The Adventure of the Plated Spoon and Other Tales of Sherlock Holmes (16 page)

“I fancy they have an interesting history.”

“They have that, sir.”

“I seem to have heard that this ill-omened guillotine was specially built for some ancestor of your late master?”

“Aye, the Marquis de Rennes. Built by his own tenants, the varmints, hated him, they did, simply because he kept up old customs.”

“Indeed. What custom?”

“Something about women, sir. The book in the library don't explain exactly.”

“
Le droit du seigneur
, perhaps.”

“Well, I don't speak heathern, but I believe them was the very words.”

“H'm. I should like to see this library.”

The old man's eyes slid to the door at the end of the hall. “See the library?” he grumbled. “What do you want there? Nothing but old books, and her ladyship don't like—oh, very well.”

He led the way ungraciously into a long, low room lined to the ceiling with volumes and ending in a magnificent Gothic fireplace. Holmes, after strolling about listlessly, paused to light a cheroot.

“Well, Watson, I think that we'll be getting back,” said he. “Thank you, Stephen. It is a fine room, though I am surprised to see Indian rugs.”

“Indian!” protested the old man indignantly. “They're antique Persian.”

“Surely Indian.”

“Persian, I tell you! Them marks are inscriptions, as a gentleman like you should know. Can't see without your spyglass? Well, use it then. Now, drat it, if he hasn't spilled his matches!”

As we rose to our feet after gathering up the scattered vestas, I was puzzled to account for the sudden flush of excitement in Holmes's sallow cheeks.

“I was mistaken,” said he. “They are Persian. Come, Watson, it is high time that we set out for the village and our train back to town.”

A few minutes later, we had left the castle. But to my surprise, on emerging from the outer bailey, Holmes led the way swiftly along a lane leading to the stables.

“You intend to enquire about the missing horse,” I suggested.

“The horse? My dear fellow, I have no doubt that it is safely concealed in one of the home farms, while Gregson rushes all over the county. This is what I am looking for.”

He entered the first loose box and returned with his arms full of straw. “Another bundle for you, Watson, and it should be enough for our purpose.”

“But what is our purpose?”

“Principally to reach the front door without being observed,” he chuckled, as he shouldered his burden.

Having retraced our footsteps, Holmes laid his finger on his lips and, cautiously opening the great door, slipped into a nearby closet full of capes and sticks, where he proceeded to throw both our bundles on the floor.

“It should be safe enough,” he whispered, “for it is stone-built. Ah! These two mackintoshes will assist admirably. I have no doubt,” he added, as he struck a match and dropped it into the pile, “that I shall have other occasions to use this modest stratagem.”

As the flames spread through the straw and reached the mackintoshes, thick black wreaths of smoke poured from the cloakroom door into the hall of Arnsworth Castle, accompanied by a hissing and crackling from the burning rubber.

“Good heavens, Holmes,” I gasped, the tears rolling down my face. “We shall be suffocated!”

His fingers closed on my arm.

“Wait,” he muttered, and even as he spoke, there came a sudden rush of feet and a yell of horror.

“Fire!”

In that despairing wail, I recognized Stephen's voice.

“Fire!” he shrieked again, and we caught the clatter of his footsteps as he fled across the hall.

“Now!” whispered Holmes and, in an instant he was out of the cloakroom and running headlong for the library. The door was half open but, as we burst in, the man drumming with hysterical hands on the great fireplace did not even turn his head.

“Fire! The house is on fire!” he shrieked. “Oh, my poor master! My lord! My lord!”

Holmes's hand fell upon his shoulder. “A bucket of water in the cloakroom will meet the case,” he said quietly. “It would be as well, however, if you would ask his lordship to join us.”

The old man sprang at him, his eyes blazing and his fingers crooked like the talons of a vulture.

“A trick!” he screamed. “I've betrayed him through your cursed tricks!”

“Take him, Watson,” said Holmes, holding him at arms' length. “There, there. You're a faithful fellow.”

“Faithful unto death,” whispered a feeble voice.

I started back involuntarily. The edge of the ancient fireplace had swung open, and in the dark aperture thus disclosed there stood a tall, thin man, so powdered with dust that for the moment I seemed to be staring not at a human being but at a spectre. He was about fifty years of age, gaunt and high-nosed, with a pair of sombre eyes that waxed and waned feverishly in a face that was the colour of grey paper.

“I fear that the dust is bothering you, Lord Cope,” said Holmes very gently. “Would you not be better seated?”

The man tottered forward to drop heavily into an armchair. “You are the police, of course,” he gasped.

“No. I am a private investigator, but acting in the interests of justice.”

A bitter smile parted Lord Cope's lips.

“Too late,” said he.

“You are ill?”

“I am dying.” Opening his fingers, he disclosed a small empty phial. “There is only a short time left to me.”

“Is there nothing to be done, Watson?”

I laid my fingers upon the sick man's wrist. His face was already livid, and the pulse low and feeble.

“Nothing, Holmes.”

Lord Cope straightened himself painfully. “Perhaps you will indulge a last curiosity by telling me how you discovered the truth,” said he. “You must be a man of some perception.”

“I confess that at first there were difficulties,” admitted Holmes, “though these discovered themselves later in the light of events. Obviously the whole key to the problem lay in a conjunction of two remarkable circumstances—the use of a guillotine and the disappearance of the murdered man's head.

“Who, I asked myself, would use so clumsy and rare an instrument, except one to whom it possessed some strong symbolic significance, and, if this were the case, then it was logical to suppose that the clue to that significance must lie in its past history.”

The nobleman nodded.

“His own people built it for Rennes,” he muttered, “in return for the infamy that their womenfolk had suffered at his hands. But pray proceed, and quickly.”

“So much for the first circumstance,” continued Holmes, ticking off the points on his fingers. “The second threw a flood of light over the whole problem. This is not New Guinea. Why, then, should a murderer take his victim's head? The obvious answer was that he wished to conceal the dead man's true identity. By the way,” he demanded sternly, “what have you done with Captain Lothian's head?”

“Stephen and I buried it at midnight in the family vault,” came the feeble reply. “And that with all reverence.”

“The rest was simple,” went on Holmes. “As the body was easily identifiable as yours by the clothes and other personal belongings which were listed by the local inspector, it followed naturally that there could have been no point in concealing the head unless the murderer had also changed clothes with the dead man. That the change had been effected before death was shown by the bloodstains. The victim had been incapacitated in advance, probably drugged, for it was plain from certain facts already explained to my friend Watson that there had been no struggle and that he had been carried to the museum from another part of the castle. Assuming my reasoning to be correct, then the murdered man could not be Lord Jocelyn. But was there not another missing, his lordship's cousin and alleged murderer, Captain Jasper Lothian?”

“How could you give Dawlish a description of the wanted man?” I interposed.

“By looking at the body of the victim, Watson. The two men must have borne a general resemblance to each other or the deception would not have been feasible from the start. An ashtray in the museum contained a cigarette stub, Turkish, comparatively fresh and smoked from a holder. None but an addict would have smoked under the terrible circumstances that must have accompanied that insignificant stump. The footmarks in the snow showed that someone had come from the main building carrying a burden, and had returned without that burden. I think I have covered the principal points.”

For a while, we sat in silence broken only by the moan of a rising wind at the windows and the short, sharp panting of the dying man's breath.

“I owe you no explanation,” he said at last, “for it is to my Maker, who alone knows the innermost recesses of the human heart, that I must answer for my deed. Nevertheless, though my story is one of shame and guilt, I shall tell you enough to enlist perhaps your forbearance in granting me my final request.

“You must know, then, that following the scandal which brought his Army career to its close, my cousin Jasper Lothian has lived at Arnsworth. Though penniless and already notorious for his evil living, I welcomed him as a kinsman, affording him not only financial support but, what was perhaps more valuable, the social aegis of my position in the county.

“As I look back now on the years that passed, I blame myself for my own lack of principle in my failure to put an end to his extravagance, his drinking and gaming and certain less honourable pursuits with which rumour already linked his name. I had thought him wild and injudicious. I was yet to learn that he was a creature so vile and utterly bereft of honour that he would tarnish the name of his own house.

“I had married a woman considerably younger than myself, a woman as remarkable for her beauty as for her romantic yet singular temperament, which she had inherited from her Spanish forebears. It was the old story, and when at long last I awoke to the dreadful truth it was also to the knowledge that only one thing remained for me in life—vengeance. Vengeance against this man, who had disgraced my name and abused the honour of my house.

“On the night in question, Lothian and I sat late over our wine in this very room. I had contrived to drug his port, and before the effects of the narcotic could deaden his senses I told him of my discovery, and that death alone could wipe out the score. He sneered back at me that in killing him I would merely put myself on the scaffold and expose my wife's shame to the world. When I explained my plan, the sneer was gone from his face and the terror of death was freezing in his black heart. The rest you know. As the drug deprived him of his senses, I changed clothes with him, bound his hands with a sash torn from the door-curtain, and carried him across the courtyard to the museum, to the virgin guillotine which had been built for another's infamy.

“When it was over, I summoned Stephen and told him the truth. The old man never hesitated in his loyalty to his wretched master. Together we buried the head in the family vault and then, seizing a mare from the stable, he rode it across the moor to convey an impression of flight and finally left it concealed in a lonely farm owned by his sister. All that remained was for me to disappear.

“Arnsworth, like many mansions belonging to families that had been Catholic in the olden times, possessed a priest's hole. There I have lain concealed, emerging only at night into the library to lay my final instructions upon my faithful servant.”

“Thereby confirming my suspicion as to your proximity,” interposed Holmes, “by leaving no fewer than five smears of Turkish tobacco ash upon the rugs. But what was your ultimate intention?”

“In taking vengeance for the greatest wrong which one man can do to another, I had successfully protected our name from the shame of the scaffold. I could rely on Stephen's loyalty. As for my wife, though she knew the truth she could not betray me without announcing to the world her own infidelity. Life held nothing more for me. I determined therefore to allow myself a day or two in which to get my affairs in order, and then to die by my own hand. I assure you that your discovery of my hiding place has advanced the event by only an hour or so. I had left a letter for Stephen, begging him as his final devoir that he would bury my body secretly in the vaults of my ancestors.

“There, gentlemen, is my story. I am the last of the old line, and it lies with you whether or not it shall go out in dishonour.”

Sherlock Holmes laid a hand upon his.

“It is perhaps as well that it has been pointed out to us already that my friend Watson and I are here in an entirely private capacity,” said he quietly. “I am about to summon Stephen, for I cannot help feeling that you would be more comfortable if he carried this chair into the priest's hole and closed the sliding panel after you.”

We had to bend our heads to catch Lord Jocelyn's response.

“Then a higher tribunal will judge my crime,” he whispered faintly, “and the tomb shall devour my secret. Farewell, and may a dying man's blessing rest upon you.”

Our journey back to London was both chilly and depressing. With nightfall, the snow had recommenced and Holmes was in his least communicative mood, staring out of the window at the scattered lights of villages and farmhouses that periodically flitted past in the darkness.

“The old year is nodding to its fall,” he remarked suddenly, “and in the hearts of all these kindly, simple folk awaiting the midnight chimes dwells the perennial anticipation that what is to come will be better than what has been. Hope, however ingenuous and disproven by past experience, remains the one supreme panacea for all the knocks and bruises which life metes out to us.” He leaned back and began to stuff his pipe with shag.

“Should you eventually write an account of this curious affair in Derbyshire,” he went on, “I would suggest that a suitable title would be ‘the Red Widow.'”