Above us was the white brilliance of the lantern. The light of each flame at its centre was intensified by being sealed in a glass funnel with a mirror behind it. This was surrounded in turn by square banks of parabolic reflectors in silvered glass like rows of shallow cups standing on their edges, turning slowly. A beam shone brilliantly out to sea, day and night, but was seldom visible during daylight, except in fog or adverse weather.
Black iron shutters in their runners were adjusted across many sections of the glass window panes. By this means, the revolving beam flashed out to sea intermittently, at one angle only. This corresponded with the markings of the Old Light on the charts of the Boston Deeps. After the silting up of the little ports and the building of the bridges at Sutton Cross, no shipping used this estuary. The corresponding light on the opposite bank of the estuary, which had once shown red and so measured the river mouth, was no longer in use.
Holmes finished his inspection of the gleaming apparatus.
“This, Watson, is the dioptric system of Augustin Fresnel. In other words, a stationary chandelier of white light surrounded by banks of Bodier Mercet’s silvered reflectors. The device is no longer modern, of course, but it is sufficient. Our French colleagues were pioneers in such matters. I daresay this one will be replaced before long or may be taken out of service altogether.”
Even if antiquated, it was a magnificent creation—a wonderland as Holmes had called it. The effect was almost hypnotic as the rows of reflectors rotated slowly, endlessly, and almost silently in the warm air, except for an occasional creak of wood at their axle. In the lower level of the lantern-room, standing before the tall wooden case with its clock dial and governor, Holmes opened the pendulum door. The mechanism of its smaller descending weights also controlled the flow of paraffin oil to the lamps. I noticed that a measuring scale of some kind had been carved on the interior of the case to indicate the progress of the weights. The length of time before the device must be wound again was clearly indicated.
To prevent the reflectors from coming to a halt, a metal strike-bell was attached a little above the base of this scale. Like the incessant striking of a clock, this alarm system would summon those in the barrack-room or nearby before the weight was fully unwound. According to Inspector Wainwright, “our man from Freiston Beach” had attended to the winding early that morning and again while we were with Dr Rixon.
I turned to the little wooden table and opened the log-book. It was divided into columns for the date and time of winding, another for the point on the scale which the weights had reached before the winding took place, and a fourth for any comments to be read by the next keeper on duty. Underneath was the name of the keeper on watch.
These columns indicated that Abraham Chastelnau had wound up the weights for the night watch just before 8pm on Sunday evening. The time must have been almost immediately before Roland’s warning gunshot had lured him to their fatal confrontation on the flooded sands. An entry by the Freiston Shore relief on the following day confirmed that the Old Light had ceased flashing by 5.20 on Monday morning, according to the collier’s signal.
Holmes glanced at the entries and closed the book.
“The log and the pebbles can wait their turn. We have all night for them. Before it is too late in the day, it would pay us to take a stroll along the beach and visit the scene of the brothers’ last encounter.”
I looked out of the window across the ribbon of sand darkening to grey, and a tide that had already turned to the flood.
“I should have thought, Holmes, that it was already rather late. The sun has almost gone and the twilight will be upon us very soon.”
“All the better. It will be just as it was at the time of the quarrel. In our case, however, we are not going to quarrel and we shall have the strong beam of the Old Light to lead us back. Keep that in view and we shall not go far wrong.”
I noticed, however, that he had brought his redoubtable walking-stick, that “Penang Lawyer” which settled all arguments. We lowered ourselves down the iron ladder and stood upon the wet sands. The filling estuary was immediately to our right and the incoming tide lay ahead. I feared I might have better reason for my caution than I guessed. The pale yellow sun of that October evening had disappeared half an hour ago behind a silhouette of black Scotch firs which marked the flat inland horizon of Sutton Cross. Darkness was gathering across the wide sands with their low dunes and deserted shore. This impression of twilight was intensified by a contrast between the beam of white brilliance flashing out to sea, followed by sudden darkness as the silvered reflectors of the Old Light turned away from us behind their black shutters. They then shone only upon the interior of the iron, which covered the panes of the lantern on the far sides.
Holmes, swinging the stick in his hand, set off across the dark mud towards the point where Roderick Gilmore and his sexton had seen two diminutive figures struggling on Sunday evening. We were about half a mile seaward from St Clement’s church tower. Now, as then, a descending night mist was rolling in with the tide, progressively veiling the spot from onlookers ashore.
We had turned our backs on the Old Light and were walking away from its intermittent beam which shot across the waves. No ship’s light marked the horizon anchorage of the Boston Deeps. By comparison with the brilliance of the Old Light, even the beacon on the church tower was a mere glimmer confirming our position on the treacherous sands.
As soon as we had completed our reconnaissance, we need only walk back in a straight line until the Old Light shone straight in our faces. Then we should turn right at forty-five degrees and make our way steadily towards its iron ladder, along the raised path of the river bank. Or so it seemed. I could already feel the sand yielding more easily underfoot, as the tide seeped beneath us. By the yellow oil-light of my lantern, I could also see that each of my footprints now flooded progressively deeper and more quickly as my boot was lifted from the mud.
Holmes was at his most dogmatic.
“I think we need another half mile to reach the scene of their encounter. I should like to determine a direct line from St Clement’s beacon to the incoming surf.”
As he said this, I noticed that the blurred but luminous line of surf was now the only thing visible to our right between the darkness of sky and sea. We walked for about fifteen minutes more, scarcely exchanging a word. I felt the coldness of the October night coming in with the mist. Even the lemon afterglow of sunset had vanished from the inland horizon beyond the village. The rest of the shoreline was obscure and the descending mist which the rector had described now hung between us and St Clement’s beacon, condensing slowly into fog. I tried a cheerful note.
“The ground seems a little higher here, Holmes, a rib of firm sand. If we follow it back, when we turn, and keep Mr Gilmore’s beacon in view to the right, we should soon have the beam of the Old Light full in our faces.”
“I daresay,” he said impatiently but with no sign of turning back, “If I had been the survivor of that fight between the two brothers on Sunday night, I should have assumed much the same.”
“I thought we had agreed that there was no survivor of the encounter.”
“On the contrary. That is a matter which we are about to put to the proof.”
By this time, I had very little wish to put it to the proof. Indeed, with the light gone, I began not to like the whole business. We were not more than eight feet apart but it had become increasingly difficult to make out the gaunt purposeful stride of my companion or anything but the hazy flicker of his lamp. As if reading my thoughts, he added,
“We must keep together. It may be firm going here but it would be well not to get separated where the sands are more perilous.”
So we walked on until we were, at the very least, level with the beacon of the church tower. It seemed far away now across the flooding sands.
“We must take care that the tide does not get behind us,” I said a little breathlessly.
Holmes was not listening.
“Get back to the Old Light! Where else should he go?”
“Very well, Watson. You have committed murder or, at the least manslaughter. Now, pray lead on.”
This was not what I had bargained for but I was relieved to be turning back before the flood tide encroached any further. As a soldier, I was not unprepared for the challenge. There was no light along the western horizon nor a moon in the sky. The lamps of the village were scarcely pinpricks. I heard an insistent murmuring from the dark billowing sea which was a good deal louder now than when we had set out. For the first time, I noticed a sharp north-east wind gathering at our backs, a light spot or two of cold rain. It was a reminder that, despite the pleasant sunlight of that afternoon, this was the season of equinoctial storms.
When I had joined the Army Medical Department a decade earlier and sailed for Afghanistan with the Northumberland Fusiliers, even a surgeon’s training for service overseas included a course of instruction in map-reading, compass-bearings, judging distances and identifying terrain. In my mind I now constructed a square map. In the top right-hand corner was the beacon of the church tower. In the top left-hand corner was the Old Light. Along the bottom was the line of the incoming tide. Holmes and I were in the bottom right-hand corner, walking parallel with the foot of the map.
We were following what I had judged to be a rib of sand six inches or more above the level of the dark beach around us and therefore firmer. The temptation was to cut a diagonal across the square map towards the Old Light. Fortunately, I had surveyed the terrain from the windows of the barrack-room that afternoon and had seen that such a diagonal would take us into lower ground, probably already flooded by the tide and possibly containing quicksand. The prudent line of march was still to follow the bottom line of the map until we were face-to-face with the lighthouse beam. Then we should know that we had reached the bottom left-hand corner and need only take a right-angle and walk straight into the beam to reach the safety of the iron ladder to the barrack-room.
The sand beneath our feet was softer but there was no doubt that we were still on slightly higher ground. I thought of Holmes’s question and my answer. Suppose I were my brother’s murderer, making my escape. In the first place, it was impossible that I should go anywhere but the Old Light. I assumed that I would not have intended murder when I set out. Therefore I would not have been prepared for immediate flight without returning to the barrack-room.
Holmes said nothing in all this time but appeared content to follow where I led. The light of St Clement’s beacon was dropping away behind us on our right. The beam from the Old Light was ahead but shining at an angle, slightly away from us. We seemed in danger of pulling inland behind it. That must be avoided at all costs for it was where I had noticed earlier that the mudflats lay and the treacherous “shivering sands” might be. It was easy enough to set a course a little further to our left. This brought us slightly closer to the tide but also took us further round on an angle that should put us in the lighthouse beam. Once there, we were safe.
I had begun to feel that a man could make too much of such difficulties as this beach had presented. Then I put my right foot forward and, before I could pull back, felt the leg sink half way up the shin in freezing mud.
“Stop! Stop, Holmes!”
We were almost level with the lighthouse beam but were somehow in the very terrain I had tried to avoid. To one side, among what was now fathomless mud rather than firm sand, I could see strands of grass, limp and wet. Fresh water could mean only the river, which we should not have encountered at all. Though we were still short of the lighthouse beam where it crossed our path, we had somehow come too far. How could that be? How could we be where we evidently were—and how had we got there? The doomed baggage-train of King John, all those centuries ago, had thought themselves secure. Had we made an error in common with them? I had dipped into the chronicles which Holmes had brought and now recalled with dismay a warning that the first step to destruction in shifting sands and estuaries is when the victims lose their way—as we had done now. The ground opened in the midst of the waters, wrote the medieval chronicler Roger of Wendover, and whirlpools sucked down men and horses. It was already too late. To those who might help us, our cries would be inaudible.
The true terror, in the darkness and the fast sinking mud, is to know that one has followed meticulously the path to safety but come only to the verge of a cold and cruel death. There was no explanation and, without that, we were done for. We must move instantly or the incoming tide would overwhelm us—but where was our path? There was nothing but the surf and the sinking sand around us, on every side.
By every calculation, we should be on a firm river-bank path. It must by any logic lead us directly and easily back to the Old Light and the village, both of them now lost in the mist. The intermittent beam which must be our salvation was drawing us ever deeper into the deadly chill of the river mud. This was surely impossible, which was only to say that we were utterly lost in the darkness and the sea fog. But now there was a quiet and sinister ripple of incoming water across the path behind us and nothing but the filling estuary about our legs in front.
Where, by all reason, there should have been firm ground, the softening mud offered no foothold but a fathomless trap.
I hope I should not have fallen into a panic but the cliché of not knowing which way to turn was never more true. The square map firmly in my head was now submerged as surely as the drowning Roland Chastelnau.
“I think,” said Sherlock Holmes, “you had better leave this to me after all.”
I was never more glad to do so. In that familiar voice there was assurance and a confidence which I was far from feeling.
“Step back!” he said.
His hand gripped my upper arm, as I performed a grotesque about-turn with my left leg, relying on his support. The last of the firm ground, from which I had stepped a moment ago, was under my right foot once more. I saw by the reflected light of the beacon that he was probing the mud with his walking stick. It was a painstaking business but after a dozen carefully chosen steps the fearful sense of bottomless silt became something which yielded a little but then held firm. But now we were walking away from the beam of the Old Light—surely in the wrong direction?
“A little further still I think, if my calculations are correct,” Holmes remarked casually.
What those calculations were, I could not say. By mine, we were heading straight into the shivering sands. Yet the mud underfoot was still turning to firmer ground. Presently, at each step that I took, the slush did no worse than engulf the lower portion of my boots. And yet the Old Light seemed to fall further behind us. This was no time to argue the matter, I took one more step and felt what seemed like compact earth under my boot.
“Now a little more to the left, I think,” said Holmes cheerfully.
Surely we were by-passing the Old Light and walking into the same quicksand that I had seen earlier? Yet it was still firm going and gradually I could just make out the ghostly contours of the Old Light with its heavy wooden supports and the round body of its barrack-room. Yet if that was so, then the beam which should have been directed out to the Boston Deeps was shining a little more in the direction of King’s Lynn. It was a discrepancy that might not be noticed at a distance where the beam was more widely reflected but was just enough to lead us a hundred yards out of our way across the mudflats. Was this not the sort of trick which a century earlier the wreckers had employed to decoy a ship on to the rocks and loot it?
Presently we found our way to the black-painted iron ladder and climbed it, the first ripples of the ebb swishing about our feet. Holmes lit the oil-lamp in the barrack-room.
There was no policeman on guard on the sands below for the tide would soon have covered them. We should be undisturbed for several hours until the tide had turned and the Freiston relief arrived.
Holmes drew his silver flask from his pocket and the comforting spirituous aroma of whisky came to me as I sat down on one of the two black horsehair chairs. Reason returned where panic had prevailed.
“Roland Chastelnau was not the victim!” I exclaimed, “He was his brother’s murderer!”
Holmes said nothing. He was climbing the wooden ladder now into the lantern-room above us. There was a pause and then I heard his voice.
“It is as I supposed, though it was not obvious by daylight. The black metal shutters on the windows have been adjusted. The direction of the beam has been deliberately altered, not by much but enough to prove fatal. Any man trying to navigate the route back from the scene of the brothers’ struggle to the Old Light by using this beam would have walked into the river estuary with a floor tide running. Not the quicksands, Watson, but the river with its tidal undertow and currents.”
Then I saw the whole mystery clearly. Roland Chastelnau had decoyed his brother to the mudflats by a warning gunshot. There was a struggle, in which Roland had either died or escaped only to drown later on. The evidence of that was conclusive since this afternoon. But to make assurance doubly sure, before he went down to the beach leaving Abraham alone in the Old Light, Roland had moved the black iron shutters of the lantern in their grooves so that it shone several degrees or more in error.
No one who merely wound the mechanism, at the lower level, needed to climb to the top of the dome to check the iron shutters. The altered direction of the beam would not have been visible at all in daylight. To the Boston Deeps at night, it would be the usual distant glimmer. But whatever the outcome of the struggle on the beach, Roland intended that Abraham Chastelnau should never get back to the Old Light alive. The death which Holmes and I had avoided in the estuary at flood tide would have overtaken Abraham if all else failed.
Sherlock Holmes and the King's Evil: And Other New Tales Featuring the World's Greatest Detective Page 9