He got up from his chair and, as was his custom on such occasions in Baker Street, crossed to the window and continued.
“At the mercy of a skilled prosecutor you would do badly before a judge and jury. As a matter of law, perhaps you have a case to answer. Yet as a matter of justice I shall not betray you.”
Now he turned and spoke to both of them.
“A man travelling alone may be suspect when a couple is not. If you love your brother, Miss Chastelnau, travel across the Pen-nine hills with him to Birkenhead docks. Travel as a betrothed couple, if you wish. Take two berths on an emigrant ship. Single men and women are separated at either end of such a vessel but may associate for an hour or so in the evening. That will suit your purposes and your story. Among so many hundreds or thousands you are unlikely to be remarked. The voyage to Australia under sail will take three months. By then the Sutton Cross mystery will be stale news.”
They both watched him but neither spoke. Holmes continued.
“When you reach Queensland or New South Wales, the country you have left will have forgotten you. The one you have arrived in will know nothing of you and will not be looking for you. You can safely be brother and sister once more. You are both young enough to begin again. Such will be the last days of the old life and the first of the new.”
Miss Chastelnau thought for a moment.
“There are only three girls in residence at the moment, Mr Holmes. I have already communicated with their parents to explain the bereavement I have suffered. I have received an undertaking that they may all be transferred to the Abbey Close school in Lincoln. As for these premises, the lease has not long to run and the rent has been paid.”
Holmes nodded. He opened his leather bag and took out an object wrapped in lint.
“Abraham Chastelnau, this shall be yours. It may be a holy relic or, for all I know, a tinker’s trick. At least one of the pebbles is a sapphire and the metal upright is gold of a common quality, not in itself of great value. If it has lacked healing properties over the past centuries, may it assume them now for you.”
10
So it was that we left Mablethorpe and Sutton So Cross, returning to our quarters in Baker Street. The three months of an emigrant voyage passed and nothing more was heard or printed concerning the mystery of the Old Light. Several months later an envelope arrived by post with my name upon it. It bore two lines of thanks from Alice Chastelnau. There was no address but it had been stamped in Brisbane. I handed it to Holmes across the breakfast table. He read the lines and handed it back with a muted snort.
“Well, let us hope they will be happy. Curious, Watson, that you have surely noticed her partiality for Abraham over Roland and yet never remarked the possibility that she might not be his sister.”
I was thunderstruck by this.
“How can that be?”
“Because she is perhaps his mother?”
“Impossible!”
“Put together the little pieces of the puzzle. She left home suddenly, at fifteen, for her health. Her father’s new wife accompanied her to the seaside. Many months of convalescence followed, for a convenient touch of consumption. The two were visited by old John Chastelnau. Shortly before their return from the seaside, news was sent to Sutton Cross that Abraham Chastelnau had been born to the step-mother. Or was he?”
“Preposterous!”
“Is it? Suppose the mother remained in touch with the child and a little learning rubbed off. He may appear something of a Neanderthal but do you not recall how he wrote ‘physician’ for ‘doctor’ and ‘afflicted’ for ‘suffering from’? Not to mention his recollections of Edward the Confessor and Edward III.”
“Absurd!”
“Very well, old fellow, you have only to go the registrar of births, marriages and deaths in Somerset House. Look up the name Chastelnau and, in this case, the mother’s maiden name. I would not be surprised to find that it was also Chastelnau.”
“I shall do no such thing. Even were it true, there are some things which it is better not to know-and certainly better not to hunt after.”
He shrugged and sighed before opening the newspaper at a fresh page. He spoke from behind it.
“Very well. A hint to you, old fellow. I recall that in the lantern-room of the Old Light I congratulated you upon some little discovery and remarked that we should make a criminal investigator of you yet. It seems I was in error. There is a certain lack of morbid persistence in your method which must always be a handicap to your powers of detection.”
III. The Case of the Portuguese Sonnets
1
In the archives of Sherlock Holmes few papers have been more jealously guarded than those which touch upon blackmail or extortion. How strange it is that these should include a small collection of literary manuscripts and rare first editions acquired in the course of an investigation in 1890. They are items which Oxford ’s Bodleian Library or the British Museum or wealthy collectors like John Pierpont Morgan might have fought over in the auction rooms of the world.
To the present day, most of these treasures remain unknown to literature or scholarship. In the Baker Street files repose such lost works as the manuscript of Lord Byron’s Don Juan in the New World, in the poet’s own hand. Its stanzas confirm the great romantic rebel’s ambition to make his home in the land of Thomas Jefferson. Among other manuscripts is The Venetian Nun: A Gothic Tale, written in 1820 by the notorious William Beckford, creator of the short-lived extravaganza of Fonthill Abbey. A further portfolio contains the monologue of a famous heretic facing the flames in fourteenth century Florence, “Savonarola to the Signoria,” apparently omitted by Robert Browning from his collection of Men and Women in 1855.
A shelf of rare editions, which Holmes acquired during the same investigation, was equally remarkable. He was particularly fond of a small octavo volume in pinkish wrappers. It bore the simple title of “Sonnets By E. B. B.” At the foot of the cover was printed, “ Reading: Not For Publication, 1847.” Such was the first appearance of Sonnets from the Portuguese, written by Elizabeth Barrett to express her love for her bridegroom, Robert Browning, at the time of their elopement and marriage in the previous year. No more than three or four copies of the private 1847 edition have survived. It was intended for intimate friends, the printing arranged by Miss Mary Russell Mitford. Sherlock Holmes’s copy bore a pencil inscription on the fly-leaf “For Miss Mitford, E. B. B.” It was Mrs Browning’s reminder that this copy had been set aside for her friend.
How odd that half a century later such a treasure should find its way into the pocket of a dead blackmailer.
2
The case occurred almost ten years after my first meeting with Sherlock Holmes. It followed a visit from our Scotland Yard friend Inspector Lestrade on 24 April 1890. He was now in the habit of calling upon us of an evening, once a week, sharing a glass or two of single malt and passing on the detective gossip of the day.
In the course of conversation on this occasion, he mentioned that a man in a plaid overcoat was reported to have been found dying in a Chelsea gutter. The man in question was known to the police as Augustus Howell, of whom I had never heard. It appeared that he had been suspected from time to time of demanding money with menaces but nothing had ever been proved against him. Lestrade now told us that shortly before he left his office that evening, a report of the man’s death had come in. It seemed that the gutter in which he lay was outside a bar in Kinnerton Street, Chelsea, and that the victim’s throat had been cut. Between his teeth was wedged a gold half-sovereign coin. Several years later I was to learn, in our investigation of “The Red Circle,” that in the underworld of Naples this is the traditional reward of a blackmailer or a police informer.