind. As it was, he was a stain on the world, and deservedly was erased.”

  “I gather his younger brother lives hereabouts,” said Frankland.

  “Yes. Colonel Moriarty. A station master by profession. Curiously, his forename is also James.”

  “Two brothers, both called James? How queer. Their parents cannot be very imaginative people.”

  “Perhaps they were fond of the name.”

  “It is an excellent name,” Frankland said. “Had I ever had a son, I might well have called him James. It derives from Jacob, I believe, and means ‘a supplanter’. Ha! There’s that word again.”

  I myself had had some dealings with this other James Moriarty, who in 1893 wrote a number of letters to The Times, The Telegraph, and a couple of other national broadsheets, in which he excoriated Holmes and mounted a vigorous defence of his brother – this being the “bit of a fuss” Frankland had referred to. In response, I had felt moved to set the record straight and publish the truth of the matter in the form of my story “The Final Problem”. The tale, I believe, successfully rebutted the slander on Holmes’s reputation and put paid to any attempts to rehabilitate Professor Moriarty’s.

  At this point in Holmes’s and Frankland’s conversation, Loach brought in a silver pot of piping-hot coffee. He served both men with polished efficiency before withdrawing.

  “But it cannot be that you have dropped by simply to talk about stargazing, Mr Holmes,” Frankland said. “Only a fool would presume this were a social call.”

  “It is not, I regret to say.”

  “I imagine it has something to do with the recent appa
lling business at Baskerville Hall. Poor Lady Audrey. And poor Sir Henry too, to be a widower so young and after so brief a marriage. An estimable couple, those two. Both so civilised – and there is not a great deal of civilisation in this neck of the woods, Mr Holmes, believe you me. Many’s the fine dinner I enjoyed in their company. I can hardly countenance the tragedy of it all. Truly the Baskerville name is an accursed one. Not that I believe in curses, but what else can one call such a run of tribulation? Sir Charles and that hound, and now this… It was murder, of course, was it not?”

  “I am minded to think so.”

  “Can only have been. Someone – something – emptying the blood out of her like that. Makes me shiver to think about it. I shiver all the harder when I consider that, but for the grace of God, it might have been my own daughter.”

  “Mrs Lyons, you mean?” said Holmes, canting his head inquisitively.

  “Yes. I recall that you met her when last you were down here. It is in no small part thanks to you that she was able to gain some sort of redress against that scoundrel Stapleton. How he abused her trust, the fiend!” Frankland’s frown turned doleful. “She is not a woman who chooses men wisely, my Laura. She has many good qualities, but the ability to distinguish a worthy suitor from an unworthy one is not among them. First there was Lyons himself, that brute of a fellow. I knew from the outset that he was no good and the marriage was headed for disaster, but Laura could not see it, not until it was almost too late. She was forever excusing his wicked behaviour, even blaming herself for it. At last, thank heaven, she came around. Then there was Stapleton, and not long after that whole sorry business was done with, she and Sir Henry formed an attachment. I did harbour the hope, then, that she had at last learned discernment. I hoped, too, that their association might lead to something more, especially once the court ruled on a decree absolute and her marriage was annulled. But it was not to be.”

  Holmes remembered Sir Henry speaking of “a couple of brief dalliances that had come to naught” before his engagement to Audrey Lidstone. One of those dalliances had been with Beryl Stapleton, and it was clear, now, that the other had been with the newly divorced Mrs Laura Lyons.

  “Do you know why it did not work out between her and Sir Henry?” he asked Frankland.

  “Oh, just the way of such things,” Frankland replied with an airy wave of the hand. “I hold neither of them to blame. Certainly not Sir Henry. Laura, on the other hand… My daughter can be awkward, Mr Holmes. Very awkward. She combines vulnerability with touchiness, and that is not a stable mixture in a female.”

  “In anyone, for that matter,” Holmes opined.

  “Yes, yes, true. But it gives Laura a viperish tendency that men find highly unattractive. I suspect – I do not know, but I suspect – that Sir Henry was the unhappy victim of her venom, and it put paid to any romantic entanglement which might otherwise have developed. Nor would he be alone in feeling the sting of her spite.” Frankland gazed off into the distance, his manner wistful. “All I can say is that my daughter has had a lucky escape, for if she were to have married Sir Henry and become Lady Baskerville, it might have been her lying out on the moor, stone dead, rather than Audrey. That is the one redeeming feature of it all.”

  “You say ‘suspect’, Mr Frankland. This rather suggests to me that you and your daughter are not in close contact, and have not been in some while, else you might be better informed with regard to the ins and outs of her dealings with Sir Henry.”

  Frankland exhaled a sorrowful breath. “It has not been good between the two of us, not for some time. Our relations were always strained, but of late Laura and I have fallen out completely. We have become – what’s the word? – estranged. I don’t really want to go into it.”

  “I heard you when I was at the front door, expressing the hope that it was your daughter calling or her representative. You believe some sort of reconciliation is still possible?”

  “If you were a father, Mr Holmes, you would know that you never give up on your children, no matter how far from you they stray. I have made countless overtures towards Laura, only to be rebuffed every time. I have done all I can. The onus is now on her to reach out to me. I have faith that one day she will.”

  Holmes gently probed him, trying to get him to expand further on the matter, but Frankland would not be drawn.

  “Really,” said he. “I have already told you more than I ought. It is too personal. Too painful.”

  Holmes gave it up, thinking that there were other methods by which he could get at the truth. He did not know whether the gulf that yawned between Frankland and his daughter was in any way pertinent to his investigation. Yet he felt it could not be ignored, just as the fact that Sir Henry and Mrs Lyons had courted, however briefly, could not be ignored.

  At this point Holmes interjected, to me, that his impression of Frankland was very different from the one he had gleaned from my depiction of the man. “Given everything you’d told me about him, Watson, I was expecting someone cantankerous and spiteful,” he said.

  “So I adjudged him.”

  “Whereas I found that, although there was, admittedly, something of the pompous busybody about him, he was an agreeable and also a rather melancholy sort.”

  “Could it be that time and the difficulties with his daughter have changed him?” I offered.

  “That may very well be so. Misfortune is the great abrasive. It smooths a person’s character, rounding off any rough edges.”

  Returning to his encounter with Frankland, Holmes said that eventually he was able to get down to the nub of the conversation, the reason for his visit to Lafter Hall.

  “I have come, sir,” said he to Frankland, “seeking a favour.”

  “And I will be sure to grant it, Mr Holmes,” Frankland replied, “if it lies in my power to do so.”

  “I require the use of your telescope. I know from my great friend Dr Watson that you have one on the roof of this house.”

  “I do indeed. Made by Dollond of London, in the Cassegrain reflector design. Two hyperbolic mirrors. Achromatic lenses. Brass casing. Two-inch aperture on a three-foot barrel. A marvellous instrument.”

  “It sounds it.”

  “Your Dr Watson availed himself of it when here, I recall,” Frankland said.

  “Indeed. Through it you had spied a boy making regular deliveries out on one of the most desolate parts of the moor, and your presumption, which you conveyed to Watson, was that he must be taking food to the escaped convict Selden.”

  “The good doctor saw for himself the lad going about his errand, through the telescope.”

  “And thus, by chance, did he uncover my hiding place.”

  “Yes, so I learned later. It was you to whom the messenger boy was ferrying supplies, not Selden at all. You had sequestered yourself secretly on the moor during your investigation into the ‘hound’ affair. And I can only assume you require the telescope for a similar purpose now, as part of another investigation. Am I right?”

  “You are, but I’m afraid I cannot tell you any more than that at present,” said Holmes. “My enquiries are at a delicate stage, and I must take care not to do anything that might tip my hand. You understand.”

  “I understand.”

  “I mean to cast no aspersions on your integrity.”

  “Quite, quite,” said Frankland. “Better that I don’t know than that I inadvertently let slip the truth and the wrong ear is listening. Then everything would be ruined.”

  “I am grateful for your indulgence.”

  “Think nothing of it. If I have learned anything from the many lawsuits I have filed over the years, it is that no matter how painstakingly you build your case for litigation, it may be undone by a single careless comment. Tact is the watchword.”

  “I shall need to be able to come and go at Lafter Hall more or less as I please,” Holmes said. “There are certain criteria that must be fulfilled first, you see, in order for your telescope to come into play, and I have no control over
the timing of them.”

  “I am almost always at home,” said Frankland, “and should I happen to be out, I shall make sure Loach and the rest of the staff know that you have the run of the place.”

  “You are too kind, sir.”

  “Anything to help, Mr Holmes. If I play even a minor part in catching Lady Audrey’s murderer, I shall be most gratified. Most gratified!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE STRAITENED CIRCUMSTANCES OF LAURA LYONS

  Frankland showed Holmes how to obtain access to his telescope. The windows of an attic room opened onto a small area of flat roof situated between pitched sections. There followed a quick lesson in collimating the mirrors and adjusting the focus, and then the two men went back downstairs and enjoyed a convivial luncheon.

  Afterward, Holmes struck out for Coombe Tracey. It was a long walk but his reserves of energy were always substantial, and with the sun on his face and a gentle zephyr at his back, he was content.

  His path took him within sight of the Grimpen Mire, whereupon he made a deviation, for he had spied the mighty figure of Benjamin Grier standing at the edge of the bog, deep in conversation with another. He hailed the American, who introduced him to his companion, a fellow named Damerell.

  This squat, swarthy local was a ditch digger by trade, whom Grier had had the great good fortune to encounter in Fernworthy and whom, after just a few minutes’ acquaintance, he had hired to act as site foreman.

  Damerell was under no illusion as to the enormity of the task facing them. The mire was on low-lying ground and, in order to drain it, it must be emptied into yet lower-lying ground. The nearest suitable example of the latter lay quarter of a mile to the west, where a gentle declivity led down to a stream.

  “I were just tellin’ Mr Grier that if haste be required then it’s going to take men, sir,” Damerell said to Holmes, scratching the back of his head beneath his cloth cap. An unlit clay pipe was clamped between his teeth. “Lots of men. We starts diggin’ the main ditch there, close to the stream, where the ground begins to slope downward. Ditch don’t need to be too deep but it do need to be broad. We works our way back ’ere, and meantime we also starts diggin’ ditches as be comin’ inward at angles from the mire to the main ditch. Four of they oughter be enough, so I thinks. Don’t you reckon, Mr Grier?”