Donald Thomas - Sherlock Holmes and the King’s Evil

“Suppose Abraham set the trap of the shutters for Roland?” I asked.

“Then Abraham need not have fled. Accidental death by drowning would be the verdict. Abraham need only slide the shutters back to their usual angle and there would be no case against him. This is something more.”

“And what of the evil that he confessed to?” I asked, “What has he done?”

“I cannot tell you in his absence. I beg you, Miss Chastelnau, bring him in. I promise that I wish no ill to either of you and that I will help you if I can.”

This was extraordinary! Had Sherlock Holmes tracked down a murderer only to offer him help?

The poor woman at the centre of the drama stood up and went to the door. Almost at once she returned, followed by a tall loose-limbed man with a ruddy complexion. He did not look like a fellow of great intelligence as his eyes flicked at each of us in turn. Holmes stood up and held out his hand.

“Mr Abraham Chastelnau?”

Miss Chastelnau intervened, as if protecting a wild animal from those who hunted it.

“My brother watched you come into the hall and feared that you were police officers who had come for him.”

“No,” said Holmes calmly, “he need not fear that. Pray, Mr Chastelnau, stand over here in the bay of the window. Face the light. Watson too, if you please. Have no fear, Abraham, my friend is a doctor. Perhaps he is the doctor for whom you composed your letter, and then could not bring yourself to send it.”

I stared at Chastelnau’s face. It was strong-featured but round. The jaw-bone and, indeed, the neck had been disfigured by small and inflamed lumps or swellings, long healed over. I would have expected to find similar marks on his chest and shoulders, had I examined them. The infections had come, suppurated and healed over but they had never disappeared.

“I believe, Mr Chastelnau, that you have been a martyr to scrofula, have you not?” I asked.

“I have heard it sometimes called that, sir. I do not quite know what it might be.”

“Your brother may have teased you unkindly?”

“He did sometimes, sir, but I would not kill a man for that-nor kill him for anything.”

Sherlock Holmes intervened.

“Dr Watson tells you that it is scrofula but have you sometimes heard it called the King’s Evil?”

“Mostly that, sir. I was taught how a king a thousand years ago, Edward the Confessor, was given power by the Pope to cure it. Afterwards a king or queen had only to touch a man or a woman. They might have such a curse as mine taken from them.

Ornaments blessed by a king might do it. There was King Edward III. He could cure poor people by giving them a gold coin with St Michael on one side and a ship on the other. An Angel, they called that coin.”

For the second time since our arrival in Suffolk, I heard a few lines of Shakespeare quoted, this time by Holmes.

“The King cured, did he not, what the Bard calls strangely-visited people? I daresay you are not familiar with the play of Macbeth.

The mere despair of surgery he cures,

Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,

Put on with holy prayers.”

“Who would look at me, as I am?” asked Abraham Chastelnau quietly.

“Because of the evil within you?”

“With the wickedness coming out through the sores, as I was taught, sir.”

I could not let this mumbo-jumbo go on.

“I had better tell you,” I said, “that what you have is not an evil curse but a chronic tubercular condition. It is not as grave as consumption but it will produce hard red swellings which commonly suppurate.”

“And what is all that, sir?”

“It is advice that you should seek a better diet, sunlight, exercise and bathing. All those together will take you a good long way.”

“And the Chester Cross?” Holmes inquired of Chastelnau, “If that is what it was.”

Light returned to the poor fellow’s eyes.

“I cannot tell, sir. It came from the oil-cake works in my father’s time. It had been thrown to one side, left in a drawer with the pebbles. I took them all when we came away. I cannot say where it was from. I heard it was bought with the pebbles as tinker’s magic for a shilling or two in my grandfather’s time. We never knew where the tinker had it from. But I hoped it might be the very one His Majesty King John had blessed all those years ago. For then surely its touch might cure me.”

Holmes led him to a chair and sat him down.

“Now, if you please, tell us the story of the sands.”

Abraham Chastelnau knew what was meant but looked up at us without a qualm.

“Roland and I never got on, sir, but the cross and the stones was the worst of it. Trumpery, he called them. When we first went to the Old Light he swore to throw them all into the sea.”

“And that was why you cut a gap in the ledge at the back of the clock case and slid the metal fragment in its place?” I suggested. Abraham Chastelnau nodded.

“And the pebbles I wrapped and pushed to the back of the table drawer. That Sunday night, I went to wind the mechanism of the clock and crank the chain of the lantern weight. It was just before eight o’clock. But when I opened the clock-case, I saw the metal piece had gone. I never bothered to wind anything but went to the table drawer. Four of the five pebbles had gone. He’d missed one of them because I always carried it with me for luck.”

“And the letter?” I asked, “Surely he would have taken that?”

Abraham Chastelnau shook his head.

“No, sir, for he was no hand at reading.”

“You heard the shot?”

“Just as I was looking in the drawer. I heard his gun and went straight down, not knowing what he might do. He always said I was a simpleton to believe such things. He’d throw them in the sea. It was dark and wet all round by then, no hard sand underfoot.”

“You fought him?”

“I went for him to get the piece of the cross and the pebbles back. He’d got them in his hands. As we struggled, I said where was the harm in them. I’m stronger than he was and he’d been drinking. He did sometimes. I got the better of him and threw him down but I thought the pebbles fell. He tried to sling the piece of the cross towards the sea but it never went far. When we broke away from each other, I went down on my knees to find the stones and the metal. Roland ran off, along the beach with the tide after him and the drink driving him on. I found no pebbles, after all. I still ran after him, not to do harm, but he turned and raised the gun. I was the stronger and he knew it but I daren’t get near his gun-not even to save him. He drew further off and further off.”

“Did he fire?” I asked.

“He kept making to. The distance between us seemed to grow. I tried to get closer, shouting at him to come back and not to be a damned fool, for he was in softer sand and almost to his knees in water. He might still have got back but then he fired in earnest. The sea was so far in I hardly heard the shot above the surf but I saw the flash. Something went wrong when he fired that seemed to knock him off his balance into the surf. The shot went well past me, but I jumped down and stayed down, for he might have reloaded the other barrel before this. When I looked up I couldn’t see him again, only the surf booming in. High tide and low tide there is miles apart. When it come in, that sea can move like an express train. With dark coming on, there was such water between us, all of a sudden, that I couldn’t get near him nor see him. Only the surf. And that was all.”

“Did you know that you were seen from the church tower?” I asked.

“I thought we must have been noticed when I heard the rook rifle. If they saw us fighting, not for the first time, and only one come back, they’d swear I’d choked him or chased him to his death. I’d never stand a chance. Better they should think we’d both gone into the sea, Roland in one of our fights and me on the way home. I went back to the Old Light, changed the shutters a little, wound up the chain, and then came away. I thought of everything, except the letter in the drawer.”