Sherlock Holmes and the Lady in Black

by June Thomson

  Before the man had a chance to reply, Holmes had thrust the visiting card through the narrow opening in such a brisk, positive manner that the man had to take it. But not for long. A second later he had pushed it back at Holmes who had begun his little introductory speech he had practised over breakfast, about Victorian novels, and how he had been told that Mr and Mrs Whittaker of Fulwell Hall might be willing to sell and oh, how excited he was at the chance.

  It was at that point that the man opened the door a little further in order to give himself room to return the card, saying abruptly as he did so, ‘You’ve come to the wrong address. This isn’t Fulwell Hall,’ before slamming the door shut.

  The encounter lasted only a few seconds, just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of the man’s features – an elderly man in his mid to late seventies, I estimated; almost bald but with wisps of grey hair still clinging to his scalp; skin wrinkled and leathery as if from long exposure to the sun and wind; voice, hoarse and with an accent I could not quite locate except it sounded northern – Manchester, perhaps? Or Birmingham?

  As for the interior of the house, I caught no sight of that at all before the door shut.

  Holmes came down the steps towards me, shrugging his shoulders and grimacing, as if he was not entirely sure if the little gambit had been successful or not, but he was holding the visiting card tenderly by one corner and he wiggled it at me as if to signify he was hoping for the best.

  Conscious that we might still be under observation by the man who had answered the door, we continued to maintain our roles, Holmes going ahead and getting into the back seat of the car having squeezed himself round the gate, I following a few steps behind before climbing in behind the wheel and starting the engine. Neither of us spoke until we were a good few yards from Fulworth Hall and safely out of sight around a corner in the road.

  ‘Well, did it work?’ I asked, impatient to find out Holmes’ real impressions of his success or failure.

  However, he still remained doubtful.

  ‘I still can’t decide,’ he replied. ‘The man took the card as I had hoped so his prints should be on it. But I have my doubts he was the person who climbed in through that window. If I am right, then the whole affair is a waste of time.’

  He sounded so downcast that I hastened to cheer him up.

  ‘If he wasn’t the man, then there might be other prints that Inspector Bardle found at Melchett Manor, perhaps on the cabinet that was broken into that will match up?’ I suggested.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he agreed but not very positively. ‘We must wait for Bardle’s confirmation on that.’

  As he spoke, he was carefully stowing away the visiting card into a special pocketbook he had carried with him, which I remembered from our Baker Street days for the safe keeping of such pieces of evidence.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ I asked. ‘We can hardly go back to the cottage. Mrs B will be there. She’ll surely notice our disguises. You know what she is like.’

  ‘Only too well,’ he agreed, taking off the deerstalker hat and throwing it onto the back seat of the car, remarking contemptuously as he did so, ‘Ridiculous headgear! I’ve never liked it!’

  ‘Shall we go to the Fisherman’s Arms then?’ I suggested.

  ‘Not there either; Reg Berry and his wife will notice us, and while they’re not as inquisitive as Mrs B, they might still be a little too curious. Drive into Lewes, Watson. We’ll find somewhere there.’

  In the end, we found refuge in a prim little café in a side street where we drank tea and tried not to look too conspicuous but even stripped of our caps, false moustaches and such like accoutrements we still drew the attention of the other customers, consisting entirely of elderly ladies, and were glad to creep away when at last the time came when Mrs B would have left the cottage and it was safe for us to go home.

  As Holmes remarked gratefully as we drew up by the front of his beehives, ‘Thank heavens that’s over. We can only hope Inspector Bardle’s report is satisfactory and we don’t have to go through another ridiculous ruse like that again.’

  ‘And Langdale Pike’s report,’ I reminded him.

  ‘His, too,’ Holmes replied. ‘In fact I think his is possibly the most important.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  There was no mystery attached to Holmes’ mood during the next few days. With increasing impatience, he waited for Langdale Pike’s answer to his request for information regarding the Trevalyan family and for Inspector Bardle to contact him about the fingerprints found on the scullery window at Melchett Manor, although the latter seemed of lesser importance. It was Langdale Pike’s delay that caused my old friend the greatest discomfort.

  Every morning, at the time when the first post was due to arrive, he paced up and down the living room waiting for the rattle of the letterbox that heralded the delivery of the mail. As soon as he heard it, he raced into the hall, abandoning his breakfast, to return empty-handed apart from a clutch of unwanted correspondence, which he threw down on the table in disgust.

  So anxious was he not to miss the delivery that he was even unwilling to leave the house and it was only the expected arrival of Mrs B that drove him out. Even so, we never went far, only to the cove where he had seen the Lady in Black and where he prowled up and down the beach or seated himself on the rock where she had sat and like her, gazed out to sea.

  This state of mind continued for several days and I was also beginning to find the situation distressing, not for my own sake, although Holmes was not his usual companionable self, but for the return of certain patterns of behaviour that had occurred during his old Baker Street days and I was concerned that he might revert to some of his earlier habits, in short, his use of cocaine.

  I was therefore immensely relieved when, on the morning of the fourth day, the letterbox gave its customary rattle and he rose from the table to answer its summons, rather reluctantly, I thought as if not expecting any positive news, when I heard him give a delighted exclamation. Moments later he returned from the hall waving an envelope above his head like a victory flag.

  ‘It has come at last!’ he cried and with no further ado, he flung himself down on his chair and, in his eagerness, slit the envelope open with the butter knife before extracting several sheets of paper which he immediately began to read, totally engrossed in their contents.

  I knew better than to interrupt his concentration although, judging from his responses, he was not wholly satisfied with Langdale Pike’s report and it crossed my mind that if Holmes had a telephone installed in his cottage, it would make contact with people such as Langdale Pike much simpler. It would certainly make it easier for me to speak to my wife. As matters stood, I would have to go to the post office in the village in order to let her know when to expect me to return home. It was obvious that my stay in Fulworth was likely to be longer than Holmes’ invitation to a week’s holiday with him in Sussex.

  ‘Good news?’ I asked when Holmes laid aside Langdale Pike’s report.

  ‘Yes, on the whole,’ he replied. ‘Pike has evidently gone to some length to cover most of the information I asked for.’

  ‘Such as?’ I prompted, eager to know all the details.

  But he refused to be tempted. Rising to his feet, he thrust the letter into his pocket, announcing as he did so, ‘It is too complex to discuss now. Besides Mrs B will arrive at any moment. So I suggest we go somewhere quiet where we can talk in complete privacy.’

  The ‘somewhere’ he referred to was, as I had expected, the cove, the most appropriate setting for any conversation that concerned the Lady in Black, so I was not surprised when, after we had descended the steps, we set off across the beach to the rock where Holmes had first seen her sitting and gazing out towards the sea.

  ‘Now,’ he said retrieving the letter from his pocket, ‘let us first deal with the Trevalyan connection. Langdale Pike has gone to the trouble of drawing up a genealogical history, interesting but not relevant apart from the more recent family members, in pa
rticular Henry Trevalyan whose rather grand tomb is, as we know, in the vault at St Botolph’s and who, according to Mrs B, and confirmed by Langdale Pike, died in 1870 at the age of seventy-five, leaving behind a widow and a daughter. As Mrs B also informed us, they had only one child, Henrietta, no doubt named after her father. She was usually known as Hetty and she ran away from school to elope with a man she had met in Lewes. As a result she was disinherited by her father. All this information is confirmed by Langdale Pike.

  ‘It was at this point that Mrs B’s information ran out, but thanks to Pike’s enquiries, we can now follow up the details of Hetty’s later life.

  ‘The man she eloped with was George Sutton, a well-to-do, forty-year-old bachelor from Birmingham who owned a successful building firm.’

  ‘Forty years old!’ I exclaimed. ‘Why, he was old enough to be her father!’

  ‘Exactly, Watson. You have, as they say, hit the nail on the head. In my opinion, I think Hetty may have chosen him as a surrogate father, someone kind and considerate, unlike her own father. And George Sutton may have chosen her as a substitute daughter. One can understand Henry Trevalyan’s reaction to his daughter’s marriage; not only to a man old enough to be a father but to a builder for goodness’ sake: a tradesman in other words, whereas he was trying to create a lord-of-the-manor image for himself. It was much too demeaning for him to accept.’

  Here Holmes paused and raising a quizzical eyebrow in my direction, asked, ‘Does anything about this account strike you as significant, Watson?’

  Not sure what he was referring to, I replied, ‘Significant, Holmes? No, not really.’

  ‘That is because you are a man, my dear fellow, like Langdale Pike. You are seeing the situation entirely from a man’s point of view. No one has given a thought to what effect all this had on Mrs Trevalyan and her family. After all, Hetty was as much her daughter as Henry Trevalyan’s, as well as her mother’s granddaughter. They, too, may have been as displeased as Henry Trevalyan by Hetty’s marriage to a man twenty-three years her senior, even though he was a wealthy businessman.’

  ‘I see what you mean, Holmes. Does Langdale Pike refer to them?’

  ‘No, not at all. That is my point. As a man, he is concerned only with the male side of the family. We can, of course, follow up the female side ourselves if need be. I often think,’ he added in a musing tone, ‘that even our language has the same gender bias embedded in it. Take, for example, the word “history”. Why not herstory? The ‘his’ part of it comes from the Greek word, “history”, meaning “a wise man”. The Anglo-Saxons were no better. The very word “woman” derives from their term “wifman”. Mark my words, Watson, one of these days the women will rise up and demand their rights to equality and heaven alone knows what will come of it. Lady judges? Female bishops? Women in Parliament? Perhaps even a “wifman” prime minister? But they’ll probably be no worse than their present male counterparts; even better; at least one must hope so.

  ‘But all this is beside the point. To continue with Hetty Trevalyan’s story. According to Langdale Pike, she eloped with George Sutton to Birmingham where they married and set up home in one of Sutton’s very comfortable, newly built villas, containing every modern convenience a bride could wish for, including not one but two carriages and a bevy of servants. They soon became part of an affluent group of Birmingham residents, mostly successful businessmen and their wives with whom they enjoyed a very pleasant social life, probably far better than Hetty would have known in Fulworth.

  ‘Some time later, they had a daughter whom they christened Eleanor, possibly after the child’s maternal grandmother although unfortunately Pike does not comment on this aspect of the family tree. When the child was five, her father suddenly died of a heart attack, a great shock to his widow who was grief-stricken and for a time became a virtual recluse. Do you have any comment to make on this, Watson?’

  He was regarding me with bright-eyed attention and, a little bemused, I shook my head.

  ‘Oh, come, come!’ he admonished me. ‘You disappoint me; I thought you would have had more sensitivity. You are a doctor so you must have had to deal with the death of certain of your patients during your career and witness the grief of those who were close to them. What do you do in such circumstances?’

  I was deeply disturbed by Holmes’ comments. Of course I was aware of the effects such tragedies had on their loved ones. In fact, I had experienced a great personal loss myself when my first wife died and, despite the happiness that my second marriage had brought me and my gratitude for that consolation, I was still aware of a sense of bereavement that time had not fully healed.

  I also remembered my own distress when, years earlier, I had stood on the edge of Reichenbach Falls in the Swiss Alps, convinced that Holmes had plunged to his death with Moriarty, his arch-enemy, as they grappled together on the edge of the ravine.

  So Holmes’ remarks, which I took to be a criticism of my lack of sensitivity, cut me to the quick. It seemed so unjust. While I had mourned his loss, how had he responded? He had lain hidden on a ledge above the falls, observing what happened with an objective eye, untouched, it seemed, by any emotion.

  And yet, this dispassionate attitude was one of his greatest assets, I suddenly realised. Unlike myself, or Langdale Pike, or Henry Trevalyan, or any other man who was involved in the Lady in Black inquiry only Holmes alone could successfully interpret the plot and the actors who took part in it. I also realised that when in the past I had described him as being cold-blooded and lacking in feeling, I had seriously misjudged him. Yes, he had indeed little sentiment, but that was his nature, and I had either to accept it or reject it and the latter option was quite out of the question. So, although it was a bitter pill to swallow, I gave way and admitted my inability to understand with a gesture of acceptance.

  Holmes, who had been regarding me with that intense gaze of his, now softened his expression and, leaning forward, touched me briefly on the shoulder, remarking as he did so, ‘You see, my dear Watson, we both have to transfer our line of inquiry from the men to the women in the case, to Hetty and her family connections and also to her daughter. They must from now on take centre stage. According to Langdale Pike, Hetty was deeply affected by her husband’s death, for a time at least, becoming something of a recluse.

  ‘However, he said nothing about the daughter who was five years old when her father died. How did she respond? Or, come to that her grandparents, the Suttons, on her father’s side? In fact, Langdale Pike fails to mention them at all. So we know nothing about their relationship with one another. Did Hetty visit them? Or did they visit Hetty? What was their reaction to George Sutton’s death or Henry Trevalyan disinheriting their daughter-in-law? There are so many questions that remain unanswered.’

  ‘So what do you propose doing about it, Holmes?’

  ‘I suppose I shall have to write to Pike again, although I am reluctant to do so. He takes so long to reply. The waiting plays havoc with my nervous system.’

  And with mine too, I added silently.

  Out loud, I said, ‘If you had a telephone installed here, you could speak directly to Langdale Pike, instead of having to wait for him to write to you. Wouldn’t that be easier?’

  Holmes regarded me with a long, direct gaze before replying, ‘I dislike telephones, Watson,’ he said dismissively.

  ‘But you had one in Baker Street,’ I pointed out.

  ‘That was London, my dear fellow. This is Sussex, quite a different kettle of fish. I would rather not have the peace of the countryside shattered by the ringing of one of those wretched instruments. However, I see your point. A telephone would speed up matters. Perhaps I should submit to the modern way of life, loath though I am to admit defeat. But having one installed will take several days, I should imagine. What shall I do in the meantime?’

  ‘Couldn’t Mrs B help? She seems to know quite a lot about the family.’

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Watson! In her own way, she is almost
as infuriating as Pike!’

  He broke off suddenly in the middle of his protestation.

  ‘Wait a moment though! I think you may have the answer!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Have I, Holmes?’ I asked, delighted that I might have solved the problem but not sure how I had managed to do it.

  ‘Let me think,’ he continued, ignoring me and addressing himself.

  Turning abruptly on his heel, he took several short paces up and down the room, slapping his forehead with his open palm as if the rhythm of the repeated blows might release some half-forgotten memory. Then, as suddenly as he had sprung into motion, he stopped and spun back towards me; his face vivid with excitement.

  ‘Of course! I remember now! When Mrs B spoke of the Trevalyans, she mentioned Mrs Trevalyan’s family. Can you recall what she said?’

  ‘Yes, at least some of it,’ I replied hesitantly, unable to summon up any clear recollection of the occasion but anxious to appease Holmes for whom the information was evidently crucial. ‘She said something about them being a farming family who had lived in the same village for generations …’

  ‘Never mind all that! Their name, Watson! That is what I want. It was something similar to Lackham, was it not? Or Laycock?’

  The name suddenly popped into my mind without any effort on my part and to my great surprise, I heard myself enunciating it.

  ‘The Lockharts, Holmes!’ I cried out.

  ‘Of course! Of course!’ he exclaimed, crossing the room to thump me on the back. ‘The Lockharts of Barton! Well done, Watson! What a genius you are!’

  I felt hugely gratified by his compliments but a little guilty as well, as I had contributed so little to deserve it. But there was no opportunity to do anything about it for Holmes was on the move again, bustling over to the door and urging me to be quick.