Denis Smith - The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes

After only a moment’s hesitation, Holmes made a sign to me and we quickly withdrew.

‘It is a terrible thing, to leave him there like that,’ said my friend tensely, as we passed through the front doorway into the darkness of the night. ‘But, had we stayed, it might have been more terrible yet. You saw the look in his eye, Watson.’

I had to acknowledge the truth of his observation. Dreadful as it seemed to walk away from that tragic scene, there was nothing else we could do. The man had every right to throw us out, innocent though we were of any part in the tragedy which had befallen him.

Not a single word further passed between us that night, but I caught sight of Holmes’s ashen face as we mounted the stairs of the inn and saw more clearly there than any words could ever have conveyed, how deeply the death of Amelia Davenoke had moved him. For myself, I confess that I was numb with shock at the events of the evening, and sat long in a chair, smoking my pipe and unable to sleep.

It was scant hours later, and the first grey light of dawn was breaking, when I was roused by a terrific commotion downstairs. At first I endeavoured to ignore it; I needed no further alarms that night. But the tumult increased, until I wearily left my bed, slipped on my dressing-gown and hurried downstairs to see what was the matter. I found Sherlock Holmes, fully dressed, at the foot of the stairs, in earnest conversation with the landlord.

‘There’s worse, Watson,’ said he, turning to me. ‘I am a desperate fool to have left that young man alone last night – a criminal fool!’

‘Whatever has happened?’ I cried in alarm.

‘Shoreswood Hall is ablaze, that’s what! They have sent for fire-engines from Framlingham, Woodbridge and goodness knows where else, but I’m damned if it will do any good. Quickly now! Into your clothes and let us see if we can help!’

Two minutes later I was dressed and we were hurrying up the road in the company of three men from the village. It was a chill morning and patches of mist lay in hollows in the fields.

‘It seems,’ said Holmes to me, ‘that not long after you and I had been so unceremoniously ejected from Shoreswood last night, Davenoke decided to make it a general prescription and threw everyone else out, too.’

‘What!’ I cried. ‘Miss Strensall, too?’

‘Miss Strensall, Hardwick, the cook, the maids – everyone. Hardwick drove them all down to Wickham, where his sister has a house. However, he found himself unable to sleep for anxiety over his young master; so, like the faithful servant he is, he drove back again to Shoreswood to see if there was anything he could do to help. When he got there the house was going up like a bonfire, from one end to the other, and there was no sign of Sir Edward. He tried to find a way in but the fierce heat drove him back, so he came down and roused the whole village.’

‘There’ll be no putting it out if it’s caught as he says,’ said one of the men with us. ‘There’s too much dry wood in that old place.’

At that moment a great surge of orange flame showed above the treetops ahead of us, like a giant fireball, and the distant noise of roaring and crackling came clearly on the morning air.

‘It must be sixty feet in the air!’ I cried.

‘The roof has fallen in!’ said Holmes in dismay.

‘Aye!’ cried one of the men with us. ‘There’ll be no saving her now.’ We quickened our pace to a run, though each of us knew in his heart that the effort was useless, and when at last we reached the scene, the heat was so intense that we could get no closer than the ruined chapel. Small groups of silent men stood around there in impotent horror as the terrible inferno raged before them with an awesome, deafening roar. From every window the wicked flames blazed and spluttered with the force of a blast-furnace. From the top of the building, dense clouds of smoke and flame surged upwards, and scattered sparks and flaming debris all about us.

‘Does anyone know where Sir Edward Davenoke is?’ shouted Holmes at the top of his voice to one of the bystanders. In answer, the man raised one finger and pointed it at the dreadful sight before us.

At seven-thirty we finally abandoned our terrible vigil and returned to the inn. The fire-engines had at length arrived but had been unable to approach close enough to have any effect upon the fire. The officers of the County Constabulary were summoned, and Holmes spent a considerable time with them in the parlour of the inn, going over and over the events of the previous night. At length, when our presence could serve no further purpose, we made our way to the railway station, weary and dejected beyond description, and caught the first available train to London.

It was as we were passing Brentwood station that Sherlock Holmes spoke for the first and only time on what was the most melancholy and depressing journey I can ever recall.

‘I have failed,’ said he. ‘I have failed more tragically than I have ever failed before.’

‘Nonsense!’ I retorted, seeing clearly what was passing in his mind. ‘No blame can attach to you. There is nothing you could have done which would have averted this tragedy.’

‘I could have told Lady Davenoke all I suspected, when we spoke yesterday afternoon. A positive theory, however disagreeable, is more consoling to the mind than a vague, nameless dread.’

‘Perhaps, but the lady was in such a state of nerves that I doubt very much that your confidence would have had any beneficial effect upon her. Besides, you were endeavouring to limit your interference in the matter to the very minimum. Your judgement was sound.’

My friend lapsed into silence for a moment before replying.

‘The saddest story I have ever known,’ said he then, ‘is that of the Babes in the Wood .’

My face must have betrayed the surprise I felt at this abrupt and, so it seemed to me, incongruous remark, for he hastened to assure me that he spoke in earnest.

‘The whole of world literature contains nothing more pitiful,’ he continued. ‘There is no tragedy written which is not a mere embellishment upon that theme. What are Oedipus and Hamlet, but helpless babes lost in the thicket of fate, unable either to understand their predicament or to escape from it? In the story of the Babes in the Wood , the two infants are banished to the forest by a wicked parent and only spared the axe because the man delegated to do the deed shrinks from it at the last. So they wander together in the forest as the cold night closes in. Without food or shelter, and without either the knowledge or resource to procure them, their tenure of life is a brief and pathetic one. They die unloved and unwanted, forsaken and alone; and when they are dead the trees shed their leaves upon them, as a coverlet, and a robin pipes his song over their grave. And what is so pathetic and moving about their fate? It is that they are so innocent, so helpless. There is no true tragedy in the world’s literature which you can name me, Watson, which is not that story retold.’

I was not disposed to argue with him, so I said nothing. Besides, I could see that he felt keenly the sentiments of which he spoke.

‘And the profound sad truth,’ he continued after a moment, ‘which I confess has only come to me as I have advanced a little in years, is that, at bottom, when all the talking is done and the posturing abandoned, we are all lost babes, in the wood we know as life.’

I returned to Suffolk the following week to give evidence at the inquest. No traces had been found of the bodies of Sir Edward Davenoke and his wife, nor ever were. The verdict reached by the coroner’s jury was one of accidental death in both cases, it being supposed that the blaze had been started by chance, by one of the many lamps and candles which had been lit that night. Sherlock Holmes, I was aware, was privately of the opinion that, distraught with grief, and driven perhaps beyond the bounds of sanity, Davenoke had fired the Hall himself; but neither Holmes nor I voiced this opinion publicly. Nothing would have been gained thereby, and the matter could in any case never have been proved for certain one way or the other. Of Shoreswood Hall itself nothing remained but a blackened shell upon a blackened field. It had occurred to me in London that the contents of that damp underground chamber in which we had spoken with Sir Edward might have escaped the inferno, but that, too, was empty and black, no doubt overcome by the intense heat of the raging fire above it.