Add to that the fact that Baker liked his glass of something - the evidence of Baker’s hat, says Holmes, ‘seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him.’ And later on Watson notes in Baker ‘A touch of red in nose and cheeks, with a slight tremor of his extended hand,’ all of which seems to confirm Holmes’s surmise. As long a Baker had money to spend, he would be likely to stay in the Alpha; while as long as the Alpha had paying customers, it would remain open, particularly on Christmas Eve, when trade would be sure to be good.
As a last point, we do not know for certain that Baker had not left the Alpha much earlier; he may have set off for home, forgetting all about his goose, only remembered it when his shaky hand put his key in the lock, and been obliged to return for it!
JH: Mr Henry Baker says: ‘a Scotch bonnet is fitted neither to my years nor my gravity.’ So why did he buy the thing?
HY: Goose is not a popular dish in Japan, but according to the Granada TV version of ‘The Blue Carbuncle,’ it is much larger than a chicken, if smaller than a turkey. I am not too familiar with the English appetite, but a goose seems to me to be too much for two people. I suspect there were also young Bakers, sons and daughters, perhaps grandchildren. As Baker himself says, a Scotch bonnet is not fitted for an older gentleman, but it is for young people. I think that as a rule this bonnet was put on Henry Baker Junior’s head, and his father simply borrowed it temporarily.
HY: Ryder ran away, but what of the Countess of Morcar’s maid, Catherine Cusack? Holmes presumably did not give her away to the Countess, so did Cusack perhaps continue a life of crime?
JH: Perhaps. But then perhaps Holmes dropped a hint to the Countess - without actually giving away Ryder, or naming Cusack specifically - which would lead the Countess to dismiss Cusack?
We do not know the exact relations between Ryder and Cusack. Ryder himself says ‘It was Catherine Cusack who told me of [the carbuncle],’ which suggests that Cusack was pretty amoral to begin with. (Though, in fairness, Ryder comes across as the sort of little creep who would take refuge in ‘The woman made me do it,’ anyway.) It may possibly be that Holmes did, after all, tell the Countess directly that her maid was untrustworthy; or perhaps Holmes, still full of Christmas spirit, had a quiet word with Cusack, told her to watch her behaviour in future, because Holmes would certainly be watching it closely?
As so often in the Holmes stories, one is left wondering just what became of Ryder and Cusack after the story closes.
JH: What was the real ‘Hotel Cosmopolitan’?
HY: The Countess of Morcar, who stayed at the Cosmopolitan, owned the blue carbuncle, whose value was estimated at £ 20,000. It is improbable that she stayed at some B&B, or the Victorian version of the YWCA.
Gavin Brend suggested Claridge’s, with honourable mentions for the Ritz, Carlton, Berkley, and the Cecil, all first-class accommodations in Victorian London. Brend also suggested that the Savoy was unlikely, as it had just opened in 1889, and was unlikely to need repairs. In view of the Countess’s wealth, few Sherlockians would dispute Brend’s choices.
There is, however, one problem. James Ryder took the stone from the Countess of Morcar’s room, and hurried with it to his sister’s house in Brixton Road, which is south of the Thames. Ryder told Holmes that ‘I made up my mind to go right on to Kilburn,’ where a friend, Maudsley, a former crook, ‘would show me how to turn the stone into money.’ Now, Kilburn is north of the Thames, near Hampstead, in the north-west London.
Ryder, in association with Catherine Cusack, the Countess’s maid, had stolen the stone, and, according to the newspaper report, he ‘gave his evidence to the effect that he had shown Horner [the innocent handyman framed for the crime] up to the dressing-room of the Countess of Morcar upon the day of the robbery, in order that he might solder the second bar of the grate, which was loose. He had remained with Horner for some little time, but had finally been called away. On returning, he found that Horner had disappeared, that the bureau had been forced open, and that the small morocco casket in which, as it afterwards transpired, the Countess was accustomed to keep her jewel, was lying empty upon the dressing-table. Ryder instantly gave the alarm, and Horner was arrested the same evening.’
Ryder, confronted by Holmes, said that he did not know what to do after he had taken the stone. This is unbelievable. Holmes himself says that Ryder ‘knew that this man Horner, the plumber, had been concerned in some such matter before, and that suspicion would rest the more readily upon him. . . You made some small job in my lady’s room. . . and you managed that he should be the man sent for. . . when he had left, you rifled the jewel-case, raised the alarm, and had this unfortunate man arrested.’ And Ryder denies none of this. Ryder, then, had planned the whole thing well in advance, from the choice of fall-guy to the loosening of the bar of the grate. It is surely inconceivable that Ryder had made no plans for the disposal of the stone? His logical course would have been to go to Kilburn at once, rather than cross the Thames, and later re-cross it, all the while leaving himself open to being stopped by the police for further questioning - or it would have been logical if the hotel were north of the river.
The difficulties with getting to Brixton are lessened if the Hotel Cosmopolitan were south of the river. At that time, there were few really good hotels on the south bank. Prices here at the turn of the century are in the range 3/6 (York Hotel, Waterloo Hotel) to 4/6 (Bridge House Hotel, Queen’s Hotel at Upper Norwood) per night. This is comparable with places like the railway hotels (Charing Cross hotel, 4/6; Great Western Hotel, from 4/-), but considerably less than Claridge’s at 10/6, Carlton at 7/6, or even the Cecil, from 6/- a night. The hotels on the south bank would all be perfectly satisfactory, but the Countess would surely want something a touch more expensive?
There is one outstanding candidate for the hotel patronized by the Countess. It is not actually south of the river, but is very near Blackfriars Bridge. De Keyser’s Royal Hotel was ‘well situated on the Victoria Embankment, Blackfriars, and largely patronized by Germans, Frenchmen, and other foreigners; 400 rooms, electric lights, lifts, large marble hall and lounge pens. [pension] 12s 6d - 25s per day,’ according to Baedeker (1905).
It would not be too surprising if the Countess were not British. Even if it were a British title, she might be the daughter of a French or German aristocrat. [See also the question on the identity of the Countess, below.]
De Keyser’s Royal Hotel was about one-and-a-half miles from the Brixton Road. Ryder would cross Blackfriars Bridge, then via Blackfriars Road, Lambeth Road, and Kennington Road. He probably planned - had the scheme with the goose not gone horribly awry - to go back to Victoria Station, from where an omnibus to Kilburn started.
JH: Note that the fact that Ryder had deliberately loosened the bar of the grate means that the Savoy cannot be excluded, despite Brend’s observation noted above. But my own candidate for the ‘Cosmopolitan’ might have been the ‘Metropolitan,’ on the grounds that the names are so similar; the Metropolitan stood near Liverpool Street Station, again north of the river, though, and I agree that the thought of a quick getaway might appeal to Ryder.
But had he in fact intended all along to take the stone to his sister’s? Ryder does seem very inept - Holmes says ‘He’s not got blood enough to go in for felony with impunity,’ and this seems to me to understate the matter quite considerably. Ryder tells Holmes that when Horner was arrested ‘it seemed to me that it would be best for me to get away with the stone at once,’ which is a very odd statement; had he not thought that before stealing the stone? Perhaps not. Perhaps he had originally planned to conceal it somewhere in the hotel but it then - belatedly - occurred to him that that was not such a good idea after all. In a word, he panicked.
Fearful of a search, he fled precipitately, running for shelter to the familiar surroundings of his sister’s house, with no real notion as to what to do next. It was only w
hen he got to the Brixton Road that he thought of his old friend, Maudsley - ‘I went into the back yard and smoked a pipe, and wondered what it would be best to do. I had a friend once called Maudsley, who went to the bad. . . I made up my mind to go right on to Kilburn. . . and take him into my confidence. . .’ [Note in passing that his sister must have been an early recruit to the anti-smoking brigade, making him take his pipe out into the yard. I sympathize.]
Two other points of interest: the first is that Ryder’s employers must have had a very lax attitude, they never seem to have queried his being away on ‘some commission’ for what must have been - whether the hotel were north or south of the river - a considerable time. (Although there would be, presumably, a very considerable fuss when once the loss of the stone were discovered, which might cover Ryder’s long absence.)
The second point is that Ryder says that he will leave the country, then the charge against Horner ‘will break down,’ which makes very little sense; Ryder had not, after all, seen (or, rather, pretended to see) Horner steal the stone. Perhaps this is another case where we must postulate Holmes having a discreet word with the authorities as to the true facts? (And perhaps also with the Countess regarding her maid, as noted elsewhere here?)
HY: Who was the Countess of Morcar?
JH: A sneaky ‘bonus’ question! And an interesting one. There is - obviously - no real title corresponding. The name sounds Scottish to me, so that will be the starting point; and, although I generally disapprove of pulling names to bits to deal with individual elements (since it does rather denigrate the writer’s powers of creative imagination), the results are interesting in this case. Conan Doyle’s use (over-use?) of the mor. . . element in Sherlockian names has been widely noted, though I personally cannot see any deep and sinister significance in it. A logical candidate might be ‘Moray’; James Stuart, illegitimate son of James V of Scotland, was created Earl of Moray (and, by the way, also Earl of Mar, another name not a million miles away from our target) by his half-sister, Mary. Moray was involved in the death of Rizzio, and various other adventures, and it is impossible that Conan Doyle should not have known the name and history.
For the . . .car element the glaringly obvious candidate is Carlyle (incidentally a one-time mathematics teacher who later became a private tutor - sound familiar?), who later yet became a noted writer (and translated Goethe, a writer quoted by Holmes), and was Lord Rector of Edinburgh University in the 1860s; again, it is impossible that Conan Doyle would be unaware of the man. (Doesn’t Holmes quote him somewhere or other? and as yet another of these trivial asides, Carlyle accepted the Prussian Order of Merit, but when offered a GCB by Disraeli, he refused it.)
A Scots title, then Morcar. The Countess was wealthy: the reward offered for the return of the blue carbuncle was £1,000, and that, says Holmes, ‘is certainly not within a twentieth part of the market price.’ Holmes goes on to say, ‘I have reason to know that there are sentimental considerations in the background which would induce the Countess to part with half her fortune if she could but recover the gem.’ The last bit may be mere hyperbole, and even if it isn’t the calculation is complex, but it does seem as if the Countess’s fortune was at least £ 40,000.
There may not have been an Earl of Morcar; the title may, in one of those odd quirks of aristocracy, have descended in the female line. (And it is interesting to note that of the five ‘Countesses in their own right’ still extant, four are Scottish titles, the fifth being a very recent (1947) creation.)
It there were an Earl of Morcar, then - Scots lairds being proverbially as poor as kirk mice - we may perhaps postulate another trans-Atlantic alliance of new money and old names similar to that planned in ‘The Noble Bachelor’; in a word, the Countess may well have been an American heiress. If that were the case, then it seems probable that the Earl had died, since the Countess appears to have been travelling on her own; evidence of a young wife and old husband, perhaps?
Be she Scots or American, with a fortune and a title and no husband to be seen, the Countess is surely an interesting character in her own right. And perhaps with something of a past: when Holmes speaks rather prissily of ‘sentimental considerations’ he may indeed mean that the stone was a legacy from dear old Auntie, but the phrase does seem to hint at something a good deal racier. It is a great shame that we never actually get to meet the Countess.
8. “THE SPECKLED BAND”
JH: Watson opens his tale with: ‘On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes. . . ‘ Is it believable that Holmes had only seventy cases in eight years? Or does ‘odd’ mean ‘strange and noteworthy’?
HY: It is unclear whether Watson’s ‘eight years’ means the interval between A Study in Scarlet (1881) and ‘The Speckled Band’ itself (1883); or that between ‘The Speckled Band’ and ‘The Final Problem’ (1891); or that between the case of ‘The Speckled Band’ and Watson’s publishing his account (1892). If the former, it is ‘two’ years and not ‘eight.’ I don’t know the reason for such a misprint (it might be, as usual, a typesetter’s mistake), but it is believable that there were seventy cases in the first two years of Holmes’ and Watson’s association, ie around one case per week. However, as noted in A Study in Scarlet, Holmes was widely consulted by detectives as Scotland Yard, and also by private clients; Holmes would not necessarily have been an active agent in these ‘cases,’ but a consultant, a true armchair reasoner, giving his opinions or conclusions without having visited the scenes of the crimes. Watson would very likely not include such cases in his tally, particularly since he hand Holmes might not even be sure of the correctness of the deductions, or of the outcome of the cases.
Taketomi Koh estimated the number of Holmes’ cases, and he accepted the figure of two years. (Taketomi Koh, ‘Iraikensu-u (Number of Cases of Sherlock Holmes)’ Sherlock Holmes Zatsugaku Hyakka, 1983, Tokyo Tosho, pp 44-47). He estimated that Holmes had accepted five hundred cased by 1888 (on the evidence of The Hound of the Baskervilles), and over a thousand by the time of the Great Hiatus. In all, he estimates Holmes dealt with a total of 2,872 cases. Frank Walters (‘Upon the Probable Number of Cases of Mr Sherlock Holmes’) estimates Holmes’ cases at around 1,700.
However, this means changing the Canonical figure from ‘eight’ to ‘two.’ Henry T Folsom considers that when these words were written, Watson was looking at his notes after Holmes’ death. In that case, seventy cases is too small a figure for almost nine years of activity on Holmes’ part. ‘Odd’ might thus mean ‘strange and noteworthy.’ But it means such remarkable cases occurred only once every seven weeks or so, which in itself seems a very small figure. Taketomi estimates the average length of a case at 3.28 days, so it seems odd that Watson did not take note of any case for an average of 45 days, merely because there were no cases worthy of note!
My preferred solution is the former, the seventy cases are those between A Study in Scarlet and ‘The Speckled Band,’ in which Watson attended investigations with Holmes.
JH: I think there is a misprint, but of the number of cases, not the number of years.; I think Watson jotted down ‘700’ and this was transcribed or misread as ‘70’ then polished up to ‘seventy,’ or perhaps our printer’s devil (axiomatically if not proverbially inept) thought that seven hundred was impossibly high and ‘corrected’ it. Seven hundred cases in eight years is around two per week which approximates to Taketomi’s estimate of around three days per case.
HY: Some scholars think it impossible that Helen Stoner could get to London in the early morning, and indeed suspect that Helen herself may have killed both her sister and father. What do you think?
JH: We must remember that railways in Victorian England were somewhat more reliable than they are nowadays. There is no difficulty in believing that Helen could have got and early train!
What is harder to accept is
that Helen - who had already claimed to be in a very nervous frame of mind - did not notice her step-father get into, or out of, the same train as she herself took. (He must have taken the same train in order to follow her so closely.) However, if it were dark (and it was 7:15 am. in April when Watson was roused from his slumbers, by which time Helen was already seated in the sitting-room at 221b, so it would be dark when she set out); and more particularly if there were activity at Leatherhead station (and there would most likely be workmen setting out, milk or post being loaded, etc, so that is not too hard to accept either), then she - not expecting Roylott to be up and about at that hour - may well have failed to spot her step-father.
There are three serious arguments against Helen as the murderer of her sister and Roylott. The first is the mere fact of Roylott’s visit to Holmes; why should Roylott threaten Holmes if Roylott had nothing to hide?
The second is the problem of the mechanics of the thing: Helen might have killed Julia with no difficulty, but how could Helen, not even being in the house, possibly arrange for the snake to (i) lurk in the ventilator until it was time to be thrashed by Holmes; and then (ii) crawl back to kill Roylott? True, it might have been trained; but in that case it was damned well-trained! (And there remains the metallic clang, the whistle, etc to be explained as well.) And arising from this is the third objection, namely why on earth should Helen ask Holmes to investigate a number of which she herself was guilty? As with Roylott’s visit, it simply makes no sense at all, unless the explanation given by Watson and Holmes is correct.
JH: Speaking of their requirements of a night at Stoke Moran, Holmes tells Watson ‘An Eley’s No.2 [revolver cartridge] is an excellent argument. . . That and a tooth-brush are, I think, all that we need.’ When did Holmes think that Watson would want, or need, to brush his teeth?
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