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

‘Your name and address are correctly rendered,’ I continued, ‘but the writing is very scratchy, indicating perhaps that the writer is careless with his pen, or too mean to fit a fresh nib when one is undoubtedly needed. The writing itself, however, has a certain strength and regularity. It is the hand, I should say, of a man of character and intelligence.’

‘Thank you!’ cried my friend, choking with laughter and collapsing helplessly into a chair. I looked again at the envelope. ‘Holmes!’ I cried, ‘this hand is your own! You yourself wrote it!’

‘Indeed I did,’ said he when he had recovered himself. ‘I wrote it in a post office and the pen was the best one available, I am afraid.’

‘I am glad you find your own jest so amusing,’ I remarked with some asperity. ‘I was under the impression that we were engaged upon a serious investigation.’

‘So we are, my dear fellow, so we are,’ said he. His tone was an earnest one, but this served only to irritate me further.

‘You go too far, Holmes,’ said I coldly. ‘You send yourself a letter with nothing in it, open it up and gaze at its emptiness, then pronounce the matter to be of significance. It is significant only of idiocy!’

‘There you make a mistake, my dear friend.’

‘I think not.’

‘But you do, nonetheless. Your mistake is in supposing that I sent the letter to myself. That, I agree, would be idiocy.’

‘But you have admitted as much.’

‘Not at all. I admitted only that I wrote the address upon the letter, and you leapt to the conclusion that I also sent it. As these actions do go together as a general rule, the conclusion is, I admit, a natural one; but it by no means follows with apodictic certainty. The two actions are really quite distinct, a fact which I feel may be of considerable significance in the Davenoke case. But, come! I have no desire to make further mystery when there is so much already. Do you recall the Baker Street Division of the Detective Force?’

‘The Irregulars! Most certainly,’ said I, smiling at the thought, despite myself. ‘A more dishevelled and disreputable collection of street-Arabs I never saw in my life!’

‘Nevertheless, there is much good work to be got from them. You will no doubt recall the assistance they provided in the Jefferson Hope case, and also in that singular business of “The Three Eyes”.’

‘I am hardly likely to forget either of those cases. You are employing them at present, then?’

‘Precisely, Watson. As I informed you the other day, I myself made inquiries for Sir Edward Davenoke at virtually all the conceivable places. The Baker Street Irregulars are therefore trying all the inconceivable places – small hotels, many of them distinctly disreputable, cheap lodging houses, odd rooms that are let in public-houses and so on. I provided their leader, Wiggins, with a ready-stamped envelope, for him to communicate his findings to me – I addressed it myself, as writing is not Wiggins’s strong suit – in order that we should not have the house invaded by these boys, as has happened before – much to Mrs Hudson’s distress, as you will no doubt recollect. But if, and only if, he was certain that they had looked everywhere, and that there was nowhere remaining where Davenoke might be, he was to seal up the envelope, empty as it was, and send it back to me, to let me know that they had completed their task, and that Davenoke was nowhere to be found. Such a negative message is every bit as interesting and important, you see, as any positive message could be. Knowing the thoroughness with which Wiggins and his friends have always performed the tasks I have set them, I can thus declare with a confidence approaching almost to certainty that the letter which Amelia Davenoke has received is nothing more nor less than a monstrous lie.’

‘What, then, do you see as the truth?’

‘This is not the time to discuss theories,’ replied Holmes after a moment. ‘I am not yet entirely clear in my mind about one or two points. One thing that does seem clear to me, however, is that the arrival of this letter is bad – very bad. It rather eliminates the possibility that this whole business is a series of accidents, unfortunate mischances and misapprehensions, and renders it virtually certain that things are as I feared. All that had happened to this point was vague and inconclusive, and susceptible of some innocent explanation or other, however unlikely: thus, the man we saw in the street may indeed have been hurrying to visit his dentist, and the fact that his cab followed Lady Davenoke’s so closely may have been sheer chance; the anonymous note we received may have come from some crank or monomaniac who has no connection with the Davenokes whatever – it did not mention any names after all – and the fact that it came when it did may be utter coincidence; the figure Lady Davenoke saw upon the lawn may indeed have been a poacher, the lights some natural phenomenon, the footsteps in the night a servant sneaking to the kitchen for a slice of bread and cheese. But this letter she has received’ – he paused to give emphasis to his words – ‘this letter, I say, is a concrete, physical lie, which can in no wise be explained away.’

‘I see clearly now what you mean,’ said I. ‘But what can we do?’

‘We might do worse than read the book I picked up at Hatchard’s, yesterday afternoon,’ replied my friend. ‘It is always an advantage to understand fully the historical antecedents of a case.’

He took up the brown-paper packet which had lain unopened upon his desk and extracted a red-bound volume. As he turned the pages over, I saw that it was Robinson’s County Guide to East Suffolk . After a moment, he found what he was looking for.

‘“Shoreswood Old Hall, its history and legend”,’ he read aloud. ‘I shall give you a résumé of the history, Watson, and perhaps when you have finished your work with that egg-spoon you would be so good as to read the section devoted to the legend.’

‘Certainly, if it is of interest to you.’

‘“The manor of Shoreswood is one of the oldest in the country,”’ he began after a moment, ‘ “and has many historical associations. It has been the home of the Davenoke family since the middle of the fourteenth century, for a pipe roll of 1347, in the reign of Edward III, records that one Guy Davernuck was granted the manor of ‘Shorriswode’ in recognition of the service he had rendered the king at the battle of Crécy, the previous year. In the fifteenth century the Davenokes were closely associated with the Pole family, supporting the claims of the latter to” – this is not very interesting! Let me see – Ah! “At the time of the Reformation, the family remained faithful to the Church of Rome, but although their sympathies were widely known, they appear to have escaped any great penalty upon this account. Later, Roland Davenoke was one of the leading supporters of Mary Tudor’s successful claim upon the throne, he being largely responsible for the rallying of English Catholics at nearby Framlingham Castle, from where she marched to London to take the Crown. When Elizabeth became queen, the Davenokes were several times fined for recusancy, and for many years the estate lay under threat of confiscation, but the threat was never enacted. Elizabeth’s officers visited Shoreswood on many occasions, acting on persistent rumours that Jesuit priests from France were in hiding there, but none was ever discovered.

‘“At the time of the Civil War, Robert Davenoke took the Royalist side and was killed at the Battle of Naseby, fighting alongside Prince Rupert. A tradition in the area has it that the future King Charles II spent a night at Shoreswood after the Battle of Worcester, on his way into exile abroad.” – Ha! – If Charles II had indeed stayed a night in every place which lays a claim to harbouring him after the Battle of Worcester, he would never have found time to get abroad at all! What else do we have? Hum! – “In 1738, during the time of Sir Charles, the first baronet, a completely new house was begun three miles away, in the Palladian style then popular. The original house was thence known as ‘Shoreswood Old Hall’, in contradistinction to the new. So poorly was the new hall constructed, however, that within a dozen years it had become unsafe for habitation and within two dozen the greater part of it was in ruins. Having insufficient capital to effect the necessary repairs, the family moved back to the Old Hall, where they have remained ever since.”