by David Marcum
I was used to his methods, but Miss Warburton grew weary as time passed. I urged her to re-enter the cottage while I made her some tea. By the time Holmes walked into the sitting room, she was ensconced in her father’s armchair with an empty teacup at her side. Holmes brushed off my offer of refreshment for him.
“Perhaps you would like to stay here, Miss Warburton, while Dr. Watson and I continue our investigation,” said he. “My next step is to examine the trees that stand between this cottage and the cliff.”
“Oh, no, Mr. Holmes,” she said brightly, rising to her feet. “Dr. Watson’s tea has quite revived me. I am eager to continue.”
The three of us crossed the grass and entered the little grove of oaks and beeches. I noticed nothing unusual. Holmes strode along, hands slapping the trunks, shoes shuffling through the grasses, with his eyes darting everywhere - to the left, the right, and particularly up at the canopy. At one point, he even shinnied up a bole and crept out on a limb to look at something on a budding set of branches that only his eye had seen. Miss Warburton and I remained below, craning our necks and watching as he scrambled from one tree to the next for several minutes. When he dropped to the ground and turned to us, he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his hands.
“This has been a most interesting and fruitful exercise. I think the next step should be a visit with your father.”
Miss Warburton looked surprised. She obviously had a number of questions to ask, but she had learned by now that it was futile to question Sherlock Holmes in the midst of his investigation. We walked back to The Fortress. As we entered the front hall, we were met by Dr. Warburton, his wife, and two young men, obviously also of Warburton stock. The men were putting on their overcoats as the butler Morell stood by with an armful of hats and scarves.
“Katherine, where have you been?” asked the older of the two men. Miss Warburton murmured introductions to her cousins, Fenton and Farley Warburton, the doctor’s sons. “We were about to go out and find you. There has been most upsetting news from the asylum. Uncle Jeremiah has escaped!”
“Escaped!” exclaimed our client. She went pale to the lips and dropped into a hall chair.
“A telegram was received an hour ago from the institution’s superintendent, Mr. Belloes,” said Isaiah Warburton. “Jeremiah was discovered missing right before breakfast this morning. The attendants believe he ran away sometime after lights-out last night.”
“Where is this institution located?” asked Sherlock Holmes.
“In Carlisle to the north,” answered the doctor.
“Then he has had plenty of time to make his way back to The Fortress,” mused my friend.
Miss Warburton raised her stricken face to all of us. “Why do you think he would come here?” she asked.
“Because here is his home,” I answered gently.
“What are we to do? He must not be harmed!” Miss Warburton cried.
“Mr. Holmes, what do you think?” asked Dr. Warburton. “He is my older brother, but if he is unstable and offers violence to the women-”
“He must be tracked down and captured,” declared Fenton firmly. “Mother and Katherine must stay in The Fortress with the maid servants. Father, you cannot walk far. You must stay with them. I will send Bonner down to the pier to watch for him there. Morell and the gardeners and stablemen can search the outbuildings and the fields, starting at the north edge of the property, closest to Carlisle. Farley and I will contact the local police. Mr. Holmes, you and your friend must guard The Fortress. In his madness, our uncle could be capable of anything. Above all, the women must be protected.”
The Warburton men agreed at once. Within a few moments, the available forces had been thus dispatched and Holmes and I found ourselves alone in the deserted hall. The maids, along with Miss Warburton and her aunt, had found refuge somewhere upstairs. Before he joined them, Dr. Warburton instructed the butler to hand over the keys to The Fortress to Holmes. Out of Miss Warburton’s sight, Fenton distributed rifles to his brother and the servants. Two horses were hastily saddled, and the younger Warburtons rode away in the direction of Ambleside.
“Do you have your service revolver with you, Watson?” asked Sherlock Holmes.
“Of course I do,” I replied. “But Miss Warburton does not want her father harmed.”
“There may not be the luxury of choice available to us, Doctor,” replied the detective. “The Fortress is secure enough, but the Warburtons have forgotten something important. Follow me.”
Still wearing our outside garments, we slipped through the front door and locked it. Then we silently crossed the distance between the main house and the Colonel’s cottage. The door entering off the tiny front porch was easily opened under Holmes’s sure touch, and we found ourselves standing once more in the little hallway.
“The Colonel, once away from the asylum, is more likely to return here to his cottage. As you said so eloquently to Miss Warburton, here is his home. We must be ready for his arrival. You will find a place of concealment within while I take up watch outside. It is most important that we find the Colonel before any of his family does.”
Holmes put his finger to his lips and disappeared outside. I looked around the cottage. There were not many places to hide. The bed sat too low to offer any cover, nor was there any to find amid the other bedroom furniture. The back part of the cottage was too exposed for shelter. Finally I closed all the curtains, turned the high-backed wingchair so its back was to the sitting room, and seated myself there.
The fair morning sky had turned overcast, and in the small rooms, lacking fires and lighted lamps, the corners were full of shadows. The atmosphere grew even gloomier as the sun passed the meridian and crawled downward. The afternoon slowly advanced. The only sounds were the ticking of the mantel clock and faint noises of Lake Windermere’s waters lapping at the bottom of the nearby cliff. I was comfortably seated in the depths of the high-backed wingchair, but the need for absolute silence was nerve-racking. My muscles, motionless and tense with waiting, felt like they were on fire. Involuntarily I remembered that last night before Maiwand, when the entire regiment was ordered to wait silently at arms before dawn broke and the Afghans came screaming down from the hills to begin their bloody slaughter.
It was almost with relief that I finally heard a faint sound from the back of the house. I could see nothing, but my hearing was excellent. There was the click of a lock. A door opened, then closed. Faint sounds of scuffling were heard. Footfalls came toward me. They did not come into the sitting room as I expected, but instead shifted to the bedroom. I could hear metallic clinking, then the unmistakable sound of a rifle bolt being drawn back. I gripped my revolver and leapt from my hiding spot to confront the intruder.
I only had time to glimpse a muffled figure standing in the hallway. At my sudden appearance, the figure turned and I recognized Colonel Warburton’s Afghan rifle pointed at me. I raised my weapon but the rifle muzzle blazed and smoke filled the air. I felt a sharp, hot pain in my right lower leg as my own shot went wild. I fell to the carpet as the mysterious assailant dashed out the front door. Holmes had left it unlocked.
I tried to follow, but the pain of my wound made it impossible for me to stand. Blood was spreading across the floor. I grabbed my leg to compress the artery and felt my fibula shift. I fumbled for a handkerchief to stem the bleeding. Outside I could hear yells and footfalls. Time slowed down as I concentrated on my wound until Sherlock Holmes burst through the door, shouting my name.
“Watson! Watson!” Holmes first turned to the bedroom but when I responded with “I’m here, Holmes,” he swiftly ran to where I was crouched on the sitting-room carpet.
“Watson! Believe me, if I had had any idea this would happen, I never would have sent you in here!” He dropped to my side and examined my injury. Gentle fingers added another handkerchief to the binding I had applied. He lifted
me up to sit on the wooden chair. Holmes’s face was white and strained, his eyes anxious. I wanted to reassure him, but for some reason I could not speak. I was growing weak from pain, loss of blood, and shock. I did not notice when others entered. Orders were given, and I was carried out of the gamekeeper’s cottage and placed into a carriage. Before it left the cottage, I lifted my head and saw through the window the man who had shot me. It was Fenton Warburton, securely bound and guarded by a Cumbria policeman.
At The Fortress, where I was carried up to my room, Dr. Warburton examined my injury. The crude Jezail bullet had passed through my lower leg, just above the ankle, leaving a jagged, still-bleeding hole. My right fibula was broken, as I had thought in the cottage. The local doctor, a surgeon named Quimby, was called in. Anesthesia was applied. The last thing I remember was Holmes’s worried face hovering over me as I counted down to blackness.
When I awoke the next morning, Sherlock Holmes was slumped in the chair next to my bed. It was obvious he had never left my side. When he saw that I was conscious, he gave my hand a warm squeeze. “I shall never forgive myself,” he murmured, “for failing to see Fenton Warburton taking the colonel into the cottage after leaving you there.” With that he got up and left, sending in the doctor.
I was told by the cheerful surgeon the operation was a success. My right leg was heavily bandaged but the pain was managed. After the breakfast things were cleared away, Holmes returned, bringing Miss Warburton, her uncle, his wife, and their son Farley. A moment later a knock was heard at my door and a familiar voice asked to enter.
It was Colonel Warburton.
He looked older, of course. It had been several years since we had last seen each other before the Battle of Maiwand. He was thinner, his hair was silvered at the temples, his step was a bit unsteady. Yet his blue eyes were bright and his handshake strong as he greeted me. Except for dark circles under his eyes, there was no sign of melancholia.
My exclamations of surprise were interrupted by Holmes, who bustled about finding chairs for everyone around my bed. When he planted his feet on the hearth rug and pulled out his pipe, I knew the time had come for his explanation of the case. Sherlock Holmes would not admit it, but he lived for dramatic moments like these, when he could expound upon his methods and astonish his audiences with the results.
Sherlock Holmes waved his pipe at the mantelpiece where Colonel Warburton’s diary was placed. “I took an interest in this case when Dr. Watson showed me your diary, sir.” he said to the colonel. “There are three ways that a man may be driven to madness. One is chemically, another is by defects of the mind, and the third is deliberately. The entries kept in that diary made it clear to me that neither defects of the mind or chemicals were responsible for the experiences that you had undergone in the past half-year. It was simple for me to pick out the clues that told me you were being persecuted. I determined that the danger had not yet passed, and so we made the journey up to Lake Windermere and The Fortress that same day.”
He turned to the rest of us. “Miss Warburton allowed us to examine the colonel’s cottage the next morning. The most interesting thing I found was that by the head of the bed in the bedroom and on either side of the sitting-room armchair were odd spots in the walls hidden behind the wallpaper. They were hollow spaces, just the size of a single brick. An examination of the outside of the cottage revealed that at each location the outer bricks had been pried from their places and then replaced. Behind the bricks, all insulation had been removed. That allowed someone outside the building to take away the brick and speak into the resulting opening in order to be heard inside.
“That explained the voices. It also established that there was a plot against Colonel Warburton. Imagination doesn’t need to move bricks to be heard.
“The floating figure in the trees was also part of the persecution. Watson and Miss Warburton can tell you that I even went to the extreme of climbing the trunks and balancing on unstable limbs in order to scrutinize the bark of the branches at the top for marks left by a human hand. I found evidence that a wire had been strung between the oaks and beeches in order to convey a lightweight something to the cliff from the other end of the line. That explained the floating figure the colonel glimpsed through his window. It was, I surmise, a thin wire framework draped in muslin or a similar fabric. I might also remark that each time the phenomenon occurred it was at night, dark and very late. All the better to disguise the perpetrator.
“Many of the pieces of the puzzle were now in my hands. Motive had been obvious from the beginning. Colonel Warburton was the landowner of a considerable property. He had returned home with no interest in the estate and isolated himself from contact with his family. His brother, next in line, since the entailment didn’t allow inheritance by females, was terminally ill and not long to live. I am sorry, Doctor.”
Dr. Warburton shook his head. “It is true. Over the past year, I have had to turn over much of the running of the estate to Fenton. He has had full access to all estate papers and contracts.”
“Therefore he knew best how much the estate is worth,” said Holmes. “If he could connive to gain permanent control of its assets, he would prosper far more than working as a headmaster at a local school. Fenton Warburton was an intelligent and ambitious man. Since his own father was dying, he reasoned that only one life stood between him and great wealth. He was also an impatient man. He decided to take steps. If his Uncle Jeremiah was declared to be insane, there would be no question of his ever gaining back control of the estate in the future.
“The reasons for the colonel’s melancholia were well known in the family. From his reading, Fenton found the most effective ways to feed his uncle’s fears. The accusing voice in the night, only when he was alone, and the specter fluttering through the trees. Even the sleep-walking which was a side effect of the stress the colonel was under, all served Fenton’s purpose.
“He felt triumphant after Colonel Warburton was admitted to the asylum. His plan had succeeded and now it would be only a matter of months before everything was his. Fenton is not a good man, and could not be expected to be a good son. With him, family considerations did not hold a candle to the possibility of profit. It was his nature.
“Then his cousin Katherine left a note and traveled to London in order to consult Dr. Watson, whose good friend was Mr. Sherlock Holmes. The family knew that because of Colonel Warburton’s favorite reading material, the Beeton’s Christmas Annual, which carried Dr. Watson’s tale, A Study in Scarlet.
“Fenton, like many intelligent criminals, made the mistake of improving upon perfection. Confinement for attempted self-destruction suddenly was not enough. Colonel Warburton must be proven to be not only a danger to himself but to others. So Fenton devised a new plan. He smuggled his uncle out of the asylum the night we arrived and left him tied up and gagged in an outbuilding close to his cottage. He realized he was taking a chance of discovery, but why would anyone look in that storage area without a good reason? Fenton knew the staff at the asylum wouldn’t discover that their patient was missing until breakfast. They would then spend some hours searching their own premises before notifying the family.
“In his confession after he was captured outside the cottage, he told how he watched as Miss Warburton, Dr. Watson, and I examined the cottage, the kitchen garden, and the line of trees from which he had previously removed his wire. The telegram arrived from Dr. Belloes, and it was time to raise the alarm.
“He assigned tasks for all the men that would scatter them over the property, but not toward the colonel’s cottage. Fenton and Farley then took the overland route to inform the Cumbrian police, but he faked an injury to his horse before they had gone far. He sent Farley ahead while he turned back to the estate. He spirited Colonel Warburton out of hiding, carried him into the cottage through the back door, and left him in the kitchen while he went into the bedroom and loaded the colonel’s old Afghan rif
le with Jezail bullets from the footlocker. He planned to fire several shots toward the searchers outside, untie and leave his uncle in the hallway, and see that he was blamed for the attack. That would guarantee that Colonel Warburton would never be released from the asylum, and he would lose all rights pertaining to the management of the estate.
“Of course, the colonel would protest his innocence and tell his own story, but who would believe a crazy, homicidal old man?”
“Why shoot Dr. Watson?” asked Miss Warburton.
“Fenton Warburton admitted that the sudden appearance of my friend startled him and his finger slipped on the trigger. He never meant to hit anyone, just to fire the weapon enough times to make us think the colonel had gone completely mad.”
“Well, he failed,” said Isaiah Warburton. “I’m sorry, Jeremiah, that I ever urged Katherine to sign those commitment papers.”
“You thought you were acting for the best,” replied his brother. “Even I was convinced that I had completely lost my senses. I do not blame you for thinking the same. The question is: What do we do now?”
“That is the subject of a private family discussion,” said Sherlock Holmes. “If you need the co-operation of Dr. Watson and myself in further dealings against Fenton, Miss Warburton knows our address in London. Meanwhile, as soon as Watson can travel, we shall return to Baker Street.”
That is the story of Colonel Warburton’s madness and the surprising results of Sherlock Holmes’s investigation. Fenton was sentenced to a long term in prison for the attacks on the colonel and myself. Miss Warburton married the surgeon, Dr. Quimby, and they made Colonel Warburton their special concern. Colonel Warburton became interested in assisting his brother in the management of the estate which helped to lift his melancholia. Dr. Warburton’s illness did take him within the year, but his son Farley proved to be an able administrator who became the rock of the family. As for me, for a time I limped from my wound, and even years later damp weather could cause my leg to ache. That was my souvenir from the adventure I always thought of as “The Case of the Diary and the Detective”.