‘But you have worked with Mr Holmes on his previous cases. You are his close friend and associate. You must have learned a great deal from him.’
‘I think I can say I know his methods, but there are aspects of his activities of which I am altogether ignorant.’
‘That would not prevent you from talking to my husband, from making him see the peril he faces. Nor from approaching Black Ralph, warning him, offering him money. Dr Watson, I know you think me overwrought, fanciful, perhaps even deluded. Is it not the case, that you think so?’
This was uncommonly and uncomfortably shrewd, not only as an observation, but also as a turn of tactics. I made some motion intended to be evasive.
‘Thank you for being so honest,’ was the smiling response. ‘Now I may be all you suppose, but I lay no obligation upon you, and would two or three comfortable days out of London in this weather be so great a burden?’
Sherlock Holmes once observed that the fair sex was my department. I never fully took his meaning, but if it was to the effect that I enjoyed any ascendancy in that sphere, he misreckoned. Otherwise I should scarcely have found myself, the evening after the interview just described, alighting at a remote railway halt some miles from Westbury.
At once a tall, broad-shouldered man in black accosted me, mentioning my name in a foreign accent. He was an obvious Spaniard – by name Carlos, as I was later to learn – with the dignified deportment of that race and an address that contrived to be at once courteous and proud. Courtesy was to the fore while he introduced himself as butler to Sir Harry Fairfax and installed me and my luggage in the smart wagonette that waited in the station yard; and yet his sombre looks bespoke a temperament to which the keeping of pledges and the avenging of slights were of deadly concern. Not that I took much note at the time; I was pleasantly struck by the baronet’s civility in sending an upper servant to meet me, and soothed by the unhurried drive through the leafy lanes, where, as the shadows lengthened, a cooling breeze blew. I looked forward, too, to renewing my acquaintance with the charming Lady Fairfax, and, with a lively quickening of curiosity, to uncovering whatever might be the nature of the threat to her husband.
The carriage mounted a crest in the road and these agreeable feelings were soon dissipated. We had come to the edge of the chalky upland that forms most of the county and entered a region of clay and rock. Some half a mile off stood a tall house of grey stone mantled with ivy and of a design that even at this distance seemed ill contrived. To one side of it lay a plantation of trees with foliage of a deep, almost bluish hue uncommon in England; on the other there wound a stream or small river. I knew at once that the house was our destination, and as soon as a curve in the stream brought the murky, weed-clogged flood close to the road, saw the force of its name. A moment later I was almost spilled from my seat by the wild shying of the pair of cobs that drew the wagonette. The cause was not far to seek – a human figure of indescribable menace lurking in the hedgerow. I caught a glimpse of a hairy fist shaken, of rotten teeth bared in a snarl, no more, but I would have been sure that it was Black Ralph I had seen even if the Spaniard’s dark eye had not fixed me with a sufficiently eloquent look.
Darkwater Hall was no more prepossessing at close quarters. Weathering showed it to be not of recent erection, but its bulging windows and squat chimneys belonged to no period or style I had ever encountered. The interior was comparatively conventional. Carlos took me to a more than adequate bedroom and quickly fetched me ample hot water, so I was able to make a very tolerable change and go to greet my hosts in renewed spirits.
With his fresh complexion, steady eye and open, unassuming manner, Sir Harry Fairfax was one of the finest types of English country gentlemen. I judged him to be about thirty years old. His brother Miles resembled him in age and nothing else, a sallow, sneering young man probably addicted to cigarettes and strong waters. From neither brother did I obtain what I had hoped the meeting would furnish, some clue or indication, something that would force out of the subconsciousness of my mind whatever it was that had stirred there when I heard the name of Fairfax; reference books had proved useless. For the moment, the memory stayed buried.
As before, I had no time to ponder the point, for my hostess, a stery in a gown of azure velvet that showed off the brilliance of her eyes, steered me towards the fifth member of the party. Him I identified as an Army man (from the set of his shoulders) who had served some years in the tropics (from his deep tan), but whose career had not prospered (from his disappointed air), and was somewhat tickled to hear him introduced as Captain Bradshaw of the Assam Light Horse. No one who had failed to gain his majority by the age of forty-five, which I estimated Bradshaw to have reached, could be called a successful soldier. I hid a smile at the thought of the ‘Excellent, Watson!’ which a well-known voice might have breathed into my ear, had its owner been present, and took to conversation.
‘I was a sort of soldier myself when I was a youngster,’ said I.
‘Oh yes? Where did you serve?’
‘Afghanistan.’
‘You saw some action there, I take it.’
‘Not the sort that a fighting soldier sees, but enough. I was wounded and at last invalided out.’
‘What infernal luck.’
‘You’re on leave, no doubt.’
‘Awaiting retirement,’ said Bradshaw in a tone as dejected as his bearing.
Miles Fairfax now cocked his unkempt head at me. ‘Welcome to Darkwater Hall, Dr Watson. Life here may strike you as a trifle dull and rustic after the bustle and polish of London, but believe me, it has its points of interest.’
‘Indeed.’
‘I presume you’re a medical doctor, not one who professes law or divinity?’
‘Medicine’s my trade, yes.’
‘Then the following fact, omitted by my brother when he introduced us, might amuse you. Although unlike in every possible way, he and I are twins.’
‘That’s not so surprising,’ said I. ‘Many pairs of twins are no more alike than ordinary brothers and sisters, and we know how they can differ.’
‘Assuredly,’ said he at his most sarcastic. ‘Is it true, Doctor, that twins can be born several or even many hours apart?’
‘It is.’
‘Not so in our case – eh, Harry? Twenty minutes was all that separated our respective arrivals in this world. But it was enough.’
His sister-in-law put a gently restraining hand on his arm, but the fellow shook it off with a roughness that, had it been my place to do so, I should have considered correcting. I was now morally certain he was intoxicated.
‘Yes,’ he went on with a growl, ‘twenty minutes settled the disposal of the baronetcy, the house, the estate, the money. God’s will, what?’
‘At least, Mr Fairfax,’ said I, ‘it’s evident you’re a good loser.’
That shot went home, and it silenced him for a while, but I was relieved when Carlos announced dinner, thus effecting a change of scene and mood. It proved to be a change not wholly for the better, in that the spacious room in which I now found myself was dominated by a most outlandish carving or relief occupying the section of wall above the fireplace. It was of some dark wood and I could not be sure what it portrayed, except that in one corner a human figure, half naked, was being bound to a post by others wearing hooded robes, while further off I thought I saw a scaffold. All in all, it made an unequivocally distasteful impression upon me. The fare, however, was palatable enough, and the service most adroit and pleasant, provided by Carlos and a young woman I learned was his wife, named Dolores. With her raven hair, creamy skin and deep brown eyes she was in striking contrast to her mistress, but female beauty takes many forms.
I was in the midst of recounting, at the baronet’s invitation, the full facts of the strange affair at Stoke Moran, when Lady Fairfax gave an abrupt gasp and raised her hands to her throat. I followed her horrified gaze and spied, through a gap in the curtains, a face I had seen for a moment earlier that day, a face onc
e more contorted with malice.
‘Black Ralph! At the window!’ I cried, and jumped up from my chair. Bradshaw was already on his feet, standing between the lady and the point where the intruder had appeared. Sir Harry and I had left the house within seconds, but, though we searched thoroughly the nearer part of the grounds, we returned empty-handed, much to Miles’s scoffing amusement. Some time later, my host contrived to disengage me from the rest of the company, having imputed to me a desire to be shown the contents of his gun-room. He enjoyed some friendly amusement at my expense when I cautioned him to stay away from the windows there until I had drawn the curtains over them.
‘Do you imagine that Black Ralph has come back with a Gatling gun?’ he asked with a smile.
‘I imagine nothing, Sir Harry. I go by what I see and hear’, and I told him of my earlier sighting of that villainous creature.
He was quite unmoved, attributing these visitations to the idle curiosity of a simpleton. ‘I am at no risk, Doctor,’ he ended firmly.
‘Lady Fairfax thinks differently.’
‘That’s her way. She watches over me with a care that would sometimes befit a mother more than a wife. Such matters will be resolved with the arrival of our first child.’
‘Is that happy event in positive prospect?’
‘Not as yet.’
Rather abruptly, he thrust into my hands a pair of antique duelling-pistols that had resided in a glass case, and inquired my opinion of them. I made what reply I could, as also when he passed me an early revolver from the time of Waterloo. After a moment he began to speak of his brother.
‘Visitors are always apt to bring out the worst in him. I fancy he sees himself through their eyes and dislikes the sight. A man with no occupation, no interest in country pursuits – except shooting, at which he excels – and yet too indolent to make a move. Poor, poor Miles, the prisoner of his own nature, as we all are! And poor Bradshaw too.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, frankly, Watson – and in the circumstances there seems little point in not being frank with you – Jack has been living here largely on my charity. I offer it gladly as he served under my father, but it galls him. And beneath that quiet exterior, you know, there’s a cauldron of feelings. Not a stable character, Jack’s. It told against him in the regiment, so the dad said.’
In the pause that followed, I ran my eye over a weapon I recognized, one of the single-action Rossi-Charles rifles with the old aperture sight. Though inaccurate at anything of a range, they had been much prized at one time for never jamming and for their lightness and cheapness. I mentioned having come across them in Afghanistan and Sir Harry told me his father had picked this one up after Jellalabad. Forty years ago and more, I remember thinking to myself, and am still at a loss to say why I did – forty years ago, before I was born.
The rest of the evening passed pleasantly if inconclusively enough, and in due course the party dispersed. My bedroom was on the second floor, above which lay what I had taken to be a number of unoccupied or unused garrets and the like; I was slightly surprised, then, to hear, as I made ready to retire, the distinct sound of a door shutting somewhere above my head, and proceeded to listen with half an ear to a conversation of which I could at first make out nothing but that, of a small number of speakers, one or more was male and one or more female. My attention mounted as the voices grew in volume and feeling until, when it was plain that upstairs a tenacious woman faced an importunate man, I hung on every word, but no words were distinguishable, none save one, the interjection ‘No!’ thrice pronounced in feminine accents, and accompanied by what was beyond all doubt the defiant stamp of a feminine foot. This evidently settled the matter; the colloquy at once died down and soon ceased, the door opened and shut again, and in a few moments all was still.
The whole incident had not lasted a minute, and its meaning and importance were far from certain. Nevertheless, I found some difficulty in composing my mind for sleep. The man’s voice I had been unable to identify; the woman’s was quite positively that of Lady Fairfax. What, I asked myself, could have taken her at such an hour to a part of the house so remote from where her own quarters must be situated?
When sleep came it was deep and dreamless. Next morning, thoroughly refreshed, I had barely finished breakfast when the household exploded into sudden clamour. It appeared that the gun-room had been broken into by a window and the Rossi-Charles rifle and half a dozen rounds of its ammunition removed. Nothing else was missing, according to Carlos, who, I gathered, was in virtual charge of his master’s modest armoury. Mindful of Sherlock Holmes’s dictum, that there is no branch of detective science so important as the art of tracing footsteps, I fetched the large magnifying-glass I had had the forethought to bring with me and set to work on the approaches to the window. But circumstance was against me in the very particular in which it so often favoured my friend; the ground, baked hard by the hot summer, yielded no trace of what I sought. I returned to the gun-room to find an altercation in progress.
‘It is indeed suspicious—’ Sir Harry was saying.
‘Suspicious!’ his wife flashed at him. ‘Might a bullet in your heart come near to furnishing a certainty?’
‘In law it is no more than suspicious, and even a magistrate cannot have a man confined on such grounds. I have no charge to bring.’
Bradshaw, at the lady’s other side, seemed disposed to agree, pointing out that there had been no witnesses to the burglary.
‘Then,’ came the ready rejoinder, ‘Harry must be placed under guard, protected night and day.’
‘I refuse to be made a prisoner in my own house, and out of doors the plan would be quite impracticable, eh, Jack?’
‘I shouldn’t care to undertake it myself with anything less than a full platoon,’ declared the soldier.
‘Then you must leave the Hall, go somewhere safe and secret until—’
‘What, and give a rascal like Black Ralph the satisfaction of making me bolt like a rabbit? I’d sooner die.’
His sincerity was unmistakable, and made an impression on all his hearers, even his brother, who for the moment forgot to sneer, though he remembered soon enough when I took a hand in the conversation.
First explaining the absence of footsteps outside, I added, ‘But I did find some fragments of glass on the soil, as we did on this side of the window.’
‘Is that so surprising?’ was the baronet’s question.
I answered it with another. ‘Is this door normally kept locked?’
‘Why, yes, of course.’
‘How many keys are there?’
‘Two. I have one, Carlos the other.’
‘Does he carry it with him at all times?’
‘No, for the most part it’s kept on a ring hanging up in his pantry.’
‘And is that generally known in the household?’
‘It might well be, yes.’
The younger twin said with a curl of his lip, ‘Your reasoning is pellucidly clear, Dr Watson. Any of us, and Carlos besides, could have let himself in here, broken the window from inside in order to suggest an intruder from outside, and made off with the rifle. How exquisitely ingenious!’
‘Mr Fairfax,’ said I, summoning up as much reasonableness as I could, ‘all I seek to do is to explore possibilities, however remote they may appear to be, and however absurd they may turn out in retrospect to have been.’
‘As the great Sherlock Holmes would be seeking to do, were he here.’
‘I am not too proud to learn from my betters,’ I observed a little tartly as I drew Sir Harry aside.
Before I could speak, he said with some warmth, ‘You don’t seriously suppose, do you, Watson, that Carlos, or Jack Bradshaw, or my own brother would have stolen that weapon? For what conceivable motive?’
‘Of course I don’t suppose any such thing,’ said I. ‘This Black Ralph miscreant is obviously the culprit. No, I was merely—’
‘Displaying your powers of observation?’ he asked,
his good humour at once restored.
‘Very likely. Now you must tell me where to find the fellow. There’s no time to be lost.’
‘I beg you to be careful, Watson.’
‘You are to be careful, Sir Harry. Keep to the house as far as you can. Take Bradshaw with you if you must venture out. Warn the servants.’
He promised to do as I said, and his directions conducted me straight to the noisome hovel which was Black Ralph’s abode, but my journey was in vain. The slattern who answered my knock informed me that the man had left the previous day to visit his sister near Warminster and was not expected back for a week. I did not stay to puncture such an obvious tissue of falsehood. When an inquiry at the local tavern fell out equally fruitless, I returned to Darkwater Hall and addressed myself to questioning the servants, the source of the disquieting rumours that had reached Lady Fairfax in the first place.
My most puzzling informant was the girl Dolores, who fortunately spoke English well, though with a stronger accent than her husband. At first she had little to say, answering in curt monosyllables or merely shrugging her graceful shoulders by way of reply. But then, by luck or instinct, I ventured to ask what were her personal views of her employer. At once her dark eyes blazed and I caught a glimpse of splendid white teeth.
‘He is cold!’ she cried. ‘He is a good man, this Sir Harry Fair-fax, a fine English gentleman, but he is cold! His blood is like the blood of a fish!’
Making no move to restrain her, for we were out of hearing of the household at the time, I did no more than encourage her to explain herself.
‘I cannot! How can I, to another Englishman?’
‘Has he treated you unkindly?’
‘Unkindly, never; I tell you he is a good man. But coldly, coldly!’
‘In what way coldly?’
Again the girl did no more than shrug her shoulders. I sensed I would get no further along this path and took a new approach by asking whether Carlos also held the opinion that Sir Harry was a good man.
‘Yes, yes,’ was the reply, accompanied by a toss of the head. ‘I think so. Or perhaps I should better say that I hope so, I greatly hope so.’
Dear Illusion: Collected Stories Page 29