John Adams - The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

At this instant she raised her head fiercely, and her eyes burned, and I saw she was indeed a very beautiful woman, and conceivably a courageous one. Despite her self-possession, it was obvious to me that Holmes made her shy and uneasy. She turned more often to me in speech. This phenomenon was not quite uncommon, I must admit. She had admitted after all to reading my histories, and so might have some awareness of Holmes's opinion of women.

"Presently," she went on, "I had recourse to my aunt's papers. I should have explained, a box of them had been left for me, with instructions from my aunt to read them. That is, the instruction was not directed solely at me, but at any woman bearing the Caston name, and living alone in the house. Until then I had put the task off. I thought I should be bored."

"But you were not," said Holmes.

"At first I found only legal documents. But then I came to these. I have them here." She produced and held out to him two sheets of paper. He read the first. Then, having got up and handed both papers to me, Holmes walked about the room. Reaching the window, he stayed to look out into the soft flurry of the falling snow and the darkness of impending night. "And she had died at Christmas?"

"Yes, Mr. Holmes, she had. So had they all."

The first paper was a letter from Miss Caston's aunt. It bore out my earlier amateur theory, for the writing was crotchety and crabbed. The aunt was a woman in her late sixties, it seemed, her hand tired by much writing.

To any female of the Caston family, living in this house a single life, unwed, or lacking the presence of a father or a brother: Be aware now that there is a curse put on the solitary spinsters of our line.

You may live well in this house at any time of year save the five days which forerun and culminate in Christmas Eve. If you would know more, you must read the following page, which I have copied from Derwent's Legends of Ancient Houses. You will find the very book in the library here. Take heed of it, and all will be well. It is a dogged curse, and easy to outwit, if inconvenient. Should you disregard my warning, at Christmas, you will die here.

I turned to the second paper. Holmes all this while stood silent, his back to us both. The young woman kept silent too, her eyes fixed on him now as if she had pinned them there, with her hopes.

"Watson," said Holmes, "kindly read Derwent's commentary aloud to me."

I did so.

In the year 1407, the knight Hugh de Castone is said to have left his bane on the old manor-farm at Crowby, near Chislehurst.

A notorious woman-hater, Sir Hugh decreed that if any Castone woman lived on the property without husband, father or brother to command her obedience, she would die there a sudden death at Yuletide. It must be noted that this was the season at which de Castone's own wife and sister had conspired to poison him, failed, and been mercilessly hanged by his own hands. However, the curse is heard of no more until the late seventeenth century, when Mistress Hannah Castone, her husband three months dead, held a modest festival in the house. She accordingly died from choking on the bone of a fowl, on Christmas Eve. One curiosity which was noted at the time, and which caused perplexity, was that a white fox had been spotted in the neighbourhood, which after Mistress Castone's burial, vanished. A white fox it seems, had been the blazon of Sir Hugh de Castone, as depicted on his coat of arms.

I stopped here and glanced at Miss Caston. She had turned from us both and was gazing in the fire. She appeared calm as marble, but it occurred to me that might be a brave woman's mask for agitation.

"Watson, why have you stopped?" came from the window.

I went on.

Again the curse fell dormant. It may be that only married ladies thereafter dwelled at the farm, sisters with brothers or daughters with their fathers. However, in 1794, during the great and awful Revolution in France, a French descendant of the Castons took refuge in the house, a woman whose husband had been lost to the guillotine. Three nights before the eve of Christmas, charmed, as she said, by glimpsing a white fox running along the terrace, the lady stepped out, missed her footing on the icy stair, and falling, broke her neck. There has in this century been only one violent death of a Caston woman at the house in Crowby. Maria Caston, following the death of her father the previous year, set up her home there. But on the evening preceding Christmas Eve, she was shot and killed, supposedly by an unwanted lover, although the man was never apprehended. It is generally said that this curse, which is popularly called the Caston Gall, is abridged by midnight on Christmas Eve, since the holiness of Christmas Day itself defeats it.

I put down the paper, and Holmes sprang round from the window.

"Tell me, Miss Caston," he said, "are you very superstitious?"

"No, Mr. Holmes. Not at all. I have never credited anything which could not be proved. Left to myself, I would say all this was nonsense."

"However?"

"The lady I call my aunt died on Christmas Eve, about eleven o'clock at night. She had had to break her own custom. Normally she would leave the house ten days before Christmas, staying with friends in London, and returning three days after St. Stevens. But this year she fell ill on the very day she was to leave. She was too unwell to travel, and remained so. I heard all this, you understand, from the servants, when once I had read the papers in the box, and questioned my staff firmly."

"How did she die?"

"She was asleep in her bed, and rallying, the doctor believed. The maid slipped out for a moment, and coming back found my aunt had risen as if much frightened, and was now lying by the fireplace. Her face was congested and full of horror. She was rigid, they told me, as a stone."

"The cause?"

"It was determined as a seizure of the heart."

"Could it not have been?"

"Of course her heart may have been the culprit."

Holmes glanced at me. His face was haughty and remote but his eyes had in them that dry mercurial glitter I connect with his interest.

"Mr. Holmes," said Eleanor Caston, standing up as if to confront him, "when I had questioned my servants, I put the story away with the papers. I engaged a new maid to replace Lucy. I went on with my improved life. But the months passed, and late in November, Lucy wrote to me. It was she who found my aunt lying dead, and now the girl told me she herself had also that day seen a white fox in the fields. It would be, of course, an albino, and our local hunt, I know, would think it unsporting to destroy such a creature. No, no. You must not think for a moment any of this daunted me."

"What has?"

"Three days ago, another letter came."

"From your maid?"

"Possibly. I can hardly say."

On the table near the fire she now let fall a thin, pinkish paper. Holmes bent over it. He read aloud, slowly, "'Go you out and live, or stay to die.'" He added, "Watson, come and look at this."

The paper was cheap, of a type that might be found in a thousand stationers who catered to the poor. Upon it every word had been pasted. These words were not cut from a book or newspaper, however. Each seemed to have been taken from a specimen of handwriting, and no two were alike. I remarked on this.

"Yes, Watson. Even the paper on which each word is written is of a different sort. The inks are different. Even the implement used to cut them out, unless I am much mistaken, is different." He raised the letter, and held it close to his face, and next against the light of a lamp. "A scissors here, for example, and there a small knife. And see, this edge-a larger, blunter blade. And there, the trace of a water-mark. And this one is very old. Observe the grain, and how the ink has faded, a wonder it withstood the paste-Hallo, this word is oddly spelled."