On this occasion, however, I could not bring myself to revisit the scene of perhaps our most terrifying exploit. However hard I tried, I could not overcome the pusillanimity that had taken hold of me.
How well I remembered those events of October 1889. It had begun with the young country doctor, James Mortimer, calling at our rooms at Baker Street. He came with news of the death of his friend Sir Charles Baskerville from an apparent heart attack. Mortimer averred that what in fact had killed Sir Charles was terror – terror brought on by an encounter with a hellhound, the same beast that, according to family legend, had been responsible for the grisly demise of his impious ancestor Hugo some 250 years earlier. Sir Charles was a superstitious man and had a weak heart. These two factors, and a panicked flight to escape the clutches of a ravening demonic dog, conspired to cause his premature end.
It wasn’t long before we made the acquaintance of Sir Charles’s nephew and sole living heir Sir Henry, who showed us an anonymous note that had been sent to him at his hotel in London, warning him to stay away from the moor. The note consisted of words clipped from the previous day’s Times and glued to the sheet of foolscap, so as to conceal the author’s identity. Even more curiously, Sir Henry was being trailed through the capital by a mysterious, bearded stranger, and one of his boots had been stolen from outside his hotel room.
Holmes charged me with escorting Sir Henry down to Dartmoor, saying that he himself was too busy with a particularly thorny blackmail case to attend to the matter in person. Arriving in Devon, I learned that a dangerous convict, the Notting Hill murderer Selden, had escaped prison and was believed to be at large on the moor.
Soon after that I met the naturalist Jack Stapleton, out netting butterflies. He showed me the great Grimpen Mire, an expanse of bog notorious for the risk it posed to the unwary. I saw evidence of this myself when, before my very eyes, a moor pony was sucked writhing and whinnying down into the swamp’s remorseless depths.
I then, separately, met Stapleton’s beautiful, dark-eyed sister Beryl. She, mistaking me for Sir Henry, advised me in no uncertain terms to leave Dartmoor and go back to London, for my own good. Sir Henry himself came across the lady later, and an attraction between the two was born, much to her brother’s disapproval. Yet another neighbour of Sir Henry’s, a Mr Frankland, wandered into my orbit, he turning out to be a wealthy elderly eccentric who filed lawsuits for his own amusement.
Late one night at Baskerville Hall, Sir Henry and I surprised his manservant Barrymore in the act of signalling from a window with a candle. We discovered that the convict Selden was Mrs Barrymore’s brother and that the Barrymores were aiding him in his evasion of the law by leaving out food and clothing for him on the moor. Sir Henry and I set off in pursuit of the fugitive criminal, in vain, although we did spy an elusive solitary figure atop one of the tors which dot Dartmoor. Not only that but during the chase we heard a sinister, blood-curdling howl coming from the direction of the Grimpen Mire, the cry of some large canine.
At Barrymore’s insistence, Sir Henry generously agreed not to report Selden’s whereabouts to the police. He gave permission for Barrymore and his wife to arrange passage out of the country for her brother, on the assurance of the felon’s continued good behaviour. In return, Barrymore informed us about a letter that had been sent to Sir Charles on the morning of his death from a certain “L.L.”, requesting an assignation at the gates of the Hall that night. We swiftly established that the sender was Mrs Laura Lyons, daughter of Frankland. She was in the midst of a difficult divorce from her bully of a husband and had written to Sir Charles to secure a financial contribution from him towards her legal expenses.
Frankland, her father, had another passion besides frivolous lawsuits, and that was astronomy. Through the telescope mounted upon the roof of his house, Lafter Hall, he had spied a young boy furtively ferrying provisions to someone else, not Selden, who was hiding out on the moor. I, presuming this second person to be the figure whom Sir Henry and I had spotted a few nights earlier and thinking him perhaps germane to the case, followed the route the boy had taken. It led me to a crude stone hut, which showed signs of occupancy. The meagre dwelling turned out to be the temporary residence of none other than Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes had secretly been staying in the area all along, conducting researches in tandem with mine. He had fathomed that Beryl Stapleton was actually Jack Stapleton’s wife, not his sister, which better explained her supposed brother’s censorious attitude towards the mutual romantic interest she and Sir Henry had developed. Holmes said, too, that Stapleton had dictated the letter from Mrs Lyons, gaining the woman’s cooperation by deceitfully promising to marry her, and that he was the fellow who had dogged Sir Henry’s footsteps in London, disguised by a false beard. It was clear to Holmes that Stapleton was not only a scoundrel of the highest order and a cynical manipulator of women but someone who would stop at nothing, not even murder, to achieve his ends.
The ultimate object of Stapleton’s deadly machinations was Sir Henry and, briefly, it seemed that he had succeeded, for the howling of a hound and a series of agonised human screams drew Holmes and me to what appeared at first glance to be the baronet’s lifeless body. However, the corpse was Selden’s. The convict was dressed in Sir Henry’s tweeds, these having been supplied to him by the Barrymores, and had perished of a broken neck, sustained after a fall from a high rocky ridge. Stapleton arrived at the scene with suspicious alacrity and was patently crestfallen upon being informed that the deceased was not Sir Henry.
At the Hall, Holmes remarked upon the close facial resemblance between Jack Stapleton and Hugo Baskerville, the latter as seen in a portrait on the wall. A visit to Mrs Lyons confirmed that Stapleton had coerced her into penning the letter which lured Sir Charles to his doom. She, naturally, was appalled to learn that her wooer was already wed. Holmes furnished proof in the shape of a photograph of the Stapletons taken four years earlier and endorsed with the words “Mr and Mrs Vandeleur”, that being the name by which the couple had previously gone. At the time the photograph was taken, Stapleton had been a schoolmaster in Yorkshire. He had subsequently lost his position when the school closed owing to an atrocious scandal.
Everything came to a head that very night, as Holmes and I lay in wait outside the Stapletons’ isolated cottage, Merripit House. With us was that doughty Scotland Yarder, Inspector Lestrade, who had journeyed down from London to lend assistance. Sir Henry was a dinner guest of the Stapletons and, at Holmes’s instruction, left their company after dark to walk home. The baronet was, unbeknownst to him, bait in a trap which my friend had laid.
What transpired on that foggy night on Dartmoor is etched indelibly in my memory, and it was this part of the adventure, more than anything, that made the idea of revisiting the region impossible for me. Stapleton unleashed his gigantic hound, which had obtained Sir Henry’s scent from the boot its master had stolen – the very scent that had led it to mistake Selden, in Sir Henry’s suit, for prey and chase him to his death. The beast pursued its true quarry through the ever-thickening fog. Happily, we three sentinels – that is Holmes, Lestrade and I – were able to intercept it in the nick of time, before its jaws closed fatally around Sir Henry’s throat.
Yet the sight of the dog bounding towards us, its eyes incandescent, its muzzle, hackles and dewlap seemingly aflame… The size of it. The coal-blackness of its pelt. The long, loping bounds with which it closed the distance between itself and Sir Henry. The savagery with which it pounced upon him. My God! It was nightmarish beyond belief, the kind of experience which could make a man irrevocably lose his reason.
In the end, a grand imposture stood revealed. The hound’s origins did not lie in some pit of Hades. It was merely a dog of unusual size and ferocity, tricked out with streaks of a phosphorus preparation and trained to kill. As for its master, he fell foul of the Grimpen Mire. The fog caused him to lose his way as he traversed the only safe path through the bog, and he drowned in that rank, miasmatic
ooze. A more fitting fate for so callous and immoral a villain it is hard to imagine.
From Holmes, I afterwards learned of Stapleton’s origins. He was the son of Rodger Baskerville, wayward younger brother of Sir Charles, and was born and raised in Costa Rica, whither Rodger had flown after certain grievous misconduct made remaining in England impossible for him. When the adult Jack Baskerville was caught embezzling public money, he fled South America with his wife Beryl, née Garcia, a local beauty. Upon arrival in England, he changed his name to Vandeleur and opened the school in Yorkshire, St Oliver’s, which failed in infamous circumstances. Changing his name yet again to Stapleton, he moved south to the West Country and hatched his scheme to claim the valuable Baskerville estate, worth just shy of a million pounds, which he felt was rightly his. In order to realise that goal, all he had to do was despatch the two relatives who stood between him and his inheritance: Sir Charles and Sir Henry. The legend of the Baskerville hound gave him the inspiration for a grotesque method of murder that would, in all likelihood, have no unwarranted repercussions for him. As long as he kept the hound’s existence hidden, nobody was likely to connect it to him. Presumably, once he was done with its services, he would have despatched the creature and disposed of the carcass in the mire, where it would never be found.
Beryl Stapleton had been his more or less willing accomplice at first, until her fondness for Sir Henry grew to outweigh her uxorial fidelity. It was she who had composed the note of warning to Sir Henry. The scent of white jessamine adhering to the notepaper had alerted Holmes to the possibility that the sender was a woman. That in turn had directed his early suspicions towards the Stapletons.
A secondary accomplice of Stapleton’s was his aged manservant, Anthony, whose real name was Antonio and whom the Stapletons had brought with them to England from his native Costa Rica. It was Antonio’s job to care for the hound when his master was otherwise engaged. What had since become of him, and for that matter of Beryl Stapleton, was not known to me or to Holmes. The general view was that both of them had returned to their homeland, driven from these shores by the ignominy and opprobrium arising from their association with Jack Stapleton.
Again and again my thoughts kept returning to that vision of the hound homing in on Sir Henry through the fog, all aglow like some phantasmagorical spectre. I recalled Holmes emptying his revolver into the creature, and the hound rolling onto its back and falling limp. I recalled pressing the barrel of my own gun against the hound’s skull, thinking to finish it off, but there was no need, for it was already gone. I knew then that it had been, after all, not ghost, nor demon, just dog.
For all that, I could not go back to Dartmoor. I simply could not. Even the idea of it gave me palpitations and brought me out in a cold sweat. As I said, I am a not uncourageous man, but bravery has its limits, and I had just discovered mine.
I assured myself that Holmes would fare perfectly well without me. He did not necessarily need me on his investigations. My contribution to his intellectual efforts was always negligible. What I offered was moral support, a sounding board and a strong right arm, and he could get all that from Benjamin Grier just as readily as from me. I had formed a good opinion of the American, despite having been in his company for a little under half an hour. He was no mean proposition, mentally and physically, and would on this one occasion be a more than creditable substitute for Sherlock Holmes’s usual collaborator.
Or so I hoped.
PART TWO
Chapter Seven
THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
Holmes was gone from London for a week, all told. I received no communication from him in the interim. I knew he was back only when a telegram arrived summoning me to Baker Street at my earliest convenience.
“You are eager to know,” Holmes said as I made myself comfortable in my old chair, “whether my time spent in the West Country has borne fruit.”
“Naturally.”
A smile played about his lips. “Then let me, in an almost literal sense, take a leaf out of your book. Rather than reveal all at a stroke, which would be the simplest thing, I shall emulate the style of your stories and dole out the information piecemeal and in chronological order. Turnabout is fair play, is it not?”
I may have harrumphed somewhat at this, but my curiosity to hear his tale overrode any finer feelings.
“Why not help yourself to some shag?” my friend said. “That’s it. And I shall do likewise. This is, at the very least, a three-pipe recitation.”
With tobacco smoke drifting about the both of us, Holmes embarked upon a brief sketch of his and Benjamin Grier’s train journey to Devon, which was uneventful. He impressed his travelling companion with his trick of calculating the train’s speed by means of timing the passing telegraph poles. In return, Grier amused Holmes with soldiering anecdotes, one of which was a rather bawdy escapade involving a drunken captain, a kitbag and a malevolent skunk. Life on the American frontier was tough and filled with challenges but it seemed it had its lighter moments. In that respect it was not dissimilar to life on the North-West Frontier as I remembered it from my Afghanistan days. Camaraderie and hearty humour made up, to some extent, for the constant deprivations and dangers.
At Bartonhighstock a dog-cart and driver were hired, and on the way to Baskerville Hall, Holmes broached the subject of gaining safe ingress into the house.
“We cannot simply walk up to the front door,” said he to Grier. “You yourself have shown the inefficacy of that approach. We could well end up on the receiving end of a load from Sir Henry’s shotgun, and it is an experience I am sure you have no wish to repeat and I know I do not crave. We must instead be wilier.”
“What do you have in mind?” Grier enquired.
Holmes outlined his plan, to which the other’s response was a low whistle.
“Are you certain?” the American said. “It sounds risky.”
“It is,” Holmes acknowledged. “I am putting my life entirely in your hands. I trust that you are up to the task.”
Grier responded with a stalwart nod of the head. “You shall not find me wanting, sir.”
“Good man.”
“But it would be remiss of me not to sound a note of caution.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“I must admit I do not.”
“Therefore mine is the stratagem we must deploy. If you are half the soldier I think you are, Grier, then I need have no concerns.”
“I only hope your faith in me is well placed.”
Holmes halted the dog-cart with still a mile to go to the Hall and sent the driver back. He and Grier then continued the rest of the way on foot. Night was falling fast and a miserable, chilly drizzle set in, fine rain gusting into their faces like waves of clammy cobwebs. It was the kind of weather the Scots call “dreich”, a word that sounds as dismal as the conditions it describes. Holmes was glad of the Inverness cape and the ear-flapped travelling cap he was wearing, while Grier, in a greatcoat and broad-brimmed felt hat that were less well suited to the weather, was palpably jealous of them.
For all that, Holmes’s mood was ebullient. “I am never more content than when a mystery beckons,” he commented to me, “and will tolerate any inconvenience, endure any hardship, in its pursuit.”
At last the Hall came into view. Lights burned in a handful of windows, dispelling any question that someone was at home. Then again, this was hardly unexpected. Sir Henry was in terror of his life, and Baskerville Hall, it seemed, had become his fortress. Why abandon the place when it afforded shelter and a readily defensible position?
Holmes tapped Grier on the shoulder and, putting forefinger to lips, indicated that from here on stealth was the priority. He gestured towards the two structures that flanked the Hall’s gates. One was the original lodge, which I remembered as being a blackened ruin and which Holmes confirmed was still in that state of neglect, even more dilapidated now. The other, opposite it, was the newer lodge that Sir Charles Baskerville had begun
building but which was left unfinished when he died. Work had resumed on it since, doubtless under the auspices of Sir Henry or perhaps the late Lady Audrey, but it remained incomplete. A skeleton of wooden scaffolding offered a foretaste of how the edifice might look when eventually constructed, while squares of tarpaulin were secured over its open end to protect against the elements.
Holmes pointed to this latter building, and Grier gave a sign conveying acknowledgement. Then the American moved off to the side, hunching low and following a course that ran parallel to the perimeter of the Hall, while Holmes stole directly towards the newer lodge.
The sky was overcast and moonless, meaning the darkness was almost total. The glow from the windows of the main house, a couple of hundred yards distant, lent just enough illumination to see by. Gaining on the half-built lodge, Holmes stepped around a few small piles of stone that at some point would become walls and entered via a hollow doorway.
Inside, he took out and lit a pocket lantern, then shone the beam around the premises. This he did in as ostentatious a manner as possible, taking special care to aim at the empty window sockets that faced towards the Hall. After five minutes or so he set down the lantern, then picked up an offcut of timber that was lying on the floor and tossed it against a wall. He repeated the action several times, eliciting a satisfyingly loud clatter each time.
“My God,” I declared. “Were you trying to draw attention to yourself?”
“Precisely that,” replied he.
At a sudden soft sound from outside, just audible above the hiss of the rain and the sough of the wind, Holmes snatched up the lantern and hastily extinguished it. In pitch darkness he waited, standing stock-still, scarcely daring to draw breath.
His alert ears detected a surreptitious footfall. Someone had come in through the doorway. He glimpsed the silhouette of a man, limned by the faint illumination from without. The fellow was carrying a double-barrelled shotgun.
Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons Page 4