“I will,” said Holmes. “In the first place, your Grace, I am bound to tell you that you have placed yourself in a most serious position in the eyes of the law. You have condoned a felony, and you have aided the escape of a murderer; for I cannot doubt that any money which was taken by James Wilder to aid his accomplice in his flight came from your Grace’s purse.”
The Duke bowed his assent.
“This is, indeed, a most serious matter. Even more culpable in my opinion, your Grace, is your attitude towards your younger son. You leave him in this den for three days.”
“Under solemn promises—”
“What are promises to such people as these? You have no guarantee that he will not be spirited away again. To humour your guilty elder son you have exposed your innocent younger son to imminent and unnecessary danger. It was a most unjustifiable action.”
The proud lord of Holdernesse was not accustomed to be so rated in his own ducal hall. The blood flushed into his high forehead, but his conscience held him dumb.
“I will help you, but on one condition only. It is that you ring for the footman and let me give such orders as I like.”
Without a word, the Duke pressed the electric bell. A servant entered.
“You will be glad to hear,” said Holmes, “that your young master is found. It is the Duke’s desire that the carriage shall go at once to the Fighting Cock Inn to bring Lord Saltire home.
“Now,” said Holmes, when the rejoicing lackey had disappeared, “having secured the future, we can afford to be more lenient with the past. I am not in an official position, and there is no reason, so long as the ends of justice are served, why I should disclose all that I know. As to Hayes, I say nothing. The gallows awaits him, and I would do nothing to save him from it. What he will divulge I cannot tell, but I have no doubt that your Grace could make him understand that it is to his interest to be silent.47 From the police point of view he will have kidnapped the boy for the purpose of ransom. If they do not themselves find it out, I see no reason why I should prompt them to take a broader point of view. I would warn your Grace, however, that the continued presence of Mr. James Wilder in your household can only lead to misfortune.”
“I understand that, Mr. Holmes, and it is already settled that he shall leave me forever, and go to seek his fortune in Australia.”
“In that case, your Grace, since you have yourself stated that any unhappiness in your married life was caused by his presence, I would suggest that you make such amends as you can to the Duchess, and that you try to resume those relations which have been so unhappily interrupted.”
“That also I have arranged, Mr. Holmes. I wrote to the Duchess this morning.”
“In that case,” said Holmes, rising, “I think that my friend and I can congratulate ourselves upon several most happy results from our little visit to the North. There is one other small point upon which I desire some light. This fellow Hayes had shod his horses with shoes which counterfeited the tracks of cows. Was it from Mr. Wilder that he learned so extraordinary a device?”
The Duke stood in thought for a moment, with a look of intense surprise on his face. Then he opened a door and showed us into a large room furnished as a museum. He led the way to a glass case in a corner, and pointed to the inscription.
“These shoes,” it ran, “were dug up in the moat of Holdernesse Hall. They are for the use of horses, but they are shaped below with a cloven foot of iron,48 so as to throw pursuers off the track. They are supposed to have belonged to some of the marauding Barons of Holdernesse in the Middle Ages.”
Holmes opened the case, and moistening his finger he passed it along the shoe. A thin film of recent mud was left upon his skin.
“Thank you,” said he, as he replaced the glass. “It is the second most interesting object that I have seen in the North.”
“And the first?”
Holmes folded up his cheque, and placed it carefully in his notebook. “I am a poor man,”49 said he, as he patted it affectionately, and thrust it into the depths of his inner pocket.
THE DUKE OF HOLDERNESSE
WATSON’S attempts to conceal the Duke of Holdernesse’s real identity are deemed “somewhat clumsy” by Michael Harrison, who points out in his In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes that the dukes of Norfolk similarly owned a great deal of land in the north of England (in Sheffield) and that Watson’s description of the Duke of Holdernesse, with his “long, dwindling beard of vivid red,” calls to mind the Duke of Norfolk who served as postmaster-general toward the end of the Victorian era.
Several other scholars seek to pierce the veil of the duke’s identity, though they come to different conclusions than does Harrison. Julian Wolff, in his Practical Handbook of Sherlockian Heraldry, proposes that the duke could have been a member of the Neville family, whose coat of arms features a saltire (a cross honoring St. Andrew), which in turn may have given Watson the idea to name the duke’s son Lord Saltire; yet several other inconsistencies lead Wolff ultimately to discard the Neville family in favor of Spencer Compton Cavendish, the 8th Duke of Devonshire, K.G., P.C. (1833–1908). Among several other points of comparison, the Duke of Devonshire’s residence, Hardwick Hall, appears to match up well with Holdernesse Hall.
While T. H. B. Symons concurs that the 8th Duke of Devonshire seems a likely choice, he notes that the character description provided by Watson does not seem to match that of the estimable political figure who was “courteous and honest” and who, despite being leading the Liberal opposition, enjoyed the favour of both Disraeli—who nicknamed the duke (who also bore the title of Marquis of Hartington) “Harty-Tarty”—and Queen Victoria. The Duke of Holdernesse, by contrast, is depicted by Watson as being cold and abrupt, wary of Holmes’s assistance in the disappearance of his son. “Similarly,” Symons continues, “it is difficult to recognize in Watson’s duke, who went to pieces on learning of the murder of Herr Heidegger by Reuben Hayes, the great Devonshire who had in 1882 to cope with the wretched murder of his brother by Fenian assassins, and who had the firmness to insist that Gladstone send an army to the relief of General Gordon.” Symons also looks at the figure of Lord Saltire, who appears to throw another wrench into the equation. According to Symons, the Duke of Devonshire had a son, the 9th Duke of Devonshire, who was born in 1868 and would have been around thirty-three years old at the time of “The Priory School”—not ten years old. (“The Priory School” is thought to have occurred in 1901. Looking at it in the reverse manner, Symons points out that the 9th Duke became governor-general of Canada in 1916, at which point Lord Saltire would have been only twenty-five and hardly prepared to assume such an important post.) But Symons’s grasp of the Cavendishes is a bit confused. Sir Victor Christian William Cavendish, the 9th Duke of Devonshire, was in fact the 8th Duke’s nephew, the son of his younger brother, Lord Edward Cavendish (1838–1891). The 8th Duke himself actually had no children at all, and the title was passed down to his nephew upon the 8th Duke’s death in 1908.
Richard Lancelyn Green notes that the 8th Duke of Devonshire was Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire, a Lord of the Admiralty, and Secretary of State for India, a title given to the Duke of Holdernesse in the original manuscript version of “The Priory School.” Bernard Davies points out that the only “Chief Secretary” title then extant was Chief Secretary of State for Ireland, a title also held by the 8th Duke of Devonshire. His detailed examination of the correlations between the curriculum vitæ of “Holdernesse” and “Devonshire” is compelling and seems to represent the consensus of opinion.
Nonetheless, there remains room for debate: Marshall S. Berdan, in “The Great Derbyshire Duke-Out,” nominates the second Baron Newton, who, while lacking many of the requisite characteristics, fit Berdan’s geographical conclusions. In short, it may be said that no single figure matches all of the geographical, political, and personal characteristics of “one of the greatest subjects of the Crown”—a testament to Watson’s obfuscatory powers.
WHICH WAY DID
THE BICYCLE TRAVEL?
CRUCIAL to Holmes’s investigation of “The Priory School” is his deduction concerning the direction of travel of the fleeing bicycle, based solely on the tyre tracks. William S. Baring-Gould complains, “Much, perhaps too much, has been written about these tyre tracks.” Holmes’s deduction respecting the direction in which the bicycle was travelling is challenged by A. D. Galbraith in “The Real Moriarty,” who, typical of the critics, says, “But it is clear that the tracks would look the same both ways, unless the tread had some lack of symmetry, or other peculiarity, and the manner of mounting it on the wheel were known.”
But there are numerous defenders of the Master’s conclusion. T. S. Blakeney points readers toward an article in a 1917 issue of the Strand Magazine, which states that the rear wheel of a bicycle would sink more deeply on an upward slope than a downward one. “In any case,” writes Blakeney, covering his bases, “Holmes probably had a dozen other small indications to guide him; though he might mention only one factor, he usually had others in reserve as evidenced by the twenty-three additional points of difference in the joint letter of the Cunninghams [‘The Reigate Squires’].”
Even Arthur Conan Doyle, in his autobiography Memories and Adventures, comments on the problem: “I had so many remonstrances upon this point, varying from pity to anger, that I took out my bicycle and tried. I had imagined that the observations of the way in which the track of the hind wheel overlaid the track of the front one when the machine was not running dead straight would show the direction. I found that my correspondents were right and I was wrong, for this would be the same whichever way the cycle was moving. On the other hand the real solution was much simpler, for on an undulating moor the wheels make a much deeper impression uphill and a more shallow one downhill, so Holmes was justified of his wisdom after all.”
Several writers suggest that the very nature of bicycle manufacture—with a stationary rear wheel and a mobile front wheel—necessarily produces distinct tracks. Others pursue Blakeney’s notion that other indications would have guided the conclusion. For example, M. Haddon-MacRoberts conducted his own experiments, riding a bicycle through mud, on which he reports in “On Determining the Direction of Travel of a Bicycle from Its Tracks.” He discovered that in order to keep upright, he had to make extensive side-to-side movements of the front wheel, leaving a track much as that described by Holmes. These tracks, he found, also allowed him to determine the direction of travel. Perhaps the most fascinating study is the discovery by Hirayama Yuichi (which he announces in “The More Deeply Sunk Impression”) of a Japanese textbook written by Sanekita Masayoshi, published in 1940, entitled Hanzai Sousa Gijuturon (The Techniques of Crime Detection). Sanekita provides a detailed chapter on “How to Know the Direction from Wheel Impressions,” with seven concrete indicators.
Peter Coleman, in “Sherlock Holmes and the Bicycle,” reports on his own experiments, riding a bicycle over good ground and difficult ground. He observed that on more difficult terrain, the front wheel had to be turned more to stay erect and left distinctive tracks. If one could distinguish front tracks from rear, one could form an opinion about the direction of travel. He concludes that “when writing the adventure for publication Watson decided that a complicated explanation would interrupt the flow of his narrative and he settled for a more simplified version. This has proved unfortunate for Holmes’s reputation as some sceptics have tended to dismiss his claims regarding bicycle tracks.”
The most authoritative word is from the mathematical text Which Way Did the Bicycle Go? . . . and Other Intriguing Mathematical Mysteries, by Joseph D. E. Konhauser, Dan Velleman, and Stan Wagon. The authors provide an elegant solution involving analysis of tangent segments to the curving bicycle tracks, demonstrating that the direction can be determined purely from the shape of the curving tracks. As to Holmes’s explanation: “Balderdash!” they write. “As observed by Dennis Thron (Dartmouth Medical School), it is true that the rear wheel would obliterate the track of the front wheel at the crossings, but this would be true no matter which direction the bicyclist was going. This information, by itself, does not solve the problem. We could, perhaps, give Holmes the benefit of the doubt and assume that he carried out the proper solution in his head. But we cannot believe that he would have expected Watson to grasp it from his comments alone.”
1 “The Priory School” appeared in Collier’s Weekly on January 30, 1904, and in the Strand Magazine in February 1904.
2 The manuscript, published in facsimile in 1985, reveals that the fictional town of “Mackleton” was substituted for “Castleton, in Derbyshire,” a real village ten miles north-east of Buxton, in the north of England.
3 Watson mentions this case in “The Blanched Soldier,” but strangely refers to the “Abbey School” and the “Duke of Greyminster” when he does so. Both sets of names—Priory/Holdernesse and Abbey/Greyminster—are patently false. June Thomson suggests that Watson may have originally chosen the Abbey School and the Duke of Greyminster as his pseudonyms, meaning to protect the identities of the participants involved; his publisher might have then pointed out that such names were similar to those of the Abbey Grange case and the real Duke of Westminster. Not wanting to confuse his readers, Watson would have obligingly altered the pseudonyms to “the Priory School” and the “Duke of Holdernesse” yet forgotten to register the change when writing up “The Blanched Soldier.”
4 The “Foreign Secretary” in the manuscript.
5 The K.G. stands for “Knight Garter.” The Most Noble Order of the Garter, as it is officially known, was founded in 1348 by Edward III and is the highest and most exclusive level of knighthood. Its origins are murky, but legend has it that Edward was dancing with a lady of his court when a blue garter fell off her leg and onto the floor. Seeking to make light of a mortifying (for the lady) situation, Edward picked the garter up and placed it on his own leg, subsequently establishing the Order of the Garter to commemorate the incident. One of the many distinguished persons to become a Knight Garter was Winston Churchill, who in fact refused the honour when it was first offered him in 1945; his party having just been voted out of office, the prime minister declared, “I can hardly accept the Order of the Garter from the king after the people have given me the Order of the Boot.” He later changed his mind, accepting the knighthood when he was back in office in 1953.
6 The P.C. stands for “Privy Councillor.” Having advised the king on diplomatic matters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Privy Council was stripped of most of its formal authority in the eighteenth century, when the cabinet officially assumed most advisory duties. The Privy Council became a largely symbolic body, with political officers of particularly high ranking (including the cabinet ministers, the archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the speaker of the House of Commons) earning membership as well as the title “the Right Honourable.”
7 As the principal official of an English county, the lord lieutenant (who is appointed by the Crown) controls the appointment of justices of the peace and issues commissions in the local military organisations.
8 Here Watson’s disguise of the location slips a bit: The ancient lordship of Hallamshire embraced parts of Yorkshire and Derbyshire, and this historic place name is preserved in the community of West Hallam, which still remains in Derbyshire.
9 There is no apparent connection to “Appledore Towers,” the home of the worst man in London (“Charles Augustus Milverton”).
10 The manuscript description—perhaps closer to the truth—reads: “Holdernesse. 6th Duke. K.G., P.C., . . . Baron Beverley, Earl of Carston. . . . Lord Lieutenant of Hallamshire since 1900. Married Edith, daughter of Sir Charles Appleby, 1888. Heir and only child Lord Saltire. Owns about 250,000 acres. Minerals in Lancashire and Wales. Address Carlton House Terrace, Holdernesse Hall, Lancashire. Carson Castle, Bangor, Wales. Lord of the Admiralty 1871. Chief Secretary of State for India. Foreign Secretary.”
11 See “The Duke of Holdernesse,” page 972,
for a discussion of the identity of the duke.
12 “Ten thousand pounds” in the manuscript. These are enormous amounts, even for the era—in today’s economics, £1,000 is the equivalent of almost £63,000, or over $100,000.
13 Anne Jordan argues that Holmes did not take the case out of concern for his own fame or pocket, but that the substantial reward money offered, along with the duke’s seeming desire to deal with the matter quietly, gave the detective pause—in other words, Holmes surmised that the situation “was suggestive of a father who had a guilty secret; a secret which he was prepared to keep hidden even if it meant putting his own son’s life at risk.” Holmes, Jordan guesses, felt an imperative to investigate if he was to save the life of Holdernesse’s son.
14 See “The Naval Treaty,” note 35, for a discussion of the state of preparatory education in England in Victorian times.
15 A short jacket cut above the waist, first worn by pupils of Eton College and later adopted by other schools for their uniforms.
16 Watson here tones down Holmes’s original cutting remark; the manuscript reads, “Had the object been to lose the heir instead of to find him, you could have hardly acted with greater indiscretion.”
17 Watson has suppressed Huxtable’s full and revealingly sycophantic statement, set forth in the manuscript: “He is an excellent person—indeed I may tell you that it was through his good offices that the boy came to my school. He has the interest of the family very much at heart and he came to the conclusion that Holdernesse Hall was an unhealthy atmosphere for a young lad.”
18 E. P. Greenwood comments that such a trip would have been “no mean feat,” as the Derbyshire Peak District, where the Priory School was likely situated, was only serviced by the Midland Railway, which left from St. Pancras Station, not Euston Station.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 2) (The Annotated Books) Page 22